The Fortunate Brother Read online

  His father’s dark shape sifted through the thinning fog. Kyle sat up and started the motor, stomping down on the gas pedal to quiet its revving. Sylvanus kicked the muck of his boots against the truck tire and near fell over.

  “Cripes, Mother’s going to shoot you,” said Kyle as his father climbed aboard. “You all right?”

  Sylvanus darted a crooked finger towards the windshield. “Drive.”

  “Smell the booze a mile away.”

  “That’s it now.”

  “That’s it now. Right.” Kyle eased the truck over a rough track of tire-flattened beach rocks and turned right from where the river fanned out over the beach before flowing into its shallow mud flat at the mouth of the bay. He drove them across a gravel flat that served as a soccer field during the dustier days of summer. A nice clapboard cabin stood on the inner side of the flat, its back pushing against the encroaching alder bed. Kate’s place. Her door was closed, white smoke clouding from her chimney. Wood must be green. Perhaps he should check whether she had enough wood splits to keep her fire hot.

  At the end of the gravel flat he turned left onto Wharf Road, a rutted thoroughfare leading between the rocky edge of the sea and the steep hillside to its right. A few hundred yards down and the road T-boned onto a long sagging wharf. To the right was their one-storey house with its front step resting on the wharf and heavily treed hills rising straight up behind it. He parked in front of the weathered woodshed and jarred his father awake with a punch to the shoulder.

  “Mother’s going to kill you. Get in the shed till you sobers up.” He got out of the truck and Sylvanus kept sitting there. “Go on, get out. Get in the shed. I’ll tell her you’re fixing your rod.”

  “Come with me.”

  “Fucking go by yourself.” Jaysus!

  He went into the porch and hung up his coat and kicked off his boots, his damp wool socks smelling like overcooked mutton. The inside door was ajar and he stepped in through to the front room. She wasn’t moving around the kitchen fixing supper as she usually was at this time, but sitting quiet in Gran’s rocker. She was leaning towards the woodstove, her head bowed before its hot orange flames licking at the glass door. Thinking about Gran, he figured, and stepped softly towards her. He often sat there himself, thinking about Gran who’d drifted from them as quiet as a puff of smoke up the chimney a year following Chris’s passing. It was nice, after the horror of Chris’s stark white face, to see Gran’s all sweet and peaceful on a lacy pillow.

  “How’s she going, Mom.”

  Addie startled onto her feet like a snuck-upon lynx and scampered into the kitchen.

  “Where’s your father?” she asked, hauling down the plates for supper.

  “The shed. Fixing his rod. What’s wrong?”

  “Supper’s soon ready.” She took down the cups, chinking them in their saucers, her back to him.

  “Mom?”

  She stopped and looked at him and his heart jolted. Her eyes, always frightfully blue, were darkened and wide with—with what?

  She raised a hand to touch him and he stepped back, then bolted to the washroom. He skimmed off his clothes and stepped into the shower, turning on the faucet and holding up his face to a spray of hot water. The last time he’d seen her face shrouded with such sorrow was when she stepped off the plane from helping Sylvie bring Chris home. From straight across the tarmac as he stood inside the airport watching her through the thick panes of glass he had seen her sorrow. Seen it in the way she kept her chin erect. In the way her eyes had determinedly sought his through the crowd gathering around and watching alongside of him. And he’d been surprised by such sorrow, for he’d expected to see in her eyes the keener suffering of grief instead. Three babies buried from the womb: she knew grief. Knew its dark and twisted path all fraught with madness and hate and fear and its narrowed arteries choking with self-blame. And perhaps she hadn’t the strength to walk through it again. Or, as he’d seen when she reached back through the doorway of the plane that day and helped Sylvie’s shocked-bent body through the narrow cylinder, perhaps her knowing disallowed another indulgent walk. Perhaps she’d learned how hope eventually creeps through darkness, making inroads through to an easier tomorrow. And that was her task then, to bear her grief with a hope that might shelter him and Sylvie through the coming days. And she had. Cradled and carried them as much as they would allow her. Oftentimes this past year, despite Sylvanus’s drinking, hope continued to grow in her eyes and he’d been turning to it more and more, hoping to offset the grey clouding his.

  Water sluiced down his back, scrubbing the day’s dirt off his skin. It caressed the smooth humps of his buttocks and streamed down the backs of his legs and plashed around his feet before suckling itself down the drain. He kept his face to the jettisoning spray of the nozzle and felt its heat flush open his pores and he flattened his hands against the shower stall as though keeping his insides from being flushed out and sucked down the drain along with the water. He had bolted from her that day at the airport, too. Bolted out onto the highway and thumbed a ride with a trucker who left him sitting in silence, staring out the side window. At Hampden Junction he climbed out of the truck with a grateful nod and started running the ten miles home, jumping into the ditch and cowering whenever he heard a car coming because he didn’t want anyone seeing him, didn’t want to talk, didn’t know what to say or do since that one ring of the phone had altered his being and it felt like somebody else was running in his shoes. When he got home, the house was swarming with aunts and uncles and cousins and friends who’d been coming and going since the news swept through the outport like a squall of wind. Young Chris was killed. Killed on the oil rigs in Alberta. An accident, a bad accident.

  Cut through him, too. Had loosened his bowels and sunk a hole in his stomach that all else sank into. He would’ve liked to cry. But the good folk kept shouldering him, kept finding him as he tried to hide. Kept bringing him back amongst them, rubbing his back and laughing and nudging him to laugh when they did. He did. Shame creeping up his face once, when he laughed too hard and imagined his mother and father hearing him from their torn pillows. And perhaps dear old Gran had heard him too as she lay in her room with her own host of women keeping vigil and wiping her teary eyes with tissues pulled from their too full bosoms.

  He wished they could have soothed him. He wished they could have filled that hole cratering his stomach and helped him straighten his legs from their cramped fetus curl and make him feel whole again. He had gnawed his nails and held back his cries till his throat ached and his fingers bled and Chris was buried and they’d all left and then he cried. He cried all the time. Crawled behind the woodpile and cried. Crawled beneath Chris’s old workshirt in the woodshed and cried. Cried walking home from the bar in Hampden and from the beach fires at night, leaning into the space where Chris had always walked beside him, grunting like a bear sometimes to scare him.

  His mother kept looking to him, willing him to share his grief with her, to let her share hers with him, but he couldn’t. Frightened that the weight of her pain would fuse with his own, toppling him. He couldn’t bear being with Sylvie, either. Couldn’t bear it. Afraid of the shame or guilt or grief that was robbing her eyes of light. Afraid she might talk, might tell him what really happened that day on the rigs and what she had or hadn’t done that might’ve prevented it, and he wanted nothing of it. It was an accident. An accident—cold, clean words that evoked no image. They evoked no thoughts, no questions that might send him raging towards her or someone else with the finger of blame and hate and condemnation. Please God. Tell me no more.

  She’d tried to tell him one drunken night outside the bar. Tried holding on to him, her wet face pressed against his, and he’d pushed her away and ran and was still running. Running from everything.

  He shut off the faucet and took as long as he could to dry himself and put on clean clothes. He wanted to slink into his room and bar the door, but she’d heard him.

  “Go call your fat
her, Kyle.” She was hovering over the table, holding a cast-iron frying pan, her wrist bending beneath its weight as she scooped fried potatoes onto their plates alongside pork chops and onions. He opened the door and roared out to his father and took his seat back at the table. She lay the frying pan back on the stove and came up behind him, scruffing the back of his head with her fingers, the cool tips of her nails grazing his scalp.

  Jaysus! He ducked away. “Still groping for head lice,” he said, feeling sheepish as he always did when she showed him affection.

  She went back to the sink and he listened to her kitchen sounds. It was his favourite thing when Chris had first left for Alberta, sitting at the table and munching toast and reading a comic and half listening as she swept and tidied, passing along bits of gossip. It was always Chris she’d talked to before. It was Chris his father had talked to. And then, with Chris flying off with Sylvie, they both started sitting with him and chatting him up and cripes it was nice and he was often feeling like the sun between a pair of sundogs.

  Then the call. The chatting stopped. And he became one of those things she helped tidy before putting away.

  She came back to the table and sat light as a pigeon, her dark hair pinned back, face small like a girl’s. Pale. She looked at him and smiled reassuringly and his fear deepened.

  “What did you say your father was doing?”

  “Fixing his rod.”

  “Get any trout?”

  “Water’s too high.”

  “All that rain. Sure, you knew that before you left.”

  “He likes going.”

  “Wish he was still the warden. Only thing he liked more than fishing cod was guarding that river.” Her hands were steadied as she sugared her tea and poured in a drop of milk.

  “Might get the salmon back yet,” he said. “Open the river agin. Get his job back.”

  “I hope he finds something soon. Keep his mind occupied.” She lapsed into silence and his stomach rolled. “Eat your supper,” she said.

  He picked up his fork.

  “Did you hear about Clar Gillard?” she asked. “Tied Bonnie to a chair at the fish plant and sprayed her with oven cleaner.”

  “What!”

  “That’s what he did, then. The cook hove a pan of cold water over her soon as he started, but she still got burns on her skin.”

  “Didn’t she leave him months ago?”

  “Still treats her like he owns her. Barbarous devil. I’m after telling her a couple of times now to phone the police on him. I phoned her agin awhile ago. Told her if she didn’t, I was going to.”

  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?”