Lucy Cloud

by Anne Lévesque

  ‘But now that she’s …,’ Annabel said. (Sarah Louise had Alzheimer’s and lived in the nursing home; half the time she didn’t even recognize Donalda.)

  ‘So why did the lawyer call you?’ Curly said.

  ‘That’s what I came over to tell you! He wanted to let me know – get this – that Uncle Paul left me an inheritance! And his house and car! I near had a heart attack when he told me!’

  ‘An inheritance!’ Annabel said. She felt a pinch of jealousy. Nobody had ever left her an inheritance.

  ‘Well-well-well,’ Curly said.

  ‘I know!’ Donalda said.

  Donalda flew to Massachusetts, where it turned out she had been once to visit Uncle Paul.

  ‘I wanted to see the house,’ she said to Annabel. ‘See if it brought back any memories.’ (It hadn’t.) Annabel felt betrayed. She couldn’t imagine how Donalda could have ever gone to Boston without her knowing. It must have been in the summer when Donalda was working and she herself was busy with Lucy.

  Donalda drove back from the States in Uncle Paul’s just-like-new Buick Ninety-Eight. ‘If you had a million years you’d never guess what I’m going to tell you!’ she said to Annabel.

  ‘He left you a million dollars?’ she said.

  ‘I wish!’ Donalda said, laughing. ‘They didn’t have that kind of money. They worked at a cookie factory all their lives.’

  ‘I went to meet the lawyer, a really nice man about my age, not bad looking a-tall.’ She winked. ‘You should have seen the view from his office a regular penthouse. He told me I had to sign some papers – he explained things really well – it wasn’t the first time he was doing this for sure. He gives me his pen, it weighed a ton honest-to-God it was pure gold, and then he looks at me kind of funny and says, “I don’t know if you were aware …” He has that Boston accent, you know what I mean? Like President Kennedy. He clears his throat and he has this look on his face and I’m thinking I should have known this was too good to be true. I’ll probably have to pay a bunch of taxes or something.

  ‘ “You will notice,” he said, “that on the forms you sign, Ms. MacIsaac” (that’s what he called me) “the two names: Paula MacKinnon, your aunt’s name, and Paula Lewicki.”

  ‘And I’m thinking ye-yes, that was his name, Lewicki. I wasn’t twigging at all.’

  ‘ “Your uncle was not Paul Lewicki, Ms. MacIsaac. His name was actually Paula Lewicki. He – she – was a woman.”

  ‘Well. You could have knocked me over with a feather!’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Annabel said.

  ‘Uncle Paul wasn’t a man at all. He was a woman! She was a woman.’

  ‘How could that be?’

  ‘They were lesbians.’

  ‘Lesbians! Not Aunt Paula.’

  ‘Yes, Aunt Paula. You know how we always called them the Paulas? They must have gotten a kick out of that.’

  THE CEILIDH

  Annabel and Lucy have just finished a late supper of boiled potatoes and curds. Late because they waited for Curly. At five-thirty Annabel said, ‘Let’s just start eating. That always works. Watch, he’ll show up as soon as we sit at the table.’

  But it hadn’t worked.

  Annabel sets the pot of Netted Gems on the back of the wood stove. It’s July, but she likes to keep a little fire on in the evening. To keep away the dampness, she says, which Lucy imagines as a kind of wet ghost pawing at the windows.

  She stacks the dirty plates and cutlery beside the sink.

  ‘We’ll do them after The Ceilidh. There’s hardly anything anyway – that’s what I like about potatoes and curds.’

  Lucy is only half-listening. With the side of her hand she pushes a salt spill on the table. Back and forth, back and forth, just like a wave on the beach. After Annabel sits in her rocking chair – the one with the flowered cushions on the seat and back – Lucy begins to synchronize the salt-wave with the rocking.

  The deejay’s voice comes on. ‘Turn up the radio, dear,’ Annabel says.

  The reels and strathspeys and slow airs roll out in the warm wide kitchen like rosary beads between Annabel’s fingers. She knows all the tunes: ‘MacLaine of Loch Buie.’ ‘The Lass of Carrie Mills.’ ‘Jenny Dang the Weaver.’ She taps her feet on the cushion floor under the chair and sometimes she even stands up to do a few steps. Her feet flash and her ankles twist this way and that but her face remains impassive and her arms as motionless as Poor Katie’s polio arm. It’s as if she is dancing only from the knees down. When she sits down again she says, winded, ‘I should learn you how to dance. Your father was a good dancer. Every bit as good as Jelly MacNeil. But he didn’t keep it up. No, it had to be the rock and roll, jumping around making a fool of yourself and that’s supposed to be dancing.’

  Halfway through ‘Sweet Molly Malone’ there is a knock on the kitchen door. Annabel looks cross – she hates to be disturbed during The Ceilidh – but only until she sees it’s Murdoch. Annabel likes Murdoch. Has the devil in him sideways, she says. Lucy likes him, too, since the day he came over with a beautiful black and white kitten for her.

  ‘Ahhhrch, leave them on, leave them on.’ Annabel says, but Murdoch takes his shoes off and pads in in his sock feet.

  ‘Cuppa tea?’

  ‘Just the tea, Annabel, just the tea.’

  ‘Make me one too, will you, dear?’ she says to Lucy.

  Lucy carries the hot aluminum teapot to the pantry. She pours milk in the bottom of two mugs then adds the tea, dark as poison.

  When she returns to the kitchen she notices that Murdoch and Annabel have the strained impatient looks of grown-ups wanting to have a word alone. She wanders over to the window. Pepper is sitting on the windowsill, watching a fat robin pulling a worm out of the grass. He begins to make funny little moans.

  ‘Is John Angus’ boy still fishing with you?’ Annabel says.

  ‘Kevin. No, he’s in Windsor.’

  Lucy strokes Pepper’s back, setting plumes of cat hair aloft.

  ‘Is he, now? I meant to ask Katie the last time I saw her but I forgot. Lucy! Stop that! Tsk. I’ve never seen a cat shed so much.’

  The thud of Pepper’s feet on the floor. He saunters to his food bowl.

  ‘He went to Hawkesbury last year and took a trade,’ Murdoch says.

  ‘Did he.’

  Lucy makes a show of plucking the Fall and Winter catalogue from the top of the chest freezer and climbing the back stairs to her room. But as soon as she is out of sight, she sits on one of the treads.

  ‘So who you got working with you?’ Annabel says. Lucy hears the volume go up on the radio.

  ‘Mickey MacMaster’s nephew, from Blackstone.’

  The ring of John Allan Cameron’s twelve-string guitar. The feel of the catalogue on her bare knees. The rhythmic creak of the floor under Annabel’s rocking chair.

  ‘One of Hilda’s.’

  ‘Hmm-hmm.’

  A dog-eared page in the girls’ section. A hundred times Lucy has imagined wearing the brown vinyl bomber jacket with the fake fur collar to school. A hundred and twenty-two times, probably.

  ‘How’s Gerard?’

  ‘Oh, the same.’

  A slim, dark-haired woman with teacher looks and bright red lipstick. Lucy turns the page and there she is again, wearing a navy blue pantsuit. With her fingernail, she begins to etch a scar across the teacher woman’s right cheek. The glossy paper shrieks, sending a shiver up Lucy’s spine.

  Murdoch clears his throat: ‘Arthur saw him at the beach yesterday.’

  ‘At the beach?’

  A horn appears on the teacher’s head. Then another.

  ‘He said he was kneeling in the sand. Like he was praying or something.’

  ‘Oh for the love of God,’ Annabel says.

  NARC

  There was a knock on the door. F
unny, Jenny thought. She had not heard a vehicle.

  It was Curly. He had come on foot. ‘Something wrong with the truck?’ she said. Because Curly never walked. He would drive up as close to the house as possible, so close that he had flattened a forsythia bush once.

  ‘Left it at home,’ he said. He looked at the spot where they normally parked their truck. ‘Eric not here?’

  ‘He went to Carmichael’s. He took Santana and Lucy. They wanted to go to the library.’

  ‘More books!’ he said, and Jenny laughed.

  ‘He should be back before supper. Is there something you want me to ask him?’

  Curly pressed his lips together. ‘Nah. I’ll come back.’

  ‘Come in for a cup of tea. I’m just – ’

  ‘Thanks but I better get back.’ (The Old Cape Breton was wary of spending time alone with another man’s wife.) But he remained talking outside for a while. As he was leaving he crouched beside the flowerbed.

  ‘My mother used to have these,’ he said. His fingers caressed the furry leaves of a lamb’s ear. ‘I love the way they feel.’

  Two days later. Eric was lying under the pickup when he heard a vehicle drive up. Glad to have a break, he put down the wrench and rolled from under the truck. It was Curly. He brushed the dirt off his overalls and began to rub at his hands with a rag. They were black with old motor oil, nicked and bloodied from trying to loosen metal parts welded by time and weather. They reeked of WD-40.

  Curly hopped down from the truck, removed his ball cap, and ran his hand over his head. He replaced the cap over the back of his head, and in a smooth unconscious gesture Eric had noticed before, slid it off and on again.

  In the old days, Curly would have ambled up to Eric, hands in the pockets of his baggy pants, shrewd brown and blue eyes scanning the yard, and leaned up against the truck.

  ‘Breezy’ he would begin on a day when a gale was blowing salt spray against all the houses on the Northfield Road.

  ‘She’s cool,’ he’d acknowledge, as Eric lay under the sink trying to thaw frozen pipes with a blowtorch. And, Jenny’s favourite, reserved for some winter calamity: ‘July’ll fix this.’ Because the Old Cape Breton had courage and fortitude. And optimism to burn. These qualities had pulled them through the worst of the brutal winters, the springs that always disappointed, the punishing work of the land and sea, the poverty and misfortune. Jenny said it was because they ate oatmeal for breakfast; it was a known anti-depressant. Eric had tried it one winter but it didn’t seem to work for him. Maybe you had to be Scottish.

  After the weather had been taken care of, the old Curly would have allowed Eric to vent about the job at hand (‘You have to take the goddamn radiator out just to get to the starter’) and then he would have spat out of the side of his mouth, looked into the motor, offered some vague advice – Curly relied on the boys at the Irving for all his mechanical work – and seamlessly steered the conversation towards his purpose.

  But the new Curly, the porcupine-haired-struck-by-lightning-Curly, just walked up to the truck and said to Eric, ‘I want to get some of that dope you people smoke.’

  ‘What?’ Eric said.

  ‘Dope. I want to get some dope.’

  ‘—’

  ‘Do you have some?’

  ‘Do you mean –’

  ‘Dope. Marijuana or whatever you call it. Do you have some?’

  ‘I could ask around. What – ’

  ‘Good enough,’ Curly said. ‘You let me know when you have it.’

  As Eric watched Curly get back in his truck, his mind travelled to their second winter on the farm.

  Jenny had planted some marijuana seeds in cut-open milk cartons full of potting soil. She put them on top of the fridge and covered them with black plastic. After the seedlings developed their true leaves, she moved them to tomato cans that she set on a south-facing windowsill. Transplanted them again, and hardened them off on the back porch in early June.

  Right after the full moon she and Eric had carried them to a patch of ground he had dug up in the woods behind the house. All summer he hauled buckets of water to the small plantation, pulling weeds and side-dressing the plants with fishmeal and manure tea. Then one August day. Not any August day but the Feast of the Assumption, on which it was believed that bathing in the sea would cure you of whatever sickness you had. Denise had told them about it. Santana had been afflicted with eczema since she was a baby and Jenny thought it was worth a try. They had spent the afternoon at Port Ban, swimming and lying on the rocks – but not standing under the waterfall as they usually did, because Jenny thought that maybe it wouldn’t work if you rinsed off the seawater. That evening after the chores Eric took a little walk in the woods behind the house to have a toke and check out the marijuana plants. He carried a bucket of water. When he arrived at his little plantation he discovered that someone had uprooted all the plants and left them to wither and die.

  He had immediately suspected Curly. Not that they were on unfriendly terms, but because the plantation was only accessible by foot and Curly and Annabel’s property was right next to theirs. And also because it was easy to imagine Curly nosing around, finding the garden and … destroying the plants? That part he couldn’t quite picture. But who else could have done it? Annabel wasn’t the type to go tramping in the woods. She hardly even left the house.

  Eric thought he detected a change in Curly after this, a coolness that had not been there before. In time he came to believe that it was his imagination: his subsequent plantations were never disturbed. But the suspicion had remained at the back of his mind.

  ‘Maybe it’s a trap,’ Jenny said. She was cutting curd at the sink. Eric watched the greenish yellow whey rising in the stockpot as her knife sliced the coagulated milk into silky white cubes.

  ‘You mean like he’s a narc or something?’

  ‘You know what? I wouldn’t put it past him. He’s been really strange since the lightning. Marilyn saw him at the beach again.’

  ‘Yeah, you told me. It’s not that strange: Marilyn’s at the beach. What’s she doing at the beach?’

  ‘You know what I mean. He’s not the type. And why does he all of a sudden want to smoke pot?’

  ‘Beats me. Did Hughie call back?’

  ‘No. No one called except Myrna. She’s coming for butter.’

  ‘I don’t know what you have to do to get a backhoe around here. It’s like they’re doing me the favour.’

  ‘Help me put this back on the stove.’

  ‘It’d be faster if I dug the fucking thing by hand.’ He lifted the heavy pot from the sink, careful not to spill the whey, and set it on the electric stove.

  ‘Call him again.’

  ‘—’

  ‘So what’re you going to do?’

  ‘I’m not calling Hughie again.’

  ‘About Curly I mean.’

  ‘Nada. Nothing at all.’

  QUEER

  He didn’t tell Annabel. He didn’t even tell himself. The truck was like a horse. It knew to go there.

  The pickup door closing. His boots crunching on the dirt. Sometimes there were vehicles. Some empty, some not: a woman eating her lunch as she looked out over the water; a couple guys having a beer, as Murdoch liked to do, or smoking dope. He could smell it as he walked past their car window. Some of them probably figured he was just an old man who wouldn’t know what was going on but they were wrong. There were a lot of things they didn’t know about him.

  Sometimes he felt a little shy going down the stairs. As if he had no business there. That he was doing something queer. Because who took walks on the beach except tourists and women who wanted to lose weight? But that wasn’t true. There were plenty others. He began to recognize some of them. By their shapes against the grey water and sky and mountain. By their clothes and the way they walked. Most of the time they were alone
. The man whose coat had faded to the colour of an old gas can. He didn’t seem to care if his feet got wet, he walked in and out of the surf. And he stopped often. To look at the gulls. To poke at something with a stick. The tall blonde who walked fast, arms pumping, bosom heaving. The woman who came with two little girls. She smoked and looked at her watch while the children ran and played. Once he saw a man with her. They were a little ways from the main beach, their backs to the dune while the little girls threw rocks in the water. Coming up on them a few weeks later he recognized the man. A fisherman from town. Married. Curly looked away.

  And the others. Huston MacDougall, walking off another binge. Frankie Chisholm’s oldest, who’d had her stomach pumped of sleeping pills. She took slow dreamy steps and avoided face-to-face encounters. He knew how she felt: that awkward moment as the person approached – would you acknowledge them, or just pass them by? (There were many ways to do this – increase the distance between your paths before they converged, stop to gaze at the sea, or just look away – and a tacit agreement that it was all right to do so.) He also didn’t like having people walking ahead of him. Unless they were very far. He wanted it all to himself. The undulating line of sea and sky. The mountain and clouds. The places where they touched the water. And on many days it was so.

  Always, the water pulled at him. Strange, because he had never been attracted to it before. He had never set foot in the ocean. And the one time he had done so at the lake he had cut it on a piece of glass.

  A Sunday afternoon. He was ten or eleven. His mother had recruited him to chaperone his sister Johnena and her beau. Not that this was ever voiced. He was old enough to know what his real job was: to make himself scarce while they cuddled and kissed in the car.