again, the trenches to be deepened, the rebar to be laid, the wasted cement, the wasted sand. He rubbed tiredly at his neck and started a slow walk to the truck. Kyle went after him.
“We’ll just do it,” said Kyle. “We’ll just take her step by step and day by day. We’ll just do it.”
“Courage is gone.”
“She don’t want you giving in.”
“Sin. Sin. Everything she been through.”
“She might be fine. You lives ten, twenty years with what she got.”
They came to the truck and Sylvanus rested his head against the door.
“Shit! Come on, Dad. We’ll drive to Deer Lake and get what supplies we needs and keep ’er going.”
Sylvanus opened the door and got inside, reaching beneath the seat for his flask of whisky. Kyle stood for a moment, then went back across the site and had a word with his cousins. He walked back to the truck and climbed inside and began the ten-mile run to the highway. The rain started as they headed west towards Deer Lake, a light drizzle against the windshield. Sylvanus kept tipping back the whisky. Kyle said nothing, no matter his mother’s words. He was talked out trying to keep his father from the booze. As long as he was sober again by the time they got home.
In Deer Lake they bought more cement and rebar and corners and wire mesh and tarps and other things Sylvanus named off from a mental list. After the truck was loaded, Kyle picked up a bucket of chicken and a couple of beers and they sat in silence by the Humber River and he drank a beer, watching the river pass and watching his father nipping at his whisky, the chicken growing cold between them as the river kept passing. Passing and passing. A slow wear as subtle as time on each pebble it touched and a new song beginning without the other ever ending. And he, Kyle, just sitting there watching. Watching and watching from some gawd-damned eddy that kept on circling.
What the fuck. What the fuck was time anyway. A clock that ticks. Revered like a god. What if we just threw it away. Threw it into the river. And he heard himself like a song, Then you lie silent, Kyle. You lie silent till the ticking takes up in your head. It’s called hunger. It becomes your tick-tick-tick and you either move with it or lie in sleep with the dead. He looked at his father who’d drifted into sleep, his jaw lodged into his shoulder and his cheek creasing up like an old road map too weathered to read.
Kyle drove them towards home, elbowing his father awake when he geared down onto Wharf Road. The rain had drizzled out, a shaft of sun warming the muddied gravel flat coming up on his left.
“What—back already?”
“Already? Cripes, time for bed. Wake up, old man.”
“What’s we doing—we going to unload?”
“Thought we’d go straight home. She’ll be back from Corner Brook by now. What’s this, now?” Kyle had just taken a sharp corner, and sitting before them and blocking the road was Clar Gillard’s green Chevy truck. Clar was standing on the rocks beside the road wearing a T-shirt and jeans, indifferent to the damp coming off the sea. His Lab was out in the water and swimming laboriously towards him, black skull bobbing, a log as big as a fence post clamped in its jaws.
Kyle tooted the horn.
Clar glanced back at them and then bent, grasped the log from the dog’s mouth, and with forearms rippling hove the log back out in the water. He linked his thumbs in his belt loops, watching the dog paddling back out.
“What the fuck’s he doing.” Kyle tooted louder. Clar never looked back. Sylvanus grabbed the door handle and Kyle snatched for his father’s shoulder. “Hold on, old man.”
Too late. Sylvanus was tearing out of the truck with curses and Kyle groaned, feeling his father’s eagerness for anything that might extricate him, no matter how temporarily, from his misery right now.
“You move it, buddy, or I’ll drown it and you in it,” Sylvanus yelled at Clar from the roadside. Without waiting, he hauled open Clar’s truck door and reached inside, yanking the stick out of park. Digging in his heels, he jammed both hands against the steering wheel and started pushing the truck towards the edge of the road.
“Christ sakes, Christ sakes, old man,” and Kyle was out of the truck, seeing his father dead from another heart attack. Clar Gillard was leaping from the rocks and back onto the road.
“Hold on there, you. Hold on!” Clar shouted at Sylvanus.
Sylvanus stopped pushing and turned to Clar. His breathing was harsh, wormlike cords thickening up the side of his neck as he spoke. “You keep the fuck away from me and mine, buddy, if you wants to keep walking. Else I’ll cut you down the size of the last headstone you trampled over.”
And he would, thought Kyle. Holy Jesus, the fury distorting his father’s face was the stuff of books. Clar Gillard’s face relaxed into that nice smile of his. He whistled for his dog and, breezing past Sylvanus, slipped inside his truck. The Lab dredged itself ashore and dropped the log, his sides sucking in and out from exertion. He shook himself dry and leaped into the back of the truck, tongue lolling as Clar eased off down the road towards the wharf, the road too narrow to turn around where they were.
“Come on.” Kyle nudged his father. “Before he starts back.” He got in the truck, his father beside him, chest heaving. “Wants another heart attack, do you?”
“The likes of that.”
Kyle grinned and thumped his father’s shoulder. “Like the dog,” he said and started driving. Clar was pulling a U-turn in front of the wharf as they rounded the bend. Bonnie was standing by her red Cavalier parked near the woodshed. She leaned back against the car as Clar braked and poked his head out the window, saying something to her. She said something back and Clar’s fist shot towards her face. She swerved sideways, escaping his fist, and Clar hit the gas, his truck jolting forward, gravel spitting behind his tires.
“Lunatic! Watch him,” shouted Sylvanus and Kyle squeezed his truck against the cliff as Clar swiped past, his outside tires scarcely gripping the crumbling shoulder of the road. Kyle watched in his side mirror as the green Chevy burned down the road. He pulled up beside Bonnie and swung out the truck door, his father beside him.
“Did he get you?” Sylvanus asked Bonnie.
She shook her head, lightly touching the tip of her nose. “Just a graze.”
“Not fit. He’s not fit,” said Sylvanus, and headed towards his woodshed. He turned, wagging a finger. “Watch out he don’t come back.”
“Give a whistle if he does,” said Kyle. “Might be better if you’re not here,” he said to Bonnie. “Stirring up trouble for the old man.”
“You don’t have to worry about Clar. He’ll not touch your father.”
“Makes you say that?”
She glanced up at the wooded slopes, beyond which the roar of Clar’s truck could be heard gunning up Bottom Hill. “Your father’s proud. Clar’s not proud. He got nothing to be proud over. He’s scared of men like your father.” She gave a satisfied smile. “That’s what I told him. That’s why he swung at me—I hit a mark.”
“Don’t sound like you’re much scared
