The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd

for a week at a time and come back with four thousand pounds of shrimp in the hold. But all he’d wanted was to run his own business, be his own boss, with the freedom to be out on the water when he wanted and home with his family when he wanted. He’d come up with an inshore fishing charter idea, saved and bought his Chris-Craft. Four years later it had exploded.

He said his religion was the sea. That it was his family. He’d told Mike and me stories about a sea kingdom ruled by a gang of ruthless mud snails and the brave keyhole limpets who tried to overthrow them. His imagination was ingenious. He told us we could make wands out of stingray barbs and, by waving them a certain way, cause the waves to sing “Dixie,” something that had occupied us for fruitless hours. If we dreamed of a great egret, he said, we would find its feathers beneath our pillow the next morning. I woke more than once to white feathers in my bed, though I could never recall the egret dream that had brought them. And of course the ne plus ultra of all his stories—how he’d seen an entire pod of mermaids one dawn, swimming to his boat.
    I could not remember a single time he’d attended mass, but he was the one who’d first taken me to the monastery to see the mermaid chair, who’d told me the story behind it. I think he’d only pretended to be a reprobate.
    Though he refused to share Mother’s religion, he seemed to admire it. Back then she was not pathological about it. Sometimes I think he married her because of her boundless capacity for faith, how she could swallow every preposterous doctrine, 80
    s u e m o n k k i d d
    dogma, and story the church came up with. Maybe her faith in the church made up for his lack of it. My mother and father made a peculiar couple—Walt Whitman and Joan of Arc—but it’d worked. They had adored each other. I was sure of that.
    Mother turned away from his photograph and waited as I finished winding the gauze bandage around her hand. She was wearing her blue chenille robe, minus the belt. She gathered the collar up around her neck, then let her hand drift down to the drawer, the one with all the religious bilge. She fingered the handle. I wondered if the clipping about his death was still in there.
    Why had I given him the pipe?
    Dad and I had seen it one day in Caw Caw General, and he’d admired it. He’d picked it up and pretended to take a puff. “I’ve always wanted to be the kind of man who smoked a pipe,” he said. I’d taken every cent of my fiddler-crab money and bought it for him for Father’s Day. Mother had told me not to, that she didn’t want him smoking a pipe. I’d bought it anyway.
    She’d never said a word to me about its being the cause of the fire.
    I tore a piece of adhesive tape and fastened the end of the gauze to her wrist. She started to get up, but I knelt in front of her chair and placed my hands on her knees. I didn’t know where to start. But I’d taken this on. I’d banished Hugh, and now it was all mine.
    As I knelt there, my belief that I could handle it by myself was starting to break apart. Mother stared straight into my eyes.
    Her lower lids drooped down into deep curves, exposing their small pink linings. She looked timeless, older than her years.
    I said, “Last night in the garden, you mentioned Father Dominic, remember?”

    t h e m e r m a i d c h a i r
    81
    She shook her head. Her good hand lay in her lap, and I took it in mine, touching the tips of her fingers.
    “I asked you why you did this to your finger, and you brought up Dad, and then you mentioned Father Dominic. Did he have something to do with your cutting off your finger?”
    She gave me a blank look.
    “Did he give you the idea that you should do some kind of penance, something like that?”
    The blankness turned to exasperation. “No, of course not.”
    “But cutting off your finger was penance, wasn’t it?”
    Her eyes darted away from my face.
    “Please, Mother. We need to talk