The Fortunate Brother (3 page)

Kyle was looking at his mother in surprise. “Since when did you start talking to Bonnie Gillard?”

“Why wouldn't I?”

“That's just it now, you never talks to nobody any time, and now you're
phoning
Bonnie Gillard?”

“Perhaps it's time I got out more.”

“And you picks Bonnie Gillard to hang with? Next thing Clar'll be coming after you.”

“Let him come.”

“Right. Just what we needs. Crazy like his father, everybody quivering like rabbits around him.”

“He'll not find me quivering like a rabbit, then.”

“I seen rabbits bite. I seen him skinning rabbits, too. Size of his hands, he'd snap her like a wishbone. Seen him carry a dead moose through the woods once—antlers and all. Slung across his shoulders like it was a dog's carcass. Why don't she just move away?”

“She's been living with her sister down Hampden the past month.”

“I mean Toronto, someplace.”

“I'm sure he knows his way to Toronto.”

“How come she don't call the cops herself?”

“Because he punishes her all the harder, after. My, Kyle, you think she haven't thought of them things? You're like everybody else—believing the woman haven't got a brain because she's Jack Verge's daughter.”

“How come she keeps going back with him, then? Don't make much sense to me.”

“You knows what makes sense to her? You walks in her shoes? All you know is talk.”

“Nothing wrong with talk. Might keep her from going back this time, everybody talking.”

“Suppose they gets it wrong—do talk help then? Might help if everybody cleaned out their own closets.”

“Jaysus, Mother, he's been knocking her around for years.”

“I'm not talking about Bonnie or Clar, I'm talking about you.”

“Me!”

“Yes, you. Got lots to say about things not your concern. You needs to be like everybody else, tending to your own concerns.” The sharpness of her eyes as she stared at him, her consternation, as though she were seeing something on his face known only to her. He fought not to look away.

She went back to picking at her food, but he could tell her thoughts were still on him.

She looked up as the front door opened. Sylvanus entered quieter than a draft of wind and took his seat at the table. He fixed his eyes on his plate and guardedly lifted his fork.

“Get your rod fixed?” asked Addie.

His brows shot upwards. “Who broke my rod?”

Jaysus. Kyle gave him a warning look but Addie appeared too taken by her thoughts to notice. She buttered a slice of bread and laid it by Sylvanus's plate, and as if she didn't know what else to do with her hands, she rested them on the table, small and pale as clam shells.

Kyle stared into the rusted brown of his cup of tea. Spoons chinked against china. Forks clicked. A hiccup from Sylvanus. Kyle coughed to cover it and asked his mother to pass the bread.

“Perhaps you should call the police,” said Kyle. “Sounds like he's on the warpath agin.”

“Who?” asked Sylvanus.

“Clar Gillard.”

“I almost called them yesterday, then,” said Addie. “He was throwing sticks into the cemetery and then getting his dog trampling over the graves to fetch it. Chris's grave.”

Kyle's hand froze midway to spearing a bit of spud. He tried to speak but couldn't. He looked at his father whose face stiffened like a mask, his eyes hard as rocks. He looked at his mother—that's why she was off. Watching Chris's grave being desecrated. That bastard. That pretty smiling face bastard Gillard.

“If I thought I was dying, I'd take him with me,” said Addie, her voice filled with such loathing that Kyle forgot his own rage and both he and his father looked at her. She picked up her fork, forcing a smile. “He drove off fast enough when I stood up. Eat your supper, Syllie. There's other things to talk about. I was talking to Elsie on the phone this morning.”

Jaysus. Kyle sat back. As if there wasn't enough on the table.

“She said Jake and her boys quit building their house with Newfoundland and Labrador Housing and that the two of ye were taking over the building of it.”

“We were waiting to tell you after supper,” said Kyle. “Yeah. They couldn't handle it. So, we thought we'd take it on.”

“
We
. What do you know about building a house, Kyle?”

“Helped Dad build Uncle Manny's house in Jackson's Arm last summer.”

“And that makes you a carpenter?”

“I liked it. That's how you find out what you like, by doing it. Imagine, if Uncle Manny never moved back from Toronto, I might be signing on for philosophy like Sis. That got her the big job, didn't it?” He tried to soften the edge in his tone but she caught it and rapped his knuckles.

“You worry about yourself. Else, straightening used nails with a rock is all you'll be good for.”

He grinned, knowing she'd like that—him taking a trade at the nearby vocational school in Corner Brook the coming fall instead of driving across the island to university in St. John's. There was a time when she would have balked at his mentioning trades. Her girlhood prayer was to be educated and live in cities and become a missionary and travel to foreign places and she was forever resentful of being taken out of school when she was just starting grade nine to work the fish flakes. But now—since Chris,
and since Sylvie flew to Africa weeks ago—she'd had the shine rubbed off her prayer beads.

“Whatever you choose, you'll have to start making plans soon enough,” she said. “What's wrong with you, Syllie? You haven't said a word.”

“He got his mind bogged down with blueprints,” said Kyle. “Hey!” He touched his mother's hand with his fork. “Somebody got to take it over. They near froze last winter in that shack.”

“They'll always live in shacks. They don't take care of nothing.”

“They never had nothing to keep clean before, did they?”

“Their father had as good as we, he just let it all rot down around him. You must be addled, Syllie, to work with Jake agin. He didn't mind leaving you in the lurch back in Cooney Arm when all the fish was gone.”

“He was just chasing the fish, Addie.” Sylvanus had laid down his fork and was staring at his food. “Why'd he do that?”

“Who, Clar? Because he heard I was urging Bonnie to call the police on him, that's why. Thought he'd have a little fun with me. Get past that now, Syllie, that's all he'll ever get out of me. Tell me about Jake—”

“Why? What's going on you wants to call the police?”

“They had another fight. What about Jake's boys? They're home, why can't they finish building the house? Didn't that younger one do carpentry in trades school?”

“Wade,” said Kyle. “And Uncle Jake's going to be working on a fishing boat for the summer. Wade needs help.”

“They needs help cleaning up the mess they've already made.”

“We needs five thousand up front to buy the supplies,” said Kyle. “Perhaps not that much. I think they got the footing laid for the basement. We'll see when we goes down—we haven't been down there yet.”

“You took it on without even seeing it? Well, sir. And suppose now I needs that money?”

She didn't speak further. Kyle laid down his fork. It was coming. She lifted her chin in that defiant manner of hers and he was struck once more by her fortitude. That whatever this new thing thickening her cloud of sorrow, hope was already ignited in her heart and offering itself as a shelter for him and his father.

“I have to go to Corner Brook tomorrow. See the doctor. I— There's a little lump in my breast. They did some tests already.”

Sylvanus blanched. Kyle closed his eyes, cringing as his mother spoke the word, that dirty little word, that ugly little word, cancer. Breast cancer. He'd known three women with breast cancer and they were all dead. He was on his feet and heading for the door and outside before his mother could reach him. He bolted up the road and started running through the night made darker by the damp shroud of fog, his feet picking his path from memory. To his right he could make out the dark ridge of shoreline and hear the water sloshing around rocks like some ancient demon slithering in and out of sight beside him. He took the turnoff onto the gravel flat and kept running, closer to the alder bed and away from the orange dome of Kate's bonfire down by the water. He heard the strains of her guitar, her voice trilling through the fog like a distant psalm guiding his feet through the dark. He came to the river and found the footbridge and crossed it and veered upriver over wet mounds of dead grass that slipped eel-like around his ankles. No longer did it feel as though someone else ran in his shoes. For three years now he'd been mapping this artery of grief. He kept winding his way upriver. When he could no longer hear Kate, when his ears filled with the river water rustling through the grass and slapping against the rocks, he lowered himself to his knees and opened his mouth and his voice rose from his belly and carried over the water like the cry of a loon.

H
e'd been sitting for some time. A bottle smashed against a rock to the other side of the river and he rose, legs cramped. Another bottle smashed, the yelps of boys sounding like young wolves tearing up the night. He walked, wiping at his eyes. The night, the fog, smothered him. Couldn't see a thing, not a damn thing. He kept his step high so's not to get snagged by the clumps of wet grass and alder roots. He inched back across the footbridge, cringing as more bottles shattered against rock and the young boys hooted. He'd like to grab them by the neck. Smell of smoke came to him and he veered left, away from the boys, his feet crunching through coarse rocks as he made his way towards the sound of the river spilling into the sea. The rocks became muddied, silt-covered, and soon he was padding silent as a muskrat on the soft sediment fanning out from the mouth of the river and spreading along the shoreline. The snapping orange of Kate's fire melted through the dark.

She was bent over, holding on to her guitar and feeding the fire with bits of sticks and driftwood. Her greyish white hair fluffed out from beneath a toque and braided down her back. There were
always half a dozen bodies lodged about, drinking beer, having a smoke, but only Kate yet this evening. Kyle sat on a white-boned log. He started jiggling his foot. To keep himself from standing back up and running off again, he clamped his attention onto Kate more tightly than the capo clamping the neck of her guitar.

“Skyless night, Kyle.” She pushed back her toque and the greyish fringes of her hair faded into the fire-softened fog crowding around her and she looked to be sitting in the maw of some white god. She reached behind her for a six-pack and shoved it towards him.

He popped a can of beer and guzzled it near dry. She lowered the capo onto a different fret and tested the higher pitch of the strings and he leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees, foot jiggling so hard his body shook.

“Got me a new song.”

He belched and spat into the fire and watched it sizzle into nothing and turned back to Kate, watching as she put a pick between her lips, twisted the keys,
plinged
on a string, twist twist,
pling pling.
She looked to be fifty with her shroud of hair, or perhaps forty when the sun shone through her wire-framed glasses and into her kelp-green eyes. She was from away and came one day about a year ago with a trailer hitched to a truck and bought Seymour Ford's old cabin just to the other side of the gravel flat. She was from Corner Brook, she said, an hour's drive west, and she said her name was Kate Mackenzie and that she wanted to live by the sea. She said no more and bore with a smile the gossip shadowing her step to the store or the post office or the beach. And she didn't go anywhere else. Except for out-of-town excursions that sometimes lasted for days. Visiting family, he supposed. Didn't matter. That's what he liked about Kate—that he could just be himself sitting with her, for she wasn't connected to nothing
or nobody he knew and was never moaning or groaning and wore only the song she was figuring on her face. And she was always figuring a song. Had boxes of half-written songs.
Turning days into words, Kyle.

“Cover me,”
she now sang, fire dancing on her glasses. “
Cover me, I feel so cold.
You feeling cold, Kyle?”

He shook his head, leaning over his knees and staring at the fire, foot jiggling.

“A blanket of stars in the midnight sky, Shimmering love streams from dark tear-stained eyes, Cover me.”

He closed his eyes, her voice crooning around him like a lullaby, and he wanted to curl beneath the tuck of the log and sleep.

“Cover me, I feel so cold, Cover me, am so alone…”

He finished the beer in three long swallows and popped another, the fizz from the trapped air a comfort sound to his ears. Kate faded from her song, looked at him. An expectancy tensing her face. She often did that and always turned away whenever he queried the look. She turned away now. She tightened a string and loosened another one and then looked up as muffled footsteps sounded on silted rock. Clar Gillard's hulking shoulders appeared through the fog, his rounded features softening into a smile. His black Lab trotted from behind, tail wagging and nose to the ground, sniffing the rocks, sniffing at Kyle's feet, sniffing at Kate's, his eyes glowing like sparks in the firelight.

Kyle stared at Clar in silence.

“Evening,” said Kate. She took a silver flask from the folds of her coat as Clar sat at the far end of the log. She unscrewed the cap and passed it to him. He grasped it with hands big as mitts and took a nip. Then he passed it back, his face squeezing up.

“You ever put mix in that?” he asked in a slow drawl.

“Breakfast time I puts a little juice in there.”

Clar took a beer from a weight-sagged pocket and looked through the quivering heat of the fire at Kyle. “Want one?” He offered the beer with an uncertain smile.

Kyle shook his head, wondering at that uncertain smile. Like a youngster's after toddling too far from the doorplace and wondering if he should go farther. It was a nice smile. And nice crinkling eyes. Hard to think someone with nice smiling eyes would trample graves and spray his wife with oven cleaner.

Kate strummed into the silence and the dog trotted over to Clar, staring up at him, ears pricked. He barked, tail wagging. Nipping his beer between his knees, Clar leaned forward and cupped the dog's smooth, shiny head with both hands and ruffled its ears with his thumbs. The dog wagged its tail faster and Clar blew a short puff of air into its black leathery nostrils. The dog snuffled and licked its chops. Clar blew another puff into the shiny black snout and the dog whined. It tried to twist away. Clar gripped its jaws, holding it closer. “What's you going to do now eh, what's you going to do,” he crooned and blew long and easy into the dog's nostrils, gripping tighter to its struggling head. The dog's haunches went rigid, its nails grappled onto rocks. Clar kept blowing. Kyle got to his feet.

“Let the fucker go, asshole!”

Clar grinned up at him, the dog's head still cupped between his hands, his thumbs caressing its jaws.

“Need to get yourself a set of bagpipes, Clar,” said Kate.

“Or a fucking balloon,” said Kyle. He sat back down.

Clar rubbed down the Lab's quivering haunches. “Go. Get,” he said, smacking the dog's rump. The dog skittered through the fog, tail folded between its hind legs. Clar stood up and drained his beer, weaving a bit—first sign to Kyle that he was drunk—then hove the bottle towards the sea. He dramatically lifted a
finger for silence, then smiled when he heard the plash. “G'nite,” he said and sifted into the fog after his dog.

“Somebody should shoot that sonofabitch.”

“Just another poor boy, Ky.”

“He's a prick.”

“Flouting his poverty.”

“How the fuck's that, Kate. He's got everything.”

“But his father's heart.”

Jaysus. “You makes everything sound like a song.”

“That's what we are. Love songs gone wrong.”

“Yeah. Well. Someone should capo the crap outta that one. Arse.” He got to his feet, dropped a buddy pat on Kate's shoulder, and headed off.

Their room door was ajar when he went inside the house. A dim light peered through the crack from a night lamp his mother read under before sleeping. Most nights he crept past their door and dove beneath his blankets to muffle their voices as they oftentimes bickered with each other. In the mornings he was always astonished to find them tucked into each other like a skein of wool. This evening he peered through their half-opened doorway and his father's head was on his mother's bosom as though he were already asleep and she was cradling him, one of her hands holding on to his as though she were frightened of wandering lost through her dreams. She was gazing at a framed picture of Sylvie and Chris and himself on her wall and he knew it was Chris she was gazing at. His eyes, so earthy brown and eager. His smile wide and open. His cropped blond hair. The golden boy, long before death took him. Framed and hanging beside the picture was a pencilled drawing Chris had done of their father sitting in a boat on moon-rippled water. Or, and Kyle could never tell, perhaps it was Chris himself, looking expectantly towards the stars.

Did you know you'd soon be amongst them?

“Did you close the door, Kyle?” his mother asked in a half-whisper.

He nodded, knowing she'd heard and was just wanting something to say.

“Now, don't go worrying,” she said.

“I won't.” He bumbled to his room and into his bed and across his pillow and the silence without their arguing resounded through his head and he stared like a hawk into the dark.

He'd scarcely fallen asleep when dawn trickled an ashy grey light around the edges of his blinds. In the kitchen his mother poured him tea and smeared partridgeberry jam on his toast.

“Your father's out in the shed,” she told him. “Nursing himself, no doubt.”

He stood by the sink and watched her, feeling within himself that hushed quiet of a mourner already at the wake. She leaned past him for the dishcloth and he smelled her scent of lavender and remembered Sylvie once saying how she thought as a youngster that lavender was a flower that smelled like their mother.

He followed her to the table as she carried his tea and toast, sitting in the chair she hauled out for him.

“Eat it for me too, I suppose,” he said and flinched as she pinched his ear.

“Now, I don't want no foolishness,” she said to him.

He swallowed lumps of toast and gulped them down with the tea.

“And try keeping your father sober.”

“What about Sylvie?”

“She called day before yesterday. We won't be hearing from her for another week.”

“So—she don't know?”

“I didn't know for sure when she called. It's fine she don't know, let her have her holiday.”

He felt a stab of resentment, a
strong
stab of resentment.

“She should be here.”

“There's nothing she can do, only worry.”

“We can call the embassy there, they'll find her.”

“
Call the embassy.
Yes now, we're doing that. Foolish. The doctors haven't made any decisions yet, and there's nothing she can do anyway. Let her have her trip.” She put her purse on the table, rooting through it. “Take this.” She took out a packet of bills and laid them on the table. “Nine hundred. I'll get the rest from the bank this morning.”

“We won't go ahead with that.”

“Yes, go on. I spoke too quick last evening. He likes building. The pride he took building this house—you'd have thought he was building a castle. I'll keep five hundred in the bank.”

“Would—will that be enough?”

“I'll know more when I talks to the oncologist today.”

“I'll go with you.”

“No, stay with him. Bonnie's taking me.”

“Who?”

“How many Bonnies do we know, Kyle. That's her outside, now. Go get her some coffee. Use that mug on the table there, it's clean. I'll finish getting ready.”

“Christ, Mother, you don't need Bonnie Gillard driving you to Corner Brook.”

“Rather have her now than anybody else. She knows how to keep her mouth shut, that's for sure. Now, go get that coffee.” She
vanished into her room and he tried not to stare at the bold form of Bonnie Gillard as she came in through the door—her too white pants and too white jacket and blood-red blouse and shoes and red handbag and lipstick and white plastic discs pinned to her ears. And a big dark scarf curled loosely around her neck.

Addie came rushing out, apologizing for being late, and faltered for a second upon seeing Bonnie, then quickly smiled.

“My, don't you look nice. Perhaps I should have pressed something. Kyle, did you get Bonnie a coffee? I'll just be another minute.”