A story unfolded in her head about a man who had drowned—or had he drowned himself?—here in the canal; his body found drifting and bobbing one morning in the scum along the bank. No one knew his name or where he’d come from, his pockets were empty, his face ravaged. . . . Marya’s heart began to beat rapidly. She knew the story already, it seemed: it was about Schwilk: it had to do with his death, here in the canal, back in September.

She had been a witness. She’d seen.

The old canal was fairly wide but it looked deceptively shallow; it didn’t give an impression of depth, or danger. Difficult to believe that anyone could drown in it, Marya thought, shivering, even on purpose.

Four

FOUR

The winter, fierce and prolonged, when Marya was fifteen, she went twice weekly—usually on Mondays and Thursdays, directly following school—to visit Father Clifford Shearing at St. Joseph’s Hospital in the hilly Riverside section of Innisfail. She was a sophomore in high school; she had no friends and told herself that she needed none; she was not in love with Father Shearing (that would have been a sin) but she had lavish fantasies in which the proposition was put to her that she might exchange her life for his, she might die in his place: Yes, Marya whispered, desperate and elated. Oh yes.

As it turned out, not even a blood donation was required of her.

Marya’s week centered around the visits, which had an air of the half illicit, the subversive, about them. She didn’t keep them secret from her family but she didn’t exactly tell them either. (None of the Knauers in this generation was a practicing Catholic though all of them—Marya included—had been baptized Catholic. Wilma had been baptized Methodist and said it was all a lot of bull, churches, priests and ministers, nuns stuck away in convents, low-minded people boasting that Jesus was their friend when, in Wilma’s words, He wouldn’t give them the time of day. If you needed Him He’d come to you directly or not at all. The same held true for God—didn’t it? Because He spoke out of whirlwinds and tongues of flame in the Bible, after all. When Marya informed her—tremulously, defiantly—that she had decided to become Catholic, to become Catholic really, Wilma had stared at her as if she’d been personally betrayed. “Now what do you want to do that for . . . ?” Wilma asked faintly.)