“Take that stupid scarf off, Silver,” she managed to say. She looked around and there was no one near them.
“You’re not going anywhere until you promise to give me the evidence you say you have!” He startled her by coming out of the trees beside her, with the scarf pulled down. “What, you take something, to give to the police? What? If Everette goes to jail over this he’ll kill us all.”
“You wait and see — we are going away! To Spain or something like that there —” She looked at him and became terrified. “I mean — I promise Michael and I are going away- and we won’t bother anyone again!”
“Michael! He’s the last person who would take you anywhere.” Silver laughed. He laughed such an awful laugh.
The trees moved in the wind, and a bird screeched.
Then came a moment when she realized he would not be able to let her go. That this conversation had precipitated an action he had not reckoned on. She realized this at the exact instant he did, and both of them looked at one another, startled.
“Tom,” she said. “Tommie!”
She turned to run back to Tom, still trying to smile. There was a blow to her head and she went to hold it, and then fell She started to vomit. She tried to stand, and she saw his hands. She suddenly remembered those hands as he had leaned against the door the very first day she had gone to the farmhouse.
“Hey, you,” she said, to call upon his humanity “Hey, you just listen.” She managed, but she was losing consciousness.
What she was going to tell Michael’s father about was the fact that they had gotten becalmed and had broken the spinnaker on the sailboat, and Silver said he wouldn’t help pay for it. That was the secret she was going to tell, to send them to jail.
And then suddenly, a rage descended upon her. She felt as enraged at the wasted time in her life, the tragic sorrow of her life, which seemed all the more sorrowful because she had bought that poetry book of Robert Frost, and no one would ever get to read it. At the loss of her life, and the child she might have held, as any human being who ever existed. She felt sorrow at the sound of voices calling her name, of those she would no longer be able to help. Then quite suddenly she began to know and to understand. And in knowing, she wanted only these things — to see and hug Madonna, to ask Tom’s and her father’s forgiveness — to long for a reconciliation between her and the entire world — to hope in love and justice for all humanity — to —
“Silver, don’t you understand? You will pay,” she managed to say, with a good amount of bravery, and then she closed her eyes, as she saw the terrible rock descend.
He didn’t mean to kill her. He would maintain that forever and ever. He only wanted to scare her away, because he’d been worried for two weeks and hadn’t been able to sleep, and was sniffing glue and taking bennies.
He hit her nine times, but she was dead after the third blow. He felt her dying, life leaving her. He hit her until a bit of brain came out the side of her head above her ear. Suddenly to Silver it was as if he could see her watching from above as he kept hitting her, as if she was telling him she was dead, and not to be frightened of her any more.
But he kept hitting her, talking to her the whole time. And then the voice above him stopped talking to him, and she just went away.
Then there wasn’t a sound. She was curled up sideways, and he rolled her over. There was blood all over the path and on his hands and clothes. He had to do something about that. And he ran. He had not meant to do it this way, but now that he had he tried to force it out of his mind.
NINE
Michael was at the party at Laura McNair’s. All evening he believed he was working himself up to an announcement — a full disclosure of what he had done that summer. At first he thought he would tell her while everyone was present. But this didn’t seem possible. As he sat looking at her parents, at her, at her friends, time marched along and his nerve failed him.
What prompted this change of heart was seeing Laura’s face, the poignancy of her decision to hold a party- Michael had not known it was in his honour until he got there. She was playing her own matchmaker. And she had invited friends of hers, whom she thought could be friends of his — a small man with hornrimmed glasses who was studying Celtic mythology and pretended to be a wine-taster. A woman who had been to Ryerson, but not when he had been there. A female member of the ndp, who used her womanhood to evoke privilege.
In all ways, her parents were kind, decent people who had not had a lot of good fortune. And he knew, looking at them rushing about, that they thought he was. He was to be their good fortune. The worst of it was, he now wished he could be.
Laura asked him to give a speech. The woman from the ndp sat forward and smiled. The little man with the hornrimmed glasses stood in the centre of the floor with his head down, as if terribly embarrassed.
Michael stood proudly “If only there is time,” he said, “I too will have a life.”
And he took Laura’s hand. Everyone laughed when he said this. It was a strange thing for a man of twenty-four to say
He left Laura’s house just after one o’clock and did not go downriver. At his parents’ house he started to phone Karrie, but decided against it. He sat on the edge of his bed, looking vacantly about the room.
“Poor Karrie,” he said aloud and felt what he had never felt before — a rush of kindly, innocent feeling towards her.
TEN
Silver had washed himself in the bay, and had thrown the rock into the waves. He went back to his house through the woods, hid his clothes and scarf behind the wall of the shed, where he kept his tool board, and got a clean pair of jeans from the dryer.
He grabbed a screwdriver and tucked it into his pants in case he had to defend himself.
Then he went back to Michael Skid’s farmhouse. A few boys were there drinking but Michael was away at a party in town, they told him. This seemed to relieve him quite a bit.
No one paid any attention to him, or to his nervousness. He examined himself carefully. There was no blood at all on his shoes. The blood on his hands had been washed away He moved those hands nervously.
Then he sat down for a while, laughing and talking, and asked three or four times where Karrie was.
But suddenly he left the house.
When he came to the black spot on the path he hoped that he wouldn’t see her. That she wouldn’t be there, but would have gotten up and gone home. Yet she was still there. Her blue eyes were half-opened, staring at the sky. One arm was out behind her.
He undid her pantsuit and took it off, and then took her panties off He was thinking of undoing her bra but didn’t. He pushed it up over her breasts, and touched them both just slightly. Then he didn’t know what else to do. He couldn’t enter her, though he thought that was why he must have done all those things. Her body was turning blue and cold and — what was terrible — it was absolutely indifferent to him. He tried to masturbate but he couldn’t.
And then he just stared at her, and realized that there was money piled inside her panties, and under her blouse. There were hundreds of dollars.
He picked the money up, and shoved it in his pants, looking back over his shoulder as he began to tremble.
Then he sat a little away from her, staring at her crotch, and its downy, whitish blonde hair, moving almost imperceptibly in the wind. It was impossible for him not to.
He didn’t know why this made him feel so sorry for her life, and how precious and vulnerable life was.
He went back along the path towards the gas bar with her panties and a hundred-dollar bill in his hand, and the three or four things he had taken from her pants pocket.
Suddenly coming towards him, smoking his pipe, was Vincent. Silver dropped the panties.
He went off to the side and watched him pass. But Vincent bent over, picked up the panties, and the hundred-dollar bill which had fallen on them too, and looked around.
“Hello,” he said. “Hello, you.”
Vincent waited for what S
ilver thought was an eternity And then he moved off down the path in the direction of the farm. Silver could smell his own sweat, and his body odour, and worse, he could smell Karrie’s body all over him. It was her body he could smell — her blood, her urine, her faeces, her brain, all of which had come from her as he hit her.
Worse, he remembered Tom’s horrible look that night at the house, when he’d given him wine. If Tom ever knew this he would kill him in a second.
“I have to act smart,” he whispered to a tree directly in front of him. If Vincent finds the body, he thought, it could be blamed on him. “It weren’t my fault anyway”
He then continued on the path, and suddenly — for all things seemed to be very sudden now — he decided there must be more money at Emmett and Dora Smith’s. He didn’t quite know why, but felt there must be.
He went around to the patio door, the one Karrie had stepped out that night when seduced by Michael, and slid it open.
The house was silent, and its unfamiliar shadows bothered him. He went into the kitchen, with its new linoleum, and its brass pot above the stove, and its oven mitts hanging above the roasting oven from a wooden oven-mitt holder that was shaped like a small cat.
He heard the fridge’s motor running and turned and saw a note on it that Karrie had written: “Home in an hour — K.”
The house was in darkness, the blinds drawn and the gas-bar light shut off. The only light in the den came from the streetlight across the highway that her father was so proud of.
“They don’t put a streetlight just everywhere,” he had said to Silver one afternoon. “They only do it with more ‘portant people on the road.”
It was that streetlight that frightened Silver. It was casting his shadow on the couch where Emmett was sleeping, his arm over his head much like Karrie’s was now. The man didn’t wake, even though Silver had his screwdriver ready just in case.
Silver’s hands were shaking and he heard Dora turning over in bed inside. So he became afraid and started to leave.
When he turned he saw the tin box on the small table below the lightswitch, where Karrie had left it.
He took it and brazenly walked back into the dark. As soon as he closed the patio door he heard Dora’s voice: “Karrie — get in the house now!”
But there was no other sound, and he turned and went home.
He put the screwdriver back on the tool board. Everything had been done, almost.
He opened the tin box. It was filled with money — fourteen or fifteen thousand dollars. For a long time Silver had suspected that they were rigging their pumps, and this money must have been collected over a two- or three-year period.
He counted the money that had been inside Karrie’s panties. There was some eighteen hundred dollars.
Then keeping the money in his left hand and looking at it as he tossed the tin box on the wood pile, he went into the house.
Madonna had just come home. He looked at her for a moment.
“Where were you?” she said. “Everette needs to meet with you.
“Just out,” he managed. Suddenly he broke out sniggering. Then he told her that he was laughing at a joke. He told a joke that had no meaning to it, and passed her, his body moving sideways. He turned and, unable to help himself, said, almost shouting, “I hope Michael treats Karrie Smith better than Tom did. I feel sorry for her. I think she thinks she’s going to go to Spain with him — probably saved the money to go.”
“How do you know that?”
“I don’t — I just-”
But Madonna had gone to her room.
A minute later he came downstairs and went outside.
Wearing his work gloves he took the tin box, and went up along the path to Arron Brook towards Donnerel’s farm. The trees waved in the wind in a constant howl now, and the sound of the brook roared in his ears, as he managed to cross it.
By the back fence of Donnerel’s property he was frightened by the mare, who twisted about in the dark and started to bolt, whining a short loud burst, kicking up her hind feet so a clot of soil flew in the night wind.
“I’ll kill you too — you scare me,” he thought as he unhooked the back gate. Then crossing to the oak tree he lay the tin box down and made his way home.
The feeling he had was one all murderers have. He felt he would be able to forget that this had happened to him, and try to get on with his life. That he would be able to forget it. After the funeral he would tell Michael that everything was taken care of, and to make sure he cleaned the sailboat of any dust or seed.
“A hard night,” he said as he passed the tombstone of his great-great-grandfather, who had run away from the English in 1821, and he burst out singing.
He calculated that he could pay back Everette Hutch, get in the clear, and still have four hundred dollars for himself. Though some of this money had blood on it, he knew that would never matter to Everette.
Walking all the way to Gail’s he found that Everette had gone to Chatham and so, after one in the morning, Silver went to Chatham.
The earth was soft and warm, and in a large, faded white house behind the park, and behind two other houses, Everette sat. He was a man who looked completely comfortable being who he was, with his large bald head, and his huge moustache.
As Silver entered the room, with its floor uneven and the smell of marijuana, he thought again of Karrie, and how cold her body must be, and he shuddered because moonlight becalmed the room and the table where Everette sat, his jeans covered in motorcycle grease.
“Is this it?” he said.
“This is it all,” Silver said, “so you don’t have to bother us any more. You leave Michael and Madonna alone.”
“How did you get the money?” Everette said now.
“I’ve got connections too,” Silver said, and he tried to sound put-out.
“You’re as white as a ghost,” Everette said, turning on the light, discounting the blood with a slight smile.
After he counted for a while he took seventy dollars and handed it over, because this had once been done to him when he was a boy, by a man in Newcastle, and he had always been awestruck by it.
“What else have you got?” Everette said suspiciously
“I’ve got a diamond too if you want it,” Silver said nervously, taking it out of his pocket. “Just to show no hard feelings.“
“Put it down,” Everette said shrugging.
Silver did. He put the diamond in front of him on the table. Then he sniffed as men do when it’s just been proven that they’ve had far more resources at their disposal then they were ever given credit for.
PART THREE
ONE
The next morning, September 10, the farrier came by. The mare had got out on the road and was wandering about, cars had backed up, honking their horns. He woke Tom, who, lying face down across the couch in the TV room, looked as if he had been drinking most of the night. In fact he had been at a bar downriver where he had spent over two hundred dollars, celebrating, he had said, “the end of a relationship.”
“You’ll wind up just like yer dad if you don’t put the booze away,” the farrier said. “The Donnerels can’t handle it — why, I’ve cleaned up more after the Donnerels than anyone — if yer going to drink I won’t come about — I took a beatin once from yer father for no reason — I won’t start it with you, Tom,” he said. “A man can take a beatin and still be brave — and I’m braver than the lot of youse,” he said, his eyes darting here and there about the room.
Tom leaned up on one arm and looked at him.
“Yer back gate was left unhooked — pretty soon you’ll let the place burn to the goddamn ground.”
Tom brushed him aside and ran to the barn to get a halter and lead while the farrier followed. Then from inside the door he said: “Don’t come in — “
But the farrier went in. He saw Karrie’s body, with her arms folded, and a pair of old shorts on, and Vincent, covered in blood, standing beside her with a cup of tea.
&nbs
p; The farrier went back outside and sat on the wheel of the tractor. He took a deep breath and looked at the gulls in the grey sky, far away, and cars on the highway trying to manoeuvre around the mare. Everything was very quiet and he could hear faraway laughter from children.
“You’d better call the police,” he said.
Constable John Delano was the first to arrive. Tom was sitting on the hay-baler talking to himself. Vincent was standing in the middle of the field under the oak tree, looking at everyone as if something was expected of him, or of the teacup still in his hand. The dog was whining on its chain, and Vincent went over and picked it up.
The farrier was talking to a group of young men who had come up from the road. The traffic had backed up all the way to Oyster River, and people were cutting across Tom’s field, which was the colour of mud, while someone Tom did not know was proudly walking the mare along the lane on a lead, as if this was what the excitement was still about.
After speaking to Vincent, who was finally able to tell him he found the body, Constable Delano went down and walked the area where the murder had taken place. He found a tiny shred from a torn bill off the far back path near a tree, where he thought someone might have stood in wait. However, there was nothing to prove that.
But he looked at Constable Deborah Matchett. It was as if the uniformity of the case now had a crease in it. He took the piece of money and wrapped it in plastic. When he stood he brushed off his pants, and walked towards the shore. He walked down the path all the way to the water. There were some motorcycle tracks, and a broken bait box sitting upside down in the sand.
To his left he could smell Jessop’s cows. On his right the smell of mud and a rotting clam bed. He turned back and came to the spot where the body must have lain. There was a pool of blood four feet from the path that turned towards Michael Skid’s.
Sergeant Brendan Fine was at the scene drinking coffee out of a styrofoam cup. He had retraced the steps Vincent had taken when he carried the body back, found where he had rested against the pole near Donnerel’s front field, where the girl’s hair left traces of blood.
The Bay of Love and Sorrows Page 14