Downhill Chance

by Donna Morrissey

  Shaking her head, Missy sat at the table, clamping her mouth shut as Clair sat across from her, feigning relish as she dug her spoon into her stew. "How come Mommy always got a bad head?" she asked finally.

  Clair shrugged. "She just has a bad head, that's all."

  "Why don't she take aspirins, then?"

  "They makes her stomach sick."

  "Why don't she take brandy, then?"

  "Uncle Sim carried it all up to Grandmother. Is she still picking her nose—the grandmother?" asked Clair, crooking her little finger and shoving its joint up her nostril.

  The pout gave way to a giggle. "Uncle Sim says one of them days she's going to pluck out her eye for a booger."

  "Humph, wonder he don't pluck it out for her," said Clair.

  Missy giggled again. "He says she's crosser than a cat."

  "That's what they're like—two cats with their tails tied together. Tell you what, Missy, why don't you get your books and we does our homework. Go on, now," she coaxed. "And after, you can tell me a story."

  "You'll come to bed same time as me?"

  "After I brings in the wood."

  "And we can tell more stories?"

  "Long as you don't wake Mommy."

  After homework was finished, and the bread taken out of the oven and buttered and cooling on the bin, Clair coaxed Missy up over the stairs and into her pyjamas. "We'll just let Mommy sleep," she said, lying on the bed as Missy crawled beneath the blankets.

  "You get undressed," said Missy.

  "I got to bring in the wood," said Clair. "Hurry on and tell." And for the next half hour Clair listened as Missy prattled about fairies combing the hair of little girls when they slept, and how the banshees were angry because the fairies took away their wails and now they couldn't give warnings of death, and how everyone was now living to be a hundred, two hundred, and even five hundred years old, and no more little girls and their mothers would ever die again.

  Adding a few details of her own to the story, Clair waited till Missy's voice began croaking sleepily, and feeling a little of the comfort she had always felt from her sister, from before her father went to war, she kissed her cheek, whispering good night, and that she would be back soon as she had the wood stacked for morning.

  "But I don't want to sleep by myself," murmured Missy.

  "I'll be up soon."

  "But I don't want to sleep yet."

  "Shh."

  "I'll be quiet."

  "No, Mommy hears every sound—and they makes her head badder. Be good now—I won't be long." Running lightly down over the stairs, she pulled on her coat and boots, and donning a cap a pair of mitts, she went outside and brought in the splits for the morning's fire. Then, listening by the bottom of stairs and hearing silence from her mother's room, she crept into the sitting room and hunkered down before the cabinet, lifting out her father's radio and rehooking the wires.

  "Shut it off, Clair, shut it off!" her mother had cried out that first time she had set it up and was tuning in to the news.

  "But I wants to hear about the war."

  "I can't hear about it," her mother had shouted. "Turn it off, child, turn it off!" And she had run from the room with her hands barring her ears.

  Listening again for any sound coming from her mother's room, Clair switched on the radio, quickly lowering its volume as a tinny male voice sounded through the static:

  ...to snapshot the past several months, we have seen the spread of war to the Balkans; we have seen the Russian army advancing over a carpet of their own dead; we have seen hundreds of Soviet planes hurling a rain of bombs upon Finland; we have heard Britain declaring she would meet Italy on land, sea, and in the air; and now with Germany's bombing of London, we can start believing indeed that this is no phony war; that indeed, Prime Minister Chamberlain may be right with his prophecy that we are entering a phase of war much grimmer than the world has ever seen....

  "Grandmother, Grandmother, we made you a cake," chanted Missy the next evening, barging inside the grandmother's house, Sare behind her, carrying a cloth-covered dish. Clair dawdled, closing the door on the cool fall evening and wrinkling her nose against the fetid smells of Vicks and cod-liver oil as she stepped into the smothering, wood-driven heat and the dimly lit room before her. Fire glimpsed through the cracks in an old rusting wood stove, flitting over the grizzled head of an old woman as she bobbed herself awake.

  "Look at it, look at it!" Missy was chanting, tugging on the fatty underside of the grandmother's arm. "We got candies on it."

  Shrugging off Missy as if she were a bothersome fly, the grandmother propped herself up on doughy white forearms, blinking herself out of her heat-induced stupor. "What'd ye lose your way?" she grumbled at the sight of Sare and Clair, her jowls quivering in the splotches of firelight and looking to Clair like yellowing pork fat.

  "Job wouldn't be pleased if we forgot his mother's birthday," said Sare, laying the dish before her and pulling Missy to one side. "He always made sure we baked you a cake."

  "Job!" snorted the grandmother. "He cared a lot now for his old mother, he did. The most I ever seen of him was the broad of his back—" Clair rolled her eyes towards the dirtied windowsill, cluttered with jars and nails and screws as her mother took a chair, listening sympathetically, apologetically, guiltily to the grandmother's drone about her crippling rheumatoid arthritis, and her heartless son, Job, hardly ever coming for a visit since his father died, leaving her dependent on the lazy oaf of a first-born who was always hove off like a lord in his room despite enough rain leaking through the roof to drown them all.

  "But I'm a good help," cut in Missy. "See, Mommy, I washed all the dishes last night, didn't I, Grandmother?"

  "That's a good girl," exclaimed Sare, finding relief through her daughter's largesse. "I'm so glad she's of help, Grandmother. I never thinks of her as being big enough to do housework, but I suppose I wasn't much older than her when I had a back-load of chores. It's just that she's so small for six years—my, I swear she haven't grown an inch this past year."

  "Uncle Sim says small people works the hardest," said Missy, "and he drags over the woodbox for me to stand on so's I can reach better, right, Grandmother?"

  Another snort from the grandmother. "As long as it leaves him with nothing to do," she said, casting a cross look towards a closed door to the other side of the stove.

  "Is he in his room?" asked Missy, darting towards the door. "Uncle Sim, Uncle Si-im!"

  "Goodness, Missy!" said Sare, darting after her, but the door was already drawing open and Sim shuffling out.

  "What's she getting on with now?" he mumbled, a stoop overtaking his shoulders as he slewed his eyes onto his mother.

  "Oh mind now, you don't have to put on this evening, Uncle Tom Langford, it's wares, not work that's waiting," said the grandmother, pulling the dish towel off the cake. "I can't even get him go to the store and get me some flour," she said to Sare, "and I been wanting a bit of hot bread for two days."

  "That's because she was going to bring a pot," said Sim, looking crossly at Clair.

  Clair started guiltily as her mother turned to her. "Don't tell me you never ran up with the bread last evening."

  "I forgot," she exclaimed.

  "Forgot!" said Sare. "Well, sir, she got the mind of a sieve. Never mind," she ordered as Clair opened her mouth to protest, and turning to the grandmother, she threw her hands up helplessly. "I'll send up a loaf by Missy soon as we gets home—I swear, I don't know what I'm going to do with her."

  "She never had no splits brought in either," said the uncle testily, his nostrils so splayed, it appeared he had sunken to his ancient beginnings.

  "I brought them in after," declared Clair, and lapsed into silence as her mother shot her a warning look.

  "She did bring them in after, Uncle Sim. Mercy, how she makes such good grades in school, I'll never know. Certainly, she's no worse than her father for keeping things in his head. I tells her all the time, that's who she takes aft
er, her father. Well, we should be going now," she added abruptly, laying a hand on the grandmother's, "and I'll send up that loaf the second I gets home. I should be sending you a loaf every time I bakes—Lord, I never thinks of such things, and it's the least I can do for all the time Sim spends bringing wood and water. There, then, I'll send you a pot—perhaps two—every time I makes bread. Job wouldn't like it knowing his mother was wanting for a loaf of bread, would he, Clair?" But Clair was taking no note of the grandmother's sour look, and had fixed her eyes onto the uncle as he searched amongst the dirty dishes on the bin for a cup, wondering how the blazes this sneaking low-life had been able to divide one loaf into thirty.

  "Suppose he gets killed; who's going to fend for ye then, if he gets killed?"

  "Goodness, Grandmother, it's thinking of him coming home that keeps me going, not his being killed," her mother exclaimed. "Clair, you ready? Come, Missy, leave off Uncle Sim and come."

  "Stop long enough for tea, I suppose," said the grandmother. "Sim, make them tea, for it's not often I gets company, and if it wouldn't for talking to the stove, I'd forget I got a tongue most days."

  "My no, I can't wait for tea, Grandmother. Missy, come on. Clair?"

  "Sim, you making tea? Look, he's already making it; sure I never sees nobody, nobody."

  "I should be sending Missy more; she's home all the time getting underfoot. That's what I'll do then, send Missy more often to keep you company. Would you like that, Uncle Sim?"

  "As long as she sweeps a floor, he'll like it," said the grandmother, attempting a smile, but so long had she brooded in foul nature, her mouth twisted sideways instead, reminding Clair of a broody hen straddling a nest of thorns. And when Sare shook her head, backing away from another offer of tea, this time from the uncle, the grandmother's voice rose nasally. "Why'd you wait till she was leaving before putting the kettle on?"

  And when the uncle snapped back, "She can make up her own mind whether to stay or not," the scorn in his tone was as much from his own testiness as from the grandmother's needling. Indeed, thought Clair, escaping into the clean fall air, and letting go her pent-up breath of Vicks and coal heat, it would be hard for even the uncle to know the source of his own testiness, for he wore the grandmother's ill nature the way a mean-spirited rider rides a contrary horse, with neither of them figuring from whence the ill nature stemmed.

  "For goodness' sakes, Clair," her mother chided, catching up with her, dragging Missy by the hand, "the least you can do is say goodbye."

  "He never brings in the wood," she all but shouted. "I always brings in the wood—and I chops the splits, too."

  "Are you still onto that?" Sare exclaimed in astonishment.

  "He's always scheming!"

  "He haven't got the sense for scheming. Now, you listen, here, my lady—"

  "Daddy said he's a conniving bastard!"

  "Mercy, Father in heaven! Do you sleep beneath our bed? I allows when your father gets home, we'll have to put a bell around your neck like we done the goat once, to keep track of its whereabouts."

  "Missy ought not to be going there," said Clair, snatching up her younger sister's hand as her mother caught up with her. "He's only wanting her to do his work."

  "There's nothing wrong with Missy sweeping a floor."

  "You're bad, Clair," said Missy, yanking away her hand. "She's bad, isn't she, Mommy?"

  "Ooh," huffed Clair, and running ahead, she burst in through the house door, kicked off her boots and skulked into the sitting room as Missy and her mother came in after her. The radio behind the glass doors of the cabinet caught her attention, and she turned from it in a huff. What mattered about a radio when you weren't allowed to turn the thing on? Marching into the stairwell, she started up over the stairs, but a sharp cry from her mother brought her running back down and into the kitchen. She was leaning over the bin, her fingers to her temples, and a loaf of bread on the floor from where she had dropped it, taking it out of the bottom cupboard.

  "What's wrong?" cried Clair, running to her.

  "It's—it's this head-ache," Sare moaned, pressing her fingers more tightly against her temples as if she might press out the pain itself.

  "I can get the bread, Mommy," said Missy, snatching up the loaf. "I'll take it up to Grandmother."

  "It comes on so sudden," said Sare, massaging her brow. "And then it near makes me sick. Ooh, it's nerves, is all. No, here," she said, taking the loaf from Missy. "You run up with it, Clair. Missy, you bide here and get your books, else it'll be late before you gets home agin."

  "But you told Grandmother I was going to bring it up—"

  "I'll do it, Missy," said Clair impatiently, taking the bread from her mother. "Get your books like Mommy says."

  "I won't," shouted Missy.

  "Missy!"

  "Shut up, Clair!" And turning from her sister, she bounded up over the stairs.

  "Leave her be, leave her be," exclaimed Sare, sinking tiredly onto her chair besides the window. "And you don't be long, either, Clair."

  "Needn't worry about that," muttered Clair, and pulling on her boots, she let herself out the door and through the gate. She turned as she started up the road, hoping to reassure her mother with a quick wave. But Sare's face appeared only as a spectre of white through the window in the evening light.

  Chapter Three

  IN TIME THE FISHERS STOPPED TALKING about her father. And Willamena found new scandal to report. Even Missy stopped asking when their father was coming back. And most disturbing of all to Clair was her own thinning memory, when she closed her eyes sometimes to think of him and couldn't bring his features up close. During those times she'd sneak into her mother's room and rub her nose into his good church coat hanging in the closet, breathing deeply of the spicy tobacco smell that clung faintly to the wool, and read and reread his letters. And now even they were coming more seldom, and were shorter, speaking of a routine that she couldn't connect with him, of his marching and digging holes and cleaning guns and training and more marching. And the 57th regiment he'd been assigned to in England was renamed 166 Nfld. Regiment since he arrived in Scotland, and he was training all over again, this time to be a field regiment as opposed to heavy artillery, which meant that he might be moved from Scodand soon, to somewhere that someone deemed his family ought not to know, because full sentences of his letter had been cut out. But that was a good thing, he continued, because now with Japan having bombed Pearl Harbor and the Americans finally at war, it was more important than ever for him to be a soldier, fighting along with everyone else for a freedom that was rightly theirs, and he'd never felt so proud. And Joey was like his little brother, he'd often scribble, following along by his side, day after day, and only seldom venturing into town after the girls. And he missed them terribly, he'd always close his letters by saying; at least those pages she, Clair, was allowed her to read. Always there was a page her mother slipped into her apron pocket and took out later in the sitting room or in her bedroom, and read in the comfort of solitude.

  And there was the radio. Those hushed evenings with her mother and Missy in bed, it was her favoured companion. Yet not even there in the rapid-fire voice of the broadcaster as he talked of the earth being pulverized, and the millions of soldiers killed and lamed, and the earth being torn asunder as the war circled the globe, could she find a picture of her father. Not even when this blight creeping over the world torpedoed a ferry leaving Newfoundland, killing 137 Newfoundlanders, 2 of them cousins to Johnny Regular's wife, Rose, could she conjure up an image of her father as a soldier. It was as if he had died. As if he'd never been. And when once she managed to pull a fragment of him out of a dream, he became diffused with the million others from the broadcaster's report, and lay dying with them on a soil torn asunder.

  "I hope the Newfoundlanders does better in this one than they done at Beaumont Hamel," Johnnie Regular's boy, Rupert, said to a couple of older boys, just out from a history lesson two years into the war. "Yup, 753 went to battle, and 68
comes out alive—I wonder who trained them to shoot?" he asked as they gathered behind the school around a scuffed-out field, kicking around a soccer ball. Clair was standing nearby, scarcely interested in her two best girlfriends, Phoebe and Joanie, as they turned admiring eyes onto the older boys, yet managing a haughty look whenever one of them turned their way.

  "Just as well they never come back, from what I seen of that fellow down Port Ray," said Phoebe loudly. "Leg cut off to a stump and half-blind. Can we play?" she asked, sticking out a foot, pretending to trip Rupert.

  "Go play with your dolls," said Rupert, nudging her to one side, missing the ball coming at him.

  "Legs short as yours, you can use some help," said Joanie, stopping the ball with her foot as it rolled towards her.

  "Here, let it go," ordered Rupert, cutting in front of Joanie and kicking the ball back to the other fellows. "Get home with ye," he huffed at the girls, running back onto the field.

  "Yup, 753 men goes out with guns, and 68 alive the next day," said the eldest fellow, Eddie Jones, from in by the church. "Now what kind of fight do ye think was that?"

  "A fool's fight is what," said Georgie Blanchard, Ralph's son, red-faced from running down the ball. "You take a man from his own place and put him in someone else's—and in a different country at that, mind you—and what kind of sense do he got? None, brother! And they had none to start with, going the frig over there in the first place," he added, a sly glance at Clair, then kicking the ball hard towards Rupert.

  "That's true, that's true," called out Rupert. "I used to listen to me old grandfather talk about them men that went to war. Strong as bears he said they was—and matched them, too. Remember old Sammy Jones—ripped his knife across the throat of a bear?"

  "Yup, and he with the bear still pawing at him," said Georgie.

  "Yes, now, that's a likely story," snickered Phoebe as Georgie ran past her. "Come on, let us play," she egged him on, running alongside of him. "Girls against the guys. Come on, Clair! Joanie!"