with my Aunt Susan in Laingford. Susan was, and still is, an agnostic. She was beside me at the funeral mass (which was incredibly long), and later she told me that, although she was perfectly willing to discuss God and religion if I wanted to, she would not be accompanying me to church again. That suited me just fine. After the initial numbness had worn off, I had experimented with prayer, probing my customary lack of faith like a sore tooth, and found that nothing had changed. There was still nobody listening, and nobody left to insist that there was.
But early training stays with you. In times of trouble, I still find myself probing that empty place in my brain where Christians promise divine comfort is.
Sometimes I feel like an Icarus lost in a flock of twentieth century frequent flyers. They all buy their tickets and whizz off to the tropics while I’m still stuck on the ground gluing chicken feathers to my arms.
That search for meaning continues, of course, and up until the day I found Francy hanging in the kitchen, I was content to putter along believing implicitly in the goodness of humankind, the healing power of the earth and my own efforts to leave as small an ecological footprint as possible. That had been enough.
However, after two murders awfully close to home, and after seeing Candy onstage at Kelso’s, it struck me that composting, making herbal tea and living the simple life of a craftsperson was absolutely pathetic.
I sat at my worktable and cried. Lug-nut plunked his head in my lap in that endearing way dogs have of trying to help, and I thought about what to do. Become a social worker? Start counselling battered women? Go to cop college and become a caped avenger with a gun? Start a farming co-op for exstrippers? Write a self-help book for New-Age artists with step-by-step instructions for changing the world? Hang myself? Or, dammit, find out who killed John and Francy and erase them from the planet?
My parents were killed by a drunk driver. I wanted to kill him back, for the longest time. Then I met him when he got out of jail. I was fourteen, and he got in touch with Susan and said he wanted to see me. She said it was entirely up to me. I said okay, because I’d never seen him and I wanted a face to go with my hatred.
We met in Susan’s front room, both sitting on the edges of our chairs, fragile as porcelain. He was thin and pale, like a root vegetable, and he wept when he saw me, the tears seeping out the corners of his eyes and dripping off his unlovely chin. He wanted to give me money. (I didn’t take it. Now, I would. Then, I couldn’t.) His hands were damp and they trembled. He smelled of fear and sweat. He had little white yuckies in the corners of his mouth. He made me feel sick, but I stopped hating him. He didn’t seem to be worth the trouble. Then he asked me to forgive him.
I used to think forgiveness was a big mystery, something you could only understand if you had been touched by God, which I hadn’t. The real Christians I know (as opposed to the bogus ones) speak of it with a kind of wonder. Forgiveness is tangled up in reams of theological wool, though. God forgives everyone everything because of his divinity, and those who believe in him look for forgiveness; they need it, beg for it, even. What’s more, they seem to get it. Non-Christians (at least this one) sometimes shy away from the concept because of all the trappings. But after meeting the man who schmucked my parents to a bloody pulp because he was driving pie-eyed, I discovered that forgiveness is actually a piece of cake. You just do it. You say “Okay, I forgive you,” and then you forget it. That’s what I did.
So, finding John’s killer, and Francy’s (if it was the same person, which was likely) and killing them back, was out. I suppose I used up all the revenge-juice in my body the last time, and there was none left. Finding the killer and forgiving him or her was an idea that stopped my tears and prompted me to light up another joint.
First of all, why should I forgive them? I mean, why me? Francy and John weren’t mine. Francy was my friend, that’s true, but I didn’t own her the way I had, in a sense, owned my parents.
If someone breaks a teacup, which is yours, you can say “Oh, that’s okay. It doesn’t matter,” and it doesn’t any more. But that’s a teacup, not a person. Forgiving that man for killing my parents was something I gave him because he needed it, and so did I. I owned my anger, he owned his remorse. Together, we gave them up, or gave them away, which was good.
I certainly had anger about John’s and Francy’s deaths, for different reasons. John didn’t deserve to die, although he was a shithead and a wife-beater, and he deserved something, but not murder. My anger about John’s death came under that big, amorphous heading “wrong”, the kind of thing that saints and superheroes fight against. Francy’s murder came under the “wrong” heading too, but I was madder about hers because it was wronger. She deserved no bad thing. She deserved better. The killer had stolen her life from her (wrong), her friendship and company from me (personal wrong) and the killer was getting away with it (extremely wrong.) Why did I want to find the killer, then? To punish them? Nope. To stop them from doing it again? Maybe. To find out if there was any remorse, so I could mix it with my anger and come up with a magical recipe for forgiveness? That was pretty close, although I felt uncomfortable with the missionary zeal of it. “Admit that you have sinned and ask forgiveness.” Yuck.
And what, I asked myself, would I do if I found the killer and discovered that they had no remorse whatsoever? What then? I would be left with my anger and nowhere to put it. I think that’s where revenge comes in. “Oh yeah? Well, I’ll make you sorry.”
What if the killer not only lacked remorse, but still had an unhealthy desire to keep on doing the “wrong” thing? To me, maybe. Then my anger would be gone, certainly, as well as my ecological footprint. I would become the best composter a human being can be. I would be dead.
At this point, I had worked it out. I couldn’t just go back to making puppets and drinking herbal tea as if nothing had happened. I would have to find the killer, danger or not, before he killed someone else, like me. As for starting a co-op for ex-strippers, well, maybe in my next life.
Twenty-Seven
This tadpole has gathered
the reins of my body,
altered my courses,
flicked open the dam of my instinct.
—Shepherd’s Pie
Francy's mother came up from the States for the funeral, which was, to my surprise, organized by the Chapel of the Holy Lamb—the Schreier’s church. Apparently, Francy and John had at one time belonged to the group, although Francy had never mentioned it to me. When I found out, I wondered if Carla had nabbed Francy in the A&P and my friend had been too polite to say no. Anyway, I had known her for three years, and I was reasonably sure that she hadn’t attended during that time.
Francy’s mother was a small, defeated-looking woman with no eyebrows. She had painted them on, which gave her caved-in face a look of unutterable surprise, even when she was crying. Her mourning attire was vintage American trailer-park and her permed hair was pale lavender. I introduced myself to her outside the Chapel and she immediately backed away.
“You’re her, ain’t you?” she said, rather loudly.
“Her? Who her?”
“The witch. The one who led her away from the Lord. Get away from me.” She turned and scuttled past a group of Lamb-ites, disappearing into the interior of the Chapel. Several people turned to stare at me, and I met the eyes of Carla Schreier, who smiled brilliantly, then turned to say something to her stocky husband, Samson. He looked over too, and I couldn’t help feeling that I
