Marcy wrote to me from Pugwash. It wasn’t a letter exactly, just a bunch of pictures she’d drawn. Marcy jumping into the pond with her cousins. Marcy’s family around the campfire. That sort of thing. She’d written “a summer in Pictures” on the back of the envelope, which was covered in peppermint-pink kittens with little hearts and stars around them. Marcy’s drawings were never very good, but I let her go on about how one day we’d be famous artists and live together in Gay Par-ee. Couldn’t help but wonder, though, how she thought she was going to get from pink kittens to Picasso.
I sat on the porch with my favourite number 3 pencil and Stillman’s number 2 pad, trying to draw a letter back. Somehow I didn’t feel like doing Mama tumbling down the stairs. And I figured the most truthful way to tell Marcy about the Gravedigger was to just leave him out of the picture. If I had my way, he’d be gone before she got back. Instead, I decided to draw the Ragman.
The Ragman was leading his old horse up the street. He called, “Rags, get out yer rags!” The cart was heaped with clothes, and the horse’s flanks were glistening with sweat. “Rags, get out yer rags!”
The Ragman was just about the only black person you saw on Agricola in the summertime, except for maybe the kindergarten teacher, Miss June, who lived over on Creighton Street. She always spent a whole week decorating the classroom before the first day of school. During the school year, a lot of the black kids had to be bused in from Africville on an Acadian Lines bus. Didn’t seem fair, when the rest of us just meandered up the street. The Ragman came from Africville, too. He looked exactly like a white kid in my class named Ben Buchanan. Have you ever seen that? Two people who look alike except for something real obvious on the surface? You point that sort of thing out to people and they say, “No, he don’t. Ragman’s black. He’s got black hair and brown skin and brown eyes. Ben Buchanan’s got blond hair and white skin and blue eyes.” But both of them had long eyelashes, and their cheeks pulled taut when they smiled and made three deep lines. And they both had big front teeth, but big in a nice way, and pointy chins. And when everything started working together—eyes, cheeks, lines, teeth—their faces made the same triangle. But if you point that out to people they say, “No, he don’t. Ragman’s black.” It’s enough to turn your kittens pink.
The screen door creaked open. Mama leaned over Norman’s umbrella and held out her coin purse. “Go to the store and get two pounds of ground steak,” she said. “Tell Jack Newberry that if he sends you home with something fatty, it will be trotted right back to him.”
Lord, I’d been to the butcher’s just that morning. And the day before. And every day since I was old enough to walk to the end of the block by myself. Another mother might say to herself, “Gee, I wonder if I ought to get a little ground steak since my kid is already fetching bacon.” Not my mother. Jack Newberry liked to tell the other customers that I had a little crush on him and that’s why I went so often. I hated that.
“It’s too hot, Mama. Do I have to go now?”
“Yes.”
“Do I have to go right now?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I said so.”
That was the law in our house, Mama saying so. Always and forever. Martha was five when I was born and Young Lil was ten. Doris was fourteen, Margaret was seventeen, and Freddie was twenty. They’re old now, the whole lot of them, but they still do what Mama says-so.
“Back again?” said Jack Newberry. “Why aren’t you off playing with the other kids?”
I shrugged. Jack Newberry put the ground steak on the scale. The stiff cold coming from the freezer felt good on my skin. I’d have pressed my whole self against the nice cool display case, except for the cows’ tongues and pigs’ hoofs on the other side of the glass.
There were other customers lining up, but he let me look at the ground steak before he wrapped it. Then I gave him the money and braced myself for the heat outside. Just as I was pushing on the door, Jack Newberry said—
“Rosalie?”
“Yes, sir?”
“You’re here so often I’m beginning to think you’ve got a little crush on me.”
I could hear them all chuckling as the door shut behind me.
Pauline Christianson and Katie Price were sitting outside of Millner’s, sucking on Popsicles, a pile of empty wrappers and sticks between them on the bench. They were Marcy’s and my best school friends. In the winter, we’d go down to Pauline’s basement, where her father hung salt cod to dry from the ceiling, and have ourselves a little salt-cod snack with a bit of toothpaste smeared on each bite.
“Rosalie! You going down to the lake later?” Pauline called.
“Nope.”
“Just come sit by the water,” said Katie. “Here, want half of my Popsicle? I got an orange one by mistake.”
I didn’t like orange either, but I wasn’t going to turn down a free Popsicle.
“I suppose you heard I can’t go too far from home these days,” I said.
“Oh, your mother!” said Pauline. “Did she really break her leg? In two?”
“Yeah, sort of. Got a cast and everything. She fell down the stairs. I heard her go, too.”
“Oh no!”
“Yup.”
“Did you hear her bone snap?” You could tell by the way Katie glanced down at the pile of Popsicle sticks that she was this close to using one to make her point. But she thought better of it.
“Well, I heard something like a snap, but I don’t know what it was exactly.”
“God!”
“Ew!”
“It was right scary,” I said. “But I looked over her until we could get her to the hospital.”
“You’re like a hero,” said Pauline.
“Well . . .”
“You are!”
“You’d have done the same. You know, your heart starts pumping what with the fright of it, but your body knows what to do, so you just do what you have to do, and . . .”
Ever stop listening to yourself right in the middle of talking? My mouth was going on about how people been known to lift cars off someone because their fear gives them superhuman strength, and maybe that’s where the inspiration for Superman came from, because didn’t he do that in the first comic, when he was just a little kid, not that I was comparing myself to Superman. Meanwhile, another part of my brain had got itself up and wandered off a ways. What it was thinking about was the Gravedigger. It was thinking: Hold on a sec. What about that letter? The one that came from Ship Harbour and went to the Flynns’ house by mistake. It was probably full of ordinary news from Aunt Izzie, and maybe there was something in it about Johnny. Something that might make the Gravedigger think he could get me going. Something that might make him think his lie would work out differently than it did. What if I could trick him into admitting he’d read the letter—steamed it open, maybe, like in my new favourite comic, Detective Fantastic? If I could prove the Gravedigger had got into our mail, I bet I could convince my parents to send him away.
After I got my superhero self home and brushed the orange off my teeth, I grabbed my shoebox full of markers and pencils. Martha was at the kitchen counter, coating a cake pan with lard. Mama was darning one of Norman’s socks. I still wasn’t used to seeing Mama sitting so much. The bruise on her face was fading into a mishmash of browns.
“For the love of Pete,” Mama said, pulling a rolled bill out of the sock toe.
Norman was forever hiding money. He wasn’t supposed to—Mama was always afraid of being robbed—but he said he felt better when he could put his hands on it. “Safe place, my eye,” Mama said. “Course he’d keep a ten in the one with the hole in it.”
She sighed, tucking the bill into her apron pocket.
“I was thinking that maybe I’d draw something on your cast,” I said to Mama. “If you like.”
“It’s hard enough to keep it clean,” said Mama.
“Oh, a little decoration is better looking than just plain old white,” said Martha. “What would you put there? Maybe some flowers, Mama?”
Mama shrugged. “I suppose you could do a small rose or something. Just on the inside there, not on the front.”
I started sketching out the rose on Mama’s cast. The plaster was hard and bumpy. I had to use the eraser a couple of times and tried not to press too hard on Mama’s leg.
“So how’s Izzie doing these days?” I said, blowing some eraser dust off the cast.
“Aunt Izzie. Don’t be cheeky.”
“How’s Aunt Izzie doing?”
“She’s got a lot of worries.”
“Things okay at the gas station?”
“Hmph. Money’s tight, as usual.”
“Why don’t the Kellocks come for Sunday dinner any more?”
“Aunt Izzie needs Sunday just to catch up with the housework. Now there’s something my father never liked us to do—work on Sundays. Used to get on Norman about it. Truth be told, he could get a little rough, your granddad, especially after Mother died and he took to the bottle. But he had a healthy respect for God, all right.”
“Well, anyway,” I said, “seeing’s how you’re laid up, maybe the Kellocks will find a way to come for a visit. Hey, you hear from Aunt Izzie lately?”
“Your father was just out there. Careful, you’re colouring outside the line.”
“Oh, sorry.” I fixed the rose’s stem with a sharp black marker. “I guess I mean a letter. I thought maybe I saw a letter from Ship Harbour last week.”
Mama stuck out her foot and admired the finished rose. Then she pulled herself up with Norman’s big black umbrella, which she kept hooked on the back of her chair. “No,” she said, tapping out of the kitchen. “It’s been a while since we had a letter.”