The Bay of Love and Sorrows

by David Adams Richards

  “Perhaps it’s because they believe they are the ones fashionable enough to be crucified,” Delano said, finally “And Karrie wasn’t included,” he said, fumbling for another picture, this one of Karrie standing on the bow of The Renegade, in a dress and carrying a purse.

  “Well, Michael was with me — the night of the murder,” Laura snapped, noticing neither the hash nor the Sportster, “and he did everything to protect her. More than the police ever do in these matters,” she said, “Two hundred women a year are battered to death by their husbands or boyfriends — “

  John Delano was taken aback. Not by what was said, but how it was said. It was as if Laura felt that he was trying to please her or prove himself to her by discrediting her friend. He had been infatuated by her, he had asked her out a half-dozen times — found out when her birthday was and sent her a card. All of this was known, by everyone, and it had made him look and feel ridiculous. But he was not ridiculous enough to be able to promote himself by this.

  “Anyway, John, there is no case to solve,” she said, more kindly, turning away and taking down her coat to put on.

  She added that it was clear that Vincent killed the woman, and certainly Tom put him up to it. Michael Skid had tried to protect the young woman from them. This was becoming more and more evident now.

  “I think you are on an entirely different case than we are, John,” Laura said, laughing suddenly.

  “I think so,” John said. Their eyes met in the mild, stuffy air of the back room of the courthouse. Suddenly a dark wave came over the sky, just for a second. And Delano knew by this that everything was over between them, every faint hope he had entertained about being with her.

  “All this mystery,” Laura said, buttoning her coat and giving an acrimonious smile. “My, my”

  Over the next five workdays, the police took statements from Dora and Emmett Smith, and from Madonna Brassaurd, who admitted that since Michael and Karrie had become friends, Tom turned jealous. They were able to verify that Daryll and Everette Hutch were in Chatham the night of the murder, and could find no evidence linking Silver Brassaurd.

  The prosecution’s office was adamant that they had to charge Tom Donnerel. Laura said that they should enter two charges against him. One for criminal negligence, the other for conspiracy to commit murder, by using his brother. The entire community, and by now the province, wanted Tom, with some justification, to pay. By these charges, the prosecution felt it would throw light upon the whole messy circumstance.

  “outrage on a violent river,” read the headline in the largest provincial paper.

  “Certain cases in our province unite people in outrage and remorse,” it stated. “And never has this been more evident than the murder of young Karrie Smith.”

  “best friends’ rivalry turns deadly,” read the headline in the other provincial paper.

  The reaction to the case caused a certain pressure. And Laura was in fact pleased by this pressure. She had interviewed a bartender and three or four patrons of the bar in Neguac who had seen Tom just after midnight that night, telling people that Karrie would no longer be around to bother him. It was also known that, a month before, he left Vincent and went on a five-day drunk, where it was reported he had turned violent.

  The idea now, quite apart from everything else, was that he was like his father — an obstinate, mean, unpredictable, and domineering drunk. And this more than anything inspired antipathy for him by Laura McNair, whose own father was kindly, helpless, and sad.

  “He spent the money at the bar,” she said, “That’s where the money went!”

  With small, inquisitive eyes which gave a cute and impish puffiness to her cheeks, she looked up at her mentor, Mr. Tait, who stood by the window overlooking the main street running back through this part of town. She was impish when not in court, and liked to tease.

  The loss of her heroic brother, Lyle, still evoked a silence in her, which could be seen in the knee-length skirts and heavy brown shoes she wore, which had become her trademark — as much as the sou’wester she wore in the rain.

  But the tragedy also gave her a more outgoing posture, for her family’s sake. And someone had finally come her way. Michael Skid. They had met as children and had dated as teenagers.

  She had always been attracted to him. And John Delano knew this, and she felt that this was the reason he was trying to ruin this case,

  “Even on criminal negligence we can press for eight to ten,” she said to her boss now, emphasizing ten the way people do when it will mean the undoing of others and not of themselves, and to show that she was savvy and knew about ten, as opposed to five or fifteen. She stared at the prosecutor and her eyes glowed, and the cuteness of her face didn’t match what she had just said.

  The prosecutor, a heavyset man of thirty-eight, who was new to the community, and had the feeling that he was in an area of intangible remoteness because he himself had grown up twenty miles outside Fredericton, said emphatically, while reaching over to tie his shoe: “He’s a son of a bitch. I’m sure he was there — I mean, at the scene. He probably told Vincent to run away, hoping he’d get killed. But we’ll never get him for conspiracy or anything if he has any kind of lawyer. He’s smart enough to get away with it.”

  The further outraged Laura McNair phoned Tom’s defence lawyer on her own initiative.

  “Lookit,” she said, as she played with the telephone cord without taking her eyes off the notes she had written, “we can take this all the way — let me tell you, we know the son of a bitch was there. We’ll sit down on this one and prove it. The hundred dollars was found — it was part of the money Tom wanted. What would Vincent know about money?”

  It was very strange that she had said, “Sit down on this one,” because it was her first murder case, and she had never used that expression before.

  There was a long pause, and it seemed longer in the heat of mid-morning. Then Tom’s lawyer spoke. His voice came as a whisper, like a distress call from a wounded animal: “I’m getting death threats over this damn thing — what am I s’posed to do if that son of a bitch came to me? My wife is angry — phone calls. I haven’t slept in a week. The best thing to do is to get this case behind us — “

  “Oh, I know — he’s a bugger,” she said, and she wrote in her notes: “big scaredy-cat!”

  Yet Laura came into the office the next morning and found she had a phone call waiting. It was Tom Donnerel’s lawyer. He said there was no way to stop his client. Tom had resolved to plead guilty, saying that he had planned everything and had forced his brother to murder.

  So, on his own initiative and to the relief of his lawyer, Tom pleaded guilty to the charge of criminal negligence and the further charge of conspiring to commit murder,

  “Do you wish to do this?” his lawyer asked, pretending to be concerned, when his only concern, Tom knew, was if Tom said no. So he looked into his lawyer’s eyes, with fear and regret, remembering how Vincent had bothered Karrie all summer long, and understood his lawyer’s plight.

  “It makes no difference now,” he said.

  “Conspiracy to commit murder — we should fight that all the way, at least — we’ll go for the first charge — it’ll make a great difference in your life — it might have been criminal negligence, I’ll say — but conspiracy?”

  Tom said no. He had, he said, led Vincent astray. And saying this, he remembered his brother’s huge lumbering hands. “If it weren’t for me, Vincent wouldn’t have done what he did.”

  “Well — a terrible thing — a terrible thing,” his lawyer said.

  FOUR

  Three weeks later Tom stood in the dock, in that brown suit he was going to wear to his parents’ funeral. There were many derisive cries: “Hang him!”

  There was an audible grumble of disbelief from Mr. Jessop. And then there was nervous laughter.

  Judge Skid, his face flushed and clean-shaven, with white, dried-out, lifeless hair and small red lines on his white cheeks, which indicated
his drinking bouts, looked about as if counting the people in the room.

  “The whole community has been outraged over this affair,” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” Tommie Donnerel whispered. He kept looking around, as if he wanted to be certain that it was the entire community or even if it was he they were outraged by. He began to shake uncontrollably, which caused Judge Skid to frown in disgust.

  He then spoke with great affection for Karrie Smith, a young woman whom the community downriver loved and whom he wished he had met. Then he looked over at the parents and nodded, and both of them seemed pleased,

  Then he looked at Laura McNair.

  Ms. McNair gave her summation. She did not speak of the murder for more than a few moments.

  She spoke of Karrie and her dreams washed away in her blood. And then she spoke of Vincent. She spoke of his childhood. She spoke of his dog, Maxwell And she introduced the report, from a day in the early 1950s, when Vincent, in stopping his baby brother, Tom, from falling off Burnt Church wharf, fell himself, causing the massive head wound that left him mentally like a child of four. This was something that Tom hadn’t known until that moment. Something that his parents had always hidden from him, something that now made him clutch the dock so he wouldn’t fall.

  “FAMILY OUTING TURNS TRAGIC,” read the headline in the old and distant yellowed paper. It was one of the provincial papers and the story appeared on page six. Ms. McNair lifted it up triumphantly. Then, putting the paper down, she went around to the front of the prosecution’s table and suddenly turned and glared at Tommie Donnerel, her nostrils flaring out.

  “And this was how he was repaid, in part tortured himself, because of his brother’s cowardice and jealousy, not responsible for his actions, and yet driven to protect his baby brother to the end. And who was there with him, Tommie Donnerel — if not in person — by proxy. But you couldn’t do it yourself, could you — ?” Here she shrugged and, at the same moment as she turned away, said, “So get Vincent.”

  Which left a deep impression on everyone.

  For a moment there was silence. They all looked at Tommie, who could not stop shaking. She walked around to her side of the table and, without looking at him again, said, in disgust.

  “And here he stands shaking like a leaf, a coward in a brown suit, in front of us.” But this comment brought comic relief to everyone, and they burst out laughing. Tom too, looked around and smiled. Only old Mr. Jessop, seated near the front, looked too saddened to smile.

  “Hang him!” someone shouted.

  “Enough,” Judge Skid said.

  Tom Donnerel’s lawyer, impressed by Ms. McNair, whom he’d been told to keep an eye on, kept trying to adjust his glasses, and, shaking as much as Tom, asked for mercy, said two lives were already destroyed here — show leniency towards the third. Then he nodded and sat down.

  It was quiet again.

  And then Judge Skid spoke: “If there were law enough to hang you, sir, I would. You have disgraced yourself in the eyes of man and God — I sentence you now to twelve years.”

  A displeased murmur went up in the crowd. Then in the balcony and out in the foyer, the murmur spread.

  “Only twelve years — only twelve years.”

  “Yes, but they didn’t prove it, he confessed.”

  “So — so what — only twelve years.”

  Tom could not stop being afraid. He kept hoping that someone, anyone, would look at him in kindness. He wanted someone to tell him how it had all come about, wanted someone to tell him how things had got so bad. He kept looking for Michael’s face amid all the other faces, but Michael wasn’t there. In the end, he tried to speak about the mare, and little Snowflake. Who would take care of them now?

  Five

  Tom wrote Judge Skid a long letter of apology from prison. In it was the testimony of a man trying to reorder his life and to gain back his self-respect.

  “I asere you, sir,” he wrote, misspelling the word assure, but liking the word because it was one Karrie had used when she spoke to him of her love, “that I will do everything in my power to change my life and be a decent human beink. That I have wronged others I am awere of, but I will never harm a soul no more. I didn’t know this about poor Vincent — how he fell off the wherf — it was a brave thing he done for me. Now I will member that as long as I live — and member that whenever anything is done to me, even if I was hit, I cannot do nothin to them. I will member that to the end of my days. I wish God to bless you — sir. And hole no grudge.”

  The judge wrote a formal reply where he spoke of mercy as being in the hands of God, and that the judge was simply the instrument of the law. He said he was pleased that a man like Tom Donnerel might consider reforming. But he added that at this moment he had no kind words of encouragement to give.

  “It was a case — so sorrowfully senseless and brutal, one of the most difficult I’ve ever had to sit before. That my own son was involved in a minor way in trying to help this young woman seemed to make some conflict upon my sitting, but I was and am the principal provincial court appointee and regarded it as duty. As regards your property, it was burned, and is in the hands of the law. So I suppose if there was money hidden it is now destroyed.

  “I take no pleasure in informing you about this, and you can be guaranteed it will be investigated to the fullest extent.”

  Then, pleased with this note, he mailed it on, but couldn’t help telling the postal clerk what it contained.

  The postal clerk nodded gravely, and stamped it accordingly. He felt a twinge of happiness, because the judge had confided in him, and because he himself had known Tommie Donnerel, and had taken Karrie Smith to the high-school prom, where she had treated him meanly.

  His life had turned out well compared to theirs. And then he thought of Karrie, and how her body had been found nude. And as he remembered how attractive she was in high school, with the wonderfully suggestive and still innocent sway of her hips in her pleated skirt one day running down the hallway, a sudden obscene pleasure took hold of him, which he felt in his groin, and which he tried to dismiss.

  For a while the judge was bothered by Mr. and Mrs. Smith, who had taken comfort in his words at court, and believed them all, and began visiting Michael at the house. Dora, wearing a black dress with a lace front, which made her white breastbone look like it was marked by blue ink, sat in the large chair drinking tea out of the best china, holding a Kleenex up to her nose.

  “My, what a fine, grand house — this musta cost somethin now,” she would say, with humiliating graciousness.

  She talked nonstop about Karrie to Michael’s mother, who soon had the habit of sitting on the far side of the room, continually glancing out at the street.

  Once when Judge Skid said he was sorry she was robbed, she answered: “Yes, my money is gone, let alone Karrie.”

  She brought some things over that Michael might want as souvenirs — the brooch of a sailboat, with the name Karrie engraved under it, and, again, the book of Robert Frost’s poems. It had come back to Mrs. Smith by way of Madonna, who had been given the duty of cleaning the sailboat before it was housed for the winter, making sure that the remnants of the fatal summer were removed forever.

  Michael took this book and opened it while they were there. His own responsibility was measured in the fact that he had not done enough, he said suddenly to them. And he suddenly felt this to be absolutely true. That he had known Tom Donnerel and had seen all the signs but had done nothing about it. The Smiths both protested, Dora especially.

  But more than this, Michael was burdened by an agitated remembrance of Karrie’s strangely sad smile when she spoke of her parents one afternoon. He could not forget it. She had looked at him in a wistful way and had said, “Oh, Dora” so plaintively that it still haunted him.

  It seemed for a while that Michael could not get rid of her parents, and had a dreary time during these prolonged visits, which happened with annoying regularity. He began to be able to distinguish the s
ound of their car from all the others driving down his street that fall, and to go upstairs and sit in his room, waiting for their visits to end.

  Karrie’s book he gave to the Salvation Army, along with the old brooch and other things, because it reminded him of those forlorn events. And his father thought that this was a reasonable thing to do.

  As it happened he felt guilty about these events, even though he was unaware. In a way he felt responsible for Tom, and hadn’t been able to go to the courtroom to watch the trial of his friend. And even though no one bothered him now, and he was free of the summer, he still felt these things. He felt guilty because of Karrie’s smile. This disturbed him more than he had initially thought it would.

  The autumn faded. And cold weather came. Quite suddenly everything about the summer seemed over. The wind blew cold, and children were back at school.

  Michael then played his trump card. He finally finished the long article on his private school near Sackville, which he had been working on for over two years, and which would be published in the Moncton Times. It contained interviews with certain students and made accusations against the drama teacher, who had various relationships with his students. It would not have been published had he not been the Michael Skid, associated with the Karrie Smith.

  Yet because it was published, the article caused Michael’s name to be spoken about, and his old drama teacher, Mr. Love, was forced to resign. Suddenly, all the dark corners, the small mean suppers, the warped floors, the old back buildings, took on a different, more odious slant. And the world of this particular provincial private school with its subterranean values was exposed.

  That he had been working on this, quietly and without giving any hints, seemed remarkable to his chagrined parents in the cold days of late autumn.