“Why wouldn’t I?”
“That’s just it now, you never talks to nobody any time, and now you’re phoning Bonnie Gillard?”
“Perhaps it’s time I got out more.”
“And you picks Bonnie Gillard to hang with? Next thing Clar’ll be coming after you.”
“Let him come.”
“Right. Just what we needs. Crazy like his father, everybody quivering like rabbits around him.”
“He’ll not find me quivering like a rabbit, then.”
“I seen rabbits bite. I seen him skinning rabbits, too. Size of his hands, he’d snap her like a wishbone. Seen him carry a dead moose through the woods once—antlers and all. Slung across his shoulders like it was a dog’s carcass. Why don’t she just move away?”
“She’s been living with her sister down Hampden the past month.”
“I mean Toronto, someplace.”
“I’m sure he knows his way to Toronto.”
“How come she don’t call the cops herself?”
“Because he punishes her all the harder, after. My, Kyle, you think she haven’t thought of them things? You’re like everybody else—believing the woman haven’t got a brain because she’s Jack Verge’s daughter.”
“How come she keeps going back with him, then? Don’t make much sense to me.”
“You knows what makes sense to her? You walks in her shoes? All you know is talk.”
“Nothing wrong with talk. Might keep her from going back this time, everybody talking.”
“Suppose they gets it wrong—do talk help then? Might help if everybody cleaned out their own closets.”
“Jaysus, Mother, he’s been knocking her around for years.”
“I’m not talking about Bonnie or Clar, I’m talking about you.”
“Me!”
“Yes, you. Got lots to say about things not your concern. You needs to be like everybody else, tending to your own concerns.” The sharpness of her eyes as she stared at him, her consternation, as though she were seeing something on his face known only to her. He fought not to look away.
She went back to picking at her food, but he could tell her thoughts were still on him.
She looked up as the front door opened. Sylvanus entered quieter than a draft of wind and took his seat at the table. He fixed his eyes on his plate and guardedly lifted his fork.
“Get your rod fixed?” asked Addie.
His brows shot upwards. “Who broke my rod?”
Jaysus. Kyle gave him a warning look but Addie appeared too taken by her thoughts to notice. She buttered a slice of bread and laid it by Sylvanus’s plate, and as if she didn’t know what else to do with her hands, she rested them on the table, small and pale as clam shells.
Kyle stared into the rusted brown of his cup of tea. Spoons chinked against china. Forks clicked. A hiccup from Sylvanus. Kyle coughed to cover it and asked his mother to pass the bread.
“Perhaps you should call the police,” said Kyle. “Sounds like he’s on the warpath agin.”
“Who?” asked Sylvanus.
“Clar Gillard.”
“I almost called them yesterday, then,” said Addie. “He was throwing sticks into the cemetery and then getting his dog trampling over the graves to fetch it. Chris’s grave.”
Kyle’s hand froze midway to spearing a bit of spud. He tried to speak but couldn’t. He looked at his father whose face stiffened like a mask, his eyes hard as rocks. He looked at his mother—that’s why she was off. Watching Chris’s grave being desecrated. That bastard. That pretty smiling face bastard Gillard.
“If I thought I was dying, I’d take him with me,” said Addie, her voice filled with such loathing that Kyle forgot his own rage and both he and his father looked at her. She picked up her fork, forcing a smile. “He drove off fast enough when I stood up. Eat your supper, Syllie. There’s other things to talk about. I was talking to Elsie on the phone this morning.”
Jaysus. Kyle sat back. As if there wasn’t enough on the table.
“She said Jake and her boys quit building their house with Newfoundland and Labrador Housing and that the two of ye were taking over the building of it.”
“We were waiting to tell you after supper,” said Kyle. “Yeah. They couldn’t handle it. So, we thought we’d take it on.”
“We. What do you know about building a house, Kyle?”
“Helped Dad build Uncle Manny’s house in Jackson’s Arm last summer.”
“And that makes you a carpenter?”
“I liked it. That’s how you find out what you like, by doing it. Imagine, if Uncle Manny never moved back from Toronto, I might be signing on for philosophy like Sis. That got her the big job, didn’t it?” He tried to soften the edge in his tone but she caught it and rapped his knuckles.
“You worry about yourself. Else, straightening used nails with a rock is all you’ll be good for.”
He grinned, knowing she’d like that—him taking a trade at the nearby vocational school in Corner Brook the coming fall instead of driving across the island to university in St. John’s. There was a time when she would have balked at his mentioning trades. Her girlhood prayer was to be educated and live in cities and become a missionary and travel to foreign places and she was forever resentful of being taken out of school when she was just starting grade nine to work the fish flakes. But now—since Chris, and since Sylvie flew to Africa weeks ago—she’d had the shine rubbed off her prayer beads.
“Whatever you choose, you’ll have to start making plans soon enough,” she said. “What’s wrong with you, Syllie? You haven’t said a word.”
“He got his mind bogged down with blueprints,” said Kyle. “Hey!” He touched his mother’s hand with his fork. “Somebody got to take it over. They near froze last winter in that shack.”
“They’ll always live in shacks. They don’t take care of nothing.”
“They never had nothing to keep clean before, did they?”
“Their father had as good as we, he just let it all rot down around him. You must be addled, Syllie, to work with Jake agin. He didn’t mind leaving you in the lurch back in Cooney Arm when all the fish was gone.”
“He was just chasing the fish, Addie.” Sylvanus had laid down his fork and was staring at his food. “Why’d he do that?”
“Who,
