The Bay of Love and Sorrows (8 page)

“I knows all about that suit,” she said one day carelessly. “Tom, it was nothing to get in a big mix-up for. Mike is ready to forget it.”

For Tom it was as if quite unexpectedly someone had scalded him.

“How do you know?” he said.

“Oh, Tom, I just heard,” she said.

“Well, I’m a fool, that’s all, but let’s not talk about it,” he answered. But he was stung deeply A moment went by. A great wind blew off the bay and against the bare picture window in the Smiths’ small, modestly adorned living room where they sat.

But he couldn’t look at Karrie. He felt betrayed.

The next evening she wanted to go to church. So they went to seven o’clock Mass.

She prayed with her gloved fingers against her lips and her head bowed. Now and again she would look at him from the corner of her eyes as she prayed. He watched her, the laced-up blouse open at her neck, the small silver cross, the light freckles on her skin. He breathed her in, in the dusk of the old church, while the priest, feeble with age, tottered before them, and the altar boy, almost asleep, would look out at them with drowsy eyes and then scratch his behind.

After church, as they went out the front door Tom saw a man standing beyond the graveyard next to the steps leading to the shore.

“Do you want to go over and talk to him? He’s been waiting over there for you,” she said.

“Who?”

“Michael.”

She smiled as if this little plan of hers and Michael’s had been ingenious.

“I’m going home,” he said. “You’re getting mixed up in things — things you don’t know about. It might a been just a suit to you — but well — ‘cause it were my parent’s funeral, for fuck’s sake!”

“Oh, Tom — don’t get all up and angry,” she said, and tears welled in her eyes.

He turned and went up the lane. She stamped her foot. “Oh Jehosephat,” she said, and followed him home at a certain distance.

They sat in his living room that evening, watching TV. Karrie had her arms folded and her chin lowered. They never mentioned anything about what had happened. But when he asked if she wanted some tea, she said she was tired and had to go.

She told him that the next afternoon she would bring him some clams and they would barbecue them for supper.

“Why can’t we just cook them?”

“No — I want it done on a barbecue,” she answered.

The next day Tom watched the blue sky, the horizon, and waited for her to come.

He set the barbecue up, and wanted to go and see where she was, but had to help the farrier — who only came once every three weeks and whose time was valuable — with the new mare.

“Come on,” the farrier said. “Stop sniffing after her and shell come along.” And he laughed, spitting tobacco on his brown leather apron.

Tom didn’t get out of the barn until dark. He had tried to rush and hurt one of the mare’s legs. And then he had to poultice it. He could see small lights far away on the other side of the bay. Everything after dark without Karrie was lonely, and he could smell tar, and smell blood from a dead animal, still warm on the highway.

Karrie was not at home. Her stepmother, Dora, answered the door of the house, with its tiny peaked roof. She looked at him with just a slight hint of mischief, as if being a stepmother gave her a peculiar licence mothers did not enjoy.

“Oh,
ain’t
she with you? Magine-magine-magine. I always thought she’d be with you,” she said.

There was the trace of malice about her mouth. And he remembered that, although she’d been nice to him this past while — when he had taken them out to dinner at the Portage Restaurant in the spring after he had a big lobster catch, she’d shown a sugary graciousness towards him — most of his life she had disliked him intensely because he was one of the Donnerels from back on the swamp road, whose father was a drunk who killed both himself and his wife driving off Arron Brook bridge in a three-quarter-ton truck.

Tom walked over to the store for a pack of plug. The first he would have since Karrie got home.

Karrie’s aunt, a French woman with tiny shoulders and heavy-rimmed glasses, who was changing the fly catcher over the ice cream freezer, seemed worried for his sake.

“Oh, she’s gone with dem — the lot of dem.”

“Them who?” Tom asked.

Her look became sad.

“Oh dem ones — she’s wit’ all of em. I don’t know what they have or what it is they do. On that sailboat they have,” the woman said, waving her hand, as if at the dead flies on the fly catcher, and, looking at Tom suddenly, as if he were at fault.

“I said it was a shame not to tell you — Dora said it’s not our business.” And again, unknown to herself she looked at him as if he were to blame.

Tom tried to look nonchalant but couldn’t bring it off, and he turned and walked out into the dark.

Far down on the shore near the clam beds he could hear faint sounds of singing and talking. From beyond the point he could see Michael’s twenty-eight-foot sailboat in the last of the light on the water. It was an old sailboat, called
The Renegade,
that had been swamped twice during the last two years.

Michael had swum out to it in rough seas after it went adrift one time, and Tommie remembered this now because he had been certain his friend would drown, and mixed with this memory were faint flickers of admiration.

He remembered that two hours later
The Renegade
in rough seas came towards the wharf, its bilge pump working, and Michael straddled up at the wheel.

“Tommie Donnerel,” he had said, out of the cold late-August wind, “I just did what you couldn’t do.”

He'll be all right with Everette,
Tom thought suddenly.
He'll understand how things are and no one will take advantage of him.

Yet everything for Michael already existed, so he threw it all away, while everything for Tom had been a struggle since he was fifteen. And Tom understood this as well

Tom didn’t take the road, but crossed Arron Brook at its highest point — just where he’d shot at the buck the fall before — and went through the woods. At places, the water came up to his waist and, though it was midsummer, the brook was still roaring, and since the rocks were slippery he had trouble crossing.

He got home, went up the stairs and lay on his bed, in torment, soaking wet.

A song came on the radio.

“I
gave you everything and you flew.”
The line resounded in the dark, and it plagued him for a long time.

Tom stayed in the barn and worked and waited for Karrie the next day.

A few hours passed. And then a few days. The stalls were swept out, the shovels placed in the corner, the long barn floor was spotless and smelled of sun and shadow, horse and oats.

The house was quiet, as quiet as it was when one waited out the warm afterscent of a thundershower.

One day, in the third week of July, he hitchhiked up to Douglastown to enroll in night school, and on his way he thought of Karrie, and how she had told him she would drive him in her father’s car.

He thought of this, standing on the side of the road, with the marks of a comb through his short blond hair.

He walked half the distance before being picked up by the milk truck. He saw Silver Brassaurd roar past him in his Pontiac without acknowledging him. And then at the door of the school he decided not to enroll.

He had lost his nerve without Karrie there. He could not understand school. He could not understand history. He had always been hindered by shyness, something that was so often never taken into account in these matters. And the smell of the school, the dogged smell, yanked him back to when the snow piles sat for months along the endless road.

The attitude of the milkman who had picked him up was synonymous with the attitude of others. People now seemed apologetic when they saw him, and he hated it. Some looked away when he passed them. Some, like the milkman, couldn’t help drifting into a slightly pleasure-filled smile.

He could tell in an instant that people were diplomatically avoiding the only subject that was on their mind.

Even Vincent was different in Tom’s presence, as if he felt something bad was happening.

Vincent went down to the road every day and waited for Karrie to come along, or he sat in the grass near the barbed-wire fence.

Tom did not go back to Karrie’s house. Nor did he go down to the gas bar. He went farther down the road to buy his plug at Wholsun Breau’s little store near the bay.

Two more weeks passed like this, and no one would speak to him about her. When he went to the horse-hauling at the community centre, he stayed until well after ten at night and she didn’t show up. Even for the light horses the next afternoon she was absent.

Then on the night of her birthday, August 4, he put the diamond in his pocket, took the tractor, and drove recklessly down to Michael’s farm, only to find that no one was there. The doors had been boarded shut, and an old clam bucket sat on the beach waiting for the tide. The sailboat was out. The barn was solid and quiet, the new picnic table deserted.

Tom went back to the tractor and, with tears of anger and hopelessness flooding his eyes, he drove back up the lane.

At three o’clock the next afternoon Vincent ran across the field to tell him that he had seen her,

Tom was piling hay into the barn, and looked at him. “Where?”

“Over there I do,” Vincent said.

The day was hot, the sky dark blue. Beads of sweat stuck to Vincent’s shirt and his pants. His pants were torn at the knees, and he had a large straw hat that he wore with a string about his neck.

Vincent pointed far away, as if the distance he was pointing was, to him, the most important aspect of the information he was giving. There, on the flat blacktop lane that ran from the farm all the way into the centre of the province, far down that road was a small solitary figure with her quart jug.

“Blueberry,” Vincent said. He smiled again, closing his eyes automatically, his teeth perfectly straight and white, and there was a smell of manure in the wind. It was as if her love of blueberries had caught her for them.

Tom threw down the hay bale, turned and walked, faster and faster, and finally broke into a run across the dried field stubble. All the while he did not know if he should be going towards her.

He reached the property marker at the back of the field, and he could now smell his own sweat, and something else — fear. He did not know why, but he was very afraid. He watched her a moment. He could not bring himself to imagine why he had not seen her for almost two weeks. And yet, besides this, he was afflicted by a kind of agony of delight.

He did not walk up the road but climbed the old bare barbed-wire fence and went into the woods. Here it was cool and he could smell the shade. He tried to think. He couldn’t. He felt himself begin to shake, as if he were cold.

“Ill give her one more chance,” he kept saying to himself over and over again, without realizing he was saying it.

On his left, the roadway where she had walked was dusty and white. Patches of the road were shaded, and in amongst the trees were the remnants of the old forest-fire growth, where blueberries now flourished.

Tom, thinking he was going to tell her off, knelt instead and picked as many berries as he could, using his shirt as a catch-bag. He picked enough to fill a quart jug, and stepped onto the lane. He squinted in the sun and at first he didn’t see her.

Then he realized he had come into the road ten yards above her. She was standing behind him, and had been watching him for some time. The first impression he had was that she was very sad. There was a mixture of kindness and sadness in her eyes. He thought of how he’d kissed her eyes that night in Bathurst when she had sat on his knee.

He then thought of her father and her stepmother, how one day the week before they had driven behind his tractor, and impatiently honked as they passed him. He was filled with anger at this now-obvious slight, at the idea of the stinginess of the stepmother, and how that would influence Karrie about a wealthy man like Michael Skid. This was what he reflected upon as he stared at Karrie, and he now saw in her those same qualities he had always disliked in her family.

“I’m sorry,” he said. He did not know why he said that. At this moment she looked inscrutably upon him, while at the same time bending over slightly to scratch her leg below her billowy white shorts. He had once teased her about those shorts, saying he could make two sails with them. She was wearing makeup and he could smell her perfume on the air. It was a delicate fragrance just lingering upon the sweltering heat.

“So you were spying on me,” she said. She smiled, but her lip trembled just a bit.

“He’s not our people,” he said. “I can’t tell you what I know — but I do.” He was saying something that was diminishing himself in his own eyes. That is, he wanted to tell her about Michael and Nora Battersoil — her own cousin — but even now he couldn’t bring himself to. He stopped short, almost apologetically.

“I mean, his farm means nothin because though it’s twice as big as mine he don’t work it — the hay will rot — the stalls are broken — why do he need it? He got that big sailboat from his dad.

“I could play the geetar — he could play the geetar but it would be different. He got money comin in, but he likes bein poor. I tell ya somethin else — ya’s a play toy for him, if ya thinks yer not.”

But when he said this, he was admitting to himself and to her that he believed perhaps something had gone on. She gave a slight start with her eyes, just discernible to someone looking into such eyes as he was at the moment.

He pictured himself at this moment outside of his body and saw a man of five-eleven with a thick neck and strong shoulders, scratched by branches and abrasions from days of work, standing before her like a child. He could even feel the presence of cars miles away on the highway, and see both him and her as tiny figures in the middle of nowhere. So, too, he felt a kind of light throbbing from the heavens as he spoke, just as he noticed the startled look in her eyes.

It was excruciating the way she stared at him. She did not defend Michael. Her green eyes were wonderful again — her hair reddish. Suddenly he recalled he had heard that there was some girl Michael teased and called “cinnamon girl” — and now, only now, did he realize, like a vague fact coming out of the blue sky and turning into one more stabbing dart, that it was her.