The Master of Happy Endings

by Jack Hodgins

  When he reached home, five of the feral sheep had come out of the woods to crop the grass between his shack and the retaining wall’s drop to the beach, their unshorn wool long and ragged and decorated with twigs and moss and bits of blackberry vine. They paid no attention to him, a foolish old man who had, in a rage, imagined pulling down a pile of logs upon himself.

  What did this mean? Had he left it too late? He was frantic, it seemed, with questions. Was he on his way to becoming that frightened old hermit who’d greeted him with his long-handled axe? That poor fellow had eventually done real damage, badly wounding a young father who’d poached a Christmas tree from his land. By the time the police arrived to investigate, the hermit was already dead by his own hand, the interior of his shack a bloody mess. Perhaps Axel Thorstad was in danger of becoming another of those mad loners known to be living invisibly in the timbered mountain valleys across the strait, men who’d fled the coastal houses to survive with a gun and maybe a dog beside some hidden lake, scurrying off to hide at the sound of a human’s approach.

  Beside his doorstep the yellow trumpets of Elena’s daffodils had gone dry and papery, while hyacinths and tulips had shot up and bloomed more showily around them. Fawn lilies bloomed in the shade beneath the trees, and here and there throughout the woods the wild currant bushes were heavy with their red flowers. The thick upper branches of the double-trunked arbutus, stripped of berries by the boozy birds, had all but disappeared within its overcoat of full white blossoms. This had always been, for him, the year’s most anticipated month.

  Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote

  The droght of March hath perced to the roote,

  And bathed every veine in swich licour,

  Of which vertu engendred is the flour;

  April after April he’d begun a lesson by speaking those words aloud, rolling them so richly off his tongue that he could almost taste them, causing some alarm and confusion amongst the desks.

  Whan Zephyrus eek with his swete breeth

  Inspired hath in every holt and heeth

  The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne

  Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,

  And smale fowles maken melodye,

  That slepen al the night with open ye,

  (So priketh him nature in hir corages);

  Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages . . .

  Rows of startled adolescents, fearing at first that he meant to speak this way indefinitely, soon recognized his intent. Though indifferent themselves to the notion of religious pilgrimages, they had their own reasons for recognizing the effects of spring and indications of rising sap. Lights, so to speak, went on. Glances were exchanged. It seemed perhaps that Mr. Thorstad might have had some understanding of their restlessness, despite being an old man in his thirties, in his forties, eventually in his fifties and still not ready to retire. Every year, he’d leapt into April with Chaucer.

  And so, for him there’d never been anything especially strange in the idea of going somewhere. Could it be called a pilgrimage if you simply returned to the world? He had nothing like a Becket shrine to visit. What had Mrs. Montana’s letter promised? An opportunity again to teach, if only in the guise of tutoring. Though Elena had mocked him for thinking of himself as a “servant of love,” believing that he was meant for “better things,” he’d known there were no better things—though he could hardly claim to have demonstrated this while living here on this small island. Maybe you had to keep trying until you no longer could—whether because you’d passed away in your sleep on your hundredth birthday or fallen and broken your neck on your first day in front of the cameras.

  5

  He should not have trusted his life to this woman. Since leaving the walk-in clinic they had been racing south at a speed he had forgotten was possible—fleeing down a wide ribbon of highway through regions of second-growth timber, sometimes crossing deep canyons on slabs of concrete with little to prevent them from plummeting to the river below like the doomed travellers in The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Tendrils of anxiety crawled in the pit of his stomach, already unsettled by a rough crossing from his little island to this larger one. If death didn’t claim him at the bottom of a ravine it was bound to arrive in the tangled wreckage of a terrible crash. Mrs. Montana’s silver Jaguar grimly overtook all convertibles, sedans, minivans, SUVs, buses, pickup trucks, and motorcycles as though she considered them the detested opponents in a life-or-death race—a contest that could never be won, since every corner revealed more contestants ahead, additional challenges for a determined woman’s right foot.

  Not only determined, Thorstad observed, but confident as well, confident that this highway had been constructed in order that she could pass unhindered down its length as on her private road. Her strong hands on the leather-and-wood-grain steering wheel conveyed this. She was, as well, a handsome woman, her short dark hair slicked back behind her ears. Her buttoned vest almost suggested a uniform.

  During their telephone interview she’d described herself as a businesswoman, which should have meant she could be trusted to arrive in time to meet his ferry. But she’d driven onto the parking lot just as he was being helped to his feet by the driver of a blue Toyota van, blood still running down his face.

  While walking up the paved slope he’d inadvertently got in the way of a youth in a hurry—his face half hidden inside a hood, his hands in his jacket pockets and elbows out like broken wings. Apparently unwilling to step around a preoccupied, white-haired geezer dragging his luggage, he’d snarled, “You want to die, old man?” and shouldered Thorstad aside. The shifting cello case on his back threw him off balance and he fell against the van, bashing his forehead on its front bumper.

  Convinced this was obvious proof that he’d made a stupid mistake, he’d placed his handkerchief against the bleeding wound and started back towards the boarding ramp. When the van driver shouted, “Your luggage?” and caught at his sleeve, he pulled free and quickened his pace, determined to take the next ferry home.

  But no one was allowed to pre-board.

  Mrs. Montana appeared at his elbow insisting she take him to a medical clinic in the nearest village. His shouted refusal was, in his own ears, the roar of a great wounded animal. What a fool he must have looked! But he hadn’t cared. Why should he care? He’d hurried along the planks and turned beside a seagull-splattered post to make his stand against the bullies. Below, oil uncurled in rainbow colours across the shifting surface of water. He would dive in and swim away.

  “Two strings broken,” announced the van driver, who’d checked the cello for damage. The instrument itself appeared unharmed.

  Mrs. Montana pleaded. “Otherwise I shall feel dreadful about this!”

  By the time he’d emerged from the clinic, bandaged but still in pain, she again insisted he come with her as planned. “If you are still determined tomorrow, I promise to make sure you get home.” She’d appeared to take pride in the doctor’s acknowledgement of his strength and good health, as though she were somehow responsible for this as well.

  So they’d set out again on the highway to participate in this futile race—his legs braced for disaster, the thinning top of his hair touching the roof, the Jaguar’s speed increasing as though it were running out of control. Everything seemed out of control— trucks and vans and sports cars and crowded sedans. This sense of hurtling in helpless free fall down a long unpredictable ribbon of pavement should have distracted him from reliving the “accident,” but the youth’s words continued to run through his head, “You want to die, old man? You want to die?” The message was clearly “You ought to be dead by now, so why are you cluttering up my world?”

  Lisa Svetic had warned him of this. According to her, the world was in a hurry to get rid of the old. Those who weren’t in a hurry to get rid of the old felt they had the right to bully them. “It’s what happens to the elderly when they’re on their own.” He’d known this himself; he’d read the newspapers. He’d seen elderly frie
nds bullied by those who claimed to be family. But he’d expected to control his own life as he had maintained control for forty-three years in his classroom. The impatient youth could have been sent by Lisa to remind him of the need to stay alert.

  Yet she had decided to be happy with his decision. “No more wondering if you might shoot me. Life’ll improve while you’re down amongst the politicians and other crooks in the city. For one thing, I won’t have to watch my grammar.”

  The maestro, too, had been pleased. For him, the silence would be a welcome respite. “Only temporary, of course. I have spent my life with music so I know a journey is never finished until it has returned to where it began. Or tried to return, at least.”

  In order to distract himself from the Jaguar’s terrifying speed, Thorstad withdrew from his pocket the envelope Lisa had handed him as he was about to step aboard. She’d come thumping down the cleated ramp to the pier—“Hold it! Hold it!”—her flesh in a chaos of contradictory movements. “This was in the—” she bent low to catch her breath “—in this morning’s bag.”

  In a tight neat slanted hand, this woman writing from Fort St. James offered an excellent fishing lake “if you are prepared to put up with black flies and no-see-ums.” If her son were to graduate next year and move south to a technical college in order to become a computer expert making big money he needed a tutor who could prepare him for life in the lower parts of the province.

  I figure someone from down there could teach him the ways of the world so he don’t ruin his chances by saying or doing the wrong thing at the worst time. What worries me is that he tends to get lost if he’s anywhere there’s more than a dozen buildings in a row. He disappeared three times last summer in Prince George, so you can imagine how it could be like in Vancouver. A response will be appreciated, even if you turn me down.

  This had little appeal, but it was something to keep, in case Mrs. Montana’s aggressive driving was only the first of unwelcome surprises.

  When she veered off onto a secondary road in search of a gas station, he assumed they were entering a brand-new town he had never seen, but she assured him that this was where he’d taught school for all of his working life, subdivisions having replaced seven or eight more miles of farms. “Recognize the little brown church? It used to sit out here by itself.”

  This meant that what they passed next had once been McQuarry’s dairy farm. The fields had disappeared beneath blacktop and a collection of stores painted bright as children’s toys. Thorstad shifted in his seat to identify them. Home Depot. Wal-Mart. Toys “R” Us. Michaels Crafts. Eddie Bauer. Starbucks. Dairy Queen. All of this had been pasture for McQuarry’s holsteins. He might almost believe they’d somehow crossed the international border.

  “The McQuarrys fought long and hard to get their farm removed from the Agricultural Land Reserve,” Mrs. Montana explained, “then sold it for several million!”

  Thorstad laughed. It was preposterous—an old rundown farm. “Not millions, surely.”

  But Mrs. Montana assured him the McQuarrys had been handed a cheque for several million dollars. “Now they’re living in a waterfront penthouse and spend most of the year on cruises.” She reduced their speed, perhaps so he could admire the transformation of McQuarry’s dairy farm. “My partners and I developed this—despite protests from the usual lunatics.” A sigh for the inconvenience. “If the McQuarrys had sold it as farmland it wouldn’t have brought them a tenth of what they got.”

  And he would not, he supposed this meant, be riding in a top-model silver Jaguar. Platinum Jaguar, rather. She’d made sure he knew the colour was nothing as ordinary as silver.

  As they pulled away from the gas station, Mrs. Montana offered to drive him past his former home before they returned to the highway. But Thorstad declined. He certainly didn’t want to discover that Elena’s sprawling villa had been demolished and replaced by an ugly condominium or a big-box store, as everything in just the past few miles had convinced him it would be. Neither did he want to see his mother’s tall old Victorian house, which he knew had been converted to a restaurant long ago, with a suite of law offices upstairs and its backyard paved for parking.

  While his former homes could be avoided easily enough, he knew his former place of work could not. Returning to the highway meant passing the high school he’d attended as a student and later taught in for the length of his career. As the Jaguar carried him into this part of town, he was not surprised by the sudden knot in his stomach, the sweat between his shoulder blades— identical to his reaction as he approached this building on his first day of teaching. The long two-storey structure with its flat roof and rows of tall identical windows appeared to be largely unchanged. He could count windows down the first floor to find the classroom he’d taught in the first few years he’d worked here.

  “Ugly fifties architecture,” Mrs. Montana said.

  Thorstad felt a brief stab of resentment, though of course she was right. “It looked pretty good to us when it was new—while I was a student.”

  “And yet you returned a few years later to teach there, I understand?”

  There was a hint of challenge to this, if not an accusation.

  Of course it had looked rather dull and unimaginative when he’d returned from university—already a drab example of uninspired utilitarian architecture, as Mrs. Montana had suggested. But it was not for the building he had returned.

  Lisa Svetic had advised him not to judge by first impressions, yet Thorstad knew that first impressions could overshadow and even erase all impressions that followed. How easily his first students could be recalled even now, despite the several hundred that succeeded them. Youthful faces, one behind the other down the rows just inside those windows. Freckled Andrea Thompson’s nervous tic beside one eye. Eleanor Morrison’s too-long curly hair, a hank of it always in her mouth. Rory Deakin’s chin propped on a fist, eyes closed to listen hard. David Minnow’s long nose following the passing traffic.

  Amongst those in his first English class was the young Cindy Miller who sat in the front row and tended to hide her face behind a fall of long brown hair, fingers occasionally pushing open an inverted V through which she could keep one melancholy eye directed upwards upon the teacher. Whenever she was inspired to jot words that would eventually lead to a poem, she allowed this triangular doorway to fall closed and wrote with no need to see, apparently, except with an inner eye. Thorstad soon learned that, from her point of view, his purpose in life was to read, admire, and comment upon these poems, though he’d soon have reason not to read between the lines.

  Like this homely building and those first students, his earliest colleagues had also made impressions that survived despite all that had happened since. To think of Andrzej Topolski now was to see him as he appeared in the doorway between Thorstad’s classroom and his own that first morning: the expensive suit, the sharp blue eyes, the pencil-thin moustache, and the smile that could appear and disappear in an instant as though flicked on and off with an electric switch. “If they tie you up and gag you, stomp your feet and I’ll come to the rescue.” Behind his back he was known as the “Polish Prince,” he said. “It happens that I’m in line for only a duchy—and only if the Russians retreat—but the local peasants are better behaved if they think you’re royalty.”

  To think now of the beautiful Oonagh Farrell on that first week was to see her standing outside her classroom door to welcome her students with a musical rise and fall of words and hefty bursts of laughter—wearing a full-skirted dress, her sleek black hair pulled back to emphasize her cheekbones and long straight nose. “My mother’s mother was a tinker on the roads of Connemara.” She often kicked off her shoes and taught barefoot, her unique beauty made all the more remarkable by the unlikely surroundings. Not even her recent photographs on the covers of checkout magazines could fully replace the Oonagh of fifty years ago, three doors down the hall, welcoming students to her room, though he was not at all surprised at the direction her life had take
n since.

  As for Barry Foster, despite the newspaper photos of the man on his way to prison, it was enough to think of his long morose face in order to recall their first conversation, in which the man had expressed his hatred for the classroom, as well as his contempt for administrators, colleagues, and especially the students, all of whom he believed were stupid.

  While he could summon up his first students and colleagues at will, his classroom had been so familiar already as to be almost outside his awareness. He had attended the school when desks were still free of initials, its toilets innocent of obscenities. Seven tall windows looked out across the front lawn to the Lombardy poplars beside the street, the bottom sashes sliding up far enough to climb through if this were necessary. By noon of his first day as a teacher he had calculated how long it would take to throw up the nearest window and race across the grass to the parking lot where his green Pontiac stood waiting. Never, as they say, to be seen again.

  This fantasy had more to do with expectation than reality. He’d been very young, after all. He was waiting for his students to behave as some of his own classmates had behaved towards teachers, many of whom had quit in despair. Miss Earley, it was believed, had been committed to the provincial mental hospital on the mainland. Mr. Barr had walked out halfway through Pythagoras’s theorem and found a job as a newspaper reporter in Saskatoon. Mr. Woods had taken early retirement and withdrawn to a tiny lake in the mainland Interior, where apparently he lived alone and welcomed no visitors. It seemed that every year at least one teacher suffered from a form of classroom shell shock and pulled out in what may have been the nick of time.