The Fortunate Brother

by Donna Morrissey

  Sylvanus looked at him hard. “What’s there to get? Truth, isn’t it?”

  “Sure, b’y. By the way, the cops after talking to Mom. She told them she don’t’ know what time we got home, she was sleeping.”

  Sylvanus went back to digging.

  “She’s thinking like Hooker, I suppose. Don’t want you hauled in for drinking and driving.”

  “Bit late for that.”

  “Whatever. That’s what they’re after saying. Better go along with it.” Kyle looked up the road. A blue and white police cruiser hummed into sight. “Yup. Dogs getting run over around here this morning. Not used to this kinda traffic. We better go talk to them.”

  “They wants me now, they can come here. Get their shoes dirty.”

  “Suppose, b’y. Wouldn’t want to seem too eager, hey.” Kyle picked up his spade and jabbed its pointed tip into the soil, half watching the police car pull up alongside the truck and park. Two cops got out and started across the muddied floor of the site towards his cousins. They were square shouldered and sober faced, walking the bow-legged walk of just about every cop he’d ever seen on the tube—like they had a billy bat reamed up their arses. His cousins let go of the plastic and stood big-eyed and nosy as the cops came up to them. Kyle couldn’t make out what they were saying, a garble of sounds. Wade’s voice tense with excitement, Lyman giggling too loud over something Wade was saying.

  The cops took their leave of the cousins, and Kyle bent himself around his shovel as they approached. One was portly around the belly and with heavy jowls and a wattle starting to droop over his tightly buttoned shirt collar. His pants sagged at the knees as though he’d been called away from a comfy desk job. The other was younger, leaner, with small raisin eyes and a crooked nose that had been broken once, maybe twice. Probably why he’s a cop, get the bastards who squished his snout.

  “How you doing, bays,” said the elder, taking on the outport talk. Jaysus. Kyle forced himself to stand at attention. His father kept on digging and the cop spoke louder.

  “Sylvanus Now?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Sergeant MacDuff here, sir. Few questions for you. Might I have your attention, sir?”

  “I’m listening.” Sylvanus kept on shovelling.

  “Your full attention, sir?”

  Sylvanus straightened, raising dark eyes onto MacDuff and pointing his spade at the cloud starting to fill in.

  “I got fifty bags of cement to pour before she starts pouring. You do your job, b’y, as I does mine.”

  MacDuff turned to Kyle.

  “You’re Kyle Now? Would you go with Constable Canning, sir?”

  Kyle laid aside his shovel and followed Constable Canning across the site, trying to think of a cop show where a sergeant rode in a cop car with a constable. His cousins were staring openly and he motioned for them to keep working. Coming to the police car, he faced the constable who was already scribbling in a notebook, eyes shaded by the brim of his cap. He looked back at his father who was still shovelling as MacDuff stood beside him, scribbling in his own notebook.

  “I understand you were in a fight with Clar Gillard last evening?” asked Constable Canning.

  “No, sir.”

  Constable Canning looked up from beneath the brim of his cap.

  “He sucker-punched me.”

  “Why did he do that?”

  “You’ll have to ask him.”

  Constable Canning raised his cap with the butt of his pen and spoke in a bored tone. “We would, son. But he’s dead. Why did Clar Gillard hit you?”

  Son? Jaysus, the fucker had but ten years on him. “I don’t know.”

  “Somebody smashes his fist to your jaw and you don’t have any indication why?”

  “Not when it’s Clar Gillard. Too much pressure on the limbic system, they says. But looks like it’s cured now.” Kyle smiled.

  “Murder’s not something to be grinning about, son.”

  “Call me Kyle.”

  “Had you seen Clar Gillard earlier that day, Kyle?”

  “Yes, sir. He was blocking a public road with his truck while he played with his dog. So, I waited till he was done and then drove home.”

  “It’s been reported that you had words before you drove off.”

  “No sir, I did not.”

  “Your father?”

  “You can ask him that.”

  “Kyle, you and me can drive to Deer Lake and we can talk about it some more if you like.”

  “My father started pushing Clar’s truck off the road to clear it. Clar got the message. He stopped playing with his dog and got in his truck and drove off.”

  “Were there words exchanged?”

  You move it, buddy, or I’ll drown it and you in it.

  “I don’t remember none.”

  “When did you see Clar Gillard after that?”

  “Outside the club around eleven. He was standing in the shadows and fisted me in the face. I woke up in the ditch.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “Started walking home.”

  “How long were you knocked out?”

  “A minute. Boys were still singing Creedence. Clearwater,” he added at a blank look from the constable. Jaysus. “It’s a band. They were singing the same song when I woke up.”

  “And then what did you do?”

  “What I just said. I went home.”

  “Why didn’t you go tell somebody in the club what happened?”

  “Don’t need nobody fighting my battles.”

  “So you went after Clar Gillard yourself?”

  “They calls that putting words in your mouth in cop shows.”

  Constable Canning looked up as though pained by an abscessed tooth.

  “This is a murder investigation, Kyle. Not a fool’s game. Just answer the question.”

  “What is the question?”

  “What did you do after you woke up?”

  “I started walking home.”

  “Did you go after Clar Gillard?”

  “No. I did not go after Clar Gillard. I started walking home.”

  “You went straight home after the altercation?”

  “There weren’t no altercation. I was sucker-punched.”

  “You went straight home after Mr. Gillard hit you?”

  “No. I started walking home and Kate picked me up.”

  “Kate—?”

  “Kate Mackenzie. You spoke with her earlier.”

  “She told you that?”

  “There’s not a soul in this outport don’t know it.”

  “Does anyone know who knifed Clar Gillard?”

  “I imagine the person who done it.”

  “Do you know who that might be?”

  “No. I do not.”

  “At what time did Kate Mackenzie pick you up last night?”

  “Around eleven-thirty. Eleven-thirty-five, actually. Her dashboard clock was lit up. First thing I seen when I got in the car.”

  “Where were you when Kate Mackenzie picked you up?”

  “The other side of Bottom Hill. Walking home.”

  “She drove you home?”

  “She drove me to her place and we had a fire on the beach.”

  “How long were you there?”

  “Bit past midnight.”

  “Was there anyone else there besides you and Kate Mackenzie?”

  “Father and a buddy of mine showed up. Hooker.” He looked over to where his father was no longer shovelling, but standing straight backed, face to face with the sergeant.

  “Would that be Harold Ford?”

  Kyle nodded.

  “When did Harold Ford leave?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why don’t you know?”

  “I left before he did. And went home.”

  “What time was that?”

  “Around midnight. I couldn’t sleep. Jaw hurt. And so I was sitting on the wharf when Father showed up. We both went inside together. I remember the clock on
the stove—it was twelve-thirty or twelve-forty.”

  “Who was home when you went into your house?”

  “No one. Mother. She was in bed.”

  They both looked up as MacDuff approached. He was scanning the shoreline, and then looked at Kyle questioningly.

  “When’s the squid rolling?” he asked.

  “Squid don’t roll,” said Kyle.

  MacDuff looked puzzled.

  “Squid strike. Capelin roll. We done here?” he asked Canning.

  “For now.” Canning snapped his notebook shut.

  “When do squid strike then?”

  “Early June.”

  “Perhaps I could buy a few. Anybody selling a few dried ones?”

  “Nobody sells dried squid.”

  “That’s a shame. Anybody I can pay to jig me a few?”

  “Sure. Working for minimum wage—cost about hundred and fifty dollars to jig, gut, split, salt, and dry a pound of squid. Still interested, talk to Hector Gale. He might cure you a pound. Yellow house up the road, green facings.”

  MacDuff stared at him suspiciously and then went to his car. Canning was ahead of him, door opened and scuffing the muck off his boots before getting in. The old fellow sank into his seat and took off his hat, scratching his grey scraggy comb-over and squinting along the shoreline. He gave Kyle another suspicious look and then turned to Canning, who was peeling back the pages of his notebook and holding out something for MacDuff to read. Yet another suspicious glance at Kyle—from both of them this time. Or perhaps the look wasn’t for Kyle. His father was approaching from behind—step soft, wary. As if he was hunting.

  “What did you tell them?” Sylvanus asked as the cops drove off up the road.

  “What I told you.”

  “Is that the truth?”

  Kyle looked into his father’s eyes. They were hot with tension, frightening and vague. He felt his own tension rise, the same sense of vagueness overtaking him.

  “Back to work,” said Sylvanus.

  Kyle followed him across the site. His hand kept going to his pocket where Bonnie Gillard’s car keys lay. He should’ve told. But gawd-damnit, it wasn’t his to tell.

  “I told them to go on home, ain’t no one here bawling over Clar Gillard,” his cousin Wade called out to him.

  “Ye gonna cut that fucking plastic?” Kyle went over to where his father was now on his knees, hammering in a peg. He touched his hand to the keys. His father glanced up at him and jabbed a finger at his spade lying on the ground.

  “Pick it up, pick the gawd-damn thing up,” he ordered.

  He let his hand fall to his side. Jaysus.

  FIVE

  The long trumpeted cry of a gull awakened him. The heels of his mother’s good shoes tapped the floor as she hurried down the hallway and then back again, pausing by his door.

  “You up? We leave in a half hour.” Her voice strained with forced lightness.

  “Right.” The hospital in Corner Brook. Her operation.

  “Your father already left for the site. He walked.”

  “Walked?” Hell. Aside from hunting and logging, his father hadn’t walked farther than his nose his whole life. “I would’ve drove him down.”

  “There was no talking to him.” Her voice faded off and he heard the washroom door open and close. He dredged himself from his bed, the floor cold beneath his feet as he dressed. His tea was poured and stirred and waiting by a plate of toast and eggs. His father’d walked. Well, sir. He sat at the table and looked through the window at the sea, rippling greyish away from him. A southerly wind. Least it was warmish outside. Likely somebody driving along had picked him up by now.

  He grasped his mug of tea and blew tepidly onto its scalding rim. His mother hurried from the washroom and across the hallway into her room. She hadn’t mentioned anything about police being there the day before, asking questions. He never brought it up, nor did his father. Neither of them wanting reminders of both their shame that night. A dresser drawer scraped open. Another. She emerged with an armload of folded blankets, bustled into Gran and Sylvie’s room, and within a minute was coming down the hallway again and into his room. He heard the dull thud of his pillow and blankets hitting the floor as she stripped his bed. All her activity took him back to the summers they’d spend in the old Cooney Arm outport where they’d once lived, helping Gran tend the vegetable garden she planted every spring. There was a cliff near their house and he’d watch his mother, those times she became dispirited, climb a steep path to the top. Couple of times he followed her. It was vicious up there, everything swept bald by the winds and the cliff face dropping several hundred feet straight down into the swirling mass of ocean. He could see his mother now, hunched like an old woman, gripping onto tree roots and brambles and dragging herself up that steep path. Scarcely enough energy to stand. Low-minded they called it back then. She’s got down. She’d be gone for hours up on those cliffs some days. But when she got back she’d be upright, shoulders squared, a steadiness to her hands as she took up her cooking and scrubbing in the house and then weeded in the garden till the flies or the rain or the dark drove her in. He felt the same energy consuming her now as she scraped open one of his own drawers and shut it and then her shoes tap tap tapping to the washer in the back room.

  He noted her small suitcase by the door. Her good raglan was folded across it and in one of its pockets he saw a glimmer of red. Her little book of prayer. She read it all the time after Chris was buried. It’s what keeps me going when I get scared, she said to him once. Scared. His mother scared. She was scared now. He pushed aside his breakfast plate and went to the door, hauling on his boots.

  “Kyle,” she said, coming into the kitchen, “you haven’t eaten a bite. Kyle!”

  He held himself erect by the door frame as she came up behind him.

  “As well to take your father with me if you’re going to act like that,” she said sharply.

  He picked up her suitcase, took it to the truck, and started the engine, warming it for her. He rubbed his bruised ribs, rubbed them hard just to feel the pain of it over the angst in his guts. The morning chill leached through his clothes and he shivered thinking about Clar Gillard splayed out in the icy seawater. His mother climbed inside the cab beside him and was quiet as he drove and he wanted to puncture that growing solitude between them, wanted to ask her about the cliffs of Cooney Arm, but the words stuck like sawdust in his throat.

  “You talking with Bonnie?” he asked, thinking he might mention his seeing her sitting at their table the night of the killing and that he knew about her car. Get her mind off this thing waiting ahead. She gave a dismissive shrug. But she was choking with words, he could tell. Just like Sylvie. Choking with words. Wanting to talk about things. Things about Chris and the accident. Things about him, Kyle. Things about themselves. And he never knew what things they wanted to tell him or have him tell them and he bloody didn’t care about them things. Just leave it alone, leave it the bloody hell alone. Christ, he was working on getting things out of his head, not shoving more in.

  He flicked on the radio. “See what the weather is,” he said, and half listened to some broadcaster sounding hollowly through the truck as he felt her choked-back silence and that he was abandoning her on a sinking boat. He turned off the radio and leaned over the wheel, looking skyward. “Guess we can see the weather,” he said, scrutinizing the patchworked whites and greys and scattered pieces of blue. “If you can read that. Warm enough?”

  She made some agreeable sound and he looked at her and her pallid cheeks. There was a hard light in her eyes. She was wearing her summer scarf around her neck, a thin silky thing patterned with ripe red roses that he swore he could smell.

  “Why aren’t you wearing a warm scarf? Thought you liked my stylish scarf.”

  “I left it in Bonnie’s car the other day. This will do.”

  “She could have brought it back, I suppose.”

  “Perhaps she didn’t see it.”

  �
��Not a hard thing to miss, a scarf sitting on the seat.”

  “My, Kyle, I got more to think about than a scarf this morning.”

  “I don’t like you being mixed up with her.”

  “Why, what’s wrong with her? You got more to worry about than her. Sucking back on the bottle like your father. How would you like it if I’d done that? I could have. After Chrissy died. I wanted to.”

  Jaysus.

  “Don’t you be taking after him, numbing everything with drinking. I’m glad I didn’t give into it. There’s good to be found in everything, even grief. I’ve learned that.” Her voice trembled with feeling yet her words were hard, without gratitude. They echoed through the cab like a confession wrung from her heart and he felt the unworthy priest. He tried to speak, but couldn’t.

  She flicked the radio back on with impatience and he hated himself. When they drove into the winter-worn town he was relieved to see her attention taken by patches of lawns starting to green and burlapped shrubs sitting like cloaked gnomes hedging the driveways. She liked cities. The sun flickered and he was glad for the sudden shaft tunnelling through the truck and settling warm around her face. And for brightening the canopied storefronts they were now passing, the white-collared shopkeepers sweeping clots of rotted leaves from their stoops and flooding gutters.

  “Father says you always wanted to live in a city.”

  “That’s what your father knows, now.”

  “Heard you say it myself.”

  “Perhaps I would’ve liked it one time.”

  “Sylvie wasn’t long taking off after she finished school. Wouldn’t know she was half raised on a fish flake.”

  She gave him a sharp look. “Sylvie done what she was supposed to do—finish school and go to university. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing. Think I got the old man in me. Likes the woods.”

  “Never hears you talking nice about your sister.”

  He opened his mouth to protest but closed it. They crested a hill, below which the red-bricked hospital sprawled like a crusted sore. Grey smoke belched through smoke stacks and row upon row of frameless windows mirrored the ashen sky, black stains tearing from their corners and dribbling down the brick face. At the entrance to the parking lot he slowed to take the turn and his mother gripped his arm.