Downhill Chance (3 page)

From there they took to him to all the best spots: Molly the horse’s grave, where the lone hoof stuck two feet up out of the ground; the gutted-out motorboat that Aunt Char had pieced around with chicken wire and kept her pig in; Aunt Hope’s well with the fancy tiled roof; Uncle Jir’s new outhouse, painted white and padlocked, with real toilet paper inside. It was always best to wait for the tide to go out and climb up through the hole and have a crap and wipe with the real toilet paper, and jump back down through the hole again when the wave washed out. And, too, there was Chouse Brook with the biggest, fattest saltwater trout in all of White Bay. And when they were able to persuade one of the elders to lend them a boat, and beg for permission to row up the bay to Miller’s Island, there was the old graveyard with a mother and daughter buried in the same grave and with the two black firs grown on either side of the headstone, imprisoning it no matter how much wriggling was done to try and pry it free. And always while roaming from one place to another Luke plied his new best buddy with a thousand “How big’s Ireland, Gid? What other names do ye have over there? What do ye call your dogs, your cats? And what about boats? Sheep? And squid—do ye have squid?” And as Gid replied, Luke would pause, clinging to every guttural syllable that fell from his mouth, his eyes fixed intently onto the brown, drooping eyes as if willing them to open like mirrors, reflecting the journey that had spat this boy upon the beach before him.

But Gid’s eyes held nothing. Partially opened at best, they would startle a little wider when called upon, as if having forgotten those around him. Coupled with his hesitant movements and halting speech, this habit proved him a rather dull companion. And on those occasions when he laughed, like when Prude’s ram butted Luke in the arse, or when Frankie slipped on a wet plank and slid into his mother’s well, it would burst from his throat in hysterical shrieks that would momentarily jolt Luke into wondering whether this favoured friend was laughing or crying. And while it was Frankie and his goading ways that caused Gid to grin the most, it was to Luke that Gid first looked, and Luke that he trailed behind like a lost pup.

“Yup, I thinks I might go to Africa in a couple of years,” said Luke one evening, a week into Gid’s arrival. He, Frankie and Gid were on the far end of the beach, out of earshot of the houses, weaving boughs through skinned alder poles they had laced around three young birch saplings, limbed and leaning teepee-like at the top, making for a good-sized bough-whiffen.

Frankie snorted, crawling inside the whiffen, “Yup, I dare say we’ll go with you, b’ye. What you say, Gid?”

“If ye wants,” said Luke. “Meet Bunga and the boys.”

“Cripes,” groaned Frankie, stretching out on the bough-padded floor, “he’s going to meet a picture in his school book.”

“Whoever’s in the picture’s not a picture, stupid,” said Luke, tossing a handful of spruce needles in through the opening onto Frankie’s face. “And it don’t matter if his name’s not Bunga; that’s why you goes to places—to find out if Bunga’s real, the same as we; or if he’s no different than Daniel in the lions’ den.”

“Oops, he’s getting smarter now,” said Frankie, grimacing as he brushed the needles off his neck. “Cripes, b’ye, Daniel’s a bloody Bible story, not a geography lesson.”

“I knows Daniel’s a Bible story,” groaned Luke. “That’s not what I means. Bunga’s not a Bible story, but he don’t seem much different from one. That’s why I’m going to Africa—to make sure Bunga’s not a Bible story. Hah, you’d be too scared to leave home, anyway.” Holding out his hand for one of the boughs Gid was lodging on top of the whiffen, he asked, “What’d you think, Gid? You wanna come to Africa with me? Or you going to stay home with Fraidy Frankie?”

“I’d go right now if you wants,” said Gid quickly, his breath scratching over dry, cracked lips.

Struck by this show of talk, Luke turned. As opposed to the indifference usually clouding Gid’s eyes, there was a clarity to them at this moment and a fear that clung to Luke with the tenacity of a cat’s claws skimming up the trunk of a tree. In time he would remember this moment, and think mostly to himself that surely it is in the light of the eyes that the soul shines forth, and that despite the previous three weeks of racing and playing about, it wasn’t till this moment, staring through those two narrowly opened pathways, did he hold court with his friend Gid. But those were eyes reborn. For now, on this bright spring evening, he was struck once more with the intensity throbbing within the thinly built frame of this new friend, and as before, the little muscle to the corner of Gid’s eye began flexing, striking Luke with the same crazy desire to lay a finger on the throbbing flesh till it stilled.

“Right,” he said in a tone much rougher than he felt. Ducking inside the bough-whiffen, he elbowed Frankie to one side to make more room.

AS LUKE AND FRANKIE SAW TO GID
, so too did the women reserve the fattest fish and leanest pieces of meat for the mister and his missus, whilst the men heartily constructed a shack to bide them over till something better could be had by winter. And there was quilt-making for bedding, and garments sewn over for the youngsters, and as festive an air as ever there was at Christmas, for it was a good Christian thing to harbour a family from a storm and make them a part of your home, and the outporters were as Christian as the angels traipsing across the pages of their Bibles. And their reward was the intrigue offered up by the O’Maras’ strange new tongue and stories the mister told as he stood watching the men smear tar on the roof of his newly built shack, or sat roasting squids near a bonfire at night about the mist-peaked mountains in a far-off land, enshrouded by the yellow-gold rays of a sun that burned red each evening in the fiery skies of Killarney.

“Yeah, I knew we were in for it when I seen the white horses,” O’Mara was often heard saying about the storm that brought him to Rocky Head, the yellow of a beach fire casting around him again the same hallowed glow as did Prude’s lamplight the night he washed up upon their shores.

“The white horses?” the outporters would chorus in return. “Yeah, the white horses,” O’Mara would reply, “that what looks to some as the curdling froth of the sea, but was made known to my father as white stallions belonging to the sea gypsies, making haste to cross the water before morn, and driving onto the rocks any poor boat happening to bear down on them.”

“Sea gypsies,” the outporters would murmur. “From Killarney.”

“Aye, from Killarney,” O’Mara would say over a nip of shine offered by the men as the women hushed the youngsters and inched closer to the fire to escape the distracting sounds of the sea washing upon shore behind them and the snipes calling overhead, “the land where your soul leaves your body at night and dances with the fairies upon the meadows, feeding upon the pollen. But then, there was no more pollen. And that’s why we left our sweet Irish homeland, our house in the lee of the Sliabh Mish mountains—to find again the pollen for our souls to feed on, and keep us from becoming as barren as our dead piling up beneath the sod.”

“Aye, to fale our bellies and save our sauls,” mimicked Luke from up behind the stove one evening, peering out around at Joey, who was lying back on the daybed, idly playing a sea shanty on his accordion, and his father, who was sitting on the far end, mindlessly listening. The O’Maras had been living in their shack for near on two weeks now, and it was the rarest of evenings that Gid wasn’t slouching up behind the stove besides Luke.

“You mind your mocking,” warned Prude, her weight sending creaks of discomfort through the joists as she trod out of the pantry, a ball of wool in one hand and her knitting needles in her other.

“Aye, I’m not mockin’, I’m talkin’,” drawled Luke, “like the Irish, hey.”

“Like the Irish!” scoffed Prude. “It’ll be a fine day when you slips your tongue and mocks him to his face.”

“Aye and wut a sheame that would be.”

“It’s more than shame you ought to be feeling,” grumbled Prude, sinking into her wooden armchair. “I’d be wary of taking you around strangers, I’d be, for fear of what’s going to come outta your mouth.”

“Strangers don’t bother me none.”

“They should then, for there’s more than one youngster that got lugged away by strangers.”

“Yup.”

“You forgets the one from Green Bay,” Prude cried. “No bigger than yourself and lugged away by the foreign boats— never seen agin.”

“Foreign boats,” mimicked Luke. “You see any foreign boats around here, Joey?”

“Good thing you don’t, else you’d be in her bowels by now, soaking in hot tar,” snapped Prude.

“Hot tar!” Luke poked his head around the stove, staring at his mother, flabbergasted. “Now that’s foolish, old woman; that’s damn foolish. Did you hear that, Joey?

Soaking in hot tar. Have ye ever heard of such a thing?”

“And worse, hey Father,” muttered Joey.

“Yup—worse,” said Herb, scarcely audible over the strains of Joey’s accordion. Luke twisted his head around to him, questioningly. Mindful of Joey’s closed eyes, his father tossed him a wink.

Luke grinned, winking back with a rush of affection for his kindly old father. “Come to think of it, I bet that’d feel real good—a soak in nice, hot, soft tar. What do you think, Father?” he asked, and groaned along with his father as Prude leaned forward in her chair, finger pointing.

“Be the cripes, I shouldn’t bawl if you was,” she warned, “for the paths around here won’t be big enough to hold you soon, the way you’re getting on these days.”

“Aye, you’d bawl,” said Luke. “Cripes, you bawls every time O’Mara tells his yarns—ye all bawls—even Joe.”

“Young bugger,” muttered Joey, shivering more deeply into his accordion and drowning out the rest of Luke’s words, for indeed, Luke was right; each time O’Mara told his story, becoming more and more sentimental with each nip of shine, they all had a turn wiping a tear. As would O’Mara. Turning soulful eyes upon his saviours (as he had taken to calling them), he’d nod slowly at each and every rapt face as he finished of his storytelling by saying “And this is where the white horses brought me, amongst folks as blessed as the Saints of Ireland, and where strangers have become my neighbours, and neighbours have become my brothers.” A tear would wet his eye, and the outporters would dab at a tear in their own, and Luke would shake his head in disgust at their snivelling, willing O’Mara instead to speak more of the white horses and their fairies, and the fiery skies of Killarney. For since the O’Maras’ arrival, his taste for that which was foreign had grown more and more sweet, like the peppermint knobs his mother passed around at Christmastime, and left him craving for more long after the sweet had been sucked from his tongue.

“We’ll leave for the Basin not tomorrow, not the next day, but next—Saturday, right when the sun’s up,” said Luke the next day, sitting cross-legged across from Gid and Frankie in the bough-whiffen. The strengthening May sun filtering through the boughs threw spots of light across the sceptical look clouding Frankie’s shiny scrubbed face. Gid sat quietly, watching as Luke pulled a wad of rabbit wire out of his pocket. “We’ll start making snares,” he said, “pretending we’s going rabbit catching—”

“Yup, that’s what we’ll do,” said Frankie, pulling a pocket knife out of his pocket. “We’ll walk partways up and set out a snare line in by the brooks. Uncle Nate said the rabbits is thousands in there.”

Luke blinked, then burst out savagely, “You sliveen, Frankie, always trying to change things and making out you’re not!”

“What’s wrong with you, my son—I wants to go rabbit catching.”

“Right, rabbit catching!” scoffed Luke. “I said we’s going up the Basin, not rabbit catching. Never heard that part, did you?”

“Yup, well, I’d rather be snaring rabbits than getting skinned like one.”

“See?” said Luke, turning to Gid, “like I told you—he’s scared.”

“I’m not scared—we’ll get caught is all.”

“How’s we going to get caught?”

“It’s too far.”

“Too far. Two hours up, two hours down and two hours up there; six hours—no different than when we goes across the bay, trouting at Chouse.”

“They’ll see us on shore from their boats.”

“See us? How’s they going to see us if we hears the boat first and hides? Now you see here, Gid—you see how he does it? Every time you catches him, he comes up with something different.”

“Oh right, my son.”

“Oh right, my son; oh right, my son,” mimicked Luke. “Fraidy Frankie. What about you Gid—you scared, too?”

“I’m not scared,” Frankie cut in, a dirty look at Gid. “Why don’t you just take Gid, then, you’re so brave?”

“Because I’m asking you, too, scaredy Frankie.”

“Right, my son.”

“Well? You coming or not?”

“I said I was, didn’t I?”

“Then you’re going,” said Luke. “And you?” he asked, turning to Gid.

Gid nodded.

“Then we’s all going,” declared Luke. He grinned towards Gid. “Bet you never went this far in Ireland by yourself, did you?” Gid shook his head, and it was then Luke saw the beginnings of a bruise purpling the skin beneath Gid’s right eye. “How come you got your eye hurt?” he asked, peering closer.

Gid put a finger to his eye, as if having forgotten it had been bruised. “Da hit me,” he said quietly.

Luke blinked. “Da hit you? How come your da hit you?”

Gid shrugged.

“You must know why he hit you,” persisted Luke.

“I wouldn’t listening.”

“How come you wouldn’t listening? Was you listening, then?”

“Huh?”

“Listening!” exclaimed Luke irritably. “Was you listening?”

Gid shrugged, both shoulders falling back, baring momentarily the reddish birthmark before hunching his shoulder and screening it again amidst hair and collars. Luke stared for a second, then grunted, “Lord, picking sense outta you is like picking knots outta wet rope. Let’s get on with her,” he ordered, tossing the coil of rabbit wire at Frankie. “We’ll make a big pile so’s they’ll know we’ll be gone for the day once we gets going. After you snips them, Frankie, me and Gid’ll tie them.”

They worked steadily for the next hour, the wind singing past the door of their shelter, and the water washing up over the shore a scant five feet from them. Yet, try as he might not to, Luke’s eyes kept creeping back to Gid’s and the bruised flesh thickening beneath. Too, there was a scratch across his throat that Luke hadn’t noticed before. And was that not the same shirt he’d been wearing for near on two weeks now? And what of his hair? Wouldn’t a good combing straighten some of the kinkiness?