Johnny Kellock Died Today Read online

By the time we got to the shipyard, Gerry was waiting outside by his truck, looking anxious.

  “Where you been?” he said. “I gotta get going.”

  “Aren’t you going to take us in?” David said. “I had to listen to this one sing hymns half the day just to get us down here!”

  “I gotta load that has to go over to Dartmouth and I’m running behind as it is. But here’s the news: I talked to him.”

  “Who?”

  “Her cousin. John.”

  I gasped. “You did! Where? What did he say? Is he coming home? Can I see him?”

  “Whoa,” said Gerry. “I don’t got that much. Couldn’t be too nosy without making him nervous, right? But here’s what happened.”

  Seems Gerry ran into Johnny at the canteen on his lunch break.

  “Alls I said was, ‘Hey, aren’t you John?’ And he says, ‘Sure. Pleased to meet you . . . ?’ And I says, ‘Gerry,’ and we shake, right?

  “So I says, ‘I think you work with Ray Campbell, isn’t that right?’ And he says, ‘That’s right,’ and I could tell from the way he was smiling and talking about the weather and stuff that he was glad to meet someone, which made me think that this guy probably just moved here, like you said.”

  I was shivering all over. “Did he say he just moved here?”

  “Nah, the whistle blew and I had to go. But listen to this: we said ‘See ya around.’”

  “What’s the big deal about that?” said David. “Do you even know if this is the right guy?”

  “I figure he is. And you know how I know?” Gerry nodded in my direction. “Because her father stopped by here this morning.”

  Norman!

  “What was he doing?”

  “Dunno. He was talking to Dad at the gates.”

  “Our dad and her dad? Was he asking about us?”

  “I couldn’t find out without giving away what I knew, could I?” That was a relief. At least Gerry could be trusted. “And like I said, I didn’t want to make this John guy nervous. If his father’s been beating the tar out of him, he’s gonna be right jumpy.”

  All my hackles went up. “What did you say?”

  Gerry looked over at David, who might have shaken his head. Just a little.

  “Uh, I think . . . I got something wrong here,” said Gerry. “You know some of these kids who run away, that’s the reason.”

  “It’s not like that in my family,” I said. “I never saw Uncle Ezra hurt anybody.”

  That wasn’t exactly true. One time, back when the Kellocks used to come for Sunday dinner, I saw Uncle Ezra kick Mrs. Greenwood’s old dog. It wasn’t doing anything, it’d just come across the street and happened to be lying at the end of our walk. As the dog ran off, howling, it struck me that Uncle Ezra didn’t think of it as a living thing—it was just something in his way. I’d wanted to set him straight, but then Mama called, “Ezra, come get some stew. Try not to kick m’kid on the way in.”

  “Anyway,” David said, “We just saw Mr. Norman. And he didn’t give a sign he knew we’d been down here.”

  “Well, maybe he’s not the person you got to watch out for right now,” said Gerry. “Isn’t that one of the other Norman girls coming this way?”

  Chapter Eleven

  Martha was carrying some books close to her chest. The wind off the harbour blew wisps of hair into her eyes. We took the chance to slip behind Gerry’s truck.

  She walked slowly along the road towards the entrance, but before she was even within spitting distance of the guardhouse, she turned around and headed back the other way.

  “She was supposed to be picking up her paycheque at the library,” I said to Gerry, who looked sort of surprised to find himself there, ducking down with us.

  “She’s got books, don’t she?”

  “Yeah, but this isn’t exactly the scenic route home.” I’d never known Martha to fib before, except for not telling about the Fort Needham thing.

  We left Gerry to make his deliveries and trailed her, keeping back a-ways, as she slowly zigzagged her way through the North End. “I bet she’s looking for Johnny,” I said. “See, Norman went to the shipyard and now Martha—that proves it. Everybody knows what’s going on but me.”

  “I don’t think no one knows nothing,” said David. “And this is the only place they can think of to look. If your parents haven’t said anything to you, maybe it’s because they think you’d make a fuss.”

  “I wouldn’t!”

  “Yeah, then what are we doing diving behind trucks?”

  I thought for a second. “Because! I don’t want Martha worrying we’ll get her into trouble.”

  “Why don’t you just run ahead and tell her you won’t? Ask her what’s going on?”

  I made a face like I was considering it, taking the dare, but I couldn’t really. All my life, Martha had been like a second mother to me, my nother-mother, as Norman used to joke. Only she was the kind of mother who read to me and bought me art supplies out of her small paycheque and made sure I was never left out. And now it looked as though she knew something—something important—and she hadn’t told me, just like I hadn’t told her. But the difference was, I knew that if I asked her about it, she’d just add another coat of sugar.

  Instead, I told David about what Martha had found in Norman’s cigar box. The bundle of money that was tied with a piece of string, like it was ready for the moment when someone would need it. And I found myself telling him about how Norman was hoping we could move out sometime and how I couldn’t stand it, even the thought of it, leaving our old house. And how it broke my heart to see Martha crying.

  “Your sister close with your cousin?” David asked.

  “Martha? When they were younger, sure. But it’s been a long while since he lived here.”

  “Oh. I was just thinking about her wandering like that.”

  “What about it?”

  “She seems sad, is all. Or maybe lonely.”

  “She’s probably worried about Johnny,” I said. “And, besides, she has friends.”

  “There’s something not quite right about her.”

  “Aw, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “There was something not quite right about my mum.” David took off his overshirt and busied himself tying it around his waist. “It’s not the same thing, I guess.”

  “What do you mean . . . not quite right?”

  “My brothers said she just . . . got sad one day. She never cheered up again.”

  “I thought—”

  “What?”

  “I thought she drownded. I mean, drowned.”

  “We were taking the ferry,” David said. “All of a sudden, she let go of my hand.”

  Sometimes you just can’t come up with the right thing to say back to a person. Sometimes the pause is so long while you think on it that you have to change the subject anyway. And sometimes, once you’ve done it, changed the subject, you see you’ve let the other person off the hook. We’d reached the Hydrostone, and we watched Martha go into the bakery. I said to David, “Let’s head back. She’s just doing errands and we might as well go get something to eat. If you like.”

  “I’m starving.”

  When we got to the front of the line at the Vogue Theatre, the early show was sold out. The movie was The Shaggy Dog starring Annette Funicello from the Mickey Mouse Club. Every girl with dark-brown hair wanted to be Annette Funicello. The lobby was packed with brown-haired girls. One of those girls was Nan Buckler, who technically had blond hair, but it looked darker and oilier today, like maybe she hadn’t washed it so it would look more like Annette Funicello’s. Nan was talking to Katie and another girl. She was probably saying tomayto tomayto tomayto. I couldn’t tell who the other girl was, but I could tell she wasn’t Pauline, who I liked better than Katie, I decided. They didn’t notice David and me before they went into the theatre. Still, I walked away from the ticket counter a little quicker than usual.

  “Should we go to your house?” I asked
David. “Mama’s expecting it’ll be getting dark by the time we get back.”

  I was relieved, actually, when he shook his head.

  “Let’s pick up some comics,” he said. “Then I know somewhere we can wait it out.”

  You would think that, finding herself in a graveyard at dusk, a person’s bones would be rattling inside her skin, but I can’t say that’s what happened, not even for the sake of a good story. My hair didn’t turn white, my blood didn’t run cold, nothing stood up on the back of my neck. I did have a nervous feeling, like when I thought of what Mama would do to me if someone were to see me here, walking over the dead like it was my own backyard. But the mist that was settling among the graves wasn’t creepy at all, and the heat had relaxed the way bath water does, and the air was soft-warm.

  The lights, I told myself, were just another rumour, like the ghost haunting the new Richmond School and the Gravedigger storing his mother’s body in a jelly cupboard—to name two things I wished I hadn’t remembered just that second.

  David said, “Here she is. My mum.”

  The earth around the little white cross had long ago settled back into itself, and the grass around it was trimmed tidy. There was no name, no dates. Just like a weed there in the far-off corner of the graveyard. Now, I know better than to ask someone why he doesn’t have his mother’s name and dates on a better marker than a plain white cross. Chances are, Mama says, a person don’t have something because they can’t afford it, and it’s not for anyone else to go pointing that out. And if maybe it’s because they don’t know any better, well, what makes you God’s gift to education?

  So I just nodded politely, like I was saying “That’s real nice,” which I couldn’t say out loud because it would be a lie, and I should think God would get you good for telling a lie in as holy a place as a cemetery.

  “I’m going to get her a big, pink stone with angels on it and a proper wreath at Christmas.” David ran his hand over the cross. “Some time.”

  I pushed a thought out of my head then, put it aside for later, when it was a better time for thinking on those sorts of things. The thought was this: I wonder if ever, when David’s mother was holding her little baby, if she ever thought about how one day, when she got old, her son would be taking care of her, and how it’s a good thing, then, that we can’t see into the future.

  “Here, I got something to pass the time, maybe, till you can go home.”

  David walked over to a big tree, just down a ways from the main gates. He reached up on his toes and pulled something down from its branches.

  “I made it myself.” The seat was grey from the weather and the ropes were thick and dirty. “It’s sturdy,” said David. “I’ll show you.” He sat on the swing and bumped his bum on it a few times. “See, she’ll hold.”

  At first it’s scary, swinging up into the rustling blackness. But then, when you get to the top, just as high as you can go and just before you come down, the branches part, revealing a patchwork of stars. After a few swings, David slid the lantern over my arm and sent me up again, and this time the tree lit up like Christmas, and each leaf was so beautiful and so perfect, and each swing so brief and so different from the one before it that my eyes couldn’t gather it all in. David pushed me again and again.

  “Isn’t it funny,” I said on the way home, the comic books in a bag over one arm and the lantern over the other, “to think that one person feels a draft, say. Maybe a door blows open. One person thinks there’s a ghost in the room, and another person thinks it’s the spirit of some loved one come to check up on them. I suppose it depends on the way you look at things, but, anyway, there are different ways to look at things.”

  We were rounding the corner of Agricola Street, where the boulevard begins and splits the street in two. David took the lantern from me and extinguished the light.

  “People are foolish,” he said.

  Chapter Twelve

  Freddie got off work early on Friday to drive Mama to the doctor.

  “They’ll be taking this cast off today,” Mama told Martha.

  “I thought you had to wear it for six weeks.”

  “Nonsense. I told them, it’s not like it was all the way broken.”

  Mama kept saying that as she put on her hat, sorted out her purse, went down the porch steps with Freddie. “It’s not like it was all the way broken! I told them it wouldn’t take so long!”

  After Freddie’s car pulled away, I noticed Martha went straight to the pantry and took down a box of lemon filling mix. Lemon meringue pie was Mama’s favourite. The meringue part I could do without, but Mama liked the lemon, the pastry, and the meringue. It was the only thing she would sit down and eat with the rest of us until her whole piece was finished. Martha must have thought we’d be celebrating Mama’s cast coming off that night.

  I’d had my eye on my sister, as Uncle Jim would say. Something had given her the idea to go to the shipyard. Had Mama and Norman told her that Johnny’d run off? Did she know Norman had been at the shipyard earlier that day? Did she know about the John who was working down there? David and I were going to find out. We had a signal. If Martha decided to go out, whoever saw first would sing (me) or whistle (David) so as to alert the other person. Then David would follow Martha and I’d tell Norman later that David had left early to take care of a “cemetery emergency.”

  “That’s all you have to say,” said David. “Don’t keep talking.”

  His eyes had followed mine to where he gripped my hand to make the point. He let go and mumbled how he had to get to the weeding. I wished there was an easy way to tell him that, actually, I was just thinking about how much cleaner his hands—his whole person, really—had been lately. Sometimes he even brought his overalls or a shirt for Martha to add to the wash. It made me wonder what would happen if Marcy came up the walk on the first day of school and this nice young feller David was sitting on the Normans’ porch. Would she still see the Gravedigger?

  I hung around the kitchen for a while watching Martha make the pie. She was her usual Martha-self, humming softly as she beat the egg whites, but the air felt different between us, as if we’d fought and forgiven each other but the memory of what we’d said hadn’t worn off yet. And I couldn’t get it out of my head how David had gone on about her seeming sad. He put it on her face like pair of glasses. Or the opposite, maybe. Like when someone who wears glasses takes them off and it’s hard to keep up the conversation because you can’t stop thinking about how different they look without their glasses on.

  When I went upstairs for my new comics, I stood for a moment in the doorway of Martha’s room. Her bed was neatly made and there were photos of her best friends, Susan and Amy, on her desk. Now that they both had boyfriends, they didn’t come around like they used to. Far as I knew, Martha hadn’t had a boyfriend yet. I thought about what she’d said about not getting married any time soon. What if Freddie was wrong? Maybe she would stay behind and take care of Norman and Mama, the way Mama had taken care of the aunties. Maybe she’d spend her whole life in this old house. Made me wonder all of a sudden if that was the reason Mama was always pushing us outdoors.

  I could feel the summer winding down with each tick of the grandfather clock. Mama’s ankle was almost better. My birthday was on Sunday, and Marcy was coming home on Monday. Then school would start. And David, he’d go off to Alexander McKay. What if I didn’t need to worry about him being at my house in September? What if he never planned to stay on?

  I imagined what it might be like in a couple of weeks if me and the girls met up with David on Agricola Street. Marcy would for sure be wanting to get away, but I’d ask politely after David’s brothers and his schoolwork, and I’d explain about Norman hiring David for the summer, you know, because of Mama. I’d probably smile in a knowing sort of way, a smile that says you’re rolling your eyes but are too kind to do it, and the other girls’ faces would melt into the same smile, and I’d try not to notice that David knew what that smile meant too.


  But the thing about David is, if he ever came upon me walking with my school friends, he’d probably cross over to the other side of the street. Not because he’s that rude—because he’d know what would happen, and that was almost worse.

  Another thing about David: he was wrong about Johnny coming home soon. And he was the only one who could help me find him. I needed . . . a clue.

  Across the hall, the faint smell of mothballs and Noxema drifted from Mama and Norman’s bedroom. I tiptoed in. From the window, I could see David in the backyard below. He was pulling up weeds, cartoon-style. He pulled and pulled as though the weeds were planted in cement. As though there was some little critter burrowed under the lawn pulling on the roots and the little critter was winning. Whenever he got a weed out, he tumbled backwards, and his feet flew into the air. It was pretty clear he didn’t know anyone was watching.

  My hand rested near the long cedar jewellery box on Mama’s dresser. Mama never wore jewellery, except for the thin, pink-gold wedding band that was her mother’s. The hinges creaked a little when I opened the lid and released a cedar-y smell into the air.

  It was full of letters. The printing on the envelopes was like a little kid’s, some words bigger than others, sloping off the paper. It brought to mind Christmas cards and birthday wishes.

  To: Mrs. Lillian Norman.

  Return to: E. Kellock.

  Elizabeth Kellock.

  Aunt Izzie.

  The envelopes had been carefully slit open and the letters refolded and put back inside. The clock ticked. My heart thumped. I couldn’t read them right there. If Martha came upstairs I might not have time to get everything back the way I found it. I tucked one into the top of my shorts and pulled my shirt down over it. I’d read it in my room with the door shut. Wait—what if Mama came home early? How would I get it back into the jewellery box? I took the letter out of my shorts. The main thing was that I knew they were here. I’d have to find a way to get everyone out of the house so I could have a proper look.

  I counted the letters. Six. All from Aunt Izzie. Underneath the letters was a jumble of little things: an old ticket stub from a movie called The General, a dime, a mussel shell, a dried rosebud, junk, junk, junk . . . a silver chain. I nudged the dry stem of the rosebud so I could slide the chain along the bottom of the jewellery box. On the end was a little heart-shaped locket that was bent out of shape, folded into itself.