THE APRIL after Cynthy was buried, sixteen-year-old Rufus, returning from another Valley dust-up, plus happy helpings of rum, passed a wooden, red-tint, square house anchoring Panuke Road. A girl-woman stuck her head out a window, purely coincidentally, and he just up and kissed her—in dawn-crisp air, flourishing light. That gal’s face was like a bouquet, so cinnamon-and-pepper beautiful. She tried to slap Rue, but he ducked, laughed.
Said, “Ya look just too pretty. Is I too bold?”
Easter Jarvis said, “Sorry bout yer Mama, but ya shouldn’t be kissin on a gal who don’t know ya.”
Rue said, “Lemme know you then.” He was hungry to be the first and last man to feel Easter.
Easter was a plum good gal, plump and sweet, her glistening, chestnut-coloured hair framing caramel looks: pacific skin riding coral that was bones. Her waist be so small, Rue could scope one hand around that sweetness, feel her hair strokin down like black vines. He was starving for fruitful trees alive with blossoms.
Easter and Rue stuck together instantly. Rue planned to quit scrappin, toing-and-froing anywhere, drinkin. He had to get out into the world, away from Three Mile Plains, with a gal he could trust. Easter’s daddy was a railway porter who’d lavished cash on her and her mom. She wanted to become a nurse—when Coloured girls could. She wished to move to Halifax, work hard, buy a comfy house, have oodles of kids. Rufus thought he might become a pianist-porter—or porter-pianist. He loved the luxury of that dream as much as he loved Easter. He’d become a sleeping-car porter for the Canadian National Railway. (Coloureds called it the Canadian Negro Railway because it employed Canadian Negroes as porters. The Canadian Pacific Railway was called the Coloured Peoples Railway because it hired West Indians, Negro Americans, and “real” Indians.) They knew the facts: men had to porter, women launder. Men would go away all week on long runs to Montreal; women’d take in soiled clothes one day, return them all washed and ironed the next.
That society, organized to drive coal-coloured men into laborious destitution, was a gigantic and depressing frustration for Rue. He was not one to embrace hard luck with a happy-go-lucky smile. But Easter’s optimism, her graces of cradling kisses, her family’s plucky stick-to-itiveness, helped steel Rue’s belief he could prosper as a musician, train man, husband, father, provider; that he could be an artist, not just artful.
Ah, Easter be easy to love. And look at the season! The spring brandishing blossoms; the sun-singed snow retreating. Rue craved to draw Easter into hyacinths, with the moon gone vermilion some misty summer night.
Easter was the antidote to cold soup.
Rue jest with her: “It’s chocolate that makes Easter Easter—the chocolate hens, bunnies, and eggs, not the sermons.” Easter’d hit im with her handbag to strike down irreligion. They’d tussle, cuddle, kiss. But all weren’t ideal. When they took in a movie, Easter had to take out her cash. If Rue wanted a tub of ice cream, he had to let Easter pay.
Rue fell into a fight right on Main Street in Windsor, and it was over Easter. He caught that whoremaster, Gabby Robie, actin fresh with her. Well, in the sunlit street, Rue plastered Gabby flat on his nose; the blood just flew. The wrinkled-up old hunchback bitched, but Rue kept circlin and boxin his head. Gabby wobbled, backed off.
A witness yelled, “I got in the barber chair when you fellas started fightin and my hair was all cut when ya stopped.” Easter gratefully kissed Rue long and hard.
Still, Easter was one of the “400s”—one of those better-off Negroes who had houses, new clothes, flash, big words, cars (or horses), quiet gumption, RESPECT, gardens, white friends, and style, but who kept their furniture covered up in sheets to preserve the newness. Easter was meant to marry within her set. But Rue’s kiss put him in sole contention for her honours—and her savings, though her pa, Loquinn, cringed at the very name of this ragamuffin. Loquinn was stocky, lightcomplected, and bulldog-mean, but a tony railway porter; Easter was headstrong, and his only child. Loquinn hated Rue as if he had always known him.
Easter had a piano in her parlour. When her folks’d go out, she let Rue play that half a keyboard he knew, then she’d serve him her good food: cabbage, turnip, carrot, squash, and eels too. Rue loved buttermilk and fried eels. He watched those darned things flapping around in Easter’s frying pan after being prepared and floured. Then he and Easter shared red wine and kisses. She served Rue easy turtle cookies and Halifax rice pudding. She’d hoist white stockings on her honey legs—just for him. They dreamt of a Christmas of cheese, champagne, and chocolates, not to mention an adulthood of babies, blues piano, and brandy. With Easter, Rue felt he could play an apple-pie hero with bread-and-butter proverbs.
He mused, “One day, I’ll sleep side her every night.”
Rue said to Easter in December, “We need a driving horse. Can’t always walk or cab. With a horse, you can ride out, see me up home.” Easter’s doting pa purchased a black filly, Andover, as a Christmas gift. Loquinn swallowed—like bad rum—his distaste for Rue, who was, to him, one more no-good Negro who gave all the hard-working ones a bad name. But Loquinn bought the sable mare, to tether her in his barn, to tether Easter, he hoped, to his home.
That Christmas was the best Rue ever had, with Easter prancing on her horse, and him and her cavorting and not caring who knew. She gave Rufus chocolates, cheese, champagne, and a new belt with a silver buckle. He gave her kisses and promises of kisses. He played her a song using only half her piano.
The ice on the Avon River was deadly in winter, but now the new spring fields were blurry with melting April snow, and the ice had to burst open in pieces. A high spring tide made the Avon a squall of water. The Atlantic, corkscrewing into the Bay of Fundy and churning into the Minas Basin, turned the Avon into a plough of water that could tear down and smash up iron bridges in that April of 1944. One year after Rue first kissed Easter.
Easter’d arranged to meet Rue at three, atop the hill where the rich had erected mansions under Windsor elms. While awaiting her arrival from Falmouth, Rue eyed cars and horses-and-buggies passing by, in front of the Windsor Baptist Church, the granite white church that spurned the wooden African Baptist facility up home. It was an easy landmark for downtown meetings. The sky was a grey-white-black water-colour turning to oils, and the wind seemed to come from January, not April. It whipped back and forth, careening, cold, mixing flecks of snow with specks of rain. But Rue felt gleeful. He could hardly wait to clasp Easter inside his coat against him, to breathe her breath like hot chocolate and to feel her breasts pressing softly into him. They’d sip hot chocolate downtown, then ride slowly to the Plains. Then the squall blew in his face and reminded him he was poor and subject to the atmosphere’s whims.
Easter was riding Andover across the spindly, rickety wooden Avon River bridge—when the river erased that bridge. Only its approaches remained, leaping expectantly toward a void. Pitched into that agitated chrome, Easter tried to keep ahold of Andover, but the horse flailed, the avalanche of ice and water burying Easter in her long black coat and apple-blossom-coloured spring dress. She almost swam, but the water was too slippery for traction and too cold to stand. It was slob water, a slushy mess of water, ice, half-frozen snow, and mud. One wild, freakish black wave had shook Easter from Andover. The next wave, quadrupling up on the first, became her assassin. It was a cyclone of water, boulders, logs, mud, and ice crashing down on anything already drowning. She somersaulted through the crushing water. Dirt and frozen water besmirched her clean, dry lungs. The sad, slow ache of disaster overtook her. She saw water turning white, as if with ice, then blackness, as she drowned, gurgling. Her eyes rimed with sand pretending to be stars. The sun rose to paleness, incandescent, as water blanketed her head and she settled, shivering, into a bed of shells and amethysts.
Rudy waited in that drenching chill and icy buffeting for an hour. Then he went to meet Easter. When he reached the Avon River, he saw the bridge drifting, tumbling, bobbing, in bits and pieces, trusses and spans, dismantled among pies and strudels of ice. Rue joined the ragtag throng gazing upon the ruins, but still felt only tiny anxiety. Surely Easter had postponed her travel, or had ridden to a safer passage, although Rue knew there was no good place to cross: the river, with all that jagged ice, was a cocktail of glittering razors. He squinted into the distance, among the empty orchards of Falmouth, looking for a brown girl on a black horse, while the ice groaned and heaved practically at his feet.
He was scanning the horizon when he heard a snake-like voice tut-tutting, “I seen the Jarvis gal go down when the bridge went out. Her and her horse.” Rue twisted about sharply to face that vile voice, to smack Gabby’s face.
But murmuring others grabbed, clutched, held his arms, as he heard Gabby say, with a ghost of a smile, “I seen her go in—and her horse—more than an hour ago, and that’s that.”
Rue sweated panic that let him slip the hands gripping him and stab-punch at the grotesque man who crowed, “If she’d worked for me, she’d still be alive.” Gabby crumpled while the crowd yammered, and Rue bolted to the riverbank. Light drained from the heavens. A cold rain lashed and pummelled.
Dazed, but hoping dreadfully that Easter might yet be floating on a floe like an Eskimo heroine or, maybe, lying ashore, half-drowned, exposed to freezing cold in her sodden clothes, Rufus rushed to Easter’s house to augment a search party. A crowd mobbed the kitchen. He pushed through the tumult of sobbing and serious-faced people.
Loquinn spied Rue; he picked up a butcher knife and swung, screaming, “You’s to blame for this! Ya told Easter to get that horse!” Loquinn slashed at the air in front of Rue while folks in the kitchen jumped back. Rue grabbed the crying, yelling man’s wrist and squeezed harshly until the knife hit the floor and Rue kicked it aside. He turned and left, and just wept and wept and wept.
Searchers dragged the Fundy water and patrolled the rain-hiked river from cliffs, seeking Easter. They sloshed around boulders of muddy, muddy ice on the riverbanks.
Later, she washed up by Evangeline Beach among seaweed-laced rocks. Her body had been dissolving in water. A lovely, delicate, easy sculpture of flesh and bone had been chafed to and fro in pulverizing, fretting tides.
Where Easter is buried, on a slope above the Minas Basin, the sky scowls over the sea—breakers seething home. It is whitewashed, blizzarding air. A broken heavens. A snowstung sky. Her stone is white granite confronting whiter waves.
Her mama, Delicia, said, through a waterfall of tears, “People don’t know how good my daughter was. Pure her body was.”