Free Downhill Chance by Donna Morrissey Page A

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