The Bay of Love and Sorrows (23 page)

“And this was how he was repaid, in part tortured himself, because of his brother’s cowardice and jealousy, not responsible for his actions, and yet driven to protect his baby brother to the end. And who was there with him, Tommie Donnerel — if not in person — by proxy. But you couldn’t do it yourself, could you — ?” Here she shrugged and, at the same moment as she turned away, said, “So get Vincent.”

Which left a deep impression on everyone.

For a moment there was silence. They all looked at Tommie, who could not stop shaking. She walked around to her side of the table and, without looking at him again, said, in disgust.

“And here he stands shaking like a leaf, a coward in a brown suit, in front of us.” But this comment brought comic relief to everyone, and they burst out laughing. Tom too, looked around and smiled. Only old Mr. Jessop, seated near the front, looked too saddened to smile.

“Hang him!” someone shouted.

“Enough,” Judge Skid said.

Tom Donnerel’s lawyer, impressed by Ms. McNair, whom he’d been told to keep an eye on, kept trying to adjust his glasses, and, shaking as much as Tom, asked for mercy, said two lives were already destroyed here — show leniency towards the third. Then he nodded and sat down.

It was quiet again.

And then Judge Skid spoke: “If there were law enough to hang you, sir, I would. You have disgraced yourself in the eyes of man and God — I sentence you now to twelve years.”

A displeased murmur went up in the crowd. Then in the balcony and out in the foyer, the murmur spread.

“Only twelve years — only twelve years.”

“Yes, but they didn’t prove it, he confessed.”

“So — so what — only twelve years.”

Tom could not stop being afraid. He kept hoping that someone, anyone, would look at him in kindness. He wanted someone to tell him how it had all come about, wanted someone to tell him how things had got so bad. He kept looking for Michael’s face amid all the other faces, but Michael wasn’t there. In the end, he tried to speak about the mare, and little Snowflake. Who would take care of them now?

Tom wrote Judge Skid a long letter of apology from prison. In it was the testimony of a man trying to reorder his life and to gain back his self-respect.

“I asere you, sir,” he wrote, misspelling the word
assure,
but liking the word because it was one Karrie had used when she spoke to him of her love, “that I will do everything in my power to change my life and be a decent human beink. That I have wronged others I am awere of, but I will never harm a soul no more. I didn’t know this about poor Vincent — how he fell off the wherf — it was a brave thing he done for me. Now I will member that as long as I live — and member that whenever anything is done to me, even if I was hit, I cannot do nothin to them. I will member that to the end of my days. I wish God to bless you — sir. And hole no grudge.”

The judge wrote a formal reply where he spoke of mercy as being in the hands of God, and that the judge was simply the instrument of the law. He said he was pleased that a man like Tom Donnerel might consider reforming. But he added that at this moment he had no kind words of encouragement to give.

“It was a case — so sorrowfully senseless and brutal, one of the most difficult I’ve ever had to sit before. That my own son was involved in a minor way in trying to help this young woman seemed to make some conflict upon my sitting, but I was and am the principal provincial court appointee and regarded it as duty. As regards your property, it was burned, and is in the hands of the law. So I suppose if there was money hidden it is now destroyed.

“I take no pleasure in informing you about this, and you can be guaranteed it will be investigated to the fullest extent.”

Then, pleased with this note, he mailed it on, but couldn’t help telling the postal clerk what it contained.

The postal clerk nodded gravely, and stamped it accordingly. He felt a twinge of happiness, because the judge had confided in him, and because he himself had known Tommie Donnerel, and had taken Karrie Smith to the high-school prom, where she had treated him meanly.

His life had turned out well compared to theirs. And then he thought of Karrie, and how her body had been found nude. And as he remembered how attractive she was in high school, with the wonderfully suggestive and still innocent sway of her hips in her pleated skirt one day running down the hallway, a sudden obscene pleasure took hold of him, which he felt in his groin, and which he tried to dismiss.

For a while the judge was bothered by Mr. and Mrs. Smith, who had taken comfort in his words at court, and believed them all, and began visiting Michael at the house. Dora, wearing a black dress with a lace front, which made her white breastbone look like it was marked by blue ink, sat in the large chair drinking tea out of the best china, holding a Kleenex up to her nose.

“My, what a fine, grand house — this musta cost somethin now,” she would say, with humiliating graciousness.

She talked nonstop about Karrie to Michael’s mother, who soon had the habit of sitting on the far side of the room, continually glancing out at the street.

Once when Judge Skid said he was sorry she was robbed, she answered: “Yes, my money is gone, let alone Karrie.”

She brought some things over that Michael might want as souvenirs — the brooch of a sailboat, with the name
Karrie
engraved under it, and, again, the book of Robert Frost’s poems. It had come back to Mrs. Smith by way of Madonna, who had been given the duty of cleaning the sailboat before it was housed for the winter, making sure that the remnants of the fatal summer were removed forever.

Michael took this book and opened it while they were there. His own responsibility was measured in the fact that he had not done enough, he said suddenly to them. And he suddenly felt this to be absolutely true. That he had known Tom Donnerel and had seen all the signs but had done nothing about it. The Smiths both protested, Dora especially.

But more than this, Michael was burdened by an agitated remembrance of Karrie’s strangely sad smile when she spoke of her parents one afternoon. He could not forget it. She had looked at him in a wistful way and had said, “Oh, Dora” so plaintively that it still haunted him.

It seemed for a while that Michael could not get rid of her parents, and had a dreary time during these prolonged visits, which happened with annoying regularity. He began to be able to distinguish the sound of their car from all the others driving down his street that fall, and to go upstairs and sit in his room, waiting for their visits to end.

Karrie’s book he gave to the Salvation Army, along with the old brooch and other things, because it reminded him of those forlorn events. And his father thought that this was a reasonable thing to do.

As it happened he felt guilty about these events, even though he was unaware. In a way he felt responsible for Tom, and hadn’t been able to go to the courtroom to watch the trial of his friend. And even though no one bothered him now, and he was free of the summer, he still felt these things. He felt guilty because of Karrie’s smile. This disturbed him more than he had initially thought it would.

The autumn faded. And cold weather came. Quite suddenly everything about the summer seemed over. The wind blew cold, and children were back at school.

Michael then played his trump card. He finally finished the long article on his private school near Sackville, which he had been working on for over two years, and which would be published in the
Moncton Times.
It contained interviews with certain students and made accusations against the drama teacher, who had various relationships with his students. It would not have been published had he not been
the
Michael Skid, associated with
the
Karrie Smith.

Yet because it was published, the article caused Michael’s name to be spoken about, and his old drama teacher, Mr. Love, was forced to resign. Suddenly, all the dark corners, the small mean suppers, the warped floors, the old back buildings, took on a different, more odious slant. And the world of this particular provincial private school with its subterranean values was exposed.

That he had been working on this, quietly and without giving any hints, seemed remarkable to his chagrined parents in the cold days of late autumn.

Michael was then offered a contract by a publishing house in Toronto to write a book on Karrie Smith, the events of the summer, which had briefly made the national news and pricked something in the national consciousness. He said yes, and set about, he felt, to tell the truth as best he could about the murder. Not to spare anyone and to ultimately show that
his
values — the values of the new man — were much superior, say, to the values of his old friend Tom Donnerel. He felt that he was a moral representative of his age group. There were those young men and women who were liberal and believed in what had to be done to secure equality for everyone and there were those who still clung tenaciously to the repressive dogma of a former time, of community and church. Michael believed more than ever that he belonged to the former group, the best group, the more inclusive group.

One night in early November he went for a walk after working all day on the first part of the first draft of his book. A young woman came out of the side door of the courthouse and moved ahead of him in the rain. She wore a yellow sou’wester and a matching rain jacket. He walked behind her for some time, and suddenly realized who it was. He had not seen her since the trial

“Laura,” he said, and she turned and gave a quick smile. “Oh, Laura,” he said. “It’s — you.”

“Oh, my God,” she said, “I was just thinking that you might have gone away, now that you’re famous, and I wouldn’t get to see you again. I was going to phone and ask you up, but you just lost your friend Karrie — and it’s horrible about Tom. Then I waited for you one night at the theatre — but you must have gone out another door.”

A car passed and its lights shone on her startled childlike face.

And for some reason she started to cry. And he went over and hugged her.

In a way, all that autumn at home, Michael was treated like a hero by his apologetic and relieved parents. And he was very relieved too. Soon he and Laura were inseparable, and then impulsively, because Michael was always impulsive, engaged to be married. And everything had turned out for him as well

Nora Battersoil had gone to work in grade ten at the small bowling alley in town. She was a thin, nervous girl and felt she was homely and would not be loved.

She met Michael Skid and fell in love and had a son out of wedlock in 1969, whom she named Owen after her grandfather. Michael did not know about this son, and she did not tell him, because he was wild. She did not want to burden him with what she considered an unnecessary request for sponsorship.

She felt that this was a brave decision on her part, because she did love him.

She had to tell her family she was pregnant but would not name the father, so her father blamed everything on her, and said terrible things she could never forget. So she left home. And, except for her little sister, Amy, who sometimes took care of the child when Nora visited the house once or twice a year, she never communicated very much with the rest of her family.