Smoke and Fire

Chapter 3

Sunday mornings were always hectic. Asha woke up extra early to make Father Brant's breakfast and to help him get clean. She used to think she'd do his laundry and make dinner and Bjorn would shower and shave him and clean him after he used the washroom but Bjorn was not a natural caregiver. Asha took over last year when Father Brant got a bad rash in his armpits. It was a silent coup; Bjorn didn't fight and Asha didn't complain.

Father Brant's best suit was older than Asha was by a lot. Its material was thin in spots, fading in others. The slacks were plain black, his vest maroon, ascot gold, like his cross. Father Brant's overcoat matched his slacks and hung off his slight frame. She used to remember what it looked like on him when he was well but the passage of time had softened her memory. One day blurred into the next so it felt like there had always been a skeletal man with a skeletal smile waiting for her care.

"Use the pomade," Father Brant demanded in his wispy way.

"I already put some in, Father."

"Not enough you didn't."

She did. But she used more, whisking his hair back with her fingers. The little bathroom smelled like cedar.

"That's a good girl." He patted her hand with his liver-spotted one. What was it about the old that made them look spidery? His fingers could be spindle legs scratching at the air for webbing. Sometimes, they snuck into Asha's dreams and tore her apart like she was made of tissue paper. When they were through, she was a stain of blood and that was all.

Asha swallowed down a lump of unrealistic and unwarranted fear. A dream was a dream. It couldn't hurt her. "We should go; the service will start soon."

"I haven't my book."

"It's okay," Asha assured him. "I have it downstairs." Another white lie. She'd tried to explain to him that he didn't give the sermon anymore but he never seemed to remember until he was downstairs, sitting in a pew and looking at Father Springer as he recited the Lord's Prayer from a bible much newer than Father Brant's old tatty one.

Father Brant started to rise but couldn't make it all the way up. Asha took his hands and helped. He didn't release her immediately. Asha held in her revulsion and didn't look at his skin against hers. Father Brant looked her over with his cataract-filled eyes and saw her with all the perception of a man who'd worn the cloth for an entire lifetime. "You're troubled, child."

Asha stalled. How could a blind man see so clearly?

"Is my hair a mess?" Father Brant asked.

Or not. "You're fine."

His mouth pulled to the left and she realized he'd made a joke at his own expense. It wasn't very often he knew he was not the man he used to be and in good enough humour to jest about it. "What's bothering you?"

Dreams and reality and the spaces between. "It's nothing."

"Nothing becomes quite heavy when you carry it forever."

He used to always say stuff like that, Asha remembered now.

"Is it about Mister Vealer?"

And he remembered Joan. Asha's expression felt ugly, caught somewhere between a smile and a frown.

"That boy has a demon in him," Father Brant continued. "Darkness."

"People are rarely all light or all dark," Asha quoted Father Brant from his confessional days when she would sit behind the confessionals when she wasn't supposed to, and listen, just because she was bored. And curious, if she was honest with herself. Piousness had always been the water slipping through her fingers.