Minister Without Portfolio

by Michael Winter

  After thirty minutes the sound died and Henry Hayward woke up and thought Keith might be out of gas. But he was finished. He came in to get paid. Henry ran downstairs and acted overly awake. He saw the fifty-dollar bill on the table. Leonard.

  Tell me, Henry said. Why do you hang out with Justin King?

  He’s my friend.

  He’s got lots of friends.

  Yeah well I don’t.

  Henry picked up the bill and gave it to him.

  That’s too much, Keith said.

  Be lavish to someone. Make their day.

  I’ve got a real one for that.

  Keith pocketed the fifty dollars and stepped outside to collect his jacket and the lawn mower and push it up the road. It was getting close to suppertime now. It takes time to make money this way. Henry had been through it, summer jobs, manual labour. It was what had bonded him to John for life. Friends with no end. Henry watched the boy push the mower back to John’s shed and then walk briskly down to the lightkeeper’s house. Past Colleen Grandy’s house and he saw Keith look over. Did Keith know about the rumour. Henry recalled the times he’d picked him up. How Keith stuffed taxi vouchers into his denim jacket pocket— vouchers that he traded for pharmaceutical drugs. There was a house in the Goulds, Keith said, that was a grow operation and part of the boy’s occupation was as a mule along the shore. The money was a lot easier than manual labour. He’s a good person, Henry thought, yet he’s unaware that it doesn’t matter if he’s good if others see him breaking the law. Self-confidence. Did his father or his mother give him that.

  8

  Henry stopped in to the Goulds for groceries—Martha was coming that weekend. The thought of her there for any duration made him nervous. He didn’t know what to cook. He drove to work and was entertained at the store by Wilson Noel walking out into the street with the end of a roll of white electrical wire. Cars slowed to a stop as Wilson paced off a hundred feet. In other stores you weigh the coil of wire and subtract the weight and you know how many feet you have, but here they don’t mind walking across the road with a tape measure and making traffic stop.

  He drove the dumptruck and Leonard King told him stories. You know Colleen Grandy, he said. Not that I know anything. And Leonard made a gesture with his shoulder that suggested something.

  She’s going to Peru, Henry said. She’s having a spiritual awakening.

  He did not mind saying it like this. It cost him nothing. He was not mocking Colleen, merely providing a defence.

  It’s not Peru people are talking about, Leonard said.

  At the end of the workday there was still a lineup of customers at Wilson Noel’s. Henry needed roofing, so he got in line. Justin King was at the counter but he wasn’t doing anything. There was Emerson Grandy, helping himself to four-inch nails. The man could do anything with those hooks. Henry looked outside to see if his horse was with him. Emerson was throwing the nails into the scale. Then he spilled the bucket of nails and Justin stooped over to help him and Emerson said, sternly, No I’ll do it. He spent the next half hour while Henry waited to be served picking up every nail with excruciating patience. He placed three pounds of them on the scale. Then Justin slipped the nails into a paper bag. You wouldn’t think a paper bag could hold that many sharp nails but someone early on created a weave for pulp that withstood four-inch nails.

  Wilson Noel came in and wrote up an order. Got your nails, Emerson, he said. Then, Justin take this, and handed the young man a slip of paper. Justin darted out the door. Wilson had to leave that counter and walk around to the other counter where the calculator was. The dark paint on the sheet of plywood counter had worn away here and the meat of his hand sat on the knots and grain of the wood. He tallied the list of items and then punched this number into a cash register and then spoke to the customers about their mothers while opening up an alphabetized ledger—there were about sixteen of these well-thumbed ledgers on the counter—and writing down the customer’s name and itemizing, once again, the things he was trying to buy. Wilson stopped writing to think about what was the best diameter pipe to be used for a surface well, they had agreed on three-inch but some people prefer the two-inch and he stopped again when a customer in the back corner of the store was asking if he had to use the all-weather plywood or could he get away with the D grade. Wilson asked him many questions to diagnose the severity of the construction and came to the conclusion that the work on the inside could conceivably be done with D grade but the exposed outer shell must be all-weather.

  It came to Henry finally and his order for six rolls of torch-on roofing was handed to Justin King who had arrived back with many lengths of vinyl eavestrough. Go get Henry some torch-on, Wilson said and Justin ran out the door and hopped in the passenger side of Henry’s car.

  Drive around the back, Justin said, and he did that and backed up to a garage door and Justin jumped out and ran in and was gone for a minute. Then he returned. He was trying his best to lift a roll of torch-on but he was lifting it end over end in the gravel, destroying the clean edge of the butt end, the end you wanted to hang over the eaves by an inch very neatly.

  Henry said, I wouldn’t be buying that roll what with the butt end all dented and small pebbles driven into the bitumen finish.

  Justin looked shocked. They weigh seventy pounds each and Henry helped him carry it back into the dark warehouse. Together they found six good undisturbed rolls and lifted them one by one to the car and put one in the well of the passenger seat as they were heavy. Then Justin tore up the hill on his own steam. Henry drove back up to the parking lot. He had to stop for Wilson who, for some reason, was in the gravel parking lot operating a forklift to delicately raise a dozen lengths of one-by-eight tongue-and-groove from a pallet on the back of a fourteen-wheel flatbed that had just pulled up and was still idling, dust settling from the shoulder of the road, the driver unclasping the nylon stays on his load. Henry parked beside the load. They all waited for this manoeuvre and Justin jogged out into the road to halt traffic while Wilson Noel changed gears and made the forklift beep and lurch. The yellow machine twisted around, the two hundred pounds of lumber almost slipping off the forks onto Henry’s car. But then all was balanced and Wilson proceeded to delicately place the lumber in the back of an open hatchback, angling the forklift sideways to push the lengths of tongue-and-groove, still wet from the sawmill, through the back seats and over the stick shift, just shy of touching the pebbled veneer on the glove compartment. Wilson was leaning over the side of the forklift to peer into the hatchback and size up his progress. He thought he could do a little better so he withdrew the lumber entirely and began the procedure again. The customers inside the shop had the same lean in their torsos, all staying where they were but tilting their hips to get a good look out the open door, their hands still half in their pockets, to appreciate Wilson’s manoeuvre. Henry stepped inside and joined them. Wilson climbed out of the forklift and had a talk with the flatbed driver about the area he’d drawn for his moose licence. He had an either-sex licence and Wilson wanted to know what pool he’d been in to get so lucky. There was no orderly lineup but the men inside knew who was next. Finally Wilson Noel returned and Henry paid for the roofing while Wilson answered the phone with four other men waiting in queue. Now how’s your mother doing, he said into the phone.

  9

  The grass seed had taken root and it was a uniform blade that sprouted. No clover. Keith brushed the fence with creosote and helped with the roofing on her new greenhouse. If he had enough of this work perhaps the mule delivery could vanish. Henry asked Wilson Noel if there was work for Keith Noyce. He’s a friend of Justin King’s.

  I got enough on my hands with one of those guys, Wilson said.

  He glanced over at Justin King, trying his best to carry a sheet of plywood over his shoulders and bent head. The thing is, Wilson said, I’m not supposed to help him. I’m supposed to lay off giving service to that American and anything connected to him. Leonard King says he knows why. I don’
t want to know why. I just listen to Rick and try to keep Rick happy. I don’t be needing to get him mad at me.

  Well that was interesting. The long arm of Rick Tobin, causing injustice. Surely, Henry said, the son of a man shouldn’t suffer.

  Look at Justin, Wilson said. That’s Leonard’s nephew. Leonard used up ten years of favours to have him on board. You know why he rides a bike to work—he lost his licence for drinking and driving. The young fellow is a ticket. When he drinks he has to find a set of car keys.

  I’ve seen him, Henry said, standing up on the pedals of a ten-speed, taking the hill into Fermeuse.

  That’s how he gets to work.

  Well if there’s anything around Renews for the kid. Rick doesn’t have to know everything.

  Wilson stretched up tall, as if reaching over his own prejudice. There’s that land in Kingmans Cove, he said. I suppose he could help Justin clear it. That’s only cash work. Rick don’t need to hear about it.

  I can ask him for you.

  I’ll do the asking. But you can come along and give a hand. Help resurrect the family garden, Wilson said.

  Nice, Henry said. The past is making a comeback.

  WHEN HE GOT HOME he put the groceries away and wondered what on earth he could make for supper. When Martha arrived he had two steaks cooking and he was peeling carrots in a bowl of water. She was exhausted from clapping a child’s back. Percussion, she said, to get mucus off the chest. She lay on his daybed while he cooked. He was self-conscious about cutting up vegetables, that it had been a while since he’d cooked for two. He pretended to a proficiency for the sake of her attraction. He was, in fact, nervous slicing an onion. He was careful about it. But she took, correctly, his deliberateness as a sign of love. Cooking can be as intimate as the other thing. And he was not himself for the sake of attracting her love.

  Next time, she said, cook the carrots first.

  They went to bed early and were happy to have found each other. They were dealing with the guilt of that though, of being too delighted in the face of Tender’s death. Martha pulled her face away to see him. I’ll tell you what Tender said, the last time I saw him. He said if anything happened to him, I was to find somebody. A good man. Well Henry Hayward I’ve found him.

  I guess though, Henry said, people can feel like you found him a little early.

  It’s never too early, she said.

  THEY WOKE UP and it was bright daylight. Henry said he was afraid to get up. It means working on the house.

  You need more fun, she said.

  They made love under Martha’s direction. She gave the orders to this lovemaking and Henry followed the commands. Then Martha jumped up immediately. Let’s take a swim, she said. He rinsed his hands in a bucket of dirty water. He found the car keys and filled the trunk with empty water containers. She was sitting in the car, the doors open. Sometimes, when she was bent like this, you saw the pregnancy and it shocked him. She had packed the wetsuits from John and Silvia’s, they were on the line and she’d run through the empty field between the houses and tiptoed up and snagged them. John Hynes had said, many a time, help yourself.

  I thought you meant a dip at the overfalls.

  The sea, she said. I haven’t been in the sea yet this year.

  They drove down the shore on the longest day of the year and counted the old houses and tried to extrapolate that number and decided there were fewer than a thousand houses left on the entire island. We have one of a thousand things, Martha said. Built of wood a hundred years ago. And we hardly paid anything for it, he said. Before he could think of what he was saying. Martha had paid a lot for him to be involved. His statement was swept into the big reserve Martha kept. She was, he kept forgetting, mourning. She might only be with him while she mourned. Who knew how the emotions would turn and they had confessed that they were both open to a change of mind.

  But then she turned to him and said, Thank you for doing it that way.

  She meant in bed. The way she liked it. The way that allowed her to think, a little, of Tender Morris. She had said it to him, inasmuch as she allowed them to make love in the first place. It was a bizarre agreement, but he took it. When you are in the land of the perverse, only bizarre things made sense.

  The beach was a private beach and it cost a dollar and this was the start of something new, of not really minding these things. Henry had grown up frugal but now there was enough money to get by because the life was modest and he realized he didn’t have to let paying for things bother him. They ducked under the rough yellow rope and walked past the wooden dory shaded under a copse of fir and juniper and decided to wait at the top of a set of stairs with one banister, the stair treads covered in sand, while a group of boys not yet teenagers tore up the steps, chilled and stuck with sand, their calves and shoulders made of sand, knees pulling at their long wet swim trunks.

  They carried the wetsuits, trying not to trespass on a game of beach volleyball, unfolded the suits and pushed their feet into the hot neoprene rubber. A wedding party was on the beach, the bride dipping her foot in the sea. The men skipped rocks.

  They were out of the way of the volleyball players, but as he zippered his legs into the suit Henry knew something was wrong. There was a gathering near the bright sea, strange vocalizations, alarm you would say, and a wide swell was pushing new water deep up onto the dry sand. The volleyball players stopped and turned. The wedding party retreated. The sea sounded different, it had gone moseying in a new direction. The volleyball had been in midair when the commotion started, and it landed in the sand without anyone diving for it and now a sheet of water slipped in and touched the ball before arresting its progress and letting it sink into the sand.

  Get out of there, a mother was screeching. Or it was a grandmother, in her fifties, with no intention of going in the water that afternoon, happy in her folding chair, but now up to her breasts, her black cotton dress floating up to the side of her, a sunhat blown off, her short hair and wire-rimmed glasses, up to her armpits, the dark stains of water high up on her, reaching out a tense white arm for her grandson who was too far out and laughing.

  Then the wild running water drew back fast and clicked at the pebbles deeper in the sand. You saw the speed of the water now. The woman lost her footing and toppled over. She was helped out. Her grandson was helping her. Drenched.

  People all over were running out of the waist-high water that was pulling back out of the bay, charging out with their knees held high. The wedding party escaped injury.

  And then the big wave hit, a rogue wave and it crested and frothed high up past the volleyball net and almost to the very solid ground where the steps and stones began.

  Out in the surf, a lone man, a chunky dog-paddler, was staring back at them. He was patient. He was beyond the new breakers and it was obvious he could not return. Heads were counted and it was all right now on the beach except for this man who no one seemed to own. Who was he and who does he belong to. His head low in the water, just his nose and eyes and his wet, short hair. It looked like he was perched on a submerged rock. He was not panicking.

  A riptide, Henry said. He had the wetsuit on now and he turned to help Martha into hers. Immediately, adults ran up to them. They mistook the professionalism of wetsuits for authority. There’s a boat, a woman said, pointing up into the trees. And three women and two men were up on the high ground in the trees turning that dory around and dragging it through the long low branches of the big fir, minding their feet, before anyone noticed it was a decorative boat that had rotted out and been retired and hadn’t touched salt water in ten years. But the physical exertion of pulling it this far made them tug it to the water. Perhaps it had one last ride in her. The waves were high now, surging in, and the nose of the boat rose and wrenched to the side, it looked like the boat might overturn, but then it righted itself. Henry got in. Martha was about to take the side of the boat like you’d hurdle a fence.

  You can’t get in the boat, Henry said. I can’t have you out in
this.

  A girl was near them. Make room, the girl said. The owner of the beach was now walking fast down the stairs.

  How old are you, Henry said.

  Sixteen, she said. I have my red cross.

  Get in.

  This surprised Martha. But he was right. She was too pregnant to be chancing it. The floor of the dory was wet. There was no plug in the hole in the back, the girl said, the drain plug, she clarified. The girl was realizing she was with a person who knew nothing of the sea or boats. This dory was not seaworthy at all and the owner of the beach, who had ahold of the stern, was shouting this out to Henry. There was only one oar and no oarlocks. What was he thinking. Another wave surged over them and the boat lurched side-on and it stayed upright but was thrown back onto the beach, the water retreating and they were stuck on dry land, Henry hurt his knee and they had almost crushed children.

  Martha pointed at the motorboat, the glare of sunlight off its chrome gunwale. Coming from Aquaforte. A little white open boat. The man submerged gave up concentrating on the beach and turned his shoulders to the white boat. He was quick to understand the odds. They admired the slow experienced loop the white boat made around the man in trouble. The boat threw him an orange life jacket and then continued to circle him. The patience felt threatening, like they were about to gaff a seal. They cut the motor and two men—you could see their expandable watchbands flashing—bent over the side and tugged him aboard by the shoulders while the boat was still coasting. Up and over. It was very clear, the bright sun offered a high contrast to the boat and men and their background of white sky. It wasn’t that rough out there. The man they saved was on the middle seat now, gathering himself, facing the back of the boat, his neck down looking at his bare feet. The man at the motor handed him something. It was a plastic flask of alcohol, it didn’t have the glint of glass. The man lifted his neck and drank it. They did not bring him in to shore, they did not even acknowledge the commotion on the beach, the rotted dory that was beating sideways into the surf, but opened wide the throttle and the bow reared up and hammered over the whitecaps, back from where they came.