Miss Elva Read online

  For weeks Gil and Dom nursed him, persevering beyond the hopes of the most stalwart of grown men, grudgingly winning the admiration of their hamlet and reclaiming the life of the horse. Old Mickey took his place in the household, and wherever Gil and Dom went, so too went the much-loved horse.

  “He got the cough.” Gil fought to blink the tears back. “Said Old Mickey was my horse, more so than Dom’s because I spoke first to keep him. Said a man wouldn’t let an animal suffer.”

  “Oh, Gil, you didn’t—”

  “How could I? I never would, Elva! Dom did it. He’s a better shot. I guess I’m not much of a man.”

  The last word was whispered, torn between the loss of a beloved pet and falling short of a father’s yardstick.

  Elva knew there was only one thing to do. Running back to the house, she gathered her life into a Red Rose tea tin: three crayons, a broken mother-of-pearl clasp and a hanky Rilla gave her embroidered with Jane’s initial. Armed against the cold with a scarf and extra mittens, she hurried back. Elva slipped her hand into Gil’s, walking along in a winter silence, broken only by her occasional deep sigh, grieving for his loss. Kirchoffer Place was soon behind.

  “You really can’t walk it, Elva. It’s too far for you.”

  Yes I can.

  But she was struggling with the deepening drifts. Gil put her on his shoulders and continued through snow-buried fields. The stacks of the foundry appeared and disappeared and the path meandered upward into the fir-covered powdery hills surrounding Ostrea Lake. Elva sang, making up the words because she didn’t like to know how a song ended, a chickadee’s voice cutting clear across long frozen shadows, holding at bay the wind that was struggling to shriek against their reddened ears.

  “It’s not for Dom, the sea. He gets sick. I’m different. And I’m big for my age. I’ll sail somewhere where it’s always warm.”

  “Won’t you miss them?”

  “No one’ll even know I’m gone. All they care about is Dom. Oh, I don’t mind. He’s smarter and Maman is sure he’s called.”

  “Called by who?”

  “God. She says God wants him to do His work. I dunno. Never heard Him, I guess. Ever wonder what God sounds like?”

  “I know!”

  “No, you don’t. Maman says you can’t hear God ’cause you’re a mongrel bitch on account of your mom’s an Indian with no wedding ring and Amos is a drunkard.”

  Elva’d have to ask Jane, when she was finished running away, what mongrel bitch and drunkard meant but she did know what God sounds like. The clasp was making a tinny banging noise in the tea box like an idea that had to get out.

  It’s like when the wind curls itself and makes that hollow-shell sound, when you can lick the salt from the ocean off your face, when oat grass rattles before snow comes and winter gales bend it to the ground. That’s what God sounds like.

  Gil was not to be convinced by a voice that did not speak with words or spoke to lesser beings like Elva.

  They stopped by the tracing of a barn in stone, its wood long since rotted away. The sliver of sunlight over the sea was diminishing rapidly with the short day.

  “It’s getting late.”

  Elva said she was hungry and did he think they’d be in Halifax soon?

  At first, Gil said nothing. His eyes were firmly fixed in the direction of home.

  “I expect Dom’ll bury Old Mickey behind the stall.”

  They huddled together out of the wind. Gil, being the son of a fisherman and thereby prepared for such an expedition, emptied his pockets. They feasted on saltwater taffy and root-cellar apples he’d secured for his flight to freedom.

  “Say, it’s really dark.”

  But Gil was somewhere else.

  “I’m glad I’m a twin. Part of me gets to always be here.”

  Gil sure wasn’t like other boys she knew. He was more, like, soft. Fancy nancy, Amos’d say.

  “I’d never leave my mother and Jane.” The last of the taffy was slowly easing down the back of Elva’s throat. Oh yeah? That’s exactly what she was doing.

  “Hey, look.” Gil stood.

  Down the hill, towards the lake, a tiny orange light bouncing. Then another. Another. A dozen, maybe more.

  “Can you hear that?”

  Gee-ohm! Gee-ohm! No one called for Elva.

  Although it was faint and far away, Elva could hear in the raw voice of Gil’s mother that she’d been calling for some time. Neither Gil nor Elva could know until later that broken ice on the rivulet up behind Elva’s house had fuelled the worst of parental fears.

  “Serves them right. Let them look,” said Gil.

  It sure was getting cold. Gil wiped his nose on his coat sleeve and sat down. He tightened his arms about Elva, all of Demerett Bridge, the shimmering sea and the churning heavens beyond, resplendent at her feet.

  Let her sister have Dom. How strong and comforting Gil’s arms felt. Like they belonged there. Like she had the right to them. For once, she didn’t want to be Jane. She said, I don’t care if no one’s looking for me. I’ll go to Halifax with you. Like you said, serves them right.

  But Gil wasn’t listening. Lights flickered on the horizon and he wondered where that ship was going. Probably somewhere really far where things like letters, if you wrote them, took months, maybe years, to get delivered. Then the reader would be much older than the words when they were written. Something could have even happened to the reader by then, and he’d never know.

  “If I’m not there to help with the firewood, Dom’ll have to load it and sell it all by himself.”

  Wood is heavy, Elva conceded.

  The voices looking for them were carried the other way, out to sea. Silence. Only the wind now. Elva relaxed into Gil’s arms.

  “Did you bring shoes?”

  She shook her head, which was under his chin.

  “What happens if your feet get wet?”

  He had a point, even if he hadn’t brought extras for himself, and she was getting sleepy. Maybe they’d done enough running away for one day.

  “That’s Rilla’s Sunday dress.”

  Jane’s glowing skin was beaded with moisture from her bath, making the dress cling in patches to her body. Curls of wet hair stuck to her cheek as she danced about, saying Hotcha! Hotcha! to the music in her head, much too delighted at the prospect of a funeral.

  “She won’t know unless some little mouse tells her.” Rilla was up with the birds that Saturday morning to return the clean laundry to the boys of Raven River. “Want me to go naked and shake my titties in front of Dom and Gil’s mother? It’ll be your fault if I go to jail.”

  Elva didn’t think Jeanine Barthélemy would be happy to see the likes of them naked or otherwise. Hard piece of biscuit, that one. Jane rolled her eyes and shimmied to Charleston, Charleston … da, da, ta-da, da da da …

  “Help me with these buttons.” Jane was pleased with what the mirror was doing.

  “Amos will see it when we—”

  “He’s sick in the shitter again. I warmed him some milk. And you’re not coming.”

  Jane hummed some more, twirling in front of her reflection. Although not a proper funeral, it nonetheless felt sacrilegious to Elva for Jane to be dolling up for it.

  “What if he drips on Father Cértain? You know. With blood?”

  “Jesus Christ, Elva! The things in that knobby head of yours.”

  Jesus Christ was Jane’s latest rage because, as she announced with full solemnity in the privacy of the room she shared with Elva, God did not exist. So it was perfectly all right to use Jesus Christ like any ol’ word without fear of eternal damnation. As yet, that bold sentiment copied from screen flapper Joan Crawford hadn’t been echoed in front of Rilla. Elva knew what their mother’d have to say to that.

  “Well, you won’t get close enough to see.” Jane turned her gaze out the window while brushing her waist-length shiny hair. “You can’t expect people to look at cripples at a funeral. It’s just hurtful when they feel bad
enough. Plain church’s different. Being thankful it’s you and not them makes them put more money in the collection. Looks like there’ll be fog.”

  “Gil’s my friend.”

  Hadn’t that been the arrangement? Two brothers, so alike, Jane couldn’t possibly need or want to covet both. One for her, one for Elva. And Elva always assumed that Gil was her, well, friend, on account that he was the brother no one seemed to care about. More so after the Meghan Rose. Only problem was, Jane never agreed to split them. Jane never agreed to anything that wasn’t completely in her favour.

  “You’re nothing but a field mouse to him.”

  She smiled condescendingly while Elva, sitting on the window seat, looked at the black pond across the road.

  Like a festering old scab.

  That tar pond was more accurately a meandering gallery of holes caulked with decades of effluent from the foundry. Nothing, unless you counted Jane and Elva, grew round it. Pools of rain formed on its surface, reflecting oily disembodied rainbows. Strong sea winds flung bits of it against the road. Rilla had long since given up trying to keep the front of the boarding house on Kirchoffer Place free from this windborne menace; she devoted her attentions to the patch garden behind the shed. But tar found its way even there. Flowers in the yard were rare, and if they did bloom, Amos didn’t want them stinking up the house.

  Jane hated the ponds. The smell sickened her and made her feel dirty in the summer heat, a reminder that the south side of town was reserved for factories, the dead, and them. A bogeyman place where old people with their brains rotted out stumbled into quicksandlike tar ponds. Amos said, It’s a kindness to their families because they’d never get their wits back and who wants to change shit-filled diapers on some eighty-three-year-old man who spits gibberish like a baby.

  Just how many tar babies do you think are down there? Jane once asked Elva, fascinated with the idea of corpses being preserved forever.

  That was the sort of folksy myth that kept you up all night worrying about keeping birds out of the begonias seventy years down the road. Elva didn’t know, didn’t want to think about that. Sometimes, on a moonlit, cloudless night, the stars reflected their way across the black surface as if the sky and earth had traded places. The ponds were kind of peaceful then. As though even in their corruption they had a reason. Still, there were times when Elva would find Jane by their window staring at them like an adversary. That could only be because of Buttons.

  Elva couldn’t remember the dog. Mostly what she knew was cobbled together from what she pieced from Jane and from the wooden crate Jane kept hidden underneath her bed. Missing lettered slats, what remained had faded: FL RIDA ORAN ES. It was the one thing left of Buttons, the only tangible proof that Jane had a father and was therefore not, as Amos claimed, crapped into the street from the arse of a mule.

  Oh yes, her real father used to buy her lots of fine things, and not just on birthdays! Jane swore she always had new dresses when her father was around, not like Amos, who made Rilla make do so that eventually everything went from her to Jane to Elva to the rag bag. Buttons had been one such gift to Jane when she and Rilla lived on Breton Street.

  Jane wanted to remember it as the house on Breton Street, posh like. Understandable, considering the landlord went by Madam and calculated her rent from the number of men who visited the women tenants. It was a walk-up that froze in the winter and droned with horseflies in the summer, spit-through walls and so leaky it couldn’t hold out a sun shower. Jane never knew the rooms could be let by the hour.

  Buttons came in the orange crate from a mating that bred an off-white mongrel with brown paws and three black daubs down his chest. Jane adored him and carried him everywhere even when Buttons grew too big. He suffered the indignity with a fierce devotion. Along with Jane’s temper, they were a force best not confronted.

  He died in a coal mine was all Rilla ever said about Jane’s father. Amos was more forthcoming.

  “Died in a mine? My goddamn shitey ass! That girl’s old man could have been any one of a hundred fuckers, black, white, red, Christ, who knows? It’s not like your old lady was particular.”

  Nor could Rilla afford to be. With a girl to feed, Amos’s attentions may not have been wanted, but the alternative for an aging whore, albeit not yet out of her twenties, with a kid, was starvation. Initially, their business dealings were perfunctory. Amos hated the crawling filth and lack of privacy in the flophouse, so he made the fuck quick, Jane holding Buttons, crouching behind a towel tacked from the rafters, listening while he grunted hurriedly through his satisfaction on top of her mother. More than that, he hated paying for what he believed a man should get for free.

  Too bad about the kid, he’d say to Madam when he made his weekly contribution to her “building society,” that Mi’kmaq woman Rilla was a looker. Yes, Jane was a fly in the ointment like they say, or was she? Maybe Madam wanted to move in some new, unencumbered tenant? And that’s how Rilla’s hard-earned talents were had for free, by shifting her and Jane by the tar ponds, away from the prying eyes of snooty churchgoers, no one saying, How come you don’t marry that woman? (As if they would, Rilla not being white.) Room and board for mother and daughter in exchange for, well, you know, and a clean house.

  Buttons earned his keep by ridding the cellar of rats, but it wasn’t enough to win affection from a man like Amos. When Amos was sober, he was tolerable. When he drank, Rilla started to exhibit bruises reminiscent of the same type Amos’s wife had. What kept them together was the illusion of free will: Amos could toss out Rilla anytime he wanted, and Rilla could leave when she pleased. When Elva came along, that changed. Getting rid of his whore and another man’s child was one thing, but his own? Even a child like Elva? Amos was a top man at the foundry. He had a position. And men like him had to honour their bastards. That’s just what you did. Overnight, Rilla and her girls were permanent, and the boozing, and bruising, worsened.

  Jane had enough sense to keep Buttons away from her mother’s man, but she was wilful, and it was only a question of when those wills would collide. After a Saturday night in town, Amos staggered back to his house on the other side of the ponds, waking Rilla to find her monthly curse had ruined her. Goddamn you! Okay then, there were other ways for a man to let off steam.

  At the first of Rilla’s cries, Buttons flew off Jane’s bed and into the hall, barking and scratching at Rilla’s door.

  I told you to keep that dog out of the house, Amos muttered, Rilla saying: No Amos please Amos don’t Amos, it’s not the girl’s fault.

  He flung open their door.

  Jane gathered up her dog and pulled him to safety. Buttons saw the fierceness from Amos as a threat and wormed free, catching Amos in the hand.

  Who could remember in what order what happened next? Jane struck by Amos? Buttons viciously attacking his hand? Rilla trying to drag her daughter out of harm’s way? Did it matter? No one would forget how it all ended.

  Snapping and barking, Buttons went down the stairs firmly clutched by neck and tail. Should have done this a long time ago, Amos was saying as if it were a decision to clean out the back shed.

  Jane was all flailing arms and legs and, No! no! no! Fighting against Rilla with a strength so uncommon in a child that Rilla fell against the stair railings, breathless, knocked helpless as Jane threw herself on Amos.

  Jane would never forget, Rilla did nothing after that to save Buttons.

  She and Amos knocked and butted their way out the front door, scratching gravel across the road to the tar ponds. Ah fuck, yelled Amos when the dog bit him again, and he heaved the dog into the air. Buttons, twisting and yelping, fell into the muck and, struggling, quickly sank up to his neck.

  Damn you, you little bitch. Amos pulled the girl off him. You want him that much? Upending her, he doused her in the pond.

  My hair! she screamed, pulling at his clothes.

  Rilla, following out on the porch, was all, Amos! Amos, please!

  Shut it, you little bitc
h, and down Jane went again, coughing and sputtering.

  But she’s just a little girl, her mother said quietly. Buttons barked helplessly from his grave.

  When Jane’s hair, her beautiful hair, was thick and clumpy from the tar, so ruined that Rilla would have to shave it off in the morning, Amos dragged her back across the road. He snapped off his belt and bolted Jane to the front porch.

  “There you sit! Goddamned tar. I’ll never get the stink off me.” Then, “You leave her be,” he snarled to Rilla, pushing past, “if you don’t want her in next to it.”

  Rilla, knowing full well the truth of Amos’s warning, did nothing as her man continued his rant, tossing around pots in the summer kitchen, looking for soap to clean up with.

  If the intent was a quick end for the dog, it did not happen. Buttons howled pitifully under the stars, trapped at the neck. Jane worked herself into such a state that when she could no longer scream, no longer cry, she vomited dryly, refusing to allow Rilla to put her arms about her.

  Around dawn, Gil and Dom’s father happened by with his rifle on his way home from rabbit hunting. He knew Amos. Not much of a Christian. Didn’t care for Amos’s highfalutin ways when he was sober, his mean streak when in the jug. Alphonse saw Jane tied to the porch, Amos’s whore sitting beside her.

  He acknowledged Jane. She was mute, doubled over at the belt, trembling. The dog was too far out, panting, too gone to save. Only one thing left to do. The humane thing. He nodded. You couldn’t tell between the shot and the sound that came from Jane.

  Sure, she was all sweetness and light now, getting into Rilla’s dress, but Elva’d seen Jane when she thought no one was watching, stare at those ponds too, that peculiar empty look in her eyes. Real empty. Dead empty. Like something had been eaten away inside, maybe from all that tar. Whenever Elva saw that in Jane, she wondered if Mr. Barthélemy should have put her out of misery too.