George & Rue by George Elliott Clarke Page A

each connection; Rue folded onto the Turkish carpet.
    Googie loathed commotion and upset—and he hated Rue’s unfunky jazz: music should doctor, not need one. Haps Rue forgot he was only a half-ass hayseed, only half a pianist, and a dime-a-dozen. Ergo, the sucker’d have to square up, clear out, pronto. Rue’d get a few bucks, and then the door. Googie couldn’t abide no nigger ignoramus!

XI
    A FTER Easter’d drowned, Rufus was impossible to endure. To George, it seemed his family was just mortally bad news. To stick with Rue could mean, then, his own doom. It was time to escape. Georgie knew there was about a hundred dollars of insurance money in the shack; he’d torch the shack, collect the moolah, split it, bill for bill, with Rue, and they’d skedaddle different routes. He set the fire, saw Cynthy’s photo blaze, got the cash, gave Rue almost half.
    Georgie left Three Mile Plains but chose to stay in Windsor because he liked country life. He did odd jobs for Pius Bezanson, a farmer, for ten bucks a month. Not sour pay, compared with bitter poverty. Bezanson’s belief was, “Let every man turn
pain
into bread.” Bezanson let George bunk in the barn, where he managed to snore despite stench and noisy, beastly copulations of animals. Mosquitoes were also wicked, stabbin George relentlessly. Even so, Georgie felt he’d do better, by and by. Hope was as striking as lightning, as deep as water, water, water, and as dream-productive as rum.
    Farmin was natural for Georgie, and Bezanson let him eat and eat. Once, the farmer paid Georgie with a seven-pound tin of blueberry jam, seven loaves of bread, and seven quarts of rum. Georgie made rum and jam sandwiches. Some good under crow-fractured, dark-blue Heaven. He had to wade through bushes, spend days cutting poplar trees and maplesand spruce and pine. He could milk cows, churn cream, set out eggs delicate, delicate. He’d lead oxen—and, times, get bogged down in mud. He could tiptoe through the marsh bushes, the thinner woods near the Avon River, tumble into orange-red mud and climb out, or quickly skinny-dip in the river. He’d wander, separate, alone, among lichened rocks, let salt spray off the Fundy splash his Coloured Nova Scotian face. He’d take barrels and haul apples out the trees. He could drink fresh water by scooping up rain. A downy rain could make even October taste as fresh as April. After trainloads of apples, after muddy roads.
    He’d found Paradise. Now he needed a woman.
    From this farm at Windsor’s edge, George eyed, daily, passing, dairy girls, lasses only thirteen or twelve, perched upright, like postage stamp queens, atop small, slow Percherons. The girls’d titter, chatter, sing. Jostling, their dairy pails pinged, as jittery as kindling breaking into flame. The dames gleamed unusually beautiful; their Madonna-like smiles as gay as fresh milk. George watched em giggle, shout, sing, as they’d pass by him on the Orotava Road. He juggled blue plums to entice their eyes. They’d look back, teehee, and he felt gratified. He noticed Blondola—one of the solar-eclipsing Plains belles (from Englishman River Falls)—noticing him. Georgie chase her small horse and hand her a blue plum. Blondola smiled, and he felt melted. She was like a fat, plush mare. The pretty women’d rub berry juice on their lips. Blondola too. The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice. Blondola was thirteen, but plump, bodacious. A lively-lookin, dark-skinned black girl in black. Her face was chocolate smooth, with supremely plush, violet lips. Her coal-coloured eyes were lit up as if by an internal night of stars. Just her “Hi,” the way she’d say it, ‘d jolt Georgie’s heart. Maybe they’d be so much in love that, making love, they’d feel like they were equally his and hers, that one set ofhands was as dependable as the other. Ah, that chocolate-dark, chocolate-sweet woman, her plum-tint eyes!
    The road is all dirt—dirty,
    My gal is all