The Freedom in American Songs (10 page)

“I'm sick of gooseberry jam. Have you not got any treacle tart?”

“You cheeky thing.” I put the ball in my pinny pocket.

“Gracie climbs up Amos Graham's beech tree and picks the nuts and eats them, then she goes to the back of Holliday's Butcher and Jimmy who drives the wagon gives her two stale sausage rolls …” Fast as the River Seaton after the rain in April he tumbled out with it … “She gives one to Cinders and eats the other one then she slurps the cream off your milk and gives Cinders the rest in a Smedleys pie tin. Then she crawls in Max Dockerty's henhouse and finds two eggs and she goes up the road to Mrs. Litster's house and Mrs. Litster fries one egg and puts it in a sandwich and gives it to Gracie …” On and on, did his concoctions have no end? “… and she keeps the other one for herself, and Max Dockerty doesn't care. Nobody cares because they all say Gracie's got to eat something and you don't give her hardly nothing at all because you've never been right in the head. My ma says next time Gracie's mam comes she's gonna tell on you. She's gonna tell her you give Gracie nothing but rotten herring and hard gooseberries. She says she should've told her ages ago but then you wouldn't get your eight shillings and sixpence every week and god knows what you might say about her and then my ma might lose her billet money as well … She says you're cracked as a pisspot.”

“Little blighter, pull the other one. Your mother told me you never stop making up stories …”

“You're the one who makes up stories … everyone says you're barmy. Everyone says you were never right in the head since you fell down the well when you were little. That's why … gimme my ball!”

It is true I fell down the well. Was I eight? I remember gulping, then inhaling the cold water … thrashing … sinking … then it felt lovely … I kept tight hold of my doll, Mathilda … she went in the well with me so it was both of us together … and then I lost her, and I was in my bed … bed that whole summer … but what had the boy called me? People were so … they were too loud. Shouting and rushing around …

“And that's why you never got married.”

“I didn't want to get married. I never wanted …”

How people interpreted things. Here I was, a quiet person to whom marriage and men and husbands seemed brutal … yet here was young Brian Heslop insinuating I'd rather be married than … couldn't a person be quiet without being considered
not all there
? If it hadn't been so insulting it might have amused me. I'd become used to letting people think whatever they wanted as long as they left me alone. I'd been alone for years … but now, Gracie.

There was something in what little Brian Heslop said that shifted my feeling for Gracie, whom I'd regarded as a nuisance and an invader. Might she and I really be on the same side, different from everybody around here, with their raucous shouting and everything black and white with four corners … Gracie was a quiet child … why hadn't I appreciated her?

Quiet little Gracie, all independent, climbing Amos Graham's beech tree and devouring all his beechnuts! Why hadn't I realized Gracie meant beechnuts when she told me a bird had shown her food that was something spiky hanging down? Those beechnuts came back to me, swirling from my own childhood. I'd spent whole afternoons in that tree myself, when it belonged not to Amos but to his father William, and I'd picked those nuts and peeled off their spiny skin to collect the chewy meats inside, and I'd … no wonder the child wasn't hungry. I feasted on those nuts when I was her age. They filled your belly right up. I never cared that my father said they were for pigs. Why did grown-ups have to spoil all the excitement? And sausage rolls! How I loved stealing sausage rolls my mother laid out to cool on the windowsill, piping hot, straight out of the oven with rivulets of juice bubbling out the knife-holes. What was wrong with grown-ups, wanting their sausage rolls cold? Poor Gracie, getting stale ones from that fellow who drove Hector Holliday's meat truck—what had Brian said his name was? Jimmy? But how clever … stealing Max Dockerty's eggs and then getting—of all people—Evelyn Litster to fry one up and stuff it in a sandwich!

The child was brilliant. I had not given her nearly enough credit, worrying as I'd begun to do, now that I'd grown old, about all those practical things I never cared a fig about when I was a child … No, I had been mistaken about Gracie. She rose in my estimation like a spear of sorrel by the lane, wild and just as surprising in her piquancy, yes, she was refreshing, and now I wanted to see her embarking on her resourceful little improvisations—the thought made something like childish joy spring up inside me for the first time since …

“My granddad was the one who lifted you out,” Brian Heslop said now. “He was the only one of his brothers little enough to go down after you.”

It was true. “They looped your granddad in a rope.”

“And lowered him and he grabbed you and saved your life.”

“He did. Freddy Heslop.”

“But you were unconscious for ages and your brain went soft and it never went right again. But that's all right. You've got your house and Mam says you've got a nice little penchant.”

“Pension.”

“Yes. My mam says if she had a nice little penchant like yours she'd be all set and she wouldn't have to do scrubbing for the Davises and the Wilsons and my dad might never have run off with Mavis Abernethy …”

“That's enough. Your voice is too loud.” I put my hand against my ears, the way I have to when I turn the radio on and it makes that awful crackling noise, or when I'm startled by a horde of crows all squawking at once.

“You're the one who's shouting, Mrs. Penrice. You're not even shouting, you're screaming.”

I wanted no more of the Heslop child. I wanted to find my own child, the intriguing, resourceful girl from South Shields, exploring hidey-holes of the village like I'd done as a child when everything was still all right, before I nearly drowned. There was something lovely about her I'd failed to notice before: I'd focused on the milk, the herring, her wetting the bedsheets, instead of on the fact that she'd tried to bring my own childhood back, the happy part of it … all those bright memories.

“Scram now, you,” I told Brian Heslop, and whipped his dog's ball at him as hard as I could, and set off for the back field where I'd walked all my life to gather beechnuts in the Grahams' tree.

When you're my age it takes longer to walk to that beech tree than it takes a child of Gracie's youth, and another thing, that tree has become larger and hard to recognize. Seeing it now, knowing Gracie's up in the branches, feels a bit like when I visit my mother's grave: that grave has become unrecognizable though it retains a familiar air. What I mean is that the day it was a fresh grave seems like yesterday, yet it's now covered in growth that looks ancient, because of course it is ancient. And it's the same with the beechnut tree. Was it not yesterday I was in the high branches like Gracie, picking nuts and eating them, hidden in the leaves, no one able to find me … “She's gone again,” they said … “Gone, gone, gone … all day long in a world of her own.”

And Gracie now, up there … lured by that same lovely tree … branches embracing her, feeding her, the only difference being that since the tree is bigger now, the child has climbed perilously high. Much higher than I was ever able to climb it … sky in her hair, and the sun so low her one little skirt is barely … is it her? Are those her legs and her feet solid on the branches … braced, but all the same … I feel dizzy.

“Gracie?”

I dare not call out too loud. No one understands the importance of speaking gently … is that … on the grass, my cat?

“Cinders?”

Her eyes flash in the gathering dusk—the cat glares at me and I remember it has been with Gracie for days: she has fed it, has helped it hide its kittens. The cat is a stranger to me. It doesn't even look like Cinders. I remember a thing my mother said about cats. They have nine lives, yes, but the lives are not consecutive. They have one life with you but eight other lives going on at the same time, about which you know nothing.

“Gracie …”

Not loud enough. For her to hear me, I'd have to shout, and I hate shouting, hate it. The branches are familiar: easy, at first, to climb—just like rungs on a ladder, at the start; that's what I always loved about this tree—it's only after the first four steps up it starts to … why must my legs insist on shaking? I've done this so many times. Stop quivering, legs! The bark is loose, or slippery … where's that crook where I always used to put my foot?

I've heard complaints that when some people grow old they do silly things, they forget they're no longer agile and behave in foolhardy ways. But I don't think it foolhardy for me to try to get a tiny bit closer to Gracie, to coax her back down. Dusk is … I don't want her to lose the light, or startle. Why have I not thought before now how easily she might startle? I've driven her from my house, eager to get rid of her, when I should have remembered how it feels to be young and small and not exactly loved. She's been a good little girl, really. She has to have been, for hasn't Cinders taken to her? Animals don't like unsympathetic people. Cats know who is gentle, who is on their side.

“Gracie?” I call from a crook in the low branches, inch my hand to the next fork, shake my slippers off … the best way to climb William Graham's beech tree has always been with bare feet. When Gracie can hear me the first thing I'll tell her will be to kick off her plimsolls. But purple darkens the sky and I know how one minute you think you can climb down the tree but the next you can't see the branch below you. If we don't descend together in the next few minutes …

“I want you to come down now … Gracie?”

The child has often pretended not to hear me and I wish I'd made a better rapport with her, because I have no way of knowing if she's listening now. If only I'd understood sooner what a brave little thing she is … My legs are rattling, the way they do when I stand too long on my stepladder trying to reach the rhubarb jam. I wish I could trust my legs but I can't. I wish that bloody Heslop boy were here to help. Panic's a funny thing: as long as you sweet-talk it, it's domestic and tame, but when night comes and the child is in the branches, so high, and you're old, it becomes an act of will to keep panic bound, and I exercise that will now, my legs and arms trembling. I remember being a child on roller skates on the downhill cobblestones and my legs felt like cushions full of pins and I have that same feeling now—it frightens me and when I see the bicycle light of Brian Heslop's older brother—Terrence or Trevor?—I have no choice but to cry out.

People are looking up—someone waves a lantern and for once they're murmuring quietly. I try to assure them I am not dangerously far up the tree, but the truth is I'm paralyzed. Really, I should be able to climb down by myself, if only I could remember where the supporting branches are and not the brittle ones. This lack of certainty makes me ashamed to have become old. The indignity enrages me. Now they're sending a man up the trunk—is it William Graham's son Amos? He looks like his father; his arm digs into my ribs—it hurts.

“The last time you did this, Mrs. Penrice, you promised never to do it again.”

“But the girl …” It's awful how fright can make you hesitate. I want to warn him to get Gracie down first. Gracie, high in the tree … her slippery plimsolls. I forgot to notice if she's wearing those awful stockings. If she falls … but it's as if I'm in that dream where you strain to speak, yet cannot. “The little girl,” I force it out.

So. I have spoken, however hoarsely, on Gracie's behalf. No one can say I haven't. I fear that because of the dark, and Gracie's silence—so furtive, but for good reason—no one will know she's in the topmost branches, stars winking over her head. She wants to remain quiet as a mouse until we've all gone back in our houses, then climb down on her own and sleep in Graham Bell's barn with Cinders and the kittens.

“She might fall,” I manage to caution Amos Graham. Mrs. Heslop has rushed across the street with Brian and the older one with the bicycle, and I see their slavery dog, all their faces garish beneath the lantern the older boy swings high. “The little girl might fall.” I crumple into Mrs. Heslop's arms and am ashamed that my tears wet her dress. I feel like a real fool. “Get the little girl down.”

“Shh, shh,” Mrs. Heslop says. “The little girl is all right.”

“But I couldn't reach her and it's getting dark …”

“Never mind that now, shhh …”

“You'll get her down?”

“Don't worry, Mrs. Penrice. You don't need to worry about her any more.”

But when they get me back into my house, I don't see Gracie. I see her mother. They must have telegraphed her and she must have come instantly. When I reach my house she's folding Gracie's pyjamas and her few little vests and I realize she's taking the things away and Gracie is already gone. The mother is going to let her board with her in the boarding house she rents in Workington. I see she's packing those cumbersome stockings, the loathsome wool things Gracie wore bunched around her ankles. The mother is folding those stockings as if they'll save her daughter from the war, from any danger of falling from beechnut trees, from diphtheria and scarlet fever, from everything that can befall a frail child on this earth. A mother's love is like that. That is where, I realize, a real mother falls short, into wishfulness and illusion, whereas we foster mothers of wartime, though we may not possess proper maternal feeling, come equipped with a far clearer and less romantic grasp on reality.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Knives

 

 

Was I a good neighbour
?

I doubted I was a good sister-in-law: when all the Desmarais brothers told me brother number five was seeing a young woman named Marlene every Thursday night down at
The Misty Moon, I toyed with the idea of telling Yvonne, his wife, in the name of sisterhood, but in the end I said nothing, just like everyone else. It subsequently became clear to me that Yvonne Desmarais had her own reasons for not caring: she knew all along about the affair and it helped rather than hurt her marriage.

But this thing with the neighbour, Eleanor Dickson, when it came to a head near Halloween when our boys were thirteen, well, I hated to be part of the subterfuge. If Eleanor had known a similar thing about my life, known it for years yet prattled on about July's strange hailstones or the new councillor with alopecia or the insane speed limit proposed for our street, and then I found out the thing she'd kept secret, I'd have wanted to strangle her.

Running in front of our houses was a poplar-lined skateboard feature that the town put in place for the kids. My son Joey and Eleanor Dickson's kids all went to St. Winnifred's school around the corner and when they came home, they got their boards and skates and played until dark. The problem was, my friend Joan Corlett sent her son Adam over here from across town on his stilts to sleep over at my place with Joey, so he did his circus tricks there all the time, on that strip, which happened to run right past Eleanor's house. Unbeknownst to Eleanor, at least I believed she was unaware, Adam Corlett was her husband Ed's illegitimate son.

According to Joan, Adam had been conceived fourteen summers before in Margaree where Joan was working on an episode of some pilot about rumrunners and Vikings. Joan was thirty-nine then and had no interest in a husband but a very big interest in having a kid, when who should show up in Margaree Harbour but just the kind of no good bad-boots Joan liked to sleep with: a pack of Export A tucked in his sleeve, lightning ascent up the scaffold on which he was replacing siding on the inn where Joan just happened to have a very comfortable and lonely suite. I barely knew Joan then, but I know she was aware Edward Dickson had a pregnant wife—Eleanor—and a toddler back in Halifax, but what was that to Joan Corlett or her famished uterus and beetle-hard manicure.

Joan kept her hair cut like the red hair of that famous New York fashion what's-her-name, Anna Wintour, and she had a hard little face men somehow managed to go crazy over, although I suppose it could have been other things they liked—at Justin Thyme Deli I overheard the president of the Board of Trade say she had a nice rack on her. Did he mean like antlers on a game animal? How are breasts like antlers? I never know what people mean when they use popular terminology. Joan was from the Isle of Man. She had a soft accent but to me her hardness superseded it and I would not have wanted to be one of the men she ate alive.

So her son Adam grew to live and breathe stilts and hacky sacks and juggling sticks—what were they called?—devil or diabolo sticks. He was agile like Ed Dickson and was recruited as a sort of extra in a couple of circus shows when Cirque du Soleil came to town. That was how my son Joey became friends with Adam, and it was also when Joan started sending Adam to sleep over at our place when she went out of town. We both knew I lived four doors down from Ed Dickson. Sometimes I wondered if that fact excited Joan.

I found the mind of Joan Corlett fascinating and treacherous. She made sure her son and his secret father spent clandestine time together. She told me she dropped Adam off at Caravaggio's Restaurant downtown once a month to have lunch with Ed so that Ed could keep abreast of events in the life of his son. Adam Corlett had a bit of a rough time at school, tripping teachers on the stairs and accidentally setting fire to things. I found it hard to believe Ed Dickson was not also keeping abreast of Joan. But what amazed me the most was that in a compact downtown like ours it never seemed to worry Ed Dickson that someone he or his wife Eleanor knew might see him sharing calamari with Adam Corlett, his secret child. It seemed to me like an arrangement crying out to be exposed.

Adam was serious about his circus manoeuvres and came over more and more often, forever sending objects or himself flying in front of the houses on our side of the street, sleeping over whenever Joan went on a shoot in Rockport, Maine or Cape Breton and wherever else she went, up on rooftops half the time, and on cranes or interviewing crews on Spanish trawlers—you could never keep track of Joan.

The night it all came apart I was having one of my kitchen sales. I held them every October and closer to Christmas I sold fair trade craft items made by women and their daughters in developing countries, and I had other sales as well. It was a bit of extra income and an excuse to have a social. But this time Ed's wife Eleanor was coming over, and Adam Corlett was sleeping over as well, and I was worried. The two had never been in my house at the same time. It was late October: people had hung witches and ghosts on their doors, they hung plastic pumpkins lit up in the poplars and hedges, and my son Joey wore his sweater with the skeleton on it. I was afraid I might let something slip in front of Eleanor Dickson with Adam right there in the house—I can knock back a few too many glasses of Chardonnay if I'm not counting—I was also wary about Adam: he was an unpredictable kid. I felt a sorry fondness for him … his hair flopped over a face that had soft edges, and it was too bad, I thought, that any boy should have to pretend he did not have a father when he knew that father lived in the same town and had three other children he took to hockey practices and all the other things dads do. I invited my friend Maurice over to help me prepare for the sale and give me advice on whether to try and keep the boys upstairs and out of sight or what. Maurice knew the whole story of Adam Corlett's secret father. A lot of us did.

This particular kitchenware sale was all about knives: I had new avocado slicers and a corrugated carrot knife and some heavy-duty blades for carving beef, and a couple of sushi blades and some high-end pieces I didn't expect to sell because the neighbours I invited usually went for the stuff between twenty and forty-five dollars, but the company insisted I show samples of every price range.

Maurice helped me mix smoked paprika dip and Mexican relish. “The kid …” he folded chopped olives into cream cheese …

“Adam.”

“Has he
seen
Eleanor Dickson before?”

“That's a good question.”

“I mean he knows Ed is his father—you told me about the monthly lunches …”

“Shh—not too loud, Maurice. Adam's upstairs now with Joey.”

“I know, I hear them—what a racket. What are they doing, flinging those devil sticks from one end of the hall to the other?”

“Here, take these breadknives and arrange them on that board, Eleanor's bringing baguettes for demonstrating … I told her not to go to any trouble but you know what she's like …”

“Is she bringing her homeless brother?”

“She might. She said Ed doesn't want to be home alone with him. He drives Ed insane.” The homeless brother, Leon, had just shown up on Eleanor's doorstep for his annual fortnight of sleeping on Eleanor's couch, devouring her damson crumble and shoplifting at the Mic Mac Mall. “He worries Eleanor to distraction but she's too kind a soul to say a word … Can you please put those grape knives with the grapes?”

“So the stilt kid …”

“Adam.”

“He
knows
Ed lives practically next door to you, in the house he totters past on those stilts, back and forth like a pendulum, like a dashboard dog …”

“Yes, Adam knows. Keep your voice down!”

“The way he parades in front of their house on those stilts it's almost as if he
wants
…”

“Shh!”

“Or
she
wants … his mother …”

“Don't ask me to decipher the mind of Joan Corlett.”

“Eleanor must have seen Adam before, on her steps or in her driveway … he's gone past her front window on those stilts a thousand times.” Maurice helped me arrange the grape peelers, the grapefruit knives that were more like spoons, the cheese slicers and Thai cleavers, and the special one … “Where's the other stuff you usually sell? The greeting cards painted by people who hold the paintbrushes in their mouths?”

“That's at Christmas. This is kitchenware, and tonight it's all knives.”

“So I see.” He picked the special one up and dangled it. “What's this snazzy specimen?”

“That's my
pi
è
ce de r
é
sistance
tonight. It's called a Wa-Gyuto. Japanese. Nice, hey?”

“How much?”

“Two hundred and thirty-six dollars.”

“Holy snapping arseholes, Marguerite.” This was a thing the straight boys used to say when Maurice and I were in junior high, a million years ago, and Maurice used to mimic them.

“Watch your tongue, Maurice. Eleanor's lovely, handsome homeless brother might be put off by that kind of language and you're always saying how you'd like to meet a man who is dangerous but also elegant.”

People started arriving. I felt dread and anticipation whenever the door opened to let in a blast of October night. Would the evening be a success? I knew my sales were hardly profound get-togethers but they were an excuse to party at the darkening part of the year and eat salty, fatty snacks. I always invited Darlene and Greta, whose mission in life was to keep any conversation from turning serious. Darlene arrived in red go-go boots and Greta brought a whoopee cushion and tucked it under the rear end of each new arrival as they sat down. Eleanor arrived with her homeless brother who was beautiful in a brooding, semi-schizophrenic poet way, the kind of person I can get talking to about the meaning of life, after a few glasses of wine. He had Jesus-clear eyes and was unfazed to enter a room full of women who saw him—as they saw Maurice—as if he were a cat instead of a man. I saw why he'd drive Ed Dickson nuts—right about now Ed would be ramping up the gears on his treadmill in front of
Hockey Night in Canada
.

Just as Eleanor arrived, the boys, Adam Corlett and my Joey, thundered downstairs to swarm the snack table. I handed them a box of Ritz and a bag of mallow puffs and hissed, “Get back upstairs.”

“Are those the ones with jam in them?” Joey bit a cookie and scowled.

“Whoooooa look at these blades …” Adam Corlett lifted a cleaver and watched it glitter impressively under my halogen fixtures. “I can practise being Ramo Samee!”

“Do you know how sharp that is?” I grabbed his wrist, uncurled his fingers from the handle and held the knife out of his reach. “Go on—you, Joey—get back upstairs and don't even
think
about touching the knives.”

“I
hate
the ones with no jam!” Joey reached for a pumpkin seed cracker and dug at the Mexican dip. “I want to stay down here.”

“Come
on
.” Adam tugged Joey's sweater. “I've got an ancient Indian trick up my sleeve …”

“Yes,” I gave Joey a shove I would later regret. “Get out of here, you two. You're not interested in
Collecting the Regalia
.

“Nobody is,” interjected the always-helpful Maurice. “Who the hell is Ramo Samee?”

“Collecting the what?” piped up Greta.

“
Collecting the Regalia
,” said Maurice, “is Marguerite's party game that she found cut out of an ancient copy of
The Daily Mail
and stored in her great-aunt Mildred's chocolate box. It involves passing bits of paper folded up with the crown jewels or something written on them …”

“
Crown
,
Sceptre
and
Sword
,” I corrected him. “The first person to collect the whole set wins a …”

“We played it last year,” Darlene told Greta. “You had ringworm and couldn't come. I won fishnet stay-ups. I wore them to work and they fell down.”

“Ramo Samee was, I believe, a Victorian sword-swallower,” said the homeless brother of Eleanor, quietly into my ear, as Adam Corlett dragged Joey upstairs and Maurice reluctantly began passing the Cadbury box full of folded sceptres and orbs. “From the Far East.” His voice made me wish I had on a decent pair of fishnets instead of my merino tights. I knew I had better get the green graph paper off the table before I drank any more wine, so I could write down the knife orders. Maybe Maurice could do the writing … there he was, inspecting the knife display … was he mouthing something at me across the room?

“What?”

“Where's the Wa-Gyuto?”

“It should be there.”

“The Wa-Gyuto …” louder this time. “appears to have gone.”

“Gone?” Eleanor Dickson sat up straight. “Has something gone?” Her voice high and sharp.

“The Japanese knife,” said Maurice. “Marguerite's
pi
è
ce de r
é
sistance
…”

Eleanor sprang up as if she were personally responsible and started shifting platters around, searching under their rims. I realized she was glaring at her homeless brother.