The Bay of Love and Sorrows (29 page)

That morning, Michael went to town and bought two train tickets from Campbellton to Vancouver. The clerk looked at him, smiled as Michael sat in stupefied agitation. The clerk had once dated Laura McNair in high school He was still upset to think that she would impulsively get engaged to someone she had known only a few weeks, after he himself had agonized over how to approach her and invite her out. So he thought of Michael as a trickster, and looked upon him as such. He didn’t like how Michael reported about the town in the paper, for he was the mayor’s brother.

“So, who are you going away with this time — Laura?” he said, and, being a part of the small community and wearing a pink shirt with a wide tie, his statement gave him a feeling of moral comfort.

Michael stared at him, the way he had learned to do when he was being bullied in private school. He would never be bullied again.

“They’re for Gary and Susan Jones.”

The clerk coughed and said nothing more. He filled out the tickets by hand — made a mistake on the second ticket and had to start that one again, and then put the price of 426 dollars on the bottom,

This transaction only increased the clerk’s appetite for the scandal it was all over town how Michael hadn’t shown up for the party. The clerk could not wait for Michael to go, so he could start telling people he was trying to run away. And he hoped Laura McNair would feel as hurt over Michael as he once had felt over her.

“He knocked up that little Battersoil one — oh, he doesn’t know that, but most people do — and now he’s running away with Madonna Brassaurd,” he said, because it was the only woman he could think of at the moment. “Yes, that slut — I’ve just made up their tickets — “And he felt himself grin selfishly at the moment he said this.

With the tickets in his pocket Michael went to Laura’s house to apologize,

He felt as if a giant hoax had been self-inflicted, or inflicted upon him by the simple judicious reasoning of the universe.

There was no way for him to stop real life from playing itself out. For life was unconcerned with what Michael said about truth and justice.

Life was only concerned with the impeccable minutiae of our vice that passed for virtue, and for virtue to be manifest in the end. Once the action was over it was irrevocable. And this is what life managed to say: “Ah, but it is irrevocable. Karrie’s smile — is irrevocable.”

He parked his car near the McNair house and went uneasily to the door.

Laura’s father looked dissociated from the world and from him. Mr. McNair spoke about the attack on Laura in the incredulous way that children sometimes do. Then he just shook his head.

So whatever Michael did or did not say would be fine. If he made up any excuse about not coming to their party with thirty guests and salmon brought in and lobster brought up all the way from the wharf at Saint John, that would be fine as well That Michael hadn’t seen Laura in her velvet dress that she had spent a month making was fine. It was in retrospect all horrible.

“Oh, the party went on — the party went on,” Mr. McNair kept saying. “He’s just a hoodlum — you’ll have to get used to that, Michael — there are some hoodlums here.” And he laughed.

Instead of hurling insults at him, Mr. McNair asked Michael to come in, shook his hand, as if Michael had been ill.

“Where’s Laura?” Michael asked.

“Down in Moncton to pick up her dress.”

Mr. McNair teetered a little and caught himself. He had been in the den looking at pictures of his son, and his eyes were wide with bright tears as the wind blew through the cold breezeway.

“I’m sorry,” Michael said, “for all of this.”

“I understand — it’s just the women, you know,” Mr. McNair whispered, not believing at all what he himself was saying, but saying it because he thought that this was what
men
should say He then nudged Michael as if it were a private joke, which showed how far outside the circles of people and of social events he had always been.

“I can’t be forgiven about this — but I had things to do.”

Mr. McNair nodded. The whole house was quiet and soundless, as if it were waiting for his boy, Lyle, to come home, to rush in from school. Laura’s passport photos were lying on top of a small envelope on the side table. She was to send away for her passport because they were to go to Spain.

“It’s just the women, you see,” Mr. McNair said again, his bright black suit-pants belt-high on his waist. And Michael, looking at these photos, trembled and nodded.

“Your son was very, very brave — really,” Michael said, his voice suddenly filled with emotion. “You must be very proud of him”

“Yes, proud,” Mr. McNair said, in a whisper. “He was good — that’s the difference. I wish he were here, because good people can always help. Yes sirree — things would be different if Lyle was here — “And he rose on his toes, as if to stretch, and then coughed into his hand.

Michael left. He did not wait for Laura, who had gone to LeClairs in Moncton to get her dress.

He did not know what to do. He smelled in the air the ash from a wood stove, and left to go back downriver once again, collecting his mail at his small apartment downtown before he did.

It did not matter that he himself did not know half of what went on that summer. That after the first loss of mescaline Silver and Madonna had been forced by Everette’s cousin Daryll to sell drugs, which made a dozen kids sick and sent three to hospital, one with severe epileptic seizures, which would put Michael himself in prison.

It did not matter that that very afternoon Michael had received the advance for his book, with a note of godspeed from the publisher.

It only mattered that he was now carrying a hunting knife, hoping to kill Everette Hutch.

That afternoon, when Madonna got home from her final day, Silver was preparing to go out. He wore his heavy boots and a thick black belt, with a cowboy hat on the buckle, shiny and meaningless, since he had never been near a horse or even liked them very much. Madonna came in with a first-prize pen she had won for shorthand, and set it on the fridge. The pen had the emblem of the high school engraved on it, and the year 1974,

All life can change, this emblem seemed to say it is just that the farther down a road a person goes, the farther she has to come back. Like finding yourself on an unsafe street in an unfamiliar city, and turning in the dark to find a street that is lighted once again.

It was five o’clock. Silver looked up at her and smiled, as he had that morning,

“Madonna,” he said,

“Where are you going?” she asked,

He told her, without looking her way, that he knew how to make some money for them, a lot of it, and this is why he had to go out. But he would be back for her. Then they would go far, far away. He spoke of the house they would have, the rooms all their own, the new car he might get.

“Well have it made,” he said, “if I do it right.”

“Are you afraid, Silver?” she whispered. “Are you afraid of our poverty, of how we were treated? Are you afraid that night you went to the Island — it’s in the paper how those kids got sick — are you afraid it’s from the drugs you used to replace the drugs Michael threw away?”

“Never,” he said. He sniffed, looking at her and lifting a cup of scalding tea to his mouth. He then glanced at the floor to her right.

“Well, then, why can’t you look at me?” she said.

“I look at you all the time — “

She took a deep breath.

“Why can’t you look at me in my panties? You always used to.”

“Yer my sister,” he said. “What are you talking about?”

She took another breath.

“Why are you now revolted? You can’t even touch me.”

“I-I-I — yer talking stupid,” he said.

“Here,” she smiled, as if it was a joke. “Take your hand and touch me.”

She reached for his hand, took it, and brought it towards her lips. But suddenly, as if frightened of being burned, he hauled it away.

“Why are you in hell?” she said. “What have you done?”

“There is no hell,” he said. But he said this so eagerly she knew he had been thinking about it for months.

“Things are not the same as they were last summer, are they?” Madonna said.

She sat in the chair between the door and the old washing machine that looked like an enamel tub.

“They certainly are not,” he said. He sniffed as if he were very aware of this.

“But why aren’t they?” Madonna asked.

“Well, they are all quite different, aren’t they?” Silver said, and he lit a cigarette. “Just as you said — so don’t play the cunt.”

“I’m not,” she said. “I just want you to tell me.”

He sat down on the chair and looked at her, and shrugged.

“I never had a bicycle,” he said. “All my life — in the summer — and once Emmett brought Karrie home a new bicycle — do you remember? We were about eight or nine after her mom died. Her old bicycle was still there — a girl’s bike, pink — you remember — and we thought Emmett would give it to you — and that you and I would have one. We ran down to see them — ran all the way down. But Dora said
no —
do you remember? — that she could sell it — and then you and I ran about all night to try to find fifteen dollars — we asked everyone, we searched in the ditches for bottles. And then we went to the priest — the priest told us to go back home, that we were ungrateful for what God had given us.

“So we walked up the lane all by ourselves. That night we collected bottles, walked as far as Oak Point — and the next morning we ran to the store again, with fourteen dollars and twenty-six cents. But still Dora wouldn’t give it to us.”

“I remember,” Madonna said. “It hurt very bad — and I had hated Karrie for it — but no more — “

“Ya,” Silver said. “Well, I remember too.”

He shrugged and tucked his shirt under the large belt as if he were suddenly vindicated.

“That is nothing,” Madonna said. “The bike is gone forever — it went to the dump in 1965 — it was the little bike Nora Battersoil bought, so good for her. It was the only bike she had too. And she was Karrie’s cousin.”

He stared at her and said nothing but there were tears in his eyes.

“So then —” she said kindly, and somehow helplessly, “that is not worth murder — neither are the hits in the head you took from dad — remember how we used to fight back? We fought back all the time then — you and I — we were brave, we fought back — that’s what we have to remember. But we didn’t murder.”

“What are you talking — murder?” he said.

There was a pause. The wind blew down the flue of the stove, and the fridge started up with a crack and a hum so suddenly he jumped.

“Do you want to go to take the Eucharist?”

“The what?”

“Take the host at Communion?”

“No, no — “

“Everette has figured things out — the money — he'll use it to destroy you — so destroy yourself first, and become something new. Destroy what you were and become something brand new. Put on the new vestments. Not bad drugs and blood that you’ve been living with for four months, and I’ve been living with, but the new vestments. Before you are destroyed.”

“What do you mean? Nothing can destroy me,” Silver said.

She looked at him, and took the diamond slowly from her pocket and put it on the table. It was as if he had just been slapped. He turned his head sideways.

He stood and moved away from her, almost ran to the counter.

“I’m not blaming you,” she said. “Half of it was done because you wanted to protect Michael — but I want you to come to church — and then go see John Delano tomorrow morning. If you do, we might be able to begin again “

Here Silver laughed, shook his head, bent over and took a drag of her cigarette, but he wouldn’t look at her. There was an ooze of broken dreams that seemed to collect on his skin, on his breath — she could tell there was the energy of deceit and malice trying to break away and fall down into the eons of history.

It was now 5:25.

“You would have to go to confession — there is still time — we could both go. I will stand beside you — if you do twenty-five years, you’ll still be in your forties. I promise I will wait for you — we will have our own place, and cause no one trouble. Just come with me to church.”

His body looked distant. His eyes glittered, and his fingers were sweating.

“It’s good theatre,” he said, because he had heard Michael say this one Sunday afternoon and he suddenly felt very sharp repeating this. He laughed at her.

“I don’t believe in the church,” she whispered. “I don’t believe in the cardinals with their red hats and pomposity, or the priests. But I do believe in the faith. I believe in our Virgin Mary — our immaculate conception, the body and blood of Jesus Christ.”

“But you burned a picture of her,” he said. And he gave a laugh. “You’ll burn in hell forever now — even if Everette made you do it.”

She lowered her eyes, and said nothing for a moment.

“He made us do nothing — we did it by ourselves,” she said finally, looking up, her eyes warm and forgiving and bright.

“He’ll pay,” Silver said, gritting his teeth. And then, remembering that this was the very last thing Karrie had said to him, gave a sob, and closed his eyes.