Sugar Town

by Robert Nicholls

  “To answer your question, darling girl,” she says with careful clarity, squeezing the words out through narrowed lips, “Yes! I do know how things get away. How life gets away. So far away, sometimes, that we might begin to wonder . . . if we can ever get it back! I just want you to know that nobody here has ever blamed you . . . for anything! Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Uh! Not really, Frieda, no!”

  Frieda takes a step back, measuring Bridie carefully with her eye. Then she takes the girl’s face in her hands and presses trembling lips to her forehead.

  “Of course you don’t! Of course you don’t!” She sighs heavily. “Eleven years, and we wake up this morning thinking of Rita! Of all people! Been a strange Festival Weekend, hasn’t it? Already! And it’s not over yet!”

  She’s ready to leave but before she does, she turns her jutting jaw on her son and Kevin..

  “What’re you looking at? Look like a pair of . . . moribund guppies!” She jabs a fat finger toward Franz and barks, “Stand up straight, Franz! Stop scratching yourself! Show some respect to the ladies in this shop! You’re as bad as your fool of a father!” She turns the stiletto finger into a small hammer, which she wags at Bridie. “Don’t put up with it, Bridie! And don’t believe ‘em, you hear me? Not a word from any of ‘em! Bloody men! They should pray to God that they never have to face a reckoning! At the very least!”

  She wheels toward the door and is almost gone before a last thought brings her raging back. The finger points to the spot where Bridie’s halo would be were she wearing one. “And another thing! Don’t waste any sympathy on ‘em, either! Not on these two, not on Johnathon Cranna; certainly not on your blessed father!” She nods once, emphatically, as though all has been clarified and, with a wave of her hand, wipes away all previous messages. “Don’t say I didn’t say so!” She swings the straps of her bag over her shoulder, clamping the scones beneath her arm and storms off out the door.

  Bridie, Kevin and Franz stand for long moments in amazement. Then, “Wow!” says Kevin, and, “Yeah!” says Franz. “That’s what we call ‘er, too!”

  Bridie turns to them, her face a study in perplexity. Before she can speak, however, Franz fills the room with his own flurry of activity, stripping off his apron, tossing it on a hook and reaching for his cap.

  “Gotta go, mate!” he puffs to Kevin. “See if I can intercept the ol’ man. Warn ‘im off! Jus’ ‘til she cools down a bit! She catches him while she’s in this mood, she’ll do ‘im like a lemon tart! See ye temorra?”

  “You bet,” says Kev’. “And good luck!” he calls as Franz trots out the door.

  * * *

  Bridie’s mouth has sagged open but words elude her entirely.

  “Don’t let her upset you,” says Kevin. “She’s just one of those people who need to vent. Anger has no eyes, the old Hindus say, and Frieda’s their living proof!”

  “Vent about what? And what have I done that people would blame me for?”

  He frowns impatience at her.

  “Don’t you think,” he asks, “that if you’d done something blameworthy, you’d know?”

  She shakes her head, surprised to feel tears judder loose from her eyes.

  “Kevin . . . there are whole years I don’t know anything about! Yesterday I found a letter my father wrote to my mother when I was a teenager, and I had no idea what he was talking about!”

  Thinking to do what’s always been done, Kevin comes around the counter, puts his slim, muscular arm around her shoulders.

  “Ru’ told me about that. But letter or no letter, my very good friend, I can tell you categorically that you’ve done nothing wrong! Frieda’s got some other thing going on in her mind and she’s mixed you up in it by accident. My advice to you is to take her advice and ignore her. Put her out of your mind!”

  Bridie sniffles and blinks watery eyes.

  “I can give you hot coffee and a warm scone,” he continues, “as a bribe. They’re so fresh your taste buds’ll want to belt out the Halleluja Chorus. Whaddya think?”

  Bridie thinks that when one is held fast in the bosom of such friends, one would be ungrateful to be anything less than positive. She takes his hands.

  “‘I am black but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar and the curtains of Solomon’.” She has to bend just a little, but she plants a kiss on his cheek. “The Song of Songs. You are a very fine friend, Kevin. And the best baker in the world!”

  He wags his head dismissively and slips back behind the counter. He’s tipping the last of the scones from the new tray when a memory pulls him up to lean on the counter, suddenly sombre.

  “You know, Bridie,” he says, “Next to his calling, you were the most precious thing in the Reverend’s life. He was hard on Rita, hard on his congregation – and maybe hardest of all on himself! But he doted on you!” He points toward the ceiling, to his private rooms where Bessie Crampton idles over breakfast and a stale, unhappy past.

  “There’s someone I think you should . . . !”

  But before he can finish his sentence, the door swings open and Dana Goodrich enters. With the change of shifts at the hospital, she’s had a late finish and will have an early start.

  “Hi youse,” she chirps. “Man, I just saw Frieda Hoggitt up the street! Whatta face! Be a sorry dog that barks at her this morning!”

  “Dana!” Kevin answers happily. “Just the one! I’ve got three dozen scones packaged up for you lot at the hospital! Franz was going to drop them in on his way home but Frieda put the wind up him and he rocketed off without them. Are you on your way in?”

  “Ah!” she says. “Thank Christ! I was afraid Cranna might’ve completely ruined the big veggie. Thought I was gonna hafta go lean on his broken leg for a bit o’ payback. Morning after Harvest Festival just wouldn’t be right without your Grand Gourd Scones, Kev’! Be like . . . !”

  “ . . . like a nose without a finger?”

  “Worse! Like an arse without a crack!”

  “An arse without a crack! The hemispheres would collide? Well . . . we must all give thanks, then!” He twists the lid on a bottle of water and raises it in a toast. “May all things broken be so easily repaired!”

  “Amen, brother!” says Dana and, turning to Bridie she adds, “Hey, Bri’! Some kinda weekend, eh? Miss Harvest Festival Queen! Wow, eh? Long overdue, in my book! And Ruthie turned into a hero!” She throws her arms high and wide and rolls her eyes heavenward. “Saving the town’s favourite heathen from drowning in sugar! Hah! Hey, and then rescuing old man Nucifora! Saving him from his demons, eh? Sugar and demons! Wow! Family’s chockers with winners this morning!”

  She leans close for an air of confidence, even though Kevin’s moved away into the back room.

  “Good o’ you to stay with ol’ Cranna yesterday, Bri’. I mean, I know that’s the churchy thing to do, innit? But still ‘n’ all . . . ! Hey, you know him and the doc’ were having a good old serious natter about you when I went to give him his night pill! I mean, they shut up when I went in, like, but I heard your ol’ dad’s name all right!” She straightens up, searching for the context. “Somethin’ about a letter. Had ‘em good and cranky, it did! An’ speaking of ol’ men, we put ol’ Isak in the bed next to Cranna and guess what! Apparently he was up an’ flying around like the bloody wrath o’ God this morning! Raving about aliens in the cane an’ ghosts from the past an’ who knows what all! I got rung up at home to hear the story!”

  She pushes hair behind an ear and blinks incuriously in Bridie’s direction. Then she props her elbows on the high counter and stretches to see where Kevin might be.

  “None of my business o’ course,” she barrels on, “but they reckon the ghost he was on about was your gran’! The fact that she died on Dabney’s watch an’ all! ‘Magine that! Doc’ D was aer-i-ated as hell, they say! Wound up sedating the poor ol’ bugger. Isak, I mean – not the doc’! Doc’ reckons the old man should be in a coma but miracles blo
ody happen, eh?” She looks over her shoulder in time to see the bakery door swinging closed.

  “Hey Bridie!” Kevin says, backing through the curtain with his armload of scones. “I started to tell you! There’s someone upstairs might be able to put your mind at ease! Did Ru’ tell you Bessie Cr . . . ? Where’d she go?”

  “Search me!” shrugs Dana. “Ever notice how you can’t get a word o’ sense outta these religious sorts?”

  * * *

  That was the story Kevin told me when I rang him. He’d tried Bridie’s phone but it was going directly to the answering service. I tried and got the same result.

  “I’ll have to go find her,” I said to Amalthea. “I’ve pushed her so hard this last little while; I guess I better make sure I haven’t broken her!”

  “Of course, of course! Listen, take my bike! You can be home in ten minutes. Asael’ll be fine here with me.”

  I didn’t want to leave him but he didn’t much care. “While you’re gone, me and Amalthea can go check on Queenie!”

  She gave me a questioning look and I shrugged. “Better you than me – me being an unbeliever an’ all!” And as an afterthought, I asked Asael, “Did you take your medication this morning?” He rolled his eyes, scoffing at my concern.

  So that became our new strategy.

  * * *

  Bridie wasn’t at home but I found her sitting on a bench in the grounds of the hospital, draped with her new ‘Harvest Festival Queen’ banner and watching a pair of Peaceful Doves searching the short grass. I parked Amalthea’s bike and sat down beside her.

  “I don’t know why I’m here,” she said.

  “God’s will?” I suggested.

  “No, I mean here . . . at the hospital.”

  “Oh.”

  Across the short stretch of lawn, a bank of recently pruned poinsettias and cordylines wagged in the afternoon light, their prunings piled neatly in front of them.

  “It was a miracle, wasn’t it? Johnathon’s plane? That it stayed up long enough to spare us all? Don’t you think it was a miracle?”

  “True blue,” I said.

  “Do you know what I was thinking? At the end when it was coming down and straight for me?”

  “That you’d need a miracle?”

  “Not that I’d need one, no. That I was owed one.” One of the doves flew off, its wings whistling against the air. The other continued feeding. I wondered how much of their day each spent wondering where the other was.

  Bridie turned to look at me. “Does that make me a terrible person?”

  I shook my head. Why ask me?

  “Where’s Asael?” she asked.

  “At Amalthea’s house. I know you said not to take him there, but he needed to see the dead goat again. I thought it might be good for him, to get it out of his system. Did you know that’s where Gramma G was living when she was attacked?”

  Bridie nodded a yes then shook a no. “I don’t know why I’m here,” she said.

  “Maybe you wanted to visit Johnathon?”

  “No, I mean here in this life.”

  “Oh.”

  The second dove flew off. I looked up and saw that they were sitting on a wire, shoulder to shoulder, nodding gravely to one another.

  “Maybe you were owed a miracle. And you’ve been paid.”

  That brought a small smile to her face.

  “Did you find Bessie?” I asked, and she shook her head.

  “I looked. Madame Zodiac. But I couldn’t bring myself to go into the tent.”

  “Ah.”

  I felt awfully let down. I wanted to know what thing of ours Bessie had carried away with her and kept for years. And I wanted to know what had become of her nasty, mean-assed husband. I hoped that maybe he’d discovered he missed her, needed her, loved her; that maybe things had worked out for the best.

  “The Showies’ll be packing up this av’,” I said. “Probably missed the chance now.”

  The doves seemed to be watching us, wondering, perhaps, at our lack of industry. How do people survive at all, sitting about like that?

  “Frieda Hoggitt says no one blames me.”

  “Oh? Blames you for what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Ah! Well that’s all right, then.”

  “But a person wouldn’t say that, would they, unless there was something that someone needed to be blamed for? I mean you wouldn’t think, ‘Well, I’m not aware of anything ever happening and I don’t blame you for that’. That wouldn’t make sense. You’d only say, ‘We don’t blame you’ if something had happened and someone was going to get the blame but you wanted to let someone know they’d been eliminated from the list! Isn’t that right?”

  This was getting to be tricky ground. “The Terrible Deed?”

  She sighed and sat back.

  As she’d been talking, a scrub turkey had edged out of the undergrowth and started scratching apart the pile of cuttings. Bugs that had been safe in there suddenly found themselves in the turkey’s maw.

  “Asael and I . . . .” I began hesitantly, unsure where I was going to finish. “We stopped here this morning. I wanted to see for myself that Johnathon was okay. And we overheard a conversation – just by accident. The old man, Isak, who we found in the cane last night? He was arguing with Johnathon and Doctor Dabney. He said that everyone in town knew who killed Gramma G. And that it wasn’t a blow-through. And he said she was probably killed because she knew about something else that had happened. Which would have to have been the Terrible Deed, wouldn’t it? And he said that . . . !”

  I wanted to tell her that the deed was possibly something done to her, but I looked into her eyes and I couldn’t.

  “And he said that . . . it’s not over.”

  She stared at me, slack-jawed, and I sat back, waiting for the questions.

  “It’s not over? What did he mean? How did Johnathon and Doctor Dabney respond? Did they believe him?”

  “Doctor Dabney said he knew! He said everyone knew! And he’d have Isak committed to a loony bin if he ever dared to repeat the story.”

  We sat in silence. The scrub turkey surveyed the ground one last time, intent that nothing should escape, then edged back into the undergrowth.

  “A loony bin,” she said.

  “Yeah. For his own good, maybe. I don’t know. I wish I could talk to him.”

  She seemed not to be hearing me anymore. “The harvest is past,” she murmured, “the summer is ended and we are not saved. Jeremiah.”

  That was all the inertia I could take. I clapped my hands against my knees and stood up. “Okay!” I said. “Enough of that! Maybe we’re not saved, but we are Queen of the Harvest Festival! And saved or not, for this weekend, at least, ‘we’ can do what ‘we’ want! Let’s go inside and see how Mister Cranna’s faring.”

  * * *

  In the foyer, greetings were waved in our direction and congratulations were sung out, but no one asked us our business. Country hospitals are good that way. We walked the little maze of halls, my thoughts jumping back and forth between the two men we were about to see. Johnathon, who had waggled his wings at me and called me pretty and who I had kissed when he was barely conscious: and Isak, who had called me by my grandmother’s name and given me a ring. Both were men I needed to talk to, but quietly and without fear of interruption from Doctor Dabney. Or Bridie.

  As we neared the room, a man’s voice, angry and too loud, sizzled past our ears. The words were rapid and mostly unintelligible but two rang clear. Those words were ‘Rita’ and ‘McFarlane’. I already knew the benefits of being furtive outside doors and would have stopped, but that sort of cunning was beyond my sister. She bowled into the room and I had to creep in, in her wake.

  Four men were there. Furthest away, Isak lay in the room’s second bed, shrivelled and gaunt, encumbered with wires, unencumbered by consciousness. Nearer to us were Johnathon, Roger Dabney and Sergeant Morrow.

  Silence flooded the room as they
turned impatient gazes on us and I felt Bridie shrink back, too late, crossing her arms in a gesture of self-protection. Roger Dabney, standing at the far side of the bed, sucked his teeth and turned his glare onto the medical chart in his hand. Johnathon, still in his bed, licked his lips and let his eyes fall to Bridie’s breasts. Sergeant Morrow, seated in a chair at the foot of the bed, stared at us the way I imagined the scrub turkey had watched for movement in the pile of cuttings. My first thought was, ‘My God, Isak’s died! I’ve missed my chance!’ My second was that we’d stumbled into the midst of an argument.

  * * *

  Morrow was a contemporary of the other two men, probably a drinking buddy when they were all off duty. Unusual for a man in his occupation, he was a small, physically unimposing man whose thin, nasal voice made him seem even less so. By all appearances, he should have been one of the malleable men – one who could be ‘guided’ or goaded along certain desirable paths. Those who spoke of him, though, never failed to mention his eyes. Most of the time they were steely, with the controlled glaze of authority. But sometimes they flitted about wildly, as though fuelled from within by madness. His temper, everyone said, was unpredictable at its best, volcanically malevolent at its worst. His nickname was ‘Masher’.

  I remembered that I was supposed to see him at the police station to talk about the crash and I wondered: if he was still here, did he expect me to be waiting for him there? He pushed hard on the arms of his chair and raised himself to his feet.

  “Well look who’s here!” Johnathon finally blurted. “The Queen of the Harvest Festival, no less! With my very own guardian angel! Come in! We were just talking about you, weren’t we, boys?” It was not the voice we’d heard from the corridor.

  “Masher, here,” Johnathon continued, waving vaguely at Morrow, “was just getting the facts on the great crash! Seems like he was just about the only one in town not there to see it! We were saying what a lucky thing it was for me that you were there, Ruthie! By all accounts! Otherwise I might still be there in the sugar hopper! Hah!” The policeman stood quietly, his eyes on Bridie’s feet.

  “He’s just come from checking on the Moth. Those little bastards burned it alright! Can you believe it? I’ll be taking it out of their hides, I can tell you!” He wagged a finger at the policeman’s back. “Just get me some names, Mash, and by the living Jesus, I’ll . . . !”