What They Wanted Read online

  IT WAS AN HOUR’S DRIVE to Corner Brook, a small city that had grown out of a paper mill. I recalled how much Mother loved it—the paved highway rolling out before her, curving around the sandy shores of Deer Lake; the cragged grey cliffs climbing out of the thick blackish waters of the Humber River, the snowy heights of the far distant mountains, purplish on a hazy day. “So beautiful,” she exclaimed to Gran once, upon return, “the houses so nicely painted, and the trees all in a row, and the grass perfectly green and trimmed, and, oh, what flowers!” Once, a taxi driver drove her through High Station where the rich people lived and she hardly spoke for a week, so filled was her mind by the grandeur of things.

  Father made the trip once. “Hurts me teeth,” he said when Mom tried persuading him back. “Driving on pavement hurts me teeth.”

  “Ahh, you poor fool,” she said, “your mind’s still anchored with your boat.”

  “And that’s where it’ll stay, clear of the stink of mill rot,” he returned.

  “Listen to him, just listen to him; forgets the fish guts he sniffed for thirty years,” said Mother, and huffed out of the room, leaving him telling Gran how he’d been sitting in his truck near the mill when the sea hove up a burp from the heavy sludge of bark rotting on its floor, the stench worse than farts from a horse’s arse.

  I smiled at the memory. “He’s gonna be fine,” I said now with sudden certitude. “He’s gonna be fine. But you—”Chris was shifting about worse than a crampy youngster in the passenger seat. “Why are you doing this—blaming yourself? How foolish is that? Well, then?”

  “Watch the road,” he growled. “Christ, for gawd’s sakes!” He jolted upright as a truck blasted past, leaving the car shaking in a gust of wind. “Jeezes, keep your eyes on the road. How’s Ben?”

  “Ohh, who knows about Ben.”

  “There she goes.”

  “There you goes! It’s complicated stuff having a heart attack, never the one thing causing it—was probably building for months.”

  “I said how’s Ben!”

  “And I said I never sees him.”

  “Never?”

  “No. Never. Few times.”

  “He’s still working the rigs?”

  “Yes.”

  “With Trapp?”

  “No doubt.”

  “He’s still drawing?”

  “Who knows. What about you?”

  He shrugged.

  “Well, are you drawing?”

  “Sure. Most times.”

  “Thought maybe that when I start my grad studies—year from now—you’d come stay with me for a while,” I offered.

  “What—you’re going back to school?”

  “’Course. Do my master’s. Perhaps a doctorate. Why stop till it’s done?”

  He shook his head. “Envy you that. Fixing your mind on something and keeping it there. Chore for me to read a comic—and I love comics.”

  I looked at him in disbelief. “Says he who crawls inside a pencil for hours and don’t blink. What’s that if not discipline? Christ almighty, how come you’re always ranting on about Ben’s drawing but never your own? You’re better than him. Yeah, you are,” I said to his snort. “Pours from you like life. Ben draws a boat, it’s just that—a boat. You draw a boat, and it’s every boat that ever was.”

  “Jeezes let’s not start that agin—”

  “You never allow for your talent—”

  “Here she goes.”

  “Thinks I’m talking through my hat, don’t you. Well, I’m not talking through my hat. Been to enough art showings these past five years to know something when I sees it, and you got something, brother, you really do. I think you’re a visionary, a true visionary. Privileged. And here you are groping and fumbling about with nets and chainsaws! Jeezes. Them days are passed when you gotta hide your paints and jig fish. You can do anything you want now, school’s in! Did you get those brochures I sent you?”

  “What brochures?”

  “Art school in Halifax.” I held my breath. I’d done far more than send him brochures. I’d actually filled out an application into the art program on his behalf and signed his name to it, submitted it to the art college along with a portfolio I’d made up with the drawings he’d given me through the years and an essay explaining why “I” wanted to pursue that course of study. “It’s where I’m doing my master’s. Gorgeous city—no more than a big town, really, and quite close to home, can hop the ferry in the morning and be home before Mother turns out the light. Did you—well, did you get them—the brochures?”

  He was gazing out his side window, scarcely listening.

  “Chris, did you get the damn brochures or not?”

  “No.” He glanced at me irritably.

  “Well, you should’ve, you should’ve had them by now. It’s a well-recognized program and I thought you’d find some of the material interesting. Nice old artsy building, cobblestones out front, great bar right alongside with live music and juicy burgers. Lotsa people our own age milling about, most of them from Newfoundland,” I added. “Always somebody hitching a ride back home for the weekend, or driving and wanting somebody along for company.”

  “Yeah, you’ll like it there,” he said vaguely.

  “I’m thinking about you, brother.”

  “Yeah, well, you just think about yourself, enough to think about yourself. See that little pine tree over there, next to the tall birches? Father got it tagged for this year’s Christmas tree. Don’t mention it, no cutting allowed. We’ll get it late some evening, when it’s dark.”

  “You’re ignoring me.”

  “Think you’ll be home for Christmas?”

  “Don’t want to listen to talk about university art programs. Afraid you might have to do something. Like make a plan, leave home someday.”

  “Will you just watch the gawd-damned road.”

  “I’m watching the gawd-damned road, and I’m telling you that’s half your gawd-damned problem right there, don’t want to leave home. How come? That’s what I can’t figure— how come you don’t wanna leave home, because you don’t, do you?”

  I looked over at him, trying to see what was behind his eyes, what was in his head, what he was thinking. It was always like that; any time I ever spoke to him about leaving he’d scoff it off, turn to something else, make jokes out of it. Surprisingly, he was holding himself back this time, his chest tensed and his mouth working as though he were struggling with some feeling he couldn’t put words to. Kinda reminded me of those times when we used to hide behind the house in fear of some unknown fate.

  But it was no youngster sitting beside me on this day. I could see thick cords jumping in his neck as he strained away from me. I could see the veins roping his wrists as he nervously flexed and re-flexed his hands into fists. He bit his lip as though to quell whatever thought he was struggling with and my fingers itched to touch him, to do away with whatever strain I was putting him under.

  “It’s not such a big deal, you know,” I blundered, “leaving a dead-end logging town built around a post office.”

  He snorted. “There goes her nose agin. Haughty, by cripes—”

  “I’m not haughty.”

  “Hell you’re not. Anything outside the outports is a step up for you. A bog.”

  “Oh, foolishness.”

  “Foolish, hell. You ranks everything over the outport. The whole island’s a outport to you, and now you’ve left that— rather waitress in some oil town—”

  “Grande Prairie, Alberta, and it’s a pretty city with bars that quadruple the pay offered by any bar in St. John’s or Corner Brook. That’s why I’m there, to make fast money.”

  “Sure you’re not chasing Ben?”

  I near drove us off the road.

  “Ohh, Christ, is that what you think? That I’m chasing Ben Bonehead Rice?”

  Catching his grin, I sucker-punched his leg. Glad to have a smile back on his face, I decided to keep the application into the art program for another time, the return
trip, maybe, after we visited with Father and made sure he was going to be all right.

  As though ensuring silence for the rest of the drive, he switched on the radio, cranking it loud. For the rest of the drive we sat mired within our own thoughts.

  INSIDE THE HOSPITAL PARKING LOT, Chris was the first out of the car, looking up at the sprawling, red-brick structure. I followed him across the lot, starting to feel apprehensive. The warming spring sun and heartening smell of fresh earth gave way to the emptied white light of long hospital corridors and the acrid odour of sickness and antiseptic. Inside the heavy doors of the intensive care unit, cowed by the silence of pending death, Chris faltered. I took his hand then and we crept like two frightened youngsters past the hushed, uniformed figures and their whitish faces hovering over blue-screened monitors that charted failing hearts in curtained-off beds. Through an opening in one of the curtains I saw Mother’s coat draped over a chair.

  Chris hung back, pulling on my hand. “Say nothing about my going sealing,” he said lowly.

  I shook my head and then held my breath as he lifted aside the drape, nudging me forward. I expected to see them both, but there was just Dad. I near cried. So big and dark in memory, his hair fanned by the wind, his black brows shading his eyes as he stood in his boat, he now lay still beneath a white sheet, his hair without sheen, his face with the pallor of an aged tombstone. His breathing, aided by rubbery oxygen tubes pronged and taped to his nostrils, sounded long, deep, and raspy.

  I bit into my fist, watching as Chris approached the bedside, his eyes fastened to Father’s hand, brown as bark against the white of the sheets and pierced with needles and tubing. Carefully he touched a finger to Dad’s and stared into the dulled, dark orbs of his eyes, their faint glimmer of life.

  “Looks better,” Chris said thickly.

  Father blinked in response.

  “Best not to talk.”

  Father nodded, staring a steady stream into Chris’s eyes, flooding them with the confusion of his weakness. Chris, as though his heart were too full to hold more, stood back, saying gruffly, “Brought someone to see you. Sylvie—your Dolly,” he added lamely. Pushing away from the bedside, he bolted outside the curtains.

  I gripped the bed railing so’s not to run myself. Father lifted his hand weakly. I tried to speak, but couldn’t. Taking his hand, I forced a smile at the needles. “A pin cushion,” I said with a shaky laugh, “one of Gran’s pin cushions.” I leaned over him and pressed my mouth against the warmth of his brow.

  “The boat,” he whispered.

  “The boat.” I forced a laugh. “Is that what you’re thinking about now, your boat? Chris got it tied to the wharf.”

  He nodded. “Next week. Home next week.”

  “No doubt. Be snowshoeing on the downs soon enough.”

  He tried to smile.

  “Seriously,” I whispered, my eyes filling with persuasion as he searched them out.

  Satisfied—else overcome with fatigue—his breathing deepened and he lapsed into sleep. Laying my palm against his cheek, I felt its roughness, almost tasting the salt from the days he straddled his boat in the stiff morning gales, hand-jigging codfish in the ways of old, face bared to the wind, legs anchored to the sea. How tall he’d stood those early mornings in Cooney Arm when he tossed me and sometimes Chris aboard with him. We’d squat in the stern, white-knuckled to the gunnels, as he rose against the sky, all big and black in his sou’wester and oilskins, doing his dance with the sea as he jigged: one hand up, one hand down, one hand up, one hand down, his hips swaying with the swell, his boat bucking with the lop. How strange his face looked now, all still and pale on that stark white pillow, his squinty eyes bereft of weather and so looking like death it was as if they knew what death was.

  And in a sense he did know what death was—or a form of death. From the moment he picked up his chainsaw and started his first summer in the woods he cursed over the sweltering heat away from the sea, and the flies, the gawddamn flies—blackflies, sandflies, mosquitoes—all swarming inside his nostrils, his ears, his eyes, and gawd-damn deer ticks gouging and breeding in his flesh. Many times I’d be hanging about the wharf when Father got home from the woods, and I’d listen to his cursing, and then Mother chiding him for his cursing, for his being wimpy over flies, for going straightaway out in boat with his nets when he’d already worked all day and hadn’t had supper yet, hadn’t washed, hadn’t fixed the latch on Gran’s door, hadn’t rested.

  “I gotta breathe,” he’d shoot over his shoulder, already pulling away from the wharf, “the heat, the heat, there’s no getting from the gawd-damn heat; can’t breathe, no wind, no air, no gawd-damn air.”

  “Give up the nets, give up the nets, Sylvanus, working yourself in the grave with them damn, bloody nets.”

  And on and on they would argue about his working the woods, his nets, and the handfuls of fish that were hardly worth his while. Till now. Till now, as usual, when Mother proved herself right.

  Chris reappeared from behind the curtain.

  “He’s sleeping,” I whispered.

  “Is he okay?”

  “I don’t know. You find Mom?”

  “I—no. I think I knows, though.”

  We fell silent, looking into the grey of our father’s face.

  Chris nudged me. “You want to go find her?”

  I nodded, but was unable to leave. “Hardly looks like him, do it?”

  “He looked worse yesterday.”

  “Imagine if he’d died.”

  He abruptly took my arm and led me back out through those heavy doors. I followed, sniffling quietly as he led us through a series of corridors. Mother was sitting in the front pew of a small chapel. She looked shrunken, her shoulders tiny like a girl’s. She was bent before a crucifix, her face the pallor of Father’s.

  Chris spoke her name. She rose, rushing towards him as she always did, as though he were a font from which she must drink. Unlike me, who she’d held aloof from birth. Small wonder. Three dead babies and me the fourth one born, small wonder she held me aloof. And then that “dark spell,” as Gran called it, the weeks and weeks of darkness that Mother succumbed to after my birth, so dark a spell that it bruised her skin in places and blocked her nipples from milking, I once heard her old friend Suze say.

  But I hadn’t fared bad. Gran brought me across the brook to her own house and fed me goat’s milk from a bottle, and such great comfort I was to that dear woman that when Mother started getting well, Gran pleaded to keep me. Which served them both, as Mother was soon pregnant again, and suffered morning sickness straight through to the last day of her pregnancy.

  Given that their houses were a stone’s throw apart, and that Gran and Mother were tighter than blood, Mother was as much a daily fixture in my life as Gran was. And I grew happy and warm, never knowing but that Mother was happy and warm too. Till I saw her coddling Chris that first time. The way she smiled into his eyes as he suckled her breast. Such a change, such an incredible change came upon her, a glow that touched her eyes, her skin, dissipating a form of darkness from her face that I hadn’t before noted.

  Naturally I can’t recall these things. But some part of me did. It watched now as Mother clung to Chris in the small chapel, caressing his cheek. It remembered how she used to smooch him with kisses when he was a baby, how she used to squat beside him on the shoreline, watching and smiling as he scooped up wriggly-tails from amongst the rocks, but then one day when I scooped up a worm and brought it home she brushed it from my hand, squished it on the stoop, and then scrubbed my hands, gently but firmly, with a bar of soap, chiding me about dirt.

  Mother put Chris aside, reaching for me. “You’ve seen him?” she asked, putting her arms around my neck. I nodded, and clung to that familiar scent of lavender, all warmed and fused into my mother’s skin. “You’ll not let him see that,” she said as I started to cry. She pulled back, the sharp blue of her eyes piercing through the tears in my own. “He thinks he’s getting better,
and that’s what we’ll let him think—he’s getting better …” She faltered, turning towards the altar.

  “Isn’t he, then—isn’t he getting better?” I choked.

  Mother looked at me, then at Chris who was paling visibly. “Yes, oh, my yes, he’s getting better, of course he’s getting better,” she cried, both hands reaching for Chris. “But—oh,” she said, her voice dropping with a sudden realization, “you don’t know, you never talked to Gran, or, or Kyle.’Course you didn’t, how could you,” she added with a silly laugh, “when they only just left—”

  Chris broke in. “Don’t know what? What is it?”

  “He’ll not work again. Your father will not work again.” She spoke with such conviction it was as though she herself were commanding his fate.

  “The doctors—?” I asked. “Is that what the doctors are saying?”

  “Yes. No. They don’t rightly know yet, but he’ll never be the same, they said he can never work in the woods again.”

  “There’s other things, he’ll work at other things,” I said, infusing my tone with hope.

  “Sure, other things,” said Mother. “What other things, Sylvie? There’s the woods and fishing on the trawlers. Your father won’t do that, he’ll never fish offshore on them trawlers.” She looked around emptily. “Might as well have killed him, he can’t work the woods. No, no, don’t take it like that,” she pleaded as Chris sank onto a chair, hanging his head. She sat beside him, her tiny, pale hands cupped around his like a clamshell. “He’s alive, thank god he’s alive. Be grateful for that. And we’ll keep him alive, keep him home, resting. There now,” she soothed, drawing Chris’s head to her shoulder, “there now.”

  I sat next to her, speaking in the same soothing tones as Chris leaned forward, hanging his head again. “He’s strong, Father is. Chris, he’ll get past this. He’ll find his strength again, and he’ll find other things to do.”

  “Sure. Sure,” Mother repeated, her tone becoming lifeless. “He’ll get past this. Live another twenty years if he don’t go dragging about chainsaws.” She rose, wrapping her arms around herself and crossing the room in short, quick steps. “How are we going to do that,” she demanded of the air around her, “how are we going to keep him from the woods? He gave up fishing, it’ll kill him to give up the woods, too. Damn old fishing— that’s what done it to him—working the woods all day long, then coming home to them damn old nets. And if he wasn’t dragging about nets and chainsaws he was traipsing through the bogs, dragging a gun. Never stopped, he never. Never stopped for a minute in the day—whatever he thought he was made of. Even the blessed Maker took his one day of rest. And dragging that old boat over that ice by himself. No wonder he’s near dead, dragging that boat across the ice by himself.”