Fall on your Knees

Frances has a dream that she is in the creek holding a bundle in her skinny arms, the water giving off a strange blue light. She awakens and shares her dream with Lily. Mercedes, in her room reading Jane Eyre, decides she is now her sisters’ mother.

Lily dreams of her dead brother Ambrose, his naked white body glistening, wrapped in a tattered blanket, and streaked with dirt. He stands at the foot of her bed. Lily screams and awakens from her dream.

It is summer, but the girls are not allowed to go out and play—the miners are on strike and the neighborhood is considered dangerous. One night, the strikers set fire to one of the mine warehouses and loot the company store. Mercedes gifts Frances a prayer book called My Gift to Jesus to help pass the hours. Lily pesters Frances about her dead twin brother. Without telling Frances about the dream, Lily claims Ambrose is always watching over her as her guardian angel.

Mercedes follows the story of the beatification of the French peasant girl to whom the Virgin Mary appeared in Lourdes. She is certain that if she could get Lily to Lourdes, the Virgin Mary would heal her leg. She is determined to show Mary that Lily is a good girl: Mercedes starts taking food, clothing, and books to the children in the local hospital.

The chapter ends with the anonymous letter that James received when Kathleen was in New York. “Your daughter is in grave danger” (223), it begins. The letter reveals that Kathleen is frequenting jazz clubs and having an affair with a Black man in violation of the laws against “miscegenation,” “snared in a net of godless music and immorality” (223).

It is Armistice Day, and the town prepares for a parade. Lily, who cannot march in the parade because of the leather brace she wears, understands that her family is being treated differently by the townspeople, although she is not sure why. Despite Prohibition, the wine and liquor flow. James does not join in the celebration—he would be content to forget the war. He remembers exactly where he was the day the war ended: in New York approaching Kathleen’s apartment, looking for her.

Frances has begun to take a keen interest in Black music. She plays jazzy pieces and rags on the piano, enthralled by the melodies and the syncopated beats.

Frances is becoming a problem in school. She is flippant to the nuns, refuses to pay attention in class, and skips entire mornings. The nuns tell her she has a musical gift, but Frances insists on bad behavior. They suggest she consider being a nun: “Sometimes it’s the wildest girls who end up with the strongest vocation” (232).

Frances wants to run away, but will not leave Lily, contenting herself with sneaking out of the house and running down to her father’s shed to watch James and burly strangers carry barrels of hootch.

Frances tries to explain to Lily what happened the night of the creek baptism. Frances believes she saved Lily by baptizing her, although the fetid creek water might be responsible for Lily’s polio.

Mercedes settles into her role as her sisters’ surrogate mother. She will finish high school later that year, but has already turned down scholarship offers for college. Her neighbor Ralph Luvovitz might make a nice husband—he is polite and already works at his family’s store—but since he is Jewish, Mercedes believes it wouldn’t work.

When Mercedes retires to her bedroom covered in framed pictures of the Virgin Mary, she contemplates the story of Bernadette, one of the girls the Virgin Mary appeared to at Lourdes. She decides to put one of her figurines, the Old-Fashioned Girl, in her mother’s hope chest in the attic, along with the family’s baptismal gown. Holding a framed photograph of Kathleen, Mercedes plays a tune on the piano in memory of her dead sister: “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen.” As James listens, he thinks about the trip to New York to fetch Kathleen: “If only he had not let her go so far from home” (246). When James sees Kathleen’s photograph, Mercedes promises to burn it. But she cannot—instead, she places it in the hope chest.

Nearing Christmas, Frances, dressed up like a Girl Guide, leads Lily to one of the closed mines outside town. She tells Lily that the mine is haunted by ghosts. As they step inside, Frances reassures Lily that her brother Ambrose is not a ghost—he is an angel—and that although he may come to them while they are in the mine, he is in heaven. When Frances tells Lily a scary story about Ambrose visiting the house and getting caught up in the creek, a terrified Lily involuntarily urinates and faints. When she comes to, Frances calms the child by telling her that she does not need to fear the devil because she, Frances, is the devil: “This is the moment Lily stops being afraid of anything Frances could ever say or do again” (254).

Lily comes down with a fever during which she has visions of Ambrose at the foot of her bed. On Christmas Eve, while her two sisters sleep by her bed to keep her company, Lily awakens and sees Ambrose beckoning her from the creek. In only her nightgown, she steals out to the creek and falls asleep on the bank.

Mercedes finds Lily in the morning. Desperate to break Lily’s high fever, Mercedes goes to the basement and eats a chunk of coal as penance. The following evening, after she has received the Last Rites, Lily awakens, hungry and alert. Mercedes wonders if her penance was responsible for the miraculous recovery—or whether Lily is being spared for some greater mission. Is her little sister with her beautiful smile and her “shriveled” leg a saint? Mercedes begins to save money in a tin to take her sister to Lourdes.

Fourteen-year-old Frances feels it is time to leave. She takes money from the Lourdes tin and hides in her father’s car when he drives to the still. There, she waits until Ginger Taylor arrives with his wagon to take deliveries and jumps into his wagon as he departs, heading to Sydney.

In Sydney, Francis heads to a speakeasy to find work: “I can dance. I can sing and play piano” (269). She is stunned to find out that the speakeasy is run by her uncle Jameel.

The following Saturday, Frances, wearing her Girl Guide scouting uniform and carrying a satchel with other clothes, sneaks out of the house and heads back to Sydney. Her first performance, dancing for the bar patrons, is disappointing: “Who wants to see a skinny Girl Guide doing a solo second-hand foxtrot picked up from the movie screen?” (271). It is only when she strips “down to her skivvies” (272) that the patrons respond. She sneaks back home.

That Monday instead of going to school, Francis gets her hair cut into a bob. When a kid in the schoolyard mocks her hair, Frances kicks him in the groin when he is in the outhouse. She is summarily expelled. That night, she lures the same boy into meeting her. She stuns him by grabbing his hair, kneeing him in the stomach, and then jamming her hand down his pants and twisting his penis until he ejaculates.

The next morning, Mercedes goes to school to fetch Frances’s stuff and calmly soaps off the graffiti on the side of the school: “FRANCES PIPER, BURN IN HELL” (274).

Frances learns how to entertain the men in the speakeasy. She performs raunchy songs and flirts, but never sleeps with the patrons and seldom touches the drinks they buy her. She starts to make money. Each night, she comes home, takes off her makeup, and talks with Lily. Mercedes, disapproving of what Frances is doing, makes sure that Lily, who reeks of alcohol and cigarette smoke from Frances, is bathed and in bed. Each night, Frances puts money back into the Lourdes can.

Mercedes graduates high school at the top of her class. Ralph prepares to head off to Montreal’s McGill’s University, but Mercedes declines her scholarship offer. She cannot leave home with Lily still a child.

With time on her hands, Mercedes becomes involved with community work, volunteering at a local hospital. When she brings Lily with her, Mercedes is amazed at how Lily acts around the patients, bringing them hope for healing. Lily is given to sudden visions, and she utters cryptic things to ease the suffering of patients, mostly wounded veterans from the war. One of the patients who feels Lily’s power tells Mercedes that the girl “has the gift” (282).

The speakeasy flourishes. Frances suggests the bar purchase a better piano. Ginger continues to bring booze deliveries from James. He is unsettled by Frances’s act, since she is too young to be performing at the bar: “She smells like a neglected child” (285). Ginger is married with two children. He also delivers the new piano.

That night, after haunting dreams about the night Kathleen died, Frances decides she cannot leave the island until she has “accomplished something” (287), although she is not sure yet what that is.