Mission

by Paul Forrester-O'Neill

Three days after Madeline left, she sat at the kitchen table.

  “She wooed them. Those men, eight hours a day in the timber mill, like dough.”

  “What about Vincent?” he asked.

  “He’s here for a reason.”

  “You think?”

  She cupped her face in her hands, her hair falling forward in tresses. “You ever gonna use that shotgun?” she said.

  “It was my father’s. The first time I saw him for twenty years it was pointing right at me.” He turned slightly, paused. “He wants the land. That’s the reason.”

  “Which land?”

  “This land. He wants to buy up the Cassidy land, like he bought up the mill and the rough terrain. He’s coming over here to talk it over.”

  “When?”

  “This afternoon,” he said, and walked to the porch-way door and opened it. He put his hand tight on the frame.

  “What will you do?”

  “Hide the shotgun, for one thing.”

  “Will you sell?”

  He drummed his fingers loud on the wood, looked down at his feet, at the scuff of his winter boots. He went years back, words falling in the muffle of snow, his mother’s lies, the smell of coffee, his gut turning like twisted rope. And his feet. And his hands on his knees. And the rug pulled from under him.

  Vincent pulled slowly off the driveway of the Mallender estate, listening still to Ted tell him how easy it’d been to buy up the rough terrain, how little he’d paid for it and how John was a greenhorn dumber than a beast, with a handshake like a kitten’s paw. He took the loop road west and turned onto the track to the homestead, scanning the realm in front of him with the gimlet eye of a landowner. He checked himself in the rear-view mirror, got out the car in the Texan boots, and started to walk. The sky was sunless, a thin, flat grey tufted with occasional white. He got the frame of the empty house to the side of the Anderson’s, a shell of beams and patchwork brick he imagined gone. Over to his left the land rose in grades and half-trod paths up to Coronation Point and, as he got closer, as his boots crunched the grit of the path, he saw the slash of the armchair’s gut and the steps to the porch-way door.

  John was in a boxer’s trance, hands down on the kitchen table, fingers spread, hearing only the piston boom of his heart. He’d taped and rope-tied Jake, moved the last of the encyclopaedias into the cellar and hid the shotgun, and he waited, a sudden swamp of heat to his face, a few swipes of grease under the eyes. He tilted his head to one side, cocked ear and snout, sensed him right there on the other side of the door. And then the knock. Montgomery, Juneau, Phoenix, Little Rock.

  Months shrank to a few, slow moments, and he couldn’t move. His sternum was gripped, his hands twitched, his head straightened. He wanted to turn and see the shotgun up against the wardrobe door. He wanted the deeds right there open on the table. He wanted to go back to the beach by the lake and hear his father tell him the story over and over again until it bled back into him. The knock came again, crisper this time, making him blink away the jabs so that he pushed back the chair and stood, in the midst of his father’s kitchen, on the floor where he’d tumbled more than once, not even trying to move, even less so to shout, lying there sallow and drawn, his skin like cellophane, his bones like reeds. Sacramento, Denver, Hartford, Dover.

  Vincent sat at one end of the table, leaning forward, the jut of his face ahead of his torso, John at the other, his eyes unable to meet Vincent’s so that he skittered from brow to moving mouth, to greying temples, to ears close to the skull as Vincent talked, and from his introductions onwards, from the first squeeze of the clammy paw, outlined his plans. He gave no specific details, just that he and his people out east wanted the land. He wanted it for reasons of business and enterprise and for reasons that would benefit the town and resurrect it as an economic force able to sustain itself after the loss of the mill. He wanted it so that he could optimise every inch of it and for that, he was willing to pay a decent and fair price. He paused for a response, or a sign of one. Nothing. So, he took a breath and kicked in again, outlining some more, buffing the plans, explaining the benefits, glorifying the resurrection, and the longer he went on, the more he threw out those orthodox left leads, one after the other, so the stiller John sat, his guard, for all those shots, staying resolutely where it was, up.

  “I have no plans,” he said, “I may sell. I may not.”

  There were so many times as he sat there, as the light of the late afternoon began to dim and Vincent pummelled his outlines and plans into him, that he wanted to reveal everything, to stop him mid-sentence, show him the ruse, the sent letters, the maps, the selling of the rough terrain. All of it. Every last detail. He wanted him to realise who he was and he wanted it to come to him piece by incremental piece so that he could watch him sit in that chair and think back and with every recollection he had get closer to knowing. He wanted him to go back to the short cons he and Lester and Madeline played. He wanted him to go back six years and walk back into the corner bar to see Jack Cassidy sat on the stool, waiting for the money to be handed over. He wanted him to remember the moment when the salesman down on his luck gave him his life-savings with the tremble in his hands because he trusted him, because he was down on his luck. He wanted him to go back until it started to snag, until he looked across the table and made those connections, until the moment hit him right between the eyes. And then. And then he was a table’s length away. He was a tiger’s pounce from whatever violence he chose, from the spade’s head to the rusty saw, from the scythe to the rake, to the one relentless blow after another of the shotgun’s butt. But he didn’t. Even when Vincent excused himself, nodded, and said, “I’ll pay a good price. Think about it. We’ll speak again,” and closed the porchway door behind him, still he never moved an inch. Tallahassee, Atlanta, Honolulu, Boise.

  The migrant housing was to go. It was deemed to have high asbestos levels and insecure roofing and as such was categorised as unsafe. On the day of their final plea for a stay of execution, a small committee of migrants made their way from the temporary shelter of the community hall to the Land Management Agency. They nodded, in turn, to the desk clerk and the ledger-men and then stood in a neat half-circle and presented their case. They spoke about their history in the town, the number of years they and their families had been there, their work records, their economic viability and their total lack of criminal convictions. They had depositions and letters from satisfied business customers and lovers of Chinese cuisine both. They asked to be cut some slack. They asked for mercy with heads bowed and hands pressed together below their chins.

  But no, it wasn’t to be. Ted had made his, and thereby the Agency’s, mind up already. The land was legally part of the mill site and as such it belonged to Vincent Clay, the new owner, who had a plan that involved the decimation of the paper houses, and who, as he said to Lester in a quiet corner of Sizzlin’ Steve’s that night, had no intention whatsoever of cutting anyone any slack and had not made a success of his life by pandering to the soft and heartfelt wishes of others.

  “What do they bring to the party, really? Where has all that piety and humility got them? On a slow boat to China, that’s where,” he said, swallowed and pointed his steak knife east. “And it wasn’t that he didn’t speak, Lester. It was the way he didn’t speak. I mean, who treats people like that, who is it sits and says nothing, who agrees to meet someone to discuss, and then lets the other man do everything and shows not a thing on his face the whole time? Who is it?”

  He stopped chewing, laid the fork down on the plate.

  “I’ve watched people all my adult life, Lester, but this kid I can’t fathom.” He leant forward, his elbows on the table.

  “We need to know who he is before we play him again. We need to figure him, to work him out. We need a weak spot, an angle in. Find out who knows him, who speaks to him, who goes to his house. Get me a profile, get me a picture. Get me anything you can, Lester. I need to know something about him. I need you to find me som
ething I can work with. And be cool. You’re asking questions, is all. Anybody looks at you funny, tell them Madeline wants to know.”

  The actual exodus of the migrants began the day after the final plea failed. Many had seen its futility and left already. A few had managed to find apartments in the south-side neighbourhood blocks. Some ignored legal instructions not to go back to the shacks by looking for remnants and keepsakes, coming back out into the sunlight with items held aloft or stuffed into pockets and bags; a muslin drainer, a floral umbrella, a porcelain holder of buttons. Removal trucks turned up outside the hall on that bright, late spring morning and loaded up with furniture, boxes, crates, objects draped or bubble-wrapped or bound together with tape, and the smaller of the people. Others packed onto the backs of flatbeds and low-loaders or squeezed into rusted cars with their belongings crammed into every available space, like a hamster’s nest they could hardly see out of. The rest, the remaining dozen or so, walked out of the hall, soon to re-open for line-dancing and cake sales, leaving with homespun rickshaws and carpet-bags and heading, like the draggled aftermath of a small circus, to catch the afternoon train east.

  Mr Parker spotted an opportunity, as Mr Parker always did. You had to be ruthless, he said. That was the nature of business. You had to be timely, fearless and unimpeded by sentimentality. How it worked was this: The laundry and the migrants who worked there had suffered because much of their work involved the cleaning of the mill workers’ overalls caked in the grease and oil and dust that ordinary domestic products couldn’t move. So, when the mill burned down, the work dried up. But, at the apex of their suffering, Mr Par-ker contacted the suppliers, bought in stocks of the ‘miracle’ detergent that worked wonders with the overalls and sold them in his store, repackaged, rebranded, and at a mark-up price just this side of scandalous. And it worked. People bought it. Whether it was his septuagenarian schmooze or the secret ingredients or whether it was, as Vincent called it, “the abject fuck-wittedness of human beings”, his profits for the month of May were his best for the whole year.

  And, for a while at least, the talk in Sylvie Buckle’s, the buzz between the cones, was not the mill and its destruction and sale, not Frances Harte and her judgement, nor Jake Massey and his whereabouts. It wasn’t the migrant workers and the wordless way they went about their departure. It wasn’t, for once, Madeline and her generosity and jewels, nor Lily and her return to the fold, nor even was it John Cassidy and his rumoured freeze-out of Madeline’s sweet husband, Vincent, but Parker’s bottled, blue-tinged cure-all for stains.

  The obvious go-to for information on John was Jake Massey. Jake had spent the most time with him, after all. He’d sat in his house, had a beer with him, eaten Chinese and, separately, ripped his father’s armchair, broken into that same house and rifled through his and his father’s possessions. There was a connection, people said. They deserved each other. But there was a problem. Nobody knew where the fuck he was.

  The next in line, according to the Mission grapevine, was Delilah Morris. But it was all speculation, rumours based on the fact that the Oldsmobile was parked on the track at all hours. That was it. And besides, Lester didn’t want her suspicious. So, he was cool. He left her alone. He didn’t say boo. Actually, the first person he went to see on that early June morning was Abraham Stone, to see what he thought about the pains in his chest and his arm and the frequency of the night-sweats.

  Dr Stone ran a few perfunctory tests, took his blood pressure and pulse, asked him a series of deadpan questions about his family history, his lifestyle in relation to exercise, alcohol, nicotine and diet, charged him, passed him a prescription for antacids and insomnia and, as a general pick-me-up, a twice-daily dose of his own preferred treatment he produced from his drawer for which Lester thanked him and, in a casual aside, wondered whether he knew or had any experience of John Cassidy. Without looking up, he said, plain-faced, that as a doctor he had signed the Hippocratic Oath, which prevented him from divulging personal and confidential information. But, as Lester left, and still attending to the paperwork in front of him and checking his watch, he mumbled the word ‘abrasive’ loud enough for Lester to hear, and put his finger to his lips.

  The town of Mission was not short of opinions on John Cassidy or the Cassidy name. Lester hardly had to poke anyone with a sharp stick to get a sizzled intake of breath. Throw a question into the pit of Ike’s barbershop, anyway, and the claws are on it faster than a gunslinger’s draw. On the day Lester was there, even before he got to John Cassidy, there were the corn prices and the fluctuations of, the cattle behaviour, the stone configurations, the beetles, and the meaning of the recent striated cloud formations seen in the eastern sky just before nightfall. When he did get to John though, when he dropped the name in there, as casually as he could, it was like feeding time at the fish tank. Everybody had something. Something they’d heard, something they’d seen, something they knew of, for sure, no matter not one of them had ever spoken to him. Seen him, yes, watched him walk through the streets of the town, you bet, but man to man chewed the fat, not exactly. But did that make a difference? Did it prevent them from having a conviction about who he was and what he was like? Did it matter that for most of those folks what was slung into the melting pot was third-hand at best? No sir, it didn’t. Was there a reining in, a reservation of any kind? It appeared not. So, John Cassidy was, as the claws ripped; thick-skinned and bestial, stoical and sorcerous. He had, it was true, the habits and ways of a lifelong mute. He was a malcontent, a delinquent, a pococurante. He had the writing of a small child, able only to make marks. And he had a hard-backed book of exotic and everyday spells and a tattoo of a rattlesnake coiled around his spine.

  From elsewhere, on that bright day, with the corn tops more swayed than blown, he got the history of the Cassidy land all the way back to Patrick, the building of the homestead, the neglect, the return, the death of his father and the scant dismissal of both Law Enforcement and Environment Agency officers using legal precedents to do so. He got the boxes and the books, the reserves of tinned fruit, his refusal of prayer and the return of the apple to the basket. “Where’s there’s no light,” a bonneted Ruth said, quietly, as she stopped by the church doors.

  Late afternoon he went to the Land Management Agency to see Ted who, for his part, re-iterated the history like a badged guide while polishing the photograph of Lily with his sleeve. He talked about the swarthy card-cheat on the rainy night, and how the land, once the Mallender land, once fertile and ripe with opportunity, had been taken and then left, twice. Until Jack arrived.

  “What was he like?” Lester asked.

  “I never met him. He was dying. He was the first Cassidy to live on the land. He was, for many people, no more than a reminder of a grievance long-held, so they resented him. We simply waited for nature to take its course.”

  “And then John came?”

  “He turned up in the last few weeks. His father was there for six years, and he shows up right at the end, and gets the land. Rumour was they hadn’t seen each other for twenty years. Rumour was the father didn’t even recognise his own son. But you should ask Sophie Li. She worked at the place. She’ll tell you more.”

  And so the following day, in his dutiful quest, he drove out to the Shaw place, going south out of Mission and then east across land as flat as a pool table. He knew the house straight off. It wasn’t difficult. Part domicile, part sculpture, part ruin. Some of the basic frame, including sections of the roof, was missing, some was blackened, some boarded, some protected by tarpaulin and rope. The use of the tarpaulin, though, meant the windshield of the old Chevy lay exposed to the fates of the weather like a maw of jagged teeth, and so was either rusted, crusted or wet. There was still the buckled, un-closable hood, the axle unfixed, the nose nuzzled into foot-high grass. There was the box-garden hooked onto the grille, a few vines held by planted canes and, as he passed, with the fist of his arm clenched, there was a moment’s rise of sweet pea and clematis amid the res
ident choke of the burnt and charred.

  He stood in front of the door, its hinges loosened, its paint more or less gone, and knocked. The pain in his arm came after breakfast, after his supersized eggs, grits, and coffee, sweet and strong.

  “Hi, Ma’am,” he said as Sophie opened the door as wide as the smallest garden cane was long, “my name is Lester Hoops and I am the legal representative of Carpe Diem Enterprises.” And with jellied eyes, with the tributaries of blood vessels over his cheeks and nose, he explained that it was his role to investigate any possible mitigation in relation to and in advance of the undertaking of whatever project the company was involved with, namely, in this case, the acreage to the west of the town known as the Cassidy land. And would she mind if he asked her some questions?

  Sophie looked him up and down. She hardly spoke anymore. She hardly did anything anymore, and she was afraid, of becoming tongue-tied for good, of becoming thoughtless. She was afraid of living out the rest of her days in that godforsaken place. So, she would’ve let him in even if he’d been selling car insurance, garden furniture or solar panels for the bare-boned roof. He was company for a while. He was a chance to speak and be heard. Plus, he reminded her of Jack, a man beyond fifty seen his best days gone.

  The inside of the house was like the inner malfunctions of a sick man; the wheezes, the slack pumps, the air trapped in swarms. The furniture was old and damaged, the kitchen no-go, a suction pad only for grease and grime. Upstairs was sealed off by cycle chains and thick wool and, in the corner of a downstairs room, to the right of a hallway towered with boxes, was a makeshift smaller room sectioned off by drapes, behind which was the bandaged figure of Lee Shaw.

  On the two right-angled walls were pictures of car parts and the various paraphernalia of white supremacy, hung there to prod and provoke him, to remind him who he was, to help him back to the land of the fully conscious. Because, in the grip of trauma, riddled with burns like atolls and reefs and lungs full of smoke, Lee couldn’t speak of or remember a damned thing.