Minister Without Portfolio (25 page)

As he limbed the trees he would come upon a rock and these he threw towards the fire to make a partial ring on the lee side. He did this without Justin telling him to. It was what Wilson Noel would do.

They threw a last heap of boughs on the fires and then walked down to the brook to eat their sandwiches in the shade. Keith opened a bottle of warm Sprite he'd left in the brook and they shared a chocolate bar and they heard the splashing through
the trees. They walked towards this screen of brush and looked through and the Noel brothers were still enjoying themselves. The Noels had cans of coke and Colleen Grandy was on her stomach now, slowly paddling the inflatable raft in to get her own soft drink. She looked like she didn't want to get even her feet wet. Colleen Grandy, Justin said. She's pretty good for her age.

They walked the sandwiches back up to supervise the burn. They were only gone maybe ten minutes but the woods were different. It was the way the smoke was coming up, not in a localized punch but sort of runnelling up thinly over a long line of land. The fire had caught and was in the ground. Justin laid his sandwich on the gas can and ran into the field. Keith followed him and they both started stamping at these little fires that had hopped around before brightly changing their minds. Keith found a fire under a big tree and had to push branches aside to get a foot in. There was a breeze. The wind was blowing life into all of this.

Something audible happened. The ear picked out another, windier, sound that was now the dominant aural cue that trouble was upon them. A roar blew up as boughs on a sawed-down tree caught and the whole length of tree, sitting on the ground, blew into a fence of flame. Long orange hairs of fire bent over in a flurry and pointed straight into the ground then returned to stand up on end thirty feet deeper into the woods.

We need water, Justin said. Where's your cell.

We need a landline.

Maybe someone at the pond.

Colleen Grandy will have a phone.

He watched Justin run. He ran through the woods on a path they used that would take him straight to the pond. Even if
someone had a cell phone it wouldn't work in these woods. You'd have to climb a hill and even then you couldn't be sure. He'll have to take the trike out to the main road. He imagined Justin tearing through the woods. Colleen Grandy lifting her head and shielding her eyes to see what the panic is.

30

Henry Hayward had seen the smoke. It was too much smoke for the work the boys were doing. He climbed Aubrey's ladder to his eaves and witnessed the fire. He could smell it.

He drove down into Kingmans Cove to see if he could help. The fire had chewed a black carpet through the valley over the old cellar and punched a charred line deep into the hill of trees, smoke coming up off the more mature trees. That was a lot of trouble. The boy Keith was down there watching the fire eat into the woods. Colleen Grandy was with him. Henry felt responsible for the fire, that somehow he had taken a spark from the incinerator with him, nursed it and let it loose in this field.

Run!

Henry turned and it was Justin King standing tall on his trike, shouting into the valley.

Then a plane. A slow yellow plane with fat pontoons on the wingtips and four propellers. This plane was all belly. It came in straight over the fire and then banked out onto the sea taking the sound of its propellers that sort of chopped at the air. It did one complete arc above the smoking valley just to point a wing at
the fire. It drove itself inland searching for a pond big enough to land on, then turned again, sharply, on a wing and doubled back and sank below the trees. Henry heard it through the woods. It would be on Butterpot Pond now, its vast cargo hold gathering water and those young Noels would have a great view of it. The yellow plane returned to the sky and Colleen Grandy took Keith's hand for they must have been nervous and they stared up as the plane flew low and the gates beneath the plane opened suddenly and it looked like paper flew out, a confetti drop that turned immediately into a curled fabric that straightened in the air and Justin bellowed out to them again, RUN.

It was as if a message was being floated down and the air inflated the message as it descended. Colleen and Keith stood there, too late to move. The water hit them both and flattened them to the ground and the water drilled the ground as if it had gone through their bodies and broke into pieces that flashed up against Keith's chest and the sound of it trickled off and he looked at Colleen Grandy as the water continued to fall on him like something tall that had fallen and the water drenched six acres of land and the silver trees beside them, the tree limbs sheared off and branches split wide open, taking sleeves of black bark from the trees and the wide plane was almost down in the trees now, dipping into the hollow of the marsh. It continued on and never came back. Colleen Grandy holding Keith close and Justin King turned them both over and said are you okay is anything broken can you talk to me, talk to me.

Henry Hayward drove down into the valley just as Justin King reached them. It was Justin's voice and shape in front of the sun and Keith Noyce who said he could not get up and Colleen Grandy could not or would not let go of him.

Jesus, she finally said, when Henry got there. That was fucking amazing.

He understood, at that moment, everything of the relationship between Colleen Grandy and Keith Noyce.

31

Keith got out of the idling car outside Wilson Noel's house in Aquaforte. Wilson Noel once had a bonfire on the family land in Kingmans Cove that went into the night and, as they roasted hotdogs, Wilson Noel took a spinning rod and flung a red and white lure deep into the dark night. You heard the lure hit the water and he waited a few seconds for it to sink then he reeled it in and the rod bent over and he fought hard and caught a herring. The herring flapping in the firelight as he thrust his thumb and finger into its eyes.

Wilson Noel opened the screen door and listened to Keith's apology. It was the first time Keith had ever seen Wilson Noel serious. Even when he'd found them shooting into the snow of the King cabin he had a sense of humour in his face. But here he was listening to Keith without any pretense of collusion. We're going to replant, Mr Noel, Keith was saying. Every tree you lost we'll—

I didn't lose a tree. You crazy sons of bitches burnt them down.

Keith's father, sitting in the car, heard the outburst. The screen door was creaking as Wilson Noel held it open. He did not
invite the boy in and he did not use the little sliding lever to keep the piston on the door ajar.

I'm sorry for that, Mr Noel, Keith said. Here's a map of the area that my father drew up and you can see where the fir are going to go around the family garden you had planned.

I want pine, he said. White pine, and birch, and I don't want them in rows.

He took out a pen and held Keith's map in his hand. He scratched out some of the markings and made others, here and here and here. He was deliberate in dirtying up the map.

Mr Noel was without humour because of his sons who had come home from being hit with seven tons of water while swimming in the brook that ran into Butterpot Pond. They could have been drowned and then burnt as the entire brook and all the cabins deep into the wilderness area were vulnerable and who knows where that fire would have eventually gone if the wind wasn't a prevailing wind and had blown it to the marsh.

32

Henry knocked down the chimney in one day and carried it out in buckets. Martha painted a dresser in the back garden.

You shouldn't be doing that, he said.

I'm wearing a mask. I'm outdoors. I'm being careful.

It's not Larry Noyce she's seeing, he said.

Martha: How do you know anything is going on.

It's going on.

What did you see.

The way they held each other. That wasn't the first time they've been together.

The bricks were not good enough to build a new chimney with. They sort of fell away as he worked first on the roof and then down through the roofline and the bricks were hardly cemented together but merely standing like children's blocks one upon another. He could not open the windows otherwise he would have thrown them out that way or used a rope to lower the buckets down. He'd done that before in the early days of working with John Hynes and Rick Tobin. These windows were painted shut.

When he was through he shovelled the mortar into a wheelbarrow and filled the barrow seven times with heavy green powder which was what remained of the lime mortar. The work allowed him to think. And what he thought was conspiracy. Baxter and Emerson were at the dump conspiring. Baxter and Emerson have a history with Rick Tobin.

The chimney foundation was ten big flat boulders stacked into a mound. He lifted these out of the hole in the centre of the floor as the house and crib would need to slide over this ground.

Larry Noyce stopped by and asked if he was going to rebuild the chimney. Henry told him about moving the house.

I have bricks, Larry said. In my cellar. From when they tore down the old lighthouse.

You salvaged them?

The house we have is the lightkeeper's house. His family lived there. I feel some responsibility for the old lighthouse—I kept the best of the bricks.

They opened the cellar and shone a flashlight and the bricks sat in a quiet heavy stack. It looked like they were hibernating. They were a warm colour, like ruddy bullion. There was a two-litre plastic juice bottle sitting on the bricks.

My god they are beautiful.

I only kept the good ones, Larry said again.

It can be an interior chimney. The weather won't get at it.

Henry asked him about the juice.

It's the root, Larry said. The medicine for the ceremony. It needs a cool dry place.

Your fridge not working?

It's a little illegal to have possession of it, Larry said.

How did you get it here?

Federal Express.

As he closed up the cellar Henry told him about the mine in Fort McMurray, the event with Jamie Kirby. It's like you have the jewellery box of Kingmans Cove, Henry said.

33

A transport truck arrived with four wooden utility poles that had been standing along a railway spur near Witless Bay for twenty-five years. Leonard King was renting the poles from the Used Lumber yard up on the main road. Six men arrived in the back of a pickup truck and they jumped over the tailgate and helped guide the winch that lifted the poles onto the ground. They used pulp mill hooks to drag the poles along to each corner of the house.

Henry picked his way through the new land and moved an old piece of fencing and used a lever bar to roll several rocks away from the path that Leonard was to take. As he did this the men used two hydraulic jacks from Hughie Decker's garage and began lifting up a corner of the house. They rolled the creosoted end of a pole under the corner of the house and then jacked up the other corner. They did this methodically around the house until the poles were under and then they jacked up the house again corner by corner and proceeded to bind the poles together with strapping and chains and long poles that went under the floor beams and tied and nailed these to the poles. This elevation was done slowly
and the creaks of the house guided them to how fast they should go. Leonard did not want them to break a pane of glass.

By the time Leonard arrived with his front-end loader the men had stopped for a break and drank thermoses of tea and plastic bottles of cola and sandwiches and cellophane-wrapped confections. They threw their garbage in the grass. Leonard must have been thinking about the project in his sleep for he did not hesitate and rammed the loader into the small alders and rotated his machine until he was on the east side of the house and ready to pull the house with the bucket of the loader. The men had heavy ropes slung around the house and tied with a pulley and connected the ropes to the bucket and Henry joined the men on the house corners as Leonard pulled with the bucket. Heave, heave came the call and the house cracked itself out of the shale footing and smeared the flat slate out in front of the utility poles and dug into the grass and then found the surface of the earth and then, very neatly, slipped greasily over the garden. Leonard had a spotter behind him who agreed with the direction and who told Leonard how to back up as he pulled the house along.

The house made progress across the old field. The roof of the house broke the horizon and it looked confident on this new land. Could you turn the house a little, Henry said, so it faces the sea. Just nudge a corner about three feet.

Leonard opened the door to the loader and stepped out and looked around. You've got a good view from up here as it is, he said. Climb up and you'll see what you have from upstairs.

Just turn the house a little.

He had moved into Tender's house and now he was moving that house away from the cemetery. The dead don't move but houses do.

A couple of men shouted out that they'd found rock in front of the house. They were picking up flat plates of slate to show Leonard. There's a foundation here, they said. Underneath the matted yellow grass was the distinct border of a house. Leonard quickly paced it off. Well, he said, lucky you.

By the early evening, the house sat on the old foundation.

You said a morning, Henry said. They were drinking beers now in behind the new house placement. Staring at the hill that jutted up and levelled off that reminded Henry of the widow's hill in Kabul. He'd forgotten its real name.

It could have been done by one o'clock but you'd have had to move the kettle off the stove.

Leonard looked around the land and pointed with his beard to the bottom of the garden. I'll come by next week, he said, and dig you another well.

34

You could see the whole cove now in this new position that was, in fact, where the old house used to stand. Henry was being a slave to origins. The past was forcing him to live the way it wanted him to live. But he was open to it. Soon, Martha said, you'll be refusing booster shots and brushing your teeth with a twig.