by John Bemrose
The courtroom was nearly full. There were reporters, curious members of the public, some senior civil servants, three lawyers representing the federal government, and a sizable contingent from Pine Island. Seated once again behind the familiar oak table, wearing freshly laundered robes, Richard waited anxiously for the arrival of the judge. Billy was sitting just behind him, and from time to time Richard would turn to pass on some information about who was here, or a comment one of the other lawyers had made to him. Finding Billy unresponsive, however, he soon gave this up.
When Judge Wannamaker appeared, the court rose together. Then the judge climbed the steps to his seat and spoke a few introductory words, raising a little laughter when, referring to the traditional clothing, he remarked with mock sternness that he hoped that never again would his courtroom resemble a Hudson’s Bay store. Then he put on his glasses and began to read his judgment. Richard listened carefully, but although he heard the words well enough, something in his understanding was blocked, and he was slow to grasp what was happening. In any case, it was not immediately clear that they had lost. At first the words seemed neutral, capable of leading to any number of conclusions. But then certain phrases began to fall, and an overall tendency began to assert itself. Failed to prove. The preponderance of the evidence. A distinct and characteristic lack of authority. Evident in the poor quality of certain expert witnesses.
As the voice droned on, Richard found himself staring bleakly at the crest mounted behind the judge’s head.
After the court was dismissed, Richard turned to see Billy pushing through the crowd toward a side door, leaving Richard to face the reporters on his own. It was nearly an hour and a half before he could escape the courthouse, and when he got back to the hotel room, Billy was not there. Richard called Ann to give her the news of the verdict, and he was still talking to her when Billy arrived, looking dishevelled. She asked him to put Billy on and for a few minutes as they talked, Richard went on studying the judgment. “Listen,” he told Billy, after he’d hung up, “Listen to this tripe.” Pacing, Richard read out a particularly egregious passage. “Complete rubbish!” he cried. “Wannamaker’s made three mistakes in law right there. This has got appeal written all over it.”
Pacing up and down, he continued his evisceration of the judgment. Wannamaker had ignored what had been established in the Calder case, he said. He’d dismissed their entire genealogical argument in one sentence, though it had taken a week to present and had been backed by one of the finest historians in the country. Richard was in full flight now. Not even in court had he spoken so passionately, with such conviction and clear sense of the truth. Billy made no comment but continued to sit on the edge of the bed, his gaze locked in space. “Hey, cheer up,” Richard said, swatting him on the shoulder with the binder.
When Billy did eventually speak, it was as if to himself. “I should have fired you months ago.”
“What? Oh fuck off – we’re just getting started.”
“You lost,” Billy said. His glance brought Richard up short. “They ran circles around you out there. Every strategy we agreed on – how to question a witness, where to lay the emphasis, what to bring forward next – you’d ignore it.”
“I was thinking on my feet, you have to out there.” Richard held up the binder. “Believe me, in the long run this is going to be good for us –”
“Do you really think you know what’s good for us? It’s all a big game to you of win or lose. Either way you’re still cock of the walk – look at you, going on like we’ve won. No one can tell you anything. Nothing can get you down.” Billy shook his head. “You’re not serious –”
Blood pounded in Richard’s head. Planting himself before Billy, he made his defence in a voice he could no longer control. It kept rising in pitch, an odd, angry, pleading thing he seemed to hear from a distance. “I haven’t had a penny for this. I’ve given months and months to it. Because I believed in it. And I’m not serious?”
Billy just stared at him with contempt. Richard found his suitcase, fumbled the last of his clothes into it, caught up his briefcase, and left the room.
Over the decade that followed, Richard came to the conclusion that he had been lured off track by the case, by his assumption of Billy’s friendship, by his naive ideas about helping the country’s native people – drawn into something that was not really him. He returned to his practice with renewed dedication. He got involved in politics. With Ann’s encouragement, he changed his way of dressing, giving up his cheap off-the-racks in favour of tailored suits he bought in Toronto. He replaced Monday-night pickup hockey and joined the best club in Black Falls, cultivating connections with the wealthy and powerful. His manner became more weighted, his speech more considered and precise, and in the end, for the most part, he was satisfied he had claimed his place among the serious men.
Billy sits in his outhouse, intent on a fading newspaper photo Matt had tacked to the wall years ago. Like a great grey tube of steel, the body of a monstrous sturgeon has washed up on the shores of a lake. Its eyes have been pecked out, giving it a spectral look, but its long, plated body remains intact. A girl of fifteen or sixteen, wearing baggy shorts and a plaid shirt, poses beside it. She looks happy – happy to be having her picture taken, happy to be young. Billy is entranced by this young woman, and envious of her. She probably doesn’t care about the great fish, doesn’t care that sturgeon of this size will probably never be seen again; but she holds the future as effortlessly as she holds the sunshine falling on her pretty face.
Voices float from the direction of his house. The querying twang of his screened door. “Don’t think he’s here,” a boy says. The scuff of shoes. More talk. Then silence. He waits several minutes before emerging.
He rounds the corner of his house to find Jimmy and Dwayne sitting on his front steps. They see him immediately, so he has no choice but to approach them. Since his binge of three days ago, he’s continued to avoid people; it’s as if his old skin has been stripped and he hasn’t grown a new one yet, hasn’t the means to deflect their curiosity, to defend the weak shoots of healing inside him. As he stands talking to the boys, he keeps eyeing the object in Jimmy’s hands. “Mom found it,” Jimmy says, holding it out – Billy’s old ball mitt. Black leather laced with yellowish thong, the maker’s name fading on the heel. He slides his hand into the cool interior and pounds his fist in the deep pocket, sensing, for a moment, the sweetness of certain evenings on the old diamond. The crack of the bat and him already ranging left, into the path of the skipping grounder –
He thrusts the glove at Jimmy.
“Here. It’s yours.”
Looking puzzled, the boy takes the glove.
“Jimmy was thinking we could play catch,” Dwayne says, his voice seeming to come from somewhere outside him.
“Sure,” Billy says. But he goes up the steps and into his house, shutting the door behind him.
Some time later, peering out a window, he sees them sitting on the ground, in the shade. Dwayne has the glove now and is tossing a ball into it with his free hand. Clearly, they are waiting for him to come out. He pulls back. Minutes go by. The pump in the sink lets another drop fall, into the brimming basin. Outside (he looks again), the white ball flies up, falls, disappears into the mitt. He is trapped.
He is not aware of deciding anything. He simply turns to the door with a sense of surrender, of yielding to an action that is not entirely his own, and walks out of the house and down the steps, toward the boys, who, in the shade of the cedars, have the stillness, now, of stones.
They make a triangle, Billy near the house, Dwayne by the woodpile, Jimmy with his back to the lake. Dwayne cocks his arm and throws hard at Billy, who watches the ball spinning, growing larger, coming straight at his head, yet he cannot move. He can sense the old ballplayer stirring, the old instincts, but there is a heavy weight in him, a sense of unreality. Then, with a life of their own, his hands fly up and the ball stings into his palms.
The next
day, he roots in the shed until he finds Matt’s weed-whacker – one of the old-fashioned, manual kind with a rippled blade attached to a metal shaft topped by a wooden handle. He spends an hour trying to raise an edge, without much success, then carries it down the road to the ball diamond. Beyond the rusted, leaning backstop, the entire field is overrun with weeds: chicory, plantain, fireweed, monstrous mulleins sticking up like spears. Ten years before, grass had spread toward a white-washed fence. Now sections of the fence have gone down before the wave of vegetation, under the somnolent, forbidding gaze of the bush.
He turns to the waist-high goldenrod beside the road. At his first blow, a single stalk droops. At his second, it droops a little farther. The tool is next to useless, but he goes on hacking, first with one hand, then with two, until after an hour he has cleared an area around home plate.
That night he dreams of the field as it used to be: the smoothly gravelled infield, the baselines running white toward distant trees. He is standing at the plate with a bat in his hands. Facing him on the pitcher’s mound is an unusually tall man with a cap pulled down over his eyes. The giant wears a grey uniform, but his exposed hands and forearms, and the lower part of his face, are red. Taking a ball from his mouth, he begins his windup – throws one leg over his shoulder, peeks out between his own knees, takes another ball from his ear –
Billy wakes laughing.
The next day, it is early afternoon by the time he starts off with his weed-whacker. Fifty yards from the diamond, he hears voices and sees, in the centre of the outfield, three men swinging scythes, laying down weeds with rhythmic, hushing strokes. In the shade near third base, Eileen Masse, sitting in a lawn chair, tilts a pitcher over the cups held out by a group of children.
He steps out of sight, and is about to walk off, when his sister appears pushing a lawn mower down the road. “Didn’t want you to have all the fun,” she says as she rattles past. He follows her along the edge of the diamond and stands talking with her and Eileen, aware the whole time of the men working in the outfield. “We thought you could use some help,” Eileen says, nodding at his weed-whacker. “That puny thing.” Her big face beams at him, slit-eyed. He had thought the Masse family was set against him, because they had opposed his pursuit of the land claim. But it seems they’ve got past that. Roy Masse is coming in from the field. He has to leave for the Harbour, he says. Billy takes Roy’s scythe and, putting it over his shoulder, walks out, into the sun.
When he gets back to the house, the sight of Ann Scott strolling across the rock surprises him: he hasn’t thought of her for hours. She regards him without expression as she approaches, and he has the sense she is testing her idea of him against her experience: this sweating, shirtless man with a strange, orange-handled tool in his hand.
“Whatever have you been up to with that thing?” There’s an archness in her voice, as if he could only be doing something trivial, amusing. He shakes his head. He does not want to tell her.
They go into the house together, and after he sponges off, they undress on either side of his bed. There is a distance between them, and their love-making is fierce, impersonal, as if they had agreed to put aside who they are, who they think they are, and come together as strangers. Then they lie in a companionable torpor. Reaching out, he lazily traces the curve where her back spreads into her hips: a place he loves.
Later, they walk to a cove near his house. She strips to her bra and panties and swims off, while he washes in the shallows. Gazing over the water, he watches her stroke briskly toward an island. So much strength and confidence in her; he feels his weakness in comparison. She is far off now, just a flashing of arms and legs. Regretting his neediness, he watches as she swims behind a rock, and goes on watching until, smaller now, she appears on the other side.
She swims back and strides from the water, looking happy and invigorated. They lie on towels on the warm rock. Directly overhead, the pines hold long, indented shards of sky.
He wants to go up to Silver Lake, he tells her.
“I thought you said it would be all clear-cut there now. Do you really want to see that again. Isn’t it what started all this?”
“’Have to see what’s happened to the cabin.” He knows it’s probably a ruin now. But he has to see it anyway. Because it is his.
She opens a can of beans, and they sit outside on two chairs, passing it back and forth.
“I told Richard I needed some space,” she says after a while. “But I’m not sure how much he understands that. He’s in pretty bad shape –
“I’m going to live at the cottage, at least for the time being,” she continues. “It feels good to be there, except for missing Rowan. He’s coming tomorrow for a week. He hates the situation – well, he should hate it. He’s not sleeping very well – wet his bed twice. Oh, God!” She gives him a look of exhausted candour. See, this is what I am.
Billy leans forward, elbows on knees, his head in his hands. So much pain, and he’s helped make it.
“Don’t worry,” she says. “You’re not going to have a madwoman on your hands. I’m not expecting you to do anything about this.”
He looks up in surprise. It’s not what he’s been thinking. Not at all. She’s gone back to the beans now, briskly scraping in the can with her spoon.
Late August. The Old Woman River has shrunk to a putrid trickle; on Ann and Richard’s street the lawns have turned to straw. Richard sits on the edge of their bed, in the hum of the air conditioner. Across the dimming room, Ann’s mirror glints above her dresser. Getting up, he begins to pace. It is never worse than when the boy is with Ann at Inverness and their big house expands around him. Evenings, loath to come home, he is tempted to eat downtown, but not wanting people to see him on his own – it is bad to fail, worse to be seen failing – he usually grazes from his own fridge and drinks a bottle of Merlot from his own cellar, and tries to work: surrendering eventually to the call of the TV in the den, and the buttons of the remote that allow at least a modicum of control as he dismisses in rapid sequence the preening talk-show host, the weatherman scrawling on his transparent board, the milling of a crowd in some distant city, stopping, finally, (who knows why?) at a scuba diver swimming, dreamlike, among spires of pink coral. He has thought of finding a woman to go out with, to go to bed with – a statement of his independence, proof that he’s all right – but although he has looked at women, he has not approached any. He wants only Ann. He’s confessed to her in a phone call that he’s not paid her the attention or respect she deserves – sentiments of deep sincerity, born of loss. What hollows him is her reluctance to respond at any length. He suspects she has already made up her mind about him and is merely hearing him out for kindness’ sake.
Doug Parsons has taken him out a couple of times for drinks. But his easy optimism – “In a month you’ll be over it,” “plenty more fish in the sea” – hides an instinctive avoidance of anything “emotional.” Despite his longing to talk only about Ann, he is relieved to be carried off into safer topics like the latest machinations in Ottawa or Doug’s search for the perfect boat. Yet while the distraction is welcome, he is beginning to realize he has reached early middle age without a single close friend.
He paces in the room they once shared. Stopping before her closet, he flicks a switch, illuminating the hanging mass of her clothes. Seizing a dress, he pulls it out and brings it to his nose but can smell only the lingering tartness of dry cleaner. They had bought it in Paris.
He remembered her modelling it for him, in an expensive shop on the Right Bank where he sat on a low hassock and the saleswoman swanned about in her snotty Parisian way – they both laughed afterwards. Ann, he thought, was happy. But he wonders now. How much of her “happiness” was something to make him feel his own gesture in taking her to Paris was not wasted? Yet wasn’t this, still, a kind of love – wanting to protect him from her sadness? While he was trying to take care of her, wasn’t she, in her way, taking care of him? For a moment, he holds the dress, then abr
uptly throws it aside.
He goes over to her dresser and begins to open drawers. Socks, bras, underwear – all in the usual tangle. A small sewing kit. A sleeping mask. A box of oil pastels. A smooth, perfectly round stone. A postcard picture of the Grand Canyon, its red depths seamed with a tiny river. It is the topmost of a packet of Billy’s cards, saved all these years. An aerial view of Wheeling, WVA. A large fish held by a boy. A transport truck. A McDonald’s restaurant. Writing this in an abandoned house. Rain dripping on my feet. Wish I was there.
He starts to rip up the card, thinks better of it, and shoves the whole pack into the drawer. Digging farther, he finds a black artist’s notebook. It has been years since he has seen her writing in it. He opens it, tilting it toward the failing light from the window.
Erica says it might help if I write here. I hardly know what to write. So I’m doing this for my therapist. As I do other things for other people. Do I do anything for myself any more? My painting – but I’m not even sure of that. I lived for it once. Now I stand staring at the canvas. No ideas, no feeling. Why do I try? Am I trying to please somebody else? I think sometimes of my father. He’s usually enthusiastic about my work, though I don’t think he gets it at all. “How did it go today? Any breakthroughs?” Already moving on to something else… Yet it matters terribly to me what he thinks – even more than Richard. If Dad frowns at a painting, my heart sinks – and can stay sunk for days. So I avoid showing him paintings, but tell him it’s going fine. Which means these days that I’m lying to him. I lie to Richard too – pretend I’m making progress. And painting used to be like a bird singing.