She didn’t speak further. Kyle laid down his fork. It was coming. She lifted her chin in that defiant manner of hers and he was struck once more by her fortitude. That whatever this new thing thickening her cloud of sorrow, hope was already ignited in her heart and offering itself as a shelter for him and his father.
“I have to go to Corner Brook tomorrow. See the doctor. I— There’s a little lump in my breast. They did some tests already.”
Sylvanus blanched. Kyle closed his eyes, cringing as his mother spoke the word, that dirty little word, that ugly little word, cancer. Breast cancer. He’d known three women with breast cancer and they were all dead. He was on his feet and heading for the door and outside before his mother could reach him. He bolted up the road and started running through the night made darker by the damp shroud of fog, his feet picking his path from memory. To his right he could make out the dark ridge of shoreline and hear the water sloshing around rocks like some ancient demon slithering in and out of sight beside him. He took the turnoff onto the gravel flat and kept running, closer to the alder bed and away from the orange dome of Kate’s bonfire down by the water. He heard the strains of her guitar, her voice trilling through the fog like a distant psalm guiding his feet through the dark. He came to the river and found the footbridge and crossed it and veered upriver over wet mounds of dead grass that slipped eel-like around his ankles. No longer did it feel as though someone else ran in his shoes. For three years now he’d been mapping this artery of grief. He kept winding his way upriver. When he could no longer hear Kate, when his ears filled with the river water rustling through the grass and slapping against the rocks, he lowered himself to his knees and opened his mouth and his voice rose from his belly and carried over the water like the cry of a loon.
TWO
He’d been sitting for some time. A bottle smashed against a rock to the other side of the river and he rose, legs cramped. Another bottle smashed, the yelps of boys sounding like young wolves tearing up the night. He walked, wiping at his eyes. The night, the fog, smothered him. Couldn’t see a thing, not a damn thing. He kept his step high so’s not to get snagged by the clumps of wet grass and alder roots. He inched back across the footbridge, cringing as more bottles shattered against rock and the young boys hooted. He’d like to grab them by the neck. Smell of smoke came to him and he veered left, away from the boys, his feet crunching through coarse rocks as he made his way towards the sound of the river spilling into the sea. The rocks became muddied, silt-covered, and soon he was padding silent as a muskrat on the soft sediment fanning out from the mouth of the river and spreading along the shoreline. The snapping orange of Kate’s fire melted through the dark.
She was bent over, holding on to her guitar and feeding the fire with bits of sticks and driftwood. Her greyish white hair fluffed out from beneath a toque and braided down her back. There were always half a dozen bodies lodged about, drinking beer, having a smoke, but only Kate yet this evening. Kyle sat on a white-boned log. He started jiggling his foot. To keep himself from standing back up and running off again, he clamped his attention onto Kate more tightly than the capo clamping the neck of her guitar.
“Skyless night, Kyle.” She pushed back her toque and the greyish fringes of her hair faded into the fire-softened fog crowding around her and she looked to be sitting in the maw of some white god. She reached behind her for a six-pack and shoved it towards him.
He popped a can of beer and guzzled it near dry. She lowered the capo onto a different fret and tested the higher pitch of the strings and he leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees, foot jiggling so hard his body shook.
“Got me a new song.”
He belched and spat into the fire and watched it sizzle into nothing and turned back to Kate, watching as she put a pick between her lips, twisted the keys, plinged on a string, twist twist, pling pling. She looked to be fifty with her shroud of hair, or perhaps forty when the sun shone through her wire-framed glasses and into her kelp-green eyes. She was from away and came one day about a year ago with a trailer hitched to a truck and bought Seymour Ford’s old cabin just to the other side of the gravel flat. She was from Corner Brook, she said, an hour’s drive west, and she said her name was Kate Mackenzie and that she wanted to live by the sea. She said no more and bore with a smile the gossip shadowing her step to the store or the post office or the beach. And she didn’t go anywhere else. Except for out-of-town excursions that sometimes lasted for days. Visiting family, he supposed. Didn’t matter. That’s what he liked about Kate—that he could just be himself sitting with her, for she wasn’t connected to nothing or nobody he knew and was never moaning or groaning and wore only the song she was figuring on her face. And she was always figuring a song. Had boxes of half-written songs. Turning days into words, Kyle.
“Cover me,” she now sang, fire dancing on her glasses. “Cover me, I feel so cold. You feeling cold, Kyle?”
He shook his head, leaning over his knees and staring at the fire, foot jiggling.
“A blanket of stars in the midnight sky, Shimmering love streams from dark tear-stained eyes, Cover me.”
He closed his eyes, her voice crooning around him like a lullaby, and he wanted to curl beneath the tuck of the log and sleep.
“Cover me, I feel so cold, Cover me, am so alone…”
He finished the beer in three long swallows and popped another, the fizz from the trapped air a comfort sound to his ears. Kate faded from her song, looked at him. An expectancy tensing her face. She often did that and always turned away whenever he queried the look. She turned away now. She tightened a string and loosened another one and then looked up as muffled footsteps sounded on silted rock. Clar Gillard’s hulking shoulders appeared through the fog, his rounded features softening into a smile. His black Lab trotted from behind, tail wagging and nose to the ground, sniffing the rocks, sniffing at Kyle’s feet, sniffing at Kate’s, his eyes glowing like sparks in the firelight.
Kyle stared at Clar in silence.
“Evening,” said Kate. She took a silver flask from the folds of her coat as Clar sat at the far end of the log. She unscrewed the cap and passed it to him. He grasped it with hands big as mitts and took a nip. Then he passed it back, his face squeezing up.
“You ever put mix in that?” he asked in a slow drawl.
“Breakfast time I puts a little juice in there.”
Clar took a beer from a weight-sagged pocket and looked through the quivering heat of the fire at Kyle. “Want one?” He offered the beer with an uncertain smile.
Kyle shook his head, wondering at that uncertain smile. Like a youngster’s after toddling too far from the doorplace and wondering if he should go farther. It was a nice smile. And nice crinkling eyes. Hard to think someone with nice smiling eyes would trample graves and spray his wife with oven cleaner.
Kate strummed into the silence and the dog trotted over to Clar, staring up at him, ears pricked. He barked, tail wagging. Nipping his beer between his knees, Clar leaned forward and cupped the dog’s smooth, shiny head with both hands and ruffled its ears with his thumbs. The dog wagged its tail faster and Clar blew a short puff of air into its black leathery nostrils. The dog snuffled and licked its chops. Clar blew another puff into the shiny black snout and the dog whined. It tried to twist away. Clar gripped its jaws, holding it closer. “What’s you going to do now eh, what’s you going to do,” he crooned and blew long and easy into the dog’s nostrils, gripping tighter to its struggling head. The dog’s haunches went rigid, its nails grappled onto rocks. Clar kept blowing. Kyle got to his feet.
“Let the fucker go, asshole!”
Clar grinned up at him, the dog’s head still cupped between his hands, his thumbs caressing its jaws.
“Need to get yourself a set of bagpipes, Clar,” said Kate.
“Or a fucking balloon,” said Kyle. He sat back down.
Clar rubbed down the Lab’s quivering haunches. “Go. Get,” he said, smacking the dog’s rump. The dog skittered throu
gh the fog, tail folded between its hind legs. Clar stood up and drained his beer, weaving a bit—first sign to Kyle that he was drunk—then hove the bottle towards the sea. He dramatically lifted a finger for silence, then smiled when he heard the plash. “G’nite,” he said and sifted into the fog after his dog.
“Somebody should shoot that sonofabitch.”
“Just another poor boy, Ky.”
“He’s a prick.”
“Flouting his poverty.”
“How the fuck’s that, Kate. He’s got everything.”
“But his father’s heart.”
Jaysus. “You makes everything sound like a song.”
“That’s what we are. Love songs gone wrong.”
“Yeah. Well. Someone should capo the crap outta that one. Arse.” He got to his feet, dropped a buddy pat on Kate’s shoulder, and headed off.
Their room door was ajar when he went inside the house. A dim light peered through the crack from a night lamp his mother read under before sleeping. Most nights he crept past their door and dove beneath his blankets to muffle their voices as they oftentimes bickered with each other. In the mornings he was always astonished to find them tucked into each other like a skein of wool. This evening he peered through their half-opened doorway and his father’s head was on his mother’s bosom as though he were already asleep and she was cradling him, one of her hands holding on to his as though she were frightened of wandering lost through her dreams. She was gazing at a framed picture of Sylvie and Chris and himself on her wall and he knew it was Chris she was gazing at. His eyes, so earthy brown and eager. His smile wide and open. His cropped blond hair. The golden boy, long before death took him. Framed and hanging beside the picture was a pencilled drawing Chris had done of their father sitting in a boat on moon-rippled water. Or, and Kyle could never tell, perhaps it was Chris himself, looking expectantly towards the stars.
Did you know you’d soon be amongst them?
“Did you close the door, Kyle?” his mother asked in a half-whisper.
He nodded, knowing she’d heard and was just wanting something to say.
“Now, don’t go worrying,” she said.
“I won’t.” He bumbled to his room and into his bed and across his pillow and the silence without their arguing resounded through his head and he stared like a hawk into the dark.
—
He’d scarcely fallen asleep when dawn trickled an ashy grey light around the edges of his blinds. In the kitchen his mother poured him tea and smeared partridgeberry jam on his toast.
“Your father’s out in the shed,” she told him. “Nursing himself, no doubt.”
He stood by the sink and watched her, feeling within himself that hushed quiet of a mourner already at the wake. She leaned past him for the dishcloth and he smelled her scent of lavender and remembered Sylvie once saying how she thought as a youngster that lavender was a flower that smelled like their mother.
He followed her to the table as she carried his tea and toast, sitting in the chair she hauled out for him.
“Eat it for me too, I suppose,” he said and flinched as she pinched his ear.
“Now, I don’t want no foolishness,” she said to him.
He swallowed lumps of toast and gulped them down with the tea.
“And try keeping your father sober.”
“What about Sylvie?”
“She called day before yesterday. We won’t be hearing from her for another week.”
“So—she don’t know?”
“I didn’t know for sure when she called. It’s fine she don’t know, let her have her holiday.”
He felt a stab of resentment, a strong stab of resentment.
“She should be here.”
“There’s nothing she can do, only worry.”
“We can call the embassy there, they’ll find her.”
“Call the embassy. Yes now, we’re doing that. Foolish. The doctors haven’t made any decisions yet, and there’s nothing she can do anyway. Let her have her trip.” She put her purse on the table, rooting through it. “Take this.” She took out a packet of bills and laid them on the table. “Nine hundred. I’ll get the rest from the bank this morning.”
“We won’t go ahead with that.”
“Yes, go on. I spoke too quick last evening. He likes building. The pride he took building this house—you’d have thought he was building a castle. I’ll keep five hundred in the bank.”
“Would—will that be enough?”
“I’ll know more when I talks to the oncologist today.”
“I’ll go with you.”
“No, stay with him. Bonnie’s taking me.”
“Who?”
“How many Bonnies do we know, Kyle. That’s her outside, now. Go get her some coffee. Use that mug on the table there, it’s clean. I’ll finish getting ready.”
“Christ, Mother, you don’t need Bonnie Gillard driving you to Corner Brook.”
“Rather have her now than anybody else. She knows how to keep her mouth shut, that’s for sure. Now, go get that coffee.” She vanished into her room and he tried not to stare at the bold form of Bonnie Gillard as she came in through the door—her too white pants and too white jacket and blood-red blouse and shoes and red handbag and lipstick and white plastic discs pinned to her ears. And a big dark scarf curled loosely around her neck.
Addie came rushing out, apologizing for being late, and faltered for a second upon seeing Bonnie, then quickly smiled.
“My, don’t you look nice. Perhaps I should have pressed something. Kyle, did you get Bonnie a coffee? I’ll just be another minute.”
“Take your time, I got lots of it,” said Bonnie. Her voice was loud, like her colours. Kyle noticed her eyeing his mother’s trim dark sweater and pants as she hurried into the washroom, and he noted her quick glance at her own red and white checkered self. She crossed the room and sat down, a cloud of cheap scent trailing behind her. She was about forty, first signs of age etching the corners of her eyes. Her jacket strained across her wide back as she folded her arms onto the table, her wrists stretching a mite too long for the cut of her sleeves.
He reached past her for the mug resting on the table and she drew back and he saw for the first time a little rash of blisters, glistening amidst a swath of salve, on the right side of her face near her hairline. The right side of her neck, partly hidden behind the scarf, was equally burned and blistering and swathed with salve. She looked up at him, her eyes big and brown and bold. Their black orbs pulsated softly and he turned from her, shamed for having looked so deep. Taking the cup to the sink, he poured her coffee.
She stood up as Addie came out of the bathroom, toilet flushing behind her. “All ready?”
“I suppose I am, can’t think properly this morning.” Addie crossed the room and lightly pulled Bonnie’s scarf away from her neck. “Looks awfully painful, dear. You sure you want to do this?”
“I could sit home and suffer it out,” said Bonnie, and she smiled. “A bit like you now, likes keeping to myself. Hates everyone gawking and talking at me.”
“We’re a pair, then,” said Addie, knotting a silk scarf around her neck. “I’ll be back sometime in the afternoon, Kyle. There’s baked beans from yesterday in the fridge for dinner. My!” She shivered as though struck by a sudden draft and pulled the flimsy scarf from around her neck. “I can’t find my wool scarf,” she complained, looking around the sofa and hummock. “Have you seen it, Kyle?”
“Take mine, it’s a woman’s anyway.”
“Don’t you be foolish. If your father can wear his now.”
“Under his shirt collar.”
“Because he likes the feel of it. And so do you.”
“Too short.”
“They’re stylish. It was their Christmas presents—cashmere,” she said to Bonnie, catching the soft woollen scarf Kyle was tossing her from the depths of his coat pocket. She folded it around her neck and smiled. “I was hoping for one to get cast aside. Small chance,” she
added ruefully. “They haven’t took them from their necks since they unwrapped them.”
“Making her feel good is all,” said Kyle. He caught his mother’s smile and smiled back reassuringly. “Drive safe, then,” he said to Bonnie, and with a last reassuring look at his mother, he plunged his arms into his coat sleeves and went outside. The air was dampish to his face, the fog rising from the land and hanging in wisps above the hills and fading into dove-grey skies. He stepped around Bonnie’s shiny red Cavalier, thinking things must be good in the fish plant these days. His father was hunched down at the end of the wharf and looking across the bay whence he’d floated them all those years ago. Kyle barely remembered Cooney Arm. Could no longer distinguish between memory and stories told and retold by Chris and Sylvie and his dear old gran and his mother sometimes about the man Sylvanus was back there. Prancing about his stage-head and boats, fishing from five in the morning to sometimes ten at night, netting and gutting and curing fish and drinking one beer a week and sometimes not that. Kyle did remember one moment from back during his father’s hand-fishing days: his father taking him in the boat one windy fall morning, hauling his nets. Christ, but didn’t he look big standing up in that boat with his oilskins and sou’wester black against the sky. And not a fear as he stood in that wind-rocked boat, knees bending to roll with the swells. And he, Kyle, white-knuckled to the gunnels.
Everybody and their dog had moved on from those days of hand-fishing and hauling nets but his father mourned them as he would a fresh dead mother. There’s them who can’t change with the times and those who won’t, his mother told him. And your father’s both kinds.
Kyle was kinda proud. He liked his father’s story. Liked how he was the last one out after the seas were overfished by greed and governments were paying everyone to leave. The story was still told how Sylvanus thumbed his nose at the relocation money and stayed till the last fish was caught, stayed till they nearly starved, and then sawed his house in half with a chainsaw and floated both halves up the bay and landed them atop this wharf and declared to his astonished Addie—This is as far as she goes. By Christ if I can’t work on the sea, I’ll sleep on it. No gawd-damned mortal telling me where I sleeps.
The Fortunate Brother Page 3