Elizabeth and After (37 page)

A small scraggly V of geese honked their way through the pale blue air. Travelling refugees. The other night he’d brought
Star Wars
home from the shop and watched it with Lizzie. Played with the idea that he, Lizzie and a few others scattered across the face of the planet were the rebel army. The only ones left who knew how to say no. Everyone else was part of the Empire; whether they knew it or not they were conscript soldiers, life-crushers, mindfucked robots blindly tramping over other life-crushed, mindfucked lives. Not McKelvey. He’d lived on the edge of the whole thing, watched it crumble around him. But Luke Richardson, all Luke Richardson needed was an officer’s uniform and leather boots. Luke was one of those officers who thought he was smarter than the system, was convinced he could play it both ways. In movies, men like Luke Richardson scared you at the beginning, then got finished off by someone bigger, stronger, smarter. Someone like Fred. Despite all his plans, his “savvy,” his toy castle.

By the time Carl had circled the lake and regained the beech tree, two hours had passed. He sat down in a pile of leaves to smoke a cigarette and watch the fading play of light across the dark mirror of the water. He had forgotten about Fred, Luke, anything that wasn’t air, water, earth, the long clouds parked above the horizon, the violet merchant ships of night bringing their cargoes of darkness.

On the way back from the campgrounds he kept taking little sideroads, making excuses to stretch out the drive. It was that lazy late afternoon feeling. You could drive for ever with the windows open, taking in the sharp snap of the leaves, the way the slanted light ran between the trees. The October after the
accident, when the weather turned irresistibly golden, he and Chrissy had played hooky for a week, slipping out every afternoon to drive around in the sun, find somewhere to park the truck, walk through the bush until they found a little sunlit meadow, a warm patch of moss, a pine tree waiting for two people exactly like them to whip off their clothes and roll around in its soft blanket of needles.

Without meaning to he realized he’d worked his way close to the farmhouse on the Second Line Road. There was a back concession no one used any more with a dilapidated barn beside a creek. After they moved into the farmhouse from the barber-shop apartment, Chrissy so pregnant he’d groaned carrying her over the doorsill, he would walk from the farmhouse back to the barn and daydream that when he’d saved some money he would turn it into a carpenter’s workshop. There would be the stream, the trees, some chipmunks he always saw when he went there—Lizzie would come and sit by the water, have her own daydreams while he worked away inside. Of course he knew it was foolish. Furniture was made in factories now. No one was going to search out a fixed-up barn on a dirt road off the Second Line just so some guy who should be working in a milk store could watch his daughter playing with chipmunks beside some stream. Still.

He parked the truck behind the old barn. Then he walked out to the dirt road and kicked leaves over the tire tracks. Since the last time he’d visited another of the barn’s corners had given way. Now the barn was toppling forward in slow motion like a giant beast whose front legs had collapsed.

He’d left because he had to, left Lizzie without wanting to, but also left everything that could remind him of Chrissy: the places they’d made love, the smell of her skin, the way they’d burned together. Burning and intensity: that was what
he’d liked, Carl knew. They’d burned down all the barriers and then Lizzie had been born and Chrissy had turned away from him and so, eventually, he also had turned. First to drinking, then to someone warmer to fill his hands when he ran out of bottles. Now that he was back, it was as though he was inside where they’d been all the time. The sky. The quick little licks of breeze. The flutter of poplar leaves against the barn’s torn tin roof. That morning she’d come for coffee, whatever separated present from past had momentarily disappeared. He could have reached across the table to her. It wouldn’t have been like that night they’d met at Frostie’s, a memory desperate to be rekindled. A kiss he had almost forgotten. Almost lost the taste for. Until the second, the third, the tenth. But he still felt he owed her something, something to be delivered to Fred.

For a long moment he looked at Luke’s shotgun on the truck floor. He opened the door, took it out, carefully wiped his fingerprints before hiding it under a nearby juniper bush. Then he locked the truck and set off on the old cowpath that would eventually lead him to the hills behind Chrissy and Fred’s house, the house where he’d once lived with Chrissy.

The trail skirted the edge of a cedar swamp and climbed into a maple bush that Chrissy’s uncle had still been tapping when he died. The barn, the swamp, the bush, all the fields and pasture that had gone with the old farm had been sold off to the neighbour. Now the bush was littered with deadfall and thick piles of maple leaves that swirled around his ankles with every step.

When he came up to the big field on the other side of the swamp he could see that the neighbour had converted the hay into corn. The dark rich soil was littered with fragments of stalks and corn silk. The field joined the neighbour’s land and
in the distance freshly painted barns and silos rose like a mirage of a city.

It was twilight by the time he had worked his way to the small hill overlooking the house. He drew his jacket close and lay on the ground. Now he was perfectly positioned to worm his way to the hill’s crest and look down at the house. From the house itself he would be totally invisible. A perfect hiding place for a war game, when you wanted to watch as the enemy soldiers came and searched for you. He had always meant to introduce Lizzie to the game, show her this perfect place but for now it was his secret, and after the sun set only he could find his way through the dark to the old barn where he’d hidden the truck. Even Chrissy had never made the walk with him—just he and the cattle knew the way through the cedar swamp that separated the two.

He moved forward and peered over the hill. A cluster of cars and trucks were parked near the road and a dozen people were standing on the front lawn, silent and waiting. White screens, light umbrellas, two long foam covered sound booms had turned the lawn into a mini-Hollywood. Spotlights began to glow and gradually worked themselves to a dazzling brilliance that bathed the front of the house, the driveway, the entire movie set full of technicians and equipment in a glaring white light.

Carl now remembered that Nancy Brookner had told him they were doing television shows about Fred. He had thought that meant Fred standing in front of Allnew, giving some kind of speech to be played on the Kingston television news. This was more like
Gone with the Wind
. Customers would probably be clamouring to rent it at the store.

He began to retreat but found himself too curious to leave. Chrissy emerged from the house, accompanied by a woman
with a clipboard giving her instructions. They went back in. The lights dimmed for a moment and Carl saw a car sweeping down the Second Line towards the house. Up came the lights again, full force. This was
light!
The spots on Luke Richardson’s house were dim toys in comparison. There was a red glow from the camera following Fred’s car into the driveway. As he stepped out, another camera had the same red glow—this one was pointed to the door of the house and was focused on Chrissy as she came out to meet him.

Strange to think that movies were made this way: giant concentrations of lights, screens, cameras and technicians all focused on a couple of tiny figures playing out their parts. Too bad the cameras hadn’t been in position a few weeks ago when Fred had broken Chrissy’s ribs. A little punch-up was always popular. Or in his kitchen that morning to get Chrissy’s version of Fred. Or maybe the fact that Fred beat the shit out of Chrissy
wasn’t
the big story. After all,
this
was the Fred Verghoers people would play on their video clips, show to their grandchildren. Even Lizzie would look at it over and over again, the way she’d watched that silly scene Carl had taken of her waking up. To Lizzie, the movies of herself were more real than the Lizzie who was watching. Like actors who drank, fought, screwed around, needed operations to fix their livers and their bellies and their faces. Everyone knew but no one cared. They were hungry for that moment on the screen, that moment when the bright lights closed in on the smooth shining skin, just the way the bright lights were now closing in on Chrissy’s face. All that glare must be killing her eyes, Carl thought, but her eyes were wide open and she was floating towards the man of her dreams—
Maybe I still love him. It’s not so bad
—as he smiled and waited.

Passing cars stopped to watch. From one of them came a shout. The lights were so bright Carl couldn’t see through to
the disturbance. Meanwhile Chrissy and Fred were replaying the heartwarming moment where she wafted dreamily towards Fred while Fred, smiling, moved up to her and gave her a kiss. Nothing too sexy. Just a little smooch to show how loving this loving couple was. Then Lizzie appeared, walking towards Fred and Chrissy as though joining this celebration of love was the high point of all her afternoons. Of course they would need that. The token child. Maybe they’d hired a few dogs to jump up and lick at Fred’s face.

The shouting had started again; “He’s a fucking fraud” ripped through the dark autumn air. Ned Richardson burst into the circle of light. He had a plastic bag and was waving it accusingly at Fred. “Do you want me to show them what’s here? Do you want me to—” A technician grabbed at him but Ned pushed him off. He plunged his hand inside the bag as Fred started towards him.

“Everyone stand back,” Fred said. It was amazing how cool he sounded, the dry authority of his voice cracking through the night, the lights, the cameras.

“I told you to get out!” Chrissy shouted.

Ned was still advancing. “I warned you. Now everyone’s going to know.”

Lizzie was standing at the edge of the light, her mouth opening in a scream as Ned’s hand emerged from the bag. Fred jumped, his arms and legs spread wide as he came crashing down on Ned, taking him to the ground.

Culture and intelligence can recognize each other—or so the intelligent and cultured like to believe. They know each other’s ways, each other’s books, each other’s costumes and disguises. “O what a tangled web we weave.” And reducing such a web to a single filament leading from beginning to end makes excellent
grist for detective novels, even for actual detectives if they recognize in the tangled motives and deliberately blurred trails minds like their own.

But before the master detective must come the mastermind, the master criminal. That would be me, Adam decided when Carl, lying half-dead in front of the shop, told him Fred was responsible. In his first moments of rage Adam wanted to chase Fred down and shoot him. But Adam, being himself, had neither a gun nor the know-how to use one. After his visit with Carl, he joined the Napanee Target Shooting Club but one night of blasting out his eardrums told him not even rage could transform the court eunuch into the mad gunfighter. One advantage of reading Shakespeare—or even Tolstoy—is that you learn every player is doomed to stay in character.

Stay in character. Accept and understand the situation fate had dealt him. That was what he would have to do. Fate had first given him love, then a son. But the love had been taken away and he had been walled off from the son by secrecy. Now, after almost thirty years of keeping that secret, the wall had started to come down: fate was offering him the chance to save his son’s life. The first instalment had already arrived. He’d been the one to find Carl. Now he had the opportunity to secure Carl’s future.

Adam needed time to think, yet he also needed to be sure Carl would do nothing precipitous. That was why he had suggested Luke take Fred and Carl hunting. Luke caught on right away, slapping Adam on the shoulder, grinning until his face threatened to break with the cunning hilarity of it all. The idea that three would go and only two would come back was something Adam didn’t have to say. Afterwards Luke would explain it was an accident or a camp-fire brawl and then he’d have Carl so deep in his pocket that Carl would never crawl out.

So. Perfect. Perfect for Luke. And perfect for Adam because Carl, believing his revenge was coming, would hold back until the hunting trip, which would be the second week in November, a week after the election and the beginning of the north country deer season. That gave Adam almost a month to come up with a plan.

Bits of dust caught in the light. Colours. Unexpected waterfalls. And of course the body. Warm skin on cool sheets. The blood’s night hum. Summer heat seeping through damp moss. The raw smell of an oak tree opened in winter. So much to love that life should be made out of loving, so many ways of loving that all stories should be love stories.

The day Carl walked to the house on the Second Line after hiding his truck near the collapsing barn that had once held so many of his dreams was one of those mythic late October days—a sunset day in a sunset month when the gold and scarlet autumn leaves shine as though shining from inside, when every hill, every tree, every rock and blade of grass is etched in the perfect light.

That same October day Adam Goldsmith was also caught up in the magic of burnished sun, burnished memories, collapsed dreams. He left work in the late afternoon to walk the road from town to the West Gull Cemetery. A tall man who had begun to take on weight over the years, washed-out blue eyes hardly visible behind the thick lenses of his steel-rimmed glasses, Adam Goldsmith seemed to be floating about in even more of a trance than was his habit. So serene, so ethereal were his movements that as he opened the gate and let himself into the cemetery he might have been a ghost returning to his grave after a hard day of haunting. But even inside the cemetery Adam Goldsmith kept moving: from his mother’s
grave to what would one day be his own, pausing only briefly to consider the grass that would form his ceiling and roof; to Elizabeth’s grave where he stood for a long time; lastly to the cemetery’s western edge where he watched the beginnings of the sunset and thought about what he had to do. By the time he started back towards West Gull, the cemetery was in shadows and as he walked down the hill darkness folded over the lake.