Downhill Chance (34 page)

“Shh, nothing,” said Beth, “jealous as a cat, she is, over Clair.”

“Yes, and talk to me about the uncle,” said Nora. “I seen him for what he was that first time she went back for a visit. Not even a minute would he give her with her sister that day.

And I remembers the funeral, too. Sure, she was only after giving birth three days before—what would anybody expect—for her to come and lay her out? Enough she got there at all. And it wasn’t just the uncle she was mad at that day—she was mad at Missy too, whatever it was Missy done or said to her, I don’t know—Alma, the postmistress, was talking in my ear. But I don’t forget her face the day we walked out of that cemetery. And I haven’t heard her talk much of Missy since. Till now. She’s not one for talking, Clair isn’t, but I sees on her face how hard this is for her. She’d raise that youngster like her own if Missy let her; I knows she would. But that’s it now. Missy’s determined she’s going to raise it herself, and that’s all anybody can do about it—stand back and let her be a mother.”

Of what use now were visits when her aunt Missy would be a mother, sitting and rocking all morning long, with a baby slobbering at her breasts? She closed her eyes to the sun, the wind and the shimmer of her aunt’s hair rippling behind her like rays of sunshine as she danced around the fairy ring. Unable to bear her heartsickness alone, she rose, doddering down the hill.

The women had gone inside to start on the colours, and she thought to go help her grammy Prude with the hoeing. Lynn came out on her stoop, her bangs sheared near to their roots, brazening a face already saucy with piercing button eyes and nostrils that twitched on sight. Screwing up her mouth, Hannah traipsed by, not wanting her company on this day.

“Missy’s a trollop,” hissed Lynn.

“You’re a merry-begot,” hissed back Hannah, then took to her heels as Lynn snorted like a horse, tearing around the corner of Prude’s house after her.

“Here, here, stop that, stop that,” Prude bawled as Hannah fell to her knees, scrambling behind the grandmother as she knelt besides a bed of greens.

“She’s mocking me,” shouted Lynn, skidding to a halt.

“No I never!”

“Yeah you did! You called me a merry-begot!”

“Get on, get on with your blackguarding; you’re the devil’s imp,” cried Prude, wagging her hoe at Lynn, “and your father’ll hear about this; mark my words.”

“Hope now I was blackguarding—she was the one blackguarding,” cried Lynn. “I’m telling Mom she called me a merry-begot!”

“Tell her what you wants—it’s the logan’s tongue you got; get home, get home!” yelled Prude.

“Trallop!” Lynn spat out to Hannah and vanished as Prude come to her feet, going after her with a hoe.

“Brazen as the devil, that’s what they is, brazen as the devil,” cried Prude, turning back onto Hannah. “Get up there, go on, get up there,” she ordered, jabbing at her feet with the hoe, nudging her farther and farther up the furrow between the two beds of greens. “The tarment, the tarment; I allows your mother will tan your arse she gets home this evening—show, is that a shoot? Is that a shoot you’re plucking out there? Name a God, they don’t know a weed from a shoot.”

“Yes I do, I knows,” protested Hannah. “He was already plucked. There, I got it planted agin, now—see, it’s growing.”

“Fine chance it’ll have; if not for ye, it’ll be the sheep— it’s a fool’s job trying to grow a green these days—show, what’s that, what’s that you got there?”

“That’s a weed; it got a yellow top—that’s what the weeds are, right—the ones with the yellow top?”

“Show, I can’t see, I can’t see that—pass it here.” Content that it was indeed a weed, Prude tossed it to one side, ordering Hannah onward with the plucking.

And after the old woman laid down the hoe and was sitting for rest besides her beds, Hannah paused in her weeding and asked, “Grammy, what’s a merry-begot?”

The weight of her grandmother’s hand whacking her on the behind jarred her a foot farther along the bed. “You bloody young thing; the dirt! I allows you’ll feel the warmth of my hand on your arse afore your mother gets home on this tarmenting day—sure, ye haven’t got a lick, not a lick of sense—your poor, poor mother; I allows she got her hands full with you, I allows she do. I wonder she don’t take a strip off your hide one of these days.”

No doubt the fates might’ve been more accommodating of Prude’s warning if they weren’t busy bringing about the greater of her prophecies. Four weeks had passed since the discovery of Missy’s pregnancy, four weeks in which Clair had made several trips up the Basin, but was met by a closed door and Missy’s refusal to see her. On this particular morning the wind had risen, a cold easterly, bringing with it an offshore fog that lay low on the sea, touching Hannah’s cheeks with the coolness of mint as she loitered on the beach with some other youngsters and Grammy Prude hollering warnings from the bank. She heard before she saw Harve’s boat as he put ashore to the stagehead, and watched as her mother climbed on top. Despite her knowing that her mother hadn’t been gone long enough to do much more than walk up over the hill and then back down again, Hannah started towards her, hoping for some tidbit of news about her aunt. Her step was deterred, however, by a dark hulk coming through the fog—another fisher from Lower Head, confused by the whiteout, she thought, letting go with the last skiddy rock she held in her hand.

“Mind the rocks, mind the rocks; there’s a boat coming,” Prude cried out, and then let out the yelp of a frightened dog as the boat popped into sight. The war vet, no doubt, his greying hair, uncommonly long and made damp by the fog, hanging in strands across his face, his eyes sunken into his skull and encircled in a misery of red, and his skin as cracked and peeled as the age-old paint blistering the punt he sat in. But it was his coat that gripped Hannah’s and the eyes of all others the way silver grips a crow’s. Made of black leather, thicker than the hide of an old harp seal, and with large silver zippers gashing both sides across the breast and jutting up and down the sleeves, and with patches of fog still clinging to him, he appeared the one flung from the heavens and falling to the shores of Rocky Head on his way to hell.

“Get off the beach, get off the beach!” cried Prude, her voice rising to the pitch of the gulls screaming overhead. And as if wearing the one boot, the crowd of them took a step back as the stranger lifted his oars out of the water, rising before them as his boat drifted to shore.

“Good day to ye,” called he in a rough voice, and as he made to climb out of his boat, the youngsters scattered like flankers shooting out of a blazy bough.

“Clair! Clair—tell he to wait, tell he to wait,” Prude was bawling out, the flesh quivering on her bones as she caught sight of Clair on the stagehead and Harve shoving himself off again.

Too late was her cry and within seconds Harve’s boat was swallowed by the fog, leaving Prude freezing in her tracks as the leather-zipped apparition wheezed, “Is there a Prudence Osmond amongst ye?” Climbing out of his boat, he made his way up over the bank with the drunken gait of a sailor. “My name’s Roland Ouncill, missus,” he huffed, a belly that had heretofore been hidden behind his coat spilling over the waist of his pants as he as leaned over, giving himself a last shove to the top of the bank. Doffing an imaginary hat, he bowed before the old woman’s stricken figure, and never had she been so joyous at the sight of Willamena scurrying towards her, her bread-making bandanna wrapped and knotted around the front of her head, and her eyes narrowing slits as she took in the sight of the stranger.

“Yes, sir?” asked Willamena, the gravity of her voice signalling her own authority.

“Sergeant Roland Ouncill, ma’am,” said the stranger with the same bow towards Willamena.

“That’s Prude you just met,” said Willamena, offering her hand, “and I’m Willamena, from up the Basin—my father, Saul Rice, he used to be the merchant, and this is my girl, Lynn,” she added, as Lynn, as owl-eyed as the rest of the youngsters, came running up and curled an arm around her mother’s waist as a means of propping herself before the stranger.

“It’s a pleasure, ma’am, a pleasure,” said the stranger, shaking the proffered hand. “I was about to tell this fine woman here,” he added, turning towards Prude who was quivering on the brink of flight, “that I come from L’Anse aux Meadows, on the Great Northern—two hours from here as the crow flies, but a fair trip in punt. Took me a while, but I allowed some years ago I was going to make this trip, come meet the folks I heard so much about.” Clearing his throat, he lowered his head towards Prude and spoke in quietude of prayer, “I knowed your boy—Joey.”

“I’ll not hear it,” she wailed, and breaking from her stance, she started running towards Beth, who had appeared at that moment from behind the woodshed, a youngster in hand. “He’s the devil, Betty,” she cried, “he’s the devil; I seen him in my tea, I did, I seen him in my tea.”

“Ohh now, Mother,” cried Beth, staring wide-eyed at the stranger as she wrapped her arms around her mother.

“He says he knowed Joey, but I’ll not hear it, I’ll not hear it. You stay put, too, Clair; you don’t listen to his yarns neither,” the old woman begged as Clair touched her shoulder reassuringly, approaching the stranger.

“Sergeant Roland Ouncill,” said Willamena as the stranger reached for Clair’s hand. “He knowed Joey in the war. I suppose you knowed Job Gale as well, then? Clair’s his daughter. She married Luke, Joey’s brother.”

The smile fell from Sergeant Roland Ouncill’s face, as did the hand holding Clair’s. “Indeed,” said he, wiping it oddly on the side of his pants. “I should’ve seen it right off; you’re his likeness.”

“I suppose you’ll come in for a cup of tea, won’t you?” asked Willamena, brushing Lynn off from heaving another hug around her waist. “The men won’t be home from the woods camp till Friday evening, and Frankie—that’s my husband—he’s the politician for White Bay—should be home by then, too. He’s in Cormack, seeing to business. For sure he’ll want to talk with you once he gets here.”

“You’ll spread no yarns about his doings,” Prude sang out as Willamena started leading the stranger towards her door. “’Twas a dark day he left, and darker ever since. Take yourself home; we’ve no need a strangers here.”

“Sir, she’s always in a thither about something,” said Willamena with a grimace. “I suppose, Clair, you’re coming for tea?”

“I sees to the baby first,” said Clair, breaking off from the group, her eyes upon the stranger as ill at ease as Prude’s.

Hannah dragged her step, watching after the war vet and his mighty coat as he followed Willamena towards her house, and then her mother as she took the baby and was walking with Nora towards home. Whom to follow? The worried look on her mother’s face won, and tearing around the woodpile to the far side of the house, she let herself in through the door and was scooting up behind the stove a full minute before Nora and her mother entered. Laying her head on a pillow, a token from cold days where she sought more precious heat, she closed her eyes, feigning sleep, her ear pinned to the door squeaking shut and Brother fussing.

“For sure Mother’s nervous,” said Nora. “My stomach’s jittery, too—do you think he come to tell us things, Clair— about Joey? Perhaps Mother’s right—perhaps we don’t need to know nothing more. Frankie said he’s a drunk, just wanting our liquor—perhaps we should drive him off like Mother says.”

“He’s probably just wanting to be friendly,” said Clair, the floor creaking as she walked, soothing Brother. “Who knows what he might have to say—” her voice trailed off wearily.

“Would she see you?” asked Nora.

“She won’t even open the door, Nory. And—she never goes outside. Leastways, not during the day.”

“She shouldn’t be cooping herself up like that. The Lord knows she’s not the first young one to fall down. Is she showing much?”

“According to Alma, she is. Lord, the thought of her suffering—”

“She won’t—there’s smaller than her after giving birth— and younger, too. And once the baby’s born, she’ll want to see you—I knows she will.”

“You don’t know her,” whispered Clair. “She’s always been so stubborn. And him—but that’s it,” she added more strongly. “No sense in crying—we’ll just have to wait and see. You go on now, and see to Prude.”

All too quickly her aunt was gone, the door closing behind her, leaving Hannah trapped behind the stove. The rocker groaned, taking her mother’s weight, and a series of snorting and suckling as Brother latched on to the bottle’s nipple. A silence fell, loud and heavy. And she knew without looking that her mother had gone to that place again. She lay there, listening. She’d never felt before the heaviness of this place that her mother sat in, what with Father clumping around, and the baby gurgling or fussing, and the noise she made herself, scampering from room to room, searching for things. She listened now to how her mother never rocked, never made soothing sounds to Brother, never hummed or whispered comforts to herself. Yet, she felt the maelstrom within her; knew it because she felt it herself—this undertow, sucking the silence more heavily around them, the burden of its weight crushing her lungs as she ached to breathe. And a fear grew within her for that place of unrest that sent emotions churning worse than the waters of Chouse, yet it fitted the sickness in her belly somehow, this silence that overlay a house, stifling all but the scattered creak of a rocker and the drone of the outside sea, for was she not sharing in this place of unrest, too, now? Was not the loss of her aunt hers to grieve as well?

Since the first that she could remember, she felt kindred with her mother.

“
FIFTEEN HUNDRED OF US CROSSED OVER
, but it wasn’t till ’41 I met Joey,” said the vet to the few women and older boys allowed inside Willamena’s kitchen that evening. “Part of the 166 Nfld. Regiment, we was then—heavy artillery, defending the mother’s shores. Till the bombing, and that’s when she went to war, b’yes; that’s when she went to war. But we was a long ways from war yet, the 166th was. From heavy artillery to field we went, and for that we was moved to Scotland. Yup, Scotland, sirs, the heart of the world, she is. In all the places I tucked in, it was there we were treated the best. No matter your name, you were a Newfoundlander, and what they knowed of us was what our forefathers showed them during the first great war. And they done us proud, our forefathers did; they done us proud, for wouldn’t nary a door that don’t open to a Newfoundlander in that prized land of Scotland. And the girls—” Raising his face with the bliss of a sleeping infant, he’d slip into more yarns of what sounded more like an excursion around the world than a sojourn into war as he traipsed from kitchen to kitchen, sipping tea with the women. And after he’d warmed them with story, and evening was drawing nigh, he’d stroll out onto the bank, talking more serious talk with the older boys, Roddy and Marty, and coaxing them to build a fire so’s he could sit, watching the sea, he’d say, and mind himself that it was over them waters that he had bathed in blood, and not till the journey back home did he wash himself clean of its stench. “And a little nip, b’yes, if you can find one, for it pains me, it do, to think on that stench—it’s still there,” he’d say, holding out his stubby, callused hands. “Every time I looks, I sees it, staining me flesh. And it’s only when I talks of it do it fade a bit, and I prays the day will come that if I tells it enough times, and if I dreams it enough times, they might start coming clean, b’yes; they might start coming clean.”