When Teresa said, ‘Did he do this?’ Donalda said nothing. Far better for people to think that she had married a wife-beater than a pervert. After the doctor sawed off the cast she tried to find work, but she did not do well during job interviews. When asked about her last job she sometimes began to cry. Teresa had just found her part-time work as a cashier at the Dominion where she was a produce manager when they learned that their father died. Donalda folded the black and navy skirts, the caramel bouclé jumper, the cream and teal blouses she had bought one paycheque at a time into empty boxes of canned tomatoes and peaches and put them on the back seat of her car (‘You’re darn tootin’ you’re getting the car,’ Teresa had said and she and her husband Bernie had gone to pick it up). Their mother had a bad heart and could not live alone: Donalda knew she wasn’t going back to Toronto any time soon.
Late that winter she heard that the new dentist had hired Mary MacKillop, the bookkeeper at the Fish Co-op, as his receptionist. Donalda was disappointed, having also applied for the job. She immediately paid a visit to her cousin Will, who was then serving on the Board of Directors of the Fish Co-op, and got Mary’s old job before it was even advertised. She had been working there since. It was a seasonal job, from April to October. The rest of the time she was on pogey, although she liked to pretend that she wasn’t. Soon after she began working there one of the fish buyers, noticing how often she used the expression ‘Holy Hannah,’ had tagged her with the name. It was a wicked good fit: living on a dirt road and working at a fish plant did not prevent Donalda from holding on to her Big City ways. She smoked and drove a car, always fast. She wore skirts and pumps and was never seen without the Holy Trinity of foundation, eyeliner and lipstick. Then there was her signature hairdo. It was the first thing you saw as you entered the crowded church on Sunday morning, or walked into the credit union where she was a Busy-Important regular with her high heels and deposit bag: bleached, backcombed and hairsprayed, it sat on her head like a golden helmet. Holy Hannah Warrior Princess.
She and Annabel had nothing in common except blood. And bingo.
MULL RIVER GLENCOE ROAD
It’s late afternoon of an unusually warm fall day. Annabel and Curly are on the way home from a family gathering, the baptism of his sister Sadie’s fourth son. Between them on the bench seat of the pickup truck is their little son Blaise. The pickup flies along two of the three pale sinuous tracks that the passage of many a vehicle has drawn on the gravel – left to avoid a pothole, right to miss another, left again because of a hump of bedrock. Sharp little brown-and-grey rocks ping against the undercarriage. A beige cloud blooms behind them.
Annabel sits ups, arches her back, and spreads the fingers of her right hand on her belly. She sighs.
‘I shouldn’t have had that second piece of pie,’ she says.
‘—’
‘Did you have any of that coconut pie?’
‘No, I had cake.’
‘Bertha made it. I have to get her recipe.’
‘—’
‘There was plenty of food there, anyway.’
‘Lot more than they’re used to having.’
‘Tsk. Poor Sadie. I don’t know how she does it. She looked all right, though.’
‘Sadie’s tough as nails.’
‘Did I ever laugh when Angus said, “Another bull!” ’ Curly chuckles.
‘I was surprised to see him. And the Monsignor. They came together. On the train.’
‘Did they.’
‘Mary’s expecting.’
‘Hmmm.’
‘She didn’t say a thing about it when I talked to her. It was Catherine told me.’
‘—’
‘She’s due in March.’
‘—’
‘He made himself pretty scarce today.’
‘Who?’
‘Malcolm.’
‘He had a bottle in the barn.’
‘That’s what I thought.’
‘—’
‘He always has money for liquor.’
‘—’
‘We’ll never get that money back.’
‘Well, I wasn’t going to ask him today.’
‘I know.’
‘—’
‘Him and Collie aren’t talking again. What is it this time?’
‘He broke Collie’s hay rake and didn’t tell him. Collie found out he had just finished mowing the – ’
A gurgling choking noise from the engine and they are thrown forward, Annabel and Curly and little Blaise, slammed back against the bench seat and again as the truck lurches and jerks between stop and go. Curly steers right, but the motor is dead before the truck reaches the side of the road.
‘Son of a whore!’ he says in Gaelic. Annabel flinches, looks at the boy. But he does not understand Gaelic.
‘Are we out of gas?’ she says.
‘Filled up yesterday,’ Curly says. He turns the key in the ignition but the motor won’t start. He shoves his hand under the steering wheel to disengage the hood, opens the door and hops out.
After a while Annabel rolls down her window. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘I don’t know.’ The hood goes down and Annabel sees him wiping his hands on his nice white handkerchief.
They were about a mile and a half from Sonny Beaton’s. Maybe Sonny would be home and could drive him to Ambrose’s. There was no point Annabel and Blaise coming along.
That was the plan.
A man, walking away on the beige and grey road. In his smart brown trousers and sporty zippered jacket – beige with a fine brown check – and shiny Sunday shoes (he would ruin them on that gravel), he looked nothing like the man Annabel saw going out the kitchen door ten, twelve and twenty times a day. As she watched his diminishing figure she saw what she no longer noticed about him: that he was a short man with a disproportionately large head.
‘Ma.’
Annabel takes one of her son’s sticky hands in hers. But she keeps her eyes on the road.
‘I’m thirsty.’
‘You’ll have to wait ’til we get home, Blaise.’
In the distance, the darkening late, the pale blotch of Curly’s jacket. ‘Where’s Da going?’
‘He’s getting somebody to fix the truck.’
Annabel looks at her son. His large brown eyes are bright with fatigue. He is used to their quiet life-ways, just the two of them most of the time. She still has him nap after lunch.
‘You were having fun playing with Danny and Lawrence, I think.’
He nods.
The darkness steals in. It smudges the edges and corners of the truck, creeps up their ankles and calves. Soon it will engulf both mother and child. All but their faces, small pools of pale like moons.
What if a car came up fast, didn’t see them and hit the back of the truck. Maybe she should turn on the headlights. Or stand outside to wait. What if someone stopped she didn’t know. Annabel locks her door, reaches past Blaise and the steering wheel to push down the lock on the driver’s door. What if Sonny wasn’t home (or on a toot more like it) and Curly had to walk all the way to the crossroad. What if a bear came out of the woods.
That time, blueberry picking with Rita and Martha.
They should have turned back after the wasp stung Rita. The blackflies were bad and the blueberry picking poor. But Martha pushed on. She had been saucy to her mother that morning and she wanted to make amends with a pan of berries. She said there was another spot. They crossed a small rough wood. Twigs and thorns caught at the hem of Annabel’s dress and scratched her bare shins. (Her father wouldn’t allow her to wear trousers, said he only had two girls in the house and he wanted them to look like girls.) But the blueberries were no good there, either.
Maybe the bear had eaten them all.
They saw him at the same moment, the three of them c
oming together like magnets in Mr. MacPherson’s science class. As they huddled wordlessly, Annabel peeked over her shoulder at the animal. He was on all fours at the edge of the clearing, blindly sniffing the air. Big.
They took off as one, not talking or thinking or looking back, just running and running until they lost the bear.
And they themselves were lost.
Rita, who was wearing a medallion of the Virgin Mary, reached in under her collar to unpin it from her undershirt. They recited a Hail Mary together and then, eyes closed, Rita kissed the medallion, spun around three times and tossed it into the air. Annabel and Martha watched to see where it would fall and they set out in that direction. The medallion was lost forever but, a miracle, they were found: a thinning wood, an old wagon track, a fence and then a field that Martha recognized as Alastair MacEwen’s. His wife Mary Florence had just died, leaving him with three young children. She had the diabetes, it was in the family; his mother had warned him not to marry her but he had anyway and now look.
There was a group outside the house and entering the yard Annabel saw that they were young men gathered around a motorcycle. She had never seen a motorcycle up close before. The girls told their story and the young men began to pick at them. One of them was Hoppy MacKay. He was tall and loose-limbed, thin but his shoulders were wide. Annabel had known him all her life but he was older, twenty-two or twenty-three he must have been, and he had been away somewhere.
They had never spoken.
He kept staring at her. Finally he said, ‘You’re Annabel, aren’t you?’ Annabel nodded and flushed: how embarrassing to be seen like this, dirty and dishevelled and in her oldest dress! And when she got home and looked in the mirror she saw a violet smear of blueberry on her cheek. And a twig in her hair.
As she lay in bed that night she tried to remember how he had looked at her. What his eyes had said. But the image kept escaping her. She had fallen asleep with her hands crossed over her heart, as if to hold in the memory.
She was seventeen.
Blaise pulls his hand away from Annabel’s absent-minded stroking. ‘I’m thirsty.’
‘You were running around too much, that’s why you’re so thirsty. There’s blueberry on your cheek. Here, let me wipe that off. Do you know who that reminds me of? That reminds me of our Rory.’
‘Once upon a time there was a boy named Rory and it was the time of year when the blueberries are ripe. Now there was nothing Rory loved better than a piece of his mother’s blueberry pie. Rory was a big strong boy, a good boy: remember how hard he worked chopping wood? And helping his mother in the barn? But he wasn’t perfect. As much as Rory loved eating blueberry pie, he hated picking the berries. But that day his mother said, ‘Everyone’s picking blueberries today, it’s gonna rain tonight and we’ll lose them.’
‘They all walked to a big field above their farm where the soil was too poor to grow anything much besides blueberries. ‘No one’s going home until they have their pans full,’ Rory’s mother said. Rory was in such bad cheer that he went off by himself to pick. He could still see and hear the others, and they seemed to be having fun. But he just wanted to sulk. He found a good patch of blueberries, they were big and there were hardly any of the hard green ones, but instead of putting them in his bowl he put them in his mouth. That’s always a bad idea. You should pick first, then eat. After that he couldn’t find a good patch. He lay down for a while and looked up at the clouds. He played with the moss beside him, throwing little handfuls up in the air. And that’s how he got the idea of putting moss in the bowl. All he had to do then was pick a few berries and it looked like his bowl was full.
‘His mother was happy when she saw how well he had done. Rory felt a tiny bit bad for cheating but he took off anyway, ran off down the hill and through the little wood and across the two planks over the brook back to the house and barn. That night his mother didn’t make pies because when she came home she had to milk the cows and make supper. But the next day Rory saw her rolling out pie crust and getting a good fire going in the stove and in no time he could smell the pies baking.
‘He couldn’t wait to have a piece of blueberry pie! He finished his supper and his sisters cleared the plates. His mother cut the pie into wedges and his sister Katie handed them out to everyone at the table. To everyone except him, that is. Katie said it was because his mother had made him one special. His own little pie! Rory was surprised. It wasn’t his birthday or anything, but he didn’t think about it too long, just picked up his fork and cut through the crust and the blueberry juice spilled out and, and: wait a minute! There was something wrong with the pie! It had moss in it. Under the berries. Rory looked up from his plate and everyone around the table started laughing. And poor Rory, well, he started to cry. His mother gave him a real piece of pie then and he ate it, but even though it didn’t have moss in it let me tell you he didn’t like it half as much as he normally did. Do you think Rory got a good lesson that time?’
Blaise does not answer. Nor does he lift his head from where it is resting against her arm. A memory comes to Annabel of sitting just like this with her own mother. It was in church, with her cheek against her mother’s winter coat. The smell of mothballs, of incense and wax. Her feet burning from cold in her thin boots. The hills and valleys of the priest’s sermon. How safe she had felt. How content, just to be near her mother. She hopes Blaise feels the same.
Up ahead she sees headlights. They cut open the darkness that has fallen so silently upon them. It must be Curly, her Curly, come to rescue them.
PAID VACATIONS
Every summer they came. In brand-new Buicks and Chryslers with Massachusetts and Ontario license plates. Wearing smart white shoes and plaid polyester pants, jewel-toned pedal-pushers and the latest style of sunglasses. A curse on the women, who had to cook and bake and clean up after them during the hottest days of the year.
Here are a pair, Curly’s first cousins on his mother’s side, home for the best two weeks of summer. Eyes on the winking blue of the Northumberland Strait, they sit in the shade of the freshly painted never-used veranda. Falling away before them is the smooth green wave of Curly and Annabel’s front yard, ‘plain’ just like its owners: a rectangle of mowed grass, a spent lilac tree and the requisite spurt of orange lilies.
‘This is the life …,’ one cousin sighs, patting his big prosperous belly full of Annabel’s biscuits and strawberry-rhubarb. ‘Eh, Curly?’
‘Nice place to sit with a quart of rum …,’ the other one winks. Inside, the women who couldn’t-wait-to-get-out-of-here-left-home-at-seventeen cluck over the lemon squares – ‘Could I have the recipe they’re delicious’ – and revel in the quaint interior, so different from their modern bungalows in Boston and Windsor and Sudbury: the wainscoting, the chesterfield from the Simpsons-Sears catalogue, the asbestos tiles on the floor – ‘Don’t you love the smell in here, Johnene? It’s just like Nana’s house. Look! I think that’s the same stove she had!’ Curly sits on the edge of a folding chair, waiting to be sprung. This time of year his lunch often consists of tea and a biscuit swallowed while standing at the kitchen door. And his breaks, on especially busy days, consist of a nap on the kitchen floor, his big head on the kitchen bench cushion and his big feet, still in his muddy boots, splayed on the doormat.
‘Must be some nice not having to punch a clock. Being your own boss,’ the cousin-who-will-have-a-full-pension-when-he-retires-from-GM says. ‘Yep. This’s the life all right.’
Curly is silent. He knows that in their eyes he is quaint and insignificant, a man who did not have the brains and gumption to leave. And he’s heard what they really think of the place: – Nice in the summer but what do you do in the winter? – Ten years behind the times and an hour to the nearest mall. – You can’t fart without the whole town knowing about it.
But Curly doesn’t let on. They’re family, after all. They were all brought up like him: sleeping three to a be
d in freezing attic rooms. Crapping in chamber pots. (Carrying the stinking sloshing things down steep narrow stairs in the morning.) Every one of them had once been the child watching the pig who wouldn’t die. Had seen its guts in a bucket and its head boiling on their mother’s stove. He and his cousins had endured at least one gearran (the second fortnight of spring) when the few potatoes left had to be saved for seed, when the haymow was empty and the skin-and-bones cattle had to be sent outside to eat the unborn grass. You wouldn’t know it looking at them now. But on Curly it’s like a port wine stain smack in the middle of his face.
To most folks in town Curly was the red or black or blue Dodge pickup gassing up at the Irving. Driving by with a load of hay. Hauling a piece of machinery on a trailer. Closer up, at the Co-op or Robin Jones maybe, he was a rough-looking man in layers of plaid shirts (he had never taken to t-shirts) and dark belted work pants (he had never taken to jeans). Just looking at him you knew that his speech was gafty, that it had the cadences and some of the syntax of the Gaelic. That he was of the Old Cape Breton: the just-scraping-by-Cape-Breton before the Causeway, the Pulp Mill and the Pogey. Before Allan J. The Cape Breton that smelled of woodsmoke and sweat and manure. What they didn’t know was that Curly was a successful businessman.
Here he is, hopping down from his pickup in someone’s yard. Pushing back his Roach Auto Salvage baseball cap, running a hard, freckled hand through his curly brown-and-grey hair, repositioning the hat. Sometimes he does this twice. As he walks to the door, his eyes – one blue, one brown with a blue speckle near the pupil – his all-seeing brown-and-blue eyes, register and appraise: the snowmobile up on blocks, the old Massey Ferguson 35, the brand-new tiller. Everything. Once captured the information is filed under the cap for future retrieval and cross-referencing with such data as the average price of beef in Truro in any of the last twenty years, the cost of a bale of good hay after a wet summer and, more importantly, the amount of cash a prospective buyer was likely to part with. They had their unemployment stamps for the winter? Curly nudged up the price. A pile of pulpwood lay greying on the side of the road? They would probably take less for that tractor. The thing about Curly is that he never gouged anyone. And – the mark of a good businessman – both parties generally came away feeling that they had gotten the better of the other.
Lucy Cloud Page 2