The Canal House

by Mark Lee

  The man in his thirties spoke English and provided the voices for the trainer and the owners. He had decided that the trainer talked like a crazed drill sergeant and all the owners were idiots. The fourteen-year-old boy, who had the cocky smile of a class clown, had come up with seven different voices for the dogs. Each dog seemed to be motivated by one of the deadly sins, such as sloth, gluttony, and lust.

  Daniel had watched famous comedians at nightclubs and in the movies, but he had never seen anything funnier than the two performers at Boma Mission. Many of their routines had evolved over the last year and Daniel was told that new material had been developed for that night’s show. The conversation between a sexually starved Pekinese, who liked to rip furniture, and his plump owner was so hilarious that one of the patients fell out of his chair laughing. When the owners and their dogs ran around in a circle at the community center, the mission comedians improvised appropriate comments as each pair trotted past the camera.

  Halfway through the film, Daniel remembered that a young woman had just died and her body was still lying in a building less than twenty yards away. Most of the people around him were going to die within the next two years, and Paul, Tobias, and Joan had perished in the plane crash. All this was true and yet he was laughing. Everyone was laughing.

  It was hard to sleep that night. Three of his ribs were cracked and whenever he coughed, it felt like a bone was jabbing into his right lung. Daniel thought about the plane crash and all the things that had happened afterward. He had a fantasy that he would go to sleep, then wake up and his unpleasant memories would be gone forever.

  In the morning, he stood in line to get his bowl of ugali and a cup of milk. The cattle boys were driving the herd out of the thorn-walled corral. There was a lot of dust and shouting, but they seemed proud that they had such an important job.

  Daniel learned from Ann Gawara that there were definite rules at Boma Mission. Do your fair share of work. Unmarried men and women in separate dormitories. No fighting. Alcohol was only allowed on Friday nights when they drank some homemade beer made from millet. Everyone was allowed to fill up their bowl with beer and it caused a lot of singing.

  Father Lokali was fairly disorganized and things got done only because Ann and two older women took charge of the food and the nursing. A mechanic named Gabriel was responsible for the mission truck and now he was in Kampala picking up more patients and supplies.

  While Daniel ate his porridge and cleaned his bowl, he watched Father Lokali. The priest never seemed to have a casual conversation. Whenever he spoke to anyone, even the children, he concentrated on them completely, as if they were the most important person in the world.

  Daniel heard the sound of a truck engine and saw red dust rising up from the northern road. By now, Father Lokali’s messenger had reached the outside world and someone official was coming to get him. He returned his bowl and cup to Ann and went back to his room. A few minutes later, Father Lokali appeared in the doorway.

  “The police are here from Kitgum. The district captain wants to talk to you.”

  They walked back outside. The policemen had arrived in a Land Rover and a pickup truck. They were parked near the blue dormitory, next to three plywood coffins.

  The district police captain was only in his twenties, but very stern and proper. There were creases in his blue uniform and he carried a swagger stick. Daniel spoke to him briefly, answered a few questions, and the captain went off to give orders to his men.

  Father Lokali stood beside Daniel as the policemen picked up the first coffin.

  “Thank you for everything,” Daniel said. “You saved my life.”

  “Your life had already been saved when the boys found you.”

  Daniel coughed a few times and tasted blood in his mouth. He didn’t want to leave the mission. It felt like the plane crash was merely a prelude to a more terrible danger.

  “You’ve got to tell me what to do.”

  “Go to Kitgum and give a full statement to the police.”

  “I mean, what do I do now that I’ve survived?”

  One of the patients approached with a problem, but Father Lokali shook his head slightly. He wasn’t finished with Daniel.

  “When I took my nursing course in Rome, my language teacher had us read the Divine Comedy. Just inside the gates of hell, Dante has placed those people who lived neither for good nor evil, but only for themselves. Because they believed in nothing when they were alive, they are lost forever in shadows. They follow a flag back and forth, back and forth, over a dark plain, never finding comfort, never finding the right way.”

  “So pick sides and make a decision.”

  “Yes. Exactly.” Father Lokali looked pleased. “The moment will come to you, as it does to all of us. Then make a choice, without hesitation.”

  The police took Daniel to Kitgum and Paul Rosen’s father arrived there a few hours later. When Mr. Rosen learned his son was dead, he cried and pounded his fists on a table. He wanted words of comfort, an explanation for what had happened, but Daniel didn’t know what to tell him. Daniel had always been able to come up with the right phrase for any situation, but now his mouth felt dry and the words seem to stick to his tongue. Back in Kampala, he sent out his articles from the American embassy, then got on a plane to return to home. The journey made him feel even more disoriented.

  When he got back to the farm, Daniel took some pills and slept for a couple of days. His broken bones seemed to be healing, but he felt restless and sick to his stomach. He drove back to Rome, withdrew half his savings, and wired it to Father Lokali’s friend at the Canadian embassy in Kampala. That made him feel good for a few hours, but the restlessness came back again. He began to wonder if the wrong people had died in the crash.

  “THAT’S WHEN I started living here at the convent,” Daniel said. “I thought it would help me being here, but I’m even more lost than in Africa. I feel different, Nicky. I feel changed. How can I go back to work and pretend like nothing has happened? Maybe I should stop being a journalist and do something different with my life. Maybe I should sell Bracciano and give everything away.”

  “Don’t make any quick decisions,” I said. “You survived a bad accident. It takes some time to recover.”

  “We don’t have enough time. Not really.” Daniel turned and stared at me as if I could help him. “So what am I supposed to do, Nicky? Can you tell me?”

  8 AT BRACCIANO

  I didn’t know how to answer any of Daniel’s questions. Instead, my first reaction was to get him out of the garden and buy him some lunch. A few blocks away from the convent, right off the Piazza Santa Maria, we found a restaurant with only four tables. No one greeted us when we arrived so I went into the kitchen. A massive woman wearing a white smock was there, drinking wine and glaring at a dead rabbit lying on a chopping board. I had the feeling that the rabbit had somehow offended her sense of dignity.

  Using my fractured Italian, I said that il mio amico was feeling somewhat precario and that he required a meal that would give him ottimismo and coraggio. The cook fired off a lot of questions, most of which I didn’t understand. Finally she asked me if Daniel was suffering from un amore interrotto.

  “Sί, signora.”

  The cook took a bottle of white wine out of the refrigerator, handed me two glasses, and pushed me back into the dining room. She served us stuffed mushrooms and onion soup, then homemade ravioli. A few more customers came in, but she kept bringing us dishes. Fried cod. Rabbit stew in a thick cream sauce. A spinach salad. Baked pears sprinkled with brown sugar.

  I kept filling Daniel’s wineglass and distracting him with questions about obscure countries like Uzbekistan or Chad. The food, the wine, and my constant chatter pulled Daniel back into the present and he began to relax. We got up from the table around five, sedated from the feast. The cook came out from the kitchen and scrutinized Daniel like a doctor who had just performed surgery. She pinched his cheek, gave us a parting shot of grappa, and sent us on
our way.

  Outside the restaurant I tried to act casual. “You know, I’ve only visited your farm in the summertime. What’s it look like in the fall?”

  Daniel hesitated for a few seconds, but the fried cod and the grappa, the talk of old news stories, and the bright blue truck roaring past us kept him from walking straight back to the convent garden.

  “It’s beautiful, Nicky. It really is. Why don’t you come out and see?”

  The Alfa Romeo was parked behind the convent. Daniel said goodbye to the little nun and we drove out of the city. That evening, we didn’t speed down the road and Daniel actually glanced at the landscape. The country air was cold and smelled like pine trees.

  I STAYED AT BRACCIANO for fifteen days. It was a relaxing vacation, even though it involved two of the things I hate most in this world—waking up early and gardening. Usually La Signora marched in around seven o’clock in the morning and started banging pots on the stove. She treated Daniel with firm affection, as if he was a difficult farm animal that kept breaking out of his pasture. One morning she was cleaning up the breakfast dishes while Daniel played a Louis Prima CD on the portable stereo. As Prima sang “When You’re Smiling,” Daniel took La Signora’s hand and danced with her in the kitchen. The old lady laughed and twirled around on the stone floor. For a moment I could see her fifty years ago, breaking hearts at a village dance.

  On a typical morning we planted the trees that Daniel had bought for a few thousand lire at the government nursery. He would drive over to the nursery, place the plastic buckets of two or three saplings on the floor of the Alfa, and lean the slender trunks against the passenger seat. Back at the farm, he’d carry the trees down to the ravine and plant them near the stream to fight erosion. La Signora handed me a pick and shovel, then pointed to the ground between the terraces and the cypress windbreak. You. Go. Plant trees.

  The volcanic soil was rock hard, packed down by centuries of overgrazing. It took me several hours to dig what I thought was an acceptable hole, but La Signora said it was too small. When I objected, she harangued me in Italian, most of which I didn’t understand. I kept digging, hacking away at the soil, until she finally murmured, “Bene, bene,” and dumped two baskets of mulch into the hole. In all, I planted three oaks and two cherry trees. I got a blister on my left hand, but I had to admit it felt good to look down the slope at my small accomplishment.

  We usually finished work around noon, then ate the big meal of the day. I took a nap on the couch while Daniel sat in his bedroom and played CDs. He was searching, always searching, for those moments of pure music. Now he was obsessed with the early recordings of Louis Armstrong and I had to listen to repeated trumpet solos from “Tight Like This” and “Potato Head Blues.” I knew that Daniel was thinking about the plane crash when he abandoned Louis Armstrong and put on Bach’s cello suites. I felt as if I was living with someone who had just been released from prison. The sun was shining and La Signora was singing in the kitchen, but sometimes Daniel would sit in the arbor and stare at the dirt driveway as if he was waiting for the police to take him away.

  In the late afternoon Daniel helped La Signora with the wet garden while I took my cameras and wandered down the hill. I forgot that I was a shooter for two weeks and spent hours photographing the texture of the stone on the Roman bridge. Leaves were falling and the countryside was brown and dark gold. I’d look up and see a huge flock of swifts surging across the sky.

  At night we’d cook up some pasta or roast a whole chicken on the spit in the fireplace. Daniel bought his wine from a barrel at a local farm and he kept it in old scotch bottles with screw-top caps. We’d drink a fair amount, then play chess or gin rummy. It was during these games that I learned a few more facts about Daniel’s past. After his mother’s death when he was eighteen, he bought a car and began to drive around the United States. He spent two seasons running a chair lift at a Utah ski resort and worked for a traveling carnival that toured the West.

  Eventually he’d ended up in Washington, fighting fires for the state forestry service. After one particularly tough job, when he and three other men were caught between fire lines, he returned to the camp covered with soot, sat down on his bunk, and wrote about the experience. “I just wanted to tell the story,” he said. “I wasn’t doing it for money or because I wanted to be famous. I thought, if I wrote down all the facts, I could understand what happened.”

  An editor at the Seattle Times read the handwritten submission, ordered some photographs, and printed the entire five-thousand-word article. When Daniel dropped by to pick up his check, the editor told him that he was wasting his time digging fire trenches, that he should take a few journalism classes and start writing for the newspaper. Within a year, Daniel was a general assignment reporter for the Times. It seemed incredible that he could get paid to drive around the city and ask strangers questions. Like a priest or a doctor, he had the right to step around the strip of yellow emergency tape and enter into different worlds.

  “I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with my life and I thought …” He paused for a second and took another sip of wine. “I believed that, if I asked enough questions and talked to enough people, I could get some answers for myself.”

  “But that’s not true?”

  “No.” He finished off his wine and got up from the table. “I’ve asked thousands of questions, Nicky. And I don’t know one damn thing.”

  Daniel was quieter, slower, more deliberate. For the first time in his life, he was cautious about the future and regretful about the mistakes he had made in the past. I know that he wrote letters to a half-dozen people whom he had angered for some reason. Three of the letters were returned unopened and two people wrote back, accepting his apology. His chief enemy, the AP bureau chief in Moscow, sent a long e-mail with a great many exclamation points and capital letters. He hoped that Daniel would step on a land mine in a war zone and suffer a painful death.

  I was the follower and Daniel was the leader in Africa, but now the relationship had changed. Daniel had lost his psychological armor, the proud confidence I had seen before the accident. I felt older than him, almost protective in an odd way. He was like a sick man whose defenses were down, susceptible to any infection. He was safe at Bracciano, but I wondered what would happen once he left this sanctuary.

  Gradually I began to coax Daniel back into his responsibilities. I encouraged him to pay his bills and send messages to his editors. He told everyone that he was recovering from the plane crash and that he would return to work in a few months. Using Daniel’s computer, I checked my e-mail and found a message from Richard Seaton: Newsweek says you’re in Italy with Daniel McFarland. How is he?

  I wrote back a chatty little note: Daniel is okay. He just needed some rest and relaxation. Beautiful weather here.

  There were immediate consequences. The next day a red pickup truck came through the gates and rolled slowly down the driveway until the driver found us digging a hole for a pine tree. The driver got out wearing the brown uniform of an overnight delivery service. Inside a manila envelope was an engraved invitation to a black-tie fund-raising party at Westgate Castle, Richard’s country estate near Gloucester.

  Along with the invitation was a letter from a Miss Hedges, obviously some kind of social secretary. In a neat and precise cursive she informed us that there was also a house party that weekend for Mr. Seaton’s friends. Richard wanted to know if Mr. McFarland and Mr. Bettencourt could arrive at Westgate on Thursday afternoon.

  Daniel jabbed his shovel into the ground, then studied the invitation. “It must be strange to own a castle. I wonder if Billy Monroe is in charge of the drawbridge.”

  I reached into the manila envelope and found a second letter written on cream-colored stationery.

  Dear Nicky and Daniel: Richard says that he’s invited you both to the house party. I do hope you can come. Yrs. Julia Cadell.

  That was all. Nothing personal. But when I handed the letter to Daniel, he read it severa
l times. “She’s left Kosana.”

  “Looks like it.”

  “I guess she isn’t mad at me anymore.”

  “She apologized to you. Remember?”

  “I wasn’t graceful about that,” Daniel said. “I wasn’t graceful at all.” He stared at Julia’s letter as if her spidery handwriting could provide more information. “Want to go back to England, Nicky?”

  “I’m tired of planting trees. I think I’m ready for hors d’oeuvres.”

  9 WESTGATE CASTLE

  I went back to Daniel’s tailor, got measured for a tuxedo, and flew to London that weekend. As soon as I arrived Carter Howard sent me north to photograph a plane crash outside of Edinburgh. A Boeing Airbus had been transformed into shards of burning wreckage scattered across three acres of muddy pasture. I took about three hundred shots, but Newsweek only used the one of a constable placing a woman’s shoe into an evidence bag. I kept fantasizing about owning a farm like Daniel and growing something that wouldn’t take a lot of work—wildflowers, maybe, or mistletoe. I didn’t know anything about farming, but I was getting tired of photographing disasters.

  When I returned from Scotland I hung around the Newsweek offices for a few days and did an Internet search on Richard Seaton. I had assumed that Richard was created in the poor-boy-makes-good mold, but that wasn’t really true. His father was a solicitor in Chelmsford and Richard went to a public school—although not one of the famous ones. While a student at Oxford, he had leased and installed an ATM machine at the town bus station near Gloucester Green. The rest of his banking empire seemed to flow from that one act.

  Until he met Julia, Richard was famous for dating beautiful women in the actress/model category. Searching through the computer archives of the British tabloids, I found several news photographs of Richard in a tuxedo standing next to actresses wearing dresses that contradicted the laws of physics. He seemed to prefer women who had slept with members of the British royal family. This preference led to a memorable tabloid headline: DASHING DICKY RECYCLES ROYAL REJECTS.