RACHEL

For most of her young-adult life, when asked about her musical influences, Rachel Holloway will bring out her one-sentence zinger. “The last thing my father did before he disappeared,” she will say, “was teach me to play the guitar.” She will further explain, if pressed, that he taught her to play a G chord, a C chord, and a D chord. “When I knew those three chords, I guess he figured that was enough parenting, and he took off.” Her listeners will not know whether they’re supposed to laugh or feel sorry for her.

Reality is, as always, messier than the story. It wasn’t as if Henry was there one day, a loving paternal figure helping her with her homework and teaching her basic guitar chords, and vanished without a trace the next. He had been vanishing with traces for parts of the last three or four years, heading off to Toronto for months at a time. Henry vanished bit by bit; Audrey told people he was gone up there to work. Both Alf’s young fellows, Doug and Randy, had good jobs in construction outside Toronto, and it was always the busy season up there. Henry never wrote and rarely phoned when he was away, and Rachel’s life went on much as it always did, school and home, her meals cooked by Nanny Audrey or by Nanny Ellen or, increasingly as she grew from ten to eleven to twelve, by herself.

Audrey often worked through the supper hour; by the time Rachel was in Grade Six she would come home from school and pick up a box of Kraft Dinner or a couple of tins of tuna off the shelf downstairs and make macaroni and cheese or a tuna casserole for herself and Nanny Ellen. Nanny Ellen was a good cook, much better than Audrey, but her legs hurt when she stood up too long, because of a condition that Rachel, till she was ten, thought was called Very Close Veins. Nanny Ellen also got short of breath, and she was forgetful. More than once she’d let the kettle boil dry and then said to Rachel, “Now, your Nanny Audrey don’t need to know about this. She’d only worry.” Sometimes she would give Rachel ten dollars and send her up to Chalkers to get hot-turkey sandwiches for supper for all three of them.

When Henry did come back, his presence made little difference to that routine. Rachel would come home from school one day and he’d be down in the store, usually arguing with Nanny Audrey, the two of them gesturing at each other with their cigarettes and stubbing out butts in Audrey’s green ashtray next to the cash register. Rachel’s memory latches onto the last of these homecoming arguments, when he came home a week before Christmas the year she was in Grade Seven. There was nothing to distinguish that from Henry’s other homecomings, except that it was the last. She suspects, later, that she’s weaving together pieces of early memories, likely even putting in some pure fiction.

Still, she sees him as vividly as if it’s a photograph, hears the ping of the door as she pushes it open and sees him leaning on the customer’s side of the counter, his long thin body wearing his uniform of faded jeans, white T-shirt, denim jacket. Everything frayed at the cuffs and collars, looking hard-used and second-hand, like Henry himself. She sees the look on his face before he turns, sees the sharp etching of frown lines, hears Nanny Audrey say, “Don’t you give me none of your bull, I was talking to Doug’s wife Shelly and she said Doug haven’t seen you since the end of September. You’ve no more been working on construction jobs than I have—”

The never-ending flow of her words cut off sharp as the door opened and she nodded at Rachel. Henry swung toward Rachel, his face changing. He reached out to hug her and she could feel how much taller and older she was than the last time he hugged her. How much more of a stranger he was, every time he came back. But also how familiar the smell of him was, how she liked hearing him say, “There’s my girl, that’s my girl.”

“Look at you,” he said when the hug was over. “You’re growing like the weed.”

In later years Rachel will pick apart this phrase, growing like the weed, so frequently used by both Audrey and Henry in reference to Rachel as a child. She will even try writing a song about it, though once you say weed it’s hard to get away from the marijuana references. Although Henry certainly smoked it and Audrey certainly didn’t, Rachel is one-hundred percent sure neither of them thought of, well, weed, when they said she was growing like a weed. They pictured dandelions or those other spikey things with the sparse white flowers on top—yarrow, was it called? Something unlovely and unwanted but tough and ubiquitous, something that sprang up within a day when you mowed it down.

She squirmed back a little from Henry’s embrace and said, “Thanks…Dad.” The word Dad always sounded funny in her mouth, like saying merci beaucoup instead of thank you.

“How’s school?” he said.

Rachel shrugged. “It’s OK.”

“You’re doing good though? Good grades and all?”

“OK, I guess.”

“She’s doing fine in school, no thanks to you,” Nanny Audrey cut in. “Doris’s young one, Janet, her husband’s working up in Toronto. He sends money home every two weeks, regular as a government cheque, and Janet takes it and buys new clothes and shoes for the youngsters, all three of them, new clothes every month because their father got the sense to go get a good job and send money home.”

“It’s not like you think it is, upalong,” Henry said. “You think there’s streets of gold, jobs just sitting around waiting for someone to come do ’em.”

“Isn’t there? Treese is always telling me how good Doug and Randy is doing, plenty of work all the time. Is there a different Toronto they’re gone to, different from the one you goes up to? Yes, I s’pose now, theirs is all full of factories and construction sites and yours got nothing in it but bars and old dance halls and the like. Yours starts up when theirs is just shutting down, and there’s nothing in yours but a crowd of half-assed drunks with guitars, is that right?”

“Geez, Mom.” Henry tipped his head towards Rachel.

“Yes now. I got to be careful what I says, I s’pose, so your daughter don’t think—”

Ping! The note that punctuated their lives cut off Audrey’s words as no warning from Henry could ever do. She didn’t believe in airing the family’s dirty laundry in front of customers. The vast bulk of Selena Ivany filled the door along with a chilly gust of air. “My god, Audrey, what a day out, sun splittin’ the rocks and you step outside thinkin’ it’s going to be half decent but then the wind is enough to cut you—oh Henry, my god, Henry, I never saw you there, is that you? You’re looking some thin, b’y, you haven’t been sick have you?”

On Christmas Eve, Audrey closed the shop at four. Nanny Ellen cooked fish and brewis. It was almost the only time, now, that she did cook, and she stood at the stove pushing the smelly mixture around in the pan and saying, “Oh, sweet adorable, my legs are killing me.” She made raisin bread earlier in the day: Wesleyan bread, she called it. Christmas Eve supper was always fish and brewis with raisin bread, the shop closing early and the four of them around the table. This was the last Christmas Eve they would all do this, but since none of them knew it, there was no heaviness to the evening, only the mingled pleasure and annoyance of family.

The next day they went to Uncle Alf and Aunt Treese’s for Christmas dinner. Treese had a turkey cooked, and everyone brought something—a cake, a casserole, a salad. The table was so crowded with food it was hard to fit in the plates. Nanny Audrey brought a bottle of wine and a box of Pot of Gold. “I don’t have time to be in the kitchen,” she announced, laying her offerings on Treese’s coffee table.

Rachel’s cousins Nancy and Judy were both there with their husbands and, in Nancy’s case, her two toddlers, Melissa and Kristi. There was another cousin too—Aunt Marilyn’s daughter Sharon, who came home to study at MUN a few years ago and got married in St. John’s. She, like Nancy, had a pair of small loud children everybody seemed to admire. The old people were there, Aunt Susan and Uncle Marv and an even older couple from out around the bay. As always, Rachel had to go kiss the old people on their very wrinkly cheeks, which she hated.

Wedged between the boring conversations of the older relatives and the squalling of the babies, Rachel was bored. She thought back over the day, wondering did you always get worse presents when you were older, or was that just her family that did that. Tomorrow she would go over to Vicky Taylor’s place; she was pretty much Vicky’s best friend since Linda Ivany moved away. Rachel was willing to bet Vicky still got nice stuff for Christmas even if she was twelve. Nanny Audrey got Rachel a pair of jeans and two velour tops, and Nanny Ellen knitted her a hat and mitts. Her present from Uncle Alf and Aunt Treese was still under the tree, to be opened after supper, but she knew that Aunt Treese, like Nanny Audrey, favoured practical gifts like clothes, so she didn’t get her hopes up.

Henry had handed her nothing when she opened her stocking and her few packages under the little artificial tree at home this morning, and he carried nothing with him when they came into Alf’s house. But when everyone started opening gifts after supper Henry said, “Rachel, this is for you,” and handed it across to her, over the heads of the small cousins.

An audible gasp of admiration went up: it wasn’t as if anyone had to guess what Rachel’s gift was. It was a brown guitar case, looking a little battered and worn around the edges. In the middle Henry had stuck a red bow.

“Dad!”

“It comes with lessons,” Henry said. “I mean, I’ll show you a few chords to get you started, anyway. I bet you’ll catch on real quick.”

Later, he sat beside her on Alf’s couch, enclosing both her and the guitar in his arms, showing her how to stretch her fingers to make G, C, and D. The strings cut into her fingertips but Rachel wouldn’t admit it hurt. Henry knew, though. “It hurts a little bit at first. But your fingertips toughen up after a while. The more you play, the easier it gets.”

Later, she ceded the guitar to Henry and he began to play, finger-picking gently, using not just G, C, and D but all the chords he hadn’t shown Rachel yet. He stayed close to her, letting her snuggle up against his left arm as he picked. He played Christmas carols first, and Treese made a faint-hearted attempt to get a sing-song going. But the only ones interested were the parents of the littlest kids, who belted out “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” and “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” like they were trying to make their cranky children laugh. Then Henry shifted into other music, and Nancy said, “Get out the accordion, Dad.”

There was a whole ritual to this, which Rachel half- remembered from other Christmases: Alf had to say no, no, a few times, until three or four people said, “Oh go on, it’s not Christmas without a few tunes,” and finally he went and got the little button accordion and said, “I don’t say I’ve had this out since last Christmas.” He squeezed a few mournful chords, and Sharon and Judy, who both had really nice voices, began to sing.

She’s graceful and she’s charming like the lilies in the pond

Time is flowing swiftly by, of her I am so fond

The roses and the daisies are blooming round the spot

Where we parted when she whispered, you’ll forget me not.

Henry joined in, and a few others came in on the chorus, and then they were on to “Now I’m Sixty-Four.” Aunt Susan pulled Uncle Marv to his feet and the two of them waltzed in the tiny bit of floor space that wasn’t cluttered with gifts and wrapping paper and kids.

“Remember Dad with the accordion?” Nanny Audrey said. “My, how he loved that old thing.”

“He used to play it all the time,” Nanny Ellen added. “There didn’t have to be a crowd over or anything special on the go.”

“Sundays. He played hymns all Sunday afternoon. ‘Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,’ ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus,’ all them old ones.”

As if Audrey’s voice was the string pulling Alf’s accordion, he moved through a few chords from the end of “Now I’m Sixty-Four” into “Amazing Grace” like it was the one song, and Henry followed. Most of the adults were singing now. Rachel leaned into Henry’s arm, wishing she could soak up how to play the guitar through his skin that way, without having to dig little grooves into her fingertips learning.

Henry left in the middle of January. By that time Rachel knew six chords, and her fingertips were starting to get calluses. One day school was closed for a snowstorm, and when Rachel got up late and stumbled into the kitchen, Henry had bacon frying in the pan while he sat at the table playing his guitar.

“What’s that song?” Rachel asked.

Henry laughed: not at any joke he was going to tell her, though. Rachel knew that laugh; something funny inside his own head. “One of your nan’s favourites,” he said.

“Nanny Audrey or Nanny Ellen?”

“All Nanny Ellen’s favourite songs are hymns. Nanny Audrey likes this one. Do you want any bacon?” He nodded toward the pan. It was nice, getting up like this and him having something cooked already, like waking up at Vicky’s house on a Saturday when Rachel slept over. Vicky’s mom cooked supper every night but on weekend mornings her dad took over the kitchen and made eggs, bacon, pancakes, or toutons.

No pancakes or anything like that here, but at least her dad had made bacon. She could hear the voices of her grandmother and great-grandmother drifting upstairs from the shop. Rachel put a slice of bread in the toaster and picked up her own guitar. “Can you teach it to me?”

“I guess so. It’s only the four chords. Let me put it in C for you.” His fingers shifted the key so the music sounded the same but different, which was still a little bit like magic for Rachel, but she knew she’d be able to do it sometime.

Hear…the lone…some whip…poor will

He sounds…too blue

he played, then changed the chord a little bit—from C to C7—for to fly. He sang slowly through the verse so Rachel could follow. It ended on a long, mournful note like a howl.

Later in the afternoon they ran through it again. “Will we play it for Nan tonight? Will she like that?” Rachel asked.

Henry rubbed his hand across his nose. “Mmm, maybe not tonight. Why don’t you wait and play it for her by yourself? She’ll like that better.”

“But you can sing better than me, and you know all the words. Won’t she like hearing you sing it?”

“No, I don’t think so. Or maybe she’d like it too much.” Rachel wanted to ask him what he meant, but she could tell by his face that he wouldn’t answer her. “Anyway, she has it on a record. She’s got them all on records. You can learn the words off that.”

“Or you can teach me.”

“Right, if I get the chance.” And then she knew he was going to leave again. She didn’t know it would be that night, after she went to bed, after an argument with Nanny Audrey, before the snowploughs had finished clearing the streets. She didn’t know that he would go without saying goodbye, or that he wouldn’t be there next Christmas. Rachel learned more chords and more songs, and she got good at the lonesome song, but she never played it for Nanny Audrey.