Wilf, drunk, leans forward and slips off his chair. His head above the table, making his point, then keels over sideways onto his back, stretching his neck up, still talking, and making perfect sense. He’s a man for whom liquor affects his body first.
10 I walk to Lydia’s in the rain. Leaves stain the sidewalks almost like a spore print from mushrooms. The trees tight with clusters of dogberries. It’s going to be a hard winter. The silver dollars have turned brown, and you can peel them now. Inside is rice paper. The furnace cut in this morning and I have hauled out my portable heater. I have lived ninety-five days on the heat of the sun alone.
I get a fire going using coal. A little drunk on Scotch as Lydia watches me. As if a foggy light, a heavy air, makes it hard to blink. I read aloud an interview with Gordon Lish. Lydia has made a steak in peppercorns, mustard, cream and white wine, garlic. Can you light some candles?
Me: Where will I find a match?
I dont know, you’ll have to imagine where they might be. Every interaction drains me of goodness.
11 Me: I was mailing something. And I got the paper. Lydia: What were you mailing?
It was an application.
A what?
There was a job.
Great.
It’s to write a book and you get to travel and interview seniors and I think you design the book too – I’d love to get it, and it pays twenty-five thousand.
Wow You’ll be, like, closing in on fifty thousand then.
Yeah. I’ll have to find a woman who wants seventy-five thousand.
Sure.
Does that piss you off?
I think it’s kind of mean.
I think it’s mean to keep mentioning fifty thousand.
It was a joke.
You keep mentioning it.
I never knew it bothered you.
I told you I didnt like it.
Well, I’ll never ever mention it again.
You know, you can be spiteful.
Say it.
That’s all I want to say. You should say it.
I’ve already said it.
You dont want to elaborate.
I think you get the picture.
Well, let’s forget it.
12 I am feeling rather spiritual. That I’d like to spend more time alone. Read books I hear are good. Study and write. There is no one else I want to be with. But I could grow into being a man who can’t live with a woman, no matter how accommodating the woman is. That is the worst, when you see lost men. Oliver is a little lost.
Boyd Coady tells me his parents live in Eastport. Theyre in their eighties with no electricity. They have an outhouse. His grandfather is still alive, at 109. He had twelve children, and only Boyd’s father is still around.
Boyd: Grampa says if Dad dies, he’ll have to go cut his own wood this winter.
13 For thanksgiving I’m invited to Lydia’s parents’. While Lydia pours the gravy into a glass jar, her mother is plonking in three ice cubes, to help separate the fat. Her brother is sorting the coats and boots in the porch and saying, Let’s get this place spotless. Lydia carries a bag of garbage out to the garage, and then returns with her boots still on. Her sister is laying plates in the oven to warm. Mr Murphy says, You want a drink, Gabriel? And he pours a generous glass of rum with orange juice. I’m putting on the cabbage. There’s one two three, nine for supper. Tinker Bumbo is snoring on the loveseat.
Mr Murphy: It calls for salt.
Lydia: It do boy, it do.
Theyve invited me for supper but I’m brokenhearted. Too many fights with Lydia. And they love me and I love them. That’s what breaks my heart. Theyre a good family and I’m losing them.
14 I look outside and focus on the twenty-two black wires strung on the telephone pole in the yard. If youre looking down Long’s Hill at the burgundy and scarlet and mustard and rust of Signal Hill, then the twenty-two wires converge and disrupt the hill in a random graph of thin crescents of colour.
This pole is leaning a little, carrying the weight of electricity and communication. A thirty-foot timber cut from the Gander region. It stands just outside the rebuilt Chinese and fish-and-chips restaurants. Where they sell laminated placemats of the Great Fire of 1993. The Old Big R engulfed in Halloween nighttime flame. Fire licked in ladders up phone poles on Harvey Road, transformers exploded. In the grocery store fire burnt turkeys in freezers. And last night, on the rough parking lot that once was the grocery store, I had a fight with Lydia.We were sitting in Jethro, discussing breaking up. At one point, a point where we’ve all been, where you are exhausted with your predicament, willing to take any ship, I realized Jethro was sitting in the aisle for fresh fruit and frozen products.
15 We’ve had our last fight. It’s finished. I hate her. Let me explain why I hate Lydia Murphy. Because she says that I’m mean-spirited. That I’m a prick. That I dont admit the real motives for my actions. That I won’t apologize. If only I’d apologize.
Nothing I do seems to make Lydia laugh. She will laugh at Max in a glowing love. Maisie laughs. Wilf will take my questions in wonder. But Lydia shuts me down. No, she’ll say, that’s not right. No one wants to eat that gravy with fat in it. But the truth is, only she doesnt. I try using the turkey baster (we’re waiting on the gravy) and she tells me not to. I’ve asked her to take care of the gravy and she goes off with Wilf. Later, she yells at me, you didnt say it had to be done now.
We play 120s and she takes sixty points off my score when I went thirty for sixty. Instead of laughing at my bad luck in a good way, she’s mean and punishes. When I ask about the sixty points she isnt sure.You just like being mean to me, I say. Then take it back, she says. Take it, take it. She is stern in front of the others. When I ask if saying hearts is strategic the ace of hearts becomes the ace of trump, reducing trumps by one
Lydia says, automatically and impatiently, Doesnt matter. She wins, but do I care? It’s not with joy.
We call a taxi to go downtown, but the cab driver says he won’t take five. I’ll walk, I say. And Max and Maisie and Wilf say, we’ll walk too. It’s only Lydia in the cab. And I see her sitting there in fury.
What’s tiresome in all this is that I will explain why I was upset and it’s as though I havent said a word. Lydia returns to her original argument. And, always, it’s me who is wrong. I will apologize for hurting her she expresses hurt through anger.
We look at each other, bent on fury and exhausted. And resigned. There is even a touch of love, perhaps sadness, when we agree we should part ways. It’s too much anger. I’d rather be on my own.
16 Thinking that when people break up, they should have to write out a statement about their feelings of what happened, what went wrong, who was at fault, and how they feel. Purely subjective. These statements should be kept together on file down at the archives for anyone to look up. Both for curiosity and for personal interest (you can look up the history of a man or woman youre interested in seeing).
17 The police invite Lydia and me to come by. We walk over to the station. The station is behind a doughnut shop, but the police, we hear, are not allowed to use that shop.
We watch the edited surveillance tapes. We see a man enter Lydia’s porch door with a full garbage bag. We cut to the kitchen. He empties the bag into the washer and starts it up. He opens up the fridge door and helps himself to a can of apple juice. He goes to the living room with the can of juice, flicks on the television, and sits himself down in the recliner. There he sits until the wash cycle is over.
The man is Boyd Coady.
18 Lydia’s called. She doesnt want to break up. But I’m broken. I’m sad and exhausted. She’s not a bad person. We just dont get along. We both love the talents we have. She’s funny. She’s wilful in a way that is good for me. But being together is destructive. Moments build until the smallest things irritate us.
; I’m taking a road trip around Conception Bay. I just dropped off a hitchhiker in Bareneed. There is a set of stairs left by the side of the road, like a huge tired accordion. The old oilcloth runner. Loads of trap skiffs. I can see the back side of Bell Island and Kelly’s Island. But all the old houses are going. The new bungalows with treeless lots. Occasionally you’ll see a saltbox close to the road with a bunch of fruit trees overgrown and choking the garden. A shed in back painted the same colour. But sagging on the foundations. Too late to save them. They needed to have been kept up ten years ago.
19 The trees on Long’s Hill have crosses painted on them. I just called city hall.
The mayor: The arborist has been by. Said those trees are 90 percent gone, boy. Carolina pine and two elms. Ninety percent gone, like me.
Me: We all gotta go some time.
When I pass those trees behind the kirk’s retaining wall I can feel the weight of the hill, the slope, the inertia pulling down the hill, the job that wall has to do. The work of a wall happens below ground. Beams of cement that creep under the road to counter the raised surface.
20 On the footbridge over Waterford River I watch the ducks. They know that to cross, they have to swim at an angle to the current. Dogs dont know this. A dog will cross a stream pointed directly at the far side, and end up downstream. But a duck calmly paddles at two oclock or ten oclock. Their beaks the green of unripe bananas.
I am a dog. I am stupid.
I pick partridgeberries and blueberries above Shanawdithit’s monument and below the Irving oil-tank farm. But I end up collecting colours. Alders, berry bushes. The sun is lower and the leaves are like tiny red ears aflame. I segregate patches of colour by looking through my curled hand. How Helmut used to direct his camera lens at small areas of caribou moss and rock pools. Looking for the particular.
As I’m driving home I catch Maisie holding hands with Earl Quigley. On this day, anyone would be happy in anyone else’s company.
21 Max comes by for a game of chess. He says he was driving by during the murder. He heard the shot. A brother shot another brother outside Theatre Pharmacy. It was over a woman, or drugs, or it was a hit sponsored by another brother in jail.
He crushes me in zugzwang.
We walk down and see the corner of the hill cordoned off with yellow police tape. The stain where the dead man lay. A mother is crying into a television camera. Along the hill, all the Carolina pine that had X’s have been sawed down. They look like a field of butchered elephants.
22 It’s midnight. I am drinking cold vodka with Max, staring down the hill where the murder took place and the trees lying on their backs like dead elephants. You can see the spire of St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church now. I’ve never been in the kirk, Max says.
Neither have I.
Max wants a length of the pine, so we drive down in his truck. He says the arborist was wrong, the wood is solid. We balance a length on his tailgate. It must weigh five hundred pounds. There’s a fine veil of rain hovering in the air. The billowing police tape still circling the murder scene at Theatre Pharmacy. Their slogan, beneath a turquoise woodcut of a bedridden patient, on prescription bags: When illness comes, next to your doctor you depend on your druggist.
Max says, I’ll put the pine in hay. For two years. This will prevent the wood from checking. Then I’ll carve it.
He has blocks of wood at the shop in various stages of drying.
Max says the murder may have to do with territory. The pharmacist sells to dealers in the early morning.
The police tape, the crime, the chunks of trees, I can empathize with this carnage. A part of me has been murdered.
23 The sun, low in the sky, hits the walls flat on and the floors are dark. Light through a piece of stained glass can travel through two rooms and pin itself on the panel above the phone.
I walk by Lydia’s house. I see her planting a hundred and one bulbs. She has kept the bulbs in the front porch. I have seen Lydia store beer, cooked ham, turkeys, undeveloped film, thawing fish, bicycles, cases of soft drinks, dormant plants in this porch.
Hi, I say.
Oh, hi. Want to help?
We find a trowel, a planter, a pick in the basement. Work gloves. We look at the key and discuss the height of allium, grape hyacinth, dutch iris. We dig among tree roots, we exhume previous bulbs. Harvesting potatoes with my father, spiking one with the pitchfork. Bright flesh in the dirt.
There are the black skins of chestnuts, split to reveal the smooth, varnished knot. The grass still green. There is new grass, even when snow approaches.
We spend the afternoon gardening and it is easy and sad. We are kind to each other, but our hearts are heavy with rain.
24 Tonight my house is full of industry. Dark windows and desk lamps. Radios on low. Iris is polishing up her thesis on sperm physiology in yellow-tail flounder. But I ask about the floating eye, the change in colour. She says most flounder are left-eyed, meaning the left eye floats over to the right side. But some are right-eyed, for no apparent reason.
Iris should be scanning Internet sites for new articles on the role of olfaction in the social behaviour of harbour seals. But she is sending an e-mail to Helmut. They are in Hawaii. In six days they set sail for San Francisco, then south through the Panama Canal. They are replacing the mast. She describes the design, injecting the material with plastics.
But it’s still wood?
She pauses. Gabe, there’s nothing from nature in these boats.
Her door ajar. I see her glowing blue from the light of her laptop. The soothing clack of a keyboard. There’s a moon breaking through the top of the sky, but fog has settled over the hills. Shipyard lights, clustered like ballpark lights, burn through in a haze of urine. The fog a beard. Sky a bald, shining pate.
25 Today I picked up my father’s jacket. The cuffs were frayed, so I brought it to Tony’s Tailor.
Tony: You have your ticket? It’d be easier.
It’s that coat hanging there.
Tony: Youre the one with the cuffs.
Yes.
It came out well.
Did you notice the back?
No.
It’s all one piece of cloth.
Tony snatches the jacket from my hands and holds it to the light.
I’ve seen that before.
It was my father’s jacket, I say. He wore it when he was my age. Before he had me. I used to think he got married in it, but my mother said no.
That’s the difference, Tony says, between men and women.
26 I walk down to the Fat Cat with Max. Earl Quigley makes his way to me. So how are you, he says. Never mind, dont answer can of worms, I know. Look, call me and I’ll buy the coffee.
Yes, I said. A confessor would be nice.
Earl went out with Lydia for four years. And now I’ve seen him with Maisie.
Then Max. Max is such an affable man. He is the word affable. But then I am just another man and we have no obligation. So the freedom to be easy and drink and tell all.
Wilf asks Lydia to get up and they whisper and they sing the song I thought was our song, Wilf on guitar. Lydia sings with her thumbs hooked through her belt loops.
Earl Quigley wins the door prize. I never know where I’ve put my ticket. The pints are cheap until eleven. And I want to get plastered. I point to my empty glass.
27 For the first time, the black roof below is covered in white. I wake up to the branches, sparrows hurrying for seeds, their claws wrapped tight against bare trees mostly white. Bunches of dogberries slivers of red under caps of white. And I think of the first time I held Lydia, bowled her over in the snow when she came back for Christmas. Our first Christmas after a fall of courting, of letters, of plane flights. And now she is not here. Our first snowfall apart.
It’s not that I return to the past; rather, the snow makes the past hurtle
forward.
There is not much new to say about snow, or broken love. Lorca: I am thirsty for odours and laughs, I am thirsty for new poems, poems with no lilies or moons, and no love affairs about to fail.
28 At the Ship with Max. It’s 2 a.m. When Max lived in Merasheen they had no electricity. He salted fish, he caught fish, he killed cattle and chickens, the whole thing. And now, in a few days, he’ll be a father.
29 The ground covered in torn leaves, mainly green, the violence of rain and wind. Dogberry leaves are stuck to the wet door frames. Already people are wearing their poppies. This bugs me.
The city has been ploughing in the public swimming pools.
I hear from Daphne that the police have found lots of evidence. Boyd Coady used seven houses in the neighbourhood. He’d break in, find a spare key, make a copy, and then study the patterns of the people who lived there. When he knew they were gone, he’d go in.
He left the television at Lydia’s because she didnt have one, and he liked to watch TV while his laundry was on.
The underwear fit him.
He admitted he took small things. He liked the things. Sentencing is next month.
30 Walking Alex home from badminton. As always the night has grown calmer and a little warmer, as if heat is coming off the earth.
I’m having a conversation about everyone knowing everything. This is my belief, that instinct over body language is a sophisticated, primitive knowledge, as old as sharks. Our new found intellect thinks it can hide true feeling through omissions in language, but it forgets the body is talking the entire time. Anything we hide we are hiding only from ourselves. As long as someone is not practising obliviousness, he will know how you feel and what you feel about him.
31 Halloween and I’m dressed as Question Man. I have a pair of cardboard glasses shaped into question marks. I wear a belt buckle with a question mark. Alex is dressed as a sheep and she asks me for a light. She says, Question Man, do you have a light? I’d thought Alex was a rabbit, but she’s Sheep.
I dont have a light, I say.
There is a freshly dug grave and a straw man with a pick through his head. The head is made of newspaper stuffed in a yellow sock. There is a thick-lipped sardonic smile. I see Lydia speaking to the pope, who wears a tablecloth and a tea cosy on his head. The pope is Craig Regular. When the hell did he get back in town? There is no defining element in the men Lydia finds attractive. All shapes and character types. Always a surprise: Wilf breaks into big American musical numbers. Craig is goofy but smart. Earl has an academic intensity. Some are sweet, others are sexy. Wilf has a charisma, that’s undeniable. But he’s an alcoholic.
This All Happened Page 18
