by Hadley Dyer
In all my life, I’m never going to see anything like it again: Norman taking the steps two at a time, grabbing hold of Uncle Ezra, and throwing him off the porch, almost clear of the yard, as though he was tossing a bale of hay or a sack of seed, like he done a million times since he was twelve years old. One heave and Ezra hit the end of the walk and rolled onto the street.
I’m glad to say that Norman didn’t kill my uncle—that he didn’t have to. Because when Ezra got over the shock of being tossed and scraped on the hot cement, he slowly got himself up and into his car and drove away.
And that’s how Aunt Izzie came to stay with us for good.
Chapter Sixteen
Aunt Izzie sat on the chesterfield beside Mama, Norman’s cigar box open on her lap. She was reading the letter that she had pulled out from under the bundle of money. I couldn’t make out the words from the landing, where David and I were sitting, but by now I recognized the neat, loopy handwriting.
“I thought he’d stolen it,” Aunt Izzie said, when she’d finished the letter.
“No,” said Norman. “Just sent it here for safekeeping. By post. I near had a heart attack when I saw that. It even went to the wrong house. But we got it back.” He winked at me. “I been protecting it.”
Aunt Izzie looked down at the flimsy old cigar box.
“Norman won’t be happy until we’re robbed blind,” said Mama. “He’s probably got rubies in the toes of those socks he’s wearing.”
Tears slid down Aunt Izzie’s cheeks. “Johnny’s not coming back. This is planned out. He said he’d do what he had to, but I never expected him to go this far.”
“Hush that. Anyway, I should have said about the money,” said Norman. “It only came just before you told us he’d gone off. You found it, didn’t you, Lily? I was hoping not to add to your worries.”
Mama shrugged.
“Never could keep a secret from you.”
“He asked you to keep it safe until I left and you did,” said Aunt Izzie. “I suppose we were all hoping he’d make his way here.”
“But he is here, isn’t he?” I said. “Didn’t you go down to the shipyard to see him, Norman?”
“Where are you getting this?” Mama asked.
“Gerry Flynn. He said there’s a new guy named John who works there.”
If you saw the look I got from David in a comic book, you wouldn’t need a bubble to tell you what he was thinking:
There’s a hole in the backyard with your name on it.
“He was probably talking about young John Hubley, Ray Campbell’s nephew,” said Norman.
“Oh.”
“I went down to speak to Mr. Flynn about getting David a new job at Nelson Seed. Didn’t want to ask in front of the boy.”
David’s cheeks flushed. “Thank you, sir,” he said. “I sure would like that.”
Norman smiled. “You could come down to talk to the boss man next week.”
“Johnny would have liked a job at the shipyard,” said Aunt Izzie. “But he bought a ticket to Montreal instead. Or maybe Toronto. Someone told me they thought they saw him at the train station.”
We had got it all wrong. Start to finish. Mama hadn’t lied about the envelope that came from Ship Harbour; Norman hadn’t showed it to her. Martha found the money Johnny sent, not Norman’s savings, and she must have been crying over the letter that came with it, not because we might move. It was a different John that got work at the shipyard, just like it was a different Jimmy who drowned that day in Friar’s Lake, when Mama thought Marshall Briggsby was going on about my Uncle Jim. Some stranger knew better than anyone else where Johnny was, and none of us knew if he was ever coming home.
“You kids have been barking up the wrong tree,” Aunt Izzie said, like she’d used X-ray vision on my brain. That was one of Judge Haliburton’s expressions. Here’s another one: Facts are stranger than fiction.
The screen door creaked.
When I saw the shadow behind Martha, it was as if, for one second, someone had pulled the brake on the carnival ride. We were all suspended there, at the top of a gigantic wheel, looking over everything that had happened. And down below, making their way through the crowds of tiny people, were Martha and Johnny.
Then they stepped into the room and he took off his cap.
It was Gerry Flynn.
“We were watching from across the way. Mr. Norman sure gave that guy the old heave-ho,” he said. “I met up with this one as she was leaving the house”—he nodded at Martha—“and I says to myself, she looks pretty darn upset, maybe I’ll say something, and then I think, nah, mind your own business, Gerry, you never hardly said two words to each other before, but then I’m saying hello, we get to talking and stuff, and then we seen what happened and . . . here we are.”
“I guess we should shove off,” David said, standing up.
Norman shook David’s hand, then went over and shook Gerry’s.
Through the screen door, I watched David pick up the kittens, which had been stalking each other on the porch, and put them back in the milk crate. He followed his brother down the steps, across the street, and up the steps into their own house. It was like he was boarding a ship or something. And our house was a different ship. And Agricola Street was a plank between us.
There was a faintly boozy smell coming from Martha.
“Johnny’s not dead,” said Mama. “You hear me? That was just some foolish trick to stop people from looking for him. He’s only . . .”
She felt around for the right word.
“Disappeared,” I said.
Martha sat down on the chesterfield next to Aunt Izzie, who squeezed her close. “We made a promise, a long time ago, that we would try to go to the same university,” said Martha. “Just had to hang in there.” She looked up at Mama. “I don’t mean I ever minded . . .” Mama cut her off with a wave of her hand. “. . . I didn’t expect to hold him to it, not really, but I always thought he’d make his way back to the city one day.”
“You know,” said Aunt Izzie, “your Uncle Jim was forever running off from the aunties.”
“But then one time he didn’t come back,” said Martha. “He went to work at the farm.”
“And if he hadn’t,” Mama said, “he wouldn’t have met Norman and Ezra, and you wouldn’t be sitting here today and Johnny wouldn’t be sitting wherever he is, God bless him. Sometimes people have to go off and sort things out for themselves.”
“Some of us take a little longer to get going,” said Aunt Izzie. “Which is how they end up having babies at near fifty years old!”
Mama gave Aunt Izzie a pinch in her side and for a moment they didn’t look like a couple of old hens. They looked like the little girls in the photographs.
Martha eventually fessed up to my parents that she’d found out about Johnny from snooping to see how much money Norman had saved. And Norman fessed up that if there’d been more room in the cigar box, she would have also found his winnings from the baseball pool and selling Irish Sweepstakes tickets on the side, and Mama said, “You did not say that and I did not hear that.”
Norman said, “Nope.”
No one ever asked me how I knew Johnny had gone off. Maybe they figured I’d overheard something, which was true in a roundabout kind of way. Or maybe it just didn’t matter any more. Maybe it was just easier to take an eraser to things and start over.
Aunt Izzie sure wasn’t one to keep things to herself. “Whew. Dropped a rose,” she’d announce as she walked into a room, and the eggy smell would follow. Or she’d smile sweetly at Mama and say, “Don’t Lil’s rump look just like a popover in that housedress?” She wouldn’t let up until Martha and me were gripping our stomachs.
In time, I heard about Aunt Izzie waking up to find Johnny’s bed made and his suitcase missing. No note or anything, just a memory of him saying that he never wanted to see Uncle Ezra lay a hand on another person ever again. Aunt Izzie said she wouldn’t have left so long as Johnny was there, and Johnny wouldn�
��t leave so long as she stayed.
Until he did. And when she still didn’t leave, because she kept thinking he’d come back, well, maybe that’s when Johnny decided he was gone for good. But, as I said back at the start, we might never know for certain.
“That’s what letting your kids read too many comics does,” said Aunt Izzie. “Makes them right dramatic.”
There was a warm breeze with a little ripple of cool under it as Martha, Aunt Izzie, and I headed off to church on my birthday. A bit of autumn slipping into the summer air. I held my head high as we went by the caterwauler in her pew, and I didn’t mouth the words to the hymn. You could hardly hear me over Aunt Izzie, anyway. She sounded like a cat filled with air and whacked against a shed, and I can’t describe it any better than that.
The family came over for Sunday dinner. Doris’s stomach, full of the baby that was almost due, got in the door about three minutes before the rest of her. My nephew, Bennie, and my niece, Laura, came with Margaret and Cecil. They had grown up a lot over the summer, but they still trailed me everywhere like little ducks. No one made an announcement about why Aunt Izzie was there or what was going on with Johnny. But I could tell the news was making its way through the family. People went to her in ones and twos, and you’d see them chatting quietly, with a hand on her arm or around her shoulder.
After I blew out the candles on the store-bought cherry-swirl cake, us Normans ended up around Mama’s kitchen table in the usual order—oldest to youngest—Freddie, Margaret, Doris, Young Lil, Martha, and me. With everyone else squeezed in between. There was talk of Norman going out Prospect way to have a look at that nice property, after all. We argued—like we had any say-so—about whether we should move and how much we’d get for the Agricola Street house, and what kind of car we’d buy so Norman could drive to his job in the city. I knew that if we left the North End, Mama’s table would come with us, but it wouldn’t be the same. It was already not quite the same. We hardly fit around it. And I wondered how many more times we’d all sit together like that.
It wasn’t long before my sisters lit up. Martha kept her hand near the inhaler in her pocket like a cowboy waiting for the “Draw!” Young Lil pushed her pack of cigarettes towards me. I pulled one out of the foil wrapper and held it between my lips. It had a musty taste to it. She showed me how to suck in while she held her lighter to the end. Everyone waited for me to choke—but I didn’t.
“Oh, hell,” Mama said. “Like a fish to water.”
I smiled and took a deep drag. Then, my throat filled with smoke, I said, “Fetch some ground steak. If Jack Newberry sends you home with something fatty, it will be trotted right back to him.”
I tell you, I had them hooting and pounding the table.
Mama said, “Very funny, smarty-pants. Now go upstairs and fetch my—“
“Noxema!” Everyone laughed.
“I’m ashamed of all of you.”
The truth is I was glad for the chance to mush the cigarette into the ashtray.
From Mama and Norman’s bedroom window, I could see my niece, Laura, pushing her brother on the swing. It was there when I came down that morning, like it had sprouted from the tree branch in the night. The ropes were old, but the seat had been painted the girliest pink you ever saw, and it was wrapped with a wide red ribbon. It hung from the old maple like a promise.
Rrrrrring!
“How do you know?” I yelled at the blue frog. But this time, instead of running, I slapped my hand down on the receiver, brought it to my ear, and cleared my throat.
“Aunt Lily? Got your message.”
If I’d had my wits about me, I might have tried to pull it off. I might have pretended I was Mama, or just told him straight out that we were hoping he’d come home soon, that his mother was here and it looked like she was going to stay on. Maybe he already knew. Maybe Mama had told him on her upstairs telephone. But Johnny realized he’d made a mistake and before I could say anything, he hung up.
You probably never heard that my Mama has more pages than a hymn book. Each one is so thin you might look right through it and not see what’s written there. But the words are there, layers and layers of them, even if they are old and hard to understand.
I went downstairs and put the Noxema jar on the table in front of Mama. Then I wrapped my arms around her shoulders and pressed my face to her wrinkled cheek. “I’m sorry I hurt your ankle,” I said.
And suddenly, even though my mind was filled up with Johnny, and how Mama had kept his secret all this time, and how she would keep it, no matter what, because that was the thing about Mama, it came to me about the next picture I was going to draw.
Mama squeezed my arm. “Spilt milk,” she said.
Still, she didn’t let go.
Acknowledgements
I have borrowed, here and there, real places and historic events and turned them into fiction. But that does not make this a true story.
There was a Johnny Kellock who went looking for a better life. I hope he found it.
I owe a special thank you to my mother, Rose, for sharing her name and her memories. Thanks, too, to those who helped me shape this story into a book, especially Lena Coakley, Kathy Stinson, Paula Wing, the Eisan family, and my editor, Lynne Missen.
Copyright
JOHNNY KELLOCK DIED TODAY
© 2006 by Hadley Dyer.
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EPub Edition: December 2017 EPub ISBN: 9781443455916
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