was bent over, holding on to her guitar and feeding the fire with bits of sticks and driftwood. Her greyish white hair fluffed out from beneath a toque and braided down her back. There were always half a dozen bodies lodged about, drinking beer, having a smoke, but only Kate yet this evening. Kyle sat on a white-boned log. He started jiggling his foot. To keep himself from standing back up and running off again, he clamped his attention onto Kate more tightly than the capo clamping the neck of her guitar.
“Skyless night, Kyle.” She pushed back her toque and the greyish fringes of her hair faded into the fire-softened fog crowding around her and she looked to be sitting in the maw of some white god. She reached behind her for a six-pack and shoved it towards him.
He popped a can of beer and guzzled it near dry. She lowered the capo onto a different fret and tested the higher pitch of the strings and he leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees, foot jiggling so hard his body shook.
“Got me a new song.”
He belched and spat into the fire and watched it sizzle into nothing and turned back to Kate, watching as she put a pick between her lips, twisted the keys, plinged on a string, twist twist, pling pling. She looked to be fifty with her shroud of hair, or perhaps forty when the sun shone through her wire-framed glasses and into her kelp-green eyes. She was from away and came one day about a year ago with a trailer hitched to a truck and bought Seymour Ford’s old cabin just to the other side of the gravel flat. She was from Corner Brook, she said, an hour’s drive west, and she said her name was Kate Mackenzie and that she wanted to live by the sea. She said no more and bore with a smile the gossip shadowing her step to the store or the post office or the beach. And she didn’t go anywhere else. Except for out-of-town excursions that sometimes lasted for days. Visiting family, he supposed. Didn’t matter. That’s what he liked about Kate—that he could just be himself sitting with her, for she wasn’t connected to nothing or nobody he knew and was never moaning or groaning and wore only the song she was figuring on her face. And she was always figuring a song. Had boxes of half-written songs. Turning days into words, Kyle.
“Cover me,” she now sang, fire dancing on her glasses. “Cover me, I feel so cold. You feeling cold, Kyle?”
He shook his head, leaning over his knees and staring at the fire, foot jiggling.
“A blanket of stars in the midnight sky, Shimmering love streams from dark tear-stained eyes, Cover me.”
He closed his eyes, her voice crooning around him like a lullaby, and he wanted to curl beneath the tuck of the log and sleep.
“Cover me, I feel so cold, Cover me, am so alone . .”
He finished the beer in three long swallows and popped another, the fizz from the trapped air a comfort sound to his ears. Kate faded from her song, looked at him. An expectancy tensing her face. She often did that and always turned away whenever he queried the look. She turned away now. She tightened a string and loosened another one and then looked up as muffled footsteps sounded on silted rock. Clar Gillard’s hulking shoulders appeared through the fog, his rounded features softening into a smile. His black Lab trotted from behind, tail wagging and nose to the ground, sniffing the rocks, sniffing at Kyle’s feet, sniffing at Kate’s, his eyes glowing like sparks in the firelight.
Kyle stared at Clar in silence.
“Evening,” said Kate. She took a silver flask from the folds of her coat as Clar sat at the far end of the log. She unscrewed the cap and passed it to him. He grasped it with hands big as mitts and took a nip. Then he passed it back, his face squeezing up.
“You ever put mix in that?” he asked in a slow drawl.
“Breakfast time I puts a little juice in there.”
Clar took a beer from a weight-sagged pocket and looked through the quivering heat of the fire at Kyle. “Want one?” He offered the beer with an uncertain smile.
Kyle shook his head, wondering at that uncertain smile. Like a youngster’s after toddling too far from the doorplace and wondering if he should go farther. It was a nice smile. And nice crinkling eyes. Hard to think someone with nice smiling eyes would trample graves and spray his wife with oven cleaner.
Kate strummed into the silence and the dog trotted over to Clar, staring up at him, ears pricked. He barked, tail wagging. Nipping his beer between his knees, Clar leaned forward and cupped the dog’s smooth, shiny head with both hands and ruffled its ears with his thumbs. The dog wagged its tail faster and Clar blew a short puff of air into its black leathery nostrils. The dog snuffled and licked its chops. Clar blew another puff into the shiny black snout and the dog whined. It tried to twist away. Clar gripped its jaws, holding it closer. “What’s you going to do now eh, what’s you going to do,” he crooned and blew long and easy into the dog’s nostrils, gripping tighter to its struggling head. The dog’s haunches went rigid, its nails grappled onto rocks. Clar kept blowing. Kyle got to his feet.
“Let the fucker go, asshole!”
Clar grinned up at him, the dog’s head still cupped between his hands, his thumbs caressing its jaws.
“Need to get yourself a set of bagpipes, Clar,” said Kate.
“Or a fucking balloon,” said Kyle. He sat back down.
Clar rubbed down the Lab’s quivering haunches. “Go. Get,” he said, smacking the dog’s rump. The dog skittered through the fog, tail folded between its hind legs. Clar stood up and drained his beer, weaving a bit—first sign to Kyle that he was drunk—then hove the bottle towards the sea. He dramatically lifted a finger for silence, then smiled when he heard the plash. “G’nite,” he said and sifted into the fog after his dog.
“Somebody should shoot that sonofabitch.”
“Just another poor boy, Ky.”
“He’s a prick.”
“Flouting his poverty.”
“How the fuck’s that, Kate. He’s got everything.”
“But his father’s heart.”
Jaysus. “You makes everything sound like a song.”
“That’s what we are. Love songs gone wrong.”
“Yeah. Well. Someone should capo the crap outta that one. Arse.” He got to his feet, dropped a buddy pat on Kate’s shoulder, and headed off.
Their room door was ajar when he went inside the house. A dim light peered through the crack from a night lamp his mother read under before sleeping. Most nights he crept past their door and dove beneath his blankets to muffle their voices as they oftentimes bickered with each other. In the mornings he was always astonished to find them tucked into each other like a skein of wool. This evening he peered through their half-opened doorway and his father’s head was on his mother’s bosom as though he were already asleep and she was cradling him, one of her hands holding on to his as though she were frightened of wandering lost through her dreams. She was gazing at a framed picture of Sylvie and Chris and himself on her wall and he knew it was Chris she was gazing at. His eyes, so earthy brown and eager. His smile wide and open. His cropped blond hair. The golden boy, long before death took him. Framed and hanging beside the picture was a pencilled drawing Chris had done of their father sitting in a boat on moon-rippled water. Or, and Kyle could never tell, perhaps it was Chris himself, looking expectantly towards the stars.
Did you know you’d soon be amongst them?
“Did you close the door, Kyle?” his mother asked in a half-whisper.
He nodded, knowing she’d heard and was just wanting something to say.
“Now, don’t go worrying,” she said.
“I won’t.” He bumbled to his room and into his bed and across his pillow and the silence without their arguing resounded through his head and he stared like a hawk into the dark.