Glass Voices

by Carol Bruneau

  Robert’s hair falls across his eyes as he nods along listlessly, as if he’s mental. Next comes a series of squawks like those of crows caught in barbed wire; if Harry’d been there, he’d have dragged the needle across the vinyl, making everybody jump. And she wouldn’t blame him. Out of the noise she can half make out some words, the singer complaining about working every day to bring home his pay, and on the heels of this, a sound like wood being tortured on a nail, swinging back and forth in a slow, hot wind. That inner marionette grins now, still faceless yet baring teeth, ghostly fingers waving while spinning her inside a cocoon that makes it hard enough to breathe, let alone move. Her worry about Harry only part of it.

  When the song’s finally over, Robert rises to flip the record, but then—in a fit of sympathy?—slides it into its case. “What’s wrong, Gran?” His smirk is playful, despite that unwashed doziness. “You don’ like ‘Dazed and Confused’?”

  “Oh. Well, that explains it,” she comments, the kindest thing that comes to mind, though isn’t music supposed to make a person gay? Happy, that is; not as if one’s body is enshrouded. Part of her could just lie down now on his filthy, matted rug and never get up again.

  “I got something here for you,” he says, rooting through a drawer. “Something you might be in’erested in, Gran. Somethin’ I done, I mean, it could be for Grampa.” To her bafflement, he’s blushing; or maybe it’s just the room’s stuffiness. He hands her a crumpled sheet of loose-leaf, wiping his mouth on his hand. “It’s, um, a pome.”

  “A poem,” she says gently, trying not to laugh out loud at what Harry would think.

  “That’s right,” and shyly he pushes it at her, and studies his album cover as if he’s never seen it before. Swallowing, he saunters back to the stereo and puts the record back on. Glory. But this time it’s quite pleasant, a slow, almost sedate organ solo that, after that last selection, is like dying and ending up in church. “Your time gonna come,” he moans along, when, naturally, like most nice things, the organ ends, giving way to more shrieking. It makes it awfully hard to concentrate. “So. D’you like it? I think it’s pretty far out, myself, if I don’t mind braggin’…” Frout, he’s always saying, which sounds to her like some all-purpose word, an all-purpose comment. Like one-size-fits-all gloves or stockings, or, heaven forbid, unisex. Eunuch-sex, as Harry never failed to point out.

  “It’s grand, dear. Grand.” But the thought of Harry’s laugh clouds her vision, blurring the boy’s difficult scrawl. The weight in her chest is like cement, and there’s a dreadful frog in her throat that makes her cough. “About my fence, now, Robert.” He’s still smiling, smiling the way he had as a tiny kid shooting marbles, and it reminds her how at times the deepness of his voice still startles her. “Your father’s getting the paint.”

  “Frout,” he says. Which she takes to mean, yes, yeah, okay, someday, when I get around to it. “The pome, though. I wanna give it to Grampa, right. I mean, in honour… As long as he don’t think I’m some fruity little weasel or nothing.”

  “My darling, your grampa would never think that,” she lies, tucking the paper inside her sleeve like a Kleenex, for safekeeping. To prove it, speaking for Harry, speaking for both of them, she leans down, never mind her back and her knees, and kisses his cheek. The roughness of a tiny patch of stubble startles her too. And before she can stop herself, out it comes, “Now don’t be sleeping your life away, young fella.” Which brings back the image of Harry sleeping that grey sleep so pale and bleached of light, and she coughs again before something makes her blurt out: “What I’m saying, dear, is don’t just drift.”

  He eyes her with that smirk again. “Oh. Like an astronaut, you mean.” The click of his teeth: whose habit is that? “Doubt it.” That mumble also like a foghorn. And then the pounding drums, and a drone like a plane flying low overhead, something heavy and hot plying the air. “Oh,” he says, almost yelling. “You mean like buddy?”

  Buddy?

  “Benny. Down the cove, you know. Livin’ the life of Riley, like Ma says, right? Wine women an’ song. That old broad he got livin’ with him?”

  “Stop right there,” she has to shout, “I take it you mean a pregnant cow.”

  He shakes his head indulgently, too indulgently. He could get away with being cute when he was ten, maybe, but not any more. “She’s loaded, you know that?”

  Loaded? Good heavens; the image comes of a drunk barrelling around a tiny listing deck.

  “I heard all about it. My friends over the Grounds? Benny told them she got, like, found under a leaf or something when she was a kid, and got raised up by some rich guy down the valley, then went nuts and started cleanin’. Cause she likes it, right? Ma keeps threatenin’ to have her do my room.”

  “Right,” she says, covering her ears. Out of the mouths of babes. Those friends of his would live in hollow trees if they could, Harry says. Then she tells herself, it’s now or never. “So, what’s this I hear about you leaving school, gallivanting out west?”

  “Gotta get a job first,” he says, looking at her, perhaps a bit peevishly. “A real job, I mean. Not like Benny, don’t worry,” and he laughs. “You worry too much, Gran. Gotta learn to take ’er cool and that. I mean,” it seems he’s forever explaining himself, “it ain’t for a while.”

  “Not,” she can’t help herself.

  “I mean, I’m not going nowheres till Grampa’s. Well. Back on his feet.” The resolute way he says it warms her, more than she might’ve expected, and makes her grateful, suddenly, for his loping, lazy energy. As if he has his whole life, plus everybody else’s, to “get his shit together,” as he’s been heard so unappealingly to say.

  Upstairs, Rebecca’s already rinsed out her mug: how odd, how unusual, the picture of efficiency all of a sudden. Jewel slides his chair in, eyeing her curiously. “You all right, Ma?” As if she might not be.

  Rebecca has gotten dressed, her hair teased into a kind of dome, and she’s wearing those green patent pumps. “Don’t be a stranger now, Ma. Keep us posted, right? You know, anything happens, holler.”

  Jewel looks as anxious and weary as she suddenly feels. “How ’bout I run you home? Say the word when you want to go back in.”

  To the hospital, he means. The very thought conjures the sickly sweetness of disinfected flannelette, and buzzing, hovering sameness—loss? What she needs most right now is air. “Stay put. The walk’ll do me good.” But it’s as if she’s being difficult. Rebecca nudges Jewel.

  “Call us!”

  “For chrissake,” she hears, fleeing—and just in time, perhaps, as a whine like a dentist’s drill squeals from the basement. That godawful guitar, someone’s excuse for a melody.

  4

  1918

  POOR HARRY, HE’D CRIED, WEEKS or was it months later, when they’d returned to their old neighbourhood, the levelled grid where the flat had been. Glass from the train station’s roof glinted in the patchy snow. Picking through frozen rubble, he’d kicked at a slab of bent metal, scraped off the soot. The oven door from the Fawcett, the name etched into the handle. Hugging Jewel, Lucy’d uncovered part of a comb and a little pink china cup without so much as a chip in it. Even without the saucer it looked as pretty as it had when she’d unwrapped it, a baby gift from her sister Ethel. Hoping to find his father’s pocket watch—his only “hairloom”—Harry found under a brick a nub of gold the size of a raisin. Staring at the ice-blue Basin, he’d covered his eye patch as if it alone couldn’t block out the sting. But they’d kept going, trudging past rows of foundations, places poking through the snow where the ground looked scorched. Above the rail yards they discovered a wall still smoking—all that was left of the foundry. Forty-one fellows had died there, some of them Harry’s buddies. Something had cooked and melted to the coal bins, black as lava. She touched a pebble in the concrete, and the heat singed her finger.

  Not far from there, they stumbled across a
small, bent wheel, like one from Helena’s pram with its big, swooping fenders, a gift, not so long before, from Mama and Dad. Handing over Jewel, she scoured the spot for other remnants. Nothing. But closing her eyes she could almost summon a smell like apple juice, its sweetish dampness warming knitted rugs.

  “Could use something like that pram now,” Harry groused, giving her the baby, and it came back in a rush: that first birth, like Vimy. Harry inspecting the tiny fingers afterwards, and Mama holding the newborn girl up to the sunny window, to cure what Mama’d called the yellow jaundice. “Lucy? Dolly? I didn’t mean to—” What? Biting down on her cheek, she’d hugged Jewel all the way back to the shelter. Given their lack of privacy, the chance never arose to ask what exactly he’d meant by glossing over her hurt.

  She celebrated her twenty-first birthday in that basement, cheered by the other homeless. A horrible prank, surely, that baby cup surviving and no little girl to drink from it! Never mind no pot to piss in, as Harry said, regaining his strength. Flicking a dead fly from the font, the minister christened Jewel; no one batted an eye. The next morning, lining up at the sink, Harry shaved as if for work, as if the sugar refinery had risen suddenly from its ruins like a sparkly white bird.

  He started disappearing, making his rounds. Rounds which she learned took him in a spreading radius. They needed somewhere to start over. They qualified for relief housing, places built of blocks of fabricated stone, with laneways and postage-stamp gardens. But he wanted space, and found it three miles west. In cottage country, he called it. She was hardly convinced. Jutting into an arm of the harbour, the Grounds was a stony peninsula dotted with shacks.

  That June they moved and Harry found work rebuilding the shipyards an hour’s walk away. The cabin had an oil stove and electricity but no running water, a well and a privy out back. Hovering on the brackish wind, gulls cracked mussels on the doorstep. “Hillbilly land,” the postmaster joked when she gave her address. As if she were some hayseed Wendy hiding out in the woods with one of the lost boys.

  “Too risky,” Harry’d said, when she broached building in the old neighbourhood. Who could argue, looking at him? Like her knees, the scar on his chest stayed a midnight blue, a tattoo, a memento mori that defied scrubbing. The Grounds’s only memento was a chunk of anchor that had blown clear across town: a fat harpoon. From the Mont Blanc, said the creatures who lived there, the powder keg ship whose collision with the Imo had sparked the whole nightmare. The papers called it an accident; in the Grounds, folks just shook their heads. It’d taken a team of horses and nine men to dredge the shank from the hole it’d gouged in the earth; then they’d just left it lying there, like a petrified limb in a clump of Japanese rhubarb. That’s what Artie Babineau said, the fellow next door who soon befriended Harry. Hard to believe, that shaft travelling so, but there it was, proof, an iron mote rusting away. Harder to pass by it without feeling as if it had somehow singled them out, yet missed. Even when the knotweed blazed up around it, walking by, Lucy had to fix on a nearby shack, a little place shaped like an inkbottle, with chickens pecking the dirt outside. A fortune teller lived there, Artie said.

  In the woods just up the hill was an abandoned house with a barn. The Big House, it was called. Whoever’d lived there had owned all the Grounds before divvying them up. The cabin was around the point, at the end of a trail choked with blackberries and wild pear. Harry chopped them all down to open the view—the Arm with its boathouses along the other side, and the cove below plugged with an island. On it stood a building shaped like a shoebox surrounded by a jagged wall. The glasshouse, as it was known: a quaint name for a jail there since Napoleon, housing prisoners of war. Trotsky was locked up over there, supposedly. The Bolshevik, and Krauts? Got them, too. “The enemy, right in their midst,” Artie said. “Food for the shark they had circling the place; a little salt ’n’ pepper with that Kraut, boy?” Artie was so full of it, it wasn’t funny.

  Still, it was hard not to listen for strange tongues, especially when fog amplified every sound crossing the little channel. But those prisoners could’ve been dead over there or lying around in a typhoid stupor, as the newspaper suggested, mentioning pestilence. Besides foghorns, the only things Lucy heard were loons and, when she rocked Jewel at night, noise from next door. The baby would whimper, the pucker of his chin enough to curl her heart, as scratchy fiddle drifted in on the coolness, tunes she recognized but couldn’t name. Sometimes singing—Harry’s?—would ring out, along with the sound of glass breaking.

  Through work Harry seemed to recover, riveting plates to damaged relief boats and destroyers. Petering out, the ads in the paper—lost, missing—gave way to news from Europe. Huns Hurled into Flanders Furnace. Double Layer of German Dead Carpet Hillsides. Like tea berries? His paper hiding blisters in the tabletop, Harry would grimace then beam with satisfaction. This was the last place on earth the riffraff would invade. “Wouldn’t have to, with the neighbours, not to mention those birds rotting over there in jail,” she’d say, flipping the page to a shrinking patch of ads. Then he’d ask what was wrong, his voice brusque, saying, “Look, there’s no sense—you have to, we both…you’ve got a baby now.” As if Jewel had always been the only one.

  MOVING SLOWLY UP THE GRAVEL lane away from that squealing guitar, she feels for the paper tucked up her sleeve. It’s as if Harry’s in the clouds now, watching. She can almost hear him speaking—to Robert, when he gets better? Across the cove, the marina bristles with glinting masts, the club where Robert hopes to work.

  A shark?

  The thought of Robert babysitting people’s yachts makes her want to laugh; all his talk about “going back to the land” and “establishment weasels, beggars.” Picking up, the breeze shirrs the Arm, whipping rope against spar, a steady, urgent clanging that reminds her of birds clamouring to be fed. Dwarfed by the clubhouse, the old prison looks rusty, its cells used for storing gear and paint, so Robert says. She wouldn’t know; most of her life spent here, she’s never set foot on the island. No reason to, not owning a boat. A spaceship would be preferable as far as she’s concerned, the Apollo, for instance, that put those men on the moon. The thought of Mr. Armstrong in his helmet warms her: if he and Buzz Aldrin could feel the moon underfoot, is it crazy to hope Harry will recover?

  Beyond the forest of spars, boarded-up cabins dot the point. A wonder they’re still there; in most people’s opinion they should be bulldozed—even Harry wouldn’t object. “Move on,” she can almost hear him, though he always was a fine one to talk.

  At the end of the lane she slows even more. Sweet Dinah, her knees. By the road, below the embankment, a couple of men swig beer in a dinghy. A little farther out, a wooden box swings on the current, a floating shack that makes the ones on the point look like those fancy joints on the Beverly Hillbillies. Voices carry; shouting. One of them she recognizes: oh Mother, if it’s not Benny the traveller, mouthing off as if he’s just outside her house again. Harry would’ve sent him packing all right, faster than any rocket. Then a bad thought hits her: what if, well, supposing, this is how Robert ends up? Benny certainly has a different lifestyle.

  Cars whiz past as she steps onto the sidewalk, and Benny appears on his makeshift deck. It looks as if he’s got car seats for furniture, and company—the woman Robert was talking about? Don’t look, don’t look, she tells herself and that presence, whoever or whatever it is, beaming down. Picking up her pace, she still catches a glimpse: billowing black, a dress. Benny’s lady friend is in mourning? And she’s well-to-do? Could it be that Robert’s friends smoke that wacky tobacco people mention on TV? If so, she ought to be more worried, not less. But there’s no time to fret: if Benny sees her, the next worse thing is he’ll come rowing over.

  Even with her head high and her chest lifted she feels him watching, and suddenly it’s as if the whole world knows something she doesn’t. “Harry?” she hears herself utter, walking faster. What if the hospital’s called, and she’s m
issed something? Next time she’ll let Jewel drive her, she promises herself; isn’t it just easier for everybody when you do what they want?

  Once she’s safely past and almost home, she remembers Robert’s little verse, if you can call something that doesn’t rhyme properly verse. The writing on the page jumps out in proper daylight.

  Rambling, for Grampa.

  Go to school everyday don’t got no pay

  Don’t got no love cuz it come from above

  Yeah, yeah

  It’s outta sight, don’t get uptight

  Like the sun in the morning and the rain at night

  Dig it man you gotta fight Dig it dig it dig it dig it

  Hmm. Well. Perhaps there was hope somewhere; perhaps she’d interest him in gardening? As somebody’d said, maybe it had even been a poet, every cloud had a silver lining.

  IF HARRY’D HAD HIS ACCORDION back then, maybe he wouldn’t have liked his liquor so. Maybe it would’ve kept his hands busy. But, blown to smithereens, the ’cordine had fared no better than anything else, save the little cup. Dreadful but, compared to the rest of their losses, laughable. It might’ve been fine, if all he’d done at Artie’s was play hearts or rummy. But it was hard not to boil over when he crept in at dawn, spent Sundays snoring off Saturdays.