Most Anything You Please Page 2

  What took Ellen longer to figure out was where she herself fit into this pattern of neighbourhood that she saw around her. The fact that she and Wes owned a house and shop meant they were better off than most of their neighbours, and that knowledge hung in the background of all her conversations with the neighbour women. They didn’t see her as an equal, exactly, but it wasn’t the same as her father’s or mother’s position behind the counter of the store back in Candle Cove, either. A merchant was someone important in a place like Candle Cove; everyone knew his role, deferred to him that little bit.

  But the neighbours here in Rabbittown were merciless to anyone they thought was “getting above themselves.” All the while Mrs. Hynes’s daughter was running around with Thomas Ivany, the oldest Hiscock girl, who was the same age, was still in school, studying hard and getting top marks on her CHE exams. Her mother bragged to the other women in the shop about her Ella’s good grades.

  “Wants to be a teacher, she do,” Mrs. Hynes sniffed one day after Mrs. Hiscock and Ella left the shop. “Can’t she see how hard her poor mother got it? That young one is fifteen years old, sharp as a tack—she could be working in some shop downtown, making decent money to help them out. I got no time for anyone who thinks they’re too good to work.”

  Ellen had a lot of thoughts about this statement: Did Mrs. Hynes understand that studying in school was hard work? Not to mention teaching youngsters, which young Ella Hiscock would likely end up doing? Mostly, though, Ellen got the message loud and clear: We don’t like folks who think they’re better than the rest of us.

  But it wasn’t as if she had a lot of time to stew over possible slights. Mrs. Hynes was barely done complaining when another customer came in, and Frankie woke up from his nap and started to cry, and Johnny knocked all the Carnation milk tins off the bottom shelf.

  Ellen hadn’t realized what long days they would be, here in the shop. She opened the doors at eight and served the trickle of women who came in throughout the morning. She shut it from noon to one o’clock so she could give Wes his dinner, which always had to be something she had prepared the night before. Throughout the morning Frank and Johnny napped and played in the crib in their little room behind the shop; they were usually good babies but she had to pop in and out to tend to them, especially Johnny who was nearly four and wanted to be out of the crib, seeing and doing things.

  The schoolchildren got out at three and there was a rush of them into the shop as they bought candy and soda-pop and ran messages for their mothers. Her own oldest ones came straight home from school and the girls took the little boys upstairs to watch them while they got supper ready. Then Ellen would collect up the lists people had dropped off or sent down earlier in the day, things they wanted delivered before supper. She and Alf bagged the orders and put them in the hand cart, and Alf went around the neighbourhood making deliveries. If Johnny had been good all day Ellen would let him ride in the cart on top of the groceries, his little face beaming under his copper curls. “I helping Aff!” he would announce loudly to anyone they passed on the street. Alf hardly ever complained about the extra weight his little brother added to the cart. He was good as gold, Alf was, pulling that cart around all afternoon and then coming home to haul a bucket of coal upstairs for the kitchen stove.

  “You needs someone to help you in the shop,” Wes said to her at the end of their first month. It was nine in the evening and they were both sitting in the front room, the little ones finally asleep and the older ones in their bedrooms. Alf, Audrey, and Marilyn were supposed to be doing their homework but Ellen didn’t have the energy to check that they were doing it. If Frankie woke up and started to cry she didn’t know if she’d have the strength to pick him up out of the crib.

  “I can’t hire anybody,” Ellen said. “We’re barely making enough to cover the cost of the stock I’m putting on the shelves. If we make any little bit extra, I can’t afford to pay out wages to anyone—not yet. Maybe never. The shop was supposed to bring in money, but I got to admit I’m having doubts. Maybe it was a bad idea.”

  “Now, you can’t go thinking like that, girl,” Wes said. “A shop’s a long-term proposition, like. It’s not like my work—I works on building a house and gets a week’s pay on Friday, and after so many weeks the job is done. A shop needs time— people got to get used to buying from it, and we got to get used to what sells, and how much of everything to order, and all that. Someday, no doubt, it’ll make money. And someday the youngsters will be big enough to do their fair share behind the counter. Alf’s a great help already, and Audrey will be in a few years. But for now—well, it’s wearing you down, my love.”

  “The girls are a help around the house, but that’s only after school. When Frankie’s a bit bigger I can put him and Johnny out in the yard to play, but right now I’m only easy in my mind if they’re close by.”

  “I’m thinking about Susan,” Wes said. “She’s fifteen now, old enough to be going into service somewhere, and Mother says she’s getting right restless out home. What would you say to us taking her in here, to give a hand with the youngsters while you’re in the shop? It’d be one more mouth to feed, but she’d be a lot of help till our own girls are older.”

  It was the obvious solution and Ellen had been thinking of it herself, going through her own family and Wes’s family for young girls of a suitable age who might want to move into town. Wes’s sister Susan was the perfect age and though she had been only a child when Wes and Ellen left Candle Cove, Ellen had never heard anything but good about her. Taking her in would stretch them in every way—they would have to put a cot up in the already-crowded room where Audrey and Marilyn shared a bed. But Susan would be able to watch the boys while the older children were at school; she could cook meals and help with cleaning, and maybe take the odd turn behind the counter. Feeding her would cost far less than hiring a stranger for wages, and if business started to pick up they could give her a bit of pocket money.

  Susan arrived on the Kyle a month later. Marilyn latched onto her like a new big sister, which put Audrey’s nose a little out of joint until Susan took over the job of curling Audrey’s hair into ringlets for church Sunday morning, and suddenly Audrey, too, adored Susan. With Susan upstairs during the day, Ellen was able to leave the two little boys in her care and knew she would come upstairs at dinnertime and suppertime to find a meal on the table.

  Still, Ellen missed her own cooking, missed preparing meals for the family in her own kitchen. Once Susan was comfortable behind the shop counter, Ellen made it a habit to give her the afternoon shift once a week so Ellen could cook supper. She usually picked Wednesday: a nice mid-point to break up the week a little. So Ellen was standing over the stove making drawn butter to go with the salt fish, listening to her small children play and her bigger ones do homework, when Alf, who had been out making deliveries, came running up the stairs.

  “Mom! Mom! Susan says you gotta come down to the shop now!”

  “Oh, my foot,” said Ellen—her strongest expletive. “Does it have to be right now?”

  “She says right now, yeah. Scabs Cadwell stole a whole bunch of candy and I wanted to run after him and beat him up but Susan said to come up and get you instead. I don’t know why she wouldn’t let me chase him. He wants a good beating, is what he wants.”

  “Susan is right—no beating up any of the Cadwells. You stay up here. Audrey, get over here. Just keep stirring this, don’t let it catch on the bottom of the pan.”

  Downstairs, she found Susan halfway between fuming and crying. “Oh, Nell, I could just wring his neck—I never saw him do it, but when he was halfway out the door I saw he had the gobstoppers in his hand and called him back, but he just took off, and when he was out on the sidewalk he looked back in at me, just brazen as brass, like he was darin’ me to come after him. And there was four or five other youngsters in here, and they all knew he done it, and I thought if I took off after him they might steal
more stuff. I didn’t know what to do, and then Alf came in, and…oh, I’m some sorry I let it happen. I gets that miz-mazed when the store is full of youngsters.”

  “It’s all right, Susan, it’s not your fault.” The words were automatic, even while Ellen thought, I should have stayed down here and let Susan cook supper. He wouldn’t have had the nerve to do it if I was here. All the Cadwells were loud, unruly, and disrespectful to adults. And what could you expect, with their father in jail for stealing? One time she caught the oldest one—Warren, was it?—out on the sidewalk with a rock in his hand, right in front of the big shop window where she’d painted the specials and prices up in whitewash. Ellen gave him a hard look and he scampered off. She had been afraid since the shop opened that sooner or later some youngster would swipe something. Most everything was back behind the counter but she always had a few small things laid out in bins on the counter, squares and dandy-cakes and hard candies. Odds were good if any child was going to take advantage, it would have been one of the Cadwells.

  “Which one was it?” Scabs, Alf had said, but Scabs and Butch and Flea-Bag weren’t their actual names. There was a tangle of boys and one girl—Soose—but she was a tiny thing, only Johnny’s age. Could the thief have been the same boy she scared away when he was about to bazz a rock at the window?

  Susan sniffled. “Not the biggest one and not the little fellow—the one in between. Ricky? I think? The young ones all calls him Scabs.”

  “Richard.” Ellen tried to get a picture of him in her mind’s eye, to pull tow-headed Richard—scabs and all—from the snarl of little Cadwells. It wasn’t their mother’s fault. She was doing her best, no doubt. “And you’re sure you saw him with the candy in his hand. You couldn’t have made any mistake?”

  “No, not a chance, I told you, his fist was full of it and he looked back at me brazen as brass. Like he was darin’ me to do anything. Should I have let Alf go after him? It might have taught him a lesson.”

  “Not the lesson he needs to learn,” Ellen said. She went to the door and turned the sign to CLOSED. “You go upstairs, finish putting supper on the table. Put a plate in the warmer for me—I’ll have mine after.” She took her coat and hat from the hook behind the counter, untying her apron before she put them on.

  At the Cadwells’ door, one of the boys—the smallest one—opened after Ellen’s third series of sharp knocks. “Mudder ain’t home,” he said.

  “Not home? At suppertime?” Ellen stared him down, the same look that quenched his older brother with the rock. “Mrs. Cadwell!” she called, over the little boy’s head. She heard the racket of the other youngsters inside, and another boy’s voice yelled, “Flea-Bag! Get in outa that!”

  “Missus from the store is at the door and she wants Mudder!”

  “Get back in here!” Little Flea-Bag was yanked back and a taller boy appeared. Was this the culprit? “Sorry Missus, me mudder’s gone out.”

  “Where is she gone to, supper hour?”

  “Gone over to Nan’s.”

  “Fine, I’ll go to your grandmother’s and talk to her there.” Ellen was bluffing, of course, but she was sure someone in the neighbourhood could tell her where Mrs. Cadwell’s mother lived, if it came to that. She pitched her voice loud, to carry past the roomful of children.

  “Mrs. Holloway! Is that you, ma’am?” Louise Cadwell, thin, red-headed, with a face that always looked like she’d just been slapped, came out wiping her hands on her apron. “Warren, you little bugger—sorry, ma’am—did you tell Mrs. Holloway I was gone out?”

  “But you told me to say—owww!” One of the Cadwells pinched the other, and the protest subsided. Ellen stood as tall and dignified as she could in their dirty front room, sweeping the assembled Cadwells with her eyes as their mother murmured apologies—for her children’s behaviour, for the state of the house, for not coming to the door.

  Ellen didn’t want Louise Cadwell’s apologies. She didn’t want to be here at all, in this dingy room with the bare wood floor and a mattress and blankets in the corner to show that at least some of the children slept here. A line of clothes hung drying in one corner, and more clothes were thrown into piles in wooden crates on the floor. A barrel in the corner reminded her that while the Holloways’ house and store was hooked up to the city water line, people on these little side streets still had to lug water in buckets from a pump on the corner. The Cadwells’ house looked like a place where people were camping out, not living, and she was sorry to have brought this poor woman any more trouble. But there was no room here for compromise: other children saw him steal, and other children would hear what Ellen did about it, as would their parents.

  It wasn’t hard, standing there in her good coat and hat, to elicit a confession from the middle boy, though it was harder to watch Mrs. Cadwell smack him across the mouth. “I’d make him give it back if I could, ma’am, but you know he got that eat.”

  “Not just me! I gave a piece to every one of ye!” the culprit yelled, pointing a finger at his brothers and sister. “Every one of them ate it and if I gets in trouble they all should!”

  “I’d make him give you the five cents if we had it,” Mrs. Cadwell said, and her teary eyes caught Ellen’s.

  “That wouldn’t be fair to you,” Ellen said. “Richard—it is Richard, isn’t it?—he’s the one that took the candy and he’s the one that should pay. I want him over at the shop Saturday morning an hour before we open up. Most Saturdays I gets one of my own youngsters to sweep out the shop and dust off the shelves and wash the window, but if he does the job for me this week, and does it to my satisfaction, we’ll say no more about it.”

  “You hear that, Ricky?” Mrs. Cadwell said. “Mrs. Holloway’s going to let you off for what you done, but you got to go clean up the store Saturday morning. And you better do a good job or I’ll give you another lickin’ to go with the one you’re gettin’ tonight.”

  Richard, or Scabs, shot Ellen a look of pure hatred, blue eyes burning at her from underneath long gold lashes and a tangle of curls. He was about the same age as Audrey, and he’d be a pretty child if he wasn’t so dirty and sullen. Ellen would have to watch him like the hawk every second he was in the shop, not just Saturday morning but every time he came in from now on. But word would get around.

  “She’s some crooked!” Ellen heard the words burst out of Richard Cadwell even before she had the door closed. She remembered fishermen back home complaining that her own father drove a hard bargain, or cheated them out of the value of their catch when he gave them credit for their flour or molasses or twine. And her father behind the counter when they were all gone at the end of the day, telling her, “You can’t run a business and have everyone like you, Nellie my maid. That’s the one thing you cannot do.”

  She went back to her shop, back upstairs to her dried-out fish and the last scrapings of drawn butter.

  ELLEN

  “I’ll take a pound of ham and a quarter pound of baloney,” said Mrs. Ryan. Ellen laid the ham out on a square of brown paper and carefully sliced through it. She gave Mrs. Ryan a discount, both because the ham was going to go bad soon and because Mrs. Ryan needed the discount. Such a tricky thing, buying meat, because there was always a demand for it but usually not as much as you bought, and unlike the canned and boxed goods it would go bad if it didn’t sell. Cheese was the same way, though at least there you could slice off the moldy bits and the rest was still good to sell. It would be easier if everything came in tins but she didn’t like to imagine what tinned cheese would be like. Ellen sliced the meat, wrapped it in paper and tied the parcel with twine, and wrote down the cost of Mrs. Ryan’s items in the book.

  In front of the counter, his head about level with his mother’s waist, Jimmy Ryan was just at the right level to eye the candy under the counter. That’s why the candies were there, of course, right where the children could see them but not get their hands on them, and ask the parent
s to buy a treat. But it seemed almost unfair in the case of the Ryans as Jimmy set up a howl for something his mother couldn’t possibly afford. On the other hand, it was all going on a tab she’d never be able to pay off, so what difference did it make? “Go on, let him have the candy—I’ll throw it in for nothing,” she told Mrs. Ryan. With a Peppermint Nob stuffed in his big loud gob, Jimmy quieted down long enough for his mother to pick up her parcel and make it to the door.

  Funny, Ellen thought, that she would do that for someone else’s youngster when she wouldn’t dream of doing it for her own. Alf, Audrey, and Marilyn all knew the best way to make sure they never got anything in a shop was to cry and beg for it. Just last week she left Susan to watch the store and took the girls down to Ayre and Sons for winter coats, hats, and boots. Ellen planned to make a little treat out of the day, let the girls try on their new things and then walk up to Wood’s Candy Store for an ice cream afterwards. But Marilyn got it into her little head that she wanted the red tartan coat with the fur trim, pretty but not as practical as the one Ellen had picked out. When Marilyn stuck her bottom lip out and stamped her foot and said, “But I wants the pretty red coat!” Ellen was quick to say, “You’re getting the coat I picked out for you, and you should be thankful. There’s little girls who got no coats and would be glad to have a nice warm one like that. And if you makes any fuss there’ll be no treat afterwards.”

  Marilyn’s lip still trembled, but Audrey, two years older and wiser, jabbed her elbow into her sister’s ribs. “Hush. I wants me cake and ice cream!” she hissed at Marilyn, and Marilyn subsided. She still didn’t look happy about the sensible navy blue coat as the salesgirl packed it away in a box with the other items to be delivered later, but she kept a still tongue in her head, and Ellen decided that was enough of an effort for a nine-year-old. The promised ice cream went ahead as planned. She didn’t mind aiding and abetting in the spoiling of little Ryans—the poor mortals had few enough pleasures—but Ellen was bound and determined that none of her lot would grow up spoiled.