She vanished into her room and he tried not to stare at the bold form of Bonnie Gillard as she came in through the door—her too white pants and too white jacket and blood-red blouse and shoes and red handbag and lipstick and white plastic discs pinned to her ears. And a big dark scarf curled loosely around her neck.
Addie came rushing out, apologizing for being late, and faltered for a second upon seeing Bonnie, then quickly smiled.
“My, don’t you look nice. Perhaps I should have pressed something. Kyle, did you get Bonnie a coffee? I’ll just be another minute.”
“Take your time, I got lots of it,” said Bonnie. Her voice was loud, like her colours. Kyle noticed her eyeing his mother’s trim dark sweater and pants as she hurried into the washroom, and he noted her quick glance at her own red and white checkered self. She crossed the room and sat down, a cloud of cheap scent trailing behind her. She was about forty, first signs of age etching the corners of her eyes. Her jacket strained across her wide back as she folded her arms onto the table, her wrists stretching a mite too long for the cut of her sleeves.
He reached past her for the mug resting on the table and she drew back and he saw for the first time a little rash of blisters, glistening amidst a swath of salve, on the right side of her face near her hairline. The right side of her neck, partly hidden behind the scarf, was equally burned and blistering and swathed with salve. She looked up at him, her eyes big and brown and bold. Their black orbs pulsated softly and he turned from her, shamed for having looked so deep. Taking the cup to the sink, he poured her coffee.
She stood up as Addie came out of the bathroom, toilet flushing behind her. “All ready?”
“I suppose I am, can’t think properly this morning.” Addie crossed the room and lightly pulled Bonnie’s scarf away from her neck. “Looks awfully painful, dear. You sure you want to do this?”
“I could sit home and suffer it out,” said Bonnie, and she smiled. “A bit like you now, likes keeping to myself. Hates everyone gawking and talking at me.”
“We’re a pair, then,” said Addie, knotting a silk scarf around her neck. “I’ll be back sometime in the afternoon, Kyle. There’s baked beans from yesterday in the fridge for dinner. My!” She shivered as though struck by a sudden draft and pulled the flimsy scarf from around her neck. “I can’t find my wool scarf,” she complained, looking around the sofa and hummock. “Have you seen it, Kyle?”
“Take mine, it’s a woman’s anyway.”
“Don’t you be foolish. If your father can wear his now.”
“Under his shirt collar.”
“Because he likes the feel of it. And so do you.”
“Too short.”
“They’re stylish. It was their Christmas presents—cashmere,” she said to Bonnie, catching the soft woollen scarf Kyle was tossing her from the depths of his coat pocket. She folded it around her neck and smiled. “I was hoping for one to get cast aside. Small chance,” she added ruefully. “They haven’t took them from their necks since they unwrapped them.”
“Making her feel good is all,” said Kyle. He caught his mother’s smile and smiled back reassuringly. “Drive safe, then,” he said to Bonnie, and with a last reassuring look at his mother, he plunged his arms into his coat sleeves and went outside. The air was dampish to his face, the fog rising from the land and hanging in wisps above the hills and fading into dove-grey skies. He stepped around Bonnie’s shiny red Cavalier, thinking things must be good in the fish plant these days. His father was hunched down at the end of the wharf and looking across the bay whence he’d floated them all those years ago. Kyle barely remembered Cooney Arm. Could no longer distinguish between memory and stories told and retold by Chris and Sylvie and his dear old gran and his mother sometimes about the man Sylvanus was back there. Prancing about his stage-head and boats, fishing from five in the morning to sometimes ten at night, netting and gutting and curing fish and drinking one beer a week and sometimes not that. Kyle did remember one moment from back during his father’s hand-fishing days: his father taking him in the boat one windy fall morning, hauling his nets. Christ, but didn’t he look big standing up in that boat with his oilskins and sou’wester black against the sky. And not a fear as he stood in that wind-rocked boat, knees bending to roll with the swells. And he, Kyle, white-knuckled to the gunnels.
Everybody and their dog had moved on from those days of hand-fishing and hauling nets but his father mourned them as he would a fresh dead mother. There’s them who can’t change with the times and those who won’t, his mother told him. And your father’s both kinds.
Kyle was kinda proud. He liked his father’s story. Liked how he was the last one out after the seas were overfished by greed and governments were paying everyone to leave. The story was still told how Sylvanus thumbed his nose at the relocation money and stayed till the last fish was caught, stayed till they nearly starved, and then sawed his house in half with a chainsaw and floated both halves up the bay and landed them atop this wharf and declared to his astonished Addie—This is as far as she goes. By Christ if I can’t work on the sea, I’ll sleep on it. No gawd-damned mortal telling me where I sleeps.
Kyle stepped quietly up to his father as he crouched at the end of the wharf. No doubt he’d been proud back there in Cooney Arm, building that house. His castle. For sure it was he then, doing the sheltering. Building a good house for his family, providing. And was then driven out. Not just by governments but by death. The death of three babies, death of the codfish, death of the fishing culture he’d woven himself around from the inside out. He’d brought them here to this wharf where the death of his eldest son awaited him. And now this. A life shaped by death.
Sylvanus looked up and Kyle drew back with a start. The dark of his father’s eyes broiled with hatred. It was as though all the deaths and dying had been gathered in the one grave and laid at his feet and it was his weakening as a man that had caused them. He hove his shoulders forward and rose, starting towards the truck, his body jerking with anger. Addie’s face appeared in the window and Sylvanus faltered and then resumed his hard-hitting steps to the truck. Guilt, cursed Kyle. Guilt that he was failing them. Guilt rotting him like an old shack built on wet ground, leaving no shores strong enough to shelter himself or his family through those coming days.
Starting the truck, Kyle drove them down the heavily potholed Wharf Road, ignoring the whiff of whisky as his father took a swallow from the flask beneath the seat. The sea was flat calm, gulls like black pods resting on its sky-whitened waters. He drove past the gravel flat to his right, smoke still trickling from last night’s bonfire, Kate’s curtain drawn. Wharf Road yielded onto Bottom Hill Road a few hundred yards farther along and Kyle hung a sharp left onto the paved stretch, doubling back the way they’d just come except it was leading uphill from the valley and cradled by tall, knotted spruce trees.
As they crested Bottom Hill he looked at the same sunless sky vaulting over the mile-wide corridor of ocean, walled on both sides by wooded hills, its horizon fading to nothing forty or fifty miles out. Beneath him and spreading out from the foot of Bottom Hill were the felted rooftops and smokeless chimneys and sleeping doorways of Hampden. The community sloped down another hill to the shore and the quiet lapping of the sea. Quiet. Everything so quiet. As though no sin had yet been committed on this day.
A whimper from his father, a soft mewl. Kyle covered it with a cough and eased them down Bottom Hill and along the main road, passing a store to the right with its weekly specials in blue marker taped to the window. He passed the Anglican church and a sunken-roofed bungalow with unpainted add-ons where Bonnie Gillard now lived with her sister. He passed a poppy-red house, a sunny ochre one, and the violet
