What They Wanted Read online

  Praise for What They Wanted

  “Morrissey stands out for her descriptive powers, her wonderful turns of phrase and the inner complexities of her characters … she writes of the Newfoundland landscape with the lyricism of a poet … Sometimes a reviewer wants to tell readers everything about a book, about all the layers of complexity, all the beauties and grace, all the revelations, but I’ll restrain my enthusiasm in this case and conclude by saying: Read this book.”

  —Lewis DeSoto, The Globe and Mail

  “A compassionate, insightful and gripping look at a family dragged through changing times … grief is so movingly presented that readers will feel it as their own.”

  —Winnipeg Free Press

  “As the plot ratchets up, a harrowing midway ride that has us strapped in our seats, Morrissey reveals the beauty and the terror of two economic realities, worlds apart from us and from each other.”

  —Toronto Star

  “Morrissey’s sentences always surprise and, like salted food, keep you wanting more … At once a sparkling gift from Newfoundland.”

  —Alberta Views

  “Told with [Morrissey’s] familiar firecracker prose and gift for drenching her readers in the sights, sounds, and textures of her settings.”

  —Quill & Quire

  “What They Wanted is Morrissey’s wisest, strongest, and most assured novel to date and it is classic Morrissey. She creates words and images that are dazzling in their originality. The novel pounds with the sound of the sea and the incessant noise of the machines and jimmies that suck the oil out of the depths of Alberta. The last third of the novel is transcendent.”

  —The Chronicle Herald (Halifax)

  “This novel reinforces Donna Morrissey’s reputation as a gifted writer and storyteller. It is rich with descriptive metaphors and dialogue and it is as heartwarming as it is heartbreaking.”

  —Atlantic Books Today

  “Morrissey is also an unapologetically emotional writer, and she succeeds at conveying the moods of men and women caught in a heartbreaking bind between what they want and what they need … Like [Thomas] Hardy, Morrissey writes with an intimate knowledge of the punishing rawness of her setting as well as her characters’ dreams and disappointments.”

  —The Gazette (Montreal)

  “[Morrissey] brings a passionate intelligence to the Canadian literary scene.”

  —The Vancouver Sun

  “What They Wanted is a moving portrayal of a family and a way of life in crisis. Its poignancy in both story and expression will be remembered long after the last page is turned.”

  —Edmonton Journal

  “Morrissey’s depiction of Sylvie’s agony when tragedy descends is the most moving description of shocked grief I have ever encountered. Equally wrenching is Adelaide’s act of confession, by which she delivers her daughter from that dark night. I leave this novel caring about these characters as if they had entered my own life, and hoping—as the last pages hint—to meet them again. Morrissey has an authentic gift not only for creating characters who live off the page, but also for bringing alive the sweep of time and fortune that is bigger than any of us. These forces are not only history and material circumstance, but also the human bonds that, in a tangled and imperfect way, shape our spiritual destiny.”

  —Literary Review of Canada

  “The action on the rig is brutal, complex, highly informed, and utterly compelling and it resolves itself in a finely written piece of industrial nightmare and something of a family reconciliation … A heartfelt picture of one family’s loss and the few gains such sacrifices attain.”

  —The StarPhoenix (Saskatoon)

  “With rich lyrical language and her distinct voice, Donna Morrissey draws us once again into the beauty, pain, loves, and wrenching losses of her characters. What They Wanted is both an extended poem and a gripping tale of a brother and a sister and their journey from their beloved Newfoundland shores into the chaotic and threatening oil fields of Alberta. The world to which we are given entry here was entirely unfamiliar to me before I read Donna Morrissey’s fiction; now it is a part of me.”

  —Edeet Ravel, author of

  Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth

  Praise for Donna Morrissey

  “Donna Morrissey is terrific, an absolute original.”

  —David Adams Richards, author of The Lost Highway and The Friends of Meager Fortune

  “There’s a sense in Morrissey’s writing that William Faulkner has met Annie Proulx … If her first novel [Kit’s Law] is anything to go by, Morrissey is almost certain to set new boundaries in fiction in Canada.”

  —Atlantic Books Today

  “Morrissey’s voice, innocent, wise, funny and boisterous, and so expertly tuned to the music of the Newfoundland dialect, is simply irresistible.”

  —Books in Canada

  “Donna Morrissey is a wonderfully gifted writer. The setting of her books is Newfoundland, but their appeal is universal. She unashamedly cares for her characters and sees them as real people with real lives worth caring and reading about. To read one of her books is to wind up laughing or crying or somehow doing both at once.”

  —Wayne Johnston, author of The Custodian of Paradise

  “A Newfoundland Thomas Hardy.”

  —The Globe and Mail

  “Dazzlingly authentic. Both physical and emotional landscapes are charted with exquisite care.”

  —Alistair MacLeod, author of No Great Mischief

  “Morrissey knows of what she writes.”

  —Toronto Star

  “Comparisons to Annie Proulx are inevitable, but Kit’s Law exists in a valley of its own saying, and in the directness of its tone, establishes its own authority.”

  —Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler’s List

  “Perhaps Morrissey’s greatest asset as a writer is that ring of truth. From the verisimilitude with which she depicts life in the outports to the note-perfect dialogue to the rich and colloquial narrative voice, Morrissey rarely falters.”

  —Quill & Quire

  PENGUIN CANADA

  WHAT THEY WANTED

  DONNA MORRISSEY is the award-winning author of four novels, Kit’s Law, Downhill Chance, Sylvanus Now, and What They Wanted, all set in Newfoundland and all subsequently translated into several languages. Kit’s Law won the CBA Libris Award, the Winifred Holtby Prize, and the American Library Association’s Alex Award. Both Downhill Chance and Sylvanus Now won the Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Prize, and Sylvanus Now was the winner of the Atlantic Independent Booksellers Choice Award. Her screenplay, Clothesline Patch, won a Gemini Award. Morrissey grew up in The Beaches, a small fishing outport in Newfoundland, and now lives in Halifax.

  ALSO BY DONNA MORRISSEY

  Kit’s Law

  Downhill Chance

  Sylvanus Now

  DONNA

  MORRISSEY

  What They Wanted

  PENGUIN CANADA

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada),

  a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2008

  Published in this edition, 2009

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)

  Copyright © Donna Morrissey, 2008

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Publisher’s note:This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Manufactured in Canada.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Morrissey, Donna, 1956-

  What they wanted / Donna Morrissey.

  ISBN 978-0-14-301427-0

  I. Title.

  PS8576.O74164W43 2009 C813’. 54 C2009-903398-4

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at www.penguin.ca

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  www.penguin.ca/corporatesales or call 1-800-810-3104, ext. 477 or 474

  For our beloved brother, Ford

  THE HOPE OF HEAVEN

  DEVASTATES EARTH

  AND YET

  LIKE CATS

  WE CARRY WITHIN US

  KNOWLEDGE

  OF THE WAY HOME.

  David Weale

  PROLOGUE

  IREMEMBERE CEAR AS YESTERDAY those last days in Cooney Arm, the sea dying around us and taking Father’s spirit with it. And my, but he had fought. Long after his brothers and the others left he’d stayed, netting cod, netting salmon, spearing flatfish, hauling crab-pots, trapping eels and rabbits, hunting seals and turrs and bull birds, and landing capelin and squid and all else the sea hove at him.

  Then the ocean gave no more.

  For months we all watched him—me, Mother, Chris, Kyle, Gran. We watched as he sat at the table looking out to sea, his head turned from Mother’s hands as she fussed with his tea and biscuits and scolded him about distressing his poor old mother, Gran, who was forever standing on her stoop watching over him as he rotted within himself, along with his stage and his flakes and his boat. But it wasn’t just Gran who Mother was worrying about. It was always Mother’s job to worry the most, and for months she’d been lamenting Father’s fate, lamenting her own need of wanting him out of this darkness, this terrible, terrible darkness he was sinking into, wanting him back in his boat with the sun colouring his face and the wind brimming his eyes and that awful, awful smell of sickness washed off him. But the fish were gone, sucked into the bowels of a thousand foreign factory ships, leaving Father, and a few other struggling inshore fishermen, sitting weighted at their kitchen tables, staring out the window at their languishing boats.

  Finally the morning came when Mother threw down her dishcloth, clasped his chin in her hand and lifted it, the stark blue of her eyes staring into the pits of his, and spoke.

  “You done your best and now it’s time to go. It’s for the children now, not us. We’ve beggared enough from the land, and we can’t pawn bones.” Leaving him staring after her, she marched across the footbridge spanning the brook, stopped to pluck a handful of daisies from the meadow, and went straightaway to her three little dears sleeping in the graveyard. After spreading the daisies on top of their beds she sat for a moment, brushing away bits of broken seashells dropped by the gulls and tracing a finger across the names scrolled across the centre of each of their crosses. I had trailed behind her, watched her lips move in silent prayer. She left the graves after a short while and went to Gran, who was standing on her stoop, worrying. Putting her arms around Gran’s bony, shrunken shoulders, Mother spoke softly, pressed her cheek against the old woman’s, and then started back towards her house.

  She didn’t seem to notice me trailing behind her. Most times she hated my trailing behind, and would chase me off. She didn’t seem to notice anything now as she walked briskly towards the house, her step filled with purpose. Once inside, and without a glance at any of us watching, she stood on her rocker and stripped the curtains off her beloved window overlooking the cliffs and the sea pounding through the neck. She faltered then, as though she’d bared herself in public, and held the curtains to her breasts, tears running down the round of her cheek.

  I remember Chris pressing against me, his body trembling. I remember trembling too at this sight of Mother, as well as Father, faltering, for in that moment I saw how that which contained me could be broken.

  The following three days were the most unsettling I’d ever gone through. Taking care of Kyle, who was just a toddler, I watched as Mother packed—first her own house, and then Gran’s. On the fourth day, when all was battened and bundled, Father came in from his woodshed with a chainsaw.

  I’d never felt so frightened as in that moment when he pulled the rip cord and the thing screamed to life there in the small confines of the kitchen. Instantly he shut it off, seeing the fear in my eyes.

  “It has to be halved,” he explained. “We’re leaving, see, and we’re taking our house with us. The house has to be sawed in half so’s it’ll float through the channel of the neck. See? The neck’s too narrow to float a house through. That’s all. We’ll put her back together fast as anything. Go on outside now, take your brothers outside.”

  We all fell back, choking the doorway, as he hauled on the cord again and started the chainsaw roaring. With a fire burning in his eyes he squinted through the blue gas filling the room, gunned the trigger, and stuck the blade against the outside of his bedroom wall, cringing as it ripped through plaster and splintering wood.

  Chris started crying. Mother picked up Kyle and herded us outside. From across the footbridge and through the leaky windows inside Gran’s house we sat through the day, watching as he sawed. Periodically he’d shut off the saw and come outside, dragging eight-foot logs that he’d cut for firewood back inside the house.

  “He’s shoring up the roof,” Mother told us, “shoring up the roof so’s the house won’t fold in on itself.”

  Well into the evening Father worked. I scarcely moved from the window, watching the flickering white light of the lantern following him through the house. Come morning the house was perfectly halved and he’d gone in boat to Ragged Rock, where Mother was from. Mid-noon he was back with two thirty-foot skiffs, a dozen men, and two dozen steel drums to use as floaters. For two more days we watched as the men jacked up each half of the house, hooked a block and tackle to a dead man, and launched each section of the halved house over a series of wet logs laid out side by side and down to the water. Once both halves were standing on the beach the men roped them each to a ring of oil drums, then to the motor boats, and started floating them across the short distance of the arm, through the narrow channel of the neck, and out into the open waters of the bay.

  The moment the two halves of the house hit the water I raced back to Gran’s house, for, due to an illness of Mother’s, it was Gran who mostly raised me, and her house I lived in till the day we moved from Cooney Arm. I stood sicke
ned inside the doorway, looking wildly around the kitchen, at the warm old couch by the stove, my fingerprints smeared onto every conceivable surface looking back at me. Gran crept to my side and I held on to her hand, sickened further by Gran’s face looking more greyish and grained than the weather-beaten door we were leaning against. We wouldn’t be needing any of Gran’s things now, our things. We’d be living with Mother, in Mother’s house. I broke down crying. Never had the old couch and creaky table felt so dear. Never had Mother looked so tall and far removed from me as she stood on the shore helping Chris and Kyle into the boat.

  “Be sure it holds tight,” cried Gran as Father closed her front door, latching it securely against the wind. Father cradled Gran’s shoulders, for he knew that her joy in her house matched the joy he felt in his own, that they had both built and moulded their homes around themselves, each nail hammered and puttied with pride.

  “You’ll be back. Soon as the ground thaws, you’ll be back for your gardening,” he promised as he walked her to the boat.

  “But they’ll have burnt it,” cried Gran, “like they done the houses in Little Trite, the government will burn it.”

  “Nay, we’re no longer sure about that. Might’ve been the Trapps that burned their own houses. Hard to tell what’s truth these days. Besides that, we took no money. We’re no part of their gawd-damned resettlement bullshit. This will always be ours to come back to. Hey, Doll?” he said to me, and capped his big hand around the crown of my head in a comforting gesture. “You sit with Gran now, we’re gonna have a fine time of it tonight putting our house back together.” He smiled, rubbing my head and knotting my hair, then lifted me into the boat where Mother and Chris and Kyle were already waiting. Lastly he lifted in Gran, and leaning his shoulder to the bow, shoved off the boat and leapt aboard himself.

  Gran collapsed beside me on the thwart as we bobbed offshore, her eyes mired onto her house, its windows shuttered with dirty, broken pickets from her yard—excepting the window by her rocker in the kitchen. That window remained unshuttered, the curtain pulled aside as though she were still sitting there, in her rocker, looking out. She leaned against me, whimpering, “Least he can still sit and watch when he comes agin,” and dabbed her eyes with a crumpled bit of cotton as she wept for her man whose soul was still restless in the sea that took him near on fifty years before, and who sometimes came ashore when winter storms riled the ocean, stirring him from his watery grave. Silent, a waft of air, he’d drift through the door and sit in her rocker, creaking his way through the night, leaving naught but a few drops of water on her floor come morning to mark his coming and goings.