Downhill Chance (20 page)

“But—but I’m not a teacher,” Clair whispered and it was only as the uncle kept talking and Missy kept crying had she realized that her words were spoken silently; and even if she had shouted them, there was no one to listen. They were gone. Her mother and father were both gone.

She repeated the thought to feel it, but felt instead the same dizziness that threatened to overcome her once, when she had jumped two feet over a split in a canyon wall, with the thunder of churning water echoing up from the darkness a hundred feet below.

That she could feel anything was a surprise in itself, for since the night of her father’s death, it felt as if a calming had descended over her insides, allowing nothing of the horror around her to penetrate, and even allowing her to smile reassuringly at Missy as they had walked hand in hand behind their mother on the way to their father’s burial. And it was as if her senses knew, for the calming stayed with her, right up through the six months leading to her mother’s death. And now, sitting here before her uncle Sim, listening to his pronouncement of her fate, the calming had shifted, surprising her with the feelings of fright it allowed in, when it was pain she had been fearing the most.

“But I’m not a teacher,” she repeated, this time louder, again startled by the tumult of emotion awakening throughout her. Like one awakening from a sleep, she looked around the room and saw all that had been taking place this past while, and her body was rising in revolt. And most of all against the rot of her uncle’s ways as he stood before her, the peak of his cap overshadowing all else, and his stoop no longer present now that the neighbours were gone.

Vulture! she uttered within. Nay, not even a vulture, for they have the grace of flight. More the slinking dog again, a weasel, crawling on its belly, waiting for the hen to stray so’s it could suck itself full of the victuals of another’s labour.

“Don’t matter you’re not a teacher,” he was saying as Clair rose from her chair, eyeing him defiantly. “They only goes to grade six down there, anyway—and it’s only to hold the youngsters over till the real teacher comes. Count it lucky that they picked you.”

It was to the uncle’s good fortune that Missy, at that moment, let out a long, shuddering sob, and Clair, seeing the misery in her eyes as she looked from her to the uncle, felt her heart wrench—and not merely for Missy’s suffering but her own as well. For it was the uncle’s side Missy was harbouring besides, and it dawned on Clair with the foreboding of a winter’s storm that hers would be a lonely path indeed, for it was not Missy’s fortune to suffer again as she had done these last two years. No. The hearth had long since chilled for Missy, starting the day their father had left for war, and their mother had forsaken all around her. And even she, Clair, had helped shush her into silence.

A shudder tore through Clair. She drew back from the uncle, hissing at him, “I won’t ever live in this house with you!”

“Clair,” Missy sobbed, but the uncle was already taking her by the arm, leading her towards the door.

“She’ll be back, you ought not worry about that,” he said roughly, his efforts to be consoling echoing loudly through a house that had heretofore been tendered in silence. And it was to this house that Clair’s eyes clung as she sat, gripping onto the wooden seat of the motorboat beneath her, trying to shut out the sight of Missy sobbing and clinging to the uncle’s hand as the two fishers from Rocky Head shoved the boat off from the wharf. Stark white against the grey of the sky, and with its wreath of colour circling beneath the kitchen window, it far more resembled a tombstone marking the death of a life she had once known than the home where Missy would continue to live—and which she, in six weeks, was supposed to be coming back to.

A crow swooped before it, like a black tear falling from the heavens, and holding tight to her seat as the piston popped to life, reverberating through her wooden seat and jarring up her spine, she turned to her sister with a last plaintive cry, “I’ll come back for you, Missy, I promise—it’s just for a little while. Be a good girl, now, and don’t forget to wash your hair—don’t forget.” The putt-putt of the motorboat drowned out her cries, carrying her farther and farther offshore till the great September sea stretched out between them and Missy was but a fairy, glancing over her shoulder and waving as she followed the uncle up over the hill.

Miller’s Island loomed to the wayside and Clair startled towards it as she heard her father’s voice sounding over the wind and the sea: “Aye, my dolly, it’s the bravest man that hides his fear the bestest,” and then the boat pitched wildly, sending a stinging spray of mist into her face as it stubbornly fought to stay in alignment with the shore. And turning calm eyes onto the curious ones of the fishers, she wrapped her scarf more tightly around her throat and looked seaward towards Rocky Head.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I
T WAS FRANKIE THAT MET HER
down Rocky Head. Hair slicked back by the wind and buffing his hands to keep warm, he stood on the beach next to a stagehead on rickety legs, half on land, and half out over the water, wearing a concerned look on his face as he waited for the boat to drift ashore.

She remembered again his bold smile the first time she had encountered him, displaying an eagerness for acceptance as well as charm. And despite the fact it was her now, landing on his shores, she saw again in the quickness of his smile that same desire for acceptance. That it should be from her, an orphan freshly begotten from the gates of the graveyard into a bed feathered by his benevolence, she was too fatigued to think. But upon clambering over the side of the boat, her knees buckling as she stood before him, partially from fear and partially from the gruelling trip on rough waters, she shored herself up. For in those moments of life’s great surprises, as with the death of her mother and father, time offered her no respite to reach inside and lift out the mottled web of feelings tangling her insides, only a nudging onward, as with her father the day he walked down over the hill to the waiting ship, knowing that to sit is to chance entwinement to a bed pillowed with naught but springs of barbed wire.

“Welcome,” said he, his handsome white teeth subdued by a quiet smile. “I worried Nate might’ve capsized the boat and drowned ye’s all.”

“It—it was a bit rough,” she managed, as he helped her out of the boat.

“Yup, that’s what she did pick up, then,” said the bearded logger, Nate, hopping onto shore behind her. “And some of us might’ve figured that out by the cloud, if our eyes weren’t glared by a pair of pretty city shoes,” he added ruefully, glancing at the shiny, wet gaiters buckling nearly up to Frankie’s knees.

Frankie grinned, grabbing hold of the thole-pin and helping Nate haul the boat farther up on shore. “I hope you don’t think us disrespectful,” he said, turning back to Clair, his grin sobering, “asking you to come work for us so soon after—well, your loss. We would’ve understood if you’d said no.”

Clair nodded, stepping aside as Nate bent over, fixing a wet plank beneath the keel of the boat. “Is you afraid of getting them pretty boots wet?” he called out, looking up at Frankie impatiently.

“I hope they gets everybody’s attention at the meeting the way they’re getting yours,” Frankie grunted, kicking the plank in place.

“Heh, no doubt they got a pretty tongue, but it’s the one in your head I’ll be more interested in hearing from,” replied Nate, giving the boat a last extra wrench, “providing it talks straight with us, that is.”

“Better watch him, miss,” called her second escort, Calve, still hunkered down by the motor in the boat, “for he’s like the merchants, he is, curling his tongue into whichever cheek got the sweetest pudding.”

“Pay no mind,” said Frankie, taking her arm and guiding her towards the bank. “Nate, you got her suitcase? The women can’t have heard us, else they’d be down to meet you by now,” he added, nodding towards the six half-painted houses standing resolute to the wind and shrieking gulls. The screeching of clothesline pulleys and the cries of youngsters sounded from beyond and Nate nodded encouragingly, hoisting her suitcase onto his shoulder. “They’re taking in the clothes—getting ready for the meeting in a few minutes, to talk about the vote.”

“You’re welcome to join us—Willamena will bring you,” said Frankie as she turned to follow Nate.

“Willamena!” exclaimed Nate, peering sharply at Frankie. “She’s coming to the meeting?”

“Geezes, Frankie, how’s we suppose to speak our minds with Willamena there?” said Calve.

“It’s honest concerns we’ll be raising, b’yes,” said Frankie. “It don’t matter who’s there when it’s honest concerns. Besides, it’ll be a chance for Clair to meet everybody at once. Better hurry on—I sees the Lower Head crowd coming.”

“I don’t know,” said Nate. He glanced at the half-dozen or so men and women walking up the shore from a scattering of houses a little distance off. “They don’t put much in a company man, no matter what his stand.”

“Company man,” snorted Frankie. “Sure now, I’m a company man. I was born and raised here same as everybody else.”

“Aye, you was fine till you went and faulted yourself,” said Calve.

“Like Luke says now, it’s who buys a man his shoes we ought to be looking out for,” said Nate, tossing a wink at Clair.

“Luke,” groaned Frankie, casting his eyes up over the tree-coated hills. “Either I brings him out of the woods and tames him or banishes him to Chouse altogether.”

“I allows that’s one meeting I’ll work on skipping,” said Nate, heading for the bank. “Follow along, miss, I takes you to the women. And no matter what Frankie says, I’m not sure if the meeting’s a good place for you to meet everyone. We argues down here about the colour of the fog, but this vote is a likely good reason to get everybody stirred up—and right it should when nobody knows rightly what it is their voting for. What do you say, miss?” he asked, slowing his step as Clair stumbled over her footing.

“I—I’m not sure,” said Clair, catching up with him.

“Nobody is,” said Nate, carrying on his way. “It’s one thing to say, yeah, we’re voting for Confederation, but what’s that? All we knows is the ways we got, and brother, that ain’t too appealing either; never a cent to call your own. But rather the devil you knows, they says, and that’s Frankie’s job now, seeing how he’s hooked in with the merchant—to convince us of the one we knows.”

Scarcely listening, Clair nodded, keeping half a step behind, growing more timid as they neared the growing bedlam of shrieking, screeching and singing out from the houses beyond. “When’s the vote?” she asked, hoping to quell her fluttering insides.

“Another six weeks. Have you decided yet?”

“Oh, I … I haven’t thought about it much,” confessed Clair, and Nate slowed his step, turning to her.

“Of course you haven’t, young miss. We feels for your bad fortune.” He nodded awkwardly, and Clair, biting down on her lip, moved past him. Kindness could overtake her right now, and she was to be their schoolteacher, not a snivelling schoolgirl. Nate fell quiet, picking up besides her and leading her onto a path between a woodshed, with six-foot logs to one side, and a two-storey house shading the other side. Her mind darkened as she pondered for a second just how much Willamena had parleyed to the Rocky Head crowd about her and her mother and father and all that had happened. But there was no time for further thought, for just then she came to the back of the houses and Clair stopped, staring in wonder. A flat patch of grassland lay before her, about sixty feet across to the woods rising straight up, and the houses and woodsheds arcing around it, forming a communal backyard that was webbed with well-scuffed pathways, and criss-crossed above with tiers of clotheslines running from windowpanes to door jambs, to limb-bared poplars—reminding Clair of a game of cat’s cradle gone wild. The lines were half filled now, with flapping sheets and towels as the women hung out of windows or doorways, reeling in their lines, and snapping the clothes from the pins and dropping them into baskets at their feet.

“Here, here, get away—get away from the sheep,” a worried voice bawled out, and Clair swung her eyes past the flapping sheets and chattering women to a baa-aaing sheep as it scurried this way and that amongst a bunch of tormenting youngsters and clucking hens that blocked its path. Straightening up from the cramped door of a henhouse, her dress tight around her barrel belly and its hemline flicking with the wind around her heavy, stockinged legs, was the old woman with the white coiled braids, the same who had hid amongst the shadows beneath the stage-head that day, watching her boy walk away to war, and who had stood on the wharf that day her father had come home, waiting his return.

“The birds is going to get ye! The birds is going to get ye!” she bawled out, setting across the patch, pointing the finger of doom down at the youngsters scattering at her feet.

“Who’s the birds gonna get now?” asked Nate, hastily stepping to one side, Clair quick behind him, as the sheep scuttled out past them.

“Well, sir—” faltered a voice from above, and Clair glanced up to see a red-headed woman, a few years younger than her mother, looking down upon her, a wide grin broadening her freckled face.

“This is our new teacher,” said Nate, and then others were looking her way, and the clotheslines stopped shrieking, and the youngsters stood still in their boots, and the old woman came up close, checking her over through little grey eyes imbedded amidst a mesh of wrinkled flesh.

“Bad day to be taking you on the water, ain’t it?” she asked.

“Ah, you worries for nothing, old woman,” chided Nate, resting the suitcase down by his feet. “I’d say she’s as good a sailor as the best of them.”

“Nay, you got no sense, you got no sense,” the old woman sputtered. “A wonder you wouldn’t drowned, hey maid?” she asked, her foreboding tones giving way to a gap-toothed grin. Caught unawares, Clair grinned back.

“And now that you’ve met Prude, you might want to meet the rest of the clan,” said Nate, nudging her arm and directing her attention to the redhead. “That’s her eldest— and my wife—Nora. And her over there’s her sister Beth,” he added, pointing to another, slightly younger woman with the same crinkly brown eyes. “And Beth’s husband is Calve, the fellow in boat with us—my brother—and she’s Aunt Char,” he called out to a scrawny old woman with a wispy white bun clinging to the back of her head as she swept the hens off her stoop with a straw broom. “She’s Prude’s cousin. They was raised as sisters, and over there, staring at us from behind her sheets—and that’s the most you’ll ever see of her—is Prude’s youngest sister, Hope— Frankie’s mother and deaf as a haddock and scarcely moves outside her door since the day her husband drowned.” Nate turned to her, his chuckle partly sympathetic, partly musing. “He drowned same day Frankie was born—that’s why yonder fellow there got such shiny boots—she been spending every day since, scrubbing his face and everything else he got, and baking him pies.”