by Wayne Grady
Whatever it was, it wasn’t music, and Jack hated it.
There was applause when it ended. Benny sighed and went back to his drink. “She’s good, huh,” he said.
Jack saw that his own glass was in Benny’s hand, empty.
The set was over, and Peter and Dee-Dee came to the bar. Dee-Dee stood up on her tiptoes and kissed Benny’s ear, and Benny lost some of his glumness.
“What was that last song?” Jack asked. “I didn’t recognize it.”
“Peter wrote it,” Dee-Dee said.
“You wrote it?”
“I got it written down somewhere,” Peter said. “Some of it.”
“What’s it called?”
“ ‘Blues Meridian,’ ” said Peter. “Go get your horn, you can join us for the next set.” Jack thought about his trombone in the trunk of the Hup.
“How much do you pay?” This was met with silence, and that vague, faraway look returned to Peter’s eyes. “Thanks anyway,” Jack said, “but I gotta get home. Viv’ll be waiting up.”
He drove back to Janette Avenue and parked in the alley behind the apartment. Boxcars were being shunted on the tracks, but they weren’t making much noise. Vivian had asked him once about hobos coming to the door and he had told her not to be such a worrywart, but he had taken to locking the car at night and listening for soft voices in the shadows. He climbed the back stairs to their apartment and let himself in through the screened-in balcony. The apartment was dark, and he closed the bathroom door before switching on the single bulb above the sink. In the bedroom he undressed and was almost in bed before he realized Vivian wasn’t there. When he turned on the bedside lamp, he saw the note and almost fainted, it sounded so much like something on a gravestone:
“Gone to Grace.”
VIVIAN
It was the first day of August. Her contractions were coming at regular intervals, like ripples from the passing of a distant ship. Alvina was probably up already, making last-minute preparations for the Emancipation Day parade. If Vivian were in Hôtel-Dieu instead of Grace Hospital, she could watch the parade from Jack’s father’s room as the high-school marching bands boogied their way up Ouellette to Jackson Park. She could wave to Alvina, who would be in the Cadillac convertible, sitting up on the back of the seat with Mayor Reaume and Eleanor Roosevelt. Another surge came in, bigger this time, and she straightened her back to meet it. There. Alvina would look up as they passed and wave back.
Vivian had decided that if the baby came out dark, she would stay in Windsor and raise it in the Settlement, with Alvina and Jack’s mother and Benny and Dee-Dee. She would get a job, typing or filing. She would get a lift to work every morning with Benny. Dee-Dee would sing to the baby all day. She wouldn’t even mind if Ephie the bird woman came around; Jack’s mother said she had once been a midwife. Vivian lay back in the bed. Another wave, but this time she was ready.
Her nurse was from the Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia and said she believed in the Bible because it put apples in Paradise. When she checked Vivian for dilation, she said, “Crikey, the little bugger’s head’s sticking half out. Where’s the bloody doctor at?” And hurried out. Vivian tried to look down to see it, but her stomach was in the way. A full minute went by and she began to worry. Then she heard Dr. Barnes’s name on the loudspeaker and the nurse returned.
“You can’t have the baby until the doctor’s here,” she said. “Keep your ankles crossed, my dear. Think of the ocean, the gentle sea, not all of it crashing in.”
The nurse must have been thinking of the Bay of Fundy.
A second nurse arrived, and the first nurse said, “Cover her up, we’ll wheel her in to Delivery.”
In the hallway she was racked by a pain so sharp she thought it would rend her. She was breaking up on the rocks. “I can’t,” she said, trying to will herself back out to sea.
“Don’t push, Mrs. Lewis.”
She wasn’t pushing. She wasn’t doing anything. She was floating, rising and falling with the pain.
The delivery room was large and cold. She wanted the red cashmere scarf that Iris had sent her. The nurses hoisted her onto a bed and lifted her legs into the stirrups.
“Give her the scopolamine now,” the first nurse said.
“This’ll just put you to sleep, Mrs. Lewis,” said the new nurse, and Vivian looked away, up into the light on the ceiling. “When you wake up you’ll have a beautiful baby to hold. There, now, tell me the names of your family.”
The names of her family? Well, there was Daddy and Mother and Wat and Iris and Freddie and … and the twins … and there she was standing on top of the cliff above Ferryland, looking down at the ocean. There were whitecaps on the waves, rows and rows of them, moving steadily towards her without coming any closer, and the wind that made them was whipping her hair, filling her nostrils with a salt-laden tang. A gull hovered at eye level, its unblinking eye fixed on her. The sea was the earth’s life-blood, her father always said, the land was its flesh, the sky its full lungs heaved with air. Heave, heaved, heaven. Newfoundland. God’s country. Fairy Land. There were fairy caps in the fields and fairy pipes in the bog, and many times she’d been fairy-led in places she knew like the palm of her hand. If she threw her head back now and looked up at the clouds she would become dizzy, and the gull’s cry would make a fairy tune, and she’d step forward, she wouldn’t be able to stop herself, she would step off the cliff and float up into the clouds. A schooner appeared at the mouth of the harbour, its pure white topsails straining against the wind. She could make out her father’s red pennant on the mainmast. Was he back from England so soon, with a white porcelain doll for her? Or back from Barbados with a tarbaby? Which would it be? Without turning her head she could see the wharf with the longliners tied up to it, all named after counties across the sea, the Wicklow, the Shrop, the Ayre. If she were on the wharf now she would hear their rigging snapping against the masts, and the bowlines creaking on the stays. She wished them tight lines and bloody decks. She wished them no hungry waves.
When she opened her eyes Dr. Barnes was there and the nurse was holding her wrist.
“Your husband’s in the viewing room,” the nurse said. “I’ll go fetch him for you.”
“Wait!” But the pressure on her wrist eased and was gone.
Dr. Barnes was at the foot of her bed, looking at her chart.
“Doctor,” she said.
“Yes, Vivian?”
She looked at the door behind him. She could still hear the roar of the waves, so close they must be just outside the room. She brought her voice down to a plea. “What colour is it?”
PART VI
ME
I live at 1856 Factoria Road in Windsor, and my telephone number is Whitehall 4-9528. My father works at Chrysler’s, on the assembly line. I have to remember that in case I get lost. Today is Sunday, August 1, 1956, and it’s my birthday. My friends are playing at my house. Uve Petruniak, Helmut Rheinhart and Marcel Smolinski. My father calls their parents DPs, but he’s friendly with them, cuts their lawns, helps them fix their cars. The church we go to is Christ Anglican, on the other side of Ouellette. My father wears a black cassock and a white surplice because he sings in the choir, and he says when I’m older I can sing in it, too. Except when there’s a funeral. My grandfather died when I was born, so I never went to the funeral.
For my last birthday my uncle Benny gave me a rifle that he made out of a piece of wood and it looked like a real one. It was painted brown and had a trigger and a rubber band that could shoot stones and marbles, but my father took the rubber band off because he said I could put someone’s eye out and we couldn’t afford that. But in the winter Uncle Benny was killed in a car accident on River Canard Road, and I was not allowed to go to his funeral because my father said his head had been chopped off and seeing it would give me nightmares.
My grandmother says that August first is called Emancipation Day. “You should be proud to be born on this day,” she says. “It’s a sign.” She sa
ys my aunt Alvina is in charge of Emancipation Day, but I’ve never met her. My father says I shouldn’t believe everything my grandmother says, because she’s old.
For my birthday lunch today we had tomato soup from a can. My father says that canned vegetables are better than vegetables from a store because they’re fresher. We also had bread and butter and, because it is my birthday, a can of fruit cocktail for dessert. After lunch we went to Riverside Park, beside the Detroit River, where there are pony rides and a Ferris wheel and a small bandstand where my father played in a band. When he sang “Has Anybody Seen My Gal?” I ran to get my mother. She laughed when I told her that Dad wanted her, and said, “Oh, that’s just a song.” My mother has brown eyes, like me, and comes from a place called Fairy Land. My father sometimes calls her Lily White.
When my father comes home from work he empties his Thermos bottle in the kitchen sink and rinses it out and puts it upside down on the drainboard. Then he stretches out on the chesterfield and rests his eyes until supper is ready. But because today is Sunday and my birthday, he set up the drum set he got me as a present. It has a big bass drum, a snare drum, a tom and a brass cymbal, and he taught me to hold the sticks a certain way, sort of like pencils. He set the drums up on the front porch because my mother said they’d give her a headache. Then we had lunch and then we went to the park.
After that, Uve, Helmut, Marcel and I caught six garter snakes in the field across from our house, in the ditch that runs between Factoria Road and the railroad tracks, and we were throwing them high into the air to see if we could wrap them around the telephone wires. We had three snakes hanging in front of our house when a kid we didn’t know rode his bike down the street. Factoria Road is a dead end, but most people who don’t live here don’t know that. And yet here was this kid, who is not from around here, riding full speed like he knew where he was going. But no one on our street knew any black kids.
“Hey!” I shouted, but the kid didn’t stop, so I yelled again. “Hey, nigger!”
The kid seemed to slow down without changing his pedalling, like he was going by in slow motion, or his wheels were half sunk in soft tar. He turned his face towards me, his eyes looking at the four of us on the sidewalk but focusing on me. He wasn’t mad or anything, his face was kind of blank. I think he was just wondering how I’d made his pedalling harder, or if I had some kind of power over him, like in a comic book.
But then I heard the screen door on our house open behind me, and my father coming out onto the porch.
“Wayne!” he yelled. “You get over here!”
I didn’t go in right away because I was still watching the black kid. He was halfway down the block. My father came down off the porch and I could hear my cymbal rattle, and he hurried to where we all were on the sidewalk beside our bucket of snakes. He grabbed my arm and almost lifted me off my feet. He looked frightened, and that made me frightened, too.
“Don’t you ever, ever call anyone by that word!” he yelled. I was staring up at him, and then he turned to look down the street to where the black kid was riding away.
“Do you hear me?” He shook me a little until I nodded.
“Do you hear me?” he yelled again, louder. I nodded again. “That is a very bad word! You know that. You know better than to call a person by that word!”
But I didn’t. No one had ever told me not to use that word.
My father looked up again and saw that the kid on the bike was at the end of the street, that he hadn’t stopped and was no longer looking back. Then my father took my face in his hands and lowered his voice, so only I could hear.
“Son,” he said, “don’t you know those people carry knives?”
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This novel has gone through many changes in the twenty years it has taken me to write it. Early versions were impossibly long and unwieldy, and it was Patsy Aldana who persuaded me that a family saga covering nearly two hundred years and five generations might be too much for a first novelist. My agent at the time, Bella Pomer, was a model of patience while I reassembled, rejected, reimagined and rewrote the book into something she could go back to potential publishers with.
I was still at sea when Nita Pronovost, senior editor at Doubleday Canada, took me aside at a party and in five minutes told me exactly what I should do with it. By then I was smart enough, or desperate enough, to do it. Several bouts of reassembling, rejecting, reimagining and rewriting later, I held the book in my hands that had been living in my head and heart for two decades. If anyone tries to tell you that writing a novel is easy, send them to Queen’s University Archives and let them read the twenty-two drafts that trace Emancipation Day’s metamorphoses.
Many people have lent a sympathetic and restorative ear to my lamentations. Among them I would like to thank Matt Cohen, Andrea Levy, Virginia Lavin-Moss, Lawrence Hill, and Jamie Swift. Jane Warren gave me some very practical advice, and Zoë Maslow provided much appreciated encouragement on a number of important levels.
I also thank my new agent, Anne McDermid, who has been very helpful with suggestions and tactical support; the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for their invaluable financial contributions; and, of course, my wife, Merilyn Simonds, for her seemingly boundless patience and inspiration.