The Bay of Love and Sorrows (7 page)

It was May 18, 1974, the day before Michael launched his father’s sailboat,
The Renegade,
into the great bay, the day before Karrie Smith arrived back home.

By the summer Tom was working full time at his farm, back on the low river, and fishing in the bay. He had for the times rather conservative views, short instead of long hair, and loved country and western music. But these qualities only reaffirmed Karrie’s belief in him, because she herself was afraid of so much that was becoming fashionable.

Tom believed in the Orwell aphorism, without ever having heard of it or Orwell. That is, that so many who were rebels against the status quo were often rebels against a sense of integrity in their own natures. He believed this about Michael Skid. But he tried his best to keep these thoughts to himself and say nothing.

However, Karrie was home and things were better. She had had two dates while away that year, but as she told Tom they were only to parties where others were going, and she got home both times by ten.

He felt he shouldn’t be too upset about these dates and so said nothing about it.

Sometimes he and Karrie would walk the cool path through the woods to the bay and back, holding hands. Sometimes he would take her to the drive-in theatre in her father’s car. On Saturday nights, they would generally be home before midnight, and see each other after Mass on Sunday morning. At the end of August, they were to start premarital instruction on Friday evenings.

Only once or twice had he seen in her something which he did not like, a contrived sentimentality over her family’s lot in life and for herself. But this was always swept aside by his love and concern for her.

Karrie began to practise writing the name Donnerel in her diary She had been into his little farmhouse, into his kitchen and living room, the TV room with its dozens of magazines. She came and went whenever she pleased, took money from the drawer if she needed it. But she had not climbed the stairs to the bedroom. She felt it proper for proper girls to wait.

At her own house things were not good. Her stepmother, Dora, ran the family, and her father, Emmett, would say nothing when Dora put her foot down, so sometimes on a Friday night, just when she was getting ready to go out, there were a dozen things she was asked to do.

On occasion, the thin little Hutch woman would come over to clean the toilets in the gas bar and wash the floor, and Dora would get her to do the same in the house. Since Dora owned the shack Gail lived in, she was not paid for this, but there was a certain amount of rent money deducted.

“Comme ah sa va?” Dora would yell at the child, because Brian had learned French before he had learned English, “Comme ah — sa va — diddly poop,” she would say, and give a knowing smile.

Gail was trying to save money to buy that shack at the end of a woodlot, that sat amongst the black spruce in the blazing summer heat, where no wind from the bay did reach.

One day in July Karrie went with Tom to the bottom field where he had to get the tractor and bring it up so he could hay the top field. The crop had been early and he was almost a week late.

At this field near the bay the hay was wild and smelled of salt, while paths ran off the edge of the cliffs towards the red muddy shore. The tide was low and smelled sulphurous, and gulls pattered here and there on the beach. Far off in the inlet an old wharf log jutted out and, farther still, a cargo ship lay off the strait, turning towards the Atlantic Ocean.

Hot wind blew at Karrie’s dress.

The tractor, red with a broken seat, had a poor clutch and a worse fuel line, and Tom was having a hard time starting it.

“Well, forget it and walk back with me,” Karrie said impatiently, trying to keep her hair out of her face.

“Don’t rush me — just five more minutes — this fuckin thing,” Tom said.

“Don’t swear, Tommie Donnerel,” she said. But he just looked at her.

“Be quiet — I’m trying to get this done.”

Karrie turned impetuously, looked at the flat metal clutch pedal and cursed it, and went along the short, cool path that led from the field. It followed the bank for a way before it turned along a cascade of trees towards the church lane.

Karrie kept looking back hoping Tommie was following her, and once, as she looked, she tripped over a root and fell over the windswept bank. Her head landed near a piece of barbed wire, and her forehead grazed a rock. For a moment she did nothing but stare up at the sky.

She would have to walk back up the hill, and her dress was covered in mud and clay.

She stood and tried to grab at the crab grass above her, but when she put weight on her ankle she felt pain and cried out. The bottom of her foot was bleeding.

“Tom — Tommie!”

There was just wind, and he didn’t hear her,

And then farther down the beach, she saw Michael Skid, He had rented one of the old farmhouses near the clam beds, a farm that sat in a desolate area of the shore.

Small trees surrounded his farm, and a river ran beyond it. There were always people at the farmhouse. They came and went as they wanted, and there was always a party. Music haunted the road after dark, loud talk, and fights would break out. Sometimes she could hear Madonna’s voice.

Michael came up to her. He had long, dark hair, and wore a wristband of brown beads. His skin was tanned. The most insistent discrediting of him had come from her stepmother, Dora, who had told her Michael and his friends believed in free love, and were mixed up with the Brassaurds, and that he wasn’t very nice to his mother.

Karrie now pretended she did not notice how Michael looked at her. He put pressure above the ankle, and taking a bottle of moonshine from his pocket, poured some over the scrape on her foot while holding her leg by the calf.

“Can ya walk?” he asked, sounding even gruffer than Tom. And then he began telling her of the story of a wounded osprey he had saved that morning. “I wouldn’t let anyone hurt a thing,” he said.

She looked down at his hand as it rested on her calf, and she smiled. Then she tossed her head, in the same impetuous manner as she had ten minutes before with Tom. But only she realized this.

He was trying to act as if he wasn’t from a town of just five thousand people, or from a house in the centre of this town. And she knew this, because she’d heard he’d been to India and had even climbed a mountain.

But she too always pretended, pretended she wasn’t from the little house just above them. This sentiment was part of the one aspect of her personality that Tom disliked.

Her stepmother had often told her that Michael did nothing. He was wild and had piercing eyes, and was just like a judge’s son, and while she was in community college he and Silver had stolen one of Mr. Jessop’s pigs.

But once when they had seen him, Dora demurely nodded and smiled, and later said in front of Karrie’s father she could understand why women liked him. And this to Karrie seemed insulting to her family

Now Michael leaned above her, and she rested back on her elbows and looked up. She studied his face. There was not only a masculine quality to it, there was a feminine quality to it as well, about the nose and mouth. And suddenly she felt that he probably thought highly of himself and very little of others.

“I was carrying this to drink — but it’s more useful here,” he said. And then he took a drink and laughed. He looked at her, and stared straight into her green eyes. She blushed because in his look she felt he had already determined her as a country girl who would be easy to impress, while she knew immediately that he would only think that way if he had no concern for her and was not once Tom’s friend. If he was wild, so could she be. Neither did he really seem disconcerted by her pain, although both he and she pretended he was.

A gust of hot wind blew across them, smelling of charred wood from a forgotten fire, and caught at her dress just slightly

His right hand lingered a moment on her calf. She understood even more that there would be a desire by both of them from this moment on to play a part for one another. She was suddenly afraid, half hoping he was going to kiss her.

Michael helped her back to his farm, while she rested on his shoulder and hopped on one foot. She carried her scuffed shoes in her hand.

When she looked up at his face there was a slight grimace to it that was mocking. What was more unusual was the fact that this mocking look was expected by her — and couldn’t be otherwise. So she didn’t look at his face, but instead at the insole of her shoes,

He sat her on the picnic table in the front yard, and then after he had wrapped her foot with great care, telling her he had learned to wrap feet in India, he convinced her to go up to the long verandah where they would be in the shade.

“Tommie,” she said, partly as a question to herself, looking back down the shore, where a lighthouse stood in solitude against the glimmering water.

“Tommie Donnerel,” he said, as an answer to himself, without batting an eye.

“I know you know my Tom,” she said in an old-fashioned way.

“No,” he said quietly, “I know my Tom.” His voice sounded hurt.

They sat on the verandah now, staring over the red clam bed — in the distance the sun was a disturbing red over the grey water — and as smoke from a dwarfed fire rose across the inlet, Michael told her that he was reading great works of literature and philosophy, which took up more time than anything else. With that he tipped the bottle again. She looked at him a little in awe, though she didn’t want to, and he noticed this.

Behind them, in one of the farmhouse windows, coloured glass chimes clinked in the breeze.

“I’m reading the Kama Sutra,” he said. “It’s all about the best way to have sex. I don’t know if Tommie has it at home.”

She smoothed her dress, looked at him questioningly, and he gave her a small sip of moonshine.

“I know nothing whether he does or doesn’t,” she said, and noticing he was wearing a small pearl earring, looked away.

As he spoke, his right leg, the one with the bandanna, moved out and touched her dress.

Far away they could hear the sound of the tractor as it made its way towards Tommie Donnerel’s farm. Karrie stared at the smoke, squinting slightly.

And then Michael reached out and took her fingers in his hand.

“No diamond yet,” he said as he let her fingers drop.

“Well, maybe someday, maybe not,” she said pertly.

“That’s right — keep him guessing.”

Then a man appeared at the door, talking about the barn. Karrie knew who this man was. He was Silver Brassaurd, who lived by Oyster River with his sister, Madonna. But he pretended not to recognize her. He was very drunk and kept lurching against the door frame, which he held on to with the fingers of his right hand. He was very upset about something just now. How peculiar his hand was, Karrie thought suddenly, for no particular reason. His hair was almost the same length as Michael’s. He was angry with Michael and wanted him to go to the barn and see to something immediately.

There was incense burning on the table inside the old foyer, and Silver’s older sister, Madonna Brassaurd, came around the corner wearing nothing but a T-shirt.

Karrie looked down and away and blushed. She blushed as much at Madonna’s beauty as anything, and at how casual this beauty seemed. How vulnerable and yet powerful she in her near-nakedness was.

“Oh, don’t mind, I’m taking her picture — that’s all,” Michael said. “For a magazine — aren’t I, Madonna?”

But Madonna’s brilliant eyes seemed to bore into Karrie’s soul and she could not look up.

Later Karrie was able to walk on her own. The ankle was swollen, but not broken. As she left the yard, Michael waved and turned away as if she had never been there. She didn’t wave back. She limped up the long road to the main gate, where there was a smell of wildflowers in the ditch.

“He ain’t so hard to figure,” she said to herself.

That she felt she understood Michael was true, that she disregarded certain things she understood, because of her vanity, was a secret also true.

That evening Karrie told Tom what had happened, and how much she disliked Michael, and how conceited he was. She did not tell him about the moonshine poured over her foot. She did not tell about the conversation, or the questions, or how Michael wore a pearl earring.

Tom said nothing. He lifted the wheel off the hay cart and set it aside as she spoke. She could see the huge sweat marks under the arms of his shirt that seemed to amplify the dust on his back and on his sunburned neck.

He knew Michael, he said. They had once been friends. He wished him well. He looked at her squarely but said nothing else.

For a few weeks things went on as usual. Karrie would walk to the barn and meet Tom and sit in the shade near a great oak tree at one side of the field. She began to insist that he do what he had put off the year before, follow her suggestion and go back to night school so he could graduate.

Each day she would bring him lunch, and watch him work. He would wait for her to come, watching for her to appear by the side of the fence. But she would become bored and trail away in the afternoon, and he would go down to her house after supper. Now and again she would say something that Tom realized had come from someone else.