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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781771834001 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Guernica Editions, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2019 |
| Series: | Essential Prose Series , #166 |
| Edition description: | First edition |
| Pages: | 260 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Island
Grand Manan Island was a slow, one-and-a-half hour ferry ride from Blacks Harbour, New Brunswick, Canada, south and east into the frigid waters of the Bay of Fundy.
From the air, the island appeared to slosh back and forth between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, side to side, as if it were swaying in an old tin pail held by long fingers of the moon and the sun. The cliffs and coves and people and sand were baptized every twelve hours by the pushing and pulling of merciless fifty-foot tides.
North Head was the largest village, where the ferry docked, beside Fisherman's Wharf, where generations of respectable churchgoing men had their mother's or wife's or daughter's name painted on the bow of their fishing boats.
Eighteen churches anchored the island along the twenty-one miles of paved road that coursed the eastern shoreline.
The Grand Manan Hospital, the Nursing Home, the drugstore, the abandoned movie theatre and record store, the wool shop, and the inns and hotel – for those who were from away – were all at the Head. The hotel had a liquor licence. The bar, with after-hours off sales, opened for business in 1978, the year after the drugstore began to sell condoms.
Farther down Island Highway 776 was the Whistle lighthouse, the North Head dump, and Pearl's restaurant where you could get a hamburger, French fries and soda, and either drop off or take out the latest gossip.
The western shoreline was steep rock walls, with the exception of Dark Harbour, which was accessible by car and boat, where dulse was harvested at low tide. Men, mostly, picked and stuffed fifty-pound sacks with the purple sea vegetable, loaded them into dories and rowed back to the natural breakwater. The wet sacks were dragged above the high tide line where the dulse was thinly spread over black fishing nets that covered the beach rocks. Here it dried in the sun and the wind.
Heading down island, villages were snuggled around coves bitten from the coastline. Each cove was a harbour, with a settlement of white clapboard houses that were either painted with traditional black window trim and matching black roof, or red or green trim and shingles. They surrounded white painted churches with peaked, red rolled asbestos roofs, and praying steeples. You could hear bells chime on Sunday mornings.
Melba and Russell Girling lived in his mother's house, almost halfway between Grand Harbour and Seal Cove on what was known as Deer Curve, where there were four houses and no church.
There were no cars parked in their dooryard, no bicycles lying on the gravel and grass driveway where children might have carelessly dropped them, and the last flakes of white paint desperately clung to the greying exterior of the small one-and-a-half storey clapboard house. The Girlings had a one-seater outhouse, a trout in the well, pigs in the barn, a cow tied to a rope, attached to an iron peg hammered in the ground where the septic field should have been, and they had children. Lots of children. But they lived in a house, on a hill with a name, and not simply out the dump road, or out the back road, like some families who lived in shacks with no running water or electricity. Places where a few two-fours of beer might hold up a front stoop, and rusted out cars, or just their seats or engines might be planted in the dooryard, and wild purple and pink and white lupines blossomed undisturbed among them in the spring.
The Girlings couldn't hear any church bells, only the deafening silence of the earless and the blind, with their condescending tongues in the graveyard around the corner. Shame on you Baptists, and Catholics and Anglicans and Pentecostals. Didn't you know that you can tell a lot about a family by looking at the laundry hanging out on their clothesline? Didn't any of you see Melba Girling's wash? Diapers flying in the salt breeze, greying and thinning season after season, blue and red, blood stained polka dot handkerchiefs hanging wrung out of square, patched knees on pants, mended dog-ears on shirts, and darned, and darned again, work socks that either blew dry in the summer or froze dry in winter.
As Esther's two brothers Paul and Luke grew, they fought their old man, defended their mother. Sometimes shirts ripped and buttons were lost. If you listened beneath the yelling, you could hear each crack and split as buttons flew into the air and dropped quickly, ping, onto the iron heat grate in the front room, then tipped slowly and sank like a drowning dory into the furnace down below in the cellar. Meanwhile a man-boy tried to nail his old man against a dark green plastered wall, and his smooth hairless fingers dug into the throat of a drooling Russell Skunk.
Young blood pumped and Luke tightened his grip. The round whiskered face of the old man turned red. Yes, Russell was drunk, and had Lloyd Slader's voice in his head saying, "How's that TV of yours working?" and laughing from a table over in the corner of the bar.
"You broke her friggin arm!" Luke wanted to kill his father.
The oldest brother Paul pulled young Luke's fingers, one by one like rotten teeth, from the smocked layers of skin that wrapped their old man's red neck.
Russell Girling was usually drunk as a skunk, so Russell Skunk is what most people called him. He wasn't always this way; Melba knows when he started drinking heavily, but she won't admit it was when she gave Esther away.
He was also a deckhand on a dragger, and when he worked, more often than not, he drank most of his pay on the other side of the Grand Banks, usually in the first bar in the first port that the Betty-Jo docked.
On Monday, even with a broken arm, Melba washed the smell of hatred from size fourteen and sixteen boy's shirts and hung them on the clothesline. There were traces of blood from Melba's hands on the wooden clothes pegs. Her knuckles were red and cracked with eczema, and her fingers were split with stinging cuts from slips of her knife when she was boning salt herring on Saturdays at Thomas' smoke shed down in Seal Cove.
CHAPTER 2Deer Curve
Not yet sunrise, Russell Skunk sat on the edge of the bed in yesterday's underwear and pulled on grey work socks with red wool ringing the top, and darned heels. His green pants were outlined with salt stains from fish scales that had dried and rubbed off underneath his hip waders. He pushed his feet into the waiting pants, stood, buttoned the waist underneath his hairy stomach, and pulled on a white undershirt. His fingers fumbled with the buttons on his green work shirt, as he looked at his eight-month-old son Luke, sleeping in the same old crib the rest of the kids had slept in, the same crib he had slept in, in the same house, his mother's house, that was originally over on Wood Island.
Around 1920, there was better fishing, wrinkling, clamming, and dulsing on Grand Manan, and a school for the kids. Best of all was talk of a sardine factory being built in North Head. All but a few Wood Island families moved to the Big Island, as they called it, and most had their houses barged over, like Russell's father Percy did. The house was skidded down the dooryard to be placed on a wood foundation, but before dinnertime, Percy had a heart attack and died right where he fell. He never slept a night on Deer Curve. Russell was five, and watched his father crumple to the ground.
Luke was sick after he was born, and didn't take to Melba's milk, or cow's milk, or Carnation milk either. Poor little fellow screamed with cramps and just couldn't keep anything from coming back up, or out the other end. Melba called her sister Flora like she always did when she needed help, and Flora's husband Sammy arranged for Melba and Luke to arrive in Montreal within a few days to see a doctor. Doctors cost money. Melba and Russell didn't have any.
Flora didn't work anymore, and she didn't drive, so she and Melba usually took taxi cabs to and from the hospital, or Sammy gave Melba a lift on his way to work, and picked her up on his way home in the evening. Melba still dreamed of shopping for makeup and nylons and expensive clothes in the big city, and going to the movie theatre, and nightclubs, and to dinner parties at fancy restaurants. Flora had that life. Melba wanted it. Had always wanted it. All of it, and the more time that passed, the less Melba thought about going back to Grand Manan.
The doctor suggested several different milk formulas and finally with the introduction of the third one, Luke stopped crying, and began sleeping for longer periods. By nine weeks old, Luke's colour turned a healthy pink; he smiled and gained one pound. Over coffee and Danish one morning after Sammy went to work, Flora asked Melba when she was going back. Melba said she wasn't going back.
"Have you lost your mind, Melba?"
"No. You must've lost yours. You said you'd send for me after you got settled in Montreal."
"Melba! You sound like a child. That was almost ten years ago. It didn't work out."
"Didn't work out for me on Grand Manan either! You have no bloody idea what it's like for me down there."
"I didn't force you to move to that little Peyton Place and marry a fisherman, a poor fisherman yet."
"Like I had so many choices. I had two kids! One of them yours, remember?"
"I remember. I'll always remember. And if I didn't remember, I have you to remind me, don't I? This is about you, Melba. You have three other kids back there. Just who do you think is going to bring them up? Russell? He's called five times for you to come home. Collect!"
"I don't care how many times he calls, I just don't care."
"Well, I care. I'm going out to play canasta with the girls tonight, and while I'm gone, you are packing. I'm calling Sammy at work to make the arrangements, and you're going back! Do you hear me?"
Melba heard her, and turned and ran to the den where she and Luke were staying. She threw herself onto the bed like a disappointed and desperate child. Luke napped while his mother thought about killing herself, or killing her sister. No, instead I'll seduce Sammy. Maybe tonight, Melba thought.
Months later, back on Grand Manan, Russell looked from Luke to Melba, then turned and slapped her playfully on the ass, as if she loved him, and he loved her, and everyone in every corner of his mother's house was happy, and he hadn't raped her pregnant body. Whoremaster, she thought. I'll fix him. Without rolling over, Melba raised her arm and swung at him, batting only air. Russell had gone.
His large frame and short legs scuffed up the gravel driveway to catch a ride with his boss, Cyril. If Russell wasn't waiting at the top of the driveway, Cyril drove right past Deer Curve and hired someone else down at the wharf. This was how it would be when Russell started drinking.
When Melba heard the snap of the screen door on the porch, she rolled over. Her face turned into Russell's pillow breathing in the foul odour of greasy hair and fish. Her stomach became sloppy as a hogshead of fresh herring slapping and flapping around down in the belly of a boat. She was eight and a half months pregnant; this was not morning sickness. She threw up the smell of Russell Skunk into a lime green plastic bowl, the bowl she used for popcorn for the kids on Saturday nights, the one the kids had teethed on, and beat right silly with wooden spoons. And tomorrow Luke would probably sit cross-legged on the kitchen floor wearing it as a hat.
On the dresser, little Ben read six-fifteen. With her index finger, Melba traced the faint baby line from underneath her breasts to her pubic hair. This one was only eleven months younger than Luke.
Melba pushed herself up out of bed and caught her reflection in the small oval mirror on the dresser. Her mother's mirror. One of the few things she brought with her to Grand Manan from Janeville, New Brunswick, after her mother died. I was never beautiful like Flora, she thought.
She put on slippers and a housecoat, left Luke sleeping in his crib, and headed downstairs to the kitchen to wash up and brush her teeth before the other kids woke up. As she walked past the barn to the outhouse, she thought: I just can't do this anymore.
CHAPTER 3Birth Day
It was such an ordinary day on Grand Manan when Esther was born, with early morning fog hanging in the harbours, and low-lying areas. Out from the Seal Cove breakwater, the bell buoy rang loud and deep, swaying side to side in the wake of another herring carrier weighted low with eighty hogsheads of fish. The Betty-Jo was one of several pumpers idling in the harbour waiting to pump the herring.
If you had walked through a hundred unlocked kitchen doors at exactly the same time, you'd probably see shortwave radios on top of fridges, and hear the familiar static and squeal of marine bands quivering in and out: "Ssss, got a load on. Fours and sixes, ssss." On those days, islanders who lived close to Seal Cove and North Head often woke to the sound of the sardine factory whistle.
Esther was born a week early, late in August. She would continue to call her mother Melba, until she made up her mind whether or not she was giving Esther away to her Aunt Flora and Uncle Sammy. Melba didn't seem to want her.
They'd been together for eight and a half months, their weight stretching out pie dough with a rolling pin, or pushing and folding and punching down bread dough on the kitchen table every three days. Mondays were wash days, and Esther wouldn't miss being squeezed against and over the washing machine, as Melba pulled heavy wet clothes from the cold water to put them through the wringer into the rinse tub and back again, only to have to pick them up one more time to hang on the clothesline. Esther's oldest sister Frieda usually brought the dried clothes in and did the ironing too. Melba and Esther planted the garden, weeded the garden, and for two months they'd been picking vegetables for supper. So much bending. Esther was tired thinking about all that they did: scrubbing floors, emptying commodes every morning, feeding the pigs, keeping the woodstove going, and washing her brothers' and sisters' faces and tushies.
Melba didn't have a name picked out for Esther, or for a boy either, if she happened to be a boy. She had two brothers. Luke wasn't one year old yet, and Paul was almost four. She also had two sisters. Liona was six, and Frieda was almost thirteen. Frieda thought there was another child somewhere. She swore she heard a baby crying when she was little, and living up in Janeville. When Melba told Frieda there was no baby, and not to talk such foolishness again, Esther felt Melba's heart pound faster, and they became warm and tired. She was remembering leaving that baby with the minister at the church.
Being born was disgusting, not to mention the difficulty of holding on during contractions. Just when Esther figured, okay, that's it, I'm out of here, someone yelled: "Don't push." It was the doctor!
The final wave came maybe one minute later. Memories of Melba began to squeeze out of Esther's body like she was being fed through those washing machine wringers. Frantic and confused, she tried to fight leaving her, but Melba pushed down and started yelling, her voice becoming louder and more clear, then Esther was out, and she was cold, and memories and fragments of memories, and words and fragments of words rushed out of her and off her into a pail on the floor. Someone cut and tied her umbilical cord. Melba's intense sadness and jealousy, the lies and anger, were gone from Esther. She was alone.
Nurse Kitty, the pale one with the nicotine stained fingers, gave her a warm sponge bath, wetly familiar. She prayed for a warm blanket. Such a small request. Kitty pinned Esther into a gauze diaper, which caused her legs to splay like a dead chicken, and after dressing her in a backless nightie tied at her neck, Kitty laid her down on a flannelette receiving blanket, tucked in all limbs, rolled her up like a holishke, and placed her face down on a scratchy sheet with a boiled clean smell. Thankfully, Kitty moved Esther's head to the side before she left. That's when Esther saw a pink card taped to the side of her bassinette. In blue ink was printed: Girling, girl. She wondered why she had no name.
Exhausted, her body sore, Esther drifted in and out of sleep until she heard Nurse Right, the tall one with the husky voice, say that "none of them knew anything about birth control, and the only difference between these two babies is three and half hours, and three quarters of an inch in length." Esther opened her eyes and saw the name Francine Slader, printed on a pink card on the bassinette next to her. Francine had blonde hair and brown eyes. They had plenty in common besides their birthdays, and would have lots to talk about the next time they met.
But tonight, on the day of their birth, they looked at each other and listened to the nurses. Like there was anything better to do?
"Sure is queer, these two born within hours of each other, wouldn't surprise me if ..."
"Nurse Right! That's just talk."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Melba's Wash"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Reesa Steinman Brotherton and Guernica Editions Inc..
Excerpted by permission of Guernica Editions.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Prologue xiii
Part I
Chapter 1 The Island 2
Chapter 2 Deer Curve 5
Chapter 3 Birth Day 8
Chapter 4 The Naming 11
Chapter 5 Frieda's Baby 14
Chapter 6 Just Like a Woman, eh? 22
Chapter 7 Queen For A Day 24
Part II
Chapter 8 Good Beginnings 28
Chapter 9 Trying On Boys 35
Chapter 10 Good and Oak and Two Pregnant 38
Chapter 11 Your Sorry Looking Face 40
Chapter 12 Montreal 1945 42
Chapter 13 Melba's Tune 50
Chapter 14 Life's Just Not Fair 56
Chapter 15 Esther Girling 58
Part III
Chapter 16 Esther Weinstein 64
Chapter 17 1962 68
Chapter 18 The Little Brown Coat 73
Chapter 19 The Counting Room 75
Chapter 20 Over My Dead Body 78
Chapter 21 Birthing a Bathroom 84
Chapter 22 No Kleenex on Deer Curve 88
Part IV
Chapter 23 Out the Kitchen Door 94
Chapter 24 Summer 98
Chapter 25 The Washcloth 101
Chapter 26 Making Believe 103
Chapter 27 Minced Meat 105
Chapter 28 Esther is a Television 109
Chapter 29 Getting to Know You 111
Chapter 30 Miller's Font 116
Chapter 31 Liar Liar 119
Part V
Chapter 32 End of Summer 124
Chapter 33 Fall 126
Chapter 34 Winter 130
Chapter 35 Some Spring 135
Chapter 36 Another Summer 138
Chapter 37 Victor Woods 142
Chapter 38 Willa Cather's Cottage 149
Part VI
Chapter 39 Saint John 162
Chapter 40 Arriving Halifax 165
Chapter 41 The Prat Family 171
Part VII
Chapter 42 Glass Walls 178
Part VIII
Chapter 43 High River Flood 186
Chapter 44 Squatting 194
Chapter 45 Grand Manan Island 197
Chapter 46 Good Riddance 201
Chapter 47 Dark Harbour 207
Epilogue 210
Acknowledgements 211
About the Author 212