by Lori Lansens
Addy’d hoped the little girl would leave then and not say any more, for what could Addy do with such knowledge? Instead the child went on, and Addy couldn’t shake the feeling she was being taunted. “My Papa puts his tongue here and here too,” she said, pointing at her neck and collarbone.
“Mmm-hmm.”
“My Papa comes in my bed at night because he loves me more than Mama. He can’t help it. I’m his Bella. I’m his baby Bella.”
The mixers were grinding out back, people shouting as trucks came and went, heavy oven doors opening and slamming shut, and somewhere in the distance Revello was drunk and ranting. Addy said nothing in response to Fiorella’s last declaration, no longer hoping but praying the child would go away. Fiorella wasn’t lying and she knew it.
Fiorella hated to be ignored though, and began to undo the crescent-shaped cookies Addy had so carefully placed on the baking sheet.
“Please don’t do that, Fiorella.” Addy smiled and ground her teeth.
“You can’t tell me don’t. You’re just a coloured lady. My Papa’s the owner.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“He’s your boss.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“And I’m your boss.”
Addy looked up. “No, Fiorella. No eight-year-old girl is my boss.”
Fiorella took one of the flaccid cookies off the sheet then, threw it on the floor, and dared Addy to hit her. They stared at each other a full three minutes before Fiorella stomped off to find her father.
As she knew he would, Revello appeared within seconds, looming over the table as she worked. “What you do to my Fiorella? Why you make her cry?” he growled.
Addy saw the child was standing just behind the door, watching her with red eyes and blotchy cheeks. “We’re behind schedule. I told Fiorella don’t throw my cookies on the floor.”
“Fiorella doesn’t throw cookies.”
“Well I’m afraid she did.”
“You don’t talk to her no more.”
Addy simply looked at him while her fingers continued to form the cookies into moons.
“Don’t talk to her no more. You understand? You talk to her again, you gonna be fired,” he growled, and waited to see what Addy’d do.
Addy held his gaze and answered him pointedly. “I don’t believe I’d have any trouble keeping my mouth shut around Fiorella, Mr. Revello, but your baby Bella does seem to like to talk to me. She likes to tell me all sorts of things. Yes, all sorts of things.”
The look on Revello’s face was one of terror. Addy’d been right in her thinking that “baby Bella” was a secret name for Fiorella, and one only expressed in dark, depraved moments. Revello left then, without another word. Some moments after that, she heard glass break in his office and knew he’d thrown something at the window.
Still, that was not the end of it, for how could it be the end of it when Addy was aware the child was being betrayed and, worse, by her own father? It had taken nearly a week for Addy to come up with the words. She’d waited till she was sure Revello was gone for the day before she headed to the office where his plump, passive wife was writing in the payroll ledger and counting dollars from a large tin box. “Mrs. Revello?” she’d said, after closing the door behind her. “I need to speak with you, Ma’am.”
The woman looked up, then seeing it was Addy, shut the money box quickly and put it on the shelf behind her.
Addy cleared her throat. “Mrs. Revello. This is a delicate thing for me to say. A hard thing for me to say. But a thing I have to say because I haven’t slept a night since this thing was said to me.”
Mrs. Revello turned the pages of the big payroll book, and though she still did not look up, Addy knew she was listening.
“Fiorella said a disturbing thing to me. It was a disturbing thing about her Daddy, about Mr. Revello.”
Mrs. Revello lifted her face slowly. Her eyes were cold but her chin trembled slightly. “Fiorella makes lies.”
“Yes, Ma’am, but I don’t think she’s lying about this.”
The woman waved her arm. “Everything Fiorella lies.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“A husband and a wife gonna argue.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“Maybe sometime we gonna yell.”
“What she told me wasn’t about you and your husband, Ma’am.”
Mrs. Revello folded the ledger and waited. Addy felt queasy and swallowed. “I feel obliged to tell you, Ma’am, that your daughter told me…your daughter told me that your husband kisses her in a way don’t sound so fatherly. She told me, Ma’am, your daughter told me Mr. Revello sleeps in her bed.”
The muscles around Mrs. Revello’s mouth went slack and Addy felt sure the woman had no idea of her husband’s sins against their daughter.
“It’s what she told me, Ma’am.”
“Fiorella lies,” the woman whispered.
“I’ll let you judge that, Ma’am, but I thought you ought to know what she said.”
“When?” Her eyes were nothing but pupils.
“Guess it was last week—”
“When he go in her bed?”
“She didn’t say, Ma’am. She just told me he sleeps with her.”
“No.” She shook her head resolutely and seemed ready to dismiss it.
“And she told me they play a game where they…” Addy wanted to sit down but didn’t. “She told me she plays a game with her father, a game where they touch tongues.”
“Tongues?”
To avoid Mrs. Revello’s eyes, Addy looked at the wood planks and newspaper boarding up the still-broken office window. When the woman spoke again, her voice was not her own. “When I sleep? When I sleep he go to Fiorella? When I take my medicine?”
“I don’t know, Ma’am. I just felt I had to say something.”
Mrs. Revello was quiet for some time before she said, “You telling all the bakery this? Addy?”
It was the first time Addy could remember Mrs. Revello using her name. In the nearly six years she’d worked there they’d hardly exchanged a word. When Addy said, “Good morning, Mrs. Revello,” her employer usually responded with a grunt or nothing at all. Addy looked into the woman’s eyes now, wanting to be believed. “I wouldn’t tell anyone such a thing, Mrs. Revello. Only I thought you should know.”
The woman nodded, opened her book, and returned to her work. Addy didn’t know what to think and wondered if she’d been clearly understood. “Well, guess I’ll be getting on home now.”
It was one of the bread men who delivered the news of her dismissal the next morning, just as Addy began icing her walnut squares. There was no reason given. There didn’t have to be. Addy knew.
It was with no sense of relief that Addy left The Oakwood that day, for she knew her association with the Revellos wasn’t over. Because she had not received her final pay envelope and had worked a full week, Addy went to the bakery the following Monday, steeling herself as she made her way toward the office. Mrs. Revello did not look up as Addy pushed through the half-open door. “I’m here for my pay, Mrs. Revello.”
Mrs. Revello finally glanced up, silent and contemptuous.
“I worked a full week, Ma’am. You owe me my pay envelope from last week.”
“I owe you nothing.”
“I worked a full week. That’s my earned money.”
“You. Go. Now.”
Addy took a breath and closed the door behind her. “Mrs. Revello, I know what I said upset you, and I know that’s why you fired me, and I guess I’ll just have to live with that, but you owe me a week’s pay and I’m not gonna stand for you keeping that from me.”
The door opened then and Mr. Revello stood, glowering. “Why she’s here?” he asked his wife.
“She wants pay.”
“No pay.”
Mrs. Revello looked at Addy. “Go now. Go. Go! You want I’m gonna call the police?”
Addy glanced at the money box on the shelf behind Mrs. Revello. She felt the urge to lunge a
t it, take it in the crook of her arm, and run. She felt the urge to run away from Degge Street and Chatham and find another place to live and another person to be. Instead, Addy Shadd lifted her chin and pushed past Mr. Revello, holding his gaze just long enough to say she knew who he was. The devil closed the door behind her, and though Addy didn’t understand their mother tongue, she had a good idea what he was shouting at his wife.
Addy wouldn’t sleep that night, or the next or the next. The entire next month, as the Christmas season approached, Addy could not find her way to slumber. She lay still in the bed that was once Hamond and Mary Alice’s and looked out the window at the same stars they’d seen. Her thoughts returned to Rusholme and that heat-wave summer night her family had gone to the lake for relief when no one in the little house on Fowell Street could get a wink. L’il Leam and Wallace were knee-deep in the cool water. Addy was stretched out on a scratchy blanket beside her nearly asleep mother. “Mama?” Addy’d said, pointing into the darkness. “That the moon? Mama?”
“Course that’s the moon.” Laisa was exhausted and annoyed.
“That right there?”
“You know that’s the moon.”
“Same one from our house?”
“What do you mean, Child?”
“Same moon I see from my window?”
“Course it’s the same moon. Close your eyes and go to sleep.”
Addy’d shuddered and could not close her eyes. She waited a moment, then whispered, “He follow us here?”
“Mmm?”
“He follow us, Mama?”
Laisa heard something in the tiny voice and turned to face her daughter. “You’re not afraid of that big old moon, are you?”
“No, Ma’am.”
“Good.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
Laisa found her soft cheek in the darkness. “Why you afraid of the moon, Adelaide? How you think he can hurt you?”
“He was out my window before.”
“Yes.”
“Now he’s here.”
“Well the moon is always gonna be right there in the sky, Child. That’s nothing to be afraid of.”
“He gonna be out my window again when I go home?”
“Yes.”
“Why he’s gotta follow me?”
“He follows everybody. That’s what the moon does.”
“He gonna follow Daddy out to Mr. Bishop’s in the morning?”
“Mmm-hmm. It’s still dark when Daddy goes to work.”
“He gonna follow Leam to Boy’s Group at school?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“He gonna follow me when I get big?”
“Shh.”
“Mama?”
“Shh.”
“I don’t want him to follow me.”
“You got no choice in the matter, Adelaide. Now close your eyes and go to sleep.”
But Addy couldn’t sleep, not then or now. Addy was afraid for Fiorella Revello, and she was obsessed with losing her final week’s pay. She was also plagued by the memories of Christmas past and longing for her loved ones. The man in the moon stared down at her, smiling and smug, reminding Addy what Laisa’d told her all those years ago. She still had no choice in the matter.
The streets were dark and deserted, and though Addy’d spent half her life wandering around Chatham, she was afraid this night and could not say why. Twice she’d spun around on her way to the Baldwins’, gasping, heart thumping, tracked by a vanishing phantom. “Go away,” she’d whispered toward a vacant house surrounded by a thicket of trees. “Leave me alone.”
Addy’d been quiet in the little room on William Street and not in the mood for singing. She shook her head when Mrs. Baldwin asked if she was ill. “Have you been sleeping, Adelaide?”
“Not much since The Oakwood I guess.” She glanced toward the window, lowering her voice. “When I was coming over here tonight, I felt like…I think a person was following me.”
Mrs. Baldwin wagged her head. “I told you, Mr. Baldwin. I said Chatham isn’t safe any longer. The whole world has gone bad. It’s the war. I do believe it’s the war.”
At the end of the evening Mr. Baldwin offered to walk Addy home, but he was old and ill and the look on Mrs. Baldwin’s face said it was not a good idea. He seemed relieved when Addy declined, saying it was just a short walk and she’d be fine. She waved as she made her way to the back door and out to the fire escape stairs. The fire-wood was stored under a musty tarp on the landing, and the hatchet Mr. Baldwin used to make kindling sat rusty and dull on top. Addy had never noticed the hatchet placed in that way before, not in all the weeks and months she’d been climbing these fire escape steps. It was a sign, she knew, and though she wondered what exactly she would do with the hatchet if the footsteps followed her again, she snatched the thing up and rested it on her shoulder.
It was possible to reach Degge Street without passing The Oakwood Bakery, and this Addy had done each night since her dismissal. The indirect route meant going by the vacant house and the thicket of trees though, and tonight Addy was more afraid of the footsteps than she was vexed by the injustice done her at The Oakwood. It was at that moment, as she chose one path over the other, that her fear was replaced with something she might have called courage, if she’d been a woman given to self-deception.
The bakers would not arrive until three o’clock in the morning and it was only near midnight. Addy looked into the sky at the wispy night clouds. She decided the man in the moon wasn’t so fearsome after all and grinned, challenging him. She felt the weight of the hatchet, swinging it back and forth, recognizing what an unusual thing it was for a person to know precisely what they would do next.
It was quiet and dark as Addy made her way to the back of the big brick building. She dared to think it was the Lord on her side when there was no fierce barking and growling from the old guard dog behind the gate. Addy didn’t know that Mr. Revello had beaten and killed the animal a few days after she left. Like the broken office window, the dog just never got replaced. The back door would be locked, of course, but Addy would use her hatchet to pry it open and she hoped the wood was just rotten enough to give. The office door would be locked too, but she felt sure a few mighty swings could break the lock and was prepared to hack all night if she had to.
Breaking through the back door was even simpler than Addy’d anticipated. So simple it made her wonder what fools the thieves in town must be not to have got there first. She chose not to wonder about the thieves too much though, for she believed herself righteous and her action not a burglary but rather a recovery.
Except for the mewling cats who skulked in the halls and kept the mice out of the flour bags, The Oakwood Bakery was still. Yet Addy knew, even before she rounded the corner to the office hallway, that she was not alone. It did not occur to her then that the presence she felt was earthly. She imagined only that L’il Leam was there, silently horrified by what she was about to do. Addy set her sights on the office door at the end of the hallway. She swung her hatchet and wondered vaguely at the odour that was climbing up her nostrils.
She reached the office door and took a breath, thinking she heard the sound of a cry. Go away, Leam, she thought. It’s my money and I mean to have it. Now the odour she noticed before was stronger and, she knew, burnt. The ovens, she thought. They must have burned a batch today. She drew her hatchet up and again heard something like a cry. This time she did not wonder about Leam and knew it was only one of the hungry cats. She paused to listen for the cry again, then thought to put her hatchet down and try the door, imagining how she’d feel if it was never locked at all.
The doorknob fairly glowed in the darkness. She reached out to turn it and it took some time for her brain to decide that the smooth metal was not icy cold but burning hot. She withdrew her hand, made a fist, smelled the smell again, and knew it was smoke. She had no thoughts after that. At least none of which she was captain. She hacked at the door until she felt it give, then she followed her feet inside t
he smoke-choked office. The flames ate the walls at the far end of the room. She heard the faint sound of coughing. Addy fell to her knees, her hand searching the floor for flesh and bone. The other hand reached up to save her mouth and nose as she shouted, “Hello! Hello!”
Addy felt the flames licking the drapes behind her. She turned to beat at the fire, not sensing the scorch on her hands. Then she saw the girl lying on the floor, sooty and unconscious. She picked Fiorella up like she was an infant and not a child of eight, slinging her over her shoulder, moving toward the door, coughing and choking. She had a vision of herself then, melting into a puddle, like she was made of wax and had never been human at all. She reached for the door, but a wall of flames exploded before her and she saw in the firelight the bodies of the Revellos. She screamed.
The window was the only way out. Addy reared back, using her foot to kick out the wood planks that had replaced the broken glass. She leaned out her dying head to draw in air. Then she lowered the child from her shoulder to the ground before she climbed out herself and collapsed.
It was described in the Chatham Daily News the following day how Adelaide Shadd had saved Fiorella Revello from the fatal fire that killed her mother and father at The Oakwood Bakery. It was described how Adelaide Shadd was a hero and did not mention she’d ever worked there or had recently been fired. It also didn’t describe the scarring burns to her hands, which would prevent her from doing common things easily for the rest of her life.
She’d spend the next two weeks in the hospital receiving thoughtful care and decent meals from whites in white. After that she’d go back to Degge Street and let the Baldwins look after her while the bandages remained on her hands. And when the bandages came off and her fingers were pulled tight and mottled white, Addy would cry, thinking of Mose and Chick and Leam and Chester, ashamed that she had survived.
The fire and the deaths were a mystery. Revello had a successful business and a nice family. The fire chief had scratched his head, wondering why the man would have doused the place with gasoline and set them all aflame. He wrote “accidental” on his official report and hoped the surviving child could one day lead a normal life.