The Bay of Love and Sorrows (26 page)

She had no idea that all that money — all those thousands of dollars — had been hidden by her brother the day she was at Karrie’s funeral. That this money was hidden almost directly under her feet, as she tapped them together, hauled on her inhaler, and sang a Christmas song.

That same night Silver waited for Madonna to come in from town, where she was taking a secretarial course she had started in late September. He paced back and forth with his hands behind his back, his right hand holding on to the index finger of his left hand.

The course Madonna was taking in shorthand and typing, given in a small, red building that had been turned into an improvised schoolhouse at the height of the baby boom, was a course that by the very nature of the world would mean nothing in ten years.

Madonna was the oldest in her class and would be in town at ten minutes to eight every morning. The woman who taught her was perhaps the first woman who was not frightened of or mortified by her: Nora Battersoil.

Madonna came home that night at six o’clock. She made a supper of beans and wieners and brown bread left over from the evening before. Tomorrow was the last day of classes until after the holiday, and she was happy because she had made 85 per cent on her shorthand test.

Silver came downstairs and sat at the table, looked at her, and when she looked at him he put his head down as she said grace. He had just been asked by Everette Hutch to go into town to get Michael Skid. He was worried, and couldn’t think straight.

“Have you stopped screwing?” he asked her.

She looked up, blessed herself, and smiled.

“Are we going to get a tree?” she said. “Let’s get a tree this year.”

“Maybe — I dunno,” he said. He said he wanted to go to Ontario. He was worried. “I wish you was the way you was,” he said finally,

“Why?” she asked. “That was no way to be or to live.”

“Why not?”

“I caused so many trouble.”

“Ahhh,” he said in disgust.

She looked shy now. The way she had been was better. For instance, she had gone on a date with that businessman Everette had set up. Mr. Jupe, who had come to Hutch’s looking for a bottle of moonshine.

He was on his way to Tracadie, and was pleased with himself, pleased by his own plump nature, and the nature of his business, which was fish, and had a gold chain about his thick, brown neck, wore three rings and a watch which he said he had bought in Boston. Though married, he flirted with Madonna for weeks, encouraged because no one in the shack said anything to discourage him.

One afternoon, they did a lot of hash together. Then hugging her about the waist and cupping her breast he walked her to the car.

She drove with him down a dirt road, hit him over the head with a wine bottle, removed those rings, tied his hands behind his back, put him in the trunk of his car, which she drove to the dump, stripped him naked, kissing and fondling him so he begged her to make him come, stole his watch and wallet with four hundred dollars in it, and went on a three-day wine-and-bennie drunk, ending up at Hutch’s with a completely different man, and wearing the bathing suit Tommie Donnerel saw her wearing two months later.

She was no longer that girl And Silver worried about it.

However, other things now occupied Madonna’s mind. In a dream the night of the murder, at about three in the morning, Karrie appeared and hugged her, and handed her a present. This present was a small brooch in the shape of the sailboat with words upon it, and these words said:
Pick up your cross and follow
me.

In this dream Madonna had cried and said, “I don’t deserve none of this.”

But Karrie just smiled and hugged her again.

It would have been less extraordinary if she had known at the time that Karrie had been murdered.

“Poor Vincent,” Madonna said now. She had hardly eaten in a month and her body was thin, her face drawn.

“Deserved what he got —” Silver said, yawning. “Tom too. It’s sad — but eye for a eye Bible says.” He nodded at her again and wiped up some beans with his bread.

“I s’pose yer right,” Madonna said.

“A course I is right —” Silver said. “I mean, we knew that girl We was friends with her!” Then, agitated, he left the room.

She turned and he was looking at her from the living room, which was dark and cold and had but one small couch and chair. The kitchen light shone on his hands, but she couldn’t see his face because no light shone there.

“You must stop at this conjecture — you must know Tom is guilty. You must forget Nora Battersoil and her prying around you. You must stop hiding my distributor cap every time I get drunk. You must stop taking the bus back and forth every day to that damn course — you must stop thinking there is ever a good answer. And be the way you was. The way you was was better!”

Then, sad and alone, he walked upstairs to his room with tears flooding his eyes. If only they knew how sorry he was, they would be sorry and love him. Even Karrie.

His room had nothing except a picture of the
Bismarck
and some toy soldiers. The strange position he and Madonna had been forced into by their terrible fear of Everette Hutch had changed both of them radically and forever — but it was up to both how this change would finally manifest itself.

It was now nearing seven o’clock. Madonna sat at the table. Her beautiful eyes roamed the desperate little place. It had taken her a while to begin to think she could change, to find the new and wonderful life she was seeking on her own terms. When she cleaned the sailboat of its mescaline dust and hash, of its cups and saucers, she had been too frightened to go into the cutty because of how she and all of them had made fun of Karrie during that night trip to the Island. But finally she did. She rushed down the teakwood stairs and saw the poems of Robert Frost forgotten on the couch. It was at that moment, that very moment, the process of change began in her. It was a change that did not include that brilliant life she had once dreamed about when she had looked through the old glamour magazines over at the gas bar. The tight-waisted garments, the fashionable cosmetics that she felt must adorn a woman’s life. No. It was a very different life. A life she never ever thought, for a moment, until
that
moment, she would seek. But now she sought it. And now, her past life seemed a distorted jumble of drugs and sex and men, and was foreign to her.

Tonight, after cleaning the table, she went out to church. She had to decide something very quickly, and it was imperative that the decision be the right one. Time was running out. She had been procrastinating for over two months, and this was probably the reason Silver and Michael were both still alive.

The pews were dark and the candles fluttered and sputtered in their grates on the side of the altar. An altar girl carried the book out to the table, and the priest, his face white, and coarse with wrinkles, spat into his handkerchief and looked out the vestry door to spy the mean, sad congregation. He was the same priest who had said Karrie’s funeral Mass to that huge assembly that day, when he spoke of redemption and healing.

Madonna blessed herself and knelt and bowed her head. She smelled the worn pew and imagined the thousand thousand hands that had touched this pew since the church was built in 1853. The hands of tiny children or severe old ladies, soldiers, thieves, and citizens of the great world, gone. All gone in little frocks or old shawls, as distant with age as was Karrie.

She remembered the look she had given Karrie on the sailboat, and the time she had smiled and said: “Well, look at it this way — you no longer have a tight little cunt.” And Karrie had hung her head.

She did not know why she had said that. But it was a part of everything that summer, a way to get back at someone for something.

She had been going to church off and on since the murder, but All Saints’ Day was different. That day, her culpability in the summer struck her with a terrible force, suddenly and overwhelmingly. And when it did, as she knelt in the pew, it made
her
body seem dead. Awful enough by pride and arrogance, for her own body, to the wilful disregard of a young girl’s life, and the robbery of a pompous, sorrowful man.

And this is what flooded up from her breast over the sputtering of candles that day. And as soon as it — and it did seem to — spewed from her, she heard Vincent’s voice, as clear as a bell: “Karrie loves you, Madonna.”

And with tears of hope flooding her eyes, Madonna knew she would never be the same.

The vision of Karrie never came back after the first night, and had in effect evaporated.

That same night Silver visited Michael Skid. It was just before Michael was to go to the McNair house, for the party celebrating the upcoming wedding. The night was cold and airy, the sky filled with bright stars, the snow powdery on the streets, and the alleyways between the old houses looked warm with newly fallen snow.

Michael had laid out his suit — the one Tommie Donnerel had sent back to him — upon the bed, and was looking at his collection of silver cufflinks. It was a moment when he had let his guard down, the one moment when he was not thinking of the past.

It was anticipated by everyone, up until this moment, that it would be a great, if impulsive, wedding.

Silver hadn’t seen Michael since the funeral and stood inside the door looking small and remorseful. He breathed heavily, smiled glumly, and came to the task at hand. He gave Michael the message Everette had told him to bring. That Michael was instructed — and he used the word “instructed” — to go downriver and wait for Everette to come and see him at the farm.

“I can’t go now,” Michael said. “I won’t go.”

“If you don’t, it’ll all come out in the open,” Silver said, and he looked up at Michael. “I’ve tried to stop him — he’ll just come up and see your father with the tape.”

“What tape?”

“A tape he has made on you talking — over a whole month —” Silver shook his head like a little boy. “I listened to it. It’ll put us both in prison. One day on the sailboat — tons of things we said and did about the mescaline. He told me he just did it as a joke — but now he realizes how much he could get for it. That maybe he could sell it to your father — and he is ready to do that. He is thinking all kinds of fuckin things — Daryll is lookin for him — and so is that guy you met in New Carlisle. So he’s scared to go to Gail’s shack and I never know when or where he is going to show up. He’s like a fuckin ghost.”

Silver shrugged, and a sad smile formed just slightly on his lips.

Michael was too sickened to answer him. He looked away quickly, as if he had just been punched, and stared at the couch. The couch seemed to mock him, and his eyes blurred.

They were in the small apartment Michael had taken in October. Books surrounded them, and a typewriter sat on the table. His article on local politicians had just been published in the local paper.

Until a short moment ago, Michael had been pleased with the jabs he had made at the mayor and the town council, pleased with everything that had come his way in the last three months. And now — in a second — everything was as petered-out and as cold as the ash he had seen one day falling from a chimney in a snowstorm.

“Can you help me?” Michael asked. “Can’t you get the tape — or tell him to wait?”

“1 already asked — for you. He said no. So go down to him — if you don’t do as he says, he can accomplish it — “

“What? Accomplish?”

“He can finally get back at everyone who put him in jail — your dad, Laura — that’s what his real intention always was — it was underneath everything else” Then Silver paused and thought. “You have never been on your own — he has been on his own from the time he was eight. You care about what people say and think of you. He don’t care what people think — it’s not in his nature. He don’t care if the police are chasing him — or if others think he is kind. He don’t. You do. He has real power. You don’t”

Michael listened to this, but said nothing else. He waited until Silver left. He poured a glass of red wine and drank it down. Then he made a phone call to Laura’s house* He could hear all the celebratory noise in the background, and hung up without speaking. He took more wine. The article in the paper, on the town council, sat on his small table. He picked it up and lit a match and burned it until it crinkled in his hand.

Then he got in his car and drove back downriver to the cold deserted farmhouse on the bay, took his hunting knife that he had bought for his one hunting trip with Tom Donnerel and put it in his belt.

He’s dead,
he thought.

He smoked Craven A cigarettes and waited. No one came. He lay awake all night, furious that he had missed the engagement party on a whim of Silver Brassaurd, and fell asleep at dawn.

At noon the next day, December 17, he woke with a slight fever. Sick of waiting, he found an old pair of snowshoes, and set out in the direction of the gas bar. After a while he came to the spot where Karrie was killed. The path that ran down to his house and the path that ran up to Donnerel’s formed a cross in the middle of the dry wood and, except for the chattering of a squirrel and the queer clean sound of snow whispering over snow, the day was soundless. The trees were muted and caught golden rays of sun on their frozen bald tips.