George & Rue Read online

  Cynthy soon selected Reverend Simon Dixon as her chief man. He was skilled at the subtle fucking of wives. Yep, he loved hogs, whores, and wine, in no apparent order, and adultery was his prized sin because he was single and had steady money.

  He say, “I’s from the Society for the Propagation of the Species.” He loved carrying on with wives all Saturday who sat, prim and proper, beside husbands in church on Sunday. He could preach so hotly about Hell, he’d gush sweat from every pore while some very upright ladies—Hell-deserving, Sunday-praying Jezebels—would piss their drawers. No, he had no use for the Bible he kept nostalgically, its pages scribbled over with gibberish, its pages all blotted and blotched and yellowed and taped together, its spineless self. Whenever he parted holy text, he departed from that text. He was one of those ministers, not just fallen, but always falling, in flagrante delicto, as lithe and proud as a saint, into down beds. He was a scurrilous pastor staggering through hilly plains and preaching the ugliness of Christ, the bitterness of Christ, the loneliness of Christ. His entry into Cynthy’s bed marked her epochal drift away from her sons. Dixon was a promise of a red dress and a train ticket to Montreal.

  So, with Georgie gone twelve and Rue eleven, Cynthy up and dumped her sons in Alisha’s backyard, right in December 1937, a hungered season, and just turned her back. The winter was already bruisingly bitter. That ice-daggered wind slashing into Cynthy’s face while she dragged squalling Georgie and sullen Rue onto the yard of Alisha’s rough and uncouth house, painted charcoal black, with her ghost-callin bottles hung on the branches; a dog slobbering, pissing like a horse, and yowling blackly and pulling at the heavy chain that held it back; and Alisha’s horse tethered weirdly to a railroad track switch plunked down ex-nowhere. The top half of a horse’s skeleton sat at the wheel of a rusted-out convertible. Then, Alisha was eyeing Cynthy approach her house, her kitchen curtain pulled back with one strong thin black hand. But Alisha didn’t come welcome em: this bad idea was foretold. Huffing, cussing, even cuffing the bawling George, the cut-eye Rue, Cynthy finally got em to Alisha’s house, then pounded on the door with a gloved hand, before racing back to the road where sly Reverend Dixon waited—his cream car and engine purring, his jaundiced, gooey look congealing—to schmooze Cynthy to Halifax, epic city of concubinage.

  VI

  RUE shed no tears at Cynthy’s vanishing. He already understood that “I love you” equals two parents and a bastard: I, you, and love. Jawgee and Rufus was just black boys blackened further by Depression. They were two pieces of shit that Cynthy just had to put somewhere. The falling snow hammered a prison into shape around them. Snow belted them like their father’s hand.

  Alisha cared for the brothers for a month: she showed them all the hidden things in her house so that they could see she had no bank of jewellery or coin. In fact, Alisha had no cash: she lived by barter, prayers traded for firewood, a medical cure exchanged for a side of beef. Still, she showed the boys—who she knew were already thieves—she had nothing worth stealing.

  George and Rue were glad to stay with Alisha because they ate better with her. Bean soup and corn cake and “smothered” rabbit stew and liver (free off the meat truck) and heart and kidneys (also free), plus roast beef, corn beef, salt fish (delivered in barrels off trucks), tons of sauerkraut, salt pork, root vegetables, too.

  When Cynthy reappeared from Halifax and from that affair that had netted her only a new coat, she took the boys back like nothing. Asa hit her of course, but she felt no pain because her hatred was like that of a martyr. While the sun cringed amid the kitchen’s kerosene and cranky smoke, Asa’s assault was like an ascension for her.

  Cynthy waited one April morning till Rue and Asa had gone out, then she called George over to her bed and sat up with only her black filmy negligée on, so he could eye her sumptuous breasts and she could enjoy his confusion, and she seized his arms, then his head, and clasped him infant-close, maternally, to her breasts, and asked him for a favour.

  He gulped, said, “Okay, Mama.” She reached under the bed and pulled out two bottles of rum.

  She said, “Don’t tell your no-good pappy on me. I need yer help, Joygee. Just take these bottles to the school and sell each one for two dollars—nothin less. Okay?” She also nagged him to bootleg cigarettes to his school chums. George nodded, carried the bottles and smokes to school, but he felt intimidated by the big boys, them aged sixteen in Grade Four. He was properly afraid they’d just smack im and grab the rum and cigs. He begged Rue to help with the sales. Rue was a natural, and prospered at this trade. He was convinced Georgie was just a slobbering crybaby.

  Georgie didn’t like doing what his Mama said he must do: bootleg. But Rue didn’t like what Cynthy and Asa was doing—taking food out their mouths to go out fucking with. Everybody had to put up or shut up. Rue found means to make his way.

  At twelve, and big for his age, Rufus took a bus into Windsor on a Saturday to see a show, but stopped by the grocery store. A cute boy, he’d learned how to be a charmer, and, at the grocery store, had so honeyed and sweet-talked the white cashiers, they cooed, blushed, and give him candy. But he had other plans. As soon as they were busy with customers, he slipped back into the coatroom and emptied their purses and coatpockets. He got fifty dollars, smooth, easy, and clear. And he didn’t get caught. When he got home, he went straight to the moonlit woods and dug beside a crabapple tree to hide a tin can full of money. The next day, he took Georgie back into the woods to show him his stash and swore him to silence. Georgie kept the secret, but he also kept half the cash by threatening to tell Asa what Rue had done. From then on, Rufus fingered Georgie for a traitor.

  What could he do to survive an incandescently ugly papa, an operatically sluttish mama? Chewing tar was good for whitening teeth, but was no real entertainment; smoking cast-off cigarette butts was entertainment, but no profit; a lengthy mouthful of bootleg could be a profit, but not yet a business. Still trying to discover a life, a way to make himself a living, he reconnoitred an old, abandoned house containing see-sawing planking for floors, a cleaver of sunlight chopping through a chink in the kitchen walls, an antique, mouldering piano in a light-drenched parlour, and obliquely black shadows hounding the piano keys. There he could consider coltish, skittish, cinnamon-and-chocolate sirens in silk and cashmere, their sweat like satin, their moans like wine, their skin, either euphoric gold or dark, very dark, carbon black, without any painful whiteness.

  This old house belonged to a minister who’d died and whose daughters spurned Three Mile Plains. They locked it up after the casket came out with their father inside, and they just rode off with their husbands. Then the lock rusted off, “pickanninies” smashed out the windows with rocks, ragpickers carted off everything portable, then the rain and snow came in, the foundation buckled, the house slumped like a dead whale. Now Rue, aged thirteen, had clambered into the fallen-down house, cross its crazy, tilting, madly squawking floors, examine the yellowed and bleached sepia pictures on the walls, glance at the shattered china scattered every which way, piss in the cobweb-mapped bathroom (inhale its smell of antique must, its aroma of old rugs and mildew), navigate floors with grass leaping through and snakes sliding through holes like open sores, look out windows now splintered reflections on the floors, and then sit at the rotting grand piano, still bearing leaves of faded sheet music. This instrument, even with the trunk of a pear tree coming up through one side of its body so that only some keys could be played, even with its seeming drift toward a sinkhole in the parlour floor, was still a fountain of notes, discordant, compelling. The piano was elegant ebony, a being once pulled to the door of the Reverend Ohio States’s home by ox-team. Music became Rue’s consolation. While Asa turned to booze, Rue turned to art.

  He had no training, but he had temper. Alone, he’d bash those playable keys; alone, he’d admire the gorgeous congress of Negro and Caucasian keys, so capable of beautiful intimacy here, but not in Three Mile Plains, not in Nova Scotia. In the rest of the world
too, such couplings were secret and brutal. The unheard-of melodies—strange—that Rufus hammered out on that piano were the Nova Scotian discovery of jazz and blues, if anyone had heard and said “Amen.” Bothered by inexplicable longings that cut through his bowels like hot water, he tried to follow memories of radio tunes that came out of black women’s redemptive mouths. He’d heard Bessie Smith—big, brown, brassy Bessie and all her blues about oversexed coffee grinders and jelly rolls and generators. He loved that voice—its symphony of proverbs—all the more. What Bessie sang was immaculately filthy. There was a wahwah wail he had to have, a piano rag that came from scrutinizing Disney cartoons in the moviehouse in Windsor. The piano became his confessional, his brothel, his hospital, his church, his army, his canteen, his library, and his school. It was refuge from a lust-busted-open shack on Panuke Road. Rue loved to feel and hear his fingers striking handsomely against a half-playable keyboard, with no knowledge of mistake or failure or trespassing or vandalism. He transmitted, without knowing it, all the lovely Negro poetry of the United States. He hammered out his broken-hearted genealogy in each phrase torn from the rotting heart of half a piano. Too, Bessie sang on, her voice black with pain—or black with a writhing, sweaty pleasure.

  In the midst of his music and this homely space, Rue felt peace. He could defecate on the ground and use leaves to cleanse himself, then wipe his hands off on the dewed grass; he could smash and ruin intrusive household insects; he could dream of Ellington piano; Ellington jackets—natty, velvet; and Ellington nights with fresh girls—spicy, smoky—one of each type balanced, naked and preening, on each knee.

  Rue coaxed from half a keyboard hour after hour of braying, bellowing, cawing, squawking, and grunting notes. His was a Negro language of ripping, cutting, smashing, and destroying sounds—the sounds of the slaughterhouse and the sounds of the whorehouse.

  Sometimes he’d just lounge in that music-haunted abode and leaf through comic books. A panel’d show a razor gashing a long hole in a face; another would show a gangster plugging a body falling like a thrown-down overcoat; or a white moll, blonde, would be pushed off a skyscraper and end up smashing in the roof of a black late-model car. His eyes roved over pages of cartoon women’s pinkish, “flesh”-coloured faces and bullet-shaped breasts; but also women who were light casketed in dark lanterns, women as golden as gold trumpets of dark rum.

  Rue painted these images in the music he drew from that half-dead keyboard, its keys going thud, thud. And the instrument kept sinking further into the caving-in floor. The keyboard warped more and more starkly, what with all the rain rinsing and gurgling into that splayed house. Stars cracked through the roof and ceiling, the floors turned to dirt; the piano was clouded and choked by pear-tree petals. The piano got carried off by the rampant pear tree. One more failure for Rue.

  Irritated by the collapse of the keyboard, its branching off into the rigging of a tree, its refusal of music in favour of nectar, Rue, still desiring sound, still lusting to employ professionally dextrous fingers, exchanged music lessons for pistol ones. He bought a stolen.32, shiny as a crucifix, and wasted all his bullets by firing at the placid heads of sunflowers. To be dapper like Pretty Boy Floyd. He go out into a neighbour’s sunflower grove. He hated those lustful-looking sunflowers tossing their yellow faces lasciviously. He fired wantonly. Those sunflowers had their heads exploded. No one found out who wrecked so disgustingly sixteen sunflowers. What was left of em charred black, in winter, in the once-pure-yellow fields. Rue buried the pistol; it was no good without bullets. His discharging over.

  While Rue had been in the music field, sort of, Georgie was in the cornfield. Rue beat on a banged-up piano; Georgie beat on two broken-down mules. Out of school now three years, and aged fourteen, of the two brothers, he was truly the “country” one: even his name was royally agrarian. His holidays was in the fields.

  Georgie got work in Windsor for twenty-five cents a day, plus board, way back in the lumberwoods, and doing odd jobs. He was always grubbing trees, toting away rocks, planting crops, and pulling up weed roots. An honest living. He chopped land. Tending gardens, he savoured the ones featuring fruit trees, plums, gooseberries, currants, or strawberries, maybe even some awesome onions and gigantic watermelons (unlike the itty-bitty ones Cynthy planted).

  His dungarees smelled of tobacco smoke. He knew that no rabbit’s foot was truly lucky unless it’d first been dipped in alcohol. (A snagged rabbit could bring in fifteen cents.) He knew how to whistle, but knew no jazz. He loved April for its water, fresh and sweet and pure and cold water. Each April, rain drooled through the new maple leaves after hurricanes of lightning—with considerable thunder and truly striking light. Then came rattling brooks, garrulous. He’d watch scraggly apple trees struggle into blossom. He enjoyed the odd tinkle of rain because each drop was noisy ointment for flowers. (Rain is how the sea summers in grass.) But he also saw how too-heavy rain could fire the brown earth to grey. The crabapple tree in the yard would blossom whitely and ironically sweet: its fruit would be sea-green with sourness. The fields about Three Mile Plains and Hants County flowered pure clover and strawberries. Apples, blackberries, and raspberries could be gobbled down along the railway tracks. In the backwoods, the maple leaves used to tickle and harass him, lewdly. Crows’d ring his head—like a bizarre halo—when he’d go out. He watched black horses riot out of fog. He spied smelts running in the creek and blueberries sunning in the fields. He’d streak through fields just like a mouse, enjoying his own sleek scurrying, the rush of tall grass against his shins, his thighs, his chest. He could walk straight as a bullet. He could swill rain and gobble berries. He’d get up in the dark, come home in the dark. His muscles waxing as the daylight waned.

  Power was in George’s arms and legs: he could swing a big axe like a little hammer. He used a seven-pound axe back in the woods. He’d hack down maples and hack up ash. He’d hack up rampikes into logs and logs into kindling like none of your business. He’d hove to and fro until each pine or maple was a goner. The work was tough; his muscles got to be damned enormous. His hands were bad-ass carpenters, ingenious mechanics. He got some cash for cutting logs, using a cross-saw and an axe. He hauled hard against horses but looked just like a bull. He hewed timber by the Annapolis River. (He poured his axe into the tender, virgin flesh of pines. They quivered every time he stroke.) He looked stocking-capped and singing, his adolescent moustache all flecked with woodchips and sawdust. His saw was a healthy steel that sang. He’d bustle into the fields, get the bulls hitched. He sweated with Percherons, huge workhorses weighing a half a ton each.

  October staged funerals of ripe fruit and vegetables in autumnal cauldrons. Maples, oaks, aspens, birches, coldly ablaze. Windfall apples sprawled frosty some mornings. Frost heaving everything up. Crackling, superficial ice defined November. George’d work well into the cold days, then work even better into warmed-up rum. He liked to trek through daytime, rainy snow—snow as cold or as warm as rain—cross barrens made palatable by blueberries, stick-and-stone together a small, smoking fire, then boil tea, bake a potato, fry apple slices, stew venison or cook a duck. To abracadabra autumn back into April.

  Game’d keep well from October to April. George’d let deer meat break down to get the rigor mortis out, to get it so tender he could cut it with a simple knife. Such know-how could turn moose and deer into snowshoes and moccasins; hunger could turn them into mincemeat. George sawed ice that was thick, cutting out squares like cakes already frosted. He could get hungry, starving, dreaming the ice was cake.

  Georgie’s first love was food. Life was a meal. He’d buy and eat a whole bowl of berries and never share. Nice bread had to be as intoxicating as molasses-distilled home brew. If Cynthy had a big pot of greens with salt pork on the boil, if the hog to be eaten had a nice juicy case of fat, if sweet potatoes could be roasted in ashes, if Sunday brought biscuits with molasses and fried chicken, if someone got a mess of smelts or eels and fried em good, this was pure pleasure. He even liked a
porcelain cup full of oatmeal-coloured bacon fat and fried beans drippings, not to mention oatmeal with lumps as big as eggs. George could dine on dandelion roots: they were tasty and they tasted even tastier because they were free. He chewed chocolates like pieces of steak. Once he found a sack of sugar and just ate it and ate it for days on end, secretly. Just scooped up big white handfuls and sat down in back of a shed and ate it and ate.

  At fourteen, Rue convinced George to sortie with him to Halifax. They hopped the train, then trolleyed to Barrington Street, site of the swanky shops. Dressed cleanly enough so as to postpone or stymie suspicion, they entered the Homer Jewellery Store. Rue asked the owner, Mr. Homer, to show him scintillating rings so he could choose one for his gal. Smiling, grey, affable, and spectacled, Homer set the dazzling rings on the counter, while George looked nervously at Rufus. Rue eyed the display rings intently, hemming and hawing as if seriously purchasing. Then, Rue asked Mr. Homer if he could use his phone to call his bank to check on his balance. Accommodating this request, Homer ushered Rue into his back office and to his phone, then returned to the front to watch the rings and the steadily humming George. Homer and George hear Rue’s loud thank-yous to his bank, and then he returns. Rufus tells Mr. Homer he will buy two rings, but not until tomorrow, once he collects his funds. Homer promises to hold the rings, and Rue and Georgie exit.

  Once they are outside the shop, George says, “Rudy, ya ain’t got no money for one ring, let alone two. Ya don’t even got a bank account.” Rue just smiles, fishes a wad of bills out of his jacket pocket.

  “While that patsy was watchin ya, Joygee, I went through his safe, which was open so he could make change easily. While he thought I was brayin on the phone, I took about two hundred dollars.”

  George whistled, but said, “We could get jail!”

  Rue peeled a twenty from his stash and handed it over. “Keep yer liver lips shut.”