The Hour of the Fox

by Kurt Palka

  Not long thereafter Sullivan’s car turned into her driveway. He said he’d come to tell her that the report on Danny’s blood was in, and it was inconclusive. His blood type was O positive, which was the same as some of the blood on the dock and in his boat. It was a common blood group, and so his sample and the scrapings from the boat would have to be sent to a special lab for a more detailed analysis.

  “I see. But while he waits, can he have his boat back? He needs it for his work. This is the storm season, and he’s behind already.”

  “Well. No. He can’t get it back until this is all done. Until the results are back from Ottawa.”

  “And how much longer will that take?”

  “I really don’t know.”

  * * *

  —

  When the sergeant had left, she changed out of her dress into jeans and a sweater. She put on her coat and then reached for her purse and keys and drove into town. At the Save-Easy she bought the newspaper and milk, and down the coast at the Outrigger restaurant she bought takeout food.

  There had been a time when she had enjoyed cooking. Her main inspiration early on had been the sauce chef at Le Boeuf d’Or. He had liked her, and one Saturday after lunch he’d shown her his station and his implements, and in tones as solemn as a priest’s he had talked about sauces and drippings and cognac and port wine and dried fruit chopped very fine, and long, long simmering and reducing, and at a near whisper he talked about his herbs, never chopped fine but left long in their stalks so they could be removed, some indeed to be removed after only minutes, others after half an hour. And she’d understood and enjoyed all that. Found it interesting, not only because it echoed Manssourian’s notion about dancing with life, but also because in French cuisine the sauce was often the one distinctive taste that lingered.

  Now at her kitchen table she flipped through the business section of the newspaper and noted the prices of silver, copper, and nickel. Silver was twenty-two dollars an ounce now, up two dollars since Jack’s last call. How much had it been a few months ago? She had no idea what any of the commodity prices meant in terms of market swings. Fluoride, there. How much was that? She knew he had developed at least two fluoride mines, one in Italy, the other in Bavaria.

  She found a piece of paper and a pencil and wrote down some questions to ask him about his work the next time he called. She might stay in this chair and read the business section now. There was often a mining segment. She looked over at the telephone on the wall. Call me, she said to him.

  * * *

  —

  Silver. She’d been three months pregnant with Andrew when she went with Jack on a trip to Turkey, into the heart of Anatolia. He’d been sent there by a mining company to report on a silver property they were considering bidding on.

  They flew over the land in a small airplane and she sat behind him, nervous about him leaning so far out the window. At one point she held him back by his belt. He brought his head in and grinned at her, and then he asked the pilot to fly as low as possible so he could make exact notes for landmarks on his geo-map. Next day they had a guide and they travelled on horseback. Three saddle horses and two packhorses with tents and food.

  It was her first experience of Jack at work. He’d walk the land and stop and go down and chip at rocks with his hammer. He’d examine pieces with his twelve-times magnifier. In a rise he found what he called a flowstone bubble, and he put on a hard hat and crawled into the cave and down so far she could no longer see his flashlight or hear his hammer. After a while he came back. He was dragging something heavy.

  What is it? she said.

  Hold out both hands and see.

  He put it in her hands, and it was a chunk of rock half enclosing a lump of pure native silver the size of a man’s fist.

  That’s a few hundred million years old, he said. It could be from an impact that melted things when the universe was still crowded with circling lumps crashing into each other. Or when some of this was still hot and bubbling.

  * * *

  —

  At ten-thirty that night he did call. Six-thirty his time, he said.

  “Were you already in bed?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  She told him about Danny’s blood test, the locked-up boat, and the new roof. And that the children had been released into her care, but now the minister was refusing to hold a service for them.

  “But I haven’t given up yet,” she said. “And I aired out Andrew’s room and stood up the mattresses and washed the sheets.”

  It was a simple housekeeping task, but because of the stark image of the mattress segments leaning against each other in the empty bed it sounded enormous to her, even just mentioning it.

  Jack must have sensed that because he said nothing for a while.

  “Did you,” he said then.

  “We could get different furniture for that room.”

  “We could. If you want to.”

  “When are you coming back?”

  “I don’t know yet. And you?”

  “I was thinking after Thanksgiving, if Hugh lets me. I can work fine here, and this place is helping me. I think I’m getting better, Jack. Maybe about everything. Even the headaches.”

  She reached for her notes on the kitchen table.

  “I see that silver is up again,” she said.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “I was remembering our trip to Anatolia, Jack. The company did lease that property, didn’t they?”

  “They did, and it was a good producer for a long time before the cost-benefit ratio dipped. There are new extraction methods now, but they are controversial.”

  “Jack,” she said. “If the funeral for the kids is in a week or so, are you sure you wouldn’t want to come out?”

  There was a pause and then he said, “Margaret, please don’t ask me that again. No, I wouldn’t, and I couldn’t. We’ve just moved new machinery to the face, and there’s no way I’d take time off to fly four time zones across the country for the funeral of two kids I don’t even know.”

  “You’d be doing it for me. Not for the kids.”

  “I know that. Let it go. Please.”

  After a while he said, “How are you really doing, Maggie?” When she didn’t reply he told her he was calling from the mine office, which was the only place with a phone. His voice had softened. He described to her what the camp was like and what he saw looking out the window. Three-thousand-foot mountains, snowy peaks, and snowfields orange in the setting sun. Tall evergreens nearby, and at the edge of the camp one tree so big that three men could not hold hands around it.

  She sat back in the chair and listened to the tone of his voice, while all beyond the kitchen the house was dark and quiet.

  Twenty-Four

  REVEREND MCMURTRY CAME OUT to bless the new roof, and all of Aileen’s friends and neighbours were invited to the celebration. It was a ceremony that had been customary in the early days along this coast, and the minister had recently brought it back. After the roof blessing he stayed for a while to mingle. Aileen served food and drink, and Pete Woolner, who had once been a fisherman but now drove the school bus, played the accordion, and someone had brought a tin whistle and someone else a washboard and spoons. People’s cars and pickups were parked on the gravel road and on Margaret’s property.

  Throughout the event the minister avoided her, but as he left she followed him to his car.

  “Reverend,” she said. “Please wait. Isn’t there perhaps something I can say or do to make you reconsider about the funeral service?”

  “Oh dear. Please not that again, Mrs. Bradley.”

  He opened the door to his Morris and squeezed in and quickly shut the door. But he did crank down the window. She put her hand on the frame and he looked at it wearily.

  “Reverend, please,” she said. “Wouldn’t it be good for this dying community?”

  “Is it dying?”

  “Well, of course it is. What are its prospects? Where are the young p
eople? The fishing’s just about killed off, and even the tire factory is running half shifts now. Look at the numbers, Reverend. And look at the turnout for this roof blessing. How we appreciate every opportunity to congregate and shake hands! A funeral service for two strange young people who’ve died here among us, far from their parents. The dignity accorded them. Imagine the turnout, Reverend. The good feeling for your church.”

  He started his engine and shifted into reverse. Then he shifted back into neutral and let out the clutch and turned to her.

  “Margaret, you speak plainly, so let me do the same. I knew your grandmother all my young life. She died when I was away at the seminary. AJ was one of the most generous and independent, but also one of the most maddeningly stubborn people I ever came across, to put it mildly. But she knew what she wanted, and I admired that. And then your father and his forest conservation project. For how many years did he work on it? Years, Margaret. Years. And now we have you and your relentless crusade for these dead, unknown young people.”

  He shook his head. But there was the hint of a smile on his face now.

  He looked away from her, down past his knees for the right pedal, and he shifted and backed up and shifted again. He turned to her and nodded goodbye, and then he cranked his wheel furiously and drove away. A moment later his hand came out the little window and waved to her.

  * * *

  —

  Later that day a hard wind came up and it began to rain again. The wind came from a long fetch across open water, and at times it blew so hard and steady that the rain came nearly sideways past her kitchen window. She was waiting for Inspector Sorensen. He had called because the results of Danny’s blood test were in, and he’d said he wanted to talk to her about that and about something else.

  When he arrived he parked on her rock and then hurried toward the house clutching his hat with both hands. She held the door open for him.

  “Wild,” he said. “Did it ever stop since last time?”

  “It did. This just started a little while ago and it’ll calm down again. But this is our storm season, and it’ll get much worse. At some point we tie our houses down. Literally. We have steel trusses for that, on this stretch of the coast, with our onshore winds.”

  He hung up his coat and hat, and they sat again at the kitchen table.

  “So,” he said. “You’ll be glad to hear that the blood in the wheelhouse of Danny’s boat is his all right, and his story about the broken window checks out.”

  “Does that mean he can have his boat back?”

  “Yes, it does. Sergeant Sullivan will give him a signed release. But there’s something else I wanted to tell you. We’ve made some progress in our search for people with the right boats and the right skills, and now we’re pretty sure we know who did the Crieff Island run that night. We haven’t found the man himself yet, but we found his truck and it had blood in the passenger seat. The blood of the man who got slashed on the dock and lost his shoe.” “Who’s the owner of the truck?”

  “I can’t tell you that. But we have a warrant out for him.” “You can’t tell me who he is?”

  “I can’t release the name yet, but I can tell you that he’s an old fisherman. A former fisherman.”

  “We have many of those. Maybe they stole his truck.” “It’s possible. We’ll find that out when we talk to him. We went to his place but there was no one there. The neighbours haven’t seen him in a while. We asked at the marina and he hasn’t been seen there in a while either.”

  “And his boat?”

  “We’re looking for it.”

  “So what happens next?”

  “Detail work. We’ll keep looking. After a while we’ll post a public warrant for him and the boat.”

  For a moment they sat in silence. They could hear the wind and the rain. The house creaked in its joinery, and Sorensen cocked his head and turned and looked around the room.

  “That’s just the wind,” she said. “The roof structure is tied directly into the full frame, and it’s all pegged with what they called trunnels or treenails. In a strong blow the house actually changes shape. Fractionally. Like a ship at sea.”

  He shook his head. “It’s all so different down here. And the people too. So scrappy. Like your Aileen. The first time I met her she just about bit my head off. In the meantime, I’ve come to like little Sweetbarry. Why is it spelled that way, with an a?”

  “We don’t know. It’s written that way in the founding scroll at the town hall. Maybe it’s the scribe’s fault. But I’m sorry, I haven’t offered you any coffee yet. Would you like some? Or some cornbread and olives?”

  He shook his head. “No time. But thank you.”

  After he’d left she waited a while, and when the weather had calmed somewhat she stepped into her boots and put on her father’s old slicker and cap and walked next door. She found Danny pacing the rock, searching the ground for nails.

  “Danny,” she shouted. “Good news. You can have your boat back. But there’s something else that’s not so good.”

  * * *

  —

  When she got back to the house there was a message on the machine, and she rewound the tape and listened. It was the minister saying that he wasn’t sure what it was, but something about their last conversation was making him willing to reconsider about the funeral service. He said it wasn’t so much her Joubert stubbornness but more what she’d said about the community. And he cared about the community. It was the reason why he’d brought back the roof blessing. In addition to that, he said, he’d been reminded that sinners before man-made laws may not be sinners before God.

  “So yes, Margaret. I make no promises, but come and talk to me. Tell me again what you have in mind.”

  She was smiling. She played the tape a second time, then she put on her good coat and shoes and pocketed the pager, and drove to the church.

  Twenty-Five

  ON THE DAY OF THE CREMATION she and Aileen and Franklin and the funeral director were the only people present.

  There had been a conversation at the undertaker’s about how the children should be clothed. The choice was hers, the funeral director had said. He recommended the usual white shifts. Most corpses were clothed that way. Good Indian cotton cloth, cut loosely and buttoned at the back like hospital gowns.

  “Really? My grandmother was fully dressed, and so was my father.”

  “Not for cremation. I took the liberty to look up the history and both were full burials, and they were dressed for a viewing.”

  “Yes. You’re right.”

  He waited a moment, then said, “So. White gowns?”

  She agreed, and he wrote that down.

  “And on their feet?” she said.

  He looked up from his clipboard. “Barefoot is customary, Mrs. Bradley. What did you have in mind?”

  “I don’t know. But barefoot?”

  “Well, I suppose…I suppose we could do white socks. Would that be all right?”

  And she nodded.

  “White socks, then, Mrs. Bradley. I’ll make a note of that.”

  Later in the sample room she’d chosen medium trim with acanthus leaves and bevelled edges on a black plywood coffin, and she’d bought black picture frames and in them mounted the drawings of the children as they had looked in life.

  Now the first coffin lay ready on the conveyor belt, and she and Aileen and Franklin sat in the front pew in the small chapel at the crematorium. On the coffins lay the flowers that she’d bought at the Save-Easy that morning. The conveyor belt ended at a purple velvet curtain, and the pictures of the children stood next to a vase with more flowers on a small table to one side of that curtain. The second coffin lay ready on trestles against a wall.

  That day at the office the funeral director had said it was not often that they fired two coffins at once. Complete incineration took a while, and they might wish to be present only for the symbolic moments of the first one. Until they saw the flames, he said, and then the gate and c
urtain would be closed again and the burners turned up to full power.

  Now in his black suit and grey vest and grey gloves he stood ready at a panel of buttons. He asked if anyone wished to say a few words, and Aileen looked at her. She shook her head, but then she stood up and walked up to the coffins one by one and placed a bare hand on them and stood for a moment.

  When she was back in her pew the funeral director turned to the panel and pushed the first button. The lights dimmed and the purple curtain moved aside and the furnace door opened. The coffin began to move forward, and inside the furnace a moving steel grid took over. When the coffin had come to rest, blue gas flames could be seen, and then the flames grew. In the heat the paint blistered and curled, and moments later the wood itself caught fire and soon all they could see were flames.

  The furnace door slid shut and the curtain before it, and a great roaring sound came from within. They listened to the flames for a while, and when the house lights came back up they rose and stepped out of the pew. At the chapel entrance the funeral director had taken off his gloves and he shook their hands.

  * * *

  —

  They drove home to Sweetbarry in silence. The clouds to nor’east had piled up again, heavy and black. Purple at the base, as if squeezed and condensed under the pressure of all the weight above. Gusts of wind and spits of rain against the windshield.

  She could see Franklin in the rear-view mirror, in an old wool suit, from when he was a much younger man, and a white shirt and black tie. Clean-shaven and with a fresh haircut that showed white skin on his neck. He nodded at her in the mirror.

  They drove on. A misty, grey day. Silver days, her father used to call them. Along the way, tall reeds in the bracken ponds lay beaten flat, and rags of foam lifted off the water and sailed across the road.

  * * *