The Bay of Love and Sorrows (17 page)

The day he sent Karrie away, Michael left the sailboat and went back to the farmhouse. He lay in bed thinking of Nora Battersoil, and remembered the line from an old country and western song:
“I give her everything but she flew.”

Later that afternoon Silver came to the house agitated and angry He sat in the living room. Michael told him he would have to hide the boat — if he could just take it up to Millerton, and hide it at an island he knew.

“The boat is my dad’s,” he said. He looked as a person does when they suddenly find themselves in a crisis and are ready to ask for help. And this is how Silver looked upon him now, in compassion for his frailty Silver wore a clean red shirt that Madonna had pressed, and jeans with the cuffs turned up. He looked like a poor and tiny peasant on his way to the county fair. In fact, he was on his way to the church picnic.

“Now” Silver sighed, “Everette thinks we’re all working together against him — and that you set him up — and — “

“But I was at his side day and night,” Michael said.

“It doesn’t matter, it’s one way he can use to — “

“To what?”

“To fuck Madonna — do you understand?”

Michael said he wasn’t sure.

So Silver just shrugged. “Madonna won’t unless he promises to bail us out of this jackpot. That’s what’s been going on with her. She’s been protecting us by keeping her arse covered. Now what you’ve got to do is
not
see Karrie Smith any more — go back up to town — stay there for your own sake. You must go back home — he won’t bother you up there — he’s too scared to do that. If you think he’ll walk in on you at supper you’re crazy — he’s a coward. And Madonna and I worry about you because — well — because you’ve been good to us! So I’ll take care of the money. But I don’t know about Professor Becker — we should never have gone to see him.”

“Who — why?” Michael said. His face was white. It looked as if he had been just hit with a board.

“Because Becker bragged all over the place that these drug people came to see him.”

“Why — who — told you — ?”

“So Everette sent Daryll to talk to him — the idea is we gave him the drugs to sell. We didn’t, but that don’t matter. Now Becker is all scared — if something happens he’ll be the first one to go to the cops — “

And the concept that it was Silver for these nine months who had been wise, and trying to hang on to the reins of reality suddenly was present in the terrible silence. And Michael looked at him with shame.

“I’ll phone Becker tonight,” Michael said.

There was the smell of cigarette smoke and aftershave where Silver sat. A poverty, a poverty of spirit, that comes in all guises and has no favourite, emanated from him like it never did from his sister. And Michael felt for him, and remembered even more painfully that the only thing Silver had wanted to do that summer was enrol in a course to become an electrician, and he had wanted Michael to help him apply. Michael until now had forgotten all about this.

Michael could say nothing. For now he had entered
their
world, and this was not what Mr. Jessop had wanted at all.

He phoned Becker, but Becker was neither at his house, a bungalow on a one-way street overlooking the river in the city of Fredericton, nor at his office at the university.

Michael then had four or five drinks and tried to sleep.

Later that afternoon, as he was lying on the bed in the master bedroom, wondering how to escape, to get away, Michael had a phone call. For a few moments he didn’t know who it was. Her voice seemed to come from far away, from a planet other than his own, from a place that still entertained ideas of goodness.

“Hello, Michael — I’m having a party — September 9 — could you come up? Don’t blame your mother — actually it was my mother — I haven’t seen you all summer — so it is me — if you could — come.”

He suddenly realized it was Laura McNair. He felt sad for her, prompted by the loss of her brother and by the anonymous death threats.

“Sure — I’ll try to make it — I really will — I promise I will,” he said.

Later he sat in the old chair in the living room staring at the sailboat chimes Karrie had bought him. Their tinkling in a soft breeze from an open window became excruciating after a while.

He left the house.

The road was muddy. It had rained that afternoon, but now the stars were poking out, and a moon, sliver-thin, hugged the sky behind the trees. He walked through the mud as if he were on high heels and made his way to the gate.

He turned to his left and walked towards the highway, later turning to his right and crossing a huge cow field in the dark. He walked in the direction of Tommie Donnerel’s house for the first time in over a year.

He could smell the horses in the night air, the farm was quiet, the barn rested against the trees as always, while the house sat in an open space with its downstairs light on.

There was a new swing on the new verandah, and Michael remembered how he had told Tom he should buy one when they were building. Everything was quiet, even serene. Suddenly he smelled sawdust and felt nostalgic for that time and place that would never return.

If only he could go back to it. He thought of Vincent, who’d always asked Michael to take him sailing, and then he turned to go. As he did he noticed a hand move the curtain and saw Tom staring out the window at him.

He saw Tom’s eyes, green and blazing dark in a kind of futile anger and sadness. They seemed to stare away at the infinite vagaries of coming darkness, the crux of the wide oak tree gone soft in the night air, and over all into the possibility of one’s own death.

That is what the eyes of Tom Donnerel were saying to him. Yet when they faced him they were bruised and hurt, and reflected a kind of irony.

His immediate impulse was to turn about and leave.

Yet he did not manage to move.

“Come in,” Tom said, as he opened the door and turned away.

Michael walked into the small kitchen, with the smell of the night in his hair, and of night air still evaporating on his skin. He wanted to tell Tommie how much trouble he was in. But pride stopped him short, and he only managed a strange, sheepish smile.

Tom sat back down with his dinner. Michael put his palms under his thighs.

Tom had been thinking of a word for the whole day and he had come up with it. “The real trouble is someday you will have to live the
posture,”
Tom said. “I don’t know when it will come, but when it does — it will be a hard life from then on.”

He kept his head down cutting his steak, while the little dog sat at his feet staring up at him wagging its tail. That was the word,
posture.
That was all Tom wanted to say. And he gave a slight, self-incriminating smile for using such a heady word.

Tom stared up at him, sniffed, and again looked down at his steak, as if he were concentrating on cutting into the plate itself. But there were tears in his eyes. Then after a long moment he shrugged. Even the shrug seemed to relay his pain and acute suffering over Karrie.

“I just came up to tell you that I — love Karrie — as a person — but nothing more — so I hope you can forgive us — because you can have her back — it was all a mistake. It’ll take time but she can be yours again — no one meant to hurt you. It is you she loves — not me. Not deep down. She thinks I am someone I am not. But she will see that it is you who are all she ever wanted — and I’ll head away and leave you two be.”

Tom said nothing. Again his eyes were dark and fathomless. And then he looked up in a kind of self-incriminating mirth, and put his head down.

Again he cut deep into his plate. Again his shoulders moved, and again Michael noticed tears in his eyes.

“I’m sorry — for everything,” Michael said. “But everything will work out.”

He went over and held out his hand. Tom looked up from his plate, tried his darndest, but couldn’t bring himself to take it.

Michael walked back down the lane, away from the house, and its added room, the shingles still golden. He walked slowly, his boots making soft slur marks in the pitted dirt, and turned down towards the lane. He walked almost to the shore, thinking that Tom and Karrie could have a happy life together.

He went to a stump and sat down, wondering what he could possibly do to extricate himself from Everette Hutch, who now said he had let him down? And further, how could he help those who had once trusted him?

“This is terrible,” he thought. “I’ll kill him if he comes for Madonna — I’ll not let them suffer any more.”

Yet he felt sick, hopeless, and terrified.

Two days after Michael visited Tom, Karrie went to see him. He was reading, sitting against the red cliff, his shoulders thrust into it as if he were hiding. He wasn’t reading the Kama Sutra, however — he was reading Cicero once again, only the subtle significance of this was lost on Karrie.

Karrie missed the sailboat and everything she thought was associated with it — its sanctuary and freedom, her desire to belong, to express the opinions of others, and to constantly think of herself as being harmed. Those things that are always sought by youth.

She walked up to Michael sternly, but then lowered her eyes. Then, like a child, she told him she would tell his father everything, for she was no one’s fool. Even if he did call her “cinnamon girl.” And then she stamped her foot.

When she stamped her foot, it made a strange thud on the desolate beach. Like a heartbeat. The waves were grey and cold and filled with dark seaweed. Michael’s eyes seemed to start, as if his pulse had quickened.

She smiled and then turned away from him, biting her bottom lip.

“What
do you know?” Michael asked.

“Oh, I just know, that’s all”

She walked over to where she had tumbled over the bank two months before, but the tide was high and she couldn’t go any farther.

So she stood with her back to him, like a small orphan.

“Come here,” he said..

And she turned slowly, then ran towards him.

Later he had the others apologize to her as if it were their fault a falling-out had happened, and not hers. He looked at Silver sternly when he spoke. And Karrie felt very good, for it was the first time she felt that things were not being blamed on her.

Silver stood before her, his eyes cast towards the ground.

“You must stop hanging about with bad people, Silver, or everyone will know about it. You don’t think I don’t have any information regarding what happened here — the trouble you two are in?” she said, shaking her finger, a bit of authority in her voice, and feeling very happy. “And with Michael’s father — a judge — why you’re just lucky you’re not all in jail!”

Silver glanced up, and looked at Michael as she spoke. And Karrie gave a brief, embarrassed laugh.

Then they went out on the sailboat. But she asked Michael to turn it about. It was past her supper hour and she had to go home.

She smiled and winked at Madonna when he let her take the wheel. She could feel the waves against the starboard side, and kept her legs wide apart and bent a little at the knees to keep her balance; in doing this she looked as she had looked as a child of six when she had placed those tiny suitcases on her dresser, all those years ago.

She began to sing loudly and there were tears in her eyes from the wind. She went home feeling vindicated for the first time since she had gone picking blueberries on what now seemed a long-ago day.

The next day Michael went to town. He sat in the waiting room of the bank. He was dressed inappropriately, in cutoffs and a T-shirt, but he wore no bandanna on his leg,

He went into the bank to ask for a loan of fifteen thousand dollars, feeling dissociated from where he was. The bank’s loans officer, one of the young men he had grown up with and liked, looked at him in embarrassment when they started to go over his assets. And Michael stood and left, without completing the application. The loans officer followed him to the door, asking him to come back, but Michael couldn’t bear to turn around.

That night he went to see Karrie, distracted and nervous. His eyes glanced here and there as he smoked, which made her nervous as well,

He asked Karrie to take a walk. She was suddenly frightened when she looked at him, seeing how unsure of himself he was. They went into the woods and along the path. Then he turned and coughed.

“I have to go away —” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean it’s not good here any more. I’ve been to the bank but I can’t get the money — “

“Why do you need money?” she asked.

“If I can get some money — I can go over to Spain — or out to B.C. I don’t like asking you this. I thought you might have some money — you mentioned that you knew where some was — it’ll all be paid back once I find a job.”

Why he looked afraid she didn’t know. Yet as he spoke a small, controlled smile appeared at the corners of her mouth.

“Is Tom bothering you — about me?” she said.

“Partly” He stared at her, and then, blinking, looked away

“I’ll talk to Tom,” she said. “So don’t you be afraid of him.”

“No — talk to no one — no one.” Then, knowing he was frightening her, he smiled awkwardly