Fall on Your Knees (41 page)

“Nothing, Lily, go back to bed.”

“It’s morning…. Is Frances home yet?”

Mercedes wiped her eyes with her onion hand by mistake and found herself unable to do anything but gulp.

“Mercedes —”

“I’m just slicing onions, Lily, don’t be foolish.”

“Don’t worry about Frances, Mercedes, I asked Ambrose to look after her.”

Mercedes seized Lily and hugged her. Lily felt something hard pressing across her spine — Mercedes had forgotten to put down the paring knife — but Lily was too polite to say anything. James came into the kitchen rubbing his hands together, refreshed despite a night in a chair in his clothes, “Who feels like bacon and eggs? I’ll cook.”

“Oh Daddy,” said Mercedes, “don’t worry about Frances, she’s sure to turn up.”

And she did, that afternoon, with a tiny carved ballerina for Lily.

Now Mercedes has ceased to worry when Frances disappears like a cat for days, confident that she is being watched over through the special intercessions of Lily. Mercedes puts it down as another sign and adds it to the lengthening report she will one day soon make to the bishop.

Mahmoud never misses the braid because he has no idea it survived the Materia purge. Frances found it under the red velvet lining at the bottom of Giselle’s jewellery box. It was a close call.

Mahmoud was in bed and out like a light at the other end of the room. Frances stood at her late grandmother’s vanity and surveyed the loot laid out before her. Silver brushes, combs and hand mirrors. A rosewood jewellery box. She lifted the lid and up struck a hurdy-gurdy orchestra along with a pink ballerina. Frances shut the box instantly and turned back towards Mahmoud, who groaned, rolled over and looked straight at her. They just stayed like that, staring at each other, until she realized he was still asleep. She waved at him. She gave him the finger. She returned to the jewellery box and opened it a hair’s breadth — yes, now she could see the little dancer lying flat on its face. Frances slipped a finger through the crack and pinned the thing in dead-swan position while she opened and plundered the box. She checked for a false bottom in case of cash, lifting the red velvet lining, and that was how she stumbled upon the black braid lying coiled in its jewelled nest. It must have been Mumma’s because why else would it be hidden? Artefacts of lost girls are always forbidden. Frances stuffed the braid and the jewels into her Guide pouch leaving only a strand of genuine pearls. She extracted the ballerina by its roots, little red bits of velvet trailing from its pointed feet. She considered laying it on Mahmoud’s pillow like an eldritch gift from the tooth fairy, but decided Lily might like to have it. Finally, she picked up the strand of pearls and carefully severed its string with her teeth. She removed one pearl, then coiled the rest back into the otherwise empty rosewood box and tiptoed from the room with her booty.

What Frances really wishes she could steal or be stolen by, however, is Teresa, who still works for Mahmoud. Teresa of the black and white candy. Queen Teresa, disguised as a maid. Frances is not fooled by her big purse and simple dress. It almost seems vain for someone with a face like Teresa’s to dress in clothes so humble that they serve only to highlight the beauty of the wearer. When Frances first spied Teresa letting herself in through the kitchen door with her own key she had the wild certainty that Teresa was now Mrs Mahmoud — my step-grandmother! But Teresa left at six that evening, having set out Mahmoud’s supper, and Frances realized she had her own home to go to — with lucky children in it, no doubt.

There’s a kitchen door to the cellar and Frances loves to sit behind its splinter of light and watch Teresa work. She does this for hours, until she turns into the dough that Teresa is kneading, or the glass that Teresa pours milk into, or the apron that she wipes her hands on. It’s so peaceful that one time Frances fell asleep and tumbled all the way down the cellar steps. She hid when Teresa came down to see what the commotion was, and even though Frances was longing to say, “It’s me, I hurt myself,” all she said was, “Meow.”

One day, a man comes and eats lunch at the kitchen table while Teresa works. His name is Ginger — “Come on in, Ginger, darlin.” He is her darling but not her husband — Teresa calls to Mahmoud in the living-room, “My brother’s here, sir.” Ginger wears overalls but he’s not a miner, he’s too healthy-looking. Frances recognizes him right away — he is the one who used to drive Kathleen back and forth to school in a black Model T Ford. He dropped off Kathleen the day Teresa gave Frances the black and white striped candy. He called to Teresa and they drove away together and Kathleen took Frances’s candy and threw it into the creek. Frances even remembers what they had for supper that night — steak-and-kidney pie. Frances wonders why stupid details like supper stick in her mind when there are other things that she’d give anything to remember, like the last time she felt her mother’s touch.

Mr Mahmoud comes in while Ginger is there and says, “Hello, Leo” — and Frances nearly loses her balance on the steps again, jolted by the collision of two men in her mind. Frances sees the name stencilled on the back of the booze truck, parked out front of James’s still, then the truck dissolves into the Model T Ford but the stencilled name remains: “Leo Taylor Transport.”

He says, “Hello, Mr Mahmoud.”

Mahmoud asks in his dusky accent, “Have you got my special order?”

“I sure do, Mr Mahmoud, and strong like you like it.”

The surprise of recognizing Leo Taylor outweighs the surprise of seeing her grandfather guzzle a brown bottle of “special order”. Frances would never have pegged him for a drinker. He isn’t, of course, it’s only ginger beer. And when Teresa pours out glasses for herself and her brother, Frances realizes that, along with the fact that she too is thirsty. When she watches the fizzy gold slide past Teresa’s lips and ripple down her throat, Frances feels a craving. Leo Taylor sips his slowly.

Frances watches and remembers when she told Lily that her real daddy was a black man from The Coke Ovens. It was Leo Taylor she was thinking of, having seen him at James’ still. She told Lily this story in order to find out if it was true. Like the old orange-cat story — how it smothered Ambrose, and Daddy buried it in the garden. Like the story of how Mumma drowned Ambrose in the creek, and the one about the old French mine. Frances needs to say a story out loud to divine how much truth runs beneath its surface.

On her narrow journeys up the attic stairs by night Frances has seen a picture she did not know she owned: Kathleen with a black-red stomach, sweaty hair, two tiny babies alive between her knees. There is no one else in the picture except the person who is looking at it —
that must be me
. There is a voice way at the back of Frances’s mind, hollering into a wind. She can’t make it out yet, it’s just a sighing sound, it’s sighing a question. The question is,
how did the babies get in the creek, Frances?
The voice is getting closer. It’s on the first step. Partly to drown the voice and partly to enlist help in travelling to meet it, Frances tells herself another story.

There at the top of her grandfather’s cellar steps, behind the crack of the door, watching Teresa and her brother drink ginger beer, Frances murmurs aloud, quickly and under her breath like Mercedes saying the rosary:
Kathleen is Lily’s mother, Ambrose drowned because we don’t know why, Kathleen was not married, she had a tumour in her belly but she didn’t really, there was a secret father, it was Ginger — he drove her and they fell in love on the way to school, that’s why Daddy says don’t play that coloured music from the hope chest — he sent Kathleen to New York Town but Ginger followed in his truck, Daddy took her home again but it was too late, she died of twins — do you know the Ginger Man, the Ginger Man, the Ginger Man, do you know the Ginger Man he lives in Ginger Lane. Amen Lily and Ambrose
.

“Goodbye, Ginger honey,” says Teresa at the kitchen door, “drive safe.”

Teresa washes the glasses and Frances pads away down the cellar steps. Part of her story is true. And part of it is true enough. Frances will find out where he lives and buy herself a case of ginger beer.

She shimmies up the coal chute and out into a stab of sunlight.

Ginger has seen a little girl on the Shore Road between New Waterford and Sydney. She strays along the edge of the ditch looking every place but where she’s going. Why is she allowed to wander the highway alone like that and why is she not in school? Who’s her father? Where’s her mother? She always wears a Girl Guide uniform, which is strange because she doesn’t look old enough to be a Girl Guide, more like a Brownie.

The third time Ginger passes, they’re both travelling in the same direction and he slows down a little, thinking maybe to offer her a ride, but he decides against it, not wanting to frighten her. She looks up, though, at the slowing truck ahead, and he sees her face in the side mirror. It hurts him. Who would let their little girl walk the Shore Road alone day after day? He never would. He has three daughters: two Brownies and one Guide.

He shivers and drives on. He glances at the St Christopher medal hanging from his rearview mirror. Ginger has never had an accident, he is a good driver, but lately he has felt funny about the road. He used to see it all at once and drive as naturally as blinking and breathing, but now it’s as though he sees each piece of road individually the moment his wheels roll over it. To either side, each stone and tree stands separately, and he has lost the knack of expecting the road to unfurl around the bend. Driving is his living — he can’t afford to be spooked.

Ever since his last trip to New York Ginger hasn’t felt right. Never quite rested, or quite awake. It’s as though a window has been left open inside his head, admitting a draft. He can’t get to it to close it. But he can look out it, even though all he sees is fog. It rolls into his mind, obscuring his ease, setting him to shiver. Still, he looks and looks. Because out there in the fog he can feel something looking back at him.

His wife, Adelaide, knows there is something not right but how can Ginger explain to her what he cannot explain to himself? He heard some music in New York. That sounds crazy, he knows it, so the least he can do is keep it to himself. Can music cast a spell? Yes. Everyone knows that. And everyone would laugh at him if he said it out loud.

It was in a club up in Harlem. Ginger had time on his hands waiting for a shipment of dresses to haul back to Mahmoud’s Department Store on Pitt Street. Whenever Ginger is in a place that’s filled with other black people it’s as though he is relieved of a weight that he was unaware of until it came off him. He walked up Lenox Avenue feeling light. In Harlem Ginger felt happy but lonely too. Home and not home. He entered a small club on 135th Street that welcomed Negroes in the audience, not just on stage. A trio was playing quiet music for a quiet crowd. The whole scene was highly unusual. No floor show, no horns or hi-de-ho. Piano, bass and flute. Ginger stood and listened.

The piano player was at the core of the trio. A slim man with long fine fingers, hand-tooled wrists. So good that he had come to prefer playing between the music. This was not for everyone and the pianist hadn’t had a new suit in a very long time. Threadbare trousers, white shirt open at the long handsome throat. A charcoal fedora angled low, and round its base a shimmering green silk band.

Three minutes or three hours later, Ginger recognized the number as “Honeysuckle Rose,” but this did not prevent him from confusing his left arm with his right when he went to lift his glass of beer. The odd thing was, Ginger had homey taste in music. If it could be sung by the whole family, it was great by him. He certainly didn’t claim to be any kind of connoisseur. And yet when the pianist allowed his fingers to settle like mist onto the keys for the next interstellar tune, Ginger had to stay and listen.

It was on the night drive back up to Cape Breton that he became aware of the fault line opening inside his head, and twice he had to remind himself to stop when the land ended: once because it was time to coast onto the ferry, and once again because he was home. He hugged Adelaide as though she were the first solid food he’d had in weeks.

Still, he hasn’t been able to shake the unease, and sights like the lost little Girl Guide are bothering him perhaps even more than they normally would. The third time he sees her, Ginger means to tell Adelaide, but it slips his mind only to return that night in a dream. He sees the thin white face in the side mirror up close — the serious brown green eyes, one freckle on the nose. It still looks like a child, but an unspeakably old one. It is the saddest face he has ever seen. Ginger wakes up even though it’s not a nightmare. For the first time it occurs to him that the little Girl Guide may be a ghost. What is she saying to him with her eyes? “Here is how I died…. Pray for me.” Ginger wipes his face — it’s wet but none of the rest of him is so it couldn’t have been a night sweat. How strange. He goes and checks on all his children in their beds. When he returns he looks down at his rusty-haired wife, who appears ready for a fight even in her sleep. Thank God for Adelaide.

Ginger means to tell his sister Teresa about the little Girl Guide and about his dream the next day at lunch when he brings Mr Mahmoud his ginger-beer treat, but again it slips his mind.

Jameel squints down at Frances. “What for?”

“Just tell me.”

Frances has awakened him in the middle of the day, he’s jaundiced as the sun.

“Why?”

“Because I’ll burn your fuckin house down if you don’t.”

Jameel horks out last night’s nicotine. “You just watch yourself, that’s all I’m sayin, Leo Taylor’s got a mean wife.”

“It’s not his wife I’m interested in.”

“He lives in the purple house on Tupper Street.”

Frances turns to leave; Jameel shakes his head and warns, “Just don’t come cryin to me.”

But she ignores him.

Ginger Taylor gets a jolt when he looks up from the shell in his youngest child’s hand to see the little Girl Guide standing in his back yard staring at him. She is a ghost. What does she want?