Mercy by Alissa York Read Free Book Online Page B

improper—a mother licking her thumb to rub dirt from a growing boy’s face. He should say something. He will. Only now, she’s no longer cleaning. She’s just standing there, gazing ardently at the body of the Lord.
HIS GIFT
    Vera reaches out from beneath the covers and grabs Mathilda’s hand. “Lord,” she croaks, “you’re an oven. How can you be so warm, girl? I’m frozen through.”
    It’s high eighties in the shade. Mathilda’s been rubbing ice along her wrists.
    “Hah.” Vera laughs weakly. “I guess you’ve still got blood in your veins.” Her face contracts with a spike of pain. “Ahnnn,” she moans, but when Mathilda reaches for the needle, Vera stops her hand. “No,” she says, “not yet.”
    “All right.” Mathilda sits back helplessly. After a moment she begins stroking the pale crustacean that was lately her aunt’s right hand. In a single bedridden week Vera’s seen more than a decade’s decline.
    “Fourteen,” Vera says wonderingly.
    “What’s that, Aunt?”
    “I was fourteen when I took over St. Mary’s. The year Mother finally took to her bed with what they used to call nerves. My father was long gone by then. Yours too—he didn’t wait for eighteen before shaking the dust of this town from his shoes.”
    Mathilda’s stroking hand stops short.
    “Easy now,” says Vera. “It’s not him I’m getting at with all this. Not my own father, either. They were useless, the pair of them.” She sniffs. “On her better days Mother used to tell me how they were both away on the traplines up north, how they’d be back with a couple of fine fur coats for us any day. Poor fool.” Vera’s mouth softens. “Father Rock came on the year after I took over. From the moment he clapped eyes on me, he took me for his pet. That was something, too, not that he was a hard man, but to most he was never what you’d call warm.”
    “You don’t say,” Mathilda mumbles, but Vera takes no notice.
    “ ‘Brilliant,’ he used to say, when he saw the glow I got on those candlesticks. ‘Like the gold along the roads of heaven, Veronica.’ “She pauses, her eyes shining. “You remember that, Mathilda? How he called me Veronica sometimes?”
    “Yes, Aunt.” Mathilda remembers all right. She tried out the pet name herself once, only to be told sharply never to utter it again. It was strictly between the two of them, like a hundred other things.
    Vera smiles secretively. “ ‘I’d better watch out, Veronica,’ he used to say. ‘Our Heavenly Father may just scoop you up to keep house for Him.’ “The pain comes again, and thistime Vera’s face caves in on itself. “Oh,” she gasps, “I loved him! Even then I was sick with love!”
    Mathilda gapes. Her aunt gestures wildly to the bedside table, the inadequate remedies there.
    Vera sleeps a little after the needle, wakes with a wildness in her eye. “We never touched, you know, not that way.” She shakes her head fiercely. “Not once.”
    “Of course not,” says Mathilda.
    “Not that I didn’t think about it.” Vera giggles suddenly, a schoolgirl sound, strange in her ruined mouth. “I did, you know. You won’t believe it if I tell you.”
    “Yes, I will.”
    “It was a dream I had.” Vera would blush if she had the blood for it. As it is, her face smoothes out, momentarily transformed to marble, a carving of someone very young. “It was kissing, that’s all—him kissing me, and me parting my lips and kissing back.”
    Mathilda shifts on her chair.
    “I dreamt it nearly every night,” Vera goes on. “After a while it got so I was dreaming it in the daylight too, you know, playing it out in my head.”
    Mathilda nods.
    “I was in the confessional one day, the penitent’s side, polishing up the leather. Maybe it was the smell of Father Rock in there, I don’t know, but the dream came on terribly strong. I kept pushing it away, rubbing it into the kneeler, the seat, but nothing would make it go. I switched