“We pay students forty-three cents an hour.”
I stopped writing. “Really? That’s not much, is it?” The man didn’t flutter an eyelash. “But if there’s a job, I’ll take it.”
“So, be here at eight-thirty tomorrow, sharp,” he said. He’d already turned his attention back to his desk.
It was not that I’d actually landed a job on my first day of trying that cheered me on my ride home, but that Mr. Thomas had asked to read something I’d written. I knew it was only because of Alex that he was willing to look at my work. But that was all right. There was nothing wrong with a little help to get one’s foot in the door. After that, it would be up to me.
I remembered how Alex had told me a writer has to be a listener, someone who pays attention to things around her, to the way that people speak, as well as to what they are saying. I could do that, I thought. Even while I worked for forty-three cents an hour at the five-and-ten. And, like Alex, I would always be on the look out for opportunities to write.
The flag was up on the mailbox out front when I came back down the road. I stopped my bike and reached inside. Instead of the letter from Margaret I’d hoped for, there was one of those dreaded envelopes with a window in it. The electric bill. Already, and the power hadn’t been turned on for one full week yet.
“Mr. Thomas is kind,” my journal entry that night read. “He asked me to bring him a sample of my writing. He didn’t hire me on the spot the way I had hoped, but who knows?
“The money at Savaway is pitiful. Maybe I’ll make some other contacts while I’m there and will be able to find something better.
“I have started reading one of the books Alex was reading. I remember when she brought this particular book home, delighted at finding it in the second-hand shop. It makes me feel close to her, holding it, knowing her eyes crossed these lines of text, her mind absorbed these ideas.
“I can see her reading this book, sitting in the lawn chair down by the river, wearing her straw hat, her legs stretched out on the foot rest. Ernie is wedged in underneath her. It is her last summer.
“I remember standing at the upstairs window, feeling on my face the breeze off the river as it comes through the screen. It is not raining, yet my face is wet. This is the day Alex tells me she isn’t going to get better, that she is going to die. When I go down to where she sits, to continue our anguished discussion, I see this book lying in her lap. I don’t think she ever got to finish it.”
I was in the midst of a dream where I was riding double on my bicycle with the woman in the polka dot sundress, throwing off newspapers door to door, when suddenly I jerked awake. What had I heard? In the dark I sensed that Ernie too had raised his head and was listening.
Pulse racing, I rolled slowly onto my back, straining both ears for what had wakened me. There it was again: a thump, thump at the back of the house. I reached up and pulled on the light on the head of my bed. The shadows leapt away into the corners of the room.
Was there someone trying to get into the house? Or worse, was whatever I heard already inside, bumping against the walls in the dark?
Ernie was on full alert now, a low growl in the back of his throat. “Easy, boy.” I crept to the window and eased the blind aside. Might be only a raccoon, I thought. The outside light was still on, and from here nothing looked amiss. The wind had risen, and I could see the tree branches swaying against the night sky.
There was a switch at the top of the stairs that turned on the hall light below. Ernie clattered down ahead of me.
Standing barefoot in the kitchen, I determined that the sound was coming from beyond the back door. There was no way I was venturing outside. Everything looked okay in the rest of the house. The chair was still wedged under the doorknob, so whatever it was had not gotten inside.
I backed away from the door and perched on the edge of the couch in the front room, shivering. Eventually, I drew my feet up under me, then curled up, pulling over me the rough, maroon blanket we kept folded over the back. I used to hate these raw blankets Nan got from the woollen mills at Bancroft. They were so scratchy against your skin, and had no satin edging like the ones on Margaret’s bed. Tonight though, the blanket was a comforting cocoon. Ernie dozed on the floor beside me.
In the morning, I discovered I’d left the canvas bag of clothespins on the line outside. It had worked its way down the wire to where it now hung, bumping in the wind against the house. Feeling ridiculous, I took it inside and tossed it into the laundry basket. If I was going to succeed at living on my own, I’d have to do better than that.
When I arrived at the five-and-ten that morning, I found Mr. Forth more frazzled than yesterday. “It’s Bobby Baker, the assistant manager who is in charge of staff,” he explained, wringing his small hands while I waited on the bottom step to the office.
I stood firm. He wasn’t going to change his mind if I had anything to say about it. When I was still there, fully a minute later, he continued. “Bobby won’t be in today till after lunch. I forgot that, when I told you to come in for eight-thirty.”
“That’s okay,” I said reasonably. “I’m sure I can find enough to keep me busy till then.”
Because Mr. Forth seemed to have no idea what to do with me, I had no trouble convincing him that I should follow the other girls around and get used to where things were in the store. “There’s nothing worse for a customer than to ask some staff person where something is, and then follow them all over the store because they don’t know themselves,” I told him.
So I spent the next two hours getting acquainted with the layout of Savaway. After that, I offered to help a middle-aged woman named Pat do some price changes. I pulled the pins out of the old price tags and Pat repinned the new ones.
At twelve o’clock Mr. Forth came around to tell me it was time for me to take my lunch. In my excitement that morning I had forgotten that I needed to bring one. There was a lunch counter at the back of the store, and I studied the menu on the wall above the grease-spattered mirror. There was a picture of a grey rectangle, masquerading as meatloaf, a colourless chicken salad, a plate of chips with gravy. The smell of the canned spaghetti was making my mouth water.
I slid up onto a stool. “Just a Coke, please,” I said when the waitress pulled the order pad out of the waistband of her apron, the pencil from over her ear.
“That all?” she glared. “I thought you were on lunch.”
“I brought my own today,” I lied.
“Well, you aren’t allowed to eat it at this counter.”
“I wasn’t going to,” I said. “I just want a cold drink.”
“Suit yourself,” the woman shrugged. She had black hair with a lot of grey in it, cut short, with whiskers at the back that matched those on her upper lip.
The man on the stool beside me left half a bun on his plate, along with a slice of anaemic tomato and a single piece of wilted lettuce. I spun the stool in the opposite direction to avoid salivating while I waited. I hadn’t had anything to eat since supper last night.
I bought a ten-cent bag of potato chips in the candy aisle and was heading for the back room when I spotted William Thomas at the stationery counter.
“Oh, Mr. Thomas,” I said, “I wanted to thank you for the tip.” He gave me a puzzled look. “About coming here to find a job? I got it. Today’s my first day.”
Recognition dawned. “That’s terrific, Libby. Congratulations. I hope you make a fortune,” he said warmly.
“I won’t, sir. Not here.”
He took the small paper bag the girl behind the counter held out for him and dropped the change into the baggy pocket of his jacket. “What are they paying you, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Forty-three cents an hour,” I whispered.
“Really?” He raised his bushy eyebrows. “Seems rather low to me.”
I shrugged. “It’s what they pay their students, so I said I’d take it. It’s a job. Till I find a better one.”
William Thomas frowned
at the bag of chips, the glass of Coke. “That’s not lunch, I hope,” he remarked.
“Today it is,” I grimaced. “I was in such a hurry to get here that I forgot to pack myself something. Can you imagine?”
He put a hand back into his pocket and came out with an apple. “Here, take this. No, I insist. Marge packed an extra one in my lunch today, and I’ll just end up taking it home again. You’ll be saving me from a tongue-lashing.”
Returning to the floor after my noon break, I spent some time trying to make an artistic arrangement out of the little packages of baby shirts and the bigger bundles of flannelette diapers. I was folding a pile of ladies’ sweaters when a young man with a foxy-coloured brush cut approached. He had a baby face, almost transparent blue eyes, and a smooth, fair complexion. “You’re Libby Eaton, I guess.” He stuck out a slim hand. “I’m the assistant manager.” Bobby Baker couldn’t have been any more than nineteen. He wore a string tie with his white dress shirt, the sleeves of which he’d turned up to his elbows, revealing pale, freckled forearms.
“Pleased to meet you,” I said. I’d heard about this young man from Margaret.
“So, how’s it going?” His tone was friendly as he struck a casual pose against the counter full of ladies’ lingerie and eyed me up and down.
“Fine, I think,” I replied, feeling my cheeks grow warm under his gaze. “I helped Pat do some price changes this morning. When she went on her lunch, she told me to do some tidying.” I bent over my folding job again.
“Always lots of that to do,” Bobby agreed amiably. “The way some people paw through the merchandise! Mr. Forth keeping you busy enough?”
I didn’t look up. “I haven’t really seen him. He said just to look around, get to know where things are, until you came in. That you’d be in charge of finding things for me to do.”
“That’s right.” He uncrossed his ankles and pushed himself away from the counter. “Do you know how to weigh out candy?”
“Not yet,” I admitted.
“Come on over to the candy counter, then. I’ll get Gloria to show you. You can help her there this afternoon. We’ve had a new shipment, and I just brought some cases to her on the dolly. The bins will all need filling.”
I followed him down the creaking floor to a block of glass cases. “Hey, Blondie,” Bobby greeted a pretty girl who was wiping finger marks off the front of the glass. “I brought you some help.”
Gloria straightened up and gave me a friendly smile. The assistant manager moved in closer to her. “Now, don’t say I never do anything for you.” His voice was a husky growl.
With a town as small as Pinkney Corners, I’d seen Gloria Hooper around, but I didn’t know her personally. She was, I discovered, fun to work with. She had a lively sense of humour and kept up a constant chatter while we opened boxes and scooped candy into the compartments in the glass-fronted case. She was eager to make me feel right at home. Gloria knew all the staff and the regular customers and seemed to know everything about them. Working with her made the afternoon hours fly past.
The first time I saw Gloria pop a French cream into her mouth, I was horrified. “My favourites,” she grinned mischievously. With her pink circle skirt, her white blouse, her hair blonder than blonde, she looked like a piece of candy herself.
“You’re allowed to eat them?” I asked.
“Sure. Everybody does. Just don’t let Freddie Forth catch you. But if Bobby’s on, he’s the worst of the lot. Comes in and grabs a whole handful of the mixed nuts.” Her face darkened. “Just watch out that’s all he grabs,” she finished, cryptically.
Gloria and I had been scooping candy together for a couple of hours, and Bobby had cruised by several times. I knew from the way she had dissected the other employees that it was just a matter of time before she filled me in on all the juicy gossip about the assistant manager.
“Let me give you a word of advice about that one,” Gloria said in a conspiratorial tone, as we broke open a carton of butterscotch wafers under the counter. “Watch out.”
“Oh?” I queried cautiously, aware of being the newcomer here and not knowing what the relationship between these two might be. “He seems very friendly.”
Gloria snorted at my observation. “That’s the understatement of the year! He’s engaged to a girl in the town where he took his training. Karen comes in to check on him sometimes. Would you believe I’d gone out with him three times before he told me about their engagement? So, you be careful. Especially seeing as you’re new. You’ll have to make it plain to him that you’re strictly business.” She gave me a knowing look. “Unless you aren’t.”
“He’s not really my type,” I said, thinking of Michael.
Six
Over the next few weeks, my work days developed a definite rhythm. I rose early, in order to have time to write a few pages in my journal while my mind was still clear. Then I dressed, ate my breakfast and biked in to work.
Each evening after supper I would sit outside with my writing supplies and the dog, until the mosquitoes and the darkness drove us in again. I’d do the dishes, fix my lunch for the next day, climb the stairs to bed and read till I fell asleep. In the morning, the whole cycle would begin again.
As for Ernie, his days were free for rambling. He never went further than the corner in one direction or the McIntyres’ farm in the other.
During the course of my comings and goings, I came to the conclusion that something had died in the back kitchen. At first, it was just a suspicion, a hint in the air when I went by—a sweet, rubbery smell. Like skunk. I tried to ignore it, but with each day the stench got worse. I knew I couldn’t avoid using the back door forever, and one Sunday, when Savaway was closed and I had a day off, I decided to tackle the problem.
I propped the outside door open and began moving things, one by one, out into the yard. The back kitchen, a fancy name for a shed built onto the back of the house, was packed with stored items. The original floor had rotted away in places, and new boards had been nailed down lengthways over the holes. The two tiny windows had disappeared behind the chaos. There were stacks of stained berry boxes, assorted wash tubs, pails and basins, rolls of rubber hose, floor mops, a teetering tower of six-quart baskets, endless empty sealer jars, bits of wood, an enormous pair of rubber boots, straw hats, several bags containing rags, and two cardboard boxes that were filled to the brim with papers.
My nose eventually led me to the source of the smell—a bloated field mouse, caught in one of Alex’s traps, down behind a box of kindling and old newspapers. How one small dead animal could smell so awful was beyond me.
Field mice were pretty common at our place, and Alex had developed her own tried-and-true way of catching them whenever they got inside. She used to tie a bit of bread onto the mousetrap, pinching the bread into a small cube of dough and securing it to the trap with white thread. Her theory was that the mouse would get its teeth caught in the thread and set off the trap.
I hadn’t thought about how I would dispose of the offending creature when I found it, and, still undecided, I carried the corpse, trap and all, outside on the end of a shovel. I couldn’t bring myself to touch the trap to free the little grey mouse, didn’t even want to look at it. Ernie was already too interested in it for my liking. If I dug a hole to bury it, he just might dig it up again.
In the end, I hurled it as far away from me as I could into the river. I watched it float slowly away and immediately felt sorry that I hadn’t dispatched the little creature with more dignity.
It was a fact of life that there would be more field mice, and no way of keeping them out of the back kitchen. Because I wasn’t going to set any more traps, I decided we would have to learn to coexist. My plan was to rattle the inside door first on my way out, to warn them that I was coming, and stamp my feet as I went through. And I could always let Ernie out ahead of me so that he’d go bounding along to the outside door. No creature would stay after such an exuberant exit.
Pleased with my
decision, I went back up to the house and moved everything inside again, creating some order in the process. Then I spent the rest of the morning stuffing pieces of rag with a kitchen knife into any crack I could find. I discovered another loaded trap under the sink and set it off. I wanted no more surprises. I fed the morsel of dried bread to Ernie who, ever curious, had manoeuvred his head and shoulders into the cupboard to watch me.
Just as I was washing my hands and thinking of lunch, Ernie gave a low, warning growl. He scrambled to his feet as I moved to the window to see what it was he’d heard. There, not twenty yards from my back door, stood a strange man looking down towards the river, in no hurry to move on. He was a large man, with unkempt, yellowing hair that straggled down the back of his neck from under a grimy cap. He wore a tattered T-shirt from which the sleeves had been ripped and a pair of wrinkled pants that may once have been part of a suit. Strapped to his back he had a large bundle, like a bedroll. While I watched, he loosened the pack and let it down onto the ground, stretching long arms over his head.
“You’re not staying here, mister!” I muttered to myself, because it looked like that was what he was planning. Ernie cocked one ear at the sound of my voice. I decided to let the dog out and see what happened.
It was clear that Ernie startled the man, but what followed was an impasse. Ernie planted himself, barking incessantly, within three feet of the man, and both of them stood their ground. I realized after a few moments that unless I wanted the stranger to think no one was home, I would have to make an appearance.
I unhooked the scissors from the nail on the wall and dropped them into the pocket of my shorts. “Ernie, come,” I commanded from just outside the door. Obediently, Ernie bounded towards me, and I grabbed for his collar.
“That dog,” the man called, “is he vicious?”
“Only if there are strangers on the property,” I retorted.
He started to come towards me. His face was grizzled with white whiskers, and the skin above his nose and around his eyes was deeply tanned. “Are there fish in this part of the river?” he asked, revealing a gap in the front of his mouth where several teeth were missing.
Finding My Own Way Page 6