Downhill Chance (16 page)

“Why, she’s shy of you,” exclaimed Sare. “Goodness, she was only six when you left, just a baby. She hasn’t grown much, has she, Father? And here’s Clair. Clair, come speak to your father.”

He rose, moving towards Clair, and her knees trembled. Struggling to breathe, she lifted her eyes to his, about to open her arms in welcome, but a sudden grimace distorted his face. She held her ground, watching, instead, as her mother, hearing the small cry of pain that had escaped his lips, take hold of his arm, staring imploringly onto his face.

“Job—”

He nodded reassuringly, yet wrapping his arm more tightly around her shoulders, leaned onto her as if she were a living crutch. Finally he was limping towards his eldest girl, his eyes heavily lined and blinking oddly as they sought hers.

She’d never known him to blink oddly before. And his eyes, ooh, those lines, almost as if they were deepening and withering as he neared her. And that dear gentle face that once smiled the tenderest of smiles was now taut in a gaunt jaw. But it was his eyes that revealed the most, for when she finally looked, wanting the milky brown of her father’s eyes, she saw instead two frozen, muddied shells. She closed her eyes and felt his lips, chilled, unmoving, touch her brow, and a shiver cold enough to solidify a thousand galaxies curled itself around her heart.

Her mother saw only life, felt only his warm flesh beneath her hand, heard only the whisper of his breath, the taste of his salt-sweetened skin, the smell of his unwashed hair. And when he let go of Clair and drew his hand across the rippled mass of Missy’s curls, and haltingly peeled back his lips into a smile, Sare threw her arms around his neck and began sobbing with the abandon of an unchecked babe. Then she was drawing Clair before him again, and lifting Missy up with both arms for him to see better, and Missy, mindful of her ribbons fluttering in the air, and those around her reaching out to soothe a wind-tossed curl, smiled sweetly at this man whom she vaguely remembered as Daddy, and clutched her arms more tightly around her mother’s neck.

“They’re so shy of you now,” sobbed Sare, letting Missy slip to her feet and taking hold of his arm. “Come, we takes you home and gets you a nice hot bath. I swear, from the smell of coal on them clothes, you must’ve been sleeping in the coal bin.” Then, caring naught for those standing around, hoping to have a word and shake his hand and welcome him home, she wrapped her arms around his waist and led him homeward. Clair followed behind, and Sim, holding Missy’s hand, followed behind her. Others trailed along as well, but Sare invited no one to walk alongside of her, and the second she was home, she marched him straight through the house and up over the stairs, calling over her shoulder for Clair to stoke the fire and start heating up water for the washtub.

Clair never saw her father for the rest of the day. Nor the next, aside from brief glimpses and quick smiles that passed between them through the room door as Sare waltzed in and out, bringing him tea and toast and puddings, or whatever else she happened to be boiling, baking or stewing for him that day. His wound was a piece of shrapnel imbedded in his back, which made it difficult for him to walk, sit or stand in an upright position for any length of time. “He’s plumb exhausted,” Sare told everyone that dropped by. “I allows I’m going to make him sleep for a week before I lets him out of that bed.” And then she’d hum her way through fixing him a meal, dabbing her finger into his tea to make sure the water was just right, and smearing his bread with molasses and baking it in the oven, the way he mostly liked it, and making up bangbellys, his favoured teacake, made out of pork fat, molasses and flour.

“Blessed Father, Missy, I allows I’m going to tread on you if you’re not careful,” she said often enough during those first days as Missy trailed behind her from the sink to the stove, from the sink to the table, from the sink to the stairway. “Why don’t you go visit with your grandmother, or sit at the table besides Clair and copy some writing like a good girl? Clair, take her, will you, dear. I sees to your father’s breakfast.”

“She won’t let me do nothing with her,” muttered Clair, equally as tempted as Missy to shadow her mother and peer inside the room for a glimpse of whatever was taking place in there.

It was on his eighth day home, a Sunday, that Job got out of bed. Clair was waiting at the kitchen table with Missy, both wearing their hats and coats, the church bell donging through the early morning air, as they waited for their mother to come down over the stairs and accompany them to morning service. It was their father that came. His face was smoothly shaved and his hair looked silken clean, winging off from his head at frightful angles as he stomped down over the stairs and limped into the kitchen, hooking his braces up over his shoulders. He stopped at the sight of them, and as Missy began to giggle, staring at his messed-up hair, he managed to grin in his old foolish way. Clair’s heart flip-flopped. Her mother had been right—it was only a rest he needed. Yet, before the thought had properly registered, he was shoving his naked feet into his boots, hauling open the door and marching outside.

“Job!” Sare called out, running down over the stairs, still pinning on her hat. “Job, where you going?” She ran out the door, Missy and Clair behind her, stopping at the gate, watching as he marched up the road, one foot steady behind the other, despite the dragging limp of his right leg, and taking no time for those others strolling along the same path with their hymn books in their hands. Straight up Bob’s Hill he walked, and through the wooden door leading inside the small white church sitting on top of the hill behind his mother’s house. Within the minute he staggered back out and headed towards home, buckling beneath the weight of the pew his grandfather had built some eighty years before, one end on his shoulder and the other dragging the ground at his heels, looking much the same as Jesus must have done trudging beneath the weight of the cross on the road to Calvary. Ignoring the questioning look of his neighbours, Sare’s astonished protests, and the wide startled eyes of his girls, he dragged the pew in through the house door and, setting it down in the centre of the kitchen, went outside to the shed and came back in with his handsaw, a hammer, and bucket full of nails. Closing the door upon the gaping faces of his friends and neighbours, he lodged the jagged teeth of the handsaw to the back of the pew, a quarter from the centre, and started sawing.

“For goodness’ sakes, Job—”

“Leave me be, Sare,” he ordered.

“Job, the girls—”

“Take them to church. There’s plenty more places to sit.”

“Job, stop—your mother—”

But he listened naught. Bending one leg onto the seat to steady it, the other stretched out behind him for balance, he continued pushing and pulling, pushing and pulling, the blade ripping through the splintering wood. Sare watched helplessly, her face wincing against the shrill scrooping of the saw as it hit upon a nail. Shooing Clair and Missy towards the stairwell, she turned back to her husband again, eyes pleading, and her hands fluttering before her like a cornered hen on the brink of flight.

Job saw nothing. Sweating and grunting, whether from pain or labour, he sawed. And Sare, overcome by the shrill whining of the saw biting through nails and knotty wood, and half frightened by the sight of her husband ripping apart with his bare hands what the saw wouldn’t cut, collapsed onto the divan and became quiet.

Missy began to whimper, allowing Clair to hold her from behind as their father, the pew now hacked into pieces, picked up his hammer and some nails, and in the space of an hour, with all three watching, built a single seat from the pew. Then, tossing out the kitchen chair next to the window, he sat the pew-chair in its place, and turning to them all, spoke the only words Clair ever heard him speak again about the pew-chair. “It’ll do me as good here as there.” So saying, he sat sideways on his new seat, leaning one elbow on the table, the other on the windowsill, and with a fine covering of pew dust settling on his forehead and shoulders, he stared vacantly past the faces outside his window, lighting his pipe.

CHAPTER SIX

I
N GROUPS OF THREE OR FOUR
they came, and sometimes five and six, as visiting strangers from nearby outports were equally as curious as family and friends to hear from a man just home from war on a continent that most had never heard of, despite it being their pilgrim ancestors’ starting point. And too, there was the pew-chair.

“War’s a hard thing for a man to put behind him,” said Ralph, leaning against the wall, staring warily at Job, as Crow and Johnnie sat at the table alongside of him. “They says some never gets past it.”

“Oh, now, Johnnie,” chided Sare, pouring more tea into Crowman’s cup, “as soon as his back gets better, he’ll be as good as new agin, won’t you, Job? Pass me your cup, Johnnie. And how’s Rose?”

“Rose is fine, maid, just fine,” said Johnnie, “and she says to tell you she’ll be up soon as the crowd starts wearing thin.” He looked to Job, sitting one elbow on the windowsill, the other on the table as he puffed on his pipe, looking from one to the other through a smoky haze, like a curtain, thought Clair, curled up on the divan, a book before her face so’s to hide her fascination as she watched her father along with the men.

“One thing I’d like to bring up, Job, b’ye,” said Johnnie, shifting his splinter-thin frame uncomfortably in his chair, “and that’s—well, it’s what Rose was asking about just before I come over, and that’s—well—she was wondering b’ye, how you feels about all we, when you was the only one to sign up?”

“My, Johnnie, what a thing to ask—” began Sare, but even she, always alert to answer any question that befell Job since his return so’s to spare him the trouble of talking, lapsed helplessly before the tumult of emotions riding over the faces of the men at the surprise question. Lowering her book, Clair peered closely as her father stopped puffing on his pipe, looking to each of his neighbours as they in turn looked to the bottom of their cups, shuffling uncomfortably, their own thoughts bristling to be heard. But they had argued and reargued their own take on affairs, and were more keen now to hear Job’s. And as he lowered his pipe and leaned towards them, their shuffling stopped.

“War ain’t no place for a thinking man,” he said quietly.

The men nodded in turn, each pondering the sense of what had been spoken, and anticipating more, but Job was sitting back in his chair again, puffing on his pipe as before.

“That’s right, b’ye,” burst out Ralph, “and like we was saying after you left, it’s not just on a bloody battlefield that you finds war either, because we signs up every time we goes in over them barrens and gets caught in a snowstorm with nary a tree or the sun to guide us out. Or, even when we goes out on the frigging water and stands a chance of getting crushed by pan ice—or—or lost in a fog, sometimes. That’s war, ain’t it—fighting to stay alive?”

“Yup, sir, brother,” said Johnnie, with a nod. “Thick as pea soup, sir, it was the other day.”

“My, if sitting in a boat in the fog is the same as going to war, then I guess we’ve all been fighting since we were gaffers,” said Sare, looking up from the blueberry grunt she was slicing, a touch of scorn riding her brow.

A flush of red stained Ralph’s neck. “There’s times I said me prayers, buddy, water lopping over the boat and you can’t see the shore for swills. I dare say Job can nod his head to that.”

“I don’t say it’s nice all the time,” said Sare, “but I allows it’s a comfort in having rode those same swills a hundred times before, and knowing that when you did get home, there’d be a cooked meal and warm fire waiting.”

“And a comfort to ye on shore knowing we was bringing home turrs for the soup,” snipped Ralph.

Raising his hand to silence Sare, Job spoke in the grave tones that had accompanied him home from the war. “And a comfort it was, b’yes, in knowing Sare and the girls would be cared for. I slept easier knowing that.”

The men fell into silence and Sare moved quietly, placing the sliced loaf before them, “Here, have a piece,” she invited, her tone much softer. “Hurry on while it’s warm. It’s the last of the blueberries for a while. I swear, I can’t wait to get in on the barrens this fall. Crow, you’re not saying much.”

“Well, I was just thinking,” said Crowman, helping himself to a slice of grunt, “fire minders is what we must be, Job, b’ye, them that stays behind to mind the fires. There always got to be them that stays behind to mind the fire.”

“You can call yourself what you frigging wants now, Crow, my son,” said Ralph, jamming his hands in his pockets, the red on his neck stirring up again, “but I ain’t no frigging fire minder. I’m a logger and a fisher and whatever else it takes to run me own life, and no one’s going to be calling me a coward cuz I wouldn’t jump on no boat and sail the frig overseas.”

“Goodness mercy, Ralph,” cried Sare, “you riles up faster than a surly dog. No one’s calling you a coward—”

“There’s them that thinks so,” said Ralph.

“Now, b’ye—” cut in Crowman.

“No, don’t b’ye me,” said Ralph, “it’s like I said before, I ain’t fighting nobody else’s frigging war when I got me own to fight. I’ve gone in on them barrens with a full storm on, tracking caribou, and the worst I got out of it was cold feet. And I’d do it right now if there was one that said I wouldn’t.”

“Would you now?” asked Sare sharply, and Clair felt the cold grey of her eyes as she turned them onto Ralph.

“Sare—”

“No, don’t stop me, Job, I’ve been hearing this kind of self-talk since the day you left, and if you thinks, Ralph, my son, that by walking in over them barrens in a storm and coming back out agin—just to show you can—makes you a hero, well then, perhaps it does, but it minds me of a youngster walking along top of a picket fence just to show off. And if that’s what a hero is, then that’s what Job’s not. He didn’t go to no war to show himself big to me or those around here. He went for his country, and all those fighting to keep it ours. And if some of them comes back with a leg missing— or, some never comes back at all—then he knows it was a manly thing he give himself to, and not some foolhardiness. And you might as well hear this too, whilst you’re standing there, Ralph, and that’s this—Job don’t hold no man lesser or higher than himself, and it would please him if they give him the same respect. Now, have a piece of grunt to go with your tea,” she said, plonking the breadknife onto the table.