Miss Elva Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part One - 1927

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Part Two - 1970

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Copyright

  For Aunt Elva

  PART ONE

  1927

  JANE AT SIXTEEN was all flaming youth and cheek-bones. Bold to her betters some’d say, mostly Rilla, by way of apologizing for her daughter. Jane would never be sorry for a goddamned thing, but Jesus! That girl could turn the head of a stone angel.

  Now you didn’t usually see her kind in Demerett Bridge, Mi’kmaq had their place up in Indian Brook, but Rilla had that thing going with her white man Amos so you couldn’t very well say no. And Jane? Half white so no one minded her checking herself out in windows up and down Commercial Street on account of her good half being on the outside. So, Girl don’t you be giving me any business, was all she’d get from King Duplak for sassin’ him and saying she’d make that ol’ catalogue dress and wouldn’t buy it in his shitty five-and-dime even if she could. She ripped the page right out of the T. Eaton book and slipped it into her pocket so she could paste it on her mirror.

  Rilla was searching through cans on the shelf and Duplak said, Hey now, it took the wife some time to get them all facing right like. So Rilla counted out nickels, going red at the cheeks ’cause she’d been caught looking for cheaper prices in behind. Be glad when this strike’s over, Mr. Duplak.

  Christ, she’s going to want this on account, King was thinking, knowing full well what no rails coming off the foundry lines meant. Wouldn’t be enough for Amos Stearns to feed his harem over there on Kirchoffer Place, specially since he’d been off sick. Amos’d been the security man at the foundry, sort of like a policeman with a lot more hitting power, but what good was that if you had to spend half your day in the crapper? When Amos’s poor stomach became a regular thing, there was talk of a pension or something, then the manager, Urban Dransfield—who everyone in Demerett Bridge now hated because of the strike—said, Thank you very much you can’t work any more here’s a watch with your name on it.

  That was before the strike, and now, not so many potatoes for the stew pot. No paycheques in a town controlled by the Maritime Foundry Corporation meant Amos’d been unable to meet ends with the boarders in that place of his. Must be why his old lady was back on the road. King’d seen for himself Stearns’s Mi’kmaq whore in that old Ford of his. Heard she was doing washing as far north as Raven River for those German yahoos up there. Hey, honest folks were hurting too and thank Jesus they’d rather starve before swabbing out skivvies and bedsheets for River people. Yeah, right. If washing was all she was doing. King smiled, remembering the old days when Rilla wasn’t looking so hard-ridden. Why if it wasn’t for the wife out back, he’d show Amos’s squaw his own laundry shed.

  He counted each coin again. Didn’t matter that the woman had been a customer for over thirteen years. It’s not like she was Stearns’s legal wife. Indians got no credit no how, so Jane didn’t need a new dress and no, added Rilla, you’re not getting your hair bobbed either.

  Daylight flooded through the open door catching the dust unawares. Barely reaching the latch, Harry had shadowed Rilla and her girls into the store. He was too young to be captivated by Jane’s adolescent charms or to know he shouldn’t stare at the other sister, well, half-sister, the one who wasn’t as pretty as Jane. Normally the ugly one sat out on the front porch when she came into Demerett Bridge shopping with her ma and Jane. Sometimes she’d colour with chalk on a writing tablet. Once when she did it, Harry stopped carving his name in backwards letters into the steps of his dad’s pool hall across the street, came over and looked. Said she couldn’t draw and why didn’t she draw boats? He might like them better if she did boats, but the girl, Elva, just said, Go away. She didn’t sit outside today because there were men on the corner, shouting now, looking to make trouble for someone new around these parts.

  Elva had trouble breathing on hot days or when she got herself worked into a lather, so when she turned away from the window and said, You have to help him, it came out all huffy.

  Rilla stared at the Elva girl. What was she thinking, giving orders to Mr. Duplak?

  Jane flipped another page in the catalogue. Big deal. It wasn’t like anyone was going to take notice of her. “Help who and stop that wheezing.”

  It took ages for Elva to get out, “There’s a man on top of the clock. Went up it like a caterpillar. He’s jabbing it with an army knife.”

  How could he do that and hold on to the clock? Jane wanted to know, but more men were tumbling out of the pool hall and crowding around the clock so Elva didn’t say. They were grey and furry like rats, Elva said and added, “There’s no more poison and there’s rats in the cellar.”

  Jane reached over and pinched her arm.

  “Don’t!”

  “What’s he doing now?” Mr. King Duplak came over to the window to see for himself.

  The pole sitter was showing the others a silver timepiece, one of those really old-fashioned watches on a fob that used to sway like a garland across fancy waistcoats. From the window where she watched, standing on her toes to be as tall as Jane, Elva guessed the watch had once been broken and maybe he’d repaired it. Probably thought he could set the town clock too. Some people are born that way. Wanting to fix things even when they don’t want fixin’, only the man no one had never seen in Demerett Bridge before didn’t know about the clock being sacred and you don’t touch it.

  “Is he cute?” Jane asked.

  “He’s kind of pasty and he wears funny glasses but he’s dreamy.”

  Jane was always saying dreamy this or dreamy that, so lately dreamy was Elva’s favourite word. Then she got all short for breath again when the men outside starting throwing rocks.

  “He’ll fall and break his glasses!”

  “Show’s over,” said Mr. Duplak, drawing the blinds. The town clock hadn’t kept time since the hurricane of ’04, and according to King Duplak, he’d no business up there in the first place. The rusting timepiece was a tribute of sorts, but less to the Nova Scotian town surviving the storm and more to the prevailing Scottish thriftiness that didn’t see the need to pay for a monument when a perfectly useless clock would do.

  “Pink-whiskered Jesus! Like a pack of dogs been through here! Who’s going to clean that?”

  It hadn’t been enough for li’l Harry Winters to follow Elva into the store and stare at her. No. He had to go to the counter for a penny jawbuster, then wander over to the corner where he stood wide-eyed and sucking, oblivious to the trail of black muck from his shoes. Goddamned tar ponds! A mecca for boys of Harry’s age, wanting to throw stuff in, or worse, drag dead things out. Now Harry’s cub-like marks were everywhere.

  Jane said, Haw haw, when she saw the mess on His Lordship’s floor.

  Only Elva saw the footprints as something more than an hour with a brush and bleach, taking some doing to scrub out the wooden planks. A tar map. Their long crescent harbour was right there, on the floor of Duplak’s store, Demerett Bridge at the far northeastern end with Ostrea Lake in behind, the foundry, the black ponds and the monastery about halfways, and just a little to the southeast, Kirchoffer Place, where the factory worker
s lived and where Elva’s ma ran her man’s boarding house. Not that she’d learned about maps in school, Elva didn’t go. Gil taught her about maps. But his maps were drawn in sand.

  Where do you think Gil is? she might have asked Jane, but Elva didn’t want her sister to think she’d been forgiven for killing her pet bird and as it was, Elva had a hard time remembering she wasn’t talking to Jane. Gil and his brother, Dom, were two years older than Jane, although Elva hadn’t seen Gil for so long now, not since he’d run off, that if it weren’t for Dom, she’d forget what Gil looked like.

  It used to be that on Sunday mornings after church in Demerett Bridge, the brothers, free from starchy collars and wearing only torn-off dungarees in summer, drifted down to the end of Kirchoffer Place where the road tinkled with loose slate and ran off to the beach because, maybe, Jane would be there. If she was so inclined, they were not disappointed. Elva could always be counted on to be waiting.

  Before they got a few years older and just sat around on washed-up logs moaning, There’s nothing to do in this armpit of a province, and, Can’t wait to get out, Gil would etch maps in the sand with a piece of sand dollar, all of them planning the afternoon’s adventure. Usually it ended up being to Corry Canyon, where there was a stonecutter’s hut and everyone knew the Indians had scalped him and left the hut in ruins.

  Don’t be so foolish, Rilla said about that.

  No one got tired of going out there, but organizing it was sometimes a battle. Dom would kick out the map with his foot, saying, No, stupid, that’s wrong, it’s over here! Gil’d say, Fuck off! His French accent made Elva giggle. Jane’d watch the two boys getting all sweaty against each other as if she was deciding something, but what, Elva never figured. A plan agreed to, they’d be off, running, whooping, jumping lupins if it was June, leaving Elva quickly distant, crying, Wait!

  If anyone slowed down, that would be Gil. But like it was said, Gil had been away for ages and Dom was busy now, on the Lord’s day.

  “He followed her in here,” King was saying, pointing to Elva, “and she’s your problem.” Harry had already hightailed it back to his dad’s pool hall, the most prudent course of action, but King wasn’t about to let Rilla do the same.

  Now he was calling for reinforcements from out back: Bernice, the wife. An unpleasant piece of work, her. Stuck up like a Woolworths heiress and didn’t say much. Fishy lips with whiskers and from Cape Breton. Made a better Bernie than Bernice. She sounded odd to Elva because her mother tongue was Gaelic; it left the woman spitting a lot of extra vowels she didn’t know what to do with. Figured her old man was way too kind letting Rilla and her half-breeds in amongst their rough, unpainted wooden shelves and pine plank floors that coughed up summer dust whenever anyone with boots walked upon them, tinkling with vibrating crockery. The Emporium, as Mrs. La-de-da Bernice liked to call it. Jane always made a face when she said la-de-da.

  Christ, Rilla wanted to say, except Rilla’d cut her own tongue out before she’d take the Lord’s name in vain. Forgive me, Father. It was for Jane’s sake that she even considered swearing, but what choice was there? Rilla still had to drive out to Raven River that afternoon and there was no way she could have supper late—Amos wouldn’t tolerate that. Jane would have to get the evening meal on the table.

  “Get on with you, straight home, girl. Put the turnips on to boil and stay out of his way.”

  Amos had to be fed. Christ!

  Elva was told to go with Mrs. Duplak and find a pail.

  “No. I want to go with Jane.”

  Jane’d have none of that. Neither would Rilla. Elva sensed her mother didn’t like to go to creepy Raven River on her own, especially if it was starting to get dark on the way back. As for Jane, well, Elva knew Jane didn’t want her kid sister following her anytime. Let’s see, time with her mother, who wanted her, or with Jane, who didn’t. When no one noticed, and who noticed Elva, she stepped into one of Harry’s tar patches and said, Oh look, I have it on my shoe, too.

  Rilla set her meagre bag of groceries on the counter like it was filled with rocks. This would have been her third Christ! of the afternoon.

  Get off the two of you and no shilly-shallying, Rilla warned, but no one heard because Jane on her own with a mind of her own was already out the door trying to lose Elva. That wouldn’t do in a town full of idle men frustrated by a long strike, bored and looking for laughs. Hopefully it wouldn’t last, the bit about Jane’s own mind, that is. At least Rilla didn’t need to worry about Miss Elva. Blessed be small mercies. Misshapen. Miss Ugly. Miss Nothing.

  “It’s hot.” Jane was swinging back and forth, her hands clasped around an old fence post. Then she was off, and not in the direction of home. That was the arse out of her mother’s stricture.

  When Elva took her place, closed her eyes and clasped her hands around the post, she was sure she could feel where Jane’s hands had been, warm like. Maybe even magical, for Elva could believe it really was she, and not Jane, greeting the spring sun, stretching for coolness against the sea wind, that wind blowing through her long, oily black hair, pressing Rilla’s made-over dress against her long legs, her nipples tingling underneath the slippery fabric with every gulp of salt air.

  But spells don’t last forever. When brightness washed away her dreams and Elva blinked to see Jane jump across the ditch to the road, the fingers clutching the post in front of her were gnarled and twisted, knobby like sandpipers caught in the ooze of the foundry’s tar ponds until they were nothing more than limpid black lumps. In the wake of Jane, Elva became the short, ugly thing she was, shoulders drooping like late-summer sunflowers. It’s like the good Lord was rushed, slapped down her noggin, gave it a yank and short-shrifted her on a neck, her aunt Blanche had sighed with a sadness when Elva was born, and echoed in some way or another every time she visited Rilla. It was left to Elva to punctuate that with a tiny oh!

  “Well, what are you going to do with the money?”

  Nothing got past Jane. Must have heard the quarter fall out of Elva’s birthday note from Auntie Blanche and go blonk! on the kitchen floor before Elva scooped it up and hid it in her change purse. Jane’d been trying to part it from her sister ever since.

  Bus coming, with a frisky churn of dust and gravel.

  And of course, Jane believed that Elva was being plain hateful by not sharing her birthday bounty. Hadn’t Jane been saying for weeks to anyone who’d listen that she’d die if she didn’t see The Flaming Forest and it was only going to be at the Towne movie palace for a week?

  “It’s got flappers, you know, and Mounties and savage Indians.”

  Normally, Elva would’ve given Jane anything. Funny how that went, the snottier Jane was, the more Elva wanted to do for her. But not this time. Jane wasn’t getting that money and both sisters knew why.

  “It’s that stupid bird, isn’t it?”

  “You know,” said Elva.

  The bus hurtled by, causing Jane to step onto the shoulder and shield her eyes from the grit, so she missed the passengers’ faces through ashen-shaded windows. Behind it came an automobile. Now there was something you didn’t see in Demerett Bridge every day and it demanded that the girls pause. This one had rolling rounded fenders, one dented, and a yellow cloth roof. In the moment between the clearing of the cloud from the bus and the passing car, Elva caught the flash of dark glasses, low hat, paisley scarf.

  The silence of the country road back around them, Jane had no intention of filling it with an old argument. “I could do that, and be in the movies. Everyone says I could.” What was the word they used on the radio? Jane wrapped her hands in front of her chest as if she were revealing the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

  “Emoting,” Elva said. Emoting was Hollywood lingo for making loopy faces to a camera for lots of money.

  “Yes, better at that. Everyone says so. Watch.” The accompanying grimace might have meant a heart severed by love’s inconstancy, or merely the need to belch.

  So by rights, didn’t Jane just have
to see for herself by going to the movies? She stomped her foot. That was to let Elva know she was serious.

  Who’s everyone? Elva wanted to know, fingering the quarter through her faded calico purse. She liked it because it looked like a kitten with a silver comb in its back.

  There was enough for two matinee tickets, maybe some Milk Duds too. Caramel centres were Elva’s favourite because they’d melt in between your teeth, saving some for later, even if going to the movies meant she had to sit in that really hot last-row balcony with the other Mi’kmaq where she couldn’t see very well and couldn’t hear over the clicking of the projector. But Rilla had said the coin was to be Elva’s mad money, you know, for a girl’s emergencies and hidden in her sock when out with a fella so he’d never know you had it. That way she’d always have a way home.

  “Like you’ll need that,” said Jane. “Don’t share, then. I don’t care.” Not that she had any intention of bringing Elva with her.

  The now distant bus lurched off the Old Narrows Road and rocked its way into the centre of Demerett Bridge. Elva didn’t care for buses. They reminded her that sometimes people left you. That Jane might be one of them. It never occurred to her that someone might want to come back.

  Jane cut off the road and hopped the fence beyond the ditch. So what if she showed her panties doing it.

  “Hey! Where’re you going?”

  “None of your beeswax.”

  “Rilla said take me right home—”

  “Then go, you baby-la-la, get home and start dinner and don’t say!”

  Jane was heading in the direction of the monastery but it wasn’t going to be any business of Elva’s as to why.

  “I’ll tell her about the milk. I’ve seen you.”

  Elva had to yell that to be heard, but it stopped her sister. Stopped her dead in her tracks. Jane turned, eyes wide, teeth set. Uh-oh. Elva had seen that look before.

  “You spying little witch! Tell, then! But don’t think I won’t twist your arm off.”

  Jane bent Elva’s arm sharply until she cried, but that was the end to it.