The Fortunate Brother

by Donna Morrissey

  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?”

&nb
sp; “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.

  “She going to hold?”

  “Might. Be slow going, pouring cement in this weather. Cheaper buying a small cement mixer than renting one. Be days working around the rain.” He looked around the site again, the trenches to be deepened, the rebar to be laid, the wasted cement, the wasted sand. He rubbed tiredly at his neck and started a slow walk to the truck. Kyle went after him.

  “We’ll just do it,” said Kyle. “We’ll just take her step by step and day by day. We’ll just do it.”

  “Courage is gone.”

  “She don’t want you giving in.”

  “Sin. Sin. Everything she been through.”

  “She might be fine. You lives ten, twenty years with what she got.”

  They came to the truck and Sylvanus rested his head against the door.

  “Shit! Come on, Dad. We’ll drive to Deer Lake and get what supplies we needs and keep ’er going.”

  Sylvanus opened the door and got inside, reaching beneath the seat for his flask of whisky. Kyle stood for a moment, then went back across the site and had a word with his cousins. He walked back to the truck and climbed inside and began the ten-mile run to the highway. The rain started as they headed west towards Deer Lake, a light drizzle against the windshield. Sylvanus kept tipping back the whisky. Kyle said nothing, no matter his mother’s words. He was talked out trying to keep his father from the booze. As long as he was sober again by the time they got home.

  In Deer Lake they bought more cement and rebar and corners and wire mesh and tarps and other things Sylvanus named off from a mental list. After the truck was loaded, Kyle picked up a bucket of chicken and a couple of beers and they sat in silence by the Humber River and he drank a beer, watching the river pass and watching his father nipping at his whisky, the chicken growing cold between them as the river kept passing. Passing and passing. A slow wear as subtle as time on each pebble it touched and a new song beginning without the other ever ending. And he, Kyle, just sitting there watching. Watching and watching from some gawd-damned eddy that kept on circling.

  What the fuck. What the fuck was time anyway. A clock that ticks. Revered like a god. What if we just threw it away. Threw it into the river. And he heard himself like a song, Then you lie silent, Kyle. You lie silent till the ticking takes up in your head. It’s called hunger. It becomes your tick-tick-tick and you either move with it or lie in sleep with the dead. He looked at his father who’d drifted into sleep, his jaw lodged into his shoulder and his cheek creasing up like an old road map too weathered to read.

  Kyle drove them towards home, elbowing his father awake when he geared down onto Wharf Road. The rain had drizzled out, a shaft of sun warming the muddied gravel flat coming up on his left.

  “What—back already?”

  “Already? Cripes, time for bed. Wake up, old man.”

  “What’s we doing—we going to unload?”

  “Thought we’d go straight home. She’ll be back from Corner Brook by now. What’s this, now?” Kyle had just taken a sharp corner, and sitting before them and blocking the road was Clar Gillard’s green Chevy truck. Clar was standing on the rocks beside the road wearing a T-shirt and jeans, indifferent to the damp coming off the sea. His Lab was out in the water and swimming laboriously towards him, black skull bobbing, a log as big as a fence post clamped in its jaws.

  Kyle tooted the horn.

  Clar glanced back at them and then bent, grasped the log from the dog’s mouth, and with forearms rippling hove the log back out in the water. He linked his thumbs in his belt loops, watching the dog paddling back out.

  “What the fuck’s he doing.” Kyle tooted louder. Clar never looked back. Sylvanus grabbed the door handle and Kyle snatched for his father’s shoulder. “Hold on, old man.”

  Too late. Sylvanus was tearing out of the truck with curses and Kyle groaned, feeling his father’s eagerness for anything that might extricate him, no matter how temporarily, from his misery right now.

  “You move it, buddy, or I’ll drown it and you in it,” Sylvanus yelled at Clar from the roadside. Without waiting, he hauled open Clar’s truck door and reached inside, yanking the stick out of park. Digging in his heels, he jammed both hands against the steering wheel and started pushing the truck towards the edge of the road.

  “Christ sakes, Christ sakes, old man,” and Kyle was out of the truck, seeing his father dead from another heart attack. Clar Gillard was leaping from the rocks and back onto the road.

  “Hold on there, you. Hold on!” Clar shouted at Sylvanus.

  Sylvanus stopped pushing and turned to Clar. His breathing was harsh, wormlike cords thickening up the side of his neck as he spoke. “You keep the fuck away from me and mine, buddy, if you wants to keep walking. Else I’ll cut you down the size of the last headstone you trampled over.”

  And he would, thought Kyle. Holy Jesus, the fury distorting his father’s face was the stuff of books. Clar Gillard’s face relaxed into that nice smile of his. He whistled for his dog and, breezing past Sylvanus, slipped inside his truck. The Lab dredged itself ashore and dropped the log, his sides sucking in and out from exertion. He shook himself dry and leaped into the back of the truck, tongue lolling as Clar eased off down the road towards the wharf, the road too narrow to turn around where they were.

  “Come on.” Kyle nudged his father. “Before he starts back.” He got in the truck, his father beside him, chest heaving. “Wants another heart attack, do you?”

  “The likes of that.”

  Kyle grinned and thumped his father’s shoulder. “Like the dog,” he said and started driving. Clar was pulling a U-turn in front of the wharf as they rounded the bend. Bonnie was standing by her red Cavalier parked near the woodshed. She leaned back against the car as Clar braked and poked his head out the window, saying something to her. She said something back and Clar’s fist shot towards her face. She swerved sideways, escaping his fist, and Clar hit the gas, his truck jolting forward, gravel spitting behind his tires.

  “Lunatic! Watch him,” shouted Sylvanus and Kyle squeezed his truck against the cliff as Clar swiped past, his outside tires scarcely gripping the crumbling shoulder of the road. Kyle watched in his side mirror as the green Chevy burned down the road. He pulled up beside Bonnie and swung out the truck door, his father beside him.

  “Did he get you?” Sylvanus asked Bonnie.

  She shook her head, lightly touching the tip of her nose. “Just a graze.”

  “Not fit. He’s not fit,” said Sylvanus, and headed towards his woodshed. He turned, wagging a finger. “Watch out he don’t come back.”

  “Give a whis
tle if he does,” said Kyle. “Might be better if you’re not here,” he said to Bonnie. “Stirring up trouble for the old man.”

  “You don’t have to worry about Clar. He’ll not touch your father.”

  “Makes you say that?”

  She glanced up at the wooded slopes, beyond which the roar of Clar’s truck could be heard gunning up Bottom Hill. “Your father’s proud. Clar’s not proud. He got nothing to be proud over. He’s scared of men like your father.” She gave a satisfied smile. “That’s what I told him. That’s why he swung at me—I hit a mark.”

  “Don’t sound like you’re much scared of him.”

  A hurt look flickered across her face. He was struck by that—that she felt hurt, not fear.

  “Your mother,” she said, her voice quieting. “You need to go in. And your father, too. She has something to tell you.” Touching his arm, she got in her car and slowly drove away. He stood there watching her. Fear pumped through his heart. It suffocated his brain and tasted like sulphur in his mouth. He went to the house and could see Addie’s shape through the window. He heard his father call from the shed and then call again but he couldn’t move, couldn’t tear himself from the window, couldn’t leave her.

  He went inside. She was sitting at the kitchen table, her coat still on. She beckoned for him to sit, her eyes so fiercely blue they held him to her. She said the cancer was in both breasts. She said they wanted to remove them and launch an aggressive attack with chemo and radiation. It may extend my life by five, ten years and who can think beyond that, she said. He tried to twist away from her but the strength in her eyes held him in place. Hope, Kyle. They’re offering much hope. Others have done well with the same cancer and treatments.

  But he was done with hope. It took her babies and Chris and he had no more courage for hope. Hope had failed her too many times. Rather that she had never hoped. Rather that it was just those babies she grieved and not the pain of lost hope as well.