Читать книгу The Fortunate Brother - Donna Morrissey - Страница 8

TWO

He’d been sitting for some time. A bottle smashed against a rock to the other side of the river and he rose, legs cramped. Another bottle smashed, the yelps of boys sounding like young wolves tearing up the night. He walked, wiping at his eyes. The night, the fog, smothered him. Couldn’t see a thing, not a damn thing. He kept his step high so’s not to get snagged by the clumps of wet grass and alder roots. He inched back across the footbridge, cringing as more bottles shattered against rock and the young boys hooted. He’d like to grab them by the neck. Smell of smoke came to him and he veered left, away from the boys, his feet crunching through coarse rocks as he made his way towards the sound of the river spilling into the sea. The rocks became muddied, silt-covered, and soon he was padding silent as a muskrat on the soft sediment fanning out from the mouth of the river and spreading along the shoreline. The snapping orange of Kate’s fire melted through the dark.

She was bent over, holding on to her guitar and feeding the fire with bits of sticks and driftwood. Her greyish white hair fluffed out from beneath a toque and braided down her back. There were always half a dozen bodies lodged about, drinking beer, having a smoke, but only Kate yet this evening. Kyle sat on a white-boned log. He started jiggling his foot. To keep himself from standing back up and running off again, he clamped his attention onto Kate more tightly than the capo clamping the neck of her guitar.

“Skyless night, Kyle.” She pushed back her toque and the greyish fringes of her hair faded into the fire-softened fog crowding around her and she looked to be sitting in the maw of some white god. She reached behind her for a six-pack and shoved it towards him.

He popped a can of beer and guzzled it near dry. She lowered the capo onto a different fret and tested the higher pitch of the strings and he leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees, foot jiggling so hard his body shook.

“Got me a new song.”

He belched and spat into the fire and watched it sizzle into nothing and turned back to Kate, watching as she put a pick between her lips, twisted the keys, plinged on a string, twist twist, pling pling. She looked to be fifty with her shroud of hair, or perhaps forty when the sun shone through her wire-framed glasses and into her kelp-green eyes. She was from away and came one day about a year ago with a trailer hitched to a truck and bought Seymour Ford’s old cabin just to the other side of the gravel flat. She was from Corner Brook, she said, an hour’s drive west, and she said her name was Kate Mackenzie and that she wanted to live by the sea. She said no more and bore with a smile the gossip shadowing her step to the store or the post office or the beach. And she didn’t go anywhere else. Except for out-of-town excursions that sometimes lasted for days. Visiting family, he supposed. Didn’t matter. That’s what he liked about Kate—that he could just be himself sitting with her, for she wasn’t connected to nothing or nobody he knew and was never moaning or groaning and wore only the song she was figuring on her face. And she was always figuring a song. Had boxes of half-written songs. Turning days into words, Kyle.

“Cover me,” she now sang, fire dancing on her glasses. “Cover me, I feel so cold. You feeling cold, Kyle?”

He shook his head, leaning over his knees and staring at the fire, foot jiggling.

“A blanket of stars in the midnight sky, Shimmering love streams from dark tear-stained eyes, Cover me.”

He closed his eyes, her voice crooning around him like a lullaby, and he wanted to curl beneath the tuck of the log and sleep.

“Cover me, I feel so cold, Cover me, am so alone . .”

He finished the beer in three long swallows and popped another, the fizz from the trapped air a comfort sound to his ears. Kate faded from her song, looked at him. An expectancy tensing her face. She often did that and always turned away whenever he queried the look. She turned away now. She tightened a string and loosened another one and then looked up as muffled footsteps sounded on silted rock. Clar Gillard’s hulking shoulders appeared through the fog, his rounded features softening into a smile. His black Lab trotted from behind, tail wagging and nose to the ground, sniffing the rocks, sniffing at Kyle’s feet, sniffing at Kate’s, his eyes glowing like sparks in the firelight.

Kyle stared at Clar in silence.

“Evening,” said Kate. She took a silver flask from the folds of her coat as Clar sat at the far end of the log. She unscrewed the cap and passed it to him. He grasped it with hands big as mitts and took a nip. Then he passed it back, his face squeezing up.

“You ever put mix in that?” he asked in a slow drawl.

“Breakfast time I puts a little juice in there.”

Clar took a beer from a weight-sagged pocket and looked through the quivering heat of the fire at Kyle. “Want one?” He offered the beer with an uncertain smile.

Kyle shook his head, wondering at that uncertain smile. Like a youngster’s after toddling too far from the doorplace and wondering if he should go farther. It was a nice smile. And nice crinkling eyes. Hard to think someone with nice smiling eyes would trample graves and spray his wife with oven cleaner.

Kate strummed into the silence and the dog trotted over to Clar, staring up at him, ears pricked. He barked, tail wagging. Nipping his beer between his knees, Clar leaned forward and cupped the dog’s smooth, shiny head with both hands and ruffled its ears with his thumbs. The dog wagged its tail faster and Clar blew a short puff of air into its black leathery nostrils. The dog snuffled and licked its chops. Clar blew another puff into the shiny black snout and the dog whined. It tried to twist away. Clar gripped its jaws, holding it closer. “What’s you going to do now eh, what’s you going to do,” he crooned and blew long and easy into the dog’s nostrils, gripping tighter to its struggling head. The dog’s haunches went rigid, its nails grappled onto rocks. Clar kept blowing. Kyle got to his feet.

“Let the fucker go, asshole!”

Clar grinned up at him, the dog’s head still cupped between his hands, his thumbs caressing its jaws.

“Need to get yourself a set of bagpipes, Clar,” said Kate.

“Or a fucking balloon,” said Kyle. He sat back down.

Clar rubbed down the Lab’s quivering haunches. “Go. Get,” he said, smacking the dog’s rump. The dog skittered through the fog, tail folded between its hind legs. Clar stood up and drained his beer, weaving a bit—first sign to Kyle that he was drunk—then hove the bottle towards the sea. He dramatically lifted a finger for silence, then smiled when he heard the plash. “G’nite,” he said and sifted into the fog after his dog.

“Somebody should shoot that sonofabitch.”

“Just another poor boy, Ky.”

“He’s a prick.”

“Flouting his poverty.”

“How the fuck’s that, Kate. He’s got everything.”

“But his father’s heart.”

Jaysus. “You makes everything sound like a song.”

“That’s what we are. Love songs gone wrong.”

“Yeah. Well. Someone should capo the crap outta that one. Arse.” He got to his feet, dropped a buddy pat on Kate’s shoulder, and headed off.

Their room door was ajar when he went inside the house. A dim light peered through the crack from a night lamp his mother read under before sleeping. Most nights he crept past their door and dove beneath his blankets to muffle their voices as they oftentimes bickered with each other. In the mornings he was always astonished to find them tucked into each other like a skein of wool. This evening he peered through their half-opened doorway and his father’s head was on his mother’s bosom as though he were already asleep and she was cradling him, one of her hands holding on to his as though she were frightened of wandering lost through her dreams. She was gazing at a framed picture of Sylvie and Chris and himself on her wall and he knew it was Chris she was gazing at. His eyes, so earthy brown and eager. His smile wide and open. His cropped blond hair. The golden boy, long before death took him. Framed and hanging beside the picture was a pencilled drawing Chris had done of their father sitting in a boat on moon-rippled water. Or, and Kyle could never tell, perhaps it was Chris himself, looking expectantly towards the stars.

Did you know you’d soon be amongst them?

“Did you close the door, Kyle?” his mother asked in a half-whisper.

He nodded, knowing she’d heard and was just wanting something to say.

“Now, don’t go worrying,” she said.

“I won’t.” He bumbled to his room and into his bed and across his pillow and the silence without their arguing resounded through his head and he stared like a hawk into the dark.

He’d scarcely fallen asleep when dawn trickled an ashy grey light around the edges of his blinds. In the kitchen his mother poured him tea and smeared partridgeberry jam on his toast.

“Your father’s out in the shed,” she told him. “Nursing himself, no doubt.”

He stood by the sink and watched her, feeling within himself that hushed quiet of a mourner already at the wake. She leaned past him for the dishcloth and he smelled her scent of lavender and remembered Sylvie once saying how she thought as a youngster that lavender was a flower that smelled like their mother.

He followed her to the table as she carried his tea and toast, sitting in the chair she hauled out for him.

“Eat it for me too, I suppose,” he said and flinched as she pinched his ear.

“Now, I don’t want no foolishness,” she said to him.

He swallowed lumps of toast and gulped them down with the tea.

“And try keeping your father sober.”

“What about Sylvie?”

“She called day before yesterday. We won’t be hearing from her for another week.”

“So—she don’t know?”

“I didn’t know for sure when she called. It’s fine she don’t know, let her have her holiday.”

He felt a stab of resentment, a strong stab of resentment.

“She should be here.”

“There’s nothing she can do, only worry.”

“We can call the embassy there, they’ll find her.”

“Call the embassy. Yes now, we’re doing that. Foolish. The doctors haven’t made any decisions yet, and there’s nothing she can do anyway. Let her have her trip.” She put her purse on the table, rooting through it. “Take this.” She took out a packet of bills and laid them on the table. “Nine hundred. I’ll get the rest from the bank this morning.”

“We won’t go ahead with that.”

“Yes, go on. I spoke too quick last evening. He likes building. The pride he took building this house—you’d have thought he was building a castle. I’ll keep five hundred in the bank.”

“Would—will that be enough?”

“I’ll know more when I talks to the oncologist today.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“No, stay with him. Bonnie’s taking me.”

“Who?”

“How many Bonnies do we know, Kyle. That’s her outside, now. Go get her some coffee. Use that mug on the table there, it’s clean. I’ll finish getting ready.”

“Christ, Mother, you don’t need Bonnie Gillard driving you to Corner Brook.”

“Rather have her now than anybody else. She knows how to keep her mouth shut, that’s for sure. Now, go get that coffee.” She vanished into her room and he tried not to stare at the bold form of Bonnie Gillard as she came in through the door—her too white pants and too white jacket and blood-red blouse and shoes and red handbag and lipstick and white plastic discs pinned to her ears. And a big dark scarf curled loosely around her neck.

Addie came rushing out, apologizing for being late, and faltered for a second upon seeing Bonnie, then quickly smiled.

“My, don’t you look nice. Perhaps I should have pressed something. Kyle, did you get Bonnie a coffee? I’ll just be another minute.”

“Take your time, I got lots of it,” said Bonnie. Her voice was loud, like her colours. Kyle noticed her eyeing his mother’s trim dark sweater and pants as she hurried into the washroom, and he noted her quick glance at her own red and white checkered self. She crossed the room and sat down, a cloud of cheap scent trailing behind her. She was about forty, first signs of age etching the corners of her eyes. Her jacket strained across her wide back as she folded her arms onto the table, her wrists stretching a mite too long for the cut of her sleeves.

He reached past her for the mug resting on the table and she drew back and he saw for the first time a little rash of blisters, glistening amidst a swath of salve, on the right side of her face near her hairline. The right side of her neck, partly hidden behind the scarf, was equally burned and blistering and swathed with salve. She looked up at him, her eyes big and brown and bold. Their black orbs pulsated softly and he turned from her, shamed for having looked so deep. Taking the cup to the sink, he poured her coffee.

She stood up as Addie came out of the bathroom, toilet flushing behind her. “All ready?”

“I suppose I am, can’t think properly this morning.” Addie crossed the room and lightly pulled Bonnie’s scarf away from her neck. “Looks awfully painful, dear. You sure you want to do this?”

“I could sit home and suffer it out,” said Bonnie, and she smiled. “A bit like you now, likes keeping to myself. Hates everyone gawking and talking at me.”

“We’re a pair, then,” said Addie, knotting a silk scarf around her neck. “I’ll be back sometime in the afternoon, Kyle. There’s baked beans from yesterday in the fridge for dinner. My!” She shivered as though struck by a sudden draft and pulled the flimsy scarf from around her neck. “I can’t find my wool scarf,” she complained, looking around the sofa and hummock. “Have you seen it, Kyle?”

“Take mine, it’s a woman’s anyway.”

“Don’t you be foolish. If your father can wear his now.”

“Under his shirt collar.”

“Because he likes the feel of it. And so do you.”

“Too short.”

“They’re stylish. It was their Christmas presents—cashmere,” she said to Bonnie, catching the soft woollen scarf Kyle was tossing her from the depths of his coat pocket. She folded it around her neck and smiled. “I was hoping for one to get cast aside. Small chance,” she added ruefully. “They haven’t took them from their necks since they unwrapped them.”

“Making her feel good is all,” said Kyle. He caught his mother’s smile and smiled back reassuringly. “Drive safe, then,” he said to Bonnie, and with a last reassuring look at his mother, he plunged his arms into his coat sleeves and went outside. The air was dampish to his face, the fog rising from the land and hanging in wisps above the hills and fading into dove-grey skies. He stepped around Bonnie’s shiny red Cavalier, thinking things must be good in the fish plant these days. His father was hunched down at the end of the wharf and looking across the bay whence he’d floated them all those years ago. Kyle barely remembered Cooney Arm. Could no longer distinguish between memory and stories told and retold by Chris and Sylvie and his dear old gran and his mother sometimes about the man Sylvanus was back there. Prancing about his stage-head and boats, fishing from five in the morning to sometimes ten at night, netting and gutting and curing fish and drinking one beer a week and sometimes not that. Kyle did remember one moment from back during his father’s hand-fishing days: his father taking him in the boat one windy fall morning, hauling his nets. Christ, but didn’t he look big standing up in that boat with his oilskins and sou’wester black against the sky. And not a fear as he stood in that wind-rocked boat, knees bending to roll with the swells. And he, Kyle, white-knuckled to the gunnels.

Everybody and their dog had moved on from those days of hand-fishing and hauling nets but his father mourned them as he would a fresh dead mother. There’s them who can’t change with the times and those who won’t, his mother told him. And your father’s both kinds.

Kyle was kinda proud. He liked his father’s story. Liked how he was the last one out after the seas were overfished by greed and governments were paying everyone to leave. The story was still told how Sylvanus thumbed his nose at the relocation money and stayed till the last fish was caught, stayed till they nearly starved, and then sawed his house in half with a chainsaw and floated both halves up the bay and landed them atop this wharf and declared to his astonished Addie—This is as far as she goes. By Christ if I can’t work on the sea, I’ll sleep on it. No gawd-damned mortal telling me where I sleeps.

Kyle stepped quietly up to his father as he crouched at the end of the wharf. No doubt he’d been proud back there in Cooney Arm, building that house. His castle. For sure it was he then, doing the sheltering. Building a good house for his family, providing. And was then driven out. Not just by governments but by death. The death of three babies, death of the codfish, death of the fishing culture he’d woven himself around from the inside out. He’d brought them here to this wharf where the death of his eldest son awaited him. And now this. A life shaped by death.

Sylvanus looked up and Kyle drew back with a start. The dark of his father’s eyes broiled with hatred. It was as though all the deaths and dying had been gathered in the one grave and laid at his feet and it was his weakening as a man that had caused them. He hove his shoulders forward and rose, starting towards the truck, his body jerking with anger. Addie’s face appeared in the window and Sylvanus faltered and then resumed his hard-hitting steps to the truck. Guilt, cursed Kyle. Guilt that he was failing them. Guilt rotting him like an old shack built on wet ground, leaving no shores strong enough to shelter himself or his family through those coming days.

Starting the truck, Kyle drove them down the heavily potholed Wharf Road, ignoring the whiff of whisky as his father took a swallow from the flask beneath the seat. The sea was flat calm, gulls like black pods resting on its sky-whitened waters. He drove past the gravel flat to his right, smoke still trickling from last night’s bonfire, Kate’s curtain drawn. Wharf Road yielded onto Bottom Hill Road a few hundred yards farther along and Kyle hung a sharp left onto the paved stretch, doubling back the way they’d just come except it was leading uphill from the valley and cradled by tall, knotted spruce trees.

As they crested Bottom Hill he looked at the same sunless sky vaulting over the mile-wide corridor of ocean, walled on both sides by wooded hills, its horizon fading to nothing forty or fifty miles out. Beneath him and spreading out from the foot of Bottom Hill were the felted rooftops and smokeless chimneys and sleeping doorways of Hampden. The community sloped down another hill to the shore and the quiet lapping of the sea. Quiet. Everything so quiet. As though no sin had yet been committed on this day.

A whimper from his father, a soft mewl. Kyle covered it with a cough and eased them down Bottom Hill and along the main road, passing a store to the right with its weekly specials in blue marker taped to the window. He passed the Anglican church and a sunken-roofed bungalow with unpainted add-ons where Bonnie Gillard now lived with her sister. He passed a poppy-red house, a sunny ochre one, and the violet two-storey—and took a longer look at its windows yellowed with breakfast light. Julia’s house. Julia. Chris’s girlfriend.

He passed a clump of newly vinyl-sided houses, the rage these days, and turned left, heading downhill. The flag hung limp from its pole near the post office and muddied water streamed like a brook down the guttered sides of the road.

A short, rotund man with wire-framed glasses and suspenders hiking his flannels up past his belly doddled along the roadside just as he’d been doing the past sixty years, watching the morning light breaking through shadows around him. Dobey Randall. He’d be here this evening, walking the opposite way, watching the same sun go down and the light fading back to shadow. The old-timer turned a gummy smile onto Kyle and Kyle tooted his horn and the road turned sharply to the right at the bottom of the hill where the government wharf extended into the sea.

They drove for a mile along the shoreline and slowed, passing the tidy settlement of the Rooms and the whiffs of smoked salmon floating from Stan Mugford’s smokehouse. The graveyard lay beyond the last doorstep. Kyle sped up Fox Point Hill, away from the headstones and the bouquets of plastic flowers on Chris’s grave, flattened sideways and faded by the snow-wet winds of winter.

Another two miles of shore road and they rounded a black cliff. Kyle slowed down coming into the Beaches—twelve houses sitting with their backs to the wooded hills behind them, their doorways opening onto the strip of road and rocky beach separating them from the shifting waters of the Atlantic. A knot of youngsters hovered in the middle of the road, taunting him till they saw he wasn’t going to break speed, and then broke apart to blasts of his horn.

“Ye’ll get your arses trimmed!” he roared, rolling down his window, and then rolling it back up to a chorus of laughs. The eldest of them pinged a couple of rocks off the tires and Kyle grinned. “That young Keats. He’ll be strung up yet.” He looked back at the youngsters shooting fake bullets at the truck. “Little bastards.” He looked at his father who had scarcely noticed. The road ended a few hundred feet past the last house and before them lay the gouged black earth, readied for building.

Switching off the motor, Kyle kicked down the gas pedal to stifle its dieselling. “Might as well get going, hey. See the mess they got made. What—just going to sit there?”

Sylvanus was slumped in his seat like a spineless effigy.

“Come on, b’y, let’s get out.”

“No courage.”

“C’mon, dad.” He touched his father’s shoulder gently. “C’mon, now.” He opened his door and got out. He walked to the edge of the site and glanced back, seeing his father slowly unfold himself from the truck. He waited and then they walked about the excavation, their boots squishing through mud. They both shook their heads. Looked like a tornado had pitched itself through a hardware store and emptied its wares onto the site before blowing off. An upturned wheelbarrow half mired in mud. Couple of hammers and boxes of nails soaked open. Picks, shovels, and an axe lay in a murky pool. Six or seven gallons of paint stood haphazardly beside a pile of two-by-twelves that were half-lodged on a mound of gravel being washed out by rills of rainwater.

“Well, sir,” said Sylvanus.

“Not a clue,” said Kyle.

“What a mess, what a mess.”

“And what’s they doing with the paint? Footings not laid and they’re buying paint?”

“Not a clue.”

Kyle stepped around fifteen or twenty bags of cement that were uncovered and wet from the rain. He kicked at a bag and it broke open, the powder too wet to spill.

“Ruined, all ruined.” He kicked at the other bags. “Every one of them.” He bent, picked up a hand-carved wooden gun out of the muck. He glimpsed a couple of red eight-shot ring caps half submerged in mud beneath the cement bags. “Them youngsters,” he said to his father. “Using the cement bags for blockades. How much stuff now, did they muck off with?”

Sylvanus stepped over muddied puddles and followed along the trench dug for the footings. He bent for a closer look.

“Sure, look at that. They only got them dug three feet down. No more than three feet, should be four. Show, get the tape and measure that.”

Kyle hunted for a yellow measuring tape from amongst a debris of tools and stood by his father, looking for a place where the footings weren’t flooded. Extending the tape across the width of the trench, he leaned over, reading the measure. “Fourteen by eighteen inches.”

“Well sir.”

“What’s it supposed to be?” asked Kyle.

“Sixteen by twenty-four. Turned down. They would’ve had it all turned down by the inspectors.” He looked skyward. The white was starting to darken. “Gonna rain. Bad time of year to be building.” He stood up, scratched his head through his cap, looking about.

“Here they comes then.”

The roar of a V-8 engine without a stick of pipe in her sounded a full minute before the four-door Dodge came into sight and halted by the truck. Two young fellows got out—the youngest stout and pretty-faced and fair, the other dark and skinny and already sunken into his chest cavity like his father, Jake.

“Uncle Syl. How’s she going?” asked the pretty one, Wade.

“How’s she goooin,” asked the other, Lyman, in his slow, deep drawl that tired Kyle on his most patient of days.

“She’s not gooin nowhere no time soon,” snarked Sylvanus. “Which one of you is the carpenter?”

“He,” said Lyman, pointing to Wade.

“Me,” said Wade.

“And they didn’t tell you to keep cement out of the rain?”

“We went to buy tarps but it rained ’fore we got back.”

“Well, sir, well, sir.” Sylvanus shook his head. “If you buys cement in April, you buys tarps along with it. Unless you got a garage or woodhouse. You got a garage or woodhouse?”

“Told father we needed tarps,” said Wade.

“Where’s your rebar? You going to pour cement without rebar?”

“Oh, come on, Uncle Syl. I was getting it but Dad was there arguing we didn’t need doubling up on the rebar. And he had it all measured wrong so I left it for the next trip.”

“We got the trenches dug before the rain started,” said Lyman. “We thought we’d have the cement poured, too. Right, Wade?”

“Right.”

Sylvanus went back to the site, muttering, “Well sir, well sir.”

“We heard about Aunt Addie,” Wade said quietly to Kyle.

“Feels awful bad about that,” said Lyman.

Kyle nodded. “Say nothing to Father. Come on. Let’s start cleaning up.” He pointed the boys to the wheelbarrow and shovel and the bags of cement. “Break it all open, them bags. Start shovelling it around. It’s all ruined.” He buddy-punched Wade’s shoulder and went over to where his father was eyeing the sky.

“She going to hold?”

“Might. Be slow going, pouring cement in this weather. Cheaper buying a small cement mixer than renting one. Be days working around the rain.” He looked around the site again, the trenches to be deepened, the rebar to be laid, the wasted cement, the wasted sand. He rubbed tiredly at his neck and started a slow walk to the truck. Kyle went after him.

“We’ll just do it,” said Kyle. “We’ll just take her step by step and day by day. We’ll just do it.”

“Courage is gone.”

“She don’t want you giving in.”

“Sin. Sin. Everything she been through.”

“She might be fine. You lives ten, twenty years with what she got.”

They came to the truck and Sylvanus rested his head against the door.

“Shit! Come on, Dad. We’ll drive to Deer Lake and get what supplies we needs and keep ’er going.”

Sylvanus opened the door and got inside, reaching beneath the seat for his flask of whisky. Kyle stood for a moment, then went back across the site and had a word with his cousins. He walked back to the truck and climbed inside and began the ten-mile run to the highway. The rain started as they headed west towards Deer Lake, a light drizzle against the windshield. Sylvanus kept tipping back the whisky. Kyle said nothing, no matter his mother’s words. He was talked out trying to keep his father from the booze. As long as he was sober again by the time they got home.

In Deer Lake they bought more cement and rebar and corners and wire mesh and tarps and other things Sylvanus named off from a mental list. After the truck was loaded, Kyle picked up a bucket of chicken and a couple of beers and they sat in silence by the Humber River and he drank a beer, watching the river pass and watching his father nipping at his whisky, the chicken growing cold between them as the river kept passing. Passing and passing. A slow wear as subtle as time on each pebble it touched and a new song beginning without the other ever ending. And he, Kyle, just sitting there watching. Watching and watching from some gawd-damned eddy that kept on circling.

What the fuck. What the fuck was time anyway. A clock that ticks. Revered like a god. What if we just threw it away. Threw it into the river. And he heard himself like a song, Then you lie silent, Kyle. You lie silent till the ticking takes up in your head. It’s called hunger. It becomes your tick-tick-tick and you either move with it or lie in sleep with the dead. He looked at his father who’d drifted into sleep, his jaw lodged into his shoulder and his cheek creasing up like an old road map too weathered to read.

Kyle drove them towards home, elbowing his father awake when he geared down onto Wharf Road. The rain had drizzled out, a shaft of sun warming the muddied gravel flat coming up on his left.

“What—back already?”

“Already? Cripes, time for bed. Wake up, old man.”

“What’s we doing—we going to unload?”

“Thought we’d go straight home. She’ll be back from Corner Brook by now. What’s this, now?” Kyle had just taken a sharp corner, and sitting before them and blocking the road was Clar Gillard’s green Chevy truck. Clar was standing on the rocks beside the road wearing a T-shirt and jeans, indifferent to the damp coming off the sea. His Lab was out in the water and swimming laboriously towards him, black skull bobbing, a log as big as a fence post clamped in its jaws.

Kyle tooted the horn.

Clar glanced back at them and then bent, grasped the log from the dog’s mouth, and with forearms rippling hove the log back out in the water. He linked his thumbs in his belt loops, watching the dog paddling back out.

“What the fuck’s he doing.” Kyle tooted louder. Clar never looked back. Sylvanus grabbed the door handle and Kyle snatched for his father’s shoulder. “Hold on, old man.”

Too late. Sylvanus was tearing out of the truck with curses and Kyle groaned, feeling his father’s eagerness for anything that might extricate him, no matter how temporarily, from his misery right now.

“You move it, buddy, or I’ll drown it and you in it,” Sylvanus yelled at Clar from the roadside. Without waiting, he hauled open Clar’s truck door and reached inside, yanking the stick out of park. Digging in his heels, he jammed both hands against the steering wheel and started pushing the truck towards the edge of the road.

“Christ sakes, Christ sakes, old man,” and Kyle was out of the truck, seeing his father dead from another heart attack. Clar Gillard was leaping from the rocks and back onto the road.

“Hold on there, you. Hold on!” Clar shouted at Sylvanus.

Sylvanus stopped pushing and turned to Clar. His breathing was harsh, wormlike cords thickening up the side of his neck as he spoke. “You keep the fuck away from me and mine, buddy, if you wants to keep walking. Else I’ll cut you down the size of the last headstone you trampled over.”

And he would, thought Kyle. Holy Jesus, the fury distorting his father’s face was the stuff of books. Clar Gillard’s face relaxed into that nice smile of his. He whistled for his dog and, breezing past Sylvanus, slipped inside his truck. The Lab dredged itself ashore and dropped the log, his sides sucking in and out from exertion. He shook himself dry and leaped into the back of the truck, tongue lolling as Clar eased off down the road towards the wharf, the road too narrow to turn around where they were.

“Come on.” Kyle nudged his father. “Before he starts back.” He got in the truck, his father beside him, chest heaving. “Wants another heart attack, do you?”

“The likes of that.”

Kyle grinned and thumped his father’s shoulder. “Like the dog,” he said and started driving. Clar was pulling a U-turn in front of the wharf as they rounded the bend. Bonnie was standing by her red Cavalier parked near the woodshed. She leaned back against the car as Clar braked and poked his head out the window, saying something to her. She said something back and Clar’s fist shot towards her face. She swerved sideways, escaping his fist, and Clar hit the gas, his truck jolting forward, gravel spitting behind his tires.

“Lunatic! Watch him,” shouted Sylvanus and Kyle squeezed his truck against the cliff as Clar swiped past, his outside tires scarcely gripping the crumbling shoulder of the road. Kyle watched in his side mirror as the green Chevy burned down the road. He pulled up beside Bonnie and swung out the truck door, his father beside him.

“Did he get you?” Sylvanus asked Bonnie.

She shook her head, lightly touching the tip of her nose. “Just a graze.”

“Not fit. He’s not fit,” said Sylvanus, and headed towards his woodshed. He turned, wagging a finger. “Watch out he don’t come back.”

“Give a whistle if he does,” said Kyle. “Might be better if you’re not here,” he said to Bonnie. “Stirring up trouble for the old man.”

“You don’t have to worry about Clar. He’ll not touch your father.”

“Makes you say that?”

She glanced up at the wooded slopes, beyond which the roar of Clar’s truck could be heard gunning up Bottom Hill. “Your father’s proud. Clar’s not proud. He got nothing to be proud over. He’s scared of men like your father.” She gave a satisfied smile. “That’s what I told him. That’s why he swung at me—I hit a mark.”

“Don’t sound like you’re much scared of him.”

A hurt look flickered across her face. He was struck by that—that she felt hurt, not fear.

“Your mother,” she said, her voice quieting. “You need to go in. And your father, too. She has something to tell you.” Touching his arm, she got in her car and slowly drove away. He stood there watching her. Fear pumped through his heart. It suffocated his brain and tasted like sulphur in his mouth. He went to the house and could see Addie’s shape through the window. He heard his father call from the shed and then call again but he couldn’t move, couldn’t tear himself from the window, couldn’t leave her.

He went inside. She was sitting at the kitchen table, her coat still on. She beckoned for him to sit, her eyes so fiercely blue they held him to her. She said the cancer was in both breasts. She said they wanted to remove them and launch an aggressive attack with chemo and radiation. It may extend my life by five, ten years and who can think beyond that, she said. He tried to twist away from her but the strength in her eyes held him in place. Hope, Kyle. They’re offering much hope. Others have done well with the same cancer and treatments.

But he was done with hope. It took her babies and Chris and he had no more courage for hope. Hope had failed her too many times. Rather that she had never hoped. Rather that it was just those babies she grieved and not the pain of lost hope as well.

She bore his choked sobs with a bowed head. When he was done she leaned across the table and gripped his hands and spoke softly but firmly. I don’t fear death, it’s taken too much from me. I owe it nothing. But I’ll learn to hate like your father if it takes you from me too. This isn’t the worst thing to happen. Losing him was the worst thing. And knowing it’ll be hard for you is the second worst. The biggest thing you can help me with is taking care of you. I already lost your father; the bottle got him. But you must tend to him while I’m sick. Keep him from me when he’s drunk. There’s nothing sacred about a drunk and I’ll not have my coming days defiled more by his drinking. She rose and held his forehead against her belly that bore him. She stroked the back of his neck and then kissed his nape and removed herself and gathered the cloth off the table. Go get your father now. It’s time for supper.

He wiped his eyes and nose, made his way outside, and stood gazing down the darkening hull of the bay. He walked to the side of the house and sat down, his head thrown back, gazing at the ashy sky, wishing it was dark and there were stars. Chris loved the stars, loved sitting right here and gazing up at them. Proud evening star in thy glory afar—he was always quoting from some poem. Once when Kyle was small and playing outside in drifting snow, Chris came home with a box of Cracker Jacks and led him to this very sheltered spot and they sat with their backs to the house and Chris packed the snow snug around them like a blanket and fed him half the Cracker Jacks. One for Kyle and one for himself. One for Kyle and one for himself. Except for the glazed peanuts. Those he kept and popped into his own mouth. He always remembered that. How good he felt, banked in with snow and his mouth opening like a baby bird’s and Chris feeding him the Cracker Jacks. First time he had knowingly felt love. Before that it had been fed to him daily like bread and he hadn’t noticed. He always loved Cracker Jacks after that; they were his favourite sweet. Oh, Chris. That something like this can be happening with Mother and you not know. He thought of Sylvie and his heart closed in anger. You should be here.

He sat there for another long minute, the hazy light beginning to wane. The light went on in the kitchen, throwing a pale shimmer on the seawater gurgling around the pilings beneath him. He got to his feet and went to the shed for his father.