“Well, then, nothing,” said Mother. “She was just too smothering is all.”
“Too smothering?”
Mother tried to brush aside her words. “I don’t know, Sylvie. She was always at him, hovering—always trying to nurse him. He was a big youngster, and she still kept trying to force the breast on him. I remembers him now, gagging. Yes, she was silly like that,” Mother replied to my growing look of distaste. “Almost four—near school age—when she finally stopped trying to force the breast on him. Shh.” Mother looked to the door as if Suze might be standing there, and lowered her voice. “Now, don’t you go talking about this.”
“I won’t. Gawd, no wonder Ben never wants to talk to her.”
“Not that she done it regularly,” said Mother. “When he was sick, that’s how she used to try and comfort him. He was always sickish with asthma, and went to sleep on a snowbank once. That’s how she found him, sleeping in the snowbank, his face starting to cover over with snow. She thought he was dead and she never got over it.”
“Gawd,” I repeated, unable to get past the wretched image of Ben being smothered against his mother’s breasts, gagging against her nipples.
“He was handled too much,” Mother whispered, and then moved away as a nurse came into the room.
I meant to ask Mother more about Ben and Suze but was kept busy after that, with Father being moved from emergency to a room on the ward. For the rest of the day our attention was focused on him—bathing him, shaving him, trimming his dark, shaggy brows, stuffing minty breath fresheners into his mouth (he hated them), doing his toenails, his fingernails. No doubt our conversation from the night before dogged our steps, but there were moments when we moved as one around Father’s bed. It felt nice. It was the first time I’d known Mother and me to stand side by side, working together. Always there’d been Gran, the boys, Father, and always Mother’s daunting fortitude as she held things together, as she might see it. Easy enough when all things concerned were within her arm’s reach. But here, now, was a different kettle of fish. Father’s near death had forced her to stretch further than the confines of her own doorstep, and I felt her unease about what tomorrow would bring, about the uncertainty of this road newly laid out before her.
And I felt the silent look of appeal in her eyes as she walked me to the parking lot and hugged me goodbye. She complained about my going back to Alberta in the morning, looking so vulnerable that I felt the same resolve well up inside of me as Chris had felt earlier with Father—to make sure that things would be okay, that I would make them okay.
Giving her one final, cheery wave, I started towards the car. Already I was impatient to begin tomorrow’s journey back to Alberta, to the extra hours of work I’d take on and the pocket-loads of tips I’d be counting out and sending home.
“AND SO HE’S GETTING ON. Good, and so should we, then,” said Gran over a late supper that evening. Chris, I noted, was unnaturally chatty, his shoulders no longer slumped as they’d been yesterday, the same burning fever in his eyes as when he’d left Father at the hospital. Wolfing down his potatoes and sopping up the gravy with bread, he chided Kyle, “Come on, come on, eat up.”
“There’s a band playing at the club tonight and we’re going,” he said to me, sucking on a chicken bone.
He balked as I slapped his hand from his mouth, ordering him to go wipe the grease off his chin. “And I’m not going to no club,” I declared, getting up and scraping my plate onto Gran’s.
“Yeah, we’re going,” he said. “Least you can do on your last night home, go out and see some people.”
“Go—ready yourself,” said Gran. “I can manage a few dishes.”
“Ohh, I can’t stand crowds, Gran, you know that.” I dropped a handful of cutlery into the sink, turned on the taps, and squeezed dish detergent into the running water. “Pass me your fork,” I ordered Chris. “Ky, you finished? Sit down, Gran, let me pour you some tea, you still like it cold?”
I poured Gran’s tea into a tumbler part filled with cold water and then started rinsing the glasses, half reassured, half worried by Chris’s frenetic mood change as he kept yakking about the dance. We hadn’t had an opportunity to speak alone yet, to plan for the days ahead, and so despite my reluctance, after the kitchen was cleared away and Gran tucked into her rocker with her knitting and her lamp lit, I allowed him to persuade me into my coat and boots and out the door.
The sky was still bright outside, the trees gathering darkness. My foot slipped on the muddied trail—a shortcut to Hampden leading up through the woods behind the house. “I don’t wanna go to the damn bar, Chris. Let’s just go for a walk, we need to talk.”
“For an hour,” he said, “and then we’ll talk. Come on,” he coaxed, “and watch the stairs—they’re slippery, too.”
I grunted, scraping the mud off my boots on the half-rotted bottom step. They were a series—about three or four sets—of little stairways that Father had built over the steepest part of the trail so’s to shorten our walk to the school up Hampden. With crooked hand railings made from stripped juniper and pieces of plank bridging the muddied, levelled spots, those stairs were always the best part of coming or going to school, whether it was fear or excitement edging my step. I paused beside a brook all throaty with roots, choking its way through the underbrush down the hillside, and stood for a moment, the air minty cool upon my skin. I looked down at the sea. It was bluish black in the half light of evening, fretting amongst the rocks on shore, with the steeply wooded hills appearing as darkened humps against the sky—like shoulders, I thought, great mammoth shoulders of the earth settling into sleep. What I ought to be doing.
“Lose your way?” called Chris from above.
“Oh, just keep going,” I muttered, and paused again at a rustling from below. Kyle’s head popped through the brush.
“Thought you were staying with Gran,” I said.
“She likes sitting by herself.” He brushed past me, his breathing heavy from his upward climb. Chris sprang from the bushes, barrelling him almost to the ground.
“It’s he, Paunchy, who’s scared to be alone,” he taunted, knuckling Kyle’s midriff. He grunted as Kyle managed a punch to his gut. I skirted them impatiently as they tackled and yelped like pups, just as they’d been doing since they were youngsters, and wondered again at Chris’s mood swing. Breaking through a canopy of branches, I came upon mounds of rotting sawdust and the long, low structure of the old sawmill sagging in its midst, its clapboard roof and walls blackened by weather. I cringed from the memory of that screaming, monstrous saw and how it had curdled my blood in those first years here.
Two of the Trapps from Ragged Rock owned it. They’d had a falling out with the other half of their clan and moved to Hampden a few years before Father floated us from Cooney Arm. I’d never seen a Trapp up close, except for one of the older ones, years ago, motoring from Ragged Rock to Cooney Arm, buying salt fish from Father. But I’d certainly heard the stories about their queerness, how they clanned together, taking nothing from nobody and bringing home wives from the far side of the island so’s to have nobody visiting them. And they certainly looked clannish, I’d thought, that first time seeing a bunch of them in the store in Hampden, the women and girls wearing dark, drab dresses down past their knees, their eyes both shifty and shy, and the men all bearded and bald, with something akin to scorn curling their lips.
Undoubtedly, the people of Hampden were relieved that the Trapps stuck to themselves, minding their own business in their cliquish way. And I learned to ignore the Trapps too, given the manner in which they’d treated Father.
It was during that very first month we’d moved from Cooney Arm, still settling ourselves. The Trapps didn’t like it that Father had started cutting a path through the woods bordering their sawmill. They said nothing, owing to its being public property. Just stood there, was all, when Father first came in sight of their mill, their heads tilted back in a haughty manner, as though daring him to step one foot ove
r their boundary line. Father just kept swinging his axe through the brush, his eyes darker than I’d ever known them, seeing nothing but his own madness. For he was mad those first few months, prowling the house like a cut bear, and would’ve probably thrived on a fist fight, wanting something to put his spite upon.
And the Trapps lured him good one morning. It was before Gran, Mother, or the boys were awake, only me, trailing behind him up the path the way I used to trail behind him to his stage in Cooney Arm. There had been no sound from the sawmill that morning, the air quiet as church on Sundays. But the second we came into its sights it screamed into life, near shocking me out of my shoes. I bolted after Father and stood still as stone, as did he, staring at a pile of logs thrown across his half-forged path, blocking him from going any further. He looked towards the mill. Aside from the timbers rattling from the screaming taking place within it, the only thing moving was a steady stream of sawdust flowing from beneath its rotted flooring like yellow pus. Throwing aside his axe, Father started towards the mill.
“Stay there, Dolly,” he said as I started after him. “I said stay,” he ordered as I kept following, as incensed as he over this deliberate blockade. Turning back, Father lodged heavy hands on my shoulders, steering me towards home. I walked as far as a pile of brush then ducked behind it, watching him. A tremor of fear shot through me as he neared the darkened doorway, and I called out. He couldn’t hear over the noise of the saw, and my fear heightened as he marched through the doorway without breaking stride.
I thought to run back down the hill and tell somebody, but there was no one, only Gran and Mother and the boys. I thought I heard Father’s voice but knew I couldn’t possibly over the whine of the saw. I tried to stand but was riveted to that darkened doorway and the shrillness of the saw growing louder. I turned sharply towards a pile of lumber stacked partways between me and the mill. There was nothing there, yet my nape tingled. Something moving at the side of the lumber pile caught my eye and I bit back a scream. A young fellow, about twelve or thirteen, with a small, pointy face and thick reddish brows, crouched quiet as a cat, staring at me.
My stomach cramped. I bent over, my skin prickling as though foreknowing of that cold day to come when fate would factor this creature’s footstep into mine. He pounced towards me with a flat hahaha laugh, his thin, pinkish lips scarcely moving. He hissed as though shooing me away, but I stood unmoving, snared by the glassy green eyes now upon me.
Just as quickly he stepped back with a laugh, his eyes softening, as though tiring of some game we’d been playing. “What’s your name?”he asked, his tone a touch nasal. “What’s the matter, cat got your tongue?” I didn’t move, my eyes fixed on his face.
At that moment Father’s voice broke through the shrill cry of the mill. “Batter to jeezes,” he roared upon seeing the young fellow, and marched towards him with a handpick held threateningly in each hand.
Springing backwards, the catlike figure vanished into the woods.
Father started back towards the woodpile. His mouth curling as contemptuously as the Trapps’, he plunged the tips of each handpick into a log—one onto the end and the other midway down the length of it—and yanked on it with such force that his face and neck contorted. After hauling the log free from the path he came back and plunged the handpicks into the next log, dragging it to the side in turn. An hour later the path was cleared. Flinging the picks towards the mill, he took his axe from my outstretched hands and resumed his slashing through the woods.
I hung close by him for the rest of the day, my eyes scanning the nearby woods as he finished the path, my stomach still churning from that flat hahaha laugh and those glassy green eyes. Towards evening, sitting around the supper table with the boys bickering with each other, Mother talking over their squabbling to Gran, and the kettle whistling off steam, I soon forgot about my fear. Yet that night, half asleep on my pillow, it blew back on me like a bad wind. I bolted upright, a pair of luminous green eyes flashing at me through the dark.
There were no more barricades after that. Father said nothing of it to Mom or Gran, so I hadn’t either. I wondered if Father even remembered my being there, till several weeks later when Chris and I, sporting new clothes, our hair spruced to a shine—mine hanging down my back in two wet, skinny braids, Chris’s brush-cut standing straight up on his head— stood on the wharf, readying to take the path for the first time to school. I hadn’t seen Father watching through the window, else I might not have quailed from taking that first step.
Immediately he pounded on the window, his eyes fierce beneath their black thatch of brows. “No one going to bother you up there,” he shouted through the pane. “You go on, now. Take your sister’s hand,” he prompted Chris. “Stay on the path.”
I nodded, trying to swallow my fear, but he’d seen it anyway, and flung open the door, coming towards me.
“I’m going, I’m fine,” I said hurriedly, but he was grasping my shoulders so hard he near lifted me off my feet.
“You got nothing to fear from that crowd,” he said, his eyes black as peat, his voice fighting for calm. “You seen what they’re like: stand timid and they’ll roll you in shit; stand straight and they’ll walk off—they don’t like the bother. Besides, they likes bigger game than you, so go now. Be scared of nothing. That scruffed, weasel face,” he added, as I kept staring at him, “is he what’s scaring you?” His voice softened. “Go on now, he belongs down Ragged Rock. Was just visiting his uncles, is all, he’s gone back down.”
Clutching my books, I started up the first of the little wooden steps, Chris plodding behind. The shrill scream of the saw grew louder as I approached. Against my will my step slowed. My eyes darted towards the lumber pile, expecting that reddish pointy face to lunge before me. Then suddenly the saw whined into a silence. Something—perhaps the thud of a footstep on the path or the flapping of a warbler’s wings flittering through the bush—caused me to tighten my grip on Chris’s hand. But then, as a cock knows the first rays of the sun, I suddenly knew my father was on the path behind me. And that the Trapps weren’t going to hurt me. And that Father had learned that, else he never would’ve sent me past the mill alone. It was my fear he was watching over, not his. Releasing Chris’s hand and pulling his attention away from the tracks his new sneakers were making in the mud, I walked steadily up the rest of the path onto the Hampden road.
Less than a fortnight later Mother received word that her father was ill, and I found myself wandering along the dusty, cratered road through Ragged Rock. Since then I’d heard plenty about the Trapp fellow from Suze, who lived in Ragged Rock and was frequently visiting Mother. His name was Vernon, but he’d been nicknamed Trapp by the outporters because he embodied all the ills of the entire clan, people said. There was no one thing to condemn him, merely a series of things that rendered him bad stuff, like how in grade school he’d pinned youngsters smaller than himself to the ground and blown air incessantly into their nostrils till he near smothered them. And how he snuck up behind girls, pressing the pads of his thumbs against their eyes till they saw flashes of white, and then how he’d run off laughing as they cried out in fright and pain. And how the only thing he got along with was a half-surly dog that was always trotting at his heels.
It was this last bit of information that came to mind the day I wandered along the road in Ragged Rock and saw Trapp sitting on the beach, wrestling a stick out of the mouth of a tan-coloured mutt with four white paws and a white-tipped tail. Barking and whining, the dog dropped the stick and laid its two front paws upon Trapp’s knees, licking at Trapp’s face, its tail wagging excitedly. Trapp kept stretching his neck sideways, upwards, backwards, trying to escape the sloppy pink tongue, laughing—nothing of that flat hahaha I’d heard from up besides the sawmill that day, but the same mirthful laugh I’d hear from Chris or Kyle whenever Father dug his fingers into their ribs, tickling them hard.
Suddenly the dog’s head snapped up and Trapp was on his knees, watching two girls and a dark,
curly-haired young fellow—all of them about the same age as Trapp—striding purposefully onto the beach. It was Suze’s son, Ben. Tons of times I’d seen Suze’s photos of her favoured boy, heard her stories of how grand he was with his curly dark hair, his penchant for drawing, and how he charmed the old ladies, taking tea with them and drawing pictures of their cats. The two girls halted near the top of the landwash, cross looks marring their faces as they pointed accusingly at Trapp. Ben, ignoring the dog now leaping and barking about his feet, strolled up to Trapp, and without warning, punched him in the face. Trapp staggered backwards from the blow then sprung at Ben, the both of them going down in a tussle. The dog’s barks turned to snarls. It drew back on its haunches, its ears perked forward, its tail no longer wagging, its hackles rising. A loud groan from Trapp and the dog leapt at one of Ben’s flailing legs, sinking its teeth into his calf.
I closed my eyes at the scream from Ben, and opened them to the bedlam of Ben hobbling about with blood running down his leg, Trapp coaxing the barking dog to his side, Suze running down over the landwash, shrieking like a gull. An old man who must’ve been Trapp’s father or grandfather, with his reddish scraps of hair and brows garnishing his thin face, was also running towards the fracas, a rifle slung over his shoulder and a brace of rabbits flung to the side.
“Shoot it! Shoot that gawd-damned dawg or I’ll be shooting it for you!” Suze was screaming at the old man.
“What did he do to that dog—what did he do?” snarled the old man.
“Matters not what he done,” cried Suze, “you don’t have dogs chewing up youngsters—put that gun to its head, or by cripes I’ll call the cops, you won’t get away with it then, I calls the cops.”
“I said what did he do to that dog?” the old man growled at Trapp.
Trapp, his mouth a tightened, crooked line, was squatting beside his dog, refusing to look up. Ben was holding on to his bitten calf, his mouth tightened as much from pain as from a reluctance to speak, I thought. Suze swooped beside him, hurtling further threats at the old man and the dog. In a fit of rage the old man grabbed Trapp by the scruff, twisted him towards where their home must’ve been. The dog scampered after Trapp, and at another shriek of indignation from Suze, the old man raised the gun, took aim, and fired. The dog let out a surprised yelp, leapt into the air, and fell to the ground.
What They Wanted Page 10
