stomach housed a wilting African violet. She put her hands on either side of her face and pulled back the skin. She stuck her tongue out and made a lizard face. Soon she would be old. All her chances at happiness seemed behind her. Before her the future loomed plain and comfortless.
If she could just find a point, a reason for her life. She had asked Reverend Fuller to see her after church yesterday. She thought surely he would be able to understand and offer her guidance. The Reverend was a huge heron of a man with a beaklike nose and thin lips. His hair was wiry and white, his skin laced with small red veins. His bony shoulders stuck up under the black material of his jacket, and his sleeves were too short. When she had asked for a few moments of his time, he smiled gently and told her to wait on his porch, next door to the church. Margaret did not want to wait there, in full view of the street. But she did as she was told.
“Masie,” he called to his wife, “make Mrs. MacNeil comfortable, won’t you, my dear. I shall be with her directly.” Margaret refused the offer of tea and sat stiffly on the edge of the wicker chair. She told Irene to do the same.
“Stop fidgeting, Irene. Honestly!”
“But, Mummy, there’s a piece of stick. It pinches.” Irene was hot and miserable in her crinolines and hat and gloves.
“Shush. Be good. We won’t be long.” Margaret busied herself in her purse as a way of avoiding eye contact with other members of the congregation now on their way back home. The entire exercise of going to church was frightening. All those faces, all those well-meaning inquiries as to her health. She wouldn’t go except she fervently hoped that here she might find answers to the questions she didn’t even know how to form.
Before long the Reverend finished shaking hands and accepting compliments on his sermon. He approached her, his black Bible tucked under his arm.
“And now, Mrs. MacNeil, you have my full attention,” he said and led her to his office at the back of the house. She told Irene to wait outside.
His office was small. Just a desk, with a chair behind and one in front, where he indicated she should sit. Books lay everywhere and a cup half-full of cold scummy tea sat on his desk. Another cup rested on the floor, and yet another on a small table near the window. The Reverend Fuller perched on the side of the desk, facing her. He smelled of camphor.
There was so much of him, all height and limbs. The room seemed too intimate, like a closet in which they were hiding together.
“Now, what can I do for you, Mrs. MacNeil?”
“I need your help, Reverend. I’m not myself these days.” She twisted the strap of her brown leather purse. How to phrase it so he understood?
“Well, these are difficult times.” He held his head down, not looking at her directly, as though he was a priest and she a confessor. It made her fear he might not grant her absolution.
“It’s just that I can’t pull myself together. My head goes round and round with the strangest thoughts. Dark thoughts. I can’t seem to stop worrying.”
“We all have our worries.”
“I find myself overcome with them, very nearly. Like I’m drowning.”
“What do you worry about?”
“Well, the sorts of things that everyone worries about these days. Money, shelter, poverty, destitution, starvation.” She heard a noise. Was he laughing at her? He must not be laughing at her! She couldn’t bear that. Her palms were sweating, and her thighs stuck to each other.
The Reverend blew his nose with a handkerchief that was none too clean.
“Things are not that bad, surely? We must trust in the Lord. He will provide. Have faith, Mrs. MacNeil.”
“I do try, Reverend.”
“Of course you do, dear lady.” He patted her shoulder. Then he turned his face toward the ceiling and began to recite. “’Be patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord.’ James 5, verse 7.”
“I try to be patient, but I’m not, mostly. I can be,” she paused, unsure if she should continue, “peevish.”
“Ah,” he said, and looked severe.
“I do try. It’s just that... sometimes. . . ” She wanted to tell him about how lost she felt, how she knew the world was passing her by, how she was entombed in that little house.
“Yes?”
The conversation was not going the way Margaret wanted it to. She had hoped for solace, for comfort, perhaps even for a shoulder to cry on, just a little. She had taken such a risk coming here, telling him her secrets, but perhaps she hadn’t told him enough.
“I can be, impatient, irritable with Douglas, my husband.”
“Does he beat you?”
“Heavens, Reverend! No, of course not.” His voice, his big, sonorous voice, was terrifying.
“Does he commit adultery?”
“No, no, nothing like that.” Margaret felt a little dizzy and couldn’t catch her breath.
“Does he drink?”
“Well, yes, sometimes he does.” There was that at least, surely now he would soften toward her, drop his disapproving stare.
“I see. Well, although alcohol’s the Devil’s cordial, I don’t think your husband is an evil man, Mrs. MacNeil. It’s your duty as a Christian wife to obey him and create a place for Jesus in your heart and home. Your husband is in danger, but that is our responsibility, is it not? To bring in the lost sheep? Impress upon him the importance of God in his life. Impress upon him the benefits of living his life within the boundaries of the Church. You must bring him into the fold.”
“Douglas will never come to church. He’s not that kind of man.”
“Still, he is your husband and you must never stop trying. I believe you understand, Mrs. MacNeil. I will remember you in my prayers.”
And with that she knew she was dismissed. Almost on cue, the minister’s wife popped open the study door, and Margaret realized with horror that she had been eavesdropping. As she stumbled blindly to the front door her mind conjured pictures of the minister and his pigeon wife chirping with laughter at her as they sipped their tea. Back on the porch, her face burning, Margaret grabbed Irene by the arm and yanked her down the steps. It was only when the girl cried out that Margaret realized how tightly she was holding her. The red marks of her fingers were clearly visible on Irene’s wrist. She knelt down on the sidewalk and hugged her and murmured, “I’m sorry, so sorry” until they both believed it. The pebbles under her legs cut into her painfully and this was just as she deserved. She ground her knees this way and that. When she stood, blood dribbled down her legs, and the little pieces of stone that had torn her stockings were embedded in her skin.
How hard she had prayed that night, to keep her faith, to hear some small voice of reassurance, but her words fell lifeless from her lips. It must be her fault. Reverend Fuller was a man of God, after all. Her rage and unkind thoughts had been no more than hurt pride. What had she expected him to say? She knew Reverend Fuller was right. She
