Rachel had gone through kind of a slutty phase, where she lost her virginity in the bandstand at Bannerman Park with Roger Ivany and then slept with a few other guys, but that was really only the summer after Grade Twelve and the first semester of university. She had gone through all of junior high and high school tied to Vicky’s coattails or apron strings or whatever, and had assumed she’d cruise into university the same way. Then Vicky kind of fell apart after the whole thing with her father. Her house wasn’t a great place to be anymore and she stopped asking Rachel over after school.
Rachel had thought that the fact that Vicky’s father killed himself might create an added bond between them; Rachel’s mother had died in an accident that, from the little she could figure out, might have been suicide, and her father had gone away and might be dead too. But it didn’t work that way. Instead of growing closer, Vicky pulled away from Rachel, then dropped out of school halfway through Grade 12. She moved to the mainland to stay with some aunt or cousin or something. People went away; that was the main thing Rachel had learned.
So the summer after Grade 12 Rachel got drunk and high a lot and slept with a couple of guys, and her whole first semester at MUN was kind of like that. But when she flunked a course and got put on academic probation she had to smarten up, pull things together. And even though sex, unlike drinking, didn’t actually take up that much time or affect her studies, it kind of fell by the wayside too. She hadn’t had a serious boyfriend yet, and it was only on the drive up here that Rachel had admitted to herself that she wouldn’t really mind at all if the motel room she shared with Larry only had the one bed.
Now they were both lacing into the guitars, singing and playing together. They had taken words and music from eighty years ago and made this new thing out of it. As Larry’s voice soared on the last “Never will come back no more,” Rachel found the harmony and their voices twisted and twined together, and when it was done they looked at each other and smiled. Larry laid aside his guitar and crossed the room from his bed to hers, and before Rachel could put her own guitar down he took her face in both his hands and bent down to kiss her, and there was no need for the second bed, after all.
RACHEL
The stage at the Ship Inn was a tiny triangle, like a corner dog-eared on a page. Rachel picked up her guitar as she followed Larry up the single step onto the little space. There wasn’t a big crowd here tonight. A few of their friends, a few Ship regulars. It was early—9:30—and there would be more people here later, and bigger acts on stage. It wasn’t like the Evening Telegram was going to send out a reporter to cover the fact that Larry Kennedy and Rae Holloway were performing live for the first time.
Rae. She had decided to go with Rae. That was how they had introduced her tonight and that’s what she had asked Larry to call her, if he had to say her name onstage. Truncating her name, making it into a stage name, gave her at least the illusion that there was some separation between Rae and Rachel. Not that she expected that a six-song set at the Ship would bring them instant notoriety and have the paparazzi pounding at the door. The need to hide, to be a different person onstage, was something she couldn’t explain even to Larry.
“We could come up with a name,” he had said when she finally told him about the Rae thing. “I mean, not a name for you. A name for us. Like, as a duo.”
“Like Figgy Duff.” Only she couldn’t think of any name for the two of them that wouldn’t sound—well, pretentious. After she laughed at the first few names Larry suggested, he started pitching names just to make her laugh. Moonglow. Stormswept. The November Gales. “Save that one,” she said. “Some band will come along where they’re both named Gail, and those chicks will be all over that.”
“Fish and Brewis?”
“No, because I feel like I’d be Brewis.”
They told the guy at the Ship just to announce them as Larry Kennedy and Rae Holloway.
“Just Larry and Rae, maybe?” he had suggested.
“Like Corey and Trina? Hmm, I’m not sure,” Rachel said.
“Last chance,” Larry had said as they walked into the Ship tonight. “Gut-Foundered. I’m just saying. Great band name.”
But no. She was just Rae Holloway, “Forklore” student, on stage for the first time with her musical partner, her boyfriend, her lover, Larry Kennedy. As she shifted up onto the stool she had a quick memory of Henry, dressed up to go out for a show, in a blue cowboy shirt with long ridiculous fringes. She had never seen him play with the band, being much too young to go to gigs, but once or twice he had brought her along to a sound check and she remembered seeing all four of the men in those shirts, some parody of—what? American bands, maybe, back in the 50s and 60s. At least nowadays you could get up on stage wearing your own clothes.
Larry introduced their first song, a lively and toe-tapping “I’se the B’y.” Then he shifted the mood, changed keys with a little finger-picking. How sexy was that, a man finger-picking on the guitar? Rachel could be over at Larry’s place working on a paper for school or whatever, and as soon as he started idly picking away at the guitar, it was as hot as if he had come up behind her and kissed her on the back of the neck, and she couldn’t keep her mind on anything anymore. Now, though, all that energy had to go into her own guitar, her own voice, as she harmonized with him on “She’s Like the Swallow.” It was Larry’s favourite folk song, so haunting and eerie, and Larry wanted her to take the lead vocal because he said it was made for a woman’s voice.
As she sang, she could feel how the song gathered the attention of the room, even of the little clutch of people talking by the door. Get their attention with “I’se the B’y,” hold it in the palm of your hand with “Swallow,” then give them something new. It was going to work, she was sure, yet even as she sang the final notes…and love is no more, she felt a nervous flutter in her chest.
“Hi, um.” It was the first time she had ever spoken onstage, and what an opening. People would be talking for years, no doubt, about Rae Holloway’s brilliant debut at the Ship. “So, um, Larry and I collected—” that was the right word, the folklorist’s word—was there a different word that musicians would use?—“this song, from an old lady named, um, Effie Mifflin, last fall up near Twillingate. We’ve been working on it for awhile, trying to take something—something that was a family tragedy for this one old lady’s great-grandfather, and turn it into something that everyone could hear, could—relate to, I guess.” Worse and worse. Shut up shut up shut up, Rachel, let Rae take over and start singing. “Anyway, hope you like it, this is ‘Never Come Back No More.’”
She shifted her weight on the stool again, leaned back a little from the mic, and sang the first line acapella.
My man is gone off at the swilin…
Then she hit the chord and she was on her way, the woman’s lament unrolling out of her throat as if she had herself stood in an outport kitchen boiling the kettle on the woodstove and waiting for her love to come back. Larry took the second verse and she didn’t even have to look down at the audience to know they were listening, and nodding, and loving it.
From there they did another familiar one, then the song they wrote based on the old woman’s version of “Barb’ry Allen,” and finally, for a big rousing finish, “The Ryans and the Pittmans.” Feet were stomped, hands slapped on tabletops, everyone ranted and roared on the chorus, and there was a big round of applause for Larry and Rae. Afterwards, their friends and even a few people they didn’t know came up to say what a great set that was, bought them drinks. Opportunities for a couple more gigs. It was everything you could hope for in a first performance.
Much later in the evening, two or three bands later, Rachel was at the bar next to an older guy—well, forty-something, anyway—whose name she couldn’t remember, although she should. A drummer, maybe, with some band she had seen a few times. They were both a little drunk when he said, “I knows who you are now. I couldn’t place you before. Holloway…Hollowa
y. You anything to Henry Holloway?”
It was like everything in the room went into slow motion and Rachel shook her head automatically, denying it before he had even finished saying it. But though her head was shaking now, the words, sounding slowed-down like draggy tape, came out of her mouth. “That’s my father.”
“Go on, you don’t say. I knew it though, you got something of him in you. Where is he to these days, your old man? Up on the mainland, last I heard?”
“I…I’m not really sure. We’re not…not in touch.” She counted back in her head. He called to say Happy Birthday when she was thirteen. Six years, nearly seven.
The long-haired man shook his head now, sighed into his beer. “Sorry, sorry ’bout that. Musicians, nobody ever said they made good husbands and fathers. Well, that’s a damned shame, but you know, Henry was…I mean, he was pretty decent. On the guitar,” he added after a moment, as if to clarify that he didn’t mean to imply Henry was decent as a person.
“That’s going to happen again,” she said to Larry as they wove their way home, hand in hand, through the dark streets up to Larry’s apartment on Cochrane Street, each with a guitar in their free hand. “Again and again, if I keep playing around here. I mean…it’s not like my dad was a big star or anything. And he’s been away for years. But people knew him.”
“Is that so bad?” Larry formed the words slowly, like he was trying to remember the right ones. “If people’s…if they have good memories of him.”
“Yeah. I just. Don’t like it when people…I don’t know.” She stumbled a little, instinctively gripped the guitar tighter, but Larry tightened his hold on her other hand.
“You OK? Careful.” They were only a few houses away from his place now. Rachel had told Nan she’d be out late, and, not for the first time, it looked like late meant all night.
“Don’t mind me, I’m just being stupid.”
“No, you’re not.” At the door, Larry laid down his guitar, fumbled for his keys in the pocket of his jeans. “You just…you don’t like to be reminded of him. At all.”
“I don’t know. Maybe that’s it.” Rachel followed him into the dark hall and up the long narrow flight of steps to his place on the third floor.
AUDREY
“All right now, I know you got this big thing on the go tonight, but I got to drop up to Contessa to get my colour done and then I got to go see Mom. I won’t be no later than three o’clock getting back, but I got to spend some time with Mom, because you know she’s going to take this hard.”
Rachel, settled behind the counter, nodded. “Just so you know. I’ve really, really got to go by three. If you’re not back by then I’ll have to call Rhonda and see can she come in. We’ve got sound check at four and this is, like, a really really big deal.”
“You don’t have to tell me again.” It was a really, really big deal every time, as far as Rachel was concerned. Some kind of outdoor concert down in Bannerman Park didn’t seem like that big of a deal to Audrey, but Rachel’s idea of an important event did not always line up with hers. The girl had been off with her boyfriend half the summer, taking off every weekend to every little Buckety Bay and Tickle-Me-Arse folk festival, playing and singing, leaving Audrey to run the shop with the help of young Rhonda Hiscock from down the road, who was that spaced-out Audrey sometimes wondered if she was all there. But no matter. Rachel was here till two o’clock today. Audrey would be back by then, and in the meantime she had other fish to fry, like getting her hair touched up and then breaking the news to her mother about Frank’s phone call last night.
Really, Audrey thought as she left the beauty salon after her appointment, there was no reason the news should upset to her mother. The death of a woman she barely knew, a woman she had only met once, who had been fighting cancer with varying degrees of success for four years—in itself, it wouldn’t be devastating. But the woman was Frank’s wife, Sophie, and they were all thinking of Frank and young Frankie, whose life these last years had been so bound up in Sophie’s cancer that there had hardly been time for anything else.
“Oh my word, poor Frank,” said Ellen when Audrey told her. “What is he going to do now, at all?” After a moment’s pause she added, “At least she’s out of her misery, poor thing.”
They hardly knew Sophie, but they knew a lot about her misery. She and Frank had been married for twenty years and had a seventeen-year-old son. (“Only the one,” Ellen would say, “I wonder if she couldn’t have no more? You don’t like to ask, of course.”) Frank had brought his family to Newfoundland for a vacation when Frankie Junior was twelve. It wasn’t long after that Sophie had gotten her first bad report.
So many people Audrey knew had had cancer by now that she knew the routine like the steps of a dance. The Bad Report, then the First Biopsy, then the First Chemo followed by the First Surgery (“They think they got it all”). Then the refrain: She’s in Remission, Thank God. Sophie had a break of a year that time, and Frank took her on a trip to Italy. Nobody Audrey knew had ever gone to Italy, but Sophie’s grandparents came from there, and she’d always wanted to go. And then, not long after Italy, the second and third verses: It Came Back, and Where Did It Spread?
Some people went quickly, but for most it was a long, hard slog. Audrey’s old school friend, Valerie, had been at it for six years before the cancer that started in her breast and moved to her bones finally took her last year. For Sophie it had been four years, and these last months Frank was on the phone to his sister and his mother two and three times a week. His voice sounded strained, stretched thin. June, who visited Sophie in the hospital often, had told Audrey, “He’s good as gold, Frank is. You wouldn’t think it—I never pictured Frank as the kind who’d be good in a crisis. But he’s been like the rock for her all through this, and when she goes I wouldn’t be surprised if he breaks down altogether.”
“What about poor Frankie Junior?” Ellen wondered. “How is he taking it?”
“I don’t know, Frank never said, but you know he’s got to be taking it hard. He’s a handful, anyway, from what June says—this last year, with his mother in hospital so much, he’s been giving Frank a lot of worry.”
They were sitting in the lounge at the end of the hall in St. Luke’s, Ellen in the wheelchair which she was now confined to. Audrey was convinced that if the staff would have encouraged her mother to walk more, to use her limbs, she wouldn’t be wheelchair-bound, but it was easier for them if she simply sat in the chair and got pushed around. Ellen always wanted to go down to the lounge when her family visited and Audrey was much of her mind; the shared room was tiny and the other woman, Mrs. Gregory—in seven years Ellen had outlived two roommates—always had her TV on full blast, which made it hard to have a conversation.
“He should come home, the both of them should,” Ellen said. “There’s always a place for any of the family here at home, and when something like this happens, you wants to be around your own people.” She spoke, Audrey thought, as if she still lived in her own home, with a spare room she could offer up to any family member who wanted to return.
“I suppose he could if he wanted to, I got two—I got an empty room there now.” She had two empty rooms, and was about to say so, but she couldn’t tell Ellen that Rachel had moved out and was living with her boyfriend. “But I don’t say Frank would come home. I mean, he got a job and a house up there, his whole life is up there. What’s there for him if he comes back here? There’s no jobs here, the young ones are always saying. Look at Rachel, university degree and she’s still only working part-time.”
“With the crippled children though, I’m sure she’s good at that,” Ellen said. Her face was always bathed in smiles when she talked about Rachel. She adored all the grandchildren and now the new generation of great-grandchildren—Judy’s girls, Melissa and Kristi, and Nancy’s three little boys, as well as the ones away that she rarely saw. But Rachel was her first great-grandchild, the o
ne she had helped raise, the one closest to Ellen’s heart.
Rachel came in to visit once every month or so, usually with her young man, Larry. They brought their guitars and sang folk songs and hymns with her down in the lounge. An admiring circle of old folks and nurses would gather around and listen and sing, and Ellen lapped it right up. Those visits with Rachel, Larry, and the guitars brought Ellen far more pleasure than Audrey’s dutiful twice-weekly visits ever did.
Rachel had a part-time job at Exon House with the handicapped children, who probably enjoyed her singing and playing the guitar as much as the old folks did, though she had a lot of less pleasant work to do to, wiping dirty backsides and lifting them in and out of their wheelchairs and all that. “I’m sure she’s good at it, but she didn’t have to go to university for four years to get that job,” Audrey said, “and there’s no signs of it turning into full-time, she still needs her hours at the shop to get by.”
“And there’s still no talks of her and Larry getting married? He’s such a nice young fellow.”
“No talks of it that I’ve ever heard.” They seemed happy to live in sin, as people used to say. Ellen would surely think of it that way. Now mind, she’d changed her tune about some things over the years—forty years ago when Alf and Treese got married it was a shocking thing that her son had married a Catholic girl and it caused a big dust-up between the two families. But now Ellen looked at Larry Kennedy from the Southern Shore, as Irish as they made them, and only saw a nice young fellow. So maybe she wouldn’t be so shocked if the youngsters shacked up together.
Maybe she wouldn’t even be shocked if Audrey said, “Mom, Richard’s still after me to move into his place with him, and I think I just might do that.” Audrey still had no interest in getting married, but after so many years of keeping company she occasionally thought about giving in to Richard’s suggestion that they move in together. Two of her three excuses for not moving—caring for Rachel and her mother—were gone. But she still enjoyed the convenience of living right over the shop, not to mention having the house to herself and everything to her liking.
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