Miss Elva

by Stephens Gerard Malone

  With a slap to her ass they started up the narrow stairs to the loft, but the woman stopped halfway.

  “Don’t you worry. Ol’ Noddie’s a queer thing.” Winters was always considerate to explain how things were, like how his wife’s weakening neck and shoulder muscles made her head nod. “She’s fucked in the head. Don’t speak a word.”

  In a few minutes, the rhythmic squeal of the bed-springs increased along with, No no no, which of course meant, Yes yes yes! The springing intensified. If you put your hand to the wall you could feel the vibrations. Elva gathered up her jars of colour and cans of brushes and moved her TV tray to the other side of the room. Not that you could get away from it.

  Next morning, after Winters left for a few days’ fishing, Elva served tea and toast to the bingo girl. Elva always served tea and toast to his girls.

  “I love your paintings. I said, I love your paintings. You old cow, what’s the matter with you? I said, I, oh, right, you can’t talk. Poor thing, I don’t know how he manages with her.”

  I’m not deaf.

  When Elva was finally shut of this one, she walked out to the shoulder of the highway. Mrs. Dorey of the next farm over, overlooking where the tar ponds used to be, wanted something of Elva’s handiwork for her granddaughter in Alberta. Elva thought an empty tobacco tin covered in yellow and lavender kittens would do nicely. Make sure she pays for it, Winters had said.

  Now, much had changed since she had last seen Kirchoffer Place. A sign projecting the opening of another motel in Demerett leaned in the sand nearby. The Bridge part was long gone. Dropped off. Anyway, there hadn’t been a bridge in town longer than any cared to remember. Demerett, once home to shore birds, was now a magnet for tourists.

  They came in air-conditioned buses with toilets. Imagine. That’s why they tore down the old houses like Rilla’s and built motels. At night, a thin pink glow stretched across distant hills that had once been brooding with forest. Now they were covered with developments, with patio doors and angel-stone hearths and Kelvinators in the kitchen, marketed with a view of the Abbey.

  Easier to get to now with the road. They had to put it in when they enlarged the island to add a parking lot. So many people wanted to see the star-crossed lovers’ graves. And that’s just what the sign over the ticket booth said. Afterwards, visitors could take a ride on the Ferris wheel, rent a paddle boat or browse the gift shop selling half-dollar editions of Jane’s life that didn’t even get the year she was born right.

  The biggest change of all, of course, was the cathedral. Like something made on the beach by dripping wet sand into towers, only bigger, much, much bigger. They called it Our Lord of the Tears. Part of it covered over that fountain. She hadn’t seen it in years, but Winters said it was pretty much the way it always was, except cleaner and surrounded by lots of gold and walls of crutches and wheelchairs from sickies who’d been given the cure. They had to fill the tar ponds with shale and pave them over for the bus lots. They were mostly full, especially on the anniversary of the miracle.

  Yes. That miracle. The idea of it made Elva clap her hands and laugh, something she wasn’t caught doing too often.

  A chunk of the old Franciscan monastery remained. Winters said it’s pretty much empty now. They haven’t had to make cheese for over twenty years. Miracles were big business for the Church. At night, there’d be a single light in the upstairs window. The light might have been his. Blessed by God, they say. But Elva knew. Yes, she knew all about him. Damned by God, she’d say. Him in the lighted room across the parking lot with just a cot, surely a crucifix; Elva silent in her arthritic body. They shared this—they were both suffering. He most of all.

  At first she painted cows and pigs and Christmas trees on pieces of tile and linoleum, cats with blue tongues on kitchen canisters. Winters found he could sell them to tourists and in summer set up shop outside the house. But they were just practice. Always in the back of Elva’s mind was painting something magical. Not larger than life, their lives. Needing a broad canvas, all she had was her tiny house. And a vision.

  Because Jane was right.

  Elva was thirty-three in 1947 when Rilla placed the advertisement in the paper: Slightly crippled white woman seeking marriage. Can do light housework. $500. Apply R. Stearns, Box 315, Kirchoffer Place, Demerett Bridge, Nova Scotia.

  The dowry came from a Hollywood producer who’d visited Demerett, paying Rilla for the right to make a movie about Jane, starring Linda Darnell. But Miss Darnell decided to do Forever Amber and that was the end of that.

  Writing the advert had been difficult. To get the best rate Rilla had to keep it under twenty-five words. Demerett had its own eight-page weekly by now, The Post & Banner, so the girl in the newspaper office helped. Elva knew her mother fudged about the half of her that wasn’t white, technically speaking, and she didn’t mind the wording, not that she could read it. Rilla was getting on and Elva’s congenital weaknesses were worsening. No doubt about it, the day was coming when she’d need help and Rilla’d be gone. So Elva worked it out, that the bit in the newspaper was Rilla really saying, I love you, girl. There was only one response, Harry Winters.

  Rilla said he was, if nothing else, determined, when he arrived half an hour early for his appointment and was shown into Amos’s sitting room. Elva waited in one of Rilla’s dresses, with refreshments.

  “Don’t like to give a pass to opportunity,” he said, helping himself to another slice of cake with his coffee. Winters had only recently arrived back in town, having been with the army since ’39 and, when the war ended, trying his luck down in Halifax. Upon seeing Elva he added, “Don’t figure there’ll be much competition.”

  Rilla said of course there were other applicants, so why had he applied?

  “Well, see, it’s the money. Don’t have any trouble telling you that. And in case you hadn’t noticed, I’m not exactly Cary Grant. No one’s fixin’ to tie up at my dock. Five hundred dollars’ll get me a right some boat I’ve an eye on. Maybe a groundfish licence too. Expect I’ll do all right.”

  The honesty was to his credit.

  “Ma’am, I know’d her for years and she knows me. I can promise the little lady here a roof, not a grand one like this, but a dry one. And three squares a day. But she’ll have to cook.” It was, after all, only five hundred dollars.

  Rilla wanted to know what assurances she had that he would not put Elva out once money had changed hands.

  “I give you my word.”

  Not good enough.

  Elva watched the negotiations dispassionately, first looking at Rilla, then at Winters. She was trying to find something of value, anything, in the man or in the situation, but could only think of begonias.

  “Yeah, but you can’t expect me to marry her.”

  An unmarried woman living with a bachelor? What would people think?

  Jane would have found that funny, and Elva had to look away in case she laughed.

  “I don’t expect they’ll be thinking anything,” Winters said, glancing sideways at Elva.

  What if the five hundred came with the expectation that this house was to follow, upon Rilla’s death?

  Winters whistled. Like they say, that was a horse of a different colour. A right big horse. Interested, sure, but he had to see the whole place before he agreed.

  Elva and Winters were married quickly and quietly at the new brick town hall with a working clock. Quietly, because people in Demerett had become rather protective of Elva. At least, about the idea of Elva. Sort of like the Virgin Mary. No one wanted to think that the girl in the fountain did anything after the big event but kneel and pray. Marriage, with all its sweating and groaning under the sheets on a Saturday night, was tarnish on silver plate. They needn’t have worried.

  Without a honeymoon they moved to the one-room-with-loft house built by, and for, a bachelor with few needs. Winters insisted they make do. Elva’s first lesson in her married life: her husband was tight. Why waste money on something bigger when they had
that fine house coming their way?

  If things had gone according to plan three years later when Rilla died, Elva might never have conceived her masterwork, continuing, rather, to paint bits and pieces, odds ’n’ ends. Elva’d never have defiled the walls in Rilla’s house with her paintings. It would have been like painting over Jane and Oak.

  But the house did not come to Elva and Winters after Rilla died on that June day, when Barry Daryl Bedell (he insisted upon giving his full name in the police report) said it had scared the bejesus out of him.

  The boy was riding his bike past Kirchoffer Place, coming down from shooting squirrels with his BB gun in the hills and, No, he didn’t get none, the windows just exploded. The one over the front porch and that one, next to it. Glass everywhere, stuff coming out like the house was barfing.

  None of that now, his mom said. Tell the officer true what happened and mind your mouth. But Barry was only eight and that’s what it looked like to him.

  When the policeman drove Barry and his mom home, they stopped first to explain everything to Elva and Winters. They began by saying they had no idea how many tons of paper had actually been stored in the house. What they did know was that the floor collapsed, flushing all that paper down onto Rilla reading in her bed, washing it and her out the front upstairs windows. It took hours of digging to find her.

  Amos couldn’t throw a newspaper out after he’d read it on account of the money spent, so he piled them against the walls in the attic. And don’t anyone try and take one, he’d say, for he claimed to know where every single day for the last twenty-five years was. Probably did, too.

  Learning had come hard to Rilla. Circumstances had decreed reading a luxury, and any spare time Rilla had was usually spent with both her hands elbow deep in hot sudsy water. Amos didn’t think a native woman had the brains for it, so she never even looked at a newspaper if he was near, not if she didn’t want a slap to the side of the head. Then Amos was dead and Jane was dead and there was a living for her and Elva to be made. The strike was over and the boarding house was once again full. Rilla unexpectedly found herself an entrepreneur, and the papers, never stopped, kept coming. She figured it was in her best interests to understand what the world had to say. Or at least, what the papers thought she should know. She began to read in earnest, sounding out letters, childlike, reading aloud but with quiet determination.

  Such a hard-won accomplishment bestowed upon the papers an almost reverential quality, every word symbolic. Rilla circled the name Jane found anywhere inside, like maybe they were coded messages from beyond. The weight on the attic floor continued to grow.

  Elva wanted to ask if Rilla had suffered, but of course she couldn’t. The policeman handed over some newsprint found in her mother’s hand, saying it might mean something to her kin. Elva couldn’t read it, so the officer told her the Evening Mail article was a piece about a man in Halifax who’d had a checkered past, smuggling during the glory days of Prohibition. Bryant Slaunwhite was now a member of the Kiwanis Club, supported the Boy Scouts and ran a gardening store called Topiary on Young Street, in one of the hydro-stone houses built after the explosion in ’17. He was being feted for having just published his memoirs, High Seas Running, where among many of his exploits, he recounted doing business with a pair of German-Canadians who’d drugged their crew with coffee laced with laudanum and scuttled their schooner, using the insurance money to finance a bootleg operation.

  What condition is the house in now? Winters demanded, adding that it was his, well, his wife’s inheritance and did anyone think he could successfully sue the newspapers for the damage? And for his mother-in-law’s death, of course.

  The last word went to Barry, who was transfixed by the gnomey-looking woman with a half-painted breadbox in her lap and a smear of ochre on the side of her nose.

  “It looked like snow, all them papers coming out of the windows and flying about,” he said. “Just like winter.”

  Snow in June.

  That’s enough, corrected Mom. “Show a little respect. That crazy lady’s just lost her mother.”

  Inside Elva’s house for most of the 1960s, as American draft dodgers opened gift shops on Commercial Street and the foundry closed because it was cheaper to pay steelworkers in pesos, it remained that summer of 1927. Admittedly, the project had long periods of delay. Ill health was the more vexing problem; chronic rheumatoid arthritis often left Elva exhausted and unable to work.

  Every morning when she was well enough, she’d stoke the fire, and after a breakfast of oatcakes and mint tea, she’d settle herself in the corner underneath the potted geraniums along the windowsill, a rainbow of petals sure to dust her shoulders. The day’s work began with fussing over the TV tray that held her paints, a thickly bubbled kaleidoscope of oily drippings.

  During the long winter months when her husband was often away for weeks at a time at whatever fishing/logging/road construction job he could sweet-talk himself into, a boy from Demerett stopped by twice, sometimes three times a week. Anders Hamilton made sure Elva had enough firewood piled inside the back door, brought supplies and what mail there might be. A thick-necked boy not graced with comeliness, he was taciturn at best. Elva didn’t mind. Something about his eyes reminded her of Oak. Occasionally her curiosity got the best of her and she’d wondered if Anders ever had a girlfriend, what his mum did, if he could have one wish, what would it be. He only talked to her once. His hockey team had won a regional tournament and he was still pretty flamed about it. Like Elva would know what a shutout was.

  So Elva was not completely alone even though her husband’s cabin was a few miles outside Demerett. When the roads became snow clogged and she wrapped herself in a felt car blanket against draughts, days passed before she’d see anyone drive by. She liked these times most of all. Surrounded by spring-in-pots, armed with an idea given to her years ago by Oak, Elva conceived her vision as a series of panels, carefully sketching them out on a sheet of plywood, noting every detail before daubing colour to wall, to banister, to stair riser, to stove pipe, to window. Winters hated them. What’s the fucking point about decoration? is what he wanted to know. He wanted her to paint only what he could sell. But each time he returned home after a lengthy absence, another section of house had been storied.

  Seeing her gaily painted cottage door and window, folks on the way to the cathedral would stop, sometimes for a picture. By the end of the sixties, tourists were driving from as far as Boston just to see her. Elva’s painted squares of linoleum, her breadbox and clay flowerpots garnered her a growing reputation and acquainted her with many friendly admirers. Winters was on-board now, always on the scavenge for leftover paint to bring home to Elva. A small gallery in Halifax had exhibited some of her work, albeit to derision in the press that such childish images could be considered art. Those who admired Elva’s work differed. Often her visitors left with a painting. Sometimes they asked, Are you the girl of the fountain? Always they left wondering, Why don’t you speak?

  Winters never imagined that he could charge people to stick their head inside the house to see the mess she’d made of things. It allowed him to forgive Elva for what happened with his mother-in-law’s place. Long before Rilla’s bizarre death, Amos’s relatives appeared from St. Stephen and said no way would he have left property to a Mi’kmaq and she’d better stop calling herself his missus. Rilla feared the courts, certain she’d lose her home. Thank God, she’d say to Elva, that justice in this province is like maple sap in a cold spring. Rilla, never legally the wife of Amos Stearns, was not ruled by the courts the unlawful owner of the house at Kirchoffer Place until after her death. Looked like the five hundred dollars was all Winters could expect.

  He was eventually compensated, however, with the full jar of silver her art brought in, buried underneath the back stoop. Happy enough, in fact, that he often feared Ol’ Noddie might one day float to heaven, or possibly hop a bus to Halifax. Winters would dig up the dollars every so often, count them and bury them withou
t Elva knowing. Insurance.

  Winters’s property abutted a large parcel of Crown land wedged beside the Demerett town limits. By 1970, Demerett, owing to tourism, looked to expand. The land was viewed for development, you know, golf course, swimming pools, houses mere mortals could never hope to afford—until the Mi’kmaq community said no way. They’d been hunting and fishing on that land for generations. They cited a 1759 treaty.

  The sale went forward indifferently. Over a period of months, the standoff between town and native community escalated from name-calling in editorials to threats to highway barricades. The premier ordered the provincial police to reopen roads and restore order. Miscommunication further escalated and shots were threatened before sanity prevailed.

  It was first suggested in an editorial in The Mail-Star that Brother Dom, long reclusive, mediate the conflict. He came from the area, might understand local native issues, and was a man of God. The only problem was that Brother Dom refused to be involved in secular matters. Particularly public ones.

  It took several months of persuasion from almost every segment of the community and the threat of violence to change his mind. While no one had as yet been hurt, the unresolved issue was likely to become explosive. Only after a personal plea from the premier, the mayor of Demerett and Mi’kmaq leaders did Brother Dom reluctantly agree.

  IT WAS MID-AUGUST. The windows in the tiny house were open to the salt air. The brown and orange of black-eyed Susans twitched by the sills, like naughty children peeking inside.

  Winters was standing at the doorway, counting and cursing the cars as they came and went. The blocked road and lack of tourists, the tent fringed with flapping sides like those used for garden parties and bigger than their house, no one to buy Elva’s paintings or look inside the house—all of it was hurting. How much longer was this to go on?