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“Papers? What papers?”

“In her desk. Go through her desk, get it all settled.” Something about the way he spoke suggested that he'd had the same thought as I had: that

some day I'd be going through the things in this house alone, so we should do what we could together. It was unbearable.

“Do we have to do it
now
? I just sat down.”

“Suit yourself.” He got up and went down the hall; I followed.

Gramma had a little cherry-wood desk in that front room (the parlour, she'd called it, ignoring its modern designation as
living room
) no one ever used but her. I'd loved that desk as a kid. It had a million little drawers and cubbyholes, and a mother-of-pearl inlay on its fold-up top; the drawers opened with an ornate key. I'd always been convinced that there was a secret compartment somewhere. There wasn't, but there should have been. It was that sort of desk.

Grandpa opened a big drawer full of letters and started going through them, after a moment taking an armload to the armchair by the window so he could see better. I sat at the desk and watched him for a while, methodically holding each letter up to the light (still in its envelope) to read the address, and sometimes opening it to read what was inside. He started making two piles, and I wondered what possible use I could be in this process. I started opening drawers in a desultory manner, nose full of the scent of old wood and dust and newspaper. One little drawer near the top had the small silver key in it. It wouldn't open at first and I struggled, wondering if I was turning the key in the right direction, when the drawer slid free in a rush; it was jammed full with a bundle of newspaper clippings. They were tied together by a length of scarlet ribbon. I untied it. The paper crackled softly with age and there was a white band across the middle where the ribbon had protected the newsprint from yellowing.

The clipping at the top of the pile was so familiar that I almost didn't recognize it, here, in this safe little room.
Arterial Christened in Blood.
Cheesy, pure
fromage
as Blue would say. My parents' names, the circumstances.
Police suspect that alcohol may have been a factor. No other vehicles were involved in the accident.

My father hadn't been a drinker. It still hurt me that they'd say that: “alcohol may have been a factor.” They had found out soon enough that it wasn't. Drunk driving, now,
I
knew all about that. Trying not to damage the soft paper I turned it face down. I didn't want to see it any more.

The other articles in Gramma's bundle didn't seem to bear any relation to that first one. They were gathered from newspapers, magazines, seniors' newsletters, from bits published by the folklore department at the University. Columns called
The Way We Were.
Serials called
Incredible Tales
. Gramma had been collecting them for over a decade, I saw, ever since my parents' accident. A woman sees a group of ladies in white, dancing in a circle one night on the Three Pond Barrens just outside of St. John's. An outport cop's car breaks down one night; his radio won't work and he starts walking into town; he feels something strike his leg and when he gets home, the place where he's been struck is infected; it never heals. A man builds a house over an invisible path; at night he hears parties in the kitchen, and when he interrupts,
his face, you should have seen it. Pimples all over
. A little boy on the lower end of Merasheen Island that everyone calls “The Changeling,” saying the fairies took the real baby away;
but they're always saying that about the odd ones,
says the priest.

A mother's son disappears for days in the woods and when he comes back he just sits by the stove eating. An old midwife comes in,
she had strange powers, see.
She says that's not the son, it's a small devil, and the men throw it in the pond. The mother screams, she has to be held back by five men. But when they get back to the kitchen, who should they see on the chair by the stove but the real son? Of the mother they say,
She was some glad
.

It wasn't the sort of thing my sensible Gramma, Madeline Jones, would have been interested in. I turned over more squares of paper: priests and five-cent pieces and bread in pockets.

‘No, I'm not Jack.'

The words leapt out at me.
‘I'm not the one you thinks is Jack, now, see. I'm the one you used to know.'

The room was very quiet; even the rustling of Grandpa's letter-sorting had fallen silent.
And I turned around, and when I looked back, the fellow I was talking to, he was gone. Then I looks up the road, and there's Jack coming toward me. He comes up to me. ‘But I was just talking to you,' I says, ‘how did you get up there?' and he says, ‘That wasn't me. That was the Jack you used to know. But I've been living with you a long time.' And he looks wicked as he says this, trying to frighten me, see? ‘The Jack you used to know is gone.' But he died a few years later, and he looked young then, not a blemish on him, even though the other fellow had been going around all scriveled up. They sent back the right man when he died. They goes on. I seen that myself.

Who was “they”?

Grandpa's big hand closed over the pile like a vise. I hadn't heard him get up from the chair. “I don't want you looking at those.” He loomed over me. Then all at once he dropped his hand and turned away, looking old and tired. “I didn't know she had those.” He sat down and stared out the window.

“They're just fairy tales, Grandpa,” I said. He started gathering up the letters from their piles; a bunch of envelopes skidded off the chair and fell onto the floor. He almost swore. “I'll get them.” I came and knelt at his feet, gathering the letters in an untidy bunch. He was staring at the desk now, one hand clenching and unclenching on his knee. I sat back on my heels. “Maybe we've done enough for one day.”

His eyes met mine for an instant. He nodded. I put the stack of clippings back together, and re-tied the red ribbon around them. Then I took the silver key and, dropping the bundle back in, locked the drawer.

We gathered the rest of the letters and put them away in silence.

CHAPTER 13

It's surprising how documented death has to be, how many forms there are to fill out, how much money it costs to die. Grandpa and I picked out a little headstone – a plaque, really, and even that was bloody expensive – and put Gramma's name and dates on it. And, Grandpa's idea, his own name and date of birth, and a dash. We had several visitations over the next couple of days: mostly neighbours bearing more tuna casseroles. I hoped Queenie would visit again, but there was no sign of her. Finally I got up the nerve to ask.

“Grandpa, have you talked to Queenie since the,” I cleared my throat, “the funeral?”

“What?” He was watching the news. A child was missing, a twelve-year-old boy out on Three Pond Barrens near the city.

“I said…”

“I heard what you said.”

The TV played between us for a while; they'd been looking for the kid for three days now and hope was waning. As the commentator's voice yammered on, the camera went from the obligatory shot of volunteers in bright jackets walking through scrubby woods to a close-up of the mother's face. I continued, “It's just, that, well, she'd probably bring more of her delicious bread. And such.” The searchers were beginning to give up hope that they'd find the boy, but the mother, stony-faced, was saying
I'll not be giving up, not yet.
The camera swerved over to the husband, sitting next to her on their ugly sofa. He wore a red mesh-back baseball cap high on his head, and suddenly his face crumpled – he began to cry and took the hat off, holding it in front of his face. “I'd like to see her again,” I said.

“Oh, for – ” He went to the phone and invited her over.

That evening we heard a sports car zooming down the road and pulling up outside the house with a squeal of tires. “That'll be Queenie,” said Grandpa. She arrived with a meat pie in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other, lighting up the room in her red suit, a chiffon scarf tied at her neck with a flourish.

“What happened to your face, dear?”

“Nothing. Tea?” I asked.

She looked at me like I was crazy. “It's after five,” she said.

Two drinks in and Queenie and I had tuned the transistor radio to an oldies station, and were singing “It's Not Unusual” at the top of our lungs. I was pretending the whiskey bottle was a microphone, practicing my Tom Jones swagger. “No, no, that's too Elvis!” Queenie laughed.

“Whatever. I've never seen him,” I said. “Whoa-oh-oh-oh!”

“Who? Who haven't you seen?” Grandpa groused.

“And blah-blah-blah I don't know the words!”

“Elvis or Tom Jones? Who?”

“Well, neither,” I admitted, flopping into my chair and pouring another drink. “Except on TV.”

“I saw Tom Jones in Vegas. Oh, he was marvelous,” Queenie said.

Whoa whoa whoa whoa!
sang Tom Jones on the radio.

“Whoa whoa-a!” Queenie and I chimed in.

“When did you go to Vegas?” Grandpa asked.

“I went with Yvonne in 1985. Pour me another drink, there's a girl.”

“You did?” Grandpa sounded a bit aggrieved.

“We did. Lord, she's neurotic. Do you know,” Queenie waved her replenished glass at us, “she brought a box of Bounce sheets with her. And the first night in the hotel I hear this sort of scrubbing noise from her bed, a sort of wipe-wipe, and finally I says to her, Yvonne, what the hell are you doing? And she says, Oh, I'm rubbing my Bounce sheet over my pillow case. So nice and fresh. And you know, she did that every goddamn night!”

Grandpa palpably suppressed a desire to tell Queenie to watch her language “And that, Ruby dear,” Queenie said, lighting up a smoke, “is the one person in the family with whom you share your non-smoking habits.”

“I don't smoke!” Grandpa said.

“You used to, dear.” Grandpa looked so like a sulky little boy that I started laughing, and as he glared Queenie joined in. “Oh, he was spoiled,” she said to me with mock-secrecy from behind her hand. “That's why he's so cranky all the time. He thinks it provides necessary contrast to our girlish laughter.” She crooned, backing up Tom Jones, going off into gales of laughter.

As the level in the bottle dropped, the two of them began to reminisce about their childhood. How they used to keep hens in the backyard: “We had to buy an alarm clock after we got rid of them,” Grandpa said. And the two bawdy houses up the road, the cathouses they called them, and the women walking up the road in their tight clothes. I thought of Juanita's sisters when I'd been a kid, not five doors up from us now, and kept my trap shut. The Portuguese sailors who used to come up from the harbour to wash their laundry in the countless cold little springs and waterfalls that cascaded from the Hill.

“It was with the War that everything really began to change,” Queenie said. “All kinds of soldiers were based here: Canadians, English, Americans. The Yanks, we called them. Oh, we thought they were some handsome.”

“
You
thought they were handsome,” Grandpa corrected. “You could always tell a Yank because he was the one with his arm draped over a girl.”

“They all had wonderful teeth,” Queenie said, so fervently that I laughed.

“Mother and Father both had false teeth – lots of people did,” Grandpa put in.

“The Canadians, now, they had those baggy pants and clumsy boots, and those tunics. We didn't like them so well.”

“The Yanks really knew how to treat a girl,” Grandpa said. “Who was that fella you were going with?”

“Sam.” A complex of emotions flitted across her face. “We had some marvelous times. There were dances almost every night.”

“Queenie sure liked to dance,” Grandpa told me.

“Beautiful fella; he was lovely. He thought I was marvelous. Took me to every dance. We were at the Knights of Columbus that night it burned down.”

“Really?” I said. Clearly, this fire was something I should know about and didn't.

“That was the enemy did that,” Grandpa said, and at my look of disbelief insisted, “It was. Someone set that fire, the Germans, a saboteur. The evening was just ending. They used to broadcast from the hotel every week over the radio. I was at home listening in, with Mom, she liked to listen to the radio on her good nights.”
Good nights?
I wanted to ask, but he kept going. “The theme song was playing,
And we'll meet here every week, And you'll call her ‘my sweet,'And we'll join in the Old Barn Dance
, when suddenly it was interrupted with screaming, and then it went off the air, just like that, like someone stopping breathing. Mom went just about frantic wondering what was happening.”

“Turned out that someone laid a trail of toilet paper to a storage cupboard on the second floor and set a match to it,” Queenie said. “The building went up like a bonfire. Sam got me out – it was awful, the doors all opened inwards and people were screaming and pressing up against each other in a panic, like animals. I fell, and someone trampled over me. Sam got me up, hauled me up by one arm, he was a big fella, and he got us out. He helped a few more out too. We found out later that the emergency exits were locked.”