by Hadley Dyer
“No, sir, I’m just looking for my dad.”
“You want me to get him? I can’t go until the other guy comes back.”
“Ah, shoot. You can’t let us through just for a sec? I gotta be somewhere.” David nodded in my direction.
“Can’t keep the lady waiting, eh?” François laughed again. I fidgeted with my bag. “Sorry, but no way. I tell him you come by?”
“Nah, that’s all right,” said David. “It was supposed to be a surprise, you know.”
François looked stricken. “I tell you what,” he said. “I’m just doing my job, right? I don’t make the rules. Okay, sometimes I’m busy and I don’t notice something. So what?” He gestured in a tres François kind of way. “I do my best, you know? I do my job.”
“Gotcha,” said David. “Thanks anyway, François.” He said it kind of loudly. “We’ll get out of your way.” A truck was pulling up to the entrance.
“Okay, you kids have good times.”
I was peeved, to say the least. “This is how you sneak into places? You ask the gatekeeper straight out and then talk loud enough for half the shipyard to know that we’re trying to get in?”
“Keep your voice down.”
“Keep my voice down!”
David grabbed my arm and pulled me around the truck. “Lord jumpin’, girl,” he hissed. “Shut yer yap for a second.”
He lifted a tarp draped over the truck bed. “Empty,” he said. A quick look around, and next thing you knew, he’d scrambled up and disappeared into the back.
“Hurry up,” said the tarp. “Are you crazy?”
David poked his head out. “She’s gonna move in three seconds and there’s two more trucks coming this way. You want to find your cousin?”
The truck grumbled into gear.
I put my foot on the bumper and grabbed the Gravedigger’s outstretched hand.
Chapter Seven
The truck did a lot of lurching and swerving and smelling like gasoline and dog fur. It was hot under the tarp. My knees burned on the metal truck bed. My hand rested on something greasy. I could feel David breathing. I wondered if he was scared, but when we bumped around a corner he put his hand on my back and kept me steady.
We stopped. The truck rocked as the driver’s door opened and slammed shut. After a minute, David stuck his head out and looked around. Then he flung back the tarp, and we climbed out and dusted ourselves off.
There’s this old comic—the only time I ever saw Halifax in one—about Johnny Canuck battling infamous war criminal Rudolf Hindor, who was using brain serum and radio magnetic rays to control the minds of his private army and threaten the world. I mean, Threaten the World!!! Hindor’s army was stealing planes and ships from along the coast, and let me tell you, when you’re standing there in the shipyard you realize just how hard a time they must have had of it.
Rising above us was a gigantic ship that filled the whole sky with steel. I just about fell over trying to see all the way to the top. The ship was sitting in an enormous hole in the ground—the dry dock, David called it. Way down in the hole, workers were leaning out from wood scaffolding, tickling the ship’s belly with paintbrushes. The air smelled like paint fumes and hot metal and salt, and a strong breeze off the water snatched at my breath.
“Better start with the main building,” said David. We made our way towards it, ducking behind oil drums and a pile of large steel beams. People noticed all right, but no one stopped us. David watched for his father. And I watched for Johnny.
“Tell me again what your cousin looks like,” said David.
Across the yard, a huge crane was lowering a boiler into the keel of a new ship. The ship was built only to about where the first deck would begin. It looked like the world’s biggest gravy boat.
“I’d say Johnny’s about seven feet tall,” I said. “He has night-black hair and sky-blue eyes.”
“Are you kidding me? Seven feet tall? You think maybe he just seemed that way ’cause you were shorter the last time you saw him?”
I thought back. “Maybe he’s six-foot-something.”
David said something under his breath. Might have been “Lord love us,” but then a sick look came over his face.
“What the heck are you doing here?”
Soon as I turned around, I knew it was one of David’s brothers. Gerry, maybe. He had the same black curls and the same mean look in his eye. His chin jutted out when he was mad, just like David’s did now. They were like two sides of a mirror, only a bendy mirror that made the Gravedigger look a lot smaller.
David said, “We’re trying to find somebody.”
“How’d you get in?”
“Walked in.” His brother crossed his arms. David held his stare for a second then looked away. “Snuck in.”
“You’d better sneak back out again before Dad sees you.”
“We got business here.”
“Oh, yeah? What kind of business?”
David didn’t say anything. His brother looked at me. “This one of the Norman girls? Key-rist, Dad is going to kill you, and then her dad is going to kill you all over again. You get her out of here. This isn’t no place for a girl.”
David toed the ground for a second. He tapped my elbow. “Let’s go.”
Something I knew about David by now was that he had three walks. A stomp, a shuffle, and when he was pleased with himself, like a bear up on its hind legs—sort of light on his heels, and I can’t describe it any better than that. When he suddenly turned and walked back to where we’d left his brother, it was a five-alarm stomp. I couldn’t hear what David said to him, but when he finished he crossed his arms and looked like he’d grown an inch.
His brother called me over. “All right. What’s he look like, this cousin of yours?”
David nudged me.
“He’s about six-foot-something and has night-black hair and, um, regular blue eyes,” I said. “His name’s Johnny Kellock. Have you seen anyone who fits that description?”
“I almost fit that description.”
“He’s not near as strong-looking as you.”
“No, don’t imagine. Okay, fine. I’ll keep an eye out. Now, you two better go. I’ll take you out.”
David started to say something, but his brother cut him off. “You weren’t here,” he said.
David’s brother—who was Gerry—drove us out in a van. Thankfully, no one stopped him at the guardhouse to check for rabbits. After climbing the long set of stairs back up to street level, then the steep hill you had to face no matter where you turned off Barrington, my legs were burning like crazy. If David hurt as bad as I did, he didn’t say. It was clear enough he was mad at me for getting him in trouble. Maybe Gerry would keep an eye out for Johnny. But maybe the Gravedigger’s helping days were through.
I was so absorbed in my thoughts, I didn’t notice David step off the sidewalk, and I walked headlong into a group of sailors going the other way. On summer nights, the downtown was filled with sailors in their bell-bottoms and round caps. Dark blue edged in white. The American sailors wore white uniforms with blue trim and looked like they’d stepped right out the movies. They’d come off their ships and mingle with the local girls.
Young Lil once got caught sneaking out after curfew. She was wearing her girlfriend Marianne’s pink satin skirt with a crinoline and her mouth was covered with thick red lipstick. Martha and me watched the showdown from the stairs. I thought Young Lil looked like Marilyn Monroe—except for her brown hair and the way she spit a little when she yelled back at Mama—but Martha whispered that it was cheap to wear your effort on your face like that. Young Lil was grounded for a month. I wondered what punishment I’d get if Mama found out that, in just one afternoon, I’d gotten tangled up with sailors, a Frenchman, and a couple of Micks.
Before everyone was married off and busy, us Normans were always going downtown to take in a movie or just get a hamburger or an ice cream and walk around. Other times we’d take Freddie or Cecil’s car out to Qu
eensland Beach for fish and chips, or to the Chicken Burger in Bedford, where we’d take turns choosing songs on the jukebox. You always stayed out as late as you could in the summer, and even when you got home, after dark, you’d stay out on the porch a while, hoping the heat would be let out of the house by the time you went in. I don’t know how it happened, but all day the house seemed cooler than the outside and then—blam—the outside was cooler than the house. If there’s such a thing as a lousy scientific miracle, I think that’s it.
When we got back to Agricola Street, David went straight home. Mama, Norman, and Martha were sitting on our front porch. Norman had his feet resting on his lunch pail.
“That was a quick swim,” Martha said. “Did David have fun? He forgot to come for his clean shirt.”
“I guess so.”
My mind was going all over the place. I hadn’t remembered to wet my hair, and would there have been time enough for it to dry, and could I run my towel under the hose without Mama noticing so I could hang it up on the line?
Norman was looking across the street. “You and David have a fight or something?”
“Oh, yeah. A big one.” That part at least felt like it was true.
“You’ll work it out,” he said.
“Sure they will,” Mama said. “If Rosalie can just learn to keep her mouth shut.”
Chapter Eight
On Sunday, Martha and her friends set off for church without me. I’d told Mama I wasn’t feeling well. Really, I just didn’t want to face the caterwauler, but the thing about Mama is, she never bothers you about being sick. That’s because Martha used to miss a lot of school on account of her asthma. One time a teacher didn’t notice how she bad she was getting, and Martha almost died. Ever since then, all you had to do was say to Mama that you didn’t feel good and you could stay home.
Through my bedroom window, I could hear a bunch of boys coming down the street. They were Catholic boys, dressed up in their church clothes but pushing and shoving and laughing at each other like their mothers had just let them out of their cages. It’s a wonder, I thought, that girls ever got married, because you had to forgive your fiancé for once being a rotten boy.
Just as the boys were passing between our place and the Flynns’, David came out of his house. He was carrying a shovel, for land’s sake, holding it in front of him like he was taking a load of dirt somewhere special. Might as well have been wearing a big sign that said “Pick On Me.”
“Hey, Flynn! You digging graves in your off hours?” one of the boys called.
The others laughed—put-on-like, the way you do when a joke isn’t that funny and you’re going to pretend it was. David just stared down at the boys like they were a bunch of maggots. But there was something about the way he was holding steady there. Too steady. I ducked my head out the window and strained to see what was going on in those green-blue eyes. He was nervous.
“I said, you’re digging graves, are yah? Got yourself a fresh body in the house?” the kid called again, a little bolder this time. “Hey, Gravedigger?”
David started coming down his walk towards the boys. Real slow, real careful with that shovel. Some of them flinched back a bit, but the group held steady. Nobody was going to be the first to bolt.
“I’ll be with you in a minute,” David said, stepping down onto the sidewalk. “Only first I’ve got these little graves to dig. Small ones. Teeny. Tiny.”
He suddenly thrust the shovel towards the boys, and—oh my—didn’t that send them screaming and running, because just for a second there, it looked like the Gravedigger might lose the load of dead mice that was balanced on the end of it.
From somewhere inside the house, Norman chuckled.
A mouse had fallen onto the sidewalk, and David had to bend low to scoop up its little grey body without dropping the others. He didn’t even glance in my direction, just shuffled back up his walk and took his corpses around the back. I hoped the part about burying them was true.
I found Norman downstairs, rinsing out wash rags at the kitchen sink. He was wearing one of Mama’s aprons.
“If your mother finds streaks on those front windows, you’re going to cover for me, right?”
“Yup.”
“The Flynn boy’s been doing such a good job, I don’t know what else I’m going to do with myself today. Might have to pray or something.” He suddenly started at the sight of something out in the garden, his whole self going stiff like a hunting dog. “Cats,” he said, dropping his hands back into the water.
I held up my sketch pad so he could see the portrait of Margaret’s wedding that I’d copied from the photograph. As it turned out, Johnny was the tallest person in the picture besides the groom. Course, that wasn’t saying a lot, in our family.
“Don’t know where you got the knack,” Norman said. “Weren’t from me. Remember when you lost the locket Margaret gave you for being a flower girl?”
I rolled my eyes. I’d taken an earful about that one. No one ever let me forget anything.
“Aw. People are so hard on the baby.” He patted my head with a wet hand. “Speaking of the Flynn boy, Bean, what’s that the kids call him again?”
“Um . . . the Gravedigger.”
“Why is that?”
“’Cause he works over at the cemetery. You know, where his mum’s buried.” I didn’t tell Norman about how people said the Gravedigger had dug his mother up. It seemed pretty silly, anyway, now that I kind of knew David.
“Don’t imagine anyone’s quite right who loses their mother that way.”
“What way?”
Norman wiped his hands on Mama’s apron. Then he took it off and hung it to dry by the warming hub of the stove. “Too young. She drowned, you know.”
If you’re going to die before your time, I don’t suppose drowning’s worse than sickness or a train wreck or falling off a cliff. But it’s still shocking somehow, especially when it happens to someone who knew someone you know. Maybe it’s because when people drown, you figure most of them know it’s happening. They can feel themselves dying. If you fall off a cliff, well, let’s hope you hit bottom before your brain catches up with the rest of you.
“How did it happen?” I asked.
“I don’t think you need to hear another story about people drowning. Anyway, who’s that sneaking into the house?”
Storming in was more like it. Freddie, his wife, Hazel, Margaret, and her husband, Cecil, had let themselves in the front, and the kitchen door swung open with a bang.
“Number one and two,” Norman said brightly. “Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes.”
Martha, home from church, brought up the rear.
“We’d have got here sooner,” Freddie said, “but we thought we’d try an extra, extra slow route today.”
Margaret’s icebox eyes made it clear what the fight had been about.
“Well, sir,” said Norman, “lovely day for a drive.”
“Hello, lovey,” Cecil whispered. He bent down and gave me a quick kiss on each cheek. Cecil went to Europe once. “One from your niece and one from your nephew. They’re at their other grandmother’s today.”
“Maybe if your wife had let us roll down the windows for two minutes, the car wouldn’t have filled up with smoke, and we could’ve seen where we were going,” Margaret said, her voice rising higher with each word.
Hazel, every hair in place, sniffed a thin, rasping sniff. She shot Margaret a poisonous look before blowing a stream of smoke in her direction.
“Maybe you oughta take your own car next time!” Freddie boomed. “Wouldn’t you say, Norman?”
Norman was frowning at his watch and tapping it as if it was broken, although I could see plain as anything the second hand was moving around.
“Good Lord. Can’t you fight in your own homes!” They all gasped at the sight of Mama, with her cast, standing in the doorway, leaning on Norman’s umbrella. “I’m fine,” she said, waving away the hands trying to help her to a chair. She propped up h
er cast on the sewing box.
“Remind me,” said Freddie, “how the heck you did this.”
I slipped beside Norman in the corner rocking chair and tried to make myself invisible.
“Tripped on the stairs,” Mama said, smoothing down the front of her housedress.
“And . . .” Margaret prompted.
Mama shrugged. “I landed.”
Her face was set. She wasn’t going to say any more. Freddie looked at Margaret, who raised an eyebrow. “Mama, you should be more careful.”
“Thank you, son. I’ll keep that in mind.”
Cecil turned his head away. I think he was smiling. I might have, too, but I was caught up in how Mama hadn’t told them about the pencils. She wasn’t going to say the accident was my fault. Maybe it really was knocked out of her memory. And everyone believed her. Even Hazel just shook her head and took another drag on her cigarette.
“You weren’t expecting a Sunday dinner, were you?” said Mama. “We’re not cooking for crowds these days.”
“No, Mama,” said Margaret. “Just wanted to see how you were getting along.”
“Fine.”
“Are you in pain?”
“No.”
“No?”
“Well, the cast is damn itchy.”
Margaret and Freddie looked at each other again. They both seemed to be waiting for the other to say something.
“For the love of God, someone spit it out,” said Mama.
“You remember that lot we stopped by, out Prospect way?” Cecil said to Norman. “When my pal Dale was looking to buy outside the city?”
“Sure, sure,” said Norman.
“It’s back on the market. There’s a nice little house on it now and I hear there’s Crown land behind.”
“That’s a beautiful lot,” said Norman.
“Made us think of you, that’s all.”
“Where are you kids going with this?” said Mama.
“Nowhere,” said Freddie. “Some people just think that you might do better in a house with one floor.”
