Minister Without Portfolio

by Michael Winter

  2

  Baxter Penney was to take Henry out lobster fishing before supper. Remember to be home—he tapped the steering wheel. A truck was passing, driven by Emerson Grandy, his hooks resting on the steering wheel. Henry looked and there was a horse, high and heavy and close. His bright orange hide rippling fast. He had a big head and chest pushing against the top of the wooden trailer, a yellow mane of furious hair brilliant in the sun and the mane lashing out in parts at the wind and the wet alive eyes of the horse, delighted and wide open, urging the pickup to just once dammit go berserk on me. But Emerson Grandy was doing a steady hundred kilometres as he merged gently ahead of Henry and slipped further on as he slowed for what they call the featherbed—a dip in the road that told you Fermeuse was next. The truck drove the horse down that side road, never a moment on the brake, a mad but consistent gallop past the scrapyard and up through the newly dynamited pass of slate, taking that thrill horse out for its weekly ride. The truck might be powered by that horse and so too are my exertions powered by myself, Henry thought. I have no army telling me what to do except for the army of compulsion that is inside each and every one of us.

  Henry pulled off to the old road to Kingmans Cove. He eased the car over the potholes that splashed up yesterday’s rain, the entire land dry and bright except for these potholes. He drove down to the land that was untouched except for large rusted barrels and torsos of machines that had either helped build the road or been dumped here since the cove was abandoned.

  Kingmans Cove was what they had left behind. Footings and foundations suggested by the borders of damson plums and crabapples and double-petalled roses. When building a wall, Henry remembered, lay the rocks in their natural beds. When pruning a tree leave gaps so small birds can fly through.

  He walked out to his cellar, his spiritual centre, and felt with his feet the old potato drills that belonged to a King or a Grandy or a Morris and a Noel. They all lived in Renews now but three hundred years ago this was their home. The reason they left? A paved road and a power line. A bus for schooling. Easier access to a hospital. No one chooses to be isolated. There are no eccentrics. Everyone wants to be modern, and here in this cove they were deprived. If a ship foundered here they tore into the bounty, they did not save souls. During a court trial a woman said, Why did they come up on those rocks and tempt us so? No one can refuse the temptation of the modern world.

  Henry lifted up a branch of leaf formation. With a trowel he dug roots out of the gravel and laid the plants entire in a green garbage bag on a flat cardboard box from a tray of soft drinks. These were the children of the children of the bushes and plants that used to service the families of Kingmans Cove. Across the way he saw that orange horse being delivered to a field in Fermeuse.

  He did not understand, truly, why he did this. Why didn’t he just spend a hundred dollars at the gardening centre in the Goulds and get an instant backyard in easily transferable potted shrubs and perennials. Something, he knew, was happening to him.

  Irises by the brook. A bank of rock offered up wild strawberries and he unstrung the runners and pulled yards of puckered tendrils the colour of pigeon feet from the stone and bundled these up in the bag. He walked to where the trees started and carefully dug out a young white pine. These were Wilson Noel’s trees. He walked back to the trunk of the car and laid the trowel and the bag in the box and slammed shut the lid. Then he sat in the cellar and stared at the orange horse in Fermeuse and thought his druidic thoughts.

  When he got back to the house Martha Groves had arrived and she was laid out in the sun with a hat covering her face, a pickaxe and a crosscut saw beside her. The shadow of the corner of the house was passing over her knees. She had been busy cutting sod away from the house and collapsed here.

  I saw this horse, she said.

  THEY MADE LOVE in the bed upstairs, the new mattress and duvet and sheets still with their creases from the packaging. He pushed her around the bed and sort of turned her over and licked her and they were careful. It’s okay, Martha said. The house rocked with the weight of the bed and their movement on the bed. Somehow the horse had made them decide on the bed. This agreement on seeing an unusual horse. They had been waiting for an image or a conversation and the horse comment had made Henry take her hand and she agreed when she heard that the horse had passed him. She agreed to climb the stairs. Even then, when the bed appeared in the doorway and the floor joists deflected with their combined weight, the house knowing they were together upstairs and the house moving with them, even so they were nervous and Martha closed her eyes and absorbed him and then there was a panic in her eyes, like she was falling off a cliff. They played around and learned a little bit of each other and then they got serious and energetic and Martha came and that made him come and they both knew the baby was in there and for the first time they felt perhaps this was love and not something to be ashamed about. People seventy years ago had made a child in this room and it felt like Tender was in the room encouraging this behaviour.

  Henry lay back in the sheets and held Martha, the sun shining through a white cotton curtain he’d brought back from Afghanistan. He was alive with this result and he felt something profound had occurred but he distrusted the look on Martha’s face. She must be pretending. She must be of two minds and resigned to this complication. But then he saw she was lining up her columns of commitment and sending them forward to deal with any querulous rebellion. He helped Martha with a box of tissues.

  You don’t skimp on anything, she said.

  That’s not true, he said.

  You either have it in good supply or not at all.

  I have no oven, he said.

  That’s good, Martha said, like he’d told a joke. A joke with some exercise.

  We need a cookstove in here.

  And a chimney liner.

  I’m glad you came over, he said.

  I don’t know what I’m doing.

  It’s okay, we’re all mature and we’re all lunatics.

  This is not our first time around.

  There’s no romance. It’s only love we’re talking about here. What does that mean.

  It means a bigger thing.

  You mean I can’t expect any romance?

  We’re taking care of each other.

  You’re talking about kindness.

  We’re going to be kind. And funny.

  You have a nice cock. If that matters.

  Likewise. In your own department.

  Great I have a department.

  I find it profoundly meaningful to be doing this with the situation. That presents itself.

  And yet you enjoy yourself so well.

  They knew it was dirty but the only way to make it clean was to admit it was dirty. If you were honest about it it was clean.

  Outside a motor revved high and then sputtered, like a two-stroke engine, near the corner of the house, the house upstairs still uninsulated so you could pick out everything almost the heartbeat of a man approaching the back door. Come on Henry, a voice said. It was a holler from the door.

  That’s Baxter, Martha said.

  He lurched out of bed and pulled on his pants and down the stairs, reaching into his shirt with his arms and bending his torso so as not to strike his head on the landing. All he could see of Baxter Penney was his rubbers as he’d given up and just the back boot of his stride left in the doorframe then his figure in the kitchen window walking up to the road where his bog bike was rammed into the wild roses. On the dirt shoulder, idling. Henry ran after him and jumped on the back of the quad. Baxter could see Martha’s car was there and yet he had not seen her.

  They drove past Colleen’s and then the American house and out towards the automated signal in Kingmans Cove. It was getting near dusk now but it was still warm. Baxter with a yellow bucket bungee-corded onto the back carrier behind them, the metal handle swung a little screech as they bounced down over the gulley to Kingmans Cove and zipped over the cow fence then parked by the pen for the sheep and
unhooked the bucket.

  They walked down over the grass bank and the loose scree to a steep rock face that had been lifted up out of the ocean and twisted vertical by glaciers ten thousand years before. Split into shelves of rock that were like two hands praying where the preacher doesn’t close the hands together but speaks the sermon into the hands and the words are funnelled up to God. In these hands, along the fingertips of God as it were, is where Baxter walked out, and in the low tide you could see a long stick, the bark peeled off it, jutting out of the water. Baxter looked into the water below and carefully nudged up the stick and gave it a quick jerk and thrust it down again and said, over his shoulder, Get the bucket.

  Baxter lifted the stick out of the water and on the end were the vicious tines of a rusting pitchfork and then up and out came a green arching flick of seawater full of black lobster fixed on the middle prong of that pitchfork. Baxter dropped the face of the pitchfork into the bucket and the lobster’s claws and tail flexed in agony against Henry’s bent thumbs and Baxter shook off the lobster and twisted the timber around again to the sea surface where the pitchfork had been anchored, baited with the head of a herring. He thrust the fork down again on another lobster that must have been feeding and puzzled and waiting unfortunately for something to return. Up it came, this smaller lobster, one you’d throw back if it was in your pot, and Baxter did this three more times for five lobsters total that stood on their heads or flexed their tails staring up out of the bucket, antennae and claws scratching slowly on the flush plastic and the tails batting down on one another, settling further into the bucket. That’s two for me, Baxter said, and the three small ones you can share with your missus. You’re going to have to cook them right away—they don’t last.

  3

  They boiled the pronged lobsters and ate all of them with a bottle of white wine and a pot of butter with garlic in the butter. Henry told her about Baxter’s comment. He said, Your missus.

  That’s part of coming clean, she said.

  But that night it rained and the wind slammed the rain against the windows, the sheers on the windows moved and they felt the wind through the walls. They had torn off the pink rose wallpaper and used scrapers on the sheets of newsprint that had been glued with flour paste onto the walls a hundred years ago. He’d read the news while he flaked it off. They did not wear masks, but tied T-shirts around their faces. He read of business collapse and troubles in the Balkans and teachers on the Labrador attempting to illuminate St John’s on the social conditions of the local population. With the newspaper scrubbed off there were gaps between the wooden planks and you could feel the air running in under the clapboard. This news had kept people warm.

  They were in bed in the dark now staring at the chipped ceiling, making pictures out of the random shapes, listening to the sea and the rain hitting the house. The house did not sound like it was going to make it. The roof was solid and holding its own and they felt proud that something they owned was protecting them from the elements, but then they heard a splat and it was a leak somewhere. He got out of bed with the flashlight and shone the light on the floor into the second bedroom. He turned on the light. The house shuddered again. This was where the worst damage to the house was, where that man Careen and Nellie Morris had slept. The bed was there and the little box of ammunition full of letters and photographs. He did not like entering this room but he pushed through his reluctance until he discovered a wetness. It was near the chimney and it was where he had torn out a portion of the ceiling. He went downstairs and fished around for a bucket and brought it up and put the bucket under the leak. It plunked hard, an annoying loud plunk, so he took a pillow off the bed and stripped the pillowcase off and threw the pillowcase into the bucket. He got back in bed and grabbed for Martha because his hands were cold and she yelped but he kept his hands on her and pulled himself to her and you heard the rain dimpling on the roof and it spattered down, bouncing and leaking in between the slats of the old white ceiling, running along a course of the slats to the area above the bucket. The bed moved with one gust and then there was a new drip and he walked back down to the kitchen and found a pot and brought it up and did the same with the other pillowcase. It was disenchanting to have leaks. It deflated you. They lay in bed under a brand-new duvet and listened to this rain and felt the house strain on its foundations, the eaves pulling up against the roof trusses. It was windy but not excessively so, and when they felt this tremor in the bed they both worried that the house would have to fall down.

  It’s not much wind, Martha said, for the house to be doing this. I mean, it gets windier, doesn’t it?

  The wind can blow the milk out of your tea.

  They were unsafe in the house, was Henry’s feeling. The house would not last another winter and they would have to abandon any thought of living here. Martha rolled over and held him tight and he realized he was inside her, she had made him hard and pushed him in and he hadn’t done a thing.

  He felt the baby move.

  He pulled out.

  What’s wrong.

  He said it felt like Tender was in the bed with them.

  But Tender is in the bed with us. We’ve said that. He will always be there. Is that something we can live with?

  This wasn’t something that made him happy. Not this time. But he understood. Henry had simply misjudged how complicated being with her was. He thought he was throwing himself, like a martyr, into a situation. And then when duty presented itself he realized he was in fact enjoying himself. Martha was full of independent life and he loved that life. He enjoyed seeing her active in the world. And so, when Tender made an appearance, it caused a conflict in him, that he wasn’t sacrificing himself at all, but astounded at his luck.

  You have to remember, Martha said, that Tender is happy with this. He’s happy to know this.

  I will try to adopt that way of looking at it, he said.

  There will always be the three of us, Martha said.

  4

  Wilson Noel said did you feel that last night?

  Henry paused to think if he’d heard correctly.

  I’ve lived here fifty-four years and that’s happened once before, you must have felt it. The sea pounding the bedrock.

  He couldn’t wait to get back to Martha with the news. As he drove past the shore road the sea had a run of high surf and the curtains of water were being pushed in by some distant force. These were not young waves. After hundreds of miles of movement they had reared up to plunge into the headlands, waves that had been born in another hemisphere entirely. The sky was bright blue.

  It wasn’t the wind, he said. It’s the sea. And it happens twice in a lifetime.

  But Martha was preoccupied or she was upset. It’s nothing, she said. But he knew it was something he’d done. Just say it, he said. It’s ridiculous, she said. Then she turned her shoulders and faced him. Okay, it’s the pillowcases. I found your buckets with the pillowcases in them.

  He wasn’t expecting that. We’re not going to save the pillowcases, he said. Or anything off that bed. I didn’t ruin anything.

  I know it’s foolish of me to feel this way I just—you put your hands on them, on that dead bed and then you handled me, she said. You should have washed your hands, she said.

  This made him exhausted. She was right, of course, but the work was getting to him. The labour was mixing in with their pleasure. I’m sorry, he said.

  I’m sorry too, she said. I’m sorry for feeling it. I wish I didn’t feel it, it’s just creepy sometimes to be living in a house that’s—

  I know, he said. It’s alive this house.

  It’s not though. It’s a lovely warm house but it’s Tender’s house and Tender’s relatives’ and he’s dead and they’re dead.

  Nellie’s not dead and this is not Tender’s house. This was a part of Tender he didn’t know existed. We’re building a brand-new extension of Tender. I wasn’t thinking last night, he said. I was tired and solving a problem and I wasn’t thinking.

/>   I know you were, and you’re good at that you’re really good just think a little more, okay? I know it’s hard but we’ve got to think about everything, okay?