He did what he could. Already stricken by his illness, he was physically limited. The cracks, rust and rot he could do little about, and so he was left only to restore it to the habitable. That was it. No adornments, no flourishes, just the bare bones, just a place to live in, for however long. The other thing was that, until Sophie, he had no help whatsoever. One of the homesteads was empty almost a decade and the other was lived in by Ruth and Elijah Anderson and their two pale-faced children, who went nowhere without clutching a Bible to their chests and for whom colour was a sign of Godlessness and frivolity, and who had an immediate mistrust of Jack, not only because he refused the offers of neighbourly prayers, but because the resentment had passed down through the town so seamlessly that there was a confederacy of spite towards any member of that godforsaken family.
And even though, in those first few weeks and months, he tried, he soon got to realise that part of that confederacy came out in the closing of doors in his face and the frosty silences and, on occasions, the slashed tyres of his Toyota. So, he hunkered down. He had no choice. He stopped going into the town and drove into neighbouring Serpentine instead, to places where the mention of the Cassidy name didn’t trigger revulsion, to stores and garages and bars where he was treated like a human being. But, after a while, the hour-and-a-half round trip, plus the loading up and off of the goods, began to exhaust him. So too, the weekly hospital appointments, the upkeep of the land close to the house and even the simple maintenance of the rooms themselves.
The advertisement for help was prudent not to mention that surname of his, but everyone knew. It spread like an air-borne virus that the Cassidy bastard out on the stolen land was on his last legs, that his miserable days were numbered and that, finally, the town of Mission might get its land back. After a month there was one applicant, Sophie Li.
The hatchback pulled away from the migrant shacks where the previous day’s rain had wetted the gravel to a muted crunch. The clean mop-heads were in the back, as well as the fresh bottles of detergents and bleach. At the end of the road Sophie, with her hair washed and tied up, took the left on to the road that ran by the rail-tracks, shaking the axle bearing twice as she did so.
It was a journey she’d made three times a week for the last three months. She’d gone from midwinter with its frosts and drifted snow to an early spring of rain squalls and nascent buds. Other days she cleaned and cooked in other places. Saturdays, she did a ten-hour shift at the hardware store, stocking the shelves and working the till. Sometimes she drove out sacks of cattle feed, or machinery bits or cuts of timber. And once, she’d taken a pot-bellied pig halfway out to Serpentine.
She got to Blessings Point with its girdle of fir and Ponderosa pine that stretched as far as the Mallender land and the house with its whitewashed walls and balustrades where Lily Mallender, some thirty years younger than her husband, sat with drying, crimson nails and waited for Jorge, the even younger Venezuelan gardener, to arrive in his tool-rattling jalopy.
By the time Sophie’d taken the long arc of road past the burial grounds and the sandstone bulk of Rupture Hill she was thinking of the hours to come, of how she’d open the door from the porch-way and see him sitting at the wooden table; that rag doll of a man, leaning on bare, gnarled elbows, his jawbone cupped in his hands, those rheumy eyes roaming the spaces of the room. She was thinking how the collars of the plaid shirts he wore were always open, and how little neck there was for them to contain. She stopped the car, as she had done from the first day, on the turn of the unmade track, rolled down the window and, come rain or shine, lit her first cigarette of the day.
She watched him as she slid the mop-head over the linoleum floor, as she hissed out the freshener or ran the faucets with broom-lined hands. She watched him as she went through the house, as tresses of hair sprang from the bandanna she wore and those dainty boots glided over the damp of the floor in a beginners’ waltz. Each room she cornered and creviced for dust. Each room she picked something up to polish underneath and in each room, even after all the cleaning and the dusting and the polishing, still the smell of him wouldn’t go away; skin, hair, breath, the rare-changed clothes he resisted to shed, all of it, as well as the leaks of piss and sweat, held in a fetid warmth that festered because he wouldn’t open the windows, because in those last few weeks whatever will there might’ve been had puttered out to nothing.
And it was there, in those flickering still-lives, those tableaux of Jack Cassidy in his plaid shirt sitting at the table with reed-like fingers holding the deeds of the land while Sophie moved around him amidst the paltry allowance of light, that the knock on the door came.
Any noise of mop or broom halted. The dainty boots stilled. Sophie glanced over at Jack, who swallowed, narrowed his eyes and allowed the oval of his radish-red mouth to pucker. She wiped her hands on the skirt and moved towards the door. When she opened it, the light hit her like a slap so that it took her a few moments to make out the young man with the crooked snout. She smiled, faintly, stepped out and closed the door to a chink only behind her.
“Is Jack here?”
“Who wants to know?”
There was a pause, a gathering in of breath. “It’s John.”
“John who?”
“Cassidy,” he said, with the tiniest of breaks in his voice, “I’m his son.”
Sophie didn’t know whether Jack had heard or not. She blinked, smiled faintly again, and looked down at the porch-way floor, picking out leaves of stray wisteria.
“You’re not the first person to turn up here and claim to be related,” she said. “There’s been another son already. We’ve had a nephew, a niece, a second cousin. We’ve had them all. Why don’t you leave the poor man alone?”
The voice that came from back inside the house was like the cough of an old motor. “Who’s there?”
Sophie looked at John again and half-turned. “He says he’s your son.”
The pause fell around them, around the figures in the porchway, around the house and every one of its contents. “Tell him I don’t want to see him. Tell him that. Tell him he’s twenty years too late.”
Rain fell in the late afternoon as if sprinkled from old metal cans, pattering the dome of leaves above him like the steady drop of bearings into a pitcher’s mitt. The soil responded. It got moist and scented. It got darker. It got softer. Over by the clearing of Coronation Point, it got richer red.
From where he was crouched on the wood’s edge, he could see through the bracken to the slow descent of land. He could make out the homesteads beyond, could see a bonneted Ruth Anderson and the taller of the embalmed children pulling in the washing from the line as the rain moved steadily west and the tremors of trailing wind shivered skunk cabbage and salmonberry. He could see the figure of Sophie Li closing the door of the house behind her, hauling the bag of mop-heads and detergents over her skinny shoulder and walking away, down the track to where she’d left the car. He watched her sling the bag onto the back seat, light up a cigarette, and drive out towards the road.
Rupture Hill was coated in rain and a slow-rolling dusk that leeched the sandstone of its peachiness. And, as clouds with the sheen of industrial sinks began to drape around its crown, John Cassidy stayed on his haunches and bided his time. Still, he didn’t know what it was, or what to call it. Still, it was just a wordless swathe around him, a smothering, just like it always had been. It was like an animal pulse, a twitch of the hindquarters.
He waited until the light was squeezed out, until the gibbous moon was swallowed up and the clean-living Anderson family had snuffed out their beatific candles and gone to sleep. Then he stirred, his feet shifting in the undergrowth and soil. For a moment, he stopped on Coronation Point and tried to map his way down to the flatter land, and then with his packed bag and his peacoat fastened in the chill, he headed for the house. And, in fifteen minutes through the darkness and hush, past the Anderson place with its crucifix hung in the porch-way and the long-empty shell of a house, he was there.
He took off his boots and left them by the veranda steps. From out across the land came a long coyote howl. His ear twitched, so too his snout. He crept towards the door in stockinged feet and whenever the boards gave out a creak he’d stop, his breath held tight against his chest. He tried the door. Nothing. Same with the windows at the side. He looked around, at the house and the gloom-bound land beyond. In the pocket of his coat he had an assortment of hatpins and hairpins. He took out a handful as he peered down at the lock. He tried each one and listened, sensing the tiniest of scratches and scrapes. He bent and twisted them, the beads of sweat running down his forehead, taking the chicane of his nose and dropping onto the boards. Finally, with the twitch of the last ridged and angled pin, the door clicked open. He put the pin back in his pocket and pushed at the door, creeping in in tiny steps. And, because there was so little light, because there was no sound but the faint whistle of the wind, the first thing that hit him was the smell. There might’ve been scents of cooked meats and refried beans, the smack of generic bleach and powders to clean the floor with, but the reek of a sick and dying man overrode every single one of them. Outside, there came a second coyote howl, like the mewl of a baby left out in the woods.
He stood still on the linoleum floor, made out the table in front of him, a handful of wooden chairs, one of which was pulled out at an angle. On the table was a half-empty glass of water and a large manila envelope. Next to the glass was a small droppered bottle and next to the envelope was a pencil stub the size of a child’s thumb. His fingers jangled the pins. Behind him, a stronger gust of wind shook the frame of the door. His ear twitched again, his snout sieved the rainy night air and the netted kitchen drapes shivered like a spinster at a graveyard.
“You make one more step and I’ll blow your fucking brains out, kid.”
The door beyond the table’s far edge inched open and gloom or no gloom, grizzled light or otherwise, the black, shiny barrel of a gun loomed out a good two feet ahead of the hidden face behind it.
“What do you want?”
John looked at the owl-eyed barrel and swallowed.
“I asked you a question. What do you want?”
A barely discernible schoolboy shrug.
“You come out here. You break into my house, and you don’t know?”
He saw the bony hand, the ridge of knuckles.
“To see you.”
“Oh, to see me. To see me what? To see me how?”
He heard the wheeze of his father’s voice. And not a word even whispered in his own.
“What I wonder is this. How come it’s now you’re here?”
The door opened a few inches more. The figure edged forward, so too the gun.
“Now, I know people want the land. People have always wanted the land. And I know I’m despised because I have it and that people will cherish the day the Cassidy land is returned to the town. I know all that. So, you can see why it is I wonder why now a nephew comes to the door, why now there’s a niece out of the blue and how come there are two sons, the first of which is bigger than a barn door and the second of which, you, breaks into my house like a coward and a thief. You see my point?”
He heard him breathless then, the gasps as if trawled and spat from the pit of his lungs to rattle down the barrel’s sheen.
“I knew nothing of the land…My name is John, John Cassidy.”
“So was the other son.”
“Born August ninth.”
“Yes.”
“West Creek Hospital. Six pounds and six ounces. My mother’s name is Margaret. Margaret DeMille.”
“Yes, I know. Next. This is information any fool could know.”
“She was the one told me you were dying, where you were.”
He heard him sniff, clear his throat of phlegm.
“And she drinks. And she’s fucked up. And she told me I put a spoke in her life the day I came out.”
The barrel lowered slightly, and the face of his father as if cowled by the shade.
“You remember Dwayne?”
The face mumbled he did.
“Did the other son?”
“Yes, he did.”
“Did he say where he was?”
“He said he was in an institution.”
“Did he say how he got there?”
“No.”
“I put him there. I sent him psychotic. I put amphetamine sulphate into his protein drinks until he didn’t know what the fuck he was doing.”
Jack fumbled around in the room, the gun propped between his knees. Then came the sudden torchlight, blasted in John’s direction.
“How come?”
“Because he deserved it,” he said, shielding his eyes with the sleeve of his coat.
The torchlight snapped off.
“What else?”
“What do you want?”
“The other son had places. The other son had the make of the car, the licence plates even. He had the river, the drive across town, the ice-cream store on the corner by the railroad tracks. He had the laurel trees, the turn off the road, the dusty track.”
“I don’t have those.”
“He had the suitcase full of shirts. He had colours. He had candy stripes, button-down collars, long sleeves, short sleeves, pockets or no pockets. He had music on the stereo. He had songs he remembered, tunes he could sing along to, and did.”
John took a long breath in. The hatpins pricked the ends of his fingers, drew baubles of blood.
“I have only a winter’s day,” he said, looking away from the barrel of the gun and the bony hand that held it, away from the half-hidden face and the opened door. He pulled one of the chairs away from the table and sat on it. The snout gave out a short twitch, so too the ear, “I have snowfall. I have a packed bag and winter boots. I have the sound of the tyres crunching across the snow…and I have the pain that I never found a name for. Not then, not now.”
The coyote howled a third time.
They circled each other for almost a week, the days like long, attritional sparring sessions. They didn’t know each other. Apart from the first five and a half years and even then only sporadically, there’d been no connection between them whatsoever. Nothing. And, aside from the absence, from the lack of contact of any kind, there was the weight they couldn’t shake, the weight so heavy neither could drag it out into the open and leave it there for both to see, so that it clotted the air, so that Jack might shuffle back into his room and close the door behind him, or John might put his boots on and take a walk out just to breathe; that they both believed the other had abandoned them.
And yet, in spite of that weight, of neither knowing what to say or whether those words if, or when, they came, should be brutish or forgiving, an acceptance began to grow between them. On the third day, Jack invited John to stay at the house on a permanent basis. Perhaps invitation is too strong. It was more like a nod in the direction of the spare room during a meal of chicken and rice. A day later John helped his frail-boned father out of the house and into the old armchair on the veranda for the afternoon, and the following day, with that drift of pine on the westerly wind, they both climbed into the old Toyota, and went to see Dr Abraham Stone, a physician with a heart made up of his surname. Dr Stone who, at the designated time of two thirty, with a sheet of headed paper half-hiding that peach of a face of his, delivered his final diagnosis as if informing the man his Toyota needed brake fluid.
“Mr. Cassidy,” he said, glancing up for but a moment, “you’ve got a month. Tops…Next.”
Jack didn’t take it well. He knew as much, felt as much, sensed the days were numbered at best, but to hear it so dismissively clipped was something that hit him hard. The doors of the house were closed, the lights put out, the drapes drawn. He wouldn’t eat or drink and instead of sleep he ground his way through the dark hours. At times his nails dug at the sheets until the rips came and he burrowed his face so far down into the pillow he could hardly breathe. When he sat on the bedside chair his bo
nes ached with the weight, his muscles tightened and then slumped and grew weak. His eyes, for the entire time, were tight shut.
Sophie didn’t know what to say, and even her few practical words per day, more often than not domestic or food-related, became non-existent. Her manner of busying herself around the two men as if they were simply blocks of skin and bone stayed the same, but around Jack, she was more delicate. She brushed instead of hoovered. She ran the water slowly into the bucket to fill it and when she mopped those heads never rose more than an inch above the floor. In the evenings when she drove back to the migrant house she cried the whole way, quietly.
And what of John? Well, he knew that his father was dying. He’d known from the moment he’d called his mother. He’d known as he walked the neighbourhoods of the town and the ten miles to the highway west, as he made his way across country in those cars and trucks. He’d known as he lay on the floor of Mission station, on the mattress in the cell and in the barn beset with snakes. He’d known as he set out to find his father’s homestead, as he’d knocked on his door and sat at his table. And yet, when Dr Stone had sat behind his desk and dealt his callous blow in one short sentence and a flippant ad-dendum, when whatever colour was left in his father’s face had drained to nothing, then all that knowing crumbled into no more than powder and dust.
Two days later, with his father showing no signs of emergence, he knocked on the bedroom door. It was 7.30 in the morning.
Mission Page 4