The Bay of Love and Sorrows

by David Adams Richards

  “Look”

  “I am looking,” Deborah said.

  “And what do you see?”

  “I see a picture of the victim taken in the barn on September 10,

  1974.”

  “And what do you see?”

  (Pause)

  “And what do you see?”

  (Pause)

  “And what do you see!”

  “Goddammit, John Delano, will you fuckin shut up — and let me look?”

  “Well, come on, Debby,” John said peevishly, “what do you see?”

  “I don’t know,” Deborah said finally

  And John pointed. He didn’t point to the clot of blood on the head, the swollen face. He pointed down, to the bottom of the picture, on the right calf. “What’s that?” he asked.

  “I don’t know — a birthmark?”

  “Let me tell you what that is,” John said. “I will tell you what that is, and then I will make a gambler’s bet about this whole case. That’s a burn from the exhaust of a Harley-Davidson. And it’s Hutch’s Harley-Davidson.”

  “Well, why wasn’t it mentioned in the autopsy report?”

  “I don’t know — I don’t know why it wasn’t mentioned in the autopsy — okay — but that’s what it is. That’s what the bike tracks on the shore were.”

  “Well, so what? She went for a ride on a Harley, big deal Nothing can be proven by that.” She smiled indulgently at him, sat back, and lit a cigarette.

  He stood and walked to the window. There was a peevishness about him when he knew he was right, and the room was silent and filled with the deadness of cold air. He had not wanted to go against the grain. But not only the grain, of course. He had tried to convince himself that Laura was right about the case, and he felt that if he had pursued what he knew with more vigour, she would not now be engaged to Michael Skid.

  The new polished streetlights at the end of the lane had not yet gone off, the traffic continually ground over flat windswept ice.

  Delano turned and lit a cigarette.

  “I know. For the last few months I thought the same thing. So what? It’s just a drive on a bike. It was the grey area, but it fits. It fits since I first met Michael Skid in the hospital last summer. Something bothered me about him. About his rebelliousness. The idea of freedom for Karrie Smith, who never had any And Hutch posturing as a good man, and Michael replacing his friend, Tom, with his new friend, Hutch, and finally posturing as a bad man. But you see he was not a bad man. That’s what was behind all this — not Vincent or Tom — it had nothing to do with them.“

  Constable Matchett continued to glance through the pictures of the body, and of the barn, now destroyed. Here she lifted her gaze and cleared her throat.

  “Oh, I know I’m moralizing about Michael — but moral responsibility in the hands of the frivolous is the real case,” Delano said. “Michael traded upon it — I think he traded Karrie’s life for it, and by now I think he probably knows this. That’s what the pictures at the farmhouse always said to me and I didn’t understand why. But Karrie is the only one in those pictures that never belongs — she is always the country girl dressed to go to the city — killed because she knew something. That’s what the burn from the exhaust pipe really says. It says this: Everette had the whole group of them hook, line, and sinker.”

  “Where would Karrie get the money?”

  There was silence for a moment, and then John nodded.

  “Every cent came from the Smiths. Well take it downriver and set it in front of them. They didn’t admit to losing it, so it had to be stolen money — or a tax ripoff or something.”

  Constable Matchett said nothing.

  “Every cent came from the Smiths — somehow — and if they had told us this back in September, Tom might not be in jail, or Vincent dead.”

  He looked out the grimy window again, smiled slightly, but only for a second or two. He began to ponder why it was they hadn’t reported this money as being stolen.

  TWO

  Dora Smith had Karrie’s upstairs room locked, for she could not stand to go into it. And she would not let Emmett near it. His mourning and his remorse burdened her. Sometimes she would go up to him and clap her hands in front of his face.

  “Snap out of it — shape up!”

  She had sent Gail Hutch into that room to clean it out just after the funeral. The woman had gone in, scared to meet the ghost of her friend, and did what she could, but left a few things where they were, out of respect.

  When Constable Matchett came down with Constable Delano at ten o’clock on the morning of December 20, Dora Smith was sitting in the back porch, alone, staring out at the empty bird feeder (the bird feeder Karrie used to fill in the winter for grosbeaks, as soon as she got home from school, and in the summer for sparrows and chickadees) Emmett took the constables in to see her, and stood a little back from them.

  Delano asked if she would take them to see Karrie’s room. (Deborah Matchett felt that this is where they would be the most vulnerable. And to her it was simply good police work.)

  “I have the room locked,” Dora told them. “I can’t stand to go in and see it. Either can Emmett — can’cha, Emmett.”

  “No, no,” Emmett said, shaking his head. “I can’t.”

  Delano nodded, and asked again if he might see the room.

  “If we might just see her room,” Matchett said.

  Finally Dora said it was okay with her and she picked up a handful of cashew nuts from a dish beside her, and stood, glancing at her husband, popping nuts into her mouth as she went behind them. Emmett followed.

  “Soon there’ll be a book on poor Karrie,” she said. “The whole world is waiting for it — it’ll sell.”

  They went up the carpeted stairs, the stairwell burdened by dark-stained wood, and a picture of a young man in a small fedora, standing proudly by a Ford car circa 1935. This was Emmett Smith at age eighteen, and the ground he was standing upon was where his house and business now stood.

  There was a whiff of perfume as Dora passed them on the stairs and moved on her flipflops along the hallway, illuminated by a rectangle of soapy December light from the bathroom. This light seemed discomforting.

  “Sometimes at night I hear her in here,” Dora said. “I hear her crying. Wanting to come back home, from the path. Goddamn Vincent. Now the room is bare — but I didn’t sell her things — did I, Emmett? — I give most of them,” she turned the lock, “away.”

  And with the word away she leaned against the door and it opened, with a solemn squeak.

  The bed was stripped, and the far window was curtainless. The dresser sat with its drawers open and empty. The small collections of dolls and miniature suitcases were gone as well. And no one would ever know what they had meant to her.

  Dora remained in the hallway, with her husband, craning her neck and smiling at them glumly when they glanced at her. Emmett seemed to be going through what he desperately considered reasonable motions, and in these motions he found sanctuary. This was evident by his wife’s cautionary and scolding look every few seconds.

  “What is it yas are lookin for? Somethin for the book? I give all the pictures over to her aunt — “

  Delano opened the closet, and it opened hard as if the wood had swelled. The air inside was trapped and musty. A coat-hanger and one shoe lay on the floor.

  “Her clothes are gone?”

  “Yes, they was all given away — well, most of them were, weren’t they, Emmett?” Dora said, patting the edges of her hairnet. “Poor Karrie,” she said as an afterthought. And then cleared her throat in the musty stillness.

  Constable Matchett went to the window and looked out, at the top of the shingled and snowy porch, looking out at the road, and far away, at what was left of Tom Donnerel’s farm. That desolate burned farm gave her a strange sense of foreboding. Below them the two inspectors from Esso that John had called at nine o’clock were opening the gauges on the pumps to check the calibration, and Emmett, who had come to
the window, noticed this, at first in perplexity, and then as someone astounded.

  “Here we go,” Delano said from inside the closet.

  Searching the shelf, he brought down from behind the faded pullover and old woollen blanket the mauve jewellery box. It had been hidden there since the night of the murder. The last person to have touched it was Karrie. It brought the feeling of immediacy back — as if she was now in the room scurrying about.

  Dora now heard the pumps being turned on. It was like a small rumble. She cocked her head and, listening, looked towards her husband. “Is someone at our pumps?”

  No one answered, not even Emmett Delano brought the jewellery box over to the bed and looked at it. Then he took a small wire from his pocket and picked the lock. It opened, not unlike a tomb. Karrie’s serious and crisply new passport pictures lay on top of her diary, three hearts engraved upon its cover and locked by a snap. The passport pictures had been done on August 31, and her forms had been filled out, and placed neatly under the diary. There was, under these forms, a small black-and-white photo of her and Vincent at the picnic. And another tiny picture of Maxwell, the dog, beside his tin dish. This picture was dated the winter of ‘74. There was a locket which held a picture of her mother, and a lock of her mother’s hair.

  This was what was left of Karrie’s memory and her own hidden life. And it made Delano impetuously angry. He could not help glancing about and staring first at Dora and then at Emmett. Dora gave a slight start and Emmett lowered his head and seemed to sink, so that he looked small and frail beside Constable Matchett.

  “Who’s out at our pumps?” Dora asked. “Tell them to stop running the pumps —” Then she cleared her throat and, looking at John Delano, said: “What is it yas got there?”

  John took the money from an evidence bag in his pocket, and threw it on the bed at the same time as he upset the jewellery box. At first there was no sound. And then a kind of squeal accompanied a rushing of flipflops into the room.

  “My, my,” Dora said, her face beet-red, and looking at them. “My money — look — the little bitch stole my money.”

  Emmett turned and walked over the stripped bed, his legs wobbly, and put his arms on her.

  “How can you say that about her?” he yelled, coming alive suddenly after fourteen years of marriage. “How can you say that about my girl! — I know you — I know who you are now!”

  But Dora tore loose, angry, and pleased at her anger. Then Emmett put his hands on her again, and Dora grabbed at his fingers.

  “Karrie didn’t steal that money — at least not all of it,” John said. “Only the money that has blood on it. Why, why in God’s name didn’t you tell us? If you had, an innocent man might never have gone to jail — “

  “Yes, yes — an innocent man, so what?” Dora said, holding the money in her hands, and then glaring. “You see — I knew it! It’s the money — “

  She looked around at all of them, her head slightly cocked. All of a sudden there was quiet in the room. Dora had been talking very loudly so as to be heard over the pumps, yet the pumps had suddenly been shut off so “the money” sounded loud and brazen. There was a pause, and she stared in silence at her tired husband in his high-waisted, wrinkled suitpants. Emmett had not given them away, she had.

  “Our pumps — so you think it’s us. I didn’t kill Karrie.”

  No one spoke.

  “So you think it was my idea — it was Emmett — “

  She stopped speaking and closed her eyes. She began to weave back and forth just slightly. Emmett raised his hand, but dropped it and sank upon the bed.

  Deborah put her hands on Dora’s shoulders to stop her from falling. “Yes — I’m sure of it,” she said, over Dora Smith’s shoulders. But she was speaking not about Dora. Dora or the money or Emmett didn’t matter to her at all.

  She was speaking to John Delano — for the first time in three months — about the innocence of Vincent and Tommie Donnerel.

  “Silver?” John whispered.

  And he looked with pity at the jewellery box and very gently closed its lid.

  The remnants of the story were vague in Bobby Taylor’s memory now. But it must have been quite simple and therefore terrible.

  By December 20, people were no longer gathering at the gas bar, but going down to the little store owned by Wholsun Breau — the place where Tommie went to buy his plug the August before. It was a small yellow store with a bit of holly over the door, and a large cardboard cutout of an Oh Henry! bar in the window that winked with soft, forlorn Christmas lights. It was in effect a very different part of the road, though only a mile and a half away. It was a store that had held on to its traditions and had been usurped by the gas bar eight years before.

  Each person had a story to tell, standing by the old potbellied stove in the store that day, and Bobby realized he had had a story as well, and was somewhat the centre of attention because of little Gail Hutch. Bobby remembered himself and remembered Joyce looking at him in forgiveness.

  But most of the talk was about Silver and the various, almost forgotten incidents in his and Madonna Brassaurd’s life. And old Mr. Jessop re-informed them, reminded them about this life, as he sat there smoking his pipe.

  How they arrived on the road with their father when they were five and six, came from the remotest corner of the woods, and took over the old homestead. How they were an odd mix in the community. How, one night, they were beaten with sticks and left outside after their father took a water hose to them.

  All the warmth of the community, the decorations for Christmas, made Silver’s life seem particularly sad and cold then. And sadly, a rage began to turn against Michael Skid. He was looked upon now in all his conceit, his money, his smile, which now seemed to annoy them. Four or five people, fathers who worried about their daughters and sons, remembering how their own piety and traditions were laughed at and dismissed over the course of the summer, and remembering the effect Michael’s presence had upon the little community of pleasant farms and tiny houses, said they would kill him.

  “He’s not even from here — what in hell did he come down here for?” they said.

  “Drugs,” Dora Smith was reported to have said, “I knew it — he couldn’t fool me, I always knew it. If we had men about here who weren’t spineless and gutless, they’d take care of people like that.”

  But no one at that moment was listening to her.

  By noon these men were certain nothing could have happened if it hadn’t been for Michael, and they set out towards the farmhouse.

  “We have to get there before them,” Mr. Jessop said suddenly to Bobby Taylor. “That or they will kill him.”

  They went along the shore road, hoping to reach the farmhouse before the rest.

  Michael was sitting in the kitchen when they got there.

  “Others are on their way,” Mr. Jessop said quietly. “We must go before they get here.”

  “Oh, I see — what has happened?” Michael said. “Where are Silver and Madonna? Are they okay?”

  Sitting on the table in front of him was the bundle of bloodied clothes.

  Silver Brassaurd had wandered the road half the night, trying to figure a way out, to keep clear of Everette Hutch. He came down to Breau’s store at two the next afternoon, and bought a pint of milk.

  “Oh,” Mrs. Breau told him, “did you hear? The police was wanting to talk to you — they just put out a bulletin — I just heard it on the radio — wanted to talk to Everette Hutch and Silver Brassaurd. I wonder what that is about?”

  He looked at her and said, “Ya, that’s about Mr. Jessop’s prize pig — “

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Ya — that’s what that’s about — someone wanted to steal her — we was just foolin.”

  But he was shaking, and when people again started to arrive and look at him over their shoulders, he went outside and stood in the parking lot with his hands in his pockets, muttering to himself.

  Finally he asked t
he milkman to give him a drive down to the top of the church lane. He stood in the same spot in the white truck as Tom had stood in July, as the milkman, his face solemn and ashen, drove him. But when the milkman made a stop, Silver jumped out and ran into the woods, on the other side of the Jessops’ corn field.

  He walked deep into the woods, and later police were able to discover that he had cut up some boughs, improvising a lean-to.

  As it got later in the day, people passed each other and stopped their cars to talk. Old enemies became enthusiastic pitchmen for each other. Each rumour caused the one before to disappear or to reappear with new traces and lines.

  It was reported that Silver was seen at the airport in Chatham and the restaurant in Loggieville, that he had killed an old woman in Neguac, and that he was in Fredericton already in custody.

  But no one, in fact, saw him for most of the day

  At five o’clock he appeared at the church and spoke to someone, no one remembered who, asking if they had seen Madonna. He asked if he could go in and pray to the Virgin Mary because he wanted to say something to her, give her a piece of his mind.

  But the church was locked. Snow was falling heavily and blurred the shoreline, and the trees lay solid and still, all the way back the church lane.

  “That is what the church does — oh yes — it locks me out,” he said. “It only picks certain people and it would never pick me!”

  “You can pray at any time, anywhere,” he was told.

  Everyone who saw him that day had in retrospect a kind of grave sympathy for him. They remembered his upbringing, his time in Centrecare. They only asked him, as a favour to himself, to go to the police.

  When it got dark he found himself at Arron Brook He made his way towards the back of his house, came in through the clothesline window, and decided to pack and go away.

  Madonna was not home. He looked in her room, and saw that her small blue suitcase had been packed but was still lying open on her bed. The pen she had won for shorthand was on her dresser.