The Master of Happy Endings (5 page)

When he'd returned the book to its box and was about to reacquaint himself with the opening words of
The Old Man and
the Sea
, Lisa Svetic put her head in the doorway and beckoned with a finger, half singing her words as though from a childhood taunt. “I've got something you been waiting for.” She held an envelope high and forced him to follow her through the mud to the post office and wait while she went behind the counter. “I can't just go around handing out Her Majesty's mail in the
street
!” She probably thought she was amusing, but Thorstad was long familiar with the playground bully's notion of humour.

The return address was a street in Prince Rupert, hundreds of kilometres up the coast. At once he saw himself boarding a plane: Comox to Vancouver, Vancouver to Prince Rupert, stepping out into their ocean-scented rain. He tore open the envelope and turned away in order to read the tight handwritten script in the light from the window.

Dear Sir,
     Though you gave only a post-office address in your advertisement
and could be a cold-blooded murderer for all I know, I
am sending my telephone number because I can tell from the
way you described yourself that you could easily be my dear husband
who disappeared while on a fishing trip with some friends
fifteen years ago, and must be suffering, I think, from amnesia.
I am sure there are people now who can help a person recover his
memory. If you call me and tell me where you are I will come
and identify you. Does the name “Sebastian” sound familiar? I
have waited so long for this.

“Well,” said Lisa Svetic, coming out from behind her counter. “Is she rich enough?” She used a broom to scoop a cobweb from the ceiling. “You have to watch out for gold diggers when you advertise for a wife.” This set off a low satisfied chuckle in her throat. “Let me see,” she said, leaning the broom against the canned-goods shelf. “Maybe I can tell if you've got yourself a crank.”

But he left the Store without showing her. How could he expose this poor woman's desperate hope to Lisa Svetic's eyes? Was this what he had done—invited the world to seize on his ad as a solution to their lives? Now he would have to decide how to assure the woman that he was not her husband.
I am sorry to tell
you that I have never been to Prince Rupert, and my memory is still
reliable enough to remember my wife, who passed away several years ago
.

A second letter arrived a few days later, along with his
Harper's
, this one from a Nora Stockton (Mrs.) with a Vancouver address. He waited to open the square pink envelope until he was deep into the woods, passing through a swampy area where the trail was lined on either side with the rust-coloured skeletons of last year's cow-parsnips, nearly as tall as he was. Inside the envelope was what appeared to be a homemade card, a watercolour of a fawn drinking from a shallow stream choked with water lilies.

I believe you are the answer to my prayers. My son has just been
released from jail and banned from the nearest schools for the
time being and I am looking for someone to teach him at home
for I can't myself, having little education. His offence was not a
serious one, only a playground scrap where the other poor fellow
lost an eye. I hope that . . .

Without reading more, he returned the card to its envelope. As soon as he'd reached his shack he slipped it between
Under the
Volcano
and
Death in Venice
on his wall of books. Then he dropped into his chair, exhausted. He was too old for this. If this was the sort of response he was to receive, there was little point in opening any more letters, or even in walking out to collect them. For several days he stayed home to read books borrowed from Hammond's box—thick histories of the Second World War, a set of mysteries by Reginald Hill.

According to Lisa Svetic, Bo Hammond had come up from California as a draft dodger during the Vietnam War. He'd taken up residence within a community of other transplants from below the border, on the property owned by Dave and Evelyn Edwards. This couple had opened up their extensive property for the purpose of creating a commune where like-minded folk could argue philosophy and smoke the marijuana they'd grown in the woods. Lisa's aunt had filled her in on this. Nobody minded them at first, apparently. They put on great parties. Some of them had brought skills the locals could use. Police raids were only a small inconvenience, and helicopters thrashing back and forth overhead were just something to laugh at. But then Ben Morrison began to notice some of his beef cattle missing and traced them to the commune, where he discovered they were being butchered and cut up to sell across the water. Even that was not enough to turn the island against the members of the commune, but they weren't satisfied just to steal their neighbours' cattle, they started to steal the neighbours' daughters as well. “I mean, they started turning the daughters of farmers and fishermen into hippies like themselves, smoking dope and dragging around in long skirts and having babies whose fathers they couldn't name.” Because Hammond was the good-looking one, there was a time when three different girls all told their fathers that he was the one who'd got them pregnant, hoping this would end with a wedding. What it ended with was most of the commune people taking off, including Hammond. “At the time, nobody knew where he went, but now we know he went to South America and got mixed up in politics. Soon afterwards, most of the commune was chased off the island altogether, with a lot of island girls following close behind.”

In recent years, Hammond had returned now and then to take up residence on the nearly deserted commune, where he built furniture he sold to dealers across the strait. Apparently none of the smitten girls had followed him for long enough to return full circle to the island. Instead, there was often a mysterious male companion from some foreign country. “Political agitators,” Lisa claimed. “He sends money back for their Causes and lives on almost nothing.”

Though he may live on almost nothing, it appeared he did read books, and seemed to read them with remarkable speed before leaving them at the Free Exchange. The volunteers were unable to tell him where the books had come from. They knew for a fact there wasn't a single volume in the abandoned commune. Since no one had witnessed them arriving on the ferry they must be brought in by someone down one of the narrow pot-holed roads into the woods—one of those mysterious figures Thorstad sometimes glimpsed loping along at a distance, disappearing suddenly into the disorderly bush. It was common knowledge that boats came and went in some of those hidden bays, discharging or taking on mysterious cargo, so it was not entirely impossible that some of the traffic should be in books—though it was hard to imagine why.

“Obviously there are secret messages left in them,” Lisa Svetic explained when he'd wondered aloud about the books. “Some sort of political stuff going on that's dangerous for you to know about.”

No more letters arrived until the snowdrops had faded in the small garden outside his door and daffodils had begun to open. The skeletal bushes of ocean spray had acquired their countless green knots of incipient leaves. By this time, the Sinfonica had begun to allow him an isolated bar from a familiar concerto, then a phrase from a familiar sonata—hints of the pleasant arrival of spring followed by a melancholy glimpse of uncertainty and indecision, tantalizing fragments of music whose entirety had been lost to him. It was as though his lovely cello had turned traitor and decided to torment him with chaos.

The next response to his advertisement had no return address on the envelope. Inside, there was a short note on a 3x5 card and, as well, a smaller re-used envelope with a previous address crossed out. On the card, someone had written:

Saw your advertisement in the paper. If you are looking for
something to do with your life I'm sending this sad note I received
but cannot afford to do anything about.

The letter was clumsily hand-printed in blue ballpoint on a page of foolscap, a red line providing a margin down the left side.

I greet you in God's name and thank the good Lord that I
have learned of your address from a friend. I am a fourteen-yearold
girl living with my blind father in our village in Cameroon.
My mother was massacred in a rebel raid a short time ago, and
my father, who is unable to work, is failing his health. I am
writing to request for your kind assistance in God's name to help
me with a gift of money. I will pray to God Almighty to let you
hear my cry for help. God bless you now and forever.

So his advertisement had been read as a plea for “something to do” with his life? Stunned by what it had brought him this time, Thorstad gave in to Lisa Svetic's clumsy hints and allowed her to read the hand-printed letter. She opened the foolscap out on her counter and planted a hand to either side. As she read the immature printing she shook her head, setting off a cataclysm of competing tremors in her throat. “Now you've gone and done it,” she said. “You'll be hounded for money till you give in.” She read the letter a second time, the colour rising in her cheeks. “Unless you plan to catch a plane for Africa and carry a machete everywhere you go, you better stay right here, away from the horrors of the world.” Since he'd last seen her she'd acquired a small tattoo on the side of her neck—a purple thistle.

It seemed she'd given herself the opening she must have been seeking. “Here you are, welcoming messages from strangers who would drag you into the middle of their messes when you haven't even got to know the folks right under your nose. I never heard of you paying anyone here a visit.”

Of course he needn't remind her that when he and Elena had come here during school holidays they had made friends with other summer couples along the shoreline, since she would already know that three of those friends had since died, and a fourth gone into a nursing home in Vancouver.

When the next response arrived a week later, he did not open it immediately but wandered down to the pier and stood for a while to watch the herring boats pass by, a scattered parade of seiners and flat-bottomed scows and small trawlers heading south, all at different speeds, like individuals setting off for a large meeting they were confident would wait for them to get there. They would congregate at a designated area and mill about while they waited for a bureaucrat's starter gun—perhaps tomorrow, perhaps not—to begin this year's frantic season, possibly only two days long. Not a fish could be caught until a certain number had had the opportunity to lay their eggs and turn the water into a milky substance with their fertilizing milt. Only then would a government official declare it time to drop the nets.

While walking home through the woods he could still hear the throbbing engines of the assembling boats. From his doorstep he could see that several of them had chosen to gather not far out from his shack, as though to lay plans or simply indulge in gossip. As the light faded from the sky, he sat on his step to watch them mill about, no doubt impatient for that starter gun. Half a dozen trawlers remained close together, motionless, perhaps to visit, perhaps to avoid associating with the others. One long graceful boat with a series of white Christmas lights the length of its upraised rods broke away from the others and slowly cut a circle around the group of more than twenty boats, as though patrolling for danger.

Despite the throbbing engines, Thorstad was aware of the gentle slapping of the evening high-tide waves against the berms of gravel and scattered logs from his winter-damaged retaining wall. He remained on his front step until the damp chill and the falling dark drove him inside. Then, at his desk, he turned on only one low-wattage light so that he could still observe the floating city of milling boats even after he'd opened the long white business envelope.

Dear Sir,
     
It is clear from your newspaper advertisement that you are
a man who has overlooked the countless opportunities available
for doing good for your fellow humans. We at the Sacred Heart
Charity for Homeless Men of Vancouver are always in need of
additional volunteers at our east-side drop-in centre, where the
homeless men of our city . . .

If he finished reading this one he knew he would be nagged for weeks by pangs of guilt. All those homeless men would be happy to have his health and this shack to live in, while he was free to devote his life to improving theirs but had chosen not to. If the person who'd written this had hoped he'd be disappointed in himself, he had succeeded.

Of course this could be their careful way of asking if he himself might be destitute, in need of their services, so long as he was willing to move to Vancouver.

It appeared the effort of writing to the newspapers had been a waste of time. When he had folded this letter back into its envelope, he slipped it into the tight gap between
The Spoon
River Anthology
and Chekhov's plays, tapping it into place so that it would not destroy the tidy uniformity of the row.

Out on the invisible strait, all of the boats had now turned on their lights, every one outlined in strings of white bulbs, some of them with small spotlights running up and down their own masts and splayed rods—a floating, throbbing, shifting city of lights. Those lights would be on all night, he knew, the men and women awake and waiting, chatting over coffee or beer, their engines thumping through his sleep, so that even in his dreams he would be aware of the restless and impatient population waiting for the signal that would allow them to move into position and let out their nets for the catch that would enrich their future. Of course the seals and seabirds and other creatures that knew nothing of government regulations would already have travelled unseen and silent beneath the surface or overhead in the dark to wherever it was the herring had congregated, and would already have started to feast.