Africaville

by Jeffrey Colvin

  One mild November day she was delighted to read an advertisement by an elderly couple willing to look after her son during the day, in exchange for a bit of housecleaning. At noon Kath left her other part-time job and was rushing to view the apartment when she was startled by a voice behind her on the street.

  “Excusez-moi, madame.”

  Kath turned to see a man whom she probably would have overlooked even if she hadn’t been in a rush. Timothee Peletier wore one of those fur hats young professional men were fond of wearing with suits, but which Kath thought looked silly. Appearing disoriented, he asked for directions to Javier Street. Only later would Timothee admit he was a draftsman at a construction firm just a few blocks from where they were standing. But his sly grin told Kath he had invented the street name to delay her on the sidewalk. She liked the gentlemanly way he handed her the slip of paper she had dropped, the patient way he stood there shivering as she tugged on her gloves, pretending to be thinking over the matter. Two months later, she moved into his apartment. A year later, they were married.

  Little Omar was barely walking when Kath brought him to Montreal. Timothee was happy to adopt her son, but before the marriage he asked her to change the child’s name. They settled on four names: Etienne Omar George Peletier.

  Girl, why did you buy only peppermint?” Kath asks, peering into the paper bag her sister has tilted toward her. “You know full well butterscotch is my favorite.”

  In the reception area of Arcadia Travel and Leisure, Luela has taken a seat on the bench beside Kath, scooping Etienne’s bomber jacket onto her lap. Inside the bag are shiny red-and-white candies that look like little pillows.

  “Butterscotch cost double, girl,” Luela says. “And don’t look at a gift horse sideways.”

  Kath takes two candies from the bag. “I hope that son of mine is on his best behavior later today,” she says, dropping the candies into her purse.

  “Hope will get you far.”

  “He’s a little sore because I won’t let him go on the school trip with his friends.”

  “Vancouver’s awfully far for a teenage boy to travel without a parent along.”

  “Most of the way is by train, only a few days are by bicycle. But Timothee and I let Etienne go skiing with his friends, what was it, three months ago? Those bandits busted two lamps and broke the legs off a side table at the lodge. I do not want to imagine all the devilment our son would get into in Vancouver.”

  Sucking loudly on a peppermint, Luela looks through the stack of photographs Kath has brought with her. “Eh-tinne doesn’t sound happy about going to the camp.”

  “He doesn’t get to make those decisions.”

  “Now you’re talking sense. Will Eh-tinne be going to that school in the fall?”

  “His name is Eh-ti-enne. Not Eh-tinne. I hope when you talk to him you say his name correctly. And yes, indeed, he will be going to the school in the fall.”

  “When are you going to tell him?”

  “That’s his father’s job. This is all his idea.”

  Luela chews the remnants of her peppermint candy as she traces the initials E. O. G. P. stitched above the right front pocket of Etienne’s bomber jacket. While it may have been Timothee’s idea to send Etienne to a camp run by the private school from which he graduated, it was probably Kath—who brags about the school’s rigorous academics—who filled out the papers to enroll their son there. But why further anger the child who has been a terror since he found out he was adopted? George and Shirley wanted to tell Etienne years ago, but Kath forbade that. You’d think the boy, as inquisitive as he is, would have discovered the papers sooner than last year.

  “He doesn’t like it when we snoop,” Kath says, noticing that Luela has retrieved two movie tickets from the front pocket of Etienne’s jacket.

  “My French is rusty,” Luela says, presenting the tickets. “What does it say?”

  Kath shakes her head and takes a peach-colored compact out of her purse. As she suspected, the small mirror reflects a face that looks as tired as she feels. Timothee should not have let her sleep this morning until after ten. Now they are going to be late getting to Shirley and George’s house. Just spreading the talcum onto her cheeks with the sponge is tiring. Despite her doctor’s disapproval, a cigarette would provide a nice jolt. On the walk here from the hotel she did not need a few puffs to wake her up, since hearing the rattle of a streetcar on Barrington Street gave her a burst of energy. She had never seen such large crowds at the pier. As a teenager she used to dream of boarding an ocean liner to begin a journey with a man she loved. And now she will.

  “I’d like to ask a favor,” Kath says, tossing the compact into her purse.

  “Oh, what’s the trouble now?”

  “No trouble. But when Etienne finishes at the camp, I’d like for him to stay with you.”

  “Didn’t Momma and Daddy ask to take him?”

  “They didn’t ask. They agreed to. But I’m not sure Etienne will like living with his grandparents.”

  “You mean living with George.” Luela hands back the stack of photographs. “Why didn’t his grandparents in Montreal offer to take him this time?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They usually look after Etienne when you and Timothee are traveling.”

  “Do you have reservations about looking after him?” Kath asks.

  “It’s just that the child hardly knows me.”

  “He will if you look after him. You only have to watch your nephew, what, a week and a half? Most of the time we’re away he’ll be at camp.” Kath frowns. “Given the way you’re acting, you’d never know the boy was family.”

  Instead of answering, Luela places the movie tickets into a pocket on the sleeve of Etienne’s jacket.

  “You’ve put the tickets back in the wrong place,” Kath says as Luela zips up the pocket. “He’ll know you’ve been snooping.”

  “I know he will.”

  When Kath turns her head toward the ticket office, Luela really notices for the first time the discolorations bleeding through the powder on her sister’s cheeks. “Oh no, no,” Timothee had said when Luela offered to put the family up with her or at Shirley and George’s place. “We don’t want to be a bother. We’ll get a hotel.” But one of the big shots at the Wales and London helped Luela secure the Bay of Fundy Suite. Luela hoped the hotel’s nice beds and room service would help Kath recuperate after the long car ride from Montreal. Kath will need her strength to get through this afternoon. There will be a few people at the picnic she will be none too happy to see.

  Kiryl Platt called me at the hotel yesterday,” Luela says later, when she and Kath are exiting the travel office.

  Kath halts on the sidewalk, looking at Timothee, who is walking ahead. “What did that boy want?”

  “You don’t have to say it like that,” Luela says. “He was calling to say Chevy’s gotten worse. Could be any day now.”

  “My goodness. I didn’t know.”

  Luela carries Etienne’s jacket. “Kiryl asked if you were coming to the picnic this year,” she says. “He said if you were, he’d try to come by for a brief visit.”

  “I hope you told him to stay at the hospital.”

  “I told him what I knew. I said you would be at the picnic.”

  “Can we talk about something else?”

  “We can as soon as I am finished with this. It is plain to me that Kiryl wants to see you.”

  “Did he mention seeing his nephew?”

  Getting no answer from Luela, Kath starts walking again.

  “You said yourself you want Etienne to get to know where he came from,” Luela says at the crosswalk. “Isn’t that the reason you’re here to attend this year’s picture party?”

  “I meant the old neighbors,” Kath says. “And the relatives who care about him.” Kath looks across the street to the next block, where Timothee is disappearing around the corner. “Kiryl had plenty of chances to see his nephew when Etienne was an infant,
” she says. “Why didn’t he? Can you answer that question?”

  “I believe you know the answer to that question.”

  “I never led Kiryl Platt to believe there was anything between us.”

  “Maybe not between, but probably on his side there was something.”

  “Even if he were angry with me, why did he take it out on his nephew?”

  “If you are still mad about that you need to quit it.”

  Kath grabs Etienne’s jacket out of Luela’s arms. She walks on again, angry with her sister. But she knows she shouldn’t be. For the year and a half her son lived on the bluff, Luela was there nearly every weekend to bathe him and change his diapers. Luela had also been in Montreal last year, cleaning, cooking, and looking after Etienne during the two weeks Kath recuperated after her operation. But had Luela not heard what Kiryl said years ago? That if she had let him escort her around town, she wouldn’t have gotten pregnant out of wedlock, that she would now be a better woman? The nerve.

  As Etienne grew up, if anyone in the family wanted to see him, they had to come to Montreal. As a result, Etienne knew little about the place where he was born. Regret about that is one of the reasons Kath is here today. Despite her anger at Kiryl, she would have made an exception and brought Etienne to Woods Bluff to see his uncle. But Kiryl Platt has never asked.

  And did Kiryl really want her? Or were his advances merely stupid competition with his cousin Omar? No matter. In Nova Scotia, Etienne’s other relatives—the Platts—are few and far between. Chevy Platt is definitely short for this world. Though Kath’s memory is somewhat vague, she seems to recall that Omar appreciated his great-uncle.

  Now Kath gives herself another assignment for this trip home. For the picture party, she will keep all the nasty things she would like to say to Kiryl Platt out of her mouth. She will keep her tongue so that she can begin to repair the estrangement between nephew and uncle. She will do so to honor Omar’s memory.

  I told him to wait at the car,” Kath says to Timothee, when they arrive at the Regent parked at the curb on Barrington Street.

  “Clearly he didn’t listen,” Timothee says.

  “I have three-quarters of a mind to leave without him.”

  “He’s got the car keys.”

  Kath steps close to Timothee. “You didn’t bring the other set?”

  “Didn’t you?”

  “Well, now one of us should go find him.”

  “The boy’s sixteen. I’m not chasing after him.”

  Timothee leans against the car door, rubbing his necktie with his hand. Kath grumbles as she grabs Luela’s arm. “Let’s go see if the little imp went down to the water.”

  Mother and aunt are several blocks away when Etienne saunters up to the Regent. After he takes the car keys, Timothee throws the bomber jacket into Etienne’s chest.

  “Get in the back seat with that snake you had no business agreeing to look after,” Timothee says. “And do not let that creature out of the cage until I or your mother say you can.”

  Etienne climbs into the car without argument. He is quiet in the back seat when Kath and Luela return to the car. But at the curb in front of the drugstore, as soon as his mother and aunt exit and head up the sidewalk, he rolls down the window. “I want a cream soda, a bag of pommes frites, and three hi-fi records.”

  The women continue without responding. When they near the front of the drugstore, Etienne jumps out of the car.

  Timothee rolls down the window. “Where do you think you’re going, captain?”

  “Out here.”

  “Get back in, please.”

  When Etienne doesn’t comply, Timothee gets out of the car. He used to be as skinny as Etienne. But eating the big meals the woman who comes over three evenings a week to cook has caused his waist to spread. “Do you want me to cancel your mother’s trip?”

  “No.”

  “I will do it. And if I cancel your mother’s trip, you will get to go back to Montreal. But you’ll have to forget about that new stereo. And that new bicycle you brought with you will be going away.”

  “You can’t send my bicycle away. You didn’t buy it. Grand-mother did.”

  Timothee steps close to Etienne. He pokes Etienne in his chest with the car keys. Etienne knocks the keys out of Timothee’s hand, and they bounce against the car tire and land on the sidewalk.

  Standing up with the keys, Timothee seems to recognize how tall Etienne has gotten. “I hope you like Saint Richelieu this summer,” he says, “because you may be going there in the fall.”

  “Mother won’t make me go.”

  Timothee laughs and gets back into the car. After Etienne has slid onto the back seat of the Regent, Timothee turns to watch Etienne undoing the latch on the glass cage. “Don’t you dare let that creature out again, captain.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I said so.”

  “Mother’s not afraid of it.”

  “Yes, but your grandmother Shirley might be. And I don’t want any unnecessary trouble when we get over there.”

  The Newcomers

  Who’s to say why white residents began moving out of the eleven houses in the West Slope?

  Some say the decisions began in March of ’38, the month bulldozers began clearing land to double the size of the municipal dump. By December of that year, two houses had been left empty. Three more families moved out in 1940, after logging opened up a passable road that enabled traffic from Centervillage and the Hindquarter to clatter through the West Slope, along the new shortcut to downtown. Some bluff residents say if logging were to blame for the white exodus, the final leaf fell in the autumn of ’42, when the residents of the last two occupied West Slope houses realized that the bare forest gave them a clear view of Centervillage. Center of whose village? Certainly not theirs.

  For a few dollars more than the cost to rent an apartment, Shirley and George Sebolt rented a whole house in the West Slope. Only three other families from the Hindquarter joined them there. The remaining houses became occupied by families who arrived in Halifax from the Caribbean islands. Most new families attended Basinview Baptist and all painted their houses in bright colors, like the houses on the rest of the bluff. But the new bluff residents were quick to correct anyone who suggested they lived in Centervillage or the Hindquarter.

  The newcomers considered the deal good, even though they had to use their own funds to finish installing the indoor plumbing. “Our rental agreements give us the option of purchasing our homes,” they pointed out. And buoyed by the promise of new services by the city government, many of the new arrivals wanted to call their neighborhood New Halifax. But across the bluff, and even downtown, that area of the bluff became New Jamaica.

  Following a brief rainstorm, the lights in Shirley and George’s house have been flickering all morning. Afraid the electricity will go off altogether, Shirley plans to serve iced tea and cake to Kath and her family on the small back patio.

  “Get up and move over to this chair,” Shirley tells George, who is stretched out on a pinewood lounge chair on the patio, drinking a cocktail of prune and apple juice.

  “Why?”

  “The back on this one keeps slipping. Do you want our company sitting in a broken chair?”

  “If the chair’s good enough for me to sit in, it’s good enough for company.”

  Shirley wipes the matching pine table with a damp cloth, inhaling the bitter-orange scent of her blooming sweetspire bush. She likes it when the air is thick with that fragrance and the smell of her flowering plants, all confined to pots. Her knees are up to the task of working a garden, but not her arthritic shoulder.

  “Are you going to move or aren’t you?”

  “I will in a minute.”

  Shirley watches George take another long draw on his cigarette and then marches off, grumbling. Inside the house, Shirley searches the hallway closet, looking for a present to give her grandson. But there are only nicked ashtrays, imitation Tiffany lamps, and embroid
ered hotel towels. Nothing suitable. But she does locate the pack of double-D batteries she has been looking for all morning. What in the world could be keeping Luela and the others? she wonders, pressing the last battery into the back of her portable AM radio. It is well past one o’clock. She and George could have taken the bus to Marcelina’s party. But Kath had insisted on giving them a lift. Too much longer and she will miss the children’s singing program. Hearing those young voices is always a joy. The wait may be worth it though. Their grandson has not been on the bluff since he was a baby. George would never admit it, but he also wants to spend time getting to know his grandson.

  “I’d like to give this to our grandson,” Shirley tells George on the patio. “Do you mind?”

  George picks up the striped maple candle box Shirley has placed on the pine table. It is one of the few items passed down from his grandfather Kipbo. Shirley has applied wax in the small grooves to help the top slide back easier. He always did that.

  “The closet’s full of a whole heap of whatsits,” George says. “Give the boy some of them.”

  “You mean the hotel junk? I doubt your grandson will want any of that.”

  “That boy won’t appreciate whatever you give him.”

  “He appreciates that brand-new bicycle.”

  “You don’t have to compete with his other grandmother.”

  With the box resting on his lap George stretches out again on the lounge chair, hearing Shirley’s house slippers flap as she leaves the patio.

  When George opens his eyes, he realizes Shirley has carried off his cigarettes. Just as well. An hour from now the next cigarette is bound to taste sweeter. Before the operation to dislodge a gnarled growth in his trachea, he worried his raw cough meant trouble with his lungs. He once thought having a lung ailment would help him understand his younger daughter better. She knocked him dumb as a doorstop years ago, when she brought Timothee home and announced they had gotten married. “This is the thanks your mother gets for taking care of your child while you finished school?” he said to Kath. “You don’t bother to invite her to your wedding? Or even tell her you’re getting married. What madness has overtaken you?”