Free George & Rue by George Elliott Clarke

Easter had postponed her travel, or had ridden to a safer passage, although Rue knew there was no good place to cross: the river, with all that jagged ice, was a cocktail of glittering razors. He squinted into the distance, among the empty orchards of Falmouth, looking for a brown girl on a black horse, while the ice groaned and heaved practically at his feet.
    He was scanning the horizon when he heard a snake-like voice tut-tutting, “I seen the Jarvis gal go down when the bridge went out. Her and her horse.” Rue twisted about sharply to face that vile voice, to smack Gabby’s face.
    But murmuring others grabbed, clutched, held his arms, as he heard Gabby say, with a ghost of a smile, “I seen her go in—and her horse—more than an hour ago, and that’s that.”
    Rue sweated panic that let him slip the hands gripping him and stab-punch at the grotesque man who crowed, “If she’d worked for me, she’d still be alive.” Gabby crumpled while the crowd yammered, and Rue bolted to the riverbank. Light drained from the heavens. A cold rain lashed and pummelled.
    Dazed, but hoping dreadfully that Easter might yet be floating on a floe like an Eskimo heroine or, maybe, lying ashore, half-drowned, exposed to freezing cold in her sodden clothes, Rufus rushed to Easter’s house to augment a search party. A crowd mobbed the kitchen. He pushed through the tumult of sobbing and serious-faced people.
    Loquinn spied Rue; he picked up a butcher knife and swung, screaming, “You’s to blame for this! Ya told Easter to get that horse!” Loquinn slashed at the air in front of Rue while folks in the kitchen jumped back. Rue grabbed the crying, yelling man’s wrist and squeezed harshly until the knife hit the floor and Rue kicked it aside. He turned and left, and just wept and wept and wept.
    Searchers dragged the Fundy water and patrolled the rain-hiked river from cliffs, seeking Easter. They sloshed around boulders of muddy, muddy ice on the riverbanks.
    Later, she washed up by Evangeline Beach among seaweed-laced rocks. Her body had been dissolving in water. A lovely, delicate, easy sculpture of flesh and bone had been chafed to and fro in pulverizing, fretting tides.
    Where Easter is buried, on a slope above the Minas Basin,the sky scowls over the sea—breakers seething home. It is whitewashed, blizzarding air. A broken heavens. A snowstung sky. Her stone is white granite confronting whiter waves.
    Her mama, Delicia, said, through a waterfall of tears, “People don’t know how good my daughter was. Pure her body was.”

X
    A FTER E ASTER S DEATH, Rue could not tolerate the rose smell, the apple blossom aromas, the peach scents of Three Mile Plains. He said, “I must start out and scythe down grass for myself.” He boarded the train to Halifax, that open sewer on the Atlantic. Its alleys unfurled a parade of puddles and garbage and feces and head-dented cats. Dogs looked half-run-over or had only three legs. Ugly gals sashayed with black-leather-skirted asses or black-silk-scarved necks. Salubrious, unchaste voices, redolent of pigeon squabble and pidgin gabble, chortled over sidewalks scrawled on by illiterate Satanists whose graffiti exclaimed, “Satin lives!” Pigeons stumbled like broken-winged rats at Haligonian feet. Always, clouds clung to the city, for it liked to have its sunlight shrouded in fog.
    Was an operatic city, Halifax, with Citadel Hill splitting it between the smokestack North End and the rose-trellised South. A peninsula, its shape resembled the cranium of a
Tyrannosaurus rex.
Streets were haphazardly flung, ragged daggers, plunging downhill to the harbour or stabbing uphill, then vaulting past the domineering Citadel and the flat, adjacent Commons, to dart downhill again to the Northwest Arm or Bedford Basin. It were a San Francisco of vice with San Franciscan hills. Easy for a car to conk out when moving uphill, then roll speedily backwards, right down into the harbour. Many a horse had metits