Downhill Chance (36 page)

“About whether or not we should have a store?”

“About how to go about starting it. He knows the right people, and he’s offered to put his name on a bill for us—but it was my idea,” she said loudly, “and it’s a damn fine idea. And I would’ve told you, but I thought you’d say no.”

“Yup, and that’s just what I thought,” he said. “Go talk to somebody else because Luke’s scared of change, right? Well, it’s funny you thinks I’m scared of going out and meeting

change, lovey, because that’s what I thinks about you—”

“Me!”

“Yup, you. All the time sitting and waiting, sitting and waiting. I heard you say it once,” he said as she stared at him in sheer astonishment, “about how you was always waiting for either your father to come home or your mother to get better. And now it’s Missy you’re waiting for—for her to come to you. And barring that, for the uncle to die, and then you thinks you can go right in there and scoop her up. But I expects it’s more than a road or a dead uncle that’s going to bring Missy to where you wants her. It’s a nasty thing to sit and wait on life, lovey, when all the time it’s flowing right past where you’re sitting.”

“You dare talk to me about going out to meet life,” she said in a near whisper, “when you’ve been up the shore once since the day of a shooting accident thirteen years ago.”

He stared at her for a second. Then, “You spends too much time thinking in fear, lovey; you’re starting to see it everywhere you looks.” And as if he’d turned to stone, he remained staring at the spot she’d been standing whilst she snatched her sweater off the rocker and walked out the door.

Too late she heard her father treading towards her. Scooping her into the curve of his arm, he trudged tiredly up over the stairs, lugging her into her room and tossing her onto her bed. “And mind you says your prayers,” he warned, turning back into the hall and down over the stairs again.

Springing onto her knees, she pushed her face against the window, staring out into the darkening evening. Her mother was standing in the shadow near their woodpile, looking down on the old war vet as he sat, legs splayed out in front of him, besides a fire, guffawing loudly and passing around the brew jug to Marty, Roddy and some others from Lower Head. Her uncle Nate was out there as well, she saw, along with her uncle Calve. Shoving open the window, she leaned out through, shivering as a shaft of night air washed over her face.

“You can’t think cold on a desert, b’yes, no sirree, you can’t think cold on a desert. And I allows every Newfoundlander there suffered more in that whore’s oven than he did lying in mud, dodging bullets. Eight months we was in Africa, eight months of swapping flies and spitting out sand and sweating. Be God, we cursed the night we crossed over them seas, swinging in hammocks.”

A movement near the woodpile, and her mother had vanished. Hearing nothing more from the old vet but yarns about Italy and Cassino and some monk’s place on a mountaintop, she pulled down the window, lying back on her bed. A gust of wind rattled the pane, and her stomach tightened again as she thought of her mother out in the night, wearing only her sweater. She lay there for what felt like a long time, refusing the blanket. Later, when she heard the door open, she shed her clothes and then covered herself, pretending to be asleep when her mother came up over the stairs with Brother in her arms. Scarcely opening her eyes, she watched as her mother paused at doorway, looking in on her. And for the first time that she could think, she wanted her to come and tuck her in as she sometimes did on real cold nights. She didn’t. Instead, she turned into her own room. The sound of her father’s accordion took up from out on the stoop. Rolling onto her back, she lay awake till long after the old vet’s yarns and the crackling of their fire had dulled, listening to her father playing out his song to the quiet of the patch.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

T
HE NEXT MORNING HER FATHER WAS UP
and gone to Salt Water Pond on an overnight hunting trip, and her mother too might just as well be gone, given her scarcity of attention as she wandered about the house, attending to the baby and her cleaning. A quiet followed his return, a quiet that served them well as they took care not to be caught alone with each other, Clair going to bed before Luke, and Luke spending most of his time out by the woodpile, sitting on the sandstone, filing down the blade on an old bucksaw rusted by the winter’s snow. But it was a quiet that did little to mask Luke’s unease, or the sense of urgency aggravating Clair’s movements. And while it was her father Hannah traipsed behind the most, it was her mother that her eyes continuously sought, knowing with a child’s heart that it was within her that past deeds were now colliding, and as with those things that catches up with you from the inside, there is no uncle to slew one’s eyes upon, no sick mother or dying father, or burrowing-eyed store clerks, only the self, and those innocents who may be wise enough to remain at bay, yet are caught like suns in a field of gravity.

Her mother’s turmoil grew after Luke left for another two weeks in the camps and she stood at the window, watching the old vet wander off down Lower Head, abandoning the beach to the youngsters and the gulls. Hannah took to the hills, rambling old paths and despairing that she’d ever see her aunt again, except as a mother, which brought about as much comfort as the sourness of Brother’s spit as she tried to rock him to sleep one evening, and her mother stood washing dishes at the bin. It was turning into September, and light was fading early. Striking a match, her mother lit the lamp, turning the wick high and wiping at the baby’s mouth with the corner of her handkerchief.

“I’m sending you up with Missy for a couple of days,” she said, lifting him out of her arms, “before school starts.”

Hannah simply gawked. “To sleep?”

“I heard from Willamena that Sim has to go in the country for a few days. She’ll be glad for the company. Frankie’s going up tomorrow—he’ll take you. You want to go, don’t you?”

Hannah nodded forcefully, the joy she’d normally feel at a time like this tethered to the paleness of her mother’s hand as she caressed Brother’s bottom. But the first rays of the morning sun dispersed the gloom of the past weeks, and licking the butter off her fingers and dragging the comb through her hair, she bounced across the kitchen with her usual quickness at the sound of Frankie’s voice, even stopping on her way out the door to smack a kiss atop of Brother’s head as he gurgled in his crib. Her mother followed behind with a carrying bag packed with a few garments of clothes and an offering of wild strawberry jam—Missy’s favourite—tucked in besides them. Miss Tattle-Tale, Blabbermouth, Forever Running to Her Mother with Lies Lynn skipped onto the bank, a bag of her own tucked beneath her arm, and her bangs plastered wet across her forehead. She scowled at Hannah and Hannah scowled back, but then Frankie was hoisting them aboard the boat, and Hannah sprawled flat-belly across the cuddy, leaning over the bow, her insides seized with excitement. Lynn flattened out besides her as Frankie shoved off the boat, and the fact that Lynn was a tattletale blabber fell into the backwater like yesterday’s rain. And that Hannah had bloodied her head once with a sharp-edged rock, and she’d bloodied Hannah’s twice in return became part of the sea, buoying them from shore. The putt-putt of the piston cracked through the air, and with the morning sun warming their backs, and the sea wind spraying their faces, and the vibrations of the motor reverberating through their bellies, and their throats bleating “M-i-i-l-l-e-e-r-r-s-s—-I-s-s-l-l-aa-n-n-d” as they motored passed the tombstone with the mother and her little girl buried side by side, they were best friends forever. And upon arriving at the Basin and Frankie boosting them up on the wharf, and Lynn’s cousin come running down over the hill to greet her, the lambs became two long-horned rams, heads down and ready to butt as one sallied forth towards an aging old merchant with boxes of candy still hidden in his cupboards, and the other towards the enchanting sweet of a fairy-like aunt.

Johnnie’s wife, Rose, and others called out to Frankie from their doorways as he walked along behind Hannah, carrying her bag, and he’d slow his step, commenting on the road coming through the following week, and the wood trucks along with it, to start trucking wood from the boons to the pulp and paper mill in Corner Brook. Hannah skipped ahead impatiently, hearing none of their greetings, except when Alma stepped off the post office steps, blocking her path.

“She’s letting you stay this time, is she?” she asked, glancing at the bag Frankie was toting behind her.

“Till Sim gets back, day after tomorrow,” said Frankie. “Is Les going in the woods with him?”

“He got to—to get his stuff from the camp. They says whatever’s not took is going to be ploughed over. I says it’d be some road, sir, if they ploughed over my new saw.”

“They had their time—is he taking his horse?”

“He got to—all the stuff they got to bring back. And he said he was going to take apart the camp and haul some of the wood closer to Rushie Pond. That’s good wood they got there in that camp.”

“A day’s work, for sure,” said Frankie.

“I allows Sim’ll have a fit, seeing Clair’s maid back agin— he’s frightened to death, he is, Clair’s going to come and take Missy from him. Do he know you’re coming?” she asked Hannah, but Hannah was already running off, leaving Frankie to satisfy Alma’s curiosity.

Coming upon the house, she ducked through the gate and down the path. The bluebells stood merry, their heads nodding in the breeze, but the fairy ring was grossly overgrown, and no dead flowers in sight. And too, the kitchen window was curtained. Her step lagged, as did her spirits, before this maimed frontage, returning to the gloom of her last visit. Taking hold of the door handle, she quietly opened it and stepped inside, a hush falling on her ears as when stepping through the doors of a church already in service. It was as if she had never left, as if the clock hanging resolute upon the kitchen wall were withholding time. And her footstep was no release for its pendulum, for the uncle never so much as laid down his pipe and rose from his seat as Frankie pushed open the door to his own knock and followed her inside.

“Is she come for her agin?” he asked contrarily, his eyes falling onto the bag beneath Frankie’s arm.

“Mommy said I can stay the night,” said Hannah, glancing around eagerly for her aunt as Frankie laid her bag on the table.

“It’s Hannah she’ll be coming for,” said Frankie, “day after tomorrow. She thought it’d be good for Missy to have some company the next few days you’re in the country.”

“Missy’s not wanting company,” said the uncle, coming forward in his chair. “She’s resting in her room.”

“Ahh, she ought to be getting out more,” said Frankie, “and perhaps she will now, with Hannah here. What time in the morning are you leaving?”

Unhearing of the uncle’s response, Hannah darted into the stairwell, feeling his eyes snapping at her heels as she ran up over the stairs. The door to her aunt’s room opened as she bolted across the landing, stopping her dead upon sight of the lithe, slender body that had twirled and bent like a willow in the wind now all bloated and fat inside a hideous dark dress, and looking as dejected as a sawed-off stump as it half hid behind the door, looking out at Hannah. But it was her aunt’s face that stunned Hannah; her hair, all dulled from lack of sun, was tightly drawn back into a ponytail that consumed the gentleness of her features, producing a tautness that snapped the second she opened her mouth to speak.

“You can’t stay, Hannah!”

“Mommy said I could—”

“She got no right to say you could. Now, listen to me,” she said, taking hold of Hannah’s arm as her mouth began to pucker, and pulling her inside the room. “I’m not well—you can see—and I can’t be playing with you.”

“Mommy said we could just walk—”

“No, we can’t.”

“But Mommy said!”

“Mommy!” Missy twirled on her heel like the young sapling again. “She thinks she can just send you—well, she can’t. And you’ve got to go. Now. And don’t go crying about it, either—it’s no good crying.”

Hannah shook her head, staring at the dark encircling her aunt’s eyes and wanting to touch it, to wipe it from her skin. Her aunt turned from her, wringing her hands and pacing the room worse than her mother the past few weeks.

“Listen to me, Hannie,” Missy whispered. “I needs to be alone for the next day or so. Come back after if you like— but not now; you can’t stay now. Don’t be mad, all right? Just give me a couple of days and then I’ll be much better and you can stay.” She peered into Hannah’s eyes, the crystalline blue of hers all clouded and dark as she attempted a smile. “You’ll see,” she whispered, “everything will be fine soon. But right now, you got to go home. Will you go home like I asks you, and come back next week?”

Hannah dropped her eyes from her aunt’s begging.

“You’re such a good girl,” said Missy with relief. “And when you come back, I got something to show you—a place, a secret place—and it’s all mine,” she whispered, hugging Hannah to her side, walking her to the door. “I goes there by myself when it’s dark; that way nobody can see me and talk about me looking the way I am—big mouths, all of them, always gawking and talking. Promise you won’t tell anybody, now,” she coaxed, stopping at the room door. “You promise?”

Hannah nodded and Missy gave her a quick hug, dropping a kiss on her nose. “That’s a good girl. Better hurry, then—catch Frankie before he leaves. Go, hurry, and next week you’ll be back.”

One step, two steps across the landing. “Go,” Missy urged. “Hurry, now.” One step down, two—and as might a sleepwalker awaking on the edge of a cliff, Hannah suddenly stopped, and throwing back her head she cut loose with a wail that sent the uncle’s chair scrooping across the kitchen floor, and her aunt swooping across the landing and down over the stairs behind her.

“What’s wrong with her?” bawled out the uncle, thumping into the stairwell.

“Nothing, shhh, Hannie, shhh, ooh,” cried Missy, leading her back up the stairs. “She’s fine, she’s fine,” she called down to the uncle.