Mission

by Paul Forrester-O'Neill

  Not only that but the shacks were but a frisbee’s throw from the timber mill which buzzed and boomed and whose siren twice a day was louder than an air-raid warning and shook most things in the shacks that weren’t pinned down. So, decades then of broken glass, smashed plates and ornamental keepsakes sent tumbling, not to mention tinnitus, fractured sleep and anything that could be damaged by the constant inhalations of dust. But, for Sophie Li, driver of the old hatchback with its backseat full of cleaning fluids, mop-heads and brushes, it was home. Inherited from her Oriental great-grandmother who, once upon a time, had worked at the laundry, she kept it as neat as she could on cleaners’ wages and with a cleaner’s eye for the enemies; dirt, dust and wayward food.

  She unloaded the mop-heads and detergents, shook loose her jet-black hair with its hint of goose fat and bed linen and sat on the striped deckchair of her living room as the smell of steaming, root vegetables and rice drifted around the shacks. She lit a cigarette, closed her eyes and thought once again of the old man sitting at his kitchen table, fingering his deeds.

  The timber mill siren had sounded already and a cluster of the workforce, including the new boy Jake Massey, had gone straight into Harry’s bar across the bridge from the mill and five hours later the young Massey man with the short and chequered biography had talked himself into a night in the town’s cooler. Not for the first time.

  Born of a sizzled Vietnam vet and a slave of crystal meth who could no more hold onto him than they could a dutiful dog, he’d not had the best of starts. And, raised on the outskirts of Mission by a single aunt with a propensity for the tremors, he’d also received little in the form of guidance, giving him a radically short attention span, a desperation to please and a general absence of judgement. What he also had was a dogged persistence that made him difficult to refuse, so that even though he’d worked and fucked up on a regular basis from the age of sixteen, he would always appear like a tongue-wagging spaniel knocking on someone’s door for work and that someone, knowing they were being foolish and sentimental, would always offer him something.

  At the end of his first working week at the timber mill, he’d overstayed his welcome in Harry’s bar again. He’d got bumptious and loud and instead of leaving when the other mill workers did, to fill those empty stomachs, he’d decided to stay and that lack of judgement had careened into a loss of self-control. It wasn’t that he was a danger to others. He wasn’t. No, those nights in the cooler were there to protect him, to prevent him from going home, drinking himself into a hazardous oblivion or falling out of a window he’d opened to smoke. And even though it happened four or five times a year at least, he was never charged, only told with that mixture of warning, advice and a hint of resignation by whichever Desk Sergeant was on duty, not to be so damned repetitive.

  That Friday was no different. He was informed of his situation by the two young law enforcement officers smelling of aftershave and relish. His belongings were transferred into a transparent zipper bag and he was led down the stone steps into the cool vaults of the cells that had barely changed since the days of the panhandlers.

  Within a minute, he was asleep, as per usual in his three-by-four-yard suite with the springy mattress and the blanket the colour of maize. And, within another minute, he was snoring like a piglet trapped in a squeeze-box. Back upstairs, the two officers played pinochle and talked about Rita and her friend Delilah while the Desk Sergeant, Frank Bellow, ironically a cousin of Jake’s single aunt, studiously wrote up the night’s events, including Jake and his ‘exuberance’, and, on the sheet next to him, the appearance of the ragged young man with the old peacoat down at the rail station, incapable of giving his own name and with no word to say on why he was there.

  The following morning of a bright, spring day, with the crags of Rupture Hill veiled in mist, the town of Mission with its fifteen hundred souls, tucked neat into the crook of the flat lands and the granite bluffs, began to busy itself: The baker shovelled his breads, while Ike, the barber, sharpened his cutthroats. The chandler laid out his wares on the corner of the covered boardwalk and, over in Sylvie Buckle’s Beautician’s, Mrs Lily Mallender was having her weekly treatments and talking, with a curled, but beautifully shorn lip, about her husband’s gastric entrapments to Rita Mahoonie whose eyebrows were being plucked to near extinction.

  Jake, meantime, rearranged his belongings at the desk, trying both to lick moisture back into his lips and to manage the eyes that strained to open and whose lids felt like they’d been sandpapered by a bored child.

  “So, listen,” Frank was saying to him, leaning forward to deliver his periodic and pointless sermon. “Give yourself a break. Get your head down. Keep off the booze. Go home when the others go. Find yourself an interest. You get my point?”

  “Who’s the guy downstairs?”

  “He’s none of your business.”

  “He said my snoring was a fucking noise. Who is he?”

  “No, Jake.”

  “I want to apologise.”

  “He’s a guy they found asleep down at the railway station, turns up here with nothing to say as to why. No I.D. Vagrant. He’s on the midday train back east. Or at least he’d better be.”

  Jake looked down into the last few dregs of the zipper bag.

  “Where’s the pool chalk?”

  “There was no pool chalk.”

  “Is that all the money there was?”

  “That’s it.”

  The zipper bag lay empty on the desk.

  “You got any spare cash, Frank? I’m clean out of milk.”

  “No, I haven’t. Now go home.”

  “What kind of day is it?”

  “Bright.”

  “Fuck.” Jake blew on the bones on the backs of his hands.

  “How old are you, Jake?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  “Don’t let’s see you for a while, huh. Let’s see if we can have ourselves a summer of love.”

  “Where’s his zipper? The guy downstairs. He’s got a zipper, right?”

  “Leave. Go home. Learn some lessons.”

  “What’s he got?”

  “Jake.”

  “Few bits and bobs…Uncle Frank?”

  “He’s got a packed bag.”

  “How packed?”

  “Packed.”

  “And he’s new to town?”

  “As far as I know. Now go. And watch yourself. He shakes, he sniffs. I don’t know, Jake, there’s something.”

  Jake sat and waited on a low stucco wall, the brightness making him squint, ironically, like a man in the throes of concentration. He’d gone across to Parker’s general store and bought gum, keeping his slitted eyes on the doors of the Police Department building and the three stone steps that led to the sidewalk. But, while he spent his sticks of peppermint gum, chewing hard and trying with all his might to keep watching that door, to wait for those vagrants’ shoes to walk down the steps and to see just how packed the packed bag was, he missed him. Snared both by Rita Mahoonie crossing the street in a dress too thin and summery and the sudden, excitable whir of the key-cutting machine next to Parker’s, he never saw the doors of the building open those first few inches, or the man stand in the doorway, drop his packed bag to the floor and stoop to tie the laces of his worn winter boots.

  At 11.45 John Cassidy was in the small, square waiting room at the railway station, the packed bag down at his feet, the coat unfastened and the efforts to restart his same failed system seen in the rapid blinking, the movements of the mouth and the jerks of the fingers and feet.

  Sometimes he lifted his head to look at the woman and the young boy who sat close to the opened door. Sometimes he stole glances at the boy, at the excitement when his mother looked his way, and the uncertainty and tension when she didn’t. He caught how she tidied him up; the way her mayfly fingers adjusted his collar or pushed the flick of hair away from his face. Sometimes, in his half-listening to them, he got snippets, pieces of the puzzle: The boy was going to se
e his father. His father had been away for most of his life. The boy’s memories of him were so isolated and brief they hardly made sense and in spite of his mother’s insistence, in spite of her attempts to generate something upbeat, he remembered little that moved of his father. John could see in the way his face played its animations like piano keys that he was working the scale between hope and disappointment and back, between a good day and a bad day, between what he might resent and what he might forgive.

  “Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison,” he whispered to himself. “Monroe, Adams, John Quincy, Jackson.” He stopped. His crooked nose took an inhalation, his head tilted a few degrees to the right. “Are you checking on me?” he said.

  The woman and the boy glanced up. They looked first at John and then towards the doorway which, from where they were sitting, framed nothing but the prairie land beyond the tracks.

  “I said are you checking on me?”

  Slowly, and in incremental shuffles, Jake presented himself in the frame of the waiting-room door. “How did you see me?”

  “I have a nose and a pair of ears.”

  The young boy looked quickly from one to the other, and his mother, fearing the imminence of bloodshed, whispered for him to stop.

  “I came to apologise, for the snoring.”

  John stared at him a good ten seconds. “You want to make some money?” he said, still staring.

  “How much?”

  “Ten dollars.”

  “What for?”

  “Information.”

  “What kind of information. Some might be ten dollars, some might be fifty.”

  John licked his lips. “Where are the homesteads?” he said.

  “That’s fifty.”

  John narrowed his eyes, heard the soft implosions around his mouth, “Van Buren, Harrison, Tyler, Polk.” He unzipped the packed bag, took out and counted the fifty dollars, held it between his fingers.

  “You first,” Jake said.

  John handed over the money. Jake looked down at the bag. “Over the rickety bridge, beyond Coronation Point. Why do you want to know?”

  “That’s my business.”

  “You looking for the Cassidy man? That’s where he lives. They say he has land. And money.”

  The woman brushed at the young boy’s coat, at the collar and sleeve.

  “You want to make some more?” John said. “Five hundred dollars.”

  He stood then, his worn winter boots squeaking as he did so. “Do you know these people?” he said, nodding towards the woman and the boy.

  “No. Do you?”

  “No, I don’t. So, here’s the wager. We’ll guess the boy’s birthday,” he said. “What’s your name?”

  “Ben,” the boy said, tapping his polished tan shoes on the floor.

  “We’ll guess Ben’s birthday. You can have one guess and I’ll have two. Odds of two to one, right? Right?”

  Jake nodded.

  “Except…I’ll give you odds of a hundred to one. If I get closest you give me five dollars, but if you do, I’ll give you five hundred.”

  “Let’s see it.”

  John crouched down again to reach into the bag and unpicked a small compartment at the side. Then, looking between Jake, the boy, and the five hundred dollars, he counted the notes out and held them rolled in his hand. The clock showed six minutes to twelve as the two men faced each other.

  “Who goes first?” Jake said, slavering.

  “You do.”

  Jake, a slight whisky sweat rising up on his skin, looked away from where the money was and over towards the boy, who glanced up at his mother, then back towards Jake. “He looks like a summer child. I’ll say June…seventeenth.”

  “That’s your guess?”

  “That’s it.”

  The boy and his mother switched their rapt attention to John.

  They got the old navy coat that hung from his shoulders, and they got the scuffed boots with soles as thin as ham slices. What neither of them got, though, as the train sounded in the distance and the station bell rang out, was that the young, dishevelled man with the dog-legged nose and the pale-yellow bruising around the eye, whose ear visibly twitched as the train sounds got closer, was getting his system back. He looked hard again at Jake and tried to weigh up more than his stab in the dark. He leant in towards the boy, took a ten-dollar bill from behind his ear and put it, folded as small as a stamp, in his hand.

  “That’s for your help, Ben,” he said. Then he turned to Jake, picked up his bag and said, “June sixteenth, June eighteenth. Now give me the five dollars, I’m getting on the train.”

  Three days later, he was back. He’d got almost as far as the state-line and then stopped, climbing off the train in a place called Bethel that smelled of rapeseed and aluminium and where he’d found an old barn on the edge of the wheat-fields to sleep in. He’d stayed the rest of the day and the following day and night and then the morning after, in a light rain, after he’d gathered himself as best he could in a barn beset with snakes, he got on the train out west again, as far as the town of Serpentine twenty miles away and, with his damp, peacoat, sometimes on and sometimes off, he’d walked the rest of the way.

  He got to the edge of the town by mid-afternoon via tracks that skirted the burial grounds, and from there, over rough and untended land, to the rickety bridge in under an hour. The gauze of the morning had lifted from the crags of Rupture Hill and the dull-silver bluffs of its torso were sharper. He looked round, the head raised, the cochlea and snout prickled and pert. He got pintails and warblers, shovelers and hawks. He got the sudden, scooted flights of cinnamon teal and grey geese. He settled his bag down on the slats, draped the coat over the loosened rail. Ahead of him the soil and the grassland gave way to bushes of mesquite and juniper, to steeper ruts and rises and to the woodland beyond.

  It wasn’t just the boy and his story that turned him round. It wasn’t just curiosity or hope or those feelings he could never put a name to. It wasn’t to do with the money, or the land, or the heritage of the family name. It was that he couldn’t leave it behind, that the thought of walking away, of leaving everything unknown, and unfinished, was not possible. He had to see him.

  The further he went towards and into the woods, through creosote and prickly pear, on tracks that bevelled and dipped, he sensed the same twist in his gut come back, and by the time he got to Coronation Point where, so the story went, young Nathaniel Hansetter found his traces of gold, he had to drop to his knees and take the count. Sunlight sliced through the lattice of the trees, and he raised his head only to look out to a section of flatter land in the middle of which, like three leather buttons stitched into it, were the three homesteads, in the furthest of which lived his father, Jack.

  The story of how the Cassidy land became the Cassidy land was one passed down like an unwashed heirloom through the various inhabitants of Mission for over a hundred years. And, no matter it may’ve gained a few spurious appendages here and there or that Patrick John Cassidy himself may have gone from the young, ragged panhandler who wandered into the Station Hotel on that rainy night in the dying embers of the mining days and asked to play cards, to the gold-toothed trickster who schmoozed his way past local businessmen and walked away with the deeds of the land, it acted as a reminder of the town’s hubris and foolhardiness still.

  You see, even though it was just a handful of wealthy and opportunistic men who saw in wild-haired Patrick and his request no less than meat served up on a platter, and one member of the group in particular, Edward Mallender, Snr, whose sense of his own invincibility led to the surrender of the land, still it was the complicity and silences of others who allowed it to happen. Of course, the town didn’t see it that way and laid every ounce of blame at the grimy feet of the stranger.

  What was worse was that not only did those men lose the land, not only was it ripe for the kind of development that would’ve made them all a healthy profit and boosted the economy of the town, but Patrick John Cassidy,
with his full house of threes and kings, left the land alone for forty years. And when he did return it was to build a home for his orphaned grandson, Jack, who, at just four years of age, had lost both his mother in childbirth and his father on the shores of Utah beach, and who, until just six years ago, had never once visited the town of Mission nor the house on the land won by his grandfather over a century before.

  The land itself, stretching from the homesteads, along the track as far as the road and around in a mile-long arc of rough terrain was, when Jack got there, those sixty years of his life overgrown; a splay of tumours and growths, in places riddled with sot-weed and bunch-berry, in others tangled with devil’s club and vine. There were sudden ridges of soil, powdered in summer, crusted in winter. There were gullies where the rain had collected and stayed and where snow and ice had bored into the land. There were places of deep shade, of leaves and branches bedecked with liverwort, places that drew in like purse strings so that only beads of sunlight ever got in.

  Further out towards the curve of the road were patches of open land, either grazed upon or gnawed at, with prints of skunk and vole and strands of coyote fur. At its closest to the base of Rupture Hill there were the gnarled outcrops of granite and sandstone and, if you looked with a geologist’s eye, you might find those mineral veins of copper and chalk.

  On the other side of the track that led to the road were the two other homesteads. The story went that when Patrick returned to build the house that his grandson might one day live in, he leased the land not to the Land Management Agency in the town but to a private development company who sub-leased it for rental purposes. The story also went that whereas the two neighbouring homesteads were built with a noticeable economy of cost and looked indistinguishable one to the next, the Cassidy place, overseen by the near-septuagenar-ian Patrick, had adornments and flourishes of every shape and size in all of its rooms and on every one of its external walls from gargoyles to guttering. Pity, then, that that single-storey home, from the very day of its completion, when the lone figure of Patrick John Cassidy stood resolute in the doorway smoking his cheroot, would stay empty for another sixty years. And pity, too, that those imported tiles, the ornate cornicing, the brass legs of the enamel bath and the veranda painted the most verdant of greens, all suffered from neglect so that by the time Jack eventually arrived one rainy fall afternoon those many years later the house was a rank shell of atrophy and decay.