these days, and turned left, heading downhill. The flag hung limp from its pole near the post office and muddied water streamed like a brook down the guttered sides of the road.
A short, rotund man with wire-framed glasses and suspenders hiking his flannels up past his belly doddled along the roadside just as he’d been doing the past sixty years, watching the morning light breaking through shadows around him. Dobey Randall. He’d be here this evening, walking the opposite way, watching the same sun go down and the light fading back to shadow. The old-timer turned a gummy smile onto Kyle and Kyle tooted his horn and the road turned sharply to the right at the bottom of the hill where the government wharf extended into the sea.
They drove for a mile along the shoreline and slowed, passing the tidy settlement of the Rooms and the whiffs of smoked salmon floating from Stan Mugford’s smokehouse. The graveyard lay beyond the last doorstep. Kyle sped up Fox Point Hill, away from the headstones and the bouquets of plastic flowers on Chris’s grave, flattened sideways and faded by the snow-wet winds of winter.
Another two miles of shore road and they rounded a black cliff. Kyle slowed down coming into the Beaches—twelve houses sitting with their backs to the wooded hills behind them, their doorways opening onto the strip of road and rocky beach separating them from the shifting waters of the Atlantic. A knot of youngsters hovered in the middle of the road, taunting him till they saw he wasn’t going to break speed, and then broke apart to blasts of his horn.
“Ye’ll get your arses trimmed!” he roared, rolling down his window, and then rolling it back up to a chorus of laughs. The eldest of them pinged a couple of rocks off the tires and Kyle grinned. “That young Keats. He’ll be strung up yet.” He looked back at the youngsters shooting fake bullets at the truck. “Little bastards.” He looked at his father who had scarcely noticed. The road ended a few hundred feet past the last house and before them lay the gouged black earth, readied for building.
Switching off the motor, Kyle kicked down the gas pedal to stifle its dieselling. “Might as well get going, hey. See the mess they got made. What—just going to sit there?”
Sylvanus was slumped in his seat like a spineless effigy.
“Come on, b’y, let’s get out.”
“No courage.”
“C’mon, dad.” He touched his father’s shoulder gently. “C’mon, now.” He opened his door and got out. He walked to the edge of the site and glanced back, seeing his father slowly unfold himself from the truck. He waited and then they walked about the excavation, their boots squishing through mud. They both shook their heads. Looked like a tornado had pitched itself through a hardware store and emptied its wares onto the site before blowing off. An upturned wheelbarrow half mired in mud. Couple of hammers and boxes of nails soaked open. Picks, shovels, and an axe lay in a murky pool. Six or seven gallons of paint stood haphazardly beside a pile of two-by-twelves that were half-lodged on a mound of gravel being washed out by rills of rainwater.
“Well, sir,” said Sylvanus.
“Not a clue,” said Kyle.
“What a mess, what a mess.”
“And what’s they doing with the paint? Footings not laid and they’re buying paint?”
“Not a clue.”
Kyle stepped around fifteen or twenty bags of cement that were uncovered and wet from the rain. He kicked at a bag and it broke open, the powder too wet to spill.
“Ruined, all ruined.” He kicked at the other bags. “Every one of them.” He bent, picked up a hand-carved wooden gun out of the muck. He glimpsed a couple of red eight-shot ring caps half submerged in mud beneath the cement bags. “Them youngsters,” he said to his father. “Using the cement bags for blockades. How much stuff now, did they muck off with?”
Sylvanus stepped over muddied puddles and followed along the trench dug for the footings. He bent for a closer look.
“Sure, look at that. They only got them dug three feet down. No more than three feet, should be four. Show, get the tape and measure that.”
Kyle hunted for a yellow measuring tape from amongst a debris of tools and stood by his father, looking for a place where the footings weren’t flooded. Extending the tape across the width of the trench, he leaned over, reading the measure. “Fourteen by eighteen inches.”
“Well sir.”
“What’s it supposed to be?” asked Kyle.
“Sixteen by twenty-four. Turned down. They would’ve had it all turned down by the inspectors.” He looked skyward. The white was starting to darken. “Gonna rain. Bad time of year to be building.” He stood up, scratched his head through his cap, looking about.
“Here they comes then.”
The roar of a V-8 engine without a stick of pipe in her sounded a full minute before the four-door Dodge came into sight and halted by the truck. Two young fellows got out—the youngest stout and pretty-faced and fair, the other dark and skinny and already sunken into his chest cavity like his father, Jake.
“Uncle Syl. How’s she going?” asked the pretty one, Wade.
“How’s she goooin,” asked the other, Lyman, in his slow, deep drawl that tired Kyle on his most patient of days.
“She’s not gooin nowhere no time soon,” snarked Sylvanus. “Which one of you is the carpenter?”
“He,” said Lyman, pointing to Wade.
“Me,” said Wade.
“And they didn’t tell you to keep cement out of the rain?”
“We went to buy tarps but it rained ’fore we got back.”
“Well, sir, well, sir.” Sylvanus shook his head. “If you buys cement in April, you buys tarps along with it. Unless you got a garage or woodhouse. You got a garage or woodhouse?”
“Told father we needed tarps,” said Wade.
“Where’s your rebar? You going to pour cement without rebar?”
“Oh, come on, Uncle Syl. I was getting it but Dad was there arguing we didn’t need doubling up on the rebar. And he had it all measured wrong so I left it for the next trip.”
“We got the trenches dug before the rain started,” said Lyman. “We thought we’d have the cement poured, too. Right, Wade?”
“Right.”
Sylvanus went back to the site, muttering, “Well sir, well sir.”
“We heard about Aunt Addie,” Wade said quietly to Kyle.
“Feels awful bad about that,” said Lyman.
Kyle nodded. “Say nothing to Father. Come on. Let’s start cleaning up.” He pointed the boys to the wheelbarrow and shovel and the bags of cement. “Break it all open, them bags. Start shovelling it around. It’s all ruined.” He buddy-punched Wade’s shoulder and went over to where his father was eyeing the sky.
“She going to hold?”
“Might.
