On the second day she said, “Let’s live here for ever, let’s never go anywhere except New York City.”
And he said, “Don’t you want a lovely big house and fine handsome children and to have your parents say, ‘Well, you were right all along, Mrs Piper’?”
“No,” rolling over to lie on him, her elbows on either side of his face, “I want to stay right here for a long long time,” curving her belly against him, “for ever and ever …” kiss me with the kisses of your mouth. “And ever and ever …,” he sighed.
When he came out of the woods for provisions on the third day, James was seized by two large men and taken by cart to Sydney and the back room of Mr Mahmoud’s Dry Goods Emporium on Pitt Street. Mr Mahmoud sat on a pressed-back wooden chair, a long narrow man with leathery cheeks and black wavy hair.
“Sir —” said James.
Mr Mahmoud had splintering brown eyes. James looked for Materia in them. “Sir —” said James.
Mr Mahmoud raised his forefinger slightly and the two younger men removed James’s boots and socks — James noted with some distaste that they both of them could use a shave.
“— where’s my wife?”
Mr Mahmoud took a leather thong and whipped the soles of James’s feet so that for days they swelled and peeled and leaked like drenched onion paper.
They put him in the YMCA and brought him meals. When he could walk again with the aid of a cane, the two men escorted him to Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church. “Take your hands off me,” James said, but he hadn’t heard either man speak a word of English. “Oily bastards,” he added.
Materia was waiting for him alone at the altar, veiled in black. She wouldn’t look at him. Her hair had been cut off. They exchanged vows once again, this time before a priest of Rome. It was James’s first time in a Catholic church. Smells like a whorehouse, he thought, although he’d never been in one of those either.
At the back of the church Mrs Mahmoud’s heart broke, because how could that pale boy with no family and no real religion possibly know how to treat a wife? It’s a terrible thing for a mother to know that her daughter will not have the happiness she herself has had. But more than that — more than sorrow — was a chill. For she had seen something in his cup.
Mahmoud didn’t beat his daughter, and he counted it a weakness that he’d never been able to bring himself to raise a hand to any of his girls for there was the root of the problem. The day after the horrible wedding, he instructed his wife to purge the house of Materia. He went to his shop and sealed himself in his back room while Mrs Mahmoud burned, snipped and bundled off his daughter’s memory. Materia’s favourite little sister, pretty Camille, cried for days. She and Materia had dreamed of marrying two handsome brothers: they would live side by side in big white houses and their children would grow up together; Materia would brush Camille’s beautiful straight black hair every night and they’d share a room just like always. Camille wrote a letter to Materia in large neat printing with x’s and o’s at the bottom, but Pa found it and burned it. He called Camille to him in the cellar and beat her.
It wasn’t so much that the piano tuner was “enklese,” or even that he was not a Catholic or a man of means. It was that he had come like a thief in the night and stolen another man’s property. “And my daughter yielded.” There was a word for all this in the Old Country: ‘ayb. There was no translation, people in this country couldn’t know the depth of shame, of this Mahmoud was certain. There was no taking her back, she was ruined.
But God is merciful and so was Mr Mahmoud. He allowed James to convert to Catholicism in exchange for his life. And Mr Mahmoud arranged for a good-sized house to be built for the newlyweds nine miles up the coast near Low Point. This was so he wouldn’t have to toss them from his doorstep a year from now when they turned up destitute. Such a thing would kill his poor wife.
As for the yellow-haired dog who stole my daughter, may he rot. May he awaken to the contents of his mouth strewn across his pillow and may God devastate his dwelling… well, perhaps not the dwelling.
As for my daughter. May God curse her womb.
The night after Materia’s horrible wedding, Mrs Mahmoud opened her rosewood jewellery box. Immediately the little ballerina popped up and began to revolve to the strains of “The Anniversary Waltz”. Mrs Mahmoud peeled back the red velvet lining from the bottom and placed there her daughter’s long black braid, coiling it flat. She covered it with the velvet and replaced the beautiful things her husband had given her over the years — rubies, diamonds, moonstones and pearls…. Then she went into the big oak wardrobe where he would not hear her, and mourned.
Materia never saw her family again. Her father forbade it. Her younger sisters were taken out of school and kept home till they were married. Materia’s older brothers were forbidden to kill the English bastard but, all the same, he had better keep out of their way. She was dead to them all from that day forth.
James and Materia moved into their big two-storey white frame house, with attic, a month later. But just because it was new, doesn’t mean it wasn’t haunted.
Low Point
What James resented most was that enklese nonsense. He wasn’t English, not a drop of English blood in him, he was Scottish and Irish, like ninety percent of this God-forsaken island, not to mention Canadian. Filthy black Syrians.
“Lebanese,” said Materia.
“What’s the difference, you’re better off without them.”
There was no town or village at Low Point. There’d been small mines around here, some dating back to the first days of the French, but they were all closed up now. Though scratch anywhere and you’d find coal. The closest neighbour was a Jew who raised kosher meat, and James kept his distance. God knows what rituals involving chickens and sheep….
In back of the house there ran a creek that emptied into the ocean half a mile away. The Atlantic was always in sight and this was something James and Materia both came to depend on.
If you followed this creek, you’d walk through long pale grasses keeled over in the damp, careful not to stumble on the rocks that sleep and peep out here and there. Past a stocky evergreen or two, their spiky scent, beaded sap stuck with rain. Startled by the scarlet mushroom, you might stop and stare. Or bend to feel the purity of the stream, refresh your eyes upon the pebbles stained with iron gleaming on the bottom there. Then you’d come, with your wet shoes and droplets in your hair, to a dirt road that stretches nine miles to Sydney on the left and all the way to Glace Bay on the right. Some called this Old Lingan Road, and others called it Victoria or Old Low Point Road, but in time it came to be simply the Shore Road.