Mission

by Paul Forrester-O'Neill

  To those it does concern,

  My time in Mission is over, my deeds done. Everything is played out. The land is sold, the homestead and the mill, the river, the burial grounds either no more or not what they used to be. The taunting and the riling is finished, the ruses, the plans and reassurances, the false trails that led nowhere but down, and out, the manipulations and moves, the pulling of strings, the sleights of hand, the beetles, the cattle, the haystacks and stones, all gone.

  You might ask yourselves why. You might sit in your abjection and wonder how and why and when it happened. You might then, having slowly and dimly figured it out and put it together, piece by shocking piece, baulk at the severity and the extent. You might consider the wholesale ransacking of your town, your land and your lives excessive and unreasonable. You might, Mr Clay, think the ruination of company, esteem, reputation and hairy-eared sidekick, to be disproportionate or heavy-handed. You might wonder, why so brutal, why so unforgiving and remorseless, why so lacking in mercy? But, let me ask you this. What did you expect? What did you think would happen?

  You might ask, was it for revenge? No. It was more than that. You might ask, was it an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth? No. Too simple. An eye for an eye has little in the way of resonance. It doesn’t stay in the system long enough. It’s over too quickly. So, no. You had to be exposed. That was the whole point. You had to be revealed. You had to be shown back to yourselves as the people you are, to look at those reflections and not like what you see, to catch it in every surface; the greed, the deceits and delusions, the corruption, the hundred and more years of intolerance and presumption, and the maltreatment of a sick and dying man whose helplessness you spat back in his face.

  Vincent let go of the letter. He knew, as if something had plumbed to the bottom of a lake, and boomed. And just as Vincent knew, so did everyone else. They pieced it together, wherever they were. Dr Stone knew as he looked down into his empty drawer. Lee Shaw knew even through his murk. Ted Mallender knew. All those in Steve’s and Harry’s knew, in Ike’s and Sylvie’s and old Mr Par-ker’s. All the posses and the diggers and the panners knew. All those who’d let loose a door in the sick man’s face, who’d watched his struggle with relish. All those who’d plunged a knife into his tyres. All the yea-sayers and the naysayers, all the women and the men in the town of Mission. They all knew. They all went back, to the moments of what they’d done, to the moments they’d weighed those actions up, or not. The only one who didn’t was Lester Hoops, his letter read to him by a nurse in a pale-lilac uniform who frowned as she went to the end.

  For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Every action has a consequence. Cause and effect. There will always be someone. Someone willing to wait and bide their time, to choose their own moment, to know just when that consequence peaks. But this is not justice for justice’s sake, not a correction, a campaign or crusade. There are no angel’s wings, no clarion call. I am not an apostle or a vigilant eye. I am not the righter of wrongs, not the merciful, nor the humble, nor the peace-maker. I put a spoke in my mother’s life the day I came out. The first looks in my direction were those of disdain and regret. I was taught little in the way of guidance and nothing in the way of care. I don’t always know what to do, what to say, how to be. I am an outsider. I am, so you say, a cut-throat and a savage. I am a housebreaker, a picklock, a cutpurse and a thief. I am, like my father before me, full of human frailties, and I am taking his redemption by proxy.

  And you were played, lined up and aimed at, like fat-assed bowling pins staring dumbly down the lane. You were knocked and spun and dragged. And now none of you have any worth any more. You are crippled, no sticks to beat with, no carrots to lead by. You are no more than the cattle in the fields.

  Yours

  Epilogue

  On a brighter than usual June morning three months later, Ruth Anderson walked out of her rented apartment in the southern neighbourhood in a cherry-red dress with matching nails and lipgloss and a pale-hide bag the size of a piglet. Her husband of fifteen years but not for much longer was out in the fields as he was every day, and her two milky ducklings, less roseate and rural as before, sat in a school classroom and tried to absorb the whys and wherefores of algebra.

  She got to the sandstone building of the Land Management Agency just before mid-day. The inside had been refurbished since Ted had scrambled together his belongings and gone. The painting of old Edward astride of his stallion was no more. The Italianate cornicing had been replaced, along with the walnut angels and every other manifestation of pomp. The Mallender regime, rooted only in bloodlines and heirlooms, was done with, the dynasty dismantled, all evidence of its reign removed like stains.

  Ruth paused at the glass partition, ran her fingers down the skin of the bag, and walked in. To her right, in their usual places, were the two white-shirted, but tie-less, ledger-men. Behind them, on the fresh-painted, magnolia walls the pins were still colour-coded but the maps of the land had been rearranged. The smaller, separate room, once the enclave of Ted, his neuroses, and his Lily in Oklahoma, was gone and, over by the window, in a room now as open plan as a cornfield, sat the new, fresh face of the LMA, Doug Sketchings, who looked up as Ruth stood in the centre of the room.

  “I’d like to buy the land,” she said.

  The smell of rose-water settled like dew.

  “Which land is that? Doug said, standing, a half-smile more than Ted would ever give.

  “The land that Vincent Clay had. The rough terrain, the old Cassidy land, the land on which my home stood. It is for sale.”

  “Yes, it’s for sale, but…”

  “Then I’d like to buy it,” she said.

  Doug moved away from the window. He took a pause. “There are thousands of acres out there, Mrs Anderson.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the selling price is…”

  “I know what the selling price is.”

  “The LMA bought up the land cheaply, but puts a high ransom on it, to avoid a similar mistake, you understand. Any company or concern or interested party will be vetted thoroughly, its intentions investigated and fully costed, its plans scrutinised to the very last detail.”

  “I have plans.”

  “We’re looking at sizeable investments, above and beyond the actual purchase of the land. This is more than just buying your home back, Mrs Anderson. This is long term. This is infrastructure, consolidation. This is business.”

  Ruth fixed young Douglas straight. “A restoration of the burial grounds, with a plaque and a stone memorial,” she said, “the detoxification and cleansing of the river and its banks. Full reparation of the damaged land. Considerable construction and reconstruction. Housing, public spaces, a library building, books to fill it, a new medical centre, a new physician to run it. There’s more. I have the plans, and,” she said, with a cherry-red smile, “I have the collateral.”

  She unzipped the leather bag, took out the cheque and held it up between thumb and forefinger like a prize.

  “This,” she said, “is the sizeable investment.”

  Doug watched as Ruth placed the cheque on the desk, put his snow-dome paperweight on top, and turned to go.

  “Blessed are the meek,” she said, “for they shall inherit the earth.”

  The day was cartoon-clear and bold, the few stray clouds nuzzling the crags of Rupture Hill like day-old lambs. She walked through the streets of the town, lighter in weight and look, the temperate air upon her face. She walked past an empty Sizzlin’ Steve’s with its half-price steaks and fries, past Ike’s and Sylvie’s, and past old Mr Parker’s whose profit margins had taken a downward turn those past few months, checked only by the surge on bug-sprays and the book of incantations to defuzz the cattle. She walked past the chandlery and Smithson’s loans, her head an inch or two more aloft, her faith in herself, if not her ability to devote, restored.

  And, as she did so on that zingy summer’s day, so Doug pushed the paperweight aside and picked
up the cheque. He took it to the window to let the light fall on it, called over the ledger-men to look at the figures and the scrawl of the signature and watched as their realisation began to chime in with his own.

  He felt the sunlight on his face, imagined a mid-iron to the heart of the green, the lush grass, the soft sand, and the eighteen delicious configurations of land. He imagined John Cassidy sitting down to write it, in his magician’s suit, his old winter boots and a packed valise somewhere at his feet, his crooked nose sniffing out, adding his big zeros to the cheque, one after the other, like he was circling the words in his father’s encyclopaedias.

  “The Lord moves in mysterious ways,” he said, aloud, walking to the wall and taking out the red border pins on the map of the Mission land.

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks to Sue, Olivia, Calum and Ellie Forrester-O’Neill for their unwavering and heartfelt support, and to anyone, anywhere, who has ever helped me along the way. Special mention to the MMU Writing School, peers and tutors alike, for being there while Mission grew.

  About the author

  Paul Forrester-O’Neill has been writing for forty years, while working in those early years as a bingo-caller, meals-on-wheels driver, care worker with the homeless and a quiz-setter in order to do so. He is currently employed in the more secure position of a Specialist Skills tutor at Keele and Staffordshire Universities. He has an MA in Creative Writing from Manchester Metropolitan University where he won the Michael Schmidt Prize for the novel of the year. Mission is his first published novel.