The Speed of Mercy by Christy Conlin (good books for high schoolers txt) 📕

Granny in September, no formal routines, no mothers to report to. No mothers to keep a cautious eye. Cynthia seems to know what Stella is thinking without Stella even having to ask. For a moment Stella thinks this is what it is to have a sister. Stella is conscious of how her teeny breasts poke out of her T-shirt as she pants. She doesn’t even need clothes anymore, covered as she is in a cloak of self-consciousness, shame and regret. Stella also knows that her intelligence is as much a curse as it is a blessing. Stella should keep it sweet.

Stella points to the sidewalk at the stones. “What are those?”

Cynthia kneels down by the paving stones, her bike leaning against the stop-sign post. She traces the stone markers with her finger. “I don’t know exactly. They’ve been here since forever. Street markers or something, before they had street signs. We can ask Granny. They’re left over from the old days. There were lots of freaky things in those days.” Cynthia is now whispering. “Our forefathers all went to this old-time men’s club — a fellowship, is what Granny says they called it. First it was religious: the Sodality of Fire and Mercy. Now they just say Sodality. It’s some weird men’s group. You know how they like to get together and talk about all that man stuff. That’s how my father knows Tommy Jessome and those guys from out of town. I know your dad’s a historian and all, but maybe he didn’t tell you. There was someone associated with it who took people’s money. For business favours or something. And he wouldn’t let people get vaccinations and a lot of the children died. He sold them what my grandmother calls snake oil. He used to preach down by the harbour on the Main Street on Friday nights. Granny Scotia said his personality was the size of Texas. He squandered their money and killed their children with his quackery. He made people beholden to him. That was the problem. Granny says he ruined my grandfather and your grandfather, that they were around him too much when they were younger, that he brainwashed them, poured rum into them. The men’s group was kind of like the Masons or the Rosicrucians. Did you have those in Ohio?”

“There was a Masonic Temple. My father said it was stupid.”

“Well, it’s all gone now. My dad’s a member of a men’s group, but they raise money for charity and stuff like that.”

The house smells delicious inside. The girls hear faint music down the hallway, in the back parlour. There is a dark rectangular cake on the kitchen table, cooling. They find Granny sleeping in the parlour, the music loud now, Handel’s Messiah, the room partially decorated for Christmas. Yule. Cynthia’s voice is a whisper. “That’s what Granny Scotia calls it. Yule.” Cynthia presses her lips together, her eyes azure pools, a gust of something over the surface, stirring the water, a tear trickling down her cheek. They take down the decorations and turn the music off. Granny doesn’t wake up.

In the kitchen, Stella helps Cynthia make sandwiches. While they’re eating they hear Granny coming down the hall. She stands in the doorway. “Goodness me, I dozed off. I was going to make you girls dinner and I sat down to wait, and next thing you know, it’s a hundred years later, and here I am, an old lame crone of a woman.” Granny seems normal. She doesn’t mention the Christmas decorations. She gives a snort and crosses the room to put the kettle on for tea. Stella clears the table and takes the china plates across to the old sink. Granny gasps. “Did you hurt yourself, Stella?”

Stella looks down. Coming out from under her dress is a trickle of blood. She leans over the sink and a tear smacks down on the worn porcelain. She’s sore and sticky. Her hip still burns. Granny puts her hand on her back. “My dear, I think you’ve started your cycle. The Red Lady. Not to worry, my dear, not to worry. You’ll get to know her and miss her when she eventually leaves you. Cynthia, do you have anything she can use?”

Outside the downstairs washroom Cynthia hands Stella a black washcloth and a pad and a clean pair of purple underpants. “Use these. Just hang the cloth on the towel rack. Don’t worry, okay? It happens to us all. I got my period when I was almost twelve, last year. I was swimming. It was totally embarrassing and so grody and I almost barfed. Total humiliation.”

When Stella comes outside they don’t say anything to her about it. Granny rubs her head and gives her a glass of frosty lemonade.

They go for a walk through the marsh, over a footpath to a sandy beach. They stop by a plaque on a post, which Cynthia reads out loud:

Seabury Marsh: A Restored Wetland

This pathway stands on an old dike built by French saulniers, or salt marsh workers, in the early 1600s. The marsh was later drained and used for pastures and hayfield. The land was donated to the Town of Seabury in 1970 through the generosity of the Seabury Family and Cineris International.

Then Cynthia leads them to the beach. Stella takes off her shoes. Granny Scotia is already barefoot and she’s standing out in the water.

Cynthia waits for Stella.

“Is this the salt water cure, Cynthia?”

She giggles. “No, we’re just standing in the water. You’ll know the salt water cure when it happens.”

It’s all very cryptic. Stella thinks of when she was a child at the beach with her mother. A group of adults with tie-dye T-shirts and beads and long hair were smoking by the food stand. “The last of the hippies,” her mother said. “I was a bohemian, not a hippie. There is a difference. Hippies aren’t intellectuals.” Stella hadn’t known what her mother was talking about except that her mother told her she’d spent a year in Paris.