The Big Why

by Michael Winter

  17

  The church organized a drive to raise funds. I had the children help me make puppets. It would be a Punch and Judy theatre. But what would our characters be. The children were often asking questions, and so I thought to make a question puppet and an answer puppet.

  Rocky: How about a bird that wonders and a cat that answers.

  So little Kathleen made a bird and we called him the Wonderbird. He flies under things.

  He gets to the bottom of things.

  The underbelly bird.

  No, it’s Wonderbird.

  Rocky made a cat and called it a panther.

  He answers to the Wonderbird.

  He’s the anther panther.

  The Anther Panther and Wonderbird.

  Those, I said, are terrific.

  I built a portable theatre that folded and we marched down to the Stand, where there were booths for cookies and punch and a spinning wheel. Men were gambling at a crown and anchor. I sat under the theatre and had Wonderbird ask every question it could think of and the Anther Panther solved the world’s problems in no less than ten solid hours, until every loose penny from every pocket was collected and donated to the Methodists’ worthwhile cause, whatever it was.

  I should have been easier with the children. But I did not want to have children with bad manners. Kathleen was much more generous, and it was the only thing she’d get mad about, my judgment. My attempts at laxity were strained. I was not easy about letting them be the way they were or even playing with them. I had opinions. I was quick to warn them if they almost knocked over a glass. I’m too proscriptive. But maybe that’s a good thing, Kathleen said.

  They were outside, pitching buttons at a stick.

  Well, theyve made me pull up my socks. Theyve forced me, I said, to be responsible.

  Youre serious about the painting.

  About making a living at it. We should have Emily Edwards over more, to help with the children.

  A few hours now and then would be good.

  Kathleen was exhausted.

  Have you seen Tom Dobie?

  I havent seen him all day.

  I went over to the Pomeroys’. To talk to Stan. But they were gone, his father said. Stan and Tony Loveys and Tom. Off mending the nets and getting the cod trap set up, and theyve been gone since dawn and he wouldnt see them again before nightfall.

  18

  It began to rain and Emily Edwards made my son a sandwich. Rocky said he liked how Emily made food. She makes it look real tasty. Even brown rice. But especially apples and sandwiches. He said, Emily says things like, When I’m eighty I’m gonna live in an apartment in Manhattan forty storeys up and smoke on the window ledge and look out on all the people walking past.

  I heard her say, Let’s open a window. The wind will help us clean the table.

  Every action Emily did she spoke of aloud. She’d say to Rocky, I’m taking off my shoes and hanging up my coat. She’d say, Let’s get the kettle on and let’s put a piece of fish on to soak and cook him and eat him. I heard her say, If you go to the Pomeroys’ for eggs, Rocky, you have to wash your hands after. All this through my studio door.

  I found myself thinking about her. I was trying to paint but I was writing a poem in my head. Or a poem that is like an equation. That she is round but has an edge to her, like an eye is round but has a corner. People say she is round, but I’ve found an edge to her. There is nothing I have given her. She has found it all in her roundness. Every edge, every corner of the room she’s found me with something other than her.

  I had Rocky and little Kathleen eat before we left for dinner at the Bartletts’. They had big appetites and I didnt want them embarrassing us.

  19

  We hadnt seen Tom Dobie, so I walked over to Frogmarsh. They were out checking the trap, Rachel Dobie said. Tom and Stan Pomeroy and Tony Loveys. I hate it when theyre late.

  She was by the root cellar with a piece of watersoaked fish — that was the kind of fish they kept for themselves, fish they could get only a number-two price for. She’d decided they hadnt caught much. Had I seen anything. I hadnt.

  Me: Can three men handle a trap?

  Rachel: Yes sir they got to.

  Tom had got up, she said, in the dark with a hangover. She could smell it. He’s been on a square bender, that one.

  The boy had marched past his mother and into the porch and flung his boots on the oilcloth. Then he laced them on. He filled the black kettle with water from the dipper and placed it, dripping, on the back hob and they both listened to the branding sizzle. That was the last she saw of him.

  I walked back to Kathleen. The sky had darkened and it was windy. Where there’s a break in the houses you blew away. This was their first excursion of the season, I said. So we stayed up and played cards. The wind abated.

  Kathleen: There’s a light.

  A quiet lantern rounded the Head. A lone trap skiff rowed into the bay. We went outside. Once you saw the skiff you could hear the rub of the oarlocks. There were two figures at the oars. Tom Dobie and Tony Loveys.

  I’ll go down, I said. They must be exhausted.

  Rachel Dobie was there to tie them on. They were prying a large fish from a sheet of canvas on the floor of the skiff.

  Tom: I need a hand, Kent. My handwrists are all worn away.

  I hoisted myself down, and from there the fish turned into the stiffened body of Stan Pomeroy. He was white and frozen flat, with a gaff mark in his jaw. He was dead and half-naked in the shaky light. He looked like he’d been dead all his life.

  Tom Dobie said not a word, except, quietly: One two three. Together we cracked Stan out of the frozen canvas sheet. Strands of unmixed blood swam in the sea water in the bottom of the boat. We hauled him to the stagehead. I was at the feet. Bare cold feet.

  Tom: What do you think, Mother.

  As if she had a plan to revive him yet. To dip Stan in warm water. Thaw him alive again, gently. Tom hadnt seen our faces. We were trying our best to stay calm.

  Pass up the gear, boys.

  There seemed to be no urgency in the situation. Items were passed up. Then we climbed up the wharf side. Tony Loveys: I’ll go get Old Man Pomeroy.

  Tom Dobie stood guard with us, the corpse of the barefooted Stan Pomeroy rimed in a crust of ice. Stiff. The wharf was a cold wooden water. What a good kid, I said.

  Tom Dobie took off his jacket and laid it over Stan’s bare cold feet.

  That’s about all I can do now.

  He knew, at least, that the bare feet were wrong and needed protection from the elements.

  He was leaning over the cod trap, Tom said. You could hear the fish chopping on the surface when they rowed near the trap. Stan had one foot up on the gunwale and it was icy. That’s how we went at it. We had the haul ropes hooked and the doorways shut off and Stan was checking the spy bucket. Trap’s crammed with fish, he said in a soft voice. Fish were thick, their mouths full of kelp. The walls of the trap were straining and Stan was drying up the twine. So he got full up on the gunwale and he almost capsed her, but then he fell over.

  He slammed into the icy water. Just melted into the crowd of fish. I saw him wrestle over onto his back. It was like a jelly of bodies crowding him. His hands they came up very white. None of us can swim, me, Stan, or Tony. So he just sank beneath the fish.

  Tom Dobie was telling us this when Tony Loveys came down the path with Mr Pomeroy. I’m disgusted, he said. Mr Pomeroy looked over his dead son and waited.

  Tom: We hauled in the trap, sir, to save him, but the catch was heavy and there were only the two of we.

  Mr Pomeroy nodded at this. He knelt down and touched Stan’s face.

  We poured the fish into the skiff, trying to get at Stan. But he was smothered. We had fish up to the gangboards. I saw his hand rise out of the fish, and I made a grab for it to haul him o
ut of the fish, but he was — sir, there was nothing.

  Tony: He was gone.

  So we kicked out all the fish to make room in the skiff hey Tony, and we started to rub him down. We rubbed his arms didnt we and pulled off his boots and Tony had a go at his feet. We tried to coax the air into his lungs.

  Tony: His eyes were out of his face.

  He didnt drown I reckon. We just couldnt get any air to him.

  Tony: He suffocated for the success of the fish.

  This is the story Tom Dobie reported to us that night. He told it once again, to Stan’s mother at the Pomeroy kitchen table while Stan’s body lay over it, before Mrs Pomeroy covered him in a tablecloth. Go home, Tom Dobie, she said. And take Stan’s gear and store it in the twine loft. I’m lonesome, she said, to have it in the house.

  Mrs Pomeroy didnt say anything else to us but went up to her room with her husband. We saw off Tony Loveys, and then Tom and I walked over to Frogmarsh with his mother. He went up into his room, he told me later, and all the whites of the bedroom were lit by the moon, even his own feet at the heel of the bed, numb and strange to him. The birch ribs of the bunk bed, the same wood as the skiff and the wharf, the stage and the house and even what they burnt for heat. It was all connected: home, boat, stagehead, fish.

  I lay in bed with Kathleen and thought of the image of Stan Pomeroy amongst the fish, in the dark, while the far wall of the bedroom shone a blue light. The wall was a pale cream in the morning — what was it with colour. Everything seems to depend on circumstance. But I had seen a large fish at first in the bottom of the skiff, and ever since all I’ve seen is Stan Pomeroy. So in truth a thing is a constant thing, though we may believe it to be something else occasionally. Yet here was the wall changing before me and what did it mean? To say sunlight versus moonlight or artificial light?

  20

  Sad, sad. They kept Stan’s body packed in brine and on a warm day in June they took him from the root cellar and laid him barefoot on the kitchen table again. They had a wake. Rachel Dobie bought a dozen clay pipes and spread out a cloth full of tobacco. The men walked in and filled the clay pipes and stood and smoked. I was among them. Stan had whitened and his flesh was of an old fish. Where they had held him the flesh stayed pushed in. The brine ran off his cuffs and trousers and ruined the tablecloth. The wound on his jaw was grey. There was a grimace on his face. On his chest was a white square made of ribbon with the letters IHS. I Have Suffered.

  Tom Dobie and Tony Loveys dug a hole at Grave Hill and they lifted Stan Pomeroy off the table and put him in a box. They did not carry the box — instead, the pallbearers escorted the box on a cart. They did not have a lid on the box. The pallbearers wore white bands around their caps. They carted the pickled corpse up Grave Hill and lifted him out of the box and lowered him in the hole with the tablecloth wrapped about him. I did a sketch of this. Mr Pomeroy had taken some of the soil and warmed it in the oven. They spread handfuls of this warm soil on the tablecloth. Then Stan and Tony Loveys shovelled over the cold soil. It still had ice crystals. It was hard earth they dropped onto Stan’s body.

  I stood at the graveyard gates and drew a picture of Stan’s burial. Kathleen and the children among the mourners. Curved lines on the hill and the drift of weather. I would send this to Charles Daniel. See what he thought of this life in Brigus.

  Later, we went home and I spread molasses on slices of bread. We ate them while I fixed more, cutting them in half. I brought a slice to bed and laid it directly on the sheet beside my head. I did not use a plate. I ate the bread and molasses and did not fall asleep. Instead, I got up again and walked to the field across from the house and ploughed and set out a garden. I could plant everything, Tom said, except the potatoes.

  21

  My tools arrived, my father’s tools. The big walnut case was at the station. They had salvaged them. The wood had bulked out and the hinges on the box were caked with rust. The lock busted off. I asked George Browiny about that.

  Accidental, he said. Looks it. Probably when the freighter went down.

  More like vandalism, I said. And I thought there was more to it than he was letting on.

  I had Swift the pony lug the box home on the mail cart. The hills were full of dandelions. I opened the box and the tools jiggled on their little ledges, tucked in alcoves, hung on nails. The tools too were lined with rust, but a bit of oil and steel wool and they were fine. Behind each tool lay a painted shadow of the tool on the wood. So you knew where it belonged. All that was missing was a table clamp and a vise. It wasnt so bad. Perhaps George Browiny was right. The woodcarving tools were wrapped in cloth and leather and the cloth had oil on it. The carving tools were marvellous. My father’s tools. When my father died there was a field of dandelions. There was sun. It was a day like this day. It was before I knew that the sky wasnt always blue and bright. There was the news and there was a letter from him. And my mother folded the letter, unopened, and pushed it into the wastebasket. As though the corpse had lifted a finger, or inhaled, as if the gasses of my father had mustered in his lungs and infected the letter with decay and the roil of illness. And when his ashes came home, there was a funeral and Nanny Rosa was not invited.

  My father used to open his mail with a pocket knife. He believed a man should keep a knife on him. He was a man who could do two things with his hand at once. He could hold a bottle of wine with his thumb and forefinger and gesture with the rest. Splay up with those three fingers.

  22

  Me: Can you cut me a cross?

  Tom: I can make you two lengths.

  Cut me two lengths and I’ll make a cross. I’ll carve Stan’s name on it.

  I realized that part of the reason why I had moved to such an isolated place was that I was losing my ability to feign interest in boring things. I was becoming a loner. If you want to get along with people it’s important to be polite. Or to cut people off nicely and feign an excuse. New York is full of idiots.

  Kathleen had not tired of being polite. We spoke about this after Stan’s funeral. How removed I looked, sketching pictures of the mourners. How she and the children had accompanied the family to the graveyard. She said, Youve even forgotten how to mask indifference.

  Was I indifferent?

  I felt I had been politely tempering my emotions. For thirty years I’d done that, and now my face was betraying me. There was something to profit from the death of Stan Pomeroy, and I was not about to show false emotion. I was excited to draw it. And yes, perhaps there was something boring in the fatalism of accepting death.

  Kathleen: We all know when we’re being boring, but we appreciate the polite gesture, the kindness of someone’s responding with class and respect.

  Yes, I said. We like people who tolerate us, and they feel liked and like you back for it, even if you are boring them.

  But you look like youre afraid you’ll be stuck with them.

  Is it that plain on my face?

  When you said that to Mr Hearn, about waiting for a train.

  You were there for that?

  You told me about it. As a joke.

  This was depressing me. I felt like a bad citizen. Kathleen tried to revive me. When I say these things, she said, about your bald honesty, it’s not that I’m judging you. I’m saying that youre more open to your own nature, and I tend to cut myself off from that kind of experience. I’m impressed with your free attitude. But it’s also scary to realize I’m hitched to this.

  Me: I feel youre judging me.

  Kathleen: Perhaps part of me is.

  Me: Which part. I touch her thigh. This part?

  Kathleen: I’m trying to make light of my jealousy. I’m trying to speak of it so it doesnt fold into the secret life and go on growing without either of us speaking of it.

  Jealousy is an odd word.

  Envy, then. I envy your zest, even if it is nasty. So forgive me if you fe
el like I’m chastising you.

  You think every possible thought, dont you, Kathleen.

  I think every thought. Yes.

  23

  The women were making fish along the shore. The older ones wore slouches to protect their faces from the sun. Flies were on the fish so thick that sometimes the fish looked blue. Tom Dobie and Tony Loveys had built a flake out along the Battery trail.

  Tom Dobie: You put flat boughs on the flake and you spread the fish on the boughs fair in the list and when the leaves drop off and the wind blows up underneath, up through the boughs, well then that is what makes excellent fish.

  With Stan buried and the cross planted they turned to Marten Edwards, and he had gone in with them. They were getting good fish in the trap, just trouble drying it with the poor weather.

  24

  Rupert Bartlett was heading to Labrador for the season. He asked his sister Eleanor if she could recall where the tulip beds were. He didnt want to coil rope on the tulip beds.

  I’m going to count on your memory, he said.

  I helped him with the ropes. The flies were bad and he was using a dried-out branch from an aspen to kill them. He held the branch over his head and flicked it back and forth, the sharp twigs of the branch killing the flies. He was loading up a cart to take down to the Morrissey. The Bartletts had a station in Turnavik. Youre more than welcome to come down with me, he said.

  But I wanted to get work done here. I mailed off my House of Dread to Charles Daniel. I didnt like the mood of it infecting my family. I had recovered from the friction of the seal hunt. I was making my wife happy. I wanted to paint something hopeful.

  We waved off Rupert and the Morrissey. I did as Rupert had suggested. I watched the women work. Rachel Dobie and Emily Edwards with Rose Foley and Amanda Sweeney. Their backs bent all day.