Timothee arrives later. After conferring with the headmaster, he exits Divine Hall and chats with Luela at the curb while Chamberlain directs the boys who are loading Etienne’s belongings into the trunk of the Regent.
“Seems like she just dropped her son off yesterday,” Luela says.
Timothee nods and then turns to Luela to resume their discussion of the funeral arrangements. Luela is not happy with his decision to have her sister cremated.
“Sebolts’ bones need to be somewhere the family can get at them if they want to,” Luela tells Timothee. “That’s how the family sees it.”
“I’ve discussed these plans with Shirley,” Timothee says. “She offered no objection.”
“Shirley might have thought that you were not serious.”
“I assured her I was.”
“I want to see my sister’s body. Shirley and George will, too.”
Timothee nods. “They have a nice chapel at the facility. We could also have a service before the cremation. Will you help plan the service?”
Luela puts on her gloves, noticing the constellation of rust and yellow flowers on the nearby lawn. Flowers and an open casket is how things ought to be done. If Shirley agrees to go along with Timothee’s distasteful plan, she can be the family representative at the service. Luela wants to say she’ll have no part of it. She notices Timothee’s eyes looking toward the dormitory down the hill. Etienne is there in the doorway shaking hands with the headmaster. She doubts Timothee will go down to escort his son to the car. He is not that kind of father.
Luela spots the streaks of gray in Timothee’s hair. Was George correct to say that this older man had exerted undue influence on Kath to get her to marry him? After all, Kath met Timothee when she was still uncertain about whether she could raise her child alone. Luela has always believed she was much more accepting of the marriage than Shirley or George were. Was it a mistake to accept Timothee so quickly into the family? Perhaps her mind is not right today, but she does not like how easily he seems to discard a Sebolt family tradition.
I can’t believe what I’m hearing,” Marcelina Higgins says a week later in the lobby of the cremation facility in Montreal. “We came all this way to see Kath. Why can’t we?”
Other neighbors from the bluff who have traveled from Halifax with Marcelina in a six-vehicle caravan stand nearby. Everyone looks first to Shirley and George and then to Timothee, who is speaking in French with a tall woman dressed in a bright-green suit.
“The manager says they are not allowed to bring out the remains once the chamber is locked,” Timothee tells George and Shirley. “It’s the law.”
“Get the owner out here,” Marcelina says.
“Forget the owner,” someone else says. “Get a constable.”
“And get one straightaway,” Reverend Steptoe adds. “For all we know they have misplaced the body. Or sold it to the government medical doctors.”
When Reverend Steptoe, Clemmond Green, and Dominion Penncampbell begin moving toward the double doors leading to the firing chamber, the employee hurries past them. “I will go in first,” the woman says, as she pushes open the doors. “Stay here, please.”
There is a low grumbling while the crowd waits for her to return.
“All right,” the woman says when she comes out again, “everyone will get a viewing.”
Years ago, when the nice suit Kath had purchased for her first job interviews began to fray, she cut off the buttons and stored them in her jewelry box. For her thirtieth birthday, Timothee surprised her by having the buttons sewn onto a pale-blue suit. The body is now dressed in that suit and stretched out on a long steel table in the chamber. As the crowd approaches the table, a loud gasp rises from several visitors.
“If this is their idea of a cooling board,” the Reverend says, “I am not here for it.”
“They could have at least put her in the coffin the family paid for,” Steppie Caulden says, holding Veronica Teakill’s hand.
“Don’t look like her at all,” someone says.
Reverend Steptoe leads the crowd in the reading of a few Bible verses. One of the women sings a short solo. While the crowd is debating and fussing about how long to remain here, one of Marcelina’s nieces tugs on the front of Marcelina’s dress. “Who is she?” the girl asks.
When the girl asks more insistently, everyone looks at Marcelina. But she seems unable to fashion an answer.
The six-vehicle caravan travels back home from Montreal, stopping at a cluster of roadside picnic benches, where the neighbors quietly eat sandwiches while the children play. When a conversation begins it is low and not about the unsettling incident the group has experienced in the city. It is about the place to which they are returning. A few stilted laughs break out when several neighbors begin a friendly argument about how to characterize Woods Bluff. All nod in agreement about the neighborhoods that make up Woods Bluff: the Hindquarter, Centervillage, and, yes, New Jamaica. And do not forget the Bowl. But there is little agreement about the bluff’s temperament. Is the bluff impish and contrary like a three-year-old? Or is its temperament like a grown-up’s—harsh and angry, with its hard rain and heavy snow steeling its residents for future struggles? Nobody agrees with one man who says the place is as moody as a child when the sky is overcast. The bluff, many say finally, is nurturing. Where else to be on a warm fall day when a lingering evening grosbeak with black-and-white wings can be seen streaking through trees bursting in reds and golds? And at the comment that the best months to be on the bluff are June and September, a chorus of hands rises in agreement.
Luela, still angry with Timothee about his insistence on cremation, had left Montreal before the caravan arrived. The day after it returned, when neighbors come by to tell her about the ride home, their words assure beyond a doubt that her sister’s body is no longer on this earth. The sadness that overtakes her plagues her all through the winter. The following spring, at the picture party, when Marcelina Higgins approaches about having a memorial service for Kath in Halifax, Luela says, “Sorry, Marcelina, but I am nowhere near ready to discuss my sister.”
A week later, however, Luela cannot keep quiet about the item Marcelina has brought with her on a visit. It is something M. T. Everson’s son said he found wedged into the back seat cushion in one of his father’s two cars, which carried the neighbors to the service in Montreal. Luela inspects the oblong button, which has a distinctive polished wood back and a gold-plated front etched with small crescents.
“This has to be a button from the blue suit that belonged to my sister,” Luela says. “I know because I pressed the suit myself before it was put on Kath’s body.”
“What has the world come to?” Marcelina says. “Who the devil would have the nerve to take a button off a deceased woman?”
“Well, who was in the car?” Luela asks.
“The riders changed cars several times on the drive back,” Marcelina says. “It would be near impossible to tell from whose pocket the button fell.”
“But I’ll bet M. T. Everson can tell me who rode in his cars,” Luela says. “Surely he could give me the names of the people.”
“Good luck asking them about that,” Marcelina says. “Them Everson boys got a jitney service to operate. I doubt any of them will tell on a customer.”
Luela puts the button away, barely able to contain her anger. Over the next year, whenever she has guests visiting, she leaves the button in a prominent place in her living room. But not a single former neighbor seems bothered at the sight.
On the afternoon of November 15, 1954, a year after the cremation ceremony, when Marcelina visits, Luela tells her that she has put away the button from the blue suit for good.
“Does that mean you are tired of grieving in the same way?”
“I suppose,” Luela says. “I do know I was tired of harassing people about the button.”
“Are you warming to the idea of having a memorial service for Kath here in Halifax?”
“Not yet.
But I’m ready to give the idea a bit of thought.”
After the visit, Luela learns that Marcelina is planning what she calls “a citizen’s march” from Woods Bluff to city hall to urge the mayor and councillors to stop ignoring the needs of bluff residents. Every event Marcelina plans on the bluff seems merely to be an opportunity to talk about her march. Given the tepid response by people to this crusade, Luela is fearful that Marcelina will turn a memorial service into a recruitment event for the march. So she decides to plan the service herself. Feeling guilty about excluding Marcelina from helping to plan the service, Luela asks her to design invitations for the event.
A few weeks later, Marcelina arrives carrying a box of envelopes already stuffed with invitation letters. Reading one of them, Luela discovers that the invitation contains only a few of the sentiments she had drafted. Mostly the letter talks about the upcoming march.
“I want a small memorial for Kath,” Luela tells Marcelina, “not an invitation to a protest.”
“But the kind of work I do is trying to make things better for everyone,” Marcelina says. “When I was in Montreal, it hurt me to hear my grandniece say she did not know who Kath was. Kath loved the bluff. Probably more than either of us. I’ve said so in the letter. We’ll say so at the memorial. It will be good for the children. They will hear about her from her old neighbors and we will say that Kath would be happy that we are trying to get things to change on the bluff.”
Marcelina takes a bite out of a haddock cake, looking at Luela as if not liking the silence. “There are two hundred invitations here,” she says, wiping crumbs from her chin. “It’s going to cost plenty if you have to print everything again.”
Luela watches Marcelina take a sip of iced tea, her legs crossed at the ankles, her neck and wrists burdened with the clunky turquoise and faux-silver jewelry women in their forties and fifties are fond of wearing these days. Now that Kath has passed, Marcelina has been going around giving Kath credit for the colorful houses on the bluff. But before Kath died, Marcelina took credit for that. And if Marcelina or anybody else believes Kath spent a second of her life in Montreal missing the bluff, they are surely wrong. Once Kath moved away, her thoughts moved away, too.
“I’m sorry,” Luela says, putting the letter back into the envelope. “I want invitations that honor Kath. These do not.”
Near the end of winter, Marcelina presents an idea that Luela listens to without a hard face.
The upcoming Tenth Anniversary Splash of June Memory Celebration will present an excellent opportunity for a small half-hour ceremony in Kath’s honor. Fund-raising for the celebration has been going very well. No doubt, the event will be well attended. There is even a gospel group coming up from Philadelphia.
Luela likes the idea and writes a note about her sister, which Marcelina includes in the invitations that go out at the beginning of March. By the middle of April, Marcelina notices a worrisome trend. Not a single person from New Jamaica has returned the RSVP card included in the invitation.
Called to Shirley and George Sebolt’s house on April 14, Marcelina finds a tall stack of invitations on the coffee table. They are all from folks in New Jamaica.
“Serves you right that nobody over here is attending,” George Sebolt tells Marcelina. “You have been disrespecting this neighborhood for years.”
“I have not,” Marcelina says. “Have I, Shirley?”
Instead of answering, Shirley picks up the unopened invitations and puts them into a paper bag. “My neighbors gave me their invitations because they wanted me to know they had no desire to disrespect my daughter,” she says, handing the bag to Marcelina. “You know we were planning to honor her. But now, as I told my neighbors, we may not be able to attend the picnic this year anyway. George may need an operation on his hip at the end of May.”
Marcelina accepts the envelopes, looking exasperated. “What can I do?” she asks.
“That’s easy,” George says. “Talk to more of your neighbors over here.”
Marcelina leaves New Jamaica confused and frustrated. To an outsider, seeing the colorful houses all over the bluff, a visitor might think the area is a unified community. But if this stack of returned invitations is any indication, in some ways the bluff has never been so divided. When her aunt Oneresta was doing community work, she had only to consult with the community council, a few captains of the bluff, and the ladies club if matters were severe. But these days, if anyone wants to do anything important in the community, they also must consult the Centervillage Business Council and several young people’s groups. Everybody on the bluff, it seems, wants to question every decision she makes on behalf of the community. She listened when residents of New Jamaica said they wanted more than one representative on the Woods Bluff Community Council. It was just that she didn’t agree.
The next week, Marcelina visits every home in New Jamaica. Not a single complaint she hears makes sense to her. Except one—moving the picnic to Nobody’s Acre. It makes sense because Nobody’s Acre abuts the Hindquarter, Centervillage, and New Jamaica. A neutral spot if there ever was one.
The fund-raising Marcelina has been doing for her enrichment program is also going well—so well that the classes are now being taught by paid teachers. Since Kath Sebolt is being honored at this year’s picnic, the children are once again doing the project Kath taught a year ago. This afternoon in the church basement, Marcelina has to fight back tears as she turns the pages in the scrapbooks the children have been filling with poems and writing and drawings about Sierra Leone. Marcelina hands one of the teachers a pack of letters that have come to the bluff from children at a school in the distant village of Halifaxship.
“For their lesson today, let’s have our children write back,” Marcelina tells the teachers.
Marcelina carries an armload of letters to the post the next day, noticing that each letter has a return address that says Halifax. But folks on the bluff don’t really feel they are a part of Halifax. Perhaps there might be a bit of pride, however, in a name that unites the neighborhoods we have. Of course, New Jamaica residents will not want to say they live in the Hindquarter, and Hindquarter folks will not want to say they live in New Jamaica. What we need is a name that folks from all parts of the bluff will agree to.
The following Sunday, with a hard rain beating the windows of Basinview Baptist, Marcelina stands in the third pew, asking the congregation to consider a proposal: a single name for the entire bluff. “Something better than Woods Bluff,” she says.
“What name though?” someone asks.
“Africaville.”
Many in the congregation ponder and then nod their heads, but no one says outright they are behind the idea. Several days later, the postman attends a meeting of the Woods Bluff Community Council carrying a letter addressed to Oneresta Higgins in Africaville. In his presence Marcelina opens the envelope, which has no return address. Inside are three blank pages.
“I cannot deliver mail to an address that doesn’t officially exist,” the postman says. “I could lose my position.”
After he leaves, Marcelina advises the men and women on the council how to modify the return address on the letters. “You should still write Halifax, Nova Scotia,” Marcelina says. “Just write the new name on a line above that.”
A week later an envelope with Africaville written on the front is delivered to Gussie Mills. Gussie keeps the insurance bill inside but gives Marcelina the envelope. Marcelina shows the envelope to Oneresta. But, having had another stroke, Oneresta is too confused to comprehend.
Few of the neighbors who see the letter are impressed. One letter got through. So what? The next ones may not.
But over the next few weeks more letters appear with the new name, including one that is placed in the mailbox of the Sebolt house. It is a letter Marcelina has sent while traveling. But it is not addressed to Luela.
At the Splash of June Memory Celebration of 1955, Marcelina passes around other letters that have made it to the bluff wi
th only an Africaville address. One of Marcelina’s nieces makes the honorary first visit to the picture board. The crowd watches the young girl tack up the map Kath helped her draw of Sierra Leone. But they burst into applause when she adds, below the drawing, a posted, unopened envelope addressed to Kath Sebolt, 68 Dempsey Road, Africaville, Nova Scotia.
Part Three
Crowing
Lyons and Crows
Burlington, Vermont, November 1961
Why the hard face?” Luela asks Etienne as she exits the taxi in the driveway of his house. “Aren’t you happy to see your aunt Luela?”
“Yes, I am happy to see you,” Etienne says.
Waiting for her change, Luela notices that Etienne has put on a few pounds and grown a beard since she saw him at the Splash of June picnic more than six years ago. The tribute to his mother had already concluded when he drove his motorcycle onto Nobody’s Acre. His hand bandaged from a motorcycle mishap, he seemed mature as he greeted the attendees, most of whom seemed elated that he had come to the celebration. “Pop wants me to go to college in Montreal,” Etienne had told her later at the house. “But I’m going to school in America. It’s going to be a flat-out nosebleed.”
The sweatshirt that says WESTERN NEW HAMPSHIRE SWIMMING testifies that Etienne achieved that goal. In the threadbare pullover, he walks with hunched shoulders ahead of Luela along the brick path through a narrow tunnel of snow. Luela’s steps are careful. She is annoyed at Etienne’s grandmother, Claire, and does not want the distraction to cause her to lose her footing.
Other than his father, Claire is the only family member Etienne writes to regularly. The last letter Luela received from him arrived several years ago during his last year of college. She was surprised to get a call last week asking if she was interested in joining Claire and her husband, Jean-Yves, for a get-together down in Vermont with Etienne and his wife. She hesitated even after Claire offered to arrange a hotel room and any transportation she might need while she was in Burlington. She agreed to come only after learning that Etienne and his wife had a new baby. Luela had gone along with Claire’s idea to let her arrival be a surprise to Etienne. However, the look on Etienne’s face when he opened the taxi door was not surprise. It was shock.
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