The Master of Happy Endings

by Jack Hodgins

  4

  Since he could not bring himself to accept even the perfect response to his ad, he saw no harm in allowing Lisa Svetic to know the nature of the advertisement that had resulted in all those letters crossing her counter. She was, or said she was, appalled. “This is far more dangerous than a mail-order bride! A family of lunatics could’ve decided to get themselves a servant for the dirty jobs they don’t want to do for themselves. They’d lock you up at night so you couldn’t escape.” While tidying up a shelf of canned soup, she outlined a situation where he would be walking into a house filled with young monsters who would make his life a misery by playing tricks on him. “They’ll hide your books, bust your cello strings, and mock you in public when you’re forced to walk them to school.”

  This had been, indeed, a possibility. “But I expected an interview first, of course. And I’ve had some experience with mischievous youngsters—some holy terrors in fact.”

  But even after an interview, she insisted, the person he might have chosen from all those letters could turn out to be a former student who’d been waiting for the opportunity to take revenge for humiliations he’d suffered—because of his poor grammar, for instance, or the graduation ceremony he’d been denied because of Mr. Thorstad. “And there’s always the chance you’d fall into the hands of a homicidal maniac who likes to murder old men who remind him of his father.”

  Since it must have been obvious that he was not especially alarmed by her imagined scenarios, she informed him, as she rang up his cheese and eggs on her ancient machine, that if he fell for one of those job offers he would find the world much changed since he’d said goodbye to civilization. “Haven’t you been reading the papers?” For instance, if he thought wearing a fur coat was still the worst of crimes a person might commit in public, always punished with a hostile splash of thrown paint, he should be prepared for an endless list of newer crimes. “Suppose you lit up a cigarette in a restaurant! Prepare to see your picture in the paper. ‘Old Man Endangers Public Health.’”

  “But,” Thorstad said, aware that he was grinning, “I haven’t smoked for forty years. It’s not likely I’ll start again now.”

  Although his letters obviously represented a failed attempt to change his life, he opened the next to arrive because it was addressed to a Mr. Axel Thorstad in quotation marks, as though he might not any longer be himself. He read it while sitting on a bench outside the Free Exchange. The long blue coastline across the strait had reappeared with this morning’s light. Ragged columns of mist rose like white smoke from behind each successive hill as though from hundreds of secret bonfires, gradually revealing the chain of blue mountains down the island’s centre—some rising to snowy peaks and others to scalped plateaus and isolated Mohawk cuts of timber left to drop their seeds for future growth. The world was still there and getting along without him.

  Dear Sir,

  The other day I was told, by someone who was only partly sure of his facts, that my Grade Twelve English teacher now lived on Estevan Island. I am writing in care of the island’s post office in case this is true.

  I was in the same class as Ivan Norris (I know you’ll remember him and the red hat he refused to remove because he was already going bald—at sixteen!) and graduated thirty years ago before going on to the University of Saskatchewan and marrying a cattle rancher. I have not been back to the Coast since leaving, but I have kept in touch with Muriel Willis. I have no doubt you remember the day Muriel accidentally set my hair on fire while we were sneaking a smoke in the girls’ washroom.

  Now that my children have flown the coop, I’ve enrolled in university again to complete my degree. My Shakespeare professor reminds me so much of you that I feel compelled to write, if only to say hello. Like you, he towers above the class, his long arms flailing like an animated scarecrow. Like you, he is so much in love with his subject that it’s sometimes comical—like a small wide-eyed boy excited to tell about the treasure he dug up in the garden. Like you, he is even more interested in his students’ welfare than he is in his beloved subject, somehow making you realize that what he appears to be teaching is only the tools he uses for teaching something else. I haven’t yet figured out what this is, but I know it is something subversive. I may not have thought too often of Paradise Lost while helping my husband brand the cattle, but I know that whatever happened in your classroom expanded my life somehow, and may even have made me a better wife and mother and rancher, and community member as well.

  I didn’t intend to write a sappy letter. Maybe I’ve reached an age where high school has begun to take on a rosy glow. I hope you are enjoying a happy retirement—fishing probably, and beachcombing, (and still practising your famous Australian crawl?) and re-reading Paradise Lost for the hundredth time! Tammy (Adams) Hermann

  Tammy Adams and Muriel Willis were two freckled girls who’d sat along the wall farthest from the windows and written messages to one another above the chalkboard ledge beside them, sometimes forgetting to erase them later.

  Ernie Grant keeps a French safe in his wallet.

  How do you know?

  Never mind.

  Do you think everyone does?

  He wished Elena could read this letter. She had often tried to convince him to give up teaching. On the Townsends’ cool veranda she had even attempted to enrol Esther’s sympathy in this matter. “I have begged him—begged him!—to quit and find something more creative and important! But the man is obsessed with his job, with his students, with becoming the best teacher in the stupid world!”

  But Esther and Herbert had a son-in-law who taught high school science in North Vancouver. “Curtis loves his work. We wouldn’t want him to give it up. Maybe Axel feels the same?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Elena said. “He throws away his life! Listen, he thinks he’s a servant of love—I’ve heard him say so! In fact, he is the servant of selfish adolescents and their demanding parents, and the stubborn school board, and the ignorant taxpayers. ‘And what are you doing for your own happiness?’ I say to him. Good God—I call him ‘The Master of Happy Endings.’ He is never happy himself unless he’s slaving over lesson plans, trying to make his students’ lives turn out like a Hollywood movie!”

  “I can’t imagine how I will survive retirement,” he’d once confessed to Elena. He’d probably been in his fifties at the time. “Life will be almost as empty as it would be if I were to lose my fiery, too-opinionated beauty from Madrid.”

  She had not come to him from Madrid, of course, though that was how they’d always spoken. She had been born in Madrid, but her family had fled the fascist dictatorship and lived as refugees in various cities of France. Perhaps this was why, though she’d loved this getaway island, she was determined never to stay very long. “As everyone knows, if you stay too long beneath trees you will forget how to move. You’ll be stuck here forever with your roots in the ground!”

  His commitment to teaching was not Elena’s only disappointment. That they had not had children was, at first, because children would have interfered with a heavy schedule of performances taking her away from home. And then, when she was willing to begin a family, they had discovered the miracle was not possible. This had been so distressing that eventually they’d applied to become foster parents, as an experiment before considering adoption. Stuart had come into their lives for most of his tenth year, but before they had fully comprehended what was happening he was taken from them and adopted by someone on the mainland. “Never again,” Elena said, when she had grown exhausted from blaming him for not warning her of this. When he’d suggested they might adopt a child one day in the future, she made it clear she could never look at an adopted child without weeping for their lost Stuart.

  Though Thorstad had been happy to work with a new crop of students every year, he had now and then wondered if he might one day encounter a young man who would offer his hand and say, “I don’t suppose you remember me.”

  When the people still living on the remain
s of the disbanded commune announced that instead of a funeral service for Bo Hammond they would hold their first spring market of the year “in his honour,” Lisa Svetic drew to his attention that this was his opportunity to act like someone intending to become part of the community. She kept his Teacher magazine pinned to the counter with her fist to make sure he heard her out. “Since none of your letters rescued you from the horrors of our company, you might as well force yourself to be friendly. Who knows—it might not even hurt.”

  She warned him, though, that because he’d never been anywhere near the old commune in all the years he’d lived here, he should brace himself for a shock. “It’s a disgusting, filthy, rundown pigsty mess, but you shouldn’t judge by first impressions.”

  Although Thorstad had no desire to go anywhere near the commune, he knew it wouldn’t hurt to put out a little effort to honour poor drowned Hammond. Even so, when the day came, before climbing into Lisa’s ancient pickup without doors—shuddering and emitting foul blue exhaust—he insisted on a promise that he wouldn’t have to stay for more than an hour.

  While he clung in rigid alarm to the edge of his seat in order to avoid being thrown into the roadside bushes, she hurtled them up the twisting road through the woods with little attention to protruding rocks or exposed roots, and only minimum regard for corners. At one sharp bend he believed his end had come when the truck swerved off the road altogether, carving a wide swath through patches of waist-high salal and barely missing a stand of sturdy pines. Some of the deeper potholes tossed them both off the seat.

  This road took them speeding through a part of the island Thorstad had never seen, past deserted farmhouses dangerously aslant, their doors and windows removed to be used somewhere else. Deer grazed in an abandoned orchard. In the front yard of a house painted green, a white-haired woman sat on a kitchen chair to read a book while her sheets dried on a clothesline attached to a leaning birch.

  Eventually they pulled to an abrupt stop at the edge of a clearing grown over with alder saplings and overlooking a cluster of log buildings and sagging sheds finished with slab-wood still attached to its bark. The postmistress yanked on the emergency brake and slid out to stand waiting for him to join her for the walk down to the buildings, but as soon as his feet touched the ground he discovered the reckless journey had left his legs a little shaky. By taking hold of a nearby limb he was able to swing down to sit on the fallen cottonwood it belonged to. “Go ahead without me,” he said. “I need a few minutes to recover from the Ride-of-Death.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “You chickening out?”

  He saw no reason to hide his smile. “Nothing in that market could be as frightening as what I’ve just been through. I’ll be along as soon as these legs remember how to walk.”

  Great piles of dry brush sat here and there waiting to be burned, and fallen trees had been left, it seemed, where they’d landed. A filthy, run-down pigsty mess, Lisa Svetic had said. He’d overheard at the Free Exchange that the proceeds from this market would be used for converting the largest of these old buildings into a bed-and-breakfast for visitors who wanted to stay overnight, but he could see no evidence that the work had begun on this ambitious task. Nor could he imagine why anyone would choose to stay there.

  The buildings were dwarfed by a pyramid of logs and car tires and scraps of old lumber stacked up to possibly five or six metres and crowned at the peak with a large hand-lettered cardboard sign spelling “Bo” with red paint. If he hadn’t known that Hammond’s body was still somewhere in the sea he might have believed it was in that pile, awaiting the flames. He felt a surge of indignation on Hammond’s behalf. What sort of people created a memorial out of the scraps and rubbish they’d been too lazy to burn or haul away?

  In front of the sprawling main house, two canvas tents had been set up, and several tables, covered with what looked like the sort of items you found at yard sales. Boxes of magazines, he imagined, and machine parts. He’d been to enough sales of this sort with Elena to be fairly certain there would be plants, bottles, cakes, loaves of bread, leather belts, hand-painted cards, lamps make from twisted driftwood off the beach, velvet paintings, stacks of old National Geographic, and books dedicated to the art of seeing the future in crystals, tea leaves, palms, and lizards tossed into a campfire.

  The booths appeared to have been set down at random, without any thought of creating rows. Since the forest floor was a natural mess it was not surprising that those who lived within the forest should follow suit. The few customers working their way through their hodgepodge of tables may have come off the ferry but they might also have walked up one or another of the trails from the shacks or trailers or houseboats few had ever seen— the invisible islanders rumoured to be living in hidden bays in order to write a screenplay, plan a takeover of a rival company, receive shipments of Colombian cocaine, or honeymoon far from paparazzi interested in minor royalty.

  Someone approached him from behind, feet swishing through the young alder, twigs cracking underfoot. “You timed out for misbehaving?”

  When she’d come up beside him he saw that this was Gwendolyn Something from the Free Exchange, the young mother of the six indigenous flowers.

  “Just waiting till I see someone I recognize.”

  “Well, you should recognize me, after all the time you spent pawing through Hammond’s books.”

  She had Susan Hayward’s slightly turned-up nose and tiny waist. She may have been aware of this herself—she always wore dresses with tight waists and loose gathered skirts to the knees. And white high-heeled shoes, even here in the bush.

  “What will they do with that pyramid, do you think?”

  “Goodness knows,” she said. “You can’t expect this bunch to follow through with anything. They’ll wake up tomorrow and wonder how the damn thing got there!” Her laugh had little humour in it. “Their brains went up in pot smoke long ago.” She was so pleased with this that she put a hand on Axel Thorstad’s shoulder while she wheezed. She had never even said hello in the Free Exchange.

  “Well, I better get a move on,” she said. “I was back in the bush for a pee. No way am I going anywhere near their toilet.”

  She paused after just a few steps through the tangled twigs and clumps of grass. “You’re going to sit there like a bump on that log, aren’t you?”

  There was no point in getting indignant. Staying here was exactly what he’d prefer. “I can think about poor Hammond better here than down amongst the money-changers.”

  “Don’t brood about him. At least he had a life. Travel? Adventure?” This was wistfully said. Gwendolyn Something was envious?

  “But murdered.”

  She might not have heard this. “At least he did some good while he was out there in the world.”

  “Not everyone would think laundering drug money was doing good.”

  She shrugged, as though indifferent to such fine distinctions. “There are poor people out there grateful he risked his life skimming off the top for them while he could. That’s what I heard, anyway. He wasn’t sending it all to the bad guys.”

  “Which is probably why he’s no longer alive,” Thorstad said. There was no harm in letting his impatience show when what he felt was far too close to anger.

  “At least he wasn’t afraid. Me, I haven’t made a single enemy but I worry myself sick every time I have to go across with the girls to that school! What kind of life is that?” She shuddered, hugging her arms to her chest, and started off through the young alder shoots and the mess of fallen twigs.

  But she turned and came back a second time. “I thought you were supposed to be leaving us. If you’ve decided to stay, you may as well take over Hammond’s job.”

  He laughed. She really was an innocent. “You want to see me murdered next?”

  But it seemed she was serious. “Hammond risked his life for others. What use are you and me to the world, hiding out in this place?”

  “If Hammond risked his life for others, doesn’t h
e deserve something better than a funeral pyre made of junk they’re too lazy to haul away? If I don’t go down there now it might be because I don’t trust myself not to start tearing it apart.”

  “Whoa there!” She held up both hands as though to resist an attack. “You can stay where you are till you turn to stone if that’s what you want. We’ll hang a sign around your neck: ‘This man took too long to leave.’” She chuckled to herself as she set off again through the young alder. Apparently Axel Thorstad was amusing.

  The alarming thing was that he could easily imagine himself as that stone figure, solidly in place, with a warning for others hung around his neck.

  At the same time, it wasn’t difficult to imagine himself standing up to stride through the mess of fallen twigs and clumps of weed down to their ridiculous pyramid, and then to climb—he was strong enough for this—from one log to the next, up over tires and dead limbs (market-stall merchants and visitors rushing over to demand that he stop) and eventually getting close enough to the top to grab hold of Hammond’s name and fling it into the woods, then beginning to dismantle the monstrous heap, dislodging one ridiculous piece of rotted lumber or rubber tire after another, rolling them down amongst the alarmed crowd of islanders and visitors from across the strait. Quite possibly, too, dislodging a linchpin log and causing the entire construction to dissolve and tumble down to crush and bury him.

  But why would he do such a thing—or even imagine it? He would have accomplished nothing except to make an absurd spectacle of himself. If he survived, the police would be called, a certain incident with a gun reported, and any number of additional complaints hauled out to reinforce the charge. An “old-folks home” would be threatened once again. Doors would clang shut.

  Of course they would not understand that for him the pyramid was as unsuccessful for its purpose as the stone on Elena’s grave. Just as his “teacher of the year” awards were little compensation for the loss of his career, a heap of logs or a cold gravestone could never compensate for the loss of another human. Neither stone nor pyramid nor framed piece of paper could cancel an unwanted dispatch to an irretrievable past.