The Bay of Love and Sorrows

by David Adams Richards

  From inside the church, beyond the glowing windows, he could hear the priest’s tired voice. And in a few moments parishioners started to file out the door into the golden-coloured night.

  “It will snow tomorrow,” Michael thought. “It will snow all the days of my youth.”

  He waited for Madonna. When she came down the steps, she turned and made her way along the path Karrie had taken that final night, her body huddled into the dark. Her entire life Madonna had fended off men, and really had given herself to very few people, and in her face was the absolute dignity of that struggle, born in poverty and violence and faded skirts and thin blouses.

  This is what he suddenly realized, and he made his way through the dark to speak with her. To kneel before her. She had loved Tom, perhaps, and she had loved him.

  “Madonna,” he said.

  He came out from the trees on one side of her, and she looked up, startled.

  “You scared me half to death,” she said.

  They were in that clump of muted winter trees. Here the stars dazzled, and there was a whisper from heaven that all life would of necessity be born again.

  “Where did Silver get the bad mescaline?”

  “Daryll brought it to us, told us to cap and sell it,” she said. “But we didn’t know — we didn’t know it was really bad until after we sold it.” She looked past him. “It was done to try to get you out of a scrape after you threw the good mescaline overboard. We sold it the night of Karrie’s birthday — “

  She said all of this straightforwardly.

  “What kids got sick?”

  “On the Island — Silver wanted to go back over. To sell it — so Everette wouldn’t take the sailboat on you. Silver couldn’t think of anything else to do. Daryll gave us the bag and we capped it in the barn — I don’t know what in hell was in it, but they say it was poison. They’ve linked it back to us — or they will. And one of the kids had epileptic seizures — his father will want to kill us — you.”

  Michael couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “Because of us, look what happened to Karrie and Tom,” she said simply. “Because of us.”

  He stared at her, at the top of her head, and suddenly he realized how indebted he was to her, and how much she had hidden from him. And how much he himself had used her and Silver. That in a perverted way, Silver had murdered for him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “But well find a way out — it doesn’t have to go any further.”

  She said nothing.

  “Look, Tom will be paroled in two years — I’ll write about it in the paper every day — I’ll see to it.”

  She said nothing.

  “Well,” he said, a little exasperated, “do you want your own brother to go to jail?”

  “He’s in hell now — jail would be a blessing — you must decide what to do — I can’t decide for you — I mean, I don’t want to. The truth is the great investigation book will be turned on us.”

  She smiled at him, with sympathy and pity and tenderly touched his face, as if no matter how he was used, treated later on, this touch was a reminder of her universal love. He had not realized how tender her touch could be, how it was alight with power and goodness.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I am sorry for all I’ve done. I’m sorry there is no way out — I’ve tried to find a way out for all of us for months. I am sorry I was Everette’s partner in the robbery of that poor man — but there is nothing I can do.”

  He took her hand and kissed it, and smiled. But there were tears in his eyes.

  NINE

  “There will be no truce until this is over” Silver thought, sitting upstairs and looking across the room at the model of the Bismarck. Suddenly, looking in the tilted mirror and raising his eyes, he realized what had been created over the last thirteen months.

  He left the house at 8:30 and went to the shed to get the long screwdriver. He would have to kill Everette. Then, he felt, he would be free with the money. But he hoped he wouldn’t have to kill Gail and her boy

  When he went to the shed, he saw that the boards had been pulled back, and the clothes were missing.

  Christ, I have to do this now. I have no choice, he thought, shoving the screwdriver into the shed’s paper-thin wall. There was only a wisp of wind, some dry rat-droppings, and the body of one thin and hairless baby rat.

  He set out, wearing his heavy coat and a pair of white muk-luks. He made his way around the back of his house, crossing on dry powdered snow towards the small drain, under the soft moonlight. He had taken nine bennies during the course of the afternoon to stay awake, and they had been taking effect for a while. His mind drifted and raced, like a dory’s small motor. His eyes were tracking off lights, which made violent, fantastic rainbows for hundreds of yards.

  “The money is at the end of the rainbow.” He laughed.

  He carried the large screwdriver in his pocket, and he touched the handle every few seconds.

  “It’s good it’s there —” he kept saying.

  The air was icy and filled with winter smoke. From the gas bar, lights twinkled, small and obscure, and a Santa with a cigarette smiled. The sky was wide with brilliant stars, firing the heavens for as far as his eyes could see. If he had to kill, he would kill the boy first, so Brian would not have to watch his mother die. That was the best he could give them.

  His shadow moved along his left side in the snow. And he passed Bobby and Joyce Taylor’s house. He could see them near their tree, and heard music.

  After twenty minutes he saw the cold, obscure shack. It was now nearing nine o’clock on December 19, 1974.

  The boy, Brian Hutch had had his birthday party, and had been staring at the floor for a long time in a kind of stupor, trying to keep warm. Now and then he would yawn and smile at something, or fold his hands deeper under his armpits. Once he nodded off completely. And then he awoke — because of the wind — and looked at the floor once more. It was as if the flat wind, as Gail called it, suddenly prodded him, making him conscious of what some force of life was trying to explain to him, a voice in his ear.

  “Mom —” he said, finally, “look — something must have went across our floor — from under the bed.”

  Gail, sitting in the chair, herself almost asleep, looked over at the small tiny markings that came from the hole beside a board under the bed, and seemed to cross the room at an angle and run against the wall Something keeping close to a wall meant only one kind of animal

  “A damn rat,” she said.

  “It musta gone behind the stove,” the boy said. But when he jumped down to check there was no rat near the stove, or in the other room.

  Gail said, “Maybe it’s gone. But you stand on the bed — with the shovel — and try to hit it when I take up this board. That’s what we get living close to the dump.“

  The boy grabbed the small shovel and waited. Gail tried to lift the board but it was nailed.

  “Everette nailed that board,” Brian said.

  “When?” she asked.

  “That day when you was at the funeral — I forgot about it.“

  So she went to Everette’s toolbox and got a tire iron. She came back into the room and pulled and pried until the board came up. It was a brand-new nail.

  There was no rat. It had gone.

  No rat, but she stared for the longest time at the thousands of dollars. And then, taking them up, as you would remove an old earthen jar from soil, and seeing blood over dozens upon dozens of bills, she said something that was to change the course of everyone’s life.

  “We have to go to the police.“

  “The police,” the boy said, in disbelief.

  She looked at her son, sat with this money in her lap, and considered. The money was wrapped in elastic, and marked just as Dora said it would be, and covered in plastic. But there would be someone coming for this money — her brother or Daryll Hutch - and she knew she and her son were in danger. For the blood told her. She did not know that dange
r was already on its way, was now walking towards them.

  “This is terrible,” she said. “Brian, don’t you ever touch this money You become a good citizen of the world. We are not going to obey Everette any more — ever again!”

  She replaced the board as best she could, closed the damper on the ire, put on her old coat, and put the inhaler in her pocket. She waited a moment at the door and listened. Every sound now seemed to be amplified a hundredfold.

  “We must cross the road, and take the ditch,” she whispered.

  And she made her way out into the night air, taking the boy by the hand, rushing across the road to the far ditch so as not to meet anyone. There they hid for a moment and she listened.

  “There is someone coming,” she whispered, “on the other side of the road — look — shhhh.” Then, grabbing the boy by the hand again, she moved away and turned towards the next house on the road.

  Silver went to the shack. He drew his screwdriver and kicked the door open. When he entered, he yelled to scare them. But they were gone. The money — which was supposed to be under the board — was missing. The place was still warm, and there was still a pot on the small Coleman stove.

  He searched the shack in rage, spending this rage on kicks and screams. Then he fell to the floor, and jabbed his screwdriver at nothing.

  Finally he went outside, looked at the sky, stopped in his tracks, wondering in terror what in the world he should do.

  He went back along the road, hearing in the distance the music that spoke of angels. He passed Bobby and Joyce Taylor’s house, and again saw the lights celebrating Christmas. Gail and her boy were already sitting in their living room, with all the money, and all those streaks of blood. Silver had missed meeting them by twenty-eight seconds exactly.

  One second for every year of Vincent Donnerel’s life.

  After a while, the whole town followed these events — riveted to them like tin to a roof. They gathered by the radio, and listened to the appeals from the police, the mayor’s statement to the press, and turned on their television sets to see themselves on the national news.

  PART FIVE

  ONE

  After twenty years the events were brought into focus again, by the custodian at the amalgamated school, Bobby Taylor. Sitting in his small closeted office on a cool June afternoon, he thought back to that time.

  He could see Silver, after all these years, in his mind’s eye.

  He took a drag on the cigarette and held it in his lungs, then blew it out the open window into the sunlight, the smell of fresh paint on the window sill, and the warm scent of tilled earth for the flower bed that grew along the brick wall

  On December 19, 1974, at 8:52 in the evening, he and Joyce had been decorating the tree and had drunk a full pitcher of eggnog and white rum. The air was sweet, the fire going with lovely sticks of birch, and outside, above their back porch, the stars illuminated the heavens and seemed to toss off sparkles on the snow, which blanketed their property to the trees.

  It was their first wedding anniversary and they were reminiscing about what had gone on over the year. Karrie had been Joyce Taylor’s bridesmaid, Tom had been one of the ushers,

  “It was as if that was Karrie’s wedding too,” Joyce said, hesitantly, as good people who sometimes mix deep thought and sentimentality are hesitant to expose this mismatch,

  A gloom descended upon their private party and Bobby looked at the nutmeg in his eggnog and was silent. For in truth he had been more than mildly fond of Karrie.

  “You know,” Joyce said, “it’s Brian Hutch’s birthday today,

  He was like Karrie’s little boy. She brought him presents last year, remember? I wish we could do something for them - something to help them start all over. Karrie would have wanted that,”

  “Of course,” he said, “but I don’t know what we’d ever be able to do — with Everette Hutch as her brother and his uncle. He would either steal it, break it, or threaten them.” Then he added, “I pray that someone shoots him soon — but it won’t be until Everette kills someone first,”

  So Bobby said what people always say when someone dangerous is about,

  Joyce nodded at him. “Well, something good will happen sooner or later,” she said.

  Just then the door opened and little Brian Hutch came in, followed by his mother.

  To Bobby it seemed the strangest coincidence.

  He drove them to the police station, where they handed the money over. Gail felt great fear in going to the police, for she had been conditioned from childhood to hate and fear them. Every one of her relatives had hated and feared them. By now even Brian did. But she hoped that this fear would pass, and knew that her life and the life of her son must change forever.

  “I’m going to make them supper — so bring them back if you can,” Joyce said.

  “Be home by ten o’clock” Bobby said, wondering why in the world that statement sounded familiar.

  John Delano took over the case that night of December 19, at ten o’clock, as instructed by Sergeant Fine, who now accepted the notion of spots of blood and a darker, more sinister summer, and made no more derisive comments about Delano’s personal motivation of infatuation, or about Tom Donnerel getting what he deserved when he was stabbed.

  Delano had no sooner gotten back from downriver when Gail and Brian arrived, with Bobby Taylor. The bills were placed in front of him.

  “Whose money is this?” Delano asked.

  Gail told him it had to be Dora Smith’s — part of the money that had been stolen. And it was hidden in her house.

  “And who stole it and hid it at your house — Vincent and Tom?” John asked.

  Little Gail Hutch laughed and laughed, and then squirted her inhaler.

  “Vincent and Tom never entered our door — it was Everette —” she said.

  “You sure?” John asked.

  There was silence. And then Brian spoke, his voice clear and calm.

  “He hammered the nail,” he said, “where the money was hidden — he told me he had to hammer the nail.”

  John Delano handed the little boy a cup of hot chocolate and patted his head. The little boy gave a crinkly smile.

  “It’s his birthday,” Bobby Taylor whispered.

  So John Delano telephoned a person who could find a birthday cake and candles at such an hour. And party hats if she could. A person who made no judgement, who worked for the police with the homeless and bereaved. A person John Delano admired.

  This person was Nora Battersoil.

  Rumours began. The river was taking on that agonized, dazzling feeling that a crisis was in the cold December air. And the murder of Karrie Smith was being refitted, retraced. Now Vincent and Tom had both resurfaced out of the din of death and speculation as heroic. Tom again thought of as heroic as he once was by that young woman willing to invest her time in him. And now, because of this exoneration, Emmett Smith wanted to confess, saying he’d known of their innocence all along. Dora caught him telephoning the police station and stopped him. Such was the state of affairs at the Smith house at eleven o’clock that night.

  John Delano drove about the small town, and waited for morning. Then at seven o’clock, without an ounce of sleep, he phoned Deborah Matchett.

  “You think it’s him too,” he said cautiously and sorrowfully.

  “I don’t know — I hope not, for Laura’s sake.”.

  There was a pause.

  “Come over — I want to show you something — something I kept pretending did not matter,” Delano said.

  He lit a cigarette and lay on the couch in the early-morning dark. Then he once again went over his notes.

  The youths who had been treated in hospital in Charlottetown for poisoning had said that the bad mescaline they bought for their beach party had came from a sailboat. (These were the same teenagers Karrie had spoken to from the deck the night of her birthday.) Their statements, each eleven pages long, were given two months ago, the Monday after Thanksgiving.
r />   That was how long John Delano, connecting these events, was certain Karrie had been murdered by someone else.

  The pictures of Karrie’s discarded body, bruised and naked with a swollen face, were being looked at by John Delano.

  He sat with Deborah Matchett at the table in his trailer, at eight o’clock, with a pot of coffee warming. He sat back while she looked down at these photos. She too was now engaged to be married. And it seemed to him that she, too, for one or two moments the previous fall had believed, as others did, that he was stalking Laura. That he had used this murder as a way to stay involved with her. Delano felt Deborah’s thinking was a way people sometimes had to make others slaves of their own good conscience.

  Now that she no longer felt this way, John took no delight in her change of heart. Other questions were predominant. He had no time to reflect on how slightly he had been treated. But there were one or two moments when she looked at him in whimsical apology.

  “I have treated women badly,” he mumbled for no apparent reason, as he stared at the picture. He was in a way apologizing to Deborah Matchett, to all women because of this. He looked at her quickly, “I mean in school — and I’m sorry about it now — some of the things I said — did.”

  “Oh, John — we’ve all treated people badly — we all have — so —” She stopped short. He nodded pensively and shook his head. Then looked at the picture again.

  There was blood on the victim’s left breast and nipple. He showed Deborah the picture of Karrie’s left buttock, where there was a bloodstain in the shape of what could have been a bill. He showed her the picture of the drip of blood on the path thirty yards away from the murder, in the opposite direction of the Donnerels’.

  But there was something else. Delano had something to show her on a photograph taken at the barn the morning Karrie was found, something he had disregarded at the time.