by Jack Hodgins
How could he be certain that he wasn’t as captive here as Topolski in his nursing home? The possibility, however unlikely, raised goosebumps on his arms. This could be precisely how it happened: you got old and one day appeared confused and unable to understand how someone else was living in your house, so people who thought they knew what was good for you tricked you into a building where your meals were cooked for you and your bed was made by strangers but you were not allowed to leave. Leaving would be difficult if the institution were on a small island with a passenger ferry that crossed the strait only two or three times a day, and a captain like Danny Joseph who could be instructed not to allow you to board.
Well, this was no time to let his imagination make a fool of him. He could have a fight on his hands just to recover his shack and should not allow himself to be distracted by what-ifs.
If he were indeed in an Assisted-Living Home for senior-seniors, he was one of very few residents. In the dining room, two elderly women in khaki shorts looked up from their meal and nodded pleasantly. He had his choice of table from the five that were still unoccupied. There was no trio attempting Schubert here. No nurses stood by to watch, though Alvin White stood in the kitchen doorway.
Once he was seated at his own table, one of the women looked up to ask if he supposed that pyramid of logs was the remains of a previous civilization. The smile invited Thorstad to join in the joke.
“Yes it is,” he said. “Previous to the B&B, that is. This spring, in fact. A funeral pyre.”
Smiles faded. “But it hasn’t—”
“It hasn’t been lit because the body was never found.”
The woman with tight yellow curls nodded. “A monument, then. For the dead.”
“The dead is no longer dead, and has resurfaced in a Haitian jail. Or so I’ve been told. I suppose they may burn it on Hallowe’en.”
“Extraordinary!” The women returned to their meal, though they did not look convinced.
His bowl of vegetable chili was a stewed mixture of lima beans and chickpeas and colourful peppers and tomatoes, but smelled deliciously of fennel and celery and cilantro. He wished he’d brought a book to read, as he’d always done whenever he’d had to eat alone in public. It was often necessary to read those pages again, later, but at the time a book provided an occupation. If you had nothing to do but watch others you could be challenged by offended strangers, and yet if you did nothing but look down at your food you were little different from a cow at its manger, or a dog with its muzzle in a dish.
Of course, there was the still-unopened letter from Calgary in his pocket.
But it was not from Calgary as the envelope promised. According to the top of the letter itself, it had come from an unpronounceable location in Thailand. The signature at the bottom of the second page raised an immediate image of someone familiar, cast into doubt by a sudden dizzy spell. Maybe he’d experienced some sort of premonition, a warning against reading this thing.
Perhaps he was to receive letters from former students for the rest of his life—some thanking him, some delivering unhappy updates. This one was from Cindy Miller, the girl who’d looked out through a narrow inverted V in her long hair and slipped ambiguous love poems behind the windshield wipers of his car. He wasn’t sure he had the courage to read it, but he would try.
Dear Mr. Thorstad,
I suspect you don’t get many letters from former students awaiting execution. The Thai police intend to shoot me, which is what they do to people accused of bringing drugs into their country. To protest my innocence means nothing here, and there seems to be no way of proving that someone else stashed the cocaine in my luggage—though I haven’t yet entirely given up hope.
A little breathless suddenly, Thorstad lowered the page to his lap. Was this a gimmick to catch his attention where the windshield-wiper-poems had not? He would prefer to think so, but feared it was genuine. At any rate, she had certainly made sure that he would read on.
Before it is too late, and in case I never see home again, I am using my time in jail to write a few letters of appreciation I should have written long ago but put off in favour of the demands of daily life and the excitement of too much travel.
I want to thank you for all you did on my behalf when I was the dreamy half-suicidal poet in the front row, no doubt driving you crazy with my imitative adolescent scribbling. You were always kind, and encouraging, though I realize now that it was not the poet you were encouraging but the unhappy teen. I suspect you knew that I had a terrible crush on you—how could you not? You were single, and rather good-looking, and only a few years older than I was. Yet you treated me with a distanced respect that somehow avoided hurting my feelings or making me feel rejected. I believe I would have killed myself if you had rejected me cruelly, yet I know very well that if you had taken advantage it would have been a disaster for us both. You may find it amusing that many years later, two of my poems were published in an obscure Alberta magazine—Yippee!—but that was both the beginning and the end of my literary career.
You may also find it amusing that I received my punishment by giving birth to a daughter who was, as a teen, as dreamy, moody, and “poetic” as I was myself. She eventually grew out of that, thank goodness, and is a lawyer in Calgary now, with children of her own, and is doing what she can to convince the Ottawa government to apply pressure on Thailand to give me a fair trial. It is a desperate hope, I realize, but we must do what we can.
(If you wish to contribute to my defence, either with money or by adding your name to my daughter’s petitions, you will find her address on this envelope, for I will send all my thank-you letters to her and give her or her secretary the task of digging up addresses for the people I’m writing to. There is little else you can do—unless, of course, you are inclined to pray.)
Naturally the minute I’d written that last sentence I thought how awful it would be if every student you’d taught in your life were to write and ask for your prayers in an effort to help them clean up the mess they have made of their lives. I expect most would, if they thought of it. Even so, I would be inclined to claim the right to be first in line!
I have no idea where you are living now, or even if you are still alive, but I trust my daughter to seek you out and deliver these long-overdue words of appreciation.
Blessings on you, kind Sir!
Cindy (Miller) Wright
Axel Thorstad looked up to reassure himself he was still in the commune’s dining room, that his vegetable chili was still half-eaten in the bowl before him, the large spoon leaning against the side. Obviously some of his pupils had gone out into a far more dangerous world than he had. How many teachers had received thank-you letters from former students about to face a firing squad?
Cindy Miller assumed that all former students had made a mess of their lives. Was she simply projecting her own failures onto others in order not to see herself as worse than the rest, or was this something for him to take seriously? Must he accept that whatever strengths you helped others achieve, whatever feelings of success you encouraged, you should assume they would all go on to make a mess of things? Perhaps it would be better to disbelieve in endings altogether. Carter Stone might live to love again. Cindy Miller might yet be freed. Hundreds could be praying, and the federal government could be already at work on her behalf.
Had he actually believed that if he nudged the young towards success and happiness this would last for the rest of their lives? If his father hadn’t fallen on his first day in front of cameras, would he have continued to believe he was providing safety, happiness, and the opportunity for success to all those actors he was required to impersonate, or would he have decided eventually that his job had no real lasting moral importance at all?
21
Once the two elderly women had finished their breakfast, placed their suitcases in the bed of Alvin’s truck, and left to catch the morning ferry, Thorstad removed the cello from its case and sat outside the front door on a short bench fashioned
from rough lumber. Normie Fenton had set up a chopping block down along the side of the main building and was splitting stove-wood lengths of alder. Thump! Crack! Thump! Crack! Bo Hammond’s pyramid glistened a little from the night’s rain.
It seemed appropriate, though he wasn’t sure why, that in this place, with the instrument between his thighs, he should offer up as many bars of Dvok’s Cello Concerto in B Minor as the Sinfonica would allow. And today it seemed his hands and fingers took over the task on their own, releasing him from any conscious effort and leading him effortlessly through such exquisite familiar sounds that a wistful sadness welled up to make him think of unhappy Topolski trapped in his Home for senior-seniors, of Cindy Miller confined to a jail in Thailand, and of his own beloved, lost, and recently silent Elena.
Yet it heartened him to think that Elena would consider this a sign that God had begun to speak to him in longer sentences. Or, more likely, that her husband had finally begun to listen. At any rate, the cello’s small miracle this morning encouraged him to believe in the possible liberation of his expropriated shack. The rebuilt bicycle, which had obviously been intended for someone with shorter legs that didn’t interfere with the handlebars, sent him abruptly from one side of the road to the other, and tried to toss him into the bush. But he eventually got the hang of it and pedalled, with knees wide apart, out the dirt road past abandoned fields and sagging barns and through dark stands of fir. Water fell on his neck from the laden trees and he had no choice but to splash through what were possibly the world’s largest mud puddles as he sped south beside the open coastline towards the cluster of buildings above the ferry dock. A deer looked up from grazing in the field to his left, his five-spike rack of antlers ridiculously large for his dainty head. Farther along, a cock-pheasant exploded out of the ditch and flew upward across his prow, the surprise causing him to lose control of his handlebars for a moment so that he had to wrestle the whole rusty contraption back into obedience. Nothing stirred in the overgrown hayfield that had become the eventual resting place for Alvin’s reconditioned vehicles. Hauled in and dumped at random, they’d been sewn to earth by the young alders and Himalaya blackberries that had grown up through their windows and doors and rusted-out holes.
From the gravel parking lot where trucks sat waiting at random angles for their drivers to return from night-shift work across the strait, he could see the little ferry ploughing its way through the water in this direction. Alvin’s truck was nowhere in sight, but the two elderly guests of the B&B were standing down on the dock. Lisa’s leather-clad friend was down on the dock as well, his motorbike beside him.
Lisa stood at the top of the ramp. “I’m here for the mail,” she said, in case he thought otherwise.
“Your friend is leaving?”
“A fellow from Alberta’s coming next week. Says he made a fortune working in the tar sands but likes the idea of helping run a store on a friendly island.” She chuckled for a moment and studied the approaching ferry. “Think of all them letters you wrote and all the stamps you bought when you could’ve gone across and used the Internet. You must be getting old.”
When the ferry had scraped against the dock, drifted briefly away, and was pulled back to be roped to the bollards, Lisa went down the cleated ramp to fetch the mail. Then, holding the canvas bag by the throat like a strangled goose, she followed several of the disembarking passengers up the ramp. While Thorstad walked his bike over towards the entrance to the Free Exchange, two men with lunch buckets under their arms hurried past in the direction of the waiting trucks. A third passenger had reached the top of the ramp before he realized who it was.
“I decided I couldn’t go home without having a look at this place.” His red maple-leaf knapsack hung off one shoulder.
Thorstad could not deny the pleasure he felt in this surprise— Travis in his shorts and T-shirt, grinning wide. He was probably grinning wide himself. “You can see most of it from where you stand. Welcome to downtown Estevan.”
Travis appeared to think this was a trick of some sort. “This is it?” Mouth open, he turned full circle in case there was more.
“This is it.” Thorstad pointed out the highlights: the dock, the Free Exchange, the parking lot, the Store and Post Office up the slope, and Alvin’s machine shed beyond the giant maple. “It’s possible to see everything worth seeing and get back on the same ferry you got off—if that’s what you had in mind.”
“I’m not leaving till I’ve seen your hangout. Where is it from here?”
Unwilling to be specific, Thorstad tilted his head in a vaguely southern direction. “Along that coastline there. Quite a ways along, past two or three bays and Sogawa Point.”
At the top of the ramp, Lisa narrowed her eyes to study the newcomer. “So, what crimes did our friend commit while he was off where I couldn’t keep an eye on him?”
Travis grinned. “Some bullying, a lot of nagging, and one noisy showdown, but we both survived. I just wanted to see what this place has that my parents’ mansion don’t.”
“Doesn’t,” Lisa said. “Didn’t he teach you anything?”
“I’ll follow you up to the Store for some licorice all-sorts,” Thorstad said to Lisa, once he’d done the introductions. “A few chocolate bars as well. If everything they serve at the B&B is as healthy as what I’ve had so far, my system may go into shock.”
“You never said you live in a B&B,” Travis said.
“That reminds me,” Thorstad said to them both. “Make sure I come back to the Free Exchange. I need to look for something to use as a chamber pot.”
Lisa crowed. “You refuse to use the commune toilet?”
“The commune toilet is for ladies only. Last night I got lost trying to find the men’s privy—down a long hallway with a burnt-out light, turn left, find a door with your blind-man’s hands, then outside across a pitch-black stretch of gravel till you come to the smell. I gave up and peed into a bush.”
“Thank you for sharing that,” Lisa said. Her breathing was heavy as she led the way to her Store, though there was obviously little in the mailbag at her side. Over her shoulder she announced that Normie Fenton had agreed to help fix up a place for Gwendolyn and her girls. “He adores you, Mr. Thorstad. I’m not sure why. He’d be glad to help you with any job it if means he’ll get to hear you thank him for it. He’ll even do all the work while you sit with your nose in a book and look up now and then with advice. As for Gwendolyn—”
Thorstad interrupted: “We can talk about that woman another time.”
But Lisa had decided not to hear. “I scared her the best I know how. You’ll have to wait and see if it worked. Tomorrow or maybe the next day you might get to live in your shack again. Or maybe not.”
“Raccoons!” Travis crowed.
They were standing now on the coarse gravel Alvin had dumped in front of Lisa’s Store to fill the large mud hole that swallowed a truckload of gravel every year.
Lisa laughed but did not turn back. “A whole tribe of females are living in his house. Is living in his house?” Her eyes shifted briefly to Thorstad, then back to Travis. “The place is draped with panties and fancy stockings. A couple of training bras too.”
“Looks like I got here just in time,” Travis said, walking again. “I’ve been dragged kicking and screaming out of squats often enough to know how it’s done.”
“Calm down,” Thorstad said. “These are mostly little girls.”
“Which doesn’t mean you want to tangle with them,” Lisa said. She paused for a rest before her doorstep. “We probably don’t want Gwendolyn to get a good look at you, either. You may never be seen again—like a lot of other men and boys that wandered onto this island and disappeared.” She grimaced. “Though not before leaving their mark, I guess you’d have to say.”
Alvin’s GMC pickup pulled off the road beside them. Brakes still squealed. Tailgate still rattled. Alvin had been neglecting his Mission in Life while he waited on tables. He sat behind the wheel with his windo
w rolled down and his arm down the outside of his door, his fingers tapping at the crusted metal. His beard had been laid back over his shoulder. “You seen anyone go past just now?”
“Road’s deserted,” Lisa said, “except for you and these two refugees from California.”
A passenger on the far side of the cab leaned across to explain. “We got a call from someone.” Thorstad had never seen this man before, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t lived here all his life, down some overgrown trail. His chin was naked but his white moustache hung down past both sides of his mouth like twin beards pointing to the open neck of his shirt. Maybe this was Alvin’s brother, visiting. Or maybe Alvin had advertised for a roommate during Thorstad’s absence. “Said they left a man behind in one of them shacks at Deeper Bay.”
“I figured they’d have to come by here for the ferry,” Alvin said, “but if you never seen them they musta been leaving by their own boat. Shoot! Drug people, not wanting a sick man to slow them down.” He spat on the ground. “Sorry, Leece.”
“Said their pal was in pretty bad shape,” the other man said. “They seemed to think they were doing him a favour, calling someone to get him. You sure you never seen strangers coming up the road?”
“I don’t miss nothing goes by here.” Lisa was clearly offended, as though both her word and her vigilance had been doubted. The aged building behind her was all the proof she needed of both her authority and her ideal post for surveillance. Everything and everyone dependent on road or ferry had to pass by here.
Alvin slammed his palm against the door. “Definitely calling from their boat on the far side. Big hurry to get away and didn’t want to deal with their pal.”
“Or,” Lisa suggested, “someone stumbled on them that they had to shoot before they could leave.” Perhaps she read the more violent sort of comics.
“This is island life?” Travis said, once the truck had roared up the muddy road and they’d followed Lisa inside.