Downhill Chance (5 page)

CHAPTER ONE

C
ROUCHING BESIDES HIM CLAIR WATCHED
as her father, Job, pricked the tip of his knife through the hide of a young caribou, then drew it slow and easy across its belly, the hide singing back, and the blood spilling warm over his hands, staining scarlet onto the snow. Laying the knife to one side, he slid his hands inside the warmth of the carcass and pulled out the liver, pulsating purple in the afternoon sun, and threw it quivering upon a rock.

“Don’t drop it,” he cautioned as she lifted the flesh, still trembling in her hands, and ran to the cabin door, trailing a bloodied path behind her.

“Wait, Clair; wait right there,” her mother called out and, snatching a frying pan off the stove, met her at the door.

That evening, at supper, Clair turned to her sister, Missy, a good six years younger than she, and said, “Mmm, tastes like berries.”

“No it don’t—do it, Mommy?” protested Missy.

“Yup; squashberries, partridgeberries, raspberries—all chomped together—like eating summer,” said Clair.

“Mommeee—” “

Pass me the meat, Sare, I haves a bite of winter,” said Job, long and gangly, his oversized features sombre as he pulled into the table besides them.

“Landsakes, you’re going to drive her foolish, the both of you,” said Sare over Missy’s rising protests, the lamplight colouring their faces like apricots as she sat at the table with them. “Here, come sit besides me, my dolly. I cuts up your meat.” She fussed as Missy knelt upon the bench besides her, her face haloed with curls. “Sure, no wonder she’s always prattling about fairies when all she hears is her father and sister telling lies.”

“Lies?” gasped Job, eyes popping. “I’ve never told a lie in me life.”

“The banshees will take you,” Missy warned, “and you won’t even know it because it’s winter and there’s no bluebells to ring that they’re coming.”

“There, you’ve got her going agin,” admonished Sare. “Eat your supper, child. You’re smaller than the fairies tickling your dreams. You too, Clair, and never mind your father’s foolishness.”

Clair grinned as her father forked a piece of meat and pork scrunchions into his mouth and chomped down hard, his eyes widening with innocence as he turned them upon her. She didn’t know it then, supping back on a strip of fried onion and kicking his leg underneath the table, that winter, as she knew it, would never come again. Thus it was with the same comfort as yesterday that she scrabbled out the door that evening, dragging a piece of canvas up over the hill behind her mother, and sliding back down with Missy, her mother and father taking the lead, their shrieks echoing through the crisp night air, and the snow stinging the red of their cheeks.

It was what they did most evenings here in Cat Arm, their winter isolate till the ice broke, and their father, finished with his yearly logging, took them back up the bay to their home in the Basin. “Enough,” groaned Sare, part-ways up the hill for the third time, dragging Missy besides her.

“Come on, come on, me b’yes, downhill chance, downhill chance,” bellowed Job, walloping them on the behind much as he’d do with his old bone-wearied horse, Pearl, as he coaxed her, straining and snorting uphill, dragging a load of logs. “That’s the way,” he said heartily as they managed the top and fell to their knees. “Chance to catch your breath on the way down—come on,” he ordered, directing them to fall in line behind him as he plopped down on his piece of canvas. And leading the way, he swooshed back down the hill, digging his heels into the snow so’s to send it drifting back in their faces.

“Mercy,” pleaded Sare as they landed in a pile at the bottom of the hill, and flopping back onto the snow, they stared up at the star-littered sky, listening as Job whistled shrilly up to the heavens, commanding the northern lights to dance.

“There they go, do you see them, Missy? See them, Clair? They’re dancing. Smile big—show your teeth, for he’s seeing us now, all lit up with his lights, and you wouldn’t want him catching you scowling, else he’ll think you’re not proud of the little small corner he’s given we.”

“The foolishness of him,” tutted Sare.

“Foolishness! You think this is foolishness!” exclaimed Job, expanding his arms as if to embrace the snow-blanketed evergreens, glowing white in the moonlight, and coating the hills that steepled two thousand feet above them. “Out of the garden with you, Mother—go on, out you go—that’s right, on your belly,” he roared, buffing the powdery fine snow off his mitts onto her upturned face. Squealing with laughter, she shielded her face behind her scarf and crawled towards the cabin.

After cocoa and crackers, and with her father puffing on his pipe by the stove, her mother gathered her and Missy around her lap as she always did before bedtime, and read to them from the Bible, showing them pictures of archangels standing over dreaming men, while thundering clouds gathered grey in the sky behind, and a tunnel of golden light led the pathway to heaven. The reading done, she bade them to her knees and listened as they said their prayers out loud. “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep; God bless Mommy, Daddy, Sissy and all the starving children in the world, and the red men who died in the Congo.” Then, with only the crackling of the fire and the creaking of the cabin beneath its snow-banked roof to hinder them, they recited the Lord’s Prayer in silence.

Clair would speed through hers: “Ourfather whoartinheaven hallowedbethyname thy kingdomcome, thywillbedoneonearth asitisinheaven …” Once, she was awake when her father went to bed and she listened as he got to his knees and said his out loud: “Ooouurrr faatherr, wwhhhooo aarrrttt iinn hheavven” he whispered, so slow, so beautifully slow that each syllable was registered and words that she hadn’t known were in there became isolated from their stream and took on meaning—or changed their meaning, like “lead-us-not-into-temptation” and not “leadusnot” as she’d always prayed. And all this time she had wondered why “snot” was in the Lord’s Prayer.

It was when she lay in bed, muffled beneath a mountain of blankets, that she said her most important prayer, as if those spoken at her mother’s knee were destined to go no further than the cabin door: “Dear God, please bring me a dolly, a real dolly.” She would squeeze her eyes shut, bringing the darkness tight around her and feel her soul craving for the quiet of her mind as she concentrated on the curly yellow hair fluffing over the shoulders of the green lacy dress of her friend Joanie Reid’s doll, and the marble blue eyes that slept when you tilted her back, and the little plastic hands that had crook marks across her fingers, just like her own. And when finally she drifted into sleep, she’d take with her the murmur of her father’s voice as he’d assure her mother that all was well, and stoke up the fire in the stove for one last burst of warmth before he huddled besides the small wooden boxed radio, the volume low so’s not to awaken them as he listened to the news about a place called Warsaw and a man called Winston Churchill. Then, the radio off and the battery removed so’s it wouldn’t ground out, he’d crawl into the bottom bunk with her mother, and tuck in for the night.

It was a week later, the night before they were to leave Cat Arm for their home up the Basin, that Missy had the dream. Awakening them all with her screams, she tumbled out of the top bunk onto the floor, frightening Clair that she’d broken her neck. Scrabbling to light the wick in the lamp, Job hurried back to where Sare sat on the floor, holding the now sobbing child in her arms.

“I had a dream, M-mommy!”

“Hush now child, and so you did,” Sare soothed.

“The bluebells were ringing—”

“Ohh, now, it’s only a dream—”

“And you were bleeding, Daddy, and there was spiders crawling out of your mouth.”

“Precious Lord,” Sare cried out.

“There now,” said Job, bending besides Sare and stroking Missy’s hair. “I’m not bleeding, see? And there’s no spiders in the wintertime.”

“You were lying in the m-mud, Daddy—and there was spiders.”

“Shhh, how can something so young have such a dream?” Sare demanded almost angrily. “Go back to sleep, angel. Can Daddy get you some milk? Bank up the stove, Father, and heat her some milk with a bit of water. Do you want to climb in besides Clair again? There you go, back with your sister. This time get on the inside so’s you don’t fall out agin. Are you O.K., my angel?”

Clair wrapped her arms around Missy’s trembling body as her mother passed her over and gently rocked her. By the time the milk was heated, Missy had gone back to sleep.

By morning Missy had forgotten the dream. Clair awakened to her shrieks as she ran tither beneath a clear, blue sky and a sun that shone loud on the white of the pan ice that dotted the face of the sea. Her mother was packing up the kitchen as her father loaded up the boat, and wolfing down the last of her pickled herring, Clair bolted out the door and up top of the hill, calling out goodbyes to the trees and the hills, and the stars that came out at night, and the northern lights now hiding from the sun. Her mother called out to her from the cabin doorway, ushering her onto the beach along with Missy and her father waiting besides the boat. When finally she was sitting on the short wooden bench spanning the belly of the boat, and her mother and Missy were fixed away behind her, her father leaned his shoulder to the bow, inching them off from shore, and leapt aboard a split second before the boat began bobbing out to sea.

Clair clenched her fists as the boat rocked beneath her father’s weight, and stared down into the ever deepening water. Then the put-put of the piston blasted through the air, reverberating through the wooden bottom of the boat and up her legs and back, seizing her with excitement as they cut across the bumpy waters of the arm like a skidding rock. She looked back at her father, standing steady besides the motor, arms akimbo and his eyes squinting past the blinding white of the pan ice. He grinned down at her and she relaxed her grip, turning back to face the wind and the cool pinpricks of salty sea spray dotting her cheeks and stinging her eyes.

Leading out of the arm, they headed onto the heaving waters of the bay, a mile wide and forty miles long, the hills rising from grey rocky shores on either side, and hundreds more pieces of pan ice drifting towards them. Squinting as far ahead as the eye could see, Clair started to hum “aaaaaaaaaa,” an effortless sound that started low in her throat, and broken by the vibrations of the boat, bleated through her mouth like the cry of a lamb. Big Island, a tree-covered gorge of rock in the middle of the bay, loomed before them, then fell to the wayside, bringing into sight Chouse Brook, whose name belies that river churning down the eastern hillside and spilling into the sea. Gold Cove appeared on the western side, thus named because of the goldenrod that ran rampant over its meadows in late summer, and then just ahead, Rocky Head, a small outport whose people were thought to be more than a little dull in thought, and whose youngsters were reported to be as brazen as a moulting goose.

It was the quiet that first struck Clair. The spew of youngsters that usually combed the beach, singing or whistling as they fished for tom cods off the stagehead, and fired rocks at all passing boats whilst ducking amongst the outhouses and woodpiles that lined the shore, were nowhere to be seen. And without the disruption of faces peering around their curtains the six or eight houses that lined the shore, their clapboard weathered a metallic grey and their windows glazed by the sun, looked to Clair like gladiator shields, this morning, protecting all therein from the lashings heaved upon them from the wind and sea. Only the winds were kind this day, and the sun an outside lure.

“Must be someone dead,” Sare called over her shoulder to Job.

“Must be,” said Job, steering them back towards the middle of the bay to get away from a clutter of pan ice floating towards them. But not before a stirring of shadow somewhere near shore caught Clair’s attention, and scanning beneath a stagehead that stood out over the water on rickety legs, she glimpsed in its lee, and scarcely discernable from its shade, a fat, heavy-breasted old woman, her dress flapping around her stockinged legs from the wind, and her arms folded across her breasts. She turned from her scrutiny up towards the Basin, ducking farther back into the shade as their boat passed by, and if not for the white of her tightly wound braids showing through the dark, Clair might have questioned if, indeed, she had actually seen an old woman, or had witnessed, instead, the disembodied spirit of some long-lost fisher’s wife.

The boat struck against a chunk of ice, startling Clair’s attention away from shore and back to the rocking boat.

“Sit back down,” Job warned as Sare half rose in fright.

“Lord, don’t drown us, Father,” Sare called out over the droning of the motor, “else there’ll be no supper for you this night.”

“There’s a fate,” her father chuckled, steering them clear of the ice and farther out to bay. “No rations for a dead man.”

“I’m scared,” sang out Missy.

“What’s to be scared of, child?” said Sare. “See? There’s Miller’s Island, and just beyond is the Basin. Sure, you can almost see our house from here.”

“Can I see the gravestone?” asked Missy.

“Soon, now; here, stand up a bit—my, she never grow’d an inch all winter—see over there?”

Steadying herself on her seat, Clair glanced towards Miller’s Island with Missy, her eyes fastening on a granite headstone, a little ways in from the shore, and imprisoned between two full-grown fir trees.

“Tell me about the little girl, Clair,” said Missy, leaning against her sister’s back and wrapping her arms tightly around her neck.

“I keeps telling you.”

“Tell me agin.”

“A mommy and her baby girl, buried side by side,” said Clair impatiently.

“In the same grave?”

“In the same grave.”

“And the girl died first—because she was thirsty?”

“Because her body was parched from the fever.”

“It was tiefie?”

“Typhoid.”

“Her body couldn’t hold water.”

“She kept throwing it up. And her mother, too. And lots of others. And they brought them out to the island to bury them, so’s to carry the sickness away from the land.”