Minister Without Portfolio

by Michael Winter

  Henry walked down into Kingmans Cove with the oars and the yellow dory was hauled up against the low tide. What a happy, ageless prospect. He knew Baxter didn’t like to speak of temporary things. A horse can move and then where would you be. When they’d bought the house and were drawing up a plan to submit to the registry, it was Baxter Penney who told them to refer to the cemetery for their base measurements of location. Fences move, he said. Dead people don’t.

  Sure enough, Tender hadn’t moved an inch. Hello Tender. Hello Nellie.

  He lifted up the bow and pushed the dory down to the water and then picked up a few of the log rollers and walked to the shore edge and threw them under the dory and rolled the Happy Adventure into the surf. As he did this he heard a sound that felt a long way off, some roar occurring in the ocean. He stood up and looked at the water. Three specks in the sky just above the horizon but they were moving fast. They were pummelling forward towards him and they screamed directly overhead, it made him duck. Overland now and gone, but they were towing a massive turbulence that filled the little cove with the bellow of a distant massacre. A little wave of wind passed through his body like the ghost on the stairs and he realized he hadn’t heard the sound since Afghanistan.

  He tossed the four rollers up onto the high beach and realized he’d forgotten the plug and water was coming in. He jumped aboard and pushed the plug in the floor and shoved off with an oar and quickly settled the oars into the oarlocks. His heels got purchase against the knees of the dory and he spun the boat around and headed out to sea.

  A strange feeling came over him. He was rowing away from the land and he saw where he lived. It wasn’t just Kingmans Cove or Renews, it was the land of earth. This is how astronauts feel, he thought, to look back from space. He delighted in how cheap an experience this was, to understand space travel.

  He rowed along the shore and studied the banks for what could be considered mouseholes. Then he remembered the white fish in the cliff face. He passed many things, nothing decisive.

  He coasted and then decided he liked the look of the water just off the lighthouse. There were motorboats out further but he tried the jigger here. A whale breached out by the larger boats. The whales were after the caplin, which the cod were feeding on. He let out the heavy green filament until he struck bottom and then brought in a yard of the line. He jigged. The Happy Adventure rode high in the water. As he fished he got a little seasick. That was the swell. Some people lay flat rocks in the bottom so the boat doesn’t ride so high.

  He pulled up the line and rowed out a little further into the head of the current. He was in two hundred feet of water now— he could measure it in yards of line. He felt like he was floating in the branches of a very tall tree, dangling a line two hundred feet below to the ground, trying to bring to the surface something from the deep past.

  He fished so long without a bite that he was forgetting what it felt like to have a fish on.

  Sometimes he had to pull up his line because he wasn’t sure, the weight could be a cod. But the jigger clunked against the side of the boat and there was no fish.

  It was a beautiful evening. He decided to row out to the motorboats. One or two of the boats had sounders and the other boats kept an eye on this technology and the sounders found the caplin which the cod were feeding on. The men were gutting the fish over the side and seagulls left their high-tide perches and wheeled in to grab the clots of stomach and intestine. All day long, from the shore, you saw this glint of fibreglass hulls and the whales spouting and the seagulls turning with one black wing high in the air, all circling around, deep below, the carpets of caplin.

  The sun was still high and the sky was clear and it took him fifteen minutes of heavy rowing to get amongst them. They were drifting and then starting up their motors to realign themselves. There was one on a Sea-Doo. Starting and stopping and dropping line and pulling it up frenetically like he was riding a rocking horse. One boat came over close and an old-timer asked if he could take a picture of the boat. No one did this now, rowing out in a dory.

  You rowed out of Kingmans Cove, the man said. And turned his head a little, like the past was making a comeback.

  The sun was bright but it was getting a little foggy now down by the water. At first he could still see the other side of the bay so it wasn’t bad. But then that disappeared and he only had the lighthouse. Then that vanished. I can still pick out the rocks and cliffs below the automated signal.

  There were no fish. The motorboats had caught their limit, even the Sea-Doo had bombed off for Aquaforte, for they said weather was on the way. Henry was alone, having to row further out. Several humpbacks arrived and snorted around the dory, just fifty feet away, playing with him, definitely diving under the boat—their long white flukes like blue arms—and coming up the other side to blow. He tried to stay calm. The shore had vanished now but he could hear the birds on the cliffs. He fished. Birds were out on the water too—the sound of birds was all around him. He listened further to the sea. It crashed up against the rocks below the lighthouse and he twirled the dory around fast and closed his eyes and listened, guessing where the cliffs were.

  He caught five fish one after another. Big fish.

  The sun tried to burn through the mist. It turned the fog a brilliant opaque yellow. It was very bright out there on the open water and yet no direct sun or any concentration of sun, the entire sky and sea turning a bright but dull particulate of golden light and it hurt his eyes, the brim of his cap was no good against it. He’d never seen anything like this before.

  He gutted the fish. He pulled a sharp filleting knife up from the vent through the belly to the gills. He grabbed a string of blue intestines and pink heart and orange britches from the spine and slung them over the gunwale. The guts floated on the water and he could see now how much he was drifting. Gulls careened in to pull the guts out of the water. On the last fish, he rinsed the gutted body and a tremor pulsed through the fish and he lost his grip. The fish righted itself and slowly swam away, its head pointing into the depths with deliberation, and descended into the dark. It had gone home. It had no idea it was gutless.

  The fog lifted and it was clear now, but a large cloudbank was coming down over Fermeuse. The cloud was charcoal black and it towered up and leaned towards the sun. It was marvellous how dense and high the cloud was and then it passed over the sun and devoured it. A lightness left the sea. The wind twisted around to the north. He looked at the horizon, and the long line of the flat sea seemed to rise. He picked up his oars and turned the dory around. The wind whipped in and the sky darkened. He had to row against the wind and a swell pushed the boat south. Please, he said, let me get back into the cove. He rowed, the oars erratic in the choppy waves, but he got himself back into the shelter of Kingmans Cove. The boat sideways on the waves but he made it, the hills of Fermeuse protecting him from the wind. The horse of Fermeuse was over there, coughing and licking its chops and staring right at him. He beached the dory and hauled it up though the weather felt gentle now. He carried his bucket of fish into Renews. As he walked past the lightkeeper’s house, he saw Larry Noyce at the open door of his car. He was busy with a hose and a bucket of sudsy water. He was spraying the hose inside his car.

  What on earth are you doing.

  Then he saw the fish guts on the seats. The head of a cod sitting on the dashboard.

  Someone threw a bucket of fish into the car, Larry said. Too bad it’s been a hot day.

  Henry put down his own bucket of fish and went to lend a hand.

  It’s okay, Henry. You don’t want to get involved in this.

  HE WALKED HOME, shocked at the violence of the act. Who would do that. Of course, he knew who would do that, but Rick Tobin was in Alberta.

  He told Martha the story.

  Yes, she said. Rick is away but who runs things around here. She admired his fish. Let’s have one before bed.

  He skinned and filleted two fish and dipped them in flour and fried them in butter on th
e hotplate.

  I was talking to Colleen, she said. Her parents are selling a cookstove. It’s a good stove, she grew up with it.

  What’s wrong with it.

  They’re just tired of wood, Martha said. It’s Emerson Grandy.

  I’m okay with him.

  They sat down and ate the fish with salt and lemon. Then he remembered to tell her what had happened to the fish that swam away. Gutless. He realized, in telling her, that it was shocking. And Martha was perturbed by it. That’s you, she said.

  I’m gutless?

  That you’ll get away, no matter what. Then she added, This is the best fish I’ve ever eaten in my life.

  24

  They drove slowly north to Fermeuse. It was a dirt road here. A tow truck was winching Emerson Grandy’s vehicle onto the flatbed. Hughie Decker. Two kids and the orange horse were watching him.

  Henry: Are the Grandys home?

  The kids ran inside. A woman looked at them through the storm door and then disappeared. Colleen’s mother. Then she came out and admired Martha’s figure. I’m Emerson’s wife, she said. You know Colleen.

  Then she turned her attention to Hughie Decker and asked about the truck. If it’s not computer-related you can fix it?

  It might be the fuel pump, he said.

  She peered in and pointed to a flap of the timing belt. Hughie, you didn’t see that?

  It must have jarred loose when I towed her up.

  Hughie drove off and the woman, watching him go, said, He had it made. Had the business handed to him by his father. Hughie couldn’t keep it going. They handle all the rentals out here, contracts for that. Now he’s working for Andy Baird in Aquaforte, who bought him out. The stove, she said, is in the corner of the kitchen.

  It was old-fashioned and nothing ornate about it. A workhorse. Then Emerson Grandy came in with his hooks. He’d been in the shed, parting out some ATVs to sell in the classifieds. Leaning up against the wall of the shed was a stack of interior doors. Doors look upside down when they’re off their hinges because the doorknob is the eye and the eye is supposed to be high up on the face—Clem had told him that.

  You’d like a beer?

  They remembered the alcoholism. Too early for us, Martha said.

  You like the stove, Martha?

  She did and they settled on three hundred. Cash. The trouble with this stove, Emerson Grandy said, is getting it out the door.

  There was a woman on a couch that must have been Colleen’s aunt, for she looked ill. Martha sat down with her to let the men drag the stove out. Perhaps the kids were related to the woman. No one acknowledged her but Henry understood Martha was offering her some quiet advice. The only old thing left in the house now was the couch she was sitting on. As soon as she gets up, Henry thought, they’ll switch it on her.

  They were selling the stove because Emerson found he couldn’t be junking up bits of wood any more.

  So you found a limit to your hooks.

  It’s not the hooks, he said. Arthritis.

  They took off the warmer and door handle. Shifted the kitchen table. Removed the cast-iron top and stove liners and tray. The men lifted it out. God it’s heavy. It slid out, taking a layer of paint off the trim. Out to the truck. They got it all packed in and took a breather. A small terrier came for a pat. The horse too. They were living at the edge of the world, Henry said. Whales sleep under the clift, Emerson said. You hear them at night.

  Henry unfolded a tarp to drape and tie over the stove.

  Better, Emerson said, if you let the wind blow her clean.

  THE TRUCK LURCHED OVER a bump and Martha said, Easy orange horse. Henry checked the rear view mirror—a dry spray of ash funnelling from the stove. The bump and Martha’s reaction, he felt the ambush of emotion. The moment of Tender gunning it over that disturbance in the road, then turning to laugh at them. Tender knew it was not an IED, but what he did not realize was the mound in the road was a decoy, to halt a convoy.

  Henry gripped the wheel and tried to think like an official, that death was a tail-risk outlier event. Martha asked if he was okay.

  You’re a hard worker, he said.

  And good at it.

  Wheelbarrow, rake, pick and shovel. The way she used the rake reminded him of how boys in Afghanistan fished plastic bottles out of a sewer hole.

  They arrived home and left the stove in the truck. In the morning he’d get John to help him in with it. The firebox was blasted clean from the wind, as though a junk of wood had never been burned in it.

  25

  They took the car to the overfalls. The descent is so steep your toes dig into your flipflops and your free hand is grabbing at the bushes. The gorge is deep and the sun figures out a way to get down in there in the mornings and late afternoons. Henry and Martha climbed down this hill with their bathing products and feet barely staying in their flipflops. They have been, for the first time in their relationship, arguing. It’s a very young argument, both of them are shy to raise their voices, but the work has made them tired and Martha had an appointment at the hospital for an ultrasound. They had gone in together and heard the baby’s heart. The monitor with its ecstatic graph that reminded Henry of the seismic tests he’s done on concrete and in mines. And now she was due in less than three weeks.

  Perhaps it was the hospital—the event at the incinerator ambushed him—or maybe seeing the terrifically alive heartbeat in Martha that made him uncomfortable, but he realized his entire life was changing. They were growing familiar and this made Henry realize he wasn’t going to avoid conflict with a woman.

  They walked down the river to a manmade section, there used to be a swimming pool here, or a cordoned area bordered in short cement walls and at a gap there’s a chute of water and they sat on this ledge with the bottle of shampoo and washed their hair and their armpits. They were furious with the washing and sick of each other until they heard voices and, up on the trail, some teenagers were falling down the trail, sort of skidding in their big sneakers and the teenagers had seen them and were pretending to not see them. Keith Noyce and Justin King. The boys were encouraging the girls to keep coming down anyway, even though there is a man and a woman here washing their bodies. The teenagers look shocked that people are using the water for a practical function.

  The boys are wilder than the girls. Justin and Keith running directly into the water and falling in fully clothed, their sneakers still on, baseball caps floating towards the falls. The girls undressed and were wearing bathing suits underneath and they stepped into the shallows barefoot.

  On the way home.

  Martha: When you were a child you didn’t get a chance to speak. To feel close to anyone. You didn’t have any control.

  Henry: Yes this is true.

  Martha: See I like talking like this. This is real.

  Henry: I like it too, thinking about the little me.

  Martha: We should remember to do this. Think about the little people inside us. Let’s not ever get complacent.

  Henry was trying to turn a corner on arguing. He thought perhaps arguing was something you did with specific people, but the truth is you argue with the one you’re with. With Nora his face would grow stiff while he heard that he was the problem and caused her grief and he’d shout back it’s your generalizations and how you tell me I’m wrong rather than how you’re hurt. And Nora would say you’re being hurtful now and there’s no need for it. That whole side of his relationship with Nora returned to him from behind a bone in his skull.

  It took him a few minutes but he turned the corner on this old anger and apologized. Martha was not responsible for this anger. He was still in the routine of Nora and this was not fair. It was not fair to Nora, either, he realized. These are selfish ruts. Ruts and chemistry and the ways of the individual. Those kids at the falls. Would Keith Noyce ever turn the corner on the anger he has for his parents.

  He said this to Martha in the car.

  You’re mentioning this because you think Keith can’t t
alk to his father?

  His father is too hard to please, Henry said. The boy is sick of it. Of trying to get his praise.

  26

  There was something different about the light and it was Martha who spotted the moths. The trees out front decimated by satin moth. The caterpillars just now turning into white wings and fuzzy bodies. A robin with a satin moth in his mouth, like he’s delivering a small piece of mail.

  They heard a rumble, the sound tanks make on roads in Afghanistan. It was Leonard with the front-end loader tottering over the road. It slowed out in front of Baxter’s and jerked into Henry’s driveway under the ruined trees, Leonard King snapping at the gearsticks to make the turn and raise its bucket to avoid the stove still in the back of John’s truck.

  Told Wilson I was dumping garbage, hey?

  I’m sorry Leonard, I was confused.

  Never mind, he said. But some day I might ask for a favour.

  The loader lurched through the gap between the truck and the house. Leonard King, with his big white beard, twisted the machine around the corner of the house and then to the bottom of the garden and settled the back anchor. He lifted his rear wheels as the diesel burned loudly out of the pipe exhaust. He sank the loader into the garden. The bucket fell through the bush and curled in on itself and suddenly lifted forty gallons of earth and rock and bush and grass and garbage too, broken bottles and a vinyl shoe and strips of shower curtain and the purple sleeve of an acrylic sweater. Leonard swung the arm of the bucket over and dropped the earth and returned to the hole. The bucket felt around for a soft area and dug in and lifted another load of earth, this one of clay and water, a denser material that had not been disturbed since the glaciers left this plateau ten thousand years ago. The waste and toil of civilization accounted for the first eighteen inches. Now we are back to prehistoric times. The bucket chewing without sentiment through soil and rock. Leonard leaned the hydraulics into solid bedrock and pushed until the rear wheels nudged against the anchor brake and the smell of gear plates drifted onto Martha and Henry as they stood in the open doorway to watch. Leonard released the torque and lifted the nose of the machine and then returned the bucket to the rock with a thud—a tremor they felt in the soles of their feet. Leonard scooped out a rock the size of a hippopotamus, this grey wet rock slick with an oily gushing water. It looked for a few seconds as though grey ice was melting in the tucked crook of the front-end loader’s arm. Leonard lifted this rock clear of the hole and gently landed it at the far end of the garden where it rolled and found its natural bed. That’s when Emerson Grandy arrived and stopped everything.