Glass Voices

by Carol Bruneau

  Rebecca sprinkles a bit on Harry’s leg. “Git behind me, Satan!” Forgive her: she never did know when to stop. Emptying the dregs into the African violet, Elinor plunks the ’cordine on her dad’s lap; wiggling in behind, she works the bellows while he fingers a melody. A gleam lights her face; if Lucy weren’t so forgiving, she’d call it cruel. But she tries to imagine a child—with braids, wearing pink?—her little hands tickling the ivories, and she hears herself ask, Your parents, were they musical?

  “Couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, Missus.”

  REBECCA’S NOT DOING SO HOT, so Lucy takes leftover frankfurter casserole. Robert’s downstairs entertaining the girlfriend. At least, she hears the TV—Mod Squad?— and smells that smell. Washing dishes, she’s trying not to think of tiny Jewel mucking around in the sink, when Sheryl slips out. Robert appears, stinking of tobacco; no, that evil weed, she guesses, and it fills her with a fuzzy dread. What can she do? He’s too big to threaten or bribe. As he scrabbles through the fridge, his eyes look as though he’s been crying. There’s a mark on his neck; glory, the girl’s a vampire? “What is it?” she prods, but he doesn’t make a peep, and she’s shot with an image of Jewel in his little bed, and that day in Sister Jerome’s office, the day Lucky struck: a dog, God spelt backwards.

  “Your dad, he wouldn’t want to see you like this.” Her voice is as firm as the one she imagines whispering sometimes from the clouds: Jewel’s. “If you’re going, my darling, go. No good hanging around. Heavenly God,” she finally blurts. “You mustn’t just give up.”

  “You give up,” he turns on her. “That God stuff. If God was real, why would he let so much crap come down?”

  ELINOR SETS UP THE WASH basin, gets Harry’s razor and Old Spice, then holds the mirror, telling him to help himself. His hand shakes. It’s painful to watch, so Lucy tries to help him. He’s got to learn to do it for himself, Elinor insists, and she’s right. That doesn’t make it any easier, though there’s something she’s learned from Elinor, that things handle themselves, more or less. Afterwards, Elinor bathes his face. Lucy thinks of a minister dousing that tiny forehead: Helena’s christening. How she’d screeched and waved her yellow fists, Harry sneaking off for a beer. Give her a kiss for me, dolly—she’d best be asleep by the time I get home.

  Lucy’s downstairs when there’s a shout: “Quick, Missus!” An urging. She’s up the stairs in a flash, in time to see Elinor manoeuvring Harry in the chair, practically popping a wheelie. It’s like watching Robert alone on the Ferris wheel when there weren’t enough spots, and waiting below, she wished she were there, too, in that rinky-dink seat. Harry nestles on his sheepskin cloud. Let sleeping babes lie, that advice rushes back, the words of women in that basement, not St. Columba’s but the other, earlier one where she had nursed Jewel and the fissures inside her. A blanket of memories, white as a snowy field and black as tar.

  Harry’s half out of the chair, almost but not quite standing. She moves quickly, trying to ease him back, till Elinor stops her. His dark green slippers pedal the floor, his face red as he steadies then lifts himself again. Trembling, like a heron testing its wings, then lifting off. Elinor holds out both hands as he shuffles towards her: one foot before the other, baby steps. “C’mon, bud. You can do it!” Arms around each other, they’re glued together, those two. “Where there’s a will there’s a way, eh, Missus?”

  Except, Lucy’s heart seems to have quit beating, her pulse replaced by a hum, the air in her lungs? There’s nothing for it, but to bury her face in the wood of his neck.

  “If this doesn’t call for a celebration, I dunno what does,” Elinor brays.

  SOMEBODY’S GOT TO GET ROBERT up, if Rebecca can’t. The kid would sleep forever. “When’s he leaving, anyway?” That’s Harry. Don’t give up, Ma. The voice from the clouds is dogged at first, though little by little it loosens its grip. Someone has to keep an eye on Robert, keep him in line. Eighteen, still a baby as far as that goes. The Lord opens a door whenever he, or she, closes a window. There’s talk now of Benny kicking the hippies out of his mother’s place, him and Elinor moving in. She’s even talking about going to sea, cutting Benny’s moorings and drifting out—thankfully, not in front of Harry. Maybe wanderlust’s contagious.

  “Get up!” Lucy hollers, “Get the frig up!” as his grampa would say. It’s noon, and she’s got something, fifty dollars, in her pocket. A donation, though a kick in the pants might be better deserved. A nudge, it is. He’ll need to eat on the road. Worse than ever, he’s sluggish and stubborn, glued to his bed. There’s a stitch in her neck, as if the ache in her knees has wiggled its way up. Never mind, she flaps the blankets, the first time in ages she’s made it past the threshold. The hair above his shorts and his hairy thighs a shock. His eyes squeezing out the world, the world of his room. There are pictures on the wall, greyish snaps taped up, row on row. Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow? In one of them, his dad props his foot on a man’s back in a field of backs, uniforms, helmets. The look on his tiny face sober, triumphant.

  “What the fu—?!” Robert stirs. Fudge, he means, half asleep.

  Wetting a cloth with icy water, she presses it to his cheek, saying he mustn’t waste his day. As he squirms a healthy hum rises up, the one Harry used to give off, so remote it’s as if that young Harry never existed, beyond her wanting him to. Mixed in is a smell like freshly-laid carpet. Opening an eye, he glowers, swings out a leg.

  “I thought you’d come for a walk, dear.” It’s if she’s asking him to steal a car, but she tells him he could use the air, that it helps people think. Pushing her out, he slams the door. She hears him getting dressed. Not a peep from Rebecca upstairs. “How’s Sheryl?” she asks through the wood.

  “I dunno,” he mumbles sourly, yanking on his jacket.

  Sink or swim, the voice carps, the voice of the man in the picture holding bodies captive. Robert grabs some bread, cramming it into his mouth. “The shore?” she elbows him; the top of her shoulder barely reaching his ribs. At least being half-awake, he won’t argue, not at first. “Down where the old place used to be, where Grampa and your dad and I…” Her voice malingers. “What’s there now? Not much, I guess.” She doesn’t mention Ida Trott’s or that day he’d kicked the tire, or how the Grounds is the last place she’d have visited once, willingly.

  Shrugging, he scuffles along, the day ripened to a pearly grey as they walk in silence. Below the road, the rocks shine dully, the first dabs of red in the trees mirrored on the tide. When he veers off, she keeps up the best she can, following through the woods. The pines have been razed, making way for something. She’d hardly recognize the place, though a queer comfort creeps up from the ground, up through the roots and stones. She could find her way blindfolded.

  Rubble from the Big House sinks in a blaze of alder, wood from the barn crisscrossing the swamp. Robert stumps past Ida’s inkbottle house as if it were gone, too, though that van is still there, its windshield like a spider web in the timid sun. Soundlessly, a jet scores the spreading blueness overhead. Its plume links the clouds, cutting the path, perhaps, that fiery bits of metal once did. Parts of a ship, and souls sprayed like milk and eggs and perfume, invisible as a sliver in the heart, or a baby about to enter the world, leaving behind snug darkness.

  It’s not so hard, keeping up. Only a bit out of breath, she tugs his sleeve. She needs to show him something, never mind if he’s seen it a thousand times. Just ahead, the shank of iron surrounded still by knotweed; like bamboo that might grow in Japan, probably did, in Hiroshima, the stalks dwarf her. The dead blooms barbed as wire.

  “Here, darling.” Her voice is a murmur, a soft rasp. Somebody’s painted the shaft, recently by the looks of it, and it no longer lies on dirt, but on concrete. Pieces of beer bottle glint up, and a plaque: Mont Blanc’s anchor, Dec. 6th, 1917. His hand leaves his pocket easily when she reaches for it, touches his fingers to the metal. It’s cool and
pitted, as if the air has eaten it. The money waits in her pocket, but first she hikes her coat to bare both knees. That blue, a prayer.

  Dampness seeps between her toes; she can feel her hair frizz as they poke towards shore. The path is slippery and she takes his arm, feeling it tense. “Your father…” she begins softly, her heart swelling, but he’s not listening. His eyes are locked on something out in the water—a shag, maybe, a loon with no mate? Straight as can be she clings to him, shivering in spite of the fallish warmth. The spring of his muscles soothes her, their warmth through that stupid khaki. Suddenly she could weep—with joy, the seedling of it, being here with him. The two of them mismatched but kindred as runaways from the fair. Maybe he feels it too, but just can’t speak. Behind some brambles, what look to be bedsprings rust in the grass. The remains of Babineau’s cabin, Artie’s love-shack.

  His elbow presses hers when they finally reach the rocks. The seaweed’s laced with junk: things that make her want to look away. As always, though, the water is a magnet, redeeming what’s before it, and she can’t help scouring the edge with her eye. No better than a crow, a scavenger on the lookout for something shiny and free.

  “As if the sea can swallow it all—what’s wrong with people?” she has to ask, grappling for his hand again, pressing the bills into it. Shamed and afraid, too, because who knows how he’ll take it? Our Lady of bleeding hearts and mustard pickles, Rebecca called her once, not to her face, but still. Rebecca, their Lady of Avon: as close to a daughter as she can get. A cloud yawns inside her, a mushroom, but his boyish laugh blows it out over the cove. “Gran. What the fu—?” That language alone would make her despair, more than a little Marryatt there, not to mention—but shutting her eyes, she lets the gleam float through her lids. God have mercy, for the sins of the fathers and mothers too, and give us hope, even if it’s pinned on things nobody will ever see.

  When she looks, Robert’s perched on a rock rimmed with weed, waving something. “Shit, Gran! This is kind of frout.” Far out, wild, he means: good. It’s a bottle, with nothing so quaint as a note inside. A glimmer from her childhood, walking the jetties with her dad. Skidding towards her, Robert holds it out. An antique, the kind milkmen used to deliver, and not even chipped! As she steadies herself, bending close, the stink makes her flinch. A host of creatures are lodged inside, periwinkles and barnacles laced with algae. Home, the way an empty shell shelters a hermit crab.

  Already Robert’s face shows disappointment, that restlessness creeping in. But as he hauls back, aiming his find towards the dropoff, she catches his wrist. “Wait, it’s a souvenir—don’t you see?” and he stops. A sullen patience lights his eyes, those eyes so like Jewel’s, and almost tenderly, without answering, he wedges it between the rocks.

  Acknowledgements

  HUMBLED BY THEIR PERSEVERANCE, I remain indebted to the Explosion survivors whose stories have appeared over the years in newspapers and are preserved in Janet Kitz’s book Shattered City. Thanks to the Canada Council of the Arts, Acadia University, and friends and family, especially Bruce Erskine, who supported me through the writing of this novel. Heartfelt thanks to Joy O’Brien for her photos of the Edmonds’ Grounds. On a lighter note, thanks to Alma Chestnut Moore for How to Clean Everything (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952).

  Thanks to Shaun Bradley and Transatlantic Literary Agency, and to Cormorant Books and mareverlag for publishing earlier editions of the book.

  My deepest thanks, however, go to Whitney Moran, Terrilee Bulger, and all the rest of the dream team at Nimbus/Vagrant Press for giving Glass Voices a new home and a whole new life.

  Onwards!

  About the Author

  Courtesy of Nicola Davison

  Carol Bruneau is the acclaimed author of three short story collections, including A Bird on Every Tree, published by Vagrant Press in 2017, and four other novels. Her first novel, Purple for Sky, won the 2001 Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and the Dartmouth Book Award. Originally published in 2007, Glass Voices was a Globe and Mail Best Book and has become a book club favourite. Her reviews, stories, and essays have appeared nationwide in newspapers, journals, and anthologies, and two of her novels have been published internationally. She lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, with her husband and their dog and badass cat. Visit carolbruneau.com.