Far Cry, page 18
“Yes-but, yes-but, that’s all I hear out of you these days.”
You will not have forgotten that moment, Kit—I remember you glancing up from the page of equations I had set. Your mother looked as though she had been slapped. Your father’s face did not move. Inside, though, he was in motion. Landing on one stone, gathering himself for the leap to the next.
It was Knox who got him the rest of the way there. Late July, was it? One of those disappointing Saturdays when he showed up for a game.
“I was saying to Laramie,” he said, looking over his hand, “you have to admire these young fellows, going over to do their part. Envy them even.” He poured himself two fingers from the watered bottle, plucked a card and laid it down. Lifted his glass in Frank’s direction. “Course, it’s different for old married men the likes of us. Mrs. Knox would have something to say on the subject.” A laugh. A little shake of his head. “Doubt they’d have us anyhow, me with my back and you being, well, on the smaller side.”
Your father sat still as a portrait. I knew then, Kit. Why else, in the days to come, did I fail to read aloud the notice that married men no longer required permission from their wives to enlist? Frank must have heard talk of it among the men. Perhaps even Knox himself, come down from behind his desk to make a show of inspecting the catch.
However he got wind of it, your father took the news to heart. Not long after the season closed, he let himself out into the moonlight, careful to wake neither his daughter nor his wife. He picked a path down to our little beach, pushed off in the Coot and rode the falling tide to the inlet’s mouth. At Duncanby Landing he paid young Travis Mead to tow my little reska back to Far Cry, while he caught the Camosun on her southbound stop.
To think he might have come back to us on her next northbound pass. If only the recruiting officer had been a man of fewer words. Half an inch under regulation height. Frank tried out his charm, but there was no bending the rules. He was almost out the tent door when the officer added, “You might try the Medical Corps.”
Imagine, Kit, the height requirement an inch shorter for those men who would carry the injured, the dead. I suppose Frank saw himself pounding across a muddy wasteland, one end of a stretcher on his shoulders, a soldier’s blood running down his back. At least he would be part of things. Anything was better than boarding the steamer for home with his tail between his legs.
* * *
Full moon, the net glinting as they bring it in. Kit’s hands begin to burn after the first couple of yards. She looks to her boatpuller, whose alarm is beginning to register on his face. She was small the first time she felt the stingers’ fire. She tells Jimmy what her father told her then: “Jellyfish. It’ll pass.”
He shakes his head, digging with his pick to twist a salmon loose. With the next length of net, a fat, translucent jelly drops over the rollers to wobble on the boards. The net still wound in her fist, Kit hooks her pick on her belt and stoops for the bailing can. Scooping up the jellyfish, she slops it back overboard. It’s the first of several. Those that land out of her reach, Jimmy shovels her way with his boot.
With the catch aboard, Kit shifts to hang her swollen hands over the side. Jimmy shuffles the other way on the forward thwart, sweeping his hands in the sea. When the cold gets too much, they sit facing each other, hands in their laps. Moon-eyed salmon crowd around their boots, some still clenching, others reduced to a flutter about the gills.
“There’s time to make another set,” she says. “Reckon you can row?”
Jimmy flexes his fingers and nods.
As he hauls on the oars, Kit looks past him to the moon’s white road. Nothing so cold as that light, so clear. The night her father left for the war, it lay in a drift across her bed. She woke to hear him go. Out to the privy? Strange to need more than the pot at that hour. Maybe he just couldn’t sleep. Run out of drink, gone walking the night path to let himself into the store.
It had the feel of a lie even as she thought it. She lay listening for him until her breath betrayed her, deepening into sleep. The next sound was Bobbie crying. Kit should have known—the hour, yes, but also his step. It had been wrong somehow. Too soft for a man doing anything but slipping away.
* * *
It made sense for the three of us to take supper together once Far Cry emptied out. I would have been happy to eat at the cabin, but your mother preferred to come to me. To begin with, she made every day Sunday, carrying over her stew kettle and a loaf of bread. By mid-winter she was cooking at my stove.
With Frank gone, the two of you helped more than ever with the off-season upkeep. Bobbie and I were replacing a stretch of the cookhouse stairs when she caught her thumb with the hammer and cried out. White-faced and wincing, she brought her hand to her mouth.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
Lowering her hand, she held it to her chest. “I used to see him, you know, the first month or so after he left. But it would be a branch moving. One time it was the water bucket, just hanging there on its hook.” She examined her thumb. “That’s over now. My head knows, but the rest of me…” She looked at me, dry-eyed. “The other night I went into Kit’s room and sat there. You know, just to hear somebody breathe.”
I nodded. You will remember Skygge’s way of sighing in his sleep. Lys is quieter, but I can still reach down beside the bed and find her moving flank.
And what of me? Did Anders Viken, storekeeper, miss his friend? I did not realize how much until late May, when Far Cry began to come to life. The Knoxes were back, along with a few early-bird fishermen and the cannery’s set-up crew. The first time I heard the manager’s hard-heeled boots outside the cottage, I felt a gladness that caught me off guard.
Clearing the smile from my face, I opened to his knock. The winter had aged him—less flesh on his bones, more scalp showing through his hair. He had an armful of the cannery books, carrying them home. I used to wonder, did he leave all the tallying to Orpha, or did she only check over his work?
I had not thought to water down a bottle. Before long the whiskey loosened his tongue. He had had enough of Orpha’s brother lording over him at the family store. “Manager? Sonofabitch couldn’t manage his own asshole. Get him up here, see what running a real operation looks like.”
I cut the deck and pushed it toward him. “Your deal.”
“Got half a mind to move up here year-round.”
I looked up sharply.
“See how the little shit gets along then.” He worked a clumsy shuffle and tossed down two hands.
I took mine up and discarded. Knox peered at his hand until I tapped my two cards in the crib.
“Hold your horses, hold your horses.” His first card hovered partway to the crib. He snatched it back and chose another, along with the one beside it. Laid them face down on mine.
“And Mrs. Knox?” I said.
“What about her?”
I cut the deck again. “How would she fare up here in winter?”
“Yes, well.” He turned up the starter. “Who knows how long the poor girl will be with us.”
Sober, he never would have said it out loud. Still, he arranged his expression well enough—long-suffering, resigned. He played a card, then I did. Then he.
“I suppose none of us knows,” he added.
My card, his.
He grinned. “Thirty-one.”
Thirty-two, in fact. I let him have his point.
“You take Frank,” he said, gathering his cards back for the count. “What are the chances he’ll come through it all?”
He held his thin lips straight, but he could not quite dim the light in his eye. Of course, I had noticed him watching your mother—men did. Until that moment, though, I had failed to see how deep his interest ran.
* * *
—
The following day, I waited until the trickle of morning trade had subsided and you had taken Lys out for a row. Bobbie was passing a sieve through the flour barrel, looking for bugs. I let my broom bring me close.
I could not repeat what the manager had said. We had an understanding, your mother and I—we would never speak of Frank not coming home.
“You know Knox has his eye on you,” I said finally.
She looked round, the sieve in her hand, flour dusting the floor. “You think I can’t handle a mouse like him?”
“Are you certain that is all he is?”
“Mouse, rat, either way.” There was a hardness in her gaze, a glitter I had marked years before in the eye of her friend.
“All right,” I said, and I believe I thought it would be.
17
Kit’s war was made of stories. Tales overheard on the docks and in the store, articles her uncle would read aloud and those he wouldn’t. Sometimes Kit picked up a newspaper on her own. She was twelve, then she was thirteen, old enough to understand. “Casualties” meant both injured and dead. The dark-bordered lists broke down: Killed in Action. Presumed to Have Died. Her father wasn’t “in action,” so far as they knew. Still, she moved a finger down each column of names.
Died of Wounds. Wounded and Missing. Wounded and Gassed.
An army marched on its stomach—she’d read that in the World. All right, she couldn’t go out with the fleet, but fish-pitchers played their part, and a cannery couldn’t run without its store. She was helping. What more could she do?
The answer came through her mother, a message from the manager’s wife. Kit and Bobbie both—all good women and girls, in fact. They could knit.
Bobbie had long since given up dragging her along when she went to sit with Mrs. Knox. The parlour was as Kit remembered—close and dim. There was a fire in the grate, as though it was January and not June. Windows all round, casements fastened, curtains drawn. What was the point of living on the point?
Mrs. Knox took her role as teacher seriously. She sat on the chesterfield between them, a big-eyed bundle of twigs in a heavy shawl. On her lap, she held three sets of needles, three balls of dark-grey yarn. In, up, around and off—the veins stood up in her hands, as though the yarn were spooling through her too. Bobbie got the hang of it right off, but Kit struggled. Funny, given how good she was at mending nets.
Once they were under way, the manager’s wife gathered herself and walked carefully to her chair. The effort set her coughing, a raw, upsetting sound. Bobbie rose and went to stand behind her, rubbing her back. Catching Kit’s eye, she raised an eyebrow. The fuss.
In time, Mrs. Knox settled and returned to the balaclava she was knitting; a pile of them sat on the small table beside her, dark, flattened heads with holes where the men’s faces would go. Meantime, Bobbie worked on the tube of a sock. That left cholera belts for Kit. Apparently, if the men wrapped up their middles, their organs would remain sound. Each belt was to be six inches wide and as long as a soldier lying down. Kit couldn’t imagine finishing one, let alone the dozens Mrs. Knox had in mind.
The manager’s wife talked in breathy bursts. What if Mr. Knox should take it in his mind to enlist? Worse, what if conscription came and all the able-bodied men were called up? Kit felt her mother smile inside. Able-bodied? Knuckles Knox? Out loud, Bobbie offered assurances. He would never. He knew he was needed here.
Kit sank beneath their talk, like dunking your head with the gulls still crying above. Her father’s name called her back.
“And Mr. Starratt?” Mrs. Knox was saying. “Have you had any word?”
Bobbie kept her head down, needles ticking. “Still working at the hospital in Taplow so far as we know.”
“You’ll be glad of his pay.”
“Gladder to have him home.”
The manager’s wife left a pause. “We’ll have the Prohibition soon. That’s one good will come of all this.”
“You think so?” Bobbie said.
“Oh, yes, certainly.”
“I can’t see how it would last.”
“Why ever not?”
Bobbie glanced up. “People need a way out of themselves.”
Mrs. Knox pursed her lips. There came a stretch of no talk, only the negotiating needles, the rhythmic rat-squeak of their hostess’s breathing.
No matter what Kit did, her stitches tightened down. Bobbie showed her how to hold the yarn loosely, shake the tension out of her hands. Still, each row lay shrunken atop the last. Kit’s eyes began to smart. She was jamming her needle’s point into a constricted loop when she felt her mother’s gaze.
“Why don’t you go round to the woodshed, Kitty-cat. Split some wood for Mrs. Knox.”
“Oh, no,” said the manager’s wife. “Mr. Knox can send up one of the cannery lads.”
But Kit was already standing, dropping the sad inches of knitted belt.
“It’s all right,” Bobbie said. “She doesn’t mind.”
Kit took her leave before Mrs. Knox could speak again. Round back of the house, she stood for a moment, letting her eyes reach out to sea.
When she’d split and gathered a healthy stack, she filled the woodbox and let herself in through the kitchen door. Here too the fire was stoked up high—heat and the smell of something yeasty, though there was no sign of any rising dough.
Mrs. Knox’s voice reached her from across the hall. “He won’t touch me.”
Kit stood frozen, the box dragging at her arms.
“Oh, now,” Bobbie said.
“It’s true, not so much as a kiss.”
“He’s careful of your health, that’s all.”
“He thinks I’ll break.”
“Oh, Orpha—”
“He said so. He said it would snap me in two.”
Quiet then. Kit imagined her mother laying her needles aside.
“I’ll put the kettle on. You’ll feel better after a cup of tea.”
Kit was still standing there when Bobbie came in. She opened her mouth, but her mother shook her head, gesturing for Kit to set the woodbox down. “Go on,” Bobbie whispered, nodding toward the door.
* * *
You will remember the day your father’s first letter arrived. No word of apology for leaving the way he had, or if there was, your mother did not read that part aloud. They had us like fish in a hold on that damn train. By the time we got into Halifax every other bugger was burning up with the measles. Lucky boy Starratt already had it. Just about killed me when I was a sprog.
The shortness of the letter should have come as no surprise—when had you ever seen him write more than a handful of words? An item or two on the list for catalogue orders, notes on a sketch for a new shed. Rooster scratch, Bobbie called it, though she was never much of a writer herself. If you recall, I was the one who made sure we sent a letter out on every boat.
Two months passed before we heard from Frank again. By then he was overseas, posted to the Canadian Red Cross Hospital in Taplow, England. Tell Kit they got a cat in the kitchens here called Kit. A real mouser. Tell Andy I cleaned up at cribbage last night. A little about his days, his duties, his bunkmate—a fellow orderly who farted in his sleep. It seemed they spent most of the workday cleaning and carrying. No weight like a dead weight. At least those poor buggers are quiet.
Eventually, he wrote with the happy news of his posting to a hospital ship. About time too. I been telling them since I signed up the likes of Frank Starratt is wasted on land.
* * *
Mrs. Knox’s chest was bad. “She can hardly catch her breath, poor cow,” Kit’s mother reported one day in the store.
Uncle Anders made no reply, but it was as though Kit heard him nod. She was down the back, tidying after the weekend crowd.
“That new tonic they’ve got her on smells like tar,” Bobbie added.
Kit drew a toppled stack of overalls toward her; behind it on the shelf, the telltale rise of a mouse nest. She bent closer. No pups in this one, thankfully. Last time had been like finding four pinky fingers cut off and come to life. Unable to make herself step on them the way her father did, Kit had carried the nest out the side door and set it in the crook of a branch. Not a kindness—she didn’t kid herself. A meal for a raven or whatever got wind of them first.
“I told Knox I’d help with the books,” her mother was saying now.
Was there a shift in her uncle’s quiet?
“You needn’t look like that,” Bobbie said. “It’s only an hour or two in the mornings. Not on boat days, and I told him I couldn’t do weekends.”
Finally Uncle Anders spoke. “He is paying you?”
“Of course he’s paying me. What kind of a goose do you think I am?”
Kit sat back on her heels.
“Well then,” Uncle Anders said.
“Well then. All right then.” Bobbie gave a short laugh.
After a moment, Kit reached to close her cloth over the nest. Sweeping the pale jumble into the dustpan, she recognized threads of blue. Somewhere in a stack of work shirts, she would find the one the mouse had made its own.
* * *
—
The store had been busy for a mid-week morning. When noon came around with no sign of her mother, Kit went next door to the cottage to cut sandwiches for lunch. She made enough for three, but only Uncle Anders came to join her, Lys at his heels. When they were done, he rose and wrapped the last sandwich in a clean dishtowel.
“Take that down to her. He cannot keep her working with nothing to eat.”
The whole of Far Cry reeked during the season; even so, as Kit stepped into the cannery’s high gloom, she fought the urge to plug her nose. A few strides in, she felt herself break a sweat. Down the far end, light from the fish-ladder door streamed across the gut shed. It broke into colours where water splashed down from the overhead pipes. Ida Paul looked round from the washing table, and Kit found herself holding up the sandwich, part explanation, part wave. Ida nodded, or seemed to in the scattered light.
