The Bay of Love and Sorrows (32 page)

Michael sat in the room in the dark clutching the bag of clothes, and rocking back and forth as if he had terrible pains in the stomach,

“Karrie,” he whispered, once, twice, thrice.

He put the bag back under the couch and left the house. He felt himself running towards the church. He came out on the road near the graveyard and waited, almost exactly at the spot where he had waited to see Tom Donnerel all those months before. Perhaps he did not realize that he was five feet from Karrie’s grave.

From inside the church, beyond the glowing windows, he could hear the priest’s tired voice. And in a few moments parishioners started to file out the door into the golden-coloured night.

“It will snow tomorrow,” Michael thought. “It will snow all the days of my youth.”

He waited for Madonna. When she came down the steps, she turned and made her way along the path Karrie had taken that final night, her body huddled into the dark. Her entire life Madonna had fended off men, and really had given herself to very few people, and in her face was the absolute dignity of that struggle, born in poverty and violence and faded skirts and thin blouses.

This is what he suddenly realized, and he made his way through the dark to speak with her. To kneel before her. She had loved Tom, perhaps, and she had loved him.

“Madonna,” he said.

He came out from the trees on one side of her, and she looked up, startled.

“You scared me half to death,” she said.

They were in that clump of muted winter trees. Here the stars dazzled, and there was a whisper from heaven that all life would of necessity be born again.

“Where did Silver get the bad mescaline?”

“Daryll brought it to us, told us to cap and sell it,” she said. “But we didn’t know —
we didn’t know
it was really bad until after we sold it.” She looked past him. “It was done to try to get you out of a scrape after you threw the good mescaline overboard. We sold it the night of Karrie’s birthday — “

She said all of this straightforwardly.

“What kids got sick?”

“On the Island — Silver wanted to go back over. To sell it — so Everette wouldn’t take the sailboat on you. Silver couldn’t think of anything else to do. Daryll gave us the bag and we capped it in the barn — I don’t know what in hell was in it, but they say it was poison. They’ve linked it back to us — or they will. And one of the kids had epileptic seizures — his father will want to kill us — you.”

Michael couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Because of us, look what happened to Karrie and Tom,” she said simply. “Because of us.”

He stared at her, at the top of her head, and suddenly he realized how indebted he was to her, and how much she had hidden from him. And how much he himself had used her and Silver. That in a perverted way, Silver had murdered for him.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “But well find a way out — it doesn’t have to go any further.”

She said nothing.

“Look, Tom will be paroled in two years — I’ll write about it in the paper every day — I’ll see to it.”

She said nothing.

“Well,” he said, a little exasperated, “do you want your own brother to go to jail?”

“He’s in hell now — jail would be a blessing — you must decide what to do — I can’t decide for you — I mean, I don’t want to. The truth is the great investigation book will be turned on us.”

She smiled at him, with sympathy and pity and tenderly touched his face, as if no matter how he was used, treated later on, this touch was a reminder of her universal love. He had not realized how tender her touch could be, how it was alight with power and goodness.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I am sorry for
all
I’ve done. I’m sorry there is no way out — I’ve tried to find a way out for all of us for months. I am sorry I was Everette’s partner in the robbery of that poor man — but there is nothing I can do.”

He took her hand and kissed it, and smiled. But there were tears in his eyes.

“There will be no truce until this is over” Silver thought, sitting upstairs and looking across the room at the model of the
Bismarck.
Suddenly, looking in the tilted mirror and raising his eyes, he realized what had been created over the last thirteen months.

He left the house at 8:30 and went to the shed to get the long screwdriver. He would have to kill Everette. Then, he felt, he would be free with the money. But he hoped he wouldn’t have to kill Gail and her boy

When he went to the shed, he saw that the boards had been pulled back, and the clothes were missing.

Christ, I have to do this now. I have no choice,
he thought, shoving the screwdriver into the shed’s paper-thin wall. There was only a wisp of wind, some dry rat-droppings, and the body of one thin and hairless baby rat.

He set out, wearing his heavy coat and a pair of white muk-luks. He made his way around the back of his house, crossing on dry powdered snow towards the small drain, under the soft moonlight. He had taken nine bennies during the course of the afternoon to stay awake, and they had been taking effect for a while. His mind drifted and raced, like a dory’s small motor. His eyes were tracking off lights, which made violent, fantastic rainbows for hundreds of yards.

“The money is at the end of the rainbow.” He laughed.

He carried the large screwdriver in his pocket, and he touched the handle every few seconds.

“It’s good it’s there —” he kept saying.

The air was icy and filled with winter smoke. From the gas bar, lights twinkled, small and obscure, and a Santa with a cigarette smiled. The sky was wide with brilliant stars, firing the heavens for as far as his eyes could see. If he had to kill, he would kill the boy first, so Brian would not have to watch his mother die. That was the best he could give them.

His shadow moved along his left side in the snow. And he passed Bobby and Joyce Taylor’s house. He could see them near their tree, and heard music.

After twenty minutes he saw the cold, obscure shack. It was now nearing nine o’clock on December 19, 1974.

The boy, Brian Hutch had had his birthday party, and had been staring at the floor for a long time in a kind of stupor, trying to keep warm. Now and then he would yawn and smile at something, or fold his hands deeper under his armpits. Once he nodded off completely. And then he awoke — because of the wind — and looked at the floor once more. It was as if the flat wind, as Gail called it, suddenly prodded him, making him conscious of what some force of life was trying to explain to him, a voice in his ear.

“Mom —” he said, finally, “look — something must have went across our floor — from under the bed.”

Gail, sitting in the chair, herself almost asleep, looked over at the small tiny markings that came from the hole beside a board under the bed, and seemed to cross the room at an angle and run against the wall Something keeping close to a wall meant only one kind of animal

“A damn rat,” she said.

“It musta gone behind the stove,” the boy said. But when he jumped down to check there was no rat near the stove, or in the other room.

Gail said, “Maybe it’s gone. But you stand on the bed — with the shovel — and try to hit it when I take up this board. That’s what we get living close to the dump.“

The boy grabbed the small shovel and waited. Gail tried to lift the board but it was nailed.

“Everette nailed that board,” Brian said.

“When?” she asked.

“That day when you was at the funeral — I forgot about it.“

So she went to Everette’s toolbox and got a tire iron. She came back into the room and pulled and pried until the board came up. It was a brand-new nail.

There was no rat. It had gone.

No rat, but she stared for the longest time at the thousands of dollars. And then, taking them up, as you would remove an old earthen jar from soil, and seeing blood over dozens upon dozens of bills, she said something that was to change the course of everyone’s life.

“We have to go to the police.“

“The police,” the boy said, in disbelief.

She looked at her son, sat with this money in her lap, and considered. The money was wrapped in elastic, and marked just as Dora said it would be, and covered in plastic. But there would be someone coming for this money — her brother or Daryll Hutch - and she knew she and her son were in danger. For the blood told her. She did not know that danger was already on its way, was now walking towards them.

“This is terrible,” she said. “Brian, don’t you ever touch this money You become a good citizen of the world. We are not going to obey Everette any more — ever again!”

She replaced the board as best she could, closed the damper on the ire, put on her old coat, and put the inhaler in her pocket. She waited a moment at the door and listened. Every sound now seemed to be amplified a hundredfold.

“We must cross the road, and take the ditch,” she whispered.

And she made her way out into the night air, taking the boy by the hand, rushing across the road to the far ditch so as not to meet anyone. There they hid for a moment and she listened.

“There is someone coming,” she whispered, “on the other side of the road — look — shhhh.” Then, grabbing the boy by the hand again, she moved away and turned towards the next house on the road.

Silver went to the shack. He drew his screwdriver and kicked the door open. When he entered, he yelled to scare them. But they were gone. The money — which was supposed to be under the board — was missing. The place was still warm, and there was still a pot on the small Coleman stove.

He searched the shack in rage, spending this rage on kicks and screams. Then he fell to the floor, and jabbed his screwdriver at nothing.

Finally he went outside, looked at the sky, stopped in his tracks, wondering in terror what in the world he should do.

He went back along the road, hearing in the distance the music that spoke of angels. He passed Bobby and Joyce Taylor’s house, and again saw the lights celebrating Christmas. Gail and her boy were already sitting in their living room, with all the money, and all those streaks of blood. Silver had missed meeting them by twenty-eight seconds exactly.

One second for every year of Vincent Donnerel’s life.

After a while, the whole town followed these events — riveted to them like tin to a roof. They gathered by the radio, and listened to the appeals from the police, the mayor’s statement to the press, and turned on their television sets to see themselves on the national news.