Miss Elva (11 page)

“Don’t look like Mr. Duplak,” Rilla said.

“Looks like it’s a composograph,” said Oak.

“A what?”

Jane returned with a plate of cake slices, the screen door banging after her.

“It’s made up. Papers in the city do it all the time when they don’t have a real picture. They take other pictures, cut pieces of them together and make one that fits the story.”

“Doesn’t seem like that’s right.”

Oak shrugged.

“Well, was he hurt?”

Dom couldn’t say for sure, but the newspaper said the shopkeep had to be taken to a hospital in the city.

While Rilla wasn’t particularly sorry about that, neither did she have a wish for any harm to come to King Duplak and couldn’t understand why this had happened.

“It’s the strikers, ma’am. Folks have been saying for years that Mr. Duplak sets his prices by what the Corporation tells him, and now with people having a hard time making ends meet, it was bound to happen. Especially now. Rumour is, they’re going to truck in even more scabs and get the foundry up to full production.”

No one was eating Jane’s cake.

“What? What’s wrong?” asked Dom.

“Gil’s—”

“Shut up!” said Jane and she slapped Elva on the wrist.

“Well?”

Big long pause.

“I’m working at the foundry, Dom,” Gil said.

“Jesus Christ! Are you nuts?”

While everyone else thought so, no one said.

“But why?”

“Money, what else?”

“Gil, they’re going after anyone they even think is doing it. I came here to tell you to stay away from town, don’t even go past the ponds. It’s not safe.”

Elva figured this visit was really for Dom to tell Jane, No more trips to the Abbey.

“Promise me you won’t do it again. It’s too dangerous. If they find you out, they’ll come here.”

“I’m afraid it’s too late for that,” Rilla said. She explained about the rock.

“Oh, Gil!”

Elva knew Dom was angry because Gil’s actions jeopardized Jane, but Dom couldn’t raise too much of a stink, could he?

“You have to stop,” Dom said. “Please, Gil.”

He excused himself by saying he had to get home, didn’t like to leave his mother alone with so much unrest about. No chance for a private word with Jane. Amos was awake upstairs and shouting, Rilla!

“Warm me up some milk,” she said to Jane, going inside. “Bring it up when it’s ready.”

There were flies now, on the untouched cake slices.

After Rilla made Gil explain to her the precautions being taken to keep scabs’ identities secret—decoy buses, alternating which factory entrances they used, even paying off strikers to keep their mouths shut—she agreed to turn a blind eye. What choice did she have with Amos upstairs puking his guts out and shitting
red? They’d just all have to continue to tread lightly and make sure the sick man didn’t find out. But Jane and Elva were forbidden to leave Kirchoffer Place.

Like that was going to do any good. It’s not fair, Jane chafed under house arrest, but exactly not fair to whom Elva didn’t know. She knew that Rilla’s admonishment to avoid town was losing potency with each day. Jane missed Dom, wanted him, and while his very reflection dogged her step in the house, it brought no solace. Just the opposite. She took out her frustration on Elva, flushing her out of her sight with tear-wringing pinches.

Elva wasn’t the only one to suffer. Rilla, ever mindful of keeping food on the table and Amos alive—and consequently, the roof over head—barely noticed anything amiss in her daughter’s behaviour. Wasn’t that just Jane? Oak was different. He once had the misfortune to be holding a fresh cup of tea during one of her moody passes through the hall. Pardon, he begged, the tea splashing down onto his leg. Not a boo of complaint from Oak, although Elva later found him slathering a butter poultice on a large raised blister. He smiled gently, said that Jane scared the hell out of him and he missed having that tea.

If Elva and Oak got in Jane’s way, Gil was getting at her heart. Of course Gil had to know that she was frustrated being apart from Dom, but rather than stay away from her, Gil seemingly taunted her. Hello, Jane, how’d you sleep? Can I get something for you, Jane? Shall I
read to you, Jane? What would you like to listen to on the radio, Jane?

Don’t I look like my brother, Jane!

To Elva, Jane should have been revelling in two brothers adoring her. And if she didn’t care a fig for Gil, why not enjoy being his harmless fantasy? It’s not like she was asking for his attention. Yet Gil’s flattery enraged her. Elva couldn’t figure it out. Nor could she understand why Jane did everything she could to stay in Gil’s sights.

Nope. It just didn’t make sense to Elva at all.

Rilla was desperate to get the man some relief and thought berries might settle Amos’s stomach. She and Elva were out back.

“Gruson’s Field. They ripen there first.”

A hearty ocean wind blew the tall grass flat and gave the few scrappy alders in the yard a workout.

“They won’t be ready,” said Elva.

“Look for the higher plants. They get more sun.”

“They’ll be too small.”

“They’re the tasty ones.”

Elva, not much help with heavier housework, had been delegated to pick strawberries. Amos liked them with his breakfast, said it helped to keep his food down. Although the afternoon was perfect for such a chore, the field was several miles away and no way was Elva going out there on her own.

“Gruson’s Field is nowhere near town.”

But what if, what if, what if …

“We’ll just ask the berries to hold off ripening till the strike’s over” pretty much summed up Rilla’s thoughts on that. “Fine, then. The boys’ll be home soon. Ask one of them to go with you.”

Elva got her wooden basket and plunked herself down on the back stoop. Gil and Oak, their hours at the foundry irregular, soon came up the lane. They’d found it easier and safer to slip through a hole in the foundry fence and make their own way home rather than take the bus. Those strikers out for scabs by the gates wouldn’t spare time for a couple of stragglers.

“Hey, Elva, what’s up?”

“Gotta pick strawberries for him upstairs and I’m afraid to go by myself.”

“We’ll go with you,” said Oak and he grabbed an empty Mason jar off the window sill.

Gil looked to the door. “Yeah, why not, eh?”

Oak, it turned out, was a consummate berry picker. Fast, delicate, stopping only now and then to stretch and gaze out over the low rolling meadow overlooking Cape Jeddore Head.

Gil would have none of that. He stripped off his sweat-stained coveralls and singing loudly about a waltzing Australian Matilda, he washed himself clean in a pool of rainwater collected in a mossy basin of bedrock. It was ice cold and made him scream, Aye
Nellie! Then he lazily spread himself on a carpet of lichen, his head resting on his hands. Overhead, white outraged faces were being pushed unceremoniously across the heavens while the Major tore after dragonflies.

“What? You’ve seen me naked before.”

That was as a boy when they swam at the beach. He didn’t know about the crack in the bed room closet thing. This was different. Gil didn’t care. Or he didn’t care that it was Elva who saw. She thought Gil was looking mighty pleased with himself one minute, perplexed by a riddle the next.

“If you could have one wish, Elva, what would it be?” he said dreamily, Oak too far away to hear.

“To be Jane,” she replied without thinking.

Gil sat up. Elva looked away from Gil quickly and went back to picking.

“Yeah? You know, I pretended to be my brother. Years ago. We only tried it the once. Dom got caught nippin’ into the wine at church when he was an altar boy.” From the look that got from Elva, Gil added quickly, “Now don’t you ever let this out, you, or Dom’ll skin me alive! It’s our secret, okay?”

“What happened?”

“He got pissed is what happened. That crazy old Father Bourque marched him all the way home, goin’ on about hell and sin and if you kiss a girl and something starts to stiffen, you’re in mortal sin. Thought Maman was going to have a fit. Said when my father
got home, Dom was going to get it. Belt, get it. Dom was throwing up all over the place saying, I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry. Fun-ny!”

“Did he get it?”

“Naw, I took his place when my pappa got home.”

“How come?”

“We both knew my old man would whip Dom some good with that belt of his. I wasn’t going to let everyone in town see my brother looking beat up the next time he was serving Mass.”

“Did they find out?”

“Sure, but by then, they’d calmed down some. Dom was okay.” Then: “Why you, Elva? Why do you want to be Jane?”

She bent her face away, regretting she’d said anything.

“Elva, everyone’s, well … crippled in some way, even Jane.”

She wondered what he saw about Jane that was deformed. Even so.
Folks don’t mind cripples if they’re like Jane—or you—and you’ll prefer anything over me, and always will. I know that, don’t I, Gil?

“Now me, I’d be one of those clouds. Not a thought in my head. Spending all day drifting about looking down on you lugs. I’d be in Barbados by dinner, Brazil by supper.”

Oak, his jar filled, joined them.

“Ask him,” said Elva.

“Ask me what?”

But Gil did not, deciding that no one, at least not Elva, needed to hear what Oak’s wish would be.

Major began to bark.

“Someone’s coming.”

Gil stood up. “It’s Dom. Where’s he going?” He jumped into his clothes and ran into the field after him, Major barking wildly in pursuit. “I’ll see you back at the house!”

“Anything to get out of picking berries, huh?” Oak said to Elva.

It was getting late. Oak bent out the kinks from being hunched over. The mosquitoes were starting to bite. They were partial to the young man, even more than Elva. She thought it was because he was tall and they’d get him first.

They said practically nothing as they walked home. Elva didn’t mind. His silences weren’t unnerving like Gil’s or Jane’s. When those two weren’t talking, it was like something ready to erupt. Oak was just, simply, a quiet fellow. Comfortable. Like Major when he was curled up at his master’s feet. That’s why the blast startled them.

A short snap from the northeast, followed by a hollow roar and the resounding collapse of timbers. The sound travelled far and easily over the lake waters and the tar ponds and in the evening air. Elva knew the explosion was from a good distance and only when she saw the
smoke by the shores of Ostrea Lake did she know it had come from Demerett Bridge.

When she turned to ask Oak what he thought it was, she found him on his knees, trembling so hard that his face glistened with tears that came from the sides of his mouth. Two bright red patches appeared under his eyes, and when he seized her hands, his were like ice.

“Would you get me back?” he managed, adding that he’d be obliged if she didn’t say anything about this to anyone, especially to Gil.

As Elva helped Oak to his feet, she saw that he’d wet himself.

R
ILLA SAID THE NOISE
reminded her of the
White Bear
when the steamer gutted herself up the coast. She’d been a child when it happened, seventy-three passengers and crew spilling out like toy soldiers on the shoals at Chance Cove. She remembered driving out in the back of a horse-pulled wagon to see the wreck and someone, she wasn’t sure who, giving her warm root
beer. There were so many sightseers, it was like a Sunday picnic.

The explosion in Demerett Bridge was not as memorable as
White Bear’s
boilers shooting out hissing coal like Catherine wheels, but it destroyed the union headquarters on Pleasant Point Road, killing one man. With local resources already stretched by the strike, Halifax sent additional police to aid in the investigation. The conclusion: an incendiary device planted by someone well acquainted with the office layout. The official report pinned all blame on the victim, a union steward, claiming he set the bomb to win back waning public sympathy from a long and bitter strike, but something had gone wrong.

The union reacted swiftly, whipping up its membership by protesting that the police were nothing more than pawns of the Maritime Foundry Corporation. More capitalist corruption! Red flags began to flutter from rooflines and appear in arm bands. Just the spectre of Communist involvement in the dispute was enough for Province House in Halifax to send in more police. Lines of angry men faced off against uniforms on horseback. Those folks in Demerett Bridge not battling in the street stayed home, drew their blinds and wished it all away.

“How sweet.” Amos laughed. “Serves that bloody Jew right.” Yet again on the mend, he’d been catching up on the doings in town. He was most delighted to hear King
Duplak had been ruined, his windows, once the envy of the town, shattered by a mob, littering the street like crystal. “Only good thing to come out of this!”

Rilla said she saw Mr. Duplak and his wife at church and said she didn’t think they were Jewish, but Shut up, woman, was all she got for that.

The early start to summer had brought unusually hot winds laced with fine caustic beach powder—gritty, gnawing, rubbing everyone’s nerves raw like sandpaper. The troubles in town had not yet spilled over to the other side of the tar ponds only because there wasn’t anything of value for either side in the dispute to burn or tear down.