Audrey had been thinking for months—years, maybe—that she could go on like this, that things would get better someday. New Year’s night had made it clear that she’d been lying to herself. She must have known—packing those suitcases, buying that one-way ticket—that she wasn’t coming back. Coming home. She had never once said that in her mind about South Ridge, Louisiana, about the house she shared with Harry. Never described it as home.
She went back to the train station, dragging a tired Hank. She would get her suitcases back, ask someone there about boarding houses near the station. Fifty cents should get them both a room for the night.
She looked at the big board with train times and destinations. A train was leaving in a few hours for Washington, DC. A big city, with connections to other big cities. She asked the man behind the counter what it would cost for a ticket to Washington D.C., and beyond that, one from Washington to New York.
If she could get past Washington, she’d be out of the South. In New York, in Brooklyn, her father and her mother both had people, aunts and uncles who had settled there. She could make a long-distance call home, get an address, turn up on their doorstep, and they would take her in. They were family.
“You’d be lookin’ at about forty dollars for the whole trip, ma’am,” the ticket agent said. “That’ll be for yourself, and a child’s ticket for the little boy…and you’d need to change trains….” His voice drawled on but Audrey stopped listening when he said forty dollars. She had taken twenty—she thought of it as stealing, knew Harry would see it as stealing—to come here, and the tickets from South Ridge to Montgomery had cost half of that. She could get back to Harry if she turned around and bought a ticket right now, but that was all she’d be able to do. If she bought a ticket back to South Ridge, she wouldn’t have enough left to rent a room or buy a meal.
She thanked the man and went to sit down on a bench. Hank was crying for something to eat. Somehow, in less than forty-eight hours, Audrey had become a woman who had stolen money, run away from her husband and abducted their child, a woman with no home and no place to go. She could still go back, tell Harry about the funeral, apologize for being so reckless and foolish. Take her medicine.
Instead, she went into the nearest snack bar and bought a bag of chips and a Coke for Hank, then went to the pay phone. She hadn’t made a long-distance call once in the time since she had left home; Harry would have been horrified at the cost. Long distance was for emergencies. She didn’t want to have this emergency, to throw herself at her parents’ mercy, but the only other choice was the one thing she could not do.
As the operator connected the call and she listened to the distant ring on the other end, Audrey thought of the comments she had heard Ellen make about divorces, which were rare in the neighbourhood when Audrey grew up. Putting up with it, making the best of a bad situation—that was the rule. Ellen might well tell Audrey to stiffen her upper lip, buy the next ticket back to South Ridge, and submit herself unto her husband.
“Hello?” It wasn’t Ellen; it was June, her voice young and light, crackling over the miles.
“I have a collect call from Audrey,” the operator’s voice said. “Will you accept the charges?”
ELLEN
“Now, I won’t be gone that long, and you don’t need to worry about anything—your father’s right upstairs and I told him to leave the door open. You call out if you need him, all right?” Ellen stood on the unfamiliar side of the store counter, rubbing her index finger over the softened edges of the piece of paper she clutched. June had been working in the shop after school for months now, but Ellen had never left her alone there in the evening, and wouldn’t have done it now if Wes hadn’t been upstairs.
Not that there was anything to worry about, of course not. None of the neighbours would cause any trouble, but what if some stranger were to come up the street, stop into the store for a pack of cigarettes, and give a hard time to the fourteen-year-old girl behind the counter?
“Everything will be fine,” Ellen said.
“I know it will, Mom. I don’t know what you’re worried about.” Fourteen, so sure of herself. Ellen remembered this stage with both Audrey and Marilyn, that sudden shift from little girl into young woman, standing behind the counter, looking like they knew it all. Like they could handle anything life might throw at them. The very fact Ellen had to go to the train station tonight proved how untrue that was.
She looked out at the street, waiting for the headlights of Alf’s car. She unfolded the telegram once more—it fell open easily, its creases permanent and deep from the many times she had read it and tucked it away since it had arrived. CROSSING ON CABOT STRAIT THURSDAY STOP TRAIN ARRIVES ST JOHNS FRIDAY EVENING STOP CAN YOU MEET US STOP.
A telegram, at least, was a more common thing than a long-distance phone call—Ellen still wasn’t fully recovered from the shock of Audrey’s collect call a couple of weeks earlier. She couldn’t think when she’d ever seen or heard her eldest daughter cry, since Audrey was a little girl. But there she was on the phone, calling from some place in Alabama, telling them she’d left Harry and she had the little fellow with her, and she only had ten dollars to her name.
Alf pulled up in the new Dodge he was so proud of. “You know we’re too early,” he said as Ellen got in.
“Train comes in at eight.” Ellen checked her watch; it was only seven-thirty, but she wanted to be in plenty of time.
“Train’s due in at eight. You really think the Bullet’s going to get here on time for once, just because Audrey’s on it?” Alf, like a lot of people, had picked up the habit of calling the train the Newfie Bullet like the American servicemen did during the war. They used to laugh at it because it took forever to get across the island. Ellen knew it was nearly always late, but she couldn’t count on that, not with her daughter and grandson arriving.
From her purse, during the inevitable wait at the railway station, she took out the other things she carried, like good-luck charms, to prepare her for this meeting. Audrey’s last letter from Louisiana, written to tuck into her Christmas card, no hint that she was thinking of running away from her husband. The letter had sounded like Audrey’s letters always did: funny, interested in the news from home and family, not exactly happy about her own married life but—what was the word? Resigned, maybe. A fair bit short of contented, but Ellen had often told her life was no bed of roses. To be married with a small child and living far away from your own people was a hard row to hoe. Audrey, she had thought, was making the best of it.
She looked at the letter again now, as she had done over and over in these last two weeks, re-reading it to see if she could find a hint of what Audrey was about to do. But there were none: it was a card with a poinsettia on it, signed, “Love from Audrey, Harry and Hank,” and a breezy two-page letter. And a small photo of her grandson, only the second photo she had ever seen of the boy. Audrey didn’t have extra money for going to town and getting a family picture done.
The boy, Henry—named for his father and grandfather; Audrey called him Little Hank in her letters—was a handsome little fellow, with dark brown hair and serious eyes that stared straight at the camera. She couldn’t see anything of Audrey in him: he looked just like Harry Pickens. Ellen had one picture with Harry in it: Audrey and Harry on their wedding day, looking happy and hopeful as a young couple should.
“Why do you think she left him?” Ellen said now. The clock said eight-thirty and the man at the counter said the train had left Mackinson’s at eight.
“How would I know? You’re the one who was talking to her.”
“Yes, but—she didn’t say much. Well, she wouldn’t, on the phone, would she? But she writes to you and Treese. Did she ever give any hint, anything…I mean, I know she wasn’t very happy, but I thought she was just homesick.”
“Had to’ve been more to it than that.”
Alf, like his father, was a man of few w
ords. Of course, anyone married to Treese didn’t need to talk a lot; she’d do all the talking for him, and Ellen had already pulled her daughter-in-law’s tongue on the subject of Audrey’s marriage and her sudden departure. The one who really could have told her something, Ellen suspected, was Marilyn, up in Toronto. She was the second of Ellen’s daughters to marry and move far away, though Marilyn’s letters sounded more cheerful than Audrey’s did. Perhaps Marilyn and George were really in love, or perhaps Toronto was just a more interesting place to live than a farm in Louisiana. There were lots of other Newfoundlanders around up there, Marilyn said. Of course George was a Newfoundlander himself, from down on Bond Street, not some stranger from a faraway place. And as they hadn’t had any children yet, Marilyn was still nursing, so she had work to keep her occupied and out of the apartment all day.
“There must be more to it,” Ellen said now. “It don’t add up, doing something so drastic like taking off without a word to her husband or a penny in her pocket, just because she’s lonely.”
Ellen and Wes had wired the money for Audrey to buy a train ticket for herself and the little fellow up to Toronto, where they had stayed with Marilyn and George for two weeks. The second phone call had come from there; a long one where Ellen and Audrey had hashed out the possibilities. Audrey could stay up there in Toronto with Marilyn for a while, though they didn’t have much space in their apartment. “That’s probably what I’d do if I was on my own,” Audrey said.
“But you’re not. It’ll be hard, finding a job and finding a place, if you’re a…a single mother. A child needs to be raised in a family, Audrey, and if you’re not going to take him back to his father, then you should bring him home here. There’s always a bed here for both of you, and a job in the shop till you gets on your feet.”
“I’m not going back to Harry, Mom. That’s out of the question.” Audrey’s voice sounded like it used to be when she was a young girl arguing with Ellen over breaking some rule or sneaking out of the house with her friends. You couldn’t turn that girl an inch once her mind was made up. Hard as nails, Ellen used to say Audrey was.
But when Audrey stepped off the train into the icy January wind that cut down the platform, she no longer looked hard as nails. The red-haired woman with the sleepy child in her arms looked softened, worn by stress and trouble. Her tired eyes searched the people waiting on the platform without seeing her mother and brother. A porter set two suitcases down beside her as Ellen stepped forward to greet her daughter.
“Oh, Mom. You’re here. They told us the train was late so—I didn’t know.” Audrey hugged her mother, or accepted Ellen’s hug, as well as she could with her arms full of Little Hank. Alf picked up the suitcases.
“Is this all you got?”
“That’s everything.” Audrey met her mother’s eyes again and tried to smile. “It’s not much. I didn’t—well, you know. I didn’t plan this very well. Marilyn loaned me a few things, winter clothes. I can’t—anyway, you know. I’m going to pay you back, don’t worry. I just…,” her words stumbled off into a silence Ellen understood. For Audrey, “Help me” and “Thank you” were two of the hardest things to say.
“Now, don’t you worry about any of that. Plenty of time to sort it all out when you’re settled.”
“Oh, this is your car, Alf? Very nice—what year is it?” Audrey’s voice was brighter and sharper when she had something practical to talk about, and Alf, who had been pretty much at a loss for words since she got off the train, was almost chatty, talking about his ‘51 Dodge Wayfarer and what he had paid Tony Nolan for it second-hand.
“There, you get up in front with Alf, now, I’ll sit back here with Henry,” Ellen said as Audrey laid the sleeping boy on the backseat. Ellen covered him over with the extra coat she had brought along. Poor little mortal was wearing a cloth jacket—he wouldn’t have known cold like this ever in his short life. He had stirred and opened his eyes and whimpered a few times while Audrey carried him from the platform to the car, but it was better he was sleeping through this arrival.
“It’s all right,” she murmured to him as they drove down Water Street. “You’re home now. You’re home.” It wouldn’t seem that way to Little Henry, of course, but at three years old his notion of how things were would be shifting all the time anyway, and soon St. John’s would be home to him. She stroked his dark hair, ran a finger down his rounded cheek. Thought of Audrey at the same age, sprawled off asleep, long-legged and round-cheeked. “You’re home now,” Ellen whispered again, though nobody heard her.
AUDREY
“Hank, you little frigger, will you get out of that! Go outside and play, you got me drove up the wall.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“I’ll stop calling you a little frigger when you stops acting like one.”
“Not that.” He stood in front of her with the bag of chips he’d taken from the shelf, his little cowlick down in his eyes. She wanted to hug him and smack him all at once. “Hank.”
“It’s your name, what else am I supposed to call ya?”
“Nan and Pop calls me Henry. MeeMaw and PawPaw calls me Henry. Daddy calls me Henry.”
Four years old, talking plain as you like—and talking back to her like that! Already as stubborn as…as what? Stubborn as the mule, was the expression. Audrey didn’t know much about mules, but she did know the truth she saw reflected in her son’s face. It was Harry’s eyes and Harry’s chin she saw, but the expression in those eyes and the tilt of the chin were her own.
Stubborn as me. Mom’s old curse: I hope you haves one just like yourself. And now it was Mom’s words he was flinging back at her: “Nan says” and “Nan does” had become potent weapons in Hank’s little arsenal over the months since they had been back home. He was right: her parents, like his Louisiana grandparents, had not taken to calling him Hank. With Harry’s parents she had always assumed it was because they wanted him to be called Henry like his grandfather. But Ellen just sniffed and said, “Hank sounds like a cowboy in a Western. It don’t sound like a serious man’s name.”
“He’s not a serious man; he’s a little boy.”
“Yes, but he’ll be a man someday and he’ll want a man’s name. I was always careful over that with my boys,” Ellen had said, pointing out as usual how she had done everything perfectly. “Alf and Frank, neither of those were names boys would be ashamed of when they grew up. You get in the habit of calling him Hank, and he’ll be after you to change it when he’s sixteen. Better to start the way you mean to go on.”
Now here he was, four years old, already after her to change it. Audrey shook her head. “They can call you what they want, but you’ll always be Hank to me.”
OK,” he conceded, tilting his head like he was thinking it over. “But not out loud. I won’t come if you call Hank.”
“I’ll call you whatever I damn well please and you mark my words, you’ll come when I call or I’ll swat your backside. Now take them chips and get out of the shop, I don’t need you underfoot.”
“OK but when you call me for dinner, you better say Henry!”
Audrey opened her mouth to get the last word but the door had already swung shut behind him. She sighed as she lit up a smoke. That youngster loved to win a fight. She couldn’t picture how saucy he’d be by the time he was thirteen. Outside the door she heard him hollering at the other little boys playing out in front of the shop. Hank’s—Henry’s—little voice was a weird mixture of the southern drawl he heard for the first three and a half years of his life, and the St. John’s accent he was already picking up. She wondered if someday Louisiana would be erased from his voice altogether, along with memories of MeeMaw, PawPaw, and Daddy.
“You’re taking my son away.” She could still hear Harry’s voice over the telephone line. She had stood in Marilyn’s little kitchen in Toronto, one hand gripping the handset of the phone and the other hand knotted into the phone co
rd, playing with the little loops like Treese’s Aunt Maggie playing with her rosary beads. She had waited till she was safe there at Marilyn’s, out of the US and into Canada. Only then had she felt able to call Harry, to face his anger.
If he had said, “Come back, Audrey, you know I love you”—what would she have done? All through that endless train journey, from Montgomery to Washington, Washington to New York, New York to Toronto, all those crowded second-class carriages, all those hours of Little Hank complaining and her trying to keep him entertained—the main thing she had felt was relief. Like she had been tied to a chair and someone was snipping away the ropes that held her, one by one as they crossed each state line, crossed the border into Canada.
The door pinged as her brother Frank came in. “Henry and them other little ones was starting to head off down the street but I told them they couldn’t go no farther than Mrs. Vokey’s gallery,” he said. “You wants to watch them—I know they’re only little but Butch Cadwell’s young one, Eddie, is the ringleader and all the other ones follows him like ducklings.”
“I’m sure they won’t get into too much trouble, out there on the street with the neighbours watching,” Audrey said. “It’s a nice change for him to have other youngsters around to play with.”
“Ah, I’m sure he’ll be fine. I’m only sayin’ watch out for the Cadwells as usual.” Frank headed up the steps.
Funny, Audrey thought, how easy it was to slip into old roles when you moved back home. She was like a young girl again, both arguing with and depending on her mother, working in the shop. She was still Little Hank’s—Henry’s—mother, but most of the time it felt like Henry was one more baby for Ellen to raise, and Audrey was a big sister to him as well as to Frank and June. She didn’t feel the burden of being a mother the way she had all those long days in the little house in South Ridge. Here, Henry had other youngsters to play with and she had her family. She missed Marilyn—June wasn’t quite old enough to fill the gap, and while she got on all right with Treese, there was always a bit of distance with her brother’s wife. She needed her own friends, her own crowd, but the girls she had grown up with were either moved away or married.
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