The Sign on My Father's House

by Tom Moore

  4

  Betrayal

  Before long, Dick and Ellen were running the shop. Ellen was also doing some courses at Memorial University, so Dick was left to do most of the work. Old Clara White only came in to slice bologna, bag apples into dozens, and onions into pounds. A new guy was hired in the shop, Joe Gosine. He was the colour of the darkest tan we had ever seen in Curlew, darker even than the Americans. He had just arrived from Lebanon the year before, but things hadn’t clicked for him with his relatives on Bell Island, who were diamond jewellers and business people. For unknown reasons, Joe ended up with us.

  Joe’s job was mainly to shovel coal, the distant cousin of diamonds. Dick had taken to wearing a white shirt and tie in the shop, and shovelling coal was a dirty job. Joe’s job was to fill bags with fifty and one hundred pounds of coal.

  Sometimes I helped him by holding the bags while he shovelled. It wasn’t too bad in the winter or during wet weather, but on a hot, dry summer day, the dust would rise with every movement of shovel or feet. It got in our eyes and our noses, not to mention our clothes and faces. Fortunately, few people in Curlew burned coal in summer.

  Joe boarded with the Whites, not in their big old house, but in a two-room apartment built in the flour store. It was cold in winter, but in summer it was warm and pleasant. It radiated past days, and you could almost see old Wayne White coming around a corner with a roll of canvas on his shoulder. The red and black Drink Coca Cola sign, with the smiling girl, still ran across the flour store door.

  I was sweeping out the flour store one day when I found Dick’s dolls.

  Dick’s workroom had always been off limits. He had politely explained that he would be cleaning it up himself, but late one afternoon I saw the light shining from under the door, and I opened it. At one end of the room, which smelled of newly cut wood and fresh paint, was a workbench with several vises attached to its top. On it were dozens of chisels, saws, augers, and woodworking tools of every description.

  The rest of the room was filled with dozens of small wooden people, each about three feet high. They were lifelike with flesh and clothing painted on them. Their eyes were wide open, the irises cut round in the wood. Their arms were all down by their sides, and their little feet perched together in pairs on the floor. They looked like people you’d see walking down Joey’s paved road. I found ones of Clara, Joe, Shirley, and Father. The most attractive one was of Ellen. I was looking for one like me when I lost my nerve. As I scurried out the door, I noticed their faces were all smiling—even Clara, who never smiled, looked happy and benign. Dick had created a little Curlew whose citizens were all content with life.

  The day Dick was killed was another splendid summer’s day. I was the only one in the shop when the robber came in. Dick was out back refilling the salt beef barrel from five-gallon buckets. But a moment after the stranger came through the door, Dick was back behind the counter. Shopkeepers have this sixth sense even without that little bell over the door.

  Dick’s smile was a question as he spoke to the man. “Yes? Can I help you?”

  Any stranger was news in Curlew, but this one was stranger than your average stranger. His collar was up and his cap was hauled down to his eyes. He leaned in over the counter.

  “I want all your money, now. And what’s in the safe, too.” He produced an old army handgun and levelled it at Dick. The picture is etched in my mind, like E. J. Pratt’s seagull.

  Outdoors, the sun gazed from a blue sky. A light wind moved through the tops of the tallest trees. At 10:00 a.m. the paved road was deserted as the asphalt started to warm up. That morning was about to pass into the lore of local history.

  I saw the words US Army on the blue metal of the gun. Dick froze. The robber froze. I froze. The three of us waited for Dick’s reaction.

  Then I noticed the meathook in his right hand. He had brought the rusty iron hook with him from the salt beef room. I couldn’t tell if he even remembered it was still in his hand. Behind the counter, it was almost hidden from the robber.

  I am still amazed how clearly my mind was working at the time. I was not a bit frightened after the initial shock. The rising of one eyebrow marked Dick’s recovery from his own shock. I knew that his response was now imminent.

  In fact, the initial surprise was still partly on his face as he swung the meathook hard at the robber. It seemed to take a long time for the blow to land, for Dick swung the hook up from his side, back behind him, and then down at the robber. The process seemed to take minutes. It really took about a second.

  Still, the robber’s gun did not go off. The hook struck him in the front of his neck and imbedded there. Blood spurted out of the astonished man. I think Dick was astonished, too. He continued his attack by pulling the robber toward him like a piece of hooked salt beef. As the robber hit the side of the counter, the hook popped out. He slipped to one knee and rested the arm with the gun in it on the counter. Dick and I looked at the gun. Neither of us moved. The robber pulled himself up to his feet and then pushed back from the counter. Blood was pouring from his neck and soaking his black windbreaker. He had just received a fatal wound and looked smaller than before. Then he raised the gun and shot Dick.

  One shot. It struck Dick full in the chest, and he tumbled backwards into the shelves. Cans of aerosol deodorant and packages of hairpins fell to the floor as his arms flayed out. Then he turned his back to the robber and me and grasped one of the shelves with his right hand for stability.

  It didn’t work. Like a wooden doll of Dick White, he slowly toppled to the left. His right hand was stuck out, but unattached to the steadying shelf. He hit the floor with a soft rustle of his starched white coat.

  The robber and I looked at each other. I saw the blood still flowing freely from the wound in his neck. He seemed to suddenly remember it, too. He dropped the gun to the floor.

  He was only a kid, about eighteen or nineteen. His face turned the colour of ashes. He looked at me again, and his jaw slacked and his eyes rolled around in his head. He turned and sized up the door, like someone about to park a car. He pushed himself toward it. One bloody hand clung to the door frame after his body had passed through. He fell and died not twenty feet from his old car.

  A big housefly buzzed across the shop and pitched. On tiptoes, I peered over the counter at Dick. He lay neatly, as if mindful that someone would have to clean up after him.

  Ellen and Joe Gosine came through the back door.

  “What was the noise?” she asked through full red lips. Then she saw Dick, and her scream jolted me to the horror of what had just happened.

  I ran around the stove and in behind the counter. As I passed, an image stayed in my mind to be recalled later: by Ellen’s side, almost hidden in the folds of her frilly dress, her long white fingers were knotted tightly with Joe’s dark ones.

  “My God, Joe!” she shrieked.

  Joe let go of her hand, and we looked down at Dick. He was perfectly still, but wheezing slightly. Joe looked at me. “Felix, go get the doctor.”

  I was out the door in a flash. Doctor Phil Janes was often drunk, but still as fine a doctor as Curlew ever saw. He came immediately, leaving a glass of whisky and his dinner on the table. His cook, Wilma Bartlett, clucked at the inconvenience of it all.

  We were both out of breath after we hurried to the shop. A small crowd leaned over the counter, and the family huddled on the floor inside, waiting for the doctor.

  Clara was on her knees beside Dick. She was holding a towel against the bullet hole with both hands.

  “Easy, Clara,” were the first words Doctor Janes spoke as he slipped to his knees beside her. He lifted her hand and the towel and looked at the wound. Then he looked at Clara and saw the desperation in her eyes.

  “Let’s get to work, now,” he said, slipping out of his jacket and tossing it up onto the counter. “Joe, get over here.”


  “Yes, Doctor.”

  “Get his shoes off, belt off, pants loose.” He was rooting around in his big bag.

  “Clara, let go now.” She would not, so he gently lifted the old woman away from her stricken son. He took her place at Dick’s chest and put a large bandage over the bleeding hole. He spoke to Clara softly: “Go wash the blood off your hands, now. I want you to phone the hospital in Fillmore. Tell them we’re on the way and he’s lost a lot of blood.”

  “Will he live?”

  “I don’t know.”

  A familiar voice came from beyond the counter. “My truck is just outside.” It was Father, and I knew things would be all right now. I believed he could cure all ills, even death itself, such was my faith in him. “Get a mattress from the storage room,” Father said.

  “I’ll get the mattress,” said Joe.

  “I need someone to sign for me to send him to hospital.” Doctor Janes produced a form from his bag. “Where’s Clara?”

  Ellen pushed forward. “I’ll sign it. I’m his wife!”

  “Yes, of course,” said the doctor, and held it up to her.

  Dick’s last ride to Fillmore was in the back of Father’s Dodge pickup truck.

  They brought him back home the next day, a certified corpse, to the Curlew Funeral Home. Then the world of euphemisms took over.

  Will Mullins met us all at the door and “took possession” of the “remains.” Will was a classic undertaker, tall and lanky with a thick head of dyed-black hair. His tresses were combed back with deep tracks over his ears. He was unctuous and simpering on behalf of the “bereaved.” Wringing his long, thin hands, he welcomed us into his “home,” the funeral parlour built onto his house.

  “Mrs. White.” He touched Clara’s hand.

  “Will,” Clara mumbled an acknowledgement.

  “Mrs. White,” he said again, and Clara look surprised.

  But Ellen greeted him clearly. “Mr. Mullins.”

  He nodded to Joe Gosine and me without really seeing us. Ellen tried to play a wifely role, but it was Clara who picked out the casket from among the five or six on the premises. She chose the most expensive, as we all knew she would. She handed Mullins Dick’s good suit, the one in which he had been married. She also gave him a small wrapped package. The others wondered what was in it, but I had seen her wrap Dick’s Brylcreem.

  Two days later, Dick’s funeral was held in the same church where his marriage had been two years before. Much the same crowd was present. Dick looked good. His tight black curls were shining under copious applications of Brylcreem, just as in life.

  Ellen was as ravishing in black as she had been in white. A sheer black veil replaced the sheer white one she had worn on her wedding day. When she knelt alone in front of her husband’s casket, her lace gloves were clasped in prayer and her head was bowed. She cried a bit on her mother’s shoulder, as was appropriate under the circumstances.

  Clara was just as stoic at the funeral as she had been at the wedding. But she had noticeably less trouble standing up during the service.

  The shop was closed for one day after the funeral, “in deference to the deceased,” as Will Mullins put it. I stayed around the house and talked to Shirley. She openly smoked a pack a day now.

  “When do you go back to work?” she asked me.

  “Monday.”

  “You’re almost a man now.” She seemed to be looking through me as she sat at our yellow chrome table and matching chrome chairs with the yellow plastic over the padded backs and seats. July sun shone through the kitchen window.

  I leaned my rump against the sink and studied her. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you’re the only one in this house with a paying job.”

  “I guess I am. Does that bother you?”

  “Yes, it bothers me when we have to do without things because of your father’s sign.”

  The door opened, and Father came in from tending his sign with a bucket and cloth.

  “Eggs?” I asked.

  “No, tar this time,” he said, and reached under the sink for the bottle of kerosene.

  “Are you going back at it, now?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  So Father and I went out into the yard. I held the ladder as he climbed up to the sign and began cleaning it. Two years older now, and starting to grow, I held the ladder firmly, knowing that no one else would help him. Sun, wind, snow, rain, as well as Liberals, had all assailed his sign. Cleaning it had become a daily ritual, like brushing his teeth.

  “She wants it down, doesn’t she,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Soon, I think, soon,” he said.

  In the two years the sign had been up, his jaw had been broken twice in community altercations. I still have memories of him at the table, drinking soup through a straw, with his jaw wired up.

  I held the ladder as he wiped off the black globs with a cloth and some kerosene. He looked smaller than I remembered him as he dabbed and pushed at the black tar defacing his sign. But his jaw was firmly set, as if the wires were still in place.

  On Monday, back at my summer job, things were pretty much as usual on the surface. The shop was open, with Clara and Ellen behind the counter. Sometimes, I caught myself looking at Ellen and longing for her, envying Joe Gosine, who could secretly hold her hand. He was usually moving around out back, bringing supplies down from the sheds to the shop and the attached stockroom, much the same job as Dick had formerly done.

  Life went on as week followed week, except without Dick.

  But I began to notice subtle differences. I was up in the flour store loft sweeping one Saturday in November. It was suppertime, and I had only a little more to do to finish the job, so I worked on. Below me, I heard Joe come in and go to his room.

  Then someone else entered the main door, and Joe’s door opened and closed again. I went into Dick’s workshop and crept over the boards. Muffled voices—Joe’s and Ellen’s—came from below. Soon the voices stopped and I heard other sounds. The cooing sounds of tenderness and love. My heart was beating out of my chest, so I crept back through the dolls and returned to the shop.

  “Did you see Ellen?” Clara asked.

  “No, ma’am.” The lie came easily.

  Later that week, Clara sent me into Dick’s workroom to pack his wooden manikins into cardboard boxes. Each doll had to be carefully covered with newspaper and lowered gently into a box, much as we had lowered Dick into the grave. It was September, and the last of the sun lay on the floor of the dusty loft. It shone on the miniature town of little people standing silent, as if mindful of Dick’s demise. A radiant Ellen doll smiled from atop the workbench.

  I got down on one knee and lowered a jolly little fisherman, three feet high, into his cardboard box. Clerks and clergy, children, women, and cows soon followed. I was Mr. Mullins burying a happy town, a better time, a lost summer, the last of Dick White.

  An hour or two later, the sun had set and the land was dark. I was almost through the packing when the main door opened below, and I heard Joe. Soon, the loft door swung open, light tumbled in, and Joe stood there looking at Dick’s dolls.

  “Anyone in there?”

  I froze on my knees with the dolls, still and silent on the floor as Joe peered in. I stared ahead blankly with the dozen or so wooden figures still on the floor. I had joined their little village, and Joe looked but did not see me. He walked in and saw Ellen on the workbench. His pants leg brushed against my shoulder as he touched her wooden form. Eyes wide, like the others, I looked straight ahead. Soon the door swung to, and he was gone down the steps to his room. I stayed frozen like that for a time, not wanting to leave their smiling world, Eden before the snake. But soon my knees hurt, and I moved and looked around at my company. No sore knees or feet among them. No
pain, no fear. Eden forever. I put them in their boxes.

  The outside door opened again, and I knew it was Ellen. She went straight to Joe’s little apartment. I felt my way across the workshop floor. Light was coming up through a seam between the floorboards, and I peered down through it. Directly below I saw them. Her voice raised in agitation.

  As I got down closer to the hole, I smelled something familiar.

  “Oh, Joe, you must believe I love you, and I need your help. Do you really want to be poor all your life? With other people looking down on you? This business is our chance for security, to be somebodies instead of nobodies.”

  Her arms went around his neck.

  He tipped slightly back toward the door. I heard them drop onto the couch where Joe slept. They were at it for half an hour. When it was over, she got off the bed and put on her clothes without a word. She kissed Joe again as she left. I heard her go out the main door as I lay on the floor of Dick’s workshop, awash in a sea of emotion.

  Soon I heard Joe snoring.

  The little people in the room all looked straight ahead discretely. They had heard it all many times before. As I got up, I felt something greasy on the wood where my head had rested. The tiny smear on my finger smelled pleasant, like perfume. It was Dick’s Brylcreem.

  5

  Out into the World

  One night, when I was five, my mother and I had sat out on the front step. We saw a blazing light streak across the silent sky. “What’s that?” I asked.

  “A meteor.”

  “Like a comet?” My question surprised her, and she roused herself to answer me. The light of her cigarette danced between us.

  “A comet has a regular orbit, like around this house.”

  “Like Halley’s Comet?”