Saltwater Cowboys (5 page)

She ran to the end of Pebble Drive and headed toward home on the gravel laneway. She made it to the back porch. Jack growled and nuzzled her neck then pulled the elastic that held her long black hair loose with his teeth. She struggled to get away, broke his grip with her hands, went inside, and slammed the door in his face.

The next morning the sun rose gently over Grandmother McCarthy's house as she sat in the kitchen nook peeling potatoes. Her crinkled, pale white hands, speckled with light brown age spots, expertly carved the earthy brown potatoes. Her powder blue housedress, seams in loopy threads, spread out underneath her. Her dyed-black hair curled around her small ears. Her soft, pink mouth hung gently open.

Her husband stood by the window watching for his grandchildren. Two lines of flesh between unruly grey eyebrows formed a tent-like triangle above his square nose. Waves of crinkled flesh fanned out from the corners of his eyes. His overbite displayed front teeth marbled with barb wire-grey ribbons of rot. His bulbous, bald, shiny head dominated his features. Wild pockets of brittle black and white hair poked out of ears and sat clamped over cheeks like zebra mussel shells.

The children rushed in, followed by Jack and Angela.

“Nanny and Poppy!” they yelled in unison.

“Well, hello, my loves! Want tea and a Purity biscuit?”

Angela served while Grandmother McCarthy finished the potatoes. Mr. McCarthy's loud voice crackled throughout the kitchen.

“Well, good morning, son. Angela,” he said and nodded in her direction.

“John,” she answered politely.

“How are you today?” he asked and slapped Jack on the back.

“There's something I want to tell you. Girls, go play in the yard, please.”

“Watch my flowers!” John said.

His beautiful garden, packed with plump roses, lazy lilacs, and charming crocuses, always placed first in the local garden contest. He spent hours and hours in it, and it was a tranquil space that the children loved to run around in and play make-believe. Inevitably they would get rowdy and knock over a lilac stem or two, trampling a few of his prized flowers like little rabbits.

“Mom, Dad,” Jack said and settled into a chipped wooden chair, “I lost my job. I've got two weeks.”

Grandmother McCarthy nodded slowly.

John's chest sank.

Angela placed the tea and biscuits on the table.

John poured a cupful for everyone and drained his tea out into his saucer. He wondered what his son would do. He knew the boy wasn't that strong. Jack buckled under pressure.
Thank God he has Angela
, he thought. He let his tea cool before he picked it up to slurped it slowly.

“I'll try to find work here,” Jack said.

“No, you won't!” Angela said and glared at him.

John stopped drinking his tea and placed his saucer on the table. He looked at his son and daughter-in-law evenly.

“John, Marg,” Angela pleaded, looking from one to the other, “tell him there's nothing here for us, close by or in town. Tell him we have no choice but to go to the mainland.”

“You'll have to go. Angela is right.”

“But,” Marg gasped, “the girls.”

“He'll have to do it for the girls. You don't want your grandchildren to suffer, now do you?”

Angela smiled gently. “I know it will be hard, but we must go, there's no future for us here. You'll find work. Pete Fifield found a job.”

“Where?” Marg McCarthy asked.

“In Foxville, Alberta, a gold-mining town in the north,” Jack said and pulled the address on the scrap piece of paper from the back pocket of his jeans.

“How long have you had this?” Angela hissed and snatched it from him.

“Only for a day or two,” he said tightly.

“I don't care. That's one or two days of your severance gone.”

“Now dear, it's alright,” Marg said. Then she sighed and added, “I'll go get the girls. Angela, you sit. John take out the roast, Jackie, set the table for us all, your brother Bill is coming too, with Rose and the boys, so bring out the extra table.”

Jack poured Angela another cup of tea, and she wiped the tears from her eyes.

After a silent, tense supper, Jack and Angela carried their drowsy children down the hill toward their front door. They took off the girls' patent leather shoes, blue raglan jackets, white tights, and cotton floral dresses and pulled Winnie-the-Pooh pajamas over each of their heads.

When the children were asleep, Jack and Angela sat in the kitchen in silence.

“I'm off to bed, my love,” Jack said wearily.

“I'm going to read for a bit,” she said and picked at the lint on her cords, avoiding his eyes.

As soon as Jack turned out the light in the bedroom, Angela tiptoed into the bathroom, slipped her hand into the back pocket of Jack's jeans, and pulled out the mining company's address. Back at the kitchen table, she wrote a long letter, outlined her husband's work history, and signed it with his name.

O
n a rimy Thursday morning, Angela stood on the front steps in her mint-green housecoat. The frayed ends of the coat fluttered in the cool air. Brittle leaves whipped around her ankles. The grinding wind, sharpened and split by rock, had pushed late autumn's warmth away, sucked the warmth from the town, and left tension and irritability in her bones.

She waved Jack off as he headed to the unemployment centre to comb the job boards. She came back inside and closed the door. She looked over her shoulder, crept to the bedroom, and opened the closet door. She riffled through bras and white socks in the top dresser drawer, socks full of holes, with dark grey stains on the bottom — she shook her head at the state of them — and reached for her Chinese lacquered keepsake box hidden behind the pile of underwear.

Inside the box was an unopened letter. It had come the day before with the evening mail. Lloyd Pinsent had handed her the stack with the Noraldo Mining Company letterhead on top.

“Some lot of these letters around here in the past few weeks, Mrs. McCarthy. Daresay we'll all be up there in one way or another,” he'd said. She'd answered distractedly, fingers trembling as she held the letter.

Mr. McCarthy … your qualifications sound ideal for Noraldo … we'd like to interview you … a recruiter will be in St. John's on October 15th
, the letter said. Angela clutched it to her chest and smiled.

After breakfast, they walked Katherine to school. Angela waved across the lane at Wanda and Peter. They were busy packing towels, blankets, clothing, and furniture, and discarding knick-knacks, dishes, books, and newspapers. They were flustered yet worked happily. They were sure of themselves, gestures and features strong, not weak and slack like Jack's, or frozen and worried like Angela's.
Our time is coming
, Angela thought, and smiled smugly.

She looked at her two daughters trudging up the little hill toward the school. They all had beautiful hair, gleaming white teeth, soft clean skin, and cheeks scrubbed clean, shining like waxy apples. A surge of love tore through her chest. She'd do anything for them. So would Jack, she thought. Of course he would do what she wanted — he always did.

At school, Katherine reached up to give her mom a hug. Lily cried when her sister disappeared inside the heavy, solid door.

“We're going to Nanny Harrington's house, Lily,” Angela said soothingly. Lily smiled at the prospect of seeing Nanny. Maggie walked a few paces behind, timid and uncertain. Angela knew Maggie worried about visiting her mother. Her mother was less than kind to Maggie; she considered the child spoiled. When they reached her doorstep, Lillian Harrington opened the door. She was a smiling, rosy-cheeked, robust woman in a lilac floral housedress, her short, curly strawberry-blonde hair poking out of a frayed red kerchief. She invited her daughter and two grandchildren inside with a wave of her fleshy arm. Her hands and apron were dusty with dried flour. She'd spent the morning baking bread and making Yorkshire puddings for a roast beef supper.

“Hello,” she said and pried Lily from Angela's arms. She held her tightly and coddled the child's cheeks with her dusty fingers.

Maggie wandered into the pantry adjacent to the kitchen and noiselessly searched for chocolate pudding. Nanny's pantry smelled like caramelized icing sugar. The clean chrome shelves were fully stocked with tins of fruit and dry cake mixes. She sat on an overturned silver mixing bowl on the serrated linoleum, chrome blender and eggbeater on the shelf above, and had tea with imaginary friends.

Lily sat on the kitchen floor and played with the crusty old calico cat. It barely raised a paw to scratch or a meow in protest when she tugged on its tail.

An old black stove in the corner, a relic from the forties, grumbling and moody, dominated the room. Above it on the wall was a solid wood block in the shape of Newfoundland, with various small spoons with enamel pictures of provincial flags, coins, or small animals on the tip of the arm, resting in special nooks. The rooster clock on the yellowing white wall ticked noisily.

Lillian Harrington eyed her daughter silently, her hands resting primly on her upper abdomen. “You're after eating six of those cookies,” she sneered.

“Mom, I'm —” Angela said, her mouth full of chocolate.

“Pregnant. I could tell weeks ago. You swell up some quick, especially around the mouth and neck, you always do.”

Angela swallowed her cookie and wiped the crumbs from her swollen lips.

Lillian sighed deeply and shook her head. “I don't know how you are going to do it. Jack won't be working after the next few days, and UIC won't feed the current lot, let alone another mouth.”

Here she goes again, badmouthing
Jack,
Angela thought. When Angela and Jack had started dating in their teens, her mother would warn her about the McCarthy family. “Little foxes spoil the vine, she'd say,” quoting scripture — her weapon of choice for the self-righteous way she had of proving herself right — as she stood in the kitchen baking. “It's the little things he'll do that will let you down,” she'd say and loudly tap the flour bowl with her wooden spoon. “He's a follower, he'll never think for himself. He'll allow others to get him into trouble, and then what will you do? No, my dear,” she'd say, putting her hands on her hips, “you can't count on Jack McCarthy.”

Angela would tilt her head to the side, stare at her mother with one eye closed, and try not to laugh. What did her mother know anyway? She'd been holding a grudge against the McCarthys for years. Jack's father John had been calling her “Lily-white-arse” ever since she was ten.

Lillian's father, Aloysius White, had given the boy a trimming for cursing at his daughter, and when they grew up John McCarthy would nickel-and-dime Lillian on plumbing jobs and use spoiled, rusted pipes in her house instead of new ones.

“A letter came yesterday from a mining company up in northern Alberta.”

Maggie meandered out from the pantry, chocolate pudding smeared on her face and fingers. “Your appetite will be spoiled,” Lillian said, appraising the child derisively.

Maggie grinned mischievously, chocolate stuck to her front teeth.

“Let her be,” Angela snapped. “She can eat whatever she wants.”

“Not in my house she can't.”

Maggie stood, nervously knotting her black pageboy with her chocolate-covered fingers, innocent and bewildered blue eyes wide and round as those of the cows in her colouring books.

“Don't bother with the tea. If my kids are hungry, I'll go home and feed them.”

“I'm sorry —”

“No need to explain,” Angela said and rose to pick Lily up from the floor. “We've worn out our welcome here.”

Angela slipped on her coat, wrapped Lily in a shawl, and nudged Maggie toward the door. Outside on the wooden step, she turned back toward her mother at the door, her face slack and sad.

“Don't worry, we'll be gone soon, and you won't be bothered —” she said bitingly as Maggie kicked stones halfway down the gravel driveway “— by the child,” she continued and covered Lily's ears with her hands, “that looks exactly like the man I married.”

As she walked away, she brushed a few tears from her face.
It's bad enough that she doesn't like my husband, but to take it out on our daughter? That's unforgivable,
she thought sorrowfully.
It will be great to get out of here, to get away from her. She's a horrible, miserable old woman. She thinks she knows what my husband's faults are? She doesn't know the first thing about Jack. He won't let me down. He's promised to do everything for me and the children. I don't doubt him. He listens to me, he always has. It'll be good for the children to not have to grow up with her condescension. God knows how I survived it myself.

Angela thought back to all the hours she'd spent arguing with her mother over every choice she'd made or wanted to make: all her life, badgered about her preferences from skirt length — in high school — to hairstyles, choosing baby names, and finalizing wedding details.
She'll have no say in this new little baby's life
, Angela thought, and her eyes cleared. She sniffled and wiped her nose with her sleeve. “We'll be far away from her. Hopefully sooner rather than later,” she whispered to Lily, asleep in her arms.

Jack took his time taking the last few steps from the unemployment centre toward home. He couldn't believe it: she was pregnant again. He'd heard her throwing up this morning. She'd tried to hide it with the running water and a lot of loud coughing. He let out a low whistle, unable to believe that another baby was on the way.

Another mouth to feed
, Jack thought and gulped as he halted mid-step. He looked around, hoping for someone, anyone, to be heading home. He'd like to find someone to go play darts with or have a game of cards. He didn't want to face her. Or face this.
How could this have happened? Why weren't we more careful?
He wanted to run back to the mine and burrow underground. Or swim away, jump into the Atlantic and go to Ireland and search for his roots, his other family, and other men in his gene pool: roughnecks who quite naturally had deserted their women for the drink or for the freedom to chase other women. Or he could shove off to Boston, stay with his uncle who owned an Irish pub in the university district, take a course with his bar-tip money and become a history teacher like he'd always wanted to be. He could still make that choice; there was time. Angela hadn't seen him come down the road yet.

Suddenly Maggie's eyes flashed into his mind, her beautiful blue, full round eyes, stubborn and righteous, innocent and wise. He couldn't bear the thought of her in the care of some other father, a man who inevitably would come along and be moved by Angela's beauty and would quite naturally want to provide for her and the children in place of the nasty old black Irish husband who had deserted them. But there'd be one child the new husband wouldn't like. It would be Maggie, of course, because she looked so much like her father. And she would grow up and want to be a schoolteacher, just like her father, whom she believed had left them for that very purpose. She would tuck her grief away, like the hair she would tuck behind her ears, clipped in a tight bun, place glasses over it, to smother and drown all of her twisted, convoluted feelings for men: deep love and hate for the man, her father, who had deserted her, and a certain emptiness she'd feel toward the stepfather.

No. He couldn't do that to his little Maggie; she was too precious.
They all are, especially Angela, oh Christ … Angela
…he thought. He put one foot in front of the other and continued toward the house, a bright smile on his stiff face.

After supper she paced the room while he sat in the easy chair, a hot cup of milky tea in a saucer on the tea table beside him.

“Well, what are we going to do?”

He took her in his arms and hugged her tightly. “Whatever you want, my love.”

She smiled and let him hold her. “There's something else I have to tell you.”

His stomach tightened. “Yes?”

“You've got an interview, Jack, in St. John's with Noraldo.”

He stiffened and his heart thumped. Worry drained the blood from his face but he forced a smile. “This is great news,” he said and squeezed her hands tightly. “How did this happen?”

“I applied. I sent in your resume.”

“Well, I'm glad one of us was thinking,” he said and rubbed her belly, “otherwise we might've missed the interview.”

“You're not upset, are you?”

“No,” he said as his stomach and jaw tightened simultaneously. “Don't worry, my love, everything will be fine. I'll have a job before you know it.”

On the morning Jack went to St. John's for his interview, Angela stood at the kitchen sink and held a box of table salt at an angle, ready to pour the contents into a small clear glass shaker. The salt was held in a white cardboard box with ochre and electric-blue rows of oversized polka dots that faded as the dots got bigger. It trembled in her thin hand, the salt spilling onto the chrome sink.

“We go through so much salt,” she mumbled and shook her head. She pinched the grains between her fingers and rubbed them lovingly. She dipped the end of her tongue into the white crystals. Saliva dripped from her cheeks and the glands in her neck cramped with pleasure.

There's so much salt here, in the fish, in the water, in the rain, on our tables. Too bad it isn't worth anything
, she thought. She had read an article one morning while tidying up the girls' bedroom in Katie's junior science magazine she'd found lying on the floor. The article contained all kinds of interesting trivia about salt. Salt had once been used as currency, it said. Roman soldiers were given salt rations known as “solarium argentum” or a
salary,
and before they went off to battle they rubbed themselves with salt. After reading the article she had gone to the kitchen and had thrown salt over her shoulder, superstitious and silly, but the article also noted the importance of salt in religious rituals. Throwing it over your shoulder casted out evil, because salt was a symbol of incorruptible purity, the article had said.

I should have rubbed Jack with salt before he went off to town for that interview, keep him incorruptible and pure. He would think I'm crazy, and I probably am, a married woman licking the salt from her hands, standing by the kitchen window. If Wanda were next door, it would be her turn to pity me and want to feed me, under the guise of asking me to help her pack or pull laundry from her line.

Wanda had left a week ago with Peter at the wheel of a U-Haul truck, setting out for the long drive up to Alberta, due to work two weeks from the day they left. Her home looked animated now that they were gone, taking with them all the gloom and dolor of a family dealing with unemployment, leaving in its place, underneath the receding shroud of anxiety, what had always been there: a beautiful yellow clapboard with chocolate-brown shutters and window frames sitting primly around easy windows, flower boxes spilling an assortment of perennials, yellow tulips and daisies. It was a sweet little house, not quite as large and spacious as Angela's, with her high, pointed, arched, vaulted ceilings, and the large front porch with a wood-burning stove, spacious kitchen, large living room, and two bedrooms with old-fashioned coiled radiators. Even Jack's wooden shed was almost twice the size of Peter's, but it was cozy, rustic. Angela wasn't sure, but she figured Jack was smarter with money than Peter, who liked to play cards and spend a lot of money on the drink. Jack rarely did either. She was grateful that he was a simple family man, not the least bit tempted by things he had outgrown in high school, or so she told herself, and so she hoped, as she pictured her man in St. John's by himself, surrounded by the beautiful women of the city and the women down by the wharf, waiting for the Portuguese sailors to dock.