Her eyes roamed the room. When they fell on Anna’s treasure chest, she remembered the candlestick she’d cracked, and the dark curl of hair. The brother, Pat O’Donnell, whom Lib knew only from a photograph with painted-on eyes. How had his little sister become convinced that she needed to purchase his soul with her own?
Lib laboured to take Anna’s struggle on its own terms. To put herself in the position of a girl for whom these ancient narratives were literal truth. Four and a half months of fasting; how could that much sacrifice not be enough to make amends for the sins of a mere boy?
“Anna.” Only a whisper. Then more loudly. “Anna!”
The child struggled to surface.
“Anna!”
Her heavy lids batted.
Lib put her mouth very close to the girl’s ear. “Did Pat do something bad?”
No answer.
“Something nobody else knows about?”
Lib waited. Watched the flickering lids. Leave her be, she told herself, suddenly exhausted. What did any of this matter now?
“He said it was all right.” Anna barely voiced the words. Eyes still shut, as if she were still in her dream.
Lib waited, breath held.
“He said it was double.”
Lib puzzled over that. “Double what?”
“Love.” A push of tongue for the L, the merest puff of breath, teeth pressed to the lower lip for the V.
My love is mine, and I am his; one of Anna’s hymns. “What do you mean?”
Anna’s eyes were open now. “He married me in the night.”
Lib blinked once, twice. The room stayed still, but the world plunged dizzyingly around it.
He comes in to me as soon as I’m asleep, Anna had said, but she hadn’t meant Jesus. He wants me.
“I was his sister and his bride too,” the girl whispered. “Double.”
Nausea rose through Lib. There wasn’t another bedroom; the siblings must have shared this one. That folding screen she’d put outside the room on her first day had been all that had separated Pat’s bed—this bed, his deathbed—from Anna’s mattress on the floor. “When was this?” Lib asked, the words scraping her throat.
A tiny shrug.
“How old was Pat, do you remember?”
“Thirteen, maybe.”
“And you?”
“Nine,” said Anna.
Lib’s face puckered. “Did this happen just once, Anna—on a single occasion—or…”
“Marriage is forever.”
Oh, the terrible innocence of the child. Lib made a small sound, encouraging her to go on.
“When brothers and sisters marry, it’s a holy mystery. A secret between us and heaven, Pat told me. But then he died,” said Anna, voice cracking like a shell, eyes fixed on Lib. “I wondered if maybe he’d been wrong.”
Lib nodded.
“Maybe God took Pat because of what we’d done. ’Tisn’t fair, then, Mrs. Lib, because Pat’s bearing all the punishment.”
Lib pressed her lips together so the child would keep talking.
“Then at the mission—” Anna let out a single hard sob. “The Belgian priest, in his sermon, he said brother and sister, ’tis a mortal sin, the second worst of the six species of lust. Poor Pat never knew!”
Oh, poor Pat knew well enough to spin a glittering web around the thing he was doing to his little sister night after night.
“He died so fast,” the girl wailed, “he never got a chance to go to confession. Maybe he went straight to hell.” The wet eyes looked greenish in this light, and the words came out in gulps. “In hell the flames aren’t for cleaning, they’re for hurting, and there’s no end.”
“Anna.” Lib had heard enough.
“I don’t know if I can get him out, but I have to try. Surely God must be able to pluck someone—”
“Anna! You did nothing wrong.”
“But I did.”
“You didn’t know,” Lib insisted. “This was a wrong your brother did to you.”
Anna shook her head. “I loved him double too.”
Lib couldn’t say a word.
“If God grants it, we can be together soon, but no bodies this time. No marrying,” Anna pleaded. “Just brother and sister again.”
“Anna, I can’t bear this, I—” Lib was crouching on the edge of the bed now, blinded, as the room turned to water.
“Don’t cry, Mrs. Lib.” Those spindly arms were reaching out for her, enclosing Lib’s head, pulling her down. “Dear Mrs. Lib.”
She muffled her weeping in the blankets, the hard double ridge of the child’s lap. The upside-downness of it: to be consoled by a child, and such a child.
“Don’t fret, ’tis all right,” Anna murmured.
“No, it’s not!”
“All’s well. All will be well.”
Help her. Lib found herself praying to the God that she didn’t believe in. Help me. Help us all.
She heard only silence.
In the middle of the night—Lib couldn’t wait any longer—she felt her way through the kitchen, past the shape of the sleeping maid on the settle. The skin of Lib’s cheeks was still tight and salty from weeping. When her fingers found the rough curtain that partitioned off the outshot, she whispered: “Mrs. O’Donnell.”
A stir. “Is it Anna?” asked Rosaleen hoarsely.
“No, she’s fast asleep. I need to speak to you.”
“What is it?”
“In private,” said Lib. “Please.”
After long hours of brooding, she’d come to the conclusion that she had to reveal Anna’s secret. But only to one other person, perversely the one Lib trusted least: Rosaleen O’Donnell. Lib’s hope was that this revelation might wake Rosaleen to a sense of mercy for the tormented girl at last. This story was the family’s, and the mother of Pat and Anna was entitled, if anyone was, to hear the truth about what one of them had inflicted on the other.
The hymn to Mary sang in Lib’s head: My mother, look kindly on me.
Rosaleen O’Donnell shoved the curtain aside and climbed out of the little chamber. Her eyes were uncanny in the trace of red light from the banked-up fire.
Lib beckoned, and Rosaleen trailed her across the hard earth floor. Lib opened the front door and Rosaleen hesitated for only a moment before following her out.
With the door shut behind them, Lib spoke fast, before she could lose her nerve. “I know all about the manna,” she began, to gain the upper hand.
Rosaleen looked back at her, unblinking.
“But I haven’t told the committee. The world doesn’t need an explanation of how Anna’s lived all these months. What matters is whether she’ll go on living. If you love your daughter, Mrs. O’Donnell, why don’t you do everything in your power to get her to eat?”
Still not a word. Then, very low: “She’s chosen.”
“She’s been chosen?” Lib repeated, disgusted. “You mean by God? Called to martyrdom at the age of eleven?”
Rosaleen corrected her: “She’s made her choice.”
The absurdity of it choked Lib. “Don’t you understand how desperate Anna is, how racked with guilt? She’s not choosing any more than she might choose to fall down a bog hole.”
Not a word.
“She’s not intact.” Lib’s circumlocution sounded absurdly prim.
Rosaleen’s eyes narrowed.
“I must tell you that she’s been interfered with, and by your own son.” The syllables plain and brutal. “He began tampering with her when she was only nine.”
“Mrs. Wright,” said the woman, “I won’t stand for any more scandalmongering.”
Was it too inconceivable a horror for Rosaleen to take in? Did she need to believe Lib was making it up?
“That’s the same filthy falsehood Anna came out with after Pat’s funeral,” Rosaleen went on, “and I told her not to be slandering her poor brother.”
Lib had to lean on the gritty wall of the cabin. So this wasn’t news to the woman at all. A mother understands what a child doesn’t say, wasn’t that how the proverb went? But Anna had said it. Grief for her dead Pat had given her the courage to confess the whole shameful story to her mother, back in November. Rosaleen had called her a liar and maintained that now, even as she watched her daughter pine away.
“Not another word out of you,” growled Rosaleen, “and may the devil take you.” She swept back inside.
Just after six, Saturday morning. Lib pushed a note under Byrne’s door.