Miss Elva Read online

  “Well, don’t worry. I’ll stay long enough to make some money, get me out of Nova Scotia. Then the Major and I are gone for good.” Gil stooped to scratch his dog’s head. “He adopted me in Halifax. Figure he’ll look out for me at sea.”

  “Don’t you know about the strike?”

  “There’s always work.”

  “Not now. Unless you want to, scab.”

  He shrugged off the dirty word.

  “Jane wants to see blood,” Elva suddenly said, finding her voice, wanting Gil to see her.

  If Jane’s look could speak it’d say, Shut up!

  Gil took no offence and led them deep into the shed. Elva didn’t care for the smell of things.

  “Is that him?” Jane was whispering.

  Gil nodded at the short bundle on the work table. “What’s left of him.”

  Not much to see in the dusty, opaque gloom. Could have been anything wrapped up there. Bit of a disappointment.

  “Is John still the sexton?”

  Both of the girls nodded.

  “It’ll be okay if I sleep here tonight. John won’t mind. And when it’s dark, I’ll soak the old man in tar from the pond and light him. Ought to fire up like a torch, a human torch.”

  “You wouldn’t!” But Jane sounded hopeful.

  It was not lost to Elva that Jane was touching Gil’s arm.

  “Dom and Father Cértain have arranged—”

  “The bastard’s better off in the pond. Save Maman the cost of burying ’im.”

  You didn’t always think like that.

  “It’ll put off your mother, you coming back.” Jane’s eyes were riveted to the coal-dust-stained funeral shroud, as were Elva’s. The air was getting sweeter, sickly sweet.

  “Still down on her knees, praying for Dom to be pope?”

  Jane’s face clouded.

  Uh-oh. Foul mood acoming. Lately, all it took was saying stuff about Dom.

  “And my good brother obeys her in all things?”

  Jane shrugged.

  The air, thought Elva, so sweet, so thick.

  Gil patted the swathed corpse. “Too bad you’ll miss your own party, Pappa.”

  And Elva vomited quietly into her hands.

  “Elva, you thing!”

  The fresh air, the sound of water trickling into that fountain, was a godsend. Or was it that she had leaned her head against his shoulder when Gil picked her up and carried her outside that made her feel better?

  I always knew you’d come back.

  Jane followed. “You can’t stay in there and you can’t go to town. No one’s forgotten about the wreck. What your father did to himself, it’s bringing it all back.”

  “You mean, the lies?”

  Wiping her hands on the grass, Elva added that the striking men in town were scratching for a fight. Rilla said that’s what men do when they’re drunk and don’t have work. That’s why they threw stones at the guy fixing the clock.

  Gil chuckled. “Someone tried to fix that old relic?”

  “Some fool,” said Jane.

  “Who?”

  Elva shrugged. “Never saw him before. Black and starchy like an undertaker.”

  “And white,” added Jane.

  “White? Fixing the clock?”

  A bell pealed from somewhere inside the Brothers’ residence.

  “I gotta go.”

  “Where?”

  “Nothing,” he said, kind of confused, searching the direction of Demerett Bridge.

  They followed Gil, bending over to hide below the tombstones in case anyone was watching from the windows. At the gates, they parted.

  Rilla would be back from Raven River soon and supper still hadn’t been started. They both knew what Amos would be like should his meal be late.

  “I hate him,” Jane cursed quietly.

  So do I, thought Elva, but as it was in regards to her own father, she didn’t say it out loud. But she did say, “I’m glad Gil’s back.”

  “He didn’t come for you.”

  Reluctantly they left the Eye and followed the shore of the tar ponds around to Kirchoffer Place, Elva periodically looking over her shoulder to see the young man diminish into nothing.

  Rilla was cleaning up from the evening meal in the summer kitchen of the boarding house that had come to Amos from his late wife, Dorothy; Dotsie, as he came to call her. A woman thirteen years his senior and a widow, she owned the boarding house on Kirchoffer Place when Amos started with the foundry. Amos, walking all the way from his home in Canso to look for work, needed a place to hang his hat, and Dotsie had rooms. His subsequent rise through the factory ranks paralleled his fast track from the bed in room number five to Dotsie’s own. Matronly, somewhat prone to worry, Dotsie died less than a year after they were married. Although in the months before her death she ate herself to hot-air balloon proportions and developed a clumsiness that left her bruised all over, no one thought anything amiss of her sudden personality change prior to her abrupt passing, or how Amos had quickly come into real estate. If there was room in her coffin now, she’d be spinning at the notion of a Mi’kmaq woman taking her bed, in her house.

  Don’t say shitty, was all Rilla said about spending the afternoon on her knees scrubbing floors.

  Elva, rebuked, crossed her arms, immovable on the point. It wasn’t fair to Rilla and yes it was shitty. And besides, if Jane was allowed to say shitty, how come she wasn’t?

  The wall of screens, their only defence against horseflies mean as starving beggars, rattled in the sea air.

  “He wouldn’t have made you clean that up if—”

  “If what, girl?”

  “We were white.”

  “You’d do well to be silent ’bout that.” Rilla stretched the kink of a long day out of her back. When she did that she always said, Cold in my kidneys. “God is fair, girl; men are not.”

  Her mother might as well have said, You be thankful, Elva, for what the good Lord provides, you don’t hear the birds minding what table crumbs they get.

  But I’m not a bird.

  Hard to accept that leftovers were her only due and, oh yeah, thanks God. He’s fair, is He? All Elva had to do was look in the mirror and see just how fair God had been to her when every day she was reminded how much He’d given Jane. Still, it didn’t matter to Elva, well, not so much, that Rilla preferred Jane. That was like gracing a table with a centrepiece of mayflowers instead of stinkweed. Purely natural to go for what was pleasing.

  Rilla groaned through clenched teeth as she strained with the heavy bucket of soapy water to the screen door and poured it down the steps where it foamed into the sand. For Rilla’s sake, Elva now regretted what she’d done to get out of going with her. It needled her sharply. Guess whatever makes Jane beautiful and impervious to pain left me deformed and weak of heart, she thought, so weak that every hurt rushes in and unpacks.

  Elva might have had a delicious afternoon in Raven River with Rilla all to herself even if it did mean visiting bloody krauts who fed their horses in the last war with girlie guts. Well, that’s what Amos said.

  Amos also believed that Germans hereabouts, any Germans, must have been spies in the war and were behind the Imo and Mont Blanc colliding in the harbour and blowing the crap out of Halifax in ’17. Elva was only three when that happened, but Jane remembered windows rattling and being knocked to the ground, even though Halifax was pretty far. Amos’s belief was generally echoed in Demerett Bridge, making folks wary of the Germans of Raven River, second only in unpopularity to the Mi’kmaq of Indian Brook.

  Mind your p’s and q’s, Rilla warned every time she took her girls out to the insular community where she picked up washing for two men. Don’t touch anything and don’t stare were standing orders. Elva asked what to call them. No one had offered real names to Rilla and she wasn’t asking. Not as long as they paid for their laundry, which they did. But they were some strange. The men weren’t related, although Big Head treated Squirrel Boy like an imbecilic younger brother. Lou
d and lots of orders.

  The only woman Elva knew to come into their lives, apart from Rilla scrubbing out their underpants, was a deeply lined, rail-thin ghoul who guarded the front porch and tried to keep the birds out of her potted begonias. Rilla said she was Mother Big Head or Mother Squirrel Boy, not sure which because they acted embarrassed by her and said nothing, but she was certain Mother Whoever wasn’t right in the head. The old gal didn’t speak English and spat at Elva as she sat waiting for Rilla, partially because Jane stuck her tongue out at her and made faces. Then one visit, the old dame in the even older clothes wasn’t on the steps with her begonias and gardening tools and Rilla said she’d been sent back to Germany. Jane didn’t believe it and on the way home in the truck told Elva she was murdered and buried in a trunk in the attic because she howled at the moon at night and kept everyone in Raven River awake. That’s just talking loose, said Rilla. But, as Jane pointed out, at least the mosquitoes wouldn’t bother her anymore.

  But in the strange category, nothing compared to how the men lived. Why? No one knew. Jane hated to agree with Amos on any point but she conceded they must have been spies, hiding something, or from someone, to live in an immense wooden house built over sinking pilings driven into that bog. A makeshift plank bridge with rope guardrails was the only egress over ooze that rose during spring, and remained high through summer, setting the house in a moat, home to the fiercest mosquitoes and hungriest blackflies ever known. Elva always left swollen and itchy with bites and stings. They didn’t seem to care for Jane’s blood.

  An unsound architectural vision and, somewhere along the way, the money running out left a legacy of turrets, gables, sagging balconies and arches rotting amid piles of timber, warped bundles of shingles, glass-empty window frames, rusting saws and trusses.

  Elva had only been inside once. The entrance hall was dominated by a staircase to nowhere, guarded by a headless suit of rusting armour. Most of the second floor was uninhabitable, the few rooms reached by the ladder at the back of the house. Bare walls, rough railings, torn scaffolding and dust—dust thick like volcanic ash that threatened to bury the gilding of the ornate furnishings, oriental carpets and paintings of grey-skinned, black-eyed women with barely concealed breasts.

  After that one time inside, from the way the two men stared at her daughters, Rilla thought it best to have Jane and Elva wait on the porch or in the Ford, where Elva coloured on old newspaper and Jane sighed to pass the time.

  Nonetheless, the few coins Raven River brought Rilla were welcome during this long strike, and now that the supper dishes were done, she put water on the stove. There’d be double the cash in it for Rilla if she did overnight service, so there were hours yet of being up to her chafed elbows in steaming water and hauling sheets out by lamplight to dry in the dark. Elva, seeing how it was with her mother, offered to make tea. A quick cup and then on to the laundry.

  “Where is he?”

  Rilla never referred to Amos as her man or her husband. It was just he, or him. Not to make a point, mind you. Rilla wasn’t like that. Too busy trying to hold it all together. With a wilful daughter in Jane and the likes of Amos, that meant, most often, stopping them from killing each other.

  At least that wasn’t a worry as far as Elva was concerned. She’d been born at Kirchoffer Place after Rilla and Jane took up with Amos. Such a baby, townies conceded, was a sign that God damned miscegenation—you know, the poison tree, poison fruit thing. Although Amos couldn’t bring himself to strike his own flesh and blood, he sure didn’t like to be reminded that Elva was his, so Rilla’d never ask Elva where her father was.

  Elva said he’d gone to bed. Stomach ache. Again.

  “Go ask Jane to get some milk and warm it up for him. I’ve only got two hands.”

  “I can do it.”

  “You’ll spill it.” She meant to add, With that arm of yours. It wasn’t enough that Elva’s knuckles were, by thirteen, hardening up into painful knobs, she had to be born shorn of any usefulness by a withered arm.

  The kettle started to whistle. Elva ran her fingers over the back of a kitchen chair. When it was just the two of them, Rilla’d let Elva help. Go on then, make the tea, she said.

  “Did it get fixed?” Elva asked, climbing on the chair to reach the tea tin.

  “What?”

  “The clock.”

  Rilla sighed and closed her eyes, thankful for the moment’s rest. “Oh no, girl. By the time those boys were finished with him, he could barely stand up.”

  “Was he hurt much?”

  “Some cuts.” Careful, she added, watching Elva pour the hot water. “Didn’t know Dom Barthélemy had a dog,” she said by way of an afterthought.

  It caught Elva off guard. She was about to say, He got one, too?

  “And I think he knows that young fella trying to fix the clock.”

  In Rilla’s telling, the bus to the city was loading so there were lots of folks about when Dom found the boy sitting underneath the clock. They looked like they were happy and scared—both at the same time—to see each other.

  Elva put out the tea things and slipped into the chair across the table from her mother. It felt very adult to her. So then what?

  Rilla shrugged. Didn’t notice. She had had the floor to finished scrubbing, hadn’t she?

  GIL HAD COME BACK and Elva refused to think about it, preferring to save the idea so she could savour it in bed, when Jane, beside her, was asleep. She had to concentrate on her dinner to do it, making fields of snow out of her potato and causing Amos to snarl, You want a slap there, girl! Rilla glanced at her daughter sharply, but Elva didn’t care.

  Gil has come back to me.

  That’s what she believed, although Jane would have pissed herself laughing if Elva said it. No matter. Didn’t Elva know first hand Gil had tried to leave once before and had stayed because of her, or so she believed? It wasn’t so hard for her to make believe that it had happened again.

  Dom and Gil came from the hamlet of Chezzetcook Bay, a scattering of spindly wooden huts perched precariously on stilts over the restless tide, squatting on blue rocks topped with shocks of gold seaweed like turbaned old men easing arthritic bones into a vat of cold water. Contemporary map makers decreed it had been a place of fishermen since 1760 with the settling of Acadians hiding from the Expulsion. Rilla knew her people had been making seasonal camps by the bay long before there was a Dominion. No matter. According to the textbooks, history didn’t start until a white man showed up with a flag and a priest.

  The boys were put out to field, supplementing the family income as it were, as soon as they were able to walk, poverty being the dogged lot of the Barthélemys. They regularly took the road through Kirchoffer Place, tar ponds on one side, Jane and Elva’s ungainly mansard-roofed house—wider at the top than at the bottom—on the other. When they rode together atop Old Mickey on their way to Demerett Bridge to sell firewood or fish from their father’s catch, Gil was always first, but Dom held the reins from behind. Considering how physically similar they were, Gil and Dom were like an object and its mirror reflection rather than two halves of a whole.

  Sometimes Jane and Elva would go with the boys into town, gallantly perched atop that aging roan while the boys hawked their offerings of fresh cod. Dom and Jane could chat forever about stuff. Gil’d just shake his head and say, Silly beggars, those two. Elva was the quiet one, the one noticing the stares they got from the townies. Even though Elva was just a child, she’d figured out pretty quickly that half-breed wasn’t a term of endearment. Don’t you take no mind, Elva, Gil’d say, trying to make like the folks looking at them were the ones to be laughed at, but Elva always did.

  Finding out that Gil wanted to leave Demerett Bridge that first time, leave behind, as Elva felt, the entire world as she’d come to know, startled her. The day had been grey with winter and began with the sharpness of a single shot ringing through still-sleeping white hills.

  The boys had been unusually absent for days, and eve
n though Elva thought she overheard Dom tell Gil that it was bound to happen and Gil replied angrily, Shut the fuck up, the idea that something was wrong still came as a surprise. Shortly after the gunshot, Gil passed through Kirchoffer Place carrying only a cloth sack, over trails of fresh snow that by day’s end, would be dull with soot from the foundry chimneys. No sleigh. No Old Mickey.

  Elva was at her window, keeping quiet to not wake Jane, and was using her fingers to draw pictures on the frosted glass. Hey, she said, not knowing if it was Gil or Dom, and wouldn’t until he spoke. She pulled on her coat and slipped down the stairs and out the front door.

  “I’m heading south.”

  So it was Gil. His dirty face was streaked with new tears he quickly brushed away. Thrusting out his jaw, he almost pulled off looking stoic. If he lowered his voice he sounded unafraid and maybe just a bit older. Then it didn’t sound so much like he was running away.

  A rent in the distant sky spewed broken cloud and sun over the sea.

  “Can I come?”

  Overwhelmed that morning in his father’s old boots, an oversized coat hanging loosely past his knees, Gil shook his head.

  “I’m going to Halifax. Maybe one day, even Toronto.”

  A place with more people than Demerett Bridge was a concept too great for six-year-old Elva. The very notion of going somewhere as mythical as Toronto elevated the eleven-year-old Gil to manhood in her eyes.

  “I’ll get work, and some day I’ll have a big house with a stable in the back. Just for horses.” He looked back in the direction of his home. Just for horses, he reiterated.

  “Please, let me come?”

  “No. No one can.”

  Elva fell in stride and tried to keep pace.

  “Why away?”

  “Pappa wanted me to shoot Old Mickey and I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. He said I was a coward and can’t stand the sight of me.”

  That horse was legendary in Demerett Bridge. He’d been rescued from a rocky bluff near Chezzetcook Bay by Gil’s father after a steamer hit a sandbar. The horse survived the wreck and swam to nearby rocks accessible only by sea. When Alphonse finally managed to free the animal by tying it to his dory and pulling it into the water, it fought back so hard it almost drowned from exhaustion. The poor animal was so weak from hunger and shock that a bullet through the head was the humane thing. No one, especially Alphonse, could have reckoned on the persuasive powers of the Barthélemy brothers.