Downhill Chance (7 page)

“Daddy!” Clair ran after him and stood on the roadside, watching, as he marched down the road towards where the boat was waiting at the wharf. The wind brought his tobacco smell back to her and she curled her toes in her boots, clenching her fists by her side, wanting to run after him, but caution overtook her and she turned instead to the windows all around her. There were no faces, but she felt them watching; watching after him as he walked to war whilst they hid behind their wives, and the tuckamores in on the downs. She felt a burst of pride then, as she watched after his wide, strong back. And it looked as if he must have felt her onward nudge, for his step picked up and he started swinging his arms as if he were already a soldier, a daddy soldier who could never hurt anybody, and who could never be hurt, for after all, hadn’t he prayed the Lord’s Prayer every night, with all the words slowly spoken and their meanings soft and clear? Squeezing her eyes shut, she lifted her face towards heaven and promised never again to pray for a doll with fluffy yellow hair and blue marble eyes that slept upon tilting, only for all wars to end.

Her mother’s wailing sounded through the doorway, and taking a last, longing look after her father’s back, she ran back through the gate and inside the house. Sare was running down over the stairs, her cries taking up with Missy’s.

“Your father’s gone, child,” she cried, running to the window. “He’s gone, he’s gone, damn him, damn him!” and collapsing onto a chair, she dropped her head into her hands and sobbed freely.

Clair struggled to move, to run to her mother, but her feet were rooted, her eyes fixed on her younger sister, crumpled onto the floor, her fluffy yellow hair sticking to the wetness of her tears, and her blue marble eyes half closed as she tilted back her head, sobbing, “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy!”

“Hush, hush, you dreamed it, Missy,” cried Sare. “And now he’s gone, he’s gone.”

“Clair,” wailed Missy, holding up her arms, and Clair held back from the little hands reaching up for her, almost afraid to look for the crook marks across the fingers that would bind Missy to the doll in her prayers. And that night, the first since Missy had been weaned from her mother’s breast and placed in her older sister’s bed, Clair lay apart. And later, when Missy started thrashing and moaning in her sleep, Claire awakened and refused at first to touch her sister. Missy’s moaning grew louder, and chiding herself for being foolish, and not wanting to awaken her mother, Clair finally reached over, jiggling her awake.

“The little girl, the little girl,” cried Missy.

“Shh, you’ll wake Mommy.”

“She’s not dead, Clair. The banshees took her—”

“Hush, now, Missy—”

“No, I s-saw them,” sobbed Missy. “It was a changeling they buried. The banshees put it there. And the little girl’s not dead. She’s living with the fairies, Clair. She never h-heard the bluebells ringing.”

“That’s nice, Missy, that’s nice. The fairies made everything nice. Shh, now, you’ll wake Mommy.”

“Is Daddy coming back?”

“Shh, he’s coming back. Now, go to sleep.” And minding her father’s words, she laid her cheek against the damp of Missy’s, rocking her.

CHAPTER TWO

A
NY SIGN OF WILLAMENA?”
called out the merchant Saul one sunless September afternoon as Clair qualled to the lee of the store, watching the great belly of the sea rise and fall with the wind.

She crouched lower now, enclosed from view behind a stack of lobster pots, idly listening as the merchant grumbled noisily about his daughter’s laziness to a couple of loggers just tying up by the wharf. It was how she mostly liked it since her father left the past five months; qualled away by herself, somewheres, so’s not to hear their gossiping tongues. Indeed, those first few weeks it was as if he were being waked the way everyone crowded into her mother’s kitchen, bestowing upon her every move the same subdued excitement one rendered the freshly bereaved. No doubt her best friends, Phoebe and Joanie, and the others hers and Missy’s age were quick to move on; the lure of the sunfish that ran aground on the beach or the bright pink of Joanie’s new skipping rope quickly taking over from any intrigue found in her mother’s kitchen. Not so were the elders as quick to stray. And their talk was unkind—as was warranting any man confronting self-sustaining, brave-hearted mortals with the limitations of their own courage. And no fear of boredom, for with each new nuance that got spun on the spot, the grey shrouding Job’s enlistment had taken on the vibrance of Joseph’s coat, with each tuck of the sleeve or turn of the collar reflecting the whims of its fashion-conscious narrators.

Clair startled—her attention snagged by Saul’s latest recount of the war.

“Twenty miles wide across the sky they said the bombers was stretched out, and forty miles long, sir,” he called out. “There’s not much of London left standing after that.”

London. Bombed. Clair whipped her head around the lobster pots, staring out at the merchant. Her father’s letters had assured them that England would never be attacked, that there were too many of them guarding her shores for such a thing to happen, and that the most he and Joey had to do was dig holes, march and stand guard, and that he’d soon be coming home, and wasn’t it good that he’d signed on as a soldier after all and was able to stand besides Joey and the others and stave off attack on the mother’s shores?

“Be the lamplighting geezes, I wouldn’t want to be sitting under that cloud, buddy, when they was droning overhead, dropping bombs,” said Johnnie Regular, his tone thinner than his wiry frame as he hunkered down by a grunt, pulling out his tobacco pouch. “Another telegram come, did it?”

“Not yet today—I managed to get a bit of radio this morning,” said Saul, burying his hands inside his new sealskin coat as he strolled from his stoop towards the loggers, who were all three sitting or squat by the edge of the wharf now, rolling tobacco. “She come as a surprise to me. From what they been saying, I figured the only fighting our boys would be doing would be over a poker game.”

“Yup, sir, I wonders about Job,” said Johnnie. “I allows we’ll have something on our hands if anything happens to him—Sim says Sare’s too sick to get out of bed most days.”

“Fool, he is, to go over there,” blustered the second logger, Ralph Blanchard, his thickened features raw with the wind. “Hard enough to stay alive on our own shores with things the way they is—let alone going the frig over to foreign shores and offering yourself up to be shot at.”

“Yup, it’s a strange thing, war,” drawled Crowman, called so for his thatch of black hair and hawk-like nose, and known for his moseying over thought. “Some says we’re all at war, that we signs up every time we goes in over the barrens and gets caught in a snowstorm with nary a tree or the sun to guide us out—or out on the water getting squat by pan ice in a fog. They’re getting enough meat, are they?”

“Sim’s seeing to that,” said Johnnie. “Leastways he is for now. Willamena said she was talking to him the other day; sounds like he got a lot on his plate with taking care of Sare and his mother crippled up, and the both of them calling on him night and day.”

“That’s not true,” Clair protested silently, but held her tongue, listening as Saul commended the loggers for having the sense to stay at home.

“For ye’re good family men and here’s where ye ought to be—taking care of your own—not over there, getting killed in somebody else’s dirty business. And it’s not just we that opt to stay home in this one, for none of the Americans went, either. Let the ones who wants to fight go ahead and fight, I say, and leave them that don’t out of it because them ones over the seas, they’re forever meddling and fighting with their own kind, and you’d think after how tired and broke they all is with the big one just over, they’d be sick of it by now; yes, sir, sick of it—how much blood can the soil hold? There she is, then,” he added abruptly, the grey of his eyes as barren as the pelt on his back as he caught sight of Willamena, heavily bundled against the driving cold, striding down over the hill towards them. “I’ll be off. Good day to ye, b’yes, and thank the Lord for the warmth of your fires when ye goes home this evening.”

Clair half rose, wanting to leap from her roosting place and follow after him, but despite the quivering in her stomach to get up over the hill and into the post office and hear further news of London, she was willing the extra five-minute wait so’s to avoid Willamena’s tart tongue—even more acidic now since the reading competition.

“Yup, for sure now it’s we he thinks about,” Johnnie Regular was muttering, raising a brow after Saul’s back as he walked away. “Right sick with worry, he is; I allows he’ll knock a month’s grub off our credit after this, what you say, Crow?”

“A man’s got to pay for his fancy furs somehow, I suppose,” said Crowman. “Hey, Ralph, boy. And I dare say you’ll be looking pretty enough in furs too, you gets made foreman someday.”

“Be the frig, I’m a thief too now, is I?” said Ralph.

“Yup, that’s what you’ll be when you gets made foreman, buddy—a thief,” quipped Johnnie. “I says you’re looking right good, my son—first a coward, now a thief.”

“Coward!” muttered Ralph, flicking his butt over the wharf.

“Heh, that’s what the soldier was calling ye, then,” said Willamena, her shrewish eyes darting to the men as she bustled up to the store door. “Cowards, hiding behind the women’s skirts.”

“Be geezes, I’d like to been there, brother, when he was calling me a coward,” blustered Ralph. “I would’ve told him a thing or two about cowards. As far as I’m concerned all them that puts on a uniform is the cowards—too frigging lazy to get off their arse and go in the woods and hunt a bit of meat for their wife and youngsters—they leaves it to we to do it for them. Well, they can call me what they wants, brother, but as far as I’m concerned, Job Gale’s the frigging coward, deserting them that needs him the most.”

One of the lobster pots crashed to one side as Clair rose and walked straight-backed across the wharf. “What knows ye about courage,” she bit back from saucing the fishers, “when ye’ve never left the soil ye were born on?” She wanted to hiss at Willamena, “Strife-breeder! Always spreading yarns.”

But pride stilled her tongue. And aside from a tsk-tsk sounding from Willamena, silence followed her wake. It was as her mother said—they were the roots of their own souls, and the likes of Willamena and Ralph would strangle themselves some day with their twisting, misshapen tongues. Time would show who was the coward. And what of this uncle who would blaspheme the soil of his brother’s stoop for their worthless praise? Hadn’t she heard her father call him a bastard once when she oughtn’t to have been listening?

Coming upon the post office, she ran up to the door, poking her head inside. Alma, the postmistress, was sitting with her back to her, raising her hand for silence as she rapidly jotted down the message tapping its way through the telegraph. Spotting the great big book that looked like a Bible, lying opened on top of the counter, Clair anxiously crept forward, reading from the position of the last person who had read the entry. It was today’s—about the bombing:

The feeling and reaction of the ordinary citizen is a mixture of fortitude, valour, anger, and some fear. Casualties are heavy, but Londoners are carrying on despite the hell being thrown upon them. Children are being evacuated, and thousands are cleaning up the city, putting out fires and continuing business as usual and showing they are able to stand proud. But concerns rise as the German war machine turns its attention to the rest of Europe …

“Here, you knows your mother don’t want you reading this stuff,” said Alma as the tapping stopped. Shoving herself heavily to her feet, she pulled the book to one side, staring disapprovingly at Clair. “And tell her there’s no mail today. Go on now,” she ordered kindly, her glasses slipping down the broad bridge of her nose as she reached for her nib pen and ink bottle.

Clair trailed towards the door, staring back over her shoulder as Alma sat herself back down, dipping her pen into the ink and copying the message into the big book. Another warning look from Alma over the rim of her glasses, and Clair pushed out through the door, trailing the rest of the ways up the road. Just as well her mother didn’t allow for the news, she thought, for despite the anger quickening her step earlier, the closer she got to home, the heavier became a weight that had been slowly settling itself around her shoulders. There was a bitter truth to Willamena’s words. Since the day her father left, her mother had given over to a sullenness that was becoming more and more so each day she awakened and Job wasn’t lying besides her. It felt to Clair as if the sun had been sucked out of her world, leaving only the dark—a cold, miserable dark that covered her mother’s tears every night and bared her swollen face each morning upon arising. And even Missy, who’d already retrieved her step since their father’s leaving, and who was wearing once again the sun’s rays within her sheen of curls, appeared dulled to Clair, shadowed by the want of a prayer she feared God had already tallied.

Her mother was sitting in the kitchen window as Clair neared their gate, staring out over the muddied flower bed beneath the kitchen window where Job had planted a bed of sweet williams, already in bloom, the day they had moved into the house. “It’s your morning gift, Mother,” he had said that morning as they lingered over breakfast, laughing and chatting over molassy bread and tea, and savouring the fruity sweet scent of the blooms that wafted through the window.

“And kind you are to be always thinking of me, Father,” her mother gaily replied.

“Aye, it’s to keep you thinking of flowers when you’re scrubbing me dirty socks and soaking the skid marks off me underwear,” replied he.

“As if scent could do away with such a thing,” she scoffed. “Now, seal blubber might do the trick.”

“Well, well,” sighed Job, “and here I was thinking how nice the flowers smelled, when it’s a seal’s carcass I ought to have dragged to your window.”

“For goodness’ sake, Job, is the stink of your dirty socks worse to you than the stink of a rotting seal’s carcass?”