Downhill Chance (8 page)

“No, my love, ’tis neither stink that bothers me, because I been smelling them both all me life. It’s the other man’s stink that smells the worse, and it’s your fine little nose that got to labour over mine.”

“Then, I thank you for the flowers, sire, but, if I’d known they were to cover the smell of your poop, I dare say I wouldn’t have felt so proud watching you plant them.”

“Now, now, Mother, it’s the thought that counts,” Job sang out over the burst of giggles from Clair and Missy over their mother’s bad word. “I dare say I could’ve gone out and planted you piss-a-beds for a stronger smell if I’d thought on it,” he added with a wink as Missy and Clair burst into more giggles, leaving their poor mother shaking her head and pointing a scolding finger as she tut-tutted warningly about how he carries on so with his talk of pee and stink, when it was flowers they’d started out talking about, and the shame of him with his girls listening.

Wanting now a sense of her old mother, Clair skipped up to the window, smiling. Sare smiled wanly down at her, and Clair was about to push in through the door when her uncle Sim, as thin as he was tall, and stooped, as if by burden, appeared around the corner of the house, the black of his brow deepening further the air of depression that pulled down the corners of his mouth, rendering a dull look in his small, sunken eyes.

“You was suppose to fill the woodbox,” he snapped.

Clair pulled back, her mouth contorting. “I always do’s it, don’t I?” she snipped. “And there’s no need for you to be coming by here any more, either—” The rest of her words were silenced by a rap on the kitchen window and her mother’s footsteps sounding across the kitchen floor.

“He was talking about us,” she muttered, brushing inside as her mother opened the door. Turning, she stood staring accusingly at the uncle over her master’s shoulder.

“I swear, she’s always forgetting things,” said Sare apologetically. “I suppose Grandmother’s doing fine?”

Clair grimaced as the uncle’s nostrils suddenly twitched, catching the smell of hot bread. And like the sly old dog ambling towards a nap till a whiff of something from the pot stops him in his tracks, his ears perked and his shoulders slunk as Clair imagined his plotting whether it best to hang his head and beg, or to lunge upon his hind legs and fill his chops afore anyone had a chance to stop him.

“She’s not been good,” he mumbled, shaking his head discouragingly. “Her hands is too crippled to even do a bit of baking.”

“Dear soul. Tell her I’ll send Clair up with a pot of bread after it’s baked. I’d come myself, but—” Sare broke off, gazing down over the hill towards the wharf “—since Job left, I guess I haven’t been going out much.”

Sim nodded, his stoop becoming heavier as old Mrs. Rice, swaddled in layers of skirts and shawls, looked their way. Stifling a snort, Clair stormed into the kitchen.

“Ohh, I can’t stand him,” she burst out after her mother had made her goodbyes and was closing the door.

“You listen here, my lady—”

“He’s so
sleiveen,
Mommy!” she all but shouted. “And he’s talking about us; he’s telling everyone he’s doing our work, when it’s me bringing in all the wood and chopping splits.”

“It matters naught to me,” said Sara wearily. “Let him have his say if that’s what pays him. For as long as your father’s gone, we needs him, and I won’t stand for you saucing back.”

“I can bring in the wood and water. We don’t need him.”

“And cut the logs, too? Mercy, Clair, it’s more than bringing in the wood and water and chopping a few splits that needs to be done. There’s meat to be had, and God knows what’ll happen to this roof after another winter.”

“We can get somebody else to do it.”

“I won’t argue it,” cried Sare, pressing her fingers against her temples. Clair quieted, struck by her mother’s pallor, made more so by the curls tumbling around her face without their daily constraints of combs and clips. “Can we not fight?” she pleaded tiredly to her daughter. “I swear I haven’t got the will these days to keep a junk of wood in the stove—and now you’ve got me worrying about what people are saying.”

“Ohh, they’re not saying nothing,” said Clair, her tone becoming contrite. “You want me to make you some tea—I’ll make you some tea.”

“If you wants,” said Sare. Sinking tiredly onto her chair, she turned to the window.

“Where’s Missy?” asked Clair, taking two cups down from the cupboard.

“Up to the grandmother’s, I expect.”

“She’s going up there a lot, isn’t she?”

“Since her father left, she has. I suppose it’s a good thing—the grandmother don’t get much company, poor old soul.” Sare turned to her. “There’s a bit of stew left in the pot—why don’t you have some?”

“You want some, too?”

“No. Just the tea.”

“I’m not hungry, either.”

Laying a cup before her mother, Clair sat aside her, wrapping her hands around her cup, absorbing its heat as she watched her mother do the same. “Soon be summer,” she said. “You want to plant more flowers?”

“Your father was the gardener.”

“It was you that was raised on a farm.”

“So I was,” said Sare, turning back to the muddied patch outside her window. “But it weren’t planting that I learned.”

“Tell me agin—about when you met Daddy,” Clair begged, knowing how her mother liked to talk about such things.

“Oh, Clair,” sighed Sare, her eyes that usually danced with merriment when flooded with such memories now dulled, emptied, beggared by grief.

“You were a girl, not much bigger than me,” prodded Clair.

“Just a girl.”

“And he was a dear, handsome man,” whispered Clair with an exaggeration that had often merited her kisses on the nose in the past, or a playful pinch on the cheek as her mother snuggled into such beloved memories with a warble in her voice, and her father sat across the table from her, interrupting her story with saucy grins and winks. A piteous look befell her mother’s face now as she allowed her eyes to fall onto his chair, emptied and pushed tight against the table since he had gone, his canvas bag stuffed with dirty clothes she hadn’t had a chance to wash. Yet, it was the scent of him she wanted, and despite her reluctance to graze such tender fodder, she pried her tongue from the roof of her mouth.

“Yes, he was—” she began.

“He took you from your house, he did.”

“Yes—”

“And it was a hard house.”

“Oh, Clair—”

“And you won’t ever say why.”

“I said so to him.”

“Was it haunted and that’s why it was hard?”

“Lord, you do go on.”

“But why won’t you ever say?”

“It’s because
they
were hard,” cried Sare, her eyes clinging to Job’s chair, her mouth trembling as her words spilled forth. And unwilling to quell an insurrection that so aided her now in her misery, she stared hard at her girl. “The backs of their hands was how they taught us,” she cried bitterly, “and the sharpness of their tongues. They near killed us they did, with their hands and their tongues. And when they weren’t swiping at us with those, they lashed out with their belts and their buckles and—and whatever else lay close by.” She grimaced, her face turning ghastly, but her grief, finding vengeance in past laid injustices, lent fuel to her outpouring, and her words fell more wildly. “They were all bigger, they were, and wont to strike out at whatever didn’t strike back. And I was the smallest. A split-arse girl, they called me. And there was always reason to strike—the cold, or the soggy wood, or the storm door that slammed with every gust of wind, or every damn bird that shat on the house as it flew overhead. Ooh!” She stopped, clutching her fist to her mouth, her eyes widening in shock. “Blessed child, now look what you’ve done. And I promised Father I’d never be hurt by their lashings, again.”

And Clair, aghast at her mother’s revelations, recoiled as she tried to imagine the horror of a daddy hitting his little girl and calling her vile names, and that little girl being her mother, with soft curls dancing all around her face, and her eyes wet from tears as she spoke of such things—as they must have been then, when they were striking her. She understood then, why it was that her father always rose from his chair and circled behind her mother as she come to that part in her story, twirling a finger through one of her curls as she skipped past those horrible deeds and spoke happily of him, instead—of when he had found her on the beach, her knee bleeding from where she had slipped and scraped it on a wet slab, and her cheek bruised from the morning’s beating.

Pulling her chair closer to her mother’s, Clair patted her hand, smiling hard, knowing that her own brown curly hair was much like her mother’s, and her eyes, as her father often said, were the same as the ones in her mother’s mirror. What comfort her mother could draw from her daughter’s likeness at this moment, she didn’t know, only that her father once said it was an ointment to gaze upon the slight crook in her and Missy’s noses and to know that it had been borne from his. “He came in a horse cart, didn’t he?” she whispered.

Sare nodded, choking back a sob. “To buy strawberries for his mother. I was just fourteen. He spoke like the poet when he squatted besides me.”

“What words did he say?” asked Clair.

“Silly words—as he always does when he’s feeling that way.”

“The tender misery of crushed girlhood,” quoted Clair, her eyes soft upon her mother’s.

“Goodness,” said Sare, coming back to her daughter with some surprise. “I hadn’t thought I’d said that.”

“It’s what he whispers when you leaves them out,” said Clair.

“Is there nothing you miss?” Sare exclaimed incredulously. Pushing her untouched mug of tea to one side, she rose, her hand to her forehead. “Take up some stew for you and Missy. I’m going in on the daybed for a bit. It’s the devil of a headache I’ve got. And mind you never tells anybody what I just said—about the beatings,” she added sternly. “It’s your father’s wish.” Walking briskly into the stairwell, she disappeared into the seldom used sitting room, caressing her cheek. Clair watched, a cold lump in her stomach as she imagined a father’s hand striking such a thing. And shifting over to her mother’s chair, she slouched back against the window, gazing after her.

“Unburdened gentleness,” she mouthed. “That’s what you saw when you looked into his eyes. And then he built you a house, and married you. And everyone talked, with you being so young, and he walking away from his sick mother, leaving her to Uncle Sim who was just as indulgent with complaints. And no one come to visit after me and Missy was born, because of the misery, they said, with all of us talking at once, and Daddy would grin as they walked out the door, shaking their heads and muttering about how it sounded like they’d just been in a barn with a dozen nanny goats running about, baying over sweet hay.”

Sighing, Clair stared morosely around the kitchen. But for the moaning of the half-boiling kettle on the damper, there was silence, a hard silence, bursting with yesterday’s noise.

“Here, Missy, get off the railing,” she recalled her mother’s voice ringing out from a last winter’s eve. “Mercy, Clair, go catch her; she’s sliding down the rail agin.”

“Did you catch her?” called out Father as Missy swooshed off the bannister, her bottom plummeting into Clair’s belly with a whump! “Then go get your book and start your reading.”

“Blessed mercy, Clair, help your sister off the floor—did she hurt herself? My Lord, she’s forever falling and crying.”

“Like one other I knows,” said her father with a playful pat at her mother’s rump as she hurried by with the broom, “always falling and bruising and bawling.”

“Now, Father, I’m never one for bawling,” laughed Sare. “Sit at the table and let me get you your tea—for sure you must be thirsty from all day at the wood. And mercy, Father, catch her,” she shrieked as Missy dashed out of the stairwell and sprang onto her father’s lap. “Mind you, child, you’re going to break your neck if you tries that again. Start your reading, Clair.”

“Read louder,” said Father over Missy’s squeals, “because I allows you’re going to win over Willamena in the reading competition again this year. Won’t she make a grand teacher, Mother? And she’ll write to us everyday from her desk in the city, won’t you, my dolly?”

“You’re always filling her head, Father. Pass me that child if you can’t stop her squealing.”

“And such a pretty head it is,” said Job, smiling fondly at Clair. “Stand back in the corner now and practise making your voice louder, for it’s a good strong voice you’ll need to be a teacher. Sare, you listening to her voice?”

“I’d like to, but for this one,” said Sare, peeling Missy off his lap and clapping a hand over her mouth.

A sudden screech cut through Clair’s dreaming and she sat up with a start as Missy burst in through the door, bounding across the kitchen, pink cheeked from the cold and bundled in caps and scarves.

“It’s Grandmother’s birthday, it’s Grandmother’s birthday,” she chanted, skidding across the floor with muddied boots and slamming into the cupboards.

“What’s wrong?” Sare cried out, running out of the sitting room, her hand to her heart.

“Ohh, it’s just Missy! She’s the noisiest thing, Mommy, she’s fine,” said Clair, yanking her younger sister back to the door by the hood of her coat.

“It’s Grandmother’s birthday, Mommy, aren’t we baking her a cake?”

Confusion clouded Sare’s eyes.

“You don’t have to, anyways,” said Clair. “How come you always got to make her cake?”

“We always makes her cake, and I can help,” said Missy, tearing away from Clair and snatching her mother’s apron off the sink. “Uncle Sim lets me help all the time. He says I’m the real little woman.”

“Bet he likes that, somebody else doing his work,” sniffed Clair. “Get your boots off,” she ordered, pulling Missy back from the sink.

“Let me go, Clair.”

“You’re getting water everywhere.”

“Uncle Sim said you’re brazen. I can help, can’t I, Mommy?”

“Uncle Sim—” sneered Clair.

“Ohh, Clair—take off your boots, Missy,” said Sare, and trudging across the kitchen, she cleared some dirty dishes to one side on the sink, and pulled a mixing bowl out of the top cupboard.