Downhill Chance (18 page)

“Better than dead,” said Sim, and Clair glared at him all the harder as the fight oozed out of her mother like a torn windsock.

“It’s all right, shoo, it’ll be fine,” said Job, limping to Sare as she crumpled onto a chair.

“I don’t mean to be uncharitable,” she whispered, bowing into her hands.

“Course you didn’t,” said Job, stroking her cheek. “Course you didn’t.” He nodded as Sim grunted impatiently at the door, then rose, wincing as his legs took his weight, and the final band of constraint holding Clair in check snapped.

“Bet you didn’t tell them how sick Daddy was, did you?” she hissed at the uncle. “That’s because you wants to hear about the war like everybody else.”

“Clair,” warned her father, but a horse bursting out of a barn thinks no more of his return to his stall than he does the bog holes and ruts of the terrain he’s about to blaze across.

“He’s a bastard, Daddy,” she shouted, and oblivious of her mother’s leaping to her feet, forbidding her another word, she shouted all the harder. “And he stole from us when you was gone. He used to mark things down and keep them for hisself and the merchant had to give us stuff! Yes, you did!” she continued scornfully as the uncle turned a savage look upon her. “Saul’s the one who told me—and he give us charity to cover what you stole!”

“She lies,” snarled the uncle, raising his fist in anger towards Clair. “Nothing but sauce is all I got from her, no matter the work I done, lugging wood and water—anything I took was to feed the young one. Lord knows she spent enough time eating at the house.”

But Clair was quiet now, the uncle’s tirade as he slunk back to the door scarcely audible. It was her father taking her attention, corralling her into a new twist of torment as he shook his head, lowering it into his hands as had her mother but a minute ago.

“You get yourself up over them stairs, young lady,” her mother ordered, reaching her arms around Job’s waist. “Not another word. Get on now—get!” And Clair crept towards the stairwell, no different from the uncle stealing out the door, her stomach seething with sickness.

Cowering at the railing, she closed her eyes as her father whispered harshly, “Did he leave ye enough?”

“Yes, yes, more than enough. There’s nothing for you to think on there, Job Gale, and I won’t allow it. And there was nothing that was given that wasn’t tallied back—you can trust Saul on that one.”

“Tell me the truth, Sare.”

“It’s the truth, every word of it the truth. They lacked for nothing, the girls didn’t, and me neither. And we’ve paid back; not a cent do we owe—I seen to that.”

“I should never have left.”

“Ohh, you can’t think that, now. It was a good thing you done. No matter what, I’ve always known that.”

“You don’t know.”

“Know what, my dear?”

“What I’ve done. What I’ve taken from them.”

“From who, Job?”

“And I’ve nothing to give them—not even the truth,” he more groaned than said.

“No, no don’t leave,” said Sare as he began for the door, “What’re you carrying, Job—oh, my dear, let me come with you. I’ll dress warm—” But he was shaking his head, pushing her behind as he stepped over the stoop and, with a last tortured smile, closed the door.

“Ooh, poor soul, poor soul,” Sare whispered, running over to the window.

Creeping up the stairs, Clair darted to her window, looking down upon her father as he leaned his weight upon Frankie’s shoulders and began walking down the hill. Scarcely visible through the dark, he turned, looking back at her mother, no doubt, as she watched over him from above the flower patch, and gathering his strength, he waved reassuringly, smiling all the while. It was then she, Clair, understood that in the absence of humility, only shame can lower a head so, and as did her mother when caught decrying the bereaved whilst selfishly nurturing her living, and her father as he tallied his deeds against himself, she hung her head, denouncing the extra torment she had brought upon them, and desired the weight of her blankets in which to bury herself. But her eye strayed back to the window, lured by a neighbour’s light falling upon the uncle. He was dodging a step or two ahead of her father and Frankie, and her mouth curled in contempt. “Old bastard,” she whispered. “Old bastard!”

It was an hour past midnight when he returned. And towards dawn when his screams started. Jolting awake, Clair sat up in her bed, horrified by their guttural rawness. Leaving Missy plunging beneath the blankets like a frightened mouse, she sprang out of bed, dashing out of her room and across the landing to where his door stood ajar. He was lying on his back, his fists clenched to his throat, and his head twisting from side to side as the screams rippled harshly out of the depths of his guts. Her mother was half lying over him, shaking him, holding him, and yet his screams kept coming— loud, raw and hard. And when she failed to awaken him, she lay across him, crying, “Scream, my love, scream it out, scream it out.” And when finally his eyes sprang open, staring wildly at the ceiling, and he peeled back his lips, gritting his teeth, striving to hold back the utterances still rasping out of his throat, she cried louder than he, “No, don’t hold it, don’t hold it, be sick, my dear, be sick all you wants.”

Her cries gave way to a gentle humming as his body slowly quieted, and soon it was only the sound of his breathing, along with her murmurings, filling the room.

Creeping back to bed, Clair pulled Missy up from hiding beneath the blankets. “It’s fine,” she said, wrapping her arms around her to still her trembling. “It’s fine. Daddy’s fine.”

But it wasn’t fine. It wasn’t fine at all. The acid that had begun seeping into his stomach somewhere over there across the seas, had been eroding all this time, its gnawing felt only by him as he sat day after day, aiding its corrosion. And now the burning pain of its rot, once broken through, continued its discharge, night after night, stripping his throat and numbing further his eyes as he arose each morning and limped down over the stairs to his chair besides the window, filling and refilling his pipe as he puffed and puffed, tapping his foot and staring vacantly outside.

“I thought your headaches were gone with Job coming back,” said Alma one frosty Sunday morning after she’d invited herself for tea at their breakfast table.

Clair picked at her fried dough and baked beans, yet despite her feelings of discomfort, and those, she knew, of her father over yet another visitor, she was relieved for the disruption of the interminable silence that was growing more and more loudly around their mealtimes since the night screams started.

“Yes, maid, they did,” her mother was saying, tearing off more dough and dropping it into the frying pan, “but they’ve started up agin, now. I allows I’ll never get clear of them. Is it next week Willamena’s getting married?”

“Yup. I never thought I’d see the day when a merchant’s daughter would be marrying someone from Rocky Head,” replied Alma, “but it’s what the merchant says now—with Willamena’s looks, they’re not lining up. And they says he’s like her father, the young fellow is, out for the dollar. What about you, Job? I suppose it’ll be some time before you gets back to work?”

“I dare say,” said Job around the stem of his pipe.

“Mercy, it’s what everyone’s asking of him—as if he’s the maker of his own health,” said Sare, her tone becoming a little crotchety. But then catching herself, she turned on a smile and flipping the touten out of the pan onto a plate, she laid it before Alma, asking pleasantly, “How’s your mother doing with this cold? I allows it’ll never warm up agin.”

“My dear, she’s wonderful grand.” Alma gave a short laugh. “I got to say, Job, b’ye, it’s not something I ever wanted to ask about for fear of sounding stun, but all this time you been home, me and mother been trying to figure out what a piece of shrapnel is. Then I finally out and asked Will Brett the other day and he told us it was a piece of steel. So here I goes, sounding stun agin,” she added with another laugh, “but what me and Mother can’t figure out now is, how’d you manage to get a piece of steel in your back?”

“Well, bless the Pope, how’d you think!” Sare exclaimed. “From an exploding bomb, maid. He was in a war, you know.”

“My, yes, I knows that,” said Alma, water swamping her eyes as she swallowed too big a piece of the dough, “but it’s hard to tell what something’s like when you only sees bits of it in pictures, hey, Job? You knows, b’ye. I suppose you never seen a battle tank till you got over there. It must’ve been some bad having them all around you—they looks so big— what was they like?”

“We don’t talk about the war,” said Sare sharply, laying a protective hand across the back of Job’s chair as he began puffing harder on his pipe. “How’s that’s touten going down?”

“You fries a good one, Sare. I got to say, I can’t stand Mother’s. She don’t fry hers in pork fat, she uses butter and it loses its taste without pork fat—too dry. But it’s easier now, keeping the fog at bay in a easterly wind than trying to change Mother’s ways. Well, sir, you’re some quiet this morning,” she interrupted herself to say to Missy. “What’s you scared of, your father?”

“Scared!” exclaimed Sare as all eyes turned to Missy, who, in turn, looked up from her plate to stare wide-eyed at her father. “My, Alma, why’d you say that?”

“Maid, that’s what Willamena was saying in the store the other day.”

“For the love of the Lord—Job’s been home for more than a year—and the little thing’s been good as gold.”

“You knows Willamena,” said Alma.

“The mouth of a guppy, always gulping for air and spitting back the same,” cried Sare, looking fretfully at the look of concern replacing the vacant stare in Job’s eyes. Leaning across the table, he laid his hand over Missy’s, peering into her face.

“Is that true?” he asked, his grave tones somewhat roughened as he strived for softness. Clair caught her breath as Missy raised her eyes to his—this stranger with the tortured smile who sat staring relentlessly out the kitchen window day after day, and screamed like a devil in her mother’s bed night after night.

“Missy?” asked Sare, fondling one of her daughter’s curls.

“Shh, leave her be, Sare,” said Job, but Missy, emboldened by an encouraging smile from her mother, stared back at her father, shaking her head from side to side.

“I’m not scared,” she declared.

Job’s mouth twisted into the semblance of a smile as he sat back in his chair, but his back was rigid, thought Clair, as rigid as it had been that first night she had burst into his room and found him screaming on his pillow. And his fingers, the nails chewed to the quick and bleeding in spots, shook as he refilled his pipe from his tobacco pouch. She remembered when he would squat before the motor in their boat on the way to Cat Arm, greasing up the piston and oiling the flywheel, those same fingers so swift, so strong and so very, very sure. And now, with their chalky colour and chewed nails, they more resembled the blood plant, whose roots, once ripped from the earth, gnarled outward, bone-white, and its sap the colour of blood as it dripped from its ragged tips.

“She’s still getting used to me being back, I think,” he said, and raising a clawed hand, he tweaked a lock of Clair’s hair before lighting his pipe.

“Of course she is,” said Sare, patting Missy’s hand as if she had just done something good. “There, you’ve finished your beans. Put on your boots then, and take these toutens up to your grandmother—I told her I’d be sending her up some this morning.” And wrapping a tea towel around a plate piled high with fried dough, she stood waiting as Missy slipped off her chair and into her boots. “And tell her I’ll try and get up later the week,” she said, opening the door, “and mind you don’t spend all evening—you got homework to do. Clair, why don’t go with her?”

“I’m not finished,” said Clair, quickly bending her head and scraping her fork across her beans.

“My, she dawdles,” sighed Sare, closing the door behind Missy, and then noticing Job beginning to tap his fingers, she hurried to the bin. “Alma, there’s still a few toutens left— why don’t take them home to your mother.”

“No, no, maid, no need for that, it’s enough I dropped in for tea; I wouldn’t want to rob you of supper, too,” Alma protested, but Sare was already wrapping another tea towel around the few pieces of dough left on the plate.

“Don’t be silly,” replied Sare, holding out the plate to Alma as one would a coat to a departing guest, “we’ve been eating them all morning. Be sure to give your mother my blessings—and Job’s, too.”

“Yes, yes I will,” said Alma, rising reluctantly. “I suppose when this cold weather’s over with, Job, b’ye, Mother’ll get up to see you.”

“I minds her well,” said Job, laying his pipe in the ashtray. He began to rise, his body creaking like an old rocking chair. “And Alma—” he managed his full height “—tell her they sounds louder than Bear Falls in springtime.”

Alma blinked, then broke out in smiles. “Ohh—the tanks! Lord, that’s some roar, then. I’ll tell her that, my son. And you take care of yourself, now. And you too, Sare,” she said, allowing Sare to lead her to the door, “you looks awful white to me.”

“The winter sun,” said Sare. “Tell your mother we looks forward to seeing her.”

“That I will, that I will, my dear. Later, now.”

And then Sare was shutting the door and hurrying back to Job as he started his slow, painful walk across the kitchen, his breathing becoming faster and harder. “Here, hold on,” she said, offering her shoulder, “and if anybody else comes knocking,” she called over her shoulder to Clair, “tell them your father’s gone to bed for the day. For a month we should be telling them,” she grumbled, “give you time to get your strength back, and perhaps I will start telling them that, perhaps I will.”

Her father, as if remembering her presence, turned to her with a little smile as he made his halting way into the stairwell. She smiled back, watching after him, and the second he was out of sight, the smile fell from her lips. Pushing aside her plate of beans, she turned to where he’d been sitting and shifted onto his chair. Taking his pipe from the ashtray, she lifted it to her lips, and then leaning one elbow on the table and the other onto the windowsill, she looked out over the muddied patch of garden, allowing her eyes to empty, to see what it was that emptied eyes saw as they looked for hours in a day, as quiet as a mouse in a flour can, staring, staring, staring at some distant point that held no shape or colour.