How Loveta Got Her Baby

by Nicholas Ruddock

  They couldn’t see the ocean; there was a dull roar out there to the south and there was mist in the air.

  “They must have planted that sign real deep,” said Eunice. “Otherwise she’s gone.”

  In fact the wind was so strong, once they got out of the van, it was hard work to even stand up.

  “Forget the heavy stuff in this,” said Aaron. “We’re going to have to travel light.”

  So Eunice took her lunch along and she carried the leather bag full of chisels, Henry took the gas and the oil, and Aaron had the Cheesies and he wouldn’t let go of the chainsaw. Off they went into the blowing mist, peering into it.

  “Lean and mean, see you there,” said Aaron.

  Off he went and then came Eunice and Henry. It was warm for October. The barrens were already red and brown all over. Aaron was so fast, he got out of earshot, whistling. His long legs ate up the yards. In another world and another time and with another personality, this would have been the perfect place for Henry to reach out and touch Eunice Cluett on the arm of her coat, and say something to her, something nice, something witty, something wry and something kind, and in that other world, she’d stop and put down those chisels and sweep the loose hair off her forehead and smile one of those smiles at him, a smile that said, “Okay, this is all right with me.” But he didn’t have it, that kind of smooth skill. He knew for him it would always be awkward, the stumbling word, the averted eye, and thus the missed opportunity.

  But no, he actually said something.

  “Eunice, come to the dance with me on Friday night?”

  He shouted it over the wind. No way he could have said it in the normal fashion, he would have choked on it. Somehow though, when he shouted, the force of air in his lungs blew courage into him, and the words flew out of his mouth, surprised as he was.

  “Fossils or no fossils, Eunice, either way,” he shouted again.

  All she did was walk on. She didn’t hear a word. Or maybe she did, maybe she didn’t.

  Aaron then came back a bit, to hurry them up.

  “We’re getting close,” he said.

  The nearer they got to the shore, the higher blew the wind and it took Aaron’s hair, and Henry’s, and Eunice’s, and blew it out straight back or across their eyes. It snatched their voices whenever they tried to talk. The roar from the shoreline was louder too, and the mist was more like rainfall, stinging sideways, salt water flying in on the gale. They huddled up closer together and walked up to the cliffside, holding onto all the tools they had.

  There, the sea was so high it was hard to think straight.

  Whoa, wait a minute, is what Henry thought, this is something else.

  He stood where he was, fixed to the spot. Eunice didn’t seem to mind, but she didn’t make a move down onto where the fossils were either. They all just stood there. It was only a little slide down, mostly grass, to the shale, maybe a six-foot drop. But they couldn’t see enough to go forward, it was all black and grey and every time the surf hit further out it was like a firehose blown back.

  Then all at once, “Let’s move!” Aaron said.

  He slid down the bank and crawled out onto the slick black table of streaming rock. He scuttled like a crab and kept low, with his head down. There went the Cheesies, they took off on their own and exploded against the cliffside and disappeared. Aaron Stoodley waved back, laughed, and pointed downwards. Then he was on his knees. Eunice and Henry both held their breath and slid on down like they were sea otters having a good time, except they weren’t. Henry was close now to Eunice, who looked okay. Maybe the weight of the chisels held her faster on the rock, more secure than Henry felt with those damn fuel tanks that wobbled and cut into his hands. He should have left them up top, he figured. He put them down and cupped his hands around his eyes and looked at all the fossils lying there. How far from being an Arab could you get? Not much further, he figured. The leaves, the flowers, the fish, whatever they were, Henry thought, get me out of here, get us all out of here.

  “Rev it up!” Aaron Stoodley said.

  He was oblivious to it all. But they felt the boom of the ocean as another massive wave and then another piled through the wedge of rock that half-protected them from the sea. By now all of them were on their knees, but then Aaron stood up, put his feet wide apart, took a different kind of grip on the chainsaw, pulled the cord, and damn but it started right off.

  “Baghdad!” he shouted.

  Right away, Eunice and Henry jumped back cliffside to give him space and they watched him snap the chainbrake, rev the throttle and then he stood up, studied the rock floor as though he was one of those bearded professors, and then he leaned over and slammed the spinning teeth into the shale like he would have done with poplar.

  He must have got blinded by the shower of sparks that exploded off the rock. He fell back, he stumbled twice, and there was no way he ever saw the giant wave which pounded down twice as heavy as any so far. It rose like a whiplash to Aaron’s waist and, still holding the chainsaw, down he went, sucked right out like nothing in the backwash of that monster.

  Like a speck in thunder, gone.

  It took Eunice and Henry about four seconds to get back up on the meadow grass and run along to where they could see. By a miracle, he was still there, stuck and caught in one of those narrowed cracks that ran at right angles to the shore. Then the next wave came in, just as big as the last and Aaron disappeared again inside the white froth and tumble as it broke down on him, and they saw him, picked up by it and coming their way, shoreward. It was throwing him back like a piece of kelp torn off, and he still had the saw in his hand, dangling loose.

  “Drop it, Aaron!” they shouted both at once but there was no way he could hear them. They couldn’t hear themselves. He was thrown down by the force of the surge and he was barrel-rolled over the fossils in the rage of water that now came up to Henry’s boots before it sucked back again. There was Aaron Stoodley flopped on the rocks. He looked dead. The chainsaw was gone. Without further thought, and later he wondered where that courage came from, Henry Fiander found himself in mid-air jumping towards the body, and Eunice was there too and they grabbed Aaron Stoodley by the collar and pulled him back up to the edge of the grass. He was a dead weight, water soaked through his clothes. He lay there blue and started to shake but he was alive. He moved his lips a bit but they couldn’t hear what he said.

  Maybe it was still “Baghdad.”

  Then the two of them took their dry coats off and piled them up on Aaron Stoodley to warm him up. That made it cold for them, but Eunice moved in tight to Henry, and to keep warm, she put her arm around his shoulders.

  “Cold,” she said.

  He put his arm around her too, he lay it there as light as a feather, and then it was, right then, that it occurred to Henry that this was by far the best disaster he’d ever had. Even though, almost for sure, the reason Eunice Cluett was tucked in there the way she was, was because she lost her coat, because of the weather, because Aaron Stoodley was lying there half-way between the living and the dead. She was not there because she was in any way attracted or bonded to him for any reason, for any reason that would hold up for any longer than this one instant in time, this abnormal hypersituation that could never happen again even in another million years.

  But he didn’t ask why she did what she did. He just held onto her while he could, and the wind picked up again so that Eunice had to turn her face inwards, towards his neck, where her lips lay, where he could feel every warm breath she took.

  Then Eunice broke off the hold she had. She pulled her head back from his shoulder and she looked at him with her blue eyes directly into his face. She held that look for a long long time and then, despite the cold, she stood up and grabbed her bag of tools and slid on back down to where the fossils were. This time she stayed up real high. There was a lull in the waves and the weather, the kind of lull that always happens when you’re there long enough, and she took advantage of it. She took out one of those shiny
chisels of hers, and a hammer, and around one of those animals, or plants, it was hard to tell which, she chipped away for maybe ten minutes, real careful and slow. The edges broke and cracked some, but when the piece came away, it was perfect.

  She gave it to Aaron Stoodley when he woke up.

  “There,” she said, “we got it.”

  Then they all went home.

  It turned out that none of them made any money at all, not even from that one chipped-out fossil. It never got anywhere near Paris, France. Instead, Aaron Stoodley put it up at home, on the mantle next to the picture of the Pope, a picture that someone— it must have been Aaron—had, one time in the past, taken out of its silver frame and, with a magic marker, replaced the usual ivory-white raiments with the exact replica of a knitted sweater, all in bright yellow. That particular Pope, the one with the yellow sweater, he looked good. He looked warm. The chipped-out fossil lay beside him on the mantle as though it were a simple home decoration.

  Aaron, Henry, Eunice, none of them were interested in selling it. It had way too much sentimental value. It was a personal souvenir of the time Aaron Stoodley floated out onto the ocean like a wood chip and came back alive, of the time Eunice was still a single mother, of the time that Henry and Eunice sat shivering with their arms around each other.

  Henry got home that night and remembered, amazed, that he’d asked her out to the Legion dance. She’d given no indication she’d heard a thing. He’d shouted into the wind with all the courage he could muster, and been greeted with silence.

  When they looked back on it, they saw that luck had touched them all out there at Mistaken Point. Not in the obvious way, in the way that no one had died, that Aaron Stoodley had been thrown back alive, that the only thing lost was a chainsaw. No, it was more than that.

  Luck had flown through the spray and the mist and the savage waves and laid like a wreath on their shoulders. On Henry’s shoulders, most of all. That’s what he felt. When Eunice Cluett breathed upon his neck the way she did, it was the first indication he’d ever had that his life, such as it was, could someday be etched in stone like those fossils, that he wouldn’t be scattered piecemeal, that he could screw up his courage, knock on her door at seven on Friday night, carry Queenie to her aunt’s, walk to the Legion with Eunice Cluett, hand in hand the whole way. Dance all night.

  Not bad at all, not bad at all, Mistaken Point.

  shuffle

  IT MUST HAVE been some other place you learned to slow dance like this, to breathe in such a space so tight, rapt, oblivious, still moving though the music’s stopped, the band stepping down, it’s break time, walk to the parking lot, why not, look west, the sun’s fading behind the hill called Blue Pinion, and look what the night wind has done, it’s ruffled your hair, pulled at the corner of your blouse, twisted your skirt just so; we can say anything at all, feel the dark breeze shuffle through.

  how

  eunice

  got her

  baby

  EUNICE CLUETT DIDN’T get her baby, Queenie, in the usual way, through sexual intercourse with a boy in a bed, in a car, or out on the meadow after dark. Instead, she inherited her baby from the estate of her older sister, Florence, through a tragedy. From the estate? Well, it wasn’t really an estate, because of course there was no will made up, but when the baby became available, through the sudden accident that claimed the life of Florence, it was Eunice who was first in line. And that was a proper thing as it turned out, because Eunice was the best mother a baby could have. Better than the natural mother, some said, because Florence had a wild way about her that Eunice didn’t have. Flo was impulsive and did things on a dare. Flo drove down the Trans-Canada Highway on the blackest night of the year with all the car lights turned off so she could see the stars better. Flo shut her eyes, or pretended to shut her eyes, and she crossed the busiest streets like that, with her arms stretched out.

  “Look at me,” she said. “I’m a zombie.”

  She also drank way too many beers too early on at dances, then right away she’d dance too close, and stay out way too late, past the wee hours. She skipped classes at school the next day too, including the ones on precautions, and how she got her baby was therefore no mystery to any of her friends. Why, more often than not, Flo came home with her underpants scrunched up in her purse.

  That was Flo, but that was not Eunice, and that’s how her little baby, Pasquena, who they all called Queenie, got lucky, sort of, when tragedy struck her mother down.

  Now let’s not go on too much about the wild side of Flo. There was lots that was good about her. “She’s got energy to burn,” that’s what her father said, whenever he was asked. “She’s got her thermostat cranked up high.”

  Her father talked like that because he had one of the best jobs on the whole Southern Shore, and that involved fuel oil. He had a yellow truck everybody recognized, and he knew everything there was to know about thermostats, and energy, and the foolish waste of heat. Some families burned their oil up twice as fast as others, he’d seen that over and over. And Flo?

  “Well, Flo, she’s like a comet,” he said, “there’s no stopping Flo. She’s fire in the sky. She burns oil.”

  She was the oldest of all the seven children, the first in line, the experimental one, and Eunice was the baby, the last of the whole family. That meant, praise the Lord, that Eunice got insulated from the wild side of Flo by nine whole years, and all she knew about Flo was the love and the care she got from the only sister she had. Eunice always got a kiss, nothing less, no matter how late Flo got home, no matter how scrunched up Flo’s underpants might have been, pushed into the top of her purse just a half hour before. Eunice got the kisses, but she never dreamed she’d get a baby from Flo. If she’d ever dreamed that, it would have been a nightmare. There’s not too many good ways you can inherit a baby.

  Even with Flo being the way she was, everything would have been fine if it hadn’t been for the boy she met. His name was Darryl Bugden, and though he had lots of charms and attributes attractive to a girl, he also had the heart and the spirit of a criminal born. Not just one who picked it up along the way, for a lark with friends, but one born right to it from the word go.

  How’d it happen? Flo was at the Minimart, the one she worked at on Long’s Hill, reading a magazine and sitting by the cash, when she was introduced to Darryl. There was no one else in the store. It was 8 p.m., three hours to go before she closed up against the scattered few customers who came in. It was mostly cigarettes and chips and the furtive magazines for total losers, that’s all.

  “This here’s a stick-up,” was what Darryl said, his first words to her.

  Flo looked up and there he was, six foot four at least, with dark curly hair and a smile despite what he said to her. All those teeth were perfect.

  What’s with that, she thought, perfect teeth? That’s rare.

  He did not look threatening to Flo, but how could she know, that death would appear to her in this outfit, those teeth, those words she’d only heard on TV? It never occurred to her, and it never would have occurred to anyone, looking at that smile. Anyway, it sure didn’t happen right away, it took three years.

  “A stick-up?” she said.

  When she got the job, the boss said to her, “If someone comes in and says, this is a stick-up, then you just collapse to the floor in a dead faint. Piss your pants too, that’s the best. Make as big a mess as you can, breathe like you’re a spastic on the verge of a fit. Oftentimes they’ll just say, Jesus Christ!, and run out of the store and go somewhere else.”

  Somehow the boss had figured that out on his own, from what happened to him once. He didn’t plan it, it just happened to him and it worked. He sure didn’t get that advice out of the manual that came to all the new employees, from the Downtown Merchants. In that manual, it said, just hand over all the money, wordless, and do not put up any resistance. Most of these robbers are on drugs and they’re twitchy, unpredictable.

  It was the nice smile he had t
hat kept her sitting there. There was no way she was going to fall to the floor and do the rest of that whole crazy drill. How bad could a girl look, no matter what?

  “There’s no money here. Everything bigger than a five goes right down that slot,” she said.

  She pointed to the wall behind her.

  “Straight down into the safe.”

  Actually it was a slot in the wall that went straight into a cardboard liquor box that was on top of the safe. She could see it in her mind’s eye, sitting there full of loose money spilling over the sides. The boss long ago forgot the number to the safe so this was a money bypass. “It’s a trick,” he said, “that fools most of them all the time.”

  “The safe, the combination is unknown to me,” she said.

  He smiled some more but he just stood there.

  “The walls are three feet thick, and solid iron,” she said.

  The next thing Darryl did was get over the counter. He suddenly turned and slid his butt over the plexiglass that lay over top of the lottery tickets, and there he was, he twisted around and his feet landed on the floor right beside Flo. They stood there like a couple. She got scared then, and looked out the door. Maybe there’d be a customer to come in and save her, but that was not likely, maybe the old man with the cane or the fat lady for bubble gum, but what chance of that? There was no one in sight. And what chance would they have, her hopeless customers, anyway?

  None, she figured.

  “Lay down on the floor,” he said.

  Those were the next words he had with the love of his life.

  Down went Flo onto the linoleum. The tiles were lifted here and there, swept just once a week so they didn’t raise the dust, and she knew her white blouse, the one she bought with her own money, the one she never should have worn that night, would be ruined. Thank God for the old jeans she had on. Maybe she’d be dead soon enough anyway. It wouldn’t matter then what she had on, unless there was a picture in the paper. They didn’t usually show dead bodies. Even then, so what? Flo didn’t care about that, really.