Miss Elva (17 page)

Oak. Oak. Yes, the accent. The voice! Now she knew where she’d heard it.

“Gil, Big Head and Squirrel Boy! They were there that night Oak gotten beaten up! It was them!”

“You’re crazy.”

“No, I’m not. He said something about, I know, a love tap! Yeah, a love tap. It was Mr. Big Head.”

It had been easy. Stupid and easy. Gil, desperate for an out, missed all the innuendoes, all the clues, charged away, like taking an oar to Bryant. No thought, no plan. Big Head and Squirrel Boy weren’t even trying to hide being in cahoots with the smuggler. Didn’t have to. There were plenty of ways for Bryant to get even.

Major was barking.

Gil saw it first from the truck window, stared hard and went dead quiet. He stepped out slowly, his jacket constricting in the wind.

“Don’t you move,” he said, like his words were pieced together from different people.

The flap of white flesh, the glint of the silver watch. Not just another groundhog or porcupine crushed under the wheels of a truck. Not this time. Elva saw it. Saw him. Left out like garbage, for all to see.

The cab began to shake. The convulsions were hers: body reacting before brain.

T
HE
F
ORD SPRAYED
the driveway with gravel.

Jesus, Elva, Gil was saying, I never said Oak’s name, but Big Head knew, I never said Oak, but he did, don’t you see, Bryant’s found us, Bryant did this because of me.

The door to the truck opened and Elva surfaced into a low wind and blinking stars through scudding
clouds. She stumbled up the porch and something pushed her through the screen door and into the hall.

Am I home?

Gil was saying, You’re home now, Elva.

Everything is going back and forth. Don’t you see?

No answer from Gil. Just the infrequent moon carpeting the way to the kitchen.

It was where he’d left it. Oak’s trinket box on the kitchen table full of watch bits and tools waiting for him to walk in and resume his tinkering. She couldn’t stop looking.

Don’t, Elva, and Gil pulled her away.

Who did that to Oak?

Gil was saying, What to tell Jane?

Felt like someone had added to the staircase. Why else would it take so long to get to the top, every step sending hot pincers through Elva’s head?

She’ll feel bad now that she burnt his leg with tea and didn’t say sorry. Gil? My hands don’t grip the railing.
She was sure she added, Gil they don’t work, but he didn’t pay her any mind.
And my feet don’t move.

Gil was saying, Hurry.

You’re still afraid, aren’t you?

Peek-a-boo went the moon across the floor of her room from the three tall, thin, rectangular windows fronting the house. Curtains by the open casements billowed around the woman waiting in the chair.

You’re not Jane. Where’s Jane?

Maman? Gil started to close the windows. Why are you here?

I’m in a dream too, don’t you know?
Elva touched the woman’s face.

Don’t do that, Jeanine said.

The palms of the woman’s hands were facing up, waiting for the nails. Why not crucify her? What a show that’d be. Jeanine’d like that, but not upside down like Saint Peter. Oh no. Her husband, her son, everything of worth, gone. After what she’s been through, she deserves to go just like Jesus. Thorns and all.

Where’s your mother, girl, she not here with you? None of this would have happened had your mother been home. A girl like that Jane needs her mother.

Maman, Gil asked, where’s Jane?

What’s the matter with this girl, why don’t she speak?

I am speaking, can’t you hear me?

Maman, what have you done to Jane? The bed, oh God, the bed, Maman, what have you done?

Gil, why are you hurting your mother like that?

Nothing, said Jeanine. I came to talk to her, only talk. Bitch got my boy’s head all confused, take him away from me, from God. He was going to run away. No, I wouldn’t have that! Had to. Her and that baby. Domenique thinking it’s his!

Gil, the bed? There’s so much blood.

Maman, what have you done to Jane?

She’s crazy, that girl, look at her, don’t she speak?

I don’t like dreams where no one can hear me.

Where the fuck is Jane?

Don’t shout at me! I came here to help your brother see sense, good and proper.

Dom was here?

Followed him here, replied Gil’s mother, after he finished telling me about that girl and the baby. I didn’t do nothing to that girl. She was crazy mad when I got here. Kept going on and on about it not being Domenique’s. See? I says to Domenique. It’s not yours, even though my boy kept saying, shut up Jane you shut up Jane that’s my child so you just shut up about that. Tried to talk reason to her, I did. Look, ten dollars! Tried to give her ten dollars to go away, but she wouldn’t. It’s all the money we have. Just hits herself in the belly like a crazy woman, over and over. She’s losing that baby. Wouldn’t let me help her.

Maman, for Christ’s sake, where’s Jane?

I won’t have to say anything about Oak now, will I, Gil?

He took her, said Jeanine. Took her away from here!

Where, Maman, where?

Said he’d take her to Halifax like she always wanted, but they won’t get far. Needs a doctor, she’s poorly. God’s blessing if she loses that bastard.

I’m dizzy, Gil. Why is everyone talking fast?

Gil, look at that girl, look at her, she’s mad too. Whole crazy family’s mad!

Maman, tell me he’s not out there tonight with Jane, Jesus Christ, not tonight!

He’s got a gun. That slut made him take it, worried because the police can’t control the strikers and I said, if you take her out of here, you shoot her! Leave me, leave God, you shoot her like a dog! Hear me, you shoot her and if you go, you break my heart, so shoot yourself too! Rot with your pappa in hell, Domenique, because that’s where God’ll send you if you go against Him. Send his own pappa to hell for her, he did.

That’s Amos’s gun. Must have taken it from his room. No one’s been in there since … Rilla says don’t go in there ’cause it still smells of his lemon aftershave and there’s a glass by the bed with dried milk in the bottom. Jane did the milk. Not me. I couldn’t do the milk.

What’s wrong with that Elva girl, Guillaume?

Nothing.

You gotta go out there for your brother.

Leave Elva? No, I can’t leave Elva. Not after, well, I just can’t leave her.

You find your brother and bring him home. I don’t care about that girl. Most likely dead now, bleeding, and good riddance.

I know, Maman, but you go home, you can’t stay here.

Why’d Jane not wait to say goodbye to me? Jane should have said, kiss me, because Jane would have wanted to kiss me goodbye, wouldn’t she? She’s my sister. She’d be wrapped in blankets, in Dom’s arms. There’d be tears. Jane, she gets to
feel things. Real things. Not me. Dom, he’d kneel so I could hug her.

That one there be okay? asked Jeanine. What’s she see out that window?

Elva’ll be okay, Maman.

Did he find you?

Who, Maman?

That friend of yours, the tall one, comes to the farm today, says he had something he needed to say.

His name was Oak. Gil, tell her his name was Oak.

I said I don’t know where you be and he goes away. Did he find you?

Yes, Maman, I found him.

Elva, will you be all right here on your own? Elva, are you okay, I’ll fix this, you’ll see, why don’t you say something, Elva, why?

I’m not saying anything because I’m trying to wake up and Jane will be in bed beside me and there’ll be eggs in butter, smelling good, and Oak will be washing up outside the summer kitchen and … you’ll hear me …

A narrow staircase at the end of the hall, its door next to what had been Gil’s and Oak’s room, led to the roof. Elva hesitated. What if he’s there? But no ghost of Amos—sitting among his beloved stacks of newspaper, saying, Bitch, I know about the milk—was in the attic that night. She crawled to the ladder over the yellowing, damp piles Amos was too miserly to throw out, to the
ladder opening onto the widow’s walk. The joists underneath creaked.

Dawn was still distant when she emerged onto the roof, but there! There was the foamy tipped crescent of beach all pearly in the windy night, the flickering lights of Demerett Bridge, the nothingness that was Ostrea Lake. The Abbey.

Elva sat against the wind, bracing up here, burying her face between her knees, that sour, wormy stink from that horrible German house still crawling out of her clothes. She had to get rid of it, and she pulled her dress over her head and flung it over the railing of the widow’s walk.

Goodbye, Jane. Goodbye, Oak.

Elva, her eyes heavy, shivering in her underclothes, traced her finger over her lips. She’d be safe now until Rilla got home. She’d not be awake long enough to see orange and yellow jagged edges eat across the island, the Abbey, and the dawn.

E
LVA TWOHIG WAS MUTE
from the moment she saw that boy’s cut-up remains strewn across the highway, and would remain so for the rest of her life.

It would be days before anyone noticed.

Rilla had been delayed getting back to Demerett Bridge. Her bus from Indian Brook had been detained by the RCMP on the highway while a group of official-looking
men with hats and badges hovered over something hidden under a tarpaulin in the middle of the road. By her window seat, she happened to see one of the officers hold up a silver watch, attached to a chain. Just as her daughter had known, so too did Rilla.

Not trusting the police and certainly not wanting them poking around murky affairs at Kirchoffer Place, Rilla returned home bent to do the only thing she could, remove all trace of her boarder. If anyone ever came around asking questions about the young man whose last name she never even knew, she’d say he’d stayed briefly and moved on. Didn’t know anything more. She did not expect to find a monk in her kitchen, Elva sitting at the table in front of a big cup of tea.

There’s been trouble, he explained to her. Hard to say just what happened. There’d been a fire. Dom Barthélemy showed up on the lakeshore of the monastery, barely conscious, having floated there from the Abbey in a canoe.

The young Brother, who clearly didn’t view this duty as a fun way of getting out of vespers, went on to say that Dom had been severely burned: face, arms, the left side of his body. He was at the monastery now, refusing to see anyone, even his mother.

Because he’s not Dom,
Elva said, but by now she had realized that no one could hear her.

Dom did manage to say, the bad news went on, that his brother and Jane are out there. Murder-suicide is
what the Brother told Rilla. With flames still smouldering, no one had been able to get to the Abbey to verify.

Elva had never seen her mother cry, nor would she now. After they were alone, Rilla sat at the table for a long time, saying only this: Oak’s dead, and, We show no tears to no one. Then she got up, found a package of Amos’s cigarettes from his things in his room and took them out onto the back step with a half-empty bottle of bourbon. She stayed there until dark. When Rilla nodded off, Elva, the screen door creaking behind her, went out and helped her back into the living room, settling her mother on the sofa and covering her with a blanket.

Elva then went up to her room and, because of the still bloody bed, took her pillow and blanket and lay down on the floor, staring up at the cracks in the ceiling. The house felt very empty. She did not sleep.

The next morning she watched them dig a grave on the other side of the tar ponds from her bedroom window. There was a police car and a truck outside the gates to the Franciscan monastery. She knew the grave was for Oak.

Gather up everything, Rilla had said. She meant Oak’s things. When Elva had done that, they put his few bits of clothing, his leather tool case and the velvet bag with his watch pieces into his brown striped suitcase and snapped it shut. Rilla didn’t say anything about Elva taking from his room her three pictures that
Oak had admired and including them. Then Rilla took the suitcase to the ponds and sank it in the tar. Standing from her dirty task, she watched Elva walking to the Eye through the tall grass on the other side.