We visit Junior at his shed in the woods. He’s studying stories of Labrador. He wants to move there. He wants to be the Member for the region. He asks me how difficult that might be. He says it’s only an idea.
The shed is a garage on the first floor and a living quarters above it. Two snowmobiles lie under tarps flanking six cord of wood. He has a sky-blue Ford Fairlane standing on a sheet of plastic. When I ask, he says,You ever hear of the wick effect? Moisture coming out of the ground, it will attach to the metal of your car and rot it. A sheet of plastic acts as a vapour barrier.
He keeps one window open a crack to avoid condensation.
Inside he has a hole cut in the floor and a plastic bag full of milk, eggs, and bacon. It’s cooler down in the garage, he says. I got no electricity yet. I’ve got no running water either. I’m living on potatoes and moose.
26 We drive to the cabin. We paddle up to Boot Brook at sunset. It takes twenty-five minutes to get to the point. Windy. It’s almost ten oclock before we start fishing. I tell Lydia to fish in the calm water of the brook. Past the white stump that has sat in the current and, in low-water times, been fully exposed. I used to believe that Boot Brook produced calm water. That calm water poured from the brook, and at dusk, this still water spread over the lake and made it smooth.
We catch a few fighters.
We paddle back in the dark. The lake is vast and quiet under the stars. First the Big Dipper and this leads us to Polaris, and from that we get Cassiopeia. About two miles down the lake we see the lights of a car on the bridge to Howley. The lights cross the water and wink out.
The caribou have pulled carrots out of the ground to munch the green fern, but a two-legged animal has been at the spuds.
Lydia puts in a fire and we drink beer and play crib. We decide to leave the generator off and just light the oil lamps. There’s no one else on the lake. You can hear the water lap against the big rock.
In the morning Lydia cooks the trout with bacon and squeezes lemon over the fish and packs on the pepper. We eat a loaf of bread by tearing it.
27 On our way out to the highway a moose stops us on the road. I get out. I approach the moose. It’s a nervous calf. He backs up. I hear Lydia, out her window: Gabe. Behind you.
I turn to see a cow moose ploughing through the ditch, her head low. She starts up the grade. I put the car between us. The moose is determined. She clambers up Lydia’s door, kicks herself onto the roof. I watch her teeter up there, turn around, metal popping and kinking like a pop can. The moose stands on Jethro’s roof and stares at me, some massive hood ornament. Then she scrabbles down my side, feints my way, and veers left to her calf. She pushes her calf and they trundle off into the scrub.
Lydia stares at me through my window. She gets out. The roof is covered in stretched craters, like the punches superheroes put in metal.
We drive back to St John’s and shower and head out to a party at Max’s.
Max says to me, Youve got to loosen up. There’s nothing going on with Lydia. She loves you. She’s crazy about you. Okay, so you guys fight. Who doesnt fight? Youve got to be a big man.
Me: I know it. Thing is, I’m battling exhaustion.
Max reflects on this. Youve got to stop looking and listen with your heart. Your heart will know. Is your heart getting fed?
I go to the kitchen because Wilf is there. I lean up against the counter beside him. Alex comes in, barefoot. Wilf puts out a hand.
Dont come in here, Alex, cause I broke a glass.
This is clearly a lie.
But it forces Alex to sit at the table.
Have you tried the soup?
The soup is delicious, I say.
And Wilf turns and sees me for the first time.
Alex says, Would you mind getting me a bowl?
I ladle her up a bowl. I can’t find a spoon so I give her the ladle.
Wilf turns to the chicken wings. I join him. I say, How did the show go?
What?
The show at the Hall. You were the special guest.
What?
I’m thinking maybe he forgot about the show. I dont want to be the one to remind him.
Youre talking about the show next week, he says.
Oh, that’s it.
Yeah, that show. It went well.
And he gives me a little grin.
Went really well.
Lydia walks in and Wilf says, It’s time for you to have some kids.
Alex:You dont need kids.
Wilf: Sure you do. He nods to me. And you dont have to worry about the donor.
We walk home to Lydia’s, exhausted.
Lydia: What do you think of what Wilf said?
Me: I think he’s pretty brazen.
Lydia: He’s funny, though. Can’t you see how he’s funny?
28 I sit in on one of Earl Quigley’s lectures. Earl is talking about the physics of decay. He describes a coffin birth. A pregnant woman dies in childbirth. She is buried, and the soft tissues degenerate. The fetus slips out of the womb into the coffin.
I look at Lydia in the mirror of her study. How I can see her face ageing, and what her face will be like. As if the mirror distorts her or she is not Lydia. So I can see her face as skin and bone and not an identity attached to it.
It’s like holding a drawing up to a mirror to see if it’s balanced.
Lydia picks out a green-and-yellow striped dress her mother wore, when she was younger than Lydia. She tucks it under her chin, swaying the hem. The carved edges of cheeks and chin. I realize I am holding some professional distance from her.
29 Maisie, on the phone: Did you get mail?
I havent checked. Have you?
It came. There was none.
Want me to check?
Okay.
Want to come with me?
Okay!
I’ll get the portable phone.
Pause.
Me: You hear me?
Yep.
Okay, I’m going out the screen door, hear the creak? There’s oregano still, I’ll just rub some between my fingers, smell that? The dogberries are deep clusters of
Gabe, I got the picture.
Okay. Oh, my God, it’s in there.
What’s in there?
A letter from the C B C.
What? What’s it say, Gabe.
It’s definitely about the contest.
How come I didnt get anything?
It’s a thin envelope.
I can’t believe it. Youre putting me on.
It’s true. I’m gonna open it. Hang on. This is it.
Oh, man, why didnt I get one?
Shit.
What is it?
It’s a rejection.
Gabe.
Yeah.
I didnt get anything, Gabe.
30 Eight city workers stand over the big pits carved by the back hoe on Tuesday. There’s a broken sewer pipe and theyve watched water and toilet tissue slip through it. The pipe belongs to Number 6 Young Street. So now theyre shovelling by hand to remove the length of pipe.
A wasp crawls over my bare foot as I’m on the phone. It’s a yellowjacket. They are licking up the aphids off my chilli-pepper plants. I watch one bite chunks out of the flesh on a cantaloupe rind in the compost heap. Black currants are still ripe on bushes.
I’m surprised when good weather lingers into fall and bad weather remains into spring. I’ve never gauged correctly the true nature of the seasons.
October
1 I drive out to Conception Bay. I’m on my way to teach creative writing to high-school students. Jethro’s studded tires rumble on the sunlit pavement. I feel tough. I let go of the wheel and the steering stays true for three hundred metres.
Two students have signed up, the librarian says. Youre in the
basement.
Two?
I follow her downstairs. There are small plywood and metal tables. The shelves are full of Robert Ludlum.
Glenda is sixteen, wearing an off-white raglan with a poppy. Her bleached bangs cover her dark eyebrows. She speaks to me with confidence, with erect posture. When she gesticulates, she bends her arms at the elbows and sways her arms. Her elbows she plants on her hip bones.
Hedley arrives, with his mother. His mother is not much older than me. Hedley is fifteen, smaller than Glenda. They shake hands and introduce themselves in a social and comfortable way. His mother says, So it’s until four oclock? And that’s all she wants to know. She’s a pretty but harried woman.
I start by saying that this chair is a chair. And if you wrote your impressions of the chair, what you wrote would become the chair. The writing is not about the chair, it is the chair.
The way Hedley and Glenda exchange a look tells me we’re going to have a good time.
2 I am picking up Lydia from the LSPU Hall. Wilf is smoking in the bar, clutching a beer with thick fingers. He has a perfect physique yet he lives on chocolate bars and cigarettes. Ragged white hair. He’s been a songwriter and an actor for thirty years. He once moved to Toronto, to do merch, he says. Sell merchandise for a folk band.
Terrific show, Wilf.
Dostoevsky says the human being is an animal that can get used to anything. And that describes Wilf.
I’ve come to like Wilf. He would be surprised to hear me think that I suspected anything. He thinks highly of me. His love for Lydia he puts down as unrequited.
Lydia, he warns, is one fucking talented woman.
3 I run and circle back to Lydia’s. She wants me to go for a walk. I say I am beat. She steps back to admire the curtain rod she has for her kitchen and stands on my finger, then my bare foot she’s wearing big clogs. I yell in pain. She says, Well, you were in my way. And I say the obvious (It was you standing on my foot), to which she leaves the room. For a half-hour she’s on the phone and so I lace up my sneakers, wave goodbye, and run home. I call up Max and go to the Grapevine for a beer. From there I call Lydia no answer. I walk back up the hill at nine and she’s not there. At ten I call and she answers. She’s mad at me for leaving without telling her, after she’d invited me out for a walk. So we go through it, and she thinks I should apologize for yelling at her, and so I do. I ask if I can come down, and she says, I want to be alone tonight. She says she stood on my hand because I’d moved a chair to the wrong place, and so she had to stand on my hand. And I say, Why can’t you admit you stood on my hand because you werent looking?
In the morning I walk down and she lets me in, but she’s serious. I see she’s been cleaning the kitchen and living room. She has thrown my things (a pair of socks, sneakers, three books, a sweater) into a corner heap. It’s so offensive. She commences to talk on the phone. So I tell her I’m off to the library. It maddens me. It makes me want to never return to her place. I’m not welcome.
4 On the way down to the Ship, I spot a kingfisher on the phone line in the rain.
I confess to Max that I’m upset. And I’m not sure what it is. I resent the little fights Lydia and I have. She’s late or she gets angry if I peel potatoes in her sink or she says I dont instigate evenings out.
He says passive-aggressive behaviour is insidious. He says, You two look so good together.
He remembers seeing me after we’d come back from Toronto. Asked what I was doing. And I said, Falling in love. Max: It sounded beautiful.
He says, Hank put faith in Audrey.
But Hank left in the end.
Max: And then he died. On New Year’s Day.
I am drinking blackberry sodas. I am eschewing alcohol. Max asks if I’ve ever eaten the testes of urchins.
Max: Use scissors, cut them open, wash away the stuff, get to these orange sacs, about five to a teaspoon? Urchins are hermaphrodites. Eat the testes raw. Taste of the sea. You know that taste on the shore? Or when you have cod right off the water? Something that gets lost after a couple of hours. Whelks.
He pauses.
I’ve eaten whelks. I’ve eaten periwinkles steamed. I’ve been eating a lot of sea crap. Milt from herring.
Alex is looking great. I tell this to Max and he raises an eye.
The truth is, Lydia loves me. When we fight, she is upset that I’m hurting her. She’s angry because I’m an asshole. It’s true she feels she’s done nothing wrong, but her anger blooms out of love. Whereas I see I’ve upset her, and I’m afraid of Lydia’s anger, but I never blame her for the argument. I try to see where I went wrong. What I resent is that she never does this, sees where she’s wrong.
5 Vinyl siding is going up in strips. Why. Why not a vat of liquid plastic that you ooze over houses. I would like that. I’m not opposed to plastic. But if it stood for what it was and did not pretend to be wood. If you could be proud to call it genuine plastic. You start from the roof with a nozzle. You mask off the windows. Ooze the hot plastic over roof and sides. Nudge it into soffits. Encase the house in plastic. It would look like snow houses. The smooth rounded surface of Gaudi architecture. This would appeal.
6 Oliver says the fights he had with Maisie eroded the beachhead of love between them. They’d apologize, but he needed good times to restore the love. Whereas Maisie became immediately in love with him again. So she could afford to fight more often than him. She was hurt, too, when he told her about the beachhead eroding. The fights never diminished her love for him.
7 Lydia has painted her cupboards a light orange. She is mixing a bowl of vegetables. She is cutting carrots. Her rings scrape against the stainless-steel bowl. She says she’ll just be a minute. She has flour on her sleeves.
Lydia is chopping the carrot very slowly. The wind gently lifts the back end of her house, just a fraction of an inch, but it lifts and cracks. I have boots on and they stamp on the linoleum. The linoleum is too soft for my boots. The phone rings and Lydia is waiting for me to grab for it. But I dont. She is supposed to be finding the books I left here. She grabs the phone with its long cord, she needs to dip under the stretched-out cord to look on top of her fridge for the books. Her hair gets caught in the cord, and for a moment, she balances on bent knees, trying to untangle herself, and she blames me for the tangle. Oh hi, she says.Yes. Sweet on the phone.
She finds the book under a chair.
Do you have the dust jacket?
Oh, she says, covering the mouthpiece. I took it off because I didnt want to tear it.
Well, at least it’s not torn.
I dont know where I put it.
8 Max serves me up borscht made with Daphne’s beets. There’s homemade cornbread and mint ice cream. We drive Daphne to work at emerge. Then we make our racquetball appointment. We’re cramming in nights out before the baby’s due. My wrist is getting stronger, I’m returning his serve.
Outside by Max’s truck a drunk man asks for a ride home.
I lives in the senior citizen’s home on Thorburn Road. It’s way before you get to Vatcher’s, he says. I’m in some pain. Pain for the past three years. I dont know what I’m doing in the home, I’m only fifty-three. My wife is on a heating pad eighteen hours a day. I try to have sex but it hurts too much, but I does it for her. My God, I thought the pain would stop after what I’ve been drinking and I had some pills too. All kinds, but it won’t go away.
Max looks over at me.
Drunk man: Everything goes right through me. Maybe you’d best take me to the hospital. That’s where I’m gonna end up. Take me in to emergency. I’m real sorry about this. What’s your name?
Gabriel, and this is Max.
Good to meet you, Gabe. Max, good to meet you too. I’m Alphonse Tucker. See my thumb, I can’t move it. Yes, in through this way.
Max idles the truck as I take Alphonse by the elbow and help him through the In On
ly. He knows the way. Daphne Yarn is down the hall. I nod to Alphonse. I say, He’s been drinking and he says he’s taken some pills.
Daphne: You got an MCP card?
No, but I’m in your computer. Alphonse Tucker.
We take chairs beside the glass wicket. Daphne says, 4 Wigmore Court?
Whatever, he says.
He searches through his pockets, pulling out pills. The pills are small and blue or large and yellow. The yellow ones are marked Dupont. He cups them, slowly, to his mouth and I put a hand to his wrist.
Now, Mr Tucker, says Daphne. You won’t try that again, will you?
He clenches his fist. He will not relinquish the pills. Daphne stands, says, Put them in my pocket here and you can have them when you leave.
I’m surprised that he almost falls for this. He moves his hand over to her pocket but then retreats.
Do what you like then, she says.
He tries to swallow them again. Daphne rakes the pills from his hand.
I say, I think you’ll be okay now, Alphonse.
It’s good of you to do this Gabe, he says in my general direction.
Daphne asks his date of birth.
1944 That means I’m twenty-seven.
I’ll see you, Phonse.
See you, my son.
I wave to Daphne.
Max and I play snooker and meet Oliver. There is no animosity in the men. Oliver says, Did you know Dali experimented with his diet – he took notes – to make the perfect shit?
Max says, Do you know why shit is tapered?
Max answers his own question: If it wasnt tapered your asshole would slam shut. He laughs. We used to say that all the time when we were kids.
I go to the washroom. I pee red. Oliver is at the next urinal.
I’m peeing red!
He says, Did you have any beets today?
9 This is my last barbecue of the year. I’ve decided to invite both Maisie and Oliver. Oliver has brought salmon. It slips off the spatula onto the dirt path. Oliver looks at it. Then grinds the fish into the dirt with his heel.
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