Donna Morrissey - Downhill Chance

Praise for Downhill Chance

Downhill Chance proves Morrisseys talent goes well beyond crafting a good Newfoundland outport tale These are huge themes, as old as the idea of story telling itself I doubt if any writer has given readers a clearer sense of the voices of the people and the subjects of their conversation as they negotiate the tricky terrain of their everyday lives in Newfoundland during the middle years of the twentieth century. Morrisseys work is a performance, an almost oral folk epic.

The Globe and Mail

A masterful, compelling story, which is magnificently created.

The Telegram (St. Johns)

So emotionally taut and brilliantly written that you wont have time to breathe until you leaf over the last page.

The Hamilton Spectator

The sort of gothic fiction made familiar by the Bront sisters, a Wuthering Heights of the craggy coast of Newfoundland.

The London Free Press

A darn good story, told with wit and affection, by a superb storyteller Morrisseys voice, innocent, wise, funny and boisterous, and so expertly tuned to the music of the Newfoundland dialect, is simply irresistible.

Books in Canada

Remote communities of White Bay are vividly rendered [A] solid, reassuring novel.

The Herald (Glasgow)

The narrative moves like a house afire, and its racy energy keeps our attention riveted.

Kirkus Reviews

Superb This is an often heartbreaking, ineffably sad story An achingly beautiful novel, and Clair is an unforgettable heroine courageous, passionate, determined to recover the unrecoverable, yet able to recognize her own wrongheadedness Capable of bursts of lush, melodic prose [Morrissey] never gets caught up in her own eloquence. She has a comic touch, too Best of all, her sense of place is overpoweringnot just the natural beauty of remote Newfoundland but also the almost suffocating intimacy of outport life. A major novel by a remarkable writer.

Booklist

Downhill Chance is a rich story from a distant place and time, enhanced by wonderfully engaging dialogue.

The Evening News

A dazzling oral folk epic.

Cobourg Daily Star

Morrisseys prose, threaded with echoes of Shakespeare, Carl Jung, and Joseph Campbell, is a perfect fit for her almost mythical story of fractured families, wars, and homecoming.

Quill & Quire

With vivid imagery and a fantastic ear for dialect, Morrissey breathes life into the small harbor town.

Publishers Weekly

PENGUIN CANADA

DOWNHILL CHANCE

DONNA MORRISSEY is the award-winning author of four novels, Kits Law, Downhill Chance, Sylvanus Now, and What They Wanted, all set in Newfoundland and all subsequently translated into several languages. Kits Law won the CBA Libris Award, the Winifred Holtby Prize, and the American Library Associations Alex Award. Both Downhill Chance and Sylvanus Now won the Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Prize, and Sylvanus Now was the winner of the Atlantic Independent Booksellers Choice Award. Her screenplay, Clothesline Patch, won a Gemini Award. Morrissey grew up in The Beaches, a small fishing outport in Newfoundland, and now lives in Halifax.

ALSO BY DONNA MORRISSEY

Kits Law

Sylvanus Now

What They Wanted

DONNA
MORRISSEY

Downhill Chance

PENGUIN CANADA

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

(a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephens Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0745, Auckland, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Published in Penguin Canada paperback by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2002 Published in this edition, 2009

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)

Copyright Donna Morrissey, 2002

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Publishers note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Manufactured in Canada.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Morrissey, Donna, 1956

Downhill chance / Donna Morrissey.

ISBN 978-0-14-317033-4

I. Title.

PS8576.O74164D68 2009 C813.54 C2009-903798-X

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at www.penguin.ca

Special and corporate bulk purchase rates available; please see www.penguin.ca/corporatesales or call 1-800-810-3104, ext. 477 or 474

To my son, David Ford Morrissey,

and my daughter, Bridgette Adele Morrissey

And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew,

and beat upon that house: and it fell:

and great was the fall of it.

Matthew 8:27

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

F OR THEIR LOVE AND SUPPORT during the writing of this novel, I wish to thank my siblings, Wanda, Glenn, Tommy and Karen, my dad and Aunt Shirley Dyke for her love of a sister.

Thank you to the Canada Council for the Arts and the Nova Scotia Arts Council for their financial support.

And for their critiques, research and time, I wish to thank my special friends Genevieve Lehr, Catherine Reader and Ismet Ugursal, my agent, Beverley Slopen, editors Cynthia Good and Susan Canavan, and my meticulous line editor, Mary Adachi.

Downhill Chance

PROLOGUE

I T WAS A DIRTY OLD NIGHT that washed Gid OMara up on the shores of Rocky Head. Sheilas Brush, the old-timers called it, that late-spring storm that comes with the fury of February winds, transfiguring the desolate rock-island of Newfoundland into a great whale soaring out of the Atlantic, shaking and writhing as if to rid itself of the shacks, wharves and boats clinging to its granite shores like barnacles. Yawning with the leisure of an old tomcat, twelveyear-old Luke scrooped open the bedroom window, letting in a blast of sea-dampened wind that near put out the burning candle stub that flickered yellow over his older brother, Joey, lying beneath the blankets in their double bed.