“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?”
She didn’t speak further. Kyle laid down his fork. It was coming. She lifted her chin in that defiant manner of hers and he was struck once more by her fortitude. That whatever this new thing thickening her cloud of sorrow, hope was already ignited in her heart and offering itself as a shelter for him and his father.
“I have to go to Corner Brook tomorrow. See the doctor. I—There’s a little lump in my breast. They did some tests already.”
Sylvanus blanched. Kyle closed his eyes, cringing as his mother spoke the word, that dirty little word, that ugly little word, cancer. Breast cancer. He’d known three women with breast cancer and they were all dead. He was on his feet and heading for the door and outside before his mother could reach him. He bolted up the road and started running through the night made darker by the damp shroud of fog, his feet picking his path from memory. To his right he could make out the dark ridge of shoreline and hear the water sloshing around rocks like some ancient demon slithering in and out of sight beside him. He took the turnoff onto the gravel flat and kept running, closer to the alder bed and away from the orange dome of Kate’s bonfire down by the water. He heard the strains of her guitar, her voice trilling through the fog like a distant psalm guiding his feet through the dark. He came to the river and found the footbridge and crossed it and veered upriver over wet mounds of dead grass that slipped eel-like around his ankles. No longer did it feel as though someone else ran in his shoes. For three years now he’d been mapping this artery of grief. He kept winding his way upriver. When he could no longer hear Kate, when his ears filled with the river water rustling through the grass and slapping against the rocks, he lowered himself to his knees and opened his mouth and his voice rose from his belly and carried over the water like the cry of a loon.
TWO
He’d been sitting for some time. A bottle smashed against a rock to the other side of the river and he rose, legs cramped. Another bottle smashed, the yelps of boys sounding like young wolves tearing up the night. He walked, wiping at his eyes. The night, the fog, smothered him. Couldn’t see a thing, not a damn thing. He kept his step high so’s not to get snagged by the clumps of wet grass and alder roots. He inched back across the footbridge, cringing as more bottles shattered against rock and the young boys hooted. He’d like to grab them by the neck. Smell of smoke came to him and he veered left, away from the boys, his feet crunching through coarse rocks as he made his way towards the sound of the river spilling into the sea. The rocks became muddied, silt-covered, and soon he was padding silent as a muskrat on the