The Bay of Love and Sorrows (19 page)

She had prayed to the Virgin Mary that, if she were a sinner, to count this as one of her
good
acts, and to protect her people, the little boy especially. She prayed that when she went away someone else would come down and help them. For them to be saved from those sad, cruel people you didn’t talk about.

The place reeked of gasoline and was dark, and she was always ashamed because Dora charged them so much — sixty dollars every two weeks.

She wanted to do
nice
things for them.

She had met girls from town who were majors at university also. They were all majors at university. And their being accepted by the new world didn’t hinge on being able to cook or clean or sew, but on having the right attitude about things, like women’s rights. And suddenly she felt she must have this attitude also.

Suddenly she thought of an off-colour joke Madonna told, and flushed. She was such a case, that Madonna!

“Oh, my bird feeder,” she thought. “What will I do about my bird feeder?”

She left the highway and proceeded down the lane, limed to keep down the dust from the traffic, making her way through the woods towards the field below her house,

She thought of Madonna’s joke, felt agitated, excited and wet.

The wind began to blow, and the tops of the trees waved. The path was rooted, and leaves had fallen over it. There had not been a sinister moment for her this summer. But now, everything affirmed itself suddenly as sinister.

She saw someone in front of her who had a scarf pulled up over his face and he was standing next to a tree.

“I’m not going to jail for you or either is
he?
he said. “So what evidence do you have?”

It startled her. She didn’t know what he meant.

“You’ll start blabbing — you stupid little cunt.”

She smiled, and then her face froze into that smile when he mentioned that awful word. She knew it was Silver, with the silly scarf- the same one Madonna wore hunting.

Karrie had no idea what he was saying.

“Take that stupid scarf off, Silver,” she managed to say. She looked around and there was no one near them.

“You’re not going anywhere until you promise to give me the evidence you say you have!” He startled her by coming out of the trees beside her, with the scarf pulled down. “What, you take something, to give to the police? What? If Everette goes to jail over this he’ll kill us all.”

“You wait and see — we are going away! To Spain or something like that there —” She looked at him and became terrified. “I mean — I promise Michael and I are going away- and we won’t bother anyone again!”

“Michael! He’s the last person who would take you anywhere.” Silver laughed. He laughed such an awful laugh.

The trees moved in the wind, and a bird screeched.

Then came a moment when she realized he would not be able to let her go. That this conversation had precipitated an action he had not reckoned on. She realized this at the exact instant he did, and both of them looked at one another, startled.

“Tom,” she said. “Tommie!”

She turned to run back to Tom, still trying to smile. There was a blow to her head and she went to hold it, and then fell She started to vomit. She tried to stand, and she saw his hands. She suddenly remembered those hands as he had leaned against the door the very first day she had gone to the farmhouse.

“Hey, you,” she said, to call upon his humanity “Hey, you just listen.” She managed, but she was losing consciousness.

What she was going to tell Michael’s father about was the fact that they had gotten becalmed and had broken the spinnaker on the sailboat, and Silver said he wouldn’t help pay for it. That was the
secret
she was going to tell, to send them to jail.

And then suddenly, a rage descended upon her. She felt as enraged at the wasted time in her life, the tragic sorrow of her life, which seemed all the more sorrowful because she had bought that poetry book of Robert Frost, and no one would ever get to read it. At the loss of her life, and the child she might have held, as any human being who ever existed. She felt sorrow at the sound of voices calling her name, of those she would no longer be able to help. Then quite suddenly she began to know and to understand. And in knowing, she wanted only these things — to see and hug Madonna, to ask Tom’s and her father’s forgiveness — to long for a reconciliation between her and the entire world — to hope in love and justice for all humanity — to —

“Silver, don’t you understand? You will pay,” she managed to say, with a good amount of bravery, and then she closed her eyes, as she saw the terrible rock descend.

He didn’t mean to kill her. He would maintain that forever and ever. He only wanted to scare her away, because he’d been worried for two weeks and hadn’t been able to sleep, and was sniffing glue and taking bennies.

He hit her nine times, but she was dead after the third blow. He felt her dying, life leaving her. He hit her until a bit of brain came out the side of her head above her ear. Suddenly to Silver it was as if he could see her watching from above as he kept hitting her, as if she was telling him she was dead, and not to be frightened of her any more.

But he kept hitting her, talking to her the whole time. And then the voice above him stopped talking to him, and she just went away.

Then there wasn’t a sound. She was curled up sideways, and he rolled her over. There was blood all over the path and on his hands and clothes. He had to do something about that. And he ran. He had not meant to do it this way, but now that he had he tried to force it out of his mind.

Michael was at the party at Laura McNair’s. All evening he believed he was working himself up to an announcement — a full disclosure of what he had done that summer. At first he thought he would tell her while everyone was present. But this didn’t seem possible. As he sat looking at her parents, at her, at her friends, time marched along and his nerve failed him.

What prompted this change of heart was seeing Laura’s face, the poignancy of her decision to hold a party- Michael had not known it was in his honour until he got there. She was playing her own matchmaker. And she had invited friends of hers, whom she thought could be friends of his — a small man with hornrimmed glasses who was studying Celtic mythology and pretended to be a wine-taster. A woman who had been to Ryerson, but not when he had been there. A female member of the ndp, who used her womanhood to evoke privilege.

In all ways, her parents were kind, decent people who had not had a lot of good fortune. And he knew, looking at them rushing about, that they thought
he
was. He was to be their good fortune. The worst of it was, he now wished he could be.

Laura asked him to give a speech. The woman from the ndp sat forward and smiled. The little man with the hornrimmed glasses stood in the centre of the floor with his head down, as if terribly embarrassed.

Michael stood proudly “If only there is time,” he said, “I too will have a life.”

And he took Laura’s hand. Everyone laughed when he said this. It was a strange thing for a man of twenty-four to say

He left Laura’s house just after one o’clock and did not go downriver. At his parents’ house he started to phone Karrie, but decided against it. He sat on the edge of his bed, looking vacantly about the room.

“Poor Karrie,” he said aloud and felt what he had never felt before — a rush of kindly, innocent feeling towards her.

Silver had washed himself in the bay, and had thrown the rock into the waves. He went back to his house through the woods, hid his clothes and scarf behind the wall of the shed, where he kept his tool board, and got a clean pair of jeans from the dryer.

He grabbed a screwdriver and tucked it into his pants in case he had to defend himself.

Then he went back to Michael Skid’s farmhouse. A few boys were there drinking but Michael was away at a party in town, they told him. This seemed to relieve him quite a bit.

No one paid any attention to him, or to his nervousness. He examined himself carefully. There was no blood at all on his shoes. The blood on his hands had been washed away He moved those hands nervously.

Then he sat down for a while, laughing and talking, and asked three or four times where Karrie was.

But suddenly he left the house.

When he came to the black spot on the path he hoped that he wouldn’t see her. That she wouldn’t be there, but would have gotten up and gone home. Yet she was still there. Her blue eyes were half-opened, staring at the sky. One arm was out behind her.

He undid her pantsuit and took it off, and then took her panties off He was thinking of undoing her bra but didn’t. He pushed it up over her breasts, and touched them both just slightly. Then he didn’t know what else to do. He couldn’t enter her, though he thought that was why he must have done all those things. Her body was turning blue and cold and — what was terrible — it was absolutely indifferent to him. He tried to masturbate but he couldn’t.

And then he just stared at her, and realized that there was money piled inside her panties, and under her blouse. There were hundreds of dollars.

He picked the money up, and shoved it in his pants, looking back over his shoulder as he began to tremble.

Then he sat a little away from her, staring at her crotch, and its downy, whitish blonde hair, moving almost imperceptibly in the wind. It was impossible for him not to.

He didn’t know why this made him feel so sorry for her life, and how precious and vulnerable life was.

He went back along the path towards the gas bar with her panties and a hundred-dollar bill in his hand, and the three or four things he had taken from her pants pocket.

Suddenly coming towards him, smoking his pipe, was Vincent. Silver dropped the panties.

He went off to the side and watched him pass. But Vincent bent over, picked up the panties, and the hundred-dollar bill which had fallen on them too, and looked around.

“Hello,” he said. “Hello, you.”

Vincent waited for what Silver thought was an eternity And then he moved off down the path in the direction of the farm. Silver could smell his own sweat, and his body odour, and worse, he could smell Karrie’s body all over him. It was her body he could smell — her blood, her urine, her faeces, her brain, all of which had come from her as he hit her.

Worse, he remembered Tom’s horrible look that night at the house, when he’d given him wine. If Tom ever knew this he would kill him in a second.

“I have to act smart,” he whispered to a tree directly in front of him.
If Vincent finds the body,
he thought,
it could be blamed on him.
“It weren’t my fault anyway”

He then continued on the path, and suddenly — for all things seemed to be very sudden now — he decided there must be more money at Emmett and Dora Smith’s. He didn’t quite know why, but felt there must be.

He went around to the patio door, the one Karrie had stepped out that night when seduced by Michael, and slid it open.

The house was silent, and its unfamiliar shadows bothered him. He went into the kitchen, with its new linoleum, and its brass pot above the stove, and its oven mitts hanging above the roasting oven from a wooden oven-mitt holder that was shaped like a small cat.