Minister Without Portfolio

by Michael Winter

  The bus driver stopped talking to allow this attention, and this sort of civilian respect moved Henry. There was gravity here and, as they resumed their conversation, he tried to think of another occupation that offered such dignity. There was nothing. He was not like the man operating the snowplough or even the bus driver, Henry wasn’t their type, but they did not perceive his individuality—they regarded the uniform and the uniform offered the epitome of service and their own services were climbing a ladder towards the apex of putting one’s life on the line for one’s country. It made him feel like a fraud. Henry had done a statistics course in trade school and knew that more snowplough operators and bus drivers lost their lives than Canadian troops in theatre, and just last night a bus driver T-boned into a cherry picker that was servicing a utility pole on Rennie’s Mill Road and killed the spotter. A week earlier a rogue highway snowblower chewed through a police cruiser on Elizabeth Avenue, killing the officer. Perhaps these men knew the real risks and were unprepared to leave their families and shave in large stainless steel bowls and drink warm bottled water eight thousand kilometres away.

  But now that he was involved with Tender Morris’s house he felt it was wrong to be dressed in army kit. John told him what Tender Morris had said when they shipped him from New Brunswick to Germany to Kabul. I want to see if all my training works out—but I don’t want to kill anybody. Tender, a few years out of trade school, had shaved his head and lived in a Buddhist colony in Nova Scotia. This was before he turned to the army and the social behaviour of men.

  Henry was, technically, still associated with Rick’s contract with SNC-Lavalin but his head was concerned with other things. He followed a man he liked the look of into a clothing store and bought the clothes that the man lifted up and discarded. Occasionally he saw a movie and he rowed at the gym watching the news. About once a month the minister of defence came on—he was always jumping out of a caucus meeting or highlighting a list of hot points to cover with the news anchor. Both men leaned into the conversation and the top of their buttoned suits bowed out a little, like flexible armour. When that happened Henry couldn’t help but think that a few months after the minister of defence had delivered their turkey burgers, the majority of Tender Morris’s body was flown to Camp Mirage for treatment and the majority of that body died at the hospital after portions of his heart suffered congestive heart failure. On the ward, he read the news release from the minister of defence that was posted: Our thoughts and prayers are with the family and friends of our fallen comrade during this very difficult time. We will not forget Lieutenant Morris’s sacrifice as we continue to bring security and hope to the people of Afghanistan. The next day Henry read the printout of what the prime minister said, reacting to the death: It is with utmost sorrow that I extend the condolences of all Canadians to the family and friends of Lieutenant Patrick Morris, a brave soldier who died due to injuries sustained in Afghanistan. Our thoughts and prayers go out to you at this time of loss. Lieutenant Morris served Canada valiantly and deserves the gratitude and respect of this nation.

  Tender Morris was killed because of a washing machine timer, a cell phone and a garage door opener. Tender Morris was killed because his coffee holder was empty of a Sig Sauer 9-mm pistol.

  Henry had sprayed a towel and wiped the handles of the elliptical. He went off in search of a rowing machine.

  28

  He opened his car door and walked over to Harold Careen’s. They were just after pulling up the supper plates from the table and there were children in the living room playing on a computer. Two decks of cards on the counter next to the phone. Harold’s wife wiped the table and he waited for the table top to be dry and he accepted the cold beer Harold handed him and then he said to the three grandsons that what he had to offer for their grandfather’s house wasn’t much but it was all he could afford— he was interrupted then by Harold Careen’s wife who called out, from loading the dishwasher, that house could fall into the ground before Harold would sell out his grandfather’s legacy and Harold said Joan that’s enough. Henry said he was sorry about that, he understood the passing down of things and the loss of things, but that this house had a hole in the roof the size of a wheelbarrow and the porches were sagging and after the next big wind that house probably would cave in like Joan says. I understand, he said, that if the grandsons of the man who built this house want an acre of land with no service to it then I will honour that, but perhaps a man’s wishes take a detour and the promise of a home is cherished by a stranger just as much as the blood of the family and there is something both humble and generous in allowing the passing of a house to someone who wishes to care for it and no amount of money could equal that wish of those upon which burdens are handed down.

  He placed the three envelopes, each with a thousand dollars, on the table in front of the men. He couldn’t tell if they looked at one another first, he was still recovering from his speech, but they all picked up the envelopes and took his pen and put their signatures on the sale agreement he’d printed off and just then is when Linda Hillier arrived in a coat and scarf and Henry realized while she knew the Careens she had never been in their house before. She signed and stamped the documents and it was a service for which she was not paid, it was part of her civic duty and she was there all of ten minutes, she had to get back to her three children and her own husband. After she left the Careens continued on with other things as if the subject of the meeting was something else entirely. The kids came in and one asked why the Canada flag stitched on Henry’s arm was green and he said it wasn’t stitched on it’s velcro and the green is so he wouldn’t get shot. He left with handshakes and a hug from Joan and the next day he drove those papers over to Bill Wiseman and by then the lawyer had already received the letter from Martha Groves returning Henry’s cheque and declining the three thousand dollars for her share of the house.

  She seems to have had a change of heart, Bill Wiseman said. The lawyer, who had been rankled by Henry’s steamrolling ahead and having gotten, miraculously, the three Careen grandsons on side, seemed satisfied that somewhere along the line a roadblock had halted the sale.

  Could I use your phone, Henry asked.

  He called Martha Groves and she was startled to hear his voice and said she was really sorry but she had something in mind and she’d like to drop by that weekend if it was okay with him. That weekend. He handed the phone to the lawyer, for it had a strange cradle to it. He got back in his car and pulled up to Bidgoods and tramped the aisles for groceries and then a hardware store where he filled a cart with a foam pad and two pillows and a duvet and a cooler. Then he bought beer and ice and two disposable flashlights, a can of white gas and six pairs of work gloves. All this he squeezed into the trunk and folded-down back seats. He needed the lights on by the time he hit the small road that ran into Renews and he felt both vexed and excited. The little houses were all lit up but Tender Morris’s house still had its eyes closed.

  He walked over the snowdrifts and opened the back door. He used the new flashlight. The house smelled good. He carried in the provisions he’d bought and, as he went back to the car for a second load, Baxter Penney came over. He was lugging a heavy kerosene heater. It was in the barn, he said. He showed him how to light it right there in the snow. It was finicky to get going but it helped cut the chill in the Morris house.

  But don’t you want a heater in your barn?

  Forty years I’ve been meaning to put a stove in that barn. You want to know the reason I don’t? He lives in Fermeuse.

  I don’t know anyone here.

  My brother-in-law. The constant visitor. He’ll never leave that barn if I put a stove in.

  They bent over the machine figuring out the knobs and the lever for the wick ring. Colleen Grandy walked by, on her way around the cove, and they exchanged hellos. Do you know her, Henry asked.

  That’s my wife’s niece, Baxter Penney said. The man I was just telling you about—I married his sister, a Grandy.

  An
d he drew himself up to connect the dots on the tips of his fingers.

  But we’re also related by blood if I’m not mistaken—our great-grandmother floated into this cove in the 1800s. She was a servant to the third Napoleon. A French woman. Baxter pointed out at the water, as though some remnant of her might still be floating in. She was shipwrecked, he said. Only survivor. She had one of those whalebone hoop skirts and the air was like a lifeboat. We’re from the one lady. His hands touched and then split apart. But now Colleen is his daughter. You know her husband.

  Rick Tobin.

  They’re like you, no kids. For a long time she had nothing to do but get a bit heavy.

  I know the story, Henry said. That’s the one thing I know from this cove.

  She couldn’t get out of a car. That’s when she started walking.

  Henry tore open the box of beer and offered one to Baxter and Baxter twisted off the cap and threw it into the snow and followed him, with the heater, into the house.

  I used to come in here as a child, he said. Haven’t been in for sixty years. There used to be a piano in that room and there was a partition wall they must have tore that down.

  Baxter looked hard at the dark rooms as Henry got the heater burning and then filled the Coleman lantern with white gas. It was fascinating to think that sixty years had gone by since this man had crossed the street and come into this house, that he used to be a boy and those days weren’t that long ago and the word Napoleon had been uttered, as though he was sitting in the parlour polishing his sword.

  We’re looking forward, Baxter said, to seeing some lights on in this house.

  They finished their beers and Henry pumped the lantern and lit the mantel. He could see the insides now and they were exactly as he’d left them. The heater gave off a plume of odour he associated with the machines they’d operated a mile underground in Fort McMurray. Henry made a bed on the floor in the parlour and Baxter said, You’re not going to sleep in her in this condition. Henry said that was the plan. He asked about power and what he was to do for water and Henry said, a little beleaguered, that he’d figure all that out in the next few weeks.

  Well, Baxter said, if you need anything we’re across the road, and he pointed out the window as if Henry would not know the direction. He was off then. He crossed the road back to his snug little home that had in it a wife who was at that moment moving from room to room turning on more lights.

  Henry made a little sliced deli sandwich and put the lantern with its throaty glow on the table so he would have something to look forward to on his walk home. He was going out to visit Tender’s grave, and the cellar in Kingmans Cove.

  29

  That night he tried to sleep in Tender’s house but small animals were near his head. His ears judged the varying acoustic weights and, as the night marched on, his mind weakened. The idea of quick animals with teeth became hysterical. He was once in a tent with Nora by a river that had a beaver dam. They awoke to splashes and then, slowly, heard beavers brushing by the tent. The beaver were chewing on birch trees and it did not seem outlandish to think one could mistake their heads for the trunk of a tree. It was a feeling similar to this one, but now there was an urgency of numbers. Not one shrew or three mice but dozens and perhaps animals a little heavier. The sounds were not consistent. He was aware of the danger of a weasel. They used the house for shelter just as they would an alcove of brush. They lined their nests with the pelts of their prey. He looked at his watch: two o’clock in the morning. Okay let’s solve this.

  He willed himself up and found his boots and coat and walked across the field with the stars above him. He stopped to look up at Orion and salute his little belt. He laughed at the animals that had trespassed and forced him out. What was he but a trespasser.

  Up to his old room in John and Silvia’s. Baxter was right. It was crazy to try and sleep in Tender’s house in that condition.

  30

  A car woke him, the engine shutting off. He didn’t know where he was. He looked out the bedroom window. Kids, independently pouring out of the rear doors. It was Silvia Hynes. She had come out with Clem and Sadie for the day. She popped the trunk and pulled out the wooden toboggan. They climbed the hill. While she was up there Silvia used her cell to talk to John. It was a scheduled time. That’s what people did on this hill, climb to the top of it and use their phones. There was a hill like this in Kabul, Henry said, but no one ever climbed it. They lived on it, little fired-brick houses wedged into the rock. A shanty town built by the widows of Kabul.

  Henry, to Clem and Sadie: Watch yourself, don’t run up there or you’ll fall and break your head and we’ll have to put you in the ground.

  Silvia: Man, guy babysitters.

  Henry walked the kids home and helped them roll three sections of a snowman. Then they reached the eaves for icicles. The house in town has no icicles, Sadie said, because of insulation. Henry found a piece of kindling with a knot in it and split it with an axe. Frosty’s pipe, he said.

  They sang songs and made snow angels and got cold and Henry built up the woodstove and pulled off their wet socks and had them run up the stairs to the second-floor bedroom—the bedroom he used—where there was a grate in the floor. He fixed them a snack. When Silvia came in she stared up to see their bare feet on the grate.

  They discovered old toys in the back pantry, toys they’d had when they were younger. They were bored so they resorted to using them. Kids play with smaller kid toys in complicated ways.

  I’m going to do a few things over at the house, Henry said.

  HE WANDERED ABOUT Tender’s house imagining himself in it. One time Baxter Penney, near his own car, waved at him. It surprised him—people can see me in here. What on earth do they think of me, rummaging through a dead man’s house, staring at bracketed plates of Jesus and small union jacks from an early jubilee.

  He made sandwiches and saw Colleen in her bright windbreaker walking up the road and she stopped in to say hello. Her hair was tied back savagely and she was excited about Tender’s house and what did he think.

  Well come in and have a look at it, he said.

  I’m in the middle of my walk, she said.

  You’ll be walking the entire time. You can march on the spot, like a soldier.

  But she stood still and soon understood the condition of it. With her hair pulled back it gave her face an abnormal intensity. Yes it requires a little work, she said. She turned and, guiding Henry’s elbows as though pushing a toy boat in water, stood him in the middle of the parlour.

  I feel like some photograph from an earlier time.

  She said, You could live in it until it falls down around your ears. She clapped her hands together then and twisted her wrist to the face of a watch.

  What a walker, he thought. And wondered about her and Larry Noyce in bed. The thought shocked him. He felt a fizzle in his skin when he realized he was alone now, a condition he often wished for. But as soon as he had it another force arose from the hills: a sense of dread at his own company.

  He watched Colleen head over the road and, two hours later, after he’d ripped a wall down to studs, he saw through the window that she had returned to drop in on Silvia. So he went over too. He was, he realized, becoming a busybody.

  Look at him, Colleen said. He wants to stay home and take care of his hundred people.

  Henry looked at her. What does that mean, he said. And how do you know.

  It’s written all over you.

  Colleen marched off to her house, the snow recently ploughed from her frozen yard so it could be graded by heavy machinery, ready for a spring sowing of grass. The Poole brothers from the Goulds, men Henry was trying to get to okay the wiring in the house, were out there right now stringing a roll of ten-two through a new shed that had been built over the winter. They watched Colleen’s arms pump hard as she turned into the concrete path before her house. What do you call that, Henry said.

  Silvia: Her constitutional.

  31

&nb
sp; Take care of my hundred people. Was she mocking me? Am I a fraud? All he was doing in Afghanistan was escaping a city that had become Nora’s city. It was John’s idea—a good idea.

  He drove to Wilson Noel’s to buy traps and steel wool to plug holes in the Morris house as he found them. In the spring he’d have to cut away the grass sod from around the house.

  On the way back he slowed down for a young man with a gas can hitchhiking. He pushed the paper sack with the traps from off the front seat for him.

  Henry: Where are you broken down.

  I don’t have a car. It’s a lot easier to get a ride if you have a gas can. I’m going to saw this baby in half and screw two hinges to it so I can carry my sandwiches.