Syllie, that’s all he’ll ever get out of me. Tell me about Jake—”
“Why? What’s going on you wants to call the police?”
“They had another fight. What about Jake’s boys? They’re home, why can’t they finish building the house? Didn’t that younger one do carpentry in trades school?”
“Wade,” said Kyle. “And Uncle Jake’s going to be working on a fishing boat for the summer. Wade needs help.”
“They needs help cleaning up the mess they’ve already made.”
“We needs five thousand up front to buy the supplies,” said Kyle. “Perhaps not that much. I think they got the footing laid for the basement. We’ll see when we goes down—we haven’t been down there yet.”
“You took it on without even seeing it? Well, sir. And suppose now I needs that money?”
She didn’t speak further. Kyle laid down his fork. It was coming. She lifted her chin in that defiant manner of hers and he was struck once more by her fortitude. That whatever this new thing thickening her cloud of sorrow, hope was already ignited in her heart and offering itself as a shelter for him and his father.
“I have to go to Corner Brook tomorrow. See the doctor. I—There’s a little lump in my breast. They did some tests already.”
Sylvanus blanched. Kyle closed his eyes, cringing as his mother spoke the word, that dirty little word, that ugly little word, cancer. Breast cancer. He’d known three women with breast cancer and they were all dead. He was on his feet and heading for the door and outside before his mother could reach him. He bolted up the road and started running through the night made darker by the damp shroud of fog, his feet picking his path from memory. To his right he could make out the dark ridge of shoreline and hear the water sloshing around rocks like some ancient demon slithering in and out of sight beside him. He took the turnoff onto the gravel flat and kept running, closer to the alder bed and away from the orange dome of Kate’s bonfire down by the water. He heard the strains of her guitar, her voice trilling through the fog like a distant psalm guiding his feet through the dark. He came to the river and found the footbridge and crossed it and veered upriver over wet mounds of dead grass that slipped eel-like around his ankles. No longer did it feel as though someone else ran in his shoes. For three years now he’d been mapping this artery of grief. He kept winding his way upriver. When he could no longer hear Kate, when his ears filled with the river water rustling through the grass and slapping against the rocks, he lowered himself to his knees and opened his mouth and his voice rose from his belly and carried over the water like the cry of a loon.
TWO
He’d been sitting for some time. A bottle smashed against a rock to the other side of the river and he rose, legs cramped. Another bottle smashed, the yelps of boys sounding like young wolves tearing up the night. He walked, wiping at his eyes. The night, the fog, smothered him. Couldn’t see a thing, not a damn thing. He kept his step high so’s not to get snagged by the clumps of wet grass and alder roots. He inched back across the footbridge, cringing as more bottles shattered against rock and the young boys hooted. He’d like to grab them by the neck. Smell of smoke came to him and he veered left, away from the boys, his feet crunching through coarse rocks as he made his way towards the sound of the river spilling into the sea. The rocks became muddied, silt-covered, and soon he was padding silent as a muskrat on the soft sediment fanning out from the mouth of the river and spreading along the shoreline. The snapping orange of Kate’s fire melted through the dark.
She was bent over, holding on to her guitar and feeding the fire with bits of sticks and driftwood. Her greyish white hair fluffed out from beneath a toque and braided down her back. There were always half a dozen bodies lodged about, drinking beer, having a smoke, but only Kate yet this evening. Kyle sat on a white-boned log. He started jiggling his foot. To keep himself from standing back up and running off again, he clamped his attention onto Kate more tightly than the capo clamping the neck of her guitar.
“Skyless night, Kyle.” She pushed back her toque and the greyish fringes of her hair faded into the fire-softened fog crowding around her and she looked to be sitting in the maw of some white god. She reached behind her for a six-pack and shoved it towards him.
He popped a can of beer and guzzled it near dry. She lowered the capo onto a different fret and tested the higher pitch of the strings and he leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees, foot jiggling so hard his body shook.
“Got me a new song.”
He belched and spat into the fire and watched it sizzle into nothing and turned back to Kate, watching as she put a pick between her lips, twisted the keys, plinged on a string, twist twist, pling pling. She looked to be fifty with her shroud of hair, or perhaps forty when the sun shone through her wire-framed glasses and into her kelp-green eyes. She was from away and came one day about a year ago with a trailer hitched to a truck and bought Seymour Ford’s old cabin just to the other side of the gravel flat. She was from Corner Brook, she said, an hour’s drive west, and she said her name was Kate Mackenzie and that she wanted to live by the sea. She said no more and bore with a smile the gossip shadowing her step to the store or the post office or the beach. And she didn’t go anywhere else. Except for out-of-town excursions that sometimes lasted for days. Visiting family, he supposed. Didn’t matter. That’s what he liked about Kate—that he could just be himself sitting with her, for she wasn’t connected to nothing or nobody he knew and was never moaning or groaning and wore only the song she was figuring on her face. And she was always figuring a song. Had boxes of half-written songs. Turning days into words, Kyle.
“Cover me,” she now sang, fire dancing on her glasses. “Cover me, I feel so cold. You feeling cold, Kyle?”
He shook his head, leaning over his knees and staring at the fire, foot jiggling.
“A blanket of stars in the midnight sky, Shimmering love streams from dark tear-stained eyes, Cover me.”
He closed his eyes, her voice crooning around him like a lullaby, and he wanted to curl beneath the tuck of the log and sleep.
“Cover me, I feel so cold, Cover me, am so alone . .”
He finished the beer in three long swallows and popped another, the fizz from the trapped air a comfort sound to his ears. Kate faded from her song, looked at him. An expectancy tensing her face. She often did that and always turned away whenever he queried the look. She turned away now. She tightened a string and loosened another one and then looked up as muffled footsteps sounded on silted rock. Clar Gillard’s hulking shoulders appeared through the fog, his rounded features softening into a smile. His black Lab trotted from behind, tail wagging and nose to the ground, sniffing the rocks, sniffing at Kyle’s feet, sniffing at Kate’s, his eyes glowing like sparks in the firelight.
Kyle stared at Clar in silence.
“Evening,” said Kate. She took a silver flask from the folds of her coat as Clar sat at the far end of the log. She unscrewed the cap and passed it to him. He grasped it with hands big as mitts and took a nip. Then he passed it back, his face squeezing up.
“You ever put mix in that?” he asked in a slow drawl.
“Breakfast time I puts a little juice in there.”
Clar took a beer from a weight-sagged pocket
