Miss Elva (2 page)

Now he was calling for reinforcements from out back: Bernice, the wife. An unpleasant piece of work, her. Stuck up like a Woolworths heiress and didn’t say much. Fishy lips with whiskers and from Cape Breton. Made a better Bernie than Bernice. She sounded odd to Elva because her mother tongue was Gaelic; it left the woman spitting a lot of extra vowels she didn’t know what to do with. Figured her old man was way too kind letting Rilla and her half-breeds in amongst their rough, unpainted wooden shelves and pine plank
floors that coughed up summer dust whenever anyone with boots walked upon them, tinkling with vibrating crockery. The Emporium, as Mrs. La-de-da Bernice liked to call it. Jane always made a face when she said la-de-da.

Christ, Rilla wanted to say, except Rilla’d cut her own tongue out before she’d take the Lord’s name in vain. Forgive me, Father. It was for Jane’s sake that she even considered swearing, but what choice was there? Rilla still had to drive out to Raven River that afternoon and there was no way she could have supper late—Amos wouldn’t tolerate that. Jane would have to get the evening meal on the table.

“Get on with you, straight home, girl. Put the turnips on to boil and stay out of his way.”

Amos had to be fed. Christ!

Elva was told to go with Mrs. Duplak and find a pail.

“No. I want to go with Jane.”

Jane’d have none of that. Neither would Rilla. Elva sensed her mother didn’t like to go to creepy Raven River on her own, especially if it was starting to get dark on the way back. As for Jane, well, Elva knew Jane didn’t want her kid sister following her anytime. Let’s see, time with her mother, who wanted her, or with Jane, who didn’t. When no one noticed, and who noticed Elva, she stepped into one of Harry’s tar patches and said, Oh look, I have it on my shoe, too.

Rilla set her meagre bag of groceries on the counter like it was filled with rocks. This would have been her third
Christ!
of the afternoon.

Get off the two of you and no shilly-shallying, Rilla warned, but no one heard because Jane on her own with a mind of her own was already out the door trying to lose Elva. That wouldn’t do in a town full of idle men frustrated by a long strike, bored and looking for laughs. Hopefully it wouldn’t last, the bit about Jane’s own mind, that is. At least Rilla didn’t need to worry about Miss Elva. Blessed be small mercies. Misshapen. Miss Ugly. Miss Nothing.

“It’s hot.” Jane was swinging back and forth, her hands clasped around an old fence post. Then she was off, and not in the direction of home. That was the arse out of her mother’s stricture.

When Elva took her place, closed her eyes and clasped her hands around the post, she was sure she could feel where Jane’s hands had been, warm like. Maybe even magical, for Elva could believe it really was she, and not Jane, greeting the spring sun, stretching for coolness against the sea wind, that wind blowing through her long, oily black hair, pressing Rilla’s made-over dress against her long legs, her nipples tingling underneath the slippery fabric with every gulp of salt air.

But spells don’t last forever. When brightness washed away her dreams and Elva blinked to see Jane
jump across the ditch to the road, the fingers clutching the post in front of her were gnarled and twisted, knobby like sandpipers caught in the ooze of the foundry’s tar ponds until they were nothing more than limpid black lumps. In the wake of Jane, Elva became the short, ugly thing she was, shoulders drooping like late-summer sunflowers. It’s like the good Lord was rushed, slapped down her noggin, gave it a yank and short-shrifted her on a neck, her aunt Blanche had sighed with a sadness when Elva was born, and echoed in some way or another every time she visited Rilla. It was left to Elva to punctuate that with a tiny
oh!

“Well, what are you going to do with the money?”

Nothing got past Jane. Must have heard the quarter fall out of Elva’s birthday note from Auntie Blanche and go
blonk!
on the kitchen floor before Elva scooped it up and hid it in her change purse. Jane’d been trying to part it from her sister ever since.

Bus coming, with a frisky churn of dust and gravel.

And of course, Jane believed that Elva was being plain hateful by not sharing her birthday bounty. Hadn’t Jane been saying for weeks to anyone who’d listen that she’d die if she didn’t see
The Flaming Forest
and it was only going to be at the Towne movie palace for a week?

“It’s got flappers, you know, and Mounties and savage Indians.”

Normally, Elva would’ve given Jane anything. Funny how that went, the snottier Jane was, the more
Elva wanted to do for her. But not this time. Jane wasn’t getting that money and both sisters knew why.

“It’s that stupid bird, isn’t it?”

“You know,” said Elva.

The bus hurtled by, causing Jane to step onto the shoulder and shield her eyes from the grit, so she missed the passengers’ faces through ashen-shaded windows. Behind it came an automobile. Now there was something you didn’t see in Demerett Bridge every day and it demanded that the girls pause. This one had rolling rounded fenders, one dented, and a yellow cloth roof. In the moment between the clearing of the cloud from the bus and the passing car, Elva caught the flash of dark glasses, low hat, paisley scarf.

The silence of the country road back around them, Jane had no intention of filling it with an old argument. “I could do that, and be in the movies. Everyone says I could.” What was the word they used on the radio? Jane wrapped her hands in front of her chest as if she were revealing the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

“Emoting,” Elva said. Emoting was Hollywood lingo for making loopy faces to a camera for lots of money.

“Yes, better at that. Everyone says so. Watch.” The accompanying grimace might have meant a heart severed by love’s inconstancy, or merely the need to belch.

So by rights, didn’t Jane just have to see for herself by going to the movies? She stomped her foot. That was to let Elva know she was serious.

Who’s everyone? Elva wanted to know, fingering the quarter through her faded calico purse. She liked it because it looked like a kitten with a silver comb in its back.

There was enough for two matinee tickets, maybe some Milk Duds too. Caramel centres were Elva’s favourite because they’d melt in between your teeth, saving some for later, even if going to the movies meant she had to sit in that really hot last-row balcony with the other Mi’kmaq where she couldn’t see very well and couldn’t hear over the clicking of the projector. But Rilla had said the coin was to be Elva’s mad money, you know, for a girl’s emergencies and hidden in her sock when out with a fella so he’d never know you had it. That way she’d always have a way home.

“Like you’ll need that,” said Jane. “Don’t share, then. I don’t care.” Not that she had any intention of bringing Elva with her.

The now distant bus lurched off the Old Narrows Road and rocked its way into the centre of Demerett Bridge. Elva didn’t care for buses. They reminded her that sometimes people left you. That Jane might be one of them. It never occurred to her that someone might want to come back.

Jane cut off the road and hopped the fence beyond the ditch. So what if she showed her panties doing it.

“Hey! Where’re you going?”

“None of your beeswax.”

“Rilla said take me right home—”

“Then go, you baby-la-la, get home and start dinner and don’t say!”

Jane was heading in the direction of the monastery but it wasn’t going to be any business of Elva’s as to why.

“I’ll tell her about the milk. I’ve seen you.”

Elva had to yell that to be heard, but it stopped her sister. Stopped her dead in her tracks. Jane turned, eyes wide, teeth set. Uh-oh. Elva had seen that look before.

“You spying little witch! Tell, then! But don’t think I won’t twist your arm off.”

Jane bent Elva’s arm sharply until she cried, but that was the end to it.

“What’ll you do if they find out about the milk?”

At first Jane told Elva to shut her mouth, then, “Someday I’ll make enough to buy a ticket to Halifax, maybe even New York. And never come back. So who cares if they know?”

Her mother had spent a life scrubbing other people’s floors and for what? Never been anywhere. Not Jane. She’d get out of Demerett Bridge. She’d never get on her hands and knees for any man like Rilla did for that Amos Stearns. And she was going to be famous.

“Where will you get money?”

Jane just twirled and tossed and smiled. Like it could be done.

Sure it could, going off to seek your fortune in the big city. Didn’t Elva know someone who did just that?
Gil? So long ago by now that she stopped hoping he’d come back, even if it was more apt to say he was a boy running away from home after everyone said he cut his father’s legs off. Well, not as if Gil held the knife, he was only thirteen at the time, but he might as well have. That’s what Amos and even Gil’s own mother had said, when Gil fell asleep on night watch five years ago, letting the
Meghan Rose
hit that shoal. They had to cut Mr. Barthélemy’s legs off after they got tangled and crushed in the schooner’s rigging. Elva’d miss Jane if she left, but she herself had tried to leave once and the aborted attempt proved to Elva she had no want to go anywhere.

And this was why. Following Jane through the acres of silvery grass, she came to her disappearing place. It was by that porkchop-like lake of salt water behind the town, leaking in from the sea, wrapping itself around and then bleeding off into the foundry’s tar ponds. Along the way, Ostrea Lake paid a call at the shores of the monastery. There, if she lay among the reeds filling the void between the harbour and the lake, ripe with strawberries by early June, dragonflies buzzing ferociously over her head, the sun would melt Elva into sweet dreams, into nothing, into being Jane.

“Won’t Mr. Barthélemy need legs in heaven?”

Spring grass, minty green, already waist high, was brushing Elva’s open fingers.

“Nope. He’s in hell.”

But won’t Gil’s father need them there, too? Elva wondered but didn’t say. They had come to the monastery gates and she asked Jane if it was okay to go in, it being only Friday and not a church day. Jane said, Who cares about a couple of girls, so shut up.

The iron hinges winced as Jane boldly entered the Eye, the centre of the Franciscan order’s compound, the self-proclaimed spiritual epicentre of Demerett Bridge. When most of the seaside town buckled under the 1904 hurricane, coincidentally days after the Brothers condemned the opening of Winnie McClelland’s House of Burlesque as a godless vice the citizens would answer to God for, the eye of the storm passed over the cemetery by the monastery, leaving it untouched. The Franciscans liked to say the Eye of God had blessed the dead as a lesson to the living.

Now you’d think from the way folks still went on about it, and from the look of a town best described as saggy, that the hurricane had only just happened, and not ten years before Elva was born. By the waterfront, wooden sidewalks railed like roller-coaster rides, storefronts disintegrated into windborne straw, and flooding turned streets into soupy canals. Even the bridge across the creek that drained Ostrea Lake into the sea, and for some reason needed to be appended to the name of the town, had been blown away, and never was replaced. The Demerett family, the town’s first, had built the bridge to the grassy knoll by the lake where they liked
to picnic. Rich folks from the olden days, before they got all petty about paying income taxes, did those sorts of philanthropic things, especially if they got their names on a plaque. While they once owned a slew of smart houses behind Commercial Street and along the waterfront, the only Demeretts left in town were enjoying heavenly favour in the Eye.

The other structure unscathed by the storm was that damned theatre, where the evening show with the Fan Fan Girls and Jimmie the Talking Dog went on as scheduled—well, the troupe had come all the way from Toronto and was not to be missed—with patrons ferried for a nickel in a dory through flooded streets. Following fashion, the House of Burlesque would reinvent itself in a few years as a nickelodeon, then as the Towne Theatre, the
e
added for class. No pronouncement from the pulpit was ever made as to what its longevity meant.

The Brothers’ living quarters in the monastery was a reclining two-storey stone house, serving to barricade one side of the Eye. The tar ponds, effluent from Demerett Bridge’s largest, and now strike-bound, employer, the Maritime Foundry Corporation, maker of all things railroad, blackened another. To the south, tombstones were hemmed in by an iron grape-leaf gate. A squat stable, used for storage, completed the rudimentary square.

Jane was well on into the yard. Walked right over graves, she did. Elva tried to dodge the mounds and
said, Sorry, when she couldn’t. She guessed where Jane was going. The legless body with the hole in the head was all anyone in town or at home was talking about, although Elva had no desire to see for herself. She wished Jane didn’t either, but Elva’d thrown her lot in with her sister and she’d follow it through, if she could keep up. Besides, she didn’t want to be the one to face Amos if Jane and Rilla weren’t home when he expected.

Alphonse Barthélemy was to be buried next day in the narrow strip of potter’s field between the cemetery and the tar pond because, as Rilla’s priest had explained, the man was in mortal sin. Saturday was the only day the burial could take place, Father Cértain said, it being an unholy Jew day and good enough for burying bad Catholics. Unfortunately, Alphonse blew his head off after Sunday’s mass, so the corpse was bound in coal sacks from the mill and kept on ice slabs in the stable for over five days.

But that’s where we keep cool the Halifax-bound cheese, some of the Brotherhood had protested to their spiritual authority. To make matters worse, Alphonse had missed, blowing away his jaw, before he was successful with a second shot. His widow couldn’t afford a coffin, and no amount of coal sacks could stop the blood from seeping onto the floor. And everybody knows blood drips from a suicide can be heard from miles away as a warning to everyone else. That pearl of wisdom
came courtesy of Aunt Blanche, who had words of wisdom for all occasions. Jane had to see for herself.