Downhill Chance

Praise for
Downhill Chance

“
Downhill Chance
proves Morrissey’s talent goes well beyond crafting a good Newfoundland outport tale … These are huge themes, as old as the idea of story telling itself … I doubt if any writer has given readers a clearer sense of the voices of the people and the subjects of their conversation as they negotiate the tricky terrain of their everyday lives in Newfoundland during the middle years of the twentieth century. Morrissey’s work is a performance, an almost oral folk epic.”

—
The Globe and Mail

“A masterful, compelling story, which is magnificently created.”

—
The Telegram
(St. John’s)

“So emotionally taut and brilliantly written that you won’t have time to breathe until you leaf over the last page.”

—
The Hamilton Spectator

“The sort of gothic fiction made familiar by the Brontë sisters, a
Wuthering Heights
of the craggy coast of Newfoundland.”

—
The London Free Press

“A darn good story, told with wit and affection, by a superb storyteller … Morrissey’s voice, innocent, wise, funny and boisterous, and so expertly tuned to the music of the Newfoundland dialect, is simply irresistible.”

—
Books in Canada

“Remote communities of White Bay are vividly rendered … [A] solid, reassuring novel.”

—
The Herald
(Glasgow)

“The narrative moves like a house afire, and its racy energy keeps our attention riveted.”

—
Kirkus Reviews

“Superb … This is an often heartbreaking, ineffably sad story … An achingly beautiful novel, and Clair is an unforgettable heroine— courageous, passionate, determined to recover the unrecoverable, yet able to recognize her own wrongheadedness … Capable of bursts of lush, melodic prose … [Morrissey] never gets caught up in her own eloquence. She has a comic touch, too … Best of all, her sense of place is overpowering—not just the natural beauty of remote Newfoundland but also the almost suffocating intimacy of outport life. A major novel by a remarkable writer.”

—
Booklist

“
Downhill Chance
is a rich story from a distant place and time, enhanced by wonderfully engaging dialogue.”

—
The Evening News

“A dazzling oral folk epic.”

—
Cobourg Daily Star

“Morrissey’s prose, threaded with echoes of Shakespeare, Carl Jung, and Joseph Campbell, is a perfect fit for her almost mythical story of fractured families, wars, and homecoming.”

—
Quill & Quire

“With vivid imagery and a fantastic ear for dialect, Morrissey breathes life into the small harbor town.”

—
Publishers Weekly

PENGUIN CANADA

DOWNHILL CHANCE

DONNA MORRISSEY is the award-winning author of four novels,
Kit’s Law, Downhill Chance, Sylvanus Now
, and
What They Wanted
, all set in Newfoundland and all subsequently translated into several languages.
Kit’s Law
won the CBA Libris Award, the Winifred Holtby Prize, and the American Library Association’s Alex Award. Both
Downhill Chance
and
Sylvanus Now
won the Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Prize, and
Sylvanus Now
was the winner of the Atlantic Independent Booksellers Choice Award. Her screenplay,
Clothesline Patch
, won a Gemini Award. Morrissey grew up in The Beaches, a small fishing outport in Newfoundland, and now lives in Halifax.

ALSO BY DONNA MORRISSEY

Kit’s Law

Sylvanus Now

What They Wanted

DONNA
MORRISSEY

Downhill Chance

PENGUIN CANADA

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

(a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0745, Auckland, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Published in Penguin Canada paperback by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2002 Published in this edition, 2009

1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10 (WEB)

Copyright © Donna Morrissey, 2002

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Manufactured in Canada.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Morrissey, Donna, 1956-

Downhill chance / Donna Morrissey.

ISBN 978-0-14-317033-4

I. Title.

PS8576.O74164D68 2009    C813’.54    C2009-903798-X

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at
www.penguin.ca

Special and corporate bulk purchase rates available; please see
www.penguin.ca/corporatesales
or call 1-800-810-3104, ext. 477 or 474

To my son, David Ford Morrissey,

and my daughter, Bridgette Adele Morrissey

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

F
OR THEIR LOVE AND SUPPORT
during the writing of this novel, I wish to thank my siblings, Wanda, Glenn, Tommy and Karen, my dad and Aunt Shirley Dyke for her love of a sister.

Thank you to the Canada Council for the Arts and the Nova Scotia Arts Council for their financial support.

And for their critiques, research and time, I wish to thank my special friends Genevieve Lehr, Catherine Reader and Ismet Ugursal, my agent, Beverley Slopen, editors Cynthia Good and Susan Canavan, and my meticulous line editor, Mary Adachi.

Downhill Chance

PROLOGUE

I
T WAS A DIRTY OLD NIGHT
that washed Gid O’Mara up on the shores of Rocky Head. Sheila’s Brush, the old-timers called it, that late-spring storm that comes with the fury of February winds, transfiguring the desolate rock-island of Newfoundland into a great whale soaring out of the Atlantic, shaking and writhing as if to rid itself of the shacks, wharves and boats clinging to its granite shores like barnacles. Yawning with the leisure of an old tomcat, twelveyear-old Luke scrooped open the bedroom window, letting in a blast of sea-dampened wind that near put out the burning candle stub that flickered yellow over his older brother, Joey, lying beneath the blankets in their double bed.

“The old woman’s going to skin you,” Joey warned, the accordion he’d been lazily drawing a tune out of flattening back against his chest as he squirmed deeper beneath the blanket, pulling his brown worsted cap farther down over his ears. But Luke was already skimming his belly across the sill and dropping to the ground below. A swipe of rain cut across his face as he scurried to the lee of the house to break the wind, ducking below the lamplight spilling out through the window where his father, his cap rolled high above aging eyes, and his mother, a crown of greying braids besetting a brow forever etched with worry, sat watching the storm. A wave broke over the bit of bank that separated the string of six houses from the sea-pounded beach, and he gave a low whistle as seething white froth swooshed up around his feet, then slid back into the rioting black water.

Always he wondered what it would be like to live inland, away from the wet, wind and fog heaved at them by the sea, and for sure he would travel inland someday, as soon as he was old enough to get clear of his mother. But nights like this, when the storms were at their fullest, he wished for nothing. Hunching his head into his shoulders and jamming his hands inside his pockets, he crouched down besides a woodpile stacked against the house, and inched underneath the canopy made by the water-sogged canvas that covered it. Sea shelters, he called them, those dry hollows sometimes found in the tuck of an overhanging bank, or beneath the eave of a chicken coop, or behind the glass prism of frozen cliff water. He loved it, he did, crouching in weather, his mind lulled by the wind gusting past him, and the sea swarming up over the shore. And the gulls, sifting white through the dark, cried differently at night: tremulous, haunting cries that only the solitary deserved to hear.

Oftentimes, when curled in the bow of a beached boat or crouched within the warmth of a bough-whiffen—those little dome-shaped shelters he often made by weaving boughs into each other—and with the rain plinking all around him but never a drop dampening his skin, he slept. And as he crouched now, and a couple of fair-haired youngsters, their curls made limp by the drizzle, appeared out of the dark and stood in the spot of light thrown out through the window by his mother’s lamp, he thought surely he must have fallen off and that the divinity presenting itself before him was but a sweet-scented dream. Then another boy, about the same age, appeared in the light. Luke blinked, then blinked again as a woman with a blanket wrapped shawl-like around her shoulders and a babe curled in her arms and a man with dark hair and a beard flowing down his chest appeared too out of the dark—all huddling into the spot of lamplight as if it might reprieve them from the storm.

In a land where the only visitors were fogbound fishers or the scattered husband or wife brought ashore to keep the bloodlines clean, this apparition growing in numbers before Luke became more and more extraordinary, and with a frightened yelp he tore to his feet, racing around the side of the house, hollering that Christ had returned, bringing with him the lost children of Abraham, and they was right outside, standing in the light of his mother’s lamp. In less time than it took to spit, every man, woman and youngster from the six houses that made up Rocky Head were crowding out their doors and piling warily onto the bank. Luke was in the lead, and his mother, Prude, her hands clasped anxiously before her ample bosom, brought up the rear. They were as Luke left them; the children like shivering elfs, standing quietly in a patch of light besides their mother and father, their yellow curls tangled by the wind, a dull curiosity in their pale blue eyes and a stooped indifference around their scarcely clad shoulders. And when the smallest of them, no more than a toddler, turned to his mother and asked in a lilting voice and with the most sweetest of sounds, “Is this where we’s going to live?” a gasp went through the outporters, and all eyes swung to Luke as they believed surely he must be right, and this bedraggled bunch were celestial creatures sent straight from the Divine Mother Spirit to land upon their God-forsaken shores—for such was the beauty in the melodic brogue of the child’s Irish tongue, a brogue never before heard by anybody from Rocky Head. And when the father replied in the same sweetened tongue that it was up to the good people before him, because his boat had been lost to the sea, and everything they owned with it, the outporters stirred from their half-frozen states. Resisting their wariness of strangers, they reverently approached their God-given gifts, and divvying them up, half-carried, half-walked them straightaway into their homes and into their hearts.