One October night, the moon a silver dollar, his singing had echoed in, almost a howl coming through the cabin window: Goodnight Irene, goodnight Irene, I’ll see you in my… Just like at the party where they’d first met, when she was barely seventeen and Harry but a year older. The accordion almost sliding from his knee. “Doll-face,” he’d called her: “There’s a face that’d stop a clock.” And clocks had stopped that morning a few years later when all had been lost and time itself melted then froze like a watch crystal, eelgrass hands trapped under ice.
Bundling Jewel into his crib, she’d slipped across the stony yard next door. There were dancers in the windows, someone torturing a violin, people raising glasses. A lady staggered outside, her silhouette blurred by the party’s swirl behind her. A child’s crying pierced the music. “Well,” the woman had slurred, “if it isn’t herself.” Clutching a doll, a little girl rubbed her nose on the woman’s skirt. The woman snatched the doll and pitched it down the steps. “Lookin’ for your husbant, I suppose. What, it’s his bedtime?”
Lucy’d handed the doll to the child. Stumbling outside, Harry had reached for the woman’s waist, then started. “Lucy! You’re still up.” Then he’d backpedalled, mumbling something about tea. The woman, Lil, smirked even as Harry’d tried coaxing Lucy to stay, as if she could leave Jewel. She hadn’t bothered answering, the wind through the pines wheeling her home.
Next morning he was shaky and hardly contrite, refusing to get up. “You’ll die sleeping,” she couldn’t resist, and he said he’d get up when he felt like it: sometimes a fellow just needed to forget, and what was wrong with that? Jewel had howled from his crib. Then he’d said that her trouble was, she wouldn’t forget. “You can’t just quit, can’t spend your whole life—” Waiting, she knew he meant. Hoping. “A person has to get—” On with things: her voice could’ve cracked the blurry mirror, Jewel’s scream reflecting back. “That’s it.” Harry’d flapped the quilt and Goodnight Irene, goodnight eddied back, and the thought of his hand on Lil’s waist. Easy for him, she’d said, plucking Jewel up.
THE SCENT OF YEAST AND molasses fills the house. She’s halfway to the kitchen when the phone rings, and she steels herself. It’s the league selling raffle tickets. Tickets? “Mrs. Caines?” The voice could be long distance, though the church is just down their little street and across the busy road. The caller’s sobriety is irksome; here it comes, Lucy thinks. One request always loaded with another for more—and her urge to give always reined in by some need or another to conserve.
“Can we count on you to bake, too?”
“Pickles,” she casts about for a substitute, not quite an excuse. “I have lots of those.”
“Oh. Well, okay,” the woman says, asking, too, if she can pray for someone’s niece.
Harry’s condition is a tangle that her chumminess teases out. “Actually, I have a request of my own—ah, for my husband.” That’s all she can get out before the tightness in her chest returns, and her need once more for the hollow quiet of the kitchen. The voice is too careful, asking if he’s all right. “No. But we’re hopeful.” That fake brightness of hers again, as if everyone is a troubled teen needing help.
“Now what about that famous bread? Can I talk you into giving a loaf?”
A weight like a fun fair beanbag seems to fall from the sky. She can’t wait to get the woman off the phone. “We’ll see.”
Under its tea towel, the puckered dough resembles an old timer’s maw—and I’m one to talk, she thinks, flouring the counter. Heavy and limp, even in the oven it won’t rise back up. Folding and tucking their ends, she flings the loaves into the pans anyway, then, sticky-handed, phones the hospital. Nothing new, says the person she speaks with, and rhymes off visiting hours.
A little while later Jewel phones; when can she be ready? He sounds distant, edgy; if she didn’t know better, she’d say put upon. “He probably won’t know we’re there,” he says.
“But he’ll feel it, dear. Perhaps.”
THAT FIRST SAD AUTUMN, LEAVES had sifted over the Grounds in a perpetual fog. She spent a lot of time walking, without much purpose or direction. A relief just to escape the cabin with its smell of diapers and mould, wood damp enough to grow toadstools. Steering from the shore, she walked miles in circles over trails crisscrossing up hill and down, around boulders and through pine woods. Bundled against her, Jewel would smile up with his eyes, their colour enough to make her look away. Without warning, Mama’s voice flooded back: Oh, Lucy Locket, look at the pretty baby! Don’t worry, dear. The sun’ll turn her pink, pink as can be. Sometimes, back in St. Luke’s basement, or on the street with Harry, the same voice had reminded her of things she needed. Soap, darling; sugar, thread. Once, she’d glimpsed the back of someone identical to Mama disappearing into a store; another time, a coat just like hers. Helena was harder to summon: her tiny drawl, her tinier vocabulary: a few split words. Day by day, what she preserved of it weakened: a thread spinning into nothing but crying, an echo that grew fainter and fainter.
One Sunday she found herself outside St. Columba’s, newly built, it appeared, by the gleam of paint. Families trooped in, mostly women and children. Jewel weighed on her, his eyelids drooping. It was the singing that drew her, solemn but inviting, restful. Holy holy holy, Lord God Almighty. The inside of the church smelled of fresh wood and varnish; the pew felt sticky-smooth beneath her. Timbers arced overhead: it was like being inside an overturned boat. Then the Latin started: Mama would’ve turned in her grave! But Lucy heard another voice—Dad’s?—admiring the woodwork. Lucy Locket lost her pocket, Kitty Fisher found it, it seemed to chant. As the priest switched to English, sermonizing in a flannel voice, “For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face…” her eyes grazed the statues. Graven images. The Virgin’s alabaster cheeks; Christ’s honey-coloured beard. Jewel dozed in her lap, and the tinkling bells and murmuring voices trickled through her, as ticklish and soothing as having her hair brushed. A hundred velvet strokes, the ghost of Mama’s hand.
A tiny smile creased Jewel’s sleeping face—did babies dream? A little voice rose: Mumma. Her nipples tingled: sparks lit her spine. The priest lifted the silver cup as if it were a weighty furnishing. Deo, Deus, Dei. The whispers in her head: tiny feet on linoleum.
Behind the church, the cove sparkled like crushed glass. Leaves fell silently as ash as she found the path. Bricks, a chamber pot and some bedsprings lay in the bushes, objects as random yet settled as the shaft of Mont Blanc’s anchor. Jewel stretched and let out a squawk.
Rounding a hill she’d come upon the knotweed patch, and that cottage shaped like a toque. Smoke curled from the pipe poking from the roof, carrying the smell of bacon. Ida Trott was outside chopping wood, mannish in her trousers and turned-down boots, hens pecking around her. Swinging her axe, she hobbled over. Grinning, barely a tooth in her head, she stuck out her hand and peered into Lucy’s face as if they were acquainted.
“My, my, that’s some cute,” she’d said, asking if it was a boy or a girl, saying he reminded her of her own when he was small. Stroking Lucy’s palm, she’d probed it with a stubby finger. When Lucy tried to pull her hand away, Ida gripped it, studying the lines, good and deep, and she’d explained, “This here’s your heart, this is your heeead, and this one’s your life.” As Lucy’s gaze slid to the axe, Ida had nodded appreciatively, saying the right hand was fate, but the left—everything else—that was up to you. “Choices,” Ida rolled the word around in her mouth.
Jewel had screamed and before Lucy could shrink away, Ida gave him her finger. Next best thing to a tit, the old woman said, and, oh, couldn’t folks see she had a way with kids? And with a promise to read Lucy’s tea leaves—for a fee of course—licking her thumb and running it over her blade, she also offered to babysit.
Harry was up and dressed and had tea on by the time she got home. Jewel settled in to nurse, his hand roaming her breast, then going limp
. What had been on Ida’s finger? “All that fresh air knock him out?” Harry didn’t ask where she’d got to, peeling back the little rugs knit by strangers, stroking her nape as she laid Jewel down. As he pulled her to the bed, the idea of that drunken Lil evaporated in a huff of laughter. Moving his hand under her skirt, he slid his tongue between her buttons. The bumps at the top of his spine like the crown of a puppy’s head. Closing her eyes, she’d given in, kissing his scarred brow.
JEWEL WAITS AT THE DOOR while she gets her sweater. “Becky’s coming, too,” he reminds her. “Wouldn’t want the old man to think—” What? That his best girl’s abandoned him? she wants to say, looking for her purse.
Staying put in front, Rebecca smiles, looking a little behooved, a vase of blowsy carnations on her lap. The miniature kind are much prettier; still, it’s the thought that counts. The vase tips, spilling water as they back up. “Oh, frig! You bugger.”
“Beck.” Jewel’s voice cracks down. Meanwhile, Lucy feels like a little kid alone in the back seat, or, perhaps, the way Robert does going anywhere with his parents. But it keeps her occupied, studying the back of Rebecca’s elaborate hairdo. It’s as if she’s forgotten to comb it, that shade almost like Orange Crush, and the whole thing the texture of cotton candy.
“How’re you making out, Ma?” Rebecca half turns, flicking water from her fingers, those clawed nails painted a pearly white. Today her lipstick matches, a ghoulish accent to that buffed complexion. Her dress is a tropical turquoise, perhaps to go with her shoes? Morning fresh, is the phrase that springs to mind, if she had to describe Rebecca right now: a phrase from a commercial for some thing or other. Her look doesn’t match the time of day. Maybe it’s best not to answer. Distracted, Lucy forces an absent smile. “Oh, Ma.” Rebecca wags her head, staring at Jewel, but his eyes are fixed on the intersection ahead.
In the hospital Rebecca makes a fuss refilling the vase, which only adds to the clutter at the bedside. Inexplicably, beside the tissues and tubes of salve there’s a glass with a straw and a tiny container of juice. For Harry sleeps on, all the wires and tubing in place—though the nurse is cheery, alarmingly so, and doesn’t seem to mind that they’re breaking visitor rules. “Soon as he wakes, we’ll get him drinking,” she says, and Rebecca laughs almost gleefully, hearing how it’s important to keep them in fluids. Already Harry’s been sent to the realm of them.
“But, he’s holding his own,” Lucy ventures, trying to squeeze some hope into her voice. The nurse’s smile seems slippery, transparent, saying the regular doctor will be in on Monday, if they’d like to speak to him then. To Lucy’s dismay, Rebecca begins to sniffle. Tugging at tissues, she knocks something over, which Jewel retrieves. The last thing anyone wants is a scene, of any kind. As sedately as possible, Lucy leans close, trying to keep despair at bay. “Harry?” she says, too loudly. “Harry, dear, can you hear me?”
The nurse moves the carnations. How much better they’d look as boutonnieres, that fierce red: boutonnieres for a field of grooms or boys escorting girls to a prom; or on a Remembrance Day wreath—or even in a floral arrangement for a wake, like the one for Artie Babineau, years ago. But thinking of it fills her with a sudden panic: Good God, what if the flowers are all Harry sees when he wakes? If he wakes, and there’s no one to stroke his brow and explain.
“Excuse me,” she says, as the nurse adjusts the intravenous, squeezes the yellow bag stowed indiscreetly at the side of the bed. “The other day, yesterday (had it only been yesterday?) he seemed…able to hear. The doctor thought—”
“Time’ll tell, darlin’.” The nurse can’t be much older than Robert; how can she be from the same generation? Talk about the gap they’re always bemoaning on TV. “Just have to be patient.” Darlin’. Lucy braces for it, but without another word the nurse slips out.
In the distance a train whistle blows, or perhaps she’s just imagining it, above the machines’ beeping and the respirator’s wheeze. That in-out-in-out sighing that makes her think, with a fresh stab of regret, of Harry’s accordion. “Wouldn’t a tune perk him up,” pops out of her—it’s either that, or give in—and Jewel and Rebecca stare, sending her that puzzled, half-suspicious look they share, more like siblings sometimes than husband and wife, more two peas in a pod than either lets on.
“Well, yeah,” says Jewel, “if we knew anyone that played, Ma.”
But Rebecca stops sniffling; something lights her eyes, and she even winks. “Why didn’t you bring it up earlier?” As if Lucy is somehow to blame here. “Not a problem,” Rebecca insists. Now she’s done it: Rebecca will have Robert bring in his guitar. Come to think of it, though, she hasn’t heard him play in a while, so maybe he’d bring in a poem. As if either could bring someone back, like the Pied Piper pulling children and rodents from the sea. The drowned. Her mind flits over the surface of it, and suddenly she imagines Harry singing—the way he did when Robert was tiny, staying over while his parents went out. Someone’s in the kitchen with Di-nah, someone’s in the kitchen I know-o-o-o. That small voice of his chiming in—glory, he was cute; what happened?—Dinah wontcha blow, Dinah wontcha blooooow, Dinah wontcha blow your ho-o-orn!
She smoothes the sheet over Harry’s chest, the flannelette cool and stiff. But sure enough, yes, there’s warmth under it, the warmth of a heart beating, however feebly. Jewel’s eyes dart uncomfortably. “What’re you smiling at, Ma?” he wants to know, as if she’s grinning at a funeral. But it’s not that at all, and once again the tightness fills her. It’s the tightness of salt-dried skin, only on the inside; the afterfeel of a wave that’s tossed and sucked her outwards before flipping her back ashore.
“Oh my soul,” she murmurs, grasping for something, humour a buoy. Saying that if he had his fiddle, they could bring it in and give him a shock. “Fit to raise the dead,” Rebecca adds enthusiastically, then bows her head. If Lucy didn’t know better, she’d swear she was praying; suddenly Rebecca’s so still she might as well have left the room.
“Oh, my. Remember, darling?” Once more it’s as if Lucy’s head is above water; even better, she’s sitting on warm sand. “The two of you in the cellar, playing guess the tune? When you first came back—”
“Yeah.” Jewel glances away. Before they were meerreet? Rebecca pronounces it, the way she pronounces her maiden name.
The squeak of soles makes everyone straighten up. Jewel feels for the cigarettes in his shirt pocket, where the stitching has begun to unravel. It’s that nurse again, blinking; maybe there’s mascara in her eye. Their time’s up, she tells them; he needs his rest. So Harry is singular once more, if unnamed, yanked back from the faceless, ominous them. This in itself she takes as a good sign. Frout, she can imagine Robert saying. Still, the least the nurse could do, being one of them herself, would be to call him buddy, that all-purpose, one-size-fits-all endearment.
5
AS SOON AS SHE GETS HOME she turns on the oven, though she’d be just as wise to throw out the dough and start over from scratch. But…waste not, want not. So she shoves in the loaves, trying not to think of Harry being put into the ambulance. Lo and behold, the bread comes out like bricks, something Rebecca would bake. She could palm it off on the church raffle and sale; that’s a possibility. But…do unto others, she tells herself. Leaving the batch to cool she trudges dutifully upstairs: sticking to a schedule helps, even if there’s no one around to notice.
Still, it’s awfully early for bed, and as she lies there the world funnels through the window, every possible sound unspooling from the darkness. The chugging of a train breaks the breezy flow: the Ocean Limited or a freight train? Too late to be the dayliner. Dinah wontcha blow, Dinah wontcha… And it returns to her, that time way back, before Robert was so much as a twinkle in anyone’s eye, technically, even, before Jewel was born, just months shy now of fifty-two years ago to be exact, when the fellow in the Relief office had said there were trains, relief trains, echoing what she’d already read in
the paper. Someone’s in the kitchen with Di-nah. Indeed, indeed, she thinks, turning her face to the pillow. Strummin’ on the old banjo.
1915
HARRY’D SUNG THAT OLD STANDBY on their wedding day, in the kitchen before the service and afterwards at the party. He’d stashed liquor in a washtub behind Dad’s work shed—heaven knows where it’d come from, Prohibition in full tilt. Mama’d played the piano, Harry’s friends from the refinery the guitar and violin. The party soldiered on four doors down, Harry’s pals wheeling the piano along the gutter then hoisting it onto the veranda. That’s what they heard, anyway, later on.
She and Harry’d had other things to do, things put on hold since that morning.
Mama’d been out borrowing extra linen, Dad and her sister, Ethel, off somewhere, who knows. Bad luck for a couple to see each other before the wedding, but there he’d been, three hours from the altar, packing bottles like fish into that tub, then covering the whole works over with nightshade nourished by the neighbour’s horse. “Can you see it from the house?” was his excuse to come in; he’d covered his eyes: “Can’t see a thing, honest to Pete.” Next he was covering her in kisses, everything all askew. Kissing and tussling, halfway under the kitchen table when they heard a noise out front. Kissing and tussling like it was the end of the world, and just as he’d sneaked out the back, Mama appeared, but in all the flap no one noticed Lucy’s hair still in rags but most of them falling out. Bathing, primping, she’d entertained a dreadful thought: what if he changed his mind?
But he’d turned up in good time and later, while everyone danced and caroused, she and Harry curled together between their wedding-gift sheets, a mist of happiness sifting over the drafty, half-empty flat. Fee-fi-fiddly-i-o, fee-fi-fiddly-i-o-o-o-o! and into the morning they made love to the sound of cars being shunted and coupled over at the glass-roofed station. Can’t you hear the whistle blowing? Rise up so early in the…
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