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 father, 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