Still Life with June

by Darren Greer

  “The white man’s unholy trinity,” corrected Julie, as though she was still in writers’ group and couldn’t help editing. “Fascinating.”

  Suddenly embarrassed, I realized that I had taken on a lecturing tone. I was quoting directly from one of the stories I had written that year about Darrel.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Kind of dull, I guess.”

  “No,” said Julie. “Really, it’s fascinating. At least they named the motel after one of the Indians as a sign of respect.”

  “Glooscap?”

  “Wasn’t he an Indian?” Julie asked.

  “Sort of,” I said.

  According to what I’d read, Glooscap was not just an Indian. He was more like a god, who walked on the backs of whales, used islands as stepping stones, commanded the animals, and created the first Micmac man to keep him company. I doubted somehow that such a creature would consider renting out forty-dollar rooms with free satellite television any great compliment. But I didn’t say this to Julie.

  Sometimes, when you’re writing a story and you visit the place where that story is set, there is a kind of power there, a sense of primal underness that is almost spiritual. It is hard to describe, but seeing all the places that form the setting for your stories, imaging all the people you have created walking around those same streets, gives you a powerful sense of nostalgia even though you may have never been there before. That’s how I felt about this town. I knew how the chiefs and the tribes must have felt, having lost something so sacred. June, good at sensing my moods, sent a chill rippling up my spine when she started softly saying, “Glooscap. Glooscap. Glooscap.”

  As if she knew what that word meant.

  As if quoting the name of some long lost Indian god who had abandoned this land centuries ago could keep us from being blown off our bridges into that legendary place where the three rivers meet.

  CLXXXI

  Twenty years after the meeting between the British and the French, the French ousted the British settlers, discontinued the annuity agreed to by the British and the Indians, and changed the name of the town from New Stratford to L’Acadie. Later, the British won the territories back and ousted the French in a famous expulsion, scattering poor French settlers in every direction with livestock and carts of possessions in tow. The British settlers changed the name of L’Acadie to Three Rivers. Three Frenchmen who refused to leave were hanged in that year, just as a few British settlers who refused to make way for the French had been hanged years earlier. The Indians, those that hadn’t been moved off to reserves or migrated west to escape the inevitable European encroachment, were hanged regularly for such offenses as inciting violence and revolution, looking at white women, or practicing black magic by burning sweetgrass and sage and cedar in wooden bowls in public areas. During the first British resettlement, two travelling Southern revolutionaries were hanged by a band of black loyalists who had also chosen to settle in the area. The revolutionaries had come to the settlement with the intent of stirring the patriotic ashes among “the niggers.” The British supported “the niggers” because it furthered their colonial aims for the time being. To make themselves feel better about associating with coloureds, the British settlers continued hanging Indians left and right.

  CLXXXII

  In a town where so many people had been hanged, there was never a re-enactment of a public execution in any of the high-school historical plays. If history really was as pleasant as Grade Eleven drama teachers tried to make it, we wouldn’t need a Constitution or a Charter of Rights.

  Emily Post for Colonial Invasions would have sufficed.

  CLXXXIII

  The religious history of Three Rivers was laid out thus:

  1. The first church was built on the east side of the eastern-most river, the Lahave, by the original French settlers.

  2. A second church was built by the British colonizers.

  3. A third, Baptist, church was built by a wave of puritan British loyalists from the south, whose treasonous countrymen, engaged then in the full cry of revolution, were really just tax-burdened Englishmen who had lost their accent and their admiration for a monarch who lived five thousand miles away and never came to visit.

  4. The first French Catholic church was burnt down one night by a band of English Protestants.

  5. The Anglican church was built in its place many years later.

  6. By the late 1970s time when the Pentecostals muscled their way in, you could no longer be hanged for burning sweetgrass in the public square. Of course, there was not an Indian to be seen in Three Rivers. The black loyalists still lived there, in their own little community about an hour outside of Three Rivers. No one bothered them, and they bothered no one.

  Giddy-up.

  CLXXXIV

  The secular history of the town was laid out thus:

  1. The rivers themselves, which had once been saddled with unpronounceable Indian names meaning sharing, caring, and respect, were long ago renamed after famous French rivers. Then two were named after famous British rivers, as they are still named today.

  2. In 1918, Three Rivers was the first town in North America to rename sauerkraut liberty cabbage, in defiance of the Germans defeated in the First World War.

  3. In 1922 everyone forgot all about liberty cabbage when the Three Shirts Garment Factory on the west side of the furthest river, the Mersey, burned to the ground and sixty-one workers died.

  4. Among those workers was one Sherman Greene, Darrel’s great-grandfather. The records of the names of the deceased were to be found at the Three Rivers Historical Society in the town hall, which is where I spent much of the Saturday afternoon of my little trip to the town of Three Rivers.

  5. I also discovered that Darrel’s great-grandmother was directly descended from native and French Canadian heritage, and that after her husband burnt to the ground along with the factory, she lived on the furthest edge of the Three Rivers town limits in a little one-storey house, where she raised one son.

  6. This son, named David, eventually married and had one child — Jacob, or Jake — Darrel’s father. Both worked at the local pulp and paper mill, which is where Darrel might have worked had he not been sent to reform school, become gay, got addicted to alcohol and drugs, and moved to the nearest large city.

  7. June was moved to the Sisters Who Gave Good Hope in the city two years after their mother died.

  8. None of this was to be found in the voting, birth, and death registries in the dusty, under-utilized one-room historical society office beneath the town hall.

  9. Most of this I got from Darrel and June’s files.

  10. If the Three Rivers High School were to make the Greene’s family history into a play, it would begin and end with the death of Sherman Greene in the famous Three Shirts Garment Factory fire of 1922. Probably, as she had done in the historical revue all those years ago, Sherman’s wife would stand on the stage wringing her hands and wearing a genuine Indian blanket.

  CLXXXV

  I caught up with Julie again at two at the Coffee Spoon Diner, a sheaf of loose-leaf covered in pen-scrawled notes under my arm. June was eating pancakes and syrup, not really lunch material, which she had managed to smear all over her face by the time I arrived at their table. Julie was having coffee and a danish. I ordered a coffee from the waitress.

  “What did you find out?” Julie asked.

  “Not much,” I told her. “Where they used to live. That’s about all.”

  “You wanna go there after we eat?”

  Julie knew I did. I had come to Three Rivers for no other reason. June lifted one side of a soggy pancake with her fingers and tried to eat it that way. I told her to use a fork. She nodded, laid it back on her plate, and did as she was told, though she still somehow managed to get more syrup on her face than in her mouth. When she was done, Julie handed her a napkin and told her to wipe her face. June took the napkin and with great concentration began to take inexpert swipes at her own cheeks. Julie laughed, and took the napkin
from her to help. “I like June,” she said. “How could anyone not?”

  “Good,” I said. “You can take her into the bathroom and get her cleaned up, so she doesn’t stick to the floor of the car.”

  While June and Julie were gone the waitress came over to clear our table. I asked her if she had ever heard of the Greene family.

  “There’s a lot of Greens around here,” she said. “Which ones?”

  “Greene with an e.”

  “Lots of those too.”

  The waitress went away. Julie and June came back and sat down. June decided she wanted a milkshake. She slammed both her fists down over and over on the table.

  “Goodness gracious,” said Julie. “Great balls of ire.”

  I tried to order one, to stop June from throwing her tantrum and so that the other patrons in the diner would stop looking at us.

  “That’s the summertime menu,” the waitress said. “We don’t serve milkshakes in December.”

  “What’s the summertime menu doing on the wall in the wintertime, then?” I asked Julie when the waitress had left. I have always been too cowardly to make a comment to a waitress’s face, but I can complain lustily behind her back.

  “I don’t know,” said Julie. She added that, in her pink uniform and her pink pantyhose and pink hat, the waitress “looked like bubble gum.”

  Unless that bubble gum brought us a milkshake, which was not going to happen, June was about to go postal on us. “I want a milkshake, Bubby!” she said, pounding her fists on the table with every second word. “I want a milkshake, Bubby!”

  This was the first time Julie had seen June get like this, and I think she was beginning to realize what a mixed blessing retardation was. Along with all the sweet naïveté came plenty of childish petulance and the occasional temper tantrum. A child can get away with this. At most they’ll draw an amused look or a “tsk tsk” from some mother who thinks that she could do better. But June was thirty-three, for Christ’s sake. A thirtythree-year-old, overweight, blonde-haired, somewhat wild-eyed woman demanding a chocolate milkshake from her brother in a busy diner on a Saturday afternoon draws more than a few quick glances. It draws long, hard stares and lots of whispering. And no one looked particularly amused. Frightened maybe, but not amused.

  “Come on,” I told Julie. “Let’s get her out of here.”

  “What about your coffee?”

  “We’ll have to get it somewhere else. When she gets like this, you can’t do anything but wait it out.”

  On the sidewalk among the Saturday afternoon shoppers, June decided, as General Dawes said she would, that she wanted to go home. Even swearing at her wouldn’t work this time. Finally, she lay down in the middle of the sidewalk while Julie and I stood embarrassed above her. People avoided us by crossing the street. A small crowd gathered in front of the Barristers and Solicitors office on the opposite side of the street to watch Julie and me beg June to get back up on her feet.

  “For fuck’s sake, June. Get up!” I said.

  She just lay there crying in her blue parka and green polyester slacks, a great, colourful whale on the sidewalk. Julie knelt down on knee beside her. We were doing the good cop/bad cop thing.

  “June, honey,” said Julie. “You’ll catch cold.”

  “I want to go home,” June sobbed. “Bubby swore at me.”

  “I know he did,” said Julie. “Bubby wants us to go with him, June.”

  “Bubby wouldn’t buy me a milkshake.”

  “There were no fucking milkshakes, June,” I said.

  June, whose face was buried in the crook of her arm, shook her head violently and cried harder.

  “I don’t think you’re helping,” Julie said.

  “Are you?”

  “At least,” said Julie, “I’m not cursing at her, Cameron.”

  “Fuck you too, Dagnia!”

  Julie slowly stood, brushed the dirt off her knees, and gauged me cooly. “She’s your sister. You get her up off the goddamned ground then. Bubby!”

  Julie neatly sidestepped June and moved on up the sidewalk. I looked down at June. She was at that stage of a temper tantrum when the breath was beginning to hitch in her throat. “Fine,” I said. “We’re leaving now. We’ll see you later.”

  I walked away too. Before I reached the bridge (Julie was halfway over it and marching determinedly back to the car) I turned for a quick look around. June was still lying on the sidewalk in front of the diner. All we could see was the bulk of her blue, blue parka. All pedestrians were now officially using the other side of the street.

  “Come on,” I shouted to Julie. “Let’s go get her.”

  It took us twenty minutes to coax June up. Julie finally did it by promising her that we would go get her a milkshake and then take her back to the Sisters Who Gave Good Hope. “I wanna go home,” June mumbled, half to me and half to herself as she walked beside us back to the hotel.

  “We’re going,” I said. “We’re going soon.”

  We drove June to BIG BAD HAMBURGERS, the only place she could get a milkshake at this time of year, and June had another meal there. She started farting as soon as we got back in the car.

  “There’s no way,” said Julie, who had calmed down a bit, “that anybody’s food can work in them that fast.”

  “I think just the idea of that place makes June shit,” I said.

  “Uh-oh, Bubby,” June said, after a particularly loud hallelujah chorus in B flat Minor. “I think I pooped myself.”

  Julie looked over at me gravely. “How you wanna deal with this one, Bubby?”

  CLXXXVI

  Julie ended up going back into the restaurant with June. June didn’t want to change, she first wanted someone to see if she needed to change. I couldn’t hack it. I didn’t think I could check the inside of June’s enormous nylon panties for ... I’ll spare you. Julie did the dirty work, but when she was finished June wouldn’t leave the bathroom. It took us another twenty minutes standing at the door, with all the customers staring at us and the manager threatening to call the police, before we finally got June outside again, and then only by telling her we were taking her home.

  “Are we?” asked Julie, as we headed back towards the car.

  “Sort of,” I said. “But not to the Sisters Who Gave Good Hope.”

  “Then where?” Julie asked.

  “We’re going to what used to be June’s home.”

  It didn’t take us long to find the place where the great-grandmother, the Indian/French Canadian, built her little home, lost her husband to an industrial fire, and raised a son who raised a son who raised a son. It was, according to the title search I had done that morning at the historical society, just on the outskirts of town, on a sparsely populated road called Mermaid Lane. I knew roughly where it was. But we took our time, even though there was little to see. Here was the secret shame of all small picturesque towns: the collapse of the great economic dream, the worst of failures. Here were the people who, even with the advantages of race and the right religion, lived in tarpaper shacks and two- or three-room houses, who let their lawns grow weedy and long, piled them high with used car parts and oil drums bleeding rust and sinking ungraciously into the earth. A fresh coat of paint was a rarity, though occasionally we passed a well-kept, neat little bungalow painted bright yellow or blue with shockingly white trim; you knew that these were people with the rising and falling tides of life behind them, old people whose kids had left and who had been able to put enough away to fix things up a little bit and keep the grass at bay with a cheap electric lawnmower.

  I grew up in a place like this, in a town like Three Rivers. I knew what it meant to be one of these people, to go to school with the wealthier kids from town, who would go home to colour TVs and ping-pong tables and fresh ham sandwiches on their kitchen counters. I knew what hell it was to stay on that school bus, to ride it out to the furthest reaches, and never to bring your friends home for fear they wouldn’t speak to you again if they saw the squalor in whi
ch you lived. To pretend that you were an only child who lived in one of the town’s great white Victorian houses and settled into a clean, well-appointed bedroom every night, instead of falling asleep amid broken clutter and threadbare sheets and blankets that never seemed to keep you warm and rode down to your ankles in the middle of the night. Fathers who drank and hit, mothers who disappeared just when you needed them most. I knew the bitter, metallic taste of inequality well; I could feel it here, in this place. We passed house after house like this, in between the town dump and the sulphur-reeking paper mill and the occasional do-it-yourself auto repair barn with an old wooden sign suspended from a tree branch by a rusted chain. Mermaid Lane was more of the same — a dirt road just off the main highway, a collection of poorer houses and lawns crowded with junk, brown and desolate in the grassless December. Places like Mermaid Lane were what once were known as shantytowns. Often these places were named after something fanciful or optimistic. I wondered where the name Mermaid Lane came from. Perhaps it was only an exotic irony, or a secret wish for transformation. Back in Three Rivers proper the wealthier areas all had streets named after woody vegetation — Elm and Maple and Birch.

  “They cut down all the trees to build houses,” Julie had commented wryly, “and then name the bloody streets after them.”

  Not being from a place like Three Rivers, Julie was a newcomer to small-town irony.

  The confusion was evident on Julie’s face when turned onto Mermaid Lane. Why would I want to bring June to a place like this? She said nothing, however, and just drove her car slowly past the potholes and over the rain ridges. As we passed each small house Julie asked if this was the one. June was now asleep in the back seat, the snoring and farting having abated. Finally, Julie suggested that I get out at one of the houses and ask.