On that score, she knew he could rest easy. The headmistress was as skilled at deception as the Artful Dodger. She’d advertise the leap as a tragic accident. Privately, she might even rejoice, seeing as the funeral would provide her sympathy and attention. She’d see to it the service was a social event on the Middlesex County calendar, held at St. James with the Reverend Rector Brice Harvey Mandible presiding, and herself in charge of the eulogy, a moving oration correct in all particulars.
Mary Mabel pictured Miss B., a monument brave in grief, declaiming from the pulpit: “Our Miss McTavish was a motherless child whom we cherished as our own. Despite her circumstances, her hard work in the laundry and kitchen earned her a desk at the Academy alongside our young ladies. Here she flourished, winning academic honours in English Language and Literature as well as the Bentwhistle Prize for penmanship. A flower nipped in the bud, God has taken her to His bosom to blossom by His heart.” After the interment, Miss B. would arrange a memorial assembly in the Academy chapel at which her young ladies, decked out in black lace and crinolines, would be obliged to offer up prayers. Mary Mabel planned to give them all a good haunting.
Her reverie was interrupted by her papa, mumbling an order in his sleep. With me gone, he’ll be up to his ears in dirty underwear in no time, damning my memory for the bother, she thought, and surprised herself with a laugh.
There was still an hour to sunrise. Mary Mabel had half a mind to go to the bridge then and there, while her determination was awake and the world asleep, but she held back. The vision had been specific as to the time, and, as she knew from her books, “the constellations have purposes we mortals must attend.”
Besides, the truer reason, she hadn’t finished A Tale of Two Cities and was desperate to know how things turned out for Sidney Carton. He was a drunk, but a noble one. Mary Mabel couldn’t imagine her papa risking his neck for anyone. Would she love him any better if he got his head chopped off? What a pity she wouldn’t have the chance to find out.
She took her Dickens to the rocker, opened it to the page marked with the feather retrieved from one of Miss Bentwhistle’s Sunday hats, and began to read, eyes darting as fast as Madame Defarge’s knitting needles. She whittled down the pages till ten o’clock, when her papa woke himself with a loud fart, the explosion starting him bolt upright. “What time is it?” he blinked.
“Ten,” she said. “Would you care for some porridge and toast?”
Brewster grunted, padded unsteadily to the john, peed, and poured his weekly bath. Following the Sunday morning service at St. James, he had a standing engagement to clear Miss Bentwhistle’s drainpipes. She had, as she put it, “sensitive nasal capillaries, owing to good breeding and refined genes,” and he took care to keep her nose in joint.
By the time he was spruced up, Mary Mabel had his food on the table. Her papa at feed made eating an adventure in nausea. She shot him a look. Sidney Carton was about to die, and all he could do was belch. She consoled herself that this was the last time he’d disturb her reading.
Porridge guzzled, Brewster wiped his toast around the bowl, mashed it into a ball, popped it in his mouth, chewed twice, and gulped. Then he pushed back his chair and gave his tummy a pat. “What mischief will you be at while I’m out?” he asked, as he went for his toolbox and plunger.
“I’m going to jump off a bridge.”
“Mind you don’t make a mess.” Brewster snorted and lurched out the door.
The heroines in her books would have cried out, “Farewell, Papa, I love you.” Not Mary Mabel. She returned, dry-eyed, to Mr. Carton’s redemption. At last, the final page, the final paragraph, the final sentence, the final word. It was then that she cried, rocked for a bit, and thought that like brave Mr. Carton it was a far far better thing she was about to do than she had done, and a far far better rest to which she was about to go than she had known. A curious peace descended.
With great calm, she returned the book to its friends on the shelves, closed the closet door, and went to the teacup on the apple crate beside her bed. The cup wasn’t much to look at — late Victorian, green, with gold trim about the rim and handle — but it was the only thing of her mama’s she’d managed to grab the night she and her papa had fled Cedar Bend.
Mary Mabel held it tight, closed her eyes, and saw the large woman with big, warm breasts who sang to her and read her stories. She remembered how she cuddled next to her mama for afternoon naps. And about the three days that her mama lay very still at the end of the parlour, the house full of grownups, while she ran around getting lost in a sea of black skirts and saying to anyone who’d listen, “My mama’s in that box,” without quite knowing what that meant, except that when she said it, it made the grownups cry.
She remembered other visitors, too: her mama’s sewing circle that brought baskets of food; and the strange women who tucked her papa into bed when he was lonely.
One night, a man with big red ears barged in when her papa was out. He came from the lodge and smelled of raw meat. The man turned the place upside down yelling for someone called Marge to come out and face the music. When he realized the little girl was alone, he said, “When your pa gets back, tell him Slick Skinner dropped by, and he’ll be round again to gut him clean.”
Mary Mabel passed on the news. In a heartbeat, she and her papa were on the run with no more than they’d tossed in a pair of bags.
“Who’s Marge?” she asked.
“A mistake,” he wheezed, dripping sweat so bad the suitcase handles slipped his grip.
They hopped a freight at Peak’s Gully and hit the Sault border by dawn, fleeing into the States, west to Wisconsin. “Know why Skinner’s got elephant ears?” her papa asked. “He never forgets. As long as you live, you see them ears, you head for the hills.”
From that night on, the pair wandered as gypsies through a wilderness of small towns. Sometimes Brewster got odd jobs, and when he did, they’d stay, and when they’d stay, Mary Mabel would meet a new “aunt.” It seemed that aunts were like dandelions: a common nuisance found everywhere, and you couldn’t get rid of them.
They, however, could get rid of you. Inevitably, they’d complain of her papa’s late nights abroad, the upshot being that they’d be out on the street by daybreak. To hear him tell it, it was always her fault — she’d got on their nerves with her games of pretend — that’s what he’d grumble as they’d hitch a ride to the next town and the next aunt. It was like that from north Wisconsin around Lake Michigan, and back into Canada at Detroit — like that all the way to London, Ontario, where they happened upon the Bentwhistle Academy for Young Ladies, and its headmistress, the illustrious Miss Horatia Alice Bentwhistle, B.A., a.k.a. her Auntie Horatia.
Mary Mabel checked the clock on the wall. It was time for her to put away the past and end the future. She gave her mama’s teacup a little rub and replaced it on the apple crate.
There were a few loose ends. She figured she owed her papa a clean start, so she did the dishes, wiped the ring from his tub, sewed the small tear on the underarm of his plaid shirt, and put a fresh bottle and a tumbler on the table. Finally, she took pen and paper and sat down to compose her note. She wished her last words could be as beautiful as Mr. Carton’s, but he went to a Paris guillotine to save the husband of the woman he loved, so how could he not be eloquent?
She got to the point: “Dear Papa, Forgive me. Please don’t blame yourself or worry. I’ve gone to a better place. Your loving daughter, Mary Mabel. Postscript. For supper, you’ll find a plate of macaroni and cheese leftovers in the icebox.”
It was all done but the crying; that, she’d leave to others. She propped the note up against the bottle. Then, before procrastination could cool her heels, Mary Mabel took a deep breath, rose smartly, and set off to be with her mama.
The Wichita Kid
Three days before, Grace Rutherford had stood on her front verandah across town and peered down her long nose at the little