On Sunday, Martha and her friends set off for church without me. I’d told Mama I wasn’t feeling well. Really, I just didn’t want to face the caterwauler, but the thing about Mama is, she never bothers you about being sick. That’s because Martha used to miss a lot of school on account of her asthma. One time a teacher didn’t notice how she bad she was getting, and Martha almost died. Ever since then, all you had to do was say to Mama that you didn’t feel good and you could stay home.
Through my bedroom window, I could hear a bunch of boys coming down the street. They were Catholic boys, dressed up in their church clothes but pushing and shoving and laughing at each other like their mothers had just let them out of their cages. It’s a wonder, I thought, that girls ever got married, because you had to forgive your fiancé for once being a rotten boy.
Just as the boys were passing between our place and the Flynns’, David came out of his house. He was carrying a shovel, for land’s sake, holding it in front of him like he was taking a load of dirt somewhere special. Might as well have been wearing a big sign that said “Pick On Me.”
“Hey, Flynn! You digging graves in your off hours?” one of the boys called.
The others laughed—put-on-like, the way you do when a joke isn’t that funny and you’re going to pretend it was. David just stared down at the boys like they were a bunch of maggots. But there was something about the way he was holding steady there. Too steady. I ducked my head out the window and strained to see what was going on in those green-blue eyes. He was nervous.
“I said, you’re digging graves, are yah? Got yourself a fresh body in the house?” the kid called again, a little bolder this time. “Hey, Gravedigger?”
David started coming down his walk towards the boys. Real slow, real careful with that shovel. Some of them flinched back a bit, but the group held steady. Nobody was going to be the first to bolt.
“I’ll be with you in a minute,” David said, stepping down onto the sidewalk. “Only first I’ve got these little graves to dig. Small ones. Teeny. Tiny.”
He suddenly thrust the shovel towards the boys, and—oh my—didn’t that send them screaming and running, because just for a second there, it looked like the Gravedigger might lose the load of dead mice that was balanced on the end of it.
From somewhere inside the house, Norman chuckled.
A mouse had fallen onto the sidewalk, and David had to bend low to scoop up its little grey body without dropping the others. He didn’t even glance in my direction, just shuffled back up his walk and took his corpses around the back. I hoped the part about burying them was true.
I found Norman downstairs, rinsing out wash rags at the kitchen sink. He was wearing one of Mama’s aprons.
“If your mother finds streaks on those front windows, you’re going to cover for me, right?”
“Yup.”
“The Flynn boy’s been doing such a good job, I don’t know what else I’m going to do with myself today. Might have to pray or something.” He suddenly started at the sight of something out in the garden, his whole self going stiff like a hunting dog. “Cats,” he said, dropping his hands back into the water.
I held up my sketch pad so he could see the portrait of Margaret’s wedding that I’d copied from the photograph. As it turned out, Johnny was the tallest person in the picture besides the groom. Course, that wasn’t saying a lot, in our family.
“Don’t know where you got the knack,” Norman said. “Weren’t from me. Remember when you lost the locket Margaret gave you for being a flower girl?”
I rolled my eyes. I’d taken an earful about that one. No one ever let me forget anything.
“Aw. People are so hard on the baby.” He patted my head with a wet hand. “Speaking of the Flynn boy, Bean, what’s that the kids call him again?”
“Um . . . the Gravedigger.”
“Why is that?”
“’Cause he works over at the cemetery. You know, where his mum’s buried.” I didn’t tell Norman about how people said the Gravedigger had dug his mother up. It seemed pretty silly, anyway, now that I kind of knew David.
“Don’t imagine anyone’s quite right who loses their mother that way.”
“What way?”
Norman wiped his hands on Mama’s apron. Then he took it off and hung it to dry by the warming hub of the stove. “Too young. She drowned, you know.”
If you’re going to die before your time, I don’t suppose drowning’s worse than sickness or a train wreck or falling off a cliff. But it’s still shocking somehow, especially when it happens to someone who knew someone you know. Maybe it’s because when people drown, you figure most of them know it’s happening. They can feel themselves dying. If you fall off a cliff, well, let’s hope you hit bottom before your brain catches up with the rest of you.
“How did it happen?” I asked.
“I don’t think you need to hear another story about people drowning. Anyway, who’s that sneaking into the house?”
Storming in was more like it. Freddie, his wife, Hazel, Margaret, and her husband, Cecil, had let themselves in the front, and the kitchen door swung open with a bang.
“Number one and two,” Norman said brightly. “Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes.”
Martha, home from church, brought up the rear.
“We’d have got here sooner,” Freddie said, “but we thought we’d try an extra, extra slow route today.”
Margaret’s icebox eyes made it clear what the fight had been about.
“Well, sir,” said Norman, “lovely day for a drive.”
“Hello, lovey,” Cecil whispered. He bent down and gave me a quick kiss on each cheek. Cecil went to Europe once. “One from your niece and one from your nephew. They’re at their other grandmother’s today.”
“Maybe if your wife had let us roll down the windows for two minutes, the car wouldn’t have filled up with smoke, and we could’ve seen where we were going,” Margaret said, her voice rising higher with each word.
Hazel, every hair in place, sniffed a thin, rasping sniff. She shot Margaret a poisonous look before blowing a stream of smoke in her direction.
“Maybe you oughta take your own car next time!” Freddie boomed. “Wouldn’t you say, Norman?”
Norman was frowning at his watch and tapping it as if it was broken, although I could see plain as anything the second hand was moving around.
“Good Lord. Can’t you fight in your own homes!” They all gasped at the sight of Mama, with her cast, standing in the doorway, leaning on Norman’s umbrella. “I’m fine,” she said, waving away the hands trying to help her to a chair. She propped up her cast on the sewing box.
“Remind me,” said Freddie, “how the heck you did this.”
I slipped beside Norman in the corner rocking chair and tried to make myself invisible.
“Tripped on the stairs,” Mama said, smoothing down the front of her housedress.
“And . . .” Margaret prompted.
Mama shrugged. “I landed.”
Her face was set. She wasn’t going to say any more. Freddie looked at Margaret, who raised an eyebrow. “Mama, you should be more careful.”
“Thank you, son. I’ll keep that in mind.”
Cecil turned his head away. I think he was smiling. I might have, too, but I was caught up in how Mama hadn’t told them about the pencils. She wasn’t going to say the accident was my fault. Maybe it really was knocked out of her memory. And everyone believed her. Even Hazel just shook her head and took another drag on her cigarette.
“You weren’t expecting a Sunday dinner, were you?” said Mama. “We’re not cooking for crowds these days.”
“No, Mama,” said Margaret. “Just wanted to see how you were getting along.”
“Fine.”
“Are you in pain?”
“No.”
“No?”
“Well, the cast is damn itchy.”
Margaret and Freddie looked at each other again. They both seemed to be waiting for the other to say something.
“For the love of God, someone spit it out,” said Mama.
“You remember that lot we stopped by, out Prospect way?” Cecil said to Norman. “When my pal Dale was looking to buy outside the city?”
“Sure, sure,” said Norman.
“It’s back on the market. There’s a nice little house on it now and I hear there’s Crown land behind.”
“That’s a beautiful lot,” said Norman.
“Made us think of you, that’s all.”
“Where are you kids going with this?” said Mama.
“Nowhere,” said Freddie. “Some people just think that you might do better in a house with one floor.”
“Some people do, do they?”
“Why not make it easier on yourself? Once Martha goes off and gets married, there will only be three of you. You can’t be depending on Rosalie.”
The mountain of words that piled up in my brain was so huge I couldn’t even get a foothold. I felt Norman’s arm tighten around me.
“We’ll manage, thank you,” said Mama. “You forget the aunties stayed here until they died.”
After my grandmother passed on, people said my granddad couldn’t raise his kids on his own. That’s how Mama, Aunt Izzie, and Uncle Jim ended up here. If Mama died, I couldn’t imagine leaving Norman to go to live with someone else, especially two old gnarled-up great-aunties who made you earn your keep by doing chores from morning till night. Mama took care of the aunties until the end, when they caught the same flu and died within a few days of each other. We’re not supposed to say a word against them, mind, since they left Mama the house.
“The aunties had you helping them, didn’t they?” said Freddie. “These girls aren’t going to stay in this house any more than Johnny’s going to stay in Ship Harbour his whole life to help run that station. You and Izzie got to start thinking ahead.”
“I think you’ll be waiting a long time to see me married,” Martha said quietly.
“Why? You’re good-looking enough.”
Martha’s mouth opened, but no words came out. Couldn’t get a foothold, I guess. Or maybe the smoke was getting to her, because she just smiled, plucked her white church gloves off the counter, and glided out of the kitchen.
“Speaking of Johnny . . .” Norman began. I twisted around in the chair so I could see his face. “Oh. Well. Rosalie drew a real nice picture of him.”
“Goody for Baby,” said Hazel.
“Bean.”
I dog-eared the copy of Richie Rich I was reading and put it on my bedside table. “We’re not going to move, are we?”
“Aw. That’s just talk.”
“Okay.”
“Always wanted a big yard for you kids. And a better garden for Mama. But I probably don’t got enough squared away for a lot as nice as that one.”
“That’s good. I mean, I don’t want to move.”
“Yeah, moving’s hard when you’re young.”
We sat quietly for a bit. When you grow up with about a hundred kids in your family, probably the best thing you could wish for would be a nice place of your own to live in, and here I’d just said no to it, like I had any say-so.
I didn’t know how not to talk to Norman about something. Not telling him what I knew about Johnny was like having an itch you can’t scratch under a cast. But I wanted him to tell me. And something else. If something’s so big it’s too big to talk about over cigarettes at Mama’s kitchen table, well, maybe I didn’t want to know the whole truth of it yet.
“Funny when Hazel dropped that spoon in her teacup, wasn’t it?” said Norman.
“Yeah,” I said. “Tea flew up her nose.”
Norman creaked his old self down the hall, and I lay in bed not-sleeping. After a long while, I turned on my flashlight and tried thinking up a new comic strip, but it just wouldn’t come.