Downhill Chance (24 page)

“I dare say! Looking through my window, he was—”

“Looking
at
your window, he was,” cut in Frankie. And opening the door, he let himself out.

“Lord, Frankie, sir!” cried Willamena with such dejection that Clair turned to her in surprise.

“He often goes fishing?” she asked sympathetically.

“Only with
him
—that’s all he can get
him
to do, he’s so loony,” she ended sourly. And spurred to charity by her moment of humility, she turned to Clair: “I didn’t mean nothing,” she exclaimed quickly and just as quickly assumed her queenly tilt. “Anyway, Frankie don’t like for me to talk about it,” she said, rising. And marching into the sitting room, she closed the French doors behind her, leaving Clair alone with the table and the dirty dishes.

Later, after Frankie had his tea and gingersnap, and he and Willamena had retired to their room for the evening, and the patch had been cleared of chickens, sheep and bustling souls, Clair lay back on her bed, her curtains slightly drawn, watching the first stars prickle through the evening sky, and listening to the sea rustling up over the beach rocks.

“IT’S MY TURN,” ANNOUNCED RODDY
the next morning, rising from his seat, a scribbler in his hand. “Can I, miss?”

“No, I wants to tell,” cut in Marty.

“You’ve already told one, Marty,” said Clair. “And it’s ‘may I,’ Roddy, and yes, you may,” she added, stepping aside from her desk, and taking Roddy’s seat as he stood before the room, hair wet and standing straight up from an horrific morning’s brushing, and a smidgen of jam sticking to his bottom lip.

“It’s a big story, so I’m going to tell it in bits, all right, miss?” he began. “A bit right now, and a bit tomorrow and the next day—”

“Hope now, my son, you can’t do that,” protested Marty.

“Sure he can,” said Clair. “Whoever wants to tell a story in bits can. Go ahead, Roddy.”

Wrinkling his nose at Marty, Roddy took a deep breath and began.

“‘Once upon a time there was this contrary boy named Henry who hated and complained and made fun at everything in his house, till one day his mother drove him out.

“‘And don’t come back here till you gets better manners,’ she bawled after him.

“‘Ha,’ said he, ‘it’s me own house I’ll be getting, and once I finds it, I won’t be back here no more, either.’

“‘And no you won’t be,’ called out his mother, ‘fore if you goes up that shore, you’ll be took by strangers and boiled in hot tar and never be seen or heard from agin, I’ll warrant you that.’

“‘Cripes, took by strangers,’ scoffed Henry, ‘big fellow like me, took by strangers. Foolish is what you is, Mother, bloody foolish.’

“So he starts off up the shore, looking for his own house. Well, he was so mad that he never minded going way on up the beach by his self. And he scarcely ever looked back, checking that he could still see the smoke from his mother’s chimney curling up over the trees. But after awhile, sir, he started getting a bit tired, and too, he never had nothing to eat yet the day, and he was starting to wish for a slice of bread and some molassey. And then, when he thought he was going to faint he was so starved, he spied another fellow, same age as he, sitting on a rock, munching on a big chunk of scald pudding.

“First he was a bit scared because this other fellow was a stranger, even though he was his own age, and he was always thinking on his mother’s stories about strangers carrying boys off and soaking them in boiling tar. But he was
so
starved, he went up to the fellow, anyhow. And besides, this fellow had nice shiny eyes, and a great big smile and didn’t look one bit mean.

“‘Hey, buddy, you got a piece of scald pudding to spare?’ he sings out.

“Now, this young fellow, his name was Conner. And even though he was nice enough, he was lazier than a cut cat and was always looking for a way to con his way in to or out of something. That’s why he was called Conner— sly as a conner.

“‘What’re you doing all by yourself up here?’ he asks Henry.

“‘I’m leaving me old mother’s house,’ said Henry, pointing back to where he could still see her smoke curling up over the trees, ‘and I’m going to find me own.’

“‘Ooh,’ says Conner, ‘that’s a fine idea.’ But that’s not what he was thinking at all, because along with being sly and lazy, Conner was just as scared of strangers and stuff as Henry. So he was wanting a nice comfortable house to heave off in. And he was wanting some good grub, too. So he thinks, Mmm, I wouldn’t mind living in Henry’s mother’s house, with the fire going and for sure, there’d be bread baking. So he gives all of his scald pudding to Henry and says, ‘Now I got nothing left, so you got to take me with you and let me live in your house when you finds it.’ That was fine with Henry.

“‘All right, b’ye, that’s fine with me. But first you got to help me find one.’

“‘Well, that’s going to be hard to do,’ said Conner with the big frown, as if he was thinking heavy. Then he looks up and says, ‘I knows—let’s go back to your mother’s. I bet she got some good bread baked by now.’

“‘I already said I was never going back,’ snaps Henry, ‘so come with me if you wants.’

“Ol’ Conner, he didn’t like it, but he figured he’d best go along for awhile, till he got another chance to change Henry’s mind. And Henry was glad Conner was coming, because, see, he never let on, but he was starting to feel a bit scared by now, being this far away from his house. So off they went, walking side by side, up the beach, Henry talking about finding his own house, and Conner trying to weasel him back to his mother’s by saying things like ‘Bet your old mother’s worried about you now,’ or, ‘You think she’s out looking for you, yet, Henry?’

“But Henry was caught on to Conner’s weasling and just kept on walking up the beach, every now and then, whistling a bit. And that’s when they seen this other fellow, same age as them. All curled up, he was, in the root of a big log, just like a baby. And he was skinny and shivering all over, with no socks or boots on, and when he opened his eyes and seen Conner and Henry staring at him, he never even got a fright, he was feeling that miserable. And all he done, when Henry and Conner come right up close to him, was sit up and look. And that’s when Henry and Conner seen the gun lying under him. And that’s all I’m going to tell ye’s the day.” Looking proudly at Clair, Roddy marched back to his seat.

“Oh, yeah, my son,” said Marty.

“Can’t tell it if that’s all I got made up, can I, miss?”

“Guess not,” said Clair. “Did you make it up all by yourself, Roddy?”

Roddy shrugged. “Henry’s making it up, miss.”

“Then Henry’s a good storyteller,” said Clair, nodding her praise.

Missy would like it here, she thought later that afternoon, gazing over the little rows of bent heads, studiously working on their assignments. But then, as always when she thought of Missy, her face darkened and she paced the floor between the rows of desks, wringing her hands and looking for a tardy student she could sit with, or take the dusters outside and beat them together till chalk clouded the air around her, rendering her head and shoulders to that of her father’s the morning he had sat at the kitchen window, sheathed in pew dust. And chance she was caught without a pencil, a ruler or a book to occupy her hands, she was running for the mop and broom to sweep, scrub or polish the grey-painted floorboards. And when an unexpected rain threatened the caplin drying on the flakes, she’d lecture her students to stay seated and finish their lessons, and bolt outside with the rest of the women, quickly hauling sheets of canvas over the catch, or layering with boughs those the canvas couldn’t reach.

“Like one of our own, you are,” Nora exclaimed one breezy Saturday morning as Clair squatted down besides her and Beth on the beach, pipping a bucket of squid.

“Not like some others we knows,” said Beth, with a peevish look towards Willamena’s house. Catching a warning look from Nora, she chanced a sideways glance at Clair, and fell to muttering, “Well, she knows we’re going up the Basin this evening; you’d think she’d help us try and get a head start on the day.”

“The smell of squid makes her sick,” said Nora. “My, the youngsters loves school this year. You must be making for a grand teacher, Clair—and what’s they doing with all the writing? And in secret, too? Sir, I never seen Frannie so quiet before as when she goes in her room with her pencil and scribbler.”

Ignoring Nora’s questioning look, Clair glanced down the beach to where Marty and Roddy hung over the edge of the stagehead, jigging tom cods, and Frannie and some other girls were scampering around the beach, collecting white rocks. “They’re pretty imaginative,” she replied with a smile, then turned her attention to the slippery cone-shaped fish near slipping out of her hands, and tried to keep her fingers away from the mass of tentacles dangling from where a mouth ought to be.

“Here, like this, look,” said Beth. And taking the squid out of Clair’s hand, she slipped her thumb between its head and the jelly-like flesh of its body, then broke the three dots of gum-like sinew connecting them. A good yank on the tentacles, and the head and entrails slid out, neatly detached from the now hollowed body.

“And mind you don’t break the sacs,” she warned, tossing the pip out over the water to the gulls shrieking and flapping over the bounty, “because there’s nothing like squid shit to stain a garment black. Should tell that to the merchant, Saul. He might use it to tone down his halo, because it’s shining awful bright them days now, with the vote almost here.”

Nora tutted.

“Well, what’s wrong with talking to her about him?” argued Beth. “I’m just curious, that’s all,” she said to Clair, “about what the people up the Basin is saying. One thing to be grumbling agin Saul all the time—we’d do that no matter who the storekeeper is—but are they going to vote for him, that’s what I’d like to know; or are they scared of getting cut off the same as we if we don’t vote for him and he wins?”

“I don’t think Saul would cut anybody off—” began Nora.

“Oh, yes he would,” said Clair. “I—heard Mommy talk about it once,” she added as both sisters looked at her with surprise.

“What did she say?” asked Beth.

“Well, that this one family had to move to Bonne Bay once, because the merchant wouldn’t give him no more work and cut off his store bill.”

Both sisters continued to stare at her, their squid lying limp in their hands.

“And they moved?” asked Nora.

“Yup,” said Clair.

Nora gazed past Clair towards where Frannie and the other girls were now squatting down by the water’s edge, giggling over the smooth white rocks they had found, and were now using gulls’ feathers to paint them with water; and to young Roddy and Marty arguing excitedly over a tom cod Roddy was hauling in; and Prude hollering out her warnings to the little ones scampering to and fro the water’s edge, their shrieks mingled with the gulls swooping over their heads. “Sure, how can you just move from a home?” she asked quietly of no one. “And what about all your family—your sisters and their youngsters—and your old mother—how can anybody leave their old mother?” She shook her head, turning back to Clair, “I could no more leave here than I could walk out in that water and drown,” she half whispered.

And indeed, why should she ever have to leave, thought Clair, for it’s how she herself would feel, could she ever find her way back in Cat Arm again, with her mother chattering around the stove as she fried up pork scrunchions, and her father carving the liver out of a moose, and Missy supping back onion strips, giggling over his silly sayings. For it was, as her father had said, perfectly fine to claim one’s own small corner and make it a sacrament of God. “If everybody voted against him, there’d be no fear of getting cut off,” she said, turning to Nora. “He’s got to have some customers, don’t he?”

“Ahh, now you’re sounding like Luke,” said Nora, “but how do you get people rallied together—especially when everybody lives so far apart?”

“And you don’t know who to be talking to up the Basin,” said Beth. “Some of them’s up the merchant’s arse, and them who aren’t don’t bother talking with we most times. If it wouldn’t for the bit of news Luke brings home—he goes up the hill high enough to get radio—then we wouldn’t know the half of anything, would we, Aunt Char,” she added loudly as the scrawny old woman appeared on the bank, her long black skirts rustling around her legs as she bustled down besides them.

“What’s ye harping about, now?” she asked in a tone already fixed on arguing as she settled herself on the end of the log besides Beth, reaching into the squid bucket.

“The vote,” called out Prude from down the beach. “That’s what they’s always talking about when they got their heads together, whispering.”

“My Lord,” groaned Nora, “she don’t miss a word.”

“Foolishness, that’s what ye’s be getting on with, foolishness,” grumbled Aunt Char, flinging a pip to the gulls, its juices spattering Clair’s face as it sailed by but an inch from her nose. “The old ways worked for we, it can work for ye. Sure, ye’s getting as grand as the merchants with your want of fancy tablecloths and the like.”

“Having a tablecloth don’t make for grand ways,” said Nora, in the resigned air of one who’s been through this argument a dozen times before.

“When it got to match the curtains, it do,” said Aunt Char. “Putting yourselves in the hole just to have something nice for the youngsters to spit on.”

“Well, sir,” said Beth, taking a keen look at the old aunt, “what kind of youngsters did you have, that went around spitting on curtains?”

“What I can’t figure,” said Nora, “is that they’d get all of our wages, anyway—and then more, if we starts getting money for youngsters and the old and so forth—why wouldn’t they be wanting us to have more money?”

“It’s not just our wages they’re fighting to keep,” said Beth, “it’s what Luke says—they gets triple for a cord of wood over what they pays us. And if the big companies moves in paying wages, and the men all goes working for them, then they starts losing their fortunes.”

“And what’s a fartune but something to sit on,” said Aunt Char. “We’d still be sitting here, I tell ye, whether it was a money bag or a cantal of fish cushioning your arse. Better the fish, I says; you can eat that when all else is gone.”