The Master of Happy Endings

by Jack Hodgins

  I believe you are the answer to my prayers. My son has just been released from jail and banned from the nearest schools for the time being and I am looking for someone to teach him at home for I can’t myself, having little education. His offence was not a serious one, only a playground scrap where the other poor fellow lost an eye. I hope that . . .

  Without reading more, he returned the card to its envelope. As soon as he’d reached his shack he slipped it between Under the Volcano and Death in Venice on his wall of books. Then he dropped into his chair, exhausted. He was too old for this. If this was the sort of response he was to receive, there was little point in opening any more letters, or even in walking out to collect them. For several days he stayed home to read books borrowed from Hammond’s box—thick histories of the Second World War, a set of mysteries by Reginald Hill.

  According to Lisa Svetic, Bo Hammond had come up from California as a draft dodger during the Vietnam War. He’d taken up residence within a community of other transplants from below the border, on the property owned by Dave and Evelyn Edwards. This couple had opened up their extensive property for the purpose of creating a commune where like-minded folk could argue philosophy and smoke the marijuana they’d grown in the woods. Lisa’s aunt had filled her in on this. Nobody minded them at first, apparently. They put on great parties. Some of them had brought skills the locals could use. Police raids were only a small inconvenience, and helicopters thrashing back and forth overhead were just something to laugh at. But then Ben Morrison began to notice some of his beef cattle missing and traced them to the commune, where he discovered they were being butchered and cut up to sell across the water. Even that was not enough to turn the island against the members of the commune, but they weren’t satisfied just to steal their neighbours’ cattle, they started to steal the neighbours’ daughters as well. “I mean, they started turning the daughters of farmers and fishermen into hippies like themselves, smoking dope and dragging around in long skirts and having babies whose fathers they couldn’t name.” Because Hammond was the good-looking one, there was a time when three different girls all told their fathers that he was the one who’d got them pregnant, hoping this would end with a wedding. What it ended with was most of the commune people taking off, including Hammond. “At the time, nobody knew where he went, but now we know he went to South America and got mixed up in politics. Soon afterwards, most of the commune was chased off the island altogether, with a lot of island girls following close behind.”

  In recent years, Hammond had returned now and then to take up residence on the nearly deserted commune, where he built furniture he sold to dealers across the strait. Apparently none of the smitten girls had followed him for long enough to return full circle to the island. Instead, there was often a mysterious male companion from some foreign country. “Political agitators,” Lisa claimed. “He sends money back for their Causes and lives on almost nothing.”

  Though he may live on almost nothing, it appeared he did read books, and seemed to read them with remarkable speed before leaving them at the Free Exchange. The volunteers were unable to tell him where the books had come from. They knew for a fact there wasn’t a single volume in the abandoned commune. Since no one had witnessed them arriving on the ferry they must be brought in by someone down one of the narrow pot-holed roads into the woods—one of those mysterious figures Thorstad sometimes glimpsed loping along at a distance, disappearing suddenly into the disorderly bush. It was common knowledge that boats came and went in some of those hidden bays, discharging or taking on mysterious cargo, so it was not entirely impossible that some of the traffic should be in books—though it was hard to imagine why.

  “Obviously there are secret messages left in them,” Lisa Svetic explained when he’d wondered aloud about the books. “Some sort of political stuff going on that’s dangerous for you to know about.”

  No more letters arrived until the snowdrops had faded in the small garden outside his door and daffodils had begun to open. The skeletal bushes of ocean spray had acquired their countless green knots of incipient leaves. By this time, the Sinfonica had begun to allow him an isolated bar from a familiar concerto, then a phrase from a familiar sonata—hints of the pleasant arrival of spring followed by a melancholy glimpse of uncertainty and indecision, tantalizing fragments of music whose entirety had been lost to him. It was as though his lovely cello had turned traitor and decided to torment him with chaos.

  The next response to his advertisement had no return address on the envelope. Inside, there was a short note on a 3x5 card and, as well, a smaller re-used envelope with a previous address crossed out. On the card, someone had written:

  Saw your advertisement in the paper. If you are looking for something to do with your life I’m sending this sad note I received but cannot afford to do anything about.

  The letter was clumsily hand-printed in blue ballpoint on a page of foolscap, a red line providing a margin down the left side.

  I greet you in God’s name and thank the good Lord that I have learned of your address from a friend. I am a fourteen-yearold girl living with my blind father in our village in Cameroon. My mother was massacred in a rebel raid a short time ago, and my father, who is unable to work, is failing his health. I am writing to request for your kind assistance in God’s name to help me with a gift of money. I will pray to God Almighty to let you hear my cry for help. God bless you now and forever.

  So his advertisement had been read as a plea for “something to do” with his life? Stunned by what it had brought him this time, Thorstad gave in to Lisa Svetic’s clumsy hints and allowed her to read the hand-printed letter. She opened the foolscap out on her counter and planted a hand to either side. As she read the immature printing she shook her head, setting off a cataclysm of competing tremors in her throat. “Now you’ve gone and done it,” she said. “You’ll be hounded for money till you give in.” She read the letter a second time, the colour rising in her cheeks. “Unless you plan to catch a plane for Africa and carry a machete everywhere you go, you better stay right here, away from the horrors of the world.” Since he’d last seen her she’d acquired a small tattoo on the side of her neck—a purple thistle.

  It seemed she’d given herself the opening she must have been seeking. “Here you are, welcoming messages from strangers who would drag you into the middle of their messes when you haven’t even got to know the folks right under your nose. I never heard of you paying anyone here a visit.”

  Of course he needn’t remind her that when he and Elena had come here during school holidays they had made friends with other summer couples along the shoreline, since she would already know that three of those friends had since died, and a fourth gone into a nursing home in Vancouver.

  When the next response arrived a week later, he did not open it immediately but wandered down to the pier and stood for a while to watch the herring boats pass by, a scattered parade of seiners and flat-bottomed scows and small trawlers heading south, all at different speeds, like individuals setting off for a large meeting they were confident would wait for them to get there. They would congregate at a designated area and mill about while they waited for a bureaucrat’s starter gun—perhaps tomorrow, perhaps not—to begin this year’s frantic season, possibly only two days long. Not a fish could be caught until a certain number had had the opportunity to lay their eggs and turn the water into a milky substance with their fertilizing milt. Only then would a government official declare it time to drop the nets.

  While walking home through the woods he could still hear the throbbing engines of the assembling boats. From his doorstep he could see that several of them had chosen to gather not far out from his shack, as though to lay plans or simply indulge in gossip. As the light faded from the sky, he sat on his step to watch them mill about, no doubt impatient for that starter gun. Half a dozen trawlers remained close together, motionless, perhaps to visit, perhaps to avoid associating with the others. One long graceful boat with a series of white Chri
stmas lights the length of its upraised rods broke away from the others and slowly cut a circle around the group of more than twenty boats, as though patrolling for danger.

  Despite the throbbing engines, Thorstad was aware of the gentle slapping of the evening high-tide waves against the berms of gravel and scattered logs from his winter-damaged retaining wall. He remained on his front step until the damp chill and the falling dark drove him inside. Then, at his desk, he turned on only one low-wattage light so that he could still observe the floating city of milling boats even after he’d opened the long white business envelope.

  Dear Sir,

  It is clear from your newspaper advertisement that you are a man who has overlooked the countless opportunities available for doing good for your fellow humans. We at the Sacred Heart Charity for Homeless Men of Vancouver are always in need of additional volunteers at our east-side drop-in centre, where the homeless men of our city . . .

  If he finished reading this one he knew he would be nagged for weeks by pangs of guilt. All those homeless men would be happy to have his health and this shack to live in, while he was free to devote his life to improving theirs but had chosen not to. If the person who’d written this had hoped he’d be disappointed in himself, he had succeeded.

  Of course this could be their careful way of asking if he himself might be destitute, in need of their services, so long as he was willing to move to Vancouver.

  It appeared the effort of writing to the newspapers had been a waste of time. When he had folded this letter back into its envelope, he slipped it into the tight gap between The Spoon River Anthology and Chekhov’s plays, tapping it into place so that it would not destroy the tidy uniformity of the row.

  Out on the invisible strait, all of the boats had now turned on their lights, every one outlined in strings of white bulbs, some of them with small spotlights running up and down their own masts and splayed rods—a floating, throbbing, shifting city of lights. Those lights would be on all night, he knew, the men and women awake and waiting, chatting over coffee or beer, their engines thumping through his sleep, so that even in his dreams he would be aware of the restless and impatient population waiting for the signal that would allow them to move into position and let out their nets for the catch that would enrich their future. Of course the seals and seabirds and other creatures that knew nothing of government regulations would already have travelled unseen and silent beneath the surface or overhead in the dark to wherever it was the herring had congregated, and would already have started to feast.

  3

  On the second day of herring season he learned at the Free Exchange that Bo Hammond’s overturned boat had been discovered floating just beneath the water’s surface. Hammond himself had not been found—probably carried with the currents into the colder, deeper waters of Georgia Strait. To Thorstad this was shocking news, but it was discussed rather matter-of-factly amongst islanders who’d lived through too many herring seasons to be surprised. “Some of them guys, they can’t stop filling their nets even long enough to deliver to the cannery boat. A little skiff like his, gets so low in the water the first decent wave just swamps ’er.”

  He knew that bigger boats than Hammond’s had gone down before now from the weight of too many fish, their owners made reckless by the vision of countless herring enriching their bank accounts. This was greed, he supposed, doing its ugly work. Yet the news about Hammond caused him the same sense of loss now as he’d experienced whenever he’d heard unhappy news about former students.

  Well, it was more than just a sense of loss. He was surprised by a heated rush of anger—the stupidity of it. Unlike Lisa Svetic with her sarcasm and von Schiller-Holst with his criticisms, Bo Hammond was one person here whose company, however fleeting, he’d enjoyed. He’d had a new tale to tell after each excursion away—close calls with pirates at sea, dangerous journeys up South American rivers, beautiful women left weeping in forgotten villages—all a little preposterous but, you suspected, probably true. They’d been welcome reports from a dangerous left-behind world.

  When he stepped inside Lisa Svetic’s store still reeling from this news, the postmistress roused herself reluctantly from her red-leather chair to stand large and stern and important behind her counter wearing a pair of faded bib overalls. “Do you think anyone ever found Blondie and Dagwood funny?”

  She showed too little distress at Hammond’s drowning. Her uncle, she said, had drowned in a similar manner. “Why they gave that fool a fishing licence I’ll never know. Uncle Geoff I mean.” She used a ribbed undershirt to dust her ancient cash register and the full length of the counter. “Hammond wasn’t exactly a fool but he must’ve got carried away, thinking of all the revolutions he could finance with the money he’d make if he didn’t stop pulling in fish.”

  “This is a terrible thing,” Thorstad said, indignant that Hammond could be so casually dismissed. “A good man has been lost!”

  She tossed the undershirt under the counter and bent to scribble something in the little notebook she kept beside the till. “The problem with a two-day season is it turns the whole damn business into a cutthroat competition.” The thistle tattoo bristled with her disapproval. “They’ll risk their stupid lives rather than leave a few fish for someone else’s net.”

  Thorstad felt an unfamiliar brand of sadness to think of all the secret messages that had entered Bo Hammond’s brain from those books—now lost, or dissolved in the cold grey sea along with his self-image as a saviour of the downtrodden, while all the fish he’d hauled in were free to swim away or spawn as they’d originally planned.

  “Somebody over in Nairobi was probably counting on him,” Lisa said, “or them poor suffering souls in Haiti. Those poor souls in Haiti.”

  He wished he’d never let her know he’d been a teacher.

  “Of course it could be suicide,” she added, standing back to fold her arms. “Or murder. I thought that Cuban fellow looked suspicious but Hammond always claimed they were friends. That’s the sort of person they would send, isn’t it?”

  Was this what came of reading the coloured comics? “Why would anyone want to kill Hammond?”

  “The usual reason.” She looked off into the distance and tapped two fingers on her counter. “It’s the risk you take when you get involved with drugs.” Sharing this information seemed to cheer her up.

  Thorstad made no effort to disguise his shock. This was enough to make him believe he’d been asleep for years. He’d liked Hammond, though of course he hadn’t known him well. How had he got himself involved in a business like that? Of course Thorstad had no experience with illegal drugs himself, beyond catching the occasional student with a joint in his pocket.

  “I figure he was collecting their money—large bills tucked behind the flaps of them books. Those books.” She pulled a sour face and came out from behind the counter to roll a twenty-litre container of water over beside the others near the door. “Paying the local growers—you know—and sending the rest off to who-knows-where. Laundering it, I guess you could say. They must’ve caught him cheating someone big.”

  He crossed his arms, to hide his agitated hands. “And you knew this all along?”

  Behind her counter again and panting a little, Lisa Svetic shrugged. “I thought you educated people could see right through the rest of us, ha-ha.” She slid two envelopes out from his pigeonhole and slapped them down on the counter. “Hammond knew the risks. He would’ve gone nuts if he’d stayed too long where it’s safe, with nothing to do but building chairs.”

  Pushing the letters inside a pocket of his corduroys, Thorstad left the Store and started across the muddy road—confused, uncertain what he’d intended to do next. Though Alvin White stood up from under the hood of the blue Henry J he’d rescued from across the water, Axel Thorstad did not stop.

  Lisa had followed him to the door. “If all them letters are offers of marriage you must be pretty damn fussy. You holding out for Penelope Cruz? Scared some old witch will get you i
n her clutches?”

  “You knew Elena,” he said without turning back. He meant: Do you think there’s anyone could replace a woman like her?

  “It was lovely of you to say that, my darling,” Elena said, once he had started down the forest path, “but don’t you think you ought to explain to poor Lisa what you really want, because I’m sure some part of her thinks that even having a man like you around is preferable to living alone in that house behind the Store and hoping every day that someone new will come in through her door and offer to make her life more interesting, since whatever you think of her she is a good-hearted woman who has treated you well and probably looks out for your well-being more than you realize—which reminds me that there is bound to be some sort of memorial service for your friend Hammond and it would be just like you to refuse to attend even though you know perfectly well that you ought to be there even if you don’t speak to a soul, just so you will be seen supporting the only neighbours you have in your shrunken world, so please make sure Lisa drives you to the service in that old Ford pickup she parks behind the Store.”

  Elena was the only woman he’d ever known who was convinced the Ford Motor Company had manufactured every pickup on earth. Lisa’s truck was an ancient Chev without doors, decorated with rusted-out holes, running on three cylinders and four bald tires, just barely capable of taking her down the narrow muddy roads into the hidden parts of the island when she needed to deliver a shut-in’s groceries or mail. Like the few other vehicles seen on these roads, her Chev had been brought across the strait on a barge, since the little ferry was capable of carrying only pets, mailbags, vegetables, caged chickens, foot passengers, replacement parts for water pumps, and hardware purchased from Canadian Tire.