The Bay of Love and Sorrows (2 page)

Karrie put on a kerchief and lipstick, and she and Vincent started on their way it was well after ten.

They could hear the waves crashing far beyond them and, beyond the dark immovable trees, they heard the roar of Arron Brook, which always stayed high, and which Vincent was told never to go near.

Thin clouds swept the night sky, like crooked hawks, and the moon shone on the old potato field to their right, behind some forlorn hedges. Wrappers and cardboard lay in the ditches that once had many flowers. It made Karrie melancholy and sad to think of this road, and those broken trees, and her mother, who used to come in from work every night at quarter past five all winter long, and who died during a simple appendix operation.

As they approached the halfway mark of their journey Karrie ran out of things to ask Vincent about Tom, and things to say about herself, so she kept talking about the moon, and the clouds, and wasn’t it a lovely night — and how many more nights would they have just like this?

They saw a man approaching them along the road. His body looked strong and fit, without ever taking pains to be.

“Tommie — Tommie,” Vincent yelled, and ran up to him, patting him all over the chest and shoulders. “Tommie, Tommie.”

“Thank God,” Tom said. It was at this moment, and with a certain amount of emotion, that Karrie realized how protective Tom was of his brother.

“I brought him home for you,” Karrie said, and emotion rang in her voice.

“Thank you,” Tommie said. “Thank you, thank you. My God, I thought he had gone up Arron Brook.”

“Thank you, thank you,” Vincent said, turning around. “But she has to come and see my puppy”

“Oh, the puppy,” Tommie said, smiling.

“It doesn’t matter,” Karrie said.

“Oh no — come on up to the house — come on — have a cup of tea — all right?” Tom said. “Please, I want you to — I wanted to invite you over before now.”

“Okay,” she said.

And off they went, the three of them together.

The puppy, named Maxwell, stayed in Vincent’s part of the house, and Vincent had his own key to the door. He was proud when he was able to open this door, and prouder still that Maxwell ran to him before anyone and began to pee. Karrie did not like puppies very much but she pretended to for Vincent’s sake. And she patted its matted fur with her painted fingernails, crouching down on her haunches.

Vincent was very pleased that Karrie could see his pictures of his mom and dad, and even more pleased when she said she liked the room, and found it “just right” for him.

She had a cup of tea. The wind was blowing, and the trees waved in the darkness. Far below them they could see the streetlight over her house, which her father was proud of.

Each time Tom spoke she would nod and look away from him, and then bite at her lower lip, as if afraid that she was going to say something inappropriate. He seemed so strong and self-reliant at this moment that she felt he wouldn’t look upon her as anything but a schoolgirl. And as she sat there she felt her legs shaking just slightly.

She finished her tea too quickly, she thought, and then thought she was too abrupt when she said she didn’t want another.

“Do you want me to walk you home?” Tom said.

“Well, okay,” she said, as if angry with something.

And they started down the road together.

“I didn’t come to your graduation party, or your graduation either,” he said.

“I know,” she said. There was a peculiar emphasis on the word
know
that sounded, in the dark night, longing and sensuous.

“I wanted to — but I don’t know what to do at them things — and then I wanted to tell you that in church — but you were busy lighting candles, I think to your mom’s memory, and so I couldn’t. And then — well, you ran out the back way, while I waited for you. I haven’t been able to figure out when I was going to see you at the right time. A long time ago I tried to ask you for a dance — but I couldn’t get up the nerve, I s’pose.”

“You did — ?” she asked. There was a tiny smile at the corner of her mouth, just visible, which because of the way she was walking, with her arms folded like a country girl, seemed indispensable to her character.

“I don’t know ‘nough to go up to no graduation,” he said. “I shoulda answered ya — and then I thought ya might have been mad at me — or eventually I thought you had a boyfriend — Bobby Taylor is always over there at the store.”

She burst out laughing and turned and hugged him. He could feel her warm body press into him, and he was somehow overwhelmed by her. Instinctively he felt he must hold her the right way or lose her to someone else.

“Bobby Taylor,” she laughed. “He’s already engaged!“

She looked up at him in a very strange way, as if asking a question, and then, without finding an answer, hugged him hard again.

Snow started falling by November, like ash out of the sky, over the tortured clearcut to the north.

The sun sat all day in one angry spot, which showed a cluster of dead crab-apple trees, and sometimes in the wind there was a rush of small, grey birds, taking wing at the exact same time. The potato field was nothing more than stubble and cold earth, and the great bay had turned black and solid.

Karrie had gone away to a community college and Tom was alone. He would take walks down the dry lane, in the afternoon, while the sky was red, and come home, seeing Maxwell sitting near its doghouse with its tin disk

That fall there was a large ten-point buck roaming the chop-down, and by the second week of November Tom was in the woods every day crossing Arron Brook and waiting for it above the small interlinking deer trails.

The path to Brassaurds’ lay through thick woods, where the buck had left scrapes, and once in a while Tom would see the tawny bronzed back of the two year-old doe just out of sight along the upper ridge.

The path to Brassaurds’ never seemed to catch the light of the weak sun that filtered in strange dark sadness in Arron Brook’s pools. Old deadwood and fallen leaves and parts of broken machinery lay along this trail, where the wind seemed to whisper. And halfway along the path was the old gravestone, half buried and moss-eaten, of Guillaume Brassaurd.

One day during the last week of November Tom put on his boots, took his rifle, and walked far into the woods, almost to Brassaurds’ property. He picked up a fresh trail, and in a snow-squall at mid-afternoon saw the buck coming towards him, nose to the ground.

He fired somewhat thoughtlessly, and was suddenly sorry. The buck turned sideways and ran, and Tom followed it, picking up a trail of blood, just before dark.

“Damn me — the poor old boy’s gone to lay down,” Tom thought. He was angry with himself, because he thought of the doe, and how she was alone. He stood and looked at the trees, and felt sad. Then he heard another shot, from a shotgun, very close to him.

He waited a moment and walked, bent over, through some tangle and brush, and in a few minutes came out on the old deer trail near Brassaurds’ property line. He saw the buck down and Madonna Brassaurd kneeling beside it with a scarf about her face, and a twenty-gauge pump in her hands. The buck had its head turned back, its tines dug into the snow behind it.

She looked up at Tom and, taking the scarf down, smiled.

“You sent it right to me,” she said.

“No,” he said. “It was real sick after I shot it — “

“Oh, but I was the one who killed it,” she said. “Karrie’s gone?”

“Commun’ty college,” Tom said.

“Oh — I bet she’s already at you to take upgrading, so you be smart as she is, or she’ll fly away from you,”

Tom gave a laugh because of Madonna’s remarkable eyes fastened upon him, “What are you lads doin in here, poachin moose? I found half a carcass up near Arron — and you’ll find a 30.30 bullet in your buck.”

“Tom, yer just scared there won’t be any left for you,” she said,

The Brassaurds always said what they felt others were thinking, and never minded what they said. And the fact that Tom was very protective of animals made this remark scald him. But many untruths had been said about him, just as they had been said about his parents, who were both wild, and he felt the untruths would continue,

“Don’t want you up on my property killing moose,” he said, though he liked Madonna and always had,

“Do you know who came home last night?” she said, deflecting his statement with customary nonchalance, as she took out her knife,

“No — don’t,” he said,

“Mike Skid.”

Tom didn’t answer. The wind blew against his open coat, and his grey eyes watered.

“He’s been to India and back,” she said.

“Well, he’s got time on his hands.” Tom smiled. “Don’t he?”

She glanced up at him and cursed, her hands over blood, and said: “He’s turning into something of a photographer — and is going to put all his photographs out in a book. A publisher has already talked to him. So I want him to take some photos of me — it’d be my chance.”

Then she moved around him on the path, and pumped her shells out. “And he is writing an article about the private school he went to and is waiting for the right time to publish it.”

Tom had heard all of this before. He felt a little resentful that Michael was now telling these same stories to Madonna Brassaurd.

Tom looked at the air directly in front of him and could see the sky blurred by small flakes of snow,

Madonna bent over to take the buck’s testicles in her hands and cut them off, but then frowned: “Tom — you do this — will you? — and I’ll give you some steak.”

When they were finished, he helped her drag the buck out to the road near her property where she had left her sled.

“Are you going to tag this?” he said.

“Tom, why don’t you give me your tag? I used mine up.” The wind blew stiff against her old orange cap, and against the deer’s dull, sad, staring eyes. Again she looked at him and, with her scarf pulled up over her face, she resembled the bandit she was.

Tom made his way back along the path to his house after dark. Snow came out of the sky in large, wet flakes. There was blood on the path, and the intestines near the river were golden in the cold sharp air.

He for one couldn’t travel the world. He liked it where he was. An old piece of machinery covered in new-fallen snow, off on the side of the path, and the old tombstone sunken into the earth with white snow falling on it proved this to him once again. He breathed the air, was happy with his lot. And then suddenly a small flame of angry thought flickered inside him, as he turned towards Arron Brook. Because, having known Michael for three years, things remained unresolved between them.

The first was the remark Michael had made about Karrie, two winters before.

They had gone to the Christmas party at the community centre. Tom walked the floor all night, going by her table. Yet he couldn’t find the courage to ask her for a dance. Finally, she got up and began dancing with another girl and Tom, embarrassed, left the building and started home. The snow was piled very high on the side of the road, and snow was still falling out of a black sky,

Michael came outside and, walking behind him, teased him all the way home,

“If you can’t ask her to dance, how’ll you ever get it in her?”

The remark was forgotten the next day, because Tom knew Michael was so drunk he hadn’t remembered anything. And Tom never mentioned Karrie to him again,

The second issue was the way Michael spoke about his past that Christmas night. He told Tom about his former girlfriend,

“Don’t laugh,” he kept saying, as if he was used to people laughing at true emotion in his life, or as if he laughed at this himself, at the private school he had gone to as a boy. Then he cursed her to the ground, in a show of bravado,

But Tom found nothing at all to laugh about, and felt pity for Michael cursing her. Her name was Nora Battersoil.

“I was wild, I guess. I told her we could go away I waited for her to come and meet me — we were going to run away together, We were seventeen, eighteen, I had flunked out of school that year, and had fourteen hundred dollars saved, God knows where we would have ended up. But she should have contacted me — the fuckin bitch, I never would have betrayed her!”

“I know about it,” Tom said,

“Well, then — do you know why she broke up?”

“No,” Tommie said, but he was lying.

Michael did not speak about her any more. He drank from a pint bottle of Captain Morgan’s white rum, and, holding a piece of meat pie in his hand, he began to wave it about half-angrily, half-jubilantly. He spoke about being forced to go to private school and having to wear a uniform when he was eleven years old. How his mother and father were small-town snobs to send him away. And how it had ruined his life, because he couldn’t make friends there, and was bullied, and then found it hard to make friends here. He stared at Tom a long time, his eyes glittering with drink, his meat pie with a bite out of it, his head cocked sideways. “Yes,” he said suddenly, “I’ll show you it!”

“What will you show me?”

“You’re the only one I’ll show it to, you’re the only friend I have.”

And he took an envelope with the draft of an article he was working on from his inside coat pocket. It was written on regular lined binder pages, in red and blue pen, scratched and scribbled over. Tom initially felt privileged that Michael would show him this article. But as he read it he discovered dark secrets, which ultimately took the form of tattling on others.