Minister Without Portfolio

by Michael Winter

  MINISTER

  WITHOUT

  PORTFOLIO

  ALSO BY

  MICHAEL WINTER

  The Death of Donna Whalen

  The Architects Are Here

  The Big Why

  This All Happened

  One Last Good Look

  Creaking in Their Skins

  Michael Winter

  MINISTER

  WITHOUT

  PORTFOLIO

  But Love has pitched his mansion in

  The place of excrement;

  For nothing can be sole or whole

  That has not been rent.

  W. B. YEATS

  PART ONE

  1

  She told him there wasn’t another person. Henry watched her stand up from her kitchen table and push things around on a counter. She peeled up the foam placemats that made that satisfying sound. She was busying herself and of course he was in her house, he was the one who would have to physically leave. For three hours they talked it over and she told him how it was and he fled through the spectrum of emotions and they were both cleansed but she returned to what was not an ultimatum. I’m leaving you now can you please leave.

  But I love you, he said.

  He was quite proud of how he said it. He did not know he would begin a response with the word “but.” He hadn’t punched a piece of furniture or raised his voice and now he said this short sentence with mercy and with confidence and honour. It might have been the voice of a messiah, the little messiah that runs each of our lives. The statement was reassuring and he could tell it had some effect. But they were broken and she knew he was a good man but who can push through the hard times of the mundane life any more? The idea of not enough on the line, he could absorb that. But she had dismounted from the horse they were both riding. One of the things she said was she wanted to live a dangerous life.

  He found his construction boots and bent his toes so the joints creaked and said so long in his head, not out loud, it would have been too casual. Also, he caught himself and understood that the previous words were the best words to leave on. But I love you. They would give him the high ground and he could really dig a good ditch for himself now and remain unshaven and unwashed and drink himself into a narrow hallway with no door at the end, he could do that and search for commiseration.

  It was bright out, a very happy afternoon in the autumn. Astonishing. He put his heart on a little branch, hung it there, and then almost skipped into the street. He knew that if she was watching, that little hop would not be very attractive. But he was cleaving himself in two, something he did often for sentences at a time, but not for long days or weeks and that is how he spent his time now, split apart. A stacked cord of wood that should have been a tree.

  Luckily he lived in a town that was built around a harbour and Nora’s house was on top of a hill, so he had an easy walk down to the bars on Water Street. The roofs of buildings swallowed the hill and he would not have to walk past her house all the time if he just stayed downtown. That is the logic people use when they discover themselves drinking intensely. He had lived down here just after trade school in a one-room apartment on Colonial Street. He paused at the window now and the door where his mail used to come—his life before Nora.

  He found himself in one bar called the Spur and a man in a corner was singing a country song which filled Henry with loathing. The man had no right to pollute the air with that song, a song from Nashville that understood nothing of a real life. He knew the man, of course, had spoken to him perhaps three times. Henry ate a pickled egg and chewed through the overboiled cold and dull yolk and drank down a pint of pale ale and came around on the song. Stripped of the production Henry was applying to the vocalization, the core of the song was ultimately true and as he left the bar he patted the old man on the shoulder. He was humming it now, Henry was. There was a line at the end where a man cuts off his lover’s head and kicks it against the wall. He sang it the way the old man sang it and walked down further towards the polluted harbour and stared up at the green and marble monument to the war dead. The men up there with their bayonets and loose helmets and kneeling and dying and forever enjoying their patina. Was it brass? No one rubbed the nose of a soldier on a memorial for good luck. Live a dangerous life.

  There was the dark harbour to end his land activity. The sleeping marine transports servicing the offshore industry and a coast guard search and rescue vessel and a military tug of some kind. Pure utilitarian boats all moored on very thick hawsers. He stared at the serious hulls, empty of men, and saluted. The stink of cooked diesel. Perhaps there is something here, he thought. The thought of war, or not war but an expulsion from civilian life. Or the hell with it, there is something noble in servicing oil rigs. Oil will be the end of mankind but to be in service of it is not without honour. What was it John’s son had told him? Oil was the bones of dinosaurs. Civilization was something Henry had not chosen. He was born into good manners and a life sheltered from death. He could renounce it. What had it given him? What were the benefits but a broken heart?

  2

  He walked around the town all night and, as the sun rose over the ocean, he found himself back at Nora’s door. He sat across the road and watched the house and street slowly wake up. The sun was a magnificent thing. He had to be back at the Bull Arm site Monday morning and he knew he’d pay for it, this being up all night. But he was thinking there might be early activity at Nora’s house. He wondered if he had the strength and accuracy to fight a man and win. Anyone passing him by at that hour could see he was looking to break up what is called an aubade. But Nora was asleep and there was no man with her and the alert daylight made him stagger to the house of his best friend, feeling small and without a shell. He felt himself evaporating and it scared him. He let the sun warm his shoulders and kidneys and fill him up, the sun pushed him to John and Silvia’s. He found the hidden key and let himself in and their dog, Wolf, did not make a sound but smelled his hand and knew who he was and followed Henry downstairs into the finished basement. Henry felt with his hands for any sleeping kids and fell into the guest bed with Wolf and hugged the big dog.

  He woke up remembering Nora Power had broken up with him.

  She had come into their bedroom about two weeks ago and, he realized now, tried to break up with him. Henry had been watching hockey on a small colour TV, with a bag of roast chicken chips on his chest. He had worked hard all week at Bull Arm and sometimes he just liked to lie around and be a table for a bag of chips. She sat on the floor with him and wiped away her tears and put her arm around him and he gave her a good hug and she ate his chips. She was wearing a white sweater with red sequins sewn into it and the chip crumbs clung to it. She had beautiful skin and she was a big woman with a gorgeous body that he loved to stroke.

  He went to work. He drove his car to the site—it took ninety-five minutes—and every weekend for the next three months he tried to convince Nora Power otherwise. The word otherwise, he thought. Otherwise I will throw myself in the drink. It was edging into winter now and the drinks were frozen over. Sometimes, on a Sunday morning, he’d watch cartoons with John and Silvia’s two kids while Silvia made pancakes. Clem: Did the milk walk away from my mouth? The boy was using a straw in a small glass of milk. His sister Sadie explained the milk was running back down the straw. Then they ran around the house with their Star Wars lifesavers.

  3

  Henry’s buddy John Hynes had a contract with Rick Tobin and was gone to Fort McMurray for three-week stretches. It was mining, not oil. Henry had been thinking it was the work at Bull Arm that had made Nora stray from him, but Silvia didn’t mind John in Alberta. They managed to foster a love at a distance. He examined his friend a
nd his friend’s wife. Fostering, he thought. I will foster this love. He spent the money he made and attempted to convince Nora. He found himself one evening pressed up against her frosted window pane saying please, Nora, please until her father’s waist arrived and said Henry, Henry. Her parents were over for dinner—it was one of the family things Nora did that Henry loved. He stared at her father’s belt through the window that Henry had caulked the year before, the yellow wool vest Nora’s father wore in winter—Henry knew her father loved him but her father also understood his daughter. Or at least—because no one can understand Nora Power—he backed her up in her dismissal of Henry Hayward.

  It took five failed efforts for him to turn the corner on Nora. The corner was tall and sheer and almost so acute it might have been an eighty-eight-degree angle. It had taken a hundred days to have Nora agree to go out with him in the first place so he felt another campaign of a hundred days would convince her to let him return. But it was Christmas and no return occurred. John Hynes and Silvia took care of him. It was John who asked Rick Tobin to hire on Henry for an overseas contract. John was home for two weeks to get his buddy back in shape. John, his hair dark and thick and cut short and his handshake arriving just before a generous hug, his lanyard ID still around his neck, the little slap the lanyard gave as he walked towards you, touching him under each armpit in a self-affirming manner. John loved people. He always found something in you to love. That nose that had been broken on the job several times, set by John himself. This job isn’t an Alberta job, he said. It’s in the Middle East. You’re through with Nora now you need to break your relationship with the land. The land is her land or it’s your land together and you can’t walk it any more alone.

  The contract started in March. Springtime, Henry—start anew.

  This logic of land and season reminded Henry of those Sunday school sermons of ancient times when men walked with giants. The only thing keeping you standing, John said, is fresh air. Get that out of your system and you’ll be set to go again.

  John, not a big man, but with strong shoulders who had been in construction his entire adult life. A man used to turning slowly. He spoke of Henry as if he were an old shed built with found wood. Which he was. Which we all are. Henry had worked with John out in Kelligrews hauling busted cinder blocks into a rolloff container. They had lined up at coffee shops covered head to toe in spackle. If you sat in a car with John you realized his torso was long (his head touched the ceiling). He was telling Henry that Rick Tobin had won this contract in Afghanistan. It’s a big one and it’ll be hilarious and we get to hang out with Tender Morris. Tender Morris was in the reserves and now he’s stationed in Camp Julien. Oh my god Tender Morris. They had gone to trade school with Tender and then Tender had joined the reserves.

  Henry returned to work in Bull Arm and took an elevator every day down the leg of a module four storeys underwater to conduct stress tests on the concrete being poured there. It was a routine and he enjoyed how busy he was and how distracted he felt and insulated from the truth of Nora Power having left him. This enormous pillar underwater protected him from that truth and he could lick his wounds. It was when he came back to the surface that he was vulnerable. Sometimes on the weekends, when he could not sleep and he knew he was deeply alone in the world, he’d check Silvia’s computer and there’d be an email from John out in Alberta telling him of the crazy things going on in the mining sector.

  Henry spent his weekends in St John’s. He continued to have drinks in bars, but one early morning a man next to him called for a pint and the bartender told him there was none left. Can I take the keg home on my bike? No. Okay let’s have five tequilas.

  Tequila’s the only thing that’s true, the bartender said.

  Man: She is hard and cynical about everything except a deep sentimental attachment to anything dealing with animals.

  Henry paid his bill and left. He promised himself not to hear that type of language again: caustic truths with no self-mockery. He did push-ups and vowed he would get his life together. He remembered the man who had lived in this finished basement for a few weeks during 9/11. Noyce was his name. A stranded passenger that John and Silvia had befriended through Colleen Grandy. This man Noyce fell in love with Newfoundland and bought a house around the bay near John and Silvia’s summer home in Renews. Noyce was strong in the way a bird is strong, big chest and hollow-boned. Ready for perky flight and a ruddy, round, sunburnt head with just a horseshoe of golden hair at his ears, hair that he kept a little long. He wore torn T-shirts and necklaces children from the Amazon had made for him—strings of wood and feathers and beads and strips of black rubber from sandals perhaps.

  Henry would receive strength from the walls of this basement just as that man Noyce had. Noyce is a spiritual man and so will I be. On Saturdays Henry played with John and Silvia’s kids and took them to lunch at a diner downtown. Over hamburgers and pea soup he saw a woman in a gallery falling a hundred times in three hours, one time for each Canadian soldier dead in Afghanistan. She did this in a gallery with a window onto the restaurant where he was eating his hamburger. He did not like art particularly, but there was something in the woman he liked. Henry was not shy. He was a guy who handled polyethylene tubing and connected electrodes to cured cement but he was not flummoxed by a performance artist. He crossed the street with the kids and opened the door to the gallery and asked the artist where she got the idea. She told Henry about this residency with the military. They have artists who accompany the army to the Arctic or, in this case, Afghanistan. She returned and felt compelled to become each soldier that had fallen.

  He never saw this woman again but it made him think about John Hynes’s notion of a contract in Kabul.

  4

  Rick Tobin was three years older than John and Henry and Tender Morris but they knew him growing up in the west end of St John’s. Little Rick like a bantam cock in his blue coveralls, all hundred and forty pounds of him bounding into things. Rick had energy that bewildered Henry and he was not the first to realize Rick could channel this force into ambition and drive and learn how to connect labour with materials and funnel them into the delivery of services to small towns along the shore. It floored him, how successful Rick was. He had married Colleen Grandy and moved into her town which was down the road from where John and Silvia had a summer house. Renews. Tender Morris had been left a house there too by a great-aunt, a house Tender Morris was going to fix up some day if he ever got out of the military. Henry asked Rick if he worried about leaving the city for such a small place.

  I’m never home, Rick said. If Colleen is happy then I’m happy.

  Henry had visited Renews a few times, but living in a small place was not something that had appealed to him. He appreciated a city giving you a movie to watch, rather than having to constantly make your own movie. Rural areas were for excursions.

  Henry and John and Tender, in their twenties, had gone to work for Rick. One time they set some dynamite to blow up virgin land in a new subdivision that was being cut out of the woods. There was concern for the fallout, so Rick had everyone park their vehicles around the perimeter of the blast site to act as a buffer. Rick pressed the button and the earth lifted a little. There was a whump and the sound of tinfoil crumpling. The surface of the denuded land was torn away and all was silent, and then soil fell on them, entire root systems, and when they got up off the ground they could see that the windows in all the vehicles were blown in. The performance metrics on this job, Rick said, are a little askew.

  A few years ago Rick had bought nine second-hand dumptrucks from Alberta and shipped them here. He went halves on a sawmill in Horsechops Lane and became principal owner of a lounge in Fermeuse, the Copper Kettle. He snapped up two big boats from the classifieds, forty-footers, when the snow crab fishery collapsed. John explained that Rick Tobin was constructing an old folks’ home up the shore, and he’ll take the senior citizens out in the wilderness area on the crab boats and then, if all goes well, they’ll
lose all their money on the video lottery terminals at the Copper Kettle.

  Henry was in this bar once and Rick called him over. Hey Henry. Rick bought him a beer. Then said Henry there’s a man at the door I have to have a word with. He went over there. Rick obviously a small guy. It got loud, and Rick wiped the floor with him, then took him outside and kicked him down the handicapped ramp. That guy owed me three hundred dollars.

  He’s buying land in Costa Rica, John said, to grow trees. Teak wood, he said, you can’t get your arms around it. He wants to set the sawmill right here and ship the teak up. He asked me to supervise the mill. You can have all the teak you want, he said. Teak is twenty-seven dollars a board foot, Henry.

  5

  You can say no to Rick and that’s okay, he’ll find other people and other plans. Such is what happened with John, and the sawmill and Costa Rica went bye-bye. Tender, oddly enough, moved to Nova Scotia and stayed in a Buddhist monastery. Then he returned and joined the reserves. Some kind of spiritual vexation, John said. And this Kabul gig—the money is good and Silvia is behind it.

  She’s not delighted but she’s okay with it, Henry said.

  They have family to help with the kids. You sign on for a year with one trip home and four-day stints touching down in the United Arab Emirates. Health, dental, a seven-hundred-thousand-dollar insurance policy—put down one of my kids, Henry. Security provided by her majesty’s government. Tender Morris will take care of us.

  Live a dangerous life. The one unsmooth element in the story of Rick’s life around the bay was the rumour that his wife was having an affair. Colleen Grandy. That spiritual American who had lived in John and Silvia’s finished basement and bought the lightkeeper’s house in Renews. Noyce. Everyone seemed to know about this affair except Rick. Or if Rick knew he did not let on and, like the fight in the bar over three hundred dollars, he wasn’t the type of man to absorb nuance. Who is to know how couples arrange their lives? On financial matters Rick had life solved and he wanted to share that solution with his friends. He sent the international paperwork and Silvia printed off the forms and spread out the duplicate papers on the dining room table while the kids ate a bucket of chicken on the carpet with paper towels and root beer. John and Henry initialled each page of the agreement and signed their names and Silvia witnessed it. Airplane tickets arrived as a PDF on Silvia’s laptop.