Mission

by Paul Forrester-O'Neill

  The talk in Sylvie Buckle’s was like the short twists of the curling tongues, full of sizzle and hiss. John had gone. John had finally packed up and left because Goodness had knocked on his door and he was not able to look it straight in the eye. He’d flinched. He’d averted his eyes. They heard that before he left for good, he seared the earth around the house, scorching the soil with signs. They heard he skinned and sawed animals he kept in the cellar, that he roasted them on a makeshift spit and with some he didn’t even wait for them to cook so you could smell the burning flesh for miles. It was true they found satanic items, that the walls were black before they were blackened and were strung by catgut with all things craven and deprived, with pelts and skins and juju dolls. And it was true, too, that if you followed the signs on the walls and joined them up it was like tracing a road map to the devil himself.

  If there were any doubters, anyone less uplifted than the rest, they were Dr Abraham Stone, for one, for whom happiness of any kind was a financial kick in the balls because there was less of a need for his coated pills, and, surprisingly, for another, Ruth Anderson. You see, even though she considered John Cassidy to be without light and beyond salvation, and as a Christian woman she recognised the sizeable role that fire and destruction played in the scriptures, she was less convinced of the Lord’s contribution to this particular case. She understood why He might get involved but questioned, kneeling at her bedside, His specifics. She asked for guidance.

  And it was different for Delilah Morris on that morning in late July as she sat in her apartment with the painted-on door. Not only because, as she dressed and listened to another half-baked apology from Rita on the answerphone, she’d been vandalised, abused and rejected, but because she had a connection with John through the aches and pangs she felt since he’d gone. She missed him, was the truth. She missed driving out to the homestead, being with him, having him there in her life. She missed the encyclopaedias, the tinned peaches, Jack’s beers. She missed the seed packs on the veranda, the kitchen table, and the shoe- and shirt boxes. And she was thinking of him on that morning when she walked out of the apartment, stood in the quiet and shade of the hallway and opened up the mailbox with a key. There was an envelope. Inside it was a piece of paper with two words written on in John’s child-like scrawl: Follow Madeline, and two thousand dollars in bills. That was the connection. That whenever she thought about him, he would somehow be there.

  It was different, too, for Doug Sketchings, sitting at the battle-ground of the kitchen table, with Viola asleep and Lloyd and Floyd shackled to their high-chairs like baby escapologists because, for one thing, he was not a born and bred Missionite and so the whole Cassidy rancour had not invaded his bloodstream, and for another, just like Delilah, he had allegiance. And it was that allegiance to John that he considered on that bright morning as he sat and thought about the phone-call he’d had from Vincent the day before, telling him the unveiling of the plans was a week away and there was work if he wanted it, measuring out the land.

  He sighed, as the toaster pinged and Lloyd poised with a spoonful of wetted oats. You see, Doug had found something through that allegiance. In the midst of all the bedlam around him, he’d found his importance and worth. The problem was, or were, as he opened the letters from the mailbox that morning, amongst others, Dr Stone’s medical bills, the utilities, the dwindling savings, the upkeep of the Korean car, the cable package, ants, in-laws, numerous breakages, the boys’ rampages and Viola’s continual slide, none of which lessened his worth, but all of which added to his headaches and to the sense of his tether being stretched to snapping point.

  But on that day, rising up to the late 70s already, with the sound of Viola up and stirring, the shower on, so too the TV, he opened the last envelope on the pile that lay on the kitchen table, splashed with milk. The oats got flung in slo-mo, hitting Floyd flush on the forehead. Inside was a cheque for five thousand dollars.

  And for Sophie Li it was different, both because of her sympathy for Jack and because she had been made to feel like a migrant. Different, despite the part-fixed roof, the cooked dinner and the offer of respite, despite Lester’s handouts and a room to sleep in that wasn’t full of junk. Different, even though she’d dished the dirt on John and left him to the lions’ claws. Different, as she left the house that same morning and lit a cigarette, as she walked past the nosedown Chevy and stopped at the mailbox. Inside the mailbox was a cheque for three thousand dollars.

  And for Margaret Sweeting, formerly Cassidy, formerly DeMille, who lay in the bath of the apartment out east she could only just pay the rent of and frazzled over what drink was in the place, and where. She was not familiar with the north-west of the country, nor the Cascade Mountains. She was not familiar with the town of Mission nestled in the crook at the edge of the prairie fields, nor with its brief but turbulent gold-mining history, nor, of course, with the plan of her only son to sell the Cassidy land and entrap Vincent Clay until he was a ruined and fractured man.

  She got out of the lukewarm water, dried herself with a threadbare towel and walked around the apartment naked. She was forty-six years old and the last ten had not been kind. She looked in cup-boards and drawers, in every compartment, blocked or otherwise, of the refrigerator, in and on top of the single wardrobe with the broken door. She got down on all fours to see if anything had rolled under the old sofa and stuck, and it was in that position, her ear on ground level, her hair matted by bathwater and sweat, her face blotched claret, with the sag of thin-dough skin and the vine of pubic hair, that she saw the letter by the apartment door.

  Her first thought was of eviction, of a landlord’s notice, a writ for late payment. Or it was a janitor’s bill, a neighbour’s gripe. It was a prosecution, a demand for money she didn’t have. It was the sheet of test results, the grim news on bloods and liver functions, on scans of heart and lungs and brain. It was Dwayne up there in the hospital she visited twice a year when he barely recognised her and she barely recognised him. Or, as she crawled across the creaking boards, it was written confirmation of what she feared most; a dry day.

  She picked it up, didn’t recognise the scrawl on the envelope she ripped at with cracked nails. She held the letter up in the shake of her hands and twisted herself so she could sit with her back against the door, her knees and feet tucked in. TV noise came from the neighbouring apartment, a siren wailed in the street outside. Her lips were salty and dry, and moved along to the words she read:

  You lied to me and you lied to him, it said. You told me something that wasn’t true and from that moment on I am the way that I am and all that time is lost. You fucked me up and you deserve nothing. If you’d raised me like you should’ve, if you’d given me a chance, given me anything, things might be different. But you didn’t. So, I have no sense of mercy. I owe you nothing. You told me where he was because you wouldn’t raise a finger to help me when I needed it. You told me not out of kindness but spite. And I had him for six weeks when he was skin and bone, when he had a rattle for breath. I had him to shave and to wash his feet, to see him scooped out to nothing. I had him to bury. I had him to mourn over. So, this is not forgiveness, it said. This is not a change of heart. I will be gone from your life and you will be gone from mine. This is a choice you never gave me. Do with it what you will. And, folded next to the letter, was a cheque for five hundred dollars.

  The people of Mission knew the revelation was coming. They knew Vincent Clay had bought up the land for something, but what that something was and when it would be unfurled, they had nothing. Rumours were rare, any guesswork based on estimations of Vincent’s stock, on Madeline, and the fact that he’d told them it was a grand-scale thing of hope and opportunity.

  Vincent had opened up the land. He’d invited anyone from the town to go and walk on the earth that no-one, apart from the posse of six, had ever walked on. He invited them to go up close, to stand on that cracked, black stone where the homestead had been, to take a look over to Coronation Point and t
o Rupture Hill and to try and sense the dark and dreadful presence of the Cassidys. When they’d gone, when the last of them had headed back down the track to the road or trailed across the land to the base of Coronation Point and up in small, none-the-wiser clusters, Vincent and Lester stood on a rise in the late afternoon light. Without the building, the veranda, and the steps that led to the porch-way with its armchair and its seed packs, the land looked different, like a rotten molar pulled out and left.

  Vincent watched the last car drive away. He listened to the engine shake and the exhaust rattle, looked down at his hands. “This is the moment when, Lester,” he said.

  Lester’s neck was itchy. He was hungry and dry-lipped.

  “It works like this. We get the people into the hall. We set up a table on a raised platform and put four chairs behind it. And we explain. With Ted, with Lily, with Madeline. We tell them all about the financial backers, about our wise men in the east with their power and their vision and the money they want to invest, about how they see in the Mission venture only the floodgates of possibility about to open. And then we tell them about the gold.”

  Lester looked over towards Rupture Hill, across the rough terrain. His feet were sore and he wore an Oilers’ cap to keep the sun off his threadbare scalp. He had three days’ worth of stubble scratching at his chin.

  “Where am I?” he said.

  “What?”

  “In the hall. You have chairs for the others. What about me?”

  Vincent paused and turned towards him. “Lester, you are where you belong. You are where you are best. Amongst the people.” He clasped a hand onto Lester’s shoulder, onto the faded, chequered shirt with the collar starting to fray. “These folk are readable,” he said. “Look at the faces, look at the way their bodies move and twitch. They know reactions, and that’s it. Look at the anger they have, look at the resentment. They don’t possess refinement of thought, Lester. They don’t know nuance and guile and the playing of one thing against another. They have limitations, and one of them is the mental equivalent of not being able to turn around physically.”

  Lester squinted out. His lids and lashes were sore and a line of sweat ran from each temple. On those days when the temperature nestled snug up in the 80s and stayed there, when he was outside and bearing the full brunt of the heat, then Vincent’s puzzles and abstractions made the bones of his head ache.

  “How long are we here now?” Vincent said, looking back over his shoulder towards Coronation Point.

  “Months.”

  “This is the eighth month, Lester. Winter, spring and summer. We live here. We work here. And now we wait only for the people to sit and listen. You know why they will? Because they’re expecting something, they’re in a state of anticipation. It’s like Christmas Eve out there. They want something to happen. Trust me, Lester,” he said, holding out the palm of his hand, “I have them right here.”

  They drank lukewarm water from a canteen and walked down the rise and on past the house that was shell and neglect only. They took the path that led them close up to the Anderson place, to the breaths of the white sails and the porch-way in shade. And then the slopes and the jags up to the pate of Coronation Point, where they stood, Lester bent and billowing, his face plum-skin, a monkish bowl of sweat where he’d taken his cap off, Vincent still, taking a breath in and looking out, over his dominion.

  “What did he say? We are animals with brains. We are urges and drives and if we see something we want, we go out and get it. What did he say? The world is up for grabs. If you don’t take it, you don’t deserve it.”

  A hundred yards ahead and to the left, the figure of Ruth Anderson, minus bonnet, hung out the laundry on the line. She worked quicker than usual and when she was done, she took her empty basket, lodged it against her hip, and walked back towards the house. When she got to the porch-way she stopped, her hair loose and over her shoulder, with a noticeable lack of ribbon. Something else was different that day as the sheets and the aprons began to sway. Despite her husband’s pious protestations, the crucifix had gone.

  Two days later, after he’d gone to the Mallender house and told Ted to prepare his charger, after he’d made his confederate asides to Harry and Steve and old Mr Parker, and made his call to Madeline, Vincent was ready. And, in the community hall that had its residual haunt of rice-steam and blankets, of starch, lemon-grass and ginger, with the majority of the town either gathered or represented, flanked by Ted and Madeline, with Lily to the side in a sea-blue dress and a new diamante brooch, he stood and unveiled the plan.

  He told them life was about more than just survival, more than living day to day, week to week, hand to mouth, not knowing from one month to the next whether it would get any better or not. For him, that was not enough. There had to be more. He told them the plan he was about to present to them was a long-term plan, not just a like-for-like replacement for the mill. It was about expansion and enterprise and the chance of prosperity. It would provide work and financial stability. It would, by necessity, require that sense of civic responsibility that every citizen would be able to wear like a badge of honour. And then he paused. He waited for Madeline to lean forward and place her hand on his, for Ted to straighten up his back and put the bugle to his lips, and with the steeliest look in his eye, his jawbone set, and the firmest tone in his voice, he said, “We’re digging for gold.”

  And, with barely a pause for breath, as Lester looked out for those twitches and signs of unease, he told them that the location, the rough terrain, the mill, and the Cassidy land, and the estimated volume, which was substantial, had come from reliable sources, that he’d seen the maps and the written evidence himself and of its existence he was one hundred per cent convinced. He told them that what had happened before, the ruination, the tearing apart and the filth, had done so because of the naivety and the short-sightedness of a single young man; Nathaniel Hansetter. The town had not been prepared. It had no time to prepare. It didn’t know how to prepare. This is not the same thing, he told them. This is nowhere near the same thing. The excavation, the digging up of land, as surveyed as it is, as measured out as it will be, is not an act of pillage or piracy. There will be no invasion. There will be no hordes. You will not be at the mercy of cutthroats and heathens. You will not be swamped by the unwashed and the uncouth. You will not hear blasphemy and profanity or be preyed upon by the darker sides of man. This time, he said, there will be no strangers.

  He talked about stages and time-scales, about what would happen when and where and how, about those solid and guaranteeable things that made people feel more secure. He talked about planning. He talked about structure. And, with his shoulders set back, he talked about hope and ambition and risk. His voice soared out over the hall, over the heads of the gathered and represented. He became evangelical, a believer who made others believe, who carried them with him and took them, with their years of only the tack and the sniff and the rattle of things, and he gave them a sense of the beyond, of the possible.

  He asked for commitment and trust. He asked for optimism and faith. He talked about a good and fair wage for anyone wanting to work, a bonus scheme, an incentive. And he asked those who doubted, those who feared the upheaval and the change, who had concerns for his conviction, to ask themselves these simple questions: Why would we buy up the land? Why would the backers do the backing? Why would we dig up the land if there was no gold? Why would we come all the way out here on the strength of nothing? And then, as Ted stood and moved alongside him, so too Madeline, and as Lily sneezed and dabbed at herself with a silk kerchief, he nodded, once. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the plan. Have faith, he said. Trust me.

  Over the next few weeks, as late summer moved into early fall, the sense of belief and assurance began to take hold. Optimism was greater, faith stronger, and if there were any creaks in trust, they were smoothed over by Vincent’s confederates. So, Harry convinced his drinking clientele, Steve his steak-eaters and Ted, basking in his associative glow, spo
ke at every opportunity of the man’s credibility and vision and his ability to make the town prosper again. He was backing him, he said, and there was a sizeable cheque to prove it.

  All this was helped, of course, by the presence of Madeline. For the people of Mission, Madeline was balm wherever she went. She was pacific and good and able to eliminate all traces of doubt simply by standing next to Vincent and breathing. And if Vincent was next to Ted and Lily, or if the four of them were seated like royalty at a corner table in Steve’s, then everything had to be hunky dory.

  People did react, just as Vincent said they would. In the first few days alone the majority of the ex-mill workers, including most of the first posse and half of the second, along with some of the neighbourhood men, responded to those advertisements for work, as drivers of rock trucks and bulldozers, as operators of sluice boxes and water-pumps, or as labourers paid to maul and dig and pan as soon as the machinery arrived. They came into the community hall, one after the other, and Vincent, sometimes with Lester, sometimes not, with every contract signed and every shake of the hand, made them feel responsible again. He made them get their importance back. He made them think they were of value and impact and not the inevitable by-products of a backwater town with grievances and gripes, nor made out of clay, or dough, nor credulous beasts, nor fruit ripe for picking or plucking. No, they would turn up on time and give him no grief, and he would pay them to find him the fortune he’d make.

  They reacted to the promise of work and a steady wage by buying boldly on the strength of it; farm equipment they’d wanted, truck parts, cattle and cattle feed in bulk, barn doors, fences and posts, the industrial sander on the list a long time. There were conceptions, proposals, and renewals of vows. Plans were made, futures decided, whole lives shifted. The man, so enraged he’d fired the shot into the doorframe of the Cassidy home, donated his shotgun to his one and only son, and bought himself a new one.