In Works of Mercy, Sally Thomas’s slow-burning debut novel, we meet Kirsty Sain, a childless widow who moved long ago from the Shetland Islands to the fictional suburb of Annesdale, North Carolina. At first, Kirsty seems to want only to be left alone. Once a week, she cleans the spotless rectory for Father Schuyler, a socially awkward new pastor who has taken to locking himself up in the sacristy after mass. But in Father Schuyler, Kirsty recognizes a kindred spirit: “I too, scrubbing away at things, dodging conversation, watching the bleach cleaner circle round the plughole as if it mattered in the least—I too am ridiculous.” Meanwhile, she must fend off frequent oversharing after mass from Janet Malkin, who with her Jewish husband Howard is raising an indeterminate number of children. Janet explains her relationship with Howard thus: “Nice Jewish boy: socially bar mitzvahed. Nice Irish girl: socially baptized.” But Howard, whom Janet has spirited away from his parents before they could send him to Yale, occasionally longs for the familiar rites of his childhood. Their youngest son, Henry, large-eyed and observant, talks knowingly to Kirsty about ticks and other odd things.
Kirsty herself resembles a dour Olive Kittredge, or perhaps some hardy solitary from the novels of Penelope Fitzgerald. “My father, in the war, had been damaged in some invisible way,” she recalls. He and Granny Astrid followed a local sect, so as a child, Kirsty would cross the water every week with her mother to Lerwick to attend mass. Kirsty goes on to Catholic boarding school, just as her mother had done. But sometimes, she says, “the ghost of the berserker arose in me and looked about for an axe.”
Kirsty returns often in memory to the moment when Dermott, her university tutor, reads her essay on the Jesuit poet Robert Southwell, and asks with an indulgent smile whether her work - and, by extension, her faith - isn’t all a bit “credulous.” In response, Kirsty channels Sister Bede from boarding school:
As much as the poems thrilled her, and us, it was the bold words at the gibbet that stirred us, the mental spectacle of the bowels steaming as they were unreeled from the warm and quivering body. Sister Bede did not laugh at these things. She never intimated that our poet had wasted his life, that he might have done anything else but what was asked of him. Was this what it meant to be credulous?
Nevertheless, Kirsty succumbs to an affair with Dermott and is quickly discarded, but not before she becomes pregnant. “In time, anyway, of its own accord, the child would go the way of my illusions. All of it: there and gone like a candle blown out, yet its smoke was the shape of the rest of my life.” Kirsty goes on to marry Ranse, a cheerful American diabetic she meets on a train. When she and Ranse come home to North Carolina to live with his Baptist mother - it will be years before Kirsty returns to the Catholic church - she says to herself, “I have ruined my life.”
But what Kirsty seems to mean by this is that she has loved too little; and of course, it is never too late. She adopts a blind, hairless kitten that seems to defy evolution: “the more improbable an animal is, the more valuable it becomes,” the vet tells her. “You wouldn’t believe what people will pay for naked things.” And while she insists that she has “set Southwell aside, that drab, my old love,” she continues to wrestle with him.
Janet Malkin must go on bedrest with yet another pregnancy, and Kirsty grows closer to the family in spite of herself. She begins to enjoy “[sitting] in the midst of that chaos which bothered nobody, apparently, but me.” In one of the story’s many small graces, Janet presses on Kirsty a rescued statue of the Infant of Prague, which Kirsty takes home to display alongside some long-neglected photos of her family—the first real sign of her presence in the house she has inherited from her mother-in-law. She wouldn’t have chosen this devotion, she says, “but there he stood, sweet-faced, the little King of Heaven with some of his more questionable throng.”
When tragedy strikes the Malkins, it is suddenly clear that Howard was more than just socially bar mitzvahed. His crisis of faith ricochets through the whole Malkin family, and in response, Kirsty must call on Father Schuyler to become his best self. It’s refreshing not only to read of a priest with an honest, human problem, but of a woman who manages, when the moment comes, to speak the very words he needs to hear. Sometimes Kirsty succeeds in rousing complacent hearts, and sometimes she fails. But her witness is in itself a work of mercy.
Like the poet she is, Thomas offers us no pat ending, but suffice it to say that Mary Magdalen’s Funeral Tears is never far from Kirsty’s thoughts. Thomas is as careful in her development of relationships as she is sure-footed in her navigation of memory and old hurts. There are no false notes here. With a pure voice and a complete lack of egotism, Sally Thomas tells a good story all the way down.
