Miss Elva (6 page)

Buttons came in the orange crate from a mating that bred an off-white mongrel with brown paws and three black daubs down his chest. Jane adored him and carried him everywhere even when Buttons grew too big. He suffered the indignity with a fierce devotion. Along with Jane’s temper, they were a force best not confronted.

He died in a coal mine was all Rilla ever said about Jane’s father. Amos was more forthcoming.

“Died in a mine? My goddamn shitey ass! That girl’s old man could have been any one of a hundred fuckers, black, white, red, Christ, who knows? It’s not like your old lady was particular.”

Nor could Rilla afford to be. With a girl to feed, Amos’s attentions may not have been wanted, but the alternative for an aging whore, albeit not yet out of her twenties, with a kid, was starvation. Initially, their
business dealings were perfunctory. Amos hated the crawling filth and lack of privacy in the flophouse, so he made the fuck quick, Jane holding Buttons, crouching behind a towel tacked from the rafters, listening while he grunted hurriedly through his satisfaction on top of her mother. More than that, he hated paying for what he believed a man should get for free.

Too bad about the kid, he’d say to Madam when he made his weekly contribution to her “building society,” that Mi’kmaq woman Rilla was a looker. Yes, Jane was a fly in the ointment like they say, or was she? Maybe Madam wanted to move in some new, unencumbered tenant? And that’s how Rilla’s hard-earned talents were had for free, by shifting her and Jane by the tar ponds, away from the prying eyes of snooty churchgoers, no one saying, How come you don’t marry that woman? (As if they would, Rilla not being white.) Room and board for mother and daughter in exchange for, well, you know, and a clean house.

Buttons earned his keep by ridding the cellar of rats, but it wasn’t enough to win affection from a man like Amos. When Amos was sober, he was tolerable. When he drank, Rilla started to exhibit bruises reminiscent of the same type Amos’s wife had. What kept them together was the illusion of free will: Amos could toss out Rilla anytime he wanted, and Rilla could leave when she pleased. When Elva came along, that changed. Getting rid of his whore and another man’s
child was one thing, but his own? Even a child like Elva? Amos was a top man at the foundry. He had a position. And men like him had to honour their bastards. That’s just what you did. Overnight, Rilla and her girls were permanent, and the boozing, and bruising, worsened.

Jane had enough sense to keep Buttons away from her mother’s man, but she was wilful, and it was only a question of when those wills would collide. After a Saturday night in town, Amos staggered back to his house on the other side of the ponds, waking Rilla to find her monthly curse had ruined her. Goddamn you! Okay then, there were other ways for a man to let off steam.

At the first of Rilla’s cries, Buttons flew off Jane’s bed and into the hall, barking and scratching at Rilla’s door.

I told you to keep that dog out of the house, Amos muttered, Rilla saying: No Amos please Amos don’t Amos, it’s not the girl’s fault.

He flung open their door.

Jane gathered up her dog and pulled him to safety. Buttons saw the fierceness from Amos as a threat and wormed free, catching Amos in the hand.

Who could remember in what order what happened next? Jane struck by Amos? Buttons viciously attacking his hand? Rilla trying to drag her daughter out of harm’s way? Did it matter? No one would forget how it all ended.

Snapping and barking, Buttons went down the stairs firmly clutched by neck and tail. Should have done this a long time ago, Amos was saying as if it were a decision to clean out the back shed.

Jane was all flailing arms and legs and, No! no! no! Fighting against Rilla with a strength so uncommon in a child that Rilla fell against the stair railings, breathless, knocked helpless as Jane threw herself on Amos.

Jane would never forget, Rilla did nothing after that to save Buttons.

She and Amos knocked and butted their way out the front door, scratching gravel across the road to the tar ponds. Ah fuck, yelled Amos when the dog bit him again, and he heaved the dog into the air. Buttons, twisting and yelping, fell into the muck and, struggling, quickly sank up to his neck.

Damn you, you little bitch. Amos pulled the girl off him. You want him that much? Upending her, he doused her in the pond.

My hair! she screamed, pulling at his clothes.

Rilla, following out on the porch, was all, Amos! Amos, please!

Shut it, you little bitch, and down Jane went again, coughing and sputtering.

But she’s just a little girl, her mother said quietly. Buttons barked helplessly from his grave.

When Jane’s hair, her beautiful hair, was thick and clumpy from the tar, so ruined that Rilla would have to
shave it off in the morning, Amos dragged her back across the road. He snapped off his belt and bolted Jane to the front porch.

“There you sit! Goddamned tar. I’ll never get the stink off me.” Then, “You leave her be,” he snarled to Rilla, pushing past, “if you don’t want her in next to it.”

Rilla, knowing full well the truth of Amos’s warning, did nothing as her man continued his rant, tossing around pots in the summer kitchen, looking for soap to clean up with.

If the intent was a quick end for the dog, it did not happen. Buttons howled pitifully under the stars, trapped at the neck. Jane worked herself into such a state that when she could no longer scream, no longer cry, she vomited dryly, refusing to allow Rilla to put her arms about her.

Around dawn, Gil and Dom’s father happened by with his rifle on his way home from rabbit hunting. He knew Amos. Not much of a Christian. Didn’t care for Amos’s highfalutin ways when he was sober, his mean streak when in the jug. Alphonse saw Jane tied to the porch, Amos’s whore sitting beside her.

He acknowledged Jane. She was mute, doubled over at the belt, trembling. The dog was too far out, panting, too gone to save. Only one thing left to do. The humane thing. He nodded. You couldn’t tell between the shot and the sound that came from Jane.

Sure, she was all sweetness and light now, getting into
Rilla’s dress, but Elva’d seen Jane when she thought no one was watching, stare at those ponds too, that peculiar empty look in her eyes. Real empty. Dead empty. Like something had been eaten away inside, maybe from all that tar. Whenever Elva saw that in Jane, she wondered if Mr. Barthélemy should have put her out of misery too.

Rilla was half right. It was Gil who knew the clock fixer. They were coming up together from the beach, striding through those distant fields towards the cemetery on that unusually mild spring day. Let me see, Jane said, joining Elva by the open window. He’s taller than Gil, Elva noticed even though they were on the other side of the ponds. Well, if they were heading that way, Jane said she must be late and raced out of the room. Speed was the easiest way to lose Elva.

Rilla was somewhere between here and Raven River, and since the strike, there hadn’t been any boarders, Amos not exactly the credit-extending kind. The screen door in the summer kitchen had banged, so Amos was back from the shitter, sprawled now in front of the parlour radio. He was dozing, wrapped in a blue cigarette haze, drifting off to white men pretending to be black, which Elva thought was foolish ’cause who’d want to be any colour but white, singing about mammies, which was just plain foolish.

“Wait for me!” Elva called as she hobbled into the road. The cemetery in the Eye of the monastery was not
far but there was all that grass clogged with breaching dunes. It made for hard going.

“Can’t you leave me alone even for a minute?” Jane yelled back at her, but when she saw that her sister was determined she slowed grudgingly to a trot. Elva didn’t know why she was so fired up to hurry. Rilla didn’t want them to go and Amos sure wouldn’t like it if he found out, and Elva said so.

“If you’re going to yabber, I’ll run, I will.”

So Elva kept quiet, tried to keep up with Jane and wondered what the clock fixer’s name was.

The gate was already open. They’d have to cross through the cemetery proper to get to the strip of pauper’s field against the pond. Once there, they hid behind a polished maroon obelisk to one of Demerett Bridge’s founding fathers.

“Get back, they’ll see you,” said Jane, but Elva wasn’t touching the tombstone ’cause she saw cobwebs. Spiders can nest under your skin if you get bitten in a graveyard and then one day they’ll be so many they’ll crawl out your nose. Everyone knows that, and then they’d have to call her Spider Elva.

“Don’t be so stupid,” said Jane.

Apart from John Ingram, the sexton who for a price would dig even a suicide’s grave, they watched Dom and his mother, Jeanine, bury father and husband. But where’s Gil, his dog, and that clock fixer?

The unnaturally short corpse was trucked to the
grave on the back of a squeaking cart. Dom and his mother resembled the long granite faces tucked underneath the eaves on the post office building, holding up the roof. John gingerly lowered the canvas package into the pit. Stiff, the dead man fit in nicely, but John had to avoid touching the head. Still dripping.

“You’re green,” Jane said.

It all went to remind Elva of that other grave, and it was just like that Jane to act like it didn’t exist. Elva couldn’t forget. She started wiggling her toes. That was Rilla’s home remedy for a poor stomach, not having any money for drugstore physics. Guess if you were wiggling your toes, you weren’t thinking about throwing up. Wasn’t working for Elva.

Beyond the tombstones, past the grape-leaf bars of the gates, the fields of spring seagrass, the black pond and the sea were quickly disappearing. Its coming reminded Elva of something she did when a drawing wasn’t right, blotting out the scene, like this fog did, with a blue-grey foam. It was moving fast, already cold on her face and the inside of her nose. Elva wondered what it would be like to start over. Really start over. God drawing you all fresh again, getting you right this time. She pulled her sweater about her tightly.

That other grave was down by the beach where the Kirchoffer Place road turns from slate to sand. It was a small one. Only big enough for a bird, a sandpiper. Elva’s sandpiper. Murdered by Jane.

The sandpiper was near dead in the pitch-like ooze when Elva found it, its wings black with tar. So weak, its eyes glassy, beseeching Elva, the poor bird meekly allowed her to carry it to the summer kitchen. You’ll be better in no time, she said, fashioning a hospital bed out of a cylinder of Quaker rolled oats by cutting it lengthways and layering it with scraps from Rilla’s sewing basket.

For two days Elva ministered to her patient, swabbing its feathers as best she could, not even leaving it to sleep. When she was not gently rocking the rolled oats box, she was outside turning over rocks and digging for worms and grubs, not knowing if sandpipers ate them, but hoping to entice the poor thing to eat.

It was after one of these forays that she returned to find Jane with the lifeless bird. She had just wrung its neck and there had been enough tar left on the bird to stain her hands.

She carefully laid it back in the oats box.

But I was cleaning its feathers with spirits, look, brown with speckles, right there in my hand, it let me, trembling, watching me, trusting me. Rilla was so angry ’cause I got black on my dress, but I couldn’t let it suffer.

Elva sobbed convulsively, her muddy hands red with cold, wriggling worms falling to the ground.

“It was suffering.” Jane spoke softly and unusually sympathetically. “And so were you. It was right to let it go.” Now that Jesus Christ had no value, that was as close to religious dogma as Jane got.

Even though Jane helped plan an elaborate funeral for the sandpiper, which they buried on the beach with a procession and Our Father, Elva came as close as she ever had to hating her.

The sexton waited expectantly after the last spade of dirt had been smoothed over Alphonse Barthélemy.

“Damn you, John Ingram.” It was softly said by the widow, but a curse nonetheless.

“It’s the Church who makes you pay.” What did he care as long as someone did.

“Pay for unblessed ground? No words of comfort?” She couldn’t stand to look at him, pitying her.

Dom pressed a few coins into the sexton’s hand.

That’s when Jane made her move, stepping out from behind the obelisk, like she wanted to say something to Dom and maybe to his ma. Then from out of nowhere came Gil’s dog, barking, tail wagging, going right for her. Shush, go away! No! Jane fell back, but not before Dom and his mother turned and saw what looked like Jane and Elva playing with a dog.

“You?” Of all folks to see Jeanine Barthélemy in her hour of trial, that half-breed girl from the other side of the tar ponds? It was too, too much.

Jane slowly stepped forward, pushing Elva back from view, yet tightly holding her hand. I’m very sorry for your loss, was all she managed with a stiff and very unnatural curtsy.

Dom’s mother was not a large woman, and seemed as bereft of sap as bleached driftwood. But she was a forceful one. She had held her family together during hardship and want and was stoically determined to force what was left of them through the scandal of this death and into the exalted heights of redemption she was sure Dom’s calling would provide. Come hell or high water.

“Jane’s come to pay respects.” Dom’s eyes shifted awkwardly from his mother to Jane.

Elva’s tightly gripped hand was starting to hurt.

“Her respects? Jesus, Mary and Joseph, she’s not here for that! I know about her kind, like her mother.”

Elva closed her eyes and grit her teeth. She could just imagine what Jane’d have to say to that Barthélemy woman now, the fact she was Gil and Dom’s mother be damned. But Jane said nothing. Just stood there and took it. Elva couldn’t believe it. When she finally dared to look, there was Jane, looking confused, sheet white, like she had her wind knocked out.

That same look had come upon Jane once before. Years ago now, even before that time Dom got real mad about the butterfly. A silly thing really. In other folks, forgotten with time. But not by Elva. Yup. Dom was madder than hell over it, and Elva’d remember that most whenever there was talk about Dom and God.