George & Rue (9 page)

D
ESPERATE for post-Xmas money, Rue shadowed a pimply-faced soda jerk, Omar Bird, into snowy Mazzuca’s Lane late at night. Rue snuck up behind Bird and bashed him in the back of the head with a rock. The boy wheezed and slumped down, badly bleeding, but hollering worse. His spectacles had flown free and exploded on the sidewalk. Rue felt the glass shards crunch under his shoes.

He barked, “Shut up!” But a constable, Rex Knox, come runnin, clapped handcuffs on cool, cool Rufus, while Bird sat up, feeling his bleeding scalp and weeping and pointing at the blasé, cigarette-needy man who only felt like smoking, laughing, drinking.

At his trial, Rue charged Knox’d called him a nigger and that he, Rufus James Hamilton, had been trying to help Mr. Bird, who he’d seen hit by another man, who escaped just as Rufus approached. But everyone hated Rue’s story.

Rue pointed dramatically at the right side of his head: “I am the real victim of assault here. My bruises be blunt proof.” The judge’s verdict? “Guilty!” Rue’d go to Dorchester Pen for two years.

The verdict was just a nick to Rue, but it was a knock-out blow to India. She could hardly credit how ridiculous Rue’d turned out to be. Yes, he could dress, he could dress up, and they acted a photogenic pair. Too, Rue had the polish of the
boudoir and the poise of the theatre. But in reality he was a pianist who couldn’t play piano in any regular style and who couldn’t play piano because he didn’t have one. To woo her, he had to employ his bumpkin brother’s crummy shack. And did he hold any belief for the tomorrow after tomorrow? After Rufus attacked Omar Bird, India felt he’d attacked her and their relationship too. He’d acted like a dumb coward, and she wanted, needed, an intelligent, heroic Negro. Rather than remain in Fredericton and suffer the poison-darted looks of her sister workers and her family, who would shun her for having taken a convicted bungler to her bosom, India collected her wages, her savings from tips, and bought a train ticket for Halifax. She reasoned that if she couldn’t land employ as a beautician, she’d join a mortician’s enterprise and learn to make the dead look good. She resolved to send Rue no letters. That affair—that love—was now an Ice Age, a prehistory that should be left as blank and fixed as ice. Besides, their union had endured for only a few weeks. Why should she pretend to any loyalty? She was not Mrs. Rufus Hamilton, nor was she his fiancée, nor was she his mistress. She was a singularly glamorous
belle,
one who deserved a courtier of a courter.

The train that delivered Rufus to Dorchester in January 1947 insinuated itself, squirming like an eel, into the muddy sea-like landscape that defines Dorchester, which lays in southwestern New Brunswick, between the Nova Scotia border at Sackville and the Acadian-ruled town of Moncton. When Rue could see around him, he saw a penal-colony building that looked like it’d been sliced off from the Houses of Parliament. Here was the Alcatraz of the Tantramar. Dorchester Penitentiary was like a grand hotel—a Château Frontenac of the bleak marsh. The green-copper-roofed Gothic castle sat islanded on a hill, staring down stark, sawgrass marshes and mudflats caked ochre amid little brittle lances of iced-over blue-black water
and a river glistening like oil. Now dusk, it was purple ponds and dark woods. Ice flashed in the never-parched land like a series of broken bones. Crows leapt from carcasses in the wet fields. One was tearing another one apart by the remains of a bridge. Mudflats mirrored a
craquelure
of glazed terracotta, a blood-coloured primeval ooze creased like a crazed brain. Rue’d do his whole stint between January 1947 and December 1948. If he busted out, eluded the snapping dogs and the singing bullets, he’d drown awfully in that abysmal burgundy mud; he’d stand up and get shot down in that mucky, bird-filled, grass-filled no-man’s-land.

Inside the medieval-musty prison, its stony enclosures detesting light, was Rufus, being felt up and clubbed and called niggerniggerniggerniggernigger like it was his number and his name. Same treatment struck the other twenty Negro inmates in the harsh pen that held three hundred judge-scolded “wicked” men. The cellhouse’s heavy metal doors slammed behind Rue, just as his fist had to slam into other men’s faces if he didn’t want to be raped. He spied the sun between barbed wire and iron bars for two nasty years in a palace of thugs. Luckily, the con who bunked with him, Octave King, was also niggerish, and bad and black enough not to be messed with. He was in for a pickaxe murder, and he was always known to have a homemade knife around his body, somewhere, and no one wanted to find out exactly where.

Still, Dorchester conjured up Hades. Disgusting insects garnished slop. Inmates made pets of the cockroaches that scuttled over their beds or scraped at crumbs on their lips or clambered down sleeping throats, spurring unfortunate, reflexive vomits that could mean choking to death. Nothing was decent in that prison: not the food, not the soap, not the inmates, not the guards, not the light, not the water. The only fresh air was when cons had to go out into the prison yard, to
exercise or to tend to the little farm of potatoes, carrots, lettuce, all of which would be ground down later with mud and served to them as supposed suppers. Of course, there was no piano—busted or otherwise—to think of playing. Rue dreamt hammers hitting strings forcefully. His music was hammer hammer hammer hammer hammer hammer hammer, a stammering thud thud thud thud thud.

Rufus heard of India’s defection via hearsay, gossip. She had vamoosed from his life, a wreck, before it could further harm her own. He understood he had lain with a phantasm, an evanescent wisp, one who had taken on flesh and its pleasures for temporary convenience. He shut his eyes and conjured India in his mind, but she was no more real than the contours of India on the prison library’s globe. It seemed he had never brushed her lips with his own, never been coddled by her thighs, never heard her laughter in his heart. Her running off to Halifax almost made his blood run cold with sorrow. But, by now, he was accustomed to solo failure and solitary confinement—even outside jail.

I
N FEBRUARY 1947, after Rue’s dispatch to Dorchester, Blondola took pregnant. She and Georgie felt unbelievably prosperous. George just doted on his slender, tender wife. Otho was born in November 1947, and Georgie became Mr. George A. Hamilton, Papa, father of a big, husky baby boy—one born free of any of his convict uncle’s criminous habits.

When he brought his wife and baby proudly home to Barker’s Point, it was in a taxi driven by cheery Silver, a.k.a. Nacre Pearly Burgundy. He was a short white man, and dapper in his dark limousine, driver-style cap, black wool car coat, and guilelessly courteous, paying clear compliments to Blondola and the baby and being deferential to Georgie. In truth, him and Georgie hit it off right away, because they were both veterans with young families. Silver saluted George as a brother serviceman who was also tryin to improve his self. Silver then showed off snapshots of his own children, while Otho sighed and cooed in his mama’s arms.

Right after Otho appeared, George was still doin part-time woodlot work and part-time short-order cook and part-time whatever, and he kept at all these tasks through the lush if ice-flooded spring. In April, Blondola took pregnant again. She sang, Otho fattened and grew, and George just smiled and smiled all through beer-smell summer and crisp, busy autumn.
He never mentioned Rufus; in fact, he forgot all about the “bad man”—as Blondola dubbed him—rusticatin in Dorchester. Nor was there any letter from Rue. Nor was any sent to him.

In December, George elected again to go into the woods to cut timber with O’Ree. He worked even harder than he had in December ‘46 and December ‘47, but O’Ree seemed standoffish, and, times, George saw the auburn man lookin at him ornery. But Georgie just shrugged it off. He figured he’d collect his pay, then hie on home and pick up fresh work in the new year. But when the day dawned, O’Ree tendered no cash.

Instead, him told Georgie, “You’s work’s poor. Ain’t got a cent for you. Scram!”

George saw he’d slaved a whole week for nothin. So Georgie snatched up all the man’s tools he could carry, and left.

He got home on Saturday, was arrested for theft on Monday. O’Ree said George was just a thief who ain’t done no work. George said O’Ree was lyin, but Georgie had the criminal record. The Laws confiscated all the damned tools—but not a hammer—that Georgie’d lifted. He pulled the same judge as Rue, but fared better: George got a suspended sentence. His efforts to make Cy pay him by taking the tools as collateral on the outstanding debt had backfired and give him a crooked name in Fton. Blondola felt cross and soured on her empty-headed husband. She threatened to go back to Nova Scotia if Joygee didn’t smarten up.

T
HEN Rue arrived, with his crooked heart, straight from Dorchester. December 23, 1948. No one happy to see him. And he was grimly unhappy. His brain could still number each single freezing brick of Dorchester—that blizzard of a prison.

Once more Rue sat, grinnin ruthlessly, in Blondola’s kitchen, despite all her dirty looks.

His attitude was, “Let a woman weep while a man drinks.” She had to be careful, in her own house, not to get too much on Rufus’s “nervous nerves.” But Blondola was very, very pregnant, and didn’t want Rue infectin her Otho with his smell. She meant every word every time she told Rue, “Go to Hell.” Rue snapped at George, “If Blondola was my wife, she’d keep to her place.” George had to let Rufus backtalk Blondola cause the army hadn’t made George as muscular as jail had made Rufus, and he’d exited the pen in a bad mood. But George’s pacifism worsened Blondola’s anger.

Christmas 1948 was hardly Christmas. Little cheer in the Hamilton camp (as a judge would later call the house). And there was a hammer on the premises, but no piano.

As for India, she’d fallen for a dandy, fancy talker in North End Halifax, a sporting ladykiller who’d proven another vapid con. However, she saw his emptiness and saw through his vaporous promises only after he had bade her womb welcome
a lifelong customer for her beautician’s art and a fervent worshipper of her taperings and curves. She’d not married her Lucifer—despite his charms—but she had settled all her love upon her child, her daughter, while relegating men, Negroes especially, to the outer limits of untouchability: they were smooth in speech, slick in bed, but too slippery to hold.

India became a beautician at the Canadiana Hair Salon in downtown Halifax. She took up residence in the room above, with her lipsticks, her perfumes, and her babe in arms. She became adept at fashioning “Canadian” hairstyles—all derived from Montreal. Her customers left the salon looking like film stars, but always ended up with ruffians who looked like they had just left a saloon—because they had. Nevertheless, by looking good, the women felt better about their bad choices. This cosmetic salvation also applied to India herself.

B
Y JANUARY 7, 1949,

Asa was disappeared in Halifax;

Cynthy was buried in Windsor;

Easter was drowned in the Avon River;

Reverend Dixon was kicked destroyingly in his side by a horse;

Googie and Purity was jailed cause bawdy houses were “a Communist plot";

India was a lone parent, toiling as a beautician in Halifax;

Blondola was fresh in the hospital;

George was free, but broke; Rue was broke, but free.

Morning: snow sifted over two mourning, superficially smooth mugs. An ashen omen of snow: too much like two cold boyhoods in Three Mile Plains. It fell like dry and cold flakes of ash.

On January 7, 1949, there was no money and no food and wood in the house. No rabbits hung from roof beams; no deer carcasses dangled in a shed.

On January 7, 1949, twenty-two-year-old Rue felt as bad as alcoholics with that violent craving. He was as desperate as them drunks who attack each other, tearing open each other’s bowels and stomachs, hoping that drinking each other’s blood’ll give em the alcohol they crave. He felt his whole life—his future too—
depended on moolah and a lick or two of rum—Pusser’s Navy rum, please.

On January 7, 1949, in that shack on Fredericton’s edge, twenty-three-year-old George Hamilton was a father twice over, with Blondola closeted in the hospital downtown with the latest, and without money. Hear Dog, the rusty-coloured cat, meowing crazily with hunger.

The brothers was once scrawny, beaten-up black boys. Now, they was thin black men, with black, angular caps and secondhand denim shirts. They was needing so much, beginning with love and respect and ending with beer and cash. They’d have to clip a jerk and swipe his budget. If they had the spunk. If they had such verve, Rue’d extract new clothes now trapped in the cleaners and go to Halifax to rescue India, and Georgie’d retrieve a wife and newborn child now immured in the hospital.

To snitch and snatch was the answer to
empty
and
used-up.
The air was cold in that shack: words could practically be traced in the white mist that cracked their mouths. Not even their blood flowed right in this winter. They had to burn wood—or freeze. All-important kindling dwindled. They was in a jam.

“The universe is perfect,” thought George, “except for us.”

Their breakfast did not include fogging oatmeal in a white china bowl anointed with Quebec maple syrup and cream, or butter slathered over gold cornbread, or yellow eggs, pink ham, and green-white onion sighing in the black Eden of an iron frying pan. They did not consume honey and oranges either. Not even no salt pork and brown biscuit—as in the days of the first Hamiltons a sesquicentennial back. The current Hamiltons had only the benediction of hot coffee. (Rue cussed: “Shit! Make it dark black!”)

If they could’ve starved the hungriness out their bellies, they would’ve. Their day offered no church of holy warmth, no salvation from the hellish cold. There was no Wharf Sale of cold
plates, baked goods, produce, or tea. (They couldn’t've bought anything, anyway.) They had a trickle of smoke to keep from freezing. (Fire split the stove: half wood, half flame.) Clothing was no help. They couldn’t sheathe themselves in cotton undershirts, or wool pullovers. Nor were there lambswool coats or leather gloves and boots.

Rue averred authoritatively, “I’m so hungry, not even wolves could scare me off a meal.”

George commented, “Why doncha get a job? Bring some loot into the house.”

Rue glared coldly. “You think we gonna redcap? Shit! We’s gonna stay slaves forever!” He paused, then snapped: “Somebody want to shovel shit on us? Well, we’ll shovel it right back.” Rue had philosophy: “Joygee, ya gonna go on biggin up Blondola every year, letting her shit out babies year after year, bang, bang, bang, with nothin in the bank?”

George just looked at his frozen-faced brother.

“Ya wanna have children, Joyge, ya gotta have cash. Look at what poverty did for us! Nothin!”

George replied: “I been working honest to provide for the wife and house.”

Rue guffawed: “Joygee, we is just thieves, pure thieves. We steal firewood, chickens, clothes off clotheslines, even fools’ bad ideas.”

George’s rejoinder: “Sin’s on ya like lice, Rudy.”

Rue just smiled. “All I’m sayin is, we stun and rob a man. I ain’t sayin he gotta be hit hard enough to kill.”

In his mind’s eye now, George saw a white man staggering, bloody and wallet-less, through a downtown alley, maybe Mazzuca’s Lane.

The decision to go out and hit a white man real hard to get some cold cash did not require much dialogue:

So a hammer was gonna fuck up a head. Skin a skull. There was no other way to make a dollar. They could smell the money brewing in their stomachs, hear it rustling on their backs.

But there was contentiousness. Otho—thirteen months old—ate at Mrs. Roach’s house cause there was no food in his own, and his mama was confined with his newborn sister, Desiah, cause Doc Clayton Pond’s delivery bill was unsettled. Georgie couldn’t just go back in the woods and hammer down some trees, because he had to baby Otho. He couldn’t leave Otho with Mrs. Roach every day cause she had three children of her own. Mr. G. Hamilton’d already been to the Unemployment Office in downtown Fredericton. But there was no porter job on the train, no white man hirin help, no company wantin two arms to lift, shift, and steady packages. Worse, he couldn’t hoist a beer because he didn’t have none: when your pocket’s dry, your mouth’s dry.

George left Rue dreamin at the kitchen table in the afternoon and took a bus downtown and visited Blondola at the Fredericton General Hospital. She was lookin good, feelin better. George’d hardly peeped at his daughter, Desiah, when crippled up, white-haired Doc Pond, wobbling on his crutches, called him out into the corridor and said, “Georgie, we’re gonna keep your wife and baby here until you pay my bill or give me a welfare slip from city council.” Georgie didn’t go back in the hospital room, but faced the chilly Friday, January 7th air of 1949, and caught the bus at King and Westmoreland.

He got him home at about 4 p.m. Where Rue was, he hadn’t a
clue. His feet and hands were so cold he could hardly coax fire out the matches and the couple sticks of wood he’d boosted in the neighbourhood. Then, he tidied the embarrassingly barren table and trudged over to Mrs. Roach’s to pick up Otho. When Georgie entered the Roaches’ place, he was surprised—and not—to see Rue, sittin at Mrs. Roach’s big maple table, finishin up a steamin plate of beans and wieners. Weren’t Rue evil enough to reach for a pitcher of maple syrup and pour a gallon of it, slowly, cruelly, over that hot, fulfilling food, but to do it casually too, as if it were not a feast? Rue smiled, then took Mrs. Roach’s delicious homemade brown bread, dipped it in molasses, scooped up some beans, and ate like a king. Unfair: him could solicit anything out of anybody, but here was Georgie, starvin.

A fortyish, cedar-skinned, big, amiable woman, Mrs. Roach didn’t offer George food, but she let him sit by the stove for warmth, then she went into a bedroom to get Otho. George ask Rue what he’d done all day.

Rue snapped, “Slep.”

George say, “Why doncha help put sumpin into the house?”

Rufus, coldly: “I’s no slave.”

Mrs. Roach come back, hand goo-gooing Otho to Georgie, ask, “Why doncha play sweet on your harmonica, Joygee?” George obliged. He played his Dante Marine Band harmonica, dirty, frothily, as if he were on stage at the Capitol Theatre in Saint John, and Mrs. Roach grinned and patted her hefty thighs in rhythm. He blew out the blues songs that he’d perfected on the high seas during the war: “Burning Water” and “Death Be Gentle.” (Those hungry for true blues remembered George Hamilton was always anxious to please.) But Georgie was too shy and too ashamed to beg Mrs. Roach for biscuits and beans.

The brothers lingered at Madame Roach’s abode until her man, Roach, trudged in from the woods, at about 5 p.m., along
with Jehial States, who was so crafty as to seem a simpleton, but was actually so astute as to work only when he wished and to do his best work when he was least sober. Roach, a fiftyish lumberman, plaid-shirted, plaid-jacketed, blue-jeaned, and work-booted, with a stocking cap on and brown plug tobacco and a black pipe in a pocket, him had a bottle of red wine and a dozen tall beer he set generously on the table. Then they all got busy—except the missus and the children—sipping wine and tippling beer and blaring blues to harmonica. But one man was hungry and another was angry.

The boys got wine and beer from Roach, to settle their blasphemated guts. By 7 p.m., Roach swayed so elegantly—blind drunk, he seemed to float out his front door, but pissing himself as he went.

George—cradling a squalling Otho—and Rufus returned to the redoubt of Master George A. Hamilton, Esquire. Frankly hard up, they parleyed about their zilch cash.

George had a suggestion: “Break into a store, a house, a car, lift some goods.” Anything solid turns liquid in crooked hands.

Rue hissed, “That’s no good, we want cash.” The correcto idea was, as Rufus’d hinted that morning, to go to Fton, pick a man, pull him in an alley, knock his noodle to his ass, haul his wallet out his pocket, scram.

George blurted, “I don’t wanna go to Dorchester for two years!”

Rue rejected that riposte: “I had fucked-up luck two years ago. I ain’t wouldn’t’ve even had to go out that night if you’d had a drop of drink in this house for your brother. It’s only a little bitty job to slug a sucker.” Besides, Rue wanted “a fur cap, a fur coat, and a silver-handled, silver-tipped walking stick, please and thank you.”

George: “Okay, but ya need a blackjack.” George got his poverty-struck toolbox, and the boys rummaged its paltry,
poor-condition contents until Rue, recalling a piano, picked out a hammer. George whistled: the hammer could work.

Then, hulking, horse-faced Plumsy Peters knocked to see what the boys had to drink. Rue drawled his answer, “Naw, but we’s gonna get some—if you mind the house, keep the fire goin.” George added: “And keep an eye to Otho.” Plumsy nodded okey-dokey. Slow-witted, with a bumpy face, he could cook and steal: his skills kept him in food and clothes, if not in lodging and drink.

Roughly 7:30 p.m., the Hamiltons walked down Eatman Avenue to the Richibucto Road: two dark men tossing shadows like knives into the unsuspecting white snow. They passed the Roaches, said “Good night.” Then Rue approach Roach, ask him to “hold on to” a lighter. Roach give him two dollars for the pawn, then Rufus run back up to where George was. Good fresh cash for a beer and the bus. It come, they got on, sat at the back by two gals they knew—Yamila James and Zelda King. The bus rattled, wheezed, left the duo at Carlton and Queen streets, smack dab in Fred Town. From here, they could not go wrong. But that hammer stuck in Georgie’s back pocket, it didn’t hang right.

They passed a billboard pledging “Jesus Saves” and another billboard, by a nearby grocery, swearing “Swanson saves you more.” Hungry—hungry, Geo thought: “Only water in my stomach.” Rue was cold-blooded cold. Blown from roofs, snow the shade of pure milk—or impure night—snuck down with the lacy, sure manoeuvres of a million generations of spiders. They tromped past the legislature; it sat near Fredtown’s mansioned riverfront strip, Waterloo Row. From here, the boys could look across the river to the shacks of Barker’s Point. The moon: an albino slug breathing against a black-soil sky.

Rue breathed out a cold mist to tell George to hit and lug a fool into an alley. But it was Friday night.

“Too many people on the street. No way to hit a man.”

So George said, “I’ll phone a taxi.” He took out his wallet, empty cept for three cab company cards, and chose Elroy’s Taxi. He stepped into a phone booth and dialled. A woman answered; a taxi’d pick em up outside the Canadian Legion hall in ten minutes. Georgie said as much to Rue, who decided to go into the Legion to buy a beer. He come out a couple minutes later without a beer.

Rue say, “Joygee, those people is crazy in there. They won’t sell me a beer without a membership.” Nothing to do, then, but choose who’d clip the driver. Rufus resolved: “Joyge, it’s your plan, your hammer, and you’re the one carryin it.”

George nodded.

It were a foolproof plot, yep. But designed by one fool and one foolhardy
philosophe.

Then the cab arrived and George shook. He was expecting a stranger. But here was Silver—leaping to open the passenger side doors of the black Ford sedan with black leather upholstery for George and Rufus as if they was gentlemen. Silver wore a black sable coat, black leather shoes, a black-looking cap, and his usual warm, azure eyes.