Most Anything You Please Read online

  MOST

  ANYTHING

  YOU

  PLEASE

  MOST

  Anything

  YOU

  PLEASE

  a novel

  Trudy J. Morgan-Cole

  BREAKWATER

  P.O. Box 2188, St. John’s, NL, Canada, A1C 6E6

  WWW.BREAKWATERBOOKS.COM

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from Library and Archives Canada.

  Copyright © 2017 Trudy J. Morgan-Cole

  ISBN 978-1-55081-684-6

  COVER PHOTOGRAPH: Shopkeepers Bell (Detail)

  Image provided courtesy of Love Vintage Books, Willoughby Sydney.

  eBook: tikaebooks.com

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada and the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador through the Department of Business, Tourism, Culture and Rural Development for our publishing activities.

  PRINTED AND BOUND IN CANADA.

  Breakwater Books is committed to choosing papers and materials for our books that help to protect our environment. To this end, this book is printed on a recycled paper that is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council®.

  FOR CHRIS

  Keep Singing

  Old Brown sells from off the shelf most anything you please

  He’s got jews-harps for the little boys, lollipops and cheese.

  His daughter minds the store and it’s a treat to see her serve

  I’d like to run away with her but I don’t have the nerve.

  prelude

  AUDREY

  We’ve been a part of Canada since nineteen-forty-nine

  For most of twenty-five years we’ve been having quite a time...

  That jeezly beer commercial again, I’m some sick of it. VOCM must play it every ten minutes. Gets on me nerves enough I almost goes to turn off the radio, although I can’t get through the working day without a bit of music in the shop. But just as they’re singing, On the island that belongs to us, with the beer that’s yours and mine, the door opens and two little ones, only Rachel’s age, comes up to the counter.

  – A loafa Sunnybee, package a Red Rose and a pack a Export A for Nan.

  She hands me a creased-up five-dollar bill. She’s an Ivany, that one–what’s her name? Linda, something like that. The other little one, staring down at the candy under the counter, looks like a Taylor.

  – Yes, I s’pose it’s for your Nan. I hope the likes of you is not taken up smoking yet. Stubbing out my own smoke in the ashtray before I reaches back to get the baker’s bread and the cigarettes from the shelf behind me.

  – You get the tea yourself, you knows where that’s to.

  She crosses the floor to the shelves on her side of the counter, where most of the tinned and boxed stuff is. She’s moving her hand back and forth between the seventy-two and the hundred-and-forty-four of Red Rose, and I knows what she’s going to ask before the words are out of her mouth.

  – If I gets the big one how much do I got left?

  – You buys that big box, you got sixty-five cents left. Buy the small box, you got a dollar twenty, but your Nan’ll be mad at you.

  I wasn’t bad at math in school and I done a bookkeeping course since then, but this is the kind of math always came most natural to me, because I learned it when I wasn’t much bigger than these youngsters. While I puts the things in the paper bag the two little ones are figuring out how to spend the change. I sees all kinds in here and there’s youngsters would make up their mind in no time flat. Sure, Rachel would have a can of Pepsi and a bag of chips and not even mind there was fifteen cents left. But these two are the careful kind. They spends a good ten minutes looking at the candy, talking it over.

  – If we got ten Icy Cups, five caramels, and a box of Smarties, would we have enough for a can of drink too? What about if it was an Aero bar instead of Smarties?

  These two won’t set foot outside the store till every cent is gone and they got value for their money. I can sit back down on me stool and not have to worry about change because there won’t be any change to give them. Smart youngsters. Linda’s Nan was Ruby Hiscock, she used to go around with my sister Marilyn. Ruby was a sensible girl too, though the Hiscocks had some queer ways. The old man, Ruby’s uncle, used to always be drunk and out in the middle of Merrymeeting Road in his undershirt ranting about Jesus and Satan and the great war in heaven.

  Ping! There goes the door again and another crowd of youngsters streels in off the street. The day blows in with them, cold for all the sunshine outside. The wind is in and it’s chilly enough that the young ones shuts the door without me having to bawl at them. Now they’re all hanging over the counter, helping the other two make their choices. No doubt hoping they’ll get a share. I wish Rachel was here with the crowd of them, but I knows already she won’t be. I drove her out of the house after breakfast but who knows where that one spends her time? Not hanging around with the crowd on the street.

  It’s not like I wants her hanging out with a tough crowd like Marie Walsh’s young ones, or the Cadwells, but there’s nice youngsters here, like this little one, Ivany, and her friend I’m sure is a Taylor. Why can’t Rachel run around with them instead of keeping to herself? But there’s no good looking at a youngster and wishing they’re any different from what they are. If there’s one lesson I’ve learned, it’s that.

  Finally they got their candies picked out and young Linda doles them out among her friends before she picks up the bag of things for her Nan.

  – Bye, Mrs. Holloway. And all the other ones echoing like a chorus: Bye, Mrs. Holloway.

  – Say hello to your Nan for me.

  They all calls me Mrs. Holloway, never guessing the name is more than half a lie. I was a Holloway, and I was a Missus, but never the two of it together. But that’s what I gone by for more than twenty years now and it makes as much sense as any other name.

  I got to go around the counter to close the door behind them and damned if the radio isn’t playing that same friggin commercial again. It’s one of them songs gets stuck in your head and you can’t get it out all day then. Blue, Blue, Blue Star, the beer that’s in demand, you can take a toast to Newfoundland with a Blue Star in your hand.

  Youngsters are always leaving the door open, and the spring that’s supposed to close it behind them is bust. I must have told Alf about it forty times but do he get around to fixing it? The shoemaker’s children go barefoot and I s’pose the carpenter’s sister got to live with a busted door.

  No sooner am I back behind the counter, turning the radio dial to CJON in hopes of a bit of decent music, when the door opens again and Lorraine Penney comes sailing in.

  – Oh my word, Audrey, I needs something for Ted’s supper before he gets home from work and I haven’t got a thing in the house. What are the men like, at all at all. Sometimes I think you’re better off the way you are, none of that kind of trouble at all, my love.

  Hoists myself back up on the stool behind the cash register and settles in, now. Lorraine will only get two cans of pork and beans but picking that up will take the better part of
an hour once she’s gone over what the men are like at all. Time to light up another smoke.

  one

  SHE KEEPS A LITTLE GROCERY STORE

  1936–1946

  ELLEN

  Wes Holloway ran his hand along the edge of the shelf. Ellen could tell from his half-smile that the edge was smooth, no jagged bits or splinters. Good thing, too; there was no time for him to go hauling out the plane and trying to make it perfect. In five minutes she would flip the sign to OPEN and there would be customers coming through that door. She couldn’t have Wes in here fussing around like an old woman. She had already delayed opening the shop twice so he could get everything to his liking.

  “Go on now, you got work to do and I’ll be busy in here soon enough,” she said, and he shrugged and turned to go, out through the back door of the shop where he’d hung a little curtain to block off the stairs that led up to the rest of the house, their kitchen and living room and bedrooms. There was more work to do up there. Everything was only half-finished, but Wes had to go work on someone else’s house now. Their own would have to wait.

  One little room at the foot of the staircase was hidden from the store by the flowered curtain but well within earshot. It was just wide enough for the cot to fit in, and the baby, Frankie, slept there while Johnny played with a pyramid of tins on the floor behind the counter. If Frankie woke up and bawled, Ellen might have to take him up, but she hoped he would sleep at least till she went in to give him a bottle. Once the older ones got home from school, the girls could watch Johnny and Frankie, and Alf could haul the cart around if there were any deliveries to make.

  It would all work out.

  Ellen flipped the sign to OPEN.

  It was as if she had imagined that as soon as the sign was turned over, the door would burst open and a flood of people would pour in. As if they were all congregated out on the corner of Rankin Street and Calver Avenue, ready to hammer the door down. She flipped the sign, and stood for a minute looking out through the square of glass. There were children playing on the street—the small ones, not in school yet—but no sign of adults. She opened the door, took in the fresh cold breeze, heard the ping so she knew the bell was working. It was too cold to have the door standing open so she closed it again and went to sit on a stool behind the counter. Johnny looked up at her. “Somebody come in?” he said.

  “No, my love, that was just me. Nobody’s here yet. But they’ll come soon.”

  When Wes first started building the house, Ellen had thought they would live on the ground floor and rent out the upstairs rooms. That seemed like a way of making ends meet, earning a bit of money to pay for the privilege of living under their own roof. Most of the houses out here in this new part of town, as in their old neighbourhood downtown, were filled up with renters. Ellen and Wes and the children had been renters themselves, living in three rooms on Casey Street since they’d moved into town. But when she was expecting Frank, Ellen decided their days of living in rented rooms were at an end. Land was cheap here on the fringes of town. Moving from Casey Street to Rankin Street would surely be less of an upheaval than the move from Bonavista Bay in to St. John’s.

  It was her father who gave her the idea of opening a shop. A natural idea for him, being a merchant. Ellen had to work Wes up to it, convince him that having a shop on the ground floor would be less trouble than having a parade of down-at-heel folks streeling through their upstairs rooms all the time. She found she still had a prejudice against the kind of people who rented rooms instead of owning a house, despite the fact that she had been a renter for six years. She was Ellen Holloway, daughter of Ki Tuff; she had grown up knowing her father was king of Candle Cove, and that made her a princess.

  She knew, now, what a tiny thing it was to be king of a place the size of Candle Cove, what a low rung on the ladder an outport merchant like her father occupied. Still, he saw things with a clear eye, her father did. When he came into town last fall he walked out with them to have a look at the new house—Wes just had it framed in then—and he looked around at the houses nearby. They were cheap two-storey row houses, less than ten years old but already starting to look rundown. Ellen thought he was going to say it was a shame, what a lovely house on a nice piece of land she could have if she and Wes moved back around the bay. But instead he looked beyond, to the open fields out past Rankin Street. There were streets there—Suez and Suvla, Hamel and Monchy—names that echoed the places Newfoundland boys had died in battle twenty years ago. Hardly any houses on those streets yet, only rutted roads and long stretches of fields between them.

  “Someday that’ll all be built up like this is,” Ki Tuff said to his daughter.

  When he said it, she could see it too—see the way the town was bursting and straining at its seams, pushing north and west away from the harbour. “You should open a shop, is what you should do,” he said.

  “A shop?” She thought of the stores already open nearby. “There’s a Mrs. Hickey got a candy store in the front room of their house, just down over the road here. I suppose we could give up one room to do that.”

  Her father snorted. “Sure what good is a candy shop? No, I means a proper grocery store.”

  “Something like Mr. Butler got down there on Goodridge Street, or Davises up on Merrymeeting?” New as the neighbourhood was, it already had its share of shops. “Both of them are close to here.”

  “Folks in town, they wants a little shop on every street corner. Nobody in town wants to walk half a mile to the one shop like they do out home. They wants a shop right by the house, so they can send the youngsters out to do a message, or order salt pork and cabbage delivered for their supper. You mark my words, you opens up a grocery store and they’ll be beating your door down.”

  Again, her father’s words worked that magic in Ellen’s mind: she saw their shop on the first floor of the house as soon as he said it. Saw herself behind the counter, her son pulling a handcart of goods to deliver to the neighbours. Saw her family living in the upstairs rooms, the children growing up to work behind the counter, the neighbourhood flourishing around them.

  But still she had misgivings. “Grocery stores like that, that’s a big operation. It’s the men in the family that run them, and they usually got someone else in the shop to help them. I don’t see Wes doing that kind of work. He likes his carpentry. And I got the house and youngsters to look after.”

  Ki Tuff shoved his hands deep in his pockets, rocked back on his heels. He was still looking over the newly built streets, not meeting his daughter’s eyes. “Didn’t you grow up working alongside me in the shop? What’s there to running a store that you don’t know as good as any man? And before long your youngsters will be big enough to help. You was behind the counter by the time you was twelve, sure.”

  And now here the shop was, real and solid and ready to open. Their house stood on the corner, attached to the neighbours on one side but with its own outside wall. Wes built it on Saturday afternoons and weekday evenings, after his regular work building other people’s houses was done. He had been working fourteen-hour days for a year now, every day except Sunday, and Ellen was anxious for customers to start coming through the front door so she would be making some money too, doing her bit to help out.

  She waited half an hour for the first customer and when the door finally opened it was Mrs. Hiscock from two doors down. She stepped inside and looked around, taking in the rows of shelves that Ellen and the children had stocked with canned goods yesterday.

  “Well, Mrs. Holloway. Nice little shop you got here.”

  “Well now, Mrs. Hiscock, I hope we got everything you might need.”

  “I was looking for a tin of beans for the mister’s dinner. I made bread but I never had time to put on beans.”

  Over time this was something Ellen would get used to—the need some women had to apologize when they bought tinned beans or tinned soup. Buying it in tins meant they d
idn’t make it from scratch, and some women felt that anything less was a bit of a failure. Poor Mrs. Hiscock—and she was poor, most of the neighbours were—had six children, took in washing, and had a husband laid up with bad lungs he got working in the mines up in Nova Scotia. Who would judge her if she didn’t have time to put a pot of beans on to soak the night before and stand over the stove cooking them all morning? But she judged herself, of course.

  Throughout that first morning, the women came in ones and twos to pick up a few items, but mostly to look around and chat. In the months since she moved her family into the half-finished rooms upstairs, Ellen hadn’t gotten to know the neighbourhood women very well; she knew some of their names and recognized their children, but she had never been one to stand a long time talking over the back fence. She realized it was a strange choice for such a private person, to put herself behind the counter and invite the whole neighbourhood into a shop that was an extension of her home.

  She learned more about her neighbours in those first days of shopkeeping than she had in six months of living on the street. She learned that Myrtle Hiscock was frustrated with her sickly husband and would give anything to go back out home to Spaniard’s Bay where she came from, but there was nothing to do out there but fish and her husband was too weak to go out in boat ever again. She learned the police had been called in to break up yet another fight between the two men who owned land down on Liverpool Avenue, and that one man had beaten the other with his own wooden leg in an argument over the property line. She learned that Mrs. Hynes was worried sick that her oldest daughter was only being led along by that young Ivany fellow, that he would get her in trouble and leave her. She learned that Mrs. Kelly’s daughter really did get in trouble, with Leo Nolan, but they were getting married and nobody was asking questions.

  Every house’s door hid a dozen stories behind it, and the families criss-crossed each other like links in a chain, related by blood or marriage. Ellen learned which families were which: Mrs. Hynes was the wife of Hynes-from-the-butcher-shop; they bought their handcart from Nolan-the-blacksmith; Mrs. Hiscock’s husband was Poor Mr. Hiscock because of his ill health. Downstairs from Mrs. Hiscock lived That Crowd of Cadwells. Louise Cadwell had a husband who was in and out of jail and a crew of youngsters always in trouble.