Lucy Cloud

by Anne Lévesque

  At the gate, Curly turned up a dusty track that wound between red sandy hills studded with trash and yellow flowers. There were rows of holes in some of the hills. Birds flew in an out of them. Up above the gulls circled the clouds.

  Lucy pushed the truck’s heavy door and jumped down. The stench, only made bearable by breathing through her mouth instead of her nose. The warm red dust sifting through her toes, between her soles and her sandals. She watched her grandfather heave garbage bags and odds and ends into the pit for a while, then she went exploring. Mysterious items caught her eye. A set of hard-blue stairs going up to the sky. A piece of worn oilcloth the same pattern and colour as the one in Alec and John A’s kitchen. A headless Barbie. While she poked around, Curly talked with people: the bulldozer operator and other men, some who worked there and some who were walking around, pulling lumber out of jumbled heaps, extracting parts from overturned washing machines. ‘Got yourself a helper?’ they sometimes said to Curly. (Some of them had said the exact same thing of another small child, one with dark and curly hair. And it made them both sad and happy.)

  One day, one of them said to Curly, ‘Girl gotta a bike?’ and they had taken home a blue CCM bike in A1 condition. It was too big for Lucy but Curly had fixed that by putting wooden blocks on the pedals so her feet could reach. Curly was good like that. Annabel was another story. Anything Lucy brought home had to go straight to the garbage can or, on rare occasions, soak outside for at least a day in a bucket of water and Javex. When Lucy found that shoebox of black and white photographs, however, Annabel had laid them all out on the porch steps to look at them.

  ‘They look like the Anggie Dans,’ she said to no one. And then she dumped them all in the garbage can and made Lucy wash her hands.

  On this day, a dump truck had arrived. Lucy watched the driver back up to the edge beep-beep-beep-beep, lift the box and dump a load of plain brown cardboard boxes. As they tumbled among the garbage bags a few of them opened, releasing bright purple and yellow boxes. From their winking cellophane windows, the brown faces of Easter bunnies. Lucy scrambled down the slope to rescue as many as she could. Curly laughed.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ he said. ‘We struck gold today.’ And Lucy felt smart, and lucky.

  After that they had gone to Smithville to look at a roan mare. Along the way Lucy had eaten the head and left shoulder of one of the bunnies and crushed its gritty yellow eyes between her teeth. Coming back there was a man on the side of the road. He had his thumb out. Curly stopped the truck and Lucy had to move to the middle of the bench seat so the man could get in. He had a blonde ponytail and his hands and fingernails were dirty. He held a small, heavy-looking cardboard box in his hands.

  ‘My granddaughter,’ Curly said, and the man glanced at her. ‘How are things on the Loch Road?’

  ‘All right,’ the man said. ‘Aside from the fact that I lost my wheels.’ He lifted the box from his lap. ‘Brakes went on the truck.’

  ‘You still have that International?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘That’s an able truck.’

  ‘I’ve been waiting two weeks for this rotor. The first one I got was the wrong one.’

  ‘Isn’t that the way?’ Curly said, and they were silent.

  ‘I always meant to ask you where the horse ended up,’ the man said after a while.

  ‘Someone in Black River bought it.’

  ‘Oh that’s good. The kids were asking. Can’t say I miss it.’

  ‘Like the tractor, then?’ Curly said.

  ‘Don’t have to feed it when I’m not using it. But it caught fire last week. I was giving one of the girls a ride and we had to jump off.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘The gas tank. You know how it’s right above the battery? Must have leaked or something.’

  ‘They’re all like that, the 33’s. But I’ve never heard of them catching fire.’

  The truck slowed down to turn onto a road.

  ‘You can just leave me here,’ the man said.

  ‘I’ll take you up,’ Curly said. The truck began to climb a narrow track.

  ‘How’s the blueberry business?’ Curly said.

  ‘Aw, it’s coming along.’

  ‘What’s the price like this year?’

  ‘Don’t think it’ll be as good as last year. I’m thinking of switching to highbush.’

  ‘Highbush?’

  ‘They grow on a bush, you can just pick them like raspberries.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Friend of mine in the valley has them. They’re real easy to pick. Nice and big. The only thing is they take a long time to start producing.’

  ‘Couple of years?’

  ‘More like eight he says. It’s like what they say about trees. The best time to plant one is twenty years ago.’

  ‘That’s a good one,’ Curly said. The truck slowed down and turned onto a deeply rutted lane. It was lined on both sides with evergreens, then with a low-growing reddish vegetation: the blueberries. A hoodless white convertible appeared, then a little later the rusty hood, overturned on a patch of moss. It had a chain attached to one end. There was a red pickup truck at the top of the hill beside a grey house. They parked beside a big tractor. It was taller than Curly’s tractor, and had a single wheel in the front. A big dog came barking up. The man opened his door and yelled at the dog and it stopped barking. Lucy sidled past the steering wheel and got out on the driver’s side, keeping her eye out for the dog.

  She was struck by the heat and stillness of the place, the silence. It was a lonely kind of silence.

  ‘Show you what I mean about the battery,’ the man said.

  Curly looked at it.

  ‘It’s not tied down,’ he said. ‘See? Did the tractor tilt before it caught fire?’

  ‘Yeah, the left wheel went into a rut.’

  ‘The post must have hit the frame. You have to tie down the battery.’

  ‘That’s good to know,’ the man said.

  When they reached the house, Curly showed Lucy the wall. It was made of logs stacked and cemented together. She touched the face of an embedded log. She could hear a loud noise inside the house, a kind of clackety rumbling. Looking up she saw that they were standing below an open window. They followed the man into a windowless porch with a rough counter on one side. In the doorlight Lucy saw a green stove like the one she and Wendy used for camping, and a row of pots and pans and jars on a shelf. The man opened the second door and Lucy saw what was making the racket. Two children were riding tricycles on the unpainted chipboard floor. There were no walls in the house, it was just one big room, and the tricycles just went round and round and round. A woman was standing in front of a white plastic sink against the wall. She looked up, startled. Lucy saw that she was washing clothes by hand, like Wendy did in Tobago except that there the tub was outside, and made of cement.

  The tricycles stopped and in the sudden silence Lucy saw that the riders were twin girls. They stared at her with their brown eyes, not moving or speaking, hands still on the handlebars, right foot on the high pedal and left poised on the low. The woman dried her hands on her jeans. She stared at Lucy, too.

  Curly looked down at Lucy. Then he started to laugh. ‘Girl got into some chocolate,’ he said. He took his red-and-white-checked handkerchief from his pocket. ‘Somebody threw out a truckload of Easter bunnies at the dump.’ He wiped Lucy’s face. ‘I’ll go get a couple for the girls,’ he said.

  ‘No!’ the woman said suddenly. She and the man looked at each other. All of them stiff and silent as a family of Easter bunnies.

  ‘The children don’t eat chocolate,’ the woman said. At this the tricycles took off, filling the room with noise.

  ‘I hope you asked him why he was getting rid of it,’ Annabel said to Curly as she rubbed Lucy’s face with a wet facecloth. ‘And her hands f
ilthy from heaven-knows-what-you-can-pick-up-there. Did you think of that?’

  ‘Looked like perfectly good chocolate to me,’ Curly said. ‘All wrapped up like in the store.’

  ‘Must’ve been something wrong with it. They wouldn’t be throwing it out if it was perfectly good.’

  ‘I never heard of chocolate going bad,’ Curly said. He winked at Lucy. She smiled at him but with effort; she wasn’t feeling so good all of a sudden.

  ‘For all we know it could be poisoned,’ Annabel said.

  ‘Poisoned! Where do you get those ideas? Poisoned! How could there be poison in an Easter bunny?’

  Lucy began to walk up the stairs.

  ‘Well, there’s people who put poison in the Tylenol. And they’re always finding razor blades and needles in Halloween candy.’

  ‘Oh for – ’

  ‘I have to throw up!’ Lucy said.

  ‘Get the bucket!’ Annabel said to Curly. But it was too late. The chocolate bunny was all over the landing.

  Annabel turned to Curly. ‘I can’t trust you a-tall.’

  Lying on top of the quilt, the curtains drawn and the cool dark of a damp washcloth over her eyes.

  ‘Come, drink some of this hot ginger,’ Annabel says. ‘It’ll make you feel better.’ Lucy shakes her head and the washcloth falls on the pillow. Annabel picks it up. ‘Have a little sip and I’ll tell you a story.’

  ‘Rory went to a school that had just one classroom and one teacher for everyone, big and small. Rory was a big strong boy, and a good worker, like I told you before, but one thing about Rory was he didn’t like school. He wanted to be home with his father putting in fence posts and pulling out stumps and planting potatoes. In the winter he didn’t mind so much because there wasn’t a whole lot to do outside but come spring it made him clear crazy to sit on a school bench. He’d be squirming in his seat, his feet a-jiggling, looking out the window and not hearing a thing the teacher was saying.

  ‘That year the teacher was only sixteen, a little thing no bigger than a twelve-year-old, and at the end of March she slipped on some ice and broke her leg. The school trustees had to find a replacement, which was hard at that time of year. Eventually they got someone from Truro, he was related to the inspector of schools or something, and his name was Mister Gallant and he thought he was a pretty smart cookie, being as he had gone to Normal School and was all of nineteen years old and from the mainland to boot.

  ‘Rory was the big tall boy sitting in the back, so big the new teacher figured he must have failed a couple of grades. He didn’t look as if he was one bit interested in reading, writing or arithmetic. So Mister Gallant wasn’t impressed with Rory that first day, or the next day, when he asked him to spell Atlantic. Which was a queer word to ask anyone to spell, don’t you think? Do you know how to spell Atlantic, Lucy? Well, neither did Rory. He spelled it a-d-l-a-n-d-i-c. And he forgot to say capital A.

  ‘It was a hot hot spring that year – so hot that at the end of April Rory and his sisters had already jumped in the brook, and so one day in May that was just like summer, Mister Gallant decided to take all the children to the field above the school to eat their lunch. There was some deadwood at the edge of the field and a lot of dried-up spruce branches, and Mister Gallant, who was only a youngster himself, remember, got the idea that it would be fun to make a little fire. He sent one of the boys back to the schoolhouse to get the matches they used to light the stove in the winter and everyone started gathering dried twigs and in no time a-tall they had a good little fire going.

  ‘They were having a rip-roaring time, everyone thinking what a nice teacher they had, the last one would have never let them make a fire outside, when this little breeze come up and poof, just like that, a big patch of grass caught fire. Well, that wasn’t in the plans. Mister Gallant hadn’t thought of bringing a bucket of water or anything, that’s what you’re supposed to do anytime you make a fire, he just stood there looking at the flames running up the hill with the wind like he was hypnotized. That’s when our Rory went into action.

  ‘ “Quick,” he said to the other children, “take off your shirts and aprons,” and he got everyone to surround the fire – even Mister Gallant took off his shirt, a smart blue-and-white striped shirt, he was quite the fancy dresser (and a good dancer, too) – and beat the fire with their clothes. The flames were licking at the grass and it was hot and the smoke was in their eyes but they did everything Rory told them to do, just as if he was the teacher, and they managed to put out that fire. Then they went to the brook and washed their hands and faces and rinsed the soot from their aprons and little jackets, but of course most of them were full of holes, and their parents were none too happy about that when they got home. And that’s how Rory saved the day. And his teacher. Because imagine if he’d started a forest fire! Or burned down someone’s house! After that Mister Gallant had a new respect for Rory. He knew that even if he didn’t know how to spell Atlantic, he was one smart boy.’

  LUCY CLOUD

  Whenever it was time for the Christmas Concert or the Spring Concert, there was always the problem (for the teachers) of Lucy MacLeod who could not (would not: she thought it demeaning) sing, dance, recite or even be one of the three (silent) Wise Men.

  ‘Et toi, Lucie? Veux-tu être un ange?’ Madame Bazinet says. Lucy lifts her shoulders high, almost up to her ears: This means ‘Not a chance.’ But Madame Bazinet does not know the language of shrugs. She thinks it means ‘Okay, might as well.’

  That night Lucy asked her mother to buy her a piece of white Bristol board. And the next day, or rather two days later, when Wendy remembered to get one at the drugstore during her lunch break, Lucy used a red magic marker to draw the outline of a fat happy cloud. Then she cut out the shape with a pair of very sharp scissors. While she was at it, she snipped a hole in the red tights she was wearing. And then another and another – it was really fun until Wendy saw what she was doing.

  When she walked into the classroom the next morning she was holding the Bristol board cloud in front of her. The only things Madame Bazinet could see beside the cloud were Lucy’s little hands the colour of skimmed milk, her little blue-jeaned shins and her pink Barbie sneakers. (‘They’re not real Barbie sneakers,’ Brianna Thomson had sneered.)

  ‘I thought you were going to be an angel,’ Madame Bazinet said.

  Lucy took to being a cloud in a big way. While Mitchell led a fake donkey around the stage with Hannah and Malik and the three Wise Men made farting noises with their armpits, or Carissa held her mouth in a hoity-toity way and sang ‘Cloches de Noël’ Lucy drifted across the stage. Sometimes she went fast, as if a Cape Breton gale was about to blow her off the stage, and sometimes she went so slow that her progress was imperceptible. Or she bounced the cloud up and down with what she thought was the beat of the music. Madame Bazinet was pleased that Lucy was enjoying her role but after a while she became a little annoyed. Every time she turned around there was that darned cloud. As if it were the star of the show or something. She worried that it would distract the audience from the performances, that people would think the cloud was some kind of portent, or worse, a joke.

  But she didn’t have time to think about it much because Amanda hadn’t studied her lines, there was a game of tag going on that involved screeching ‘Boys’ lice, girls’ lice’ and then Gaik Wah threw up on the gym floor. Madame Bazinet need not have worried. Lucy had never once participated in a school concert. She arranged this by not telling her mother anything and leaving all the teachers’ notes in the bottom of her schoolbag. And if by chance Wendy found out from another parent she could always be counted on to forget. Her mother could never keep track of things like gym days, hotdog days, fancy hat day, or even the first day of school. If all else failed, Lucy knew that she could always beg off with a stomachache.

  The cloud was subdued during the last rehearsal. For the longest time it was still, so still tha
t Madame Bazinet forgot about it. When it began to move again, it was very, very slowly, like the clouds at Nana and Grampie’s before the wind wakes up in the morning. The Lucy Cloud sidled by the stale fudge curtains and down the varnished gold stairs. It picked up a little speed in the empty corridor that smelled like orange peel and sandwiches. Then it floated past the secretary’s office and right out the door.

  MILLION-DOLLAR RELISH

  Sometimes Donalda was beside her house. At other times she was in an unfamiliar place, but outside. It was always outside. The sun was uncommonly bright. So bright that she had to shade her eyes to see anything. And then it went down. A beautiful little star appeared. It sparkled bright blue and white like a diamond. Then it was over. There were no people. Nothing else happened.

  ‘I had that dream again last night,’ Donalda said to Annabel.

  ‘The one about the star?’

  ‘Hmm-hmm. This time I was beside the lake.’

  ‘Anyone else there?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Usually there’s people in a dream.’

  ‘I know. I think it’s trying to tell me something.’

  ‘It’s not a bad dream …’

  ‘No … But I still want to know what it means.’

  ‘—’

  ‘Nettie says there’s a woman tells fortunes in Hogamagh. Maybe she could tell me.’

  ‘Do you believe in that? Fortune tellers?’

  ‘Why not? This one’s supposed to be good. She told Nettie she was going to come into some money and a couple of days later she won at bingo.’

  ‘Nettie always wins at bingo.’

  ‘But this time it was the jackpot.’

  ‘Well, you know what happened to Ellen when she had her fortune told.’