Downhill Chance

by Donna Morrissey

  "Don't he say nothing, not even to your mother?" Phoebe asked one windy, sunny day as Clair, during one of her rare outings, sat on the steps outside Joanie's house, waiting for Joanie to finish her dinner so's they could go swimming down on the sandbar.

  Clair shrugged.

  "Don't you listen?" asked Phoebe.

  "No."

  "Sure, why won't you listen sometime?"

  "Because I don't want to," said Clair.

  "Aren't you scared?"

  Clair gazed distractedly at Phoebe's long, coppery hair, wishing the wind would lift it as it had on other summer days, and wrap it around her face, and she and Joanie would laughingly flattened it down with their hands and braid it into fat pigtails and tie the ends with skinny alder twigs that were still supple and dripping with sap, and then tickle and tease each other, and romp through the timothy wheat, playing hide and seek, the way they always used to—before her father went away to war. But the wind was mindless of Phoebe's hair on this day and merely sifted a strand across her brow, a strand that was quickly plucked back and wedged behind an ear, baring nosy, grey eyes that flitted from side to side as they searched out Clair's.

  "Why should I be scared?" asked Clair, her voice dulled, her mind already wandering, knowing the answer.

  "Scared that it might be something in his blood."

  "What might be in his blood?"

  "Mental, b'ye, you knows. When someone goes mental for nothing, it might be something in his blood. Then that might've been passed on in your blood and you could turn mental, too, when you gets older—and your youngsters."

  Phoebe's voice had dropped to a whisper, but she might as well have been silent, for Clair was leaning forward now, her body quiet, and her eyes a little dazed as she drifted into some distant place that would become a place of refuge in years to come.

  "I didn't mean to make you angry," Phoebe called after her, her voice deeply affected with regret, as Clair rose. But Clair was beyond hearing as she strolled up over the hill towards home, head down so's not to encounter any more concerned souls dawdling on their step. Pausing at the gate, she watched her father watching through the window at her mother squatted in the muddied patch of garden, her straw hat shading her eyes from the sun, and ever so often glancing up and smiling at him as she ripped out weeds and grass from amongst the sweet williams. Clair smiled at him too, and calling out a greeting to her mother, went inside, kicking off her boots.

  "Not gone swimming?" asked her father. He turned to her, his eyes cocoa brown in the sun.

  "Too windy," she said, noting that the pained lines that usually marked his face were absent today, their shadows flushed out by the brilliance of the light, and pulling a half-used scribbler and piece of pencil off the bin, she sat across from him in the splotch of sunshine, and idly began to write. Her mother's spade chinked against the rocks in her flower bed, and a thousand dust mites swam lazily through the air. Missy was off somewhere, no doubt visiting with Grandmother, and all was fine really, thought Clair, pushing away the nagging words of worry Phoebe had whispered in her ear.

  "What are you writing?" he asked, after she had done a page or more.

  "I told Missy I'd write her a story," she answered, smiling, knowing the effort that it took him to ask.

  "Perhaps you might read it to me."

  "Right now?"

  He nodded, turning finally to smile at her. Her heart melted, as had his eyes in the hot July sun, and going to the farthest corner of the kitchen, she took a deep breath and began reading in a clear, strong voice, the story Missy had been telling her for some years now.

  "My, Father, you got her going with the stories agin," said Sare. "Isn't she the reader—and what stories Missy makes up. I keeps telling them, they're like you for telling the lie, but it's a funny thing that a lie becomes a story simply because it's written down. Shall I make you tea, dear? Clair, sit besides your father, I makes us some tea."

  Clair sat back down. With her mother's charm, and the warmth of her father's eyes, and the sunshine spilling through the window, it felt like the old days. And as they sat sipping tea together, it was easy to forget that Missy wasn't sitting with them, and indeed, hadn't been home for suppers for weeks now, and that her father, though he was sitting with them, nodding to their chatter, even smiling, had ceased hearing their words long ago.

  It was nearing midnight, and Clair was easing away from the sweat of Missy's back, when a loud cry sounded from her mother. Scrabbling out of bed and cautioning Missy to bide where she was, she ran across the hall, carefully opening the room door as her mother's cries grew harder. She was as she had been that first time Clair had run into her room—the night her father's screams had started—half-sitting, half-lying across him. Only she wasn't soothing him on this night as she had been, then, but shrieking crazily as if it were her, Sare, being tormented in sleep. Clair stepped farther into the room to understand why he wasn't soothing her mother as she had him, why it was that he lay upon his pillow, his teeth clenched, his head stilled.

  "Mommy," she whispered as her mother's shrieks became more harsh.

  "He's dead!" cried Sare, squirming atop of him as if to awaken him, and Clair saw then that his eyes were not sleeping at all, but glazed pits, staring straight ahead, as if shackled to some horrific image that not even death could intercept. And his hands, those big strong hands, were tightly clenched across his chest, as though protecting him from a war that finally killed him, three years after the shelling had stopped. Holding her hands to her heart, she watched as her mother, now whimpering like a hurt puppy, crawled all over him, crying fretfully as she tried to find comfort on a breast awash in the coldness of death.

  SIX MONTHS LATER, ALMOST TO THE DAY, on a sunny September afternoon, Clair and Missy walked home from school and found their mother curled up on the bed of sweet williams, her cheek cushioned against the purple-and-pink petals as if she were napping, her hat shading her eyes from the sun, and a curious, almost flirtatious smile frozen on her face. Sinking onto the dirt, Clair reached blindly for Missy's hand, her ears deaf to the rising hysteria sounding from her sister, and a sense of the unreal overtaking her. Holding out a finger, she traced the curve of her mother's smile. Anyone watching might have been heartbroken to see one so young maintaining such control in the face of her mother's death. In shock, they might say, or too frightened to honestly believe her mother was really dead along with her father, and that she and her sister were truly orphans now. Or perhaps even that she had lost her senses, like her father, and that it wasn't the war after all that took poor Job Gale's mind but a sickness of the blood like they'd been thinking all along during his last year.

  It was this last thought they would have held true if they were privy to the absurdity consuming Clair's mind at the moment, for it wasn't herself she was thinking on at all, or her younger sister, Missy, and that they were both orphans now. But a deeper intrigue to her at that moment, as she traced her finger around the curve of her mother's smile, was the memory of the grimace that had so distorted her father's face as he had lain upon his pillow. How was it, she wondered, beginning to rock ever so gently, that it was her mother who went smiling into the arms of death, when it was her father who had so craved its comfort?

  TWO WEEKS LATER Clair sat in the same perplexed silence in her father's pew-chair, clutching a sobbing Missy to her side, as Sim stood before them, his words falling around her like a cold rain as he declared himself their guardian. He told her that Frankie, who had married Willamena, was offering her a job to teach down Rocky Head—at least for the next six weeks till they found a real teacher. Meanwhile he and the grandmother would be moving into this house to take care of Missy, for there wasn't enough room in his old house for himself, the grandmother and Missy. Too, Clair herself would be needing a room after she finished with her teaching spell down Rocky Head, and she couldn't very well live on her own yet. But wouldn't she be wanting to leave for teaching college the following year, after she finished
grade eleven, the way her father always said she would? Then it made sense that he and the grandmother move into the house so's there would always be somebody here to take care of Missy—and the grandmother's house could now be used for a woodhouse, given the roof was rotting off.

  "But—but I'm not a teacher," Clair whispered and it was only as the uncle kept talking and Missy kept crying had she realized that her words were spoken silently; and even if she had shouted them, there was no one to listen. They were gone. Her mother and father were both gone. She repeated the thought to feel it, but felt instead the same dizziness that threatened to overcome her once, when she had jumped two feet over a split in a canyon wall, with the thunder of churning water echoing up from the darkness a hundred feet below.

  That she could feel anything was a surprise in itself, for since the night of her father's death, it felt as if a calming had descended over her insides, allowing nothing of the horror around her to penetrate, and even allowing her to smile reassuringly at Missy as they had walked hand in hand behind their mother on the way to their father's burial. And it was as if her senses knew, for the calming stayed with her, right up through the six months leading to her mother's death. And now, sitting here before her uncle Sim, listening to his pronouncement of her fate, the calming had shifted, surprising her with the feelings of fright it allowed in, when it was pain she had been fearing the most.

  "But I'm not a teacher," she repeated, this time louder, again startled by the tumult of emotion awakening throughout her. Like one awakening from a sleep, she looked around the room and saw all that had been taking place this past while, and her body was rising in revolt. And most of all against the rot of her uncle's ways as he stood before her, the peak of his cap overshadowing all else, and his stoop no longer present now that the neighbours were gone.

  Vulture! she uttered within. Nay, not even a vulture, for they have the grace of flight. More the slinking dog again, a weasel, crawling on its belly, waiting for the hen to stray so's it could suck itself full of the victuals of another's labour.

  "Don't matter you're not a teacher," he was saying as Clair rose from her chair, eyeing him defiantly. "They only goes to grade six down there, anyway—and it's only to hold the youngsters over till the real teacher comes. Count it lucky that they picked you."

  It was to the uncle's good fortune that Missy, at that moment, let out a long, shuddering sob, and Clair, seeing the misery in her eyes as she looked from her to the uncle, felt her heart wrench—and not merely for Missy's suffering but her own as well. For it was the uncle's side Missy was harbouring besides, and it dawned on Clair with the foreboding of a winter's storm that hers would be a lonely path indeed, for it was not Missy's fortune to suffer again as she had done these last two years. No. The hearth had long since chilled for Missy, starting the day their father had left for war, and their mother had forsaken all around her. And even she, Clair, had helped shush her into silence.

  A shudder tore through Clair. She drew back from the uncle, hissing at him, "I won't ever live in this house with you!"

  "Clair," Missy sobbed, but the uncle was already taking her by the arm, leading her towards the door.

  "She'll be back, you ought not worry about that," he said roughly, his efforts to be consoling echoing loudly through a house that had heretofore been tendered in silence. And it was to this house that Clair's eyes clung as she sat, gripping onto the wooden seat of the motorboat beneath her, trying to shut out the sight of Missy sobbing and clinging to the uncle's hand as the two fishers from Rocky Head shoved the boat off from the wharf. Stark white against the grey of the sky, and with its wreath of colour circling beneath the kitchen window, it far more resembled a tombstone marking the death of a life she had once known than the home where Missy would continue to live—and which she, in six weeks, was supposed to be coming back to.

  A crow swooped before it, like a black tear falling from the heavens, and holding tight to her seat as the piston popped to life, reverberating through her wooden seat and jarring up her spine, she turned to her sister with a last plaintive cry, "I'll come back for you, Missy, I promise—it's just for a little while. Be a good girl, now, and don't forget to wash your hair—don't forget." The putt-putt of the motorboat drowned out her cries, carrying her farther and farther offshore till the great September sea stretched out between them and Missy was but a fairy, glancing over her shoulder and waving as she followed the uncle up over the hill.

  Miller's Island loomed to the wayside and Clair startled towards it as she heard her father's voice sounding over the wind and the sea: "Aye, my dolly, it's the bravest man that hides his fear the bestest," and then the boat pitched wildly, sending a stinging spray of mist into her face as it stubbornly fought to stay in alignment with the shore. And turning calm eyes onto the curious ones of the fishers, she wrapped her scarf more tightly around her throat and looked seaward towards Rocky Head.

  Chapter Seven

  IT WAS FRANKIE THAT MET HER down Rocky Head. Hair slicked back by the wind and buffing his hands to keep warm, he stood on the beach next to a stagehead on rickety legs, half on land, and half out over the water, wearing a concerned look on his face as he waited for the boat to drift ashore.

  She remembered again his bold smile the first time she had encountered him, displaying an eagerness for acceptance as well as charm. And despite the fact it was her now, landing on his shores, she saw again in the quickness of his smile that same desire for acceptance. That it should be from her, an orphan freshly begotten from the gates of the graveyard into a bed feathered by his benevolence, she was too fatigued to think. But upon clambering over the side of the boat, her knees buckling as she stood before him, partially from fear and partially from the gruelling trip on rough waters, she shored herself up. For in those moments of life's great surprises, as with the death of her mother and father, time offered her no respite to reach inside and lift out the mottled web of feelings tangling her insides, only a nudging onward, as with her father the day he walked down over the hill to the waiting ship, knowing that to sit is to chance entwinement to a bed pillowed with naught but springs of barbed wire.

  "Welcome," said he, his handsome white teeth subdued by a quiet smile. "I worried Nate might've capsized the boat and drowned ye's all."

  "It—it was a bit rough," she managed, as he helped her out of the boat.

  "Yup, that's what she did pick up, then," said the bearded logger, Nate, hopping onto shore behind her. "And some of us might've figured that out by the cloud, if our eyes weren't glared by a pair of pretty city shoes," he added ruefully, glancing at the shiny, wet gaiters buckling nearly up to Frankie's knees.

  Frankie grinned, grabbing hold of the thole-pin and helping Nate haul the boat farther up on shore. "I hope you don't think us disrespectful," he said, turning back to Clair, his grin sobering, "asking you to come work for us so soon after—well, your loss. We would've understood if you'd said no."

  Clair nodded, stepping aside as Nate bent over, fixing a wet plank beneath the keel of the boat. "Is you afraid of getting them pretty boots wet?" he called out, looking up at Frankie impatiently.

  "I hope they gets everybody's attention at the meeting the way they're getting yours," Frankie grunted, kicking the plank in place.

  "Heh, no doubt they got a pretty tongue, but it's the one in your head I'll be more interested in hearing from," replied Nate, giving the boat a last extra wrench, "providing it talks straight with us, that is."

  "Better watch him, miss," called her second escort, Calve, still hunkered down by the motor in the boat, "for he's like the merchants, he is, curling his tongue into whichever cheek got the sweetest pudding."

  "Pay no mind," said Frankie, taking her arm and guiding her towards the bank. "Nate, you got her suitcase? The women can't have heard us, else they'd be down to meet you by now," he added, nodding towards the six half-painted houses standing resolute to the wind and shrieking gulls. The screeching of clothesline pulleys and the cries of you
ngsters sounded from beyond and Nate nodded encouragingly, hoisting her suitcase onto his shoulder. "They're taking in the clothes—getting ready for the meeting in a few minutes, to talk about the vote."

  "You're welcome to join us—Willamena will bring you," said Frankie as she turned to follow Nate.

  "Willamena!" exclaimed Nate, peering sharply at Frankie. "She's coming to the meeting?"

  "Geezes, Frankie, how's we suppose to speak our minds with Willamena there?" said Calve.

  "It's honest concerns we'll be raising, b'yes," said Frankie. "It don't matter who's there when it's honest concerns. Besides, it'll be a chance for Clair to meet everybody at once. Better hurry on—I sees the Lower Head crowd coming."

  "I don't know," said Nate. He glanced at the half-dozen or so men and women walking up the shore from a scattering of houses a little distance off. "They don't put much in a company man, no matter what his stand."

  "Company man," snorted Frankie. "Sure now, I'm a company man. I was born and raised here same as everybody else."

  "Aye, you was fine till you went and faulted yourself," said Calve.

  "Like Luke says now, it's who buys a man his shoes we ought to be looking out for," said Nate, tossing a wink at Clair.