He was wearing a grey shirt without a collar, and dungarees. His boots were neatly placed by the door. This was a sailor’s berth, shipshape. Grey blanket on the cot, tucked in with hospital corners, his sea-chest at the foot, and on it some books. She was amused and a little comforted to see that he had brought with him his old picture book, Nursery Lessons, In Words of One Syllable, with the unsailable fishing boat and the good dog Dash and the aunt who gave the boy his horse. She touched it, saying quietly, “See here is a fine nag.”
The floor was stained, but clean. On the green-washed walls he had pinned a few postcards: the Morning Light, the Belmont, Captain Hilton’s ship. A photograph of Roddy and Thea. Herself, scowling in a toga at the high school tableau vivant; and there again, shrieking, in the photograph Francis had taken of her when Aren slid the piglet down into the barrel bath.
She touched the smooth little moon scar on her arm, from the piglet’s sharp hoof. “Are you better here? Happier than in Yarmouth?”
He lifted his brows, that quick assent. “Good enough, there is nothing wrong with me.”
He was the same person, always merciful to her. To them all.
“I came without telling Thea, or I’d have never got away—but she’d have sent her love, and a parcel, if she’d known.”
“I am all right for cakes,” he said. “They feed us well.”
Kay hated that he must put a good face on it. Most likely, they were quite cruel to apprentices at the shipyards. All hard discipline and men shouting. But a person has to live somehow, of course. Aren could have chosen school, she told herself; this was his own choice. Only it was not. Staying at school in Yarmouth was impossible. It had been too difficult for her, and she was white and English; he would always be foreign and coloured, no matter how staunchly Thea championed him. Where else could a person go to make a life?
“What have you done with him?”
“Francis got Jerry Melanson to bury him, back in the orchard.”
“You did not want to be there for the funeral?”
He was laughing at her now. She caught herself frowning, and let it go. “I would not have held a funeral. Only one sacred song and a wreath.”
“Well, a grave marker, though.” He was serious now.
She nodded, having drawn one on the train. She did not want to show him in case he laughed again. Then she pulled out her notebook, for of course he wouldn’t laugh.
He did not. Staring down at the careful lettering she had drawn, he lifted his eyebrows again and again in strong agreement.
Fear not, I will Pilot thee.
She’d drawn a straight marker, no cross, Pilot in her view not being subject to God, but being God’s straight emissary. Not requiring salvation, being without sin.
“I wish you would come home, Aren.”
He stood up and went to the tiny cupboard. “I am home.”
“To your real home, I mean,” she said.
At the cupboard, his back to her, he asked in his quiet way, “Where is my real home?”
Then she heard what she had said. How stupid she was. Not Yarmouth, he meant. Where else could be their home now?
“Pulo Anna?”
He laughed at her, a furious burst of bitterness.
She wished she’d never said those words. He was past reaching anyhow. She had wasted her time coming here, and he would never come back, nor want to. This half room, this ugly life was what he was choosing. No more business of hers.
He laughed again, amused this time, watching her look around the room. From a stack in the cupboard he took a celluloid collar and began to attach it to his shirt. He was not meeting her eyes. But that was all right, he never did by choice, though he usually would allow their gaze to rest together. Maybe he was too sad, because of Pilot.
“You caught me as I was going out,” he said.
“Out where?”
It was already ten in the evening. No restaurant or place to buy food would be open now, on a Thursday night.
“To drink.”
But—oh, he must mean to a secret place, a silent pig or a speakeasy, they called them. Not legal, but of course everyone knew where they were. Mrs. Curtis Surette ran one in Yarmouth. She had not been there herself, but Marion Hilton had gone to one of Mrs. Surette’s special nights with Murray Judge. Cocktails in china teacups.
This would not be one of those places. Anyway, Aren was too young for drinking. But she did not know what his life was like now, or what it had been like for the last two years. He was a good deal older now than Jack and Arthur had been when they came aboard so drunk one night that Mr. Best whipped them at the mast next day to teach them manners.
“How do you know where to go?”
He laughed, a short bark. “Follow any sailor!”
“Is that what it is like, being a workingman in Halifax?”
“They’ve no choice—a sailor isn’t going to stay in dry dock for long.”
Marion Hilton had gone to one, after all. “What happens if the police raid?”
“You get arrested—give a false name, and they let you go in the morning.”
A night in pokey would be a thing to experience. That would top Marion Hilton.
He picked up his jacket from the floor and beat at it, not to much purpose. “I’m off,” he said. “Come if you like. I have a friend to meet. You can meet her too.”
Kay looked around the half room and put on her squashed hat.
The streets were wet, shining black and gold in the light from a few bright windows. The electric street lights did not cast much glow this foggy night, but served as direction pointers. They walked more or less together, Kay straggling behind sometimes when she thought perhaps she should not go after all. Then her courage, or her stubbornness, would come inching back, and she’d run to catch him up.
After a considerable damp tramp, Aren turned in at a narrow corridor between buildings and down some metal stairs into the first establishment, where a large man took his money and opened a wine-dark metal door.
It was darker inside than out. Aren stood poised a moment, holding Kay with a touch on her arm, and then started forward through crowded tables.
She followed close, not wanting to be alone in that strange place. All the people there were darkly clothed and grimy, some of them clearly black-gang men from steamers, marked by oiled-in coal dust that would never wash off. The women, not very many of them, hung over the tables, breasts dangling under not enough fabric. They were not pretty, exactly, but their lack of care had a crazy attraction; Kay felt it herself. A sour disorder in the dress, that wantonness. They laughed and talked too loud, to be heard over the din.
After speaking to one woman, Aren turned back and pushed Kay toward the door again.
“Not here,” he shouted into her ear above the din. “Cherry says to try Isadore’s.”
Each place after that one was worse. The raucous noise everywhere was surprising. Kay was not shocked, and certainly heard nothing she hadn’t heard already from a thousand sailors, but she had thought speakeasies would be hushed places, to avoid detection. These closed-in rooms, each with a smoke veil hovering three feet down from the low ceiling, were tighter and hotter than she’d expected. She hadn’t thought about that part, the smell of other people, none of them in very good health. Worse than below decks, worse than any crew mess she’d looked in on. But she’d been lucky, always to sail on respectable vessels. So had Aren.
And the drink, not a good smell either. Bootleg rum, or something water-coloured and tasteless that (when Aren passed her a tot to try) hit the back of the tongue and then the throat with a scrape like paint thinner. Everyone was pretty much half-poisoned, it seemed to her. The older men drank warm yellow beer in thick-bottomed glasses. Kay felt her insides curdle at the sight of it, horrible stuff.
In each place, different but the same, A
ren led the way through the press of people and stopped at one table or another to ask after the girl, Merissa. One woman had seen her, she thought. “Out Bedford way, she was.”
Aren shook his head and said that must have been her sister, whose fellow lived in Africville.
The woman nodded and shook her head, first nodding and then shaking, very drunk. She demanded abruptly, “Where you from?”
“I am from the South Seas,” Aren said. “From an island called Pulo Anna.”
“Yeah, I seed you was different from these other fellas…”
Aren shook his head, giving it up, and they went out.
In the fourth place, Jerry Joe’s, a player piano played at top speed, a man standing beside it banging on a drum. That was the loudest place yet.
Kay had put her First Greek Book in her pocket to read on the train, thinking that perhaps she might find solace there in Cyrus’s old campaign, and it clunked against the table.
Aren saw it peeking from her coat pocket and laughed. “Your vademecum.”
She tried to shove it deeper, but he took it from her and flipped through the pages, shaking his head. “That old language is not even real, nothing they wrote is real any longer,” he said.
She was aware of that, and aware besides that she didn’t even read Greek now. “But I could have, if I had worked harder,” she said, not explaining, stiff with him now. She slid the book deep into her pocket.
“Here we only speak the words we need to speak,” he said. “Piss, cunt, money.”
What had happened to her brother?
Just then, a drunk fell stiff as a plank and landed on the floor beside them, feet twitching. His shirt was open wide and his narrow chest fluttered pearly white beneath a tide line of dirt. An eddy of filth and ash from below the tables swirled around his head.
A man came from the bar counter and hauled the drunk away, pulling under the arms so the fellow looked to have fallen sweetly asleep.
Aren handed Kay another drink, saying she might like this better—it was sweeter, but still tasted raw and dangerous.
“What is it?” she asked him.
“Spruce beer, maybe?” His eyes kept roaming, checking. “Or needle beer. Don’t ask.” Then his eyes fixed, gladly, and his arm flew up to wave at someone.
At a table by the back wall sat a girl, her black hair half bright orange from dye, hanging in matted locks around her lacquered face. Under thick-drawn eyebrows her mostly closed eyes were ringed with black and her lips were painted bright, strong pink, showing bluish underneath the paint. She had a dainty nose and a full chin, but a very sullen expression.
“Merissa!” Aren called.
A man knocked Kay’s elbow. “There’s a fellow calling you,” he told her, indicating a man at the other side of the room. “Why aren’t you answering him?”
“Why don’t you answer him?” said a woman on her left. “Too proud for it?”
“I don’t know him,” Kay said. She frowned at the woman, who was colossal.
“Are ya sure?”
“Perfectly sure!” But in her heart Kay felt some doubt—she was so short-sighted it might have been someone she knew, someone from Yarmouth, from the South End, or a sailor.
The people wouldn’t let it go. They started shouting to the man by the door, “Joey! That you, Joey Cremo? This lady say she doesn know you!”
Well, she did not know a Joey Cremo. For a moment he had the look of Jacky Judge, but he was younger than Jacky must now be, just a boy. He came over, smiling, a bit shy, and took off his hat. He had such a soft look—like the boy she once imagined would bring her groceries, when she was living on a solitary island…The thought of Arthur Wetmore surfaced for a moment, but she pushed that aside.
“Oh,” he said. “I thought for sure you was my cousin! I do beg your pardon, Miss.”
“He begs her pardon!” the first man shouted. “Buy’n a drink!”
This was uncomfortable. Kay lifted her glass as if to toast him, to say she already had one, thank you, and drank the spruce beer down. It made her choke, but she swallowed more, still choking, and laughed. She felt the bruise below her eye. Still tender. That swollen eye was why she fit in here.
The boy’s name was Augustine Muise. The large woman was Doraine, and the shouter said he himself was Old Joe Brooks, and he seemed to know Aren, so they all sat at a table in the smoky noise while Aren and the red-haired girl talked together by the wall for a long time. Someone gave Kay another glass of spruce beer. She tried to pay for it, but could not find her purse in her pocket. Oh dear. She turned to Aren, worried—
“I’ve got it. You dropped it a time ago,” he said, “in Tom Poulette’s place.”
He held out her little brown purse, and she fished in it for a fifty-cent piece. The price of drink was criminal here, but of course it would be. How could Aren afford it?
Merissa was sitting on his lap now. Kay did not like that at all. She was tired.
Then there was a cloudy time, walking through the streets making too much noise. Kay tried to shush Aren, for he would get in worse trouble than she would. Merissa, the girl, kept hanging on his arm laughing, with her head rolling around. She had a loose way of hanging and strutting that Kay did not like but Aren seemed to find hilarious.
A gang of sailors in duck pants and sweaters rolled past, and one man stopped to look back at them.
Then he turned and ran back to grab at Aren, shouting, “Get away from these girls! You’re a foul bastard and will take them your way to hell!”
It made no sense to Kay, what he said, nor to Aren, apparently.
“We bunked on the Alhambra, you know me!” the man shouted. “Off Manila in ’19!” It seemed to enrage him when Aren shrugged and moved aside, lifting a shoulder to prevent the man from grabbing at his neck.
Kay waded in then, though she had nothing to fight him with. The other men from the ship were laughing and chivvying their mate. Seeing a long piece of lath there on the ground, Kay picked it up and swung it like a mashie, as if to take the man’s feet out from under him, but it broke on his ankles and the men all laughed.
Aren laughed too and put his hands up, making peace with them. He called over his shoulder not to take them on, that it was not worth it. “Not worth the fight,” he said. Or did he say, I’m not worth a fight?
Then someone spotted a dock guard coming and the gang of men went reeling off in another direction, still laughing at the broken lath.
Aren loped ahead to catch up to Merissa, and Kay had only a splinter in her palm for her trouble.
They ended up in another place, a cellar, with men sleeping against the wall. People were smoking at a stove, passing a stubby pipe around, and Kay did not like that either. She was glad of her dark coat that let her slide into the background, glad of her lack of prettiness.
The men swayed toward and away from Merissa; some of her clothes seemed to have got lost. Aren stood back by the cellar door, leaning against the wall and laughing sometimes, but keeping a grip on Kay’s hand too. He wanted to leave and Merissa did not, but in the end he won, and they were walking again…
Kay did not know the route they took, but when they stopped tramping, they were at the foot of the stone steps at Aren’s house. In the dim hall, Merissa went ahead of them up all those stairs, shoes clacking all three flights up, swaying exaggeratedly, looking back over her shoulder at them. Aren told Kay she was to sleep in his bed, that he would find another bunk. “There’s an empty room down the hall,” he said, “but it will be a sty.”
Merissa hung in the doorway waiting for him, and when Aren was satisfied that Kay was safe, they left her there.
“Lock the door,” he whispered through the crack before he shut it.
She did. Then she was alone in that half room. She did not take off her clothes, but slid her shoes together in front of the door so she
could find them.
It was no longer entirely dark. She lay down on his bed and heard strange noises, sounds she did not want to hear. She heard Aren’s voice and then high laughing, and strange crows from that girl, and huffing noises. It was miserable to hear them together. It was none of her business. She stuffed her fingers in her ears and waited for sleep to hide her.
Without a perceptible interval, without dreams or thinking, it was bright morning. She’d forgotten to wind her watch, but it was still ticking: just after seven. She wound it carefully, her fingers not working very well.
Standing, she made the bed; the sheets were worn thin as silk. She put her shoes back on and tidied her hair, and pulled her coat around her—little purse back in the pocket, yes, with her Greek book, and a still-clean handkerchief. There was no water in the room, and she did not dare explore the hallway to find the pipe. Gently, gently, she unlocked the door and turned the handle, and stepped out.
Aren opened a door nearby. “Goodbye,” he said.
“Goodbye.”
At the head of the steep-pitched stairs, she turned. He was still watching her.
“I’ll come and see you again,” she said. “We miss you so much—we are always looking for you.”
He touched his fingers to his lips and blew, as she had taught him to do on the Morning Light, and turned back into that other room.
* * *
—
The stairs were steep and the stairwell so ill-lit that she had to take her time going down the three flights. She’d already missed the early train, she’d have to take the DAR train through Wolfville to get home by supper.
Almost at the bottom of the stairs, the outer door opened and in came a woman Kay knew: Esther Field, who had been in her class at school. Her father was the Baptist minister at the South End church in Yarmouth.
Esther looked up and cocked her head under her neat blue hat. “Why, Kay!”
“Hello,” Kay said, stopping on the stairs. “Do you live here too?”
Esther smiled, taking that as a pleasantry. “No, I am a district visitor these days, and this rooming house is on my beat. I go round Saturday mornings to look in on a few church families and elderly people, see that they are getting good nutrition, you know, and arrange help for those who need it. You’ve come to see your nephew?”
The Difference Page 26
