Miss Elva Read online

  “Don’t you touch him! Don’t you fucking touch him! Oak?” That was Gil shouting.

  His friend never let out a sound. When the pummelling stopped, whoever was responsible tossed Oak into the sand and went as shadows toward the car.

  ON THE RADIO DOWNSTAIRS: Runnin’ wild, lost control; Runnin’ wild, mighty bold; feelin’ gay, reckless too …

  “He’s got a funny name,” said Elva. “Here.” She offered Gil a mug of steaming tea thick with cream and honey, but he was still too upset to touch it. Amos’d be mad if it was just going to waste.

  Jane and Gil had carried Oak to the boarding house, Elva bringing up the rear. Literally. The unconscious boy was too heavy for just Gil and Jane, and Elva did her best to prop up his middle during the staircase manoeuvres. Thankfully, Amos was slurring consonants when they carried him in. Feebly stirring from his stupor in front of the radio, he was easily appeased by, They can pay.

  “Fuck ’im goddamned, take ’im upstairs, then.”

  Amos’d not trouble a soul until morning. By then Rilla, not back yet from Raven River—probably off by the side of the road somewhere waiting for the fog to lift—would be home to deal with the shakes, the pounding head and all the good things that came after swimming inside a bottle.

  The room they put Oak in was next to Jane and Elva’s. It used to belong to Gentien Rangeard, a welder from Labrador City, but he’d moved on when the foundry strike went from weeks to months and no end in sight. I’ve a family back home that must eat, he explained with a what-else-can-I-do shrug to Rilla, knowing she’d be in the lurch, her roster of boarders dwindling.

  Gentien had happened upon Elva drawing one evening on the porch. Amos didn’t like to see her waste time on such foolishness. Jane, well, Jane just laughed at anything she did, so Elva often hid her scratchings. She was startled, struggling by the last bits of light with cows and sleighs and a farmer with a can of milk, when the welder caught her off guard.

  Bien! Such majesty, Mademoiselle Elva! he said in that silly teasing way of his. She had no idea what perspective in her art was, but Elva knew something was askew when she saw it. The welder dismissed her concerns. She was tickled. Jane said their boarder was just being nice, but Gentien insisted Elva present him with three of her finest works. He then fashioned frames for them and decorated them with pine boughs before he mounted them on his wall, so that Elva’s images appeared to peek out from the trees.

  The boughs had long since dried out and fallen off, but the pictures were as Gentien hung them, where Oak would be able to see them when he awoke.

  He’d been pretty banged up. Lots of cuts and, Gil thought, maybe even a broken rib or two, but how would he know? They bathed and wrapped Oak Egyptian-like, from the neck to the waist, another bandage across the side of his face. Jane then slipped out to the summer kitchen to wash the blood out of Oak’s shirt, not sure, judging from the stain, if it was worth saving.

  “You should have told him about the clock so he wouldn’t have touched it when he was waiting for you.”

  “He wasn’t waiting there, he follow—He wasn’t waiting,” Gil said, running his hands through his damp hair. “It’s all my fault.”

  The mug of tea was weighing heavily on Elva. She tried to offer it again.

  “You weren’t even there when he tried to fix it.”

  “What? For Christ’s sake, Elva, it has nothing to do with that fucking clock! Oh, here. Gimme that.” He snatched the cup of tea from her crippled hand, spilling it. “Jesus, Elva.”

  Jane returned and said the boy’s shirt was hanging outside to dry. She fixed a plate of bologna and cheese, some bread.

  “You probably haven’t eaten.”

  “Can I count on service like this for every meal?”

  Jane wasn’t about wearing her concern for all to see, nor would she take it being made light of. She sat the plate down angrily on the nightstand. Oak groaned.

  “Starve, then!”

  Elva took a piece of cheese and handed it to Gil’s dog without anyone seeing.

  Too tired to offer more, a weak smile from Gil had to serve as an apology. “Just joking,” he said.

  “You should be thinking about who did this.”

  “Don’t care.” Gil closed his eyes and stretched out on the bed alongside his friend.

  “He will,” Jane said with a nod to the injured one. “And whoever did this to your friend shouldn’t get away—”

  “I’ll take care of it, Jane. Like Elva says, just boys in town getting worked up. And he’s not …”

  That was all he said. Major took up vigil on the floor by his sleeping master. Amos would never agree to dogs in the house, but that was a tomorrow issue.

  “What are we going to do?” Elva asked as Jane shoo-shooed her out of the boys’ room.

  “Nothing. You heard him.”

  Elva wondered if they should talk to the constable in Demerett Bridge.

  “Like he’d do anything,” Jane said. “Go to bed.”

  All right, but that didn’t stop Elva from thinking it was some odd, Gil trying real hard not to be concerned over whoever this Oak was.

  Elva thought sleep would come easily, but it was hot upstairs even with the windows open and there were all those things going through her head. The abbreviated version of Mr. Barthélemy being sunk in a hole. Gil. Lying face down in the fog, the sound of footsteps coming up through the sand. The poor guy in the next room, lumpy as a sack of spuds. The longer she stared, the bigger the meandering cracks in the plaster overhead seemed.

  It was a bed she shared with Jane, who often slept with her arms about Elva. She liked to feel Jane’s breath upon her cheek, pert nipples stirring against her back, but that night Jane kicked fitfully, practically throwing Elva out of bed until Elva got up, sat by the open window and rested her head on the sill.

  From there, clouds like cormorants’ wings hurried wildly nowhere. The fog had passed, leaving a cool-kissing wake cradling Elva into a slumber, thankfully dreamless, for even in her dreams everyone but she had dazzling smiles and straight limbs.

  The snapping of the screen door awoke her. Rilla was home, talking at Amos, who was still snoring on the sofa, the radio crackling voiceless. Rilla snapped it off. Elva listened dreamily to her mother’s voice say the fog was too thick outside of Raven River and she had to stop and that she’d almost been sideswiped by a fancy yellow car. Rilla’d remember that colour.

  Elva used to wonder why her mother would have these conversations with Amos passed out here or there until Jane told her that was the only time Rilla could have a regular-like-normal-folks conversation with him. Elva expected that by now, Rilla’d be putting a blanket over Amos before heading up to bed.

  When she awoke to the soft click, the sound of a door quietly closing below, Elva figured she’d drifted off and that the fragments of Jane rustling into her clothes, Elva saying where are you going, Jane shushing her, were just dreams. It was still night. Elva was still by her window, but through sleepy eyes, it was no dream that leapt into the fields skirting the pond. Jane? Elva stood up. It really was Jane! What time was it?

  Slipping out onto the landing, Elva saw that it was all dark downstairs. Gil and Oak’s door was closed. Rilla’s too. The dog gave out a quick growl at her creaking on the stairs. Outside, peepers were electrifying the fields with shrill calls.

  Whatever mysterious force drew Jane on compelled Elva, though not as fearlessly as her sister. Jane was indomitable by nature and unable to move any direction but forward. Once Jane had fixed her mind upon a resolve, she pursued it as a duty with all the advantages inherent with beauty. Elva watched, that was her lot. Everything about Jane fascinated her. She was a light so bright Elva herself cast no shadow, only withered from its heat. Although it was madness to be out again when reason decreed the men who had attacked them might be lurking nearby, Elva pursued her sister, her body palsied by fear, her heart succumbing to its nature.

  The moment when there is as yet no real l
ight, just a lessening of the dark, made Jane’s shadow a bouncing beacon as she reached the end of the slate road by the beach and headed in the direction of Demerett Bridge, past the monastery, cutting inland through fields towards Ostrea Lake with its ring of thick fir-covered hills. The tidal lake was also the home to Ipswich Abbey.

  Elva didn’t know if fabulous cities like Halifax lay claim to unique places that haunt them. She did know that Ipswich Abbey haunted her. Poised on a miniature island in the lake, it was not an abbey at all but a labour of love easily walked to at low tide. Even at high tide, the surrounding waters were only a few feet deep and easily forded.

  Of its owner, John Solomon Purvis, little was known. He was from away and had owned the island for decades, spending only the temperate months in Demerett Bridge while transforming the scrubby island. In addition to indigenous plants, Purvis cultivated English seedlings. Over the years oaks, cypress, Japanese maple, Dutch elm, poplars and apple trees grew into lumbering shade-bearing giants that looked as if they might sink the small island, while beds of colour clogged meandering walkways of blue oat grass.

  When the century was very young and in the year before the hurricane, the newly launched schooner Meghan Rose sailed into Demerett Bridge, its hold brimming with a special cargo for the island—stones from an ancient kirk somewhere in Scotland that had been demolished. The townies laughed over the expense of such a folly. Sending rocks to Canada! Why it’s like shippin’ coal to Cape Breton! Rumour was, even the altar with the finger joint of some dead saint embedded in it was included. The bits of old church were transformed into garden art, a medieval wonder of turrets—nested by the Ipswich sparrow, which gave the Abbey its name—cloisters, roofless halls and arching bridges over a shimmering pool.

  It’s for the woman he loved, Elva once made up to Jane. “And from the top of the castle, you can see the name Lenore spelled out in apple trees, so beautiful in spring. No one knows who belongs to the name. She had very pale skin.”

  Everyone was white in Elva’s stories.

  Through the screens of the summer kitchen, Jane and Elva could see Rilla enveloped by sheets on the lines, brushing the hair back from her face, adding more pins, getting eaten alive by squares of white.

  “She died of a broken heart.”

  Jane preferred stories about jazz and necking parties and taking baths in tubs full of gin. No way flappers with lapis lazuli hair-bands would ever die of anything, let alone something so stupid.

  “Must be from Cape Sable, then. The crazy ones come from there.”

  Elva thought about it. “From a town called Skyler.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Because it’s gone now. Washed away in a hurricane. And that’s how Lenore’s real love perished.” As in all the great romances, Elva knew, no one died. They perished. Wasting away coming a close second.

  The screen door banged shut behind Rilla as she came in with her empty laundry basket, noting that potatoes won’t peel themselves.

  “I’m going as fast as I can do you want me to cut off my fingers and have bloody mash potatoes?”

  “They’d only be pink potatoes,” Elva said. She had put down her pencils and was shucking peas, so had nothing to worry about.

  Don’t say bloody, Rilla said on her way to get more wet sheets. She glanced at the clock. Big, round, with Roman numerals. Couldn’t help notice how much time until, or how much time left. Elva was to get that drawing stuff of hers put away before Amos got home and saw it.

  “Mr. Purvis was in love with Lenore’s mother but she ran off with a sailor.”

  “I’d pick the sailor too.”

  “So Mr. Purvis follows her to—”

  “Montreal.”

  “Okay, Montreal, but she’s had a baby and is dying.”

  “Where’s the sailor?”

  “Oh, he’s long gone.”

  Figures. Wouldn’t happen in a story with gin-soaked Shebas with bobbed hair.

  “So he brings them back to Skyler where he builds a castle on a cliff and calls it Ipswich Abbey. It’s like a prison and that’s where he keeps Lenore because she looks so much like her mother that Mr. Purvis vows she’ll grow up to love him.”

  In addition to everyone in Elva’s stories being white and of course beautiful, they were always vowing something or other, then regretting it.

  “In the basement he builds a room all out of marble with candles for the mother ’cause he’s still in love with her too and remembers that she’s afraid of the dark. He goes down there to talk to her.”

  “But she’s dead.”

  “I know.”

  “You can’t talk to dead people.”

  Jane was missing the point. “How do you think of those things? Is he rich?”

  “Well, he builds ships.”

  “Then he’s rich.”

  Rilla wanted to know what they were on about.

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing.”

  Rilla hated when her girls said nothing over something.

  “Elva’s making up stories about Mr. Purvis.”

  Don’t you be gossiping, Rilla said, because in her books Mr. Purvis was a fine gentleman by all accounts. Never gave her any cause. The screen door slammed, punctuated with a Peel, girl!

  “Well, go on.”

  Elva wasn’t sure she would after that. Rilla was back at the lines stringing more sheets. Cripes, but laundry day went on forever.

  “When Lenore grows up, she meets David from the town and falls divinely in love with him.”

  “You said Mr. Purvis kept her locked up. How could she meet someone?”

  “I don’t know everything!”

  “It’s your story, stupid. Well, go on.”

  They saw a sheet get away from Rilla. She’d have to wash it again.

  Jane still had the same potato in her hand. There! there! there! She stabbed it with her paring knife. “I hate peeling potatoes. It’s not fair you get the cripply arm and I have to do all the peeling. And you shouldn’t say mister. Just call him Purvis.”

  “So they love each other so much that being kept apart makes them crazy and Mr. Purvis—and Purvis says, You’ll have to marry me Lenore because you’ll have no money without me and I love you and your mother in the basement said so. David can’t stand to be away from Lenore so he runs away and joins the navy. Here she comes.”

  The screen door banged behind Rilla with the errant sheet. She went to the pump and rinsed it.

  “But he can’t stay away from Lenore,” whispered Elva, shucking more rapidly. “So he comes back to her on a ship he stole but a hurricane’s washed away the lighthouse even though Lenore went out there every night with a lantern to warn him. Just in case.”

  The ridiculous story didn’t make any sense, but Jane had to know what happened next. Rilla was still making water at the squeaky pump.

  “The ship hits the cliff in the dark and Ipswich Abbey crumbles down on top of it, sinking it, and David and Lenore are finally together in a watery grave.”

  What are you two whispering about? Rilla wanted to know.

  “It’s Elva. She thinks Purvis—Mr. Purvis—has a dungeon at the Abbey where he keeps dead ladies.”

  “I do not! I just made it up!”

  Rilla said Amos would be back shortly and Mr. Purvis was from Connecticut who minded his own business so enough of that loose talk.

  “How come I have to do the peeling and Elva doesn’t have to do anything?”

  Their mother said Elva was doing her share, but it sounded as if she meant, Be thankful, girl, you’re not like her.

  “Fine. Not my fault if we have pink potatoes.”

  At the shore of the lake, Jane tied her skirts around her waist, waded through the shallow water, her shoes held overhead, and vanished from Elva’s view.

  Why come here? No one comes here. Anything could happen and no one’d ever know! Jane!

  The last thread of her courage snapped. Elva could bear no more, go no farther. R
unning as best she could along the beach after her sister had been one thing, but once Jane dashed across the road and into the fields towards the lake, Elva’d gone too far, and knew it. Scared: plain and simple. No telling now if the dull clanging was the distant channel marker bobbing in the swelling tide or Elva’s racing heart. Farther ahead were twinkling orbs of yellow and orange circles: lights from Demerett Bridge. Here was darkness and shadow. Behind, nothing but that occasional yawn of the surf preceding the thunder of sea on sand and splashing foam.

  A thin line of azure appeared on the horizon in that place that spawned fog. As angry as she knew Jane would be, Elva had to find her sister and plead with her to take her home. That meant crossing into the lake and the tide was in. Muddled, Elva forgot to remove her shoes. Now they were wet and Amos would be furious if he saw them ruined.

  Hello Mary!

  It felt more right to Elva to start the prayer off that way. Hail sounded like Gil and Dom when they used to pretend to be Roman soldiers. Rilla always said to pray to the Virgin when you were in trouble, but now Hello Mary full of grace wasn’t working. Nothing was working. Her breath began to clutch, a prelude to tears, when she noticed a faint light in the Abbey’s faux cloisters.

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t come.”

  Even whispered night voices could be heard from a distance across the lake, so Elva, much relieved, knew Dom was with Jane as she crawled up on the shores of the island and wrung out the folds of her dress. Through the Abbey’s wispy birches rose the arches of the roofless cloister under a cavernous oak, the breeze jostling its dewy leaves. They were inside. Surrounding the rows of columns, white rhododendron, gone grey in the infant morn, along with Elva. Watching.

  “Someone followed us home.” Jane covered Dom’s face with kisses. “I had to make sure they were gone. And my mother was late getting home.”

  Dom grabbed Jane’s face in his hands. “Are you okay?”

  A kiss for a reply.