When the Saints Read online

  WHEN THE SAINTS

  ~ A Novel ~

  SARAH MIAN

  Dedication

  For my mother.

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  ADVANCE PRAISE FOR When the Saints

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  THE RHUBARB LEAVES HAVE GROWN UP TO THE FIRST-floor windows. From the bottom of the driveway, I spy a juice pitcher and some plastic cups sitting on a table on the porch. I strain my ears for voices, but all I’m picking up is the buzz of insects and power lines.

  When I get closer, I see cobwebs binding the table to the railing and a grey feather sticking out of the jug. A wool sweater hanging over the back of a chair doesn’t stir with the breeze. I squint up at the windows and fight the urge to bolt, pushing my fists into the back pockets of my jeans to anchor myself. A crow starts a staring contest from the roof and I look away first, glancing around at all the beer cans scattered in the grass, wondering what debris was left behind and what’s been brought since by kids using the house as a party place.

  It’s hard to focus with those beady eyes boring into my forehead, so I give up and walk around the side yard to the garage. Thorn bushes catch the hem of my jacket on the slight incline and it takes a few good kicks on the door before I can squeeze inside. Grandpa’s shotguns are rusted out and there’s a lonesome smell of oil over everything. The dirt floor next to the deep-freeze Daddy used to throw chunks of deer meat into is stained black from years of spilled blood. The wall hook is empty. All the keys are gone, even the one for the disassembled tractor.

  Something slides past my foot and vanishes behind a metal jerry can. I push the can aside with my boot, squat down and spy a garter snake coiled back beneath the shelves full of dusty tools. It darts past me and slips outside, and as I’m tracing its path through the weeds I notice the long grass is flattened near the kitchen entrance of the house. As soon as I start wading down there, the crow alights on the awning to keep me in its sights.

  I get a familiar jolt as I approach the small round window in the kitchen door. Back in the day, this was the porthole to whatever shitstorm was in swing if Daddy was home. If it was getting dark and my stomach was growling, I used to drag over a sawhorse to stand on and press my face to the glass. Sometimes I could make out a figure slumped over in a chair or catch the shadow of a bottle tipping back. Once, Daddy surprised the hell out of me with his eyeballs right up to mine. I fell backward onto the grass, crawled through the bushes and from a safe distance watched him lurch out the door and trip over the sawhorse, hollering that I was dead meat. While he lay there passed out in the moonlight, I shivered in the trees for an hour until my older brother came home. I watched Bird poke Daddy with a long stick and when Daddy didn’t twitch, I sprinted out from my hiding spot. Bird pushed me into the house and locked the door behind us. We stood at the window watching Daddy’s belly rising and falling. “Stupid shithead,” Bird said. “He won’t even remember how he got there.” He turned around, snatched Daddy’s glass off the table, and I watched the few amber rivulets that missed his mouth go trickling down his neck.

  Now I only have to stand on tiptoes to peer inside, but all I can make out are blurry shapes. I try the knob and it’s unlocked, so I slowly walk in.

  The walls and countertops are scarred with cigarette burns. There are butts on the floor, glasses of mouldy liquid and a shrivelled mouse on a plate. It’s like someone hosted the tea party from hell.

  I hold my nose and search the room for something familiar. After a few seconds, I spy the rooster clock, the one we got free from an offer on the back of a cereal box. It used to “Cock-a-doodle-doo!” until it startled Daddy one day and he bashed it with his fist. After that, it would only whisper “Cock” every hour followed by a garbled noise like it was being choked. I take it down off the wall, wipe off the grime and wind the little pin in the back, but that bird’s finally out of its misery. I carefully hang it back in its place and wander to the next room.

  My boots on the floorboards set off a chain reaction of groans and rattles throughout the whole house. In the murky green light, everything looks as if it’s under water. The hallway is a jungle of coat hangers and unravelled cassette tapes, piles of fallen plaster and broken Christmas-tree ornaments. Someone booby-trapped the main staircase by nailing a flannel sheet over a missing tread.

  Upstairs, the floor’s given way in spots. I find where a beam shows through and walk the length of it into the master bedroom. Two white cats are lying on a bare matress. They stare at me, wide-eyed. In the closet, Ma’s yellow dress was a banquet for moths. The buttons she kept in the Mason jar on her bureau are stuck together. There are water stains on the walls, wings flapping in the attic. Even the clouds are creaking outside.

  I pick a sturdy spot and slowly rotate, taking it all in. Before I can even begin to wrap my mind around this mess, I hear a car door slam. I make my way back down the stairs and peer out a window. The RCMP officer I spoke to earlier is parked down on the road and coming up on foot. I open the front door and quickly undo the top few buttons of my blouse. I’ll need a place to sleep, and it sure as hell won’t be in this house.

  “Had to see for myself,” I say once he’s in earshot.

  He takes his hat off. “Sorry, I don’t have any more information for you.”

  He’s lying. I can tell by how fast he drops his eyes. I walk down off the porch and ask, “You know if anyone in town needs a waitress?”

  He stares hard at my red boots, tries not to let his eyes slide up my legs. I see he’s wearing a wedding ring. A voice cuts through the static on his belt radio and he flicks the volume down with his thumb. “Just head to the tavern. West knows everything anybody knows. You’ll get all your answers in one place.”

  “Who’s West?”

  “He’s been running the Four Horses since Clutch passed.”

  “He got a girlfriend?”

  “Listen, Tabatha.” The cop fidgets and puts his hat back on. “Things have been quiet around here.”

  “You going to give me a ride or not?”

  I hear a rustle of feathers and look up to see a whole flock of crows now perched on the rusty telephone wire. They seem to be waiting for a signal. I raise my arm and give them the middle finger, but that wasn’t it.

  THE MAIN DRAG WAS NEVER A WELCOME PLACE FOR Saints. My stomach tightens as we pass the convenience store I used to steal from right out of the register, and next to it the barbershop with the dirty candy-striped pole Bird once licked on a dare.

  Up ahead, I see the big town history mural painted on the stone wall. There’s a trick to it where, if you stand in a certain spot, you become another face in the crowd of people cheering for the men come home from war. As we pass it, I see that all the townswomen have been defiled by spray paint. They’ve all got big tits and tongues hanging out, ready to jump any soldier who still has his legs.

  The cop lets me out at the stop sign and drives off without a word. I need to clear my head, so I duck down an alley into the Doyle Street Country Club. That’s the name the cops gave to the back lot where kids started congregating to pass around cheap bottles of Great White. By the look of all the empties, the club’s still swinging, though the new house beverage is something called Dory 72. The label has a cross-eyed cartoon fisherman with the slogan Get It in Your Gills.

  I trail my finger along the wavy green line that the big flood stained along the back walls of the buildings, remembering how bits of algae and g
arbage were stuck to everyone’s houses and cars. The day after the storm, my father paddled our family down Main Street in a canoe, pointing out floating baby doll heads and whisky jugs, hooking in the stuff Ma wanted with a ski pole. The cemetery was submerged except for the tallest crosses, and later we heard that some of the bodies went for a ride. One of them floated face up beneath Grandma Jean’s kitchen window. She was sure it was Jim Weir, whose funeral she’d been at two weeks before. When she got sick of looking at him, she paid some kids to tether him to their rubber dinghy and tow him down to the station.

  I light a cigarette and smoke it down to my fingers while I search for my old graffiti. Someone carved I fucked your mother last night into the dumpster, and beneath it someone else scrawled You wish, Dad. I wish a few of these kids were hanging around so I could tell them about some of our old hijinks. Like the time some church nuts marched down here preaching the light of the Lord, handing out pamphlets and T-shirts that said, JESUS LISTENS. We ripped the sleeves off the shirts, stole some permanent markers from the pharmacy and added TO METALLICA in thunderbolt letters. Then we sat on the church steps Sunday morning and gave them back to all the people walking in.

  I crush out my smoke, crack my neck a few times. Then I pop a piece of gum in my mouth and head back through the alley. I start up the main drag, but I only get as far as the beauty parlour before my stomach seizes up again. One time, my mother and I were walking hand in hand and she stopped short right in front of this door. She had a green and yellow bruise on that day and it was almost pretty, like a fireworks display across one cheek. She said, “I’m going to get me a job and get us out of here.” She grabbed my hand, burst through the door and said, “You need workers? I’ll do anything that needs doing. I can work sixteen hours a day for the price of eight.” And without even looking up from putting perm rods in some old lady’s hair, the woman who ran the place, Beula Dean, said to no one in particular, “I’d sooner hire that stray dog that hangs around the library with one eye hanging out of its head.”

  It was moments like those that forced me to be who I am. If ever I drifted just an inch from being a Saint, something always snapped me right back in my place. The thought of it makes me want to duck into the beauty parlour right now, slice Beula Dean’s throat with a razor blade and have a skating party in her blood. But the only person inside is a bored-looking black lady sitting behind the counter reading Wedding Bells magazine. She looks up and beckons for me to come in, but I keep moving.

  The funeral parlour is boarded up and moved around the corner into what used to be the bowling alley. I don’t see any reason why I can’t just walk in and ask if anyone in my family cashed in their chips. There’s a loud bell that jangles when the door opens and organ music playing on a little boom box behind the desk. I nose around, touching all the display coffins and urns, until a young man with big glasses and hair all combed over to one side emerges from the backroom.

  “Hi there. I’m Tabby Saint. I’m curious if you might have buried anybody from my family in the last eleven or so years. I’m just back in town and haven’t exactly kept in touch.”

  “Saint?” The way he looks at me, so spooked, I figure he’s going to tell me they all burned up in a fire or something. “We haven’t provided any services for Saints.”

  “Is that because no one died or because they’d sooner dig a hole in the woods than pay your fees?”

  He can’t seem to pry open his jaw.

  “No offence,” I add. “I can see them doing that.”

  “One moment.” He opens a door and goes down some stairs. When he comes back, he clears his throat and says, “My father says no Saints have passed on since Jack Saint in 1971.”

  “People always said we were hard targets. Speaking of which, what’d you do with all those pins and balls when you moved in?”

  “We boxed them up and put them out in the parking lot. Some kids carted them off.”

  I imagine my brothers and sister laying down planks of plywood and setting up their own little bowling alley in the front yard, charging other kids lane fees.

  He straightens his glasses. “Anything else?”

  I take a last look at all the half-open coffins with pink linings and little pillows so shiny they give me a headache. “Just like luxury cars,” I say, running my hand down the side of a black casket. “I’ll bet the typical dipshit who goes down in one of these showboats spent his years driving a Pinto with bald tires and a driver’s-side door that had to be duct-taped shut.”

  He looks at me blankly.

  I wink. “I think I liked the place better when it served beer.”

  I push the door open and step out onto the sidewalk, and there’s this little ringlet-headed thing coming toward me. She’s about six years old with a flat nose and juice stains on her neck. She stops and says, “Are you lice? My mother seen you this morning, and she said you’re lice.”

  “That was nice of her.” I spit my gum out on the pavement. “Who’s your mother?”

  “Nancy Roth-MacDonald.”

  I know that name. Nancy Roth was in my grade. She told her friends my parents were brother and sister and it spread around school like a bad fart. There were a lot of nasty things said about my family that were true; that girl had no good reason to be throwing extra stink into the pot. I bend down to this kid’s face and say, “When I was fourteen, my hair hung straight down to my ass and poor Nancy Roth had these little curls stuck to her head like pubic hairs.” I wrap a strand of her hair around my finger and wind it up to her scalp. “The meaner she was, the tighter and frizzier those curls got. You think about that.”

  She hesitates, then pulls away like I scalded her with a hot curling iron.

  “Tell your mother I said hi.”

  THE TAVERN HAS A BRIGHT NEW PAINT JOB, BUT THE men inside are worse than ever. Or maybe they’re the same drunks a decade older and uglier, but I can’t distinguish one fat ass hanging off the back of a stool from another. I march up to the bar and the bartender finally pries himself from the television set they’re all staring at.

  “You’re West?”

  “I am.”

  “I’m Tabby Saint.”

  His face twitches like there’s a bug crawling across it. “So?”

  “So nothing.” I take a stool. “Give me a beer.”

  He doesn’t move. The chalkboard on the wall behind him says, Today’s Special: Two Drinks for the Price of Two Drinks.

  “I lived here till I was fourteen years old,” I tell him. “I don’t remember you.”

  “I’m from Cable.”

  “Did you know my father?”

  He spits sideways into the sink. “Yeah. I knew your father.”

  “Where’d he go?”

  One of the men snorts and shakes his head. The room falls silent except for the dart game on the television. I eye a basket of stale-looking pretzels sitting on the bar. It’s been a while since I’ve eaten.

  “Where’s the rest of them gone to?” I ask, taking a handful.

  West uncrosses his arms, grabs a bottle of Ten-Penny from the fridge behind him, twists the cap off and smacks it down hard in front of me. “They were smoked out ages ago. Got run across the bridge.”

  “What for?”

  He shrugs, turns back to the television. I can tell I’m not going to get anything more out of him. Not in here, anyway. He’s got a broken tooth on the bottom row, but other than that he’s decent-looking. Strong arms under his black shirt, full head of hair, copper-coloured eyes.

  I wash down a mouthful of pretzel with a swig of beer. “I need a job.”

  “Oh yeah?” West motions down the line of pasty faces. “Why don’t you join the club?”

  I hang around for hours watching darts, then pool, then bowling, then darts again, until the last wino picks himself up, takes his ball cap off the coat rack and stumbles out the door. West goes out to empty the trash, comes back in and locks up the fridge, gathers some dirty glasses and sets them in the sink. “
You’re still here,” he says over his shoulder, buttoning his coat.

  “You hadn’t noticed?”

  He leans over and crosses his forearms on the bar. “That guy who left just before Carl came in here wearing a leather jacket that belongs to a friend of mine whose truck was busted into. He must have ripped the tabs off and scuffed it up a little, but it’s the same one.” He glances down at my cleavage. “Asshole paid me with a hundred-dollar bill, which means he just sold something, and he said his name is Dave. Course, when I pretended the phone was for Dave, he didn’t react until I said it twice, and after that he knew I was on to him. Know how I know?”

  I shrug.

  “Because buddy left right then with a third of beer in his bottle whereas the previous two he drained to the last drop just like you and every other loser in this dump.” He takes a mint from the glass dish next to the register and pops it in his mouth. “I notice everything.”

  “I saw the hundred he paid you with,” I say. “I also saw the two fifties in his wallet and the driver’s licence that says his last name is Graves. And for the record, I’m no loser, and I don’t appreciate you making assumptions based on my last name.”

  He bites down loudly into the mint. Then a smile creeps into his lips as he reaches out and tucks a piece of my hair behind my ear. “Okay then.”

  THAT NIGHT I WRAP MY LEGS AROUND WEST AND ONCE he’s done and snoring I lie awake and walk through each room of our house again in my mind. I can’t imagine what would make Daddy leave the place to rot. He used to brag that his father built it with his own hands, which wasn’t even true, but he seemed to believe it.

  After Grandpa Jack fell drunk in the river and drowned the year I was born, Daddy talked him up like he was the Messiah when really he was a demented alcoholic tyrant who used to beat Daddy with this black horse statue that sat on the mantle. Once, we were riding in our old station wagon and passed a black horse grazing in a field. Daddy started rubbing the left side of his head with the palm of his hand and pressed his boot down on the gas pedal so hard that all the trees slurred together outside the windows. My baby brother Jackie started screaming and Daddy slammed on the brakes, wrenched the car to the side of the road and told Ma she had ten seconds to shut the little bastard up. He pushed in the cigarette lighter as she jumped out and hauled Jackie from his car seat. The lighter popped and Daddy held it up where she could see it as she stood on the side of the highway cooing in Jackie’s ear. Then Daddy turned around and stared at Bird and me as he pressed the burning end to the passenger seat, melting a hole where Ma’s head had been. I grabbed onto Bird so tight my fingernails made little red half moons in his arm.