The Bay of Love and Sorrows (36 page)

The prosecutor’s office, feeling that they had been duped the first time, charged Michael with criminal negligence and conspiracy to traffic in illegal drugs.

The prosecutor spoke of how Madonna had fought Everette to the death while Michael ostensibly ran away.

“And how much did she weigh?” the prosecutor said. “One hundred and five pounds? — yes — so get Madonna.”

And this made a tremendous impact on everyone.

“Put him away,” someone shouted.

Michael had cut his hair, wore the suit he had loaned Tommie Donnerel for his parents’ funeral, and sat in the dock near his lawyer. His father had taken a leave of absence.

Laura McNair didn’t handle the case for the prosecution. She was under review. But once during the examination of Constable Matchett she came into the courtroom to deliver Karrie’s diary to the prosecutor. Her hair was longer — her face looked a little thinner.

At that moment Everette’s tapes were being played, the mescaline shown, and a picture of
The Renegade
was up on the bulletin board, with a picture of Karrie standing on the bow.

Laura glanced over at Michael. Their eyes met for a few seconds only. Then she looked at his lawyer, Philip McSweeney, and smiled, as if at Michael’s expense. She turned and quickly left the courtroom, with a movement of her skirt. It was the last time Michael would ever see her.

Professor Becker testified that he was surprised at Michael’s appearance that afternoon he and Silver had visited him in Fredericton, and felt that Michael had fallen in with bad company, but because of his sense of duty tried to straighten Michael around.

Yet it was Karrie’s diary which was the most damning. It was as if an investigative report had been done on him, conjured up for the papers. Her whimsical writing was matched only by the meaning of her words, which she herself did not understand.

“Michael could fly above us — but he has decided to lower hisself into the pit, just like the pit at the dump. Why? Well I think it’s to pretend he has his bad side. But real men never have to do this. Only the sad cruel men he has taken up with. So I will help him get away from them — you see that’s my secret summer job.”

Michael came to hate that diary, and long for his own destruction.

When he stood to be sentenced he couldn’t help trembling. He tried not to. His lawyer pleaded his youth, his brilliance, his potential to vindicate himself someday through good works. That is, all the usual things were said. But his journalistic talents were never mentioned.

“He forgot that a source of self-recrimination always comes tomorrow morning,” the judge said.

Dora and Emmett Smith were present for the sentencing. So was old Mr. Jessop, the only kindly face in the court.

Laura McNair was not present. She couldn’t stand to be. For she loved him deeply

He received five years.

“Only five years,” people whispered.

From prison he heard that Laura had lost her virginity to his lawyer, Philip McSweeney, and they were engaged to be married.

In prison he was mocked and tortured every day by the man who had stabbed Tommie Donnerel.

Michael wrote letters from prison, one to his father, and one to Nora Battersoil, asking both for forgiveness.

Nora Battersoil sent him a picture of his son, Owen. The picture had been taken the day after Michael had saved Amy and the boy’s life. (This was something Nora would not know until twenty years later.)

The picture she sent him had been taken at the church picnic.

Nora informed Michael that she had loved him, but for the sake of the child thought it best to leave and hoped he would someday forgive her. “I’m so sorry and feel responsible that all of this has happened.”

The picture had one more striking detail. In the background was Silver Brassaurd, who must have just left Michael’s house that August afternoon. He was walking straight towards the camera, wearing the clean shirt and pants that Madonna had pressed, his hands thrust into his pockets.

The Smiths were given a fine and ordered to do community service. After this Dora developed chronic angina, so the gas bar was sold, and the little profit they had made was spent, and Emmett and she moved to an apartment in town, where Emmett took care of his invalid wife, began to drink to forget, and Dora turned very bitter towards Gail Hutch and all other people on the road.

Everette went to prison and, after seven years, his health failed. In time he became a hypochondriac, worrying the guards about his aches and pains, complained about the omission of true friendship, turned feeble, had a local writer write his life story, and forever needed to see a doctor.

Tommie Donnerel was released on December 29, 1974. His neighbours wanted to throw him a party, offered to rebuild his house, and waited for him until well after New Year’s Eve, but he never arrived. He moved to Saint John instead and became apprenticed to a mason, working in mortar and brick, and for some years looked at Saint John, from the south end to the new waterfront, as a place that he himself helped design. He received fifteen thousand dollars as compensation.

He grew strong and read much and took night courses at the university and began to write. Never, as long as he lived, did he strike another human being.

Each year during the picnic he instructed Bobby Taylor to put flowers on Karrie Smith’s lonely, solitary grave.

But no one from downriver would see him at his old home again. Except, of course, for once.

One summer day, four years after the murders, a sailboat was seen at the mouth of the inlet. Off in the distance the gas bar sat empty, ready to be bulldozed away for the new highway the Conservative government had promised.

The sailboat had been refitted: its prow looked majestic, its sails fluttered, the new spinnaker rustled as it took the sea and went towards one of the inland islands.

At the wheel was a man standing barefoot and in shorts, his body muscular and suntanned, a small tattoo on his arm. His eyes blazed. On the north bay all knew him, but near the islands on the south bay he was known only as the man who had gotten out of jail that spring. His family still loved and hoped for him, but were, because of him, outcasts from the town, and he felt he had let his family, his parents, the fragmented aunts and uncles, who had once considered him a darling, down.

The day was blowy and very warm. He had spent the last three months fitting his sailboat out. But then at the roughest point off Fox Island — an island filled with grey dunes and long sharp whip grass — the man scuttled the proud boat, called
The Renegade,
and made his way to shore.

There he sat in the sun on his haunches and waited for night to come. He took from his waterproof bag a picture of his son, Owen. He looked at it, kissed it, and placed it carefully away. He looked for his passport, and the fourteen thousand dollars given over to him from his father’s trust.

When night came with stars in the large heaven, and when he could see the lights of Burnt Church in the distance, he looked up at the sky and said: “This is the decision for the rest of my life. If I make it to land I will live, if I drown I drown — either way makes no difference to me now.”

And with that Michael Skid entered the sea and swam. He was a very strong swimmer, but it was a dark, salty, cold bay.

Nora Battersoil married.

She met her husband in May of 1980 on bus number 11, travelling from the south end of Saint John to work. She was looking at him through the window, at the bus stop near Queen’s Park. When he boarded the bus he pulled out his copy of Robert Frost, and leaning his head back began to read, as a man who knows how to read, and what it is he is reading, will do.

“I’m glad you like the book — I’m glad I sent it to you,” she said. He turned quickly about and saw a woman with short black hair sitting with a ten-year-old boy.

The man was Tommie Donnerel.

And that was how their life together started,

They married and lived near Hampton, for many years, where Tom worked on their farm and mended clutch plates for tractors, and Nora taught school

His adopted son, Owen, would phone the customer and say, “I am to inform you your clutch is fixed.”

Tom taught the boy how to fish and hunt, the grand importance of books, the meaninglessness of fame or material wealth. And both loved Nora.

Their corn field overlooked the Kennebecasis River, and behind them deer moved through the apple grove in the wood. Each night Tom would spend an hour alone, working in solitude at the edge of the field where he had a blueberry crop. Twice a month he visited the prison at Dorchester to give words of hope to prisoners.

By the age of forty-four he was grey, but stood erect at five-eleven. Tom Donnerel loved community-centre dances, and playing horseshoes. He suffered from pain in his left lung, and from insomnia. At times a great melancholy would overcome him because of the way his adopted son smiled, or spoke, and he would remember the boy’s father, and all the potential of his wasted life.

It was known that people felt Tom strange and aloof. He seemed content, yet had few friends. And at the happiest moments he would look at Nora, and tears would flood his eyes.

Bobby Taylor reflected on all of this as he sat in the janitor’s back room of the school and smoked his cigarette. He wanted to write his letter to Tom Donnerel and Nora Battersoil very carefully, and wanted to sound wise. It had been twenty years since he had seen them.

He wrote about his own wife, Joyce, and joked that, though he still loved her, there was more of her to love every year.

“The yield is greater as the years go by, and the poor thing now has more arse than picnic seat.”

This led him to talk about the picnic, and how he was taking orders from Gail Hutch, who was organizing it this year.

“Like a little sergeant major — she’s got us all toeing the line — “

He wrote of Gail Hutch, who had married Bobby’s brother, the farrier, late in 1975, and had three more children. The prettiest and brightest on the road was her daughter Sarah. Brian was now out west working.

He said that the graves of Karrie and Madonna, of Vincent and Silver, were being tended to — and flowers placed on them at regular intervals.

He wrote that there was not a day that went by that he and many others did not think of Karrie. (This was somewhat of a lie.)

He then said he had some important news that Laura McNair, of the firm of McSweeney and McNair, had just delivered to him and his wife through an rcmp officer who now lived in Taylorville — Sergeant John Delano.

It was about a man, somewhere in Colombia, who collected exotic birds and fish and butterflies for the markets in the U.S. and Canada, and who helped relocate abandoned or destitute children to homes in North America.

This man lived by himself as a celibate. Once a week he would walk into the village to buy pipe tobacco at the store, where he was looked upon as a great oddity Yet a month or so ago he awoke to hear about an argument in the village.

A group of men had come into the community accusing the village of informing on their cocaine trade. They dragged the mayor out of his house, and the mayor’s wife and little boy. They made them kneel, by the brook.

The man lived a good mile away, kept to himself in this most dangerous area, and though people maintained he had always thought “a good deal about himself and how clever he was — and loved to argue about the world, when he drank — he was in no danger whatsoever, as long as he stayed to himself.”

But told what was happening, by a small girl who helped clean for him, he said, “Those sons of bitches, never again.”

He grabbed a machete and went down to stop it. Always, they said there was this hot and ruthless side to his nature tempered by his idea of justice.

He was dressed in a ragged white shirt, and his beard was long and greying. When he came along the road he saw that some of the horses had been killed. He looked up at the sun, and took a run at the well-armed men.

But he forgot how old he had grown. They took his machete in a second.

He spoke as well as he could. He appealed to them to leave the village alone. He was a great debater. Everyone thought he had convinced them.

But then they laughed, and finding out he was without a woman, put
la barra de labios
on him — I guess it is lipstick. They then put some —
la lenceria —
on him to wear — I guess it is like girl’s underwear. They paraded him about like this. So the townspeople could laugh at him. He was given a trial with all of them laughing at him, and some of the townspeople joining in — for often those whom you try to protect are those who betray you. They went and got a rat to act as judge.

The leader of the men who’d invaded the town looked bored and upset, and kept swatting flies with his hand. As all men of power he mimicked power, swinging a knotted stick in his hand.

“I thought it would end in a much better place.” Michael smiled. “I was going to go back home, tomorrow.”

Then at the end he proudly yelled out the name of Madonna, which surprised people because he had always argued against the blackmail of religious dogma.