Miss Elva

by Stephens Gerard Malone

  The door to the truck opened and Elva surfaced into a low wind and blinking stars through scudding clouds. She stumbled up the porch and something pushed her through the screen door and into the hall.

  Am I home?

  Gil was saying, You’re home now, Elva.

  Everything is going back and forth. Don’t you see?

  No answer from Gil. Just the infrequent moon carpeting the way to the kitchen.

  It was where he’d left it. Oak’s trinket box on the kitchen table full of watch bits and tools waiting for him to walk in and resume his tinkering. She couldn’t stop looking.

  Don’t, Elva, and Gil pulled her away.

  Who did that to Oak?

  Gil was saying, What to tell Jane?

  Felt like someone had added to the staircase. Why else would it take so long to get to the top, every step sending hot pincers through Elva’s head?

  She’ll feel bad now that she burnt his leg with tea and didn’t say sorry. Gil? My hands don’t grip the railing. She was sure she added, Gil they don’t work, but he didn’t pay her any mind. And my feet don’t move.

  Gil was saying, Hurry.

  You’re still afraid, aren’t you?

  Peek-a-boo went the moon across the floor of her room from the three tall, thin, rectangular windows fronting the house. Curtains by the open casements billowed around the woman waiting in the chair.

  You’re not Jane. Where’s Jane?

  Maman? Gil started to close the windows. Why are you here?

  I’m in a dream too, don’t you know? Elva touched the woman’s face.

  Don’t do that, Jeanine said.

  The palms of the woman’s hands were facing up, waiting for the nails. Why not crucify her? What a show that’d be. Jeanine’d like that, but not upside down like Saint Peter. Oh no. Her husband, her son, everything of worth, gone. After what she’s been through, she deserves to go just like Jesus. Thorns and all.

  Where’s your mother, girl, she not here with you? None of this would have happened had your mother been home. A girl like that Jane needs her mother.

  Maman, Gil asked, where’s Jane?

  What’s the matter with this girl, why don’t she speak?

  I am speaking, can’t you hear me?

  Maman, what have you done to Jane? The bed, oh God, the bed, Maman, what have you done?

  Gil, why are you hurting your mother like that?

  Nothing, said Jeanine. I came to talk to her, only talk. Bitch got my boy’s head all confused, take him away from me, from God. He was going to run away. No, I wouldn’t have that! Had to. Her and that baby. Domenique thinking it’s his!

  Gil, the bed? There’s so much blood.

  Maman, what have you done to Jane?

  She’s crazy, that girl, look at her, don’t she speak?

  I don’t like dreams where no one can hear me.

  Where the fuck is Jane?

  Don’t shout at me! I came here to help your brother see sense, good and proper.

  Dom was here?

  Followed him here, replied Gil’s mother, after he finished telling me about that girl and the baby. I didn’t do nothing to that girl. She was crazy mad when I got here. Kept going on and on about it not being Domenique’s. See? I says to Domenique. It’s not yours, even though my boy kept saying, shut up Jane you shut up Jane that’s my child so you just shut up about that. Tried to talk reason to her, I did. Look, ten dollars! Tried to give her ten dollars to go away, but she wouldn’t. It’s all the money we have. Just hits herself in the belly like a crazy woman, over and over. She’s losing that baby. Wouldn’t let me help her.

  Maman, for Christ’s sake, where’s Jane?

  I won’t have to say anything about Oak now, will I, Gil?

  He took her, said Jeanine. Took her away from here!

  Where, Maman, where?

  Said he’d take her to Halifax like she always wanted, but they won’t get far. Needs a doctor, she’s poorly. God’s blessing if she loses that bastard.

  I’m dizzy, Gil. Why is everyone talking fast?

  Gil, look at that girl, look at her, she’s mad too. Whole crazy family’s mad!

  Maman, tell me he’s not out there tonight with Jane, Jesus Christ, not tonight!

  He’s got a gun. That slut made him take it, worried because the police can’t control the strikers and I said, if you take her out of here, you shoot her! Leave me, leave God, you shoot her like a dog! Hear me, you shoot her and if you go, you break my heart, so shoot yourself too! Rot with your pappa in hell, Domenique, because that’s where God’ll send you if you go against Him. Send his own pappa to hell for her, he did.

  That’s Amos’s gun. Must have taken it from his room. No one’s been in there since … Rilla says don’t go in there ’cause it still smells of his lemon aftershave and there’s a glass by the bed with dried milk in the bottom. Jane did the milk. Not me. I couldn’t do the milk.

  What’s wrong with that Elva girl, Guillaume?

  Nothing.

  You gotta go out there for your brother.

  Leave Elva? No, I can’t leave Elva. Not after, well, I just can’t leave her.

  You find your brother and bring him home. I don’t care about that girl. Most likely dead now, bleeding, and good riddance.

  I know, Maman, but you go home, you can’t stay here.

  Why’d Jane not wait to say goodbye to me? Jane should have said, kiss me, because Jane would have wanted to kiss me goodbye, wouldn’t she? She’s my sister. She’d be wrapped in blankets, in Dom’s arms. There’d be tears. Jane, she gets to feel things. Real things. Not me. Dom, he’d kneel so I could hug her.

  That one there be okay? asked Jeanine. What’s she see out that window?

  Elva’ll be okay, Maman.

  Did he find you?

  Who, Maman?

  That friend of yours, the tall one, comes to the farm today, says he had something he needed to say.

  His name was Oak. Gil, tell her his name was Oak.

  I said I don’t know where you be and he goes away. Did he find you?

  Yes, Maman, I found him.

  Elva, will you be all right here on your own? Elva, are you okay, I’ll fix this, you’ll see, why don’t you say something, Elva, why?

  I’m not saying anything because I’m trying to wake up and Jane will be in bed beside me and there’ll be eggs in butter, smelling good, and Oak will be washing up outside the summer kitchen and … you’ll hear me …

  A narrow staircase at the end of the hall, its door next to what had been Gil’s and Oak’s room, led to the roof. Elva hesitated. What if he’s there? But no ghost of Amos—sitting among his beloved stacks of newspaper, saying, Bitch, I know about the milk—was in the attic that night. She crawled to the ladder over the yellowing, damp piles Amos was too miserly to throw out, to the ladder opening onto the widow’s walk. The joists underneath creaked.

  Dawn was still distant when she emerged onto the roof, but there! There was the foamy tipped crescent of beach all pearly in the windy night, the flickering lights of Demerett Bridge, the nothingness that was Ostrea Lake. The Abbey.

  Elva sat against the wind, bracing up here, burying her face between her knees, that sour, wormy stink from that horrible German house still crawling out of her clothes. She had to get rid of it, and she pulled her dress over her head and flung it over the railing of the widow’s walk.

  Goodbye, Jane. Goodbye, Oak.

  Elva, her eyes heavy, shivering in her underclothes, traced her finger over her lips. She’d be safe now until Rilla got home. She’d not be awake long enough to see orange and yellow jagged edges eat across the island, the Abbey, and the dawn.

  ELVA TWOHIG WAS MUTE from the moment she saw that boy’s cut-up remains strewn across the highway, and would remain so for the rest of her life.

  It would be days before anyone noticed.

  Rilla had been delayed getting back to Demerett Bridge. Her bus from Indian Brook had been detained by the RCMP on the highway while
a group of official-looking men with hats and badges hovered over something hidden under a tarpaulin in the middle of the road. By her window seat, she happened to see one of the officers hold up a silver watch, attached to a chain. Just as her daughter had known, so too did Rilla.

  Not trusting the police and certainly not wanting them poking around murky affairs at Kirchoffer Place, Rilla returned home bent to do the only thing she could, remove all trace of her boarder. If anyone ever came around asking questions about the young man whose last name she never even knew, she’d say he’d stayed briefly and moved on. Didn’t know anything more. She did not expect to find a monk in her kitchen, Elva sitting at the table in front of a big cup of tea.

  There’s been trouble, he explained to her. Hard to say just what happened. There’d been a fire. Dom Barthélemy showed up on the lakeshore of the monastery, barely conscious, having floated there from the Abbey in a canoe.

  The young Brother, who clearly didn’t view this duty as a fun way of getting out of vespers, went on to say that Dom had been severely burned: face, arms, the left side of his body. He was at the monastery now, refusing to see anyone, even his mother.

  Because he’s not Dom, Elva said, but by now she had realized that no one could hear her.

  Dom did manage to say, the bad news went on, that his brother and Jane are out there. Murder-suicide is what the Brother told Rilla. With flames still smouldering, no one had been able to get to the Abbey to verify.

  Elva had never seen her mother cry, nor would she now. After they were alone, Rilla sat at the table for a long time, saying only this: Oak’s dead, and, We show no tears to no one. Then she got up, found a package of Amos’s cigarettes from his things in his room and took them out onto the back step with a half-empty bottle of bourbon. She stayed there until dark. When Rilla nodded off, Elva, the screen door creaking behind her, went out and helped her back into the living room, settling her mother on the sofa and covering her with a blanket.

  Elva then went up to her room and, because of the still bloody bed, took her pillow and blanket and lay down on the floor, staring up at the cracks in the ceiling. The house felt very empty. She did not sleep.

  The next morning she watched them dig a grave on the other side of the tar ponds from her bedroom window. There was a police car and a truck outside the gates to the Franciscan monastery. She knew the grave was for Oak.

  Gather up everything, Rilla had said. She meant Oak’s things. When Elva had done that, they put his few bits of clothing, his leather tool case and the velvet bag with his watch pieces into his brown striped suitcase and snapped it shut. Rilla didn’t say anything about Elva taking from his room her three pictures that Oak had admired and including them. Then Rilla took the suitcase to the ponds and sank it in the tar. Standing from her dirty task, she watched Elva walking to the Eye through the tall grass on the other side.

  DON’T MIND, Elva thought in regards to her lost voice. Wherever it had gone, it had taken away the images of Oak on that road. She figured it’d be back. In time, she came to think of it gone as a blessing. When she was asked what happened out there, or what about Jane, she’d hear answers in her head. No one else would. The thing about that, not actually saying the words made her not quite feel the pain of Jane being gone, pain at all for that matter. So it was that she was able to lie beside the fresh-turned ground and miss Oak instead of grieve for him.

  They’d buried him beside the north stone wall, hidden under a grove of larches and the nearby sound of the fountain. It was private, out of the way, and every fall he’d be covered with a yellow bower. She thought Oak would like that. Elva knew she’d not find any wildflowers this late in the season so she’d brought her writing tablet, one that he’d given her, and sketched out a bouquet. She’d been working on that when she felt tired and thought, close my eyes a few minutes and I’ll finish it.

  Elva was awakened suddenly by sharp cries and yells. Thousands of glowing fireflies were falling, stinging her arms and legs and face, the afternoon gone dark, the air thick with smoke.

  Hurry! Hurry! This way, someone was yelling, the sound of metal gates swinging open. People were running, coughing, calling out names. On the dirt mound beside Elva, the pages of her writing tablet curled up one after the other in flame.

  The sizzling came first, then the stench from her burning hair. Elva scrambled to her feet, swatting her head, but the smoke filling her after every sob emptied out more breath. It grew hotter and harder to find air and the voices sounded more distant. She heard a window shatter.

  “Elva!”

  Then she heard it again.

  “Elva! Elva!”

  He groaned as he caught her, falling, dragging her against the stone wall for what little protection it afforded. She could not see him clearly, but she could feel his rough skin, heard the tipple of water. That roughness, it was gauze, bandages.

  There was another voice now, panicky, rapid, saying Dom what is Elva doing here you have to get out of here now, hurry Dom, hurry! It was John the sexton, arms flapping under the stinging rain.

  The brownness of the air was lightening to orange, becoming hotter and thicker, blowing in from all sides.

  “For fuck’s sake, you have to get out!”

  The wounded man wrapped himself around Elva and she heard him say they’d never make it to the gate. He rolled her, the pain pinching an unholy sound from him, placing Elva into the lower bowl of the fountain.

  “Are you crazy?” John was shouting. “Get out! Get out!”

  “Jesus Christ!” he replied as much from the pain as to try and shut the sexton up. Cupping his hands, he bathed Elva’s face and hair.

  Thunder rattled somewhere out over the sea and the drops began. Heavy. Plunking drops sounding like pebbles. Then more and faster, until the rain cooled the stinging on Elva’s face.

  Evening Mail

  November 3, 1927

  GOD SAVES TOWN

  Demerett Bridge, Nova Scotia, was saved yesterday from a wildfire by what locals insist was nothing short of a miracle. An eyewitness claims the fire was stayed when a man called upon the Lord to save a young trapped Mi’kmaq girl.

  The conflagration, authorities report, resulted from the flare up of an earlier fire on a small lake island behind the town proper. Wind-fanned flames spread embers across Ostrea Lake into the woods, where unseasonable weather has left conditions extremely dry. Several fires burned out of control along the outer perimeter of the lake, threatening both the town to the northeast and the Maritime Foundry Corporation and a religious order to the south. Several homes and businesses in the community of Raven River west of Demerett Bridge were, however, destroyed.

  Demerett Bridge is home to the Maritime Foundry Corporation, which has been in a long and bitter labour dispute with its union.

  Citizens of Halifax and Truro were quick to respond to the stricken community with offers of aid and medical assistance. Early reports suggest the province will convene an investigation.

  The inquiry began at the end of the month, and the only place large enough to handle the proceedings and the crush of the curious was the Towne Theatre, already doing double duty rehearsing the Christmas pageant due to smoke damage at the parish hall. Each evening the movie screen would have to be restored on the former burlesque stage, taken down in the morning under the bemused but unblinking eyes of the papier-mâché caryatids in each corner, blue-painted tassels hanging from the nipples of their gravity-defying tits. With breaks and adjournments, even the odd fainting spell, the schedules between the two conflicting spectacles overlapped. Often the gallery for the inquiry was filled with high-school girls who made up the retinue of fairies and snow princesses, all lithe and thin, humming their dance numbers and cheerfully waving cigarettes around, careful not to sear each other’s wings or the goat for the Baby-Jesus-in-the-Manger sequence.

  Rilla wore her new hat, the first piece of brand-new store-bought clothing she’d ever owned. She had purchased it for Jane’s funeral. B
lack felt, round like a cereal bowl, with a purple ribbon. With her daughter laid to rest and it being close to Christmas, Rilla thought nothing of adding a sprig of spruce and a couple of cranberries. No lifetime of mourning for her. A preacher from Preston—part of the sideshow camped out in front of the theatre each day, and backed up by a humming choir swaying like bullrushes—thought her disrespectful of the solemn proceedings and didn’t mind saying so.

  Alighting from a crucifix-adorned staging as if slow marching up a wedding aisle, the preacher man pointed an accusing finger at the cranberries. Such bold finery meant only one thing, an errant, prideful woman, and there was still time to heel to God’s almighty call! The bullrushes in behind were praising the Lord. Those who’d gathered to try to get a seat for the proceedings surged forward. The newsreel cameras started whirring and clicking. Rilla’s arms circled Elva as the flashes went off: poomff! poomff! Look this way! Poomff. Spent bulbs shattering on the pavement.

  The delay caused them to miss out on seats in the orchestra, making Rilla forget she’d brought apples for them to eat, and she never wore that damned hat again. They’d have to go up. Rilla said, Follow the angels’ wings and saddle shoes to the balcony, where one of them asked Elva to be a luv and light her fag because her nails were still wet with polish. Rilla gently pulled Elva away and they took two seats at the front.

  Someone was yelling for quiet and to please take the Christmas pageant goat outside.

  They sat by the balcony railing, where Elva rested her chin on her hands and looked down. Almost like a church crowd except that there had been fights to get in and no church that Elva knew smelled like cold cream and pancake makeup. She self-consciously felt for the healing scar on her forehead where her hair had burned. Let it alone, said Rilla.

  There was buzzing in the gallery about the just-over strike. Union men, rushing to the buckets, had saved their livelihood from ruin. In turn, the grateful owners of the Maritime Foundry Corporation yielded to demands for higher wages and a shorter work week. Boarders were already returning to Kirchoffer Place.