The next day — November 19 — John took the bag of mescaline and went to see Laura again. She was just leaving the house to go to Michael’s parents’, and she looked at him like one does when they expect never to see someone again. He recognized in her eyes the soft beat of instant dislike.
“Do you remember the mescaline that made those Ingersol kids sick on the Island?” he said. “I might have found that mescaline, or some of the same, downriver. I’m sending it to the lab, but it will probably take weeks.” He looked at her, as if wondering what she might know, and this bothered him.
She nodded, said she vaguely remembered something about it, but seemed distracted.
“Do you know a Professor Becker?” he asked.
Her face suddenly blanched. And he noticed that she was wearing a diamond.
“He’s to be Michael’s best man — why, is he hurt? Has there been an accident?”
“No, no — he’s fine — “
So John, with a sense of chivalry, kept the bag of mescaline in his pocket. For her sake he would not use it against her fiance if he could find some other explanation.
And this was something of that secret summer no one else knew.
TWO
As time went by, rumours spread about where the money was. Rumours spread about how much money it was. Rumours also spread, almost with a kind of gaiety, that someone else must have killed Karrie Smith.
Dora couldn’t sleep, thinking of this money, and as a byproduct of this thinking how much she had always disliked the Donnerels. At first she felt the money had to be at Donnerel’s house, and though she had no part in the burning of Tom’s property, she had searched the ruins. There was no money found. Now she felt someone else had it.
Emmett began to have trouble with his stomach. He took pills, and his hands, brown with hairy wrists, began to shake. He came to her on the morning of December 11, and said timidly: “It couldn’t have been Tom.”
“Why in hell not?”
“Because he wasn’t found guilty — he pleaded guilty — Why wouldn’t he tell where the money was? He has no knowledge of our money —” And for the first time in his life he grabbed her aggressively by the shoulders. “This is our fault” he said. “All of it.”
For the first time Dora looked at him, confused. But she hated what she was hearing.
“I can’t do anything about him — what do you want me to do — save the man who killed your girl? You weakling — you weakling — you weakling — you keep your mouth shut.”
And she smiled because he dropped his hands.
Emmett sat on the couch and looked about, distracted, shaking his head in dignity.
They were now enemies. She, herself, with great pride, refused to go to the graveyard and was fighting over the price of Karrie’s stone.
At night, Dora tossed and turned. She wanted one thing: to find the money and move away to Moncton to live with her sister, where no one would bother her again.
She then asked someone to look for this money — for a 5 — percent finder’s fee. Someone whom she could count on. Gail Hutch.
So on the afternoon of December 16, suffering from a heavy cough, wearing a pair of men’s rubber boots, the road she walked trailing off long and broken and barren, Gail came to the house. They sat in the porch overlooking the back field.
“I might be able to find it,” Gail said. “I could ask people at church or I could put up posters about it. How much was there?”
“I can’t tell you because I don’t know,” Dora said. “But don’t put up posters — just keep this quiet. The only thing I can tell you is if you do find it it might have “D” marked on the bills — have you seen any bills like that? Did Karrie ever give you one?”
Gail tucked Brian’s shirt in, and then took a puff of air, from her inhaler, and looked perplexed.
“Comme ah sa va — da diddly poop,” Dora said suddenly, looking at the boy. Dora’s victories were always over other people — children and the brokenhearted especially — and she laughed a short presumptuous laugh.
“The money might be all gone by now, Mrs. Smith,” Gail said. “It could all be spent.”
“Yes,” said Dora. “It might — but I have a feeling it is not.”
Wind blew over the field, blew snow over the paths, and down against the old crab-apple tree and over the graveyard on the left where Karrie’s grave was already a sunken mound, against the brittle salt air.
“Karrie didn’t say nothin to you?” Dora asked. “You were so close to her — she didn’t say nothin to your son about getting money for you?”
“Mrs. Smith,” Gail said,” Karrie was kindest ta us — all summer — except for you.” She shook her head rapidly and shifted her gaze, and then breathed a sigh, and then popped the inhaler in her mouth and took a breath. Her thin legs seemed to grow out of her rubber boots like twigs out of a pot, and she moved them back and forth, touching her toes together in the chill afternoon air.
“Well, I know she liked you. I don’t know what could have happened to all me money,” Dora said.
Gail and Brian went back to the small shack and sat on the bed, looking at Brian’s toys, and the wind blew snow off the pines and spruces and lifted the snow from the ground. At twilight, everything was black except this wind, which had the reddish tint of the sun. All day that sun hung over the rivets on the tin roof and the one window, and splashed on Gail’s straw-like hair. All day the boy tried to put the blanket against the holes to keep the wind out.
“A flat wind,” Gail called it, as she coughed, fumbling with the damper on the stove. A small yellow plume of smoke rose in the raw air outside. The little boy went to the door, opened it an inch or so to let the smoke out, and came back and sat on the bed, where he too began to cough.
He and his mother were filled with plans, and some of them were wonderful. His mother planned to have his birthday party before Christmas and said she would get party hats. And Brian was hoping to go to the store for them the next afternoon.
The boy had witnessed many things. They tried to get Everette to go away, and once Brian tried to lock the door when he came.
Gail had often been struck and bullied.
Once, after Everette had gotten out of the hospital, she had been hauled all the way down the wood path by her feet, so her head hit all the bumps.
“You are going to hurt her head! You are going to hurt my mommy’s head!” Brian kept shouting, astonished. But Everette said he would make Gail take off her clothes, and he would strap her legs apart on the bed and let his friends come and do it to her if she didn’t smarten up. And that’s how he would get back all the money. And then, after swearing about this, he got Gail to make him a Pizza Pop.
Whenever Brian remembered these things, he would sit in the shack in a kind of startled agony with a small apocalyptic smile on his face.
Brian had tried to protect his mother, but he was too little.
And though they were broke, had nothing, their nights were tortured by the thought of what they owed. The little boy would count up all his toys, and think of how much he could get if he sold them.
Gail looked towards the window. She was waiting for word from Social Services about a piece of paper coming from Quebec that would ensure her child’s welfare. Then she might be able to get some kind of job, perhaps at the fish plant in Neguac.
Every week they went to the road and hiked to town for a stipend of money. But they got little else. The local Social Services took a cursory interest in anyone who demanded nothing. And they would stand at the corner and hike home again.
“What would you do if you found Dora’s money and we got the reward?” she asked Brian, moving her fingers through his hair.
He sat on the bed beside her and smiled as light beyond the plastic on the window came in, and washed his face.
“We would pay back the business loan,” he said, for that’s what Everette had always called anything he had loaned them, “and move into a big house,” he said,
“for my birthday is what I would want, with heavy locks on the door that no one could kick at — “
“A house,” she said.
“Yes — where you would have your own room,” he said. “And we would have our own stuff. And go on a trip. I would take you on a trip. That would be my present at my birthday party, if I had money”
They talked about what they would have in their house. And then she tucked him into bed, even though it was early, and turned off the light.
She had no idea that all that money — all those thousands of dollars — had been hidden by her brother the day she was at Karrie’s funeral. That this money was hidden almost directly under her feet, as she tapped them together, hauled on her inhaler, and sang a Christmas song.
THREE
That same night Silver waited for Madonna to come in from town, where she was taking a secretarial course she had started in late September. He paced back and forth with his hands behind his back, his right hand holding on to the index finger of his left hand.
The course Madonna was taking in shorthand and typing, given in a small, red building that had been turned into an improvised schoolhouse at the height of the baby boom, was a course that by the very nature of the world would mean nothing in ten years.
Madonna was the oldest in her class and would be in town at ten minutes to eight every morning. The woman who taught her was perhaps the first woman who was not frightened of or mortified by her: Nora Battersoil.
Madonna came home that night at six o’clock. She made a supper of beans and wieners and brown bread left over from the evening before. Tomorrow was the last day of classes until after the holiday, and she was happy because she had made 85 per cent on her shorthand test.
Silver came downstairs and sat at the table, looked at her, and when she looked at him he put his head down as she said grace. He had just been asked by Everette Hutch to go into town to get Michael Skid. He was worried, and couldn’t think straight.
“Have you stopped screwing?” he asked her.
She looked up, blessed herself, and smiled.
“Are we going to get a tree?” she said. “Let’s get a tree this year.”
“Maybe — I dunno,” he said. He said he wanted to go to Ontario. He was worried. “I wish you was the way you was,” he said finally,
“Why?” she asked. “That was no way to be or to live.”
“Why not?”
“I caused so many trouble.”
“Ahhh,” he said in disgust.
She looked shy now. The way she had been was better. For instance, she had gone on a date with that businessman Everette had set up. Mr. Jupe, who had come to Hutch’s looking for a bottle of moonshine.
He was on his way to Tracadie, and was pleased with himself, pleased by his own plump nature, and the nature of his business, which was fish, and had a gold chain about his thick, brown neck, wore three rings and a watch which he said he had bought in Boston. Though married, he flirted with Madonna for weeks, encouraged because no one in the shack said anything to discourage him.
One afternoon, they did a lot of hash together. Then hugging her about the waist and cupping her breast he walked her to the car.
She drove with him down a dirt road, hit him over the head with a wine bottle, removed those rings, tied his hands behind his back, put him in the trunk of his car, which she drove to the dump, stripped him naked, kissing and fondling him so he begged her to make him come, stole his watch and wallet with four hundred dollars in it, and went on a three-day wine-and-bennie drunk, ending up at Hutch’s with a completely different man, and wearing the bathing suit Tommie Donnerel saw her wearing two months later.
She was no longer that girl And Silver worried about it.
However, other things now occupied Madonna’s mind. In a dream the night of the murder, at about three in the morning, Karrie appeared and hugged her, and handed her a present. This present was a small brooch in the shape of the sailboat with words upon it, and these words said: Pick up your cross and follow me.
In this dream Madonna had cried and said, “I don’t deserve none of this.”
But Karrie just smiled and hugged her again.
It would have been less extraordinary if she had known at the time that Karrie had been murdered.
“Poor Vincent,” Madonna said now. She had hardly eaten in a month and her body was thin, her face drawn.
“Deserved what he got —” Silver said, yawning. “Tom too. It’s sad — but eye for a eye Bible says.” He nodded at her again and wiped up some beans with his bread.
“I s’pose yer right,” Madonna said.
“A course I is right —” Silver said. “I mean, we knew that girl We was friends with her!” Then, agitated, he left the room.
She turned and he was looking at her from the living room, which was dark and cold and had but one small couch and chair. The kitchen light shone on his hands, but she couldn’t see his face because no light shone there.
“You must stop at this conjecture — you must know Tom is guilty. You must forget Nora Battersoil and her prying around you. You must stop hiding my distributor cap every time I get drunk. You must stop taking the bus back and forth every day to that damn course — you must stop thinking there is ever a good answer. And be the way you was. The way you was was better!”
Then, sad and alone, he walked upstairs to his room with tears flooding his eyes. If only they knew how sorry he was, they would be sorry and love him. Even Karrie.
His room had nothing except a picture of the Bismarck and some toy soldiers. The strange position he and Madonna had been forced into by their terrible fear of Everette Hutch had changed both of them radically and forever — but it was up to both how this change would finally manifest itself.
It was now nearing seven o’clock. Madonna sat at the table. Her beautiful eyes roamed the desperate little place. It had taken her a while to begin to think she could change, to find the new and wonderful life she was seeking on her own terms. When she cleaned the sailboat of its mescaline dust and hash, of its cups and saucers, she had been too frightened to go into the cutty because of how she and all of them had made fun of Karrie during that night trip to the Island. But finally she did. She rushed down the teakwood stairs and saw the poems of Robert Frost forgotten on the couch. It was at that moment, that very moment, the process of change began in her. It was a change that did not include that brilliant life she had once dreamed about when she had looked through the old glamour magazines over at the gas bar. The tight-waisted garments, the fashionable cosmetics that she felt must adorn a woman’s life. No. It was a very different life. A life she never ever thought, for a moment, until that moment, she would seek. But now she sought it. And now, her past life seemed a distorted jumble of drugs and sex and men, and was foreign to her.
Tonight, after cleaning the table, she went out to church. She had to decide something very quickly, and it was imperative that the decision be the right one. Time was running out. She had been procrastinating for over two months, and this was probably the reason Silver and Michael were both still alive.
The pews were dark and the candles fluttered and sputtered in their grates on the side of the altar. An altar girl carried the book out to the table, and the priest, his face white, and coarse with wrinkles, spat into his handkerchief and looked out the vestry door to spy the mean, sad congregation. He was the same priest who had said Karrie’s funeral Mass to that huge assembly that day, when he spoke of redemption and healing.
Madonna blessed herself and knelt and bowed her head. She smelled the worn pew and imagined the thousand thousand hands that had touched this pew since the church was built in 1853. The hands of tiny children or severe old ladies, soldiers, thieves, and citizens of the great world, gone. All gone in little frocks or old shawls, as distant with age as was Karrie.
She remembered the look she had given Karrie on the sailboat, and the time she had smiled and said: “Well, look at it this way — you no longer have a
tight little cunt.” And Karrie had hung her head.
She did not know why she had said that. But it was a part of everything that summer, a way to get back at someone for something.
She had been going to church off and on since the murder, but All Saints’ Day was different. That day, her culpability in the summer struck her with a terrible force, suddenly and overwhelmingly. And when it did, as she knelt in the pew, it made her body seem dead. Awful enough by pride and arrogance, for her own body, to the wilful disregard of a young girl’s life, and the robbery of a pompous, sorrowful man.
And this is what flooded up from her breast over the sputtering of candles that day. And as soon as it — and it did seem to — spewed from her, she heard Vincent’s voice, as clear as a bell: “Karrie loves you, Madonna.”
And with tears of hope flooding her eyes, Madonna knew she would never be the same.
The vision of Karrie never came back after the first night, and had in effect evaporated.
That same night Silver visited Michael Skid. It was just before Michael was to go to the McNair house, for the party celebrating the upcoming wedding. The night was cold and airy, the sky filled with bright stars, the snow powdery on the streets, and the alleyways between the old houses looked warm with newly fallen snow.
Michael had laid out his suit — the one Tommie Donnerel had sent back to him — upon the bed, and was looking at his collection of silver cufflinks. It was a moment when he had let his guard down, the one moment when he was not thinking of the past.
It was anticipated by everyone, up until this moment, that it would be a great, if impulsive, wedding.
Silver hadn’t seen Michael since the funeral and stood inside the door looking small and remorseful. He breathed heavily, smiled glumly, and came to the task at hand. He gave Michael the message Everette had told him to bring. That Michael was instructed — and he used the word “instructed” — to go downriver and wait for Everette to come and see him at the farm.
The Bay of Love and Sorrows Page 18