Sylvanus looked up and Kyle drew back with a start. The dark of his father’s eyes broiled with hatred. It was as though all the deaths and dying had been gathered in the one grave and laid at his feet and it was his weakening as a man that had caused them. He hove his shoulders forward and rose, starting towards the truck, his body jerking with anger. Addie’s face appeared in the window and Sylvanus faltered and then resumed his hard-hitting steps to the truck. Guilt, cursed Kyle. Guilt that he was failing them. Guilt rotting him like an old shack built on wet ground, leaving no shores strong enough to shelter himself or his family through those coming days.
Starting the truck, Kyle drove them down the heavily potholed Wharf Road, ignoring the whiff of whisky as his father took a swallow from the flask beneath the seat. The sea was flat calm, gulls like black pods resting on its sky-whitened waters. He drove past the gravel flat to his right, smoke still trickling from last night’s bonfire, Kate’s curtain drawn. Wharf Road yielded onto Bottom Hill Road a few hundred yards farther along and Kyle hung a sharp left onto the paved stretch, doubling back the way they’d just come except it was leading uphill from the valley and cradled by tall, knotted spruce trees.
As they crested Bottom Hill he looked at the same sunless sky vaulting over the mile-wide corridor of ocean, walled on both sides by wooded hills, its horizon fading to nothing forty or fifty miles out. Beneath him and spreading out from the foot of Bottom Hill were the felted rooftops and smokeless chimneys and sleeping doorways of Hampden. The community sloped down another hill to the shore and the quiet lapping of the sea. Quiet. Everything so quiet. As though no sin had yet been committed on this day.
A whimper from his father, a soft mewl. Kyle covered it with a cough and eased them down Bottom Hill and along the main road, passing a store to the right with its weekly specials in blue marker taped to the window. He passed the Anglican church and a sunken-roofed bungalow with unpainted add-ons where Bonnie Gillard now lived with her sister. He passed a poppy-red house, a sunny ochre one, and the violet two-storey—and took a longer look at its windows yellowed with breakfast light. Julia’s house. Julia. Chris’s girlfriend.
He passed a clump of newly vinyl-sided houses, the rage these days, and turned left, heading downhill. The flag hung limp from its pole near the post office and muddied water streamed like a brook down the guttered sides of the road.
A short, rotund man with wire-framed glasses and suspenders hiking his flannels up past his belly doddled along the roadside just as he’d been doing the past sixty years, watching the morning light breaking through shadows around him. Dobey Randall. He’d be here this evening, walking the opposite way, watching the same sun go down and the light fading back to shadow. The old-timer turned a gummy smile onto Kyle and Kyle tooted his horn and the road turned sharply to the right at the bottom of the hill where the government wharf extended into the sea.
They drove for a mile along the shoreline and slowed, passing the tidy settlement of the Rooms and the whiffs of smoked salmon floating from Stan Mugford’s smokehouse. The graveyard lay beyond the last doorstep. Kyle sped up Fox Point Hill, away from the headstones and the bouquets of plastic flowers on Chris’s grave, flattened sideways and faded by the snow-wet winds of winter.
Another two miles of shore road and they rounded a black cliff. Kyle slowed down coming into the Beaches—twelve houses sitting with their backs to the wooded hills behind them, their doorways opening onto the strip of road and rocky beach separating them from the shifting waters of the Atlantic. A knot of youngsters hovered in the middle of the road, taunting him till they saw he wasn’t going to break speed, and then broke apart to blasts of his horn.
“Ye’ll get your arses trimmed!” he roared, rolling down his window, and then rolling it back up to a chorus of laughs. The eldest of them pinged a couple of rocks off the tires and Kyle grinned. “That young Keats. He’ll be strung up yet.” He looked back at the youngsters shooting fake bullets at the truck. “Little bastards.” He looked at his father who had scarcely noticed. The road ended a few hundred feet past the last house and before them lay the gouged black earth, readied for building.
Switching off the motor, Kyle kicked down the gas pedal to stifle its dieselling. “Might as well get going, hey. See the mess they got made. What—just going to sit there?”
Sylvanus was slumped in his seat like a spineless effigy.
“Come on, b’y, let’s get out.”
“No courage.”
“C’mon, dad.” He touched his father’s shoulder gently. “C’mon, now.” He opened his door and got out. He walked to the edge of the site and glanced back, seeing his father slowly unfold himself from the truck. He waited and then they walked about the excavation, their boots squishing through mud. They both shook their heads. Looked like a tornado had pitched itself through a hardware store and emptied its wares onto the site before blowing off. An upturned wheelbarrow half mired in mud. Couple of hammers and boxes of nails soaked open. Picks, shovels, and an axe lay in a murky pool. Six or seven gallons of paint stood haphazardly beside a pile of two-by-twelves that were half-lodged on a mound of gravel being washed out by rills of rainwater.
“Well, sir,” said Sylvanus.
“Not a clue,” said Kyle.
“What a mess, what a mess.”
“And what’s they doing with the paint? Footings not laid and they’re buying paint?”
“Not a clue.”
Kyle stepped around fifteen or twenty bags of cement that were uncovered and wet from the rain. He kicked at a bag and it broke open, the powder too wet to spill.
“Ruined, all ruined.” He kicked at the other bags. “Every one of them.” He bent, picked up a hand-carved wooden gun out of the muck. He glimpsed a couple of red eight-shot ring caps half submerged in mud beneath the cement bags. “Them youngsters,” he said to his father. “Using the cement bags for blockades. How much stuff now, did they muck off with?”
Sylvanus stepped over muddied puddles and followed along the trench dug for the footings. He bent for a closer look.
“Sure, look at that. They only got them dug three feet down. No more than three feet, should be four. Show, get the tape and measure that.”
Kyle hunted for a yellow measuring tape from amongst a debris of tools and stood by his father, looking for a place where the footings weren’t flooded. Extending the tape across the width of the trench, he leaned over, reading the measure. “Fourteen by eighteen inches.”
“Well sir.”
“What’s it supposed to be?” asked Kyle.
“Sixteen by twenty-four. Turned down. They would’ve had it all turned down by the inspectors.” He looked skyward. The white was starting to darken. “Gonna rain. Bad time of year to be building.” He stood up, scratched his head through his cap, looking about.
“Here they comes then.”
The roar of a V-8 engine without a stick of pipe in her sounded a full minute before the four-door Dodge came into sight and halted by the truck. Two young fellows got out—the youngest stout and pretty-faced and fair, the other dark and skinny and already sunken into his chest cavity like his father, Jake.
“Uncle Syl. How’s she going?” asked the pretty one, Wade.
“How’s she goooin,” asked the other, Lyman, in his slow, deep drawl that tired Kyle on his most patient of days.
“She’s not gooin