Later Janice lit a fire in the vast fireplace. “There’s a chill tonight. It’ll warm the place.”
“It was probably once the centre of the house,” Duncan said. “You’d spend the winter pretty close to this thing.”
“I didn’t know it existed when I lived here,” Effie said. “It must have been walled in.” Her voice must have inadvertently revealed regret at having once again stirred the embers of a long forgotten past.
“How long was it, that you were here?” Janice asked.
“Off and on for years,” Effie said. “I practically grew up here. Mr. and Mrs. Gillis were like my parents.”
And they all just sat there for a while, memories retracting into private places.
“Did you ever find that manuscript?” Sextus asked after the long silence.
“Yes,” Effie said. “JC found it for me. It’s upstairs, actually.”
“So it wasn’t lost after all.”
“No. It wasn’t lost. I had an idea all along where it was.”
“Go get it,” Sextus said.
“I think we all could use a drink,” said John. “Even me. What do you think, Jan?”
She squeezed his hand, and he stood. Then the door opened, and it was Stella. Duncan went to her.
“I hope I’m not …”
“Thanks for coming,” Duncan said quietly, and took her hand in his.
When Effie returned with the No Frills bag, John was balancing a tray of drinks, and eager hands were claiming tinkling glasses. Then he fetched the bottle and a jug of water and placed them on the floor within easy reach. “Next round, you’re on your own,” he said. They sat, chairs hauled up close to the fire.
Sextus took the manuscript from the bag and studied it, flipped through some pages, then sighed. He removed his reading glasses and slipped them into a shirt pocket. He tossed some pages into the fireplace, almost carelessly, and watched them flutter and land separately just beyond the flames. Nobody moved or spoke. The title page sat there for what seemed like many seconds. Sextus sipped his drink, then threw in more pages. These landed closer to the blaze and caught, curled, flared and blackened.
And he continued feeding paper to the insatiable fire until the manuscript was gone.
He drained his glass. “That felt good,” he said.
A sudden draught from the chimney caught the remnants of a blackened page, and it flaked into tiny fragments.
“Now we’ll never know,” said Janice.
“Know what?” said John.
“Why men lie,” she said.
Nobody spoke. Duncan seemed to be asleep, chin resting on his chest, eyes shut. Then he opened his eyes and sat up. “Don’t look at me,” he said. “Sextus wrote the book.”
Sextus raised his hands in a gesture of helplessness.
When she awoke on Saturday, a dense fog seemed to hold the morning back. It lingered in the trees and hollows like the smoky aftermath of devastation. Grief wears many disguises, but today it would arrive as naked sorrow. Silently she prayed for rain and wind. The air outside was motionless, flattened and subdued by the weight of moisture, and by nine o’clock she saw the clear blue sky briefly, as if through a small tear in a dreary canopy. By ten the day was shimmering with sunshine and warmth that only added to her pain because it brought back memories of summer.
Duncan had spent most of Friday at his boat. There were obscure marine functions he had to check: battery, starter, various fluids and pumps. Effie suspected that there were other reasons for Duncan’s absence, but she welcomed the solitude. She slept a lot, aware that a compulsive urge to stay in bed could be a symptom of depression. She didn’t care where the urge came from. She indulged it.
When she heard her brother’s voice late Friday afternoon, she rose and dressed and started down. Approaching the kitchen through the living room, she overheard him telling John he’d left “it” at the old house.
“What’s ‘it’?” she asked, and Duncan answered with a brief, uncomfortable glance. Finally he said, “The urn.”
“The urn,” she said.
“His ashes,” Duncan said. “I picked them up at the funeral home in town. They arrived by courier from Halifax today. I left them on the little table in his room.”
“His room.”
“Your room,” Duncan said.
They sat with drinks while supper was prepared. She said, “It must have cost something, the cremation and the shipping. The urn.”
“I took care of it,” Duncan said.
“I’ll settle with you after, when we’re back in Toronto.”
“Sure,” he said. “And I’ll give you a hand with the formalities.”
“What formalities?” she asked.
“The estate. He made you his executor,” Duncan said. “He didn’t tell you?”
“No,” she said. “When did that happen?”
“Back in the winter. The little encounter on New Year’s Day seemed to make him conscious of mortality.”
“How do you know this?”
“He told me.”
“You two talked a lot.”
“We did. I think he considered me his … like his brother.”
And she noticed the tiny catch in her brother’s voice, the briefest hint of vulnerability. She couldn’t see his face, for he was staring at the opposite wall, but she could see the tension in his shoulders and his neck, a tiny ripple just below his jaw.
She put down her drink and returned to the bedroom.
And now it was Saturday morning and sunshine had defeated fog and summer had returned. She sat up, willed her legs to move, to rise and shove aside the heavy blankets, to swing to the bedside; her back to stiffen; her arms to move her body upward. And then she studied the floor and her bare feet. And suddenly it came to her, as if in his voice. Get up, the voice said. Move on. You are the custodian of hope.
She dressed quickly. The washing and the brushing and the makeup could come later.
Duncan was in the living room with a mug of coffee and a newspaper.
“They’ve caught them,” he said. “They found one of them in the hospital in Sydney. Seems JC made quite a mess of him. The other one was holed up in Halifax. They’ve been charged with murder.”
“What will happen?”
“Nothing much. They’re still under eighteen.”
“What about the girl?”
“She’s in just as deep as they are. She made it happen.”
“I want to help her.”
Duncan put the paper down.
“Last night you told me I’m his executor. He’d want that. He cared about her. I have to do something.”
“The courts take victim statements seriously. If you were to ask for compassion …”
“Not just that,” she said. “I want to use whatever money there might be in his estate to try and help that girl build a life for herself. Do you think it’s possible?”
“It’s worth a try,” he said. “Stella said she knows the kid. Had a lot of dealings with her through the school. She’s badly messed up, but basically decent, down deep.”
“JC said once that there are no bad people …” Effie said.
“Just people,” Duncan continued, “who do bad things for complex reasons. I believe that too.”
“I think he discovered that talking to that murderer in Texas. Sam.”
Duncan nodded. “Have I ever told you, sister, how much I’ve always lo—” His voice caught. He cleared his throat. “How much I’ve always looked up to you?”
She studied the sky and saw that puffy clouds were invading the vast blue emptiness. The sea had been still and dark as cobalt when they first left the harbour, boat moving slowly, sombre as a hearse. But now the warmed land radiated heat upward, and as the air began to move, the sea responded lazily. The boat had turned broadside to the swell, rocking gently, drifting closer to the shore.
“That’s an interesting rock formation,” Sextus said.
“Duncan said it’s called th
e Door,” Effie said. “Because of the shape of the hole in it.”
“More like a very dramatic tombstone,” Sextus said. “Maybe we could put a little plaque on it, with his name and who he was.”
“Who he was,” she said.
Duncan and Stella were moving carefully along the washboard, Duncan cradling the brass urn in his arms. “We might as well do this,” he said. “I think it’s going to start to blow.”
Duncan studied his sister’s face. She nodded.
“Why don’t I?” he said.
Nobody spoke.
“I was trying to think of something appropriate to say,” Duncan said. “Maybe read something from Scripture. But I drew a blank. Somehow ‘dust to dust’ doesn’t seem right. We are so much more than dust. Ecclesiastes didn’t do it for me either.”
He handed the urn to Stella and from a back pocket produced a slim book with a pale yellow cover. Effie recognized it. Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot.
“When I was at the house yesterday, I saw this on the bedside table. It was open. I suspect he might have been reading it when … last Friday night. I’d like to read what it says, where he had it open, because it seems to sum things up.”
He cleared his throat:
In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and feces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
When he’d finished, he took the urn from Stella and, with some difficulty, pried the lid off.
“Dear friend and brother, I now commend your ashes to the sea, your spirit to the stars.”
He began to pour the grey ash and sandy minerals into the water, and they watched it drift away, the lighter, dusty material lingering like lace upon the surface.
Then Duncan made a brief announcement. “I’m going to open a very special bottle—a seventeen-year-old single malt—so we can properly reflect upon the passing of a good man. To JC Campbell, who brought us to this place this day, together in so many ways.”
Sextus came to where she was seated, touched her glass with his.
“I’d like to finish what he started,” he said. “I heard they found a disc, that they’ve salvaged a lot of what he had written.”
She studied his face until he blushed. “Don’t get me wrong,” he said.
“I understand. You’re being kind. I’m going to need time. Maybe a lot of time.”
“You’ll never be alone,” he said. “Unless you want to be.”
She looked away, and as she did something moved along the washboard, near the emptied urn. It was a fine film of ash and dust, and it drifted briefly on an air current then eddied upward, becoming suddenly a tiny cyclone, turning then stalling. Then, finally stilled, it sank to the surface of the throbbing water and disappeared. The sun dimmed briefly as if by a passing cloud, and the wind, awakened, rocked and turned the boat away.
“Goodbye,” she whispered.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A woman friend recently asked me where I got the nerve, never mind the insight, to write a novel from a woman’s point of view. I didn’t have to think long to find the answer. I grew up among women, a houseful of them, in a family and a community that seemed to be defined and dominated by the women. Almost all my teachers were women. Many of the most impressive people I have known and worked with in journalism are women. I have been blessed by close friendship and frequent collaboration with articulate, insightful women. The women I have known have been, for the most part, more interesting than the men—maybe only because they excited greater curiosity on my part, I not being one of them.
This, then, is the product of long observation and close association with women, all of whom I’ve respected, some of whom I’ve loved. I’ll mention only a few: my mother, Alice Donohue MacIntyre; my aunt, Veronica Donohue MacNeil; my wife, Carol Off; my friend-editor-publisher, Anne Collins; my friend and agent, Shaun Bradley.
A special tapadh leat to my friend and Gaelic “editor,” John (Seonaidh Ailig) Macpherson.
Linden MacIntyre is a co-host of the fifth estate and the winner of nine Gemini Awards for broadcast journalism. His bestselling first novel, The Long Stretch, was nominated for a CBA Libris Award, and his boyhood memoir, Causeway: A Passage from Innocence, was a Globe and Mail Best Book of 2006, and won both the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction and the Evelyn Richardson Prize. His second novel, The Bishop’s Man, was a #1 national bestseller, won the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Dartmouth Book Award and the CBA Libris Fiction Book of the Year, and has been published in the U.K. and the U.S. and has been translated into eight languages.
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