Miss Elva

by Stephens Gerard Malone

  “Was anyone hurt?”

  “They went after your brother’s friend.”

  “Why?”

  “I dunno. Something he did to the clock in town, I think.”

  “You shouldn’t have come, Jane. It’s too dangerous.”

  “Fine. I’ll go.”

  “No! Don’t.” This time, Dom kissed her.

  “Did you really not know he was back?”

  “No. But he’s not here to honour our father. I know that much.”

  “No forgiveness for the Meghan Rose?”

  “I would if he’d admit to what he did, but Gil’s a coward. He ran away. Can only imagine what he’s done that he has to come back now.”

  “Never thought I’d see him again. No one did. Except Elva.”

  “Why did our little Miss Elva think that?”

  “Shut up about her,” Jane said, gently biting as she struggled with his shirt.

  His chest, matted with dark hair, flinched under Jane’s teasing tongue. Dom pressed Jane to him as he pulled her to the ground, wrapping his arms about her.

  “What is it?” For Dom was aware that Jane had gone still, momentarily eluding him.

  “I see your mother’s face, Father Domenique. What would she say if she could see us now?”

  “Don’t mock my faith.”

  Jane’d accepted being second to God because that meant nothing to her, but be damned, she’d not come after his mother.

  “Tell her, Dom. Tell her soon.”

  Elva was not ignorant of what happens between men and women, nor had there ever been any mystery or wonder surrounding it. Jane, growing up in the house on Breton Street, had regaled Elva with mechanical details. Never pretty; dirty, sweaty, hardly romantic. Then there was Rilla and Amos during their Saturday-night ritual, Elva not quite sure if their noisy coupling was giving them pleasure or pain. But this, what happened before her now, this was something else. Not the fumbling of a teenage boy and his girl. Not a friendship blossoming into more. How could Elva have missed noticing two natures whose essential elements required the other until, simply, this fusion?

  Elva lay under a flutter of rhododendron blossoms like one starved, feasting upon someone else being loved, certain that she was somehow sinning in the watching, not them in the doing, and unable, unwilling to turn away. No longer enough, wanting to be Jane.

  Elva awoke with a start.

  What about the white rain and running her fingers over the tidal ridges of beach sand as he held her? No, that was his chest against her face. Someone had carried her. He carried her. His hands, hard, they were hot. Elva remembered asking, What about Jane? And he said, What about you, my little marionette? I came to get you. Don’t you love me? Yes! Like a blanket he covered her, a snail traversing her neck, leaving sticky brands that tingled in the cool, sweet air of morning. She breathed his breath. He rushed into me! Then he looked sad and asked, Why did you have to be ugly?

  “What’s the matter with you? You sick?” Jane said, hastily scrubbing her face with water from the pitcher on their bedside bureau, shuddering from the coldness of it.

  No, the same. Elva shook her head. Only a dream and they have a way of becoming nightmares by day.

  “You’d better hurry. Rilla’s ready for church.”

  Lingering in bed, Elva tried to clear the still powerful images from her head, voices that whispered from across the night.

  But Jane?

  And he’d said, not to worry, she’s coming. Go to sleep. It’s better if you sleep, before she gets back. Say nothing. Say nothing, Miss Elva.

  There was an anxiousness in her abdomen she had never known before. Confusion. She sat up. That face in the mirror on the bureau grinning back at her, but not happy, wobbling, saying, See, I am a goblin.

  “Did you sleep in your dress?”

  Elva looked. She had, and stiffly got out of bed.

  “Jesus!” Jane had her hand over her mouth. “Look, you’re a woman now!”

  Oh! And Elva noticed the blood too.

  Jane was laughing, Rilla! Rilla! Leaving Elva to mark her womanhood by hiding her shoes, with their saltwater stains, under the bed.

  OAK’D BEEN PROPPED UP by his window watching Elva hunched over on a log by the end of the driveway, drawing.

  “Hey! Gil says you painted these pictures up here. That fisherman and the sleigh and those cows in the field, I pretend they’re pieces of a story. I really like the black-and-white cat with the red smile. Helps me pass the time.”

  Elva ignored him, expecting ridicule to follow.

  “I like them!”

  “Hey, back,” she’d said, looking up.

  The bruising had set in. Oak sounded awful.

  “Thanks for last night, you know, getting me back with the others.”

  Elva asked how he was feeling. He was sure he’d broken a few ribs, but all things considered, he’d be okay.

  “You some kind of a doctor?”

  No, he replied, but he’d had broken ribs before and knew what to expect. Oak didn’t elaborate.

  “Whatcha doing?”

  She could have said, Trying to keep my head from spinning off or worms eating through my heart or my skin from moulting. And she was angry to boot! Boy, was she angry, with a whole new sympathy for poor ol’ Eve of Eden, who just happened to be fodder for Father Cértain’s Sunday sermon that morning. But the priest had it wrong. You didn’t choose to eat from no damned apple tree, it just happened. Then God made you pay for not having any choice at all! Like Elva’s trip to the Abbey, which was still a muddle of half-truths and what-was-real and why did Gil keep popping up in the middle of it all, a dream in which he carried Elva home? She didn’t want to see that Jane was changing from the beloved image of a bare-footed sister, arms caked with sand when she and Elva dug for clams, into something that would take her away. But when Dom fucked her—and that’s how Elva thought about it, that’s the word she used because she didn’t want to think anything nice about him changing Jane, and she thought it with the same intensity as I hate you—so when Dom fucked Jane, Elva understood from it that Jane would know life, she’d know want. Haw haw, said God.

  But Oak was just being polite when he asked, Whatcha doing? So Elva scribbled harder and faster and said, Nothing.

  Amos let Rilla have it when he realized she’d agreed to Gil Barthélemy staying with them. As good as a murderer, he said, at the very least a coward, which, because Amos’s illness did not affect his voice, worked up to a goddamned-Jesus-fuckin’-Christ roar when he was in the jug trying to drown out the pain in his gut. Then it was best to keep doors shut, your head down, until his drink du jour, usually bourbon, worked its magic.

  Rilla didn’t care. She was thankful to have Gil and his friend as paying boarders even if Oak didn’t take kindly to her nursing at first.

  “Why do you think?” Elva asked, carrying fresh bandages for her mother.

  “You have to relearn some folks that not everyone wants to hurt them.”

  “Who did that?”

  Rilla didn’t say.

  After Oak first asked Elva to show him her sketch book, she shyly began to sit with him and Gil when she drew. The silence was unnerving. Elva sure didn’t remember Gil being bereft of the gift of gab, simultaneously skittish to be elsewhere and obsessively worried about Oak. For her part, Elva was still trying to understand why she felt like she was going to jump out of her skin. She hadn’t yet even begun to get her head around what people would say if they found out about Jane and Dom.

  “Well, then, read to me if you both won’t talk,” Oak said.

  On the nightstand was a copy of The Great Gatsby. Rilla kept it as a decoration. No one had read it, nor could she remember where it came from. Rilla said one of the factory workers must have left it, and judging from that lot, it had to be dirty. At least naughty. She didn’t think it proper to listen to Fitzgerald’s tale about men in love with other men’s wives.

  Jane, who flirted with the idea of changing h
er name to Daisy, or at least Daisy-Jane, was enthralled by Gil’s theatrical delivery. He made her laugh and Jane liked to laugh.

  “Who am I?”

  “Yes, who’s Gil,” said Elva as Jane assigned characters to all.

  Gil would have to be Daisy’s husband, Tom, but of course, Daisy was really in love with Gatsby. No one had to ask who Gatsby was.

  And Oak? He’d be Wilson the mechanic. Probably on account of the clock business. Rilla could be Miss Baker, although no one could picture her lounging around, playing tennis now and then.

  “What about me?” said Elva.

  “Yes, what about Elva! Elva needs a role!”

  She could be the creepy eyes on the billboard.

  “But that’s not a real person!”

  From downstairs, Amos banged the wall. Guess he must have overheard Gil because he said shut the fuck up about those rich Jews up there. Amos figured all wealthy Americans were Jewish.

  The readings progressed much more quietly over the next few days, the perfect balm for the ache of reality, but somewhere betwixt East Egg and West Egg and Wilson getting it wrong, shooting Gatsby in the pool, the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg watched Jane watching Gil.

  Put up a roadblock and it was bound to happen to one as emotionally hot-wired as Jane. Jeanine Barthélemy wouldn’t stop short of having Jane burned as a witch if she knew where her saintly son had been, and Rilla, well, Rilla would know all too well how tenuous their situation with Amos was. Any scandal and he’d dump them like garbage. Add to the mix the danger of so many idle men lollygagging around town, especially after what had happened to Oak, and there was no way Jane could slip out alone any more to be with Dom.

  But she could pretend she was with him, and Elva knew it.

  Can’t they see, him acting out when that Gatsby speaks ’cause Jane likes it, watching her over the top of that book, her sittin’ there all queenie-like, and I know she’s pretending he’s Dom.

  Jane’s glances lingering too long, sitting too close. As Elva knew and feared, it brought Gil pleasure when it wasn’t meant to. When she realized it too, Jane flashed him that haughty look of indignation, turning away angrily as much to chastise herself for being unfaithful to Dom as to distance Gil. But the pained expression was on a face like Dom’s, and if being angry with Dom was impossible for Jane, Elva wondered, how come no one sees?

  Elva was wrong. Someone else did see, felt what Elva felt and worried that Gil was falling in love with Jane.

  Moths bumped against the screens in the warm evening air. The kitchen calendar had a new month and a new advertisement: Ipswich Baking Powder. Elva refused to look at it any more. She was boycotting it. The name reminded her of what was trouble waiting to happen and she’d rather forget. Amos continued speculating without anyone paying too much attention.

  “There’s something not right about that friend of Barthélemy’s,” he said, Oak being more noticeable now that he was up and around. “He doesn’t speak much.”

  Jane was at the stove, stirring some milk Rilla asked her to watch. Her back was to them like she was trying to blend in with the cupboards.

  “And what’s the matter with you these days, girl?” he asked Elva, who was helping Rilla clear the table. “You’re too damned quiet as well. Gives me the creeps, you sitting around all day. What are you always drawing, anyway?”

  Elva tried to carry too much with her weak arm and the dishes clattered back onto the table, knocking the salt shaker onto Amos’s lap.

  He jumped up and pushed her away from the table, then threw salt over his shoulder.

  “For Christ’s sake, can’t you do anything without making a mess? As if I didn’t have enough fucking bad luck with the lot of you.”

  “Those boys pay their board.” Rilla skilfully gathered up the plates and deflected Amos’s anger away from Elva.

  “Yeah? How, is what I’d like to know. Where’s Barthélemy getting the money?” Amos said, his eyes blazing on Elva as he sat back down.

  “All I know is that they’re out early and not back till late,” Rilla said, the tablecloth straightened. “Must have work somewhere.”

  “In this town? Who’d hire Gil Barthélemy?” Holding his stomach, he added, “Fuck me, woman, if you aren’t becoming the worst cook in Demerett Bridge.”

  A dollar a week, Gil offered next evening after he and Oak had returned.

  His hand was on Elva’s shoulder during the asking. She was cataloguing in her mind all the physical occurrences between them. This time his hand was heavy and warm with an oh so gentle squeeze. Does it feel the same as Dom’s? Would Gil touch Jane like his brother? What would it be like if Gil touched me that way? And Elva turned her blush away.

  It was a princely sum to look after a dog. She took the job as offered not for the money but because Major had taken readily to her. The only warm-blooded thing to ever kiss her. (No, that wasn’t entirely true. That mousy Harry Winters had been dared by his older brother. There was a penny in the doing, but he cried after and said he’d got warts. Rilla? Well she had to, so that didn’t count.) So Major was the only warmblooded thing to ever want to kiss her, and he didn’t care if Elva wasn’t straight limbed or creamy skinned. Making sure he was fed and watered was something she’d have freely done. Even so, the money heightened Elva’s curiosity. Where was it coming from?

  Solving the mystery wasn’t planned. It just happened, a sort of what-if-I’m-out-and-see-where-they’re-going kind of thing, Elva rationalized early next morning when she was taking Major for his walk. It surprised her when the boys headed not in the direction of town but in the opposite way until Gil and Oak were nothing more than specks on the Old Narrows Road.

  The sun was washing steadily over green hills, splashing down into Demerett Bridge. Not a rainy May this year. The flat roadway ahead afforded Elva an easy view as she sauntered along, Major sniffing at grass roots, Elva trying not to look just in case the boys turned and caught her. When they stopped to sit by the side of the road, stripping off their shirts against the heat, Elva led Major into the tall grass and said, Quiet now.

  The dust cloud on the road beyond Gil and Oak moved quickly, stopping suddenly, a bus swallowing them whole. Then it turned off the Old Narrows Road and swaggered onto a long-unused carriage lane that once skirted all the way around Ostrea Lake. It made its way to the back entrance of the steelworks, slipping into the compound of the Maritime Foundry Corporation through the myriad of plywood sheds, chimney stacks and roofless outbuildings dotting the scarred land behind the main complex. The cloud vanished and Elva could follow no more.

  So Gil and Oak were scabs. Hadn’t Amos been saying that all along, and while he had no love for the company that turned him loose as soon as he was too sick to work, well, scabbing was unforgivable. A man just didn’t do that kind of thing. Sure, Elva wasn’t a hundred per cent certain why scabbing in a labour dispute was so wrong, but she figured by the way Amos went on about it that Gil and Oak wouldn’t want him to find out and her old man wouldn’t want to know. The day still ahead, Elva scratched Major behind the ear and said, C’mon, boy. There was her hideout to see.

  A small door in Elva’s closet led to a cramped space, several feet high, running the length of the house under the skirting of the sloping mansard roof. Amos’s wife, Dotsie, had probably had plans to use the space for storage, but other than an ancient hornet’s nest, the crawl space had never been used.

  It had become a sanctuary of sorts, like when Amos got really sauced, knocking Rilla about, shoving his gun in her mouth and saying, Shut it you cunt or I’ll blow your fuckin’ head off and them little cunts upstairs too. The girls would crawl inside, sometimes crying themselves to sleep in each other’s arms while Amos raged down below.

  After Buttons died, Jane didn’t use it much. She was getting too big to get through the door, and Elva noticed her sister more prone to stand up to Amos than hide from him. Like that time when he said she paid too much mind to her hair and she said so what and A
mos dragged her out onto the porch and wanted to cut it off. But he didn’t.

  So the crawl space became Elva’s place and she used it not just to hide from Amos but when life in general felt like too many voices speaking at once. It was hot in the summer, draughty in winter, lit by lines of light from a vent at each end, stained with watermarks from the leaking roof. Here Elva would curl up on ratty horse blankets, overhearing the men her mother let rooms to go on about poor wages and Rilla’s breaded pork chops and Jane’s tits, Rilla singing in the kitchen about sweet chariots that would come and take her home, Amos yelling across the backyard from his shed to shut the fuck up, while Elva drew, papering the cedar planks with her secret voice.

  One more thing. From all that time spent colouring, Elva knew from a crack in the plaster that she could hear everything plainly, and provided the closet door was open, she had a clear view of the room next to hers. Gil and Oak’s.

  “I expected it today. There isn’t a window on that bus that ain’t broken,” Gil was saying that evening, sitting at a table, adding what looked like sums in a ledger. “The union’s soon gonna figure out how the foundry’s getting us in.”

  Oak was sitting on the bed, tools arrayed in front of him, a watch in pieces in his hand. He was having a hard go with his tinkering.

  “I wish we didn’t have to work there.”

  “Money’s good.”

  “We’re not suited to this kind of work. I ache all over and my hands are cut up.”

  Gil snapped down his pencil. “I didn’t ask you to follow me! I’d be gone now if it weren’t for you getting the shit kicked out o’ you.”

  Oak leaned back against the headboard.

  There was silence for a while, then Gil hung his head over the back of his chair.

  “I need this job, Oak.” It sounded apologetic.

  “If we squared things with Bryant—”

  “I was dead the minute I ran, we ran. You know that.” Gil turned back to his ledger, like maybe staring at the figures long enough would magically come up with more money. “I said I’ll get us out of here and I will. Schooners are running rum along the coast all the time. We’ll get to Florida like I said. Maybe Mexico. We just need a bit more money.”