The Bay of Love and Sorrows (24 page)

So much so that in the fall of 1973 she quit her own Catholic church and joined the Salvation Army, as a member and a volunteer.

She helped take care of drives for food, fundraising for events, and, in 1974, books for the prison library,

One day in November 1974 she was given a box that had been sent down by Mrs. Fewella Skid. In this she found a brooch of a sailboat with the name
Karrie
on it. And at the bottom of the box was a small volume of poetry by Robert Frost

Mrs. Skid, when sending these things along that particular day, did not have any idea who she was sending them to.

For Nora it brought back painful memories and desires, and the kind of self-incrimination she’d always felt because her father had refused to stand up for her, threatened her with the belt, and called her a whore.

Karrie Smith had been her first-cousin, but she had lost contact with her after Karrie’s mother died. She remembered Karrie one afternoon, the last year of high school, as she ran down the hall, touching the lockers with her hands. She had been so happy at that moment. But Nora did not see Karrie again.

Twice that fall she had seen Michael Skid in town, walking arm in arm with Laura McNair. On both occasions Michael, his thick black hair falling to his shoulders, his piercing eyes as brilliant as ever, did not see her himself. Now he was writing a book on Karrie and seemed to be talked about, however grudgingly, as a very heroic man. And she was happy for him.

Thinking of this she placed the brooch in her pocket, and sent the volume of poetry to the prison library in the centre of the province.

Then she went out, on a cold snowy day towards the end of November, to ring her Salvation Army bell at the grey liquor store near the corner.

A week later she received a letter from a man at the prison. That man was Tommie Donnerel.

Nora Battersoil didn’t answer. But a few days later, with the smell of cold snow mingled with ice and the sunlight frozen across the tin roof with its rusted rivets, she received another letter from him.

It was a letter wishing her a Merry Christmas. He never mentioned his time, except to say that he could do two lifetimes if he could only be sure Karrie had not suffered. And he was now reading Stephen Crane.

This letter begged an answer more than the first, so she replied, somewhat sternly. She told him that though she too prayed that Karrie had not suffered, it was unconscionable to think that she had not. She added that she hoped he was in good health, but that he should read the Bible more and literature less, and added that she knew Vincent was not responsible for his actions and therefore was at peace.

Tommie Donnerel received the letter on December 11, his second full month in prison.

The day after he received this letter he was down in the small barren gym watching some men play basketball. He kept looking out the window at snow falling against the mesh, and trying to see as much of the sky as he could. He was wondering if Nora was the same woman Michael Skid knew a number of years before, and he was also thinking that he would be allowed TV privileges this night to watch the Christmas special

As he stood there a man walked by him with his arms folded. Then looking up at him and smiling he shoved a homemade shiv into his chest.

“Here, this is a treat for you,” he said, his face twisted in raw glee. The handle had a piece of rubber attached to it, and it vibrated slightly as it stuck in. The hope, of course, was that it would break off in Tommie’s chest. He was Everette Hutch’s friend, the man Laura McNair had prosecuted for the rape of the young woman. He was doing this as a favour for Everette, who would now, he believed, be obligated to kill Laura McNair for him.

Tommie dropped backwards, hit his head, and everyone started whistling, clapping, laughing. The man stood over him, giving the knife a tug sideways and trying to break the blade off.

“I can’t get it,” he said.

Then he went to the other side of the gym, furtively, and stood with the group. He went out onto the court alone, took the basketball and tried to throw a basket from the key, as if this would increase his popularity, and Tommie’s blood ran onto the floor.

Tom awoke in the hospital in Moncton. The shiv had missed his heart but had punctured a lung. Both the doctors and nurses, though they did everything they could to save him, maintained a dismissive attitude towards him.

In the seven nights he spent in hospital he received two get-well cards, one from Nora Battersoil, the other from Madonna Brassaurd.

The first night, when he was on morphine, he had a dream. And then another almost exactly the same three nights later after they had taken him off the morphine drip.

In the first dream Vincent was standing on the far side of the room. He was not Vincent as Tom had known him, but Vincent as he might have been. He approached Tom smiling and he bent down and showed Tom his head. There was no wound there any more.

“The doctor I have knows how to cure it,” Vincent seemed to say

Then he showed him his pipe, which was not nibbled at on the stem like it had been, but was silver, and bubbles came from it and disappeared into the wide, blue sky above him.

“I like your pipe — did you get it at the gas bar?”

“No — you can’t get a pipe like this at the gas bar — but I want to show you something.”

Suddenly Vincent became solemn, and he turned about. Someone spoke to him and said: “Not now”

And Vincent smiled and nodded, and disappeared.

There was some incident in this first dream that Tom tried desperately to remember. But as long as the pain was severe and he was kept on morphine he couldn’t.

Then, on the night after they had taken him off the morphine drip, he had the second dream.

In this dream, Vincent came into the room. He was wearing his jacket. He took out a picture of Karrie and him at the picnic. It wasn’t the picnic they had gone to with Tom. Karrie was wearing the pantsuit Tom last saw her wearing. She and Vincent were smiling, looking up at someone.

“Look into the picture,” Vincent said, as if this was most important. “Tom you
must
look into the picture — see? Not like in my room — it’s quite a different picture.”

“Will he
know?”
came the voice on the other side of his bed.

In the dream Tom felt terrified. For a moment he looked at the picture as Vincent had asked him to do. And then he turned. Sitting on the chair to his left was Karrie. He knew it was her, but he couldn’t recognize her. He only saw her smile, which caused a light to glow in front of her face.

“You must not ever worry, Tommie — I am to inform you that the clutch is fixed. You must tell Madonna to find the distributor cap for you. You must tell Michael to spend his time now to search for the good answer, and he will find it helping those he does not yet know. You must wait for Nora Battersoil at the window of the bus.” And she smiled in angelic delight.

When he turned back Vincent was gone. And he awoke.

For two days he didn’t understand the dream. The hospital was grey and hot, filled with weak and smiling clerics, and he began to run a fever. They were worried about infection and changed his bandages three times a day.

On the third day a nurse named Sally came in to change his bandages at four in the afternoon. He was sitting up, looking about morosely as she unwrapped him.

“No spots of blood today,” she said as she crumpled the soiled bandage in her hands. He came awake and looked at her.

“Yes,” he said, quietly. “Yes, yes — yes, yes!” “She looked at him curiously, and then wrote on her clipboard and left the room promptly, her white uniform hugging her hips so that he could see the outline of her slip.

Tom kept looking about for someone to talk to. But then he never spoke to a soul. He waited vainly for another dream so he could tell Karrie and Vincent that he understood. But there would be no more dreams of them. He was transferred back to the prison, along the old back road on a sunless day. It was now December 18. Snow and dirt crowded the ditches, the air was sharp and metallic. He sat in the back seat, handcuffed and staring at the white ice of the strait, and the white formless houses that they passed.

In the picture, in his dream, Karrie and Vincent were looking up at someone in mesmerized joy. And Vincent’s hands were glowing, resting on the cane stand. There were no spots of blood.

After Karrie’s funeral, things happened as always. As always, laughter and life returned.

Everette Hutch still kept his bike in the back room of Gail Hutch’s shack, the crankshaft sitting in oil and lubricant, with white rags in the cylinder heads. He still took morphine for the burns he had suffered and the doctors were still frightened of him, and turned their backs when he rustled pills from their cabinets. He still wondered why things never worked out for him, still threatened people, still played cards, and his uncles still ran errands for him, the old aunt still laughing at them when they did.

Dora Smith and her husband still slept in separate parts of the house, and each night, as always, she made her way over to the gas bar after supper to flirt with certain young men.

The young men still came, even though it was not the same. Vincent was no longer there, as a comforting person to graciously tease, and Karrie was no longer there, as a young woman to look at and admire, though the pair of gloves that she liked to wear to church sat on the inside window sill near some old bottles of fly dope and mosquito repellent.

The worry over where the money had gone, the feeling she had that the police were suspicious, the worry that Emmett wanted to confess because of remorse, aggravated the skin condition on her hands, and made Dora’s life miserable. And that was why Karrie’s gloves were on the inside window sill

By November John Delano had forgotten about Laura McNair.

But he had not given up on the case, which had too many unanswered questions. He was puzzled by the robbery. And he was puzzled by Michael Skid’s trip to Fredericton. No one else was. Yet one day when he had to drive over to the main office in Fredericton he decided to see Professor Becker. Constable Deborah Matchett thought it ridiculous and petty for Delano to keep at it, but he could not help himself, and so he met with the professor for over an hour.

A few days later, John went downriver and walked the path. Some partridge hunters were in the field, and the air was warm. He could hear a little brook running, and the sky was blue. The trees trembled, their leaves gone red. He came to where Karrie Smith was murdered. He was a methodical, careful man. He understood houses like Karrie’s, and meanness over nothing at all.