“Got a room?” he said, rolling a toothpick around in his mouth.
“Pardon?” I asked. My mother’s zeal for food and cleanliness stretched itself to include language. She never let anyone forget that she had once been a schoolteacher.
“Got a room? I bin lookin’ all over. I’m workin’ on the new road and need a boardin’ place.”
I hardly heard what he said, I was that busy looking. Even the toothpick wove a spell for me, probably because of the way his lips moved around it.
“Well?” He grinned. “Cat got yer tongue?”
“Just a minute,” I said, and went to deliver his message to my mother.
“Certainly not!” she snapped, wiping the flour off her hands with a damp cloth. “As if I didn’t have enough to do as it is.”
I wanted to get down on my knees and plead. Please, Mother. I’ll do anything if you’ll just keep him. I’ll come home from school and cook his meals. I’ll do his laundry. Only please, Mom. Can’t we let him stay, for a little while anyway just so I can look at him?
She came to the door, still wiping her hands. The toothpick was missing, and the beautiful stranger stood before her, quiet, still. I watched her, hope waning. But a flicker remained. I knew that we needed money. I also knew that my brother’s room was empty. I stayed close to her, as though hoping that some of my eagerness would seep into her.
Even in her apron, with the white kerchief tied around her hair, my mother was a pretty woman. At forty she still had a young face and firm skin. She was tanned from hours of blueberry picking and from weeding the garden, and the only flaw in her face was a line between her brows – a mark of worry or of irritation, which came and went. She reached the door, the line intact. And then her face changed. I cannot say how it changed. The line was still there, and she was not smiling. But for a few moments, there was something about her that was unfamiliar to me.
Then she said, with more courtesy than I would have expected, “I’m sorry, but I have four children at home and too much work to do already. You could try Mrs. Schultz across the way.”
“l tried Mrs. Schultz,” he said. “I tried everyone. I bin everywhere. I even bin to Mr. Snow and asked him if I could sleep in th’ barn. Please, ma’am” – he smiled – “I wouldn’t be no bother. I could cook my own meals. Just a room would be fine.”
“Well …,” she said slowly, as though to herself, “there’s Jeffrey’s room empty, now that he’s away in Upper Canada …” Then she was silent for a moment or two, staring across the bay, with that line deep between her eyebrows.
“Yes,” she said suddenly, but sighing. “I guess we could manage. But you’ll eat with us.” No way she’d be letting any stranger go messing around in her kitchen. “Will you be needing the room for long, Mr. …?” she inquired.
“No, ma’am,” he answered. “Two months maybe. Could be three. Nothin’ you can do, once the frost hits hard. Manuel. Manuel Jenkins. Much obliged.”
He picked up his suitcase and walked in, filling the kitchen with his beauty, blessing the walls, casting light and gladness upon stove, table, electric clock. Like one of the wheeling gulls, I flew out into the back field and up, up to the top of the hill, running all the way. There I threw myself down among the high grasses and the late goldenrod, face turned to the sky. Nothing mattered. Nothing. My mother could crab and fuss and complain all she wanted. My dad could roll over like the Jacksons’ yellow dog and wait to be kicked, for all I cared. The beautiful stranger had come and would live in my brother’s room for two months. I would hear him moving about next door to me, doing his mysterious ablutions. Through the vent I could maybe hear him breathing. He would be there at suppertime, casting a benediction upon us by his presence, with his smile, his dark skin, his enormous hands with their oddly graceful fingers. I turned over and pressed my face into the grass, blinded by so bright a vision.
Our first meal with Manuel Jenkins was an event to remember. My mother sat at one end of the table, straight as a stick, company manners written all over her face. My father sat at the other end, comfortable, relaxed, slumped in his chair, waiting for the mashed turnips to reach him. When they did, he lit into his food as though, if he didn’t attack it immediately, it would vanish from the plate. My mother often reprimanded him about this. “I’ve spent a long hour and a half preparing this meal,” she’d say. “There’s no law that says it has to disappear in nothing flat.” Or “This is a dining room, Harvey Nickerson, not a barn.” To which he paid not the slightest heed whatsoever. It seemed to be the one area where she couldn’t move him. Tonight I looked at him and thought, C’mon, Dad. Just for the next couple of months, let’s eat slowly, like fancy people. Mr. Jenkins is here. What will he think if we eat like savages?
What indeed? I looked across the table at Mr. Jenkins, and watched him stuff his napkin in the neck of his T-shirt, revealing a veritable carpet of black hairs upon his chest. Then he ate. Holding the fork in his fist like a trowel, he shovelled Mom’s enormous meal into himself in perhaps five minutes. And noisily, with quite a lot of smacking and chomping. And, when drinking his hot tea, slurping. I didn’t mind. He could have eaten his entire meal with his bare hands, and it would have been all the same to me. But I dared not look at my mother. She would never allow anyone to live in our house with table manners like that. Then out came the toothpick, and I watched entranced as it wandered around his mouth without the aid of his fingers. It was as though it had a life of its own. Then he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, pulled one of Polly’s pigtails, smiled his dazzling smile, scraped his chair back, and said, “Much obliged, ma’am. That was some good.” And was gone.
I looked at my mother. What would she say, feel, do? Mr. Jenkins had just spent the mealtime doing everything we had always been forbidden to do. Would she make him leave? Would she hate him? But she was just sitting there, arms and hands slack, staring at the tablecloth, registering nothing. After all, she had said he could stay. If she kept her word, she was stuck with him. The kids, who had spent half an hour with him before dinner, were all aglow, loving his cheerfulness, his handsome face, his bigness, his booming laugh.
Then he was back.
“S’cuse me, ma’am,” he said, “I’m forgettin’ m’ manners. This here’s a lot o’ people and a lot o’ food. Like you said this morning, you’re a hard-working lady. You must be some tired.” Then he picked up his dishes from the table, washed them in the kitchen sink, and placed them with amazing delicacy in the dish drainer to dry.
“Why, thank you, Mr. Jenkins,” said Mom, her face expressionless, although for a moment the line disappeared from between her eyebrows. But I remembered his dirty fingernails, and I wondered how she felt about having them in her clean dishwater. Later I saw her change the water before she washed the other dishes.
“Seems like a nice enough man,” said my father, as he stuffed his pipe full of tobacco. Then he pushed away the dishes on the table to make room for a game of cribbage with Julien.
We were given three and one-half months with Mr. Jenkins. The frost kept off and the early winter was as mild as April. We had him with us until January sixth. Three months, fifteen days, and six hours. Except for my father, we all called him Mr. Jenkins. He was, my mother surmised, about thirty-eight years old, and therefore we were to treat him with the respect befitting an older man – although we all called Aggie Crowell’s grandmother Susie, and old Sam was always Sam to us kids. I tried to keep my face inscrutable, but maybe Mom saw the glint in my eye and wanted to place distance between me and him. In any case, I used to call him Manuel privately, when I was alone in my room. “Manuel, Manuel,” I would whisper, rolling the name around my tongue, loving the sound, the taste of it.
But it didn’t really matter what she made us call him. Calling a man mister couldn’t change the way the rest of us felt about him. Even my dad, I think even he was half in love with that towering stranger, in a way that had nothing to do with sex. He grew to love him the way you love
a rocky cliff, or a heron in flight, or a sunfish turning its giant body on the surface of the sea, or a clown dancing on the street in the midday sun. Most of us, of course, didn’t see him too often. All the kids except Polly were in school, and that just left weekends and suppertime and a small slice of evening, before he’d go up to his room to read his Popular Mechanics magazines and listen to his radio. And my dad was always off fishing by six a.m., gone all day. Mr. Jenkins got his lunch at our place, but no one was there except my mother, Polly, and the dog, unless it was on weekends.
Weekends were heaven for me. He didn’t have much to do with me directly. But I watched as he made our home a sunshiny place, filling our little house with his huge and animal grace, his laughter, his easy way with life and living. He’s like an enormous cat, I thought, a panther, maybe. Working when necessary but knowing how to relax, how to play, how to soak up the sun, letting his cubs crawl all over him as he radiates serenity. Our kids all followed him around like the Pied Piper, and he never seemed to mind. Polly was four, and he’d sit with her on his lap and talk to her as though she were twenty-five years of age. “How was your day, Polly girl?” he’d ask, and then he’d really listen when she told him about her dolls and the dog and the drawings she had made. I wondered about her sitting on his dirty overalls in her clean dresses, but my mother made no comment. Politeness to guests was almost as high on her list as cleanliness.
Julien had Mr. Jenkins up on a pedestal so high that it’s a wonder he didn’t fall right off. The two of them would go out before supper and play catch, and once Mr. Jenkins took him to show him the front-end loader he worked on. He let Julien sit way up on top in the driver’s seat, and waited around for a whole half-hour while Julien pretended he was driving it. When Julien came home, his eyes were like pie plates.
Even Sarah. Gabby old Sarah who never shut up. He’d sit on the old swing with her, chewing a blade of grass, while she’d talk on and on and on. And he’d smile and nod, saying things like, “That so?” or “Well, well,” or “I bet you enjoyed that.” Never once did he fall asleep in the middle of all that talk, which is what all the rest of us always wanted to do. And Mr. Jenkins was a man who could fall asleep on the head of a pin in the middle of a thunderstorm, if he wanted to.
Happy though I was, I never got over the small niggling fear that Mom would finally make him leave because of all the bad things he did. He left his shoes around where you could trip over them, although I tried to protect him – and us – by putting them by the doorway every time I found them in the wrong place. He chewed gum with his mouth open and passed some around for all of us to do the same. My mother would chew hers with her small mouth tightly shut, slowly, as though it tasted either very good or very bad – I could never be sure which. And his belongings – his magazines, his clothes, his tools – littered the house, or decorated it, depending on your point of view, from top to bottom and side to side. My mom, I thought, must have needed that board money really badly.
One evening, early on, during maybe the third week of his stay, my father came home extra tired from lobstering. It had been a day of driving rain, and he was chilled to the bone and grey with fatigue. Everyone was supposed to take off shoes and boots at the door, and he always did, but on that day he sort of moved like a person in a trance, right into the middle of the kitchen floor. My mother flew at him and pushed him backwards to the doorway, her voice hard, as if it were hammering on something metal.
“Inconsiderate! Always inconsiderate! Not one thought for the length of time it takes to scrub a floor! You get out into the back porch and take those wet clothes off before the kitchen looks like a slum. And hurry. Dinner’s ready. You’re late! I’m not going to wait two more seconds.” My dad just stood there for a moment, as though he had been struck physically, and then he turned toward the porch.
Then Mr. Jenkins spoke.
“Jest a sweet minute, ma’am,” he said, his mouth soft and coaxing. “We all knows you works hard. We’re all right grateful to you for your good food and all that scrubbin’ and polishin’. But anyone can see with half an eye that that man o’ yours is three-quarters dead with bein’ tired.” He said all this in a lazy quiet way, but his eyes, always so kind and warm, were steely cold and serious as death.
“Now, Sarah girl,” he went on, “you jest get up and wash them few dirty spots off your mom’s floor. Won’t take but a minute. And Julien – I think your dad could use some help. Maybe you could put his wet boots out behind the stove to dry them out a bit. And you, m’girl,” he said, turning to me, “how about a bottle o’ beer for your dad, before he falls right over dead.”
He said all this from the couch by the back window. He never moved a muscle. Just sort of organized the whole lot of us into a rescue brigade. I thought that would be the end of Mr. Jenkins. I’d never my whole life long heard anyone tell my mother to shut up, and that’s really what he was doing. But she just turned quickly back to the stove and started shoving pots around, this way and that.
When we all finally sat down to supper, there wasn’t any tension left at all – not in me, anyway. Mr. Jenkins sat up, talking with his mouth full, and told us about life up in the James Bay territory, when he was working on the new highway up there. His huge brown body, sandwiched between Julien and Polly, was like one of the statues I’d seen in our ancient history book. I was sick with longing for him, but also oddly content just to sit peacefully at a distance and feast my eyes upon his grace of body and person. For me, the slurp of his tea was like background music. I always avoided my mother’s eyes at the dinner table. As time went by, I knew she would not evict him, but I felt I could not bear it if she scolded him, like us, for his table manners.
When Christmastime came, Mr. Jenkins said he was leaving for the four-day holiday. The kids all kicked up a terrible fuss, and my dad begged him to stay. “Surely they can do without you at home just this one year,” he said.
“Well,” said Mr. Jenkins, grinning sheepishly, “truth to tell, home is where I hangs my hat at any given time. If you wants me to stay, that I will do, thanking you most kindly.” Then he excused himself and took the bus to Yarmouth and was gone for ten hours.
On Christmas Day, we found out what he had done with those ten hours. He had gone shopping. And shopping and shopping. He bought extra lights for the tree and a wreath for the door. He bought a bottle of real champagne and another of sparkling wine that I was allowed to taste, and there was pink lemonade for the kids. He had even bought tall glasses with stems – seven of them – for all of us. He gave Polly a doll that said six different things when you pulled a string in her back. For Julien he had an exact model of his front-end loader, and I thought Julien might possibly faint for joy. Sarah got three Nancy Drew books, and for me he bought a silver bracelet with “Sterling” written inside it. He gave my dad a big red wool sweater to keep him warm in the lobster boat, no matter how cold it got. To my mother, he presented a gold chain with a small amethyst pendant. We all had gifts for him too, either bought or made or cooked, and the day was one of the single most perfect days I have ever known.
If Christmas was a perfect day, the day that came two weeks later was a terrible one. We all knew he had to leave soon, that the deep frost would not stay away forever. But when he actually stood there in the kitchen, holding his suitcase, it seemed that all that was warm and beautiful in our lives was about to abandon us. I could not imagine the supper table without him, the couch empty, the silence that would strike me from Jeffrey’s room. He shook hands with my dad and my mother. My dad pumped his hand and said, “Come again, Manuel, and good luck.” My mother stood erect as ever and said, “It was a pleasure to have you here, Mr. Jenkins,” and almost sounded as though she meant it. Polly and Sarah cried, and he hugged them both. Then he tossed Julien up in the air and shook his hand. Julien didn’t say a single word, because it took his whole strength just to keep from crying. Then Mr. Jenkins came and shook my hand and kissed me lightly on the top of my head.
“Have a good life, m’girl,” he said, and smiled such a smile at me, oh such a smile. Then he walked to the door.
A lot is said about the value of strong, silent men. Me, I think that men who are silent about things that matter just don’t have the strength to say what they really feel. Manuel Jenkins turned around at the doorway and said, “Thank you. I’ll be missing you a whole lot. I loves you all.” Then he was gone. I put on my warm jacket and boots and went back to the old sawmill and sat inside on a bench. Over by the breakwater, the gulls were screaming, screaming, and I could hear the winter wind rattling the broken windows. I had taken several of my dad’s big handkerchiefs with me, because I knew I was going to be doing a lot of crying.
The whole family just sort of limped through the next few weeks, but gradually we emerged from our grief and got on with our lives. My mother would say things like “My word, he was only a man. Perk up, Julien. It isn’t the end of the world.” Or to Polly and Sarah, “For goodness sake, stop sighing. At least we’re not falling all over his shoes, and there’s a lot less work for me to do.” And to my dad, “Don’t look so sad, Harvey. He’s not the only one on earth who can play crib. C’mon. I’ll have a game with you.” One day she said to me, not unkindly, right out of the blue, “He was too old for you. You’ll find your own man sometime, and he’ll be right for you. Let Mr. Jenkins go.” I wasn’t even mad. I didn’t know why.
One day in early February, I was sent home from school with a high fever. The vice-principal drove me to the front gate. I entered the house by the back door and took off my boots in the porch. Then, slowly, because I was not feeling well, I dragged myself upstairs. At the top of the stairs I stopped short, unable to go forward or back. There, to the right of me, beyond her doorway, was my mother, sitting in front of her dressing table. Her forehead was right down on the tabletop and was lying on her left hand. The other hand was stretched out across the top, and was in a tight fist. I was very frightened. I had never before seen my mother in any state of weakness whatsoever. She seemed never to be sick, and I had never heard her give voice to any physical pain. She was always strong, sure, in perfect control. A heart attack, I thought, and dared not speak lest I alarm her. Then, as I waited, a long terrible sigh shook her, and she opened her closed fist. Then she closed it and sighed again. In her hand was the gold chain and the amethyst pendant.
Nova Scotia Love Stories Page 7
