Fall on Your Knees Read online

  “First rate…. MacDonald paints a Cape Breton landscape steeped in human emotions…. She has found the language of the heart that runs below everyday discourse…. There is no resisting this story.”

  —The Globe and Mail

  “A delicious story, one of those sweeping family sagas to take on summer vacation and savour…. MacDonald is a master of exciting story-telling, of suspense and surprise.”

  —Montreal Gazette

  “With Fall On Your Knees, playwright MacDonald has taken a surprising leap into the front ranks of major Canadian novelists…. Fall On Your Knees is a novel … of such power that it lingers in the mind and continues to astonish long after the book has been put down. Eloquent, richly textured and eminently readable.”

  —London Free Press

  “This jaw-droppingly assured leap into fiction writing by the variously talented MacDonald surprises not so much by its craft but by the depth of its feeling. MacDonald’s glittering intellect mixes with a newfound yearning in this rich and haunted tale…. [Her] moody, but always precise, prose creates a historically accurate portrait of the racially rich town of New Waterford and of Harlem’s pre-Cotton Club days…. But it’s the emotion that drives this novel, naked — in more ways than one. A knockout.”

  —NOW

  “How many women leap to mind when you think of really memorable characters in Canadian fiction? Margaret Laurence’s Hagar Shipley, certainly. Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne. And they’re about it. With her first novel, Toronto playwright Ann-Marie MacDonald has added Frances Piper, one of the most fascinating and multifaceted characters, male or female, to hit the printed page in years…. MacDonald’s unapologetic, operatic sense of drama gives this book its wild storms and sunshine, so different from so many Canadian novels with their fine, constant drizzle of the everyday. It helps that the novel is also really funny.”

  —Ottawa Citizen

  “Fall On Your Knees proves that sisterhood is powerful — but not exactly as we thought it would be. It’s a bit like performing the Stations of the Cross to rock ‘n’ roll.”

  —Rita Mae Brown, author of Ruby Fruit Jungle and Riding Shotgun

  “Some wonderful writing has come out of Canada in recent years from such authors as Robertson Davies and Margaret Atwood. Now they are joined by the multi-talented Ann-Marie MacDonald … She is already a successful actress and playwright. It seems almost unfair that she should have written a brilliant first novel.”

  —Sunday Telegraph

  “Ann-Marie MacDonald has produced a haunting, assured and astute first novel… . Fall On Your Knees is a huge, old-fashioned epic full of plot twists. The story leaps gracefully across generations, national borders and cultural standards regarding race, class and sexual orientation.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Wondrous…. Its once-upon-a-time opening promises a rich family saga. The novel more than delivers with a heartbreaking story…. The reader is drawn into the intricate, haunting world of the Piper sisters and comes away thinking, Here is a true miracle of fiction.”

  —The Houston Chronicle

  “If Fall On Your Knees were merely a well-crafted, compelling story, it would be a tremendous achievement for a first time novelist. But MacDonald is also hard after her readers’ hearts. In conceiving the 20th century as a character instead of a backdrop, MacDonald implicates us all in her story.”

  —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Captivating — it’s a rollicking, playful, sometimes dark journey through three generations of a Cape Breton family…. MacDonald skilfully crafts a saga that keeps her readers deeply interested, shocked, enraged and amused…. A strange and wonderful story.”

  —Winnipeg Free Press

  “An extraordinary family saga of Gothic proportions…. She keeps you reading, not with gimmicks but with gripping, unforgettable characters so archetypally resonant, so realistically evoked, that they live themselves right off the page.”

  —Books in Canada

  “Here is an explosive mix of family feuds and incest, musical dreams and melodrama, all shot through with a fierce guilt … Fall On Your Knees is a heady, haunting brew, carefully structured, witty and distinctive.”

  —The Observer

  “The uniqueness of MacDonald’s voice, and of her approach, lies in her ability to distill … She can capture, deftly, the fleeting moment, the fragmented feelings that make up so much of what we term ‘understanding’. Thus, complex experiences become single, vivid images. It is a rare talent that can produce it for others to see.”

  —The London Times

  “In this resonant first novel … Ms. MacDonald skilfully shifts the story backward and forward in time, giving it a mythic quality that allows dark, half-buried secrets to be gracefully and chillingly revealed.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  Ann-Marie MacDonald is a Toronto-based writer and actor. Her play Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) won the Governor General’s Award for Drama, the Chalmers Award for Outstanding Play and the Canadian Authors’ Association Award for Drama. She won a Gemini Award for her role in the film Where the Spirit Lives and was nominated for a Genie for her role in I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing. Fall On Your Knees is the winner of The Commonwealth Prize for Best First Fiction, The CAA Harlequin Literary Award for Fiction and the Dartmouth Award. It was shortlisted for the Giller Prize, the Trillium Award, the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award, and Britain’s Orange Prize for Best Novel by a woman writer. Ann-Marie MacDonald lives in Toronto.

  Dedicated with love and gratitude to

  Cheryl Daniels and Maureen White

  Thanks and Acknowledgements

  The author wishes to thank the following individuals and organizations, as well as to acknowledge certain books that were particularly helpful in the course of her research. David Abbass, Sister Simone Abbass CND, The Canada Council, Cape Breton’s Magazine, Cheryl Daniels, Diane Flacks, Lily Flacks, Rita Fridella, Nic Gotham, Malcolm Johannesen, Honora MacDonald Johannesen, James Weldon Johnson’s Black Manhattan, Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory, Daphne Duval Harrison’s Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920’s, Arsinée Khanjian, Suzanne Khuri, Margaret MacClintock, Cuddles MacDonald, Dude MacDonald, John Hugh MacDonald, Katie MacDonald, Laurel MacDonald, Sister Margaret A. MacDonald CND, Mary Teresa Abbass MacDonald, Harold MacPhee and The Black Cultural Centre of Nova Scotia, John Mellor’s The Company Store, Bill Metcalfe and the Cape Breton Highlanders Association, New Waterford Three Score & Ten ed. Ted Boutilier, Beverly Murray, Michael Ondaatje, The Ontario Arts Council, Bridglal Pachai’s Beneath the Clouds of the Promised Land, Pearl, John Pennino and The Metropolitan Opera of New York Archives, Archival Staff of The Metropolitan Toronto Reference Library, Father Principe of Saint Michael’s College U of T, Shari Saunders, Wayne Strongman, Lillian MacDonald Szpak, Kate Terry and The Beaton Institute of The College of Cape Breton, Mrs Helen Vingoe, Maureen White, Gina Wilkinson.

  “Why canst thou not always be a good lass, Cathy?”

  “Why cannot you always be a good man, father?”

  WUTHERING HEIGHTS

  Silent Pictures

  They’re all dead now.

  Here’s a picture of the town where they lived. New Waterford. It’s a night bright with the moon. Imagine you are looking down from the height of a church steeple, onto the vivid gradations of light and shadow that make the picture. A small mining town near cutaway cliffs that curve over narrow rock beaches below, where the silver sea rolls and rolls, flattering the moon. Not many trees, thin grass. The silhouette of a colliery, iron tower against a slim pewter sky with cables and supports sloping at forty-five-degree angles to the ground. Railway tracks that stretc
h only a short distance from the base of a gorgeous high slant of glinting coal, towards an archway in the earth where the tracks slope in and down and disappear. And spreading away from the collieries and coal heaps are the peaked roofs of the miners’ houses built row on row by the coal company. Company houses. Company town.

  Look down over the street where they lived. Water Street. An avenue of packed dust and scattered stones that leads out past the edge of town to where the wide, keeling graveyard overlooks the ocean. That sighing sound is just the sea.

  Here’s a picture of their house as it was then. White, wood frame with the covered veranda. It’s big compared to the miners’ houses. There’s a piano in the front room. In the back is the kitchen where Mumma died.

  Here’s a picture of her the day she died. She had a stroke while cleaning the oven. Which is how the doctor put it. Of course you can’t see her face for the oven, but you can see where she had her stockings rolled down for housework and, although this is a black and white picture, her house-dress actually is black since she was in mourning for Kathleen at the time, as well as Ambrose. You can’t tell from this picture, but Mumma couldn’t speak English very well. Mercedes found her like that, half in half out of the oven like the witch in Hansel and Gretel. What did she plan to cook that day? When Mumma died, all the eggs in the pantry went bad — they must have because you could smell that sulphur smell all the way down Water Street.

  So that’s the house at 191 Water Street, New Waterford, Cape Breton Island, in the far eastern province of Nova Scotia, Canada. And that’s Ma on the day she died, June 23, 1919.

  Here’s a picture of Daddy. He’s not dead, he’s asleep. You see that armchair he’s in? That’s the pale green wingback. His hair is braided. That’s not an ethnic custom. They were only ethnic on Mumma’s side. Those are braids that Lily put in his hair while he was asleep.

  There are no pictures of Ambrose, there wasn’t time for that. Here’s a picture of his crib still warm.

  Other Lily is in limbo. She lived a day, then died before she could be baptized, and went straight to limbo along with all the other unbaptized babies and the good heathens. They don’t suffer, they just sort of hang there effortlessly and unaware. Jesus is known to have gone into limbo occasionally and taken a particularly good heathen out of it and up to heaven. So it is possible. Otherwise…. That’s why this picture of Other Lily is a white blank.

  Don’t worry. Ambrose was baptized.

  Here’s one of Mercedes. That opal rosary of hers was basically priceless. An opal rosary, can you imagine? She kept it pinned to the inside of her brassiere, over her heart, at all times when she wasn’t using it. Partly for divine protection, partly out of the convenience of never being without the means to say a quick decade of the beads when the spirit moved her, which was often. Although, as Mercedes liked to point out, you can say the rosary with any objects at hand if you find yourself in need of a prayer but without your beads. For example, you can say it with pebbles or breadcrumbs. Frances wanted to know, could you say the rosary with cigarette butts? The answer was yes, if you’re pure at heart. With mouse turds? With someone’s freckles? The dots in a newspaper photograph of Harry Houdini? That’s enough, Frances. In any case, this is a picture of Mercedes, holding her opal rosary, with one finger raised and pressed against her lips. She’s saying, “Shshsh.”

  And this is Frances. But wait, she’s not in it yet. This one is a moving picture. It was taken at night, behind the house. There’s the creek, flowing black and shiny between its narrow banks. And there’s the garden on the other side. Imagine you can hear the creek trickling. Like a girl telling a secret in a language so much like our own. A still night, a midnight clear. It’s only fair to tell you that a neighbour once saw the dismembered image of his son in this creek, only to learn upon his arrival home for supper that his son had been crushed to death by a fall of stone in Number 12 Mine.

  But tonight the surface of the creek is merely as Nature made it. And certainly it’s odd but not at all supernatural to see the surface break, and a real live soaked and shivering girl rise up from the water and stare straight at us. Or at someone just behind us. Frances. What’s she doing in the middle of the creek, in the middle of the night? And what’s she hugging to her chest with her chicken-skinny arms? A dark wet bundle. Did it stir just now? What are you doing, Frances?

  But even if she were to answer, we wouldn’t know what she was saying, because, although this is a moving picture, it is also a silent one. All the pictures of Kathleen were destroyed. All except one. And it’s been put away.

  Kathleen sang so beautifully that God wanted her to sing for Him in heaven with His choir of angels. So He took her.

  Book 1

  THE GARDEN

  To Seek His Fortune

  A long time ago, before you were born, there lived a family called Piper on Cape Breton Island. The daddy, James Piper, managed to stay out of the coal mines most of his life, for it had been his mother’s great fear that he would grow up and enter the pit. She had taught him to read the classics, to play piano and to expect something finer in spite of everything. And that was what James wanted for his own children.

  James’s mother came from Wreck Cove, the daughter of a prosperous boat builder. James’s father was a penniless shoemaker from Port Hood. James’s father fell in love with James’s mother while measuring her feet. He promised her father he wouldn’t take her far from home. He married her and took her to Egypt and that’s where James was born. Egypt was a lonely place way on the other side of the island, in Inverness County, and James never even had a brother or sister to play with. James’s father traded his iron last for a tin pan, but no one then or since ever heard of a Cape Breton gold rush.

  It used to make his father angry when James and his mother spoke Gaelic together, for his father spoke only English. Gaelic was James’s mother tongue. English always felt flat and harsh, like daylight after night-fishing, but his mother made sure he was proficient as a little prince, for they were part of the British Empire and he had his way to make.

  One morning, the day before his fifteenth birthday, James awoke with the realization that he could hit his father back. But when he came downstairs that day, his father was gone and his mother’s piano had been quietly dismantled in the night. James spent six months putting it back together again. That was how he became a piano tuner.

  All James wanted at fifteen was to belt his father once. All he wanted at fifteen and a half was to hear his mother play the piano once more, but she was dead of a dead baby before he finished the job. James took a tartan blanket she’d woven, and the good books she had taught him to read, and tucked them into the saddle-bag of the old pit pony. He came back in, sat down at the piano and plunged into “Moonlight Sonata”. Stopped after four bars, got up, adjusted C sharp, sat down and swayed to the opening of “The Venetian Boat Song”. Satisfied, he stopped after five bars, took the bottle of spirits from his mother’s sewing basket, doused the piano and set it alight.

  He got on the blind pony and rode out of Egypt.

  The Wreck Cove relatives offered him a job sanding dories. James was meant for better things. He would ride to Sydney, where he knew there’d be more pianos.

  Sydney was the only city on Cape Breton Island and it was many miles south, by a road that often disappeared, along an Atlantic coast that made the most of itself with inlets and bays that added days to his journey. There were few people, but those he met were ready with a meal for a clean clear boy who sat so straight and asked for nothing. “Where you from, dear, who’s your father?” Mostly Gaelic speakers like his own mother, yet always he declined a bed or even a place in the straw, intending that the next roof to cover his slumber be his own. Moss is the consolation of rocks, and fir trees don’t begrudge a shallow soil but return a tenfold embrace of boughs to shelter the skinny earth that bore them. So he slept outside and was not lonely, having so much to think about.

  Following the ocean a good part of
the way, James discovered that there is nothing so congenial to lucid thought as a clear view of the sea. It aired his mind, tuned his nerves and scoured his soul. He determined always to live in sight of it.

  He’d never been to a city before. The cold rock smell of the sea gave way to bitter cooked coal, and the grey mist became streaked with orange around him. He looked way up and saw fire-bright clouds billowing out the stacks of the Dominion Iron and Steel Company. They cast an amber spice upon the sky that hung, then silted down in saffron arcs to swell, distend and disappear in a falling raiment of finest ash onto the side of town called Whitney Pier.

  Here homes of many-coloured clapboard bloomed between the blacksmiths’ shops and the boiler-house of the great mill, and here James got a fright, never having seen an African except in books. Fresh sheets fluttered from a line, James guided the pony onto asphalt, across a bridge where he looked back at the burnt-brick palace a mile long on the waterfront, and contemplated the cleanliness of steel born of soot.

  Plaits of tracks, a whiff of tar, to his right a dreadful pond, then onto Pleasant Street where barefoot kids kicked a rusty can. He followed the screech of gulls to the Esplanade where the wharfs of Sydney Harbour fanned out with towering ships from everywhere, iron hulls bearded with seaweed, scorched by salt, some with unknowable names painted in a dancing heathen script. A man offered him a job loading and unloading — “No thank you, sir.” New rails in a paved street mirrored cables that swung along overhead and led him to the centre of town, an electrical train carriage sparked and clanged right behind him, the sun came out. Charlotte Street. Fancy wood façades rose three storeys either side, ornate lettering proclaimed cures for everything, glass panes gloated there was nothing you could not buy ready-made, McVey, McCurdy, Ross, Rhodes and Curry; Moore, McKenzie, MacLeod, Mahmoud; MacEchan, Vitelli, Boutillier, O’Leary, MacGilvary, Ferguson, Jacobson, Smith; MacDonald, Mcdonald, Macdonell. More people than he’d ever seen, dressed better than Sunday, all going somewhere, he saw ice-cream. And at last, up the hill where the posh people lived.