Nova Scotia Love Stories

by Lesley Choyce

  I hadn’t expected to lose Aimee so quickly. But, then, even well-placed boards have a way of finding their own pattern many rows on. By fifteen, she was a kid who was comfortable on planes and had a tattered passport to prove it. I’d been on the road a fair bit with my job building prefab Canadian houses shipped overseas from the Maritimes to places like Tokyo, Sao Paola and Madrid. What we thought was just a normal little stud wall construction with cedar shakes on the outside could look pretty exotic if you erected it under the right circumstances.

  With no thought to how she was ripping my heart out, Aimee decided she wanted to leave home and found a scholarship to a boarding school half a continent away. I was so torn up the day her acceptance letter arrived that I hit my thumb twice while hammering at work, distracted by thoughts that I just couldn’t keep someplace else. When I finally dragged myself back home, exhausted from the extra hours I’d put in building walls for a big order we had waiting, I sat with a beer and looked out at the ten-foot spruce that now filled in the space left by the dead birch at the back of our yard. I consoled myself with thinking that since it was so Nova Scotian of Aimee to want to leave, I figured it would also be in her blood to return.

  I guess it all depends. Maybe not everything is decided early. There was a restless gene inside Aimee. She had a need to distance herself that I didn’t understand, though I said I did and then bumped around the house, finding excuses to go shopping with her for things like underwear and boots that she’d need while away. I wasn’t much help with either. I couldn’t quite understand why she was buying fashionable footwear for Calgary.

  The day she flew away from me, I drove her to the airport much too early. I said I was worried about her missing her plane, or being bumped if the flight was full, or the security lines being long. Mostly I wanted time to walk with her through the terminal. I didn’t want to have to run through those last moments that I knew were the last slack tide I’d have with her possibly forever. We had a full hour after checking in before she had to go to her gate so we just sat and drank tea at Tim Hortons. She was oddly chatty as she sipped from a ceramic travel mug. I had mine in a double paper cup which, this time, at least, she didn’t lecture me about. She talked instead about what her friends had given her the night before, and worried out loud about whether she’d like her roommate.

  She seemed to know I wanted words. Things I could remember. I’d have had her sit on my knee the whole time but knew how silly that would look. Instead, I held her in front of security for longer than she was comfortable and let people stare as my eyes teared up. Aimee was the stronger one. She told me I’d be okay. She pushed herself back and with the confidence that comes with a well-laid plan, moved into line, waving each time she walked a little further away from me until the glass doors finally swallowed her.

  The summer before Aimee went to university she spent a month with me. Most years we’d found a few days to do something out of doors and that year the weather looked good enough to rent kayaks. We put in just west of Cape Chignecto, though by the time we’d loaded our boats and shed a good many things we didn’t really need, like the wool sweater I’d purposely packed for Aimee to wear if she became hypothermic, the wind had shifted to the south. As we paddled out, our bows sliced through the white froth of breaking waves that splashed over our boats and left pools of cold Atlantic seawater on our spray skirts. Aimee just bobbed and paddled through it all, never complaining even as the wind seemed to keep us glued to one spot. Once we cleared the first headland and could see the Three Sisters, the paddling got easier. Aimee still didn’t say much. She just went out a little ways and shadowed me down the coast and through the rock caves. Every time I looked she was staring at something on shore, a little smile making her dimples crease. That was really all I remember seeing that day.

  After we’d rounded the Cape on the second morning, I thought we were lucky to have a following sea. It felt good to relax our arms, but sometimes, out on the water, what looks easy can sneak up and test you. Soon the wind picked up and the waves began to grow. I lost sight of Aimee whenever we both sank into troughs of ink-black water. Aimee had kayaked with me a few times, and she was a strong swimmer, so I was only half as worried as I could have been. As long as you low brace and keep your paddle in the water when surfing on the crest of each wave, you don’t usually go over, but resist or panic and your boat will spin like a top and you’ll be tipped before you know it. I’d told Aimee all this while we rested in the lee of an enormous five-hundred-foot cliff face of reddish-tan granite swirling with seams of black diabase.

  “So paddling is just like life?” Aimee teased. I knew she was laughing at me and all my worry. She had no idea what it was like to be swallowed by a rough sea, or worse, to feel anxious about losing the only person who really matters to you.

  “A following sea can stalk you,” I told her. Everything appears to be going just fine and the next moment you’re having to kick yourself free from your boat and think real hard what you are going to do next. Aimee didn’t yet understand that kayaking could be like that. I decided it was better to say nothing more and kept paddling the eight kilometres to Refugee Cove where we put in for the night.

  “That was awesome,” Aimee said, and gave me a hug once we were freed from our boats. It was quick, like the way athletes hug, but it made me feel warm even if I was dripping from salt spray and sweat.

  I was on my back under the sink as Aimee handed me a hammer and then an adjustable wrench. Only she called it the wizard’s wrench because it made the whole dreary business of household repairs seem more magical. Sometimes I think she’s still my little girl inside that body of a young woman. I couldn’t see much of that little girl, though, from down inside the cupboard where I was lying on a dirty tea towel, which was better than laying my greying hair in the sticky brown mess that had congealed beneath the sink. I was looking up into the gunk under a sink of a ninety-year-old building on Lawrence Street. Aimee was sharing the apartment with her girlfriend Maggie, whom she’d met in the Foundation Year at King’s. They knew way more than I ever would about Descarte, Dante and Degas, but precious little about fixing sinks, unplugging toilets or defrosting old fridges. While I wiggled my way up into the crevasse behind the basin, my arms extended far above my head to grip a grey plastic washer with broken flanges, trying with all my strength and little success to turn it, Aimee just stood close by and patiently waited for me to make the problem of the leaky faucet go away. Her landlord had refused, or simply ignored the problem. I guessed I was more reliable, and gullible.

  But then, I hadn’t seen Aimee as often as I’d have liked. Even there, on my back with arms stretched to heaven, it felt like she was close in a way that was more than skin deep. It must be a dad thing. It had always been easier to do things with her than talk about what I was feeling.

  In Israel Aimee interns as a journalist for an independent magazine that pays her next to nothing but looks great on her resumé. I couldn’t care less about the money, but the war that is going on a few miles away does bother me. So I do what any reasonable father would do – I visit to see if there is any way to keep her safe. When she finds me in the arrivals area in Tel Aviv, I hug her much too tight, then pull from my backpack one of her stuffed animals. She laughs, and forces me to put it away.

  “Dad, thanks, but not here.” I flinch as she pushes the little dog back into my bag, like I’ve been slapped awake.

  Of course, there wasn’t much I could do to keep my little girl safe, so I instead saw Tel Aviv’s beaches, then Jerusalem’s old city. I even went to a kibbutz and helped erect a building for a week. Though Aimee was still back in Jerusalem, the work gave me a way of remaining closer to her.

  There was only so much, though, that I could do to occupy myself and before long it was Aimee who was walking me to the airport departures gate and waiting for me to disappear behind a glass wall. Boarding the eleven-hour flight from Tel Aviv to Toronto, I kept retracing our steps. How did we get here, thi
s odd reversal of roles? For a moment I wondered, would it be different if Diane hadn’t left us?

  I hadn’t let myself think about Diane for years, but as I left Aimee to look after herself, there was déjà vu in how she walked away with just a small wave goodbye. I worried I’d be twice abandoned. Maybe that’s why, waiting to board my flight, I let myself be distracted by a woman in her late thirties, her loose pyjama pants sitting low on her hips, low enough to suggest the crescent moon of a taut midriff. I should have known better than to stand there on the tarmac watching. Except, waiting to climb into the plane I had nowhere else to stare and the spotlights practically pointed her out. I was almost fifty and knew Aimee was no longer needing me to squirrel around her life trying to be helpful.

  I’d been lonely, a little, since Diane disappeared, but never so lonely that I wanted to put another woman in front of Aimee. Now, with Aimee old enough to walk me to the departures gate, maybe it was time to look again, to breathe a little deeper, to let myself scent something more earthy than aluminum and tar. As they positioned the stairs up to the plane, I thought, “Screw it,” and let myself be transfixed by a half-tucked white cotton drawstring, its exposed tassel left to dangle languidly between the woman’s legs.

  Hours later, as we descended into Toronto, I looked outside at the folded forward foil of the wing as it let wisps of cloud slip past in fine white strands like Diane’s sunwashed hair when she was young enough to wear it long. The year before she left she’d begun cutting it; each visit to the hairdresser was like a retractable knife being closed. To me, those salon cuts were ugly efforts, doing fine woodwork with a chop saw. The more she trusted her stylist, who wore far too much body art, the more she came home with stiff cropped hair that made her angular face look gaunt and menacing. Diane my lover had been turned into a boy, then a memory.

  She’d be middle-aged like me now. Aimee and I had agreed to never imagine where she was.

  I made the connection in Toronto to Halifax and quickly lost sight of the woman on the tarmac. Just as well. Too young? Or maybe I just wasn’t ready for small talk, drinks and the serial monogamy I saw my friends practising. I waited for a cab outside the arrivals hall and breathed the cool fall air of the east coast. It reminded me that I had promised myself I’d clean the compost bin before the first snows. The smells of summer were waning. October’s chill would make the bin less offensive. Soon it would stop reminding me it needed tending at all.

  As my cab delivered me home I realized there was no one to greet me, just an empty house, my tools and a storage shed of wood that I’d put aside year after year for some big project. A dresser for Aimee when she settled? Or maybe a wedding present. I frowned and grabbed a beer from the fridge, then wandered the house, eventually sitting on Aimee’s old bed looking at her stuffed animals, all tucked in, still safe. I’d refused to put them in storage when she left home even though she’d thought I was being silly.

  I laid back and rested my head on her pillow. Aimee’s favourite animal, Cuddles, was there beside me. It reminded me of our visit to a museum in Greenwich when Diane was still with us. While Aimee and Diane went for a toilet break, I had stood sentry among the rows of stone pillars just outside one of the museum’s pavilions. Alone. I remembered having felt really happy with my life just then. I was fit, tanned and relaxed after a week of vacation without a schedule. I’d have stayed like that, just absent-minded bliss, if a young woman with heavy black mascara and a red streak in her hair hadn’t been staring at me. I modestly (or so I hoped) avoided her eyes by looking down. That’s when I noticed an entire zoo of animals that had been placed neatly in the crook of my left arm, exactly where Aimee had left them two minutes before. Without a child to be seen anywhere, I’m sure I blushed, imagining how I looked, this guy, standing in the middle of a museum, giving his stuffed animals a day out. I was still blushing as Aimee came racing back towards me, her feet so light as she ran that she seemed to glide above the marble floors. And there in the middle of that great museum, Diane still many paces behind her, Aimee looked suddenly so independent, so much older than the child I imagined her to be.

  A Love that Stands the Test of Time: Joyce and Calvin Ruck

  Lindsay Ruck

  Here is the true love story of a husband and wife who lived through a dramatic time of social change in the Black community in Nova Scotia. The full story of their life can be found in the book Winds of Change: The Life and Legacy of Calvin W. Ruck.

  When two people love each other for better or worse, ’til death do them part, it’s a pretty special love. Theirs is a love that stands the test of time and reminds us all that true love is not just an urban legend, it’s a real and tangible thing – you just have to be willing to work for it. My grandparents taught me what it means to love someone unconditionally and that is why their story is my favourite to tell.

  In 1945, Calvin Ruck, a native of Sydney, Nova Scotia, had just moved to Halifax to work as a sleeping car porter for the Canadian National Railway. The position of porter was described as “the highest status in the Black community and the lowest rank on the train,” and Calvin’s life as one meant extensive travelling, long hours and servitude to the paying passengers.

  Despite being grateful to have found employment, Calvin was extremely unhappy and knew he couldn’t do this for the rest of his life. While the work may have been strenuous, he was about to find the silver lining of his move to the province’s capital. Her name was Joyce Alice Mae Williams.

  At a small lunch counter in Halifax, in 1946, sixteenyear-old Joyce Williams sat with her friend reading a magazine. Unbeknownst to Joyce, she was about to meet the man who would change her life forever.

  When Calvin wasn’t on the road, the twenty-year-old enjoyed playing sports and spending time with friends. On this particular day off, Calvin and his friend were walking down Cunard Street. They happened to look in the restaurant window and saw two young girls they had never seen before. Intrigued, and like any bold young men, they walked in and sat down right next to the young women and tried to get their attention. Calvin began reading aloud the cover of Joyce’s magazine. Unimpressed by this attempt for attention, Joyce abruptly shut the magazine and refused to make eye contact with this boy who seemed so fascinated by her. Not that long after, Joyce and her companion left, hoping that would be the end of the awkward situation. Calvin, on the other hand, was determined to find out more about this pretty young woman. The boys quickly exited the restaurant and followed the girls. With a little charm and a lot of luck, Calvin managed to get Joyce’s name, phone number and even the privilege of walking her home that day.

  A few days later, Calvin called the Williams’ residence and Joyce accepted an offer to go to the theatre. And so began a fifty-six-year romance.

  Joyce recounts Calvin’s courtship as respectable and chivalrous. He was polite, kind and, as Joyce recalls, he “wasn’t brazen. I can remember when we were walking one day and I felt his hand touch my lower back. I moved it right away and said that a man does not touch a lady’s backside.” Slightly embarrassed, Calvin quickly apologized numerous times, and at that moment, he knew that this girl whom he had met at the lunch counter was not like other girls. She was special.

  “When he asked me to be his girlfriend, he said, ‘You know you can’t go out with other guys?’ ” Joyce recalls with a smile. But Joyce had no intention of seeing anyone else and at sixteen, she fell in love for the first and last time.

  Two years later, with engagement ring in hand, Calvin asked Joyce to marry him, and this time, she didn’t hesitate to respond, as she knew she had found the love of her life. Her father, however, was not as taken with this twentytwo-year-old sleeping car porter. Calvin’s parents were both from Barbados and Emmanuel Williams wanted nothing to do with those of West Indian descent. Joyce tried to explain to her father that Calvin was born in Canada and was a Canadian citizen, but this did not matter and Joyce was left looking for someone else to give her away on her wedding day. Having
never shied away from a challenge, Calvin was determined to change this man’s mind and to be accepted by his future father-in-law. Exhausting all words, one day Calvin offered Mr. Williams a cigarette. It may not have been your typical olive branch, but it was all that was needed to bring the two together. From that time on, Calvin was accepted as a worthy husband.

  The Ruck-Williams wedding took place at Cornwallis Street Baptist Church in Halifax on August 18, 1948. Although Joyce’s father was present on the day, her uncle, John Pannill, gave the bride away. Emmanuel, who worked odd jobs his whole life, including as a night watchman at a grain elevator, said he could not afford a suit for the occasion and was not comfortable walking his daughter down the aisle if he wasn’t “properly” dressed. “I think that was just an excuse, though,” says Joyce, adding that her father also stated she was much too young to be married. At eighteen, Joyce, who still wears her wedding ring to this day, says she was never nervous or had second thoughts when it came to marriage. She laughs and thinks, “Maybe it was because I just didn’t know any better, or maybe it was just because I was marrying Calvin.”

  The newlyweds lived in the north end of Halifax, in a predominantly Black neighbourhood that mainly consisted of tenement homes, boarding rooms and apartments. But Calvin and Joyce longed for a home of their own and this longing only increased after the birth of their first son, Douglas, in 1950. Being away from his new baby boy also made life on the road as a sleeping car porter much more difficult. Calvin would share his emotions through regular correspondence to Joyce.