Broken Man on a Halifax Pier

by Choyce, Lesley;

  “I don’t know. Pete wasn’t here. I wasn’t around. He didn’t really walk away on anyone or anything. Even our old dog had died, so it was just him, all alone. I should have come back here to him.”

  “Yeah, you should have at least stayed in touch.”

  “He was a hard man to talk to on the phone.”

  “Then you should have come to visit.”

  “He was an even harder man to talk to in person as he got older. He and my mother often sat through entire meals not saying anything to one another. They didn’t even look like they cared if anyone else was at the table. But I think they were okay with that. They just didn’t talk unless they had something important to say.”

  Having said that, we both grew rather quiet until we knew it was time to swim back to the boat. The tide had risen and the distance to the boat was greater. The water seemed much colder now and as we boarded the Sheer Delight we were shivering.

  37

  A funny thing happened after that day. It was like we had invoked the spirit of my father somehow, because people started bringing things back to us at the house. They brought back items that he had given away. An old wicker chair for starters. Then a maple table and a bookshelf. A woman named Elsie Blanchard brought a teapot and a set of dainty English teacups that she said had belonged to my mother.

  Rolf had decided to ease up on the booze and spent more time at the worksite offering up advice — some of it good, some not so good. I think he loved the idea of people returning things that had once been in the old house and he had started making phone calls. Bud Lasky showed up one day with the old back door, finely refinished with Varathane. Dell Grigg brought a couple of windows he’d kept all these years in his barn.

  I asked the workers to make sure these things could be incorporated somehow into the new house and they did. Brody thought it quite amazing that so much stuff from the old house was being dropped off. He offered up some ideas as to what should go where and I usually went along with him. It made me feel like something of my parents’ life together would be with us there.

  Finally, the day of sentencing arrived. September 20. The courtroom was mostly empty and it looked like Brody’s case was the main order of the day. I noted a young reporter there from the Herald, the court recorder, the Crown attorney, two police officers, and four women clustered together in the back who I did not recognize. Brian sat sullenly alone. Scooter wasn’t with him. This time, Ramona and I sat in the second row behind Joe, Beth Ann, Mackenzie, Brody, and Alan. I tapped Brody on the shoulder. He turned to say hi. I couldn’t read his state of mind. But I did detect that Alan Romaine looked uncharacteristically nervous and fidgety. That threw me. I felt a cold wave of something come over me. Something was not right.

  Judge Delia Green made some opening remarks and read the charges aloud, referencing again the Criminal Code of Canada and the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. She stated that the defendant had pleaded guilty as charged and reminded us that this was a sentencing hearing.

  I had been told that the Crown, the judge, and Alan would have met ahead of time, before the proceedings, and that all information regarding the case had been put before the judge. At this point, things were mostly a formality. No courtroom theatrics like in the movies. Just the judge stating what comes next for Brody.

  In fact, it all seemed so dull and matter of fact at first that it seemed unreal.

  The judge cleared her throat and began to speak. “The court recognizes that this is Brody Myatt’s first offence, but the Crown has shown reasonable evidence that Mr. Myatt has been selling various illegal substances for a long time. It would seem he has made a career out of it.

  “It was noted that he put up a struggle during the time of arrest, but since then has been co-operative, has admitted his guilt, and appears to be sorry for what he has done. But the court has also noted that he has sold a very dangerous drug, fentanyl, to an unsuspecting person, resulting in that person overdosing and going to hospital. We are all pleased that the victim is well now and back to work.

  “I am not convinced that Mr. Myatt has knowingly sold drugs to persons under eighteen years of age but have not ruled it out. Nonetheless, I have not factored that in to his sentencing since I had no hard evidence, only hearsay.

  “The court has made note of a difficult family situation from which Mr. Myatt arose but also registers that he is a grown man, not a boy, and fully responsible for his actions. I have also noted that he is soon to be a father and I am not a person who wishes fathers to be in prisons instead of being home to raise their children.

  “The Crown wishes me to make an example of this man who has sold potentially life-threatening substances to unsuspecting individuals and the Crown has good reason to make that argument.

  “But what troubles me most at this point are the statements of four women who recently had an encounter with Mr. Myatt at a building site in Stewart Harbour. I have sworn testimony from them that Mr. Myatt threatened them and came after them wielding a hammer before they could get in their car and drive away. This prompted me to look further into his record. I found that Mr. Myatt has been charged with other acts of violence, although there were no convictions.

  “In light of this new information, my decision is based on the fact that Mr. Myatt has a clear potential to do more harm to the public, either from selling dangerous substances or using threats and violence against others. So I sentence him to two years in federal prison, sentence starting today.”

  The women in the back of the room were clapping. The judge silenced them. Brody was on his feet now, his fists clenched. Alan was standing beside him and began to speak, “Your Honour, I would like to approach the bench.”

  Joe was trying to get Brody to sit back down, but he would have none of it. “The bitches,” he shouted. “They were vandals and I caught them.” Alan turned to him and put up his hands.

  “Sit down, Mr. Myatt,” Judge Green said sternly. But Brody would not sit.

  “I change my plea,” he shouted. “I’m not guilty!”

  “You can’t do that,” the judge said.

  “This is not fair. I don’t deserve this.” He was full-on yelling now, his face red with fury and exertion.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Myatt, but your actions have determined your fate here. You are the one responsible.”

  “I demand a retrial!” He was leaning forward and looked like he was ready to explode.

  “But this is not a trial,” the judge said calmly. “You have already pleaded guilty and now the sentence has been determined.” She turned to the uniformed men. “Gentleman, please have Mr. Myatt removed from the courtroom.”

  38

  I tried to speak to Brody as he was being led away, but he just glared at me. I’d betrayed my own son. I’d come back into his life decades after he’d been born only to have him handcuffed and sent away to Springhill.

  As he was led out of the courtroom, the C-WAP women were smiling and clapping a silent applause. Brody looked defiant. It was a look that I surmised he would hang on to for a long, long time.

  “We’ll appeal,” Alan told us. “We can change this decision.” But his words were hollow. They were just words.

  Beth Ann looked at him desperately. “Then he can come home, right? Until the appeal is over.”

  Alan shook his head. “No, it doesn’t work that way. He has to go into custody. That’s the way the law works.”

  “The fucking law,” Joe said. “The goddamn fucking law. You tricked us, you little asshole. You told us this was going to work out okay.”

  “There were unforeseen circumstances,” Alan offered. But as he said it, I could see that Alan Romaine still had a weakness about him when he let his guard down. He was still the wimpy kid in the school hallway picked on by the likes of Brian Deacon and Joe Myatt.

  Beth Ann hung her head and sobbed. I’d been nothing but bad news for that girl since high school. I had no way to make up for the blunders I’d made. What to do now? Create a
problem and then walk away — that was my style. I just didn’t know if I could do it again.

  Mackenzie looked like she was in shock. She sat silently and kept twisting a Kleenex in her hand.

  Ramona just looked stunned. She sat silently looking straight ahead.

  Joe slammed his fist into the chair in front of him.

  The judge left. The courtroom cleared.

  Alan looked at me and started to speak but stopped himself. Then he snapped his fancy briefcase shut and simply walked out of the courtroom.

  Joe gathered up Beth Ann and Mackenzie and ushered them out of the room.

  It was just Ramona and me.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I convinced you to do it. I made a mistake.”

  I felt her moving away from me. We had done this thing together and, yes, she had persuaded me. I would not have done such a thing on my own. Damn. Brody was beginning to change. I had seen it in him. He’d stopped dealing. He liked the work on the house. He was changing for the better, I was convinced of it.

  And now this.

  “I don’t know if I can live with what I made you do,” Ramona said. “I don’t know what I was thinking. This idea of building a house in your hometown was a mistake. People will know what we did. We sent one of their own to prison.”

  I could feel her slipping away from me with each new word. “Not everyone will think we did the wrong thing.”

  “But what about Beth Ann, Joe, and all their relatives? They’ll hate us.”

  “Beth Ann approved of what I did. She told me it had to be done.”

  “But she’ll see it differently now.”

  “If Brody plays his cards right, he’ll be out well before two years. And maybe the appeal will work. There are possibilities here.” But I knew these to be empty words as well. I felt a great weight on me. I sensed an awful inevitability. I’d seen it in Brody from the very first time we met. He struck me as someone who would make one bad decision after the next. And that trait would follow him to prison, I was certain.

  Ramona and I said very little on the drive back to Stewart Harbour. There was really nothing to be said.

  The next morning, she told me she needed to go back to the city. To see her mother. To visit her doctor. To meet with her father and his accountant about the family trust. She didn’t say anything about me coming along.

  “Don’t go,” I said. I was convinced I was losing her. That once she left, she’d likely never come back.

  “I have to,” she said. And she packed a bag with what little possessions she had brought out there and left.

  As soon as her car was out of sight, I felt a panic creeping up my spine. It was like a living but icy thing was about to devour me. I hadn’t felt it for a long time. It was fear. Fear of abandonment. Fear of being alone. But it was more intense. It was a kind of mental paralysis that was unlike anything I’d known. I’d been depressed before. I’d felt anxiety. I’d felt an absence of emotion that became common to me — a person alive but not living.

  But this was different. Cold hard panic, fear, and hopelessness.

  I looked around to see if Ramona had left me her second cellphone. I could call her, reel her back in. Tell her I loved her now as much as ever. But she had taken the phone.

  I walked out of my father’s fish shack, down to the water, and then onto the wharf. It was empty. The men were at sea in their boats. Just me and the herring gulls and the smell of fish guts. Broken man on another pier. Isn’t that where the story began? The only real difference now was that I had hate in my heart. I hated myself for what I’d done; hated myself for having been optimistic about Ramona, about a life together, about getting to know my son.

  Pure delusion. Pure fiction. Just like my unfinished novel. Because of Ramona and because of the summer we had shared, I had returned to work on the novel. It moved from the depths of existential despair to a kind of reluctant but hopeful vision of the world. My protagonist had the air of Hemingway tragedy, but had begun to move on to something transcendent.

  Thinking about my novel and the way it reflected various threads in my own life, I walked back to my little cabin and reread what I’d banged out on the old typewriter over the summer. The parts of it I’d read out loud to Ramona had met with her approval. I think I was blindly hoping that there would be something there in the fiction, some thought, some idea that would allow me to make sense of my own life as it was now. Some small but essential sequence of words that would give me a clue as to what I could do next to make peace with the world, to move forward into whatever empty life was ahead of me, some glimpse of some possible salvation.

  I sat at the old wooden table and read.

  But there was nothing. It was the work of an amateur and it was much more trite than I had realized. Words on a page. Empty words. Cardboard characters, sophomoric notions. I was like a million other wannabe novelists. The only difference was that they probably had a life, a real life to go back to, once the fiction was over. I didn’t.

  I opened a drawer and found the stick matches. I gathered up the pages of my manuscript spread out on the table in front of me, carried them to the water’s edge, crumpled some pages to light, and then proceeded to burn the manuscript.

  That’s when Rolf walked out his door and saw what I was doing. He slowly came my way, looking rough around the edges, unshaven and stooped. He leaned over and put his hands up to the flames as if warming them on a winter day. “Chisel, this isn’t what I think it is,” he said. “Is it?”

  “Yes. It is.”

  “And so you’re burning your book?”

  “It wasn’t much of a book.”

  “It’s okay. You can write another.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “I heard what happened at the trial,” Rolf said.

  “I made a mistake.”

  “Not necessarily. A lot of people around here are still saying you did the right thing. Someone had to stop him.”

  “I just wish it wasn’t me.”

  “I haven’t had a drink in three days,” Rolf suddenly said.

  “Why not?”

  “Fuck knows. I had this feeling you’d need me sober after that legal business was over. I never trusted the law. Now look how it turned out.”

  “Do you think he deserved it? Brody, going to prison for two years.”

  Rolf shrugged. “Don’t know. I don’t know who decides what’s fair and what’s not fair. Your father used to say, the whole damn world operates under a fixed set of rules. We just never really know what those rules are until we break them.”

  “He really said that?”

  “Oh yeah. Your old man was quite the philosopher.”

  “I guess I never thought of him that way.”

  “I did. He had that kind of quiet wisdom. Your mother was a saint and your father was wise as Solomon, that’s my view.”

  “Well then, how did I turn out so fucked up?”

  “That is a bit of a mystery, I guess. You can’t blame genetics. Might be that you got all caught up in what gets hyped as free will. My view is there’s no such thing.”

  “You don’t believe in free will.”

  “Nope. And neither did your father.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I can tell you don’t. It’s the old way of seeing things. You go to sea and you have a good catch or a bloody storm comes up and flips your boat ass over teakettle and you die. You can try to save yourself, but it’s already written down somewhere — metaphorically speaking — whether you live or die. Like what happened with Brody out there that day of the storm. You worked bloody hard to save his sorry ass, but it could have gone one way or the other. It turned out good, so you think you had something to do with it. But it wasn’t that way at all.”

  “Thanks, Rolf, for your own philosophical insight. But I’m not sure it’s helping.”

  “Why do you think that a lot of these fishermen believe like their granddaddies that there’s no point learning to swim if it�
�s only gonna draw out the pain of drowning? Listen, Chisel. Brody lived that day so he got another shot at making some kind of life for himself.”

  “Except now he’s in prison.”

  “It’s called a setback. And, yes, that too was set in stone somewhere. Don’t beat yourself up. That’s where your belief in free will can get you. Blaming yourself for something that’s not your fault.”

  “Fuck,” I said. “Fuck it all.”

  “Now you’re talking.”

  “But it’s not just Brody,” I said. “It’s Ramona. She’s gone.”

  Now Rolf looked shocked. “Jesus, boy, no?”

  “Yeah. This morning. She’s gone.”

  He pursed his lips together, then took a deep breath and looked me in the eyes. “Now that you gotta fix.”

  39

  Joe showed up that night at my door, drunk and threatening to kill me. It was not an unexpected visit. He was much bigger than me and I was fairly certain he could do it if he was so motivated.

  “I should have taken care of you that first day you came back. Right there on your father’s boat. Could have taken you out and dumped you in the sea where you could visit with your crazy dead father. That would have avoided all this trouble.”

  “I agree,” I said. “It would have saved all of us a lot of trouble.”

  Joe kept clenching and unclenching his fists and he looked like he was about to explode. The fact I didn’t say anything in my own defence seemed to make him even angrier. But Rolf, my patron saint of protection, waltzed in the door just then.

  “What are you two boys jawing about?” he asked matter-of-factly.

  “No big deal, you old turd. I just thought I’d drop by and kill a rat.”

  “Only rats I’ve seen lately are those big Norwegian suckers skittering around the wharf. What we need around here are some cats worthy of their heritage to root ’em out and clean the place up.”

  “What the fuck are you blathering about, old man?” Joe said.