The Master of Happy Endings (2 page)

The black-and-white photos on the shiplap wall were as indifferent to the sounds from his cello as they were to everything else. In a framed lobby card for the movie
Desperate Trails
, the great Cliff Lyons, doubling for Johnny Mack Brown, rode beside the driver of a U.S. Mail coach, no doubt expecting to be ambushed any moment. In the second, Lyons appeared with John Wayne and Susan Hayward, both on horseback for a scene in
Genghis
Khan
. And in the third—a blown-up reproduction from a single frame of a 35-millimetre movie film—a man in a police uniform chased a shadowy figure across the rooftop of a square brick building. These long-dead Hollywood figures were too intent on their duties to be irritated by Axel Thorstad's recital.

He knew that Elena would have been surprised to see how little he'd needed for life without her in their holiday shack—its mismatched windows, rough walls, and driftwood corner posts making it look as old as the forest itself, an ancient playhouse beneath the towering firs. Inside, it could all be seen at once: his fireplace wall of books, his high plank desk at the window, the wooden chairs she'd painted red, the sharply angled rafters above the ceiling joists, and their bed in the lean-to with his poster of Chaucer's pilgrims on the wall above it, faded from its years in his classroom.

Ordinarily, he made an effort to limit the number of times he played the one brief melody his cello would still agree to, so sad that sometimes even he could barely stand to hear it. Last fall, a hunter in a red mackinaw had stepped out of the woods to accuse him of driving the deer population into hiding. “You're jeopardizing my winter supply of venison!” she'd shouted. “Play something else for a change!”

But it was too late to play something else. The instrument that had often accompanied Elena's piano had, since her death, gone into an extended mourning period of its own, refusing every piece of music but this one. Elena had claimed that music was a way God had of speaking to us, but if this was the case it seemed He'd had little to say to her widower for some time.

Lisa Svetic was bound to see his behaviour this morning as a form of betrayal—confronting her with his shotgun like some crazed hillbilly guarding his moonshine still. She was easily offended at the best of times, often complaining that the number of customers at her general store had declined, as though from some conspiracy. Old people had been dying off, young people were moving away, and there were all those suicides he'd been told about, Lisa's young husband amongst them. She had been born here, the granddaughter of pioneering farmers who'd arrived when several families were moving to this island to start a new life. “But they grew old and died, and most of the next generation moved away—including my parents, who send me stupid postcards from Arizona. If I didn't have this store to run I wouldn't see nobody from one end of the year to the next. Wouldn't see
anybody
.”

She was probably the largest young woman he had ever known, broad of forehead and wide across the shoulders, with a great roll of flesh between her chin and imposing bosom. She kept her thin, nearly colourless hair twisted into a knot on the top of her head, with escaped or overlooked strands floating messily around it. He had made a practice of staying in her store no longer than he had to, since knowing he'd been a teacher made her a little defensive about the gaps in her education. And now, in his state of confusion and panic, he had offended her today in a way that could only make things worse. For all he knew, charges could soon be laid. She might have broken with island policy and telephoned the police.

For a moment he thought the sound of a boat scraping onto the gravel beach might be the Mounties materializing out of his imagination. But when he'd leaned the cello against the wall and went out onto his step, the stocky figure of Bo Hammond was stepping out of his small wooden skiff, followed by that always-smiling friend from Cuba who sometimes visited Hammond at the abandoned commune. Together they dragged the little boat up the slope just far enough to keep it from floating away.

Shouting “Hello this house!” Hammond stepped up onto the winter-ravaged retaining wall. “My friend from
Cooba
,” he said.

Because he introduced the friend in this manner every time, Thorstad was tempted to wonder which part was untrue—the
Cooba
or the friendship. This friend from Cuba was chubby, round-shouldered, dark-skinned, barefoot even in the coldest weather. He said nothing, now or ever, but merely nodded, smiling his toothy smile. “My friend from
Cooba
here, his ears picked up your music way out in the strait. I told him you're trying to drive us crazy—same notes over and over until we're so desperate we drown ourselves in the chuck.”

Relieved to see only amusement in Hammond's face, Axel Thorstad folded down to sit on the rough plank step. “You came ashore just to tell me that?”

Hammond laughed. The Cuban lifted a foot to pry something from between his toes.

“Truth is,” Hammond said, “I'm afraid you'll upset the fish and they'll take off for somewhere else.”

“On the other hand,” Thorstad said, thrusting his chin forward, “they may stay and learn to sing.”

Again his visitors laughed, but Hammond quickly sobered. “Move deeper into the bush why don'tcha. Sound travels too far on the water. Anyways, something so sad can't be good for an old guy like you.”

The friend smelled his fingers and wiped them on his khaki shorts.

“I'll tell you what's not good for me,” Thorstad said, leaning forward to cradle his face in his hands. Who better than genial Hammond to confide in? “Being wakened too suddenly from sleep. Turns out, this old fool can be something of a savage when he's surprised.”

Once Hammond had lowered himself to sit beside him on the step, Thorstad briefly recounted his unfortunate confrontation with Lisa Svetic. “Turned her back on me and nearly
ran
. I'm working up my courage to apologize.”

“I'd give 'er a little time to cool down,” Hammond said, placing a callused hand on Thorstad's shoulder. “There's no end of things that woman could do to punish you. If she barred you from the Store you'd have to cross the strait for every bottle of milk or pound of coffee.” He cleared his throat and tilted to spit off his side of the step. “Right there's the reason you won't catch me in any one place for long. A change of scenery could do you good— especially if you look for scenery that don't include our Lisa.”

Thorstad felt the fluttery wings of anxiety astir in his chest. This was not what he'd hoped to hear. When he'd come here seven years ago, he'd intended to
stay
.

Hammond studied him now, as though to judge his mood. “D'you suppose you could hold off your concert while we dig some clams? I'm scared they'll bury themselves too deep for shovels, escaping your gloomy sound.” He laughed, and stood up, and started away, raising both arms high as though surrendering to the world's absurdities as he headed down to collect buckets and shovels from his little wooden boat. He would have been welcome company if he'd spent a little less time on his travels and more time here on the island.

While the two men spread out to dig up the exposed ocean floor, Thorstad went inside to rescue the frantic coffee pot from the stove, and brought his steaming mug out to the step. The long blue facing island had completely disappeared today behind a wall of mist or slanted rain, as though its scatter of coastline houses and backbone chain of mountains had drifted into the vast Pacific, leaving him to inhabit another dimension outside the normal world.

Where his land was about to fall away to beach, the upper limbs of a double-trunked arbutus were noisy with small black birds he couldn't identify, getting drunk and accident-prone on what was left of last fall's fermented berries. High on a skeletal snag, a bald eagle tilted its head to consider the man at the door, hoping perhaps to make some sense of this elongated figure of sharp angles dressed in a long-sleeved cotton shirt and corduroy pants worn thin and pale at the knees. Beside the step, the snowdrops in Elena's little patch of garden were in bloom.

Elena would not have permitted his shotgun behaviour to go as far as it had. Her laughter or her alarm would have stopped him in his tracks before he'd got outside. But of course the beautiful Elena was no longer here, or anywhere.

So aungellyk was hir natyf beautee.
That lyk a thing immortal semed she,
As doth an hevenish parfit creature,
That doun were sent in scorning of nature.

His
parfit creature
had deserted him by dying without any warning while he was changing the oil in their ancient Mazda, violating their agreement to expire in one another's arms well beyond his ninetieth birthday. He had reacted like a man robbed of a reason for living, left with nothing but his own despised involuntary breathing. He couldn't eat, refused to leave the house, locked the doors against friends who came to offer comfort, and lay for days in his bed, their bed, until the sheets had begun to stink. Firemen smashed their way in through a door on a Friday morning, to drag him off to a hospital bed and an intravenous drip.

What followed was a noisy life of too many people burdening him with advice, all of it interfering with his inconsolable grief at the loss of the woman who had been the essential centre of his life. He'd endured that clamorous hell of living without her for several months before selling their house and moving up here to tiny Estevan Island and their getaway cabin, dwarfed by the forest at its back, its windows facing the water and the sometimes visible mountains of the larger island that had been home for most of his life. On days like today, the sky sent down a window blind of grey-blue cotton, obscuring the rest of the world.

“It's all very well to hide out in that place in order to recover from the cruellest blow of a lifetime, my darling, but a man like you—used to many years of the classroom's lively flights of discovery and the staff room's essential gossip, accustomed to the stimulation of good movies and the pleasure of symphony concerts featuring cellos that remember how to play the most exquisite music, and addicted to the laughter of beautiful women and reckless young people as well—it's clear that this unnatural life of a hermit will eventually propel you into something rash like the suicides they've told you about. Pointing a shotgun at Lisa is just the beginning, and surely you can see that this means it's time you did something about those plans that have invaded your sleep night after night. Seven years in exile is quite enough.”

He had no doubt that this was Elena's voice because he had never met anyone else who could speak in such long sentences. Still, he resisted the painful memories that would elbow their way into his head at a time like this—the young dark-eyed beauty flirting on the dance floor, the graceful white-haired woman striding like a confident duchess into a room—because it took only one or two moments of recalling the mysterious coquette just arrived from Europe, or the regal hostess in their own home, or the serious musician dedicated to mastering a difficult passage on the piano, to bring his day's activity to a sudden halt and fill his head with the tumult of too many memories all at once.

Of course he knew what she meant. Why had he always assumed that those who'd become “bushed” from excessive isolation were unaware of their state? The question was not whether you were aware but whether you'd seen it coming and had done something about it in time. He had no excuse because he had the poet's words for it—

But the moon carved unknown totems
Out of the lakeshore
Owls in the beardusky woods derided him

Long decades ago he'd brought the Earle Birney poem into the classroom as a
project
, so that a reluctant all-boys class might use his small movie camera to make a three-minute film based on a poem they might choose for themselves. He'd known it would not necessarily create a love of poetry, but it would require them to read more closely than usual. They might even learn how to work together without using shouted obscenities, threats, and their fists in order to express an opinion. He'd chosen this poem to demonstrate what the students were to do with those they would choose for themselves: moving pictures to accompany the words.

He may have selected this poem about a hermit because he had noticed, beside the gravel road to the town's landfill dump, a plywood shack and an elderly man on the doorstep—looking, it seemed, at nothing but the woods that had him surrounded. He would ask the man's permission to film him doing his chores, so that he might later match the footage to a taped reading of the poem, a model for his students.

On a Saturday morning, he and their nine-year-old foster child had driven up that road to the old man's property. Stuart remained in the car outside the sagging barbed-wire fence while Axel Thorstad went up the trail through the dense salal and knocked on the slab-wood door. The old man threw open the door and came out swinging a double-bitted axe that he brought down too close to Thorstad's right foot. There'd been no temptation to explain. He'd run for the car. By the time he'd got through the gate the car door was open and the boy was running down the road—convinced, he'd later explained, that once the hermit had chopped Thorstad to pieces he would then do the same to him. The wide-eyed terrified look in Stuart's face was something he'd not forgotten. It was probably much like his own.

And now he could only
bar himself in and wait
for the great flint to come singing into his heart

This was a thought too chilling to ignore. He must not let this sort of thing happen to him. Hammond had advised that he wait till Lisa had had the time to cool down, but Hammond wasn't the guilty one here. Surely, if she was to be prevented from thinking he'd begun to lose it altogether, he must walk out to the Store as soon as possible, to face the postmistress and put this morning's whole unpleasant business behind them both.