Saltwater Cowboys (3 page)

Why didn't he tell me? How long has he known?

The anger in her heart rose and settled just as quickly. She knew she'd have to take charge. She went to the window. Outside her two daughters stomped in puddles the colour of milky tea. She thought of Susie across the lane, drinking sugar in her milk bottle.

Susie won't have a tooth in her head if she drinks any more sugar in her milk. I won't let that happen to my children. How could a father let his children starve if there are jobs on the mainland? How hard can it be to leave home? I won't let Jack do that to me, no matter how earnestly he clings to this old rock. He's as soft as a snail inside that barnacle of a battered hard. But the strength of the grip he's got on home, I never heard tell of a man so sentimental before. But I'll crack him. I've got to. Someone's got to speak sense in this family
. She sighed heavily.

The front door opened and a biting gust of cool air rushed in like the smack of a wave from the ocean.

Jack entered the living room, his hair awry, muck on the cuffs of his jeans, a smear of dirt on his collar, his mouth tight. He lowered his head and walked straight to the window.

“There's nothing like rain. Sometimes that's all you need, a bit of fresh air and clean water, nothing fancy, just the simple things.”

“I know what's going on.”

“Look at those clouds, moving so quickly across the sky, heading west.”

“What are we going to do now?”

He stared out the window and slowly turned to her. “We're going to stay here, of course. I'll find another job in one of the communities nearby, close to home —”

“We can't do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because there's nothing left here anymore.”

“There's got to be something somewhere —”

“We're not staying here. Pete is in town right now looking, and Wanda —”

“I won't let that happen to you.”

“Then take us to the mainland.”

“I won't. I can't. Don't ask me to do
that.”

“We have children to think about.”

A second of silence hovered.
The children.

They hurried to the back door. The yard was empty. Jack put on his shoes and followed a few little footprints in the mud heading toward Main Street. He foraged his way through the mud puddles in the back lane and made his way to Pebble Drive, which bisected the clapboard homes from the school, church, and library on top of the hill. Jack waited for a few cars to pass. All of the drivers waved and honked at him, slowed down and teased him by pretending not to let him pass. Jack smiled and played along, waved and gestured as he thumbed his nose at his co-workers. When the few cars had gone by, he ran nervously up the incline just as two little yellow coats with flapping arms and faces obscured by big floppy hats disappeared down the slope of the small ravine.

He ran after them and yelled at them to come back
right now
. They turned in unison, small mouths agape with pleasure, wide eyes framed by moist eyelashes. They ran the few feet over to him and grabbed his legs, their yellow raincoats and hats dribbling water on his blue jeans. He knelt down and encircled them.

“Where were you going?”

“To find the gold the end of the rainbow,” Katie answered and pointed at the arc in the sky.

“Can we go get the gold?” Maggie asked.

“Oh my darlings, there's no —” Jack said, sighed, and lowered his head. He lifted his gaze to meet their innocent yet expectant eyes. “Of course there's gold at the end of the rainbow, plenty of it, especially for little girls just like you, but the rainbow
chooses
who gets the gold, and when the rainbow falls over your house, it's all yours.”

“Really, Daddy?” Maggie asked and watched him with tear-filled, accusatory eyes, her tiny lips pouting doubtfully.

“Yes, of course.”

Refusing to be soothed, Maggie continued to cry. She wanted the gold right now. Jack picked her up and held her tightly in one arm. He grabbed Katherine's hand.

“Someday the gold will be all yours, I promise. But right now, Mommy is worried about you, and it's time for your bath.”

Maggie curled into his chest like a water-drenched weed. He crossed the street, and his stomach grumbled. He hadn't had anything to eat since breakfast. Weary with the knowledge that he was about to be unemployed with four mouths to feed, a wife insistent on leaving home, a mortgage, overdraft, and credit at the bank to pay, and no savings whatsoever, his stomach contracted.
I can go without supper tonight so the girls can have leftovers tomorrow
.
I'll find work in Newfoundland somehow or another. There'll be something for me to do. Like it or not, we may be one of the families that have to leave Brighton. If we do, we'll manage. I won't want to go, but Angela does. I know that now. I knew that yesterday. I've known it since the first layoffs began.

Jack whistled and the children skipped home. His mind raced with worry, fatigue, and that awful sense of dread as the knowledge of what he'd have to do, pull himself away from this town and uproot himself, became clear. Jack's heart sank, the sky darkened, and more heavy rain fell, as if they were already aboard a sinking ship.

At the top of the hill Jack's mouth dropped in surprise and widened into a grin at the man who stood on his front step waving wildly.

“
When did you get home?” Jack asked.

“A few minutes ago,” Peter said.

“Katherine and Margaret,” Angela wailed and unravelled the children from his arms, “you know you're not supposed to leave the backyard.”

“We were almost at the end of the rainbow, but every time we moved, it moved too,” Maggie told her before she whisked them inside the warm house.

Jack and Peter shook hands briskly. Peter stood over six feet tall, bulky and hairy, with thumbs as big as the head of a hammer, one of the largest miners on the underground crew. He had a self-satisfied air about him; he'd regained his easy swagger, the comfort in his own skin that the layoff had stolen.

At Brighton Catholic School Peter had convinced Jack to skip countless classes. Peter would always get caught and was harshly punished by the nuns. Burly Pete would cry but wouldn't squeal on anyone under the sting of the thick leather whip the nuns used liberally. Nothing could make Pete cry now; he was beaming broadly, and his muscular chest was bursting with pride.

“I didn't find anything in St. John's, but I got a letter yesterday, an offer of employment for a small town on the mainland, in Northern Alberta at a gold mine.”

Jack gulped. “Gold?”

“Yes, they've been developing this for years, and they're finally ready to let some of us boys at her.”

“I bet there'd be a lot of jobs.”

“Yes, and homes, stuff for the kids to do.”

“You'd go?”

“Of course. There's nothing, I've looked everywhere.”

“When are you leaving?”

“In a month. When your time's up, let me know, I can help you out —”

“It happened yesterday.”

“I'm sorry, buddy. Why don't you apply, then? Here, here's the address.” Peter ripped the return address from the corner of an envelope he'd pulled from the back pocket of his jeans. “Call them, send them an application. You can stay with us for a while until you get yourself together.”

“Peter Fifield,” Wanda yelled from her door, “I haven't seen you in a month, get home right now.”

“I'm coming,” Peter yelled. “Think about it,” he urged.

“Go easy on him, Wanda.”

Wanda winked. “He's in good hands.”

The next morning Angela bundled the girls up in their fall clothes while Jack fumbled with a warm black turtleneck and an old pair of scuffed blue jeans. Combing his black hair flat, he squirted a dollop of thick white hair crème onto his open palm and fingered it gently through to his scalp. Angela hoisted a plaid wool skirt over her slender hips and wrapped a white blouse, with a bib-like ruffled collar, around her waist, tying both ends of the cloth at her side. She tied her thick black hair in a low ponytail, securing the wisps tightly behind her eyes with a tortoiseshell buckle.

A travelling theatre group from St. John's had come to Brighton for the weekend to put on a children's play for the Fall Community Festival. The children were excited and couldn't wait to see the performance. It wasn't often something like this came to Brighton; the people of the community usually did it themselves, putting on their own shows with amateur talent, lacking in virtuosity but not without enthusiasm and playfulness, so much so that they inevitably ended up laughing at themselves, which made the show more enjoyable for the adults.

“How long has it been since you've seen her?” Jack asked as he slowly ran a razor blade across his cheek.

“At least a year. She's been touring non-stop.”

Angela's childhood friend, Sheila, had become a theatre actress, leaving Brighton to study drama in England. She had settled in St. John's and created the travelling theatre company. Tall, blonde, with cheerful blue eyes, she was a delight to watch. Angela remembered the stories Sheila's mother told about her great-grandmother, a vaudeville performer from Jersey Island who married an English wartime doctor stationed in India. Outspoken and defiant, this actress once sneered at the Nazis during the occupation of Jersey in the thirties. Sheila's petite blonde great-grandmother had sat primly in her grade-school chair, held at gunpoint by several Nazi soldiers commanding her to speak German. She consistently replied in French, blatantly disrespecting them. Somehow she had been spared.

Sheila had the same resilience, and the same gift for the stage.

“Will her father come to the show?”

Angela nodded. “Yes, I'm sure he wouldn't miss it for the world.”

Doctor Nelson had arrived in Brighton from Jersey with his small British family in the late sixties. Angela's father, Tom Harrington, a miner who served on the town council, sang in the church choir with the doctor, each taking turns playing tricks on the choir mistress, alternating soprano and baritone behind her back, confusing her ear.

Mrs. Nelson had died a few years ago, from breast cancer. Doctor Nelson was devastated. She was the only love he'd ever known. An English orphan, he had married Mrs. Nelson when she was eighteen, the daughter of a well-travelled doctor and philanthropic stage actress. He vowed to provide for her in the same way her own father had. Earning a scholarship to medical school, he soon found work in Newfoundland after graduating from Oxford.

Angela and Sheila had met during one of Mrs. Nelson's piano classes, each conspiring to play the wrong notes in the devilish hopes of frustrating their teacher.

Angela smiled; it would be wonderful to welcome Sheila home and take their minds off everything.

The public school gymnasium was dark. The children were quiet, except for the occasional squeak of an overexcited youngster. The yellow and white spotlight hit the stage and Jane Cranford, president of the Brighton Entertainment series, was illuminated. She was carrot-orange in the light, her freckles and ginger hair overexposed.

“Hello everyone, and welcome to today's performance of
This Autumn's Tale
, performed by Blackwater Tide Theatre, starring our very own Sheila Nelson!” Jane Cranford clapped airily, papers spilling out of her hands. She bent to pick them up and the spotlight heightened the red that had risen in her cheeks. “Now, children,” she said quietly, regaining her composure, “don't be frightened. This is a special play for the fall festival. It's all about a child who is far from home and …” The spotlight snapped off loudly, and after a few seconds the curtain drew back choppily, two pairs of fumbling hands on each side gripping the corners tightly. Jane mumbled apologies for the technical difficulties while being whisked off the stage by one of the primary school teachers.

The spotlight blinked on, wavered, and went out again. Finally steady, it rested on the figure standing centre stage. It was Sheila, dressed in layers of billowing white satin as the Good Fairy Princess. She held a white owl puppet on her left arm, covered by a red-velvet robe, wearing a king's crown. Colourful, skillfully drawn murals adorned the stage, and paper foliage was draped loosely across a grand trellis and white gazebo.

Lily slept, curled on her father's arm. Katie laughed joyously while Maggie watched it all quietly, her eyes wide with pleasure. Angela leaned on Jack's shoulder and he smiled wanly.

“What a wonderful show!” Angela exclaimed.

“It was great, love,” Jack said.

Sheila smiled, holding Lily in her arms. Maggie and Kate hugged her legs beneath the layers of her creamy silk dress.

“Thanks, it was a lot of fun; I don't get to do children's theatre very often.”

“You don't come home very often either,” Wanda interrupted. “How are you, my love?”

“Best kind today, love,” Sheila said.

“Good thing we bumped into you before we leave!”

Jack stiffened behind her.

“Where are you going?” Sheila asked.

“To the mainland. Peter found a job at that new gold mine, and we're leaving in a month!”

Angela's face paled, remembering Pete and Jack on her doorstep the previous evening. She clenched her jaw and turned to Jack, who avoided her gaze.

Lily fussed in Angela's arms. Katie and Maggie were tussling over the last stick of gum they'd found in their mother's purse.

“Lucky Wanda, you only have one.”

Wanda smiled, shifted a sleeping Susie on her hip. “But I plan to have more now that Pete's got this job on the mainland.”

Angela's eyes widened in panic. “Good for you….” she said and her voice trailed off weakly. Jack grabbed her hand and held it firmly.

“Come over for a drink before you leave?” Wanda asked.

Sheila nodded and smiled as Wanda walked away.

“Some glad to be rid of her,” Sheila whispered.

“Sheila!” Angela admonished.

“She stole Peter Fifield from me when I was seventeen.”

“Sheila, come on, you've got a theatre group in town, an up-and-coming folk musician who is completely in love with you, and you're worried about some small-town miner with big thumbs?” Angela whispered back.

“It's not his big thumbs I'm after,” Sheila said.

“Some bad you are,” Angela said and tried not to laugh as Sheila wistfully looked at Pete's full back and thick, long legs.

“Pass me some screech,” Sheila whispered, drunker than she'd been in ages, or so she said.

“You're getting right royally pissed,” Angela said, her voice slurred due to the amount of Jamaican rum she'd consumed.

They were sitting in Sheila's bedroom after the show. Jack had taken the kids home to bed and Doctor Nelson sat sound asleep in his study, slumped over a novel.

Angela grew quiet. “Jack lost his job yesterday.”

“Oh no,” Sheila said and rolled over on the twin bed, a remnant from adolescence, still covered in a pink gingham bedspread. She rose and went to the window and struggled to open it since it was stuck in the molded pane. This reminded Angela of when they would sit here after school, blowing smoke rings out the window from the crisp, sharp-smelling English cigarettes stolen from Mrs. Nelson's purse.

“What are you going to do?”

“Jack doesn't want to leave home. He thinks life will be rough up there, but
rough
we can handle. Starvation — which is what'll happen if we stay here — we can't.”

“Where would you go on the mainland?”

“I don't know, I suppose the same place Wanda is going.”

“That could be good then, living in a town with some people from home?”

“Yes, it'll be a comfort, that's for sure.”

“But it won't be
home.
”

“No, it won't be. But I guess it'll have to do. I mean, we don't have a choice, do we?”

Peter sat at the back of the church in his usual spot. The Women's League was tired of cleaning the dirt on the floor from the sneakers he wore in the summer and salt stains from his work boots in the winter. The other men in town wore their Sunday shoes to Mass, but not Peter. He wouldn't bother with the charade if it weren't for Wanda. She made him go. Said it had to do with giving Susie a sense of the world, a sense of service and goodness. So he complied.

He looked around the small room, a kaleidoscope of purple from the stained-glass windows, the large wooden crucifix draped with a purple cloth and the priest's vestments. His father had hated purple, thought it was too bright for the sombre occasion of Mass. Peter could still remember his parents trying to stuff him and his two younger brothers into suits for a Sunday Mass and his mother dabbing iodine over the cut on her lip, his father gargling with minty mouthwash in an effort to hide the sour, yeasty smell of more than two days of drinking beer non-stop.

They'd looked presentable. The suits hid the bruises on the boys and all seemed well. When Mass was over, the whiskey would come out, and that's when Peter's father was at his roughest.

Peter nodded at Jack and Angela as they took their seats a few pews ahead. Angela looked at him sharply. Peter avoided eye contact. She could always see through him, and he knew that half the time she didn't like what she saw.

The winter his father caught him having a draw off a cigarette and the trail of blood as he fled from the house. Angela had been trudging home with a few groceries for her mother, the winter after her father had died. She dropped the bag with the eggs in it when she saw his purple face and the blood from his nose and lip.

“You are coming with me,” she'd said.

“I'll be alright.”

She took charge, stepping over the egg yolks, lying whole out of their shells, like dandelion heads snapped from their stems, and dragged him to her mother's. The wind meowed and hissed in the bitter cold.

“Tea and a Purity biscuit for you,” her mother said.

Angela stood in front of him and patted the wounds with a warm, salty cloth.

“I can take care of myself,” he muttered. He sat stone-faced and flicked the cloth away like it was a tick.

“Give it up,” Angela said warningly and held his chin with her small hand.

The next day Peter wrote
Angela Harrington gives good head
on the bathroom wall, and she was shamed and mocked by the boys and girls alike.

“I know it was you,” she said in the playground after school as she wiped away tears with the tip of her pink frosted nail.

“Quit mothering me,” he said.

So Angela stopped. Not too many knew the truth about Peter's home life, and if they did they handled the information awkwardly: laughed, made jokes, or turned a blind eye.

As Peter sat in Mass, watching his best friend take his seat, he still couldn't look Angela in the eye. If she looked at him long enough she'd know how desperately he wanted to leave, contrary to all the senseless nostalgia and pining to stay that everyone else felt. He wasn't sure about who would make it out of Brighton. Some stayed in towns like this long after the industry's lifespan. Stayed and worked here and there, odd jobs in town or worked as scabs for striking mining companies. Some stayed on the dole for life.