Miss Elva (13 page)

Oak had been occupying his days either with tearing away the remains of the summer kitchen, piling the debris neatly in the back of the garden, or cleaning out the shed.

“That’s a fine idea,” Rilla said. “If I can park the truck inside, I can load the washing at night and get me a few more minutes in the morning.”

Then every evening after the dishes had been cleared, he’d sit at the round table with the light bright overhead and watch his watches. If he’d been studying for a test, Elva was sure he’d pass it hands down.

Rilla and her girls had been in the parlour listening to a Halifax fiddling contest from the Lord Nelson Hotel, Elva wrapped in a quilt against the unseasonable cold. Amos had taken another turn. White enamelled pail in tow, he’d limped up to bed early. The wind had been rattling the windows all evening and the electric lights flickered out. That’s that, said Rilla, and Jane followed her up to bed. Elva decided to wait until moody Jane was asleep before crawling in next to her and went to see what Oak was up to in the kitchen.

He’d just lit the oil globe hanging over the table and
the room was bathed in humming amber warmth. Summer moths, not knowing what in tarnation was going on with this kind of weather, flew too close to the hot lamp, then flopped groggily around the sugar bowl. Oak didn’t seem to notice Elva slipping into the chair beside him. A bee was crawling across the oilcloth, too cold to fly. Elva flicked at it with her forefinger just as the dainty screw in Oak’s hand slipped its mark.

“Oh, for the love of Christ!”

Oak threw it. The pocket watch bounced off the table, shattered, a fragment hitting Elva over the eye. He groaned and went outside.

“Can’t be fixed,” he said.

He wasn’t really talking to her but searching the night-darkened surf restless and angry somewhere nearby. Elva covered in her patchwork quilt had joined him by the pile of charred wood.

“You’ve fixed all kinds of things.”

“I went to see Gil this afternoon. He told me not to come by any more.”

Oak absentmindedly started on the path towards the Barthélemy farm.

“Why?”

“We fought. About her.”

“Jane?”

“Dom took a job on a fishing boat, out of Musquodoboit Harbour. Gone for three months, maybe
longer. Says he needed the money to marry Jane, take her away from here.”

Oh!

“It was kinda last minute and Dom didn’t have a chance to see Jane and tell her. He asked Gil to.”

“How come Jane doesn’t know?”

“Because Gil won’t tell her!”

“Why not?”

He touched her forehead. “You’re bleeding. I’m sorry, Elva. I shouldn’t have said anything. I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”

She’d stolen all his secrets, and forgot that she shouldn’t know. “You love him.”

Elva could only imagine the terror on a face by night she could not see. Oak looked around, cleared his throat.

“I can’t.”

“But you do,” she persisted.

“What I do is hurt!” He groaned again, holding his stomach. “Just hurt. All the time. Hurt! Does that … disgust you?”

She shook her head.

He studied her. “Why not?”

Elva couldn’t say. Like it was natural in her, knowing that for some, it was the way of things.

“And you think Gil loves Jane and not you.”

“What?” he asked, unsure if there wasn’t a hundred years of wisdom hiding in that little deformed body.
“He
thinks
he loves her. It’s not that he doesn’t care for me, he doesn’t want to care. He fights caring. I know he’s out there right now, just as I’m here with you, fighting against it … fighting against me. Love Jane? Not a chance! Jane’s what’s expected. Jane is easier. Gil wants escape, to be Dom and have everything that belongs to Dom. Being Dom means not being Gil, undoing things, not being …”

Gil was thirteen when Oak met him; the
Meghan Rose
had sunk a few months before. Filthy, hungry, he was still the most beautiful boy Oak’d ever seen on the streets of Halifax. He knew nothing about big-city ways, been begging around the waterfront for work and had been eating out of the garbage bins behind a diner. At night, he slept under the table-like tombstones in St. Paul’s Cemetery across from the lieutenant governor’s mansion, but with fall coming and the stevedores saying early ice meant a hard winter, Gil was worried about what to do.

Oak kept an eye out for boys like him, cajoled them with offers of a warm place to stay, something to eat, befriended them; he did those things for a man named Bryant Slaunwhite. Oak himself had been recruited, at an even younger age than Gil. All you have to do is close doors in your head to places you don’t want to go, he’d tell Gil later, advice Gil could never follow. Oak had been one of Bryant’s best boys,
but the man’s customers were a hard-drinking, hard-wearing lot and there was always a demand for younger, fresh talent.

Oak took Gil to Bryant’s place, the Seadog Tavern on Barrington Street, down towards the docks. Very popular with the navy lads. You won’t mind it one bit, he said. At least it’s warm and there’s a square meal in it for you. For all the advance billing Oak gave it, the Seadog Tavern was a cellar where high tide often left two inches of fish-reeking water on the floor.

As Oak knew he would be, Bryant was taken with the good-looking country boy, fixed him up with a job flogging gin because he figured he’d hold his own. But Gil didn’t take to it, told Oak that the Seadog Tavern wasn’t regular, all those innuendoes and leering glances from men—it wasn’t right.

Gil bolted the first time the place got raided. Oak knew where to find him, it not being hard as Gil had nowhere to go. Raids like that happen all the time, Oak said. Nothing to worry about. Bryant pays the cops to leave him be. It was just the way men like Bryant had to do business down in the docks. And pay no mind to what the regulars say. They’re just in their cups funnin’ ya when they talk about wantin’ to suck your dick. C’mon. Come back.

And for once, Oak wasn’t pretending to be a friend to the new kid around. He liked Gil, and their friendship from the get-go was genuine.

“Hey, thanks,” Gil said when Oak gave him the watch.

Oak had found the broken timepiece in the bar. Said he had a knack for fixing them.

“My father had one like this. Like his dad’s. But he lost it when …”

Oak said he should get over the sinking.

“How can I? It was up to me to be watching the weather. Not drinking coffee and sleeping.”

Oak said that coffee kept him awake.

“It’s my fault, Oak! After that mast went down, they had to cut my old man’s legs off when they took him off the wreck. You don’t know what that was like for him.”

“I’ve seen worse.” But Oak didn’t say how.

“Don’t think poorly of me for it, do you?”

“No.”

“Guess I’m lucky. And thankful for what Mr. Slaunwhite’s done for me. I’ll make a few bucks and then I’m out of here.”

“Gil, be careful.”

“Of what?”

“Bryant. He’s, well, he’s into a lot of things. He’s not the sort of man you want to cross.”

“If you mean he’s a bootlegger, I figured that out.”

“Then you’ll understand he never takes no for an answer.”

Bryant had been very persuasive in making sure Oak understood that Gil owed, and was owned by, Bryant.

“There’s money in it, Gil. Lots of money,” Oak said. “More than you’ve ever had. Just one or two blokes a night. Set yourself up in no time, then get away from here and no one ever knows.”

“You’re fucking crazy!”

“Just close your eyes and don’t think about it. It’s over before you know it. A few months’ work and you can do whatever you want.”

But truth was, Bryant would never let Gil go, and Oak knew that.

Gil knew all about pork-bellied shopkeepers slobbering into their brew before slobbering over you. They had it in Demerett Bridge, but it was the lot of women, and women thought most unkindly of. Women like Elva’s mother. Stained women. Once they were stained, there was no going back, never getting it out. And a man to act that way? Just what would that make him? No way! No how.

Away from the regular clientele, in a small brick-lined room upstairs, Bryant and a couple of his best boys pushed Gil up against the wall and Bryant raped him. He called it a love tap, saying there’d be a lot more after him, but he’d make sure Gil remembered his first. And this: for each time he said no to Bryant, he’d lose a finger. After that, Gil could pick which body part came off next.

The only thing Gil ever said to Oak about it was that while Bryant did him, he watched a roach hiding in
the mortar between the bricks, twitching its antennae, staring up at him as if to say, And you think I’m nothing. For a long time after that, Gil hated Oak for drawing him into this world.

Gil stopped talking about running. There’d been boys who’d run before. They’d find parts of them in the harbour. Bryant had no choice about that. His rent boys knew too much about smuggling gin and cocaine and which customs officials were getting the payoff. And of course there were the customers, who’d just as easily have sliced the giblets out of Bryant as his boys to keep the white marble stoops of their domestic reputations unsullied. So who cared a goddamned about dead nancies who let their arses out by the quarter hour? Didn’t even make the papers unless some politico was making hay by cleaning up street vermin.

But Oak knew that Gil was thinking about it just the same. In fact, there was precious little Gil said even though he and Oak were locked up together after each night for the next five years. The hatred eventually gave way, eroded mostly by Oak’s feelings for Gil. Oak was never fooled as to how Gil came around. Close quarters, shared sympathies after a licking from Bryant, reading together on cold winter nights. Take your pick. But not love. Not at first. More like a yielding that meant more to one, nothing to the other. Oak wondered how men could come round night after night and find pleasure in an act when one of the players was absent in every way
that mattered. And he wished Gil would come back. They shared a bed but it was like Gil was not even there. Instead, there was a face creased with self-loathing and contempt, a mind feverishly planning, always waiting for an opportunity.

It came during the distraction of loading a schooner. It was to be the largest cargo of spirits Bryant had ever planned to run past the customs blockade outside Boston. He had the bottles of gin and rum packed in crates marked as Bibles.

Oak was with the first crew back from loading the ship. One of Bryant’s boys was sitting on the tavern steps. Sniffling, he pointed inside to where Bryant was, face down behind the bar. A rowing oar mounted for decoration behind the gin bottles had been taken to his face, scattering his teeth about like stars. No need to wonder who’d done it. Gil was gone. Last thing Oak heard before he went AWOL too was that Bryant, who had friends in the Halifax police, had sworn a warrant against Gil.

They stood before the blackness of night, breathing in harmony, shivering. Elva was feeling very grownup.

“Hear that?” Oak said. “It’s gotten real quiet.”

“What about that fella, he okay?”

“Bryant? He’s alive. Probably wished he wasn’t. Bryant was right big on his looks.”

They were standing by the shore at the end of the slate road by Kirchoffer Place. The wind had ceased.
Oak swiped a handful of pebbles and cast them one by one into the placid water. Then they were silent for a long while.

“I … I never thanked you. For not saying anything … you know.”

Elva guessed Oak meant about Gruson’s Field.

“My folks were killed in the Halifax explosion. Baby sister too. I was delivering newspapers. Came to under a bathtub. It saved me. I have trouble with loud noises now. I’m okay if I know they’re coming. It’s when I don’t, well … Son of a bitch!”

It was snowing.

A
N EERIE SILVER IRIDESCENCE
bathed the room as Elva lurched sleepily towards the window, then flinched from the glare. From down the hall, Amos was yelling, What in Christ is going on with the weather? Brilliant white snow covered the black top of the tar ponds, crushed the fields of seagrass, weighed down the pink blossoms on the primrose bushes and clung
tenaciously to the drooping green-leaved tree branches. Only something this magical would cause Elva to forget what she had to tell Jane about Dom.

At breakfast, which Jane barely touched and over which Rilla hovered, there was no chance to say, Hey, Jane, Dom wants to marry you and he’s working on a fishing boat to save money and won’t his ma be pissed off with the both of you when she finds out? With that snow out there, who cared if Oak didn’t show for breakfast and Rilla said if you go out, take Elva, it’s safer and don’t go near town.

The morning sun was already working on dispelling whatever cosmic oops had conspired to turn the sixth month into December. Seven village children waving driftwood festooned with frozen kelp whirled in unison on the distant breakwater. Others were singing “Jingle Bells” all the way into making snow angels by the beach. With so many folks about making light of ankle-deep snow while being dressed for summer, Rilla’s concern seemed overdone.