I heard the Flynns’ door bang shut across the road and what sounded like a rake being dragged down their stairs. I didn’t look up from my sketch pad. He could come or not—didn’t matter to me. It’s just that a person should work on someone’s yard if they say they’re going to. Even if they have to hold down their creepy job at the graveyard, they should still make good on their arrangements. No one was going to make him speak to me.
David’s shadow and black-pepperish smell fell over me. I tried to hold my face still, but I could feel the smile wriggling at the corners of my mouth. Then I remembered what Norman said about David’s mother. My face fixed itself.
“Gerry says there’s a new guy named John at the shipyard. Says he’s got black hair and he’s tall.”
I looked up. “Did he talk to him?”
“Nah, he only seen him from across the way. But someone told him that was the guy’s name.”
I knew better than to ask for another favour. “That’s real nice of your brother to let us know,” I said. “I guess I’ll look into that.”
I took a pencil from the shoebox at my feet and twisted it in the little sharpener.
The rake handle pivoted slowly on the porch step.
“It’s nothin’ to me if we went down there again,” David said.
“Where?”
“The shipyard.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Gerry says if we meet him there late this afternoon, he’ll get us in. If you want. All the same to me.”
We made a plan.
I asked Mama if we could go down to Nelson Seed to see Norman. David gave me the excuse that we were running low on fertilizer for the garden and we needed to pick some up. According to the plan, we would buy extra time at the shipyard by saying we stopped for a pop somewhere on the way home. Course, that didn’t get me far.
“You can tell Norman what you need tonight,” Mama said, “and he’ll bring it home tomorrow. I don’t want you bothering him at work.”
My first instinct was to keep at her, but I shut my yap. I’d been watching how Martha got around Mama. She always came in the side door, if you know what I mean. Like how she helped us to go swimming at Chocolate Lake by telling Mama what a good job we’d done with our chores. I felt a little guilty about that. In a way, I’d made Martha lie.
So I didn’t fuss when Mama said we couldn’t go. I let her get settled on the chesterfield with her tea and her sewing and got right to my chores.
They who tread the path of labor follow where my feet have trod; they who work without complaining, do the holy will of God . . .
“What’s that noise?” Mama called.
“I been thinking about joining the junior church choir,” I said. “I got to practise!”
I worked my way through an afternoon’s worth of hymns. I sang “When the Day of Toil is Done” while I did the dishes and “Thy Glorious Work, O Christ, is Done” while I did the floors. Before I finished the dusting, I’d run through “Welcome, Sweet Day of Rest,” “For all the Saints Who From Their Labors Rest,” and “When we our Wearied Limbs to Rest.”
“I’m off to collect my paycheque!” Martha yelled over “O Where Shall Rest Be Found.”
“They don’t usually have them ready till the end of the day,” said Mama.
“I just remembered, Mrs. Johnson wants me to drop by a little early.”
“You be careful,” Mama said. “Rosalie, hush for a second. This goes for you, too. They told on the radio this morning that a man was assaulted at Fort Needham yesterday in broad daylight. Broad daylight, girls . . . Girls! What’s so funny?”
After “Lord, Dismiss Us With Thy Blessing,” Mama called me into the living room.
“Seems Martha forgot to put a piece of apple cake in Norman’s lunch. You know he won’t last until supper without a snack. Better take it down to him.”
“But, Mama, who’s going to stay with you?”
“Tell Mag Hewitt on your way out that she can stop in for tea, after all. And Rosalie.” Mama reached into her pocket. “Here’s your allowance.” She reached into her pocket again. “And maybe you ought to take David out for a hamburger and a show. He’s been fussing around in that garden all day. You two shouldn’t be stuck home with an old woman.”
Funny, but I got a little lump in my throat when she said that.
We took a tram downtown. Trams always put me in a dreamy state of mind. One of my favourite daydreams is what the city would have been like during the war. Norman was too young to serve in the Great War and he couldn’t serve in the Second World War on account of his enlarged heart. Instead, his job was to walk around during the blackouts and check that people got their blinds down and lights off. If the city was dark, the German pilots couldn’t see it from the night sky. The German planes never came, but people had to be ready. I imagined Norman patrolling the streets, making sure everyone’s tucked in good, that big heart thumping in his chest.
When you go into Nelson Seed, you have to stop for a second to breathe in deep. Your whole nose gets filled up with the thick, musty smell of seeds and peat. Behind the main counter are rows and rows of little wooden drawers, like tiny safety deposit boxes. After he set aside a bag of fertilizer to take home for us, Norman showed David how you could find just about anything you ever wanted to plant if you knew which drawer to slide open.
By the time we got to the shipyard, Gerry was waiting outside by his truck, looking anxious.
“Where you been?” he said. “I gotta get going.”
“Aren’t you going to take us in?” David said. “I had to listen to this one sing hymns half the day just to get us down here!”
“I gotta load that has to go over to Dartmouth and I’m running behind as it is. But here’s the news: I talked to him.”
“Who?”
“Her cousin. John.”
I gasped. “You did! Where? What did he say? Is he coming home? Can I see him?”
“Whoa,” said Gerry. “I don’t got that much. Couldn’t be too nosy without making him nervous, right? But here’s what happened.”
Seems Gerry ran into Johnny at the canteen on his lunch break.
“Alls I said was, ‘Hey, aren’t you John?’ And he says, ‘Sure. Pleased to meet you . . . ?’ And I says, ‘Gerry,’ and we shake, right?
“So I says, ‘I think you work with Ray Campbell, isn’t that right?’ And he says, ‘That’s right,’ and I could tell from the way he was smiling and talking about the weather and stuff that he was glad to meet someone, which made me think that this guy probably just moved here, like you said.”
I was shivering all over. “Did he say he just moved here?”
“Nah, the whistle blew and I had to go. But listen to this: we said ‘See ya around.’”
“What’s the big deal about that?” said David. “Do you even know if this is the right guy?”
“I figure he is. And you know how I know?” Gerry nodded in my direction. “Because her father stopped by here this morning.”
Norman!
“What was he doing?”
“Dunno. He was talking to Dad at the gates.”
“Our dad and her dad? Was he asking about us?”
“I couldn’t find out without giving away what I knew, could I?” That was a relief. At least Gerry could be trusted. “And like I said, I didn’t want to make this John guy nervous. If his father’s been beating the tar out of him, he’s gonna be right jumpy.”
All my hackles went up. “What did you say?”
Gerry looked over at David, who might have shaken his head. Just a little.
“Uh, I think . . . I got something wrong here,” said Gerry. “You know some of these kids who run away, that’s the reason.”
“It’s not like that in my family,” I said. “I never saw Uncle Ezra hurt anybody.”
That wasn’t exactly true. One time, back when the Kellocks used to come for Sunday dinner, I saw Uncle Ezra kick Mrs. Greenwood’s old dog. It wasn’t doing anything, it’d just come across the street and happened to be lying at the end of our walk. As the dog ran off, howling, it struck me that Uncle Ezra didn’t think of it as a living thing—it was just something in his way. I’d wanted to set him straight, but then Mama called, “Ezra, come get some stew. Try not to kick m’kid on the way in.”
“Anyway,” David said, “We just saw Mr. Norman. And he didn’t give a sign he knew we’d been down here.”
“Well, maybe he’s not the person you got to watch out for right now,” said Gerry. “Isn’t that one of the other Norman girls coming this way?”