Deluded Your Sailors (8 page)

Evan got to his knees from lying on the floor to peek under his bed. A sudden scent that belonged on Signal Hill with the Tattoo, not at the back of Evan's head: gunmetal.

—Twelve-gauge, laddybuck. Not gonna try your home invasion shit on me.

Evan kept still while his balls crawled up his throat. Kneeling back-on to his grandfather, he could see the old man's muddy reflection in the glass doors of the bookcase. —Pop, put the gun down.

—Terrorizin old people, pawin for either bit of money or jewellery for your little habit. The crystal meth, is it?

—Pop –

—You're some God damned lucky my grandson Evan isn't home. Just the two of us, but we're some team. Or maybe you're not lucky. Because he'd talk me out of this.

Can't risk turnin around. Use the childhood word.
—Poppy?

Confusion ruint True's face. He nearly dropped the twelve-gauge. —Evan? When did you get home?

—Give me that, now.

—I thought somebody's after gettin in the house.

Hands slick, Evan cracked the barrel.
Jesus, it's loaded. Somethin
else I got to hide.
—Just me, Pop. No one else has got a key.

—Don't need no key if you're hard up enough.

Evan pocketed the shells, peered down the barrel and then locked the trigger. He studied his grandfather, this big man who had snared, fished and hunted his own food, built his own house, who sold almost everything and moved to St John's to look after young Evan. Who now stood disoriented but pleased in ratty boxer shorts and a stained undershirt. Evan took his own bathrobe off the hook by the door and helped his grandfather into it. —Can I get ya a cup of tea before you go back to bed?

True followed his grandson to the kitchen, where the comfortably old wallpaper nearly made him tell the story the day he put it up. Instead he caught himself (
mind slippin like summer tires
on black ice
), nodded a hello to the woman wearing a ponytail and white gloves (
Avon lady, I spose
) and finally remembered some of what he'd meant to tell Evan all day. —I needs a ride over to Mrs Dunphy's house tomorrow night.

Evan recalled being a young teenager:
Pop, you're some good to
drive me everywhere.

Day'll come when it's you drivin me.

—Mrs Dunphy's, very good. What time?

—Eight o'clock, I wants to be there. And I needs some oh what do you call them, those doohickeys, birdhouses and whatnot, splinters and paint, you know – Popsicle sticks. Buildin her somethin.

Evan replaced the shotgun in the hall closet and took out the box of remaining shells.

—Out of Popsicle sticks?

—It shines when it's got the juice. You knows what I means.

Don't do this to me, Pop. You're all I got.
—Shines with the juice?

—You plugs it into the wall.

From the kitchen, Nichole suggested the noun. —Lamp?

—That's it. Gonna build her a Popsicle stick lamp. Tis all Popsicle sticks at her place, b'y, ashtrays, flowerpots, you name it. But she got no lamp.

—I'll get you some at the craft store. You gonna shave before you go this time?

—Go where?

—Mrs Dunphy's.

—Jeannie, right. I needs some of them – those wooden – stir coffee with them, great big toothpicks.

—Popsicle sticks?

—That's them. Wonder if she'll let me kiss her goodnight. Anyway, I'm gone to bed.

—Take your tea, Pop.

—Good night, missus. Good luck sellin the Avon.

Nichole smiled at True Rideout – beautifully, Evan thought.

—Thank you, sir. Good night.

Evan waited until he heard True's bedroom door close.

—Thank
you
, Nichole.

—Is his name Truman?

—Just True. He had three sisters, Faith, Hope, and Charity. Here's the pelt bag.

—I keep expecting the papers to be brittle or damp. But they're almost creamy.

—Sealskin's a tough shield.

March 14
^th
, 1745. From Newman Head, Merchant, Salem, Massachusetts. To John Cannard, lately of Bristol, residing now Port au Mal, Newfoundland.

Sir: I knew both Captain Finn and Captain Cleasby. Captain Matthew Finn, for so we in Salem knew him, sometimes also Kit Finn, being a Christopher as well as a Matthew, stands in my memory as a fine and capable captain who offended none, at least, none who matter.

Evan liked the new pretty shine to Nichole's eyes.

—Ev, I think it's a match. How many John Cannards in Port au Mal could there be? And Newman Head is a treasure all by himself – look, his daughter wrote this for him. This is all –

—What I want to know is, who the hell are Captain Finn and Captain Cleasby?

—And the settlement story. It's all wrong. This can all go into the play – but HARC and Rare Documents – God, we keep losing all the records.

—No. Rare Docs keeps losin them. I'm convinced they've got a firebug workin for them. Two retro-fitted, climate-controlled libraries don't burn down by accident. And now they've got half the republic lookin down at their shoes in shame, while they go on pillage. No amount of fire gives them the right to go snappin up whatever diaries, letters and photos they can get their hands on and then lock them away under glass. I wouldn't trust that crowd with last week's supermarket flyer. And TCR doesn't bat an eye. So this is what I'm after doin. My boss – you've met Chris Jackman, and you know what a dick he can be – he knows I got these letters, and he's supposed to officially notify Rare Docs of their existence. He delegates that task to his assistant, which would be me. Once Rare Docs actually finds out about the letters, they'll want a rough catalogue of those letters from a TCR Officer. Which would also be me. So I'd like to think that until Jackman smartens up, and that'll be about three minutes before the Rapture by my reckonin, you've got research time.

Days and nights of caffeinated reading and writing, of deliciously busy oblivion? —I'm there.

—Not yet, you're not. Somethin else you need to know – hang on. Pop, y'all right?

Evan and Nichole listened to the sounds of someone rustling, then falling, in a closet.

—Pop?

—Don't worry about me.

Evan smiled grimly.—No, b'y, I won't worry a bit. Now then, Ms Nichole Laika Wright, you anythin to the VOIC crowd of Wrights, or wha? Who owns you?

—You know perfectly well.

—I also know perfectly well that your uncle or cousin or whatever he is, Thomas Wright, will officially present that ledger to Chris Jackman at your family reunion in September.

—I'm not going to any family reunion.

—The ledger is.

—But I need it. For the play. And this letter. And because it proves that – oh, for fuck's sake. Thomas Wright wants to make a big fuss over giving it to Rare Docs, and it'll get locked under a clear box.

—Clear? Heaven forbid. That ledger's goin to be part of a dozen grip-and-grin photos and will then be locked in a friggin safe. No general access.

True Rideout crashed around a closet some more, then padded down the hall towards the kitchen.

Nichole blew loose hair out of her eyes; it only got tangled in her eyelashes. —And besides, the truth is dead?

—Sweetheart, you wanna go kamikaze against bureaucrats? Be my guest.

—We can't just pretend the ledger doesn't exist. That's lies and –

WHACK

Evan screamed, last nerve gone. Nichole jumped up. True Rideout chuckled and pointed to the hakapik he'd just driven into the sealskin, and the table. —Now that, me sons, is how ya gets it done.

As Evan got his grandfather back to bed, Nichole, hands trembling, gently tidied the letters. Then she eyed the pelt bag, wondering how best to rescue it.

She couldn't budge the hakapik.

7) THE SAILMAKER'S SECRET KNIFE
F
EB
15-16, 2009, P
ORT AU
M
AL AND
S
T
J
OHN
'
S
.

After waking well before dawn and blowing dust from his fingertips, Elias Winslow wrote his sermon on a laptop, his typewriter-trained fingers giving hard abuse to the computer's soft keyboard. He did not know when he might deliver this sermon.

The serpentine path a lone woman may follow, this woman already an interloper on our righteous community, a woman tainted by sins of the flesh, even bound to those sins and only then, escape impossible, did she taste the gall – the serpentine path of the songs of the flesh, the desire to wrestle with history as though it were an angel sent by the Lord, to then change that history and thereby bind it to the twistings of irresponsible imagination; to defy reason, courtesy and good counsel and persist in this desire, worsening it by associating with the deliberately ungodly, with a man of deplorable family and upbringing, they leaving together talking of alcohol – alcohol, my brethren, do you recall our long battle to declare this community free of that substance which further impedes the self and gives over to flesh, the law of sin? And where hides redemption? When one recognizes the laws of flesh and sin...

Elias minimized that window and maximized
voic.com
.

Sudden Death Delays Foxe Trial

Another delay in the upcoming trial of former broadcaster Almayer Foxe has been called, after the sudden death of a woman who was to testify. Fifty-four-year-old Evelyn Lockyear was found dead in her car last week. Police say the cause of death is carbon monoxide poisoning. Almayer Foxe faces multiple charges of uttering threats, forcible confinement, assault and sexual assault.

Elias tapped the LCD laptop screen, creating brief and tiny puddles beneath the name Foxe. As he did this, Nichole Wright dreamt she drew a very old knife, sharp blade, chipped onyx handle, and used it in murderous self-defence. Relished using it. Elias nodded. Patting the knife on his belt, he then decided to take a walk.

When not infusing the dreams of others, Elias himself dreamt of spying the midnight sun through a window at the end of a long corridor. Might he finish his days in Iceland? Or Russia? Somewhere cold, yes, he did rest reasonably sure of that, and
aurora borealis
would light the way. No midnight sun for Newfoundland, so he must rendezvous with the right light, as in his memories: swirling walls of blue and green fire, black sky, black rocks, black water. Someone whispered the land's names, Nitassinan, Markland, Lavrador, Labrador, Nunatsiavut.
Munus
splendidum mox explebitur;
the splendid task will soon be fulfilled. Elias Winslow, not created of Labrador but assigned there and left to find his way, bore his own splendid task. If he could just recollect the task's precise details...

Chanting disrupted his meditations and jolted Elias back to the ground. Sometimes he forgot himself and travelled long distances very quickly, skimming over the woods, his threads of energy wisping round spruce and fir like fog. Increasingly he got caught in streetlights. Not that anyone could wholly see him in that state, but an observant groundwalker who rarely blinked might catch a silhouette in the beam.

Settling behind trees on the edge of a small field, Elias listened to the chanting and quickly figured out who mocked the old dances this time. Every fifteen years or so, roughly since the mid-1920s, a clot of adolescents dared one another to meet in this field in darkness and – well, get up to devilment. Small town boredom and hereditary rites of passage:
My cousin, right, when she turned
14, she said there's, like, this ritual everyone's got to try in the
graveyard.

Only three of them tonight. Two girls and a boy, maybe fourteen. Pentagrams, a little altar, and three inuksuit. No animal blood staining the snow this time, just incense burning on the inuksuit heads.

One of the girls cracked her gum and fixed her hat.

Bonnets, cloche hats, salt and pepper caps, berets, toques, hoods,
and now those Andean hats with long and untied strings. Minutes
pass in hat fashion: clogged time freed. Spruce gum to sugarless
cinnamon. Can I put that in a sermon?

Gum Girl rolled her eyes at the boy in the group. —Kev b'y, I've told you I don't know how many times, you can't draw down the moon unless the moon is full. Moon's gone stale, now.

—And I told
you
we shoulda done this back on the ninth, but no, you said we had to wait til the weather got fit, because freezin drizzle rots your hair.

—Whatever. But there's no use in drawing down a sliver of the moon, because then we'd only get a sliver of the experience, and that sliver would be exponentially equivalent to the relative size of the moon meshed into our experience.

—Wha?

The other girl, consulting a book by flashlight, giggled.

—Drawin down the moon means you invite the triple goddess into your body so she can be made incarnate. Think you can handle bein female, Kev?