Lucy Cloud

by Anne Lévesque

  ‘Do you … uh … do you have to?’ Curly said and Annabel thought, ‘Oh, no …’ That possibility hadn’t occurred to her. Then she heard him say, ‘How old is she?’

  ‘I want to talk to him,’ she said, putting her hand on the receiver.

  But Curly wouldn’t let go.

  ‘Ask him if he’s getting married in church!’ Annabel said.

  ‘Just a minute, your mother wants to talk to you,’ Curly said, giving her the receiver.

  ‘Did I hear you say you’re getting married at the courthouse?’

  ‘Yes,’ Blaise said.

  ‘You’re not getting married in church?’

  ‘—’

  ‘Blaise! You’ll be committing a mortal sin.’

  ‘—’

  ‘Is she Catholic?’

  ‘—’

  ‘Is she Catholic?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What is she then?’

  Another pause, a half-second during which Annabel felt her heart plummet. It hit bottom when she heard – Blaise’s tone nonchalant, pleasant – ‘Michael’s going to be my best man.’ That’s when she realized that the girl must be in the room with him. That he didn’t want her to know what it was that Annabel was saying.

  When Annabel opened her eyes the next morning the sun was already high. Curly was still in the house, though. She could hear stirrings in the kitchen, the stove lids, the radio. She went down in her slippers and robe.

  ‘I thought you weren’t getting up,’ Curly said, smiling. He was at the table eating a bowl of porridge. Annabel hated porridge. She pulled out her chair.

  ‘I didn’t sleep half the night,’ she said.

  ‘There’s tea made,’ Curly said, and he got up to pour her a cup. And for some reason that started her crying all over again.

  DEVIL’S BACKBONE

  That Jenny Petcoff was different. She didn’t eat meat, for one thing. And she didn’t watch television. Now she’d gone and had her baby at home, all alone with Eric and some hippie girl from Judique.

  ‘Why would you want to take a chance like that?’ Annabel said to Curly. And Donalda. And Sally MacKinnon. ‘It’s not like you have to pay the doctor any-more. She buried the afterbirth in the yard she’s going to plant a tree on it. And she kept a piece of the cord, dried it on top of the stove she showed it to me.’ Sally said that was nothing her sister’s neighbours in Chimney Corner fried the afterbirth like a piece of liver and the woman had eaten it.

  Then there was the baby’s name. Santana. Now what kind of name was that for a poor little baby? When she wrote it out Annabel thought it was a little too close to the word Satan.

  Annabel had gone over about a week after Eric called to give them the news. Curly drove her. She would walk home – it wasn’t a bad day – or maybe Eric would offer her a ride back. She had a plate of fresh cinnamon rolls, a card and a little pink blanket she bought at Robin Jones.

  She had only been in their house once.

  Eric had called shortly after they moved in to ask if Curly and Blaise could help him move a wood stove into the kitchen. Curly said, ‘Want to come?’ so Annabel filled a tin with molasses cookies and climbed in the truck with them. While the others struggled with the heavy stove – she hoped Curly didn’t put his back out he didn’t seem to realize he was twice their age and half their size – Annabel had a chance to look around. There were no curtains on the windows and few furnishings. They had painted everything white: the ceilings, the walls, hadn’t even bothered to strip the wallpaper, just painted right over it. It made the place feel cold.

  After the stove was in place Eric brought out some beer – No thank you said Annabel, and to her surprise he gave one to Blaise, even though he must have known he was underage. Blaise said nothing, started drinking it right away, making sure not to look her way. He had never had liquor in her presence before. She felt a hot flash coming over her – they came out of nowhere but also, Curly had pointed out (and she continued to deny), when she was upset about something. She tried to catch Curly’s eye but he and Jenny were busy talking so she drank her glass of water and as soon as she could she moved her chair back and said, ‘We should get going, Curly.’

  This time the house was anything but stark. A stack of firewood lined one side of the narrow entrance and the rest of the hallway floor was a mess of boots and shoes and bunched-up mats. Eric shoved some of it aside with his foot to make a path for her to the kitchen where, in front of the big stove Curly and Blaise had helped to move, diapers were drying on a wooden rack like the one Annabel had thrown out after they got a dryer. She picked her way around a laundry basket, a cardboard box full of green tomatoes, a stockpot, a cream separator and a butter churn. A carboy full of wine or beer – she couldn’t tell which because they had the queer idea to dress it up in a ski jacket – stood on a counter so cluttered you’d be hard-pressed to make yourself a cup of tea.

  Eric said Jenny was resting and Annabel felt a little awkward standing there alone with him until he smiled that beautiful smile of his and said, ‘I’ll make some tea.’ He shooed a cat from on top of the table and invited her to sit next to the window, which was all taken up by a big houseplant. Annabel had never seen one like it. It was full of queer little seeds, many of which had fallen on the tablecloth. Maybe it was marijuana. She brushed a few into her hand.

  ‘This is an interesting plant,’ she said as he set a mug of tea in front of her. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen one like this.’

  ‘I can give you some seeds if you want. It grows like crazy.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not any good with plants.’

  ‘You couldn’t kill this one if you tried.’

  ‘What’s it called?’

  ‘Devil’s Backbone.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Annabel had a sip of the tea. It tasted like cow.

  ‘Blaise still in Sudbury?’ Eric said.

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘He likes it there.’

  ‘I guess,’ Annabel said. If he hadn’t heard about the wedding she sure wasn’t going to be the one to tell him.

  After the night they moved the stove Blaise had started going over to Eric and Jenny’s in the evenings. Sometimes he went alone and sometimes Gordie Smith went with him. Blaise said they talked and listened to music, and that Eric was teaching them to play chess. Annabel didn’t like it. Eric and Jenny were older, and married; she felt it wasn’t proper. Blaise sometimes smelled like beer when he came back and she worried that he smoked dope – those hippies all smoked dope. But when she talked about it with Curly he said that Blaise would soon be on his own – he was in grade twelve that year – and that she might as well get used to it.

  Blaise had been pumping gas at the Irving every summer since he was sixteen. Annabel thought it was a good job for him, and so did Blaise until the summer after his first year at St. FX. He was getting tired of working there he said. The pay wasn’t great and he felt like doing something different. Annabel hoped he wouldn’t do anything too different, like Curly’s niece Susan who had gone to Africa with Canada World Youth: her mother was sick the whole time.

  Jenny and Eric had met while working as tree planters in Northern Ontario, and they got Blaise all excited about it: it was hard work but you made a ton of money, he said. Jenny’s brother was a foreman at one of the companies, she could put in a word for him and Gordie and they could both get work no problem.

  The start of the whole catastrophe.

  The sound of floorboards creaking above, then of the toilet flushing. Jenny appeared at the top of the stairs wearing a long sweater over her pyjamas. She didn’t have the baby with her.

  ‘Hi Annabel!’ she said, looking pleased to see her. She turned to Eric: ‘She’s sleeping. Finally.’

  ‘Congratulations,’ Annabel said. ‘I just wanted to –’

  ‘Want some coffee,
hon?’ Eric said to Jenny.

  ‘Sure,’ she said.

  ‘Annabel brought some cinnamon rolls.’

  ‘Mmmm, cinnamon rolls and coffee,’ Jenny said. Eric didn’t tell her about the present. Annabel had not noticed where he had put it after she gave it to him. She hoped it wouldn’t get lost somewhere. Eric made the coffee and Annabel drank her tea and they talked about this and that. After a little while Annabel said, ‘Well. I better get going.’ She was after pushing the chair from the table when they heard the baby. Jenny sighed. She drank a last mouthful of coffee and got up. The slow slap-slap-slap of her slippers up the stairs. The baby was silent then and Annabel waited, thinking Jenny would bring her downstairs. But she didn’t.

  So it was a whole other month before she saw her. Jenny and Eric dropped in one afternoon on their way back from town. It was almost December by then, a day so dark that Annabel had kept the light on in the kitchen all day. She was spreading mashed potatoes on a shepherd’s pie when they came to the door.

  Santana was a skinny little thing. She had her father’s colouring but more on the yellow side, like she had the jaundice or something. She started crying as soon as they sat down and Jenny had to unbutton her blouse and feed her. Just like that, with no blanket to hide her breast or anything. Good thing Curly hadn’t been there he would have gone red as a beet. Jenny said that’s all the baby wanted to do. She’d even had to make a little sling for her so she could feed her while she was walking. So she could do something else with her life. She looked exhausted.

  The next time Annabel saw them was just before Christmas. They came over with a bottle of homemade rose petal wine and some hard little cookies that Annabel couldn’t eat because of her partial. The baby hadn’t plumped up any since the last time she’d seen her. Her nose was running – Jenny said she caught every little thing that was going around – and the poor little thing had eczema all over her arms.

  ‘That baby’s hungry!’ Annabel said to Curly that night. ‘That baby needs a bottle of milk and Pablum that’s what that baby needs.’ She had hinted so much to Jenny, telling her how Blaise had loved his Pablum, by the time he was two months old he had more than doubled his weight. ‘Right off the chart!’ Doctor Lauchie had said when she took him in for his shots. And he had been sleeping through the night, too, which wasn’t going to happen to this Santana baby any time soon.

  PURPLE FACE

  ‘Are you sure it’s a girl?’ Donalda said when she saw the picture. ‘The blanket is blue.’

  ‘Yes-yes, her name is Lucy, ’ Annabel said. But she had wondered the same thing herself.

  ‘Is there a Lucy in Curly’s family?’

  ‘Not that I know of. I think it’s a name she liked.’

  ‘It’s pretty. Nice and short. I wish my name was Lucy.’

  Which Annabel thought was awfully nice of Donalda to say. You certainly couldn’t say it about the baby. Her face was all squished in and she had the nose of a boxer, complete with a scab on the bridge. Donalda was the only one she’d shown the picture to. And not just because of the scab. She hadn’t told anyone about the baby yet. She had been born barely seven months after the wedding (if you could call it a wedding) and although they said she was premature she knew what people would say. Both behind her back and to her face.

  She couldn’t go anywhere without someone asking her about Blaise. There was nothing wrong with that, she did the same, enquired about children and parents and ailing relatives. But since Blaise quit school she had noticed a change in the tone. They weren’t asking just to be nice anymore. They had heard. They wanted Annabel to put some meat on the bones of the story for when they passed it on – I saw Annabel at the Hospital Tea and I don’t think she’s too happy about it. Or they just plain wanted to see her squirm. Like Mary Ellen Gillies at bingo last week, asking her how Blaise was doing at school.

  ‘As if she didn’t know!’ Annabel said to Curly as she got into bed that night. She mimicked Mary Ellen’s soft voice; ‘Oh, you must be so disappointed …’

  More snapshots of the baby came eventually, with a short letter in which Blaise said that they had moved to a new apartment, he had a different job at the hospital, and he was in the union. The union. Well, that was one good piece of news.

  In these photographs the baby was prettier although she was still bald as an egg. In one of them she was sitting in this queer swing – Donalda said it was called a jolly-jumper, Coleen’s daughter Heather had one just like it – and Wendy was crouched beside her. It was the first time she and Curly had seen a picture of Wendy. She had very blue, almond-shaped eyes, long blonde hair and a pretty pink mouth.

  ‘The boy’s got taste,’ Curly said.

  Annabel froze. It was so unlike her husband to say such a thing that at first she thought she’d misheard. But she hadn’t. The churning in the pit of her stomach – that old old feeling – confirmed it.

  Annabel had never been pretty. Not even as a young woman in her prime had she been pretty. Her long face was pitted with acne scars and she had inherited her grandfather’s big nose. The only thing she had going for her was a half-decent figure. ‘You could wear a sack of potatoes and it would look good on you,’ her cousin Rita liked to say. But Annabel knew that she only said it to make her feel better. Rita and her sister complained about fat ankles and thick waists but their complexions were clear and their noses small and pert. They didn’t have to wear eyeglasses. Annabel had stopped wearing hers for an entire year in high school. It was after David MacAulay began calling her Purple Face (he had noticed that because of the acne her face took on a bluish tinge when she was out in the cold). She didn’t care that she saw nothing on the blackboard and that her grades went down. What mattered is that when she looked at herself in a mirror all she saw was a blur.

  Then one day she put her glasses back on. She had decided to become popular. Not popular like Anita MacLean of the creamy complexion and shy dimples whom even the nuns swooned over; not popular like Christy Matheson who wiggled her arse and let boys fondle her tits – but the kind of popular who was everyone’s best friend and confidante, who got invited everywhere because she was so cheerful, fun and full of jokes. She was moderately successful. Being popular, she discovered, was exhausting work. Especially when you were a loner by nature. When she returned home after a day at school, or any other outing, the relief she felt was physical. But she persevered: she knew that if she didn’t she would never find a husband.

  She had never talked about this (she barely apprehended it herself); not to her cousins, not to Donalda, not even to Curly. Especially not to Curly. For a long time after she was married she had a fear; it was that one day Curly would look across the supper table and realize that he had married an ugly woman. And that Annabel would see it in his eyes.

  Over the years the fear had abated. She had come to realize that Curly didn’t seem to notice or care about physical appearances. It wasn’t something he talked about. And once you got to a certain age it didn’t much matter anymore: they all lost their looks getting old. She couldn’t help but notice, however, that she was faring rather well compared to some of the former beauties of her acquaintance. Her tough skin seemed to resist wrinkling and her figure was still good. A secret satisfaction.

  But today.

  The boy’s got taste, Curly had said. And it made her wonder.

  JESUS MURPHY

  Is iomadh duine laghach a mhill an creideamh.

  There’s many a delightful person that has been spoiled by religion.

  ‘Maybe we could put the crib in Blaise’s room. Then only one of them could sleep there and – ’

  ‘You can’t put them in separate rooms. They’re man and wife.’

  ‘Not in the eyes of God.’

  A sigh lifted Curly’s lean shoulders. ‘The deed is done, Annabel. They have a baby and everything.’

  ‘Even worse. I tell you Curly, my
mother wouldn’t have thought twice about this. She would have put them in different rooms and that would be that. If she even let them sleep in her house.’

  ‘It’s different now.’

  ‘How is it different?’

  ‘Things have changed.’

  ‘It’s still a mortal sin. I know: what if we – ’

  ‘Jesus Murphy, Annabel! You’re going to drive yourself crazy figuring this one out. It’s not like it’s the first time someone in your family didn’t get married in the church. What about J.R.’s daughter?’

  ‘Yes, and look how that turned out.’

  ‘Well Dernie then. He brought that girl home it didn’t kill anybody.’

  ‘Aunt Donna put them in separate bedrooms, Joan told me. She said, ‘There’s nothing I can do if they want to live in sin in Calgary but they’re not gonna do it under my roof.’’

  ‘And they never came back.’

  ‘Well, that’s because she left him. Maybe if he’d married her she would have stayed. She was a lot better than that one he’s got now.’

  ‘That was, what, ten years ago?’

  ‘And now it’s all right, you mean?’

  It peeved Annabel that Curly could even entertain the idea. She had always known that his faith was not as strong as hers. But this was going too far. How she longed for the days when this conversation would have been unimaginable. When everyone was baptized, everyone had first communion and confirmation and everyone was married in the church.

  And it had always been that way.

  Of course there had always been Protestants. But unlike Wendy, at least they went to church on Sunday. Annabel was starting to think that Wendy was an atheist. She began to cry.

  ‘Bella …,’ Curly said. She couldn’t remember the last time Curly had used that name. It made her cry even more.

  ‘You should be happy they’re coming,’ he said.

  ‘I know, I know. But all I can think of … I wasn’t raised like that. And Blaise wasn’t either.’