Mission

by Paul Forrester-O'Neill

  Dr Stone, meantime, was pulled back from blasting himself into a debt-free netherworld by the visits of the mothers-to-be, and Lester Hoops lay saved, but seized and speechless in a Serpentine hospital while his master looked out from Coronation Point in that chilled Friday dusk with his biggest flaw of all right there in front of him; the belief that he was beyond flaws.

  The cold hit him like a combination of slaps. Snow fallen overnight had drifted on the sidewalks and he stood on the steps of the stone building in the town he didn’t know with the packed bag at his feet. He looked different. He was bearded, for one. His hair had grown to shoulder-length and, on that chill-bitten morning, he wore the white shirt and black suit of the magician’s apprentice, with the old winter boots.

  He closed his eyes and took a long breath in. When he looked up his nose twitched at the small bakery and the deli next to it across the street. He fastened the buttons of the jacket across his chest and, from the inside of the bag that he bent like a pelican to reach, he pulled out the pair of washed, white gloves and put them on. He scratched at the thicker growth of his chin, licked at bagel crumbs and coffee stains, and drew the collar of his shirt tighter around his neck.

  He’d spent his winter months in a string of beach houses on the eastern coast, moving from one to the next every time the nets closed in around him, or whenever people he got to recognise got to recognise him. He cooked, ate his tinned fruit, walked over the sand, mostly at night in his peacoat, watching the skies for constellations he could chart. He read his father’s encyclopaedias again, cover to cover, from the aardvark to the zebra, the atom to the zygote. And he tried, on a daily basis, to drain out the dyes of his past, to forget the Cassidy land, to do as his father had said and leave Vincent Clay and the townsfolk of Mission behind before it ate him alive. But he couldn’t.

  With every grain of information he got from either Doug or Delilah he wanted tenfold and more. He didn’t want notification of the failures, didn’t want them in bulletins or second-hand or rumoured out of shape. It wasn’t enough for him to know. He wanted to be there. He wanted to watch it. He wanted to see the suffering and the unravelling for himself.

  He picked up the valise and began to walk down the steps, his boots printing the snow. Behind him, through the thick, wooden doors of the building, along a corridor that’d echoed, in a room a storey down of near-brutal quiet and glare, was a small box of personal belongings that he sifted through, but didn’t take. And next to that, in a larger box, with a pickled liver and cancerous lungs, was the body of his mother.

  “Draw me some fucking lines here, Doug,” Vincent said and slammed his fist down hard on the kitchen table. He loosened the collar of his shirt. “You are my leftie, my fairway to green man. You are my reader of the lies. And this is not happening.”

  He started to pace, sidestepping the loose toys and picture books as he did so. He stopped at the end of the table and leant against its edge.

  “I’m telling you straight,” he said, “I am not coming all the way out to this godforsaken place for this. Lester is not lying in his hospital bed for nothing. You understand me?”

  Doug nodded and glanced over at the washing machine with its guarantee still plastered to its side and its protective cardboard corners next to it on the floor. He moved to the window, looked across the hoar-frosted land, at the new trampoline and the shiny model race-cars, feeling Vincent’s stare aimed somewhere round and small between his shoulder blades.

  “Most of the gold is under the Cassidy land. That’s what the letter says. And I won’t leave until every inch of it is covered. I will not be beaten by this. I have not cajoled and coerced those fuckwitted lumps of clay for nothing, not dragged them off their knuckles to give them purpose for the first time since they chopped their own fingers off for peanuts down at the mill. I have not purchased land, not spent all that time chewing the fat with Ted and his walking, talking clotheshorse to walk away with nothing. With what to my name? Sections of useless, dug-up land, a lifetime of free steaks, free beers and a free haircut whenever I like? I don’t think so. So, take another look at the maps. Be imaginative. Go wider. Go random. Go anywhere.”

  He kicked out at a ball that squeaked, that bounced against the ultra-white door of the refrigerator.

  “Get your boys to do it. Grab their hands and let them scrawl, I don’t care. But draw me the lines, and make sure they go under the Anderson place. I will not be left wanting by a woman choosing to question her faith on my land. And we’ll drill by the river no matter what. We’ll drill its bends and its curves all the way back into town, both sides. And if we rile up the Indian spirits, then so be it. Let them fucking wail.”

  Doug half-turned towards the room. Everything was going so well. Viola was getting better, if not tidying up better. She was spending more time in daylight, more at the mall. She was driving again. The TV was on less, the shower more. The boys actually liked kindergarten and, with a few provisos around violence, kindergarten liked the boys. There was more money around, in bulk from John and in wages from Vincent, hence the washing machine, the refrigerator, trampoline and race-cars, and there was relative balance and calm of the kind they’d once known and since almost forgotten. And really, all he had to do was fabricate something, to close his eyes and slide his hand across the page and make whatever lines he made. But it wasn’t as easy as that. Lester had asked him to measure up land already sold, and over which he had no say. But Vincent wanted him to put his name, his authorship, not only to the wholesale sunder of land but to the destruction of a family’s house and home.

  “I can’t,” he said, his throat catching.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I can’t.”

  “You can’t or you won’t?”

  “I won’t.”

  Vincent stood by the table, tilted his head to one side, half-smiled. “Is there a reason for this, Doug?” he said. “Something I need to know of?”

  “It doesn’t feel right.”

  “Did you say ‘right’?” he said, and gripped the table’s edge. “Is that what you said? It doesn’t feel right? Let me tell you something about right, shall I? There is no such thing. Period. Right is somebody’s hillbilly version of the world. It fits when it suits. That’s it. It doesn’t exist. There is only what needs to be done, and that’s it. There are words and deeds and the rest is powder and smoke. We are animals with brains. We do what’s best for ourselves.”

  He let go of the table and moved a couple of paces across the kitchen floor. “Are you telling me this is what’s best for you, for Viola, and the boys? Are you telling me what’s best is to cut off the hand that feeds you? Is that what you’re saying?”

  He looked hard at Doug’s profiled face, which peached and reddened. “You play a foolish game, Douglas. And you play it like a novice, because I’m going to drill anyway, whether you draw the lines or you don’t.”

  Doug looked down to the cardboard corners.

  “You know, you disappoint me. You really do. I offer you the possibility of paid work. I give you money to breathe, to gather yourselves with. I give you something to go on vacation with and something for the boys at Christmas. And all you have to do is to use your charts and pins, to make your calculations and to pass on any crumbs of dirt on the Cassidy man, the pariah. I thought we understood each other. I thought, once upon a time, there was trust between us. I thought you were stronger than this.”

  He turned and walked towards the door. “And let me tell you one more thing,” he said, “if there is any duplicitous reason for this, if you oppose me in any way or prevent me from getting what I need, if I find out you’re taking the side of the devilish man with the crooked snout who violated me, I will fuck you over and no mistake.”

  Vincent was true to his word. With or without the lines, he drilled anyway, turning the land into something unrecognisable in a matter of days, a vast spread of soil tossed or mounded or flattened by rollers and tracks. He was true to his word because on the
morning of the third day’s drilling the Anderson family left their home of fifteen years behind. They packed away their plain belongings onto trucks that bumped over the shapeless ground, the ducklings haloed in pale, winter sunlight, carrying objects like offertories, their father beside them stoic to the last, loading up the crucifix first, then the carpet-bags and crates, accepting, in that bow of his head, the fate of events as if already carved in stone. And Ruth, in her final minutes, going over to kneel by the bedside, next to the cabinet, her eyes closed, her hands clasped together once more. To wait. To wait again for that voice. But she heard nothing. And by the afternoon the house was gone.

  He drilled by the river, bore into its bends and curves until even its mulch was mulched, until there was no visible bank or shore and its downstream flow was so slowed and checked it splayed out into gulleys and troughs where land became thick, viscous river with nowhere to go. And still he found nothing.

  John crouched in the woods near Coronation Point. It was late evening, the end of the first week with the Anderson house gone and only the spread of soil to see. He’d made his thousand miles west, from town to town, over flatlands and prairies and wheat-fields, and it was time to bear witness.

  Why would he not? Why would he not want to be there when Vincent Clay was reduced to nothing, when he was only flesh and bone and rank humiliation? Why would he not want to get close to the unravelling and the falling apart, to watch those people who’d burned his homestead down, who’d slashed his father’s tyres and spat at the sick man’s feet, to watch those who felt gleeful and victorious and righteous to see his land so exorcised, those men and women who cheered, who waved old Mr Parker’s flags and smeared themselves in justification and pride because they were part of that riddance? Why would he not want to see them, with each day of empty returns, start to sink, their hope of something better fading, that wish for something more starting to wither and die?

  Why would he not, in the hours of night, go out and arrange the stones again, let loose the beetles and bugs. And why would he not walk across the fields in the black magician’s suit, stand in front of those cattle and, with a few swings of the watches’ chain, make them unable to move?

  He watched the diggers and the panners first, men he recognised, men he’d pointed his shotgun at more than once. He watched from outcrops, from places he knew could conceal him, beyond the burial grounds, down by the river on the neighbourhood side. He saw the diggers follow the drilled earth day after day, mapless and lineless, with no more precision than a blind man’s swing. He saw the panners cross the pontoon bridges back and forth, wading through the sluice and the mud, trailing those tributaries nuzzle-down, and their pans aloft.

  He climbed into the foothills to watch the up-river men, to see them slither out of blustered tents like pupae in their gloop and slime, hardly able to get upright anymore, hardly able to speak but in grunts, their purpose all but gone, narrowed to a near-invisible pucker somewhere in the back of their gusted, blowsy heads.

  He went further up, towards the ridges and the sheer falls, to find only one of the Snipe boys, to see him bent into the gush and boom of the water, shirtless, crusted with dirt, his pan washed away. The other he looked for higher up, scouring for signs of him on the tightrope tracks and along the wind of colder creeks, his wet snout twitching. He found him barely conscious as dusk fell, at the bottom of a ravine cut like crooked teeth into the rock. Both legs were shattered, the cheekbone collapsed, the jawline gone. Most of him was caked in blood two days old.

  By the time John got down to him dusk had crumbled into dark. He wrapped him in his peacoat, picked him up like porcelain, lifted him across his shoulders and carried him out like a bloodied deer for two hours over land not possible to see by until he came to the upriver camp. He hid and waited, cradled the boy in his arms until the slingshot posse and the shotgun man puttered out their broken talk and crawled back into the sag of the tents. And then he laid him out, on tarpaulin and horse-blankets, covering him with any material he could find and setting his head down on the give of a saddle-bag.

  He took his coat and left him there. The others could decide his fate.

  “My father never spoke of failure,” Vincent said, as he stood in the community hall, in front of at least a hundred townsfolk, many of them diggers and panners, “in even the most difficult of times.”

  It was an early evening in February, cold and blustery, and he was trying, minus his devoted Lester, without the balm of Madeline, and with only Ted and his antacids beside him, to persuade those people that more needed to be done, that, yes, the returns had been disappointing, and yes, it smacked of last-ditch desperation, but that blasting the bedrock with explosives and using cyanide to get to the hidden gold beneath were not only options, but necessities. Have faith, he said. Have belief. Most of the gold is there.

  It was not as thankless a task as he might’ve imagined. For one, even without Madeline by his side, he was still the man who’d dragged the town off its knees and given it hope. He was the man who, only a few weeks ago, was being slapped on the back as a hero. There was even talk of a statue. And for another, a good proportion of those people were as far down the line as he was and so were just as driven to not calling it quits because a few obstacles had got in the way.

  That didn’t mean it was easy. For some of the townsfolk, diggers and panners included, the root forms of logic and reason were screaming at them to stop, or to hold fire and reassess at least. For all kinds of reasons; the unlikelihood of success, for one, the potential destruction of the town, for another, but also because that fear of looking gullible, like the malleable hicks some of their forefathers were, had started to rise. And the other thing was this, that even in the hall, let alone the town, the naysayers and the doubters were starting to match the yea-sayers, and for the first time they were starting to ask their questions aloud: Where were the assurances? Who were those reliable sources? What about the wise men in the east? What was the chance of leakage and pollution? What about the cattle and the stones, what about the juju? Who was it, they said, had been so far up into the foothills to save the Snipe boy if it wasn’t any of the panners? And where was Madeline these days?

  The toughest question, and the simplest, came last. It came from Ruth Anderson, who stood, without raising her hand to ask to speak and, in the midst of one of Vincent’s rallying sentences, said, “What if there’s nothing there?”

  The hall fell silent. Ted swallowed. The townsfolk shuffled on their wooden seats. Vincent stopped speaking, and wiped a line of perspiration away. He was not in the mood for holding fire. He was not feeling a reassessment.

  “Whose money is this?” he said. “Whose risk are we talking about, here? Whose head is on the line? Who is it that, if it fails, has nothing but land he could now only give away? So, why am I doing this? What is it that brings me all this way?” He looked out over the room. “I am a man of business, that’s why,” he said. “I take chances. That’s who I am, and it’s what my father was before me. ‘Life is nothing without risk,’ he used to say. ‘You learn nothing, you gain nothing, you go on with nothing.’ Now, I have compensated you fairly, Mrs Anderson. I have treated you and your family well enough, but if you want to come here and talk to me about failure, I won’t do it.”

  Ruth remained standing. One of the diggers next to her tried to pull at her sleeve to sit down, but she resisted.

  “This is not the Lord I know,” she said, “You have buried him from me, Mr Clay. You have lost me his voice.”

  “I have bought up some land, and I am digging for gold on it, Mrs Anderson. That’s all. If you no longer look upon the world in the same way, then that is for you to question, not me. I have buried the Lord from no-one.”

  He walked out from behind the table and stood on the platform’s edge, holding his arms out wide, to the panners and the diggers, to the yea-sayers and the naysayers who sat, apart from Ruth, and watched him.

  “I’m asking you to be there. Beca
use I still have faith and hope, and I still believe there’ll be something there. If I didn’t, why would I carry on? I’d be foolish,” he said. “And the truth is, I imagine the chance of leakage is, like most things, down to human error. And I don’t know about the cattle, or the stones, or the juju stuff, or who it was brought the Snipe boy down. I am a man of business, like I said. And Madeline is back east.”

  John watched them leave the hall, saw them hitch up collars or blow into conch-like hands and walk away in clusters, either over the bridge to Harry’s, or to Steve’s, or down towards the rail-tracks and the neighbourhood blocks. He saw the yea-sayers and the naysayers both, walking side by side, not yet torn apart, not yet snarling at each other’s throats like dog-packs.

  He watched Vincent and Ted linger on the steps, Vincent in jerky remonstrations, Ted listening, but holding his gut. For a while, as they stood there in the cold, in the mist that started to form, he watched Vincent alone, paring him down, cutting through the pale suit to get him right down to flesh and bone, to reduce him only to that heartless streak as plain as a shark bite the length of his flesh.

  He saw Ruth Anderson, the last to leave, her hands deep in the pockets of a modest black coat, her hair looser and longer. The servility was gone, the humbleness leached to the point where people hardly recognised who she was anymore, hardly knew what to say to her, as if she bore that crisis of faith through the streets of the town like a cross on her back.

  Ted drove away, almost hitting a stray dumpster as he did so. He headed towards the rail-tracks to take the road out, past land impossible to delineate anymore, past borderless earth that piled and skewed and leaked across to where the burial grounds used to be. He was edgy. He’d been there the whole way with Vincent. He’d made his sizeable contributions. He’d stood right next to him when the digging and the panning started, when the drilling had begun, when Lester was taken away to hospital. He’d sat beside him in the hall, nodded and applauded and made stiff, sure faces in all the right places. He’d shaken hands on the way out; with the meat-like diggers’ mitts, the long-boned panners, with hands used to slingshots and shotguns and those a digit or two down. He was edgy not only because of the lack of returns or the fact that the outskirts of the town, the very land of which he was supposed to manage, looked more like a battlefield, but because his whole life was built on sinking sand, on the kind of conviction that gave him enough bluster to get by but beneath which there was nothing.