The Fortunate Brother Read Free Page A

supper as she usually was at this time, but sitting quiet in Gran’s rocker. She was leaning towards the woodstove, her head bowed before its hot orange flames licking at the glass door. Thinking about Gran, hefigured, and stepped softly towards her. He often sat there himself, thinking about Gran who’d drifted from them as quiet as a puff of smoke up the chimney a year following Chris’s passing. It was nice, after the horror of Chris’s stark white face, to see Gran’s all sweet and peaceful on a lacy pillow.
    “How’s she going, Mom.”
    Addie startled onto her feet like a snuck-upon lynx and scampered into the kitchen.
    “Where’s your father?” she asked, hauling down the plates for supper.
    “The shed. Fixing his rod. What’s wrong?”
    “Supper’s soon ready.” She took down the cups, chinking them in their saucers, her back to him.
    “Mom?”
    She stopped and looked at him and his heart jolted. Her eyes, always frightfully blue, were darkened and wide with—with what?
    She raised a hand to touch him and he stepped back, then bolted to the washroom. He skimmed off his clothes and stepped into the shower, turning on the faucet and holding up his face to a spray of hot water. The last time he’d seen her face shrouded with such sorrow was when she stepped off the plane from helping Sylvie bring Chris home. From straight across the tarmac as he stood inside the airport watching her through the thick panes of glass he had seen her sorrow. Seen it in the way she kept her chin erect. In the way her eyes had determinedly sought his through the crowd gathering around and watching alongside of him. And he’d been surprised by such sorrow, for he’d expected to see in her eyes the keener suffering of grief instead. Three babies buried from the womb: she knew grief. Knew its dark and twisted path all fraught with madness and hate and fear and its narrowed arteries choking with self-blame. And perhaps shehadn’t the strength to walk through it again. Or, as he’d seen when she reached back through the doorway of the plane that day and helped Sylvie’s shocked-bent body through the narrow cylinder, perhaps her knowing disallowed another indulgent walk. Perhaps she’d learned how hope eventually creeps through darkness, making inroads through to an easier tomorrow. And that was her task then, to bear her grief with a hope that might shelter him and Sylvie through the coming days. And she had. Cradled and carried them as much as they would allow her. Oftentimes this past year, despite Sylvanus’s drinking, hope continued to grow in her eyes and he’d been turning to it more and more, hoping to offset the grey clouding his.
    Water sluiced down his back, scrubbing the day’s dirt off his skin. It caressed the smooth humps of his buttocks and streamed down the backs of his legs and plashed around his feet before suckling itself down the drain. He kept his face to the jettisoning spray of the nozzle and felt its heat flush open his pores and he flattened his hands against the shower stall as though keeping his insides from being flushed out and sucked down the drain along with the water. He had bolted from her that day at the airport, too. Bolted out onto the highway and thumbed a ride with a trucker who left him sitting in silence, staring out the side window. At Hampden Junction he climbed out of the truck with a grateful nod and started running the ten miles home, jumping into the ditch and cowering whenever he heard a car coming because he didn’t want anyone seeing him, didn’t want to talk, didn’t know what to say or do since that one ring of the phone had altered his being and it felt like somebody else was running in his shoes. When he got home, the house was swarming with aunts and uncles and cousins and friends who’d been coming and going since the news swept through the outport like a squall of wind.Young Chris was killed. Killed on the oil rigs in Alberta. An accident, a bad accident.
    Cut