Miss Elva

by Stephens Gerard Malone

  “It’s the goddamned Indians’ fault,” he said, more to himself than to Elva. “Why not claim the whole fuckin’ country for huntin’ and fishin’?” Then he turned from the door and pointed at her. “That’s what they want, you know. Won’t be satisfied until they’ve got the whole fuckin’ Jesus lot and then we won’t even be allowed to speak English any more. Those city bastards better not cave in to them.”

  Elva was painting a winter scene. They sold well in the summer, as summer ones did in the winter. Who knew why tourists wanted what they did?

  “They never said anything ’bout closing the road. We’re losing trade, Ol’ Noddie.” And why for Christ’s sake did they have to hold that goddamned meeting right next door? “It’s not right. Not right.”

  She glanced up when someone outside yelled. Looking through the open door, past where Winters blocked her view, she watched men rush out of the tent, looking as if they were carrying someone. They appeared confused and stood by the road until Elva heard, There, over there! Then, ten, fifteen, maybe more men in white shirts with sweat stains, some with ties and jackets looking very uncomfortable, others with cameras and tape recorders, raced towards them.

  A man had fainted under the stifling air of the big top. The cabin with the droopy flowers on the door seemed just the place to recover. Winters was hustled out of the way. It all happened so quickly and it wasn’t just any man.

  “Put him down there!”

  “Feet up, get his feet up!”

  Someone was standing in front of Elva, asking for water. She pointed to the teddy bear on the shelf by the window.

  “Here, give him a drink.”

  Winters stood gaping at the visitor. Someone was apologizing to him for the intrusion.

  Elva couldn’t see for those around her. She carefully laid down her tray and, with some difficulty, stood. She had expected him to have altered over the decades as she had, but not to the degree she found. His hair, growing in patches from his scarred scalp, was white. He eschewed the dress of the Franciscans, never having actually taken orders, and wore a golf shirt and black trousers.

  “Give him some air, let him breathe.”

  “Has someone gone for an ambulance?”

  By now the tiny house was surrounded. Questions were being asked. No one heard answers. Where was the doctor?

  “We need to clear the place out, give him some air!”

  Someone official, or just acting that way, began ushering everyone outside on orders of the young Franciscan, Brother Rafe, who appeared to be the man’s aide.

  “C’mon, c’mon, give the man some privacy.”

  Winters was saying it was his house. Yes, yes, but they ushered him out as well.

  Elva was in the corner.

  “You’ll have to leave,” Brother Rafe instructed her.

  So Elva joined the others outside under the hot sun. No one appeared to know what was happening, how the old man was or how this might affect negotiations. Winters was howling about compensation to anyone who’d listen. It would be some time before anyone noticed Elva melting lopsided in the heat and understood the significance of this chance encounter.

  But it was not lost on her, and she dreaded the instant the connection was made. When it happened, she knew. They stopped talking. They stared. And almost en masse, they rushed towards the girl from the fountain just as the door to her home opened.

  “He wants to see her,” Brother Rafe announced.

  What does this mean? Why? What does he want with her?

  “I’m her husband,” Winters said, following.

  Looking much recovered, but shaken, Brother Dom was sitting up on the weathered horsehair sofa that was also Elva’s bed. The shutters over the small window had been closed, but the brightness of day filtered through the slats to illuminate the walls with a deeper, more thoughtful richness. Evidently, her images had caught his attention.

  Winters was his usual self. “Well, sir, you like them? She paints them though you’d not think it by lookin’ at her. Can sell you a piece if you’re partial to it. Cut it right out if you want. Something to drink, sir, tea, maybe something a bit more powerful—Oh, excuse me, your holiness, you being a man of God and all, not meanin’ no disrespect.”

  “Leave us,” he said. “Both of you.”

  “I don’t think that’s wise.”

  The old man was silent. Brother Rafe capitulated.

  Well that doesn’t seem right, Winters protested, but the ensuing icy silence from so important a visitor reluctantly forced him out on the tail of his opinions. “I’ll be right outside this door, Ol’—my dear, if you need me.”

  Alone, Dom graciously gestured for her to sit back among her paints and geraniums in the corner. The panels, hundreds of miniature voices in every colour shouting from the walls, from the ceiling, from the floor, Come back to us! One side of his face unaltered, the other like it had melted. Standing, he retrieved his cane and hobbled, gazing intently at the pictograms, sometimes lightly brushing his fingertips over them, hearing them. Yes, yes, he said occasionally.

  For almost a full half-hour he studied the walls and then he paced out the floor. His hand went up to his heart as if the panels had magic to inflict pain. He shook violently, groaning like a wounded dog, dropping his cane. Elva saw a tear in his right eye, the one not melted. She reached down for his cane.

  “The only miracle in this town is that the likes of you could create this wonderful … vision of hell.”

  She rose stiffly and went to him, to steady him. He nodded and took her gnarled hands into his, kissing them.

  He gestured to the panels. “We’ve watched those fools build a miracle on falsehoods and deceit and profit from it, haven’t we, Elva?”

  She nodded.

  “So much time wasted. And I’ve not said their names in over forty years. Not since, not since—” He winced.

  Go, you’re free now.

  He smiled. “You thought I was Gil hiding in Dom’s world.”

  Once. Yes.

  “There hasn’t been a moment in all this long life that I haven’t wished I was in that grave.”

  Do they wait in your dreams too? This was said by wiping away his tear.

  He thought she meant to silence him. “No, no, hear me, Elva. Let me make it right. Hear the truth, while I’ve courage.”

  Look around you. See the truth.

  “Elva, I’m still Catholic enough to fear hell. Be my confessor?” She nodded, shyly. “Jane. There. I’ve said it. Jane! Jane, my Jane. She begged me to take her to the Abbey, our Abbey. That’s where she told me about Gil. That she couldn’t hate him for what he’d done. And the baby, his.”

  Tears streamed down one side of his face.

  “I blamed her, blamed him. I wanted the pain to go away. And then he showed up. My own brother! My own self. The gun to keep her safe, it just went off. I shot them both. I didn’t mean it, Elva. They never knew that about Jane. The baby, it was too late to do anything. It just happened, you must believe that. Then that damned dog of his almost tore me apart. I panicked. That’s when I stumbled across the tool shed and the gasoline. I just wanted to make everything seem like an accident. Only it went all wrong. When I got back to shore, the monks found me and gave me this life. Believe me, Elva, no prison sentence could have punished me more.”

  Dom watched Winters, strutting and muttering, through the shutters. The press perched like shit hawks on the wharf waiting for someone to empty the chum bucket.

  “Then there was that idiot John who started everything else, thinking that an old fountain and rain was some kind of miracle. Christ, it rains here all the time!”

  They both managed a smile at that.

  “And somehow that hound of Gil’s survived. Goddamn it, but I watched you and that dog every morning for nine years and 226 days sit by his grave outside my window. Even watched you bury the thing by him when you thought no one noticed. That’s how I knew you knew I wasn’t Gil. God help me, Elva. The only thing I’
ve regretted all these years is that I didn’t say, when they found me, I was him.”

  Dom started to shake again. Elva opened her arms and he went to her. That’s how Brother Rafe found them.

  “Seems a shame to cover ’em up,” April said as more of the walls succumbed.

  Winters’s women were like months: May, June and now this one, April. He dipped into a can of white paint.

  “That’s none of your business. Besides, she won’t say nothing, never heard Ol’ Noddie speak a word. Well, not since after the good Lord poked her in the head.”

  “Never?”

  “Christ, woman, you deaf too?”

  April was still being broken in, so she didn’t know much. In that sweaty time in the loft after he’d gone at her like he was jacking up a Dodge Ram, he’d explained about Elva in the fountain.

  A few more feet of wall went silent.

  “You’ll see, Noddie, ol’ girl. You can put in some of those spruce trees, like you like them. You won’t even miss ’em, startin’ all over again. Just paint ’em like I says this time.”

  Elva stared expressionlessly at the movement of the roller. The vibrant colours were bleeding quickly through the first coat of whitewash. It was going to take two, maybe even three coats.

  “Hope that paint dries quickly.”

  April stretched by the stove, scratched her underarm. “Will she do new ones?”

  “She’ll do ’em. That’s all she’s good for.” Although she hadn’t painted a thing since the old man had visited. Winters finished rolling over the last of the walls. “That right, Noddie, ol’ girl?” he said loud, like she was hard of hearing.

  “C’mon, Harry, honey.” It didn’t bother April that she was about to screw another woman’s husband right under her nose, not after she’d seen Elva. Poor guy by rights ought to be allowed a pity fuck.

  “Just a quick poke, woman, while this dries. Gotta get more paint up before I lose the light.” Winters again snuck a peek at Elva.

  “They were kinda pretty, you know, like kids drew ’em. All those fancy home magazines are full of that stuff. Pay big money for that now.”

  “I ain’t going to be out o’ pocket, if you catch my drift,” Winters said with a tap to his forehead.

  Thanks to the Church, guessed Elva. In all the years they’d been married Elva’s only value to her husband had been her contribution to his household accounts. Then Brother Rafe returned when Domenique Barthélemy died, three months after mediating the land crisis, and Winters was truly awed by Elva. Imagine that young fellow saying, Name your price, Mr. Winters, to cover up that abomination of hers. Neither Elva nor Winters had any idea what an abomination was, but safe to say, it couldn’t be good. And for the money, Winters didn’t care.

  “You know I was right to do it. It’ll bring us something for our keep, woman, maybe extra too.”

  Winters handed Elva his can of paint, but her swollen hand couldn’t bear the weight. No matter, said Winters. You know, at times, he could imagine himself being right kind to her. He smiled at that, his breath tobacco-heavy, teeth yellowed from the habit. Then he patted Elva’s head before he followed April up the narrow stairs.

  Blacks and reds were first to puncture through the veil. Blues, and Rilla’s favourite, yellow, followed. Another wash with white would take care of that.

  Afterword

  With the death of Elva’s widower in 1977, their one-room home, having fallen into disrepair, vanished. Considered lost, its fate would remain unknown for the next quarter of a century while Elva Twohig-Winters’s artistic reputation, as well as the legend of her fabulously painted cedar cottage, steadily grew.

  When the house was discovered hidden in a farmer’s shed, it was considered a major find, although it was in pieces and had been subjected to vandalism, rain seepage, exposure to salt air and vermin. Much of it was feared ruined.

  Purchased by the Province of Nova Scotia, the pieces were loaded onto a flatbed truck and taken to a shopping mall, where the public watched conservators painstakingly restore the artist’s unique voice to its original condition. Upon completion, the three- by three-and-a-half metre house was reconstructed in a specially designed gallery, the centrepiece of a permanent exhibit simply titled “Miss Elva.”

  Ontario-born, Montreal-educated, Stephens Gerard Malone has been a mortgage clerk in Calgary, a silver-service waiter in New Zealand, an envelope-stuffer in Toronto and a sex-advice columnist for Instinct magazine. He has written for a variety of media including television and periodicals. His novel Miss Elva was a finalist for the 2006 Dartmouth Book Award. Malone continues a love affair with Nova Scotia, where he has lived since 1986.

  VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2006

  Copyright © 2005 Stephens Gerard Malone

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in Canada by Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2005. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.randomhouse.ca

  Random House Canada and colophon are trademarks.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Malone, Stephens Gerard, 1957–

  Miss Elva: a novel / Stephens Gerard Malone.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-36999-4

  I. Title.

  PS8626.A455M58 2006 C813’.6 C2006-900148-0

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