Johnny Kellock Died Today

by Hadley Dyer

  That’s when I remembered about the locket. I’d been sucking on it when Uncle Ezra was setting up the family photograph at Margaret’s wedding. Johnny was telling me to hold on a minute, just wait it out, when Ezra came over and sort of pushed him back because he said I was getting mussed up. I felt my sister Doris stiffen beside me. Then Ezra’s damp hands were in my hair trying to smooth it down and his funny-smelling breath was all over me, and I started to count. Afterwards, I looked down at the heart, nestled in the pink ruffles of my dress. I had almost bit it in two. So I tucked the locket beneath my collar and hid it under my pillow when I got home. When Margaret asked me later where it was, I told her I’d lost it, which seemed better somehow than saying I’d ruined it, and she got so mad.

  I thought I remembered that day so clearly, but somehow I’d forgotten that. And this, too: when I woke up in the morning, the locket wasn’t under my pillow any more. I really had lost it. Except that I hadn’t. Mama must have found it and kept it.

  Rrrrring!

  Mama’s telephone went off like it knew I was back in the room. Stupid blue frog. I heard Martha running to the downstairs phone. Too close. I quickly put everything back into the jewellery box, closed the lid, and slipped out of the room. Martha’s voice echoed up the stairwell: “Hello? . . . Hello?” The receiver clattered back onto its cradle.

  “I thought you were going to get your comic books?” Martha asked me, as we passed each other on the stairs.

  “Oh . . . I read them already.”

  “That’s funny. I put out a little snack for you and David.”

  David was sitting at the kitchen table, shoving potato chips into his mouth.

  “Sisters writing letters to each other,” he said when I told him what I’d found. “That’s a puzzler.”

  A couple of crumbs fell onto his shirt. I reached over and brushed them away and he gave me a look that would melt kryptonite.

  “Excuse me, Captain Sarcasmo. Mama said she hadn’t got any letters from Aunt Izzie in a while, and this proves she was lying.”

  “How old were those letters?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then how do we know they aren’t more than a while old?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The one that went to my house by mistake, it was there?”

  I’d pushed that day as far back into my memory as I could. Now I tried to coax it out, like a stray cat. I thought of the smudge the Gravedigger’s fingers had left on the envelope, the weight of the letter, the neat, loopy handwriting.

  “It wasn’t there!”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure of it! The handwriting’s different on these ones!”

  “Lord jumpin’!” David clapped a hand to his forehead. “The letter that came to my house wasn’t addressed to your mother. It said Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Norman. Meaning Fred Senior,” he added.

  “I know. Norman Norman. I get it.”

  “Nah, you don’t. If that letter didn’t come from your aunt then it must have come from someone else in Ship Harbour, like your uncle or . . .”

  We heard Martha’s feet padding down the stairs.

  “I’m going out for a bit,” she said, as she came into the kitchen. She pulled her sunhat on. “Stay out of trouble.”

  Neither of us moved. The screen door bounced on its hinges. Martha’s footsteps faded away.

  “We been following the wrong person,” David said. “Your father knows where Johnny is. I bet he’s known since that letter arrived.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  I didn’t see the car pull up. I heard voices murmuring, and when I went out to the porch Mama was sitting there with Freddie and Norman. She held her purse on her lap. Her cast was propped up on Norman’s lunch pail.

  Norman looked like his normal self, chatting with Freddie. Not like a person with secrets. But Mama looked . . . older. Her mouth was pinched all the time these days. She’d fall heavily into a chair and grunt a little when she got up. Even the rose on her cast was faded. She’d been old for so long that I’d never thought of Mama getting older. It was like a tide rushing in, nothing you could do to push it back, it just kept coming and coming.

  The oldest mother in the world. How old could she get?

  “Rosa-lee, you look just like you’ve seen a ghost—you’ve seen a ghost, I say,” Mrs. Hewitt called from the other side of the hedge. Her red, glistening face and fuzzy grey hair added up to something like a mouldy cranberry pudding.

  “Leave her, Mag,” said Mama.

  “Lillian! Didn’t you say that cast would be off? I’m sure you said it would be off today.”

  “Not today. Soon,” said Norman.

  “I don’t mean to interrupt, of course. Just looking for Mr. Hewitt. I don’t know where he’s got to, I tell you, I don’t know where he is.”

  The silence from our porch was solid as a human chain, like in a game of Red Rover. The Normans versus Mrs. Hewitt.

  “Dick? Dick Hewitt, come get your supper!” she called, lumbering back to her own porch. “You don’t have flesh enough to miss another!”

  The telephone rang inside our house.

  “Norman,” Martha said, creaking open the screen door. “You need to come to the phone.”

  After a few minutes the door creaked again. Norman came out with Martha behind him. “I guess I’ll be borrowing that car of yours, son, if you don’t mind. Got to take a ride to Ship Harbour.”

  “You want me to go with you?” asked Freddie.

  Norman nodded. “That might be a good idea.”

  Freddie felt for his keys in his pocket. Norman took his hat from his chair and followed my brother to the car, resting his hand for an instant on Mama’s shoulder as he passed.

  Martha sat down on the porch step. She rested her chin on her knees. “They’re going to go get Aunt Izzie, aren’t they?” she said.

  Mama just sighed.

  “How did you know . . . ?” I started to ask, but the question evaporated like cooking steam. Martha would have heard Norman talking on the telephone, of course, and Mama and Norman never needed many words between them.

  Martha was chewing on her lip. I wished I could borrow her eyes for a while—the way you borrow a book from the library. Maybe everything would become clear. Like the time she had to explain a chapter in Little Men to me. The one where Father Baer punishes one of the boys by making him give him, Father Baer, the strap. When I looked again at the book after, it was obvious that it was a punishment the boy wouldn’t soon forget, as obvious as if the author had said it straight out. Martha could always see past the surface of things. Whereas I was forever having to choose between asking a stupid question and waiting for the words to unscramble themselves.

  “Mama?” I said.

  She lifted her eyes to me. They were so pale the blue looked almost washed out.

  “What is it?”

  “Martha made a lemon meringue pie.”

  For just a second, the pinched look almost left Mama’s face.

  By the time the dishes were washed, the inside of the house was hotter than outside, so I went out onto the porch with my sketch pad. I’d been drawing so much that summer, my drawing muscle was big and bulgy on the side of my finger. But there was one picture I still wanted to do before school started. From memory. See, if I had to pick one recollection of Johnny, this would be it. I was maybe four or five—I don’t remember. The rest of the family was in the living room, and they were dressed up to go somewhere. Johnny was wearing a suit jacket and a tie, and he was on the chesterfield between my sisters—I don’t remember which ones—sitting in a puddle of poodle skirts. What I do remember is that easy way about him, how he sat forward with his elbows on his knees and talked like a grown-up, and how he smiled when he saw me there in my nightgown and bare feet, peeking around the doorframe.

  Come to think of it, if Johnny was still living here back then, he couldn’t have been older than twelve.

  David shuffled over from
his place and sat beside me on the step. “Saw Norman heading out. What’s the matter?”

  “Nothin’.”

  “You in a mood?”

  “I don’t have moods!”

  He laughed. “Sure you do. Sometimes you get loud-mad and sometimes you get quiet-mad.”

  “Ha ha.”

  “At least you’re not like some girls who say one thing to your face and something else behind your back.”

  “It’s not just girls who do that.”

  “Girls are the worst for it, though.”

  Well, that was true.

  “One time,” David said, “in class, there was this know-it-all girl who had to recite Judge Haliburton’s famous phrases from heart. And she kept looking down at her hands, like she was so shy, just the cutest. But what the teacher couldn’t see was that she’d written them out on her palms. When she was finished, and she put hands behind her back, I could read one of the phrases from where I was sitting. You know what it was?” I shook my head. “Honesty is the best policy.”

  “Ha! Ha ha! They made you learn that stuff at St. Stephen’s, too?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Us too. You can’t get blood out of stone.”

  “Every dog has its day.”

  “Words to live by.”

  “Nah, that’s not his. His is better. It’s Live and let live.”

  We fell quiet for a second, you know how you do. I was just about to tell David about Norman going to get Aunt Izzie when he picked up my sketch pad. It was opened to the picture of young Norman on the farm. “That one’s good.” He flipped through the pages. “That one, too . . . What’s this?”

  Before I could snatch it, David had jumped to his feet with my comic The Gravedigger Cometh in his hands. “Motherless? Godless? . . . Abandoned and feared by all? This your idea of a joke?”

  “No. I mean, yes. It’s just a joke. Don’t get mad.”

  I stood up and tried to take the pad from him, but he held it out of my reach.

  “This is how you pay someone back who helped you out? You draw dirt like this and share it with your little friends?”

  I couldn’t believe it. David’s face was twisted up and his lip was puffed out. If he was a regular kind of person, I’d have said he was this close to crying.

  “You listen up. You keep your yap shut and listen good. I never done nothing to you. I never done nothing to nobody. There might be some people who don’t want to associate with me, but I got my brothers and I got family and my best friend, Kenny, too, down there in Lower Sackville.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “That’s ’cause you never asked! I might not have a mother, but I got Dad, and he has just as good a job as your dad’s. And he’s decent and he’s never laid a hand on us, not like some people’s fathers. And if we don’t go to church, maybe it’s because there’s no place for you at the church when your mother does that to herself—you ever think of that? What’s your parents’ excuse for staying at home every Sunday? You don’t have no right—no right—to look down on me.”

  “I don’t! I—”

  “I don’t care if you do! I’m through with you. And anyway, these are just stupid. They’re stupid rip-offs of other pictures and don’t mean a thing.” He dropped the sketch pad to the porch and stomped back to his own house.

  I sat down shakily on the step. The sun was setting behind the Flynns’ house, up there above ours. For the first time since the beginning of summer, there was a little chill in the night air. I picked up my sketch pad and smoothed down the pages of my latest comic, The Adventures of Captain Unbelievable. And you know what? David was right. Captain Unbelievable was just a rip-off of Detective Fantastic and Superman and a bunch of others, anyone could see that. All my artwork was just imitations. What was that expression? A poor man’s Superman. I thought for a split-sec about a hero called Poor Man, but that was so stupid I wanted to hurl myself off the porch.

  How could there be any stories left in the world to tell? L. M. Montgomery was always writing about orphans who talked too much and didn’t have a lot of friends, and she was probably just writing about herself and no one ever called her out for it. Imagine all those orphans on an island as big as your pinky and never running into each other. The Island of Chatterboxes. But L. M. Montgomery made every story seem like it was brand new. It was a good trick.

  No one ever writes a comic book about a kid with a really old mother. Or a girl who loves to sing but can’t make the noise coming out of her mouth match the one in her head. Or a boy whose mother let go of his hand. Or a young man who just up and left one day. Maybe I’d want to read that one. In a way, I’d been trying to read it, and I was sort of making it up as I went, too. It started in a small place, a village. A long drive away from the capital, where most things happened, like the Queen coming to visit. But this time something happened in the village, where a handsome boy lived. If a person were to write a comic book about the handsome boy, they’d probably give him the power to make himself invisible. But that wouldn’t be right. What happened is, he ran off. He ran so fast, he vanished. Maybe he ran so fast, he ran around the earth. Maybe he got airborne. Maybe he was orbiting the planet right now. Maybe a person might look up and think they’re seeing a distant moon or star streaking across the sky, but what they’re really seeing is a flash of handsome, still running. Maybe he can’t come down. I don’t know. I’ve looked, but I’ve never seen a falling star.

  Chapter Fourteen

  It was the first time Norman didn’t come into my room to say goodnight. When I fell asleep, he and Freddie hadn’t even come home yet. At some point in the night, Martha crawled into my bed. I woke up with my face pressed to the back of her nightgown. She didn’t stir when I slipped my feet onto the floor.

  I took my sketch pad and pencils downstairs to do my morning exercises. Martha’s bedroom door was shut. There was a pair of ladies’ brown lace-ups at the foot of the stairs. Freddie’s car was parked out front. Norman was in the kitchen reading the newspaper, his finger following the line. His knuckles were red-raw.

  I opened my sketch pad to a clean page and sat there looking at it for a while. Then I pushed it away and crossed my arms on the table and rested my head on my arms, and my eyes drifted back to Norman’s hands. I thought about how Johnny seemed all grown up when he was only twelve and what David had said about how him seeming bigger when I was smaller. That’s what artists call perspective. How things look depends on the angle you’re looking from. But there’s another kind of perspective, like how Mama says that hindsight is twenty-twenty. I think that means things seem a lot clearer when they’re in the past. Makes me wonder how far away you have to be from something before you can see it.

  His father’s been beating the tar out of him.

  I raised my head. “Norman?”

  “Bean.”

  “Where’s Freddie?”

  “Dropped him off last night so’s we could borrow the car today.”

  “Did you bring back Aunt Izzie?”

  “Yup.”

  “Why?”

  “Thought it would be nice for Mama to have her sister around, seeing as how she’s got a few more weeks to go with that cast.”

  “How did you hurt your hand?”

  Norman glanced at his knuckles. “Banged it on the doorframe when I was taking out the suitcase. Your brother shouldn’t let an old geezer like me do the lifting.”

  “Norman?”

  “Hey?”

  “I think you been lying to me.”

  Norman looked up from his paper, then folded it and set it next to his coffee cup. He reached across the table. His palm felt rough on my arm. “Oh, Bean.”

  “Why did you go get Aunt Izzie?”

  “Well. Things have been rough for her lately.”

  “Because of Uncle Ezra?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And with Johnny gone off?”

  “Ach,” said Norman. “Course you know. I guess I should have figur
ed, eh? I don’t know why we think we can make things easier on you kids.”

  “You didn’t tell the others, either?”

  Norman shook his head. “Just your brother. A few days ago.” That made me feel a little better. As better as you can feel when the worst thing possible turns out to be the stone-cold truth. “It’s a hard situation. Your mother and I, we were hoping it would work itself out.”

  “Why didn’t he tell anyone where he was going?”

  Norman shook his head. “That’s not for me to say. But, you know, there’s a lot of people who don’t have an easy time of growing up.”

  Like Norman himself. And David. I thought about what Norman had said about how a person’s never quite right when they lose their mother so young. Mama had lost her mother young, too.

  “I’d forgotten that Uncle Ezra could be rough sometimes,” I said. “Mama said that Granddad could be rough after he took to the bottle, but he still had a healthy respect for God.”

  Norman didn’t say anything for a long while. His lips were working a bit, like they were trying on different words. Finally, he said, “Your uncle has a healthy respect for the bottle.”

  He picked up his coffee cup and took it to the sink. “I know you want to understand better than I’m telling you, Bean, but I don’t want you asking your aunt about this. It’s her private business until she makes it someone else’s. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s my good girl. Now look, I got to check the warehouse, then I’m taking the rest of the day off. How do you like that?”

  “I think that’s maybe the first time you ever did.”

  Norman checked his watch. “Tell you what. You get yourself into some outside clothes without disturbing your sister, and I’ll show you something.”