The Big Why (20 page)

I stood at the graveyard gates and drew a picture of Stan’s burial. Kathleen and the children among the mourners. Curved lines on the hill and the drift of weather. I would send this to Charles Daniel. See what he thought of this life in Brigus.

Later, we went home and I spread molasses on slices of bread. We ate them while I fixed more, cutting them in half. I brought a slice to bed and laid it directly on the sheet beside my head. I did not use a plate. I ate the bread and molasses and did not fall asleep. Instead, I got up again and walked to the field across from the house and ploughed and set out a garden. I could plant everything, Tom said, except the potatoes.

My tools arrived, my father’s tools. The big walnut case was at the station. They had salvaged them. The wood had bulked out and the hinges on the box were caked with rust. The lock busted off. I asked George Browiny about that.

Accidental, he said. Looks it. Probably when the freighter went down.

More like vandalism, I said. And I thought there was more to it than he was letting on.

I had Swift the pony lug the box home on the mail cart. The hills were full of dandelions. I opened the box and the tools jiggled on their little ledges, tucked in alcoves, hung on nails. The tools too were lined with rust, but a bit of oil and steel wool and they were fine. Behind each tool lay a painted shadow of the tool on the wood. So you knew where it belonged. All that was missing was a table clamp and a vise. It wasnt so bad. Perhaps George Browiny was right. The woodcarving tools were wrapped in cloth and leather and the cloth had oil on it. The carving tools were marvellous. My father’s tools. When my father died there was a field of dandelions. There was sun. It was a day like this day. It was before I knew that the sky wasnt always blue and bright. There was the news and there was a letter from him. And my mother folded the letter, unopened, and pushed it into the wastebasket. As though the corpse had lifted a finger, or inhaled, as if the gasses of my father had mustered in his lungs and infected the letter with decay and the roil of illness. And when his ashes came home, there was a funeral and Nanny Rosa was not invited.

My father used to open his mail with a pocket knife. He believed a man should keep a knife on him. He was a man who could do two things with his hand at once. He could hold a bottle of wine with his thumb and forefinger and gesture with the rest. Splay up with those three fingers.

Me: Can you cut me a cross?

Tom: I can make you two lengths.

Cut me two lengths and I’ll make a cross. I’ll carve Stan’s name on it.

I realized that part of the reason why I had moved to such an isolated place was that I was losing my ability to feign interest in boring things. I was becoming a loner. If you want to get along with people it’s important to be polite. Or to cut people off nicely and feign an excuse. New York is full of idiots.

Kathleen had not tired of being polite. We spoke about this after Stan’s funeral. How removed I looked, sketching pictures of the mourners. How she and the children had accompanied the family to the graveyard. She said, Youve even forgotten how to mask indifference.

Was I indifferent?

I felt I had been politely tempering my emotions. For thirty years I’d done that, and now my face was betraying me. There was something to profit from the death of Stan Pomeroy, and I was not about to show false emotion. I was excited to draw it. And yes, perhaps there was something boring in the fatalism of accepting death.

Kathleen: We all know when we’re being boring, but we appreciate the polite gesture, the kindness of someone’s responding with class and respect.

Yes, I said. We like people who tolerate us, and they feel liked and like you back for it, even if you are boring them.

But you look like youre afraid you’ll be stuck with them.

Is it that plain on my face?

When you said that to Mr Hearn, about waiting for a train.

You were there for that?

You told me about it. As a joke.

This was depressing me. I felt like a bad citizen. Kathleen tried to revive me. When I say these things, she said, about your bald honesty, it’s not that I’m judging you. I’m saying that youre more open to your own nature, and I tend to cut myself off from that kind of experience. I’m impressed with your free attitude. But it’s also scary to realize I’m hitched to this.

Me: I feel youre judging me.

Kathleen: Perhaps part of me is.

Me: Which part. I touch her thigh. This part?

Kathleen: I’m trying to make light of my jealousy. I’m trying to speak of it so it doesnt fold into the secret life and go on growing without either of us speaking of it.

Jealousy is an odd word.

Envy, then. I envy your zest, even if it is nasty. So forgive me if you feel like I’m chastising you.

You think every possible thought, dont you, Kathleen.

I think every thought. Yes.

The women were making fish along the shore. The older ones wore slouches to protect their faces from the sun. Flies were on the fish so thick that sometimes the fish looked blue. Tom Dobie and Tony Loveys had built a flake out along the Battery trail.

Tom Dobie: You put flat boughs on the flake and you spread the fish on the boughs fair in the list and when the leaves drop off and the wind blows up underneath, up through the boughs, well then that is what makes excellent fish.

With Stan buried and the cross planted they turned to Marten Edwards, and he had gone in with them. They were getting good fish in the trap, just trouble drying it with the poor weather.

Rupert Bartlett was heading to Labrador for the season. He asked his sister Eleanor if she could recall where the tulip beds were. He didnt want to coil rope on the tulip beds.

I’m going to count on your memory, he said.

I helped him with the ropes. The flies were bad and he was using a dried-out branch from an aspen to kill them. He held the branch over his head and flicked it back and forth, the sharp twigs of the branch killing the flies. He was loading up a cart to take down to the
Morrissey
. The Bartletts had a station in Turnavik. Youre more than welcome to come down with me, he said.

But I wanted to get work done here. I mailed off my
House of Dread
to Charles Daniel. I didnt like the mood of it infecting my family. I had recovered from the friction of the seal hunt. I was making my wife happy. I wanted to paint something hopeful.

We waved off Rupert and the
Morrissey
. I did as Rupert had suggested. I watched the women work. Rachel Dobie and Emily Edwards with Rose Foley and Amanda Sweeney. Their backs bent all day.

I took to watching Emily. To see a young woman hard at work. I tried not looking at her, but I liked to see the strain on her face. Exertion in the young is sensual. I imagined myself behind her, I held her as she bent over and turned the fish. That’s it, Emily. Now put your hands down. You dont even know I’m behind you.

Rachel stacked the fish to press the water out. You got to keep it off the ground, Emily said, or the damp will take out the pickle.

Rachel Dobie: Let nature do work for you is what I says.

After a night in waterhorse the fish were ready to spread on the flake.

The fish is in the woman’s care, Emily said, stretching. Leaning back. Now let me just put a leg between yours. Let me push you apart with my knee. How she stroked a strand of hair out of her face. The flies drove her crazy.

A man catches the fish, Emily said, and the woman makes it.

Rachel: We mind the children, flakes, house and gardens. All the men mind is the fish.

Emily: Except for that one there.

Yes, but he’s an artist.

And they have a laugh at that. A really good laugh.

I sawed wood and sometimes I borrowed the Pomeroys’ dory and rowed over to Frogmarsh. The flakes extending off houses covered with fish. You had to spread the fish like they were your babies, Rachel told me. She wouldnt allow Tom to lay out fish. He isnt careful enough, she said. The most delicate stage of making fish, when it’s put abroad on flakes.

I had become vegetarian in New York, but I ate the fish. Fish were triangles of white protein. Rachel showed me some lightly salted fish from last year. It was the colour of teeth.

Rachel: What makes a beautiful fish is the amber colour. It looks like it’s flecked with flour, with no blood spots. No mark from the liver. A good nape, split down through the tail, with a thick, smooth, dry feel.

Then I walked along the shore, to where Emily was. She smiled at my lack of industry.

A good piece of salt fish, she said, you could hang on your wall. And hard. You could slice a man’s hand off at the wrist.

She made a motion to slice off my hand.

Tom Dobie thinks that’s you I’ve put over my door.

Emily: It’s not much of a likeness, I’d say.

I painted, with ink on cardboard, a picture of Emily Edwards tending the flake, a sheep in silhouette behind her, the jaws of black land surrounding her. Sheep and black jaws. I gave it to Tom Dobie.

Sure I’m never making fish.

That’s to remind you of the work the women do.

Theyre always reminding me.

Tom hung the drawing on the wall behind the stove. He studied it.

He’d loaned me a half-ton vise that was used by the railroads. He’d brought it over in his wheelbarrow. A block of maple in the mouth of the vise. I was carving a picture of Tom in his dory. Everything you do not want in the picture, I said, you carve away.

I peeled away shavings of light from his head and arms. How planned a woodcut must be. The ideal form present behind the wood. The emergence of dark and light — that it must be one or the other. The carving tool and the wood grain. It is important to consider the tactile joy of the work.

Kathleen pinned her hair up. Then she bent over to dig. She was planting a perennial in the rock garden. She checked a crevice to make sure it was connected to the earth by soil. Otherwise it won’t last, she said. The frost will kill it.

The tomato flowers with six white petals. The seeds from Mary Bartlett. Her son Bob loves a good tomato. What was happening to Bob. No word. No one knew.

Kathleen sat back and cut a slice of apple with a knife. She ate it off the knife. She was sitting back on her own legs. To save her dress.

Could you live here?

Kathleen: Let’s give it five years. It takes five years to decide anything.

Okay we’ll live here five years. We’ll pretend we’ve been elected to office.

She passed me a slice of apple on the blade of her knife.

When you do that, I said, it looks so elegant.

I could be in love with her. I was in love with her. The way she worked, I could funnel all the work of women into her bent frame.

The original reason, she said, why people cut slices of apple with a knife is not because it’s elegant. It’s because they have false teeth. But I’m doing it because I’ve got lipstick on and I dont want to spoil my mouth.

As I watched her eat this apple Kathleen became aware of me watching. She was uncomfortable with it. I wanted her to act a little now. Assume an air, work her wiles, seduce me. But she was a woman unable to totally lose herself, even in sex. She could not shake the stiffness of self-awareness.

I woke up to a sunny day and I was thirty-two. The hay was white and leaning. A chain of icebergs floated across the mouth of Brigus. I planted three of Gerald’s pear seedlings on the shelf of garden sloping down to the water. A Pomeroy pony came over to the fence, strong, stout, and blowing green snot on my shirt. A wild happy eye, bright and game. If we lived here ten years we’d be able to stand at the front door and pick fruit. I noted that it took seven hours for an iceberg to appear and vanish beyond Red Head. Growlers drifted up to the bridge. The bergs were strays, having calved from glaciers in Greenland, drifted south on a Labrador current, and taken a wrong turn, entering the dead end of Conception Bay. They will sail into Holyrood, grind on the bottom and melt.

The caplin were sighted in Harbour Grace, Tom Dobie remarked. We watched a seiner on the horizon shooting out its nets. A seiner has a glass window in the floor so you can see the fish. The men of Brigus prepared cast nets at Jackson’s Quay, and Tom Dobie walked over in his new seaboots to say tonight was it.

They built three bonfires on the landwash at Jackson’s Quay. Fire to guide the caplin in. It was dusk. We brought the children over. A group of children were passing a burning stick around. Kathleen spotted Tom Dobie with a wheelbarrow and six empty barrels he’d rolled down for the caplin.

Kathleen: How’s everything, Tom?

Oh, the best of gear.

The sun had sunk over the woods, and they were cooking a feed of pork and beans on the shore. They cut hanks of bread and we drank rum, our faces orange from the blazing fires. We raised a glass to Stan Pomeroy, for he loved the caplin. And the caplin were coming tonight.