The Big Why

by Michael Winter

  You make it sound like I’m incompetent.

  Gerald now come on.

  And she convinced him to leave. He was convinced.

  Kathleen: Isnt he great?

  This was after Gerald left.

  Me: A little bit too much Gerald. You know, here’s Gerald coming at ya.

  Youre not jealous are you?

  When drunks arent drinking, I said fondly, theyre good company.

  I slept on the Thayer couch. I was up early and put in a fire and heated water. I washed the floors. I did the dishes. The Thayers ginger on the stairs with their hangovers. Coffee, put some coffee on.

  Gerald: I thank you for doing the floors. And for doing the dishes.

  Alma: And what about for doing your cousin?

  Me: I think she did me.

  Oh, Kent. Kent you are so full of yourself. And a bad man. She’s seventeen.

  Gerald had sat on someone’s guitar. It was Jenny Starling’s guitar, I said. Gerald is pissed off about breaking it. I’m sorry all right?

  I had seen Kathleen straitlaced. Then twelve hours later I had seen her shit-faced. She was the last up. She took me aside.

  Kathleen: So. If we both enjoyed ourselves, I’m wondering. I mean, we were very drunk. And perhaps.

  What.

  We should see.

  Okay, so what do you suggest.

  When youre back in New York. You invite me to dinner.

  All right, I said.

  42

  Five hundred wet starlings landed on the roof. I could hear them clattering along the eavestrough as I worked. The rooms were light. The percentage of wall devoted to window was good. Across the water I heard poor sounds. Sounds of hollow tin and hungry animals.

  It rained and washed the snow away. Rain thrummed on the roof. It was a thick sound, like the pouring of berries from a drum. The rain on the snow was like torn sheets of paper.

  Tom Dobie: The more rain, the more rest.

  He watched me paint and he asked about it. Why I painted. It is almost, I said, a religious activity.

  You believe in God?

  In the religion of Christ. A person’s own beliefs. I believe in the will of the vision of one, with laws to protect the rights of many. I dont respect the authority of the book or the church, I said. I support the work of a man. I believe in the work.

  Who doesnt.

  My wife believes in the man. That the man wasnt himself, but an agent for God.

  Well, Tom said, I just believe there’s got to be something after.

  March was mild and I had hopes. Even when all of them were saying the worst wasnt over, I had hopes. I didnt stop erecting fences to keep the Pomeroy cows out. I cleared a garden and burned a heap of old wallpaper. I built, with Tom, the extension to the house where I put my easel, a maple desk, a chair, and above it a small bedroom. Tom pounded a coin into the sill.

  That’ll keep money in your house.

  The extension was eight feet by twelve feet.

  That’s for the little ones.

  They be coming soon.

  In April.

  We stood by the burning wallpaper.

  43

  Tom: So what’d you do today.

  I walked around town. I spent all day at it.

  Tom: You must have walked around it twice.

  Walking home at night. The blue acre of my snowy land, the dark blind house. Inside on the flat kitchen table I pushed my hand around until it found the belly of a lamp funnel. There were matches in a nook above the door. I fed the embers in the stove. I went to bed in my Arctic tent in the upstairs room. I pressed my feet against the canvas side of the tent and held my arms above my head to let the blood drain out of them. I let the blood pool in my torso until my arms tingled with a helium quality that made it easy to imagine I was floating. Then I prayed the way I’d heard my father pray. At this moment I thought I too was a methodical man with no initiative who copied the ideas around me. Very good at emulating the nature I admired, but the life I lived was not my own. It was a construct of someone else’s will. I was only seven when my father died. I thought this without forming the thought into words. It was a feeling I had, or a witnessing that I would, in later years, begin to pronounce on. If you were to look at me here you would see the muscles in my brow working and the facts accumulating between my outstretched arms, and you could predict that I might, if I were freed up to ponder, come to some true thought about my predicament at the age of thirty-one, some sad and wondrous realization that I was alone in the world and yet very lucky and loved.

  44

  The ground melted from behind the houses. The ponds were covered with sleepy ice, Tom called it. A field opened up beside Beaver Pond. The field was about the size of a tennis court, a flat field. Would it be good for tennis. Would it. I thought about this as we whitewashed the clapboard, painted the trim, and tarred the spruce shingles. Tom said, Let’s go over and look at it for God’s sake.

  I paced it off. Whose land is this.

  You better ask the Bartletts about it.

  Tennis would go over well, Bob Bartlett said. The pharmacist Jim Hearn. He owns that land.

  I approached him. Hearn was a character of suspicion. He walked about with just the fingers of his hands in his pockets. He was a big, tall, bald man with a red beard. It was as if all of his energy had gone into muscle, but he was unable to tap into it. It was a resource lost to him, and instead he devoted his strength to carrying around this girth. He asked questions to which he knew the answers. What else. He was the kind of man who wore all his money and it was not much money but he made it look like more money. So if you stared closely you saw that the watch was gold plate and the wool of his jacket was thin, if well cut. He stood very erect, to get all he could out of his six feet. Sniffles.

  Jim Hearn was delighted. Yes yes of course. Pleased I had come to him. It’s a field for making grass, he said. Not much lost to the ponies and he did not care to play, but yes, he said, go to it on the field.

  Should I pay you for it. Or should we sign something.

  No need for that, sir.

  I realized I had judged him and then I remembered the iceboats and thought, How mean of me. Jim Sniffles Hearn, a good man.

  He was very excited about the tennis court. Or perhaps that he could be handy to me.

  He said a woman had just come in to see him saying her tata fell. He examined her. It was the worse smell he’s ever. He wiped his nose. She was wearing several layers. He lifted up the skirts and saw tendrils of a potato creeping out of her cervix. Her uterus had dropped and she stuck a potato up to hold it in. It had rotted and fallen down.

  Some things you’d rather not know.

  45

  I walked to the telegraph office. I needed to wire New York about a chest of tools. They were my father’s tools and I was worried, for they hadnt arrived. The man before me was sending a message to a Mrs John Burns in Chapel’s Cove.

  He said, I have berth on Southern Cross, sail in four days.

  The cable officer: Youre allowed one more word, Mr Burns.

  And he thought about it and said, Then put Goodbye.

  The seal hunt. I was next.

  Please put a search on this parcel, I said. It is a chest.

  Best talk to the shipping agent. George Browiny.

  Where is he.

  He’ll be back now the once.

  I waited. Then George Browiny came in with a load of trout. He’d been ice fishing.

  Oh won’t be long now sir, he said.

  He did not even look at my receipt.

  It’s a big old black walnut tool chest, I said. Full of tools and it is late.

  George Browiny: Won’t be much longer.

  Again, not a glance at the description or my insurance number.

  They are good German tools. The Germans, I said, make the best tools on earth.

  We’ll send a boy over, Mr Kent.

  On the way home I saw the Southern Cross turning the point into Bri
gus. Tom was chopping wood.

  Look at that boat, I said.

  She’s not a boat, Tom Dobie said. She’s a vessel.

  What’s the difference.

  He held up a junk of wood.

  A boat her rudder got to be out of doors.

  And a vessel?

  Encased.

  He put his hand over the wood.

  46

  A lick of paint. I was pretending to be Kathleen, arriving at the house and appreciating the colours I’d chosen for the rooms. And now the cleanup of my brushes. The wild yank of turpentine in the nostrils. How old was I when I realized that turpentine is not chemically different from paint. Often a weak substance is used to dilute the strong: it’s not opposites that annihilate but a weaker solution of what is powerful. The thrust behind vaccines. Same with character, or love. We hate to see a weaker form of ourselves. It reminds us of our faults.

  47

  Bob Bartlett invited me down to the wharf. It was busy with men.

  The Southern Cross, he said. Last of the wooden walls.

  She was anchored out in the frozen harbour. Men were gathering up their provisions, tugging on jackets made of sail canvas. A man stood patiently while his wife looped a tow rope over his shoulder. Gaffs in hand, flagpoles, and sculp-ing knives.

  They call the hunt the swilery, Bartlett said, and Brigus invented it. Ponies and carts of provisions and men’s chests and barrels of pork and sacks of flour. For three days she’ll be in port, he said.

  Men were dragging their gear out in rodneys pulled over the ice. Crew on the Southern Cross flung over oiled ropes to winch up the works. We walked out on the ice to the wooden-walled vessel and stood under the luff of her bow. She was tall above us. She was one of the last to rely on wind. Fitted with an engine just to round her out. She had three masts, and all her sails were hoisted. Her decks covered with rough board and rails wrapped in rope to keep her clean from the work of the sealers.

  They take birch rind, Bartlett said, and lime. Shake around the beams to keep the hold sweet and dry.

  Why is she full of sail?

  Dry her canvas. When theyre dry they’ll brail her gaff topsail.

  These sealers were from Colliers and Cupids and Hibbs Cove and Port de Grave and eight from Brigus proper.

  Bartlett: Would love to go myself. The Gulf hunt is a useful one. Usually a good haul. Can never tell, though. Never had a good voyage. Swilers, they think they’ll make fifty dollars. One year, I think — one year there was a crew that made fifty dollars. So now that’s always the feeling. Could make fifty dollars. But they got nothing else to do this time of year. Come look, she’s full of coal.

  He nodded at the men.

  You need all that coal?

  They all knew him.

  This man, Bartlett said, wants some coal.

  Seven tons, I said.

  We’ll ask, the man said, George Clarke about it.

  That’s as good as done, Bartlett said.

  So youre saying George Clarke is captaining the Cross.

  Yes, Father was supposed to, but he’s not feeling num-ber one.

  All these men, Bartlett said, they come here last Christmas to sign up with Father. Some like Tom Dobie they got a secure berth they can sell it now. Tom Dobie got five dollars, did you know that?

  So he’s decided not to go.

  Sold it to Rose Foley’s youngster. Look at them line up for their four fathom of ratling. Watch that man cut it with an axe on a block. And see, theyre all wearing sealskin boots waterproofed with Stockholm tar. You could learn a thing off them, Kent.

  For three days they loaded provisions and got the ship in trim. I went aboard to see George Clarke and he agreed to sell me the seven tons of coal. I hired four men off the Cross to help me sled it over. We used a block and tackle to pull it up the embankment. They dumped it off near the Pomeroys’. A castle of black rock stunningly majestic against the white snow.

  What, Bartlett said, youre making your own naked man over there.

  They said their goodbyes on the stagehead, and we wished the men luck. The younger sealers were delighted but wore the air of propriety. They had all shaved their faces that morning, and it would be the last time any of them shaved.

  The seal patch was passing north to south about thirty miles out. But they were heading west, to the back of the island and the Gulf of St Lawrence. That was the herd the Southern Cross had drawn.

  Bartlett shared around a bottle of port. He rose a toast, Bloody decks to em!

  They all thought George Clarke a solid skipper.

  Bob uncoupled his telescope and we took turns studying the Southern Cross as the men tracked her through the ice. The men had sawed chunks of ice from her prow, sang shanties as they sawed. Chunks were hauled up onto the ice as they were cut. So there was a wall of ice alongside her.

  There is no excitement greater, Bartlett said, than sailing a sealer out of Brigus.

  There used to be forty vessels in line, he said. Sixteen thousand men in parade. You could walk across the harbour from your house to Tom Dobie’s and not get your feet wet. Well, those were the days.

  The Southern Cross loaded up and hoisted mainsail but couldnt budge. She sat out there for the night, waiting for a swell to break the bay ice. That night we saw her forecastle lanterns, and by noon the next day she had tossed a kedge anchor to a passing ice pan. You could hear the men singing as they pulled in their mooring lines and slipped out for the icefields to the northwest and into the blue drop.

  48

  Bartlett: You better get your coal under wraps.

  It’s the end of winter, no rush.

  He laughed. We got a long ways to go yet, Kent.

  The cottage was deemed barely liveable by Tom Dobie and the Bartletts, and so I sent for Kathleen and the children. I had written all through February and March. I never called Kathleen a pet name, just Dear Kathleen, but I was warm and silly in the letters. I’ve never gone for pet names. I described vignettes of Brigus, always lighthearted and with hope. I described young Tom Dobie and what he thought of the figurehead. How Bartlett barely looked at her but said that I had indeed knocked together a rough likeness of Emily Edwards.

  There was something Bartlett could not appreciate in the figurehead. But Tom, I could imagine him turning out figureheads a century ago for the bow of every schooner in Brigus.

  It was interesting that I spoke of this wooden lady. That already my wife had a competitor.

  Each day I’d try to appreciate something decorative, entirely without function. I said to Bartlett, Why is the trim on your house picked out in blue?

  Just to ease the eyes, boy. Just for a bit of colour.

  And all the gingerbread. For there was a heap of work in the eaves.

  If I were building her, there’d be no gingerbread.

  But you’ll maintain it.

  I’ll hire two boys to paint it.

  Bartlett could not make the leap. He thought my love for beautiful things extravagant, though he never spoke against it, and sometimes he would laugh at me.

  Bartlett: Nothing useful can come of looking at what youre doing as anything other than a necessity for survival. As soon as you look at your work as something outside of you, then it’s gone from you. Youre not part of it. You have to be a part of it.

  This was a man who had driven a wooden boat through ice into the Arctic Ocean for nothing more than the illusion of being at the geographic top of the world.

  Deep down, I said, youre an artist too.

  Deep down I’m a survivalist. Nothing matches sailing out of Brigus in a sealer, Kent. That’s the height of spirit. An explorer, he’s going to achieve something. Soldier too. But a sealer is going to decide if his wife and babies will have molasses with their fish. Deep down, Kent, we’re all for survival — even you.

  Tom and Stan delivered a cartload of freshly sawed pickets and posts. The pickets varied in length. I asked about this. Tom said, Who owns the fence — the house or the h
ill.

  The house, of course.

  So the fence should stay level with the house, not the ground.

  We measured the slope and made an allowance, and the railing along the fence stayed horizontal. It was true, the fence was part of the house now, instead of belonging to the hill.

  But I differed with Tom on the arrangement of pickets, railings, and posts. I thought it looked smarter to have the pickets all flush on the inside, and to give the railing to the world.

  You sir, Tom said, are always looking for beauty in things.

  And why not?

  Well what is a fence for?

  To demarcate property.

  Tom paused, and said deliberately, A fence is to keep things out.

  I would agree with that.

  Then why offer a railing to an intruder? Why make it easy for him to boost himself over your fence?

  And so we built the fence with railings and posts inside.

  49

  Each day in late March the weather grew milder, the harbour a quilt of white acres stitched with blue. I woke up naked and stood at my door naked. The physical weight of sunlight shooting down the barrel of the harbour. The brooks were full, their shells of ice melting hollow. Blades of grass shot up through the snow. I reached up and smoothed the wooden breast of my figurehead. I scratched my balls, letting the sun hit me in the thighs and belly. I like walking around naked. I like seeing, in the hall mirror, my cock and balls hanging like fruit. I posed in a tennis volley stance. I dreamed of my tennis court. Maybe by April, I thought. I thought that, even though Tom reckoned on clearing Jim Hearn’s land in June.

  I walked, barefoot and naked, to the brook for a pitcher of water. My cock hauled itself up with the cold. A bumblebee flower pushed itself out of the snow and it was hard to believe men were swiling on ice pans just thirty miles north of here. The Pomeroys were letting their horses out. One was pissing near my load of coal. I was convinced that the old Norse story of finding grapes here was true.

  I dressed and walked into town. Outside Chafe’s, Mose Harris read the newspaper. He was in his shirt sleeves.