George & Rue Read online

  It was January 1931 when, passing through Windsor town in the wake of the Xmas Shopping Sales, she saw a sumptuous dress in the windows of the shop owned by Flora Carat. The dress shone with an April-like brilliance even in the dead-end of winter. In that red dress, Cynthy imagined she could set all Three Mile Plains ablaze with crimson, see the landscape blazed in scarlet. Just flowers, flowers, flowers. She’d afford tantrums of red, a religion of red.

  She went into the bedroom and got the sixteen dollars she’d pinched and wadded and hidden in a tin can inside a hole in the floor under the crib. She forgot her boys now. Jangling gently because of the change bulging her purse, she tramped through snow, flagged down an eye-roving man who saw just her juicy, lightly clad bottom (she was only wearing her nightgown under her thin black wool coat), and got into Windsor, went to Madame Carat’s Paris Dress Shop, looked into Carat’s green Siamese-cat eyes, plunked down the coins, and bought a red crushed-velvet dress. Cynthy made sure that Madame Carat tied up the box real pretty, with a red ribbon and a bow. (She could later use the ribbon in her hair.)

  When she left Madame Carat’s shop, Cynthy didn’t just walk through snow; now, she marched through it, militantly proud, her head sky-high. She felt deliciously rich—a Cleopatra of the pines—and though she’d not have the shoes to match the dress, though the dress itself would be conspicuous in her closet, like a rose jutting from sawdust, though other women would loathe her for her expensive look, Cynthy was delighted. She felt so good, she couldn’t feel the wind drilling into her body like a host of circus knifethrowers’ blades, nor the snow that snuck down chillingly into her ankle-high boots with almost every other step.

  When Cynthy arrived back at the shack, its guts spooked by the oil lamp’s malevolent shadows, Asa had already discovered the open hole in the floor beneath their bed and had decided what it meant. She knew when she saw his slit-eyed look at her coming through the door, while she brushed snow from her shivering shoulders and held that inexplicable box crooked self-consciously under one arm, that a cave-man rage would seize him like an epileptic fit. George and Rufus ran out to meet her, expecting the box to contain gifts for them. But Asa barked at them to get to their beds. They shrank back into their shadows. Cynthy steeled herself against Asa’s leaden anger.

  Before Cynthy could say a word, Asa’s fist slammed her face like a rum bottle; the precious box flew from her grip; she fell.

  “That cash—you sly, yella bitch—was Easter!”

  She laughed, blood jerking from her nose: “Dumb-ass nigger!” Her venom was her champagne—in that hut where perfume itself seemed derisory. While his infants wailed, Asa uncoiled his belt from his pants, made a loop of that leather, then straddled his fallen, bleeding wife and treated her like he was tenderizing horse meat. Then he tore the clothes right off Cynthy’s squirming, writhing body and raped her, screeching, on the blood-muddied floor. George and Rufus wailed, watched. Their pa’s curses lashed out like a pimp’s coat hanger wire—slick, hot, whipping. Then he burnt Cynthy’s brand-new red dress in the woodstove’s red fire. Cynthy imagined hammerin a spike through Asa’s bony and backward heart. Such a brittle target should splinter like dry chicken bones, releasing marrow like dust.

  IV

  GEORGE and Rufus was born in two grim, cold, influenza Decembers, no need for Christmas, in a shack that couldn’t even play a manger. No pig would’ve been happy to bed down in the squalor to which the two black boys was introduced. Their childhood was cups of grease on a battered table; rat poison set out carefully, carefully, like meals fit for kings; hailstorms wiping out any pretty good crop; lovely, heavy crops reduced to blotches by too much water; a horde of hail and a flood of rain carrying off everything. At a young age, they watered down ketchup to make juice. This was poverty, East Coast—style, and it had a long pedigree. It was an apocalyptic genealogy. That was the household defined: lots of knives but hardly any real meat, fish, cheese, or real food. One compensation: Asa could take guts, tripe, stuff picked up from the knackery floor, get a bagful, bleeding, carry it home.

  But Asa had to root out stubbornness—in both dame and pups. His own family was, he felt, treacherous. He hid money from Cynthy, just in case she decided whimsically to go to Montreal, or to spend every cent on another triflin dress. Asa knew she was still desirous of Montreal, and George and Rue was always glancing defiant at him.

  One day when the boys were six and seven, the knackery’d paid Asa twenty dollars in cash, all in ones, and he’d come whistling home with a piggybank-fat wallet. He felt smart, fit, and wanted. He was—temporarily—a rich man during a ceaseless Depression. Seething with joy, he walked up Panuke Road as the sun abandoned the sky and the fields full of August corn. Feeling warm-hearted, soon as Asa come in the door of his shack, he opened his wallet and spilled twenty smackeroos on the table. He looked at Cynthy, who looked back with a tight smile. Next thing he knew, she’d snatched up five dollars, while the boys scooted back and forth, caterwaulin and hollerin, “Candy! Candy! Daddy, buy us candy!” The din was irksome, but Asa felt most cross with his wife. The sun lanced a final blade of light through the waxpaper-thin curtain on the kitchen window as Asa said, without menace, “Gimme it back.”

  Cynthy said, “The boys need new clothes.”

  Blood swelled up Asa’s veins in his head and throat. “You don’t care bout clothes! All you care about is you! So help me. Nah, ya ain’t gettin nothin.” George and Rufus stopped playing; they began to edge, scared, toward the bedroom. The air in the shack singed them like dry fire. Asa shot them incinerating looks. Cynthy ordered them to bed. Then she stuck her five rolled-up bills in her bra.

  Asa said, “Ain’t tellin ya again.” Cynthy levelled shotgun-deadly eyes at him. Asa stepped up to the side of the stove and picked up a healthy hickory stick. Cynthy said again she needed the money for Rue and George.

  Asa growled. “Ya gonna defy me?”

  Asa meant to show “gumption.” He lit into Cynthy. He lathered her so hard that the woman’s body…. The switch sunk blisters wherever it hit, then it’d crack em open. Blood hissed on—and under—her mistreated skin. Asa galled her bony, bent-over, black back. The stick split her spine into welts and stripes. Its crack mimicked the cracking of glass, of bone, a heart.

  George and Rufus scurried out to try to help their mother. But Asa was sore enraged. He cut up his boys too. They crawled under the kitchen table to escape; Asa seized slow ankles and hauled em out. He’d cut em good on their nakedness, like an overseer striking a slave. The brothers squatted, squealed like rats, but the switch still come down, come down—Kermash!—and it was lash, blood, screams, tears, cries, lash, blood, screams, tears, cries. The branch came down, down—Smash! Asa lathered his sons to straighten out, he felt, their cut-eye, double-talking, loud-mouth, suck-teeth behaviour. They had to learn they were worth zilch. He was a patriarch who felt commissioned to destroy his family. His fist had to smash the air, smash the rum bottle down on the scarred table, smash the table down, smash the wife down onto her fuckin knees, smash the boys into two corners of the scuttling shack. The boys had to be abused like beasts, just whipped and slapped and kicked and punched and beaten, so they’d knuckle under and be quiet niggers.

  Asa say, “Ya ain’t big enough to beat me yet. When ya’s big enough, ya try an beat me.” These children—his very own—was gonna be niggers, not engineers. So the boys heard their father’s stick baying at them; they heard it strike and strike and strike. Oh God, oh God, oh God. They had to piss and shit themselves—just like their mother. Their blood had to smirk from the end of his stick. Flesh Mama made, Pops unmade. His switch was an incisor biting down from mouthy air to gnash and gnaw on two boys and a wife like joints of raw meat.

  By the time Asa stopped walloping his family and had ripped those five one-dollar bills from Cynthy’s bra, he was sobbing sweat and his wife and boys were weeping blood. Too, the bills was so sodden and stained, the King’s face thereon so ruined, Asa knew he’d have to ex
plain to businesses taking them that he’d meant no defiling of the sovereign.

  Against this backdrop of stupidity and calamity, the boys was put to mind the chickens, bony, to tend the pigs, scrawny. Also, Georgie’d have to fill the coal lamps every morning, first, he’d wipe the soot off glass chimneys lest they break. Nights, he’d darken the light. George also milked neighbours’ cows and helped collect cream. He’d take cream, let it sour, then pour it into a churn. He’d plunge the dasher up and down to foam up sugary butter. Then he’d spoon the cream—good-quality sweet scum—right off the milk, clean and salt it, and wrap it in wax paper to sell for so many cents a pound. Here was happiness.

  Times, the brothers’d skin hides, or go out to collect junked bottles. May to August was the toiling months. They’d paper the outhouse with pictures from the Eaton’s catalogue; use those same pictures to clean themselves. They’d coat mules and horses with oil and pine tar to frustrate mosquitoes. (They wore it too.) They’d go foresting and slingshot squirrels, then slice off and hang the skins on coat hangers to dry. In winter, they eyed horses bringing fresh vegetables; they eyed horses carting away fresh coffins. They froze fish to gnaw on in the spring. They hefted boxes of coal now and then. They gave Cynthy every nickle they made, till they got to smoking.

  But the boys didn’t work well together. Rufus hated farm work and George just wanted to eat. The worst time was when a pig tumbled down the well and just floated there: Asa made the boys hoist it out and kill it—just to teach it a lesson. Rufus had to hammer in the animal’s squealing face because Georgie couldn’t handle knives. Rue pounded in the animal’s skull while George squatted and threw up his yellow guts into the green grass and the pink pig squealed, moaned, squirted blood, shit.

  To school, the guys went barefoot, at least in late spring and early fall. In fall and winter, they pulled on double pairs of socks and moccasins. Do that, or wrap their feet in gunny sack, so they wouldn’t freeze and needs be “decapitated.” In the school, a newspaper portrait, a painting in colour of George V, shared the front wall with a crayon rendering of Christ and a tacked-up tattered Union Jack. These pictures smiled on the few white kids and damned most of the black ones: that’s how the boys felt. And forget about having anything to themselves at their school: no books, no pen, no ink, no pencil, no paper smelling like mackerel. No tubby bottle of LePage’s glue, no piles of Hilroy scribblers, no heaps of Eberhard-Faber pencils, no red-leather-bound old books—yellowed bits of history—and no bottles of squid-black, Parker ink. They’d have to sit and memorize the lessons, or try to share the paper and pencils of other pupils. Everyone plunked on long pine-plank benches. (Heat in winter came from the cast-iron potbelly woodstove.) They were careful not to anger Miss Jarvis, lest she stick a three-inch-long fingernail in their ears.

  Miss Jarvis once told Rue, “You got the light of God in your face.”

  Rue parried, “No, ma’am, that’s just the lamplight.”

  A visiting white teacher called Rufus “a sly little nigger boy.” Big for his age, he slapped her. He got strapped in school, then whipped at home. That was Grade Three, when he was ten, and so he quit.

  For Georgie, too, school composed a boxing ring. White kids would throw chalk dust in his face “to make ya white,” and he’d scrap, his brown fists flailing like those of George Dixon—Kid Chocolate—that sharp, Halifax middleweight. He’d tap a chum with his fist, see if his target’d crumple. But he was a bruiser, quick, unthinking: truly Asa’s son. Times, Rue’d help, and dab a guy in the jaw, watch him fall like an axed tree. But Rue could only throw so many punches on George’s behalf. So Georgie fell out of school too, aged eleven in Grade Three.

  The boys picked up most of their letters by digging into comic books and sitting, hypnotized by silvery wisps on hallucinatory screens, in movie theatres. They scrounged grammar—a rough version—from radio gangster shows.

  The boys looked Cuban; they looked Mexican; they looked Gypsy; they looked Indian; they looked Injun. To themselves, they looked decidedly, properly handsome. To others, they looked like trouble. But what they were looking for was love—and respect.

  V

  ASA’D ALWAYS had an eye for playing cards picturing topless blondes and brunettes. He felt Coloureds was slag heaps of men wanting diamonds of (white) women. Talkin with gypsum quarry Coloureds, he knew about a special house in Windsor town, a subtle palace run by Gabby Robie, the local sports reporter. There, no one cared if a raven and a dove commingled. There, liquor was being sold, gals was being sold, hog was being sold. So when he waxed violently tired of Cynthy, her Montreal mania and her cash complaints, Asa rented hisself a creamy tart.

  When Asa found, in the backside of Windsor, the right oak back door, knocked, and was admitted, his moviehouse-dim eyes scoped Purity Mercier, gleaming through the lamplight and cigar and cigarette fog. She be to him a lithe brunette with a snow complexion. White bones basked in her arms, her sleek gams, her terra alba skin, the silky feel of an anglicized Acadienne. Her perfume was the smell of sunlight and rain and the moment that rain evaporates. Asa wasted no time wasting half his pay that Friday night on Purity. Joined with her, he experienced a vaudeville show of whinnying, oinking, snorting, gasping, spitting, and drooling, fore and aft.

  The every-Friday-night Asa—Purity duo was an importation of Othello-and-Desdemona Venice to Windsor-on-the-Avon. He wished he could fuck till the stable were shaking, shaking, and falling down around them, moistly. Purity was weekend payback for each weekday of lonely hate. True: Asa liked the look of her lily hands dabbling in, dallying with, the hot coal of black male flesh.

  Asa became a regular fool, much to grubby, rancid Gabby’s enrichment. Purity was one more victim, a woman from the impoverished, French-speaking countryside that couldn’t speak French and prosper. Like many Acadians, she’d been Englished in merciless schools and Anglicanized by predatorial bosses. These Anglo-Saxons had palms always moist for the hot love of coin; and eyes always hot with lust for their female workers. Purity felt a bit more freedom and realized a bit more cash enduring the degradations of Gabby’s bordello than she did in suffering the depredations of heartless factorists.

  In response to Purity’s needling spontaneity, a kerosene-hot lust’d snake up Asa’s thighs, into his pelvis, then all up along his backbone, and into his skull. She always seemed as impatient as a breaker and twice as wet. There was indigo doings inside ivory toings and froings. Joyous chaos of white legs akimbo where Asa’s were a randy Sambo’s. Red wine wrinkling throats and puckering lips.

  Asa’d mumble his hallelujah, and then he was zippered up, liquored up, and gone out Purity’s door, exited her deal-wood kennel, blundering through smoke or fog, then staggering across grass sparkling late night with, at times, dew-reflected stars, and then along the roadway, stopping to piss in ditches, or pass out there, until stumbling back to Three Mile Plains, only five miles away, to plunge to the depths a bottle of rum could reach. He was bleakly happy, but still dissatisfied. Asa’s brain spewed crazy phrases.

  “Another slurp, please… Skedaddle from one gulp to the next…. I feel the wall coming upside my head…. My stomach is shit…. I don’t want dribs and drabs; I want the gush…. I’ll crouch, take a sip, fall over….”

  He sing “Black Flowers”:

  Lookin for a face that won’t quit my eyes.

  Lookin for her face that’ll suit my eyes.

  Lookin for her thighs to—tight—fit mine.

  Asa’d whip Cynthy if she complained about the cash he fed Gabby. He’d clip her upside the head, slam her across the spine, belt her if she gave any lip. It was his bloody money, his funky flesh, his sweaty business.

  Cynthy detested her jointly adulterated marriage—which was really a slow-motion divorce, but with no property to divide. She fantasized more and more about mixing rat poison into oatmeal served with milk and honey, or of picking up kerosene oil and confusing it with vinegar. A smartly paced poisoning of Asa Hamilton could liberate her—Cyn
thy Croxen (she’d recover her maiden name)—more sweetly than any set of prayers. But she was no chemist, and doctors and police might discover her petty treason, and, though not unhappy that another quarrelsome dark man was dead, still send her to jail for way too long.

  Too, her sons were uninteresting to her now, save for Rufus, who always gave evidence of shifty thinking. But Georgie was as dull as Asa. Rufus was real slick. She felt seduced by him. But George be oafish, but useful. Rue reminded her sweetly of what that white man had said to her, when she was sixteen, in the train station. Times, Cynthy remembered to play mother. When Georgie was twelve, she sewed him a quilt got from twenty-pound sacks of Five Roses flour. She was goodness itself—when she could convince herself to be maternal.

  Nevertheless, Cynthy, unable to get to Montreal and unable to keep Asa at home, took lovers of her own, but discreetly, so as not to unleash Asa’s fists. She was sick of facing dirt instead of glamour. She started dragging her bony ass all up and down Panuke Road and into backwoods too, whenever Asa had his back turned. She wanted revenge for that burnt-up red dress. She lay the rusty must of her sex all over several Hants County shacks. She had to sweat and groan like some infernal engine, a piston plunging therein. Her flower-flesh, once the colour of the apricot nectar rose, her petally fragrance, both surrendered to dirt and stink. This thin, hickory-smoked woman, her hair smelling of homemade pomade got of real pommes—a randy, McIntosh scent, had hair straighter than her soul now was. She experienced a failure of discrimination. Some men she laid with were often so drunk on rum that Cynthy would get drunk just off their breaths and sweat. But so what? Sex was like aspirin; it was like eating sugar, sugar, sugar; it was income with an outgoing attitude.