The Fortunate Brother (4 page)

“Take your time, I got lots of it,” said Bonnie. Her voice was loud, like her colours. Kyle noticed her eyeing his mother's trim dark sweater and pants as she hurried into the washroom, and he noted her quick glance at her own red and white checkered self. She crossed the room and sat down, a cloud of cheap scent trailing behind her. She was about forty, first signs of age etching the corners of her eyes. Her jacket strained across her wide back as she folded her arms onto the table, her wrists stretching a mite too long for the cut of her sleeves.

He reached past her for the mug resting on the table and she drew back and he saw for the first time a little rash of blisters, glistening amidst a swath of salve, on the right side of her face near her hairline. The right side of her neck, partly hidden behind the scarf, was equally burned and blistering and swathed with salve. She looked up at him, her eyes big and brown and bold. Their black orbs pulsated softly and he turned from her, shamed for having looked so deep. Taking the cup to the sink, he poured her coffee.

She stood up as Addie came out of the bathroom, toilet flushing behind her. “All ready?”

“I suppose I am, can't think properly this morning.” Addie
crossed the room and lightly pulled Bonnie's scarf away from her neck. “Looks awfully painful, dear. You sure you want to do this?”

“I could sit home and suffer it out,” said Bonnie, and she smiled. “A bit like you now, likes keeping to myself. Hates everyone gawking and talking at me.”

“We're a pair, then,” said Addie, knotting a silk scarf around her neck. “I'll be back sometime in the afternoon, Kyle. There's baked beans from yesterday in the fridge for dinner. My!” She shivered as though struck by a sudden draft and pulled the flimsy scarf from around her neck. “I can't find my wool scarf,” she complained, looking around the sofa and hummock. “Have you seen it, Kyle?”

“Take mine, it's a woman's anyway.”

“Don't you be foolish. If your father can wear his now.”

“Under his shirt collar.”

“Because he likes the feel of it. And so do you.”

“Too short.”

“They're stylish. It was their Christmas presents—cashmere,” she said to Bonnie, catching the soft woollen scarf Kyle was tossing her from the depths of his coat pocket. She folded it around her neck and smiled. “I was hoping for one to get cast aside. Small chance,” she added ruefully. “They haven't took them from their necks since they unwrapped them.”

“Making her feel good is all,” said Kyle. He caught his mother's smile and smiled back reassuringly. “Drive safe, then,” he said to Bonnie, and with a last reassuring look at his mother, he plunged his arms into his coat sleeves and went outside. The air was dampish to his face, the fog rising from the land and hanging in wisps above the hills and fading into dove-grey skies. He stepped around Bonnie's shiny red Cavalier, thinking things must be good in the fish plant these days. His father was hunched down at the end of the wharf and looking across the bay whence he'd floated them all
those years ago. Kyle barely remembered Cooney Arm. Could no longer distinguish between memory and stories told and retold by Chris and Sylvie and his dear old gran and his mother sometimes about the man Sylvanus was back there. Prancing about his stage-head and boats, fishing from five in the morning to sometimes ten at night, netting and gutting and curing fish and drinking one beer a week and sometimes not that. Kyle did remember one moment from back during his father's hand-fishing days: his father taking him in the boat one windy fall morning, hauling his nets. Christ, but didn't he look big standing up in that boat with his oilskins and sou'wester black against the sky. And not a fear as he stood in that wind-rocked boat, knees bending to roll with the swells. And he, Kyle, white-knuckled to the gunnels.

Everybody and their dog had moved on from those days of hand-fishing and hauling nets but his father mourned them as he would a fresh dead mother.
There's them who can't change with the times and those who won't,
his mother told him.
And your father's both kinds.

Kyle was kinda proud. He liked his father's story. Liked how he was the last one out after the seas were overfished by greed and governments were paying everyone to leave. The story was still told how Sylvanus thumbed his nose at the relocation money and stayed till the last fish was caught, stayed till they nearly starved, and then sawed his house in half with a chainsaw and floated both halves up the bay and landed them atop this wharf and declared to his astonished Addie—
This is as far as she goes. By Christ if I can't work on the sea, I'll sleep on it. No gawd-damned mortal telling me where I sleeps.

Kyle stepped quietly up to his father as he crouched at the end of the wharf. No doubt he'd been proud back there in Cooney Arm, building that house. His castle. For sure it was he then,
doing the sheltering. Building a good house for his family, providing. And was then driven out. Not just by governments but by death. The death of three babies, death of the codfish, death of the fishing culture he'd woven himself around from the inside out. He'd brought them here to this wharf where the death of his eldest son awaited him. And now this. A life shaped by death.

Sylvanus looked up and Kyle drew back with a start. The dark of his father's eyes broiled with hatred. It was as though all the deaths and dying had been gathered in the one grave and laid at his feet and it was his weakening as a man that had caused them. He hove his shoulders forward and rose, starting towards the truck, his body jerking with anger. Addie's face appeared in the window and Sylvanus faltered and then resumed his hard-hitting steps to the truck. Guilt, cursed Kyle. Guilt that he was failing them. Guilt rotting him like an old shack built on wet ground, leaving no shores strong enough to shelter himself or his family through those coming days.

Starting the truck, Kyle drove them down the heavily potholed Wharf Road, ignoring the whiff of whisky as his father took a swallow from the flask beneath the seat. The sea was flat calm, gulls like black pods resting on its sky-whitened waters. He drove past the gravel flat to his right, smoke still trickling from last night's bonfire, Kate's curtain drawn. Wharf Road yielded onto Bottom Hill Road a few hundred yards farther along and Kyle hung a sharp left onto the paved stretch, doubling back the way they'd just come except it was leading uphill from the valley and cradled by tall, knotted spruce trees.

As they crested Bottom Hill he looked at the same sunless sky vaulting over the mile-wide corridor of ocean, walled on both sides by wooded hills, its horizon fading to nothing forty or fifty miles out. Beneath him and spreading out from the foot
of Bottom Hill were the felted rooftops and smokeless chimneys and sleeping doorways of Hampden. The community sloped down another hill to the shore and the quiet lapping of the sea. Quiet. Everything so quiet. As though no sin had yet been committed on this day.

A whimper from his father, a soft mewl. Kyle covered it with a cough and eased them down Bottom Hill and along the main road, passing a store to the right with its weekly specials in blue marker taped to the window. He passed the Anglican church and a sunken-roofed bungalow with unpainted add-ons where Bonnie Gillard now lived with her sister. He passed a poppy-red house, a sunny ochre one, and the violet two-storey—and took a longer look at its windows yellowed with breakfast light. Julia's house. Julia. Chris's girlfriend.

He passed a clump of newly vinyl-sided houses, the rage these days, and turned left, heading downhill. The flag hung limp from its pole near the post office and muddied water streamed like a brook down the guttered sides of the road.

A short, rotund man with wire-framed glasses and suspenders hiking his flannels up past his belly doddled along the roadside just as he'd been doing the past sixty years, watching the morning light breaking through shadows around him. Dobey Randall. He'd be here this evening, walking the opposite way, watching the same sun go down and the light fading back to shadow. The old-timer turned a gummy smile onto Kyle and Kyle tooted his horn and the road turned sharply to the right at the bottom of the hill where the government wharf extended into the sea.

They drove for a mile along the shoreline and slowed, passing the tidy settlement of the Rooms and the whiffs of smoked salmon floating from Stan Mugford's smokehouse. The graveyard lay beyond the last doorstep. Kyle sped up Fox Point Hill, away from
the headstones and the bouquets of plastic flowers on Chris's grave, flattened sideways and faded by the snow-wet winds of winter.

Another two miles of shore road and they rounded a black cliff. Kyle slowed down coming into the Beaches—twelve houses sitting with their backs to the wooded hills behind them, their doorways opening onto the strip of road and rocky beach separating them from the shifting waters of the Atlantic. A knot of youngsters hovered in the middle of the road, taunting him till they saw he wasn't going to break speed, and then broke apart to blasts of his horn.

“Ye'll get your arses trimmed!” he roared, rolling down his window, and then rolling it back up to a chorus of laughs. The eldest of them pinged a couple of rocks off the tires and Kyle grinned. “That young Keats. He'll be strung up yet.” He looked back at the youngsters shooting fake bullets at the truck. “Little bastards.” He looked at his father who had scarcely noticed. The road ended a few hundred feet past the last house and before them lay the gouged black earth, readied for building.

Switching off the motor, Kyle kicked down the gas pedal to stifle its dieselling. “Might as well get going, hey. See the mess they got made. What—just going to sit there?”

Sylvanus was slumped in his seat like a spineless effigy.

“Come on, b'y, let's get out.”

“No courage.”

“C'mon, dad.” He touched his father's shoulder gently. “C'mon, now.” He opened his door and got out. He walked to the edge of the site and glanced back, seeing his father slowly unfold himself from the truck. He waited and then they walked about the excavation, their boots squishing through mud. They both shook their heads. Looked like a tornado had pitched itself through a hardware store and emptied its wares onto the site before blowing
off. An upturned wheelbarrow half mired in mud. Couple of hammers and boxes of nails soaked open. Picks, shovels, and an axe lay in a murky pool. Six or seven gallons of paint stood haphazardly beside a pile of two-by-twelves that were half-lodged on a mound of gravel being washed out by rills of rainwater.

“Well, sir,” said Sylvanus.

“Not a clue,” said Kyle.

“What a mess, what a mess.”

“And what's they doing with the paint? Footings not laid and they're buying paint?”

“Not a clue.”

Kyle stepped around fifteen or twenty bags of cement that were uncovered and wet from the rain. He kicked at a bag and it broke open, the powder too wet to spill.

“Ruined, all ruined.” He kicked at the other bags. “Every one of them.” He bent, picked up a hand-carved wooden gun out of the muck. He glimpsed a couple of red eight-shot ring caps half submerged in mud beneath the cement bags. “Them youngsters,” he said to his father. “Using the cement bags for blockades. How much stuff now, did they muck off with?”

Sylvanus stepped over muddied puddles and followed along the trench dug for the footings. He bent for a closer look.

“Sure, look at that. They only got them dug three feet down. No more than three feet, should be four. Show, get the tape and measure that.”

Kyle hunted for a yellow measuring tape from amongst a debris of tools and stood by his father, looking for a place where the footings weren't flooded. Extending the tape across the width of the trench, he leaned over, reading the measure. “Fourteen by eighteen inches.”

“Well sir.”

“What's it supposed to be?” asked Kyle.

“Sixteen by twenty-four. Turned down. They would've had it all turned down by the inspectors.” He looked skyward. The white was starting to darken. “Gonna rain. Bad time of year to be building.” He stood up, scratched his head through his cap, looking about.

“Here they comes then.”

The roar of a V-8 engine without a stick of pipe in her sounded a full minute before the four-door Dodge came into sight and halted by the truck. Two young fellows got out—the youngest stout and pretty-faced and fair, the other dark and skinny and already sunken into his chest cavity like his father, Jake.

“Uncle Syl. How's she going?” asked the pretty one, Wade.

“How's she
goooin
,” asked the other, Lyman, in his slow, deep drawl that tired Kyle on his most patient of days.

“She's not
gooin
nowhere no time soon,” snarked Sylvanus. “Which one of you is the carpenter?”

“He,” said Lyman, pointing to Wade.

“Me,” said Wade.

“And they didn't tell you to keep cement out of the rain?”

“We went to buy tarps but it rained 'fore we got back.”

“Well, sir, well, sir.” Sylvanus shook his head. “If you buys cement in April, you buys tarps along with it. Unless you got a garage or woodhouse. You got a garage or woodhouse?”

“Told father we needed tarps,” said Wade.

“Where's your rebar? You going to pour cement without rebar?”

“Oh, come on, Uncle Syl. I was getting it but Dad was there arguing we didn't need doubling up on the rebar. And he had it all measured wrong so I left it for the next trip.”

“We got the trenches dug before the rain started,” said Lyman. “We thought we'd have the cement poured, too. Right, Wade?”

“Right.”

Sylvanus went back to the site, muttering, “Well sir, well sir.”

“We heard about Aunt Addie,” Wade said quietly to Kyle.

“Feels awful bad about that,” said Lyman.

Kyle nodded. “Say nothing to Father. Come on. Let's start cleaning up.” He pointed the boys to the wheelbarrow and shovel and the bags of cement. “Break it all open, them bags. Start shovelling it around. It's all ruined.” He buddy-punched Wade's shoulder and went over to where his father was eyeing the sky.