Читать книгу Saltwater Cowboys - Dayle Furlong - Страница 5

“When did you get home?” Jack asked.

“A few minutes ago,” Peter said.

“Katherine and Margaret,” Angela wailed and unravelled the children from his arms, “you know you’re not supposed to leave the backyard.”

“We were almost at the end of the rainbow, but every time we moved, it moved too,” Maggie told her before she whisked them inside the warm house.

Jack and Peter shook hands briskly. Peter stood over six feet tall, bulky and hairy, with thumbs as big as the head of a hammer, one of the largest miners on the underground crew. He had a self-satisfied air about him; he’d regained his easy swagger, the comfort in his own skin that the layoff had stolen.

At Brighton Catholic School Peter had convinced Jack to skip countless classes. Peter would always get caught and was harshly punished by the nuns. Burly Pete would cry but wouldn’t squeal on anyone under the sting of the thick leather whip the nuns used liberally. Nothing could make Pete cry now; he was beaming broadly, and his muscular chest was bursting with pride.

“I didn’t find anything in St. John’s, but I got a letter yesterday, an offer of employment for a small town on the mainland, in Northern Alberta at a gold mine.”

Jack gulped. “Gold?”

“Yes, they’ve been developing this for years, and they’re finally ready to let some of us boys at her.”

“I bet there’d be a lot of jobs.”

“Yes, and homes, stuff for the kids to do.”

“You’d go?”

“Of course. There’s nothing, I’ve looked everywhere.”

“When are you leaving?”

“In a month. When your time’s up, let me know, I can help you out —”

“It happened yesterday.”

“I’m sorry, buddy. Why don’t you apply, then? Here, here’s the address.” Peter ripped the return address from the corner of an envelope he’d pulled from the back pocket of his jeans. “Call them, send them an application. You can stay with us for a while until you get yourself together.”

“Peter Fifield,” Wanda yelled from her door, “I haven’t seen you in a month, get home right now.”

“I’m coming,” Peter yelled. “Think about it,” he urged.

“Go easy on him, Wanda.”

Wanda winked. “He’s in good hands.”

The next morning Angela bundled the girls up in their fall clothes while Jack fumbled with a warm black turtleneck and an old pair of scuffed blue jeans. Combing his black hair flat, he squirted a dollop of thick white hair crème onto his open palm and fingered it gently through to his scalp. Angela hoisted a plaid wool skirt over her slender hips and wrapped a white blouse, with a bib-like ruffled collar, around her waist, tying both ends of the cloth at her side. She tied her thick black hair in a low ponytail, securing the wisps tightly behind her eyes with a tortoiseshell buckle.

A travelling theatre group from St. John’s had come to Brighton for the weekend to put on a children’s play for the Fall Community Festival. The children were excited and couldn’t wait to see the performance. It wasn’t often something like this came to Brighton; the people of the community usually did it themselves, putting on their own shows with amateur talent, lacking in virtuosity but not without enthusiasm and playfulness, so much so that they inevitably ended up laughing at themselves, which made the show more enjoyable for the adults.

“How long has it been since you’ve seen her?” Jack asked as he slowly ran a razor blade across his cheek.

“At least a year. She’s been touring non-stop.”

Angela’s childhood friend, Sheila, had become a theatre actress, leaving Brighton to study drama in England. She had settled in St. John’s and created the travelling theatre company. Tall, blonde, with cheerful blue eyes, she was a delight to watch. Angela remembered the stories Sheila’s mother told about her great-grandmother, a vaudeville performer from Jersey Island who married an English wartime doctor stationed in India. Outspoken and defiant, this actress once sneered at the Nazis during the occupation of Jersey in the thirties. Sheila’s petite blonde great-grandmother had sat primly in her grade-school chair, held at gunpoint by several Nazi soldiers commanding her to speak German. She consistently replied in French, blatantly disrespecting them. Somehow she had been spared.

Sheila had the same resilience, and the same gift for the stage.

“Will her father come to the show?”

Angela nodded. “Yes, I’m sure he wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

Doctor Nelson had arrived in Brighton from Jersey with his small British family in the late sixties. Angela’s father, Tom Harrington, a miner who served on the town council, sang in the church choir with the doctor, each taking turns playing tricks on the choir mistress, alternating soprano and baritone behind her back, confusing her ear.

Mrs. Nelson had died a few years ago, from breast cancer. Doctor Nelson was devastated. She was the only love he’d ever known. An English orphan, he had married Mrs. Nelson when she was eighteen, the daughter of a well-travelled doctor and philanthropic stage actress. He vowed to provide for her in the same way her own father had. Earning a scholarship to medical school, he soon found work in Newfoundland after graduating from Oxford.

Angela and Sheila had met during one of Mrs. Nelson’s piano classes, each conspiring to play the wrong notes in the devilish hopes of frustrating their teacher.

Angela smiled; it would be wonderful to welcome Sheila home and take their minds off everything.

The public school gymnasium was dark. The children were quiet, except for the occasional squeak of an overexcited youngster. The yellow and white spotlight hit the stage and Jane Cranford, president of the Brighton Entertainment series, was illuminated. She was carrot-orange in the light, her freckles and ginger hair overexposed.

“Hello everyone, and welcome to today’s performance of This Autumn’s Tale, performed by Blackwater Tide Theatre, starring our very own Sheila Nelson!” Jane Cranford clapped airily, papers spilling out of her hands. She bent to pick them up and the spotlight heightened the red that had risen in her cheeks. “Now, children,” she said quietly, regaining her composure, “don’t be frightened. This is a special play for the fall festival. It’s all about a child who is far from home and …” The spotlight snapped off loudly, and after a few seconds the curtain drew back choppily, two pairs of fumbling hands on each side gripping the corners tightly. Jane mumbled apologies for the technical difficulties while being whisked off the stage by one of the primary school teachers.

The spotlight blinked on, wavered, and went out again. Finally steady, it rested on the figure standing centre stage. It was Sheila, dressed in layers of billowing white satin as the Good Fairy Princess. She held a white owl puppet on her left arm, covered by a red-velvet robe, wearing a king’s crown. Colourful, skillfully drawn murals adorned the stage, and paper foliage was draped loosely across a grand trellis and white gazebo.

Lily slept, curled on her father’s arm. Katie laughed joyously while Maggie watched it all quietly, her eyes wide with pleasure. Angela leaned on Jack’s shoulder and he smiled wanly.

“What a wonderful show!” Angela exclaimed.

“It was great, love,” Jack said.

Sheila smiled, holding Lily in her arms. Maggie and Kate hugged her legs beneath the layers of her creamy silk dress.

“Thanks, it was a lot of fun; I don’t get to do children’s theatre very often.”

“You don’t come home very often either,” Wanda interrupted. “How are you, my love?”

“Best kind today, love,” Sheila said.

“Good thing we bumped into you before we leave!”

Jack stiffened behind her.

“Where are you going?” Sheila asked.

“To the mainland. Peter found a job at that new gold mine, and we’re leaving in a month!”

Angela’s face paled, remembering Pete and Jack on her doorstep the previous evening. She clenched her jaw and turned to Jack, who avoided her gaze.

Lily fussed in Angela’s arms. Katie and Maggie were tussling over the last stick of gum they’d found in their mother’s purse.

“Lucky Wanda, you only have one.”

Wanda smiled, shifted a sleeping Susie on her hip. “But I plan to have more now that Pete’s got this job on the mainland.”

Angela’s eyes widened in panic. “Good for you….” she said and her voice trailed off weakly. Jack grabbed her hand and held it firmly.

“Come over for a drink before you leave?” Wanda asked.

Sheila nodded and smiled as Wanda walked away.

“Some glad to be rid of her,” Sheila whispered.

“Sheila!” Angela admonished.

“She stole Peter Fifield from me when I was seventeen.”

“Sheila, come on, you’ve got a theatre group in town, an up-and-coming folk musician who is completely in love with you, and you’re worried about some small-town miner with big thumbs?” Angela whispered back.

“It’s not his big thumbs I’m after,” Sheila said.

“Some bad you are,” Angela said and tried not to laugh as Sheila wistfully looked at Pete’s full back and thick, long legs.

“Pass me some screech,” Sheila whispered, drunker than she’d been in ages, or so she said.

“You’re getting right royally pissed,” Angela said, her voice slurred due to the amount of Jamaican rum she’d consumed.

They were sitting in Sheila’s bedroom after the show. Jack had taken the kids home to bed and Doctor Nelson sat sound asleep in his study, slumped over a novel.

Angela grew quiet. “Jack lost his job yesterday.”

“Oh no,” Sheila said and rolled over on the twin bed, a remnant from adolescence, still covered in a pink gingham bedspread. She rose and went to the window and struggled to open it since it was stuck in the molded pane. This reminded Angela of when they would sit here after school, blowing smoke rings out the window from the crisp, sharp-smelling English cigarettes stolen from Mrs. Nelson’s purse.

“What are you going to do?”

“Jack doesn’t want to leave home. He thinks life will be rough up there, but rough we can handle. Starvation — which is what’ll happen if we stay here — we can’t.”

“Where would you go on the mainland?”

“I don’t know, I suppose the same place Wanda is going.”

“That could be good then, living in a town with some people from home?”

“Yes, it’ll be a comfort, that’s for sure.”

“But it won’t be home.”

“No, it won’t be. But I guess it’ll have to do. I mean, we don’t have a choice, do we?”

Peter sat at the back of the church in his usual spot. The Women’s League was tired of cleaning the dirt on the floor from the sneakers he wore in the summer and salt stains from his work boots in the winter. The other men in town wore their Sunday shoes to Mass, but not Peter. He wouldn’t bother with the charade if it weren’t for Wanda. She made him go. Said it had to do with giving Susie a sense of the world, a sense of service and goodness. So he complied.

He looked around the small room, a kaleidoscope of purple from the stained-glass windows, the large wooden crucifix draped with a purple cloth and the priest’s vestments. His father had hated purple, thought it was too bright for the sombre occasion of Mass. Peter could still remember his parents trying to stuff him and his two younger brothers into suits for a Sunday Mass and his mother dabbing iodine over the cut on her lip, his father gargling with minty mouthwash in an effort to hide the sour, yeasty smell of more than two days of drinking beer non-stop.

They’d looked presentable. The suits hid the bruises on the boys and all seemed well. When Mass was over, the whiskey would come out, and that’s when Peter’s father was at his roughest.

Peter nodded at Jack and Angela as they took their seats a few pews ahead. Angela looked at him sharply. Peter avoided eye contact. She could always see through him, and he knew that half the time she didn’t like what she saw.

The winter his father caught him having a draw off a cigarette and the trail of blood as he fled from the house. Angela had been trudging home with a few groceries for her mother, the winter after her father had died. She dropped the bag with the eggs in it when she saw his purple face and the blood from his nose and lip.

“You are coming with me,” she’d said.

“I’ll be alright.”

She took charge, stepping over the egg yolks, lying whole out of their shells, like dandelion heads snapped from their stems, and dragged him to her mother’s. The wind meowed and hissed in the bitter cold.

“Tea and a Purity biscuit for you,” her mother said.

Angela stood in front of him and patted the wounds with a warm, salty cloth.

“I can take care of myself,” he muttered. He sat stone-faced and flicked the cloth away like it was a tick.

“Give it up,” Angela said warningly and held his chin with her small hand.

The next day Peter wrote Angela Harrington gives good head on the bathroom wall, and she was shamed and mocked by the boys and girls alike.

“I know it was you,” she said in the playground after school as she wiped away tears with the tip of her pink frosted nail.

“Quit mothering me,” he said.

So Angela stopped. Not too many knew the truth about Peter’s home life, and if they did they handled the information awkwardly: laughed, made jokes, or turned a blind eye.

As Peter sat in Mass, watching his best friend take his seat, he still couldn’t look Angela in the eye. If she looked at him long enough she’d know how desperately he wanted to leave, contrary to all the senseless nostalgia and pining to stay that everyone else felt. He wasn’t sure about who would make it out of Brighton. Some stayed in towns like this long after the industry’s lifespan. Stayed and worked here and there, odd jobs in town or worked as scabs for striking mining companies. Some stayed on the dole for life.

Peter wouldn’t let that happen to his family. He’d been fighting to get out of Brighton, he would joke with Jack, since they took a trip to Montreal in 1976. What were they? Seventeen or eighteen and in love with the city that served drinks all night, the garish spectacle of the dancing girls, the smoked meat sandwiches at two in the morning, smothered with the best mustard Peter had ever tasted. Then they came back and Jack fell for Angela, watched her in her bikini at the swimming hole, diving off the rock cliff into the deep muddy water below, her long legs tapered to thin ankles, muscles taut under the swell of her heart-shaped bottom, and he’d never looked elsewhere. Shortly after Wanda was available — her boyfriend had died in a motorcycle accident — Peter ditched Sheila and made his move because he couldn’t very well let the prettiest girl in school get away on him.

Peter looked once again at Jack in the pew, praying intently while Maggie climbed over him, her yellow skirt flaring like a petal. Angela, gaunt and stern, shepherded Maggie to her seat and shifted Lily on her hip, while Katie prayed alongside her father.

He better make it out, Peter thought. He would do anything he could to make sure of it.

Jack didn’t look back when he came up from underground for the last time, the skip cage rickety, confining, and sour-smelling, but he shook everyone’s hands and put on a pleasant face. Inside he was angry and irritable. The other miners’ tongues were as busy as ants on his last night shift.

“I got a job in Alberta,” one said.

“Me too,” another three or four chorused.

All night, talking of successfully selling their homes, belongings sorted and packed, going-away parties planned. The only thing louder than the men who had found jobs were the angry ones who had yet to find work.

“My wife has threatened to go out and work. What do I know about taking care of babies?” someone said.

“My wife has threatened to move back in with her mother if I don’t find something,” someone else shouted miserably.

Jack was silent. Sad and still and silent with shock.

The din from the machinery was the last sound he heard when he came up from underground. It had never sounded so abrasive. It made him angry.

Above ground, it was a quiet morning. Mid-September mist clotted the air. A ribbon of sparrows trailed one after the other in jagged flight. The song of that bird — he never knew its name — with the high-pitched tweet followed by four notes, descending in pitch and key, always tore at his heart. It always sounded melancholy.

He’d told Angela not to wait for him or to worry. He was going to go for a walk after his last shift at work. He was going to sneak away to the swimming hole and spend the morning by himself.

The rising sun sizzled the mist off the rocks; it was a sudden sharp and direct light.

A swim might be just the thing, Jack thought.

He walked down the hill and dropped his lunch tin, hard hat, and bag of personals from his locker on his back step and then took off. He quickened his pace, reaching the well-worn skinny path to the swimming hole in minutes. The backwoods quickly swallowed him up. The balsam fir trees were so thick, they looked black. One was so big, its roots stuck up out of the earth like a dried brown parsnip, tapered at the end to form a spindly root, a wheezy tie to the soil. The blueberry bushes were swiped clean. The women in Brighton donned kerchiefs, shorts, tube tops, and sneakers to collect them in late August under the drowsy sun, squatting over the bushes picking bucket­ful after bucketful, leaving very little for the black bears. Jack passed the crop of boulders and smiled. As kids they would hide behind the rocks with Peter’s binoculars and watch the women picking berries. When the women bent over in their tube tops, an inch of white skin, revealed alongside the caramel tan on their necks and arms, would convince the boys they’d seen chest.

One of the women, Mrs. Hynes, had gotten lost out here. She’d strayed from the group and spent three nights out here alone.

“It’s the senses that drive you mad,” she’d said for years afterwards while telling her story over a game of cards at the Union Hall. “First it’s your sight; you see things that aren’t there. I saw my son beckoning me to follow him. Then it’s your hearing. You hear things that aren’t there. I heard my grandchildren calling out to me, Nanny, supper’s ready, they’d called, confused as to why I wasn’t coming to the table to eat.”

Jack was on the path alone now, and it was silent. The sun had risen and he was nearing the falls. A few more feet to go.

Finally, no one here to tell me what to do.

Out here he couldn’t feel the swell of Angela’s will or the tether of Peter’s friendship.

I can’t hear my children, my parents, my wife, or my friends. Free from responsibilities. I could stay out here forever. Let them send out a search-and-rescue crowd.

They’d sent one out for Mrs. Hynes, found her covered in patches of moss she’d pulled from the ground to make a quilt to keep warm.

Angela had been unforgiving. “Why would anyone leave the group while out berry-picking? She must have wanted to get lost in the woods,” she’d said and rolled her eyes.

Angela would go out with her mother every year and fill ten buckets, and they had jam, scones, muffins, pancakes, pies, and cakes all year long. She’d give the girls bowlfuls swimming in milk and sugar for breakfast. She even made tea with dried berries and honey.

Of course, Angela wouldn’t have strayed from the group. She’d have shepherded them from bush to bush, inspected pails, and created an emergency plan in case of black bears or charging moose.

Jack’s mother had also been unforgiving. “It was the death of her father that did that to her, made Angela all funny,” she’d say and roll her eyes.

Jack quickened his pace along the trail. He only had a few hours before she’d come looking for him and drag him back home. He rounded the corner to the clearing. The rocks were thirty feet high, the falls pouring down in a single straight spurt and pooling at the bottom in a twenty-foot hole, fit for diving and swimming. Jack took off his clothes and climbed up the side of the rock wall, footrests smashed by hand a generation ago. His own father and grandfather before him had scaled these walls for the thrill of a dive.

At the top of the cliff he waded in the cold, silty water. His ankles turned a sudden sharp red. His feet were unsteady on the pebbles but he made it to the edge without slipping. He threw his arms up and jumped head-first. The moment of weightlessness before hitting the water; the sucking punch of the palm of water as it rushed to envelop him. Then the cocooned suspension as the water ballooned out around him. It was a pure joy.

Jack relaxed underwater for a few seconds. All he could hear was the waterfall hitting the rocks and the blood in his skull.

I could stay underwater forever, he thought. The minute the skip cage dropped him underground, he always panicked, worried he’d never see the sun again, but not here, not in the water. His was a family that loved swimming, especially in the ocean. They loved to pile in the car and drive to places like Corner Brook or Baie Verte, or the summer they drove even as far as Bonavista Bay. They’d spend the day at the ocean eating nothing but brown bags full of salty chips and chunks of battered cod. Peter and Wanda would follow behind them in their car. One time Peter goaded Jack into a drag race on the highway. Angela had put a stop to it before it even got started, raised a fist and stuck it out the window; Peter slunk back into his lane and slowed down.

This was before Susie was born, when Wanda, barely twenty-one, fed Maggie from her bottle, changed her diaper, cuddled and held her while Jack, Angela, and Katie cavorted in the waves. She must have been three, Jack thought, when I would slather ocean foam over my face and we’d play barbershop. He’d run his finger over his face in a straight line and ask her if she was next to have a shave. It made her laugh so much, Jack thought and smiled.

He came up and flopped from side to side like a fish. He treaded water and squinted under the glare of the sun.

I’ll miss this place the most. He couldn’t count how many times they’d come out here. The time when Angela was pregnant with Katie, she’d sat on a rock, belly swollen out over her black bikini, the reddish swell of a fireball-shaped clump of stretch marks already seizing the skin underneath her belly button. She’d wanted to do nothing except eat tinned peaches. Her long black hair stuck to her back and shoulders as she sweated happily in the sun.

Jack got out of the water and stretched out on his back on a grassy bank. He dragged his knuckles through the thin black soil. His gut gnarled with grief.

I can’t believe this is it. I haven’t had a stretch of time to myself like this in a long time. What will I do with myself besides fill out my forms for the dole and look for work? I haven’t worked anywhere else, been there since I left high school, about eighteen when I started. Married two years later. I am afraid to go. I don’t want to go, he thought.

He slept for an hour or so, waking to see that the sun had moved halfway across the sky, his skin white from cold.

Angela will kill me if she knew I was swimming so late in the fall, he thought. He got dressed quickly, stood for a minute at the base of the falls, then turned around and quickly got on the path. He wiped water from his eyes and forced himself to walk forward. He didn’t look back once he’d rounded the bend.

Angela and Jack whispered good night to the babysitter, hired for the evening so they could attend Peter and Wanda’s going away party, and trudged up hill to the doctor’s place. His grand house was hidden from Main Street by a clump of birch trees — peeling white bark scabbed with black moss. Remnants of Mrs. Nelson’s garden welcomed visitors at the front walkway. Lilacs and roses, once abundant, flopped from side to side, grieving for the gentle touch of their keeper’s hands. The wilting flowers made the grandeur of the bright and charming interior a splendid surprise. Dr. Nelson’s housekeepers, a roster of intern nurses from St. John’s, kept clean the oak floors, ornate spiral banister, five bedrooms, sitting room, dining room, and a modern kitchen with dangling copper pots suspended above a marble island.

Sheila shepherded them inside. In the dining room the musicians were draped over the furniture like fruit at a banquet. Snerp, an acne-prone skinny bag of bones, the custodian in the men’s dry — responsible for mopping the floors and changing the garbage — held an ivory, silver, and charcoal-grey dented squeezebox on his lap. His long, curly hair flowed like bunches of grapes. Mooney’s round face, cheeks flushed apple red, was ablaze with joy as he plucked away on the mandolin. The neck of Gulliford’s guitar was held by a strap with a banana-yellow muff that rested across his shoulder, his chest concave as his fingers strummed softly. Doctor Nelson stood and stomped, a cracked and scratched fiddle — as old as he was — tucked underneath his jowly chin, skin flapping as he raked the bow across the taut strings.

Sheila and Angela whistled and clapped. Peter clumsily whirled Wanda around the room, and Wanda blushed, conscious of her weight. She smoothed her skirt and hoped to hide the folds of fat that had grown comfortable across her hips. Peter wheeled her into a corner and she broke free, almost tipping over on a loose beer bottle.

Gulliford’s wife started to chant, “Sing us a song,” and goaded the crowd into the same. Wanda cleared her throat, stepped forward gingerly, and began to hum the first few notes of “Tell My Ma.”

“When I get home, the boys won’t leave the girls alone,” Sheila and Angela sang, drunk and slurring and well off-key.

Jack hung about the fringes of the party, sallow-faced and morose, limbs stiff. I’ll need to get good and drunk to relax, he thought. He accepted another bottle of beer that came his way from the tray of drinks passed around by one of the nursing interns, cajoled into service by the charms of Nelson.

After the song ended, Dr. Nelson shouted, “My dear friends from Brighton, thank you for helping me give our good friends Peter and Wanda a warm sendoff. As always, Wanda sang beautifully — some things never change — and was a well-behaved drunk. Let’s just hope that never changes. It’s been a pleasure having you all here tonight. This may be some of the last few times we all have together” — his voice quivered — “but I must say, I’ve loved getting to know each and every one of you over the years in my capacity as doctor and member of this community. I know, we are on the brink of change” — he looked around the room tenderly — “but I know that wherever you go, you will stick together.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Gulliford’s wife shouted. They all raised their glasses of rum.

Together, Jack thought. How would he keep it together with so many friends gone? How would he keep it together with no work and no idea of where they were headed? He’d be lost without Peter, he knew that much. No one to joke with, no one to drink with, no one to spur him on. He took another proffered beer and shot of rum. And a few more. He’d have to hide behind the swish of alcohol tonight. Let it flush over his flesh, turn his tight mind into mush.

At the end of the evening, good and drunk, Jack chased Angela down the street toward home. He teased and grabbed her waist and buried his face in her neck.

“Stop it, savage,” she said and broke free, scurrying down the street toward home, past the yellow, blue, green, and white clapboards, all lights extinguished, every window black except for the sky salted with stars, in a town that looked merciful, homely, and safe, except for the mine site, which looked morose, complex, and industrious, a cruel father forced to make painful, solitary decisions, choked of all emotion.

She ran to the end of Pebble Drive and headed toward home on the gravel laneway. She made it to the back porch. Jack growled and nuzzled her neck then pulled the elastic that held her long black hair loose with his teeth. She struggled to get away, broke his grip with her hands, went inside, and slammed the door in his face.

The next morning the sun rose gently over Grandmother McCarthy’s house as she sat in the kitchen nook peeling potatoes. Her crinkled, pale white hands, speckled with light brown age spots, expertly carved the earthy brown potatoes. Her powder blue housedress, seams in loopy threads, spread out underneath her. Her dyed-black hair curled around her small ears. Her soft, pink mouth hung gently open.

Her husband stood by the window watching for his grandchildren. Two lines of flesh between unruly grey eyebrows formed a tent-like triangle above his square nose. Waves of crinkled flesh fanned out from the corners of his eyes. His overbite displayed front teeth marbled with barb wire-grey ribbons of rot. His bulbous, bald, shiny head dominated his features. Wild pockets of brittle black and white hair poked out of ears and sat clamped over cheeks like zebra mussel shells.

The children rushed in, followed by Jack and Angela.

“Nanny and Poppy!” they yelled in unison.

“Well, hello, my loves! Want tea and a Purity biscuit?”

Angela served while Grandmother McCarthy finished the potatoes. Mr. McCarthy’s loud voice crackled throughout the kitchen.

“Well, good morning, son. Angela,” he said and nodded in her direction.

“John,” she answered politely.

“How are you today?” he asked and slapped Jack on the back.

“There’s something I want to tell you. Girls, go play in the yard, please.”

“Watch my flowers!” John said.

His beautiful garden, packed with plump roses, lazy lilacs, and charming crocuses, always placed first in the local garden contest. He spent hours and hours in it, and it was a tranquil space that the children loved to run around in and play make-believe. Inevitably they would get rowdy and knock over a lilac stem or two, trampling a few of his prized flowers like little rabbits.

“Mom, Dad,” Jack said and settled into a chipped wooden chair, “I lost my job. I’ve got two weeks.”

Grandmother McCarthy nodded slowly.

John’s chest sank.

Angela placed the tea and biscuits on the table.

John poured a cupful for everyone and drained his tea out into his saucer. He wondered what his son would do. He knew the boy wasn’t that strong. Jack buckled under pressure. Thank God he has Angela, he thought. He let his tea cool before he picked it up to slurped it slowly.

“I’ll try to find work here,” Jack said.

“No, you won’t!” Angela said and glared at him.

John stopped drinking his tea and placed his saucer on the table. He looked at his son and daughter-in-law evenly.

“John, Marg,” Angela pleaded, looking from one to the other, “tell him there’s nothing here for us, close by or in town. Tell him we have no choice but to go to the mainland.”

“You’ll have to go. Angela is right.”

“But,” Marg gasped, “the girls.”

“He’ll have to do it for the girls. You don’t want your grandchildren to suffer, now do you?”

Angela smiled gently. “I know it will be hard, but we must go, there’s no future for us here. You’ll find work. Pete Fifield found a job.”

“Where?” Marg McCarthy asked.

“In Foxville, Alberta, a gold-mining town in the north,” Jack said and pulled the address on the scrap piece of paper from the back pocket of his jeans.

“How long have you had this?” Angela hissed and snatched it from him.

“Only for a day or two,” he said tightly.

“I don’t care. That’s one or two days of your severance gone.”

“Now dear, it’s alright,” Marg said. Then she sighed and added, “I’ll go get the girls. Angela, you sit. John take out the roast, Jackie, set the table for us all, your brother Bill is coming too, with Rose and the boys, so bring out the extra table.”

Jack poured Angela another cup of tea, and she wiped the tears from her eyes.

After a silent, tense supper, Jack and Angela carried their drowsy children down the hill toward their front door. They took off the girls’ patent leather shoes, blue raglan jackets, white tights, and cotton floral dresses and pulled Winnie-the-Pooh pajamas over each of their heads.

When the children were asleep, Jack and Angela sat in the kitchen in silence.

“I’m off to bed, my love,” Jack said wearily.

“I’m going to read for a bit,” she said and picked at the lint on her cords, avoiding his eyes.

As soon as Jack turned out the light in the bedroom, Angela tiptoed into the bathroom, slipped her hand into the back pocket of Jack’s jeans, and pulled out the mining company’s address. Back at the kitchen table, she wrote a long letter, outlined her husband’s work history, and signed it with his name.