The Bay of Love and Sorrows (11 page)

He wanted to come in, and began to make a commotion.

Instead she snuck out the back door and down through the cool, dark garden in her bare feet. They went down to the field where she had left Tom that day with the tractor, and right on that spot Michael pushed her down drunkenly and lifted her nightgown. She was very silent and passive, because he was so drunk.

After that night, “cinnamon girl” took on a peculiar, odious meaning. Madonna used it, and she could not stand to hear the way it was said. Also, after that night, and more importantly, she was frightened of her father and stepmother’s terrible hope — of her as an investment for them.

She kept pretending that they were her friends and that everyone loved her. That this was the age of friendship. So her father and stepmother kept making small talk, wanting to know what Michael was really like — asking her about what a sailboat ride was like.

“Why don’t he come around?” her stepmother asked the afternoon after he had come to her bedroom window, with a smile that told her that Dora knew he had been there the night before. Karrie was walking down the hallway, and froze in mid-stride when Dora spoke.

But when Karrie gave the excuse that he was busy refitting the sailboat, that’s all that seemed to matter to Dora.

“Oh, the sailboat — when can I get on it?” Dora said.

The hallway smelled of stale summer air and Karrie glanced into the dining room where her stepmother sat, her cheeks shimmering slightly.

She went upstairs and, staring at the small freckles on her arms, began to sob in spasms. What was she supposed to do now?

After he left her on the road that day, Tom went to Brassaurds’. The wine was brought out. He hit the bottom of the bottle, took off the cap and took a drink. It was warm sherry wine, called Hermit — or Uncle Herms, as those who drank it with frequency called it. It gave most blackouts and made many violent.

There was the sweet summer smell of clover along with the smell of river water and eels. For many moments Silver, still hungover from the night before, looked upon his imposing guest with sorrowful, even bashful eyes. They talked about haying, they talked about the tractor — the clutch plate — Mr. Jessop’s prize pig. They talked about the lobster season. Until Tom had drunk half the bottle.

“What’s going on down there, Silver?” Tom said. He was staring at the corner where the fridge was. “Tell me everything — the whole of everything. What’s Mike been up to with her? Anything?”

Silver didn’t answer for a while.

“I don’t know,” Silver said, and he shook his head piteously. But then he kept right on talking, in a whisper, as if confidence were required with Tom, when the story had already been spread across the entire road, so that even Dora had heard all about it. “She was naked with him last night —” he whispered. “Now, maybe he didn’t do it yet — but I think he did it to her last night,” Silver said, shaking his head.

Though Tom took in everything he kept staring at the fridge. His whole body began to shake as if it wasn’t his, as if he had no control over it. He picked up the bottle again, couldn’t get it to his lips, and the wine spilled down his chin.

“Don’t be wastin good wine,” Silver said, and he took it from him and drank. “I got a good glance ‘tween her legs — and her hair isn’t so cinnamon downstairs. Go ask Madonna.”

Tom looked over at him, but Silver, in communicating his story with such profound and vulgar naivete, had no idea why Tom was looking like he was, and so he only whispered a little more urgently.

“Oh ya,” Silver continued recklessly. “It was the bet he made me that he could fuck her by her birthday — “

There were two awful sounds from Tom’s throat, and he looked so terrifying that all of a sudden Silver stopped speaking, tipped his chair back, and snuck away, trying to be as careful as he could — for he had just seen a monster.

Silver went outside and the night was hot. The trees waved slightly and the road smelled of tar. He went and leaned against the Pontiac. He began to shake. He was suddenly frightened for himself.

“He’s going to kill someone,” he said.

Madonna looked at him, unmoved by the statement. She loved her brother — because he was her brother. But she had no use for anyone now. Very little talk about love or violence ever moved her. Not as it had when she was a child and had loved everyone in hope. She blinked and took a drag of her cigarette.

“Go in and sleep with him,” he said. “Take his mind off of
her?
And he said
her
in an urgent voice.

“I’m not sleeping with him” she said.

“Why not — what’s wrong with him?”

“I’m on the rag,” she said.

“He won’t care.”

“I do.”

And so the argument continued in hushed and urgent tones about whether or not Madonna would go in and sleep with him, while the tractor sat like a giant sleeping animal nearby.

What was poignant about this argument was its defiling nature; for once, a long time ago, she had waited for Tom to ask her to a school party and had bought a dress by working on the weekends sewing curtains for Rita Walsh.

She thought of this now, and the smell of those curtains in town, as one sometimes thinks of their lost innocence.

She had gone to the dance with someone else. They went in a car to a camp and there was a group of boys. Thinking of this, as if stung, she said once again: “I’m on the fuckin rag — so I’m fuckin no one tonight so leave me the fuck alone.”

“Yer a different girl than you used to be — not doin me no favour,” Silver said. And he walked away a few feet and sat on the grass, looking over now and again at his sister. Then he opened a bag of mescaline and looked at it.

“This is the stuff Everette told us to sell now. What are we going to do? We have to tell Michael what we’re being forced to do.”

Madonna stood, ripped the distributor cap off the tractor, looked at her brother and said: “Useless fuckin men. The last thing I want to do is tell Michael we’re selling bad drugs.”

Madonna wanted desperately to start a new life. But she could not start a new life on the residue of her old, past life. This was the sad truth she now knew. She had struggled since she was six years old, always thinking that around one of the pale-blue turns, on a sky-blue day, her new life would happen

And so the argument ended, and the night was still soft with all its stars.

Silver walked up the old Arron Brook road, past the Jessops’ cow-corn field. He didn’t know what to do. He felt he had all the decisions to make.

Madonna went into the house while Tom was drinking his second bottle of Hermit. He asked for hash, so Madonna rolled some in a cigarette and gave it to him. He took the whole joint.

Then he asked for pills — he didn’t know what kind of pills, but Madonna realized he was probably talking about the mescaline going around. So she told him to lie down.

“The mescaline is filled with shit” she whispered. “We’re selling it — because we have to — not because we
want to —
Everette got us into it.”

She went into the back room with him. He stumbled and fell against the cot, with its old army blanket. He took out the diamond and, leaning on one knee, tried to put it on her hand. She smiled and lay him down, putting the diamond back in his pocket.

He asked Madonna to take off her bathing suit. She lay down beside him and put her head on his chest, and for an hour or more every time he tried to get up she pushed him back.

He reached down and realized that she had actually taken her bathing suit off, but she was wearing a strap and Kotex pad against her warm and somehow angelic body

After she fell asleep he went outside and lay in the grass for over an hour, and later he could hear Madonna talking to him, but didn’t answer her. Then he got up and stumbled to the driveway and tried to start the tractor.

And then he began banging his head against the tractor housing and slipped, cutting himself.

Somewhere — they were either near the tractor or near the Pontiac — Madonna was holding him, and he was shouting at something. He didn’t know what it was.

Afterwards someone said it was near dawn, and Silver appeared in the dooryard bare-chested, smoking a cigarette.

Madonna’s eyes were deep and mysterious, the most spiritual thing in the whole little yard.

By noon hour Madonna and Silver were asleep in the old house, and Tom had gone. He had washed his face and hair, and had gotten the distributor cap back on the tractor. He started out for home.

The day was quiet and warm and he drove the back road, his shirt tail flapping in the wind, his chest bare. Now and then he would look down beneath the engine at the asphalt. His head was woozy and he felt sick.

When he came to the great field of cow corn owned by Mr. Jessop, he pulled the tractor off the road and took a junk of cord from under the seat.

The field spread out for a quarter-mile in each direction. The corn was now waist-high and shimmered in the early-August breeze. Sky birds flew above and the sun beat down. This cow corn had the density of
life
that Tom had sought and thought he had attained, and he began to walk through it as if committed to do some crime. This crime was to go to the end of the field where he used to hunt partridge and hang himself with the cord.

He had no emotion except that he wanted and needed to do this as quickly as possible. For a good four hundred yards he was in a daze that glowed inside a yellow ball of light. Now and then he would come out of this daze of yellow to stop and look about. And finally the daze, the ball of yellow August light, subsided. He was hampered by the growing corn, and he stopped to inspect its shoots, noticing some small yellow breaks in the stalks, and wondering if he should not go and tell Mr. Jessop about a better quality of insecticide that he, Tom, would have used if the field were his. And, taking two or three samples and inspecting them, he looked at the cord still dangling over his arm and was surprised by it. Then suddenly ashamed, he flung it high in the air, like a black snake, and it fell beneath the ball of sun into the corn, making a stinging sound.

Then he left, determined to be by himself.

For the next week his brother was away and Vincent was alone and as scared as a boy of five. He tried to feed the mare and the stud. He tried to do the work. He sat every night in the barn talking to the horses, coddling Maxwell the dog. The horses were getting thinner and crankier. He didn’t know what to do. He kept telling them about Tom and him, and how they had gone to the church picnic.

By week’s end he needed tobacco for his pipe, but he was frightened to go and get it by himself. And he was waiting for Tom to give him the note he pinned to his shirt.

Every now and then the mare would move and Vincent would tell it to stop. He was sitting inside the door shaking. But the mare kept moving and flicking its tail.

Once he stood up, pretending he wanted to hit her, and saw that when the mare’s muscles flinched along her flank it was because of blowflies. So he took a carrot and fed it, tears in his eyes as he looked at its yellow teeth. He wept and sat on a bucket. He wailed so that the Egyptians heard him.

He took heart that in the morning the farrier would come and help him with the animals.

Then he looked through the black pouch for more tobacco, but could only find a few strands.

He went towards the house. His door was on the far side, facing Arron Brook. He opened this door with a great deal of dignity A picture of his parents sat on the night table. A large picture matching the one he carried in his pocket of him and Tom and Karrie sat on the mantel. In the far corner was a pet gerbil that Tom had bought him, named Snowflake. His little dog Maxwell looked up at him mournfully

He sat in his chair and thought. Then he opened up the dresser drawer beside him and looked into it furtively for any tobacco that might be left. Then he thought he would go and see his Aunt Libby.

For a while he smoked the last of his pipe tobacco and thought of the gerbil and how he had gone to the pet store with Tom. And how Tom, having to hold Vincent’s hand, talked to the young salesgirl whose name was Sally.