“I know. It’s just—the idea takes a bit of getting used to, don’t it?”
“It does, at that. It does take some getting used to.”
“Maybe that’s why it takes nine months—so you have some time to get used to thinking about it.” Imagine if babies just showed up one morning, without warning, no time to prepare or plan at all. Harry’s eyes swept the tiny room and she knew what he was thinking. A baby, in this tiny, half-finished place.
“I can get the old cot down from Ma’s attic,” he said. “There’d be room for it over there, between the stove and the window.”
She smiled at him, and after a moment he smiled back. It broke her heart open, that smile. She’d always thought that the joy of knowing a baby was coming was supposed to unite new parents, bring them together. Instead it seemed Harry and Audrey were drawn together by uncertainty, by the fact that neither of them had any idea what to do with this news.
“In May? You’re pretty sure about that?” he asked.
She wanted to tell him that she was sure because she knew when the baby had started—on their anniversary, the night of the Louisiana Hayride. She couldn’t be absolutely certain, of course, but it seemed likely, given how seldom they’d had relations around that time, and the fact that was one night she knew for sure they’d done it. She took up her own roast and potatoes, finally, and remembered the hotel room bed, how she had closed her eyes and pictured Hank Williams instead of her husband. It felt almost like she’d cheated on him.
“Sure as I can be,” she repeated, and Harry put down his fork a second time and rubbed his face with one hand. She could see there was stuff going on in his head, and she could have bet she knew what it was: the extra money they’d need, how he was going to work longer and earn a bit more, maybe they could build another room on the house.
She wanted him to say it out loud, to talk to her about his plans, his hopes, his fears, but she’d already learned that in Harry’s mind, it was a man’s job to worry about things like that. Audrey thought of her parents. She had been only eight or nine when they built the house and opened the shop, but she remembered, with a flush of nostalgia she’d never expected to feel, how everything between them was talked about, hashed out. It used to irritate Audrey, the shop and the way their family’s life centred on it, the way her mother was always calculating and planning. Now she was hungry for some of what they had had, that sense that a family was an operation everyone had to pitch in on.
They went to bed that night with not another word said about the baby or how they would manage. While Harry snored, Audrey stared up at the low ceiling, rubbed her belly, and thought about home.
AUDREY
The general store in South Ridge was a big place. You could probably fit four or five of Holloway’s Grocery in there, but then, it was the only store of its kind in the town. Still Audrey was flooded with homesickness every time she set foot inside, which generally was every Wednesday when Harry’s parents did their shopping. His mother was protective of Audrey now—not of Audrey herself, she realized, but of the unborn heir inside, who was making her feel so huge that she waddled instead of walked into the store.
The aisles of the store were lined with big barrels of flour and feed, and dry goods stacked on shelves. Her grandfather Tuff’s store out in Candle Cove was like this, a place where people who scraped a living off the land or out of the sea came to get the few provisions they couldn’t grow, raise, or make themselves, always in large quantities and always on credit. Her mother’s shop, and the other street-corner St. John’s shops like it, served a different purpose for a different kind of customer. A few slices of ham and a bag of potatoes: a quick supper thrown onto the stovetop before the mister came home from work. Or a can of soup for the office girl who dropped into the store on her way back to her rented rooms. And always, of course, the endless packs of cigarettes, and the chips and gum and candy for the little ones.
Around here folks were more likely to buy loose tobacco and roll their own, or that nasty chewing tobacco Harry liked. There were shelves of candy here, like in the shop at home—that was universal, the children’s desire for something bright and sweet, and the need of mothers to deny it and then hold it out as a bribe. Steering her own strangely broad and heavy body through the aisle she heard a woman drawl, “Y’all ain’t gettin’ none of that now, the way you two been gettin’ on, you just wait till I tell your father ‘bout how you been carryin’ on. No, Bobby Joe, you put them lollipops down, now, don’t even touch that, Betty!” She only needed to shift the accent and switch around a few words and it could be Mrs. Cadwell from two doors down, slapping Soose’s hand away from the candy. Mrs. Cadwell might have said “shenanigans.” What are ye like at all, the crowd of ye, oh all right, shut up whining. Quit yer shenanigans and I’ll get a box of Smarties. Just the one, between ye, now.
Sometimes the voices of memory in her head seemed louder and more real than the voices of people around her, which Audrey was pretty sure was a sign she was going crazy. Standing here in the middle of the store, she tasted and smelled a different air, imagined the blast of northeast wind that blew in with every ping of the door instead of this sultry heat that pressed down on her like wet blankets.
There had been a letter from her mother in this morning’s mail—for the first time, a letter with a Canadian stamp on it. It wasn’t that it looked so much different from the old Newfoundland stamps—the king’s face, in silhouette, and “Four Cents” above it—but there was something about the word CANADA right there across the stamp that made it seem like a child’s game of make-believe. Like they’d made up a whole new country while she was gone. Audrey knew that if she went home, she’d see the same streets, the same houses, hear the same voices—but she’d be in a different country.
The change didn’t bother her mother, who was quite happy with the Confederation. She had never been one to have much interest in politics, but government cheques coming in the mail—now that was something Ellen Holloway could appreciate.
…So we are going to be getting a new cheque called the Baby Bonus, so much for every child under 18, can you imagine what a blessing it would have been for us in the days when you crowd were all little? Now we’ll only get $15 every month since all we have home is Frank and June but even so every bit will help, and with Alf and Theresa’s little one due in the summer they’ll be getting a cheque too. And there’s another cheque every month called the Old Age Pension, your grandparents will be glad to see that and it’s something to put my mind at ease for when your father and I are getting up in years. I must say I can’t see why anyone ever campaigned against Confederation: the politicians who didn’t want us to join up with Canada are a wicked lot if you ask me, only out to line their own pockets and not thinking of the good of poor folks like us at all. Do they have the likes of that, Baby Bonus, down in the States? I suppose they don’t need it though, people being so well off.
Audrey thought of her mother’s words now as she looked around the general store at the ragged assortment of country people come in to do their week’s shopping. Two barefoot children, both clad in overalls with no shirt or anything underneath. A Baby Bonus cheque would go a long way to helping those children; for that matter, it would be a great help to herself and Harry once the baby came.
Wiping sweat off her forehead, Audrey remembered shivering in the foggy drizzle back home and dreaming of being someplace warm. She’d never imagined a place as hot, clammy, and dank as Louisiana. Everyone was sweaty, and everything smelled worse the hotter it got. She wrote to Marilyn that by the middle of summer it was like living in someone’s armpit. First she’d written “like living up in the crack of someone’s arse” but knew she couldn’t put that on paper, even to her sister, so she tore up the paper and threw it away. It made her laugh though, and it probably would have made Marilyn laugh if she’d been brazen enough to actually send it. Poor Marilyn, working as a district nurse out
in Bonavista Bay, could have used a few laughs and even a bit of Louisiana heat.
Audrey wouldn’t have minded being home with a bit of rain, drizzle, and fog now that she was nine months along. She felt big as a barge navigating the aisles of the store, rivers of sweat running down between her shoulder blades, down the backs of her legs. In fact it really did feel like a river down her legs, as if she had peed herself—she’d been running to the bathroom every half hour, it felt like, for these last few months. Was this a thing that happened to pregnant women? Did you start to pee your pants? Nobody told me this! Audrey thought, wishing her mother were nearby. She looked around instead for Harry’s mother. What would she say to Mrs. Pickens? “I have to get home, I’ve peed my pants”?
It was gushing now, nothing she could do to stop it. Audrey looked down to see herself standing in a puddle of liquid. Her already-flushed cheeks reddened deeper with shame: she was standing in the middle of the general store while everything inside her flooded out onto the floor and she had no idea what to do. Audrey fought to keep back tears as she started to waddle away from the shameful pool at her feet.
“My Lord, Audrey! Has your water broke?”
So that was it. There was a name for it. Mrs. Pickens steered Audrey out of the store, and while everyone stared, just as she’d feared they would, there were smiles on the women’s faces and murmured good wishes as they loaded her into the truck. It felt like that, like she was a bale of goods being loaded up for the journey to market, but in fact she sat up on the front seat on top of an empty feed sack Mrs. Pickens had quickly spread out. She leaked all the way home, where they bundled her into bed and waited for the doctor.
AUDREY
“Mama, wanna go down by the creek.” Little Hank’s voice, sweet as it was, had a whiny note to it sometimes, in the middle of a long, dull winter afternoon.
“I can’t take you out, I’m busy now. Maybe if Lee and Bobby come by later you can go out and play with them.” She was pretty sure his cousins, Fred and Ruth’s boys, wouldn’t be over today. It was the highlight of Hank’s life when the boys came over to play, and he’d spent most of the summer with them, exploring the fields, woods, and creek behind the house. When they went back to school in September he was lonesome and cranky. It would be another two years before he went off to school himself. Audrey wondered if she’d lose her mind before then.
He was supposed to go down for his nap in half an hour. It was Audrey’s one break in the day and she planned for it carefully. Her letters from this morning’s mail—one from Mom and one from June—were laid aside along with the Life magazine she hid from Harry because it made him angry that she spent his hard-earned nickel on such foolishness. She also saved her mail to read when Harry was at work and Little Hank was asleep, because Harry got annoyed when she sat down to read a letter from home.
She started with June’s letter. June was, what, fourteen now? She was growing up fast, and she was a grand hand to write a letter. She described the big snowfall they had had the second week in December:
I bet you won’t believe it but the snow was way up over the shop window, and Dad and Frank had to dig a tunnel in from the path that was cleared down the street, into the shop door. The walls of the tunnel are higher than our heads. And up in our room—well, just my room now—I can open the window and step right out onto the snow. I can walk right across the street to Shirley’s window if I jump over the part where the path is shovelled. I never saw snow so high in my life, did you?
Audrey wished she could share that with someone, the image of her parents’ house and street buried in snow, the dim light of the store with the snow-covered windows, not quite as dark as nighttime but more filtered and blue. She hadn’t seen snow that high since that big storm when she was June’s age. Nobody here in Louisiana would believe it. But if she told Harry, he’d snort and say, “That’s about what I’d expect up on that godforsaken Rock.”
So Audrey kept her letters to herself, for this little island of time and quiet after she had cleared away the dinner dishes and put Hank down to nap, and before she started supper. This afternoon she had an extra job because it was New Year’s Eve and they were invited to Harry’s parents’ house for tomorrow. Audrey was supposed to bring a cake. Every year Mrs. Pickens cooked a turkey for Christmas and a ham for New Year’s and invited all three boys and their wives and kids. Harry’s sisters were all married and living far from home, but the sons and daughters-in-law and grandchildren made a fair-sized crew. Every year Mrs. Pickens asked Ruthie to bring her chicken gumbo and Adele to bring pecan pies. She had tried Audrey with several different things over the years but nothing ever turned out well.
But the cake could wait for half an hour while Audrey sat down with a cup of tea and a cigarette—this was also when she had her one smoke of the day since Harry, who used to light her cigarettes for her when they were courting, had now decided he didn’t like women smoking. Audrey leafed through the magazine, paused on an article about Hank Williams and his new wife. “That’ll never last,” she said out loud; she was disappointed when Hank broke up with his first wife, and not just because the first wife was named Audrey. Everyone had one perfect match, and if you found that person you better hang on for dear life. If you married someone who wasn’t your perfect match, well, you could expect a lot of heartbreak.
With her letters read, the magazine paged through, and the remains of her tea cooling in the bottom of the cup, Audrey took out her recipe book, the one she put together before she left home, writing down Ellen’s favourite recipes in hopes that she could take a little slice of home away with her. She hadn’t counted on the fact that she would be so unhandy in the kitchen. She had all day at home while Ellen only had the scattered hours she stole away from the store, but Ellen was a born housewife, and Audrey was—something else. What? she thought, but had no answer, except the one she had always had: Not this. Not this. She sighed and opened the book to her mother’s pound-cake recipe, scanning the list of ingredients. She heard little Hank’s cranky, snuffly cry as he woke from his nap.
New Year’s Eve. Nothing special in the Harry Pickens household, no cause for celebration. Harry got off work at the usual time, ate his supper with the usual lack of conversation. There was a dance down at the community hall in the evening. Just about the time Audrey figured the musicians would be tuning up their instruments, when Hank was settled into bed for the night, she made a half-hearted effort. “You know, if I ran up and got Jenny Desroches to come over and keep an eye on Little Hank for an hour or two, you and me could go over to the dance.”
Harry was well settled into his chair by the stove with a chew of tobacco and a stick he was endlessly whittling—two habits that drove Audrey about crazy. “Now, what’d we want to be doin’ that for?”
“You used to enjoy a good dance,” Audrey said, putting away the last of the dishes. “We met at a dance.”
“Sure we did. That’s what young fellows do when they’re stationed overseas—go dance with the local girls. And young girls hang around dances trying to pick up a soldier.”
“Lots of married people goes to the dances. Ruth and Fred are going tonight, she told me. Her sister’s watching the boys.”
“I don’t know why Freddy gives in to that. Them dances are only for young folks and flirting and carrying on.”
It wasn’t as if she had expected his answer to be any different. Dishes finished, child asleep, pound cake cooling and covered, Audrey sat down across from her husband and picked up her bag of socks and her darning needle. No idle hands here to be tools for the devil.
The first day of the new year dawned cool, by Louisiana standards. Audrey was up early because three-year-olds didn’t take holidays. Harry slept in and she didn’t begrudge him that. Six working days a week and church on Sundays: let the man sleep till nine on a holiday if he wanted to. Christmas, New Year’s, Good Friday, Easter Sunday and the Fourth of July. She couldn
’t think of many other days that Harry took off. “You can’t ask for much more than a man who’s a good hard worker,” Audrey remembered her mother telling her and Marilyn as their father came home late and work-stained. But then Wes would bend over to kiss Ellen on the cheek, and she’d smile while she squirmed and swatted him away, and Audrey would think, You can ask for a little more.
They left at noon for dinner. The elder Pickens’s house was the most cheerful that drab little bungalow ever got on a day like this, with all three sons and their wives and children packed in. Little Hank was absorbed by his boy cousins, and while the men settled on the porch Audrey brought her pound cake into the kitchen. There, her sisters-in-law Ruth and Adele, and Adele’s fifteen-year-old daughter Janine, worked together to get dinner on the table, ducking and weaving around the elder Mrs. Pickens, polite to her face and laughing slyly behind her back in an elaborate language of shared glances and rolled eyes. Audrey loved that her sisters-in-law were so irreverent about the matriarch, but she knew they were every bit as capable of making fun of Audrey herself when her back was turned. They were polite to her, but she would always be the outsider, with her funny accent and her strange ways.
Still, she let herself be absorbed into the chaos and did her best impression of an agreeable woman, carrying knives and forks out to the table while Ruthie got the giant, gleaming ham out of the oven. A flurry of small boys screeched through the kitchen and out the back door. “Henry sure looks glad to be back with the big boys again,” says Adele. The other boys were all Ruth’s sons, Adele having been blessed only with well-behaved daughters.
“Oh, he loves it. He’s always asking me when they’re coming to play with him again. It’s hard for him to understand they’re at school all day and he can’t go for more than a year yet,” Audrey said.
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