The Shore Girl

by Fran Kimmel

Melvin Peevley has pale eyes and a large build and looks like he can’t figure out where he belongs. He wears suit pants with moccasins, leaves his earring hole empty, cuts his hair short at the sides, but wears a funny-looking, too-skinny ponytail. He’s got a moustache, too. When I told him I needed directions to find Missus Nielson’s house, he said, Well you got the right idea, son, cause that woman’s sure not coming to you. He went on to say she hasn’t left her house, not in decades, except for one time when her back tooth abscessed and the auxiliary ladies covered her head with a towel when they drove her to the dentist’s office. She gets everything delivered: her groceries and pills and Reader’s Digest special offers. Chesterfield takes care of its own, yes it does.

  Melvin offered to close down shop and drive me up to

  Blueberry Hill. Really. That’s what it’s called. But I said, No thank you, Mr. Peevley, and headed out on my own. Missus Nielson’s dilapidated house is beside the dead Judge Shore’s at the end of a long winding oil road with nothing else around but trees and thistles. It takes twenty minutes from Main Street to get to the top of her hill, and that’s hoofing it pretty good. That first day I puked twice on the way. Nothing substantial. There were no blueberries.

  I rang her bell and then I banged on her door and then I let myself in. I think I expected Christmas, though now that I’ve settled in I imagine the candy canes are still here and I just haven’t found them yet. There’s crap everywhere. Newspapers piled higher than me. Shiny old lampshades with gold fringes. Cardboard boxes stacked like building blocks. Bags full of twist ties and elastic bands. Tiny wool balls no bigger than grapes. Cloth squares. Mandarin orange boxes filled with old photographs and scenes cut out from Christmas cards. Everything smells mouldy.

  Missus Nielson coughed in the distance so I plowed ahead, tunnelling my way through the rows, inching forward a few steps, backing up, trying a different route. I found her in the kitchen.

  She sat at a table covered with stacks of canned peas and waxed beans. I had no recollection of what she looked like.

  She’s not what you would call flimsy. Her ankles are as fat as tree stumps. She’s got wrestler’s arms, puffy fists, and a large round head that sits like a balloon on top of her shoulders. She wears a little beaded purse on a chain around her neck, even when she goes to the bathroom.

  She didn’t see me at first. Her fingers were wrapped around a pair of orange-handled scissors, and she was trying to cut the lighthouse from the back page of a Reader’s Digest. When she looked up, her scissors clattered to the table with a thunk.

  “Grandma. It’s Joey. Carla’s kid. I’m here.”

  Her large head bobbed. I stared at the peas and waxed beans labels and all those cans bulging dangerously. She looked down at her lighthouse.

  I lifted the plates and bowls off the chair next to her and put them on the floor beside a box of canning jars. She watched as I picked up the scissors and cut a perfect circle around the glossy scene.

  “How’s that?” I said.

  After the lighthouse, I cut a square around the robins in the evergreen tree and a circle around the dove under the “Peace on Earth” greeting. From there, I just sliced into whatever she handed me.

  * * *

  Things to do in Chesterfield. A — chuck the tennis ball on the shed roof, count the falling shingles; B — play Frisbee with the old 45 records from the box on the front porch; C — chuck the 45s on the shed roof, count how many stick.

  When the excitement of A to C wears off, you can try for a coma. This involves lying in bed, lying perfectly still, breathing as little as possible, slower than slow, and transporting your body to where you won’t wake up.

  Grandma never interrupts. She’s kind of sweet actually. Every time she peeks in my room, she goes, “Oooohhh,” like she just remembered she’s acquired me. She makes the exact same noises when she sees the baby Jesuses lined up in their porcelain cradles, like she doesn’t know where they came from either.

  But now there’s the girl next door. She’s in that big old house, all alone, using the same fork that poked the dead guy’s tongue, sitting on the same toilet that once circled his butt. It’s as good a reason as any to get out of bed. So now when Grandma starts shuffling around each morning, I do too. She does her bathroom stuff, then it’s my turn. I drape my body over the stacked boxes to reach the taps, and then squeeze through the row of plastic-wrapped old lady dresses hanging along the shower curtain rod. There are seventeen shampoo bottles and eight soap-on-a-ropes.

  Grandma makes bran muffins that taste like sawdust. I eat three. She says she’s happy I’m here. She also says she’s happy the town gives rebates to seniors for garbage disposal. She calls me a handsome young fellow, and I smile and say grandsonly things like “shucks.”

  There’s a space about the size of an apple along the hedge between our houses where the leaves are brown and spindly. I can hunch down at this spot, invisible, and see everything going on. Yesterday Rebee Shore sat on her porch sipping root beer from a can and then she skipped down the stairs and onto her grass and kicked off her runners and laid down, arms spread wide, and stared up at the sky. Her ponytail fanned over the grass in waves. She was wearing a white blouse, the top three buttons open, and when the light sprung out from behind the clouds I could catch glimpses of her bra moving up and down, pressing against her skin. I stopped breathing and had to close my eyes. I don’t know how long she lay like that because the taste filled my mouth and I needed to back away before I hurled.

  Now at night, even when it makes perfect sense to aim for a coma, I lie there so horny I hurt. I listen to Grandma’s snoring and picture Rebee Shore’s small brown toes and open buttons and the way she stares at the sky like she’s gonna win her showdown with God.

  * * *

  There’s going to be an avalanche. We’ll be flattened under a giant box slide, toasters and paint cans and coffee tins filled with screws raining down. This house is gonna cave with us in it. If I could get ahold of Carla, I’d tell her that even though she’s one of God’s children now, she’s still a mom. I’d say, God is like the boss of social services and he’s telling you to leave the orphans with the real missionaries and come get me.

  When is she?

  Where is she?

  * * *

  Down at the LetterDrop, Melvin Peevley sells painted wooden ducks for thirty-five bucks apiece. They look like tattooed chickens with birth defects.

  I was trying to figure out how their beaks got so bent when Melvin snuck up on me. “Those there are Hank Hay-wood’s ducks,” Melvin said. “Local artist.”

  Melvin’s moustache is really walrusy, a scattering of long, sharp-looking bristles.

  “Can I buy some stamps, Mr. Peevley?”

  “Melvin.”

  “That’ll get to Africa?”

  “Africa?” Melvin looked confused.

  “Global postage, like for around the world,” I said.

  I thought about my letter. Dear Carla: How are the orphans? Is diarrhea a problem? Are you really in Africa? If you’re talking to God, please tell him I’m having strings of bad thoughts. Also, can you pass along your mailing address so I can send you this letter and we can sort out a few specifics? Like when I can get out of here? Melvin went back to the counter, hunched over and started rifling through drawers. “Lots of commotion up there on the hill. Those Shores coming back. Not that that lasted long. And damn but they left that girl on her own like that. Who knows when they’ll come — ” Melvin stopped midstream and looked up at me from the drawer. I think he just then made a connection between me and Rebee Shore. We were unexplainable landings. Like crop circles.

  “So how’s the girl?” he asked.

  I shrugged and stared at my runners.

  “Rebee Shore. Pretty girl. Right next door?”

  I swallowed that taste in my mouth.

  “Well, council’s got their nose in it now. Worried about the legalities. She’s only sixteen. A couple of the church ladies went up
to see her, snoopy bunch, but she wouldn’t let them in. They had to leave their casserole outside on the porch. I’d a liked to a seen that.”

  Melvin couldn’t know, but I watched that little party from my hedge spot. There was also a pie. One lady was fat like an elephant and the other had Frisbee-sized earrings. The earring lady had a big voice. She used Okanagan cherries, she said, for the pie. Both ladies stood on their side of the porch landing and took turns grilling Rebee Shore.

  Was she finding her way around Chesterfield all right? Was there anything they could help out with in her grandfather’s house? Did she like tuna? Would she like to get picked up for church on Sunday? Each new question was louder than the last. By the end they were shouting, stealing desperate sideway glances at each other. Rebee never said anything as far as I could tell. She sure never opened her screen door. The big lady finally said, “Well, I guess we’ll just leave this here then,” and she bent over and put the pie on the porch, and then she climbed back upright, using the earring lady for a brace. After they huffed and puffed their way back to their car and drove off, Rebee threw the casserole in the garbage can by the road. But she ate the whole pie with her fingers out there on her porch. It was impressive.

  Melvin found the right stamps and slid them over the counter. I fished out one of the twenties Carla left me.

  “You need three,” he said, counting out my change. “That’s for a regular-sized envelope. So who you writing to in Africa?”

  “A missionary,” I said, turning to go.

  “Cool.” Melvin didn’t know about Carla and the orphans. I’d told him I was in Chesterfield while my mother worked double shifts at the computer chip manufacturing plant in Edmonton.

  “Thanks, Mr. Peevley.”

  “Melvin.”

  I turned back around again. “She gets to stay in the house, right? The Judge left it to her.”

  Melvin looked at me and smiled. “That’s probably up to the mother. Calls herself Harmony now. What kind of a name is that?”

  “Melodious,” I offered.

  Melvin snorted. “Well, my guess is that they’ll sell and we can get back to normal around here.”

  “Great.”

  Melvin leaned toward me on his elbows. His breath smelled like coffee grounds. “There were two deaths in that same bedroom, you know. Albert’s wife. She died in that room, too. A long time ago. Giving birth to that girl who calls herself Harmony now. That girl’s real name is Elizabeth, same as her mother’s. That poor woman — Elizabeth senior I’m talking about here — spent the day alone, struggling through labour.” Melvin’s voice dropped, barely a whisper, even though there was nobody else around and he’d probably hashed through these details with everyone in town.

  “She didn’t call for help.” He shook his head as though he still couldn’t believe it. “There was a bedroom phone right beside her, not an arm’s length away, and she never even reached for it. Missus Nielson — your grandma, I guess you call her — well, she was looking after Victoria that day. That Victoria turned into one of those bad apple teenagers, didn’t she just.” He stopped, sniffing me over for bad apple smells. I passed the test, I guess, because he kept on going.

  “Victoria was still a sweet wee thing — three or four maybe. The Judge was out of town like usual. Your grandma was the one who found her, the red wrinkled baby girl squawling between her legs, still attached to her umbilical cord. The one that calls herself Harmony now. Bloody mess that was. The Judge was never the same after that.”

  My stomach rolled with the picture, a ten-second warning, but Melvin kept yakking and I couldn’t just run out like a girl. I tried not to breathe in his old coffee breath. Tried not to swallow.

  “. . . wasn’t right, a man alone in that house with those two little girls. Especially a judge. Your grandma took over, for a while anyway, until she and the Judge had a falling-out, over what, who knows. That woman can be as tight-lipped as a sky in a drought. No offence. We never saw much of him. Didn’t get so much as a haircut in town, let alone contribute to the Kiwanis or the Chesterfield Improvement Fund. Indecent the way he stayed on.”

  I’d been backing up slowly and was almost at the door. “Thanks for the stamps, Mr. Peevley.”

  “Melvin. You want to know about those Shore girls, Joey, you ask your grandma.”

  It hadn’t occurred to me I could ask Grandma. Ours was more of a moment-to-moment kind of relationship. What’s a five-letter word for funny bone? Do you want more peas? Can you bring me that box? You mean that box there? That one there as big as a freezer in the fourth row beside the couch on top of the stack behind the other stack behind the pillows?

  I made it to the alley and found a good place beside some tomato crates. Grandma’s muffins come up easier than they go down. I’ve learned that you can’t just duck into alleys and duck out again at the same spot. If anybody’s around, they look at you weird. So I walked past the back of the shops until the alley ended and contemplated the goings-on in the house next door. Rebee’s grandma lying in a pool of blood with Rebee’s momma attached to a cord, like in Alien, only worse cause the blood was blood and not chocolate syrup and there was nobody yelling cut, great job, here’s your zillion dollars. I wondered what Rebee Shore knew about her mom’s landing on the planet. I hoped not much. For the first time ever, I felt glad I’d never nailed down the details about Carla’s beginnings.

  The alley ended in front of the Sugarbowl. It’s a wooden shack beside Gaffy’s Hardware, about as big as a bathroom, pink and white candy-stripe paint and a giant ice cream cone nailed to the roof. A girl with a dirty white apron and blue hair slid the window open as I came around the corner. She’d painted a thick black line around her eyes, which made her look mad. She was half out the window, gawking at me with those angry eyes. I didn’t know what to do, so I asked if she had Tiger Tail ice cream. She slid the window back shut without answering. I wasn’t sure if that meant yes or no, so I sat on the wooden bench in case. When she opened the window again, she passed me a cone wrapped in an already stained napkin, a lopsided blob of striped ice cream on top. She wanted to know if I was the new guy up on Blueberry Hill. I nodded dumbly. I wanted to know how she knew I was the new guy up on Blueberry Hill. So far, I’d only met Melvin. Maybe everyone knew everything about everyone in Chesterfield.

  “Creepy about the Judge, right?” she said, twirling strands of blue hair tightly around her baby finger. “The whole town hated that guy.” The dark stain down her front was shaped like a giraffe. The top of her apron hung open. Underneath, she looked even thinner than me. Starved, really. Her boobs just tiny little grapes.

  “His place is haunted,” she said matter-of-factly, like it was something I ought to know.

  “Yeah, I know,” I said.

  “Really?” She picked up a bit, her painted eyes huge. She was old. Maybe sixteen.

  “There’s moaning and wailing,” I said.

  “Moaning and wailing!” She scratched at her apron like there were crawlies in there. “High pitched? Sorta aaaaah-hhhhh! Or is it more hissy and gaspy-sounding? Does she sound all pathetic and sad, or more like she’s coming to rip your balls off?”

  “Who?”

  “The dead Judge’s wife,” like duh.

  I nodded. I’m not good with small conversations. Or big ones. Nodding is a legitimate way to communicate. But then I thought of another thing to say. “It’s complicated. The moaning. A lot of vocal range. Now it’s the Judge, too, I think.”

  “Ohmigod. Like are they trying to communicate with each other? Doors slamming and stuff? You live right beside that asshole’s house, right?”

  My cone started to drip. I didn’t want to swipe licks in front of her, so I just stood there and let the goop run down my fingers. “Yeah. It’s pretty intense,” I said, searching the window ledge for more napkins. There weren’t any.

  “Bet he’ll never rest in shitty peace. He gave Chauncy Damer a two-year sentence for breaking into the Shauffers’ barn and stea
ling a baby pig. Chauncy would have given that pig back, it was just a stupid bet with my idiot uncles, but the Judge threw him in jail anyway.”

  She leaned towards me on the window ledge and ran her fingers through her blue hair, lifting up chunks that were black underneath. I held my ice cream under the ledge so she wouldn’t see the mess.

  “Chauncy Damer ended up murdering a cab driver in Edmonton and now he’s locked up again. So it’s just you and Mrs. Nielson and the dead people up there on the hill?” I nodded.

  “Interesting,” she said.

  I guess she hadn’t heard about Rebee Shore. I was glad somehow.

  “Great place for a party,” she added.

  She slammed the window shut and I just stood there so she opened it again and said, “See you on the hill, Tiger,” and then I backed away and started down the sidewalk. I dumped the cone in a flowerpot on Main Street and wiped my sticky hand on some guy’s lawn beside a yellow dog turd. I was half way up the hill before it dawned on me that I shouldn’t have said that stuff about the Judge’s house. A party for the ghosts up there might not be a good thing.

  * * *

  After supper I decided to test Melvin Peevley’s theory about Grandma remembering stuff. We’d finished our pink pork chops and canned peas and she was leaning into the sink in her flowery housecoat, that’s all she ever wears, that and the little beaded purse she hangs around her neck. I asked if she would tell me about the Judge. She had her back to me, rinsing off our gnawed-off bones for the bag in the freezer. That’s another thing she hangs onto. Gnawed-off bones. When she didn’t say anything, I tried asking again, giving clues. The Judge your neighbour, the guy who died in his bedroom a couple of weeks ago, the fellow whose little girls you used to look after, the man the town despised. She stopped washing my pork chop bone and held it up high, like a sword, and stared out the window. Finally I gave up and went into my room and restacked the boxes along the wall into an Autobot Transformer.

  One minute I was lying on top of the dusty quilt, eyes closed, wondering which would hurt more, being shot in the ear with a BB gun or stung by a horsefly, and then Grandma’s standing over me like a ghost in the dark.