Any Bitter Thing Read Online Free PDF Page A

it at that because Mrs. Blanchard was a pretty woman who had married a drinker. Mrs. Hanson was right, of course. The work was highly illegal, a kind of magnanimous sweatshop, really. But who could mind if Father Mike didn’t? We sewed sometimes for entire afternoons, the music boosting production, peanut-butter sandwiches stacked on a platter, all of us drunk on Mrs. Blanchard’s company and the music and the heady smell of leather and oil.
    Why did Mariette and I never recall these times? We were nine years old on the summer afternoon of this photograph; by fall I would be taken from there; by winter would come news of Father Mike’s death. How had we allowed the most lighted days of our childhood to fade behind us, unremarked?
    He crouched before me that day, picked up my hands and kissed them, admiring the calluses. “This,” he said, “is the working girl’s stigmata.” He was proud of my hands, and I guessed it had something to do with his memories of farm life on Prince Edward Island, where children learned how to do, to make, to fix, to solve. I rested my hands in his, palms up, showing him one more proof of how lucky he was to have me.
    “Hey,” said Buddy. “I’m an expert, too.”
    “You too, young man.”
    “And me.”
    “And you too, Bernard.”
    “Show him, Maman,” Mariette said.
    “It’s easy! It’s easy! Maman , make Father Mike sew a shoe!”
    “Make him, Maman! ”
    “Oh, brother,” he said, releasing my hands, which meant yes, and there was a pleasant rippling of voices as he sat down and allowed Mrs. Blanchard to guide his fingers through a glove. His small hands looked bigger when he tried to take a stitch. The little boys leaned close, expecting magic, but the hands that couldturn wine to blood had no aptitude for piecework. Mariette and I giggled till we had to cross our legs to hold our pee. Finally he sprang up, and to our blank astonishment, began to sing. You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog , he sang with Elvis, making moony eyes at Major, the Blanchards’ earnest basset hound. Father Mike’s cassock swung back and forth from his hips, and we all got up to dance, the shabby parlor quivering with movement and raised voices.
    I remember this. All this sweetness.
    Back then Mrs. Blanchard had a burbling, contagious laugh, and as she danced with her children, side-stepping the forbearing dog, I was visited by the most unexpected wish for a mother. Father Mike had tried to keep my mother alive for me, but it was like hearing about Rapunzel or Snow White, a seamless beauty who lived in the realm of imagination. I’d never thought to envision her as someone who might cough or sigh or open a breadbox or sew a shoe. But I did at that moment, watching Father Mike move across a parlor rug littered with shoe parts and dog hair, because of how his face looked in the warm bath of a woman’s laughter.
    Wait , Mrs. Blanchard called, running to get a camera, then caught him just as he danced his way into the foyer and turned to look at me.
    On the day Aunt Celie came to take me, nobody thought to stow the Lucy Maud Montgomery books into my tartan carpetbag, or the scapular medal that dangled from my bedpost, or the angel doll that stood atop my dresser. My aunt dutifully packed my dresses and underwear, my socks and schoolbooks, but it was Mrs. Blanchard who appeared like a fairy out of the forest that morning to give me the photograph, thrusting it into my hands like an exposed secret.

FIVE
    Not long before Father Mike was sent away, Mariette’s own father disappeared. This forever-conjoined loss, I believe, is what bound us through years of separation when most childhood friendships, even one that burned like ours, would have guttered out.
    Ray Blanchard’s previous desertions had passed unregretted. It was generally believed that when he missed a boat boarding—and two weeks’ pay—he either stayed near the docks, prowling the bars, or hastened back to New Brunswick, his