Miss Elva (10 page)

Solving the mystery wasn’t planned. It just happened, a sort of what-if-I’m-out-and-see-where-they’re-going
kind of thing, Elva rationalized early next morning when she was taking Major for his walk. It surprised her when the boys headed not in the direction of town but in the opposite way until Gil and Oak were nothing more than specks on the Old Narrows Road.

The sun was washing steadily over green hills, splashing down into Demerett Bridge. Not a rainy May this year. The flat roadway ahead afforded Elva an easy view as she sauntered along, Major sniffing at grass roots, Elva trying not to look just in case the boys turned and caught her. When they stopped to sit by the side of the road, stripping off their shirts against the heat, Elva led Major into the tall grass and said, Quiet now.

The dust cloud on the road beyond Gil and Oak moved quickly, stopping suddenly, a bus swallowing them whole. Then it turned off the Old Narrows Road and swaggered onto a long-unused carriage lane that once skirted all the way around Ostrea Lake. It made its way to the back entrance of the steelworks, slipping into the compound of the Maritime Foundry Corporation through the myriad of plywood sheds, chimney stacks and roofless outbuildings dotting the scarred land behind the main complex. The cloud vanished and Elva could follow no more.

So Gil and Oak were scabs. Hadn’t Amos been saying that all along, and while he had no love for the company that turned him loose as soon as he was too sick to work, well, scabbing was unforgivable. A man just
didn’t do that kind of thing. Sure, Elva wasn’t a hundred per cent certain why scabbing in a labour dispute was so wrong, but she figured by the way Amos went on about it that Gil and Oak wouldn’t want him to find out and her old man wouldn’t want to know. The day still ahead, Elva scratched Major behind the ear and said, C’mon, boy. There was her hideout to see.

A small door in Elva’s closet led to a cramped space, several feet high, running the length of the house under the skirting of the sloping mansard roof. Amos’s wife, Dotsie, had probably had plans to use the space for storage, but other than an ancient hornet’s nest, the crawl space had never been used.

It had become a sanctuary of sorts, like when Amos got really sauced, knocking Rilla about, shoving his gun in her mouth and saying, Shut it you cunt or I’ll blow your fuckin’ head off and them little cunts upstairs too. The girls would crawl inside, sometimes crying themselves to sleep in each other’s arms while Amos raged down below.

After Buttons died, Jane didn’t use it much. She was getting too big to get through the door, and Elva noticed her sister more prone to stand up to Amos than hide from him. Like that time when he said she paid too much mind to her hair and she said so what and Amos dragged her out onto the porch and wanted to cut it off. But he didn’t.

So the crawl space became Elva’s place and she used it not just to hide from Amos but when life in general
felt like too many voices speaking at once. It was hot in the summer, draughty in winter, lit by lines of light from a vent at each end, stained with watermarks from the leaking roof. Here Elva would curl up on ratty horse blankets, overhearing the men her mother let rooms to go on about poor wages and Rilla’s breaded pork chops and Jane’s tits, Rilla singing in the kitchen about sweet chariots that would come and take her home, Amos yelling across the backyard from his shed to shut the fuck up, while Elva drew, papering the cedar planks with her secret voice.

One more thing. From all that time spent colouring, Elva knew from a crack in the plaster that she could hear everything plainly, and provided the closet door was open, she had a clear view of the room next to hers. Gil and Oak’s.

“I expected it today. There isn’t a window on that bus that ain’t broken,” Gil was saying that evening, sitting at a table, adding what looked like sums in a ledger. “The union’s soon gonna figure out how the foundry’s getting us in.”

Oak was sitting on the bed, tools arrayed in front of him, a watch in pieces in his hand. He was having a hard go with his tinkering.

“I wish we didn’t have to work there.”

“Money’s good.”

“We’re not suited to this kind of work. I ache all over and my hands are cut up.”

Gil snapped down his pencil. “I didn’t ask you to follow me! I’d be gone now if it weren’t for you getting the shit kicked out o’ you.”

Oak leaned back against the headboard.

There was silence for a while, then Gil hung his head over the back of his chair.

“I need this job, Oak.” It sounded apologetic.

“If we squared things with Bryant—”

“I was dead the minute I ran, we ran. You know that.” Gil turned back to his ledger, like maybe staring at the figures long enough would magically come up with more money. “I said I’ll get us out of here and I will. Schooners are running rum along the coast all the time. We’ll get to Florida like I said. Maybe Mexico. We just need a bit more money.”

“What if we get caught? I heard Americans shoot bootleggers and dump them overboard so they don’t waste time with jail.”

“Stay here, then, and take your chances from the boys in Halifax. You know what that beating you took was really about.”

Below the ceiling, Amos’s snoring said he was dead for the night. Overhead, the ping of rain on the shingles. Elva was about to crawl back to her room when she saw Oak put away his watch hobby, get up, hesitate, and walk over to his friend hunched over his calculations.

“You’re tired,” he whispered, his mouth close to Gil’s ear.

Gil shrugged him off. Oak persisted.

What’s he saying? Louder!
Elva pushed her ear against the crack in the plaster.

Then Oak pulled a resisting Gil to his feet and wrapped his arms about him.

“No—”

The sound of Gil’s voice was cut off by Oak’s embrace, his lips pressed to another man’s.

“Come to the bed.”

They kissed like they meant it, Gil then offering half-hearted resistance and a feeble, No. Oak pulled back, as if this demonstration of virtue was some sort of ritual that had to be played out. Gil came back angrily. There’d be nothing tender in this, peeling off vests and shirts, the pale shades of their skin soon caught up in the sheets, little boys running, laughing, playing in the surf like a day at the beach. Elva, wide-eyed, remembered what Jane said about Gil having an undertow.

She pressed closer to see, at risk of breaking through the wall, shaking, no context, unable to turn away. Even Jane had not whispered this touching between men to her. Part need to master, part desire to succumb, their wrestling for release left them wet and satiated and panting hungrily for air. When they were done, Elva brushed away the wet from her eyes. Not because they were beautiful. Not because it had been beautiful. But because Gil was supposed to be hers.
Mine!
And Elva bit into the horse blanket.

“Not again. Not here. It’s not right.” Gil clung to the edge of the bed. He hadn’t said: never again. “Jesus, I hate you for this.”

“No, you’ll never hate me.”

Gil rubbed his hands through the hair on his chest and down his belly as if his hard body was both a joy and a curse to his touch.

“Do you think your brother will become a priest?”

“Why?”

“I know you.”

Gil smiled. “I didn’t tell you this. The night you got whacked, I followed Jane out to the lake. My brother was waiting for her. I haven’t been out there in years. Even in the dark, it’s wonderful, still wonderful. Perfect place to go if you don’t want to be found. I was just a kid my first time there. I’d seen those towers from the shore, but never up close. Maman forbid it, something about that man who built them made her people pack up and leave Grand Pré a million years ago, but she blamed that on anyone who spoke English. So I stole a canoe and rode out from the other side of the lake. No one saw.” He chuckled.

“Old Purvis had seen me coming and greeted me like I was the King of Siam. Walked me through his gardens, pointing out every tree and flower in Latin, like I knew what that was. Odd sort of fellow. Still is, I guess.”

Oak was not paying attention. Why do you look at her, why do you try and be around her, why do you
need to please her, what do you want her to see in you, why, why, why? But all he said was, “Why’d you follow her?”

“I dunno.”

“They’re lovers, aren’t they?”

“Well, Dom fucked her.”

“You surprised?”

“That she’s like an animal? Partly, I guess.”

“And that he’s a … man?” Would Oak have said, Normal?

“How could I be half my brother and not know that side of him?”

“He doesn’t know this side of you.” Oak caressed his friend’s back. Gil said, Don’t.

“How long do you think they’ve been that way?”

“Jealous of your own brother?”

Oak had Gil’s arm and tried to pull him back, but Elva was no longer paying attention.

Gil
had
been at the Abbey! He must have brought Elva home.
I was in his arms!
She hadn’t lost Gil to Oak. She was sharing him!

She lay back, hugging that sweetness to herself, smiling at the wooden slats overhead.

The popping of glass and a barking Major woke Elva and Jane and they rushed to join Gil and Oak on the landing. Below, Amos was picking up the stone hurled through the front-door window.

“Pink-whiskered Christ!” Amos looked from
SCAB,
crudely painted in red on the rock in his hand to Gil and Oak. “You bastards! I heard wind the company was … I knew you were up to something, Barthélemy!” The aggravation was churning up his stomach. “Did you know about this, bitch?”

Rilla shook her head.

“They’re out by morning, or by Christ—”

Gil and Oak denied nothing. “We’ll cause you no more trouble, Mr. Stearns.”

Elva felt Gil’s hand lightly graze her back, and flinched the flinch of the guilty. There’d been no looking him or Oak in the eye, convinced she’d find, we know about you watching us.

Couldn’t they stay? Elva wondered to Jane as she crawled back into bed. Her sister didn’t seem to care. Jane sighed the kind of sigh that wanted Elva to ask, What’s wrong? But Elva didn’t. She had her own things bumping around inside her head that needed working out. Jane was on her own.

From downstairs, the whack of hammers as Gil and Oak covered over the broken window with an old piece of siding from the shed. They must have stayed in the parlour on watch because Elva lay awake all night and did not hear them come back up. Jane didn’t sleep much either.

Amos had one of his attacks next morning. So violent in nature, Rilla drove into Demerett Bridge for the doctor.

It’s a mystery to me, was all the field of medicine could offer. Amos would be bedridden for days.

Rilla, stuck with yet another bill, did the unthinkable.

“There’s a room over the shed that can be fitted up nicely,” she said to Gil and Oak. “No need for him to know.”

T
HANKS TO LONGER DAYS,
next evening found Elva behind the shed with Rilla, weeding the square patch of vegetables. She hated crawling and picking and swatting at blackflies, listening to Rilla say, Stop fussing, girl, you’ll be thankful for potatoes come the fall. If they made it, thought Elva. What produce the squirrels and rabbits didn’t scamper off with barely
amounted to anything in soil that reeked of turpentine, of all things.

The worst about that damned chore for Elva was the black fingernails and why couldn’t she at least wear gloves? She had a hell of a time getting that tarry soil out and Amos didn’t want to see dirty hands at his table, but Rilla thought Elva was just being vain.

“Be sure to take that brush to you,” Rilla said on the way into the summer kitchen.

She and Elva found Jane, Oak and the brothers Barthélemy standing awkwardly in the hallway by the front door. This is funny, thought Elva, nobody knowing that everyone knows. Rilla said they looked as if they been caught with their hands in the cookie jar and at least go out on the porch so Amos don’t hear.

“Dom’s brought news from town,” said Jane.

Oak dragged maple porch chairs around for everyone. There weren’t enough so he sat on the railing by Gil. Gil, quite innocently, moved beside Jane, Major dutifully following, Dom on the other side. Elva mentally weaved a daisy chain of who here feels what about whom, unable to keep track of everyone’s secrets.

“Jane, cut up some of that leftover Simple Simon cake you made for the boys,” said Rilla.

Jane wasn’t much of a cook but her white sponge cake with brown sugar and butter icing was somewhat of a treat and Amos liked it to finish off a Sunday dinner because it was cheap to make. Rilla was allowing
herself some good manners in the offer, since Amos passed out sick upstairs would be none the wiser. Jane just looked glad to be doing something.

That’s not like her, thought Elva.

“Came from the church,” Dom said. “Father Cértain wanted help boarding up the windows. He’s worried about the stained glass.”

“Are things that bad?”

“Oh yes, ma’am.”

Dom stood and pulled the front page of the Halifax
Evening Mail
from his back pocket. It was a few days old, but the large photograph captured a man and woman being beaten with sticks. Knowing that Elva couldn’t read, Rilla and Jane just barely, Dom delicately explained that rioters had dragged King Duplak and his wife into the street, kicked the shit out of him, roughed her up some, looted his emporium to emptiness, and kissed the storefront plate window with a great big rod of iron.