Dave was sitting in the bow, keeping it down in the waves, and they crouched there in the growing storm. The shore was sheer cliffs and the light was leaving the sky. If they got far enough out on the lake they’d see the Hurley lights on at the cabin next door, the one out by the point, for they had seen Loyola Hurley and they could guide themselves back by his lights. They made a tack for the sheltered side of the lake and when a swell rose Zac nosed into it and they were getting near the far shore, the points of land were breaking away to form coves. They were called the jaws of the land. They had to turn into the wind and then bring the bow back around, and as Zac wheeled her the chop grew serious and the boat tilted high and slammed down and shook Dave, then the bow rose again and he grabbed ahold of both gunwales. Dave twisted around and saw that his brother was frightened. Zac was looking at something in front of them. A second wash of wave from the starboard side caught the bottom of the boat and turned it into a sail and it swivelled the boat forty degrees and a rogue wave swamped them. There was a sizzle of foam and the shock of cold water on his face and Dave was in the water and could not breathe. Then he went deaf and weightless. He found the noise again and the propeller blade of the overturned outboard motor dripping in the air. Then a wave pushed him against the propeller. He looked around for his brother. He dove for him and felt around for him and tasted gasoline and then under the boat which had an air pocket. He found a hairy body inside the boat but it was not his brother, it was a quarter of moose with the hoof hooked under the middle seat. Then something swollen and nylon and it was the hunting kit. He let that go. The yellow anchor rope, taut and heavy. He followed it up and found his brother, hanging on to the side of the boat. His mouth in and out of the water. They were going to be all right.
The anchor rope, Zac said, it’s looped around me.
The weight of the anchor was pulling him off the gunwale. The side of the boat dipped and Zac went under and came up again. The yellow rope wrapped tight around his shoulder and chest. You needed a knife to cut it. Zac’s grip slipped and he went under and Dave grabbed his shoulder and pulled him back up.
Can you unwind yourself.
Dave had a go at unravelling his brother’s arm, the arm felt dead.
Zac was calm. The gutting knife, it’s in the hunting kit.
I saw the kit, Dave said.
He dove under for the hunting kit. It had been in the bow above the moose. He’d had it in his hands and then had pushed it away. The vulgar carpet of moose, like a piece of bog. He felt around the ribs of the hull. He searched for the texture of nylon which he’d felt before. He knew he’d find it because the gutting knife would solve it and he had to solve it. So it panicked him that the hunting kit wasnt where it was any more. And then he remembered when he had ahold of it he sort of let it go again and maybe it had drifted off or sunk.
It’s only an eight-pound anchor, Dave said.
Zac: I can’t seem to move.
Dave searched around the boat. He tried for the bottom but there was no bottom. He was looking for anything sharp now. Something that wasnt technically a knife but could cut. The little can opener where was that. Then he remembered he had a pocket knife. He put his hand down under his jacket and tried to wriggle his fingers into his jeans pocket, but the jeans were wet and his hands were numb and he could not get into the pocket.
Zac, he said. I’ve got a pocket knife but I’m all numb.
He sidled over to his brother and Zac said which pocket and Dave put his brother’s hand on his right jeans pocket. Zac shoved his hand in and he had the knife and he pulled it out but he did this too quickly. They both saw the knife. Then the knife slipped out of Zac’s hand. It glinted and fell through the water and Dave grabbed for it then swam down to find it but he could not see it, he pulled himself down through the dark water and batted for it in the water until his lungs were screaming and when he came up again he realized they were drifting. They were drifting into the open water of the lake. He remembered the contour lines on the topo map and the bottom must be two hundred feet deep.
I’m going to bring up the anchor, he said to Zac.
The anchor rope was threaded through itself in a bowline. Dave tried to carry up the anchor. He had to hold his breath and cradle it. It was an eight-pound navy anchor which doesnt sound like much but there was no way to get ahold of it, his hands were so numb. He carried it in his arms like a baby and kicked and counted seconds. He was giving his brother a rest. He could see his brother’s legs above him and he knew that Zac was going to be okay. Then he had to let go of the anchor. It was like giving up a child. He looked for his brother but his brother’s face was under water again. He tried to hoist him up but Zac was frantic and he thrashed. So he dove again and followed the rope past his brother and lifted the anchor and held it once again in a cradle at his waist and prayed to God it would be all right. He hated having to let go of the anchor. He followed the top of his head to the surface. The black rain and wind. Dave was chilled to the bone and his hands were dead. He was going to die of hypothermia. He could not hold the gunwale now and had to hook his elbow through the very yellow anchor rope that was tying down Zac. They had lost the hunting kit and the pocket knife and even the lighters and the small can opener. He dove back down but there was nothing in his brother now. He pounded his brother’s chest. He opened Zac’s mouth and put his own mouth to him and blew in air on his cold lips, but the air bubbled back onto his face. He thought one last try to bring up the anchor but he could not even get down to the anchor now.
LOYOLA HURLEY found them on the shore with the overturned boat. Loyola was my father’s age. As kids we called him Cake Hurley because he worked in bathroom maintenance and the little deodorant cakes that were put in urinals had his name, Hurley, stamped on them and we delighted in pissing on the Hurley name. We did not, of course, call him Cake to his face. Loyola Hurley had the cabin next to the Twomblys and he’d seen the boys go up the lake and knew, when the storm hit, that they would not get back. He had to wait for first light to get his own boat out and drive up the lake after them. He knew where they must have gone for shelter, a place where you can beach a small boat on a shore full of steep hills. He saw the white side of the boat drawn up and there was David Twombly hysterically waving—he must be shouting though Loyola could not hear him over the sound of the outboard, or the way the wind was. Just his mouth and hands wide open.
DAVE WAS ONLY SEVENTEEN, and to witness the death of your brother, to feel the guilt of your own part in it, will affect your character for life. People who met Dave Twombly could not guess he suffered such a mishap. But in times of stress, or in moments when he was pushed forward to be talented in the world, the death hampered him, and he became diminished and stepped away from what could have been a big life. I saw it when he arrived back to school—he drove up to campus in Zac’s car. I saw how he sheltered himself, as though people might turn into a storm at any moment.
Not that he lived a small life. He was living large, but those close to him, or those who had known him in his youth, as I did, could see the potential in him. We went to campus until Christmas and then Dave said how about St John’s. He couldnt take the grief in his house. The looks from his mother.
Randy Jacobs poured a rink out of a green garden hose and we skated, all of us, for one last Christmas together, while a band of poplar trees watched. Dave held his nose with the thumb and finger of a hockey glove and hawked. We were all friends back then, Gerard and Joe Hurley, Randy Jacobs, and the young black kid, Lennox Pony. We hung around the S-turn with the older boys, men almost now, who worked the maintenance shift at McDonald’s, who were planning to drive the school bus or replace their fathers at the pulp mill. Others were slipping into dope dealing, like Gerard Hurley. I had gone to school with Gerard. In Grade One we got gold stars. We were the top boys. One day we were spelling words. Gerard had to spell England. He thought it began with an “I” because there were so many words that ended in -ing, and a country like Ingland wou
ld be responsible. English is my last name so I was a little dumbfounded at his error. A gold star for me while Gerard Hurley got a red stamp. It was his first red stamp and I saw his face collapse. Gerard Hurley realized he was working at his limits. He could not understand the new work, he was about to fall away. He had been applying himself full-on while I was coasting. Gerard’s predicament I wouldnt understand until university physics: this realization that people around you know how to do something with ease, while youve squeezed your eyes shut forcing a connection, and knowing deep in your chest it is beyond you.
The S-turn was a strip of road on the west side near the Lemon Yard, a salvage operation run by Lennox Pony’s father. The S-turn was where, at night, you could smoke under a single street light and drink a beer while sitting on the galvanized guardrail. If it wasnt for Dave I wouldnt have been allowed to play hockey or baseball with them. Even Lennox, who was three years younger, got to go in net, or catch. But Dave said, If Gabe doesnt play then I won’t play. I guess I’ll always be grateful to him for that, and I’ll back him no matter how bad it gets.
Dave wanted to leave because his mother, he said, had closed in on herself and his father had become artificially chatty. He couldnt walk around the house with Zac gone. His sister was still in high school and he felt bad abandoning her, but he was the one who was guilty for Zac’s death. He was dealing with the recriminations. But Dave did not want to go alone. Could we both move to St John’s and do our studies there. So we enrolled, but we were too late to get into residency during the middle of the year. Let’s share an apartment, Dave said. On New Year’s Day we drove across the island in Zac’s Matador and found a two-bedroom apartment near the university and we studied. We had hours of study each night. And David bought a piranha. He fed it goldfish. He bought the goldfish in a clear plastic bag. He opened the bag and tipped the goldfish into the aquarium. The piranha, like a rock on its side, lunged and the orange fish was gone. It was startling and yet unsatisfying to watch. So Dave took to just tossing the entire knotted bag in. The piranha was puzzled by this, but learned to punch through the bag. It often took him three or four attacks to tear open the plastic. I think the goldfish often died of a heart attack. It missed the severe final twenty seconds of its own body.
Back then Dave had a saying: The architects are here. It was a phrase that summed up his experience with his brother, that bad times were lurking, and even though Dave is one of the luckiest men I’ve known, he is possessed with a fatalism that one day he will be walking around homeless and broke, or unloved. The expression comes from a book by Suetonius, perhaps the only book Dave read thoroughly. There is a plot against Caesar. And when the assassins are in place, a guard issues the word: The architects are here. Dave would say it to the goldfish, as he cradled it in its baggie of water and slowly lowered it into the aquarium.
WE DROVE HOME in June, and it was our last summer together in Corner Brook. Dave was involved in a technology fair at the Glynmill Inn and asked if I’d man the booth with him. I let Dave talk about his software products and the computer languages he and Zac had worked on. Then a man came in we both recognized. It was Geoff Stirling, the millionaire who had gone to Cuba with Joey Smallwood. He was about sixty now but still wore a bomber jacket and tinted glasses. He looked over Dave’s software. That’s what this province needs more of, he said, is this entrepreneurial spirit. Who are you son? You need a job this summer?
This meeting greatly impressed us both. Geoff Stirling had given Dave the number to the news room in St John’s. You boys can work in news, he said. So Dave called. But the man he spoke to made Dave realize that there was no work in a news station for an eighteen-year-old. I’m headed for the mainland anyway, Dave said to me, but by the fall he’d heard back from the schools he’d tried to get into and his grade point average did not meet the standards. So we ended up living together for another full year in St John’s. He studied harder. We listened to late-night radio and Dave fell in love with the host of a show from Montreal and he wrote her letters. I helped with the letters. He cracked up at the little stories I made. We shoved the letters into homemade envelopes and invented names and sent them to Allegra Campinghorst, care of the CBC, in Montreal. In this small endeavour Dave could see the artist in me.
I remember his father coming to visit. He arrived at the apartment on Elizabeth Avenue. He was in town for a conference, he said. Mr Twombly remembered me from the class I’d taken, but he did not know my family that well. When Zac died, I had gone to the funeral. I’d asked my own father what should I say. We were laying a bed of pink insulation in the attic. My father thought for a moment, crouched with the blade of a carpet-cutter in his hand, poised. He was thinking about what he’d want someone to say to him, and in that space I realized he was imagining me in a box. I’m sorry for your loss, he said. If there’s anything I can do.
But when I approached Mr Twombly at the funeral I could not say those words. They were too adult and Dave and Sasha and their mother were in line. I felt the corners of my mouth move up and I thought, My mouth shouldnt be doing this. And Mr Twombly shook my hand warmly. He knew it had taken guts just to offer my hand.
He knocked on the door and I answered it. He had a pair of green tickets in his hand, for a senior hockey game at Memorial Stadium. Mr Twombly came in and did not take off his shoes. He opened the fridge and helped himself to a glass of orange juice and glanced around at his son’s living conditions. He looked like he hadnt formed an opinion before on how his son would live independently, and so wasnt disappointed. He was observing. He asked if I’d like to come, it would be easy enough to scalp a single, and while I knew it was a family occasion, I didnt know how to refuse. So I went with them and we found a ticket and, in the stands, Mr Twombly asked a man if he would shift over so we could all sit together. The way he said it was polished, you couldnt deny him. And yet there was a contrast to this public know-how and the inability he had to talk to his son. Mr Twombly had played hockey at the University of Michigan, and he fitted both his sons out to play as well.
Landscape makes character, he said. Newfoundland would be like Michigan if it warmed up ten degrees.
After the game Arthur drove us downtown. To the restaurant in the Battery Hotel. We had a view of the city from there, the harbour flaring from lights at the shipyard. Dave and I had not known the downtown existed. Neither of us had drifted below Military Road. So youre doing well. Dave’s hands tightened. His father often opened up with a question about quality, or hoping things were fine, or telling you that life was good. Dave wished his father would just tell him a story, rather than rating the experience of his life as it was happening. They had never had a direct relationship, their experiences had run through Zac or Sasha or their mother. I’m fine, Dad, he said. And I wished with all my heart I hadnt gone with them, it was an awful dinner.
TWO
THERE WAS THE SWIRL of rumour about an affair, that Dave’s father had come to St John’s during our second year not for a conference but so a girl could have an abortion. And this is where Nell Tarkington comes in. Nell had moved to Corner Brook when she was eighteen. She was so young back then she took snapshots out her airplane window as they ascended from Pearson. Three hours then the wing banking over Deer Lake, how wet the province looked. She lived in residence in Corner Brook. Nell shared a cinder-block apartment with Lori Durdle and a woman from India. She had this communications professor, Arthur Twombly. She felt threads of her body pulling away from her when he lectured. He was American, about forty. He gave a tough assignment due just before the drop date, and that whittled the class down to seventeen. I was one of the seventeen. I knew how she felt, that we had managed a hurdle and something interesting might happen. By November Nell had learned how to write a paper that made Arthur Twombly want to see her in his office. His office did not have a window, but he tacked up a print of an impressionist painting of a window in France. What about your parents? he said. She did not want to tell him they were dead. She sai
d they were neither proud nor disappointed. You get a BSc, great. You get a masters, fine. Does that mean we have to show up at your grad? Excellent.
We were a quiet bunch, I remember that, and Arthur Twombly enjoyed discussion. So Nell and I kept the talk going, though it was through the bridging of Professor Twombly’s associative leaps. He was a man who walked around with his hands in his pockets, his shoulders back, ready to enjoy himself. And during his period we learned how forces interpret an event rather than learn about the event itself. He engaged us in a world larger than the one of Corner Brook. And for Nell he confirmed her innate hunch that the modern world was the most interesting one to be living in.
But then Arthur Twombly was not present for the fifth class. Nell hadnt heard, as I had heard from David, what had happened with Zac.
Nell’s mother was a Newfoundlander but had left when she was very young. Nell’s parents had died the year before in a plane crash in northern British Columbia. That was why she had come to Corner Brook, to get away from her past life. She had taken a course from Arthur Twombly because she’d seen him in the gym on registration day and liked his demeanour. A son, Lori Durdle told her, had died in a hunting accident. Nell thought about the son and it made her feel a kinship. Zac Twombly. She herself was newly orphaned. And she wondered if children have much to say in how they get adopted. She had spent the summer in Burlington with her uncle. They’d gone for a trip to Connecticut and her uncle and aunt have a son, Howard, who is her age. Howard was spoiled, but Nell had enjoyed herself. It had been three numb months since her parents had fallen in a float plane and this had been meant as a distraction. I like Connecticut, Nell said, to be polite. It’s too much travel for Howard, her aunt said. And Nell realized that because of cousin Howard they would never go to Connecticut again and that any love she received from them would be conditional love.
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