George & Rue

by George Elliott Clarke

  George was overly confident in his crook abilities because of his proven skill at gambling, another vice he’d acquired in that assembly of thieves, thugs, rapists, and triggermen otherwise known as the army. He forgot that a brown-skinned hood, even if staying out of trouble, is bound to provoke suspicion from police. But George continued his theft spree blithely.

  Then, after three months of success, a Montreal police cruiser pulled up alongside George, two officers leapt out and, without even a “bonsoir,” frisked him roughly. The constables retrieved, from the aw-shucks persona of the dishwasher, a jeweller’s hammer, a screwdriver, and a flashlight, tools not associated with the scrubbing of nightclub glasses and not credible for Georgie to explain in that context. Charged with carrying burglary tools, George fell into still deeper trouble when a search of his room on Atwater Street excavated goods impossible for a humble dishwasher to afford, including a $4,000 fur coat, which George claimed a dancer had given him for safekeeping. It was very inconvenient for his alibi, however, that the dancer could not be found because she was, he said, abroad in Egypt.

  Unable to prove his innocence, George pulled three months in jail—one month for the tools, two months for the fur coat—and went to Bordeaux Prison on the outskirts of Montreal. Bordeaux was not as relaxing as the eponymous wine, but it was just as ruddy, a boutique, Gothic prison, with massive double doors as implacable as a drawbridge. To be interred therein was to vanish from public care, consciousness, and conscience. George’s bed was a mat; his cellmate was a rat as big and toothy as a dog; his toilet was a bucket; his heating was a radiator that gurgled and pinged but never felt warmer than an ice cube; his blanket was a Salvation Army gift but as thin as the pages of their gift Bible. Still, George enjoyed the Salvation Army troops because they’d speak English with him. The French-speaking guards were really no better than molesters and would deny him food if he couldn’t pronounce J’ai faim like a French-Canadian. But the Frenchy prisoners were worse. He got beat and pound on, beat and pound on, morning, noon, and night, in the mess hall and in the exercise yard. If he hadn’t fashioned himself a blackjack—yard rocks stuck into a sock—he’d've been ground beef for everyone and everyone’s blood pudding—what your anus looked like afterwards.

  His Majesty’s Bordeaux-on-the-Rocks Prison was a newsreel of handcuffs, aspirin, mint-flavoured cough drops, child-size cells of solitary confinement, meals of dry brown bread and cups of green-slime rainwater, sounds of inmates’ hacking coughs in the ricocheting metal and tile floors of the freezing nineteenth-century jail, yellow phlegm he brought up way too often, the piss-reek of the cell, roaches gnawing away at law books, the chunky sound of the prison smithy hammering repairs into steel chains and the clanky sound of the cons who had to wear them like perverse jewellery. The dreadfullest sounds was heard in the penal colony on holidays: coughs and cries followed by choking and gurgling. Tears sliding down like falling stars. Suicides by hanging, or by slashing wrists with homemade shivs, razors. Prison made Hell look good.

  Commandments were whims: “A bad attitude says you get nothing, or says you get hurt.” Any sly inmate was said to be “a chess player with a checkered future.”

  Under such conditions, George could not even dream of asking Blondola for her hand. All his cash was gone as quickly as it had been won. He wondered how she’d feel about his being a jailbird. He just had to generate some cash.

  Once free, George got took on as a chauffeur by the fiftyish, cadaverous, bow-tied Benny Parole, a man he’d known at Le Sphinx. Parole had scads and wads of money from his boîts de nuit and his casket-supply business. He had “Georges” drive his several cars to strange destinations to pick up “deliveries.” Eventually, Parole sent Georges on a mission where he had to back a new car, its trunk lid open, into a warehouse, to receive a box. Georges felt a heavy weight loaded into the trunk. He drove off, but he was nervous, then heard the sirens behind him before he saw the cops in his rear-view mirror. He swung the car into the alleyway brick side of a building. The trunk top flipped up and George leapt out the car and saw a man’s body with a bullet hole in the forehead. Georgie jumped on a train to Halifax—in the dark damp and Haligonian drizzle of April 1946. He scooted and skedaddled southeasterly down to what he prayed would be lucrative alleys, personable alleys, comfy slums.

  XIV

  IN HALIFAX, the end of the war meant a new, if milder, Depression. The great naval port thrived on war but withered and hibernated between conflicts. Canada’s navy, the third-largest on earth, was being scrapped, while soldiers and sailors were turning into students and fathers and relocating to the meccas of Toronto and Montreal, where factory wages could buy washers, televisions, and toasters. So when Georgie tried to find work, there was none for a black boy. Yes, he could shine shoes—again; he could carry bags—again; he could wash dishes—again. But he craved better. He tried to get on Haligonian docks stevedoring, but nothin doin for a Negro—Battle of the Atlantic hero or not. Nobody wanted his malt, half-Injun face on their payroll. Shit! He’d show up at the Seamen’s Union Hall, put his name in for a job, then wait all day, among icy faces and an icy silence, to be called for a task. Everyone else in the hall would be hired to unload one vessel or another, but never George.

  Slowly, he began to appreciate that his talents, such as they were, were best suited for wholesome, unquestioning farm labour. In such employ, as at Bezanson’s farm, he could work alone, in the open air, savouring smells of wildflowers and blossoms, savouring the feeling of his muscles pitching hay or stooking apples or leading oxen. He enjoyed the powerful honesty of pure labour, agricultural work. But he didn’t want to return to Bezanson’s barn.

  He studied the gigantic map of Canada that covered one wall in the Seamen’s Union Hall, squinting especially at the rosecoloured Maritimes. But he’d had enough of Nova Scotia, and he couldn’t bear the idea of little flinty, splinter-sized Prince Edward Island. He wouldn’t return to Montreal anytime soon either: it was a burgh of cops and jail. He hit on a different future: to ask Blondola to marry him and accompany him to—to Fredericton. It was far enough from Three Mile Plains to suggest they’d moved up in the world but not so far as to make it impossible to visit. George figured he could work as a labourer in the city proper but do small farming outside. Too, he’d have a new life: no one’d know him; he’d know no one.

  Now George packed up his suitcase, and caught the train to Windsor. When he saw Blondola again, he could hardly credit her supreme beauty. She had blossomed; she had matured; now an overly pretty sixteen-year-old, the ex-milkmaid had become a darling voluptuous, ripe woman. George was nervous to stand before her in his now patchy army uniform to entice Blondola to come away with him. No letter had gone from him to her in three years, though he had spent months in two prisons and though he had failed to secure serious money.

  Yet, from Blondola’s point of view, George did look roguishly handsome, and he had been to London and he had seen war; he had seen Buckingham Palace; he had seen the rubble of the House of Commons. He could describe for her places and experiences she had only heard about on the radio. Compared to all her other suitors—the stick-in-the-mud, cowboy-booted bullshitters of Windsor Plains—George was a living cosmopolitan. He even knew a few French phrases (thanks to Bordeaux) and a bit of the Bible (thanks to the Salvation Army). The ex-farm worker, ex-soldier (ex-con) who seemed unafraid of either work or death, who could utter charming, dashing French, and who stood tall in his patched uniform, was certainly more marriageable than the dairy dudes and uncouth drunkards who constituted the other choices. Too, Blondola loved the notion of wedding a veteran.

  Polishing his war record and omitting his prison ones, Georgie sweet-talked the impressionable, flattered Blondola into coming with him to see the rest of the world—or at least Fredericton, N.B. That homey town with no Coloured slum. George believed she’d teach him “terror don’t have half the force of love.”

  Blondola accepted his proposal after a decent interval of
hesitation just to heighten Georgie’s interest. They married in the African Baptist Church at Three Mile Plains. Rufus was not invited—nor did he attend or send greetings. It was a splendid spring day. Blondola wore a white gown and a crown of apple blossoms. George’s army uniform was newly patched and freshly pressed. Blondola’s parents gave her away, but neither looked very pleased with her choice of groom. Still, they could brag that George had been to London, even if he hadn’t met the King, and he did speak French, though no one around could say how good or bad it was. As for the patches on his uniform, they were forerunners of the medals he would one day truly earn.

  The newlyweds boarded a steam train that wept out goodbyes to the Annapolis Valley as it cried into Digby. There, they boarded the ferry for Saint John and watched, in the romantic sunset, the boat’s white wake turning golden as they left Nova Scotia.

  Their marital night was sumptuous. Blondola, sweetly still virgin, wriggled so much it was hard for George to convince her just to clasp him. They were both wet: everything about them—their faces, their chests, their thighs, their sexes—everything was shimmering. They were as wet as newborn infants and practically as pure. George felt new, that he was—they were—blessed. At last.

  XV

  THE SEAT of York County, situated at the junction of the Saint John River and the Nashwaak River, and bridging both, in the southwest centre of the province, Fredericton, The Celestial City, was ivory drunkenness and false British accents perfected in lumbercamps. It had tried to simulate Boston, Mass., but had ended up emulating Bangor, Maine, a distinct letdown.

  Rive sud was mansions, government, elmed and lilac’d streets. But Eatman Avenue, on the north side of the Saint John River, in Barker’s Point, was where most Coloureds lived: a place of huts, cops-and-robbers, lumber mills, and railway yards. Here the Ku Klux Klan clucked and conclaved occasionally. The area was named for Lieutenant Thomas Barker, an ex-Yankee and ex-con who landed in 1783 and built a house with iron rings on the walls to hold slaves. From Eatman Avenue, where George and Blondola Hamilton came to dwell, it was common for black boys to stroll with brown girls down to the river to glance at the Gothic and Georgian mansions of the burghers on Waterloo Row and to slingshot stones at the silver-roofed legislature.

  But George liked this little city, where his jokes, his labour jobs done cheerfully, and his happy-go-lucky personality seemed to win him neighbourly regard. Also, he was close to the country in Barker’s Point, where limited farmland was available. George thought he might come to plant an acre of potatoes, keep a patch for strawberries, and own a couple of maple trees and sixteen hundred bees visiting hundreds of flowers to make honey a salary. He dreamt of one hundred and sixty apple trees, fifty-two fat cows and pigs, to heap up capital in pre-biblical, antediluvian ways. The spot was fertile because of April flooding of the Saint John River, which was thick with trout, salmon, and perch. Here too, on the outskirts of the city, butterflies joshed in assembly, their wings like maps of delight. Geo could enjoy the abundant, soft brains of raspberries. He planned a crop of blueberries and blackberries, also onion, garlic, cucumber, tomatoes, and anything else that could bring the best of Three Mile Plains and Bezanson’s Farm back to his nostalgic stomach. He listened to Blondola sing in that shack a man’d sold him for seventy-five dollars. Half-fallen-down, with tarpaper shingles. A small shack with a garden of sorts, a scrawny hen or two.

  Raspberry wine, sweet, sweet kisses—

  You’re the well my water misses.

  And they got a reddish cat named Dog.

  This outset was a beaut. Blondola loved G. so much, she brought him coffee every morning, in bed. Every morning for how many months—at least six months—she was so much doting on him. And the coffee wafted a lush aroma.

  At night, Blondola was a gold seam, a perfumed gold seam. Or she wore Elizabeth of Hollywood’s Great Date blouse, in Virgin White—a perfect thrill for her hubby. Blondola said, “Oh, Jawgee, be sweet, sweet, sweet.” He could take her like he could take a sip of brandy.

  They lived as one, out of a black iron frying pan. It was their wealth, their communion, their experience of time at its fullest.

  Blondola asked, “Why shouldn’t we be happy? Who don’t have molasses, matches, moose meat, and milk?” Why couldn’t they enjoy rice and beans, that chapter and verse of the Negro Bible? One day, later, they’d add sausage and lobster.

  Weekends they heard saints who played fiddles, angels who played harmonica, and George participated as one of the latter. All those frenzied spiritual tunes were played seraphically, devilishly, by Yours truly, George. Roach would play fiddle and Mrs. Roach would play guitar. And everyone kept time right perfect.

  George knew he had to stay out of jail for the sake of his newly bride. If he had to push through suffocating snow to do woods work, to go work on trees, or if he had to ford deep snow to look at traps (and snow always at least a foot deep), there was still love in his gasping and the sweating. When there was money, he paid, with dignification, for a pound of this, a gallon of that.

  In early December, George went into the woods to work for a Coloured man, Cy O’Ree, a fortyish oreo with a face like a grave and a smell like a swamp. George felt so unexpectedly blessed. He really wanted to be settled down, a sombre citizen, watch kiddies turn out much better than he had. He was loving to his wife, loving and loving, and he’d give anyone the shirt off his back—if he hadn’t already stolen it off their clothesline.

  Feelin so uncommonly good, Georgie found out where Rue was floppin in Halifax, then sent him a postcard of Fredericton’s Green, with its statue of Robbie Burns, invitin his brother to come on up for a visit sometime. Then he went even deeper into the woods to raise cash for his excellent wife’s Christmas.

  XVI

  EJECTED from Googie’s haven and Purity’s arms just as the war was ending, in May 1945, Rue drifted. He see-sawed along Halifax’s staggered, terraced streets like a standard drunkard. He snooped around, scrounged up gigs. He hung out and gambled. He bobbed up and down the tilting, sliding streets so much, it was a miracle his posture didn’t droop. He flopped down nights in boiled-cabbage-dank three-storey wooden boxes girded by three-foot-high weeds.

  Times, Rue ducked into cinemas and studied Westerns that always showed the same crises: whisky that burned light like it was kerosene; an indigo locomotive ploughing through horses too slow to evade an obscene liquidation so that their teeth, legs, hooves, bellies exploded into pieces upon the shredding impact; black blood spewing against many white shirts; flies flocking to dead pale mouths; bullets dining, takeout style, on fat guts; smiles shattered by hard fists; the stench of rotten English trapped in a handlebar-moustache. Always satisfying violences. Two shows for ten cents was not too much to ask of Halifax.

  Finally, though, Rue’d had all he could stomach of the peace-depressed city. Here there be too much liquor that killed, too much battery acid thrown into jealous eyes. When the King’s three-cent postage-stamp face ferried a postcard from Fredericton to Halifax, featuring Georgie babbling about picking French apples and English pears from hundreds of fruit trees, Rue figured there must be pockets ripe for picking in Fredericton.

  December 1946. Right after his twenty-first birthday. After barging into Georgie’s tiny shack on Eatman Avenue, a replica of The Three Mile Plains abode, Rue eased into tippling backyard concoctions, and smoking, and just feeling evil. Still, he was impressed by the tidy two-room house and trim family Georgie’d concocted. True: George’s little home reminded him unpleasantly of the now-incinerated homestead back in Three Mile Plains (it was, for example, cold, drafty, with inconsistent supplies of firewood and food), but it was warm with blankets, kisses, and coffee, and fresh and airy with humming and harmonica. Clearly, Georgie had lucked out. Too, Blondola was such an exasperating beauty that Rufus had to remind himself frequently that she was off-limits, being his sister-in-law. When there was cash in the house, there was beer to drink and homemade pound cake galore—some soft, mois
t, sweet cake. Amen. Rue could see that Georgie was poor, but. But there was a tinge of joy in that rude household.

  Rufus imposed himself on a stove-side, second-hand sofa thrust into the front room. He was prepared to loaf, to eat and drink as haphazardly as fate provided, to plot piano gigs and casual thefts. George made room for Rufus in his tiny house, because they were brothers. But Blondola always cut her eyes at Rue—that grown man who wouldn’t work a lick for no one, but just lay about, sucking on a beer or munching on her cake.

  Rue sure didn’t feel like slavin for anyone: doin Asa-type jobs for stupid, break-ass nothin. That was for Georgie. Instead Rue wandered around Fredton, goin into the Royal Cigar Store at 78 Regent Street to sift through comics, movie magazines, sip a soda. He’d watch the D. J. Purdy riverboat arrive one day, then embark for Saint John the next. The city had a few Coloureds who acted white, would never say “Good day!” They’d turn their heads, cross the street, as if afraid Rue’d brand em with the taint of Africa just by breathin in their direction. The burg was a sight different, with its jail catty-corner to the legislature, and its mansions glaring across the Saint John River at the hovels in Barker’s Point. Rudy suspected Fred Town would last forever “cause there’s always a need for Hell.” For Rue, Fredericton was too suspiciously white to be trusted. He schemed to apply black paint to the statue of Bobby Burns on the Green—either that or smash it to bits.

  Passing by the Modernistic Beauty Parlour at 68 Carleton Street, Rufus eyed a beautician stepping down to the sidewalk like Cleopatra disembarking from her glittering barge. She shocked him once because she smiled; then, secondly, because she conjured up Easter. He could’ve cried when he seen her. Her beauty could destroy pessimism but give optimists something to worry about. Her long, black hair and her big, soft eyes could’ve belonged to some actress. Her name was India States and she lived near Barker’s Point, actually in South Devon, near the South Devon Fuel & Tugboat Company, on Titus (Andronicus) Street, where a small brook perambulated, drunkenly, outside her dusty and muddy shack.