Tommie Donnerel was released on December 29, 1974. His neighbours wanted to throw him a party, offered to rebuild his house, and waited for him until well after New Year’s Eve, but he never arrived. He moved to Saint John instead and became apprenticed to a mason, working in mortar and brick, and for some years looked at Saint John, from the south end to the new waterfront, as a place that he himself helped design. He received fifteen thousand dollars as compensation.
He grew strong and read much and took night courses at the university and began to write. Never, as long as he lived, did he strike another human being.
Each year during the picnic he instructed Bobby Taylor to put flowers on Karrie Smith’s lonely, solitary grave.
But no one from downriver would see him at his old home again. Except, of course, for once.
One summer day, four years after the murders, a sailboat was seen at the mouth of the inlet. Off in the distance the gas bar sat empty, ready to be bulldozed away for the new highway the Conservative government had promised.
The sailboat had been refitted: its prow looked majestic, its sails fluttered, the new spinnaker rustled as it took the sea and went towards one of the inland islands.
At the wheel was a man standing barefoot and in shorts, his body muscular and suntanned, a small tattoo on his arm. His eyes blazed. On the north bay all knew him, but near the islands on the south bay he was known only as the man who had gotten out of jail that spring. His family still loved and hoped for him, but were, because of him, outcasts from the town, and he felt he had let his family, his parents, the fragmented aunts and uncles, who had once considered him a darling, down.
The day was blowy and very warm. He had spent the last three months fitting his sailboat out. But then at the roughest point off Fox Island — an island filled with grey dunes and long sharp whip grass — the man scuttled the proud boat, called The Renegade, and made his way to shore.
There he sat in the sun on his haunches and waited for night to come. He took from his waterproof bag a picture of his son, Owen. He looked at it, kissed it, and placed it carefully away. He looked for his passport, and the fourteen thousand dollars given over to him from his father’s trust.
When night came with stars in the large heaven, and when he could see the lights of Burnt Church in the distance, he looked up at the sky and said: “This is the decision for the rest of my life. If I make it to land I will live, if I drown I drown — either way makes no difference to me now.”
And with that Michael Skid entered the sea and swam. He was a very strong swimmer, but it was a dark, salty, cold bay.
Nora Battersoil married.
She met her husband in May of 1980 on bus number 11, travelling from the south end of Saint John to work. She was looking at him through the window, at the bus stop near Queen’s Park. When he boarded the bus he pulled out his copy of Robert Frost, and leaning his head back began to read, as a man who knows how to read, and what it is he is reading, will do.
“I’m glad you like the book — I’m glad I sent it to you,” she said. He turned quickly about and saw a woman with short black hair sitting with a ten-year-old boy.
The man was Tommie Donnerel.
And that was how their life together started,
They married and lived near Hampton, for many years, where Tom worked on their farm and mended clutch plates for tractors, and Nora taught school
His adopted son, Owen, would phone the customer and say, “I am to inform you your clutch is fixed.”
Tom taught the boy how to fish and hunt, the grand importance of books, the meaninglessness of fame or material wealth. And both loved Nora.
Their corn field overlooked the Kennebecasis River, and behind them deer moved through the apple grove in the wood. Each night Tom would spend an hour alone, working in solitude at the edge of the field where he had a blueberry crop. Twice a month he visited the prison at Dorchester to give words of hope to prisoners.
By the age of forty-four he was grey, but stood erect at five-eleven. Tom Donnerel loved community-centre dances, and playing horseshoes. He suffered from pain in his left lung, and from insomnia. At times a great melancholy would overcome him because of the way his adopted son smiled, or spoke, and he would remember the boy’s father, and all the potential of his wasted life.
It was known that people felt Tom strange and aloof. He seemed content, yet had few friends. And at the happiest moments he would look at Nora, and tears would flood his eyes.
Bobby Taylor reflected on all of this as he sat in the janitor’s back room of the school and smoked his cigarette. He wanted to write his letter to Tom Donnerel and Nora Battersoil very carefully, and wanted to sound wise. It had been twenty years since he had seen them.
He wrote about his own wife, Joyce, and joked that, though he still loved her, there was more of her to love every year.
“The yield is greater as the years go by, and the poor thing now has more arse than picnic seat.”
This led him to talk about the picnic, and how he was taking orders from Gail Hutch, who was organizing it this year.
“Like a little sergeant major — she’s got us all toeing the line — “
He wrote of Gail Hutch, who had married Bobby’s brother, the farrier, late in 1975, and had three more children. The prettiest and brightest on the road was her daughter Sarah. Brian was now out west working.
He said that the graves of Karrie and Madonna, of Vincent and Silver, were being tended to — and flowers placed on them at regular intervals.
He wrote that there was not a day that went by that he and many others did not think of Karrie. (This was somewhat of a lie.)
He then said he had some important news that Laura McNair, of the firm of McSweeney and McNair, had just delivered to him and his wife through an rcmp officer who now lived in Taylorville — Sergeant John Delano.
It was about a man, somewhere in Colombia, who collected exotic birds and fish and butterflies for the markets in the U.S. and Canada, and who helped relocate abandoned or destitute children to homes in North America.
This man lived by himself as a celibate. Once a week he would walk into the village to buy pipe tobacco at the store, where he was looked upon as a great oddity Yet a month or so ago he awoke to hear about an argument in the village.
A group of men had come into the community accusing the village of informing on their cocaine trade. They dragged the mayor out of his house, and the mayor’s wife and little boy. They made them kneel, by the brook.
The man lived a good mile away, kept to himself in this most dangerous area, and though people maintained he had always thought “a good deal about himself and how clever he was — and loved to argue about the world, when he drank — he was in no danger whatsoever, as long as he stayed to himself.”
But told what was happening, by a small girl who helped clean for him, he said, “Those sons of bitches, never again.”
He grabbed a machete and went down to stop it. Always, they said there was this hot and ruthless side to his nature tempered by his idea of justice.
He was dressed in a ragged white shirt, and his beard was long and greying. When he came along the road he saw that some of the horses had been killed. He looked up at the sun, and took a run at the well-armed men.
But he forgot how old he had grown. They took his machete in a second.
He spoke as well as he could. He appealed to them to leave the village alone. He was a great debater. Everyone thought he had convinced them.
But then they laughed, and finding out he was without a woman, put la barra de labios on him — I guess it is lipstick. They then put some — la lenceria — on him to wear — I guess it is like girl’s underwear. They paraded him about like this. So the townspeople could laugh at him. He was given a trial with all of them laughing at him, and some of the townspeople joining in — for often those whom you try to protect are those who betray you. They went and got a rat to act as judge.
The leader of the men w
ho’d invaded the town looked bored and upset, and kept swatting flies with his hand. As all men of power he mimicked power, swinging a knotted stick in his hand.
“I thought it would end in a much better place.” Michael smiled. “I was going to go back home, tomorrow.”
Then at the end he proudly yelled out the name of Madonna, which surprised people because he had always argued against the blackmail of religious dogma.
He was shot, in the back of the head, just as the mayor’s family had been, and left to die, for the villagers were too frightened to offer help,
He fell face down in the stream — called “Ah-ron” by the locals. His body was set afire to destroy the evidence. The rat, as judge, was shot, as well
But one piece of identification remained. Someone rifling through his shack found under the floorboards a picture of his son, the date, and the name of the country.
The ambassador was informed in May. A computer search was undertaken. His parents were both dead. He had no living relatives — except a son out of wedlock. External Affairs in Ottawa wrote to the Department of Vital Statistics in Fredericton. His name was discovered,
Laura McNair was informed of this by her chronically unfaithful husband. This information struck her very hard. For she thought the man had already been dead for fifteen years.
“His name was Michael Skid. Those townspeople who stole his wallet and rings, rifled through and burned his shack, were never brought to justice — “
It struck Tom Donnerel and Nora Battersoil hard as well. It took them a week to tell Owen what had happened. At first he seemed unconcerned about it: “I’m sorry. It is terrible — but I didn’t know him — “
But as time went on he became solemn, whenever it was spoken about, and on more than one occasion was seen in the den looking for old pictures,
“He has died,” he said one night, when he found a picture of Michael Skid from the summer of 1974, “He is gone.”
There was a few months of red tape before the remains of Michael Skid were brought back home.
The funeral was attended by Bobby and Joyce Taylor, by Gail (Hutch) Taylor, her children, by Laura McNair, Sergeant John
Delano, Amy (Battersoil) Holstein, Tom Donnerel and Nora Battersoil and their son, Owen, who was now doing his master’s in history at unb.
Owen found himself attracted to Gail Hutch’s oldest girl — Sarah — now eighteen, starting her first year of university. While the older people were at the grave they managed only to think of life, and walked along the August path, talking about what courses she should take, Owen saying that he would help her when she arrived in the city at the end of the month.
They walked down to the shore and Owen was happy and talkative. But suddenly at the rocky red cliff near the path, where Michael had once liked to come to read, Owen heard an echo, felt in his heart a deep overwhelming presence in the sunlight, and in grief began to cry.
“They murdered him —” he said.
“Here,” Sarah Taylor said, holding him as a mother does a child. “Have no fear — and I’ll give you a hug.” And she reached up, in the promise of young womanhood, and bravely — quite bravely — kissed his startled eyes.
The body of Mr. Skid was laid to rest very close to the grave of Madonna Brassaurd.
The Bay of Love and Sorrows Page 26