What They Wanted (2 page)

David Weale

PROLOGUE

I
REMEMBERE CEAR AS YESTERDAY
those last days in Cooney Arm, the sea dying around us and taking Father’s spirit with it. And my, but he had fought. Long after his brothers and the others left he’d stayed, netting cod, netting salmon, spearing flatfish, hauling crab-pots, trapping eels and rabbits, hunting seals and turrs and bull birds, and landing capelin and squid and all else the sea hove at him.

Then the ocean gave no more.

For months we all watched him—me, Mother, Chris, Kyle, Gran. We watched as he sat at the table looking out to sea, his head turned from Mother’s hands as she fussed with his tea and biscuits and scolded him about distressing his poor old mother, Gran, who was forever standing on her stoop watching over him as he rotted within himself, along with his stage and his flakes and his boat. But it wasn’t just Gran who Mother was worrying about. It was always Mother’s job to worry the most, and for months she’d been lamenting Father’s fate, lamenting her own need of wanting him out of this darkness, this terrible, terrible darkness he was sinking into, wanting him back in his boat with the sun colouring his face and the wind brimming his eyes and that awful, awful smell of sickness washed off him. But the fish were gone, sucked into the bowels of a thousand foreign factory ships, leaving Father, and a few other struggling inshore fishermen, sitting weighted at their kitchen tables, staring out the window at their languishing boats.

Finally the morning came when Mother threw down her dishcloth, clasped his chin in her hand and lifted it, the stark blue of her eyes staring into the pits of his, and spoke.

“You done your best and now it’s time to go. It’s for the children now, not us. We’ve beggared enough from the land, and we can’t pawn bones.” Leaving him staring after her, she marched across the footbridge spanning the brook, stopped to pluck a handful of daisies from the meadow, and went straightaway to her three little dears sleeping in the graveyard. After spreading the daisies on top of their beds she sat for a moment, brushing away bits of broken seashells dropped by the gulls and tracing a finger across the names scrolled across the centre of each of their crosses. I had trailed behind her, watched her lips move in silent prayer. She left the graves after a short while and went to Gran, who was standing on her stoop, worrying. Putting her arms around Gran’s bony, shrunken shoulders, Mother spoke softly, pressed her cheek against the old woman’s, and then started back towards her house.

She didn’t seem to notice me trailing behind her. Most times she hated my trailing behind, and would chase me off. She didn’t seem to notice anything now as she walked briskly towards the house, her step filled with purpose. Once inside, and without a glance at any of us watching, she stood on her rocker and stripped the curtains off her beloved window overlooking the cliffs and the sea pounding through the neck. She faltered then, as though she’d bared herself in public, and held the curtains to her breasts, tears running down the round of her cheek.

I remember Chris pressing against me, his body trembling. I remember trembling too at this sight of Mother, as well as Father, faltering, for in that moment I saw how that which contained me could be broken.

The following three days were the most unsettling I’d ever gone through. Taking care of Kyle, who was just a toddler, I watched as Mother packed—first her own house, and then Gran’s. On the fourth day, when all was battened and bundled, Father came in from his woodshed with a chainsaw.

I’d never felt so frightened as in that moment when he pulled the rip cord and the thing screamed to life there in the small confines of the kitchen. Instantly he shut it off, seeing the fear in my eyes.

“It has to be halved,” he explained. “We’re leaving, see, and we’re taking our house with us. The house has to be sawed in half so’s it’ll float through the channel of the neck. See? The neck’s too narrow to float a house through. That’s all. We’ll put her back together fast as anything. Go on outside now, take your brothers outside.”

We all fell back, choking the doorway, as he hauled on the cord again and started the chainsaw roaring. With a fire burning in his eyes he squinted through the blue gas filling the room, gunned the trigger, and stuck the blade against the outside of his bedroom wall, cringing as it ripped through plaster and splintering wood.

Chris started crying. Mother picked up Kyle and herded us outside. From across the footbridge and through the leaky windows inside Gran’s house we sat through the day, watching as he sawed. Periodically he’d shut off the saw and come outside, dragging eight-foot logs that he’d cut for firewood back inside the house.

“He’s shoring up the roof,” Mother told us, “shoring up the roof so’s the house won’t fold in on itself.”

Well into the evening Father worked. I scarcely moved from the window, watching the flickering white light of the lantern following him through the house. Come morning the house was perfectly halved and he’d gone in boat to Ragged Rock, where Mother was from. Mid-noon he was back with two thirty-foot skiffs, a dozen men, and two dozen steel drums to use as floaters. For two more days we watched as the men jacked up each half of the house, hooked a block and tackle to a dead man, and launched each section of the halved house over a series of wet logs laid out side by side and down to the water. Once both halves were standing on the beach the men roped them each to a ring of oil drums, then to the motor boats, and started floating them across the short distance of the arm, through the narrow channel of the neck, and out into the open waters of the bay.

The moment the two halves of the house hit the water I raced back to Gran’s house, for, due to an illness of Mother’s, it was Gran who mostly raised me, and her house I lived in till the day we moved from Cooney Arm. I stood sickened inside the doorway, looking wildly around the kitchen, at the warm old couch by the stove, my fingerprints smeared onto every conceivable surface looking back at me. Gran crept to my side and I held on to her hand, sickened further by Gran’s face looking more greyish and grained than the weather-beaten door we were leaning against. We wouldn’t be needing any of Gran’s things now, our things. We’d be living with Mother, in Mother’s house. I broke down crying. Never had the old couch and creaky table felt so dear. Never had Mother looked so tall and far removed from me as she stood on the shore helping Chris and Kyle into the boat.

“Be sure it holds tight,” cried Gran as Father closed her front door, latching it securely against the wind. Father cradled Gran’s shoulders, for he knew that her joy in her house matched the joy he felt in his own, that they had both built and moulded their homes around themselves, each nail hammered and puttied with pride.

“You’ll be back. Soon as the ground thaws, you’ll be back for your gardening,” he promised as he walked her to the boat.

“But they’ll have burnt it,” cried Gran, “like they done the houses in Little Trite, the government will burn it.”

“Nay, we’re no longer sure about that. Might’ve been the Trapps that burned their own houses. Hard to tell what’s truth these days. Besides that, we took no money. We’re no part of their gawd-damned resettlement bullshit. This will always be ours to come back to. Hey, Doll?” he said to me, and capped his big hand around the crown of my head in a comforting gesture. “You sit with Gran now, we’re gonna have a fine time of it tonight putting our house back together.” He smiled, rubbing my head and knotting my hair, then lifted me into the boat where Mother and Chris and Kyle were already waiting. Lastly he lifted in Gran, and leaning his shoulder to the bow, shoved off the boat and leapt aboard himself.

Gran collapsed beside me on the thwart as we bobbed offshore, her eyes mired onto her house, its windows shuttered with dirty, broken pickets from her yard—excepting the window by her rocker in the kitchen. That window remained unshuttered, the curtain pulled aside as though she were still sitting there, in her rocker, looking out. She leaned against me, whimpering, “Least he can still sit and watch when he comes agin,” and dabbed her eyes with a crumpled bit of cotton as she wept for her man whose soul was still restless in the sea that took him near on fifty years before, and who sometimes came ashore when winter storms riled the ocean, stirring him from his watery grave. Silent, a waft of air, he’d drift through the door and sit in her rocker, creaking his way through the night, leaving naught but a few drops of water on her floor come morning to mark his coming and goings.

I wept too. Not over poor old Grandfather Now who I’d never known, but over my father and his silent cries as he stood at the bow of his boat, looking back over the meadow where a fortnight ago his own house had been and where now was gouged earth and a spattering of black stumps like tombstones over a fresh-dug grave.

Once we’d motored out through the neck we turned towards the open waters, watching quietly as the two halves of the house floated before us. Forty miles up and the bay ended in a wide basin with a small outport, Hampden, sloping from its centre. To the right of the outport was a cliff jutting into the water, and it was to the other side of this cliff that Father steered us and our split-apart house. Nothing stood there except an abandoned, salt-bitten wharf and a large sandbar a little farther up from a river piling into the sea. A crane from a nearby log boom stood waiting on the wharf, and within a relatively short time the two halves of the house were hoisted off the steel drums and sitting on top of the wharf looking like one again.

Then, surprisingly, in a moment I shall never forget, Father looked to Mother, his dark thatch of brows curling over his eyes, and grunted, “This is as far as she goes. By jeezes, if I can’t work on the sea, I’ll sleep on it. No gawd-damned mortal telling me where I sleeps.”

Mother blinked with astonishment. But then, when she understood what he meant, that he intended for the house to remain there, its back squished against the cliff and wooded hillside behind it and her front step to be the wharf itself, she wagged a finger of warning in his face and hissed, “If a youngster falls over and drowns it’ll be on your soul, not mine.”

They looked away from each other then, but I looked to them both, a knowing stirring deep within me that the morsels for my well-being were stowed within my mother’s larder, and the key to its lock was in my father’s hand.

ONE

T
HE WHITE OF THE ICE-CHINKED BAY
glimpsed through breaches in the trees, the coldness of its breath already on my face. The road veered to the left and then the bay opened wide before me, miles of pan ice glaring white beneath the sun and so tightly pummelled into the basin that it buckled upward, forming ridges some ten, twenty feet high in places. Hummocks they called these ridges, and scattered amongst them were the loftier heights of trapped icebergs, their wind-polished peaks sparkling like opals.

I fumbled for the handle on the rented car and tightened the window, hating the harsh coldness of the ice, hating how it crunched up over the beach, wedging against the roadside and near cramming the car against the black wall of rock to the right of the road. After a year on the gently contouring lands of Alberta, the Newfoundland coastline felt more rugged, harsh. Cutting around a sharp turn, I geared down, straining across the seat for a closer look at Father’s woodshed, the plaid bush jacket belonging to my younger brother Chris left lying on a pile of unsplit wood, the axe flung aside as though a call had sounded.

The car almost stalled, then jolted ahead the last few yards, rolling to a stop as the road ended on a sagging grey wharf that jutted thirty or forty feet to its left, into the sea. Encumbering the right side of the wharf, and wedged into the cliff behind it, was the house Father had floated forty miles up the bay from our old homestead in Cooney Arm. Sitting in his favourite spot, slouched against the side of the house with his feet dangling over the wharf, was Chris. He wasn’t sketching seals or humpbacks on this day, or paring birds out of wood, lips pursed in a melodic whistle as he plied and coaxed his knife around the curve of a wing or a beak; instead he was staring moodily out over the ice, his slumped shoulders carrying the forlorn look of a forgotten child.