Broken Man on a Halifax Pier

by Choyce, Lesley;

  “Fuck, yeah,” Brody said, nodding toward the setting sun. It was relevant to nothing in particular and could have meant most anything. I took it as a kind of acceptance of certain inevitable things to come.

  “Same goes for me, I guess.” I took another sip of beer. “Were things really that bad for you growing up here?”

  “Hey, I don’t have a shitload of fond memories, if that’s what you mean.”

  “C’mon, give it a try. Tell me about something — something good from back in the day.”

  Brody took a swallow and then coughed, nearly spitting the beer on the ground. When he got his breath back he said, “Somewhere around grade ten I had this teacher, Mrs. Watson. She was like the first teacher I liked. The first one who didn’t treat me like trailer trash. I thought she was hot too. So, when she asked me to stay after school, I did.”

  I sipped my beer and waited. Looked like maybe we were going to swap memories. All’s well so far, I thought.

  “She was from Newfoundland and had one of them funny accents. Told me my school work was pretty terrible, but she saw a spark in me. That’s the word she used, a ‘spark.’ Then she told me about my name. Brody. I’d never even thought about it before. A name is just a name. Something your parents stick you with. Something other kids make fun of. Brody the Toady. Broody Brody. But she said it was Scottish. It meant one of two things. Get this. ‘Rampart fortification,’ was one. She had to explain that to me. But I got the part that it meant ‘strength.’ Funny, though, the other meaning was ‘muddy place’ or ‘ditch.’

  “And then she asked me which one I was going to be. The rampart or the ditch. That kind of pissed me off. Another adult giving me a lecture. I was polite, though. I told her I wanted to be the rampart. The castle wall. Strong.”

  He polished off his beer in three long gulps. “Guess I called that wrong,” he said.

  “Brody, you’re young. You’re gonna have a chance to start a new beginning. It’s just around the corner.”

  Brody shook his head. “Ain’t nothing around the corner. I got a bad feeling about what comes next.”

  “You’ll get past it. We go to court. We do what Romaine says we should.”

  “Fuck, yeah,” he said again. But it had a different meaning this time.

  “I looked in the mirror the other day,” he said, “to see if I could see any of you in me.”

  “And?”

  “Not a damn thing. Maybe ole Beth Ann was a liar. Maybe you weren’t my biological father at all.”

  “We could always do a DNA test.”

  “No point. It is whatever it is. But I did have this little fantasy. Instead of bloody Joe Myatt trying to raise me, you took my mom off to Halifax once you got her knocked up. You two stayed together and raised me there. And I turned out all different. How come it didn’t turn out that way?”

  I shrugged. I didn’t want to say that would never have happened. I was not ready to raise a kid back then. The world awaited. I wanted it all — everything but a family, that is. “I was young. I didn’t want the baggage.”

  He gave me a dirty look. I’d chosen my words poorly. He flipped the empty beer bottle upside down, holding the neck, then flipped his wrist and threw the bottle against the far wall of the foundation where it shattered and splashed shards of glass all over the new smooth concrete floor.

  “Oops,” he said unapologetically.

  I handed him another beer.

  “You’ll get through this,” I said.

  “You think they’ll let me off with a fine or something?”

  “I don’t think so. But I think the judge will see it’s your first offence and you are willing to admit that what you’ve been doing is wrong.”

  “I’ve been selling stuff for years. Got away with it all this time because nobody was willing to turn me in.”

  “I don’t think that will come up. You gotta keep your head straight about this. Think positive.”

  “Mrs. Watson said that. It sounded like bullshit then and it sounds like bullshit now.”

  I didn’t have a comeback line. Jesus, me giving Brody a page out of Norman Vincent Peale. What was the world coming to? “Yeah, it does sound like bullshit,” I admitted. “All I know is that we go into that courtroom together. You, me, Beth Ann, Joe, Ramona.”

  “And Mackenzie,” he added. “The judge needs to see I got a baby on the way. Gonna make sure he sees her sitting there with the big belly.”

  “Okay. So what about Mackenzie? What about the baby? Do you love her?”

  Brody was peeling the label off the beer bottle now. That familiar gesture of men when confronted with tough questions.

  “I don’t know.”

  “She seems like a fine young woman.”

  “Fine? Not too smart if she let me into her life.”

  “But she did.”

  “I told her when we found out about the pregnancy to have an abortion. But she didn’t. Then I said she should give it up for adoption. But she doesn’t want to do that.”

  “What about her parents?”

  “No. She can’t raise the kid around those assholes. The kid would turn out worse than me.”

  “Then what?”

  Brody looked frustrated. “I don’t know. I can’t think about anything until I get past this court thing.”

  The sun was dipping below the trees. The wind had dropped and the mosquitoes were looking for dinner.

  “I’m gonna make you a promise,” I said. “We get through this legal stuff and then we come up with some kind of plan.”

  “What kind of plan?”

  “You, Mackenzie, the baby. Ramona and me will help you get started on a life.”

  “Hey, I had a life. Until you came along and wrecked it.”

  “You wanted to be a drug dealer for the rest of your life?”

  Defiance had returned to the fortified ramparts. “Yeah, maybe I did.”

  “Please don’t say that in court.”

  “I’m not that stupid.” And then he shook it off, looked around at the worksite.

  “What kind of house is this gonna be?”

  “A nice house. Nothing fancy. But a nice house.”

  “This was where you grew up, wasn’t it?”

  “Yep.”

  “And your father tore the old house apart board by board?”

  “Nail by nail.”

  “And gave it all away, right?”

  “He did.”

  “He was fucking nuts. Everyone said so.”

  “He probably was.”

  “Parents, shit. Maybe we’d all be better off if we didn’t have parents.”

  The logic of that statement eluded me, but the sentiment stuck. Despite his age, I knew that emotionally Brody was still a little kid.

  Brody hopped down off the foundation and swatted at his neck. “These mosquitoes are killing me. I’m gonna go.” He paused. “But, hey, thanks for the beer.” And Brody made his way down the driveway toward home.

  I looked around at the property — the tall spruce and fir trees that had been saplings when Pete and I had run around here as kids. I thought about my mother and father then. Brody was wrong, of course. We all needed parents to be there for us. I was lucky. Mine were.

  Too bad that I had decided to abandon them once I was ready for my freedom. I remembered once reading a biography of Hemingway back in my young and oh so literary days at Dalhousie. The book was titled Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences. No consequences? Wouldn’t that be nice.

  As the mosquitoes came in for the kill and the beer buzzed my brain, I realized there was no such thing as a life without consequences. Every little thing — or big thing — you do in life sends out ripples in the pond that keep getting wider and wider.

  35

  As the court date drew ever closer, Ramona and Rolf teamed up to take charge of the progress on the house. While they were on the worksite, I found myself sitting in the fish shack at the old Remington typewriter staring at a blank sheet of pap
er. I hadn’t written anything on a typewriter since university and even that had been an IBM Selectric.

  I’d reread my novel-in-progress a couple of times and deluded myself into thinking it was better than I remembered. Not great. Just better. But my mind was still in complete rebellion against finishing it. And that damn piece of paper kept staring back at me. Here’s what went through my head as I stared at it.

  First off, we were well into the twenty-first century so why was I wasting my time with an ancient typewriter? A real writer needed a computer, a MacBook perhaps. Something sleek and silver and ultra-thin so I could take the sucker right out on the boat if I wanted and work. Is that Hemingwayesque enough for you? The Old Man and the MacBook. Hah.

  But of course I could take the typewriter out to sea if I wanted. I was just making excuses.

  One day, I came to the conclusion that if writing a novel was like building a house (as a number of writers have claimed) then I had a house with four walls and a roof, but no foundation. Maybe that was the problem.

  And what if I actually finished my novel and nobody would bloody publish it? Well, I could counter that one with the belief that the writing itself was much more important than the result. The process not the product.

  Still the page remained blank.

  My protagonist was a man unlike me. Even though the novel was filled with angst and despair, doubts and misgivings, I had created a man of action. He was confident, worldly, and involved in the affairs of movers and shakers. I was convinced that he did not like me, the author, and that he looked down on me. Why didn’t I write about a protagonist more like myself? He confronted adversity with courage, grace under pressure. I confronted adversity with what?

  I’d allow myself no more than an hour sitting at the typewriter. Sometimes I’d end up writing a poem for Ramona. Yes, a gushy love poem. Then I’d walk it over to her at the worksite. She’d read it and drive me home and we’d end up in the sack. Now that seemed much more like real literature. Literature that served a purpose.

  Of greater importance was the real story of those around me. Ramona. Brody. There would not be a real trial. It wouldn’t be like that. Alan had continued to coach us on the matter. “You go before the court,” he explained. “Brody pleads guilty. He tells his story as to why he did it. We all stick to the narrative. We bring in the girl. Brody shows remorse. Lots of remorse. Remorse to the nth power. It will be a light sentencing. Who knows? Community service maybe. I can’t promise.”

  I tried my best to believe the outcome would be okay. I tried to convince myself I was not the instrument of my son’s potential destruction.

  And yet, in the midst of my own fears and worries, there was a summer like no other in my life. Ramona and I waking each morning in each other’s arms. Warm weather. We saw dolphins at sea and even a sea turtle once when we took the boat far from shore and made love on waters as calm as a lake at sunrise.

  The house finally had walls and a roof. It was a long way from complete, but you could walk up the front steps on 2 x 6s temporarily nailed to the risers and walk into it. No door yet. No windows. Just holes in the walls. Plywood subfloors. Everything had the smell of freshly sawed wood. Intoxicating.

  Brody would drop by from time to time, admiring the progress. “This is what I’m gonna do,” he announced on one occasion, running his hand along a beam. “I’m gonna build houses. I’m gonna build the best goddamn houses anybody ever imagined.”

  And why not? Never too late to take up a trade. Go to community college, study carpentry. Make a go of it.

  Brody asked me once on the sly if there was anything he could do to help out with the project. I said I didn’t know but that worksites always needed continual cleaning up. If he wanted to drop by anytime and keep things orderly, he was welcome.

  And he did. Ramona and I would arrive in the morning and find scraps of wood piled up outside. Inside the house, he’d have swept up sawdust and thrown bent nails into a bucket. He didn’t like it if I said anything to him about it or thanked him. So I just didn’t mention it.

  Beth Ann told Ramona that Brody was hanging out at the house sometimes in the evenings, occasionally with Mackenzie, who was having more trouble at home. She asked if we minded and we said no, not at all.

  And so, it was the summer we built the house.

  Twice, Ramona went back to the city to see her doctor. She insisted I let her go alone, that I was to stay there and keep an eye on the construction. But there really wasn’t much for me to do except try and stay out of the way.

  More than ever, I was refusing to believe there was anything wrong with the woman I loved. It became more of a joke than ever. I’d wake up in the morning and watch her still sleeping. God, I loved the way that woman breathed. Then, it was like, even though she was sleeping, she could sense I was watching her. And she’d open her eyes.

  “Lose your mind yet?” I’d ask.

  “I lost it a long time ago when I met you,” would be one of her stock responses.

  “Why me?” I’d ask in one form or another. I never ever got it. Why did she pick me, pluck me out of the fog and give me a life?

  She never had a real answer. “Divine intervention,” was one of her many responses. “God told me to do it.”

  “I didn’t know you believe in God.”

  “God is the sum total of all things.”

  “Then how does the sum total of all things tell you to take me out to breakfast?”

  “A voice in my head. A voice that said, Look at that lonely man who is in desperate need of eggs and bacon.”

  “Really, the sum total of all things told you I should eat bacon?”

  “Yes.”

  And that would be the beginning of our day. Summer. Building a house. Building a life. I even began to get some writing done. The page stopped staring back and finally spoke to me. It said, write a story within the story and see if that triggers something. It was a short story all on its own really, entitled, get this, “The Third or Fourth Happiest Man in Nova Scotia.”

  And it wasn’t bad. I even imagined it was publishable.

  Imagine. Me writing a story about being happy.

  And then this.

  I drove with Ramona to the house late one afternoon. We were checking in to see how the work had gone that day. The white Tyvek house wrap was up on the walls, windows were in place, and a door was on the house. But there was Brody up on a ladder, ripping away at the Tyvek, tearing it off sheet by sheet. Not before we could see what had been spray-painted in large red letters across the front of the house, though: This is the House of Ramona the Whore.

  The goddamned obsessed and tenacious Christian women had found us all the way down here in Stewart Harbour. We seemed pretty far off the beaten track, but I guess if you wanted to, you could track down anybody anywhere these days.

  “Brody, stop,” I yelled to him.

  He climbed down the ladder. He was seething with anger.

  “The bitches. I caught them at this. Who the hell are they?”

  Ramona just shook her head, kept staring at the words that were left on the walls of our house.

  “I caught them,” Brody repeated. “There were four of them. They’d already done it. But I scared the shit out of them. They won’t come back.”

  I was afraid to ask Brody what he said or did. Whatever it was, I was sure it wasn’t pretty.

  Ramona kept staring at the wall and what was written there. I went looking for a second ladder. Together, Brody and I ripped the rest of the Tyvek off the front of the house. The workmen could replace it easily. We crumpled it up on the ground, added some wood scraps and branches, and burned it.

  The chemical smell of the smoke made my nose burn and my eyes water. Who the hell were these women anyway? And how dare they desecrate our house and our lives.

  The next morning, as Ramona and I watched the workers putting up new Tyvek, a car pulled up. Ramona’s father stepped out. Someone else was in the car. It was Ramona’s mother.


  “My, would you look at this,” he said, all smiles. “I’m very impressed.”

  Ramona saw her mother and ran toward the car. She opened the door. “Mom, are you all right?”

  Her mother looked a bit confused but fine otherwise. She tried to stand up and Ramona helped her out of the car.

  “So, we meet again,” Stanley said, holding out his hand. I shook it and looked him in the eyes. Still trying to figure him out. “I had no idea you were building a house,” he said. And then he turned from me and watched as his wife and daughter approached.

  Ramona’s mother was smiling now, her face alight. “Is this heaven?” she asked me. “I think maybe it is. Those trees are so beautiful. The sky is so blue.” But when she looked directly at the house, the confusion returned to her face.

  She looked at Ramona. “Your father said he was taking me to someplace really remarkable. And here you are. But if you’re here, this can’t be heaven. Since you’re still alive.”

  Stanley walked toward her and put his arm around her. “I picked her up at the home this morning. She’s just out for the day. With me. I thought I would bring her here. To see you. At the store back down the road, they told me how to find you. They told me about the house you are building.”

  “What a lovely spot for a house,” Brenda said. “Are you sure this isn’t heaven?”

  “Yes, Mom. I’m sure. But we like it almost as much.”

  “Will you show us around?” Stanley asked.

  The front steps had only recently been finished. We carefully guided Brenda up them and into the house. Inside, we sat down on some boxes of hardwood flooring that had yet to be installed. The smell of sawdust still hung like lumber perfume in the air. Ramona was trying to contain herself.

  “I don’t think it is a good idea bringing her all the way here.”

  Stanley just smiled and patted his wife’s hand. “She’s just fine. Aren’t you, dear?”

  Brenda smiled and put her hand on top of his. “Yes, I am just fine. And it is a fine day. Even if this is not heaven.”