ASA’D ALWAYS had an eye for playing cards picturing topless blondes and brunettes. He felt Coloureds was slag heaps of men wanting diamonds of (white) women. Talkin with gypsum quarry Coloureds, he knew about a special house in Windsor town, a subtle palace run by Gabby Robie, the local sports reporter. There, no one cared if a raven and a dove commingled. There, liquor was being sold, gals was being sold, hog was being sold. So when he waxed violently tired of Cynthy, her Montreal mania and her cash complaints, Asa rented hisself a creamy tart.
When Asa found, in the backside of Windsor, the right oak back door, knocked, and was admitted, his moviehouse-dim eyes scoped Purity Mercier, gleaming through the lamplight and cigar and cigarette fog. She be to him a lithe brunette with a snow complexion. White bones basked in her arms, her sleek gams, her terra alba skin, the silky feel of an anglicized Acadienne. Her perfume was the smell of sunlight and rain and the moment that rain evaporates. Asa wasted no time wasting half his pay that Friday night on Purity. Joined with her, he experienced a vaudeville show of whinnying, oinking, snorting, gasping, spitting, and drooling, fore and aft.
The every-Friday-night Asa—Purity duo was an importation of Othello-and-Desdemona Venice to Windsor-on-the-Avon. He wished he could fuck till the stable were shaking, shaking, and falling down around them, moistly. Purity was weekend payback for each weekday of lonely hate. True: Asa liked the look of her lily hands dabbling in, dallying with, the hot coal of black male flesh.
Asa became a regular fool, much to grubby, rancid Gabby’s enrichment. Purity was one more victim, a woman from the impoverished, French-speaking countryside that couldn’t speak French and prosper. Like many Acadians, she’d been Englished in merciless schools and Anglicanized by predatorial bosses. These Anglo-Saxons had palms always moist for the hot love of coin; and eyes always hot with lust for their female workers. Purity felt a bit more freedom and realized a bit more cash enduring the degradations of Gabby’s bordello than she did in suffering the depredations of heartless factorists.
In response to Purity’s needling spontaneity, a kerosene-hot lust’d snake up Asa’s thighs, into his pelvis, then all up along his backbone, and into his skull. She always seemed as impatient as a breaker and twice as wet. There was indigo doings inside ivory toings and froings. Joyous chaos of white legs akimbo where Asa’s were a randy Sambo’s. Red wine wrinkling throats and puckering lips.
Asa’d mumble his hallelujah, and then he was zippered up, liquored up, and gone out Purity’s door, exited her deal-wood kennel, blundering through smoke or fog, then staggering across grass sparkling late night with, at times, dew-reflected stars, and then along the roadway, stopping to piss in ditches, or pass out there, until stumbling back to Three Mile Plains, only five miles away, to plunge to the depths a bottle of rum could reach. He was bleakly happy, but still dissatisfied. Asa’s brain spewed crazy phrases.
“Another slurp, please… Skedaddle from one gulp to the next…. I feel the wall coming upside my head…. My stomach is shit…. I don’t want dribs and drabs; I want the gush…. I’ll crouch, take a sip, fall over….”
Lookin for a face that won’t quit my eyes.
Lookin for her face that’ll suit my eyes.
Lookin for her thighs to—tight—fit mine.
Asa’d whip Cynthy if she complained about the cash he fed Gabby. He’d clip her upside the head, slam her across the spine, belt her if she gave any lip. It was his bloody money, his funky flesh, his sweaty business.
Cynthy detested her jointly adulterated marriage—which was really a slow-motion divorce, but with no property to divide. She fantasized more and more about mixing rat poison into oatmeal served with milk and honey, or of picking up kerosene oil and confusing it with vinegar. A smartly paced poisoning of Asa Hamilton could liberate her—Cynthy Croxen (she’d recover her maiden name)—more sweetly than any set of prayers. But she was no chemist, and doctors and police might discover her petty treason, and, though not unhappy that another quarrelsome dark man was dead, still send her to jail for way too long.
Too, her sons were uninteresting to her now, save for Rufus, who always gave evidence of shifty thinking. But Georgie was as dull as Asa. Rufus was real slick. She felt seduced by him. But George be oafish, but useful. Rue reminded her sweetly of what that white man had said to her, when she was sixteen, in the train station. Times, Cynthy remembered to play mother. When Georgie was twelve, she sewed him a quilt got from twenty-pound sacks of Five Roses flour. She was goodness itself—when she could convince herself to be maternal.
Nevertheless, Cynthy, unable to get to Montreal and unable to keep Asa at home, took lovers of her own, but discreetly, so as not to unleash Asa’s fists. She was sick of facing dirt instead of glamour. She started dragging her bony ass all up and down Panuke Road and into backwoods too, whenever Asa had his back turned. She wanted revenge for that burnt-up red dress. She lay the rusty must of her sex all over several Hants County shacks. She had to sweat and groan like some infernal engine, a piston plunging therein. Her flower-flesh, once the colour of the apricot nectar rose, her petally fragrance, both surrendered to dirt and stink. This thin, hickory-smoked woman, her hair smelling of homemade pomade got of real pommes—a randy, McIntosh scent, had hair straighter than her soul now was. She experienced a failure of discrimination. Some men she laid with were often so drunk on rum that Cynthy would get drunk just off their breaths and sweat. But so what? Sex was like aspirin; it was like eating sugar, sugar, sugar; it was income with an outgoing attitude.
Cynthy soon selected Reverend Simon Dixon as her chief man. He was skilled at the subtle fucking of wives. Yep, he loved hogs, whores, and wine, in no apparent order, and adultery was his prized sin because he was single and had steady money.
He say, “I’s from the Society for the Propagation of the Species.” He loved carrying on with wives all Saturday who sat, prim and proper, beside husbands in church on Sunday. He could preach so hotly about Hell, he’d gush sweat from every pore while some very upright ladies—Hell-deserving, Sunday-praying Jezebels—would piss their drawers. No, he had no use for the Bible he kept nostalgically, its pages scribbled over with gibberish, its pages all blotted and blotched and yellowed and taped together, its spineless self. Whenever he parted holy text, he departed from that text. He was one of those ministers, not just fallen, but always falling, in flagrante delicto, as lithe and proud as a saint, into down beds. He was a scurrilous pastor staggering through hilly plains and preaching the ugliness of Christ, the bitterness of Christ, the loneliness of Christ. His entry into Cynthy’s bed marked her epochal drift away from her sons. Dixon was a promise of a red dress and a train ticket to Montreal.
So, with Georgie gone twelve and Rue eleven, Cynthy up and dumped her sons in Alisha’s backyard, right in December 1937, a hungered season, and just turned her back. The winter was already bruisingly bitter. That ice-daggered wind slashing into Cynthy’s face while she dragged squalling Georgie and sullen Rue onto the yard of Alisha’s rough and uncouth house, painted charcoal black, with her ghost-callin bottles hung on the branches; a dog slobbering, pissing like a horse, and yowling blackly and pulling at the heavy chain that held it back; and Alisha’s horse tethered weirdly to a railroad track switch plunked down ex-nowhere. The top half of a horse’s skeleton sat at the wheel of a rusted-out convertible. Then, Alisha was eyeing Cynthy approach her house, her kitchen curtain pulled back with one strong thin black hand. But Alisha didn’t come welcome em: this bad idea was foretold. Huffing, cussing, even cuffing the bawling George, the cut-eye Rue, Cynthy finally got em to Alisha’s house, then pounded on the door with a gloved hand, before racing back to the road where sly Reverend Dixon waited—his cream car and engine purring, his jaundiced, gooey look congealing—to schmooze Cynthy to Halifax, epic city of concubinage.