What They Wanted by Donna Morrissey

the week’s out, watch and see if you’re not,” she called out as the door closed behind him. “Kyle, you lighting the lamp for Gran?”
    Kyle struck a match to the wick. His face was pale despite the buttery glaze of light flaring through the chimney. Raising the wick, he placed the lamp on the table and sat beside Gran.
    “What were you doing, you and Chris,” I asked, “when Dad took sick—what were ye both doing?”
    He shrugged, his face glum.
    “Oh, come on—you were doing something.”
    “Nothing. We were doing nothing.”
    “Nothing!”
    “Drawing. Chris was drawing. On pieces of birch rind.” He shrugged again, his eyes, big and blue like Mother’s, flickering around the room. “Dad!”he said accusingly. “He was supposed to call out when he was ready. We didn’t know he was leaving.”
    “No, he didn’t call out,” said Gran. “I would’ve heard him if he had.”
    “Chris was ready—all dressed to go,” said Kyle. “Never heard him call is all.”
    “Because he never, I tell you,” said Gran. “I would’ve heard him if he had. Blaming himself now, is that what Chris is doing?”She looked crossly at the door. “Go after him, Kyle— tell him to come in from the cold, and make sure he ties on his father’s boat—I don’t like that wind this evening.” She peered across the table through the window. The night beyond was charred black by heavy cloud, the wind hitting stiff against the pane. “Loosen up the pack, keeps blowing like this.”
    My stomach tensed at Gran’s words. Last thing Chris needed in the morning was loose pack ice with its trenches and leads and slush holes that could swallow a man more quickly than a swamp hole. I looked at Kyle. He was chewing the side of his thumbnail, foot jiggling, as he stared out the window.
    He knew. He knew what Chris was doing. “Hey.” I kicked his foot and forced a smile. “Pour Gran more tea. I’ll go get Chris.”
    I let myself outside, the wind, dampish and with a touch of warmth, swaddling my face. A southerly. It had turned. I looked over the wharf onto the ice, greyish beneath the thick night sky, and to where Chris was standing, a dark shape against the darker, larger shape of the boat. I knelt beside a grump on the wharf and watched as he rifled through the bundles of clothing and gear he’d stored in the boat earlier that day. The ice was heaving fretfully beneath him and crunching against the wharf. Keeping hold of the gunnels for balance, he lifted a length of rope that was ringed through the bow and tossed the looped end up onto the wharf where I sat.
    I fingered the cold, soggy thing resignedly. There was no arguing. The set look on his face, the determined manner in which he moved about the gear, the gun, the shells already stowed in the cuddy—it did away with any protests I might’ve made. And aside from Mother and Father and Gran—and perhaps Kyle, too—there wasn’t a soul in the whole of White Bay that wouldn’t have him doing this very thing at such a time. Helping his father. In fact, they’d be more surprised— perhaps accusing—if he didn’t.
    “Remember how we used to sneak into those boarded-up houses in Cooney Arm?” I asked quietly. “Well, do you?” I said again, irritably now, as he hadn’t spoken, hadn’t even glanced my way.
    He shrugged. “Not lately.”
    “And how we sometimes spooked ourselves, thinking we heard voices in the wood? That’s how I see you, full of voices and all boarded up. Yeah, I do, I really do,” I said to his tired look. “Full of things you can never fully say. I can see you now, sitting for hours, when we were youngsters, staring at a mud hole. Or a rock. Or just sitting and staring, and thinking so hard you’d either burst out bawling or burst out laughing, or both, scaring the bejeezes out of me sometimes.” I smiled. “Always remember the time you dozed off at the supper table with a crust of bread across your face. Had Mother worried to death.