Something Cankerous Must Come Out
by Lindsay Preston
(3rd Place winner, Fiction, Confederation 50 Literary Competition, and published by TickleAce Magazine, Issue #37)
Nadine's father, spotlighted in a sunbeam on the cream-coloured veranda, welcoming her with open arms, turns out to be a dream in the back seat of Glover's shabby taxi cab. A waft of vinyl tainted by cigarette smoke passes her nostrils. She wipes sleep from her eyes, peers out the chalky window over the guardrails on Gambo Hill, a glimpse of the houses below drawing her fingernails to her teeth. But she has already chewed them to the painful quick. She rubs them on the lap of her forest green slacks. Tugs outward on the front of her loose-fitting, zip-up jacket - another nervous habit born since the invitation back to Newfoundland. When Alex Moss, Gambo mayor, phoned her Scarborough apartment two months ago, asking her to read from her work at her hometown's Soiree 99 celebrations, she was elated. But that was before the big secret.
At least you'll be forced into revealing it, she attempts to comfort herself, as birch, apse, spruce, and the faint reflection of her long, brunette hair and her chubby face in the side window fade into the distant boulders protruding the waters of Gambo River. She intended to share the secret to Mom during their telephone conversation yesterday morning. But the words held fast to her tongue, stubborn as her current bout of writer's block.
Beyond the boulders, the abandoned railway tracks appear where they cross the river, but are snatched away by another roadside grove, then a clearing, and a landmark that wasn't quite finished when she took off three years ago. A monument - huge black and white side view of former premier Joseph R. Smallwood's head overlooking the community. Below the head are the words, Joey's Lookout.
"Does your father still love Joey?" Martin Glover, the driver, asks, chuckling.
Nadine's vision flicks to the streak of blood and shaving cream dried on his bumpy neck, the white wiry hair surrounding his shiny bald top.
"More than ever," she replies to the mischievous eyes in the rearview mirror, wondering how a man in his seventies still qualifies for a taxi license.
Turning to observe the passing monument, she pictures her father - without knee brace and cane - stood next to it on a stool, chainsaw slicing Smallwood's throat. She recalls the intense arguments over the first premier's intentions for convincing Newfoundlanders to join Canada.
"Payoff," her father blurting inside her head, fire in his narrow, hazel eyes. "Money in Joey's pocket."
Martin's voice plucks her back to the present. "Your father and a few others tried to form a separatist party once."
"Yes." She lowers her head to conceal embarrassment. Site of the ashtray stuffed with butts overturns the chocolate and caramel in her stomach, smell of ashes stinging the edges of her tongue. She shoves the tray shut. "That was before I was born, so I don't know much about it."
Being a history buff, she knew everything about it. Her father and Lester Humby, a Liberal Party reject back in the late sixties, trekking door to door mustering support by keying on Joey's blunders, on the surplus Newfoundland briefly enjoyed under Commission of Government during World War II. Lester Humby mixing in his claims of the premier pocketing money from Canada and the Brits.
In school, she studied a different Smallwood. A man packed with fight for the things he believed in. But people were obsessed with his mistakes - and Nadine, at age fifteen, decided to take a stand. She helped form a club at school, Youth for Heritage, a group that wrote and performed plays, presented speak offs to increase Gambo's and the surrounding communities' awareness of the aspirations of not only Smallwood, but even his rivals. She credits her experience with Youth for Heritage for inspiring her two history books: one about Newfoundland before and after confederation, the other about Joseph R. Smallwood.
Dad was furious. His daughter promoting Joey, when the whole community still talked and sang the legend of Nathan Goulding, from his separatist campaign in the sixties right back to the sawmill wars between his grandfather and the Smallwoods of the early 1900s.
The car swerves right unto a ramp, gradually slows, stops, swings left. She gazes down from the overpass, a transport with North American Van Lines written on the side whizzing by with a whine. She considers the distant possibility of Jesse, three time ex, behind the wheel, traveling eastern Canada and the United States with his long black hair, his gypsy headbands, his restless heart.
Nadine waited to share her secret with him until the night before his return to his trucking job, figuring he would need the two weeks alone in the cab of a transport to digest it. She knew he would freak -
"You said you would make sure this would never happen," he yelled, steel-nose boots pacing the floor. Always pacing. Even when he sat, the toe of his right boot would knock the other as if to prevent it from settling.
That night, he paced himself to his truck - took off eight hours early.
No doubt, Dad will freak too, though being a crippled home body, he'll stick around, rub it in with stern looks and coarse words.
Mom's a different story, she thinks, taxi negotiating the long left turn towards the end of the ramp and a huge yellow sign with black silhouette welcoming everyone to Gambo and the Kittiwake Coast. Mom, the harmonizer. Glue of the family. Nadine wishes she possessed more of her mother's personality; but her father's stubbornness is a demon in her cells.
They pass the old beige two-story where many believe Smallwood was born before the house was hauled from nearby Mint Brook. Then the next house, an A-frame bungalow where she spent several years of her childhood. But she is unsuccessful at pulling memories from there, only stories told by Mom of Dad fussing with the neighbours, finally moving down the road because he couldn't stand seeing Joey's birthplace every time he set foot outside.
Nadine smiles at that. A smile that holds half way through Gambo, but fades quickly when she spots to her right the empty cream-coloured veranda.
Tension returns. Always tension. Especially during the teen years, trudging towards that house after school, her father's harsh voice through an open window, the gnaw in her gut.
A blue minivan with a loud speaker on top approaches, but the announcements of her public reading and tonight's fireworks drift in the opposite direction as the taxi slows, the tick of its signal light in her head, Goulding Family burned on a plaque hanging slanted from the veranda.
The car stops. Union Jack flying high in the centre of the lawn, pine trees around it like guards.
"You just go on in," Martin says, "I'll take care of your bags."
Grabbing her shoulder bag off the torn vinyl seat, she squirms out of the car, her mother's silhouette pausing in the window, shooting away. Seconds later, the front door opens. Her mother steps unto the veranda, wearing a pale blue apron around a light green dress with blossoms of buttercups. Nadine is startled by the invasion of grey in her mother's hair, stretching her several years beyond her forty-eight. Wiping her hands in her apron, she smiles, strolls towards Nadine, squinting as she steps into the path between two rows of round white-painted rocks. Sunlight shifts over her face, the new cracks near the corners of her blue eyes.
Women in my family tree are cursed, Nadine is convinced. Her grandmother too (on her father's side) lived a tough life, left alone when her French, wartime husband snuck back to France without her. Never touched a man again. Nadine's mother - though her man stayed - didn't fare much better. And to suck the infected gene into the next generation, Nadine, bar hopping in downtown Toronto to celebrate the release of her second book, gets drunk, meets poet and trucker Jesse Fry.
Shits of a poet at that, she thinks, as her mother's fat arms reach. Their grip is strong around Nadine's neck, that familiar waft of sweat from a woman who can never quit house cleaning. Feeling her mother's hard chapped lips on her cheek, she returns the kiss, a peck on the chin.
"After gaining a bit of weight, arn't ya'?" Mom says, looking her over.
Nadine glances at herself, fingers pinching her jacket, pulling outward. She is drawn to her mother's eyes, memories of how they would sometimes drift from their glimmer into a dull far-away look, as though she kept at bay something that deeply troubled her.
Nadine touches the hair.
"I'm getting old," her mother grins, "but who's getting young, eh Martin?"
The trunk slams, and Martin - cigarette dangling from one corner, smoke shooting from the other - picks up a burgundy suitcase in each hand, tail of his Soiree 99 t-shirt sticking out like a tired tongue. "Body gets old, but the spirit stays young. Either that or die, with the government cutbacks."
Nadine remembers the fare. "Oh," she says, unzipping her shoulder bag.
Her mother taps Nadine's wrist. "It's already seen to."
"You shouldn't have, I'll give it back - "
"No you won't. Last thing your father said was not take any money from ya'."
Mention of her father swings her gaze to the open door. She feels her mother's hand gently rubbing her back. "He's having a terrible time with the knee - own fault though. Wouldn't listen to the doctor, so he's paying for it now." She raises her voice to Martin. "You can put the bags in the porch."
Mother's hand still light against her back, Nadine moves unto the veranda and into the porch, a flowery scent brushing her nostrils. She looks to the window, the Wizard air freshener on the sill. Figuring the sign that always hung above the kitchen door still had to be there, she checks anyway; a slice from a huge pine, varnished and burned with the words, Come near to your peril, Canadian Wolf - Charles Fox Bennett, 1869.
Shaking her head, she drops the shoulder bag, removes her sneakers, steps unto the cool, diamond-pattern canvas in the kitchen. She takes a few seconds to look around. Her palm clamps her mouth; beyond the seashell wind chimes that dangle in front of the corner shelf on the top cupboards, her grade eight photo.
"That's been there ever since ya' left," her mother's voice behind her. "Your father stuck it up there after it fell out of the album."
"My worst picture," Nadine mutters, gazing through the archway, down the hall towards the livingroom.
"He missed ya' like crazy, you know, even though he wouldn't admit it. We both missed ya'."
"Missed you guys too." Nadine lays her arm lightly around her mother's shoulder. "Dad that bad he can't walk?"
"Walks until he's in too much pain to go any further. Come on."
She clutches Nadine's bicep, a movement that brings back her escape three years ago. Her mother's hand gripping her then - so hard it hurt, impressing on Nadine how worried she would be about her daughter, begging her to wait a few more minutes to see if Dad was coming for the good-bye. But he remained in the shed in the backyard. Nadine rushing out there for a quick peck on the cheek. Nearly missed the plane.
"Dad's a bit better with hellos," Mother says, leading her to the livingroom.
Her father is lying on a black and dusty-rose couch, left leg raised on a bulky pillow that hangs over the sides of an upside down Central Dairies milk crate. His brown, wooden cane lodged on the floor, parallel to the couch. He rubs the top of his head, fingers creasing his thick black and grey hair, Nadine recalling the many times he bragged to visitors how the massage keeps him from going bald like his "supposedly" younger brothers. Turning, he regards Nadine with raised eyebrows. "Well. For a while I thought you weren't coming any further than the kitchen."
"I've only been here a minute, Dad," she reminds, her aching feet welcoming the livingroom carpet.
His hand leaves the top of his head, darts to his collar bone, fingers disappearing in a rubbing motion beneath the shoulder of his plain grey t-shirt.
"You've picked up a few pounds," Nadine says, nodding towards the bulge of his belly.
He surveys her head to toe. "You look rather fat yourself."
"Nathan!" her mother reprimands. "Give your father a kiss, maid, and perhaps he'll be nicer to ya'. And for goodness sakes, take that big coat off."
When Nadine approaches, he tilts his head so the corner of his mouth is against her face, returning her light kiss. She gives him a gentle hug, smells Irish Spring and fresh cologne.
Her mother picks up The Newfoundland Herald off the coffee table, strolls to the end of the couch, sits on the matching recliner, flips the pages. "The Write On column mentions you a couple times."
"Yes," her father cuts in. "Tell me about the new book - not another one of them Kiss- Smallwood's-Ass books, is it?"
"No." Nadine digs for a smile, determines not to allow her father to ruin her trip. She sits on the coffee table, shoves her hair out of her eyes, tucks a lock behind her ear. "Something different this time ... thought I'd try my pen at fiction ... a novel."
His eyebrows twitch, head jerking back. "Novel? Make sure it ruffles a few feathers - like that Wayne Johnston book, Colony of ... I can't remember the title ...."
"Unrequited Dreams," her mother finishes.
"Yes, unrequited dreams ... and that's just what this island is full of, unrequited dreams."
"Actually, it's about a young woman's sour relationship with her mother."
"What?" her mother says, laughing. "You mean you're going to expose our rough relationship?" She holds up the Herald to reveal the black and white picture of Nadine.
"What she really means is her trouble with her father," Dad accuses, rubbing his knee, black pants sliding up, unveiling thick hair, the base of the brace on his white leg.
"No, Dad."
"Sure you do. That's writers. No such thing as fiction. Just change the names, the places, change the details a bit to avoid law suits."
"So what happens - is there going to be a happy ending?" her mother asks, leaning forward with exaggerated interest.
Nadine shrugs. "That's where writer's block kicked in." She pauses. Catches sight of her highschool graduation photo on the old floor model stereo by the picture window. "Maybe something happens that forces them to work with each other. Like a pregnancy."
Nadine's heartbeat quickens. Her fingers float to her lips, stalling, the short jagged nails, pink quick blurring. "You know ... abandoned girl, pregnant - who else is going to help raise a child if she can't count on her parents?"
Cool sweat dampens her forehead. In the corner of her eye, her father's glare. His voice sharp: "You're not thinking about getting pregnant before getting married?"
Nadine is about to blurt her news before flashes of heat force her coat off, her bloated gut blabbing the tale. But the words on the tip of her tongue are seized by a stirring in her belly, flutters like bubbles multiplying, shifting and rising, these new intriguing movements coaxing her concentration.
Her mother's voice pulls her back, but she hooks only the last three words: "... you smiling about?"
Nadine suddenly realizes her hand is padding her stomach inside the coat. She jerks it out like a child caught at a cookie jar. Sensing the flush of her face, she contorts the expression of delight to discomfort. She looks to her father.
The flutter again, warming her outward from the spine. Smile reclaiming her lips. Both parents staring now, father's eyebrows raised. Words like "pregnant" and "baby" dancing with her tongue, Nadine unable to harness the phrases, unable to curve her mother's eyes from drifting to the baggy coat's belly.
Unzipping, she grabs her father's hand, draws it towards her stomach, discerning its shake as her own.
Distant loud speakers: " ... the reading, the fireworks ..."
Her father's palm on her belly ...
"Loud, beautiful fireworks," voice in the speaker like a dream, Nadine holding the back of her father's hand, pressing, hoping his palm would find the flutter.
Mom's eyes widen. Her mouth falls open. Dad's hand suddenly plucked away.
"Oh my god," Mom declares.
The Newfoundland Herald lands like a shot off wing on the end table.
Her father: "You're not ..."
She looks nervously at him, the gulp that contracts the bone of his throat. She nods.
"That truck driver? That Jesse guy?" her mother asks.
Nadine nods again, her father's face like someone caught off guard with a slap. His lips part. He grabs his daughter's hand. Rubs her fingers. His bewildered expression softening, Nadine remembering the dream, her father in a golden glow on the veranda, open arms, grin bracketing the corners of his mouth, Nadine now leaning over the coffee table's edge, desiring to give him the biggest hug he has ever received. But he drops her hand.
"No rings." Disappointment sags his face. "You're not even engaged."
"Jesse's got a good job. They'll be getting married, Nathan," her mother assures. "Won't you dear?"
Nadine nearly says yes, but her hand to her lips kills the lie.
The couch creaks, milk crate tipping, Dad adjusting it with a painful grunt. "There isn't going to be any wedding, is there?" he asks, grimace still set in his face.
The baby stirs. Nadine grabs her father's hand, returns it to her stomach. "If it's a boy, I'm calling him Nathan."
Her father cocks his head, appears to seek movement from the fetus, but then he pulls away. "You've known for some time. Hiding it with a baggy coat. Why'd you keep it a secret? Why?"
Outside, tires screech, male voice cursing. Nadine shrugs. "Isn't it obvious how you'd react?"
He favours his knee. Glares at his wife. "Last thing this house needs ..." He pauses, face shadowed red as he repeats. "Last thing we need ... is another secret."
Her mother barks his name, frightened cast washing over her pallid cheeks.
"What do you mean, another secret?" Nadine asks, taken by the change in her mother's wide eyes.
Her father, holding his wife's stare, gropes for his cane, brings it up hard against the palm of his hand, twisting the grey rubber tip as though something cankerous must come out of the varnished wood.
Nadine pierces the thick air with the same question.
"Might as well tell it, Lucy. Go on. Tell her."
Her mother shakes her head.
"Tell me what?"
Her father swallows. "Why you don't ... "
"Don't what?"
"Nathan!"
He turns to Nadine, eyes watery. "Why you don't look like me."
"No!" Mom shrieks, hands grabbing her fearful face. "It's not true. Your father can't accept that it's not true."
Nadine licks lips that have suddenly dried. "What's not true?"
Her father's face is stone, those narrow eyes intent on not blinking. He points the tip of the cane. "Nadine. You don't even look like me, not one feature."
The room sways, flower designs on the wallpaper beginning to spin, Nadine's stomach sending acid to her chest, taxi's ashtray returning to the sides of her tongue.
"In fact, you have some of Alex Moss' features. It's true, you do. Tell her Lucy. Tell her."
"Please stop, Nathan, please ..."
Nadine's eyes flick back to her framed graduation photo. True. No resemblance. All her features, from the short, chubby look to the thin eyebrows, the thin lips - everything resembles her mother.
So what? She reasons. Lots of people bare the likeness of only one parent.
But the possibility charges her. She stands, room dipping, her hands seeking to balance, Mom begging her to sit, Nadine staggering out of the livingroom, one hand cupped to her quivering mouth, the other guiding her through the kitchen, into the porch, unto the veranda. Heat swarms. Tearing the coat off, she gazes left, right, catches the sharp eye of the puffin face on the huge Soiree 99 sign across the road. She grabs the rail, lodges her coat there.
"Not one feature ..." her father's voice causing her to whip around. But it is her mother standing in the doorway, tears streaming, fingers twisting the apron into a ball.
"Let me explain, Nadine," she pleads, stepping out.
Nadine retreats. Back away, her mind whispers, back away, fall, bump your head, wake up.
"Nothing happened between me and Alex Moss. I used to go out with him before I started seeing your father." She glances up the road, down. "This is not a good place, come inside."
Nadine backs up another step. Her mother easing towards her, dropping the balled apron, anxiously palming the wrinkles in the cloth.
"Sara Humby, Lester's sister ... that's who started the rumor. Lied right through her teeth; said she saw me and Alex together by the old saw mill ruins, but she had her eyes on your father right from the start ... when your father got tangled up with her brother in that separatist campaign - I wish to God he never ever met Lester Humby."
She glances up and down the road. Nadine's eyes stumble in the same direction. Two teenagers: a boy in slouchy coveralls over a scrawny bare chest, and a girl in yellow alter and shorts that are too small, hand in hand, strolling, slowing, staring, girl whispering in the guy's ear. Nadine looks to her mother. Then away, detached, as though a tranquilizer has been injected. This woman she has admired all her life, this woman now begging like someone merely dressed up as her mother.
"Come inside. Your father don't believe me. I need you to believe me, Nadine. Don't ya' believe me?"
Nadine desires to believe. Her mother wouldn't lie. Not about this.
Her foot finds the edge of the veranda. She leans against the guardrail, sucks a deep breath, releases. "This is all too much ... too sudden ... the baby, Jesse taking off ... and now this."
Her mother stops. "Jesse left you again? Good God, and you pregnant. Does he know?"
She nods.
Her mother pulls the apron to her own face, wipes the tears. "That miserable goat. He's worse than a goat. A goat wouldn't leave its own kid." She is near enough to lay a hand on Nadine's stomach, caressing around the navel. "But never mind Jesse. Never mind anything. This is the most important."
Nadine lodges her hand next to her mother's.
"I'm so sorry, Nadine. So, so sorry." She squeezes Nadine's hand into a fist in both her palms, raises it to her lips, kisses the fingers tenderly twice. "Enough going on in your life without this - but I swear on my grave, the stuff about me and Alex isn't true. You believe me don't ya'?"
The desperate plea in her mother's eyes seems to expand her face. "Yes," Nadine says, deliberately firm, nodding. "Yes, of coarse." She feels her expression drop. "Why won't Dad believe you?"
She glances to the house, looks back at Nadine, shrugs. "I don't know - he does sometimes, but ... no self confidence a lot of it. Ever since that separatist thing - he got really embarrassed in front of a lot of people ... and it was in all the papers and on television."
"That was thirty years ago."
She shakes her head. "Thirty years whips by like three when you're looking back at them. You remember that ... when you're raising that child."
Glancing towards the house again, she releases her daughter's hand. "He'll come around eventually - about the baby I mean." She turns to Nadine. "He's mellowed a bit you know; he puts up a big front so you won't see it."
"He'll come around," Nadine says, deeply doubting it.
The panic on her mother's face settles. She squeezes and pats Nadine's shoulder, dabs the hem of the apron over her face. "You need to come in and sit down. Have something to eat. Feed Nathan." She nods towards the bulge, manages a smile.
Nadine is suddenly distracted by a silhouette in the window. When she gazes that way, the image jerks out of view. "You go on in," she tells her mother. "Give me a minute."
They hug, her mother kissing each cheek, leaning her lower body away, but squeezing Nadine's neck hard enough to hurt. "Don't be too long." Turning, glancing up and down the road, she trudges back into the house.
Nadine stares into the dark shade of the window. Then the open door. Spotting movement in the archway between the porch and the kitchen, she squints. But knowing her father isn't coming out, she turns, pads down the steps in her stocking feet, unto the brittle lawn. She glances back at the empty doorway once more before strolling around the side of the house into the scent of salt ocean, and the sun's glare on Freshwater Bay.
A lone gull paces on a rock that juts twenty yards from shore where the tide has receded. The gull looks around, cries twice, takes flight. Leaning against the corner, she watches it circle wide directly above the rock.
A distant horn makes her wonder what highway Jesse roams now. Eventually he'll show up at her door. Why is it always eventually with men? This time she'll say, "Strike three, you're out," and slam the door in his face.
The gull cries, wings flapping quick short spurts as it descends. Nadine finds herself wondering if the man in the house really is her father, doubt like a tapeworm already nibbling the place that holds so tightly now all she took for granted. Only two things she's certain of as the gull's feet return to the rock: her novel is out of its slump ... and if it's a boy, his name is Joey.
Closing her eyes to an orange sheen of sun, she says the name out loud, her arms around her belly seeking the flutter.