The old queen possesses a cold stare that no doubt caused those around her to tremble uncontrollably. I suspect she never smiled during what my grandmother referred to as “Her Majesty’s sixty-three year reign.”

I look up at the yellowed photo hanging on the wall, finally deciding that rain is a very fitting word. She looks as though she “rained” over a lot of people. My grandmother loved the old Queen maybe more than she loved the pump organ she played right up until the week before she died. Whatever the case, it hardly matters now that my mother is the rightful heir to both of these relics.

I jump off the organ stool, spin it a few times each way and settle my rump back down. Practise makes perfect. I clear my throat. Silently wince. Position my fingers and begin reaching for the ivory-white keys.

It is mid-morning and the day is sultry, sticky as a handful of liquorice candy. My mother is rummaging about upstairs in search of a pair of dungarees; a pair left over from the days when she worked at the creamery way back when the war was on. My father left the house last night in a fit of anger and hasn’t returned. The thumps and bumps coming from upstairs tell me she’s still fuming over the argument that sent him away.

*

Yesterday Millie from the creamery stopped by for tea. She and my mother sat at the table and talked about old times. Mesmerized by the sparkle in my mother’s eyes, the way she tilted her head in laughter, I wondered about this strange woman. How was she able to evoke such a response in my mother, something I’d never seen before?

“Come back to the creamery. A few days a week even. Come on. It’ll be fun. Like old times again,” Millie urged, sitting on the edge of her chair.

“But I’m married now,” came my mother’s hesitant reply as she looked my way.

“Good grief! You’re married not buried,” said Millie.

“Millie Flankhorn should just keep her big mouth shut,” I overheard my father say right before he stormed out of the house last night.

*

I begin pumping my spindly legs back and forth on the organ pedals, listening for the familiar sound of air to begin circulating. I can’t help from praying that something will free me of the promise I made my mother just before summer vacation started. It was a foolish promise, the result of a sudden impulse that came over me one evening as I watched her setting the supper table.

“I’m going to practise playing every day this summer,” I vowed.

“Your grandmother would be so pleased,” she said, stroking my cheek.

There was no mistaking the look of misery that had been plaguing her this past while, and so I revelled in that small gesture of hers for hours afterward, thinking I had found the secret way into her heart again, something my father had been unable to do.

*

My grandmother was the church organist at St. Paul’s for forty-one years and when the organ arrived shortly after her death I saw my mother attempting to play. Her fingers started and stopped, reached and retracted. The notes she produced were jagged and uneven, until finally out of frustration she beat her fists upon the keys sending a sequence of notes face first into the air.

“We haven’t the room,” my father had said the day Uncle Jim’s truck turned into the driveway with the organ on back, “and you can’t even play, Jennie. You can’t play a note.”

“I don’t want it, either,” she’d said, her eyes wrapping invisible hands about my father’s throat and squeezing tight. “But she left it to me. It’s mine. Mine to say if it stays or goes.”

A place was cleared in the dining room and my mother hired Mrs. Porter to give me lessons. She hung near the doorway the first day Mrs. Porter arrived and I ordered her to leave.

“She’ s anxious to hear you play,” said Mrs. Porter smiling, her flabby arms sifting through the pages of sheet music she’d brought.

“Maybe she should take the lessons,” I sputtered, and Mrs. Porter made a clucking noise.

Now, three weeks into my promise I’m beside myself. The first week of vacation had been dreary and wet. The droning notes from the organ seemed a most fitting sound as I attempted to churn out some standard hymns. I was stupid to have made such a promise. I was spurred by the thought that I was making my mother happy and the fact that there was little else to do, the weather being what it was. Besides, the old Queen was raining over our household too, looking down at us in silence, her puffy face and bare arms soaking up the humidity like a kitchen sponge. I suspected she knew more than she was letting on, that hiding behind her dreary exterior was some heavily-guarded secret that would one day affect us all.

As the summer progressed I became even more aware of a growing tension inside our house. Most days I was sympathetic toward my father for it seemed he was forever on the receiving end of my mother’s changing moods.

“Your mother is unsettled,” he said one day while we sat out on the verandah together. He had just finished mowing the small patch of grass in front of the house and we were enjoying an iced tea. “It happens to women sometimes for no real reason at all. We need to be patient.”

A small bead of sweat formed beneath his nose as he finished his drink. I had no idea what he meant by unsettled, but I nodded my head, took a sip of my tea, and pretended to understand. The smell of cut grass dithered along a thin narrow streak of fresh air. I thought of the day my father first brought home the lawn mower; the first one of its kind in our neighbourhood.

“Look at him. Like a child with a new toy,” my mother grumbled from the living room window. “Getting ahead of the Jones’. That’s all that is.”

“Why don’t you try using it? It might be fun.” I said. She gave me a peculiar look and closed the curtain with a snap.

*

The house is quiet as I sift through the sheets of music, deciding what to play next. Mrs. Porter will be coming later this afternoon and is expecting to see some marked improvement. She constantly complains to my mother that I’m not taking it seriously.

“I can’t be expected to teach someone who obviously lacks interest. Give me someone with interest and I can work miracles,” she’d said one day.

“For goodness sake you could at least try, Becky. This is costing a fortune,” my mother has whispered as Mrs. Porter headed for the door.

Before striking another note on the organ I hear the familiar whirr of the lawn mower outside. Realizing that my father has finally returned, a flash of relief flickers through me. I hurry toward the door anxious for some explanation, a reason befitting his absence. But when I reach the verandah I am caught suddenly off guard at the sight of my mother in her dungarees, the ones left over from her creamery days, pushing the lawn mower, the air singing with approval, bits of grass leaping and swirling, swirling and leaping.

Later, my mother and I sit on the verandah and drink iced tea. I gather the look of satisfaction on her face and cradle it in my arms afraid to move, afraid that it will fall flat to the ground and break.

“You don’t need to practise any more,” she says staring out across the newly cut grass. Filled with relief by the magic of her words, I throw my arms about her neck. We do not speak another word, only sit there and wait for my father’s return.

*

The grass scatters chaotically as my father now pushes the mower around the backyard. The music coming from inside the house is slow but steady. I can hear Mrs. Porter instructing my mother as to where to place her fingers on the ivory keys. I smile, turn my face up to the bright, clear sky, and hold this image close to my heart. The old queen’s rain has come to an end.

Along the edge of the harbor a brown road wiggled its way past clusters of clapboard houses wedged between rocks. Ruth Woodford washed dishes while watching her son, Allan, pitch rocks off the wharf. His face, at sixteen, was gaunt. Dry skin tightly drawn over hollow cheekbones and pale ears like two oversized petals of a buttercup. He was a very unusual-looking boy except when he smiled, as he did when the stones met the water. Then his face glowed as he clapped his hands fervently together, as if applauding life.

As the early morning clouds lay bare a promising blue sky, Ruth felt a subtle sense of dread. Attitudes towards Allan had changed since the days when he was a friendly little boy with a cheery greeting for everyone. Allan continued to be sociable but he was now tall, loud, and headstrong.

“Blue binders, Ma, that’s what I needs,” he insisted in a shrill voice in the stationary aisle at Riffs, bubbles of spit popping on his lips.

“You’ll have to take what’s there, Allan,” Ruth replied tiredly, watching the clerk stare, bug eyed.

“You needs to get blue ones, Missus!” Allan blared to the girl at the check-out. The manager adjusted his paunch like he was lifting a baby and warned “Settle down now, Allan b’y.”

His cousin flushed with embarrassment when Allan came near with fluttering hands and saliva-sprayed questions. “How come you’re not friends with Pauline no more?” he sputtered, towering over the tight-jeaned teenager. His cousin flushed and turned away, stiff spears of bleached hair fanning her shoulders.

Most of all, Mr. Churchill, Allan’s teacher in the special class at the all-grade school, worried Ruth with his complaints. “Allan is mixing with the wrong sort, Mrs. Woodford,” Mr. Churchill grumbled in the aisle of Save Easy. “Especially certain girls. He needs a firm hand. I don’t like to think of where his stubbornness might lead,” he ended, shifting his shopping cart, grim voice trailing off down the aisle of cleaners and toilet paper.

As the creaking of Mr. Churchill’s shopping cart faded, the shelves of Spic and Span and Javex suddenly felt closed in. Ruth often found Allan chasing the long-haired White girls when she pulled into the school yard. Over tea at the church hall, Ruth heard Agnes Budgell exclaiming hotly about how the girls wandered the road at night in ragged clothes. “There’s dogs that got better lives than those chil’ren,” she hissed, gulping her tea.

Yesterday a crumpled note from Mr. Churchill tumbled from Allan’s book bag. Could they meet tomorrow? the angular script requested. What could it be now, she worried, thrusting the note out of sight in her hand bag. Ruth already knew Allan was talking back to Mr. Churchill just as he did with his parents with demands to go to dances and the pool hall. He wanted to be like the other teen-agers. Ruth understood that Allan could be trying. After all, didn’t she know him best?

Ruth was forty five, her three daughters grown, when she found out she was expecting again. Allan was born skinny and blue, his face like an old man’s, underweight, and dehydrated, heart fluttering in a tiny translucent chest. They rushed him to the children’s hospital in St. John’s where he was placed in an incubator with tubes, tapes, and lights, eyelids barely flickering. The next day, a balding doctor in a limp white coat drifted beside Ruth asking, “Is there anyone else in the family who is retarded?”

When he was strong enough Ruth took Allan home from the hospital to Bernard’s Harbor. Allan spent most days limply sprawled in a little chair, head lolling, pale eyes bleary. When Ruth fed him his bottle, he brought it up, face purple. She held him, tiny chest thumping. Later, she collapsed by his crib, too worn-out to feel anything.
She accepted her life as one long watch over Allan, to make sure he lived.

It was in the spring that Allan began to look at her. Weak sunlight beamed through the kitchen window panes and when she turned around to face him, he gazed back. There was something in his eyes that surprised Ruth. Bald head tilted, blue eyes steady, he stared at her thoughtfully. In the weeks that followed, he rolled out of his chair and lifted his neck. Panting, he inched forward, grasping the table leg with a triumphant grunt.

As childhood rolled into adolescence, Allan lived life with a kind of stubborn ferocity. He learned to pull on his clothing, button his shirt, shave the coarsening hair on his cheeks, write a note, sign his name. He took the little that he had and lit it into a blaze.

Ruth waited in the school classroom for Mr. Churchill at appointment time, fingering the scratches on the desk and watching sunshine drift between folds of the curtain. Knots of children whirled by the window. Soon Mr. Churchill veered through the doorway, mustached face grim.

“We’ve got a problem, Mrs. Woodford,” Mr. Churchill began, straddling a chair and planting two brawny hands on the chair back. “Allan’s givin’ money to the White girls.” He paused for a moment, tapping thick fingers. “I think he’s paying them for something,” he blurted, face flushing. “It’s got to stop. I told him but he won’t listen. I’d like to bring him in now so you can speak to him.”

Mr. Churchill sprang up, mouth set, arms ready for action.

Ruth stared at him hard, blood rushing to her head. “What do you mean, paying the girls for something?” she cried.

The teacher blinked at her, startled. “Well, the girls have been known to do certain things for money, Mrs. Woodford and, Allan, well, he’s easily led!”

“Allan would never pay girls for certain things, Mr. Churchill!” Ruth’s voice broke as she rose, trembling, from her chair to face him. “Certainly he makes a nuisance of himself and likes to get his way. But we’ve raised him to have respect! If he’s givin’ his money away, there must be a reason for it. But you don’t think about that, sir. You just think the worst!”

Mr. Churchill’s jaw slackened and eyes bulged, “Is that what you think? I’ve done everything I can to set that boy on the right road. He’s got a burden to bear and I’ve tried to teach him. But suit yourself, if you don’t care!” he declared and marched away.

Ruth stared after him like a storm had ripped through the room and flattened it. How could Mr. Churchill accuse her of not caring? And Allan, was he involved in something shameful? Face ablaze, she hastened down the hallway and into the sunshine. Spotting Allan in a ring of children she waved him over urgently.

“Are you giving your lunch money away, Allan? Are you giving it to the girls?” she demanded, grasping his shoulders.

He blinked at her, alarmed. Eyes wide, he rolled a muddy tennis ball between his palms. “Allan!” she blared, thrusting her face towards him, “What have you done with your money?”

He swallowed, pupils dilating, face pale, tongue and throat working to form the words. “I gives it to ‘em”, he gulped, ‘cause they got holes in their socks.” He swallowed again, tongue rolling in the back of his mouth. “Big, big ones,” he added, eyes bulging. “And Ma,” he emphasized, “inside the holes, their feets is black. That’s why I gives ‘em money.”

He blinked at her, panting, and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. The tennis ball slipped from his fingers and dribbled onto the pavement. He chased the rolling ball as it plunged into the ditch, disappearing into a patch of swaying cattails. Ruth, worn-out, watched the stems sway hypnotically.

“He’s more than he appears,” a voice in her mind offered calmly. “He has always been a surprise.”

The lunch bell pealed and children sprinted towards the doors. Allan struggled up the bank of the ditch, pant legs muddied, holding the tennis ball like a grimy trophy, triangular smile triumphant. Ruth watched Allan beam at the world as the school bell resonated into the dusty afternoon air. He sees something we don’t see, she observed, children streaming around her. He sees the wonder.