Mission

by Paul Forrester-O'Neill

  Ruth Anderson fainted. She was in Parker’s buying starch for the sheets and literally collapsed in a heap of billows and tufts when she heard it. Old Mr Parker did what he could. He put her in the recovery position, cleared the airwaves, delicately parting her stiff collar. He called for medical help and, as a sure sign of that decency, he sold her the starch half-price when she left, still shaken. Later that day there was a sharp rise in the sale of earphones, comfort blankets and bubble-wrap. And for the younger men, the new, hastily improvised foam sacks to let those frustrations out on.

  Sizzlin’ Steve’s had a couple of good nights, too. People eating to feel better. People consoling themselves with large steaks and fries and extra-hot, flagellating relish. Church attendance upped. Dr Stone drew a few more folks in to seek pharmaceutical relief for their shock. And somebody, just like Lester Hoops said they would, did indeed, in an act of community, drive all the way out to the Shaw place and offer to fix up the roof. Someone did invite Sophie and her sister to go and eat with their family, and someone, an ex-mill worker with impaired hearing, volunteered to sit with Lee once a week, as respite for the sisters, and read aloud from the white supremacist literature he had around, in the hope that he might find his mojo again.

  For Vincent it was too good a chance to miss. It was the essence of seizing the day. So, contrived and promoted by a day-only, crowdpulling appearance by his loving and supportive wife, Madeline, he generated a sense of unification in the town. Any petty disputes that people might’ve had over money owed or grazing rights or farm equipment borrowed and not given back were all forgotten in the face of that growing communal resolve. Men and women, young and old. Ignoring what had happened was not a moral possibility. You let such things pass at your peril, he said. There was a duty to act, for the sake of the town, for its past and, as he reminded them, its future.

  The first posse was made up of a dozen men, ex-mill workers and men from the southern neighbourhoods, all masked and hooded, who came through the woods on that early evening in mid-June. They’d been fed by Steve and watered by Harry and they walked over Coronation Point, down onto the level land and past the Anderson sheets and bonnets until they got to within twenty feet of the house. It was windless, in the low 70s still. The striated cloud formations stretched behind the turrets of Rupture Hill.

  They lined up like a drilled unit and, from sacks made up in homes, tied in Harry’s and Steve’s and carried in turns along the way, they took out the manifold rocks and stones and, on a given and silent gesture, either by hand or from makeshift slingshots, they released them towards the longer side of the house, shattering every pane of glass in a ten-second burst.

  Two days later, an ex-mill worker involved in the beating of Jake Massey, so incensed that his wife and children had heard the word, picked up his shotgun and from a vantage point on the southern edge of the Cassidy land fired a single bullet into the frame of the porch-way door.

  They drove, most days in convoys of four or five cars, along the unmade track that led from the road to the house. It was a show of strength and unity, of preening gestures that hid the fester and churn they felt inside. And they needed a result. Without the outcome of John Cassidy packing up, leaving and selling the land so that the grand-scale plan could start, it was just moral fury and retaliation. So, imagine the frustrations of those righteous men when instead of being gripped by a fear of escalation, of sensing that none of it would stop until he was gone for good, the young Cassidy bastard simply boarded up the broken windows with plywood, nails and planks, sealed over the bullet hole and for most of every day thereafter sat on his veranda and looked out. Sometimes he took his black coffee and tinned fruit, sometimes a volume of something to read, and always, right there next to him like a trusty, owl-eyed spaniel, his father’s shotgun he picked up and turned in their direction every time they got out of the cars.

  He was taunting them. That’s what he was doing. He was inviting them to get closer. It was his own form of provocation. And the longer he stayed there on his veranda so the townsfolk and the posse and the man who’d fired the bullet, instead of feeling like they’d done their duty by the town, felt only the further twists of impotence.

  For a while, the stakes shifted. Given the failure of intimidation they moved, without any consultation, sideward. A painted black X appeared overnight on Delilah’s apartment door. Her best friend, from kindergarten onwards, Rita Mahoonie, stopped answering her calls and wouldn’t go to the door when she came. People crossed the street to avoid her. They looked the other way. For some of them the shunning was enough. It was enough for those who’d walked to the edge of the Cassidy land as part of a larger group or those who’d let close a door in Jack Cassidy’s face or stood by and watched as he struggled with groceries. It was enough for all those whose contributions to the cause was to fry the steaks, pour the beers, help tie the sacks, fill up the cars with gasoline, wash hair, paint nails, pluck brows and listen to every word of hearsay and rumour, and to lay out the hymn books on the old wooden pews so that forgiveness, asked for or not, was only a short prayer away. For others, it wasn’t.

  Two weeks after the slingshot attack and a week after the painted X, simmering with the kind of inadequacy that no church service, no late night in Harry’s or comfort steak with fries could ease, the posses and convoys and neighbourhood men got their chance and, with no talk of how or when or where to draw the line, they took it.

  After a morning spent on the veranda with his hardbacks and coffee, John had gone back into the house around mid-day and come out half an hour later with a medium-sized valise the colour of cocoa that he carried over to the Toyota, opening up the trunk and laying it down flat. Then he brought out a number of shoe boxes and a couple of shirt boxes he put either next to the valise or on the back seat, depending. Over the next few hours, on an afternoon of clear, blue skies, with every crease and line of Rupture Hill plain to see, he took items that belonged outside, the spade, the saws, the shotgun and the ruined armchair with its belly full of stones and carried them back into the house. Around three he came out with a second, smaller valise that he propped on the front seat, went back to the house to check each and every board and panel, locked the porch-way door, climbed into the Toyota and drove away down the unmade road, the dust rising up behind him.

  That night, with the Toyota not back, a second posse of six selected men, the one who’d fired the shot, three of the slingshot posse and the two teenage Snipe boys, drove out from Harry’s bar in two trucks. They parked at the end of the track, close to the road, and walked towards the house, the bottles strapped and stoppered around their waists, the mix of motor oil and gasoline thickened with dish soap and tar, the wicks soaked in kerosene. None of them spoke. The veranda smelled of syrup and varnished wood.

  The slingshot three walked round to the back of the house. There were two unbroken windows, one that looked into an unused bedroom tiled with papers and books, the other into a room crisscrossed with tools, with spades and saws and cutters splayed in a zany stockpile. The Snipe brothers hammered on the porch-way door, and the gunshot man, with the material of a ripped shirt pulled up over his mouth and nose, stood stock-still on the veranda. Just once he looked round, to see a light go on in the Anderson house, and then go off again in seconds.

  Five minutes later, with clouds passed and gone over the Mallender estate, with Lily applying strokes of night-cream and Ted dreaming of white chargers, over the prairies and the farmlands, with Doug in TV light while Viola slept, and Sophie pulling back the cycle chains to sleep in an upstairs room for the first time in months, the six chosen men lined up on the dark side of the house, lit, on the gruff count of three, the modified wicks of bandages, cloths and rags, and let those bottles loose.

  Part Three

  John drove south and then east. The land was open and flat, plains patched with corn and rapeseed, hills low and rolling, bearded with occasional woodland. If he stopped, he did so for provisions and gasoline and to chec
k on the Toyota pieced together with tape and grease, on the rusted sills, the slow leakage of oil, the wiper fixed but shorter. Whenever he needed to rest, he pulled over to the side of the road, just like he had done before.

  He sat with the car door wide, opening up his tins of peaches or apricots and pulling out the contents like fish. Sometimes he listened to the radio. Sometimes he read, one of the handful of volumes he’d brought in the shoe-box, one his father had made a mark in. The nights were warm and clear and he settled himself either sunk down in the seat or curled in the back, one of the blankets loose over him, another folded or rolled as a pillow. He tried to find sleep, an hour here or there, but it didn’t come easily. He named constellations, knew their places in the summer sky, could figure directions by them. He placed the late birdsong, the animal sounds, checked his pockets of pins.

  He knew how close he was. He knew from when he got to within an inch of Vincent Clay and made him admit to who he was. He knew he was a phone-call to the LMA and a matter of signed deeds away.

  He got to the lake in the early evening of the next day, left the car on the same pebbled shore and walked over the stones and the shale, looking towards the line of trees and the westerly shoreline sketched with driftwood and scree. The sky was soft-blue, stroked by midsummer pink, and as he walked, with the same buffleheads, shovelers and teals, he went back to the ferrying of the kitchen bowl, full, empty, full again, to the unbuttoning of the plaid shirt, the pallid and paper-thin grooves, the visible bones, to the filing of the skin on his feet, the feeling of his scalp through the brush handle, the chin through the razor, the piano-key ribs and spine through the fabric of the towel.

  He walked further along the shoreline, closer to the narrow spit of land. He stopped at the cuticle whiskered by seed-grass and listened out to the water as it lapped at the shale. There was the way his father sat, the reeds of his voice when he spoke. There were his parchment hands that rested like a bound collection of sticks on the driftwood of his legs. There were eyes all but lost in the folds of his skin, in the scribbled rivulets of blood. “It’ll eat you alive,” he said. “Find something else. Move on.”

  First light pricked around four, along with the birdsong he picked with a tilt of his head. He knelt and splashed his face with water, swept it back through his hair and allowed it to run down his back and his chest. He looked across the silvery-black surface of the lake to the dun and palest-blue of the hills on the far side. Then he stood and headed over towards the line of trees, following the narrow track cut through.

  He walked for almost an hour until he came to the small general store with its hung dinghies and surfboards and, beyond its baskets of fish reels, snorkels and masks, a call-box. He waited at the tracks’ edge. Sunlight spliced through the trees, and to his right the track widened and led down to a slipway to the lake. A car pulled up Outside of the store and a middle-aged woman in a gingham dress got out and went inside. The man sat at the wheel and leant forward. Then he rolled down the window and lit a cigarette.

  His crooked snout twitched. The woman came out of the store with provisions. She put some in the well of her seat and some on the blankets and duvets and boxes in the back. The man watched her, without speaking. He watched her get into the car and close the door behind her, glancing back as she did. He pulled one last time on his cigarette and threw it to the ground.

  He got to the call-box, heard a bufflehead sing out. One of the dinghies twisted in the riddle of wind that came off the lake. When it was over, when he no longer felt the heaviness in his limbs and the acid in his gut, when the need for closure was done with, when he’d played everything out, made the call, said the word, posted the signed deeds and made it all happen, he would walk away and leave it all behind, just like his father said. And when Vincent had bought up the land and begun that ruination of self and town and every one of the deserving people in it, he would let them all swing. He would let them tear at each other, let them ransack themselves, with no reprieve, no quarter or mercy shown, and Vincent Clay would sink to his knees as a beaten, fooled man.

  Ted Mallender wasn’t there. He wasn’t there to run to Vincent Clay with the news. He wasn’t in the Agency building to imagine himself mounting the white charger and grabbing his bugle. And he couldn’t call Lily, his flower of atonement, and tell her the Cassidy name and the Cassidy land and the Cassidy beast with his Cassidy word would all be gone, and how the lawns would get tidied up, soon. No, it was the least-mousey ledger-man who took the call, who listened as the young man told him that he was selling up the land, that he would haunt the town of Mission no more, that he would no longer be an affliction, a bugbear or blight. He had lived on his land long enough and it was time to move on.

  There was a pause when he stopped. The lake shimmered, a thousand bracelets and lockets dancing over the water.

  “Don’t you know?” the ledger-man said. “Your place is burned to the ground.”

  He stood, looked back towards the clearing, his gut twisted, his joints jellied and loose. He saw the woman change her mind. He saw her get out of the car and begin to re-arrange some of the things in the trunk, to take one of the duvets from the back seat and lay it out, to take out the bags of provisions and put them on the ground by her feet and start to swap items from one bag to another, making a heavier bag, and a lighter one, to pick up the lighter one and put it in one of the boxes on the seat, where once the duvet had been, and take the heavier one over to the trunk, pushing it in against the side.

  He got the faint music coming from the general store, the smell of pine-treatment and sawdust, the sniff from the slipway of kerosene and oil. He got the lit-olive and the pale, but lustrous mulatto of the tree trunks.

  “Was there anything left?”

  “Nothing,” the ledger-man said.

  “Anything saved?”

  “No.”

  “Anything…found?”

  “No, sir.”

  He watched her look at the trunk, top to bottom, side to side. The duvet she picked up by its two lower corners and arranged over the top of the things, including the pushed, heavier bag. He watched her reach up and close the trunk, check the lighter bag of provisions in the box on the back seat and close the door. He saw the man look towards her. He saw him speak, not for very long, roll up the window until it was almost shut, and then start up the engine. The woman fidgeted in the dress and looked behind at the box with the provisions in it. The car moved forward. The man paused a moment, turned the car full circle in the dust and drove away.

  “Mr Cassidy? Do you need anything?”

  “No,” he said, and put the receiver down.

  He imagined his great-grandfather on the land, a young and bearded player of cards, oblivious to risk or threat. He imagined the land left, bunch berried, strewn with sot-weed and liverwort. He imagined it returned to, the near-septuagenarian Patrick, still immune to the townsfolk’s wrath, building the place for his grandson Jack to live in, not knowing that the single aunt would keep it from the boy, through spite or protection, who knew, not knowing that the boy would never in his adult life go back to her to be told and would not discover the existence of the land until he was sixty years old and had nowhere else to go.

  And now it was razed, nothing but rubble and wreckage. Scorched, cindered, mounds of embers and ash only. There were no memories left to look at or touch. Nothing to distinguish. Mentioned in Masterson’s volumes only, the history and geography of the Cassidy land, how it became what it became, what grew on it, walked on it, ate and left fur on it. And now, underneath that ragged pile, those mounds of ash, the tumbled, crumbled roofs and walls, underneath what once was slept in and lived in, under the smells of his father’s dying days, of Sophie Li’s detergents and sprays, under the faint traces of Delilah’s perfume, of unguents and creams, of a onceeaten Chinese meal with spilt whisky and cigarettes and an armchair ripped and ruined, were the left bones and teeth of Jake Massey.

  A week later the deeds were on Ted Mal
lender’s desk in the Land Management Agency, the third cheque was signed, and the land was Vincent Clay’s.

  Of the fire itself there was little to no information. No-one had seen or heard anything. For their part, the Serpentine volunteers, as with the mill, given the distance and the delay, got there way too late to salvage anything worthwhile, and the Mission police department, busy celebrating Ned Scarratt’s birthday at the time, set up only a token investigation the day after, which, unsurprisingly, bore no fruit whatsoever. They figured this much: if it was arson, they were looking at a few hundred suspects at least, six months’ worth of paperwork and the nuzzling into people’s lives that would get them no thanks. An accident, on the other hand, or something of a self-inflicted nature, was a single sheet and a signature. End of. Plus, the disappearance of the Cassidy stain and the selling of the land was proof that he himself had no stomach to contest it as a criminal act. As for the six men, they were neither named nor named themselves. If people knew or suspected them then they never said, and it was never spoken of.

  Once the sale was announced, though, the town ditched its zippered mouth and was uplifted. To the townsfolk, regardless of age or gender, whether they’d been involved in the Cassidy war or they hadn’t, the destruction of the house and the sale of the land felt like a victory. It felt like a century-long, multi-generational dispute finally resolved and laid to rest, and a triumph of the Good Lord over spirits blacker than pitch. Business was good again, so too church attendance. People gathered in Harry’s and raised glasses to righteousness and hope and to the riddance of the young Cassidy brute who made their lips curl. They had larger steaks and extra fries. Old Mr Parker, never one to miss an opportunity, had a bonanza day. Special offers and reductions and a run on objects of a vaguely commemorative nature; mapped tea-towels, candles by the bulk load, playing cards and a fire sale of tinned peach and apricot segments, amongst others. People flocked, people bought, people loaded up their trunks and drove away.