Rose & Poe

by Jack Todd

  Sebastian Thorne confers with his lawyers for more than an hour before Dunn is called back in. The decision is made: he will accept a plea bargain.

  Miranda is sitting in the courtroom, flanked by Rose and Poe, the day Sebastian is sentenced to five years for aggravated sexual assault and five years for aggravated assault, the sentences to be served consecutively. She watches his sallow face as the judge pronounces the sentence. He’s going to prison, and it’s going to go hard for him there.

  Rose holds her hand. Miranda rummages through her emotions, looking for something, anything. She doesn’t feel a thing except a pervasive numbness. Joy, anger, elation, sadness, a sense of revenge, nothing. She thinks that she ought to feel pity for Sebastian, but that tank is empty.

  That night, she tries to explain it all to her father, how Sebastian Coyle is going to jail. Thorne stares at her, his watery blue eyes a complete blank. “Sebastian?” he asks. “Coyle? Do I know him?”

  ~

  Atonement

  Once Sebastian Coyle has been sentenced for the crime they had blamed on Poe, the remorseful citizens of Belle Coeur County begin to take stock. There are conversations in hushed tones. Some are truly penitent. Others feel the whole thing is a black mark against the county and that something ought to be done to erase it.

  When they learn that Rose had no insurance on her home, Dan Gillespie and Lambert Cain take on the task of raising money for her to rebuild. Shame is a useful tool in soliciting contributions. Money is still tight, but tradesmen and skilled craftsmen volunteer time and materials. The site of the original house is cleared with a bulldozer, the burned wreckage hauled away. Excavation is done quickly and the concrete poured free of charge. The frame for a four-bedroom home with a finished basement goes up almost overnight on the site of the old yellow house. Toilets, pipes, sinks, and insulation are donated, and granite tabletops installed. For the first time since she was a child, Rose will have an indoor toilet. A local alarm company provides an alarm and security cameras to help Rose and her son sleep better at night. An electronics store in search of good publicity donates a TV. Solid outbuildings go up to house the goats, geese, and the cheese business.

  Rose insists on only one thing: her bedroom has to be large enough for Poe to sleep beside her, as he always has. Maeva leaves her home at the old Kids Kamp and moves into one of the spare bedrooms. It takes some effort, but she’s able to convince Rose that with the brand-new refrigerator and freezer, she can get along without her root cellar.

  Rose recovers from her burns with only a few scars, but it takes Poe much longer. He walks with a bad limp from the fractured kneecap, he has trouble seeing out of his right eye. He trembles at the sound of snowmobiles throbbing in the night. He’s terrified of fire. He flinches at any loud noise. He mourns his lost goats, and he can never milk the survivors or the new goats provided by their friends and neighbors without remembering those that are missing, especially Susie Q, Little Dipper, and Princess Sally. He trusts only a handful of people: Rose and Maeva, Joey Ballew and Dan Gillespie, Wild Bill, Matt Harrow, Jim Dunn, Lambert Cain, Miranda. When strangers come to buy cheese, he hides until they’re gone.

  But he’s a free man, and each morning for the six months of the year when the goats are up at their summer pasture, he rises before dawn and scrambles up the mountain with the aid of a beautiful walking stick carved for him by Prosper Thorne himself — six-fingered and six-toed and still barefoot, singing his wild song. He nestles his cheek in the warm flanks of the nanny goats, he squirts milk into the mouths of feral kittens, he watches the red sun burst over the horizon, listens to the church bells ring, and checks the time on his fob watch, the big hand between the “1” and the “2,” the little hand on the number that looks like a bucket with a curved handle.

  Miranda spends the last week of her father’s life at the hospital. He takes her hand and calls her “Elena.” She weeps, as much for her lost childhood as for him. Rose sings “Amazing Grace” and “Farther Along” at his funeral, and a week after, Miranda hikes down to Rose’s place and finds Poe outdoors, trimming the cedars.

  “I want you to go back to work on the wall, Poe,” she says. “I want you to finish it for me. I’ll pay you well, better than you were paid before. You can repair it where it’s damaged and when you finish that, you can begin again with the stones we have, or we can look for new ones.”

  “Okay, Miranda. New stones.”

  “It will be a beautiful wall when we’re done, Poe. The most beautiful wall in all of New England.”

  “We’ll make it pretty.”

  “Yes, Poe. We’ll make a pretty wall. Rose will be proud of you, and so will I.”

  “You doesn’t need to pay me, Miranda.”

  “Oh, yes, I do. I need to find some way to repay you, to make it all up to you.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s alright. You don’t need to understand. All you need to do is help me finish the wall.”

  Poe goes to work on the wall the next day. He and Miranda work together. She is studying geology now, but they still have the summer to work. Miranda also hires a big strapping neighbor boy to help, and Poe teaches him how to place the stones. Young and strong as the boy is, he still can’t begin to lift some of the stones that Poe hefts onto the wall by himself. They work through May, June, July, August, and September. The work goes much faster with Miranda and the boy to help and they place the last stone in the middle of October. Miranda walks the length of it and pronounces it straight and true, a beautiful wall, the best stone wall in all of New England. She takes photographs and has the neighbor boy take a picture of her and Poe standing side by side, with Poe towering over her and the length of the wall curving into the distance behind them, and she has a shop in town frame a large blow-up of the photo and gives it to Poe to hang above the fireplace in the new house.

  ~

  The quality of mercy

  Rose forgives them all, without exception. She forgives the teenagers who burned down her house and nearly stoned Poe to death. She forgives Melody Crowder, who spat on her in church. She forgives the Reverend Hank Tattersall, the new minister at the Lamb of Jesus Gospel Church, for telling her it might be better if she didn’t attend service until things blew over. She forgives the anonymous vandals who spray-painted “Rapest!” on the side of the yellow house. She forgives the prosecutor, Savage or Savich, who did his best to put Poe behind bars, because that’s his job.

  Her customers come back, and her new notoriety brings in dozens more. The cheese business thrives. Maeva is now her partner. It turns out that she’s a born saleswoman and that to shift from selling dope to cheese is the most natural thing in the world. Alf Miller is doing fifteen to twenty years for dealing drugs, so he’s out of the way, and Maeva can get on with her life. She makes deals with cheese shops in tourist towns, and soon Rose has to start depositing some of her money in a bank, the first time in her life she’s kept it anywhere other than in the little strongbox in her cellar. The first time she needs to make a withdrawal and the bank teller hands it over without complaint, it seems like a small miracle.

  Summers, Maeva and Rose run a little camp on the side for a few of the boys from the original Kids Kamp, beginning with Skeeter and Moe. They teach the boys how to milk the goats and how to make cheese, and Maeva’s cousin Donnie, a real outdoorsman, takes them deep-woods camping. After the first summer, Skeeter and Moe stay on year-round, moving into the extra room at Rose’s place and enrolling in the high school. Skeeter becomes the quarterback on the high school football team and the point guard on the basketball team, while Moe turns out to have a gift for mathematics. When they have little else to do, they tag around after Poe. When they call him Sasquank, he rubs their heads with his six-fingered hands and laughs.

  The prostate cancer finally gets Matt Harrow. Matt is the first of Rose’s close friends to go, and it gets her to thinking. After consideri
ng it from all angles, she draws up a will. The house, the land, the cheese business, and the goats she leaves to Maeva, on condition that she look after Poe once Rose is gone. It has been a constant source of anxiety to Rose these past few years, what will happen to Poe if she goes before he does, which is almost certain. Knowing that Maeva will care for him is an enormous relief. Maeva is fiercely loyal to Rose and fond of Poe. She’s a good cook and she likes watching the big fellow eat. Once the will is drawn up and signed, Rose feels free to go when her time comes. She’s in no hurry, but neither is she reluctant. The Good Lord will call her when it suits His bidding, and she will cross to the other shore knowing that her boy is in good hands.

  Two years after the will is done, Rose is loading a heavy crate of cheese for shipment to Maine when she sighs, brushes the hair from her eyes, mumbles something about the goats to Maeva, collapses facedown and lies motionless, unable to hear Maeva’s scream. The doctor says later that the heart attack Rose suffered was so massive, she was dead before she hit the ground.

  So many people want to attend Rose’s funeral that the pastors of the First Gospel Church of the Pentecost and the Lamb of Jesus Gospel Church across the street agree to hold a joint service outdoors, where the whole county will be welcome. At least a thousand people turn out. Poe stands nearest the casket, towering over everyone, great tears streaming down his cheeks. Lambert Cain delivers the eulogy, and everyone agrees he has never been more eloquent. Maeva Miller, watching from the shade of an oak tree apart from the rest, curses the mourners under her breath, all but the handful who had stuck with Rose through thick and thin. The preachers hadn’t wanted Rose in church while Poe was on trial, and many of those who are weeping now had also helped fan the fear and hatred that almost got both Rose and Poe killed. Rose might have forgiven them, but Maeva never will.

  For months after, Poe cannot be consoled. He wanders the hills alone. He claws at the earth as if to dig down to a place grief can’t reach. He sleeps in the woods or in the shed, surrounded by the warmth of the goats. His keening lament echoes over Mount Manitou through the cold rain of late autumn and on the coldest days of winter.

  Then one spring day, he eats a big breakfast for the first time in months. That night, he sleeps in the house. Maeva, lying awake listening to him snore, smiles to herself. Poe will go on.

  ~

  The beast that lopes these dark hills

  A fisherman from the city, lingering on a riverbank, hears a strange, wild song in the distance. He shivers, wondering what manner of beast lopes these dark hills. He reels in his bait, packs up his tackle, jogs the half mile to his pickup truck, and drives four miles downriver before he dares to cast his bait again. When he does so, it’s with an eye over his shoulder for a creature not of this earth.

  Poe scrambles downhill along the rocky path. He pauses for a moment atop a knoll to sniff the scent of loam and moss and new growth. From there he can see the new house, which is painted yellow like the old one, set in the grove of cedars far below, smoke curling from the stovepipe in the cheese shed, the geese pecking at bugs, the old rusty hay-rake that has been parked in the same spot in the weeds since before he was born, the creek that trickles down from just north of the goat pasture to a hundred yards beyond the house, where it veers sharply down and down again toward the river.

  Maeva is waiting for him. She pours him a glass of milk in a big beer stein and he drinks it and she pours another. When he’s finished, she wipes his lips with a napkin and pats his bald head.

  “I have an errand for you, Poe. I have letters for you to mail at the post office and I need you to pick up a package for me. Can you do that?”

  “Uh-huh. I likes goin to the post office.”

  “I know you do, Poe. That’s why I saved this errand for you.”

  He whistles as he heads out, taking a different path from his usual route. On the outskirts of town he passes the French Mountain Cemetery where Rose is buried. It’s the first time he’s passed this way since the funeral. He doesn’t understand why the place affects him so, why there is a slight tremor in his hands. He’s munching an apple, so he pauses to finish the apple and fling the core away. Then he stops to pet a mewing black cat that is curling its way through and through the wrought-iron bars of the fence before he pushes the rusty gate open. Inside the cemetery, he searches up and down the rows of graves until he finds the slab of pinkish granite that bears his mother’s name. He can’t read what it says, but he remembers the color of the gravestone and the spot where he watched the men lower Rose’s casket into the ground. An enormous old crabapple tree near the grave is in full bloom. The heavy boughs hang low, as though sheltering her from the elements.

  Poe bends to trace his finger over the name, “Rose Didelot,” and the years of her birth and death. Someone has left a bunch of daffodils on Rose’s grave, so he picks some dandelions and heaps them next to the daffodils.

  It still doesn’t seem quite right. There’s something else he is supposed to do. He circles the grave, making low keening noises in his throat. Something that goes with a visit to the cemetery, something a person is supposed to do for his kin. He rocks from one foot to the other. He looks around, but there isn’t a soul to tell him what to do. He can’t do the remembering.

  Then it comes to him. A wide, beatific smile crosses his face. He unzips the fly on his OshKosh B’gosh overalls. It takes a while to get it going, but at last the urine begins to flow, and he pees on Rose’s grave in a mighty yellow stream that arcs through the spring air and splashes the long mound of earth all the way up to the gravestone itself. He has to go badly after drinking the two big glasses of milk, and he soaks the earth until his bladder is empty. He thinks, too late, that maybe he should have saved some pee for Huguette’s grave nearby, but that will have to wait for another time.

  A great shaggy raven watches him from the highest branch of the crabapple tree. Poe waves and says hello. The raven hops to a lower branch for a closer look. Poe says hello again and the raven answers. Then the bird flies away, its wings black against a cobalt sky.

  Poe zips up his coveralls and heads on into town, bare six-toed feet scuffing in the dust along the shoulder of the road as he walks along, whistling Rose’s favorite hymn: “Oh, they tell me of an unclouded day . . .”

  Acknowledgments

  I must thank my friend Bob Batos-Parac, Merchant Marine Chief Engineer, poet, and master carver, for the loan of his magical walking stick, the fabula animi, which I have attempted to reproduce faithfully.

  I also wish to thank Catherine Wallace, Laurie Mitchell, Magnolia Kahrizi, Judy Riggs, Lina Basile, and John Cooper, Sally Harding for her faith in the giant Poe, Susan Renouf for seeing what it could be, Laura Pastore for her dedicated work on the manuscript, and Irene Marc for her sacrifices and understanding.

  Finally, I am indebted to the Canada Council for a grant, without which Rose & Poe might never have been written.

  About the Author

  Jack Todd was born and grew up in Nebraska. He came to Canada during the Vietnam War and eventually settled in Montreal, where he has been a columnist for the Montreal Gazette for nearly 30 years. He is the author of a memoir and three previous novels

  Try another great read from ECW Press...

  On the Shores of Darkness, There Is Light From the acclaimed author of Lemon comes a clever and heartbreaking new novel of love and revelation

  Harriet is 11 going on 30. Her mixed-media art is a source of wonder to her younger brother, Irwin, but an unmitigated horror to the panoply of insufficiently grown-up grown-ups who surround her. She plans to run away to Algonquin Park, hole up in a cabin like Tom Thomson and paint trees; and so, to fund her escape, she runs errands for the seniors who inhabit the Shangrila, the decrepit apartment building that houses her fractured family.

  Determined, resourceful, and a little reckless, Harriet tries to navigate the clueless adults around her, dumpster dives for the
flotsam and jetsam that fuels her art, and attempts to fathom her complicated feelings for Irwin, who suffers from hydrocephalus. On the other hand, Irwin’s love for Harriet is not conflicted at all. She’s his compass. But Irwin himself must untangle the web of the human heart.

  Masterful and piercingly funny, Strube is at the top of her considerable form in this deliciously subversive story of love and revelation.

  ECW digital titles are available online wherever ebooks are sold. Visit ecwpress.com for more details. To receive special offers, bonus content and a look at what’s next at ECW, sign up for our newsletter!

  Copyright © Jack Todd, 2017

  Published by ECW Press

  665 Gerrard Street East

  Toronto, ON M4M 1Y2

  416-694-3348 / info@ecwpress.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.