Minister Without Portfolio

by Michael Winter

  What’s wrong Henry.

  It’s a lot of pressure, Martha. The driving this fast.

  It’s okay. You take your time. Why don’t we just drive to my place in town.

  He looked at the face in the car seat and the face stared back at him.

  You’re going to be all right, he said.

  Epilogue

  He woke early and clipped his daughter into the car seat and drove north. The car was American but it looked and ran like a European car. It had leather wraps stitched on the wheel. It was a slow drive and that allowed you to take in things, though it was foggy. But he enjoyed driving through communities that were only half there in the mist, as though they were docked along the road.

  We’ll see if they have crab in Bay Bulls, he said. His daughter knew how to stretch her neck over and see him in the rear view mirror. She was one happy kid.

  He drove down the neck of land to the old fishing town of Bay Bulls that still had a good active harbour. The gulls were circling over the cup of the harbour and you knew the trap skiffs were in. His daughter had fallen asleep now and the water tower loomed out of the fog and he stopped the car on the gravel beside a telephone pole that had yellow plastic collars over the guy wires keeping the pole from falling in the high winds. He said to his daughter, I’m getting a length of that plastic collar. He closed the door quietly and heard the doors click behind him and the key was still in the ignition for he wanted to keep the music on, to keep her asleep. He turned and looked at the car, his daughter in the back seat, and somehow his powerful stare caused the doors to lock automatically. The windows were wound up. But he heard the radio. An announcer was on now, gravely discussing a meeting for seniors in Aquaforte, the meal a choice of flipper or dressed pork. Takeouts available.

  One window, his daughter’s window, was down half an inch. He pulled at the gap. He tried all the doors. The radio was playing and she was leaning against one of the padded wings on the car seat.

  I’ll be right back, he said.

  He walked into the woods and looked for a straight stiff branch from a hardwood. There were alders. He tore off a branch and then peeled the small branches off this and trimmed the end with his pocket knife and walked back up to the car. He pushed the thin end of the branch through the window and threaded it across the chest of his sleeping daughter to the other window where the branch started to bob from its own weight and he aimed it for the door latch and had to aim it high to make allowances for the arc of the branch to droop down to the door latch. He hit it and pushed and the door latch moved.

  His daughter’s eyes opened at the sound and took in the branch and the fact the car was stopped and no one was inside the car. Her father was not in the driver’s seat. He knocked at the window and waved. He pulled out the branch. He walked over to the other door and opened it and unclicked his daughter and she reached up to his neck and tugged herself out of the car seat. He called to her. Tender, Tender. Even though this was not her name and not one of the dozen names they both called her. It was his private word, not to name her, but for her to have a memory of the name—a happiness as she held on to the neck of this man raising her.

  THEY DROVE INTO Bay Bulls and slowed as the houses started straight out of the edges of the pavement and the turns were tight. He drove out to the wharf and parked beside a yellow concrete guardrail and his daughter said click. And he unclicked the seat straps and carried her out of the back seat and down onto the concrete wharf. It smelled of fish and diesel fuel and the sea was opaque like the eyes of a grandfather, rheumy, he guessed.

  They walked over to a trawler that was hauling crab pots and there were three fishermen in the hold smoking. They were younger than he was. He was happy to see young people working.

  Can I get some crab? he asked.

  They told him he had to go to the office in the plant.

  He carried his daughter up to the plant and asked for the office. There were forklifts swivelling with their reverse beeper disabled because they were always in reverse and civilians, you could tell, never walked into the plant. With his daughter in his hands he had all the help he could get and numerous ways to the office. He took a composite of them and ended up opening a white door and through a hallway past some washrooms and a kitchen and then a lunch room with eleven men with their hardhats and their lunch boxes open, quietly eating sandwiches and soft drinks even though it wasn’t even ten in the morning. They pointed to a door and he took a set of stairs and inside his head he was making a dotted line through a blueprint of the plant, realizing he had taken the direct opposite corner to where the plant office was. But his daughter was fascinated and made the sounds of the machines and conveyor belts and crawled over his back to catch a glimpse of some bright blue tractor working inside the building. The girl had never seen such a big and very clean machine on wheels inside before and you could tell she was taking that in.

  The office was full of women laughing at a big story and when he walked in they finished up the story, some had various parts of the story that were important. They filled in these parts while walking back to desks and by the time one of them asked him what he wanted they were all sitting down and looking at monitors and typing and perhaps a bit shy.

  His daughter wanted on the floor and he put her down and she lay on the hard industrial carpet, her arms wide, staring up at the bars of fluorescent light. Go Daddy, she seemed to say.

  Is it all right if I trade her in for ten pounds of crab?

  We’re not processing today. If we were processing little girls.

  What day are you processing little girls.

  This one we’d never let her near the floor would we girls.

  She’s already been across the floor operating that big blue forklift. She’s been up and down bagging pallets of shrimp.

  The woman he was mainly talking to pressed a button and on a monitor her voice went through the building, ten pounds of crab to the office.

  They took the easier exit. Because they had not come that way, that’s how they had surprised the women in the middle of a good one. He had the child in one arm and the box of crab in another. It had just been processed and the claws were big and orange and pink and the shells nubbly and flash frozen. It is not a freeze that lasts long, so once they thaw it’s almost as if they were fresh. In fact he’s never had fresh crab, freshly boiled, and can’t imagine it tasting better than this.

  THEY DROVE BACK the way they came. But then he saw the turnoff for Kingmans Cove and thought to go there. The girl made him do things like that, it was good to have even a one-year-old with you to make you more active in the world. The road was worn here. The previous winter had frozen and washed away crumbs of pavement and the grade was making inroads into the road.

  But the valley was a blanket of green. There was no sign of the fire the boys had started. It was like goats were taking care of this valley. It reminded him, at this distance, of the valley near Kabul that Tender had brought them to. He couldn’t remember the name.

  He took up a salt beef container and carried his daughter into the green. Blueberries. He picked a bucket as his daughter nudged rocks and peered at the ants moving their white eggs. He stared over at Fermeuse and the spirited horse with his neck to the ground. It took no time to fill the bucket.

  He turned the car around and drove back to the main road. The car made a slurred sound and thump and they ran over something like a firehose. He slowed and looked back and there was a dark shape on the road behind—it hadn’t been there when they came in. He put the shifter in reverse, the car sounding like a tank.

  I’m just going to get out and check what that was, he said to his daughter. He pressed the window button down and then pulled up the handbrake and got out. It was a beaver. A big clean beaver, a gorgeous pelt on him and his mouth was open and his two yellowed curved teeth that were fused together, the size of his little finger. He was dead. Henry looked around. There was no family that he could see. He got a stick and touched it. He didn
’t like to leave it there. His leathery feet.

  He took his daughter out and got the keys and popped the trunk. He opened a tarp and lifted the beaver by his tail and laid him on the plastic by the bucket of berries. He left the trunk open, for he saw another power line. This time he walked into the woods with his daughter and pried off a collar of the yellow plastic from a guy wire and put his daughter back in her seat and shoved the plastic collar on the floor below the front seat. He was going to saw off sections to use on his oars to prevent them chafing in the oarlocks.

  They drove home and he saw the trunk lid lift up and down in the rear view mirror. He’d forgotten to close it. The beaver was an inch away from his daughter. The thickness of the seat padding between them, even though the idea of a trunk made it feel further away from the back seat than that. The flapping trunk awoke a thought in him that the beaver might not be fully dead.

  They drove into the driveway and Martha came out and stood there. She had missed them.

  I have something to show you, he said.

  You make it sound sinister.

  He was nervous. He lifted the trunk lid and looked in. The blue bloodied tarp and the shape of something that had been on it. But the beaver was gone.

  You got blueberries, Martha said.

  The bucket of berries was staring up at them. He had forgotten them.

  Yes, he said, Kingmans Cove is alive with them.

  Note

  While there are communities in Newfoundland named Renews, Fermeuse, Aquaforte, Bay Bulls, the Goulds and Kingmans Cove, I have altered their geographical shape and inhabitants for the purposes of this story. No one should read this novel as a roadmap or ethnographic study of the highways and folkways of the southern shore.

  Acknowledgments

  I’d like to thank Nicole Winstanley and Helen Smith for editing this book. Shaun Oakey helped me clarify many cloudy passages. Karen Alliston found solutions to many inconsistencies in the narrative. David Ross I thank for the production edit.

  While writing this novel I read a poem every day that is on our fridge. The poem is “Love” by Czeslaw Milosz. I’d like to thank Alayna Munce for putting this poem at eye level.

  Thank you to Christine Pountney and Lisa Moore for commenting on early versions of this manuscript. I extend my appreciation to Michael Crummey and the Burning Rock for advice on scenes and images and plot.

  I would like to thank the generosity of the University of Toronto’s Massey College and Memorial University of Newfoundland’s Department of English which both offered me terms as writer-in-residence. I’d like to thank John Fraser and Larry Mathews for their hospitality while overseeing my stays, respectively, at these two places of learning. The residencies bought me time which allowed me to rewrite this book.

  For assistance with the dialogue, I’d like to thank Ken Babstock, Ben Basha, Gerry Brake, Rick Clarke, Charis Cotter, Eva Crocker, Stephen Crocker, Sue Crocker, Garfield Crowley, Jean Dandenault, Juliette Dandenault, Claudia Dey, Gillian Frise, Les Gover, Michael Helm, Craig Hewlett, Holly Hogan, Wayne Hynes, Don Kerr, Doris Meade, Michael Redhill, Laura Repas, Ray Robertson, Andrew Rucklidge, Karen Solie, Bart Szoke, Esther Wade, Boyd Whalen, Tom Whalen, Kathleen Winter, Leo Winter, Paul Winter, David Young and the rest of my hundred people.

  Excerpts from this novel have appeared, in different form, in Walrus, Reader’s Digest and Sharp. I thank the editors of those magazines.

  HAMISH HAMILTON

  an imprint of Penguin Canada

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  First published 2013

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  Copyright © Michael Winter, 2013

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  Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Manufactured in the U.S.A.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Winter, Michael, 1965–, author

  Minister without portfolio / Michael Winter.

  ISBN 978-0-670-06715-2 (bound)

  I. Title.

  PS8595.I624M56 2013 C813’.54 C2013-904046-3

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