What They Wanted

by Donna Morrissey

  “He’ll come home, Ben. He’ll just come home.”

  “No. He won’t. He’ll not feel worthy.” He pulled back, tugging at my arm for me to face him. “He’s running, what you would’ve done. Your mother came and got you. I’ve got to go get him. I’m not thought out like you—that little boy—I can’t just turf him out—I’ve got to see him through, somehow—don’t even know what I mean by that, please.” He held me in place as I tried to pull away. “Wait, just wait—”He faltered. He let go of me, cradling his face into his hands, fingertips rubbing harshly at his temples as though erasing some stain, some spot of dirt grained into his skin. He took my arm again. “Don’t go yet, just wait, just—sit beside me, I hate to go, I don’t want to go, I love it when you talk, I love it when you sit beside me talking, I don’t know how I’ll do this without you there—” He paused for breath, and was talking again, “I’ve got to find him, and then I’m coming home. I’m coming home soon as I find him—here, this is yours, this is so yours,” and he pressed a book into my hand, a sketch pad— Chris’s sketch pad. He pressed it into my hand, already opened, already folded back.

  Tears bubbled out of his eyes. “It was on his bed, it was opened and on his bed, it’s his last thing that he drew.” He kissed my cheek, my mouth. He pressed his forehead against mine and grasped my hand, pressing it to his lips. “Don’t hate me,” he whispered, and then he was on his feet, pulling his coat so hard off the chair that the chair toppled over. Hooking Trapp’s knapsack over his shoulder, he bolted for the door, taking a glance towards Mother’s room before letting himself quietly outside.

  I sat huddling into my knees, waiting, thinking perhaps he’d come back. After a moment I rose and went to the window. Darkness crowded the sparse light thrown off by the street lamps. The sidewalks were emptied of people, a few parked cars alongside the curb. I hurt from where I was clutching the wired spine of the sketch pad against my chest. Chris’s sketch pad. His last sketch. I turned to the light and held it before me, tracing his lines with my eyes.

  It was a night sketch of our father sitting in his boat. He was sitting with his back to me, his face held towards the huge expanse of darkened sky. But his hair was light in colour, and longish, curled around his collar—it was him, Chris. It was both Chris and Dad. It was his dream. The both of them sitting as one in the boat, the water rippling beneath them as they held up a paddle, looking expectantly towards that other, more ancient sea, darkling amidst its stars. And there, in the upper left-hand corner, was an exaggerated star. I knew it at once. Proud evening star. And somewhere quite near, but invisible to see, its virgin moon.

  My hands trembled. Did he know? Did he know it was his last day? My mind flashed back to the argument I’d had with him that time in the car, driving to the hospital to see our father, and I had demanded of him why he hadn’t left home yet. I remembered how upset he became, and how I had felt fear in him, that same fear as when we were youngsters hiding behind the house from some unknown force of fate. Had it been built inside of him, somewhere, this knowing of his fate?

  My hands shook as I flipped through his other, more recent drawings: Billy the beaver scrolling into a dam, into a forest; Billy scrolling into a pond and the pond into grass. I flipped to another page, another image, and caught my breath. It was a drawing of three head lice on the palm of a hand. The hand was without definition, simply the lines creasing its centre and three large lice sitting there, unshaded. White. I gave a cry. I clutched the book tight to my heart, leaning weakly against the window.

  I’d forgotten about that dream of his. I’d never told him what Gran told me once about white lice in dreams. I’d been but a girl when I dreamt of them, and they weren’t white, they were brown, tiny and brown, and had fallen from my hair onto my scribbler. “That’s a good dream, Dolly,” said Gran as she searched frantically through my hair the following morning, “for it’s the white lice in dreams that foretells death.”

  Another memory seized me. It was before we left Cooney Arm, and he’d drawn a planet with three moons. Said he dreamt it. I saw pretty much the same picture later in a textbook after we left Cooney Arm. I remember this feeling of—of surprise, at first, that Chris could draw such a thing without first knowing it. And then awe. Because it pointed me towards something, those images that came without thought, that came out of nowhere, and yet somewhere, because, as the old thinkers said, nothing can come from nothing.

  Clutching tighter to the sketch pad I laughed, tears wetting my face. I needn’t have feared Chris standing gutted on a wharf like Father with his rotting boat and stage after the fish had gone. The thing Chris created lived in my hands, his breath upon my face. He had found that heavenly room, he’d never been without it. It had housed him in his flesh as I bungled unseeingly into walls of my own construct. It was housing him now as I stood there, understanding his lines. The thought came to me that undoubtedly we are but shadows, our thoughts shifting like clouds, never returning to what they once were, always searching for elsewhere. And yet some things are more solid than rock. He, my brother, was a one true love in my life. And his death, as was his birth, a wealth I would forever feed upon. Another thought struck me, that I need never fear how Chris’s lines transmute from one thing to another, for we are too like them, we are never born and we never die, like the waters in a flooded riverbank, simply finding different channels along which to flow.

  Ben appeared on the sidewalk below, Trapp’s knapsack hanging limply from his hand, a slight shiver from the cool night air tensing his shoulders. He stood still as stone inside the light of a street lamp, the black of his curls glimmering like onyx. A cab cruised by, easing to a stop beside him. He raised his eyes to where I was watching him. I willed him to turn from the cab, to walk back in through the doors of the hotel, to come back to me. But I knew he wouldn’t. He was wearing his resolute look again, his eyes piteous, pleading once again for understanding.

  Without intent I slowly shook my head. His eyes fell. He opened the cab door and stood aside, as though expecting someone to hop in before him. Then he lowered himself onto the seat, a figure of such loneliness that my heart ached for him as it ached for my own loneliness. As it ached for my mother, who was surely lying awake in her room, lost in the quiet of her own thoughts. As no doubt Gran was ruminating through her own aged mind right now, perhaps rocking for comfort in her rocker, the soft yellow light from her lamp shrouding her shoulders. And Dad. Was he not hunching over his spot at the table, gripping a hot mug of tea whilst his eyes searched through the oncoming waves for reason? Kyle, I knew, would be in the woodshed, his elbows propped on his knees, chewing the sides of his thumbnail whilst his eyes chewed through bits of rind unfurling from the birch junks, struggling to see what Chris might see, but thwarted by his own unlearned self.

  Without bidding, my thoughts went to Trapp. Took nothing but his truck. Most likely nose-deep in another ditch, with only his self to blame and his tortured thoughts for company. A twinge of pity stirred in the shrunken sphere of my heart, and I regretted shaking my head to Ben’s imploring look begging for understanding, for sympathy for Trapp. For in the end we are all but solitary souls, seeking little more from the moment than the right to be in it, and the right to be understood.

  The cab carrying Ben sped off down the road. I remembered back to a talk with Myrah, bemoaning the huge want I felt in my heart and was always trying to fill with romantic love. Watching Ben speed off in the cab, I waited for that feeling to again consume me. Curiously, my heart felt too full of other things now, and I wondered if it would ever feel want in quite the same way again. For I knew now that it was never a need for someone that I felt but simply a desire to return home, to that room Chris always felt in his heart, the one that fed him contentment, no matter which wharf or rock he sat upon.

  A cough, or perhaps a cry, a soft cry sounded from my mother’s room. Holding Chris’s sketch to my heart, I hurried to her bedside.

  EPILOGUE

  THE SCREAMIN
G OF THE SAWMILL falls blissfully quiet. I sit on the wharf, hunched against the side of the house, listening to the water lap around the pilings. The woods are black now, the sky dusted with stars, the moon silvery on the sea. Gran’s voice sounds softly through the window as she asks Kyle to light her lamp and take it to her room. Since the accident she no longer sleeps without her lamp lit.

  “No, no, I’m not scared of ghosts,” she tutted as I teased her once, “it’s just another blanket I wraps up in.” And she drew down amidst her bedding, becoming little more than a ripple with a few greyish-white hairs spread across her pillow.

  A light flares through the kitchen window, falling softly around my shoulders as Kyle strikes a match to the wick and fits on the chimney. I hear Mother calling out to him, cautioning him, “Be careful now, careful you don’t drop the lamp, I’ll come and comb your hair, Gran, you get in bed now, I’ll be right there.” More light pours through the kitchen window as Mother switches on the overhead light and calls out, “Sylvanus, go mix your tea, I’ve poured it for you, it’s on the sink, go mix your tea now, I sees to Gran—Gran—” and her voice fades as she goes down the hall to Gran’s room. She spends a lot of time in the room with Gran since the accident, the both of them talking in slow, steady murmurs, like a brook unimpeded by rock and softened with a thick edging of grass. I listened shamelessly once, on my way to the bathroom, caught by something Gran was saying to Mother, about a gun and a promise Mother made to her once, about burying Grandfather Now’s gun with her in her coffin when she dies, for he was never given prayers or a burial, she rambled on to Mother—as she has taken to doing lately—he was never marked with the cross, and that’s why he’s never found peace for she could never let him go, and be sure and say prayers for them both, she begged Mother, and mark the graves with two crosses, one for each them, and to pay no heed to them gawking at the gun in her coffin, for it matters nothing to her what’s said after she’s dead, only that Grandfather finds peace after all this time, because for sure he must be wearied, poor soul, searching all these years for his grave.

  The kitchen light switches off, leaving me comforted in darkness again. I hear the scraping of Father’s chair. He’s mixed his tea, and if I had leaned forward before he shut off the light I would’ve seen him through the window, his scruffy black hair uncombed as it always is about the house, his brows dark and heavy as he broods into his tea. Mostly, at night, he sits with the light off—so’s he can see the water and not himself in the damn glass, he argues with Mother. But mostly it’s because he likes sitting alone in the dark. He sits there for hours during most evenings, watching the water. Tonight his boat shimmers in the moonlight. His boat is white, he painted it white, for he says it, too, is a tombstone, a tombstone for fish.

  Luckily, he doesn’t spend much time on the water anymore, leastways, not the sea. He was offered a job on the river. His heart isn’t strong, but his body is, and he can go for days without becoming winded. It’s a small job, erecting a salmon fence, then counting the salmon to see how many are spawning each year, and plus, policing the river for poachers. It’s a godsend, the job on the river. Not just for the food it puts on the table but for the long periods of time it gives him away from the house. Sometimes I walk with him for a short ways, up to the falls. It’s not really a falls, just enough of a dip to churn the waters and dampen the air.

  The other morning as we walked alongside the river he was notably quiet and glum. We sat for a bit near the little falls, and he told me his favoured brother, Uncle Manny, was laid off from the fish plant, and was leaving for Toronto.

  “No fish in the offshore waters, now,” he said sullenly. “All gone the way of the inshore—as we all said it would happen. Gawd-damned arse-up government. Soon there’ll be nothing living in the water. Barren. Imagine that, the ocean barren.” He fell silent, staring at the river rushing past our feet. I studied his face, wearying with time, weathered with salt. He lifted his dark eyes onto mine and I drew back, feeling sickish. All those times I’d seen him coming ashore in his boat with the water foaming like mad dogs beneath him, and setting off into the woods with the winds screaming through trees and blinding his path, and it was now, only now, sitting safe on the river, with the sun warming his face and his feet dry in his boots, that I saw fear in my father’s eyes. Fear for his brother Manny, who had lived his life on the sea and was moving to a factory job in the city; Manny, who had lived his life amongst three dozen people, now moving to a city of three million. Jeezes, and Father shivered in his boots, dipping his hands into the river as though assuring himself it was there and not some illusion he might wake up from and then have to pack his bags like his brother and turn his back to his only salvation.

  No wonder the houses of Cooney Arm are haunted, I thought. Fishermen like my father, his brothers, may have moved on, but, as with the linoleum on the floor, the hinges and locks on the doors they left behind, so too are their spirits still back there, hooked into the generations that lived on the land and in those houses before them. I was reminded of the day spent with Ben and Chris on the pond with the beaver dam, and Chris asking me about the ghosts in the walls of Cooney Arm, and asking me what they wanted, “For they’re of your own making,” he had said, “so you should know what they want.”

  I wondered many times about that, whether the ghosts were of my own making. And yes, yes, they are of my own making. And we all carry them, and we all create them. But, as with the sobbing little boy in Ben’s heart, that didn’t make them any less real. And it came to me that day as I sat facing the river with Father, and seeing his fear, that I suddenly knew what they wanted, those ghosts in the walls of Cooney Arm. They wanted to be freed from those walls, freed from the confusion and blindness of times since passed, and brought forward into the mindfulness of the living. Just as those parts of me, those marooned, stifled parts of me snagged on feelings of invisibility around my mother, had been brought forward into my awareness.

  “You’ll be happy here, working the river,” I said to Father. “Factories aren’t something you’ll have to worry about.”

  He looked to the heavens with a prayer of thanks on his lips, and then ordered me back to the house so’s he could carry out his work in peace. I left him as he’d asked. He had the river now. I remember Chris saying in the cookhouse that last morning how Father liked it best sitting in his boat by himself. A few times I thought to tell Father that, how Chris could see into his mind, for I thought he’d like it, Chris understanding how he felt about things.

  But I didn’t. He doesn’t talk about Chris. He doesn’t allow any of us to talk about Chris. Once when Kyle said his name at the supper table, Father threw down his fork and left the table and went to bed. He was drinking. He carried a small mickey in his inside coat pocket. It was his secret, and I didn’t tell. We all have our opiates, and booze was becoming Father’s.

  The moon darkens behind a cloud, and I hear Father scraping his chair away from the table, saying something to Mother about bedtime. She must’ve been talking with Gran all this time, for her voice sounds tired as she speaks to Father, chiding him about the lights being out. They flare back on, as they are whenever Mother is about. She had always liked the lights on, flushing darkness along with dust balls out of corners. And as I listen to her voice sounding over the water lapping about the pilings, I am grateful for her need of light. I have learned that my great fear of things changing and rotting around me, my fear of death, came from a darkness that was constantly and poignantly signified by those three little white crosses. And I wonder, in looking back, how it was I’d never seen the fourth, marking the living grave where I had been burying my childhood feelings of invisibility.

  I hear Father’s chair scraping away from the table. I hear Kyle trodding back to the kitchen, creaking himself into Gran’s rocker. He’s had a growth spurt these past few months. But he still has those rounded, chubby cheeks, and his squinty eyes always carry a hue of smiles around them, no matter his brow buckling into
frowns or his shoulders slumping with dejection. His shoulders look perky this evening as he munches on a ginger snap, they’re always perky when he’s munching cookies, like the cow with its cud, Mother says of the contented look on Kyle’s face as he munches; if he had a tail, he’d be swishing it.

  We always smile. Rather him munching cookies than chewing his fingers, a habit he keeps up with a vengeance since the accident. He, like Father, turns from me each time I try to talk, to bring our brother into the space between us. I wonder if he blames me, but I’ve seen him turning from Mother, too, and Gran. Still, I wonder.

  A few weeks ago, about midnight, I’d been unable to sleep and had gone for a drive in Father’s truck. I spotted him in my rearview mirror as I slowly drove past the club. It was a cold night, with an easterly wind driving hard. The bar had closed and Kyle was huddling against its back door, his hands jammed inside his pockets, looking lonely and cold. I backed up, and he eagerly climbed aboard.

  “What were you waiting for, to be beamed home?” I asked gently.

  He grinned, settling into a chew on the side of his thumbnail. We were near home when he said, “I had a dream.”

  It was the way he said it that drew me. His tone was soft, yet urgent, as though it held something precious. “I was in the shed,” he went on, “stacking wood. And a voice spoke—kinda like it was speaking through me—I could feel it in my ribs. It was Chris. It was Chris’s voice. And he said, ‘You are a king.’” Kyle paused, looking at me. “It felt so real,” he exclaimed. “It felt so real that I touched my head when I woke up, thinking I had a crown.”Then he shrugged, as though it were a nothing dream.