Minister Without Portfolio

by Michael Winter

  You have to forgive the strong love and never speak ill of it, John had said. But John hadn’t told his wife about that conversation in Kabul, where Tender described his ideal beauty. Surely he hadn’t.

  Henry explained his idea about Tender’s house in Renews.

  Silvia took the keychain off a pegboard in the kitchen and tossed it to him, the key to their summer house.

  Martha’s pregnant. Did you know that.

  He caught the key and stared at it, afraid to look at Silvia again. If a promise can be a cube of sugar then he felt this cube dissolve in him. He could not look at Silvia but he knew she understood how he must feel. He was betraying that feeling in his face.

  That makes sense now, he said.

  I doubt the house is locked, just go in.

  No it is locked, he said. We tried before to get in.

  I meant our house. You should think about what you’re doing here. You and Martha. I told you because I thought you should know.

  The key dangled from a plastic Labrador dog. He was astonished at the situation. Martha was pregnant. Tender was on a month’s leave and she got pregnant. Tender had turned the key on a new life and then Henry had shut the door and locked it.

  He cleared his head. Are you okay taking care of things on your own, he asked.

  Are you kidding me? Silvia laughed. I was upset when you drove by—you don’t think I didn’t notice you? I have a big life, Henry. A life without John. I get lots of things done and have friends and family to help with the kids.

  You’re becoming different.

  You get different, don’t you find.

  I’ll get us some dinner, he said. It’s too late to be driving out there now.

  The kids came home and he ordered pizza. They had those toys, the tin whales that you wound up. As it rolls along, it gobbles up a smaller fish. One was smashed but the other still worked. He put the kids to bed. He told them a story of a bear that had come into his cabin when he was a boy and the only evidence of the bear he found was a pawprint in the bacon fat in the frying pan.

  I like cabins, Sadie said.

  We could roast marshmallows over the sun, Clem said.

  You could have really long sticks, Sadie said.

  No, you climb on a cloud.

  But when it’s cloudy there is no sun!

  When they were asleep Silvia had already gone to bed, so he found his way downstairs to the finished basement. Wolf was waiting for him. He woke up in the middle of the dark night, bewildered. Then he got his bearings. But these were only bearings for where he was, not when he was.

  He turned on a light and read a magazine. There was not a sound in the house.

  He must have fallen asleep again for Silvia’s face was waking him up. At first it felt like Silvia was someone he lived with, that he had ended up with Silvia and the rest of his adult life had been a dream of the night before. He could have, he guessed, ended up with Silvia. Stranger couplings have occurred. There was light around the bedroom curtains. Six in the morning. I’m making breakfast, she said. He put on his shoes. She saw him to the porch and must have read his mind. You don’t have kids, she said. It’s hard, having them, but they’ve made me understand who I am. And soon they’ll be old enough and another life will return.

  That’s not what I was thinking.

  Silvia had to tidy up the kitchen and get the kids off to school. She was late for work. She has a modern job where she works indoors on things that have happened outdoors. There is a wafer of electronic data that courses through her day and she gets to talk to other people and that part of her job she likes a lot.

  Another life. The sun pulling itself out of the Atlantic.

  He ate breakfast with the kids and before leaving he helped Clem lay his parka on the floor and watched him bend over and push his arms into the sleeves and lift the coat over his head and don it. It struck Henry that this is how the search and rescue technicians slip on their helicopter vests.

  He got in his car and decided to find that performance artist and tell her about soldiers dying but the gallery was not open. So he drove up to Signal Hill. He watched a limousine pour out a wedding party in a blizzard. The bride in her white gown and two men almost on their knees grabbing at the hem. My god, is the world going to rub it in? Someone getting married, not him. But he had enough reserve to cheer. Behind them, down at Fort Amherst, the white lighthouse and below that the old fortifications from two world wars. The lighthouse is a seagull and the grey fortifications are its young, camouflaged against the rock. What did that suggest? The fledglings of our own birth arise from a militaristic past.

  21

  An hour up the shore in wicked snow conditions. In Newfoundland, south is up. Henry had the radio on for company, stopping in the Goulds to fill a grocery cart and withdraw cash from a bank machine. When he got back out to the parking lot the afternoon was dark.

  The radio helped him drive the slow road out to Renews. The wind lifted the car off the road. This driving in the winter reminded him of touring through Afghanistan, the road our convoys took south of Kabul towards Kandahar. Not that he’s an expert, but one does experience things even when one is in a foreign situation ever briefly. Sand and snow both obliterate a landscape, turn it into something artificial, or a borrowed place. It does no harm to pollute this sort of landscape. Renews in winter was the Kandahar of Newfoundland, if you can think of the island as a Pashtun province and the Atlantic ocean standing in for Pakistan, which was a thought right up Henry’s alley. Tender died at home. The difference in the world rests mainly in moisture and latitude.

  He saw then lost the lighthouse beacon out on the head. The snow and the dark. Being driven to a place is much different than driving there yourself. The world involved in its own copulation.

  The side road was ploughed and the headlights lit up the high banks of snow along the road. There’d been a lot of weather out here since the funeral, or at least a lot of snow had drifted in from the sea. There was no place to park except on the road. He left the car running and knocked on a neighbour’s door. The house front encased in a new brick veneer. An elderly man in a clean shirt leaned himself up in the doorframe and Henry remembered John telling him that this was Baxter Penney. He could feel the tremendous heat from a woodstove barrel out the open door, the heat had a density to it. Baxter Penney looked over at Henry’s idling car, the confident shafts of headlight catching the descent of snow and said he could store that car in the lee of his barn. Baxter’s house and barn and driveway were lit up by a five-hundred-watt outdoor lamp that beamed a cruel anti-criminal light on the neatly shovelled lot and the brick veneer siding. How did you come to settle on brick?

  The answer to that, Baxter said, wears a dress.

  Henry parked the car and shut off the engine and, for the first time, realized he was now at the mercy of the sound of weather. The ocean was roaring. He crossed the road to John’s summer house and jumped the snowbank and plunged into darkness and noisy wind. He’d never been here in winter, only a handful of times in summer.

  He waded through hip-high snow to the storm door and knocked the ice from the padlock. The key. He had it in his pocket. The shackle of the lock leapt out of the chamber and that was very satisfying. Inside he tried the porch light but it did not work and he reached into the kitchen and that switch did not work either. He kicked off his boots and felt around for the fuse box and it took ten minutes to discover it out in the front porch. He pushed on the main breaker and the lights came on. Artificial light that you have no part in creating, the system of deliverance of light is one of the cheeriest joys of the past hundred years.

  The floors were cold in his sock feet. Henry set the thermostats on several baseboard heaters and grabbed a handful of splits from the back porch and crumpled three sheets of newspaper in the kitchen woodstove. He struck a match while jumping up and down on the cushion floor and bent his elbows and laughed at the fierce conditions he was volunteering to be in. Make a cup of tea, he yelle
d out, but the water was shut off and the blue container that had water was frozen. He had not thought ahead. What he needed was a few packets of self-heating food. The active packaging in the army. He enjoyed that, pouring water into a bag and sealing in the meal and allowing it to heat.

  He filled a pot with snow and melted it on the electric stove and found powdered milk in the cupboard along with half a bag of cookies and scraped the frost from a window and stared across the dark white field at what must be Tender Morris’s house. Dark against a dark sky and field. It was hardly there. It wasn’t there except he knew it to be there. Drinking John’s tea and eating his cookies made him feel like he was John looking out at this house he’d only heard of while on manoeuvres in Afghanistan. There had been a woman living in Tender’s house, right up until she died a dozen years ago. An older woman. All alone—like me, Henry thought. This was Tender’s great-aunt. John had seen her a few times when he was a teenager, walking down to the back of the property with a bucket. A house promised to Tender Morris. These houses all along the shore had been lived in for a hundred years by families but now they were being torn down by the dozen or only used in the summer because this generation has gone soft. John Hynes only came out to turn off the water in October and then maybe once more to fire up the snowmobile and say, bravely, that he’d been skidooing. The house—Tender’s house— was probably a wreck but his family wanted five thousand dollars for it, which is what the land is worth. He was buying land.

  22

  In the morning he found a pry bar in John’s shed and hooked it into the tongue of the yellow padlock but the lock wouldn’t give. What he ended up doing was wrenching the latch and screws from the frame of the storm door. Tender’s house, inside, smelled good. You could see your breath. He stood there in the kitchen, wondering about being there. He felt like an intruder. Over the back of a chair was a woman’s wool coat. In the parlour a sifted hill of snow—it was part of a larger snowbank that had come in through the front porch. The wind had blown snow particles under the door and into the parlour. It was pointing itself towards the chimney. Snow lived here now. Tender Morris had never spent a night here. He had inherited this house and, while he had plans for it, the truth is he wasn’t going to get around to those plans. Tender had admitted that himself. This house required an energy too large for the type of life Tender Morris was planning on living. Martha Groves lived in town and Tender would be in the army until he turned fifty-five. There was no chance of much attention finding its way to this place. Unless they had a kid.

  Pregnant. Silvia said she’s pregnant. What do you think of that, Tender Morris? Dead three months now thanks to me and your wife pregnant.

  He opened the hall door and swung it in his hands. A heavy well-hung door. He walked to the staircase and stroked the varnished newel post. He took the stairs and they did not creak. He had to lower his head to enter the bedrooms. The ceilings were low and the wallpaper was peeling off in thick sheets.

  He was trying to connect to the impulse he had to be here. He felt like he was starting a new life, venturing into new but old places.

  Newsprint and flour paste sleeping under the wallpaper. He searched for dates and found them, between the world wars. He read of fashion and baked beans and the religious judgment of loose behaviour. There were beds that were thirty years old and expensive when they were new. The aunt had a taste for the modern. The laminate bubbling off because of the damp. On a hook behind the door were hung three dresses. A pair of lady’s pumps. Under a seat cushion a leather pouch. A letter. It was typed, from an American military fellow on board a ship docked in St John’s: Dear Nellie. Her name was Nellie Morris.

  On the back of the pale blue paper a red mark—lipstick. It was a mouth. He read the letter. The letter was asking for a walk.

  He stood there in the room, utterly alone, and looked out the window. Others had looked out this window but how long ago and who. What was a window doing, framing how you look at the world. What you saw was a hill with not a tree near it. He got up close to the window and his breath fogged it. And in the breath he saw something grow: the print of a child’s hand.

  HE SAT DOWN AND FOUND other letters in a drawer and read them. There was an old radio and he turned the knob and it leapt alive. Batteries that still held power. It was an oldies station. He turned the knob to get some modern music and then he remembered the old man in the Spur singing that song of the woman whose head he kicked to the wall. He turned the raspy knob back to the oldies station and listened. This is what Nellie Morris had listened to before she left the house. The station was run by volunteers in their eighties and they spoke gravely of religion and there were public service announcements that warned seniors of the dangers of identity theft and the commercials were for dentures and funeral homes—Muirs has been carving monuments since 1841. Tender has a monument from Muirs on the road to the lighthouse. They call them monuments.

  Henry figured out, through the letters, an entire family. The structure of the family involved a widower, Melvin Careen, who had married the aunt, Nellie Morris, but the aunt already had a girl—out of wedlock is the term—with the serviceman on the ship anchored in St John’s harbour. When Melvin Careen died the children from his first marriage had tried to push the aunt out of the house—there were legal letters, threatening her. Henry thought of the aunt, all alone here, perhaps her nephew—Patrick Morris—had helped fend off the legal threats. Henry stared at the pumps and her dresses and her letters in the drawer and the notes she kept in the leather pouch. He was letting all this affect him.

  I am concerned, he realized.

  He bent down to smell the bedframe and there was a rank scent of mould. He surprised himself with this motion: his own reflection caught in a bureau mirror. His torso hovering over furniture. He realized, in a fussy instant, that this figure in the mirror was a bully. He had bullied Nora into leaving him. He didn’t know how to be himself. He found he was shouting at Nora Power. When you shout you don’t know you’re shouting. But it can ambush you later and that was happening to Henry now. He never liked that Nora was being herself. He confused her being herself with disloyalty. And now he knew she was right— she had been bewildered and surprised. Why does he think this way. Think ill of her motives. Think of her as judgmental. It had driven him insane with a rage he couldn’t gauge for he had no mirror, no one ever looks in a mirror when in full fury. Perhaps all the mirrors fold away on little hinges. Until she left him. Or asked him to leave. And in that sorrow, or realizing he did not know how to be himself without being angry at others, he had decided to capitulate.

  But I love you.

  This man in the mirror has never owned a house, all he’s owned are contents. I’ve never owned people, and people have never owned me.

  He turned off the radio and walked downstairs. He looked out the window to see if anyone was watching him. The glass in the windows was the old kind that warbled. His breath fogged the window but there was no child’s hand here.

  The woman’s coat on the chair. Tender had been late so Nellie took off her coat and laid it over this chair. This was her last afternoon in the house. She had collected a teacup and her slippers and a pack of cards and stowed them in a green box made of papier mâché and then Patrick Morris arrived and took her by the elbow and helped his aunt out the door and around the house to the car. They got in the car and reversed up onto the road and he drove her out to the Aquaforte seniors complex Rick Tobin had built where she lived until she died.

  But she had forgotten her coat. Her coat lay over this chair. It was a light yellow wool coat and the lining was exposed on one sleeve, a pale pink sheen to it and half of the maker’s label, the white buttons down the length of it stopping five inches from the floor.

  Henry whipped open a contractor’s garbage bag and plunged the coat in. He laid it on the seat of the chair. He left the house and walked over the field and slept the night at John and Silvia’s summer home. In bed he thought about the house across th
e field holding hands with this house under the earth. Their heads above the sand. The people who had lived and died in these houses. Why does this matter to me, he thought. I am no kin. Kin, he thought, an ancient thing.

  23

  He got a lawyer in the Goulds involved. The lawyer, Bill Wiseman, said who owns this house. He said it rhetorically. What he was saying was a lot of people owned this house. It was left to Tender Morris by an aunt, Henry explained, and I’m buying it off Tender’s wife with the blessings of the Morris family.

  Bill Wiseman rolled about the carpet in a black steno chair, with a ballpoint pen between his fingers.

  Yes, he said, you’re buying a house off this Martha Groves. You’re to give her money, a wife you call her but there’s no marriage in the books and a woman who hasn’t even stated on a tax return she’s common-law. She’s to hand you a key to a lock on a door. I’m unfamiliar with the term widowed girlfriend and so too, I’m afraid, is the registry of deeds. That’s like me selling you that field where my Impala is parked. Bill Wiseman pointed out the sheers with the ballpoint pen, as if he needed to. I can sell it to you, but is it mine.

  Henry explained that Martha Groves was acting as agent for Patrick Morris’s bereaved family.

  Bill Wiseman shook his head. That house, that aunt. What about Melvin Careen?

  Melvin Careen? He had not thought of Melvin Careen.

  Bill Wiseman leaned in now and put the pen on the table, for he had information. There’s two families, Henry. I know you’re dealing with Patrick’s immediate family, with a girlfriend he was to marry, and she means well. But the blood of family spreads further than brothers and sisters.

  The aunt, Henry said. And he remembered the letters. You’re talking about that man she married.