Fall on your Knees

The novel reveals the impact of secrets on a family. As Mercedes’s family tree testifies, a family is a network of relationships. In turn, families shape the psychological profile of its members. Families shape characters, define a world view, and ultimately create either the deep reward of support and love or the trauma of distrust and paranoia.

For most of the novel, the Piper family is imprisoned by the secrets it harbors. The incestuous rape of Kathleen and the subsequent birth of the twins sets in motion an elaborate matrix of lies. The surviving twin, Lily, is told that Materia was her mother. James doesn’t confess to raping Kathleen until after his second stroke, allowing the family to believe that her pregnancy is the result of an involvement with a Black man in New York. Materia’s death by suicide is redefined as the flu, while the accidental drowning of Ambrose by Frances is recast as a stillbirth. Later, Frances’s son by Ginger is dispatched in secret to an orphanage for children of multiracial relationships, while the Pipers are told that he has died. The family buries its secrets. But like the garden in which family members keep unearthing skulls, what is buried refuses to stay buried.

What scant hope the novel offers begins only in the novel’s last pages, when on returning from the funeral of her last surviving sister, Mercedes, the joyless servant of her family, has an epiphany: “That night, the Virgin Mary tells her what to do” (504). Mercedes sets in motion the revelation of all the family’s ignominy. First, she completes her elaborate family tree that exposes every dark aspect of every family relationship. Then she goes to the orphanage where Frances’s son Anthony has been exiled as a family shame. She gifts Anthony the family tree and sends him to New York to meet Lily, his last surviving relative.

The novel’s closing line affirms that hope begins with honesty over obfuscation, communication over secrecy, trust over suspicion. “Here, dear,” an astounded Lily tells Anthony, “[S[it down and have a cuppa tea till I tell you about your mother” (508).

As befits its Gothic atmosphere, and its setting amidst the grim geography of Cape Breton Island, the novel never ventures far from death. From the gruesome demises of members of the Piper family, to the bloody carnage of the World War I battlefields where soldiers—many only boys—are slain, the novel foregrounds the terrifying reality of mortality. Characters’ bodies are constantly under threat: Islanders struggle with the influenza outbreak, Lily contracts polio, Kathleen is raped by her father, and Frances is shot in the stomach. The novel depicts a toxic world where every moment is defined by the possibility of invasive physical harm.

Often, death is portrayed as senseless and inexplicable. Most emblematic of these qualities are the deaths of infants. The crib death of James and Materia’s last daughter Lily happens for no reason—it is never explained or medically accounted for. The expectation for parents is to simply carry on: “What do you do after a baby like this is get over it. Don’t mope, it wasn’t meant to be. Don’t pray, prayers don’t reach limbo. Have faith, God had a reason” (81). The same inconceivable senselessness recurs in the horrific account of the night Kathleen gives birth to her twins. Not only does Kathleen die when Materia is forced to choose between saving the mother or the babies, but even the best of intentions—Frances’s desire to baptize the babies after hearing her parents argue about whether to do so—end in tragedy, as one twin drowns and the other contracts polio.

The Pipers are surrounded by more evidence of the randomness of death. The island’s mines, the source of its economic vitality, are doomed. Regularly closed because of wildcat strikes or catastrophic mine collapses, the mines represent an industry in which premature, always violent, always imminent death is a given. The mines themselves, with their gaping openings and forbidding darkness, suggest graves.

As a refuge from their death-filled reality, the Pipers often turn for comfort to the supernatural. Ghosts, demons, and angels may be terrifying visitors from the beyond, but they also offer hope that death is not the end. This reliance on being haunted is one of the consolations of Catholicism—an insistence on the reality of an afterlife that is meant to assuage suffering on earth.