Downhill Chance (19 page)

He began spending more and more time in his room. Napping, as Sare put it. And perhaps he was, thought Clair, for he seldom slept at night any more. Always, whenever she awakened, and it was frequent, she heard his low, aching voice and her mother’s nurturing softness as they both talked their way through the hours, staving off the night screams, for he didn’t seem to be bothered by them during the day, and his sleep was much easier. And keeping true to her word, Sare kept careful vigilance at the door, allowing no one in but her girls, and to them she’d stand with her finger to her lips, becoming more and more frantic in her need to silence their footsteps.

She seldom rested, scurrying around the house on tiptoe as she did the dusting and sweeping, and speaking to her girls in low, urgent whispers, forever bidding them to do the same till they were both hushing and shushing the other. Meantime, Sare’s world became smaller, perhaps even more tortured than Job’s. Seldom had she stepped outside before, except to pin the clothes on the line and do a little gardening. Now, she had Clair hang out the clothes so’s to avoid them that leaned over the fence to have a chat, and too, she closed her curtains, begging Job to do the same with the window he sat so silently besides, hoping to stave off the curiosity of those who strolled by half a dozen times a day, hoping to be the one singled out to break his silence about the war and achieve the heroic role of becoming poor Job’s saviour. And as before Job’s return, her headaches became more frequent, for so intent was she on silence that the sighing of the walls and creaking of the beams oftentimes deepened her headaches, sometimes keeping her slouched on the divan for hours, with a pillow stifling her moans, and a bucket to catch her retchings.

In time, as Job refused to recognize any of them waving at him through the window, and Sare continuously disallowed any of them to come inside and sit at their table any more, the neighbours’ compassion dwindled. What show had he now of courage, they asked of each other, when fear from a far-gone feat still seeped from his body like the elusive blue gas of the will-o’-the-wisp? And believing he had truly gone mental, they became impatient with Sare’s insistence that he was just tired and disgruntled when she pretended not to hear them knocking on her door, and so considered it their moral duty to ensure Job was not a threat to his family or the outport. Thus, the hounding of Clair and Missy—who they likened to two anaemic calves gone white in the face and spindly in the legs from being holed up in a stall all day with two sickly parents.

“Sure, how’s your poor father today, my dear?” the fishers, the women and mole-faced store clerks would ask as they put their jiggers, laundry baskets and store books to one side, and leaned over their nets, clotheslines and counters, calling after Clair as she went along her way, and “My, it must’ve been some awful thing that happened to him in the war to make him scream and go on like that—do he talk to your mother— you know, at night. He was such a good father before he got sick, and now, my, my, he must be awfully low-minded—”

As she had before her father came home from the war, Clair took to staying at home. Drifting up to her room, she’d sometimes lean against her windowpane, staring out at the open doorways of her neighbours’ houses, hearing their easy laughter and watching the youngsters and adults alike running in and out, and Phoebe and Joanie and Georgie and the others sneaking off down the shore or through darkened paths up over the hills. And as was before her father’s homecoming, she felt caught, trapped within a sphere of light that illuminated only the darkness funnelling it. And the dark grew as a film over her eyes, swiping the colour from the world outside her window and tinting her thoughts with a vindictiveness she couldn’t trace, for what had her neighbours to do with her father’s malaise, or her mother’s need to protect?

Yet, one thought kept pervading all others; for all their talk of being fire minders, they had been quick to abandon the hearth when the fire inside had cooled to ashes.

It appeared of small consequence to Missy.

“Mommy, I’m going to Grandmother’s,” she’d say quietly most afternoons, within minutes after arriving home from school.

“You’re not being any trouble, are you?” Sare would ask, and Missy, with scarcely a reply, would lay her books on the table, and hurry out the door. And with their father so sick, Clair was as relieved as her mother by the quiet of her sister’s absence. But watching her creep out the door, her face more solemn with its loss of baby fat, and the mane of curls more tidied with buckles and combs, Clair sometimes ached for an echo of the former Missy who had chattered her way around the kitchen, sweeping, dusting and cleaning, her hair growing wild around her face. Sometimes, during those rare afternoons when Missy wasn’t up visiting Grandmother, Clair would sprawl across their bed, her cheek resting against Missy’s, pondering out loud if maybe everybody wasn’t right, and that perhaps they might all become low-minded, as her father had, and sit for hours in a day, staring out the window, more and more like the dreadful apparition that he was now.

Missy would listen for a while, her childish shrieks and laughter long since sobered by their mother’s quietening finger, and would beg Clair in a voice that had become as whispery—almost weepy—as their mother’s, to stop speaking of their father, and talk instead about fairies singing in the forest, and riding the whitecaps over the ocean till they found the land with the largest of all meadows and the grandest of all bluebells to curl up in at night. And when Missy had gone, and her mother lay resting in bed, Clair would lie on the divan, watching her father as he sat sideways on his pew-chair, one elbow resting on the table, and the other on the windowsill, staring out the window for hours, days, weeks, as if impaled upon the hell-scorched eyes staring back at him from his reflection, whilst the flankers from his pipe burned an arc on the canvas floor around his feet, and the weight of his mind burnt a hole through his entrails.

“Don’t he say nothing, not even to your mother?” Phoebe asked one windy, sunny day as Clair, during one of her rare outings, sat on the steps outside Joanie’s house, waiting for Joanie to finish her dinner so’s they could go swimming down on the sandbar.

Clair shrugged.

“Don’t you listen?” asked Phoebe.

“No.”

“Sure, why won’t you listen sometime?”

“Because I don’t want to,” said Clair.

“Aren’t you scared?”

Clair gazed distractedly at Phoebe’s long, coppery hair, wishing the wind would lift it as it had on other summer days, and wrap it around her face, and she and Joanie would laughingly flattened it down with their hands and braid it into fat pigtails and tie the ends with skinny alder twigs that were still supple and dripping with sap, and then tickle and tease each other, and romp through the timothy wheat, playing hide and seek, the way they always used to—before her father went away to war. But the wind was mindless of Phoebe’s hair on this day and merely sifted a strand across her brow, a strand that was quickly plucked back and wedged behind an ear, baring nosy, grey eyes that flitted from side to side as they searched out Clair’s.

“Why should I be scared?” asked Clair, her voice dulled, her mind already wandering, knowing the answer.

“Scared that it might be something in his blood.”

“What might be in his blood?”

“Mental, b’ye, you knows. When someone goes mental for nothing, it might be something in his blood. Then that might’ve been passed on in your blood and you could turn mental, too, when you gets older—and your youngsters.”

Phoebe’s voice had dropped to a whisper, but she might as well have been silent, for Clair was leaning forward now, her body quiet, and her eyes a little dazed as she drifted into some distant place that would become a place of refuge in years to come.

“I didn’t mean to make you angry,” Phoebe called after her, her voice deeply affected with regret, as Clair rose. But Clair was beyond hearing as she strolled up over the hill towards home, head down so’s not to encounter any more concerned souls dawdling on their step. Pausing at the gate, she watched her father watching through the window at her mother squatted in the muddied patch of garden, her straw hat shading her eyes from the sun, and ever so often glancing up and smiling at him as she ripped out weeds and grass from amongst the sweet williams. Clair smiled at him too, and calling out a greeting to her mother, went inside, kicking off her boots.

“Not gone swimming?” asked her father. He turned to her, his eyes cocoa brown in the sun.

“Too windy,” she said, noting that the pained lines that usually marked his face were absent today, their shadows flushed out by the brilliance of the light, and pulling a half-used scribbler and piece of pencil off the bin, she sat across from him in the splotch of sunshine, and idly began to write. Her mother’s spade chinked against the rocks in her flower bed, and a thousand dust mites swam lazily through the air. Missy was off somewhere, no doubt visiting with Grandmother, and all was fine really, thought Clair, pushing away the nagging words of worry Phoebe had whispered in her ear.

“What are you writing?” he asked, after she had done a page or more.

“I told Missy I’d write her a story,” she answered, smiling, knowing the effort that it took him to ask.

“Perhaps you might read it to me.”

“Right now?”

He nodded, turning finally to smile at her. Her heart melted, as had his eyes in the hot July sun, and going to the farthest corner of the kitchen, she took a deep breath and began reading in a clear, strong voice, the story Missy had been telling her for some years now.

“My, Father, you got her going with the stories agin,” said Sare. “Isn’t she the reader—and what stories Missy makes up. I keeps telling them, they’re like you for telling the lie, but it’s a funny thing that a lie becomes a story simply because it’s written down. Shall I make you tea, dear? Clair, sit besides your father, I makes us some tea.”

Clair sat back down. With her mother’s charm, and the warmth of her father’s eyes, and the sunshine spilling through the window, it felt like the old days. And as they sat sipping tea together, it was easy to forget that Missy wasn’t sitting with them, and indeed, hadn’t been home for suppers for weeks now, and that her father, though he was sitting with them, nodding to their chatter, even smiling, had ceased hearing their words long ago.

It was nearing midnight, and Clair was easing away from the sweat of Missy’s back, when a loud cry sounded from her mother. Scrabbling out of bed and cautioning Missy to bide where she was, she ran across the hall, carefully opening the room door as her mother’s cries grew harder. She was as she had been that first time Clair had run into her room—the night her father’s screams had started—half-sitting, half-lying across him. Only she wasn’t soothing him on this night as she had been, then, but shrieking crazily as if it were her, Sare, being tormented in sleep. Clair stepped farther into the room to understand why he wasn’t soothing her mother as she had him, why it was that he lay upon his pillow, his teeth clenched, his head stilled.

“Mommy,” she whispered as her mother’s shrieks became more harsh.

“He’s dead!” cried Sare, squirming atop of him as if to awaken him, and Clair saw then that his eyes were not sleeping at all, but glazed pits, staring straight ahead, as if shackled to some horrific image that not even death could intercept. And his hands, those big strong hands, were tightly clenched across his chest, as though protecting him from a war that finally killed him, three years after the shelling had stopped. Holding her hands to her heart, she watched as her mother, now whimpering like a hurt puppy, crawled all over him, crying fretfully as she tried to find comfort on a breast awash in the coldness of death.

SIX MONTHS LATER, ALMOST TO THE DAY,
on a sunny September afternoon, Clair and Missy walked home from school and found their mother curled up on the bed of sweet williams, her cheek cushioned against the purple-and-pink petals as if she were napping, her hat shading her eyes from the sun, and a curious, almost flirtatious smile frozen on her face. Sinking onto the dirt, Clair reached blindly for Missy’s hand, her ears deaf to the rising hysteria sounding from her sister, and a sense of the unreal overtaking her. Holding out a finger, she traced the curve of her mother’s smile. Anyone watching might have been heartbroken to see one so young maintaining such control in the face of her mother’s death. In shock, they might say, or too frightened to honestly believe her mother was really dead along with her father, and that she and her sister were truly orphans now. Or perhaps even that she had lost her senses, like her father, and that it wasn’t the war after all that took poor Job Gale’s mind but a sickness of the blood like they’d been thinking all along during his last year.

It was this last thought they would have held true if they were privy to the absurdity consuming Clair’s mind at the moment, for it wasn’t herself she was thinking on at all, or her younger sister, Missy, and that they were both orphans now. But a deeper intrigue to her at that moment, as she traced her finger around the curve of her mother’s smile, was the memory of the grimace that had so distorted her father’s face as he had lain upon his pillow. How was it, she wondered, beginning to rock ever so gently, that it was her mother who went smiling into the arms of death, when it was her father who had so craved its comfort?

TWO WEEKS LATER
Clair sat in the same perplexed silence in her father’s pew-chair, clutching a sobbing Missy to her side, as Sim stood before them, his words falling around her like a cold rain as he declared himself their guardian. He told her that Frankie, who had married Willamena, was offering her a job to teach down Rocky Head—at least for the next six weeks till they found a real teacher. Meanwhile he and the grandmother would be moving into this house to take care of Missy, for there wasn’t enough room in his old house for himself, the grandmother and Missy. Too, Clair herself would be needing a room after she finished with her teaching spell down Rocky Head, and she couldn’t very well live on her own yet. But wouldn’t she be wanting to leave for teaching college the following year, after she finished grade eleven, the way her father always said she would? Then it made sense that he and the grandmother move into the house so’s there would always be somebody here to take care of Missy—and the grandmother’s house could now be used for a woodhouse, given the roof was rotting off.