by Mark Blagrave
ISBN 9781897151242 | 5.5" x 8.5" | TPB with French Flaps | $21
Categories:Fiction - Literary, Fiction - Historical
Purchase:Local Bookstores | amazon.ca | chapters.indigo.ca
Silver Salts (Preview)
1. In the Looking Glass
It begins with the shattered mirror I hid beneath the floorboard — my face multiplied and imprisoned on every fragment.
My earliest memory? It is the earliest story I remember telling myself. That amounts to the same thing.
I do not feel the cuts on my hands until all the pieces have been cleaned up, but this doesn't surprise me; fear has a way of focusing my mind. What's a little sting beside what my father will do if he finds the broken glass? I would like to stop to admire the new patterns on my palms, red streets on a map made just for me, but I must erase all traces right away. The blood would only lead them back to the glass, and the glass to the mirror. It is the way their minds work. In lines. So I find one of my mother's cloths — the ones only she uses. I am pretty sure she doesn't have them counted out. I know he doesn't.
The maps transfer perfectly onto the cotton. It's just like making a print, so I'm sorry to spoil the patterns as I squeeze the cloth in my hands to put pressure on the cuts. If anybody notices, I will say I fell on the street and landed on my palms.
For that I'll need some dirt. Dirt is no problem.
It doesn't take long for the bleeding to slow. I push the cloth into the space between the joists where I have already gathered the shards of glass. The floorboard shrieks a little as I press it back in place. "Quiet," I whisper back.
My mother will miss the mirror. As early as tonight when she goes to brush out her hair, she'll reach for the little hand glass to check the spot in the back she always worries about. The mirror is valuable, and there will be hell to pay — but not for me.
Patrick and Mike will be suspected immediately. My brothers are known thieves, though only little things until now — never what my mother calls an heirloom, never anything so bold as a silver-backed, bevelled-glass hand mirror. It's only a matter of time before petty thieving turns to grand larceny, my father will say as he takes out the strap. Unless my mother suspects my father. In that case, she'll say nothing about the missing mirror. I have watched her back down from scenes with him a dozen times. That might be best in this case, even though it hurts to imagine her having to swallow all at once the pain of losing her mirror and the heartache of thinking that her husband has pawned it for liquor or tobacco or another woman.
Had I broken almost any other thing in the whole apartment, I would tell her, even though it might mean a licking. But with the mirror it's different. It's not because it's an heirloom — it was my mother's mother's, which takes it all the way back to Ireland — that's just what makes it sad. And it's not because mirrors are frowned upon for little girls, especially little girls on their own. At school, the nuns made sure there were no mirrors. Even puddles in the schoolyard seemed to dry up unnaturally quickly. The vainer girls were forced to find their faces in the windows when the sun hit just right, or in the brass fittings on the great mahogany doors. I never tried that; vanity was not my sin. You mustn't think that. I haven't been looking in my mother's prized mirror to admire what I see there. It is only to check on what a little boy said to me as I walked home this afternoon. He called me Wednesday.
"Why do you call me that? My name's Lillie."
"Oh," he said, "I thought it must be Wednesday."
"Why?"
"Well, because your eyes are looking both ways for Sunday!"
And then he skipped off down Waterloo Street, chasing the rusty barrel hoop he had set to rolling.
A lazy eye, my mother and father call it. Lillie's got a bit of a lazy eye, they say, not minding much whether I am near enough to hear them or not. My brothers never mention it, not even when they're dredging the gutters for insults, so it must be really bad. Whenever I moan about it, my mother hushes me up with a torrent of words. "That's how God made you, my dear, it's not for us to question God's plans for us." Then she tells me how nice my hair is, or my nose.
Had she been home when I came in, I might have told her about the mean boy, been given the sermon on God's will, and everything would have been as always. But only my brothers were there, playing that game of theirs with the ball on the stoop, and I went straight up to the apartment and into my mother's room. I took the mirror out to the sitting-room window. The boy was right. I knew it was wrong to question God, but I did. Then I cried. Then I dropped the mirror and it shattered. From every shard there wept back an image of me, Lillie, my face captured over and over again, lazy eye and all. An awful fairy-tale nightmare. This is what I do not want to explain to anyone, not even my mother.
The floorboard in place, I hurry back into the street. I nod to Patrick and Mike as I race around the corner and into the alley, where I will be able to stash the embossed silver back of the mirror into the rusting bin. And then I will kneel to dirty my blood-sticky hands.
2. The Burial Ground
Then there are the other memories, flickering shadows on a screen, moving pictures I have watched from a distance a thousand times. They no longer feel like they happened to me, but daughters should know everything about their mothers, so they must be told too.
A cemetery, daylight. In the distance, there's a city skyline arranged around a harbour. St. John, 1913, before the "Saint" was dragged out. Iris-in on the cemetery, the picture starting as a tiny hole in the centre and then growing in a circle until it fills the whole screen. They don't use that much anymore. Cut to a medium close-up of a little girl in the cemetery. She is holding a doll.
the little girl hears the man long before she sees him, though she is not really aware for some time that she has even heard him. If she has paid any attention to it at all, his sobbing has simply been the chuff-chuff-chuff of a gramophone when the music has finished. But she knows there are no gramophones out here. Or thinks she knows. Maybe there is a custom she has not heard about; maybe these people bury their dead with all kinds of things you'd never dream of. Including gramophones. She has heard much stranger stories than that whispered about them. They eat babies, but not pork. They have enormous hordes of money, but would rather die than part with a penny. Their private parts look different from other people's, and work in different ways. These are the things she has heard in the schoolyard, on the back steps, even in catechism. These are the stories that keep her friends away from where she now finds herself, that would have kept her far away, too, if her father had not brought her. He said he has some business here, though what business an Irish-Catholic street-railway worker could have in the Jewish Burying Ground he has not thought it necessary to explain.
The business has something to do with a woman. This little girl, Lillie, is not dumb. She has been on little jaunts with her father enough to know that much and a lot more. She is never supposed to see the women, of course. He always sends her off to play before the woman shows her face. But most times she catches a glimpse, afterwards, when her father and the woman crawl out of the bushes or stumble from the alleyway. Their hair is always a mess, as if there has been a great wind, their mouths like smudges, and they are always tugging at their clothes, something not on quite right. Sometimes she hears noises from the bushes or down the alleyway — grunts, shrieks, once laughter, quite often tears. Bea (that's her doll — a floppy body and a hard head, which is better than the other way around, her mother had said when she gave it to her) sometimes wonders why Lillie's father, who is always so nice and gentle to her and to her mother (except for the yelling and sometimes the back of his hand), would want to fight with these strange women, or why they, so much frailer and younger, would want to fight with such a big, strong man. Maybe when Bea is older, maybe when she is ten, like Lillie, she will understand. Nobody seems to get hurt, she and Bea agree, although once she noticed blood on her father's trousers.
This is the first time for the cemetery. Lillie supposes that the opponent of the day must live somewhere nearby. "Out east," as she and her friends dismiss it, as if it were a hinterland too remote and uncivilized for any more detailed notice. She has walked with her father from where the street railway stops at Haymarket Square out to Kane's Corner, holding her nose against the rotteneggs- reek of Marsh Creek, and then on into what seems like wilderness. He bought her a bag of candy on the way; there is always a bag of candy on these trips. When she complained that her feet hurt, he hoisted her onto his shoulders and she imagined she was riding an elephant into the jungles of East St. John. About half a mile from the cemetery he put her down. Bea was about to complain, but Lillie quieted her — it was because he had to preserve his strength for the upcoming wrestling. She is proud of her father, whatever he does, and she wishes she could make him know it.
They have climbed the fence a few yards from where the gates stand open. He likes to do things the hard way. Why are there fences around graveyards, she asked as they climbed, and then, before he could come up with an answer she had supplied it. Because people are dying to get in. They both laughed. It felt important to laugh in this place where the trees drooped low in mourning and the birds were silent. Her father, who was by nature a loud and boisterous man, spoke in whispers here. "What do you think, Lillie? Do you think you and Bea can play here for a little? I won't be long. You won't be frightened, will you?" She felt the stubble on his cheek, rough like sandpaper, against hers.
"No, Dad," she lied. "I won't be ascared." She hoped he was proud of her bravery.
"Good girl," he whispered, patting her head as if it were as hard as Bea's. And then he was gone, just a succession of footsteps crunching the gravel walk.
Lillie sits beside the path, tugging at the back of her skirt so it keeps the grass from tickling her thighs. It has rained in the night and she knows she will be scolded when she gets home for getting her clothes wet. But she also knows that her father will speak up for her, tell her mother to leave the girl alone, she's just a child, and children get dirty.
Bea is having a sulk because Lillie has eaten the last barley candy without offering her so much as a lick, so Lillie sets her aside, face down on some leaves, to think about her behaviour. She usually finds some such excuse to protect Bea from witnessing her father's business. It isn't for the very small.
Before too many minutes, she can hear voices in the next walk; her father and today's woman. Traces of cigarette smoke waft from the same direction. Sometimes they smoke before, sometimes after; never during, as far as she has been able to tell. Then she hears footsteps retreating, the crack of a distant branch as they push their way into the bushes. She counts to a hundred and then begins to tiptoe in pursuit. She needs to hear close-up the squeaks and moans and tears, different every time but still obviously variations on the same old song. So different from the sounds she hears her parents making on Saturday nights after they think she is asleep. At the same time, she feels it is important to be nearby in case her father needs her, in case the woman conquers him and begins to eat him up. They'd do that, they'd eat a man alive if they got the chance, she heard him complain one night when he came home very late with Frank from upstairs, and their speech was slurred and they kept hugging one another to keep from falling over.
Lillie's mother had bawled, "The two of yous shaddap. Can't you see there's people trying to sleep here? Shaddap or, so help me God, I'll cut your balls off, I will." Whatever that was, it couldn't be worse than being eaten alive, but it seemed to shut the men up.
When she approaches the spot, the rustling of the dry leaves has taken on a regular pattern, the sound of someone raking them in short, sharp strokes. Through the bushes, she catches a glimpse of her father's white shirttail flapping back and forth where his trousers no longer hold it in. Around his waist, a pair of calves sheathed in drooping stockings form a writhing sash. One foot still wears a shoe, but the toes of the other are free, and Lillie is hypnotized by their rhythmic curling and uncurling, five red-lacquered cherries in a sack. Soon the sound of their panting blocks out the gentler scratching of the leaves, and finally the mechanical chant of their voices getting faster and faster drowns out both.
Lillie is alarmed by the hush that follows. Has the woman eaten her father? Will she and Bea have to find their way home by themselves? Then she hears him sigh and laugh, and she knows everything is all right. "What do you think? One more time?" she hears her father say. Lillie uses the renewed noises to cover the sound of her creeping away back to Bea.
This is when she finally registers the sound of the man. The chuff-chuff-chuff of his sobbing.
She takes off her shoes and socks. She didn't think this precaution necessary for her father, but it seems more appropriate to sneak up on a stranger in bare feet. She wonders what her nails would look like with red varnish instead of their natural pale pink. She practises curling and uncurling her toes as she has seen the woman do, but her foot quickly cramps and she gives it up. As she moves towards the sound, the gravel sticks to the soles of her feet and lodges between her toes so that she has to stop and brush it off. The showers of gravel are probably as much a giveaway of her presence as her shoed footsteps would have been, she realizes, but the man continues to sob, so she moves forward, confident he has not heard her above the song of his own sadness.
He is dressed in black, except for a brightly coloured shawl around his shoulders. He is a bigger man than her father — not taller, although that could be a trick of his position, but broader, massive on top. His clothes are good, not shiny with wear and ragged at the cuffs the way her father's are. Although his face is half turned from her, she can tell he wears glasses. The thin gold arm presses across his temple, flattening the hair before disappearing behind a pudgy ear. The shape of his head reminds Lillie of Bea, and she is almost at the point of moving close to the man to comfort him as she might comfort her doll when suddenly the sobbing stops. It is as though someone, hidden perhaps in the bushes around the grave, has flipped a switch; as though mourning has been cut off for the day. Does that happen? Lillie drops to her knees behind a low branch and watches as the man pulls an enormous white handkerchief from the pocket of his jacket. It waves in the breeze for a moment, like her father's white shirttail flapping back and forth in the bushes, and then his round face disappears into it. The sound he makes is like a klaxon, and Lillie has to bite her cheeks to keep from laughing out loud. She knows that for him it is the sound of grief, and nobody should laugh at that. She gets up as quietly as she can from her crouched position and creeps back along the path to find Bea. Behind her, she hears the man make a big sigh, and then she smells the fresh cigarette smoke that means that her father and his woman are through with their business too.
Bea's dress is wet from the grass but Lillie does not scold her. "There's a man," she whispers to the doll, "a man who is very sad. I think he might have lost his mum. Did you think you might have lost me? Silly Bea, I wasn't far. Daddy will be back soon. He'll be too tired for a ride, we'll have to walk all that way. But I think he won again. The wrestling. Shall we go see the man?"
The doll's head nods limply and Lillie clutches her to her breast and sets off for the place where she has watched the man in his mourning ritual.
When she arrives, the white handkerchief is nowhere in evidence. She and Bea see the man bend low to kiss the stone. "I promise, Mama," she thinks she hears him say, "I promise ..." Just as the man straightens up, Lillie's father comes suddenly around the corner in the path. Attached to his arm, her claws bunching the rough fabric of his jacket, is a woman who looks like something he must have robbed from one of the graves. Her eyes are sunk deep in her face and ringed with purple shadows. Her hair is straw, singed black, so brittle it would break off if you brushed against it. Where her breasts should be, her cheap dress flaps against a cavernous hollow, and her legs, where they show below her hemline, don't look big enough around to hold her up. Bea asks Lillie why Lillie's father should want to fight such a corpse, what possible satisfaction could there be in wrestling so thin and haggard a specimen. But her father is grinning, and the woman is smiling with her red gash of a mouth, so Lillie tells Bea it must all be all right.
They are smiling, at least, until they see the man. The instant they register his presence, their lips go tight and the woman drops her hand from Lillie's father's arm. The man, whose face is still shiny with tears, doesn't seem any more pleased to see them than they are to see him. Lillie wonders whether they have met before. She wonders whether the man knows the lady-corpse, or whether her father owes the man money. He looks like the kind of man you might owe money. As she watches, though, she can detect no clear glimmer of recognition on either side. There is only coldness and the kind of shame she might feel if she were caught sneaking pennies from the jar above the sink. "Morning," the man says finally.
"Morning to you," Lillie's father replies. The woman makes a sound that might have begun as hello but ends in a coughing fit. "I'm, um, I'm sorry for your loss," Lillie's father continues, nodding at the stone beside the man's foot. Lillie feels proud. Her father always knows just what to say to people.
"My mother," the man says, and Lillie hears a little catch in his throat. "She died in the hospital. All alone. I couldn't be here. I — she ..."
"I'm sorry." Lillie's father lays a hand on the man's shoulder, pats him twice, and turns to go, but before he can take a step, the man has spun on his heel and fled the scene.
"I thought so," Lillie hears the woman say after she has studied the stone for a moment.
"What?" Her father sounds bored, tired.
"That was the Mayer kid. Remember? The junk kid. You must remember the junk kid. Used to ride around on his father's wagon, made people feel so sorry they'd give him a break, give away stuff they never meant to, even? Louis, I think. That's the kid." The woman's voice is deep, a young man's voice more than a woman's, Lillie thinks, and Bea is glad because there must have been more fight to her than it looks.
"That fella? Get away with you."
"No, sure, look, this is the mother's grave, I bet. I heard he was some kind of big shot in the Boston States now. Owns a moving picture house, I heard. Louis Mayer. He was dressed like a big shot, wasn't he?"
"There's lots dresses like big shots. That don't mean nothing."
"And there's lots that don't. And there's some look better underneath their clothes. Which kind do you think you are? We could test that out right now if you like, right on the Jew-boy's mama's grave if you want. She won't care, and he won't be back."
"I've got to get back to town. Another time."
"Don't you like me, sugar? Didn't we have fun?"
"Loads of fun, but I've got me daughter waitin' for me, and I don't like to keep her too long."
"You brought your daughter along? I never heard the beat of that. You left her waiting by a bloody tombstone while you was bangin' away at me! Well, you are the champion. That beats all." Lillie is proud that Bea can hear the woman admitting defeat so clearly.
"Just a little something to remember me by then?" the woman asks, her voice a little hoarse. Before Lillie turns away, she sees the woman grab her father's hand and guide it up her skirts. Why, she wonders, as she hurries back to the place where her father left her, would the woman want to pee on her father's hand? And why would he let her? It must be some kind of custom. This place is rich in customs, she thinks. It must be some kind of custom, she decides, as she and Bea sit down on the wet grass to wait.
And that is where we can iris-out to a black screen.
1. In the Looking Glass
It begins with the shattered mirror I hid beneath the floorboard — my face multiplied and imprisoned on every fragment.
My earliest memory? It is the earliest story I remember telling myself. That amounts to the same thing.
I do not feel the cuts on my hands until all the pieces have been cleaned up, but this doesn't surprise me; fear has a way of focusing my mind. What's a little sting beside what my father will do if he finds the broken glass? I would like to stop to admire the new patterns on my palms, red streets on a map made just for me, but I must erase all traces right away. The blood would only lead them back to the glass, and the glass to the mirror. It is the way their minds work. In lines. So I find one of my mother's cloths — the ones only she uses. I am pretty sure she doesn't have them counted out. I know he doesn't.
The maps transfer perfectly onto the cotton. It's just like making a print, so I'm sorry to spoil the patterns as I squeeze the cloth in my hands to put pressure on the cuts. If anybody notices, I will say I fell on the street and landed on my palms.
For that I'll need some dirt. Dirt is no problem.
It doesn't take long for the bleeding to slow. I push the cloth into the space between the joists where I have already gathered the shards of glass. The floorboard shrieks a little as I press it back in place. "Quiet," I whisper back.
My mother will miss the mirror. As early as tonight when she goes to brush out her hair, she'll reach for the little hand glass to check the spot in the back she always worries about. The mirror is valuable, and there will be hell to pay — but not for me.
Patrick and Mike will be suspected immediately. My brothers are known thieves, though only little things until now — never what my mother calls an heirloom, never anything so bold as a silver-backed, bevelled-glass hand mirror. It's only a matter of time before petty thieving turns to grand larceny, my father will say as he takes out the strap. Unless my mother suspects my father. In that case, she'll say nothing about the missing mirror. I have watched her back down from scenes with him a dozen times. That might be best in this case, even though it hurts to imagine her having to swallow all at once the pain of losing her mirror and the heartache of thinking that her husband has pawned it for liquor or tobacco or another woman.
Had I broken almost any other thing in the whole apartment, I would tell her, even though it might mean a licking. But with the mirror it's different. It's not because it's an heirloom — it was my mother's mother's, which takes it all the way back to Ireland — that's just what makes it sad. And it's not because mirrors are frowned upon for little girls, especially little girls on their own. At school, the nuns made sure there were no mirrors. Even puddles in the schoolyard seemed to dry up unnaturally quickly. The vainer girls were forced to find their faces in the windows when the sun hit just right, or in the brass fittings on the great mahogany doors. I never tried that; vanity was not my sin. You mustn't think that. I haven't been looking in my mother's prized mirror to admire what I see there. It is only to check on what a little boy said to me as I walked home this afternoon. He called me Wednesday.
"Why do you call me that? My name's Lillie."
"Oh," he said, "I thought it must be Wednesday."
"Why?"
"Well, because your eyes are looking both ways for Sunday!"
And then he skipped off down Waterloo Street, chasing the rusty barrel hoop he had set to rolling.
A lazy eye, my mother and father call it. Lillie's got a bit of a lazy eye, they say, not minding much whether I am near enough to hear them or not. My brothers never mention it, not even when they're dredging the gutters for insults, so it must be really bad. Whenever I moan about it, my mother hushes me up with a torrent of words. "That's how God made you, my dear, it's not for us to question God's plans for us." Then she tells me how nice my hair is, or my nose.
Had she been home when I came in, I might have told her about the mean boy, been given the sermon on God's will, and everything would have been as always. But only my brothers were there, playing that game of theirs with the ball on the stoop, and I went straight up to the apartment and into my mother's room. I took the mirror out to the sitting-room window. The boy was right. I knew it was wrong to question God, but I did. Then I cried. Then I dropped the mirror and it shattered. From every shard there wept back an image of me, Lillie, my face captured over and over again, lazy eye and all. An awful fairy-tale nightmare. This is what I do not want to explain to anyone, not even my mother.
The floorboard in place, I hurry back into the street. I nod to Patrick and Mike as I race around the corner and into the alley, where I will be able to stash the embossed silver back of the mirror into the rusting bin. And then I will kneel to dirty my blood-sticky hands.
2. The Burial Ground
Then there are the other memories, flickering shadows on a screen, moving pictures I have watched from a distance a thousand times. They no longer feel like they happened to me, but daughters should know everything about their mothers, so they must be told too.
A cemetery, daylight. In the distance, there's a city skyline arranged around a harbour. St. John, 1913, before the "Saint" was dragged out. Iris-in on the cemetery, the picture starting as a tiny hole in the centre and then growing in a circle until it fills the whole screen. They don't use that much anymore. Cut to a medium close-up of a little girl in the cemetery. She is holding a doll.
the little girl hears the man long before she sees him, though she is not really aware for some time that she has even heard him. If she has paid any attention to it at all, his sobbing has simply been the chuff-chuff-chuff of a gramophone when the music has finished. But she knows there are no gramophones out here. Or thinks she knows. Maybe there is a custom she has not heard about; maybe these people bury their dead with all kinds of things you'd never dream of. Including gramophones. She has heard much stranger stories than that whispered about them. They eat babies, but not pork. They have enormous hordes of money, but would rather die than part with a penny. Their private parts look different from other people's, and work in different ways. These are the things she has heard in the schoolyard, on the back steps, even in catechism. These are the stories that keep her friends away from where she now finds herself, that would have kept her far away, too, if her father had not brought her. He said he has some business here, though what business an Irish-Catholic street-railway worker could have in the Jewish Burying Ground he has not thought it necessary to explain.
The business has something to do with a woman. This little girl, Lillie, is not dumb. She has been on little jaunts with her father enough to know that much and a lot more. She is never supposed to see the women, of course. He always sends her off to play before the woman shows her face. But most times she catches a glimpse, afterwards, when her father and the woman crawl out of the bushes or stumble from the alleyway. Their hair is always a mess, as if there has been a great wind, their mouths like smudges, and they are always tugging at their clothes, something not on quite right. Sometimes she hears noises from the bushes or down the alleyway — grunts, shrieks, once laughter, quite often tears. Bea (that's her doll — a floppy body and a hard head, which is better than the other way around, her mother had said when she gave it to her) sometimes wonders why Lillie's father, who is always so nice and gentle to her and to her mother (except for the yelling and sometimes the back of his hand), would want to fight with these strange women, or why they, so much frailer and younger, would want to fight with such a big, strong man. Maybe when Bea is older, maybe when she is ten, like Lillie, she will understand. Nobody seems to get hurt, she and Bea agree, although once she noticed blood on her father's trousers.
This is the first time for the cemetery. Lillie supposes that the opponent of the day must live somewhere nearby. "Out east," as she and her friends dismiss it, as if it were a hinterland too remote and uncivilized for any more detailed notice. She has walked with her father from where the street railway stops at Haymarket Square out to Kane's Corner, holding her nose against the rotteneggs- reek of Marsh Creek, and then on into what seems like wilderness. He bought her a bag of candy on the way; there is always a bag of candy on these trips. When she complained that her feet hurt, he hoisted her onto his shoulders and she imagined she was riding an elephant into the jungles of East St. John. About half a mile from the cemetery he put her down. Bea was about to complain, but Lillie quieted her — it was because he had to preserve his strength for the upcoming wrestling. She is proud of her father, whatever he does, and she wishes she could make him know it.
They have climbed the fence a few yards from where the gates stand open. He likes to do things the hard way. Why are there fences around graveyards, she asked as they climbed, and then, before he could come up with an answer she had supplied it. Because people are dying to get in. They both laughed. It felt important to laugh in this place where the trees drooped low in mourning and the birds were silent. Her father, who was by nature a loud and boisterous man, spoke in whispers here. "What do you think, Lillie? Do you think you and Bea can play here for a little? I won't be long. You won't be frightened, will you?" She felt the stubble on his cheek, rough like sandpaper, against hers.
"No, Dad," she lied. "I won't be ascared." She hoped he was proud of her bravery.
"Good girl," he whispered, patting her head as if it were as hard as Bea's. And then he was gone, just a succession of footsteps crunching the gravel walk.
Lillie sits beside the path, tugging at the back of her skirt so it keeps the grass from tickling her thighs. It has rained in the night and she knows she will be scolded when she gets home for getting her clothes wet. But she also knows that her father will speak up for her, tell her mother to leave the girl alone, she's just a child, and children get dirty.
Bea is having a sulk because Lillie has eaten the last barley candy without offering her so much as a lick, so Lillie sets her aside, face down on some leaves, to think about her behaviour. She usually finds some such excuse to protect Bea from witnessing her father's business. It isn't for the very small.
Before too many minutes, she can hear voices in the next walk; her father and today's woman. Traces of cigarette smoke waft from the same direction. Sometimes they smoke before, sometimes after; never during, as far as she has been able to tell. Then she hears footsteps retreating, the crack of a distant branch as they push their way into the bushes. She counts to a hundred and then begins to tiptoe in pursuit. She needs to hear close-up the squeaks and moans and tears, different every time but still obviously variations on the same old song. So different from the sounds she hears her parents making on Saturday nights after they think she is asleep. At the same time, she feels it is important to be nearby in case her father needs her, in case the woman conquers him and begins to eat him up. They'd do that, they'd eat a man alive if they got the chance, she heard him complain one night when he came home very late with Frank from upstairs, and their speech was slurred and they kept hugging one another to keep from falling over.
Lillie's mother had bawled, "The two of yous shaddap. Can't you see there's people trying to sleep here? Shaddap or, so help me God, I'll cut your balls off, I will." Whatever that was, it couldn't be worse than being eaten alive, but it seemed to shut the men up.
When she approaches the spot, the rustling of the dry leaves has taken on a regular pattern, the sound of someone raking them in short, sharp strokes. Through the bushes, she catches a glimpse of her father's white shirttail flapping back and forth where his trousers no longer hold it in. Around his waist, a pair of calves sheathed in drooping stockings form a writhing sash. One foot still wears a shoe, but the toes of the other are free, and Lillie is hypnotized by their rhythmic curling and uncurling, five red-lacquered cherries in a sack. Soon the sound of their panting blocks out the gentler scratching of the leaves, and finally the mechanical chant of their voices getting faster and faster drowns out both.
Lillie is alarmed by the hush that follows. Has the woman eaten her father? Will she and Bea have to find their way home by themselves? Then she hears him sigh and laugh, and she knows everything is all right. "What do you think? One more time?" she hears her father say. Lillie uses the renewed noises to cover the sound of her creeping away back to Bea.
This is when she finally registers the sound of the man. The chuff-chuff-chuff of his sobbing.
She takes off her shoes and socks. She didn't think this precaution necessary for her father, but it seems more appropriate to sneak up on a stranger in bare feet. She wonders what her nails would look like with red varnish instead of their natural pale pink. She practises curling and uncurling her toes as she has seen the woman do, but her foot quickly cramps and she gives it up. As she moves towards the sound, the gravel sticks to the soles of her feet and lodges between her toes so that she has to stop and brush it off. The showers of gravel are probably as much a giveaway of her presence as her shoed footsteps would have been, she realizes, but the man continues to sob, so she moves forward, confident he has not heard her above the song of his own sadness.
He is dressed in black, except for a brightly coloured shawl around his shoulders. He is a bigger man than her father — not taller, although that could be a trick of his position, but broader, massive on top. His clothes are good, not shiny with wear and ragged at the cuffs the way her father's are. Although his face is half turned from her, she can tell he wears glasses. The thin gold arm presses across his temple, flattening the hair before disappearing behind a pudgy ear. The shape of his head reminds Lillie of Bea, and she is almost at the point of moving close to the man to comfort him as she might comfort her doll when suddenly the sobbing stops. It is as though someone, hidden perhaps in the bushes around the grave, has flipped a switch; as though mourning has been cut off for the day. Does that happen? Lillie drops to her knees behind a low branch and watches as the man pulls an enormous white handkerchief from the pocket of his jacket. It waves in the breeze for a moment, like her father's white shirttail flapping back and forth in the bushes, and then his round face disappears into it. The sound he makes is like a klaxon, and Lillie has to bite her cheeks to keep from laughing out loud. She knows that for him it is the sound of grief, and nobody should laugh at that. She gets up as quietly as she can from her crouched position and creeps back along the path to find Bea. Behind her, she hears the man make a big sigh, and then she smells the fresh cigarette smoke that means that her father and his woman are through with their business too.
Bea's dress is wet from the grass but Lillie does not scold her. "There's a man," she whispers to the doll, "a man who is very sad. I think he might have lost his mum. Did you think you might have lost me? Silly Bea, I wasn't far. Daddy will be back soon. He'll be too tired for a ride, we'll have to walk all that way. But I think he won again. The wrestling. Shall we go see the man?"
The doll's head nods limply and Lillie clutches her to her breast and sets off for the place where she has watched the man in his mourning ritual.
When she arrives, the white handkerchief is nowhere in evidence. She and Bea see the man bend low to kiss the stone. "I promise, Mama," she thinks she hears him say, "I promise ..." Just as the man straightens up, Lillie's father comes suddenly around the corner in the path. Attached to his arm, her claws bunching the rough fabric of his jacket, is a woman who looks like something he must have robbed from one of the graves. Her eyes are sunk deep in her face and ringed with purple shadows. Her hair is straw, singed black, so brittle it would break off if you brushed against it. Where her breasts should be, her cheap dress flaps against a cavernous hollow, and her legs, where they show below her hemline, don't look big enough around to hold her up. Bea asks Lillie why Lillie's father should want to fight such a corpse, what possible satisfaction could there be in wrestling so thin and haggard a specimen. But her father is grinning, and the woman is smiling with her red gash of a mouth, so Lillie tells Bea it must all be all right.
They are smiling, at least, until they see the man. The instant they register his presence, their lips go tight and the woman drops her hand from Lillie's father's arm. The man, whose face is still shiny with tears, doesn't seem any more pleased to see them than they are to see him. Lillie wonders whether they have met before. She wonders whether the man knows the lady-corpse, or whether her father owes the man money. He looks like the kind of man you might owe money. As she watches, though, she can detect no clear glimmer of recognition on either side. There is only coldness and the kind of shame she might feel if she were caught sneaking pennies from the jar above the sink. "Morning," the man says finally.
"Morning to you," Lillie's father replies. The woman makes a sound that might have begun as hello but ends in a coughing fit. "I'm, um, I'm sorry for your loss," Lillie's father continues, nodding at the stone beside the man's foot. Lillie feels proud. Her father always knows just what to say to people.
"My mother," the man says, and Lillie hears a little catch in his throat. "She died in the hospital. All alone. I couldn't be here. I — she ..."
"I'm sorry." Lillie's father lays a hand on the man's shoulder, pats him twice, and turns to go, but before he can take a step, the man has spun on his heel and fled the scene.
"I thought so," Lillie hears the woman say after she has studied the stone for a moment.
"What?" Her father sounds bored, tired.
"That was the Mayer kid. Remember? The junk kid. You must remember the junk kid. Used to ride around on his father's wagon, made people feel so sorry they'd give him a break, give away stuff they never meant to, even? Louis, I think. That's the kid." The woman's voice is deep, a young man's voice more than a woman's, Lillie thinks, and Bea is glad because there must have been more fight to her than it looks.
"That fella? Get away with you."
"No, sure, look, this is the mother's grave, I bet. I heard he was some kind of big shot in the Boston States now. Owns a moving picture house, I heard. Louis Mayer. He was dressed like a big shot, wasn't he?"
"There's lots dresses like big shots. That don't mean nothing."
"And there's lots that don't. And there's some look better underneath their clothes. Which kind do you think you are? We could test that out right now if you like, right on the Jew-boy's mama's grave if you want. She won't care, and he won't be back."
"I've got to get back to town. Another time."
"Don't you like me, sugar? Didn't we have fun?"
"Loads of fun, but I've got me daughter waitin' for me, and I don't like to keep her too long."
"You brought your daughter along? I never heard the beat of that. You left her waiting by a bloody tombstone while you was bangin' away at me! Well, you are the champion. That beats all." Lillie is proud that Bea can hear the woman admitting defeat so clearly.
"Just a little something to remember me by then?" the woman asks, her voice a little hoarse. Before Lillie turns away, she sees the woman grab her father's hand and guide it up her skirts. Why, she wonders, as she hurries back to the place where her father left her, would the woman want to pee on her father's hand? And why would he let her? It must be some kind of custom. This place is rich in customs, she thinks. It must be some kind of custom, she decides, as she and Bea sit down on the wet grass to wait.
And that is where we can iris-out to a black screen.
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