She was aware of that, and aware besides that she didn’t even read Greek now. “But I could have, if I had worked harder,” she said, not explaining, stiff with him now. She slid the book deep into her pocket.
“Here we only speak the words we need to speak,” he said. “Piss, cunt, money.”
What had happened to her brother?
Just then, a drunk fell stiff as a plank and landed on the floor beside them, feet twitching. His shirt was open wide and his narrow chest fluttered pearly white beneath a tide line of dirt. An eddy of filth and ash from below the tables swirled around his head.
A man came from the bar counter and hauled the drunk away, pulling under the arms so the fellow looked to have fallen sweetly asleep.
Aren handed Kay another drink, saying she might like this better—it was sweeter, but still tasted raw and dangerous.
“What is it?” she asked him.
“Spruce beer, maybe?” His eyes kept roaming, checking. “Or needle beer. Don’t ask.” Then his eyes fixed, gladly, and his arm flew up to wave at someone.
At a table by the back wall sat a girl, her black hair half bright orange from dye, hanging in matted locks around her lacquered face. Under thick-drawn eyebrows her mostly closed eyes were ringed with black and her lips were painted bright, strong pink, showing bluish underneath the paint. She had a dainty nose and a full chin, but a very sullen expression.
“Merissa!” Aren called.
A man knocked Kay’s elbow. “There’s a fellow calling you,” he told her, indicating a man at the other side of the room. “Why aren’t you answering him?”
“Why don’t you answer him?” said a woman on her left. “Too proud for it?”
“I don’t know him,” Kay said. She frowned at the woman, who was colossal.
“Are ya sure?”
“Perfectly sure!” But in her heart Kay felt some doubt—she was so short-sighted it might have been someone she knew, someone from Yarmouth, from the South End, or a sailor.
The people wouldn’t let it go. They started shouting to the man by the door, “Joey! That you, Joey Cremo? This lady say she doesn know you!”
Well, she did not know a Joey Cremo. For a moment he had the look of Jacky Judge, but he was younger than Jacky must now be, just a boy. He came over, smiling, a bit shy, and took off his hat. He had such a soft look—like the boy she once imagined would bring her groceries, when she was living on a solitary island . . . The thought of Arthur Wetmore surfaced for a moment, but she pushed that aside.
“Oh,” he said. “I thought for sure you was my cousin! I do beg your pardon, Miss.”
“He begs her pardon!” the first man shouted. “Buy’n a drink!”
This was uncomfortable. Kay lifted her glass as if to toast him, to say she already had one, thank you, and drank the spruce beer down. It made her choke, but she swallowed more, still choking, and laughed. She felt the bruise below her eye. Still tender. That swollen eye was why she fit in here.
The boy’s name was Augustine Muise. The large woman was Doraine, and the shouter said he himself was Old Joe Brooks, and he seemed to know Aren, so they all sat at a table in the smoky noise while Aren and the red-haired girl talked together by the wall for a long time. Someone gave Kay another glass of spruce beer. She tried to pay for it, but could not find her purse in her pocket. Oh dear. She turned to Aren, worried—
“I’ve got it. You dropped it a time ago,” he said, “in Tom Poulette’s place.”
He held out her little brown purse, and she fished in it for a fifty-cent piece. The price of drink was criminal here, but of course it would be. How could Aren afford it?
Merissa was sitting on his lap now. Kay did not like that at all. She was tired.
Then there was a cloudy time, walking through the streets making too much noise. Kay tried to shush Aren, for he would get in worse trouble than she would. Merissa, the girl, kept hanging on his arm laughing, with her head rolling around. She had a loose way of hanging and strutting that Kay did not like but Aren seemed to find hilarious.
A gang of sailors in duck pants and sweaters rolled past, and one man stopped to look back at them.
Then he turned and ran back to grab at Aren, shouting, “Get away from these girls! You’re a foul bastard and will take them your way to hell!”
It made no sense to Kay, what he said, nor to Aren, apparently.
“We bunked on the Alhambra, you know me!” the man shouted. “Off Manila in ’19!” It seemed to enrage him when Aren shrugged and moved aside, lifting a shoulder to prevent the man from grabbing at his neck.
Kay waded in then, though she had nothing to fight him with. The other men from the ship were laughing and chivvying their mate. Seeing a long piece of lath there on the ground, Kay picked it up and swung it like a mashie, as if to take the man’s feet out from under him, but it broke on his ankles and the men all laughed.
Aren laughed too and put his hands up, making peace with them. He called over his shoulder not to take them on, that it was not worth it. “Not worth the fight,” he said. Or did he say, I’m not worth a fight?
Then someone spotted a dock guard coming and the gang of men went reeling off in another direction, still laughing at the broken lath.
Aren loped ahead to catch up to Merissa, and Kay had only a splinter in her palm for her trouble.
They ended up in another place, a cellar, with men sleeping against the wall. People were smoking at a stove, passing a stubby pipe around, and Kay did not like that either. She was glad of her dark coat that let her slide into the background, glad of her lack of prettiness.
The men swayed toward and away from Merissa; some of her clothes seemed to have got lost. Aren stood back by the cellar door, leaning against the wall and laughing sometimes, but keeping a grip on Kay’s hand too. He wanted to leave and Merissa did not, but in the end he won, and they were walking again . . .
Kay did not know the route they took, but when they stopped tramping, they were at the foot of the stone steps at Aren’s house. In the dim hall, Merissa went ahead of them up all those stairs, shoes clacking all three flights up, swaying exaggeratedly, looking back over her shoulder at them. Aren told Kay she was to sleep in his bed, that he would find another bunk. “There’s an empty room down the hall,” he said, “but it will be a sty.”
Merissa hung in the doorway waiting for him, and when Aren was satisfied that Kay was safe, they left her there.
“Lock the door,” he whispered through the crack before he shut it.
She did. Then she was alone in that half room. She did not take off her clothes, but slid her shoes together in front of the door so she could find them.
It was no longer entirely dark. She lay down on his bed and heard strange noises, sounds she did not want to hear. She heard Aren’s voice and then high laughing, and strange crows from that girl, and huffing noises. It was miserable to hear them together. It was none of her business. She stuffed her fingers in her ears and waited for sleep to hide her.
Without a perceptible interval, without dreams or thinking, it was bright morning. She’d forgotten to wind her watch, but it was still ticking: just after seven. She wound it carefully, her fingers not working very well.
Standing, she made the bed; the sheets were worn thin as silk. She put her shoes back on and tidied her hair, and pulled her coat around her—little purse back in the pocket, yes, with her Greek book, and a still-clean handkerchief. There was no water in the room, and she did not dare explore the hallway to find the pipe. Gently, gently, she unlocked the door and turned the handle, and stepped out.
Aren opened a door nearby. “Goodbye,” he said.
“Goodbye.”
At the head of the steep-pitched stairs, she turned. He was still watching her.
“I’ll come and see you again,” she said. “We miss you so much—we are always looking for you.”
He touched his fingers to his lips and blew, as she had taught him to do on the Morning Light, and tur
ned back into that other room.
The stairs were steep and the stairwell so ill-lit that she had to take her time going down the three flights. She’d already missed the early train, she’d have to take the DAR train through Wolfville to get home by supper.
Almost at the bottom of the stairs, the outer door opened and in came a woman Kay knew: Esther Field, who had been in her class at school. Her father was the Baptist minister at the South End church in Yarmouth.
Esther looked up and cocked her head under her neat blue hat. “Why, Kay!”
“Hello,” Kay said, stopping on the stairs. “Do you live here too?”
Esther smiled, taking that as a pleasantry. “No, I am a district visitor these days, and this rooming house is on my beat. I go round Saturday mornings to look in on a few church families and elderly people, see that they are getting good nutrition, you know, and arrange help for those who need it. You’ve come to see your nephew?”
Trust Esther to remember Kay’s relationship with Aren perfectly—she’d won the History Prize at school, and was a scholarship student at Queen’s University. Now doing good works in Halifax, while Kay did what? Went to weddings.
She liked Esther, but she did not want to talk to her this morning, with her tongue still furred and Aren upstairs in bad straits, and also with that Merissa girl who might start shouting any moment. She stood back against the wall for Esther to pass on the narrow stairs.
“I know you can’t be happy to see him out of work,” Esther said.
So that was the truth of it.
“But you can’t do more than a person will let you. He’s chosen this himself.”
Kay looked at her.
“You mustn’t blame yourselves, you and your family. It’s not anything you did,” Esther said, her voice cooler, eyes assessing Kay’s face and hat and life.
But it was, it was exactly something that they had done.
Going through the Public Gardens, Kay stopped to lean on the railings and watch the grebes and waterhens, and bright-coloured mallards with their retiring wives. “I come from haunts of coot and hern,” she said out loud, and strode out more purposefully for the train station. Even the rails followed the rhythm, and all day long she could not get that poem out of her tired head, listening to the clicks tricking over the tracks, “For men may come and men may go, but I go on forever.”
Aren was never coming back. He would become one of those men in the cellar, lying against the wall, smoking a long pipe. He would fight with that beat-up, damaged girl and live in poverty and misery—not that he could not have money if he wanted it, but he had told Thea he would not take any. How was he living, if he’d left the job Francis had found him? Most likely running rum, and that would be a bad business—jail if he was ever caught.
What she had liked least about him was the patience in his eyes, that said this was what he expected, all he would ever expect.
Down the Annapolis Valley, the sentence made by the tracks’ clacking changed, as it often does when the train rounds a bend, or when one is tired. Not worth a fight not worth a fight not worth a fight they said again and again, while Kay tried to find a place on the windowsill that did not hurt her head.
3
Lake Milo
She jumped off at the Milton station at 4 p.m. on Saturday, planning to walk or—because she was very tired—to sit on the station fence till someone from Lake Milo came by. Along came Donny Sweeney from the ice factory, who offered to take her out in his trap after he’d off-loaded the cheese, so that was longer to wait.
She got him to let her out before the turning, cut across and walked over the fields and into the orchard. Somewhere back here, Jerry Melanson had buried Pilot. There, there was the mound. And there was Roddy, staring at a grave-marker stick, already made and carved, not very neatly. Not a cross, Kay saw. Roddy shared her mind on that, then. When she got close enough to read, she saw that it said,
PILOT
HOME FROM THE SEA
Which was what she had thought about Francis.
Hearing her approach, the boy turned as she came near, unsurprised. “Did you go to see him?”
Kay nodded. Her head still ached. “I saw his room, and met some of his friends.”
“But why—Why he hasn’t been back?” It seemed like Roddy had been wanting to ask that for a long time. “We want him around here, he is—I love him.”
A hard thing for a nine-year-old boy to say. Kay could not think of anything to tell him.
His white, knobby hands, big for his age, trembled as they adjusted the grave stick again. “It was Eleanor King, wasn’t it? The fellows were saying at school that my brother had tried to go with her, and her father and brother ran him off.”
She knew what the fellows were saying must mean. They had been making fun of him, or of Aren to get to him, which was worse. She must think of something useful to tell him.
“I don’t think it was exactly that they ran him off,” she said. In her inner ear she heard Aren saying don’t take them on, I am not worth a fight. She could not tell Roddy the real story, the sudden, ridiculous drama of Eleanor’s mother reading her diary, all those six months of 1920 scribbled with June-mooning over Aren, and the men bounding down the hill to confront Aren where he sat with Eleanor eating ice cream by the bronze horse, the mother following along clucking like a hen. And Eleanor meekly going home with them, after the months of passionate secret vows. Or Mr. King saying he’d be damned if he’d have a damned darky in the family—and Kay at the counter of the luncheonette while all this was going on, Aren standing there alone until she went to be with him and shouted a few things back at Mr. King, which even Thea had not asked her to apologize for.
She said, “Mr. King was angry because Eleanor had not let him know that she was going to the dance with Aren. He is a stupid man and takes a long time to wrap his head around new things. And Eleanor is foolish and silly, and had not grown up.” That was the crux of it.
“She is married now.”
She was, to James Fitzgerald. Not a bad person, a junior engineer on the DAR line. Eleanor was still pretty and wobbly, no more able to stand up to James than she had been to her father. But being her father’s daughter, she was too stupid for Aren, and Kay could not be exactly sad that it had all been stopped. Except that it had led to Aren leaving, and nothing was any good when he was gone and unhappy and not ever coming back. And also, Merissa Peck! She was even less possible than Eleanor King had been. Aren was perhaps only being kind to her—she was impossible—but he would probably love her soon, if he did not now, for her trouble and hurt as much as anything else.
“You smell right bad,” Roddy said as they walked back down the orchard. “What even is that smell?”
She sniffed her sleeve, breathing in deep. “Drinks, meat, smoke, sadness.” None of it smelled like Aren, his good smell of salt water and rope and sun.
Roddy went to the stables. Kay slipped in the side way to avoid Lena Hubbard and reached the bathroom before Thea could hear her, or smell her. Her fawn linen dress was probably ruined, now she came to look at it, but she washed it in the sink, tiptoed to her room and hung it in the closet to drip onto the strip of old linoleum there. Still faintly fragrant of tobacco and depravity.
On Sunday morning, the Reverend Arnold Archibald preached about the heathen. It was Missionary Sunday and he exhorted the congregation to “give up to your uttermost and then give more.”
The only way to save poor heathen souls from damnation was to enlighten them with the gospel, he said, and ended on a joke: “It reminds one of the missionary who was tasked to translate the Nunc Dimittis—Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace—into the backward tongue of an African tribe, and could get no nearer than Big Boss, kick us out gently.”
Ha ha ha, the congregation chortled as one.
Kay thought of walking out, but then there would be explanations to give, and she would become inarticulate or weep with fury. Instead, she waited for the Commun
ion prayers and the confession, where she could speak to God frankly. The prayers wound on and on in Archibald’s florid rendering, so unlike Mr. Brimner’s brisk, sane exhortations. Beside Kay, thin and stiff in his tweed knicker suit, Roddy kept kicking the kneeler very delicately, leaning his head on the pew back, unable to bear the frustration. Kay too tapped her shoe against it until her big toe hurt, even though she had learned better over long years of attendance at both services every Sunday.
Finally they were dismissed. At the door, Mr. Archibald pressed Thea’s hand, thanking her for the invitation to midday dinner. A large meal that Kay could not avoid by a walk in the fields. He pressed Kay’s hand too, fleetingly, before reaching for Aunty Bob, who had some money to give to the mission.
Kay could have given some, too, if she’d been inclined. She had no admiration for missionaries, but she was all right for cash. She was not earning her keep, but the trust from Father’s part of the English estates was at last wound up, and Kay would have an annuity. If she lived modestly, she would not have to work, though she might need to supplement her living by teaching piano, or tutoring high school boys in Latin for pin money.
She and Roddy and Thea went out into the glassy northern sunlight and Kay thought of the sun she wanted, that hot glow of the tropics, light everywhere, needing no visible source.
Virginia Archibald had a serious disposition. She was a little older than Kay, but they had been in the same class at school, which meant that she remembered the various ways Kay had made a fool of herself: knowing too much and not understanding to keep quiet; fighting in the schoolyard whenever Aren was threatened, or even when he was not; angry weeping at the top of the class when ordered to describe her experiences in the West; clumsiness at double-dutch skipping. All the myriad infelicities of her conduct at school and her inability to fit in or bend to custom or demonstrate school spirit.
The Voyage of the Morning Light Page 26