The Fortunate Brother (5 page)

“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 whistle 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.

She bore his choked sobs with a bowed head. When he was done she leaned across the table and gripped his hands and spoke softly but firmly.
I don't fear death, it's taken too much from me
.
I owe it nothing. But I'll learn to hate like your father if it takes you from me too. This isn't the worst thing to happen. Losing him was the worst thing. And knowing it'll be hard for you is the second worst. The biggest thing you can help me with is taking care of you. I already lost your father; the bottle got him. But you must tend to him while I'm sick. Keep him from me when he's drunk. There's nothing sacred about a drunk and I'll not have my coming days defiled more by his drinking.
She rose and held his forehead against her belly that bore him. She stroked the back of his neck and then kissed his nape and removed herself and gathered the cloth off the table.
Go get your father now. It's time for supper.

He wiped his eyes and nose, made his way outside, and stood gazing down the darkening hull of the bay. He walked to the side of the house and sat down, his head thrown back, gazing at the ashy sky, wishing it was dark and there were stars. Chris loved the stars, loved sitting right here and gazing up at them.
Proud evening star in thy glory afar
—he was always quoting from some poem. Once when Kyle was small and playing outside in drifting snow, Chris came home with a box of Cracker Jacks and led him to this very sheltered spot and they sat with their backs to the house and
Chris packed the snow snug around them like a blanket and fed him half the Cracker Jacks. One for Kyle and one for himself. One for Kyle and one for himself. Except for the glazed peanuts. Those he kept and popped into his own mouth. He always remembered that. How good he felt, banked in with snow and his mouth opening like a baby bird's and Chris feeding him the Cracker Jacks. First time he had knowingly felt love. Before that it had been fed to him daily like bread and he hadn't noticed. He always loved Cracker Jacks after that; they were his favourite sweet. Oh, Chris. That something like this can be happening with Mother and you not know. He thought of Sylvie and his heart closed in anger.
You should be here.

He sat there for another long minute, the hazy light beginning to wane. The light went on in the kitchen, throwing a pale shimmer on the seawater gurgling around the pilings beneath him. He got to his feet and went to the shed for his father.

H
e opened the shed door to a smell of damp sawdust. It was darkish inside, his father a phantom-grey sitting hunched on his chopping block. He was filing the steel-toothed chain from his saw laid across his knees. It was always his way to do something while he drank. Justified his time. And he was always sitting in the near dark. Times Kyle got up in the middle of the night for a drink of water and his father would be sitting at the kitchen table with no lights on, staring out the window at the water shifting restlessly around the pilings. Sadness tugging his face. As though the sea had lost its wonder and he was struggling to get it back.

“You have to go in,” said Kyle. “You have to,” he repeated as his father kept his head down, kept his eyes riveted to the slow gentle chafing of steel against steel. Kyle approached him and put his hand over his father's misshapen knuckle. “You have to go in. She's waiting.” He stood back as his father heaved up a shoulder, deflecting his words. “You have to go in!” he pleaded from the doorway. “I'm going down Hampden, down to the bar. Tell her, so she don't make supper for me. You hear me, Dad? You'll go in now?”

His father nodded and he started up the road. He walked past the gravel flat; Kate's car wasn't there, her blinds closed. He turned up Bottom Hill and looked back and thought he glimpsed Kate's blind move in her window. He paused. He stepped nearer the edge of the road, staring harder, and something else caught his eye. Angled left of Kate's eave and farther in through the high-grown alder bed nearer the river he saw a smidgen of red, the colour of Bonnie Gillard's car. He couldn't figure it—the old park road cut through the alder bed, but not that far. Too mucky to drive a car. And it was where the river roiled the hardest and was the most swollen.

He continued up Bottom Hill, but his feet dragged. He looked back again, couldn't see the car. Backtracked a few steps—there it was. Just a glimmer. It was getting dark and he turned towards the bar but couldn't make himself go forward and cursed. Women. Never knew what they'd do. He turned back, walked quickly down onto the gravel flat and cut an immediate left onto a narrow, rutted road, grassed down the centre and long since left to grow over. He peered at the ground—too much water flooding the tracks to see tire prints. He kept going, tramping near the edging of brush to keep his feet dry, stick branches scratching at his clothes. He came to a clearing that used to be a park, out of the wind, and with swings and picnic tables. The picnic tables that hadn't been dragged off were rotted now, the swings just broken chains dangling from skewed posts. The wind had proven a better mate than mosquitoes.

He looked about the thickly sodded clearing and saw bits of tire tracks on the drier clumps of nettle and quickweed heading towards the river. He followed them, his boots sinking through muck, and cursed again, feeling the damp seep through to his socks. Gulls squawked irritably above him. Swampy patches of land gave up their rotting smells. The car must have been driven
fast to gut through this muck without bogging down. Another thirty feet ahead and to the right was the clump of brush where he thought he'd spotted it. Ruptured mud holes in the soaked sod testified that the car had suddenly been revved up and reamed through the brush. His heart began thumping and he broke into a run. The alders thinned, the wind broke through, cold on his face, and a red slash bled through the thicket. There was the car, back tires bogged down in mud. The back door on the passenger's side was open, no one inside. He roared out
Hello!
The river roared back. He hauled and slipped his way up the small embankment in front of the car and looked onto the bloated, fast-flowing water of the river. He couldn't see farther than a few feet downstream. He tried cutting through the brush. Too thick. He went back to the car, saw the keys dangling from the ignition. He walked away, thought about the young boys and their nighttime drinking parties just over the way, and backstepped, taking the keys and pocketing them. Couldn't trust them little bastards. He headed back across the clearing and onto the swamped, grassy road, coming out beside Kate's. Her car was still gone. He started towards Bottom Hill, paused—her blind was partly open. He could have sworn it was closed earlier. He yelled out her name.

Silence. A flock of gulls rose with a cacophony of squawks above the river. He took the scuffed path from Kate's door, went up to the riverbank, and stood looking upstream. The gulls were spooling, squawking. Seized with a sense of urgency, he ran towards the old ruins and climbed on top of a concrete ledge. Holding on to a twisted length of rusted rebar, he leaned as far as he could over the ledge, seeing farther upriver. As if to an unseen call, the gulls floated back down to where they'd been resting a minute before. The river flowed deep, darkened by the evening light. He shivered in the sudden damp and leaped off the concrete block, starting back
to the road. Kate's blind was still half opened and he swore to Christ he was being watched.
What the hell, not my business,
he told himself and started up Bottom Hill, walking fast. Cresting the top, he looked down upon Hampden. A thick fog was creeping over the darkening sea. It crept over the wharf and through the backyards and, lifting a grey tentacle, wrapped itself around a yellow light flaring through a window in Bonnie Gillard's sister's house. The light twinkled and then blackened like a dying star.

He cut away from Bottom Hill onto a twisted dirt road flanked by brush. It was getting dark now. The one streetlight had been rock-smashed years ago by mischief makers and he kept himself tethered to the road by the faint glow of the barroom lights creeping through the brush. A low rumble of voices floated towards him as he neared. Loud whispers. Giggles. The ones not yet old enough to get inside the bar. They plied him for smokes, booze, or whatever and he shucked one of them a dollar bill. Inside the smoky cavern of the bar a crowd was growing, shoving tables together and arguing good-naturedly with razzing neighbours. A bunch of old-timers hunched around their regular table nearest the door, playing spades through the thick haze of their home-rolled smokes. On the bandstand at the back of the bar, a scrawny kid with an electric guitar was testing his mike while the other band member—his uncle—balanced a bass on his knee and fiddled with the dials on an amp. An old sod hyped with drink was waltzing himself around the dance floor to Waylon Jennings pining “Why Baby Why” from the jukebox. Nearest the dance floor was a table of Verges, Bonnie's clan. Big hair, big dark eyes. Pick out a Verge anywhere. He was about to approach them when the eldest sister, Marlene, came through the door from the women's can, scrunching her hair behind her ears and laughing at the old sod waltzing his way towards her.

“Hey!” Kyle slid along the bar towards her, pulling Bonnie's keys from his pocket.

“Hay's for horses, Sweetie.” She took the old timer's hand and swirled away with him across the dance floor and Kyle let the keys slide back in his pocket.

“Here you go, bud.” The bartender slid a whisky and ginger his way. He drank it back and held out his glass for a refill. His buddy Hooker, hair razored to his skull, had spotted him from the back of the bar and was coming towards him. Looked like he was going to church in his white collar and black jacket. He slowed to a saunter as he passed the table where his girlfriend, Rose—saucy bangs and saucy tight sweater—was sitting, absorbed in a chat with her friends. Coming up to the bar, he slapped Kyle's back and gave him a heartening grin.

“What's she at, buddy! Your mother all right? Heard she was sick.” He called to the bartender for a Black Horse and slapped Kyle's back again. “What's up, buddy—see fucking Roses back there?”

“Roses?”

“Eh, yeah, she likes me calling her Roses.”

“Ye getting married or something? What's with the duds?”

“She ditched me agin.”

“Right. New clothes gonna get her back.”

“Man, I must be dumber than a fucking trout. Always letting her reel me in and dump me back out.”

“Find yourself a different pond, bud. Listen, can we go outside for a minute?”

“Have a drink, first. Hey buddy,” he yelled to the bartender. “Cancel that Black Horse, pour us a couple whiskies. How's Syl? Heard Trapp was sneaking about agin.”

“Yeah, what's that about? Where's he living these days?”

“In Corner Brook, somewhere.”

“What's he always fucking around here for? Nobody here belong to him no more.”

“Yes, b'y. And not like he ever lived here, hey, b'y. Hung around with Ben one summer. Don't think he ever stayed much with them uncles of his.”

“Best thing ever happened, that sawmill burning down. Crazy fuckers, the Trapps.”

Hooker nodded. “Weird. Weird the way Trapp keeps sneaking back. Not like Ben's still here—whatever the fuck Ben seen in him.”

“Ben. He's got a soft spot for all the underdogs.”

“What about your sister?”

“Sylvie's no fan of Trapp. Only tolerated him because he's Ben's friend.”

“When they getting back?”

“Don't know. Few weeks.”

“I allows they'll be married soon. Married.” He sniffed. “That'll take the fun outta
ro-mance.
” He tossed Rose a snide look and turned to the flat-faced bartender. “Where's the drinks, old man—oops, sorry, bud. Here, pour one for your honey.” He threw a few bills on the bar and handed Kyle a drink, taking the other for himself. “Cheers. What's up? What's on your mind? Listen.” He gulped his drink and, leaning in, patted his jacket pocket. “Got a few spliffs here. Afghani, man. Black as spades. We'll go for a smoke in a bit. Got a few uppers, home. Get them later, if you want, all right, buddy? Your mother's going to be fine, guaranteed.”

“I'm all right, b'y.” Kyle toasted Hooker, the whisky burning good in his belly.

“And Syl, how's he doing? Always gets stirred up when Trapp's about.”

“He had a few.”

“Figures. Got a shot of shine for him out in the car. Nice shine. Fucking premium. Snuck it from the old man's larder.”

“Thanks, bud. Old man will like that.”

“Here's to Syl. And to your mother. Got some nice dried red clover back at Grandmother's. Good stuff—makes good tea for what ails you. Bring some up to your mother, if you like.”

“Jaysus, like the old country doctor,” said Kyle, clapping Hooker's shoulder. He pushed aside thoughts of Bonnie's car and threw back his whisky and ordered another for him and Hooker. One thing about the outports. You never suffered alone. Everybody was your brother or aunt or cousin or neighbour and they knew your dead like they knew their own.

“Look at her back there, look at her,” said Hooker, sneaking a glance at Rose. “She been stonewalling me all night and which ain't working because I'm stonewalling her. She'll have leg cramps from sitting in that chair before I gives her a look this evening. I always smells like pot, she says. That's her thing, right? She hates that I smokes pot.”

“Buy her some flowers, b'y.”

“Hey. Love don't care if it's flowers or pot. Love is blind.”

“So's hate.”

“You saying she hates me?”

“I'm saying it sucks to be blind.”

“It's here, bud,” said Hooker, patting his heart. “You loves through here, not your head. Too cerebral, my friend. Hey, who's that there—how's she going, b'ys?”

Skeemo and Sup were coming through the door. “W'sup? W'sup?” asked Sup. “Hey, Kyle, man, w'sup?”

“How's she going, brother,” said Skeemo. “Heard you're going to university in the fall. Got your courses picked? Get at it,
buddy. All the good stuff be gone. Fucking studying ant's tracks across the Himalayas all last year. Here they comes, then.” Two dead-alike brothers were pushing into the bar, dressed in bush jackets and padded vests and scuffing mud off their open-throated Ski-Doo boots.