George & Rue Read online

  Rue’s precocious finesse at blatant theft—bold-face and blackface—did not imp George to similar exploits. He felt prosperous enough, rambling amid blackberries or herding hogs. Rural life was wholesome, even if it was not, biblically speaking, holy.

  George’s farm work made him many things—a carpenter, a mechanic, and a gardener. But it did not make him wise or honest. He was still an amateur bootlegger, though less an expert thief. Once, though, he killed a baby bear, skinned it, and passed off the hide lucratively as fox fur.

  By the time Rue was spurtin fifteen, Asa was makin his eyes very sick. When the thug lunged at Cynthy at Christmas 1941, Rufus hefted a two-by-four by the stove and whacked the sucker. Rue swung that wood till it was ruddy. Asa lunged to grab at it, but it boomeranged and smashed his nose. That hurt; then it was hard to breathe.

  Cynthy screamed, “Kill him! Kill him, boy! Oh no! Don’t kill him! Oh God, don’t kill him, Rufus!” But Asa still stumbled bumblingly as his face collided with a hammer of wood. Asa dropped crooked, dumb—as if to apologize to that wood. Asa fell before his son’s shod feet. And Rue kicked and kicked at his pops, kicked at his face. Blood come shitting out. Rue felt instantly tired. He’d hit Asa—blip!—upside the head; blood had shat out. Rue’d nearly busted his right hand on his father’s steel-like head. The worse he pounded Asa, the worser his own heart pounded in return.

  Asa coughed and spat, “You want to piss in my face? At it?” He’d fallen akimbo, like a sick bug. Marred and shaky, he bled onto the floor, then rose onto his haunches, and mumbled how he’d sic the cops on Rue.

  Well, Rue slapped Asa’s bloody face. “I’m a-gonna break ya, nigger. Ya’ll wish to God ya ain’t born.”

  Asa start to stand, spitting, “You’ll not talk back. I got ya out that bitch.” Asa glared at Cynthy.

  But Rue roared, “Stay down there like the dog you are.” He swayed like a gladiator over his hammered-down father. He just laugh, but it was a laugh that come from a gutter.

  VII

  NOT LONG after this thrashing, Asa disappeared into dark water—the petrol-slicked, nighttime, molasses-ebony of Halifax Harbour. It were wartime; the city housed plagues of sailors in March 1942.

  Asa’d tottered from the butchery, in a patina of blood and a haze of whisky, carrying fat and spare bits of meat in a newspaper whose headlines waxed large about Stalin, Churchill, Mackenzie King, other grandiose, corpulent men. He bought a tin can of rum from a bootlegger, because he was now a drinker who ignored his alcoholism: he was always bumbling to Gabby’s bar-bordello to take a taste. Asa continued lurching, shambling, homeward, a heavy-set being crunching crocus underfoot. Before he got there, he saw Reverend Dixon in his cream car, and he flagged him down; he wanted to talk to him about Cynthy and Rue and God. Dixon let the drunk man into his car, eagerly, and told him he was going to Halifax. Asa said, slurringly, “We’ll have a man-to-man chat, Reverend.” He fell drunkenly asleep. Dixon glanced at the snoring, slumped-down man, and said, “Cross-examine thyself.” The sun crisscrossed the double-crossing road. A summery eve.

  It was night when Asa awoke to find himself lying, shivering, on a wharf in downtown Halifax. He didn’t much fancy the harbour—whose smell he knew instantly—because it ran with unadulterated shit, straight on into the Atlantic. Indeed, the raw sewage pipe into the harbour was Halifax’s concrete answer to the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, the Great Wall of China, and the Leaning Tower of Pisa. He turned his aching head and spied ruined light amid the city’s ruinous streets. Whenever he’d ride the bus or train to Halifax and glimpse its entrée to the Atlantic—all that murderous water whelming, foaming, foaming, whelming—Asa would ponder his own dying, wonder how it’d go.

  Dizzy and addled, Asa felt the wind tasting like rum-nectar in his paper-dry throat. A car engine wheezed and cussed nearby. Gulls wafted and squawked. He heard impetuous water glug-glugging among the wharf posts and the rock-tumbly shore. No doubt, black water was brushing boulders till they bristled black. Now and again a heavy wave’d break and snap and howl against the rocks like a whip smashing against skin. Lying by that water was the same as being rained on. Now he realized he couldn’t move his arms or feet. He lifted his head and saw his limbs had been roped with chain and an ungainly bumperjack was dangling, chained to his ankles. His head was throbbing as if it had been hit with an axe, but he was conscious enough to recognize Reverend Dixon, now looming over him.

  He giggled, only a little nervous, sure there was an explanation, and said, “Reverend Dixon, ain’t no need to shackle me up just to get me baptized! I always been fixin on bein saved.”

  Dixon laughed, but muffled it with his own hand: “I’m goddamned sure you’s baptized now, Asa.” And then, with his feet, he nudged the prone, wriggling, now frightened man off the wharf.

  Asa yelled, “Nooooo!” But he was already sinking into the water’s verge, with only a soft splash. No gulls disturbed by his descent.

  That night spawned a turmoil of stars. Asa was thirsty, thirsty, thirsty, then drunk, then drowning.

  He died thinking, “Who’s pissin in my face?” He left behind his good brown leather shoes on the wharf. His shadow had fell upon the water like an oil slick. His eyes weeping down his cheeks, his head brimming with rum, his body never found. An apparent sans souci suicide. He be now only a pair of brown patent leather shoes abandoned by two brown feet. So Asa sunk down, enthralled, into the cold, sloppy water. In a roomful of fish, he floated, weighted down by chains and a bumperjack. Dixon, satisfied, threw the opened newspaper package of carcass meat into the water, to deliver entertainment to the gulls—and ironic flowers to Asa. Right after Dixon drove off, a hobo named Godasse—or “dirty shoes”—swiped Asa’s patent leathers.

  Cynthy was comforted by Dixon. There was gossip about how Asa may have run off after Dixon had left him, kindly, in Halifax, but then Reverend Lucas of the Halifax church claimed to have seen a suicide note that had since been lost. The Mounties made inquiries, but nobody mourned Asa’s absence, and so the investigation became a series of shrugs. Besides, it was wartime, and plenty of official, organized massacres was underway worldwide; a puny local death didn’t interest anyone.

  Assuredly, Asa’s funeral was perfunctory—as were his mourners’ tears. The ostensible suicide’s corpse was missing, but he was far from being missed. Few felt moved to fake any sorrow on Asa’s behalf, although the transports of grief staged by the presumed dead man’s siblings were fearsome to behold. Thus, George and Rue experienced memorable extensions of mercy, prayer, and sympathy, along with compromisingly fond gestures, kisses, and hugs—the grace notes of gentility—from relatives. These emotive treasures befell them just because their vile papa had taken truly too much to drink, swilling saline solution in his lungs instead of alcohol in his blood. Neither brother regretted this result: for some days, they were treated like two young men with hearts and not two brutes lacking them.

  Even Cynthy’s tears were authentically salty, though prompted more by her tear ducts than by her heart. She accepted the fair fortune of Asa’s vanishing, his deathly disappearance, with the aplomb of a cultured killer, and resolved to be a better mother since she could not be a good one. With Dixon’s transportation aid, she rode triumphantly into Windsor and bought herself a red dress for revival after buying a black one for modelling grief. She suppressed any doubts about Asa’s suicide, though the thought nagged her that a man so mean-spirited would wreck the world before he’d ever harm himself. But Asa was, despite all his filth, somehow cleanly gone—as if his life had been a fleck of grime that an efficient charlady had eliminated with single swish of her sopping mop. After all the grimaces, frowns, and Gothic gargoyle masks of the mourners at Asa’s funeral in absentia (a kind of mock trial), plus her tried-and-true trysts with Dixon, Cynthy knew that, to keep her household together, she would have to kneel and go into Windsor to work “in service,” as a maid, a cook, a cleaner. But this labour promised the earning of new dresses
, new tickets.

  George and Rue were also emancipated by Asa’s finish. His absence—as good as death—left them both feeling boyish exuberance and manly possibility at once. Now they could stay up all night studying hoards of comic books; they could casually eat up what should have been Asa’s share of their meals; they could sip and gulp what remained of Asa’s liquor; they could breathe more easily and entertain a horizon of Aprils—thaws, buds, blooms, refreshing wind, cleansing rain…. Their muscles seemed charged with the electricity of their liberty. Their mother could upbraid their domestic laziness with glares and commands to make toil and industry their gods. They simply ignored her, pretending to honour her halo of bereavement.

  Perhaps the best result of Asa’s demise was that, for the first month afterwards, the slaughterhouse sent sympathy cuts of beef, pork, and lamb. For a month, the boys ate a mess of meats—chops, ham hocks, gizzards—and dreamt new plans.

  Cynthy didn’t long survive her husband. A stroke seized up half her once-pretty looks, gouging a half-smile into a smirk, leaving her face lopsided. Then, having taken a job in Windsor, she drooped herself over Gabby Robie’s shit-blackened indoor toilet and was scrubbing and scrubbing and scrubbing away at the recalcitrant filth left by that high-class pimp’s ass. She eyed a few of Robie’s girls, en route to and from the marbled bathroom, but ignored Purity, who only glanced at Cynthy in passing, wondering who this twisted-up-faced Negro woman could be. It was while scouring Gabby’s toilet, making it pristine, that the heart attack hit. Cynthy’s fantasies of a caviar-and-truffles epoch in Montreal foundered on the reality of her gorgeous tan hands scouring a white porcelain toilet to a champagne gleam. She died dreaming of a dazzling red silk dress. She died with her eyes open. She died on her knees.

  Rue and George trembled in the back room of the shack when they heard the awful voices in the kitchen, ranged around the dressed-up corpse of their mother. A dozen mourners were singing lustily after eating up a storm. Folks was cryin. Still, they had to have a drink or two. Big purple velvet drapes lay on the casket; food and flowers about. Tossed roses lay on the hard, reflecting pool of the casket. A lock of Cynthy’s hair had been put in a glassed-in frame.

  Alisha—imponderably old, uncowed by birth, unshaken by death—didn’t give the boys more than two shakes of her head, to say “Sorry” and “Uh-huh.” Reverend Dixon made promises to show up, and did so late, then made excuses to leave early.

  Twelve Three Mile Plains folks was there, cryin, sniffin, singin, drinkin, eatin. They were grumpy, exotic-looking Negro Gypsies. They were XXX Xns. But at least they cared enough for Cynthy and her bootleggin, lollygaggin, thievin survivors to show up. Not one of the dead woman’s bed-friends (save Dixon) came to see her bedded down in her chaste, violet funeral gown. Her mourners and pallbearers went to her graveside strictly out of Christian charity and genealogical nostalgia. As the shabby funeral party trundled the gleaming coffin on an ox-cart to the burial ground, they passed a billboard featuring a photograph of blue-black Archie Croxen eating a red, gushing watermelon wedge and, ballooned above his head, the scarlet slogan “Windsor, N.S.: Home of Sho’ Good Eatin’!”

  With their whole family now a cemetery, Rue and George began to study how to live better. They’d think on it in the morning, ponder it in the evening. They could look at each other and at Three Mile Plains and see only more struggle, more suffering, more sickness. But the Not-Again World War was on, opening up jobs everywhere; the war seeded warehouses of ready caskets and treasure chests. Them days demanded the arithmetic of bullets, the mathematics of gold, the economics of theft, the accounting of farms, the finances of hunger, the statistics of labour, and the actuarial tables of killing.

  To find their destinies, the stunted-hearted brothers would have to abandon the smelt snow of late April 1942. That light snow that glistened like gems. But life has no mercy for the living and no pity for the dead.

  VIII

  THE MA-AND-PA shack was now theirs. George assumed the coital bed, while Rue occupied solo the boyhood bed he’d shared with his brother, when they’d slept with each other’s feet at the other one’s head, like the inverted figures on playing cards. They kept in lots of home brew, now, distilled from hops and raisins. They kept a full keg, with a spigot on the side, sittin by the stove. Cynthy’s photograph smiled lonesome and winsome down at them from the back-room wall, but Asa’s pictures had long since been torn up and burnt.

  That spring and summer after Cynthy’s death, when they needed coin for more than just cigarettes, they’d stroll at dawn down to Newport Station and hitch the train into Windsor, hire out to haul garbage, pound nails, anything at all (but not the gypsum mine, not the knackery), then get the train back to Three Mile Plains at night, stop at Pemberton’s store for groceries: chocolate bars, bubblegum, salami, cream soda, ginger ale. They’d pore over comic books too, not the newspaper. Radio blaring a crime show, crackling as if afire, they’d sit up nights, not doing much but singing, or playing harmonica, or shamefully, shamelessly sobbing, over a bootleg bottle, about being hard-done-by orphans. They hugged, sometimes, but the pain inside them tore them away from each other too.

  Feeling nasty, they geared for fights always. Without explaining it to each other, and without knowing why, they’d go into Windsor, or they’d go to Wolfville or Kentville, those cigarette or liquor towns, shuttling between Three Mile Plains and Kentville, either hitchhiking or going by train, but set to fight: white boys, mixed-up boys, black boys. Didn’t matter. They wanted to incubate Fear for miles around. They wanted to be hulking hundred-plus-pound holy horrors. They wished to be so sharp-eyed, so quick in hand they could dice air with a razor, cleave the wings off a fly in mid-flight. They’d pick a town, go and get uncomfortably drunk, then comfortably snooze in an apple orchard, then walk back to town for more rum. They’d drink away whole weekends in the Annapolis Valley, keel over, then get up, set to tussle.

  One July, Saturday night, the guys was staggerin back across a railroad bridge from Kentville when three chalk-faced toughs blocked their passage on that narrow bridge.

  The palefaces laughed, “Let’s crunch these nigguhs up.” Rue already had em measured.

  George told em boys, “I been drinkin and am feelin kinda tired. So I’m gonna let my brother handle yas, while I sit down and rest.” Woozily, George sat down beside the tracks, while Rue made three guys feel sorry for themselves. One by one, he ground each of those white boys—well-done, medium, and rare.

  Then George, sobered now, got up, said, “My turn!”

  He smacked the trio silly while the sweaty, panting Rue shouted, “Run em down, knock em down, and kick em. Hard! Pound piss out of em! Break their spirits!”

  IX

  THE APRIL after Cynthy was buried, sixteen-year-old Rufus, returning from another Valley dust-up, plus happy helpings of rum, passed a wooden, red-tint, square house anchoring Panuke Road. A girl-woman stuck her head out a window, purely coincidentally, and he just up and kissed her—in dawn-crisp air, flourishing light. That gal’s face was like a bouquet, so cinnamon-and-pepper beautiful. She tried to slap Rue, but he ducked, laughed.

  Said, “Ya look just too pretty. Is I too bold?”

  Easter Jarvis said, “Sorry bout yer Mama, but ya shouldn’t be kissin on a gal who don’t know ya.”

  Rue said, “Lemme know you then.” He was hungry to be the first and last man to feel Easter.

  Easter was a plum good gal, plump and sweet, her glistening, chestnut-coloured hair framing caramel looks: pacific skin riding coral that was bones. Her waist be so small, Rue could scope one hand around that sweetness, feel her hair strokin down like black vines. He was starving for fruitful trees alive with blossoms.

  Easter and Rue stuck together instantly. Rue planned to quit scrappin, toing-and-froing anywhere, drinkin. He had to get out into the world, away from Three Mile Plains, with a gal he could trust. Easter’s daddy was a railway porter who’d lavished cash on her and her mom. She wanted to become
a nurse—when Coloured girls could. She wished to move to Halifax, work hard, buy a comfy house, have oodles of kids. Rufus thought he might become a pianist-porter—or porter-pianist. He loved the luxury of that dream as much as he loved Easter. He’d become a sleeping-car porter for the Canadian National Railway. (Coloureds called it the Canadian Negro Railway because it employed Canadian Negroes as porters. The Canadian Pacific Railway was called the Coloured Peoples Railway because it hired West Indians, Negro Americans, and “real” Indians.) They knew the facts: men had to porter, women launder. Men would go away all week on long runs to Montreal; women’d take in soiled clothes one day, return them all washed and ironed the next.

  That society, organized to drive coal-coloured men into laborious destitution, was a gigantic and depressing frustration for Rue. He was not one to embrace hard luck with a happy-go-lucky smile. But Easter’s optimism, her graces of cradling kisses, her family’s plucky stick-to-itiveness, helped steel Rue’s belief he could prosper as a musician, train man, husband, father, provider; that he could be an artist, not just artful.

  Ah, Easter be easy to love. And look at the season! The spring brandishing blossoms; the sun-singed snow retreating. Rue craved to draw Easter into hyacinths, with the moon gone vermilion some misty summer night.

  Easter was the antidote to cold soup.

  Rue jest with her: “It’s chocolate that makes Easter Easter—the chocolate hens, bunnies, and eggs, not the sermons.” Easter’d hit im with her handbag to strike down irreligion. They’d tussle, cuddle, kiss. But all weren’t ideal. When they took in a movie, Easter had to take out her cash. If Rue wanted a tub of ice cream, he had to let Easter pay.

  Rue fell into a fight right on Main Street in Windsor, and it was over Easter. He caught that whoremaster, Gabby Robie, actin fresh with her. Well, in the sunlit street, Rue plastered Gabby flat on his nose; the blood just flew. The wrinkled-up old hunchback bitched, but Rue kept circlin and boxin his head. Gabby wobbled, backed off.