AFTER Easter’d drowned, Rufus was impossible to endure. To George, it seemed his family was just mortally bad news. To stick with Rue could mean, then, his own doom. It was time to escape. Georgie knew there was about a hundred dollars of insurance money in the shack; he’d torch the shack, collect the moolah, split it, bill for bill, with Rue, and they’d skedaddle different routes. He set the fire, saw Cynthy’s photo blaze, got the cash, gave Rue almost half.
Georgie left Three Mile Plains but chose to stay in Windsor because he liked country life. He did odd jobs for Pius Bezanson, a farmer, for ten bucks a month. Not sour pay, compared with bitter poverty. Bezanson’s belief was, “Let every man turn pain into bread.” Bezanson let George bunk in the barn, where he managed to snore despite stench and noisy, beastly copulations of animals. Mosquitoes were also wicked, stabbin George relentlessly. Even so, Georgie felt he’d do better, by and by. Hope was as striking as lightning, as deep as water, water, water, and as dream-productive as rum.
Farmin was natural for Georgie, and Bezanson let him eat and eat. Once, the farmer paid Georgie with a seven-pound tin of blueberry jam, seven loaves of bread, and seven quarts of rum. Georgie made rum and jam sandwiches. Some good under crow-fractured, dark-blue Heaven. He had to wade through bushes, spend days cutting poplar trees and maples and spruce and pine. He could milk cows, churn cream, set out eggs delicate, delicate. He’d lead oxen—and, times, get bogged down in mud. He could tiptoe through the marsh bushes, the thinner woods near the Avon River, tumble into orange-red mud and climb out, or quickly skinny-dip in the river. He’d wander, separate, alone, among lichened rocks, let salt spray off the Fundy splash his Coloured Nova Scotian face. He’d take barrels and haul apples out the trees. He could drink fresh water by scooping up rain. A downy rain could make even October taste as fresh as April. After trainloads of apples, after muddy roads.
He’d found Paradise. Now he needed a woman.
From this farm at Windsor’s edge, George eyed, daily, passing, dairy girls, lasses only thirteen or twelve, perched upright, like postage stamp queens, atop small, slow Percherons. The girls’d titter, chatter, sing. Jostling, their dairy pails pinged, as jittery as kindling breaking into flame. The dames gleamed unusually beautiful; their Madonna-like smiles as gay as fresh milk. George watched em giggle, shout, sing, as they’d pass by him on the Orotava Road. He juggled blue plums to entice their eyes. They’d look back, teehee, and he felt gratified. He noticed Blondola—one of the solar-eclipsing Plains belles (from Englishman River Falls)—noticing him. Georgie chase her small horse and hand her a blue plum. Blondola smiled, and he felt melted. She was like a fat, plush mare. The pretty women’d rub berry juice on their lips. Blondola too. The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice. Blondola was thirteen, but plump, bodacious. A lively-lookin, dark-skinned black girl in black. Her face was chocolate smooth, with supremely plush, violet lips. Her coal-coloured eyes were lit up as if by an internal night of stars. Just her “Hi,” the way she’d say it, ‘d jolt Georgie’s heart. Maybe they’d be so much in love that, making love, they’d feel like they were equally his and hers, that one set of hands was as dependable as the other. Ah, that chocolate-dark, chocolate-sweet woman, her plum-tint eyes!
The road is all dirt—dirty,
My gal is all pert—-pretty.
Blondola was authoritatively everything Georgie wanted: her deep laughter reminded him of the scary gaiety of Cynthy’s laughter when she was sweaty-happy with Asa.
Georgie study Blondola close.
He ask, “How ya get that name, Blondola? Ya a secret movie star?”
She be bashful: “Nah, Ma’s name be Cassie and ma aunt’s Ann, so my middle name’s Cassandra.”
Georgie get avid: “And Blondola?” Blondola just laugh and go on her way, gigglin with the other maids. They tease Georgie fierce.
One joked, “Men peacocks are more colourful than girl ones.”
Blondola yelled, “If only it were like that with our men!”
Blondola looked a super good woman, with her plaid lumberjack shirts and jackets, her stories based on recipes, her country blues radio curing tobacco. She was partial to a house with sun in the living room and smelts drying on the roof; to a dunga-reed Romeo. Like everybody in Three Mile Plains, she’d grown up with blues gossip bout lethal booze; bout buttoned-down, open-flied preachers; bout leathered-down cowboys mangled by gypsum-mine dynamite. She’d be happy to go along with a man, a man goin somewhere, somewhere far.
Courtin Blondola should’ve been easy for Georgie. She liked his drawl, his laugh, his fearless—and sober—hard work. But he was hindered in his interest because he had no place to bring Blondola. The big drafty, stinky barn he slept in was no site for wooin a swell young gal makin dove’s eyes at him. Georgie’d’ve to pull down better than ten bucks a month to be an effective Casanova.
He found a dream solution. He saw a newsreel about khaki-clad Canucks crossin the Atlantic to cross swords with Hitler, boys clearly no taller, bigger, or older than him. They appeared on the movie screen, silvery and sunny, smokin on the Halifax docks, waitin to board ships, and kissin on two delicious gals each. All Georgie knew of war was what funny books showed: a lot of rat-a-tat-tat and pow and splat and whammy. But maybe he could ship overseas, kill a clutch of Krauts, bulk up into a he-man, lift gold rings off married corpses, juxx some British quim, then return, swaggering, and marry Blondola with much hoopla—with their wedding pix in the Hants County Register. He’d seize his future this way.
So George told Blondola he was goin to the Boches-Hun War, and he ask, “Will ya wait for me?” He’d enlist, return, keep her glad. Blondola was playful, gleeful, but found Georgie spellbindingly earnest. She nodded; they kissed.