The End of Music

by Jamie Fitzpatrick

  From the crest of this ridge, Carter sees that they aren’t so far into the wilderness. A couple of strips of highway show through the woods, and hydro wires strung along a line of towers. Further on, streaks of blue-grey sky on a flat horizon indicate one end of the airport tarmac, with the circular antenna of the military radar station rising beyond. It might be an hour’s hike away, if the ground were passable.

  His eye is drawn back to the crash site and four bodies trudging single file through knee-high grass, making for a half-submerged, gnarled hunk of machinery. Andi is in the back, young legs rising and falling, black ponytail wagging from the back of her ball cap.

  Carter steps behind a long boulder. Seeing Andi’s wet spot, he straddles it and unzips.

  It’s a rich confluence of events. Leah approaching death while he searches ancient sites of death and destruction. Carter surrounded by the trappings of flight, past and present, as he contemplates all the things he has taken flight from. The circular route that brings him back to Gander, to the past where he once obsessively plotted the future. His mother unacknowledged since he arrived. The thrill of watching Andi stumble in the thicket as he adds his hot stream to hers.

  The mystery at the heart of it all is his inexplicable need to see Leah again before she dies. Why? What possible difference could it make to sit before her one more time? It’s more in his body than his head. He twitches with it. He finishes pissing, and pauses. Runs his thumb up his cock and down again, and circles it with two fingers. He could. Right here. But the energy quickening in him isn’t lust. Or it could be, but that would waste it. His blood races, strange and familiar.

  For the first time in years, Carter has an idea that demands music.

  16

  Joyce was at the living room window waiting for the phone to ring when the garbage truck rounded the corner. An old dump truck purchased cheap from the air force. The driver’s face hung in the window. His partner jogged along the sidewalk, trying to keep pace. They shouted at each other. The truck slowed to let the walking man catch up, and sped away just as he grabbed the side mirror to hoist himself aboard. The walking man tried to hang on, but fell and tumbled. There was more shouting, the two of them sunburnt and grinning. The walking man slapped dust from his green overalls.

  “Boys,” said Joyce. “Boys and their games.”

  A few days ago, Arthur had suggested she might adopt a more generous view of the people around her.

  “Like who?”

  “People in general,” he said. “It’s a shame to be so negative. Think of the boy. Think of the lessons you’ll want to impart.”

  “If people are fools the child ought to know it.”

  Joyce could see him weighing whether to take up the debate. Then he opened his newspaper and said, “I’m sure it’s very hard, your first child and all.”

  “It’s nothing to do with Herbert,” she replied, and they let it drop.

  Nearly ten years they had tried for a baby before Herbert was born. Arthur had been terribly agitated during the pregnancy, suspecting, as Joyce did, that it might be their only chance. But Herbert was well into his second year now. There was no need for Arthur to still be after her about every little thing.

  Still, his words had worked into her, as they always did. She respected him more than anyone she had ever known. His dignity, the way he carried himself in the world, she found intensely romantic. She loved his seriousness and intense focus on the few things that truly engaged him, his complete immersion in a task or book or argument.

  She resolved to do better, resolved not to fly at him so hard next time.

  It had not occurred to Arthur to ask whether her mood had anything to do with her father. Nearly a week since she told him her father was dying, and he hadn’t said a word about it. The two men had never met, as Joyce was long cut off from the family by the time Arthur appeared. A letter announcing their marriage had received no reply.

  Gloria had called last Thursday, when Joyce’s leg cramps were so bad she could barely make it to the phone. It’s your father, said Gloria. Mom says he’s taken to his bed and won’t be getting up again. They’ve put a mustard poultice on his neck but it won’t do any good. Mom’s down there every day, as long as your brother allows it.

  The estrangement was all Marty’s doing. Arthur understood that, though Joyce had never mentioned the other reports that had trickled in from Gloria’s mother over the last few years. How Marty tortured the old man beyond all endurance, hectoring and belittling him, keeping him locked up in the house, hardly feeding him. Turning away all visitors, refusing their pies or puddings or even a meal of fish.

  The garbage truck lurched to a halt in front of the house, shooting a black cloud from the smokestack over the driver’s head. The smoke was heavy, threads of it sinking and hovering over the new pavement and new lawns that wilted in the choking dry summer. Arthur had stood for council last fall, on a proposal for new garbage trucks and more efficient collection. For two weeks he had turned his collar against the September rain and dodged the muck of streets not yet paved, knocking on the doors of new bungalows and townhouses. Coming home with his raglan soaked through and mud nearly up to his knees. Changing into clean slacks and filling his pockets with breath mints. Back out again until well after dark. Joyce washed the slacks every morning. The mud was impossible. Thick clay churned up by construction and black earth from lawns newly laid.

  Arthur had rehearsed and tailored his argument so as to be irrefutable. Battered old air force dump trucks were poorly suited to garbage duty. They broke down constantly, scuttling the weekly collection schedule and eating up countless hours of maintenance and manpower. The investment in a fleet of proper trucks would be recouped within a decade. But people didn’t want to hear of anything that might raise taxes. Some were still upset about paying any taxes at all. We should have just stayed up at the airport, they said. Government land and government services. Arthur had not polled well.

  The walking man grabbed the trashcan at the end of the driveway and used his other hand to swing aboard the truck. With deft sleight of hand he removed the lid, tipped the can bottom up, returned it to the curb, and dropped the lid back in place. The truck lurched to the next stop, billowing smoke. Joyce and Arthur had been among the first residents of Alcock Street, surrounded by the shells of half-completed houses. The neighbourhood had filled up in the two years since, but a fresh timber smell hung in the air. There were sewer smells too, and a chemical scent that made Joyce nauseous when she was first pregnant.

  The gentle snoring from Herbert’s room meant Nan Carter was asleep in the rocking chair, with Herbert dozing in his little bed next to her. His midday naps were deep and impenetrable, and his grandmother slept just as deeply. Joyce didn’t have to think about dinner, as there was chicken and potato left from last night. Arthur wanted chicken every Sunday lately, now that the stuffing was to his liking. It was his mother who set her straight on it. “Your savoury isn’t fresh,” she told Joyce one Sunday. “If your savoury’s no good you’ll taste nothing but onions. And real bread crumbs, mind you. None of those big chunks.”

  The creak and clap of a screen door brought Donna Primm into view, hugging herself as she crossed the street. The garbage men paused to watch, and Joyce stepped out to meet her on the step.

  “Did you hear about that poor girl?” asked Donna, her fine cheekbones glowing. She was very pale, but flushed easily with all the young blood pressing beneath her skin. “Beat up and left for dead behind the post office?”

  “Dead?”

  “Well, no. But she was beat awful bad. Her family is new in town.” Everyone was new to Donna. It was only last year she had arrived from North Bay and moved in across the street with her remote and gorgeous pilot husband. The wind tugged red hair from her scarf and whipped it around her neck. “Anyway, they’ve arrested a boy, and I believe you know the family?”

  “
Which family?” Donna often counted on Joyce to flesh out her gossip with telling details of history and reputation.

  “Tucker?” Donna peered at her quizzically.

  “Anthony Tucker?”

  “That’s it.”

  “He didn’t. A little girl?”

  “She’s eleven, twelve years old? Something like that.”

  Joyce got a chill like her blood drained dry. “I grew up with Gloria Tucker. She and Frank got me my first job here.”

  “How awful for them.”

  “I held him, Anthony, when he was just a couple of days old. In the old Banting Hospital.”

  “He hit her with a junk of wood.”

  “I remember thinking it was a funny place to have a baby, a place full of sick people. We were all born at home when I grew up.” Joyce said this to push away her first thought: that Anthony was capable of it. The obvious suspect. He had turned strange during high school, always clowning around. Gloria used to say she couldn’t get a sensible word from him. He had failed a grade, and had no apparent interest in anything. Joyce didn’t see Gloria much lately. But she saw Anthony when she drove past Sears, where the young crowd gathered in the shelter of the wide front steps. He was always shouting and carrying on, a curly spray of hair swinging around his spotty face.

  “Do they have other children, besides this boy?” asked Donna.

  “Three.” Frank would be at the police station by now, called away from work. Gloria wouldn’t go there with him. She’d stay at home with her private shame. It was up to Frank to appear at the station on Reid Street, whispering, “Yes sir….Yes sir” as the officer explained the situation. Then a short visit with Anthony, the two of them lost for words.

  “There’ll be nothing for them but to leave town now.” Donna pulled a pack of Viscounts from her jacket. Joyce thought about pouring drinks. But lately the whiskey gave her a funny feeling, as if this house and this street were foreign to her. It had started after Herbert was born. A kind of vertigo after one of two drinks. A third one usually got her back on her bearings.

  Herbert’s feet pounded in the hallway. He arrived at the screen door, clutching at the mesh like a prisoner and pressing his face to it. “Mama!” he shouted, and sputtered a laugh.

  “How’s your bum?” said Nan Carter, coming up behind him.

  “I better go,” said Joyce. “I should call Gloria, see if she needs anything.”

  “No word on your dad?” asked Nan, rubbing her sleepy eyes as Joyce let herself in.

  “No.” Perhaps her father was already dead, and Gloria’s mother was lending a hand. She would phone after the body was washed and dressed, the hair combed and the stubble shaved. Or she was consumed by her own grief. Her oldest grandson in jail.

  According to reports, Joyce’s father hadn’t been the same since he dug the water line into the house last summer. With electricity finally come to the Cape, he didn’t want to be hauling water from the well anymore. So he dug a two-foot-deep trench and ran a length of pipe from the well to the house, where he put in an electric pump to draw the water. The project had set off another confrontation with Marty. Nobody could quite grasp what the fight was about—their battles had always been unfathomable—but the result was that Marty refused to help and Dad had worn himself out digging the trench alone.

  He’d be waked in the front room. All hands would turn out, as her father wasn’t one to make enemies. A few might come across from Arnold’s Cove, and maybe a few of Mother’s crowd from Rosaru. They had met when he went there to work the whale factory. Three days they’d wake him, and Marty would make a meal of it. The only son in his mourning clothes, circling the room with his sad little smile. Claiming his hugs and caresses from the women. Lingering just a moment too long with all of them. All except Nell Hinchey. Poor Nell would stand inside the door, suffering his indifference, clutching the blueberry buckle she had baked from berries picked just that morning. Nell had long ago betrayed her favour for Marty, the worst mistake you could make with him.

  If Joyce dared to show, Marty would keep her in the kitchen to clean fish or pick the turrs he shot that morning. Joyce hated picking turrs. You had to ruffle their feathers to let the water in, then dunk them in hot water just long enough to get them loose. She always scalded her arms, and if the temperature wasn’t right—just below boiling—it could turn into a mess.

  But Gloria’s mother said Marty never went hunting and fishing anymore. Made his dinner at the shop, opening tins of ham and salmon and bone-in chicken. He couldn’t get to church on Sunday without stopping to catch his breath, mopping his brow as he steadied himself on somebody’s gatepost. Joyce was picturing the wake as it might have been when she left Cape St. Rose, eighteen years ago. Nell Hinchey was surely married by now, with grey hairs sprouting from her chin and children climbing her sausage limbs.

  There had been a time when it seemed Marty and Nell might settle together. Back when Marty was trim and fit and could swim to Birch Island and back three times running on a summer’s day. But he was rough with her. Nell’s father had come over one day to complain about it, Marty sending her home with her dress torn up.

  Joyce pulled a bowl from the fridge and a spoon from the drying rack. Chunks of apple and celery suspended in green Jell-O. She had to eat. If Arthur came home tonight and found the Jell-O salad untouched, she’d be in for another lecture about her appetite. Arthur was a gentle soul, but he had a poor way of talking to people. It had surely cost him votes.

  Herbert was off again, a Frankenstein monster staggering on stiff legs, arms extended. He had been walking for a month, and still delighted in the mechanical wonder of it. Laughed at his great tumbles, even the hard ones that left him bruised. The dining room chandelier chimed when Herbert crashed to the floor. The toilet water rippled.

  “Come to Nan!” Arthur’s mother scooped him up and stilled the churning legs against her broad body. She was remarkably strong for a woman past seventy, and quick too. Her territorial claims were modest. She ate anything. Kept herself tidy. Joyce hadn’t wanted her moving in just as Herbie was born. But she was a saviour in that first year, taking shifts with the baby while Joyce tried to sleep.

  //////

  Joyce walked to the pharmacy in the afternoon.

  “Quiet little girl,” said the druggist. “Grade seven.”

  “How bad is it?”

  “She’s in hospital, is all we’ve heard.” He dropped the ointment tube in a bag. “Young people today. They’re gone mad. You know the boy, and his family, I think?”

  “Gloria and I grew up together. Haven’t seen her much in the last few years.”

  “And he’s with the weather office.”

  “Frank? Yes. He was always very cheerful. But he always seemed sad underneath…” Joyce trailed off, uncertain of whether to mention his drinking or whether he even drank at all anymore. She had long avoided him.

  She followed the sidewalk across the town square to the post office, where an empty police car blocked the trail that curled behind the building. There wasn’t much to it. Just a few trees caught between streets, with a small, weedy pool where the older children gathered in summer to catch and torture frogs.

  //////

  Arthur’s mother said there was something about seeing men on the moon that drove young people mad. “Like people can do anything, because there’s no sense to the world anymore. When I was a girl, you always knew there was an order to things.”

  Donna Primm crossed the street again. The three of them met on the sidewalk, with Herbert in his playpen on the front lawn. Donna’s hair was gathered in a bun now, with damp strands sticking to her neck. She had been stretched out in a lawn chair sunning herself for a good part of the afternoon.

  “They say the girl might die,” said Donna.

  “It’s like a sickness, teenagers today,” said Nan. “The drugs and whatnot. You shoul
d move somewhere else,” she said to Donna. “This is no place for children.”

  “We aren’t ready for children yet.”

  “And why would you? If you have your pills, or whatever, why would you bring a child into this world?”

  This was strange coming from Nan Carter, who could quote Pope Paul’s encyclical against birth control. “A man who grows accustomed to contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires.” Nan had long suspected that Donna, bursting ripe but still childless, must be on the pill. Donna walked around the neighbourhood in blue jeans and flip-flops, had spent the whole summer lying in the yard in a tiny bikini. The house came with a lovely little garden and she hadn’t done a thing with it. Just yesterday, Nan had grumbled about Donna’s freckled nose and large hazel eyes, as if they were the telltale features of a sinner.

  “We might go to the airport for an ice cream,” said Joyce. “Do you want to join us?” She loved the new terminal, though she had left work before it opened in 1959. The reach of its ceiling. The smooth ascent of the escalator. The leather seats. The mural with its strange faces and shades of colour she had never seen before.

  “Is your husband off at four?” asked Donna.

  “Yes.”

  “He’ll have plenty to say about this,” said Nan.

  It was Arthur’s favourite dinner-table topic of late. Something must be done about the young people, so they aren’t just hanging about idle. He liked to quote a statistic from a few years back, which identified Gander as having more children per capita than anywhere else in Canada. “So it’s not like we didn’t see this coming.” Fearful stories had been circulating. Katie Hogan’s boy was rushed to the hospital in a marijuana stupor. That pretty Tessier girl ran away with a fellow in a van, and her parents hadn’t heard from her in a year. A family on Earhart Street gave their twin boys the run of the basement, with a separate entrance, and now it was nothing but parties day and night.