George & Rue Read online

  A witness yelled, “I got in the barber chair when you fellas started fightin and my hair was all cut when ya stopped.” Easter gratefully kissed Rue long and hard.

  Still, Easter was one of the “400s”—one of those better-off Negroes who had houses, new clothes, flash, big words, cars (or horses), quiet gumption, RESPECT, gardens, white friends, and style, but who kept their furniture covered up in sheets to preserve the newness. Easter was meant to marry within her set. But Rue’s kiss put him in sole contention for her honours—and her savings, though her pa, Loquinn, cringed at the very name of this ragamuffin. Loquinn was stocky, lightcomplected, and bulldog-mean, but a tony railway porter; Easter was headstrong, and his only child. Loquinn hated Rue as if he had always known him.

  Easter had a piano in her parlour. When her folks’d go out, she let Rue play that half a keyboard he knew, then she’d serve him her good food: cabbage, turnip, carrot, squash, and eels too. Rue loved buttermilk and fried eels. He watched those darned things flapping around in Easter’s frying pan after being prepared and floured. Then he and Easter shared red wine and kisses. She served Rue easy turtle cookies and Halifax rice pudding. She’d hoist white stockings on her honey legs—just for him. They dreamt of a Christmas of cheese, champagne, and chocolates, not to mention an adulthood of babies, blues piano, and brandy. With Easter, Rue felt he could play an apple-pie hero with bread-and-butter proverbs.

  He mused, “One day, I’ll sleep side her every night.”

  Rue said to Easter in December, “We need a driving horse. Can’t always walk or cab. With a horse, you can ride out, see me up home.” Easter’s doting pa purchased a black filly, Andover, as a Christmas gift. Loquinn swallowed—like bad rum—his distaste for Rue, who was, to him, one more no-good Negro who gave all the hard-working ones a bad name. But Loquinn bought the sable mare, to tether her in his barn, to tether Easter, he hoped, to his home.

  That Christmas was the best Rue ever had, with Easter prancing on her horse, and him and her cavorting and not caring who knew. She gave Rufus chocolates, cheese, champagne, and a new belt with a silver buckle. He gave her kisses and promises of kisses. He played her a song using only half her piano.

  The ice on the Avon River was deadly in winter, but now the new spring fields were blurry with melting April snow, and the ice had to burst open in pieces. A high spring tide made the Avon a squall of water. The Atlantic, corkscrewing into the Bay of Fundy and churning into the Minas Basin, turned the Avon into a plough of water that could tear down and smash up iron bridges in that April of 1944. One year after Rue first kissed Easter.

  Easter’d arranged to meet Rue at three, atop the hill where the rich had erected mansions under Windsor elms. While awaiting her arrival from Falmouth, Rue eyed cars and horses-and-buggies passing by, in front of the Windsor Baptist Church, the granite white church that spurned the wooden African Baptist facility up home. It was an easy landmark for downtown meetings. The sky was a grey-white-black water-colour turning to oils, and the wind seemed to come from January, not April. It whipped back and forth, careening, cold, mixing flecks of snow with specks of rain. But Rue felt gleeful. He could hardly wait to clasp Easter inside his coat against him, to breathe her breath like hot chocolate and to feel her breasts pressing softly into him. They’d sip hot chocolate downtown, then ride slowly to the Plains. Then the squall blew in his face and reminded him he was poor and subject to the atmosphere’s whims.

  Easter was riding Andover across the spindly, rickety wooden Avon River bridge—when the river erased that bridge. Only its approaches remained, leaping expectantly toward a void. Pitched into that agitated chrome, Easter tried to keep ahold of Andover, but the horse flailed, the avalanche of ice and water burying Easter in her long black coat and apple-blossom-coloured spring dress. She almost swam, but the water was too slippery for traction and too cold to stand. It was slob water, a slushy mess of water, ice, half-frozen snow, and mud. One wild, freakish black wave had shook Easter from Andover. The next wave, quadrupling up on the first, became her assassin. It was a cyclone of water, boulders, logs, mud, and ice crashing down on anything already drowning. She somersaulted through the crushing water. Dirt and frozen water besmirched her clean, dry lungs. The sad, slow ache of disaster overtook her. She saw water turning white, as if with ice, then blackness, as she drowned, gurgling. Her eyes rimed with sand pretending to be stars. The sun rose to paleness, incandescent, as water blanketed her head and she settled, shivering, into a bed of shells and amethysts.

  Rudy waited in that drenching chill and icy buffeting for an hour. Then he went to meet Easter. When he reached the Avon River, he saw the bridge drifting, tumbling, bobbing, in bits and pieces, trusses and spans, dismantled among pies and strudels of ice. Rue joined the ragtag throng gazing upon the ruins, but still felt only tiny anxiety. Surely Easter had postponed her travel, or had ridden to a safer passage, although Rue knew there was no good place to cross: the river, with all that jagged ice, was a cocktail of glittering razors. He squinted into the distance, among the empty orchards of Falmouth, looking for a brown girl on a black horse, while the ice groaned and heaved practically at his feet.

  He was scanning the horizon when he heard a snake-like voice tut-tutting, “I seen the Jarvis gal go down when the bridge went out. Her and her horse.” Rue twisted about sharply to face that vile voice, to smack Gabby’s face.

  But murmuring others grabbed, clutched, held his arms, as he heard Gabby say, with a ghost of a smile, “I seen her go in—and her horse—more than an hour ago, and that’s that.”

  Rue sweated panic that let him slip the hands gripping him and stab-punch at the grotesque man who crowed, “If she’d worked for me, she’d still be alive.” Gabby crumpled while the crowd yammered, and Rue bolted to the riverbank. Light drained from the heavens. A cold rain lashed and pummelled.

  Dazed, but hoping dreadfully that Easter might yet be floating on a floe like an Eskimo heroine or, maybe, lying ashore, half-drowned, exposed to freezing cold in her sodden clothes, Rufus rushed to Easter’s house to augment a search party. A crowd mobbed the kitchen. He pushed through the tumult of sobbing and serious-faced people.

  Loquinn spied Rue; he picked up a butcher knife and swung, screaming, “You’s to blame for this! Ya told Easter to get that horse!” Loquinn slashed at the air in front of Rue while folks in the kitchen jumped back. Rue grabbed the crying, yelling man’s wrist and squeezed harshly until the knife hit the floor and Rue kicked it aside. He turned and left, and just wept and wept and wept.

  Searchers dragged the Fundy water and patrolled the rain-hiked river from cliffs, seeking Easter. They sloshed around boulders of muddy, muddy ice on the riverbanks.

  Later, she washed up by Evangeline Beach among seaweed-laced rocks. Her body had been dissolving in water. A lovely, delicate, easy sculpture of flesh and bone had been chafed to and fro in pulverizing, fretting tides.

  Where Easter is buried, on a slope above the Minas Basin, the sky scowls over the sea—breakers seething home. It is whitewashed, blizzarding air. A broken heavens. A snowstung sky. Her stone is white granite confronting whiter waves.

  Her mama, Delicia, said, through a waterfall of tears, “People don’t know how good my daughter was. Pure her body was.”

  X

  AFTER EASTER S DEATH, Rue could not tolerate the rose smell, the apple blossom aromas, the peach scents of Three Mile Plains. He said, “I must start out and scythe down grass for myself.” He boarded the train to Halifax, that open sewer on the Atlantic. Its alleys unfurled a parade of puddles and garbage and feces and head-dented cats. Dogs looked half-run-over or had only three legs. Ugly gals sashayed with black-leather-skirted asses or black-silk-scarved necks. Salubrious, unchaste voices, redolent of pigeon squabble and pidgin gabble, chortled over sidewalks scrawled on by illiterate Satanists whose graffiti exclaimed, “Satin lives!” Pigeons stumbled like broken-winged rats at Haligonian feet. Always, clouds clung to the city, for it liked to have its sunligh
t shrouded in fog.

  Was an operatic city, Halifax, with Citadel Hill splitting it between the smokestack North End and the rose-trellised South. A peninsula, its shape resembled the cranium of a Tyrannosaurus rex. Streets were haphazardly flung, ragged daggers, plunging downhill to the harbour or stabbing uphill, then vaulting past the domineering Citadel and the flat, adjacent Commons, to dart downhill again to the Northwest Arm or Bedford Basin. It were a San Francisco of vice with San Franciscan hills. Easy for a car to conk out when moving uphill, then roll speedily backwards, right down into the harbour. Many a horse had met its end because some gentleman’s flivver had struck it as the vehicle hurtled unstoppably backwards into disaster.

  Halifax was the Warden of the North, a fast, filthy city, warships bustling about the perpetually pro-war harbour, a clapboard London of booty. It had never recovered from its abandonment by the British Empire. The city imagined its obsolescent cannon and superseded forts still guarded the Arctic, thus keeping those waters technically British, despite the Yanks’ ungodly firepower. Halifax was Venice without canals, Kingston with mosquitoes. It was the Sodom of the Atlantic—a gold mine of prostitution. Every day, atop the Citadel, punctiliously at noon, a single cannon blast marked the city’s further passage into history. Even antichrist Hitler pipe-dreamed about commandeering an ale-profit-built South End château for himself.

  Here the war was going kapow, kapow, kaboom, kapow, whammy, every day in the Loyal press, and markets were crowded with khaki’d soldiers and white-uniformed sailors desperate for swell satisfactions before sailing to battles in Europe—and also the Battle of the Atlantic, just to get to the main war. In Hell-of-a-Fuck, they saw that even chubby gals had pretty legs. They wanted to live a little before, unluckily, dying, for the Atlantic bristled with U-boats deep-sixing Allies and millions of tonnes of shippage. Under such conditions, religion was ridiculous. The true holy sites were the bars, the brothels, the taverns. Vice meant steady work. Houses were quickly organized—cop-okayed—on Brunswick, Agricola, and Gottingen, near the naval base of Stadacona, all working-class, mapled, and trolleyed streets, sliding into, or rising slowly from, the never-freezing, a-hundred-ships-at-a-time whoring harbour.

  The good news about all that huffing-and-puffing Haligonian prostitution was that the instant, upward spike in V.D. infections prompted public health officials to organize sex hygiene classes and adult learning campaigns. War plus lechery equalled improved literacy, but unimproved minds.

  The city’s Negro district, Africville, occupied the south side of Bedford Basin, on the peninsula’s North End tip. Though its denizens had land titles granted by Victoria herself, the city council considered the seaside village a shantytown fit only for a slaughterhouse, railway tracks, a tuberculosis and polio hospital, and the city jail. The Coloureds in Africville wouldn’t let in shifty interlopers who might give its citizens black eyes and bad names. Rue was welcome to play cards and buy bootleg, but he weren’t welcome to stay.

  Rue tried the railways, but couldn’t get on with either company: the waiting list for portering was eight-hundred Coloured guys long. He could go to war—that is, he could go peeling potatoes in the Royal Canadian Navy, serving dummkopfs who’d call him nigger while gobbling his hash browns and sausages. There’d be fights; he’d be brigged and discharged, if he weren’t shot. Not for him.

  Having gone from Three Mile Plains to drunkenness, and from there to Halifax, Rue, now a beanpole seventeen-year-old, wandered the codfish-perfumed and Moir’s-chocolate-factory-scented downtown streets. Soon, he landed a piano gig in a Brunswick Street bordello run by a “malloto” guy with tabby-cat skin and a face like malt, name of Googie Johnson, right from Africville. Googie was hefty, diamonded, silk-suited, coiffed, with a scar all the way round one eye and down one cheek. That warned that anyone who jousted with him could get his testicles ripped off. He’d broken both his hands—twice—tussling with fools and smashing down doors. But he was still pretty. When he wanted another man’s woman, he’d just look at her and she’d come right over: better that than see her man sliced up like a filet. His English was just spat-out tobacco juice. Few fathomed it, which was the point. It was always evening in his establishment’s plush innards—to help soldiers, sailors, as well as South End business types forget their mortality and marriages. Its slick—or plump—girls were refugees from fatal mills or repulsive fathers or hellfire faiths. They were tawny and leonine and maple and mahogany and ebony and ivory and pine and mauve like dusk and peach-cream and teak and coconut and rosy and brass and bronze and cream. They were Ethiopian or Asiatic lovelies with Abyssinian or Arabian accents. To Googie, women, black or white, were like clouds, soft outside but full of turmoil inside. Blues be in them just like blues—saturating, marinating, tissues and organs, everything, in a brine of tears, vodka, and vinegar, resulting in piquant sex and gourmet music. Googie had few cop hassles: the wages of vice is profit.

  Rue got outfitted for his new rôle: a black suit ($20), a black overcoat ($15), and a pair of black dress shoes ($10). He had to jettison the look and smell of the hayfields. It was a way to forget Easter, to forget Three Mile Plains. Rue ached to be spiny, a nappy Napoleon, with maybe a flower in one lapel. He’d become an expert in the way to wear a tie that’s shiny, the way to make sure the suit drops right, just right, around the frame, the way to wear shoes that are natty, snazzy, and jet-spanking black. He knew now how to hold a cigarette, how to wear a hat—with gangster poise. Still, Rue had a handicap: he knew how only half the piano sounded. The first half of the keyboard was constantly fooling and shocking him with its heavy, sable, deep bass notes, too resonant, and so he nixed all requests. All his pieces were originals: he had no repertoire. His blues was, thus, immaculately pure jazz, improv, boogie freestyle. Who could dance to it? All Rufus could produce was “Amazing”-ly broken “Grace,” or a series of sliding and bucking notes that harmonized like jagged carpentry. His funeral songs sounded like up-tempo ragtime. Rue put on disconcerting concerts. His style was not unpleasant, but also not pleasing. His notes were real notes—you could feel em indigoing air. Pasty Dalhousie frat boys cottoned on to Rue’s style. It were “nifty” how he squeezed so much enriched pain into the sarcophagus of a piano. Fans could sniff the phosphorous glint of jazz in the dark, opaque notes. But they could not spend much money. So this praise of Rue was, to Googie, spittle. His eyes squished into a squint. To Googie, Rue beat the keyboard like he was knockin out a motherfucker’s brains. Most pianists felt a tune; Rue hammered em out.

  Rue’s gig paid off princely—ten bucks a week plus drinks. But his playing didn’t inspire dancing, drinking, coupling, tippling, or any of the merrymaking that should accompany money-making. Rather, Rufus’s pianist style forced everyone to just stand around sipping, pondering, as if attending a recital instead of revelling in a blind pig and cathouse. The piano was spooky; its music haunted every room in the house, messin up lovers’ rhythms.

  To step outside this night-owl hangout was to step into a nightmare: a tableau of drunks pissing against walls; smoky, poxy apocalyptic gals; a couple screwing in a dark doorway. Worse, at times it was Rue himself taking advantage of poor woodsmoke-scented, stove-oil-perfumed quim, some thin-titted slut, a long plaid shirt and a tartan skirt camouflaging the conjunction. A favour for a fiver.

  Then, at Googie’s, Rue met Purity Mercier, down from Windsor to slip the Mounties. He didn’t want her: his heart was still mash. The coupling was chancy. Rue’d stood up, turned from the piano, not noticing Purity, but holding a cup of coffee. As he turned, he spilled into her; the coffee trembled, leapt in the cup, splashed out urgently—but not scaldingly—upon her bare white arm. She laughed; her hands lolled over her now sheerly visible breasts. Wasn’t Rue like a Coloured man she’d funned with up in Windsor? Her nervous, brittle laughter revealed little pleasant incisors as biting as her looks. Her feverish mouth, snatching. She thought Rue swarthy and, therefore, randy. His eyes murderously brilliant, volcanic. There was no memb
rane of glass dividing them, only stained-glass lust inside Rufus. She seemed cutely ratty, acutely dirty. The colour and taste of vodka and milk. Dark-haired Purity’d fit his narrow bed.

  She say, “I come from two lines of whores, and I’m a whore myself.” Rue was the bull to trample in her garden, kick in her stall, chew on her roses. Fine, fine.

  Their affair had lust in it—the remains of lustre. Her fingers diddling along his spine reminded Rue of a roach’s legs paddling furiously in Googie’s sink. When they turned up the lamp, yellow light, half-religious, half-sinful, all shames assumed a Renaissance glow—beige, peaceful. The bed cracked and jiggled as they cranked and joggled. Her sluice suckled him.

  “Oh—what—ah.” Fire sat within Purity, burning, burning, in her succinct precincts. Either like a preacher’s abandoned sermon, her skirts’ undone, or like a bad nun’s, with unchaste heart and unbound hair.

  Purity was Rue’s lover under tall pines in Point Pleasant Park, down by the waterfront, in late June, after the shower, pouring rain down her trembling self and gyrating amid the mud and pine needles. Tangy skin, vinegary kisses, sour wet clothes peeled off in all that rain and mud. They’d done it standing in the doorless changing room while slummy water gummed up the dry sand by the black harbour, with cold strawberries and stars and rain-sodden, wind-slurred grass in the nearby hills. The Sunday chill thrilled through June leaves. Rum hammering in Rue’s head hammered him to Purity’s thighs. Then, wet, panting, the lovers sheltered in one of the mouldered caverns of one of the ancient imperial forts. They dressed; Rue hummed. He desired the hectic Atlantic spray on their faces. Purity smiled. Rue remembered Easter and brushed away a threatening tear.