By the Rivers of Brooklyn (43 page)

Rose has cast out demons. She has seen tormented people writhe on the ground before her, heard strange ugly words leave their twisted lips, then watched them lie still, sobbing gratefully, restored in mind and spirit. She almost expects something like that to happen now. But there are more demons here than Rose's faith can handle. From behind she hears a voice that must be Gavin's, shouting. The struggling girl locks eyes with Rose, and Rose sees a fist coming towards her face. Then nothing.

She opens her eyes again in a grey room full of people and noise. She can't focus clearly on anything. Gavin's face is near hers. “Reverend, Reverend, can you hear me? Can you see me?” Rose wants to nod but the pain in her head is intense. She tries to form words, to ask where she is. But everything swims in front of her. She closes her eyes and drifts down to the dark again.

The next time she wakes everything is clearer. She is on a bed, with flimsy greenish curtains drawn around it. On the other side of the curtain a man is moaning, “Don't leave me alone here. Oh God, don't leave me alone. Somebody come. Please, don't leave me.” She is in an emergency room. She hasn't been in a hospital for – what is it? Years, years. Since her operation.

Later, a young Spanish woman with a clipboard comes in and asks Rose questions. “The young man who brought you in, he tells us your name is…” she squints at the paper “…Rosamoond Mara-nata? This is right?”

“Yes. No. My name – my legal name – is Rose Evans.” That was her name the last time she was in hospital. It's on her birth certificate, wherever that may be.

“Your age, Mrs. Evans? Date of birth?”

“Miss. I'm seventy, seventy…two? three? I'm over seventy. My birthday? November. November the fourteenth.” She's pleased at having pulled out that memory. “Where am I? What happened to me?”

“You are in the hospital, Miss Evans. Of what year?”

“What…” Rose draws a blank. Is this a test, to see if she still has her wits about her? What year is it, anyway? What day is it? The last thing she remembers is leaving the Tabernacle Cathedral, Friday night after service. Something happened on the street.

“November the fourteenth of what year, Miss Evans? Your birth date.”

“Oh. I…I'm sorry. I don't remember.” The girl – a nurse? – looks unconvinced. “It was a long time ago,” Rose explains.

The girl asks more questions: her address, her next of kin. For next of kin Rose says Gavin and Sheilah Bennett, which should give the hospital staff a turn when the Bennetts show up. No, she has no medical insurance. She doesn't have a family doctor. She still wants to know what happened.

“I don't know what happened, Miss Evans. The doctor will see you when she's available. We're keeping you in overnight for observation.”

The doctor comes next morning. It's a woman doctor, which seems strange; although being a woman minister, Rose figures she can hardly complain. The woman doctor seems very young. But she speaks with calm confidence and tries to answer Rose's questions.

“We don't know what happened to you, Miss Evans. You were brought in suffering from a concussion; apparently you received a blow to the head. We need to keep you here for observation and for some tests. In a woman of your age an assault like this is not to be taken lightly.”

When she goes, Rose turns her face to the wall, like old King Hezekiah. He asked the Lord for fifteen more years and the Lord turned back the sundial to show him his prayer was granted. Rose has had her fifteen years and more. She does not feel like asking God for miracles. Her faith is not what it was twenty years ago. She no longer feels the Spirit pulsing through her veins like fire in the blood. Blood and Fire: that's the Army motto, isn't it? If they ask, does she want a clergyman, she'll call for an Army officer. She's been her own minister for too long. She knows Jesus cares, but she also knows he's not always in the miracle business. Right now he's sitting in the visitor's chair, looking at her. Not saying or doing anything: just being there.

After supper, which Rose doesn't eat, Sheilah Bennett comes and sits in that chair. “Gavin's home with the boys,” she says. “He's been on pins and needles to know how you are, ever since he brought you in the other night,” Sheilah says.

“You tell him thanks for me,” Rose says. “I don't know what I'd've done without him.”

“You're the one we should thank,” Sheilah says. “That girl – the one those boys were after? That was Sister Penney's daughter, poor little thing. They all ran after you got hit, let her go. The Lord used you, Reverend, to save that poor girl. I brought you a nightgown,” she adds. “I didn't know if you had one. Is there anything else you need? When are they letting you go home?”

“They won't tell me,” Rose says. “If you could…I hate to ask another favour, but I have a little suitcase in my room up over the church. I've got a few clothes, a dressing gown, slippers, in my dresser drawer. Put that in, but leave the few things that are already in the suitcase. Some…a few personal items. I'd like to have them, to go through them. I don't like the thought of leaving my things there. Oh, and the few pictures on my wall, put them in the case too. Could you pack up that suitcase and bring it to me? It's no rush.”

Gavin comes with the suitcase the following evening. “You don't need to worry about a thing, Reverend Rosa,” he says. “I'm running all the services. We haven't closed the church doors once. I did the healing service last night, and we had a special season of prayer just for you. The Spirit was movin' in that room, Reverend, movin' in a mighty way.”

“Praise the Lord,” says Rose wearily. He goes on with news of the congregation, his energy and enthusiasm reminding her of herself ten years ago. Whatever happens here, she thinks, her time is over. It's Gavin's turn now.
My day is done
, she thinks, and then remembers how often she's believed that before, and how the Lord keeps coming up with surprises.

But one day, even he'll run out of tricks up his sleeve. “Brother Gavin, I need to ask you. If the time comes…if I should pass on, I want to leave something in your care. A little box, a few belongings. Can you send them on to…well, I'll leave you the address. My daughter. She lives far away from here, and I don't want to trouble her now, but I want to leave her a few small things. Will you take care of that for me? If need be.”

Some time later – after complications, after surgery, after prayer and anointing, after the lights in the room grow dim and flicker out for the last time – certain items do pass into the hands of Reverend Gavin Bennett of the Praise Tabernacle Cathedral of Miracles. The untidy note accompanying the small suitcase instructs him to send it to Miss Claire Evans, St. John's, Newfoundland. Gavin has lived all his life in Brooklyn and cannot conceive of a place so small that this address will find the person intended. He will have to do some digging, he tells his wife, to try to find out if there's a proper address for this person Claire Evans, if such a person even still lives in St. John's, Newfoundland, wherever that might be.

But the Reverend Gavin Bennett, who works eight hours a day cleaning a department store and ascends the platform at night to preach the word of the Lord, is a busy man. This complicated task gets pushed to the back of his mind as the suitcase with the note gets pushed to the back of one closet after another. His business is with the living, not with the dead, and no-one can really blame him.

ANNE
 
ST. JOHN'S, MARCH 1983

“S
HE THINKS…WELL THEY
both think…this is just going to be the ideal set-up, but you mark my words. This is going to end in absolute disaster.”

Anne tries to nod noncommittally. Claire turns on her with an impatient sigh. “You think it's going to work out just fine, don't you?”

“Mom, I don't think anything, I just
hope
everything works out.” Anne and her mother are having coffee at Intermission in the Avalon Mall after a shopping trip to find some new sheets and blankets for the fold-out bed in Aunt Annie's back bedroom.

“It's going to take more than hope, it's going to take a miracle,” Claire says. She checks her watch. “I've got to get in to work for a couple of hours. Can I drop you at Aunt Annie's with this stuff?”

“Sure. I need to go into the university library and work on a paper, but I'll walk in from there.”

“The thing is,” Claire says, gathering up shopping bags, “just because two people were best friends fifty years ago does not mean they're going to be able to live together when they're nearly eighty years old. Ethel thinks she wants to come back to Newfoundland, but it's going to be a different story once she gets here, let me tell you. And your Aunt Annie's got very set in her ways since Bill died. She thinks it's going to be wonderful having someone in the house again, but it's not as simple as she'd like to believe.”

“I guess not,” Anne says. She realizes she has been caught up in Aunt Annie's version of how nice it will be to have Ethel home again.

“Are you
coming
?” Claire says in the voice she used to use when Anne was five years old, standing in a puddle outside the front door.

Aunt Ethel arrives a week later, with the whole family out to Torbay airport to meet her. They strain to see over the heads of the disembarking passengers. Happy reunions bubble all around them. Anne, on tiptoes, is the tallest of her family, now that Stephen's gone, and she's the first to see a little old lady – she really looks exactly like a Little Old Lady – coming off the plane clinging to the arm of a flight attendant.

Her hair is very white, almost blue-white, and her face, though wrinkled, is carefully made up. She wears a light blue raglan over a darker dress, and leans on a walking stick. The flight attendant holds Aunt Ethel's carry-on bag, part of a matched set with three much larger pieces, which, in their own good time, tumble down the carousel.

“My, my,” Aunt Ethel keeps saying, looking around at the crowds. “So this is St. John's. My, I wouldn't know but I was still in New York. Nothing like this here in my day, nothing at all.”

“Well, it's not exactly LaGuardia, now, Aunt Ethel,” Doug says, straining as he lifts one of the gigantic suitcases off the carousel and onto the cart. “But at least we've got the walkway now. You don't have to walk down the steps straight onto the tarmac anymore.”

“No, it was a lovely flight, lovely,” Aunt Ethel says vaguely. Anne can't tell yet if she's just disoriented from travel or actually a bit senile. “My word, Annie, hard to believe, isn't it, how the world has changed. Flying around on airplanes… I never thought I'd see the day, did you?”

“No, never,” says Aunt Annie, who has never been on a plane and never intends to be.

In the car Ethel still seems disoriented. “Now, where are we now, Claire?” she keeps asking, twisting around in her seat to pose questions to Claire, although she is riding in the front seat next to Doug. “Are we out in Torbay? You said this was Torbay airport. Now I remember Torbay was only a little fishing village.”

Claire leans forward from the back seat where she's squashed with Anne and Annie and Aunt Ethel's carry-on. “No, the airport is on the road out to Torbay, but we're headed back into town now. See here, at the lights, now this is Allandale Road. That's the university, where Anne goes.”

“Oh, very good, very good,” Aunt Ethel says, according the sprawl of university buildings a cursory glance. “Diane's youngest, Laurie, is studying marine biology. Did I tell you that? In graduate school. She's already got the one degree and she's gone back for another. She won some kind of award, there last year, for research. Such a smart girl.”

“This is Empire Avenue,” Doug offers as they turn onto it. “I guess it's changed quite a bit since you were here last, hasn't it?”

“Oh my, yes, look at how it's all built up. I think this was what we used to call the old railroad track if I'm not mistaken. This was all open fields when I was a girl. And even when we came back in ‘32, it was nothing like this. My, if poor Jim could see this now. He used to say, ‘Ethel girl, I'd rather be back in Newfoundland on one meal a day than living here, even with all we got.' My, how he would have liked to come back home.”

“Well, we're glad
you
were able to get home anyway,” Claire says firmly into the little silence that follows. Doug turns the car onto Freshwater Road. “And when is Diane coming to visit?”

“She says she's going to try to get down for two weeks in June. Come in June, I told her, the lilacs in Annie's garden will be blooming. You still have the lilac tree, Annie?”

“Better tell her to wait till July, or pack some heavy sweaters,” Claire says. “June's not the best month for the weather.”