Lucy Cloud

by Anne Lévesque

  Lucy Cloud

  Lucy Cloud

  Anne Lévesque

  Pottersfield Press, Lawrencetown Beach, Nova Scotia, Canada

  Copyright © 2018 Anne Lévesque

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or used or stored in any form or by any means – graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying – or by any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any requests for photocopying, recording, taping or information storage and retrieval systems shall be directed in writing to the publisher or to Access Copyright, The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (www.AccessCopyright.ca). This also applies to classroom use.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Lévesque, Anne, 1956-, author

  Lucy Cloud : a novel / Anne Lévesque.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-988286-37-2 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-988286-38-9 (PDF)

  I. Title.

  PS8623.E9458L83 2018 C843’.6 C2018-900832-6 C2018-900833-4

  Cover design: Gail LeBlanc

  eBook: tikaebooks.com

  Pottersfield Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities. We also acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Province of Nova Scotia which has assisted us to develop and promote our creative industries for the benefit of all Nova Scotians.

  Pottersfield Press

  248 Leslie Road

  East Lawrencetown, Nova Scotia, Canada, B2Z 1T4

  Website: www.PottersfieldPress.com

  To order, phone 1-800-NIMBUS9 (1-800-646-2879) www.nimbus.ns.ca

  Printed in Canada

  Pottersfield Press is committed to preserving the environment and the appropriate harvesting of trees and has printed this book on Forest Stewardship Council® certified paper.

  For my sister

  This is a work of fiction. Names of actual places are used fictitiously and all characters are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  The chapter entitled ‘Black Magic Woman’ was previously published in ArLiJo.

  CAST

  Inverness County

  The MacLeods

  Annabel (nee MacPhee)

  Curly, husband of Annabel

  Blaise, adopted son of Annabel and Curly

  Wendy, wife of Blaise

  Lucy, daughter of Blaise and Wendy

  Michael, nephew of Curly

  The MacPhees

  Annabel MacLeod

  Blaise, brother (deceased) of Annabel

  Alec and John A: twin brothers of Annabel

  Donalda, first cousin of Annabel

  Sarah Louise, mother of Donalda

  Paula, sister of Sarah Louise

  Paul, husband of Paula

  The MacKays (neighbours of the MacPhees)

  Hoppy

  Frank, son of Hoppy

  Katie, wife of Frank

  Ryan, son of Frank and Katie

  The MacInnises from The Point

  Effie

  Jackie, husband of Effie

  Carol Ann, daughter of Effie and Jackie, birth mother of Blaise MacLeod

  The Petcoffs (neighbours of the MacLeods)

  Eric

  Jenny, wife of Eric

  Santana, daughter of Eric and Jenny

  Montréal

  Antar, friend of Lucy

  Mohammed, friend of Antar and Lucy

  Marie-Ève, friend and roommate of Lucy

  POOR EFFIE MACINNIS FROM THE POINT

  It’s not that they didn’t try.

  Night after night and first thing in the morning – when Annabel wasn’t always in the mood – and after supper, when she was, until it began to feel like a chore. So that when the blood came it was almost a relief, five days when she could forget about it.

  Except that she didn’t.

  ‘Must be shooting blanks,’ Curly said. But he was disappointed, too. Had imagined a boy sitting in the truck beside him, teaching him the business.

  Everyone was having babies. Father Piper was baptizing them two at a time and not a week went by there wasn’t a baby shower. While the lucky mother-to-be opened her presents the other women nudged and winked and whispered, ‘You’re next, Annabel.’ But after a while they stopped, and that was even worse. It got so bad the sight of a pregnant woman or a baby (and an empty baby carriage once, parked in front of the pharmacy) was all it took to set her crying.

  ‘Why, why, why?’ she said to Curly. And to Father Piper one night after supper while Curly waited in his truck outside the rectory. From behind his desk the shy young priest – he was a nephew to Colin MacKay’s wife Georgina who was an Ingraham from Margaree – told her that God worked in mysterious ways; that Annabel had to trust in Him; that, unfortunately, not everyone was called to be a parent (take him, for example); that maybe He had something else in mind for her. The priest bowed his head and they prayed. Then, as Annabel stood at the door: did she know that her namesake saint – to whom she had once prayed to help her find ‘a good man and a holy spouse’ – could be invoked in cases of infertility?

  She began the novena on the tenth day after her tenth wedding anniversary (ten being her lucky number, she might as well have everything on her side) and had it published in the Sydney paper to protect her anonymity.

  O glorious St. Anne, filled with compassion for those who invoke thee and with love for those who suffer, heavily laden with the weight of my troubles, I cast myself at thy feet and humbly beg of thee to take under thy special protection the present affair which I commend to thee. Be pleased to commend it to thy daughter, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and lay it before the throne of Jesus, so that he may bring it to a happy outcome. Cease not to intercede for me until my request is granted. Above all, obtain for me the grace of one day beholding my God face to face, and with thee and Mary and all the saints, of praising and blessing him for all eternity. Amen. Good St. Anne, mother of her who is our life, our sweetness, and our hope, pray to her for us and obtain our request. (Say thrice.) Amen. A.M.

  She waited.

  Two weeks and one day later Effie MacInnis knocked on the door, Poor-Effie-MacInnis-from-the-Point. She sat in one of the three rocking chairs in the kitchen, one foot in front of her to rock forward, the other underneath to steady, and told Annabel that her daughter Carol Ann had spent the summer in Sudbury with Effie’s sister. ‘You remember she married Duncan-MacDonnell-from-Brook-Village-he’s-a-foreman-at-Falconbridge; they were some good to her, Ethel and Duncan. Ethel got her a job at the lunch counter at Kresge’s and she was getting along real good but then didn’t she go and get herself pregnant? Ethel feels terrible about it. But I said to Ethel, “Ethel, it’s not your fault. What could you do?” ’

  And some girls that age could take care of a baby; Effie herself had, everyone knew that’s why she had married that no-good-Jackie-MacInnis who couldn’t keep a job or stay sober, but not Carol Ann she had always been ‘young for her age I should have never let her go to Sudbury; she wants to get her nursing she’s a smart-smart girl.’ And Effie couldn’t take the baby she already had her hands full – she didn’t say with Jackie but Annabel knew that’s what she meant, and Effie said she was just thinking …

  And then later – not that day or the next, but after Annabel had had plenty of time to steep in the idea of this baby – of one of his small, round-bottomed feet cupped in her hand, his
tiny rose-petal fingernails, his warm pliant little body smelling of Johnson’s baby powder, and of herself, Annabel MacLeod, rocking him in front of the stove after supper – well, only then did Effie put her hand on Annabel’s forearm, a cold thin nervous hand, clear her throat and say, ‘There’s only one thing, Annabel. The father’s a Jew. Ethel says he’s a real nice boy. But a Jew.’

  The baby had soft dark curls on his perfectly shaped head, deep-deep brown eyes and a miniature version of Carol Ann’s flat, heart-shaped lips. His skin was the creamy gold and brown of a Caramilk bar that’s melted on the dashboard of your car on a hot summer day. A rage of desire took hold of Annabel. A fury of love. She would rather die than not have this baby. She named him Blaise, after her brother who had died on his second shift at the mine at the age of seventeen.

  Blaise Joseph MacLeod.

  Curly MacLeod’s father had been the kind of man who, on a winter morning after the barn chores with nothing to do but smoke a pipe in front of the fire, felt guilty watching his wife wash the floor and knead bread and peel potatoes. So he did the dishes once in a while. And he taught his sons to do the same. That’s why one evening early in his marriage Curly picked up a stack of towels that Annabel had just folded on the table. He was going upstairs anyway, he just thought he’d … But Annabel said, ‘No’: she liked the towels stacked just so, with certain colours together and the folded edges facing out and she didn’t want Curly to mess with her system. Or, as it turned out, any other aspect of the housekeeping. Curly had as little to say about the location of the molasses (he would have liked it handier to the breadbox) as he did about the colour of the bedroom walls (pink) or the number of rocking chairs in the kitchen (three). So when the baby arrived he knew what to expect. Not that he minded. He liked to look at him all right, he was as nice a baby as he’d ever seen, but it made him nervous to hold him. If he absolutely had to, like in the middle of the night while Annabel prepared his bottle, he would only do so sitting well back on the couch, or in the middle of the bed, in case he dropped him on his head. While Annabel heated milk and corn syrup in a pan, poured it into a bottle and sprayed a little against the pale blue veins inside her wrist to test the temperature, he tried to calm the infant. He was in a blind rage then, limbs stiff and face the colour of blood turnips, and yet so helpless! That heavy head flopping on the soft useless neck, those fragile little bones. Curly had to look away from the pulsing fontanel, not wanting to be reminded that beneath it, unprotected, was the baby’s brain. He thought of the foal on its impossibly fragile (but working!) legs, the just-born calf mustering all its strength to stand. All this baby’s strength was in his want.

  He was relieved when Annabel became practiced enough to make up the bottle with the baby over one shoulder and he could just go back to sleep.

  Sleep is something Annabel did not get much of during those first months. She woke up not just each time the baby stirred – the crib was one pace from her side of the bed – but in between, too, when he was quiet. Too quiet. She’d lift her head from the pillow and hold her breath until she could perceive the infant’s exhalations. If she didn’t hear anything she got up and stood over the crib. She worried about crib death. That’s how her cousin Janie had lost her first, had put him down for his morning nap and found him dead an hour and a half later.

  So many things could happen to a child! He could be run over by a car – right in your own driveway, like Millie MacNeil’s little sister; he could fall headfirst into the crock of a well, get lost in the woods, drown in the brook, lock himself up in an old fridge and suffocate. She could not bear to even think of that one. And then there were all the diseases he could come down with. It was a wonder any child made it to school age.

  But Annabel’s greatest fear of all was that sweet little Carol Ann with the heart-shaped lips would waltz in there some afternoon and take back her baby. And because the adoption was not yet final there would be nothing she and Curly could do. So every time the telephone rang, or a strange car appeared in the driveway, or a letter from the lawyer came in the mail, Annabel’s heart would start to knock in her chest. She stopped going out, thinking that if people saw how beautiful the baby was word would get back to Carol Ann and she would realize her terrible mistake. But she could not keep visitors away. Nor their stories of adoptions gone wrong.

  Three months after giving birth to her ‘fifth in six and a half years and no twins,’ Annabel’s aunt Sarah Louise had a spectacular breakdown. As a crew of hungry haymakers were there to witness its climax, the details of the collapse were broadcast in all the places the hayseed in the cuffs of their pants would later fall. The doctor prescribed a rest cure and Sarah Louise was sent to live with elderly aunts in Sydney Mines. (And not, as some said, the Mabou Asylum.) Shame attached itself to the family.

  Although the women of the family were mostly sympathetic (the men were perplexed and fearful; looked upon their own wives and mothers with unease), some of the older aunts let it be known that ‘these young ones’ did not have the mettle of the previous generations. ‘Look at Aunt Gertie; she had nine children when Uncle Dan was paralyzed from the waist down; she had to carry him on her shoulder like a sack of potatoes; even had another baby. I guess some of his parts must have still been working.’ But everyone had rallied. A sister-in-law fed the haying crew and helped with the milking and the children were farmed off to an assortment of relatives.

  The infant Donalda ended up in Massachusetts with ‘The Paulas,’ Sarah Louise’s sister Paula and her husband Paul, who were childless and vacationing in Cape Breton at the time.

  Sarah Louise recovered (and/or became resigned to her situation; she had once been a lighthearted girl who liked to dance and flirt) and the children came home one by one. All except for the littlest, who was still in the Boston States. Only after the next haying season came and went (The Paulas did not come home that summer) did Sarah Louise let it be known that she wanted her daughter back: for Christmas, please and thank you. Paul and Paula had no choice but to return the borrowed child.

  They were on Mount Thom when an oncoming transfer truck shot out from behind a car and onto their lane. Quick action on the part of Paul averted an accident. The car went on its way, minus a side mirror, and everyone said it was only by the grace of God and Christmas miracles that no one was killed. All except Paula, that is. She would confess to Jessie-MacMaster-her-best-friend-in-high-school that in that moment, with the grill and lights of the big truck upon them, she closed her eyes and prayed that they would all die together. Paula never spoke to Sarah Louise again. And she and Paul would not return to Cape Breton until her father’s funeral many years later.

  Of course the family took sides.

  Some held that Sarah Louise, having been wrong to give up the child in the first place (they forgot that it was her eldest sister who had made the decision), should have let Paula keep her; she had plenty of other children and poor Paula had none. ‘And you get so attached when they’re that age. Remember when Hughena stayed with us after Sarah was born – Dan was in Elliot Lake that winter – well I near went crazy after they left.’ Another camp opined that the child belonged with her birth family: too bad for Paula she knew all along that Donalda wasn’t hers to keep. Then there was the little girl. How cruel to wrench her from the only family she knew, not to mention her life as cossetted little princess in a modern bungalow in Waltham, Massachusetts. And so it went, blame and judgment falling like snowballs (some with a rock in the middle) on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border.

  Donalda never spoke about this episode of her life. But during that terrible time while Annabel waited for Blaise’s adoption papers, she just had to see her cousin’s car in the driveway to be reminded of it.

  HOLY HANNAH

  Cò an tè òg a tha seo gun chèile?

  What young girl is here without a husband?

  – Gaelic milling song

  Donalda was the youngest of An
nabel’s fifty-two-first-cousins-on-her-father’s-side-not-counting-the-ones-who-died. In high school she was a bold beautiful girl who painted her fingernails, wore perfume and went to bed with her auburn hair bobby-pinned into curls against her skull. She wanted to be a Career Girl in a big city. So she studied shorthand and bookkeeping and stayed away from the farm boys lest they get in the way of her ambitions. Three days after her high school graduation she was gone.

  Five years later, almost to the day, Donalda came home to marry one of the managers at the Toronto insurance office where she worked. He was a tall, good-looking fellow, a MacIsaac from New Waterford. Protestant, but Donalda had promised her mother she would raise the children Catholic. This part everyone knew.

  On a cold and bright Saturday afternoon near the end of that year, Donalda left her third-storey apartment in Toronto to do a little shopping downtown. She went alone because she wanted to choose a Christmas present for her husband. Outside the heavy front door of the building she raised her collar – Donalda never wore a hat – and pulled on the stylish candy-apple-red leather gloves that she was wearing for the first time. She was so busy admiring the effect they made against her black-and-white houndstooth coat that she didn’t see the ice on the last step.

  The next thing she knew a nice couple going by were helping her up from the sidewalk, but her arm hurt so much she had to sit down (on the gritty concrete step never mind her good coat). The pain became excruciating. She re-entered the building, climbed the stairs to her flat – she was in tears by now – pushed the key in the lock and found her brand-new husband prancing around the living room wearing only her bra and panties (‘Sunday’ of her embroidered days-of the-week set).

  Waking up at the hospital with his handsome kind face bent over hers she wanted to believe that none of it had happened. But the memory of the translucent blue nylon next to his hairy thighs proved as impossible to ignore as the cast on her arm. She called Teresa, her sister who lived nearby in Burlington. She never went back to the apartment, her husband or her job at the insurance company.