Sing a Worried Song

by William Deverell

  A first trial ended with a hung jury. During the second trial, Manfred Unger, a long-time friend of the accused, committed suicide after being declared a hostile witness.

  In cross-examination at that trial, Mr. Skyler was accused of seeking sexual pleasure from the act of murder. He reacted to the guilty verdict by loudly protesting his innocence.

  SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 2012

  “Strike! Miss Menzies sure got fooled on that one.” Play-by-play announcer Scotty Phillips is sitting on a folding chair near first base. A microphone transmits his voice through coils of wire to speakers on his car roof. “Strike three, and Tildy has retired the side.”

  Tildy Sears is the star chucker for the home team, the Nine Easy Pieces. They are playing the San Juan Islanders for the championship of the Inter-Island Women’s Baseball League. It’s an international event, little Garibaldi Island against a powerhouse American team.

  “Our Tildy has got a great arm, eh, folks?” A smattering of applause. “Great legs, too.”

  Spectators shout light-hearted taunts at Scotty for his sexist excursus. From the beer garden, Margaret Blake calls out an offer to objectify his parts.

  “Nobody ever accused me of being politically correct.” Scotty ignores the boos. A corpulent land developer, red braces, red of neck, he has been quaffing a few between innings. “Up next is the Islanders’ dishy third-basewoman — any objection to that, ladies?”

  More boos. Laughter. Catcalls. Everyone is having a good time on this sunny September Sunday, except perhaps Arthur Ramsgate Beauchamp, QC, who is toiling in the beer garden. Almost half of Garibaldi Island is at the game, by Arthur’s rough count — some two hundred lolling on the grassy slopes above the diamond, fifty more on benches in this roped-off square of meadow, which is unwisely situated too close to the third-base line. Arthur has already had to duck one foul ball. He worries about injuries, accidental death, a massive suit against the Garibaldi Recreation Committee. Arthur is a worrier. It is what he does best.

  Right now, what most worries him relates to a scary bit of hearsay conveyed to him this morning, just after church, by island postmaster Abraham Makepeace: “Looks like one of your unhappy clients wants to kill you.” The reference was to the contents of a fax waiting for Arthur at the General Store, which provides that service for techno-duffers. Despite the postmaster’s penchant for reading others’ faxes and unsealed mail, he adheres to strict business practices, so more cannot be revealed to Arthur until he picks up the fax on Monday. “I already said too much,” Makepeace whispered, then hurried off to his van to join his family.

  An unhappy client wants to kill him? The postmaster’s idea of a jest? No sense of humour has yet been divined in dour Abraham Makepeace. More likely, the nosy postmaster misinterpreted the message, which he obviously puzzled over.

  But it isn’t that easy to lightly toss away the death-threat fax, because Arthur got a call yesterday from a colleague at his old law office — Tragger, Inglis — asking if he’d seen the news item about the paroling of Randy Skyler. No, Arthur had not.

  After some effort, using his primitive Internet skills, he retrieved the piece, which was succinct and accurate, though it neglected to mention that, while “loudly protesting his innocence,” Skyler had directed a postscript to the prosecutor: “I’ll see you in hell!” The threat has always stuck with Arthur. Twenty-five years since that trial, and it hasn’t much dulled in memory.

  Arthur shakes his head. He must focus on his volunteer role here: to accept blue tickets in exchange for a serving of beer or cider, or white tickets for wine. It’s not a task that requires any intellectual effort, yet Arthur is discomforted by the seductive perfume of hops and grapes. But it’s for a good cause, a fundraiser for the island’s athletic program.

  Beside him, Margaret Blake, also a conscripted volunteer, is running the till, selling those tickets. Margaret is the Member of Parliament for Cowichan and the Islands (usually called Cow Islands), and leader of Canada’s Green Party. She used to be Arthur’s wife. Until — this was several months ago — she decided he ought to call her his life companion, a phrase she claims implies equality as opposed to possession. Arthur can barely get his tongue around it. He doesn’t like the brave new words of the twenty-first century.

  Arthur hasn’t mentioned the mysterious fax to her, or anything about Skyler. She’d only fret. He’s tried to convince himself there is a humorous twist to this: Makepeace had likely misread a common colloquialism. “I’m going to kill you for not writing.” Something like that. The sort of thing his blunt daughter in Australia might write. Deborah, a high school principal in Melbourne, is eight years divorced, but, according to her last phone call, has met “someone authentic” on an Internet mating site, and they are seeing each other. Arthur doesn’t know how to respond to that. Nor to Deborah’s revelation about one of her mother’s least notorious affairs from decades ago. “You didn’t know?” she said, shocked.

  A crack of the bat. “And Felicity Jones beats the throw,” Scotty announces. “I don’t have to remind everyone she got picked off stealing last time.”

  Felicity gives him the finger, then takes off after the next pitch and slides unsafely into second. Inning over.

  It’s a tight game, one to nil for the Easy Pieces in the eighth inning. Everyone knows but dares not say that Tildy Sears is one inning away from a no-hitter. Arthur has followed baseball enough to be aware of its most celebrated superstition: merely mouthing the word no-hitter puts a curse on the pitcher’s chances of completing it. Nor are obvious synonyms permitted. The superstition is widely embraced by players and fans. Even major league announcers tiptoe around the word during live broadcasts.

  Scotty Phillips, who has returned to the beer garden to refresh himself for the bottom of the eighth, is also a strong believer in this aphonic ritual. “Don’t say it, Arthur,” he commands on accepting his refill. “Don’t even think about it.”

  He chugs back his ale, returns to his post, lowers himself carefully into his folding chair. “Okay, folks, this here’s the ninth inning. Tildy takes the mound again. It’s still a one-run ball game, and there’s other stuff going on here that I better not talk about, but you all know what I’m talking about.”

  Arthur watches Tildy Sears stroll confidently to the mound. A comely, raw-boned gal, twenty-five, six-foot-two, with a lightning fastball, she runs a home security business. She has almost single-handedly got the Pieces to this final playoff game.

  Arthur’s attention is drawn by Ernie Priposki, who’s waving a ticket at him, demanding yet another pint. Arthur wants to cut him off but isn’t sure if he has the authority.

  “I think you’ve had your last one, Ernie.”

  “No way, I got two more tickets. Two tickets, two beer, we got a binding contract — ain’t that the first thing you learn in law school?” Shouting: “It’s the law!”

  Fortunately the real law is here in force, and, smelling trouble, they are fast approaching: gloomy Ernst Pound of the Mounties and his scowling sidekick, Auxiliary Constable Kurt Zoller. Arthur toys with mentioning to them — as if in passing — the fax with the supposed death threat.

  Scotty calls, “Our Tildy has one more out to go, folks. History is about to get made.”

  A foul ball whacks a plastic beer glass, and Constable Pound scuttles from the spray before planting himself in front of Priposki, who glares back stubbornly. “Ernie, you’re gonna take your beer and sit down and finish it, and then you’re gonna walk home.” Pound brandishes the keys he’s removed from Priposki’s truck.

  “That evens the count at two and two, folks. Come on, Tildy, baby, you can do it.”

  Everyone is fixed on the game except Kurt Zoller, who is sniffing the air. “I smell marijuana.” He exits the licensed area, takes several steps, then seems to lose the scent, and wanders over to his car, to caress it. His latest toy, a second-hand, bright orange Humme
r.

  Scotty Phillip booms: “What do you say, folks, was that a bad call or what?” This stirs the crowd to boo the umpire. “Another swing, and she’s out! No … No, the ball got away! Safe on first! Relax, folks, Tildy can still win that no-hitter …”

  All players, all spectators, everyone in the beer garden, join in a mass sucking-in of breath. That is followed by utter silence. Even the birds dare not sing, or the crickets. In his folding chair, Scotty is frozen in shock at what he has done, his microphone dangling between his legs.

  Tildy Sears pulls herself together, checks the runner, rears back, throws. Her looping curveball is met with a clunk of the aluminum bat, and arcs just over the reach of the shortstop. A cheap hit, but a hit, and there are runners at first and second.

  Tildy asks the umpire for a time out. She lays her glove on the mound and walks toward Scotty. It slowly dawns on him he is in peril, and he struggles from his chair, but finds his feet tangled in the coils of microphone cable. The chair collapses from his exertions, and he is propelled face forward into the grass, his ample rear raised.

  Tildy is impassive as she approaches this inviting target. No one makes a move to intercede, not the players on either team, not the umpire, not Pound or Zoller, not Reverend Al Noggins, and not the Member for Cow Islands, who mutters, “Get him.”

  In his struggle to free himself, Scotty has fallen out of his suspenders, and Tildy takes advantage of that by shoving the microphone down the back of his pants and into his nether regions. Her proud bearing as she returns to the mound says she might have gone further were she not capable of mercy.

  She strikes out the next batter on three pitches. The crowd erupts. People are jumping and dancing perilously on the grassy slope. It’s a stirring sight to see Tildy mobbed not only by her own teammates but also the opposing players, united in their celebration of the sister who stuck it to the boorish pig who broke up her no-hitter.

  Arthur is inspired to recite Byron’s line: “Where the virgins are soft as the roses they twine.”

  “I don’t think you’ll find any rose-twining virgins there,” Margaret has taken on a cynical way since becoming a politician. There’s been a coolness about her lately, though one she doesn’t show to others. Arthur wonders if she’s become a little bored with her stuffy partner. Another worry. Add it to the list. Along with: Looks like one of your unhappy clients wants to kill you. Maybe not a client. After all, would newly paroled Skyler dare, even anonymously, to send a threatening fax? He’d be back inside in a wink. The idea is ludicrous.

  Cars and pickups are pulling out. Priposki is sullenly working the parking area, soliciting a ride to the bar, where the party will continue. Zoller has a handkerchief out and is daubing away at something on the roof of his orange chariot, maybe a bird dropping.

  Arthur hopes to pick up his own obsessed-over beauty tomorrow — his classic 1969 Fargo is in Garibaldi’s small service station, where he dropped it off this morning for a tune-up. He has vowed never again to surrender the Fargo to the haphazard care of his former mechanic, Robert Stonewell, alias Stoney, who is more adept in the fine arts of loafing and stalling than auto mechanics. Five months it took for a carburetor job.

  Ignored, alone at third base, Scotty Phillips is having problems retrieving his microphone, which has fallen down his pant leg. It is time to close up, clean up.

  §

  Margaret pulls off at the West Bay lookout so they can watch the sun kissing the breasts of distant islands before descending behind the white mounds of the Olympic Mountains. Silvery Diana rises plumply in the east, smiling at the mortals below: Arthur and Margaret, in her green, hybrid constituency car. This is the vehicle she uses to tour her domain, from Salish Sea to Pacific Ocean. She’ll return it to her riding office tomorrow before flying out — Parliament is about to go into session.

  “Lovely.” The sunset, she means, and its long, September afterglow. “This is what I miss most.”

  Arthur wonders where her life companion ranks on her missed-most list of West Coast attractions. He will miss her more than any sunset, but he can’t bring himself to say that: it sounds corny. He ought to count himself lucky that they were able to share her long summer recess, even though it was interrupted with country fairs, ribbon-cuttings (how she abhors those), baptisms, weddings, anniversaries, funerals, the entire life sequence.

  Tomorrow she will be gone, likely until Thanksgiving. When lives aren’t shared to the full, bonds are weakened: separate experiences, different interests, diversions, friends. Happy moments aren’t enjoyed, tribulations aren’t shared. Without the glue of day-by-day communion, there is a coming-apart, a distancing — that’s what Arthur fears is happening.

  Or maybe there has always been a distance, unrecognized by Arthur. Sometimes he wonders if he really knows her, if he has access to her heart. She’s not open about herself, finds it awkward to express intimate feelings. Arthur has to assume she is less in love with him than she was with her first husband, a pioneer organic farmer who died in a tractor accident.

  He is as much in love with Margaret as on the day he proposed, fifteen years ago, after his tumultuous first marriage finally failed. But he wonders whether absence has made her heart less fond. Does that account for her detached ways with him, the little messages of disapproval, the casual frictions over morning coffee?

  Surely she’s hugely distracted by politics, that’s what is filling her mind, the impending grind of Parliament, trying to get her voice heard amid all the noise and bombast, fighting for her green agenda. To stay in top form, she must keep some space between her and dreary Arthur. He understands that, must somehow accept it. He must stop continually seeking reasons to be unhappy. Maybe there’s a group. My name is Arthur, and I am a worrywart.

  His other addiction has long been conquered. He hasn’t had a sip since 1987, twenty-five years and five months ago, on the day — coincidentally? — that Skyler was sentenced to life.

  It’s late, he’s hungry and looking forward to getting back to Blunder Bay. Arthur is never at ease being away from the farm all day, though he has full confidence in Yoki and Niko, his energetic Woofers (they’re enrolled in a global organization, World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, full board for a half day’s work).

  Yoki and Niko are in their early twenties, and thus must be referred to as women, but Arthur can’t help it, and calls them girls. They are soon to return to Japan to complete their schooling. Computer virtuosos.

  The two share Margaret’s former house, which is in shouting distance from the larger one Arthur bought sixteen years ago — to escape from Vancouver, from the law, from a cheating wife. Annabelle left him for Bayreuth and a flamboyant conductor, and very quickly Arthur fell spectacularly in love with his attractive agronomist neighbour, a widow a decade and a half younger than he. He had known, when pursuing her, that she was immersed in politics — she’d twice been elected Island Trustee — but hardly expected this: a marriage divided by three thousand miles.

  And now he is again about to become the lone and lonely master of Blunder Bay, their forty consolidated acres, their goats, sheep, horse, cow, dog, cats, and chickens, plus a couple of bossy geese.

  They are soon rolling by their darkening pastures and down a dirt driveway bordered by snake fences. Their houses are on either side, both charming and old, with gingerbread, leaded glass. The Woofers’ house was built by homesteader Jeremiah Blunder in 1894, shortly before he failed to appreciate the potency of his own moonshine and fell into his well.

  Homer barks a welcome and leads them to their front door. As Arthur switches on the house lights, the death-threat fax, which has been circling around his subconscious like a shark, breaks the surface. Should he tell Margaret about it? Not now. Anyway, she is already at her BlackBerry, checking messages, dialling Pierrette, her chief of staff in Ottawa. It’s the only phone she uses, avoiding cranks and time-wasters. Arthur faithf
ully vets her incoming calls on the house line.

  That phone rings, from the kitchen extension, as Arthur pulls the remains of a potato salad from the fridge.

  “Wonders never cease, I finally got through. How’s it hanging, old stick?”

  Perpendicularly down, Arthur wants to say. It’s Hubbell Meyerson, his former best friend. He insists on calling a few times a year, usually from Barbados, apparently unaware that Arthur knows of his treachery.

  “I’m well, Hubbell. Just sitting down to dinner, I’m afraid.” Arthur hopes that sounds icy enough.

  He can hear lively African music, drumbeats. There’s a party going on. Hubbell seems to be into the sauce. Now retired from Tragger, Inglis, he was recently named High Commissioner to Barbados, a plum from friends in Ottawa. He enjoys inherited wealth and has been a generous political donor.

  “Short and sweet, then. I shall be flying up to Ottawa for the royal visit next month, and I’m thinking of a detour out your way, business to attend to. Chance for a little nosh-up, talk over old times. If we can remember them.” He chuckles.

  Arthur hedges. “Let’s both check our calendars and see if that’s possible.” He could pretend he promised to visit Deborah in Melbourne. But maybe this is the proper time to confront the adulterous blackguard. Yes, but not on the phone. Next month. Over lunch.

  “Give my love to Margaret … Damn fine of her to show up for my swearing-in, by the way. Okay, I’m being called upon to help a black beauty pop a cork. Might just get lucky tonight. It’s my birthday, did you know?”

  “Happy birthday.”

  Arthur returns to his potato salad, feeling insipid, glum. Give my love to Margaret. He can’t remember her mention that swearing-in. Or Hubbell at all.

  “You didn’t know?” Deborah had said on her long, teary, tale-telling call. What Arthur hadn’t known was that Annabelle and Hubbell were lovers in the 1980s. A time when Arthur was convinced that she had abandoned her adulterous ways and was being true to those long-ago vows.