Free The Fortunate Brother by Donna Morrissey Page B

gestured to the back of the house. “Coming down the path. Tree roots everywhere. Think I drove a tooth through my jaw. We should clean up that path—break a leg some night, coming down there.”
    She listened as he rambled. Sylvanus pulled off his boots, the smell of damp wool rising from them. He took off his coat and Kyle removed his, and they stood before her like naughty boyscaught sneaking home after a night’s shenanigans. Her face was pale, her hands, the skin on her throat—all pale, whitish, ethereal in the greyish light, as though she were already leaving them, fading beneath the folds of her clothes.
    “I’m telling you this, Sylvanus Now,” she said, her voice low yet fervent, “and you hear me good. If not for you drinking yourself to death and taking Kyle with you, I’d take no treatments. Rather live out my days with hair on my head and my eyes open than traipse about like the living dead on drugs. That’s the only reason I’ll take this treatment—to keep another of my boys from an early grave. But I won’t fight it alone. If you takes another drink, I’ll stop the treatment.”
    “Now, Addie.”
    “Don’t now Addie me. I’m doing this for you and Kyle and I wants something in return, I wants you off the booze, the both of ye. Do you promise me that?”
    She was speaking to them both but it was Sylvanus she was staring at. Waiting. For him to lift his eyes, show himself. His shame.
    Kyle tore past them and locked himself in the washroom. He twisted on the shower and stripped off his clothes. He stood in the hot steam and scrubbed his skin, scrubbing it clean, scrubbing it hard, trying to scrub out that knotted lump of upset inside his belly that couldn’t be touched, couldn’t be assuaged no matter how hard he scrubbed. Water. It could forge trenches through stone. It could wear skin to bone. But it couldn’t so much as fray that knot of nothing in his stomach.

FOUR

    H is father was sitting at the table by the window, drinking coffee, when he came out of the shower. Addie was laying a plate of beans and runny egg yolks before him and Kyle’s stomach curdled and he lunged for the door. Holding on to the grump, he spewed into the water, his ribs spearing through his side like knives. He looked up, seeing two men in a boat paddling offshore from the outcropping of rock and cliff that blocked his view of Hampden. Hooker’s father, Bill, and his grandfather. They were standing now, tensed, looking ashore towards the rock face. Their voices grew louder, alarmed. Bill grabbed the oars and, still standing, rowed furiously towards the cliff, vanishing behind the outcropping.
    Kyle heard his mother coming to the door, calling him, but he eased himself down over the wharf onto the beach and trekked across the shoreline towards the outcropping. As much to escape her attentions as to satisfy his curiosity.
    During high tide the only way around the outcropping was by boat. This morning the tide was out. He climbed across wet rock made more slippery by tide-abandoned kelp. He’d been climbing around here since he was a kid, shortcutting it to Hampden. Thefront of the outcropping spanned a few hundred feet of rugged rock face, a small inlet forged into its centre. Hooker’s grandfather was holding the boat steady near a clutch of rocks before the inlet. Bill was out of the boat and hunched over, looking down at something amongst the rocks, his face scrunched up as though tasting something nasty. Straddling the rocks opposite Bill was Clar’s dog, whining and pawing at the head of a large pool of water left over by the tide. Something greenish was floating in it.
    “What’s going on?” called Kyle. No one looked at him. He came closer and then went down on one knee, his breath sticking in his throat. Clar Gillard. Half submerged. Flat on his back, arms and legs strewn out as though he were basking in sun-warmed waters. Blue jeans suctioned like skin to his legs. Greeny brown seaweed shifting with