One day, a man comes and eats lunch at the kitchen table while Teresa works. His name is Ginger — “Come on in, Ginger, darlin.” He is her darling but not her husband — Teresa calls to Mahmoud in the living-room, “My brother’s here, sir.” Ginger wears overalls but he’s not a miner, he’s too healthy-looking. Frances recognizes him right away — he is the one who used to drive Kathleen back and forth to school in a black Model T Ford. He dropped off Kathleen the day Teresa gave Frances the black and white striped candy. He called to Teresa and they drove away together and Kathleen took Frances’s candy and threw it into the creek. Frances even remembers what they had for supper that night — steak-and-kidney pie. Frances wonders why stupid details like supper stick in her mind when there are other things that she’d give anything to remember, like the last time she felt her mother’s touch.
Mr Mahmoud comes in while Ginger is there and says, “Hello, Leo” — and Frances nearly loses her balance on the steps again, jolted by the collision of two men in her mind. Frances sees the name stencilled on the back of the booze truck, parked out front of James’s still, then the truck dissolves into the Model T Ford but the stencilled name remains: “Leo Taylor Transport.”
He says, “Hello, Mr Mahmoud.”
Mahmoud asks in his dusky accent, “Have you got my special order?”
“I sure do, Mr Mahmoud, and strong like you like it.”
The surprise of recognizing Leo Taylor outweighs the surprise of seeing her grandfather guzzle a brown bottle of “special order”. Frances would never have pegged him for a drinker. He isn’t, of course, it’s only ginger beer. And when Teresa pours out glasses for herself and her brother, Frances realizes that, along with the fact that she too is thirsty. When she watches the fizzy gold slide past Teresa’s lips and ripple down her throat, Frances feels a craving. Leo Taylor sips his slowly.
Frances watches and remembers when she told Lily that her real daddy was a black man from The Coke Ovens. It was Leo Taylor she was thinking of, having seen him at James’ still. She told Lily this story in order to find out if it was true. Like the old orange-cat story — how it smothered Ambrose, and Daddy buried it in the garden. Like the story of how Mumma drowned Ambrose in the creek, and the one about the old French mine. Frances needs to say a story out loud to divine how much truth runs beneath its surface.
On her narrow journeys up the attic stairs by night Frances has seen a picture she did not know she owned: Kathleen with a black-red stomach, sweaty hair, two tiny babies alive between her knees. There is no one else in the picture except the person who is looking at it — that must be me. There is a voice way at the back of Frances’s mind, hollering into a wind. She can’t make it out yet, it’s just a sighing sound, it’s sighing a question. The question is, how did the babies get in the creek, Frances? The voice is getting closer. It’s on the first step. Partly to drown the voice and partly to enlist help in travelling to meet it, Frances tells herself another story.
There at the top of her grandfather’s cellar steps, behind the crack of the door, watching Teresa and her brother drink ginger beer, Frances murmurs aloud, quickly and under her breath like Mercedes saying the rosary: Kathleen is Lily’s mother, Ambrose drowned because we don’t know why, Kathleen was not married, she had a tumour in her belly but she didn’t really, there was a secret father, it was Ginger — he drove her and they fell in love on the way to school, that’s why Daddy says don’t play that coloured music from the hope chest — he sent Kathleen to New York Town but Ginger followed in his truck, Daddy took her home again but it was too late, she died of twins — do you know the Ginger Man, the Ginger Man, the Ginger Man, do you know the Ginger Man he lives in Ginger Lane. Amen Lily and Ambrose.
“Goodbye, Ginger honey,” says Teresa at the kitchen door, “drive safe.”
Teresa washes the glasses and Frances pads away down the cellar steps. Part of her story is true. And part of it is true enough. Frances will find out where he lives and buy herself a case of ginger beer.
She shimmies up the coal chute and out into a stab of sunlight.
Ginger has seen a little girl on the Shore Road between New Waterford and Sydney. She strays along the edge of the ditch looking every place but where she’s going. Why is she allowed to wander the highway alone like that and why is she not in school? Who’s her father? Where’s her mother? She always wears a Girl Guide uniform, which is strange because she doesn’t look old enough to be a Girl Guide, more like a Brownie.
The third time Ginger passes, they’re both travelling in the same direction and he slows down a little, thinking maybe to offer her a ride, but he decides against it, not wanting to frighten her. She looks up, though, at the slowing truck ahead, and he sees her face in the side mirror. It hurts him. Who would let their little girl walk the Shore Road alone day after day? He never would. He has three daughters: two Brownies and one Guide.
He shivers and drives on. He glances at the St Christopher medal hanging from his rearview mirror. Ginger has never had an accident, he is a good driver, but lately he has felt funny about the road. He used to see it all at once and drive as naturally as blinking and breathing, but now it’s as though he sees each piece of road individually the moment his wheels roll over it. To either side, each stone and tree stands separately, and he has lost the knack of expecting the road to unfurl around the bend. Driving is his living — he can’t afford to be spooked.
Ever since his last trip to New York Ginger hasn’t felt right. Never quite rested, or quite awake. It’s as though a window has been left open inside his head, admitting a draft. He can’t get to it to close it. But he can look out it, even though all he sees is fog. It rolls into his mind, obscuring his ease, setting him to shiver. Still, he looks and looks. Because out there in the fog he can feel something looking back at him.
His wife, Adelaide, knows there is something not right but how can Ginger explain to her what he cannot explain to himself? He heard some music in New York. That sounds crazy, he knows it, so the least he can do is keep it to himself. Can music cast a spell? Yes. Everyone knows that. And everyone would laugh at him if he said it out loud.
It was in a club up in Harlem. Ginger had time on his hands waiting for a shipment of dresses to haul back to Mahmoud’s Department Store on Pitt Street. Whenever Ginger is in a place that’s filled with other black people it’s as though he is relieved of a weight that he was unaware of until it came off him. He walked up Lenox Avenue feeling light. In Harlem Ginger felt happy but lonely too. Home and not home. He entered a small club on 135th Street that welcomed Negroes in the audience, not just on stage. A trio was playing quiet music for a quiet crowd. The whole scene was highly unusual. No floor show, no horns or hi-de-ho. Piano, bass and flute. Ginger stood and listened.
The piano player was at the core of the trio. A slim man with long fine fingers, hand-tooled wrists. So good that he had come to prefer playing between the music. This was not for everyone and the pianist hadn’t had a new suit in a very long time. Threadbare trousers, white shirt open at the long handsome throat. A charcoal fedora angled low, and round its base a shimmering green silk band.