Mission

by Paul Forrester-O'Neill

  And when he was under threat, the Mission Mallender with a wife young enough to be his daughter was not a man of substance, and if you looked beyond that bluster there was only flatulence and creaks and pill-regimes. There was a weak and shrunken bladder and fingers bloodied on the flailing strips of Vincent’s coat-tails.

  Lily herself was no better. At best, a poor chooser, at worst, mercenary and unscrupulous, she was beginning to see the true wizened nature of her plucked fruit. She was no longer envied by those who wished to be in her place so she padded her way through the gastric and colic spaces of the house, with its views over the battered ranges of soil, with her ball-gowns gathering dust, and her oils, unguents and fillers lined up, ready for the fall she sensed was imminent.

  He moved from one shadow to the next in his peacoat and boots, watching Vincent walk pestered through the mist. He watched him take the turn down to the hotel, pause a moment outside and take a long and lofted sniff at the air, at the pungency of the earth and the metal of the rail-tracks. And then he waited, twitching his own crooked snout until the light in the first-storey room went on and the light in Lester’s empty, adjoining room did the same. He waited until Vincent Clay went to the window and put his puzzled face to the pane, as he knew he would. He watched him open it, stick his head out into the grizzled mist and peer, first one way, then the other, with that look of a man whose room, in his hour-long absence only, had been entered into with stealth and a hatpin, whose items, clothes and furnishings had been touched by white-gloved fingers, whose pillow had been pressed into, whose mirror had been gently printed on, and whose loved one, or photograph of, was no longer propped on the bedside table, but moved and flattened, face down on the bed.

  The blasts, when they came, were like nothing seen, heard, or felt in the town of Mission before. There was nothing in any of the Masterson volumes. There were no log-falls louder, no canon-fire, gunfire or musket-fire more voluble. There were no landslides or rock falls, no quakes or fault-line shudders that went anywhere near them. The land was ruptured beyond rupture. Great schisms and rifts appeared like open, brutal wounds. Fissures and abysmal chasms cut into its paste. The coyotes ran, the birdlife scattered.

  People went out there nevertheless. They drove to some point on the arc of the road, under the loom of Rupture Hill, and made their way as best they could to the rough terrain and the river alongside it. Most of the diggers and the panners were there, most of the yea-sayers, the more hopeful, those who still believed in Vincent Clay and his conviction, his reliable sources, his men from the east.

  They watched still in anticipation, predicting nuggets like hailstones, expecting showers of swirling flakes, termite-storms and a whole rain down of shimmering dust that would light up the winter skies. They watched for those first few days, some bringing fishermen’s waders to get through the mud, some earplugs from old Mr Parker, and some with pans to catch the fall-out in. Even the up-river panners, halved by then by those who’d carried the Snipe boy back into town, and stayed, stopped to listen to the booms.

  With each day, though, things began to change. With each blast that shuddered the land beneath them at regular intervals, whether they were standing in the calf-deep squelch or sitting amongst the detritus of the camp, they understood less and less of what was happening. Even the diggers who’d hacked remorselessly into the rock and stone for weeks on end, even the ex-mill workers who’d dealt in the din of whirring machinery for most of their adult lives, couldn’t quite fathom the magnitude or the scale.

  For others, it was more: For some of those who went only for the first couple of days and then stopped, those who went with pans and left them there empty, those who walked back into town along what was left of the river and saw the last throes of the trout in the toxic waters, and for some of those hardened men, those with shotguns and slingshots who’d torched the homestead, slashed the tyres, left the doors to slam into the old man’s face, what started to happen was doubt. Not only in the whereabouts of the gold or in the existence of its volume or the methods used to find it, not only in Vincent Clay, the out-of-town man of business and his grand-scale thing of opportunity and hope, but in themselves. It wasn’t sudden, and it wasn’t seismic. It wasn’t a moment of epiphany for any single one of them. It was when they looked in the mirror first thing. It was when they stayed those few extra seconds longer than they would’ve, when they caught the eyes, the flesh, the turns of skin, they began to see something about themselves that was different.

  By the time the blasting season was over and Vincent Clay had driven his frantic routes from site to site, it wasn’t just the yea-sayers, diggers, and panners who noticed the difference. It wasn’t even confined to those who’d played some part or another, somewhere down the line, in the destruction of the Cassidy land. It was most of the townsfolk. It was people waking in the middle of the night, men and women, not sure what it was that riddled them. It was people hesitant for no reason, losing concentration and purpose, feeling like they were suddenly sinking. For the men, it wasn’t spoken of, or shared. But for the women, for those it began to affect the most, it was.

  You see, the womenfolk of Mission had, for the most part, simply bore witness. They’d waved flags. They’d fed and watered and cheered the men on in ways more dutiful than belligerent and yet they felt the doubt just as much. They were culpable. And they were culpable because they’d allowed it to happen and not one of them had raised a word of protest to stop it.

  They spoke and shared in small numbers, in groups and loose meetings. For most of them, it was less to do with whether the gold was there or not, less about looking gullible or foolish, but something more internal. They spoke about that scurry across the top of the abdomen or the weight that plumbed and sat further down. They talked about those mists and squalls that befell them out of nowhere even on the brightest of winter days. They talked of moments in the food aisles, moments in the kitchens, moments when who they were and what they were supposed to be doing seemed to vanish.

  Some of them edged towards Ruth Anderson. They wanted to understand her, to know whether her crisis was as internal as their own. They wanted to know how and why her Godliness had gone. And if it had gone from Ruth, the woman with the heavenward face, the carrier of fruit and bread, with the ducklings always behind her and the crucifix in the porch, then what might become of them.

  The news, on that first, crisp day of spring, with the bite of an easterly coming over the prairies, that there was nothing there, no seams, no nuggets, no flakes and no dust, was more resonant than any blast.

  Vincent got the call first. Scattered and imploding and barely able to keep himself sane, he drove out to the Mallender estate to tell Ted. Ted, incapable of reconfiguring the lines on his face to anything other than shaken, told Lily. Lily sank. She looked across at the two men for as long as it might take Ted to put on one of his socks, and then she moved. She drove into town to tell Dr Stone who, missing his contracts out east and his savings gone west, could not even reach into his drawer and offer his patients those mounds of sugar-coated cylinders whether they worked or they didn’t. And so he just told them the news as they came in, one after the other, with their ailments and their babes-to-be, with their doubts and mists and squalls he never listened to a word of, so that within the first few hours every tendril of the news had spread and the town was covered in vines.

  Most were struck dumb. Households as if slapped into silence, not knowing what to do or how to reel back to figure how it’d all got started and what had led to what, how it’d come along out of nowhere and picked them all up like scraps and tossed them from side to side in its slavering jaw.

  For the yea-sayers it was worse. For all those diggers and panners who’d gone out there for months, it was a collapse like no other. It was every flame of hope snuffed out, every plan, every investment, every dream, gone.

  In Sylvie Buckle’s the bunting had drooped anyway, the glitter fallen from the mirrors and the fresh flowers fresh no m
ore. The lustrous pinks were the colour of pig-snouts at best and Sylvie’s buzz had lost its sizzle. The talk was muted. Internal problems were more those of a darkening soul than anything ovarian or womb-based. There were no calories or cuticles any more, no streaks or extensions. Gone were the people. Gone were Frances Harte, Jake Massey and Dan Cruck. Gone were Rita’s beaux and the migrants. And gone, even, was John Cassidy, the enigma, the boogerboo, no matter he was there all along.

  Just after mid-day, some of Sylvie’s sullen few under their driers and cones watched as Ruth walked up to stand outside and study the price-list in the window. They watched the way she checked her nails, her reflection in the mirror, and the small leather purse she took from her bag. They watched, as behind her, Delilah Morris, the woman they’d never understood or tried to, the woman they’d left behind or crossed the street to avoid, was crossing the very same street to get to Sylvie’s. They watched as she smiled, briefly, towards Ruth, and walked in, not waiting to sit or go to the counter, or to make any acknowledgement of any of the people she knew in there, including Lily and her kindergarten friend, beaux-less Rita.

  She stood instead in the middle of the floor with its thin carpet of curls, and said, “Madeline is not for real. She works for him. She’s not his wife. And there are no men from the east.”

  John watched the unravelling from any shadow he could find. He hid himself in the porch-ways and stairwells of neighbourhood blocks, stood under the cloak of trees down by the rail-tracks. He broke into empty apartments with his hatpins, into the Station Hotel, the back room of Ike’s, the storeroom at old Mr Parker’s. He looked down from rooftops and second-storey windows at the town twisting out of shape beneath him. He saw the wracked faces and bodies bent double as if something was eating at them from the inside, sinking its teeth into abdomen and gut and not letting go. He saw and heard the mewl of bewilderment, the snap of men getting worse by the hour. He saw more than one smashed mirror, more than one rockhammer get pounded into table-tops and surfaces where indigestible food shook on rattled plates. He saw pans and cradles and rock-boxes get walked out or carried, then ditched into the sludge of the river, and left.

  The yea-sayers started to blame the doubters, the doubters the yea-sayers. The diggers flipped at the panners, and the panners bit back. There was a brawl in Harry’s bar that spilled out like an unfurling spool that John watched from a cyst of trodden soil, his head tilted to one side, the shuffle of the hands in his pockets of pins.

  With Madeline, it was worse. Because for Madeline they’d changed. When they’d gone out there to dig and to pan, when they dreamed of what they’d do with their brighter and better lives, they were still attached to who they were. But with Madeline it was different. She made them become different people, made them say and think and feel things that they would not have ordinarily done. And that was worse. That was cruel, to have been played in such a way, to have been stripped and hung out to dry like dumb, bewildered beasts.

  For the women who left Sylvie’s after Delilah had said her piece, it was the same and more. They’d been pulled inside out. They’d tried to get her look for themselves, to put on that same style and grace, and by late afternoon on that spring day those shallow pretensions had started to leak into them like poison. Some of them, half-powdered, half-painted and unable to go home, gathered in the community hall as pallid husks whose pain rose up with every heave and sob. And, with every guttural noise they made, came the realisation, as the town tore at itself around them, that they were not only culpable, but weak and lacking, that they’d fallen badly short, day after day, week after week, month after month.

  John heard them. He was there. He watched the pain and confusion and suffering. The pins dotted his fingers with pricks that drew blood.

  By dusk, with the brawling done but the blaming as raw as an open wound, the men began to turn their growling attention to one figure, Vincent Clay. And within the hour, against a violet and bruise-black sky and a wind that gusted over the foothills, three trucks of men drove out to the Mallender estate to find him; the slingshot men, some of the diggers and panners, the shotgun man and his boy, both armed, and Mr Snipe, with one son gone and the other broken, who sat with his ten-inch scar and his cut-throat razor and said not a word.

  Lily didn’t want to be a nursemaid. She could tolerate the lifestyle, the jewellery, the ball-gowns and shoes. She could manage the hotels and the fancy restaurants with Ted, just. But ask her to administer his foot-cream or deal with his nightly flatulence, ask her to tiptoe through his senescence with a smile and a lit candle, she couldn’t do it. And so, when she got back from Sylvie’s late that afternoon, she knew what lay ahead. Ignominy and shame, for one thing, the burden of association, the fact of being seen so often in the company of Vincent and Madeline that they would become equal pariahs in the eyes of the town. It was too much. Put together that level of blame and hostility with nursing Ted in his twilight years and her life was done with.

  She packed her belongings quickly and without fuss. Ted didn’t know. And Ted didn’t know because he was retching in the bathroom. He was trying, with every spat-out noose of bile, to undo all the moves he’d made since Vincent first walked into the LMA to see if any of them were salvageable. By the time he was done, and the trucks choked up the driveway, Lily was gone.

  The men faced Ted in their muddied boots. Some were cut from the brawls, some limped, and some smoked and drank from bottles and hip-flasks. The portrait of his great-grandfather looked down on them from the wall behind him. Even with the flattering strokes of the oils and the light that fell upon it, the slit-eyed meanness, the ungenerous mouth, the weak chin and arrogant whiskers couldn’t be glossed over. Judd Snipe played with the pearl handle of the razor.

  “Where is he?” he asked.

  “Gone.”

  “Where?”

  “I’m as duped as you are. One minute he was here, the next he wasn’t. He left only the letters.”

  Eyebrows raised. Heads tilted to one side. The looks, to a man, said, go and get them.

  Ted coughed. He walked over to a set of walnut drawers. The men watched him, not so the boy. The letters were folded, loosely.

  “Read them out,” Judd barked from across the room, the mauve scar from temple to scapula, twitching.

  Ted held the letters with trembling hands. Night was falling over the quiet of the house, over where Lily used to sit, over the lawns and the ruined land beyond. The crown of Rupture Hill was grey on slate-black as he read, his voice quaking and stumbling.

  The men leant forward to listen, their faces, in the glow of the lamp, like the worn leather of saddle-bags, beaten by wind and dust. As they did so, the words started to prick the skin, to catch them with combinations and jabs.

  “Again,” they’d say, at certain points. And Ted would read it back.

  “The town is leaning towards a degree of instability,” he read, “a fact that, I’m sure you’ll recognise, makes it all the riper for opportunity.”

  Their heads buzzed with the punches.

  “The methods for acquiring the land will require both resolution and guile.”

  “Again.”

  Harder, more insistent blows that sent them reeling.

  “Potential for sale would, I needn’t tell you, be greatly improved should the mill fall to its knees. Or not be there at all.”

  “And again.”

  He swallowed and paused. “The people of Mission are like most small-town herds,” he read, “basic and gullible. They are bullish when feeling powerful, cowardly and deferential when not.”

  Cigarettes were lit and re-lit, bottles finished and dropped to the floor. Faces went tight and bloodshot.

  “Given the right approach you will be able to use them as you please.”

  They flopped, slack and useless onto the ropes.

  “You fucked it up,” the boy said, his hands around the shotgun’s throat.

  “Vincent acted on the letters. He played us all, and he u
sed Madeline to do so.”

  “What about his money?”

  “Spent. He got played himself.”

  “So, he lost? He invested it all for nothing?”

  “Yes, he did. He bought the land. He dug it and drilled it and blasted it. And there was nothing there.”

  The boy dug his heels into the leather of the sofa. “So who wrote the letters?”

  “No-one knows,” he mumbled, a gastric knot curling in his gut. “Whoever wrote the letters played every last one of us. From the start.”

  “My boy is lost,” said Mr Snipe, the razor out of his pocket, at right-angles on his open palm, “I have to find someone to blame for that. What was your part, Mr Mallender? What were you to blame for?”

  “I went along with Vincent Clay. I believed him. Just like you did.”

  “Did you invest anything?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  The boy sat and watched, looking at the shiny world around him, at the furnishings and ornaments.

  “Were you a stupid man?” the boy said. “Were you a dumb fuck?”

  Ted swallowed.

  “You let it happen. You fucked it up?”

  He frowned at the boy.

  “Didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”