The Master of Happy Endings (8 page)

“But,” Thorstad said, aware that he was grinning, “I haven't smoked for forty years. It's not likely I'll start again now.”

Although his letters obviously represented a failed attempt to change his life, he opened the next to arrive because it was addressed to a Mr. Axel Thorstad in quotation marks, as though he might not any longer be himself. He read it while sitting on a bench outside the Free Exchange. The long blue coastline across the strait had reappeared with this morning's light. Ragged columns of mist rose like white smoke from behind each successive hill as though from hundreds of secret bonfires, gradually revealing the chain of blue mountains down the island's centre—some rising to snowy peaks and others to scalped plateaus and isolated Mohawk cuts of timber left to drop their seeds for future growth. The world was still there and getting along without him.

Dear Sir,
     
The other day I was told, by someone who was only partly
sure of his facts, that my Grade Twelve English teacher now
lived on Estevan Island. I am writing in care of the island's post
office in case this is true.
     
I was in the same class as Ivan Norris (I know you'll remember
him and the red hat he refused to remove because he was
already going bald—at sixteen!) and graduated thirty years ago
before going on to the University of Saskatchewan and marrying
a cattle rancher. I have not been back to the Coast since leaving,
but I have kept in touch with Muriel Willis. I have no doubt
you remember the day Muriel accidentally set my hair on fire
while we were sneaking a smoke in the girls' washroom.
     
Now that my children have flown the coop, I've enrolled in
university again to complete my degree. My Shakespeare professor
reminds me so much of you that I feel compelled to write,
if only to say hello. Like you, he towers above the class, his long
arms flailing like an animated scarecrow. Like you, he is so
much in love with his subject that it's sometimes comical—like a
small wide-eyed boy excited to tell about the treasure he dug up
in the garden. Like you, he is even
more
interested in his students'
welfare than he is in his beloved subject, somehow making
you realize that what he appears to be teaching is only the tools
he uses for teaching something else. I haven't yet figured out
what this is, but I know it is something subversive. I may not
have thought too often of
Paradise Lost
while helping my husband
brand the cattle, but I know that whatever happened in
your classroom expanded my life somehow, and may even have
made me a better wife and mother and rancher, and community
member as well.
     
I didn't intend to write a sappy letter. Maybe I've reached
an age where high school has begun to take on a rosy glow. I
hope you are enjoying a happy retirement—fishing probably,
and beachcombing, (and still practising your famous Australian
crawl?) and re-reading
Paradise Lost
for the hundredth time!
Tammy (Adams) Hermann

Tammy Adams and Muriel Willis were two freckled girls who'd sat along the wall farthest from the windows and written messages to one another above the chalkboard ledge beside them, sometimes forgetting to erase them later.

Ernie Grant keeps a French safe in his wallet.
     
How do you know?
          
Never mind.
               
Do you think everyone does?

He wished Elena could read this letter. She had often tried to convince him to give up teaching. On the Townsends' cool veranda she had even attempted to enrol Esther's sympathy in this matter. “I have begged him—
begged
him!—to quit and find something more creative and
important
! But the man is obsessed with his job, with his students, with becoming the best teacher in the stupid world!”

But Esther and Herbert had a son-in-law who taught high school science in North Vancouver. “Curtis loves his work. We wouldn't want him to give it up. Maybe Axel feels the same?”

“Oh, for heaven's sake!” Elena said. “He
throws away
his life! Listen, he thinks he's a servant of love—I've heard him say so! In fact, he is the servant of selfish adolescents and their demanding parents, and the stubborn school board, and the ignorant taxpayers. ‘And what are you doing for your own happiness?' I say to him. Good God—I call him ‘The Master of Happy Endings.' He is never happy himself unless he's slaving over lesson plans, trying to make his students' lives turn out like a Hollywood movie!”

“I can't imagine how I will survive retirement,” he'd once confessed to Elena. He'd probably been in his fifties at the time. “Life will be almost as empty as it would be if I were to lose my fiery, too-opinionated beauty from Madrid.”

She had not come to him from Madrid, of course, though that was how they'd always spoken. She had been born in Madrid, but her family had fled the fascist dictatorship and lived as refugees in various cities of France. Perhaps this was why, though she'd loved this getaway island, she was determined never to stay very long. “As everyone knows, if you stay too long beneath trees you will forget how to move. You'll be stuck here forever with your roots in the ground!”

His commitment to teaching was not Elena's only disappointment. That they had not had children was, at first, because children would have interfered with a heavy schedule of performances taking her away from home. And then, when she was willing to begin a family, they had discovered the miracle was not possible. This had been so distressing that eventually they'd applied to become foster parents, as an experiment before considering adoption. Stuart had come into their lives for most of his tenth year, but before they had fully comprehended what was happening he was taken from them and adopted by someone on the mainland. “Never again,” Elena said, when she had grown exhausted from blaming him for not warning her of this. When he'd suggested they might adopt a child one day in the future, she made it clear she could never look at an adopted child without weeping for their lost Stuart.

Though Thorstad had been happy to work with a new crop of students every year, he had now and then wondered if he might one day encounter a young man who would offer his hand and say, “I don't suppose you remember me.”

When the people still living on the remains of the disbanded commune announced that instead of a funeral service for Bo Hammond they would hold their first spring market of the year “in his honour,” Lisa Svetic drew to his attention that this was his opportunity to act like someone intending to become part of the community. She kept his
Teacher
magazine pinned to the counter with her fist to make sure he heard her out. “Since none of your letters rescued you from the horrors of our company, you might as well force yourself to be friendly. Who knows—it might not even hurt.”

She warned him, though, that because he'd never been anywhere near the old commune in all the years he'd lived here, he should brace himself for a shock. “It's a disgusting, filthy, rundown pigsty mess, but you shouldn't judge by first impressions.”

Although Thorstad had no desire to go anywhere near the commune, he knew it wouldn't hurt to put out a little effort to honour poor drowned Hammond. Even so, when the day came, before climbing into Lisa's ancient pickup without doors—shuddering and emitting foul blue exhaust—he insisted on a promise that he wouldn't have to stay for more than an hour.

While he clung in rigid alarm to the edge of his seat in order to avoid being thrown into the roadside bushes, she hurtled them up the twisting road through the woods with little attention to protruding rocks or exposed roots, and only minimum regard for corners. At one sharp bend he believed his end had come when the truck swerved off the road altogether, carving a wide swath through patches of waist-high salal and barely missing a stand of sturdy pines. Some of the deeper potholes tossed them both off the seat.

This road took them speeding through a part of the island Thorstad had never seen, past deserted farmhouses dangerously aslant, their doors and windows removed to be used somewhere else. Deer grazed in an abandoned orchard. In the front yard of a house painted green, a white-haired woman sat on a kitchen chair to read a book while her sheets dried on a clothesline attached to a leaning birch.

Eventually they pulled to an abrupt stop at the edge of a clearing grown over with alder saplings and overlooking a cluster of log buildings and sagging sheds finished with slab-wood still attached to its bark. The postmistress yanked on the emergency brake and slid out to stand waiting for him to join her for the walk down to the buildings, but as soon as his feet touched the ground he discovered the reckless journey had left his legs a little shaky. By taking hold of a nearby limb he was able to swing down to sit on the fallen cottonwood it belonged to. “Go ahead without me,” he said. “I need a few minutes to recover from the Ride-of-Death.”

She narrowed her eyes. “You chickening out?”

He saw no reason to hide his smile. “Nothing in that
market
could be as frightening as what I've just been through. I'll be along as soon as these legs remember how to walk.”

Great piles of dry brush sat here and there waiting to be burned, and fallen trees had been left, it seemed, where they'd landed. A filthy, run-down pigsty mess, Lisa Svetic had said. He'd overheard at the Free Exchange that the proceeds from this market would be used for converting the largest of these old buildings into a bed-and-breakfast for visitors who wanted to stay overnight, but he could see no evidence that the work had begun on this ambitious task. Nor could he imagine why anyone would choose to stay there.

The buildings were dwarfed by a pyramid of logs and car tires and scraps of old lumber stacked up to possibly five or six metres and crowned at the peak with a large hand-lettered cardboard sign spelling “Bo” with red paint. If he hadn't known that Hammond's body was still somewhere in the sea he might have believed it was in that pile, awaiting the flames. He felt a surge of indignation on Hammond's behalf. What sort of people created a memorial out of the scraps and rubbish they'd been too lazy to burn or haul away?

In front of the sprawling main house, two canvas tents had been set up, and several tables, covered with what looked like the sort of items you found at yard sales. Boxes of magazines, he imagined, and machine parts. He'd been to enough sales of this sort with Elena to be fairly certain there would be plants, bottles, cakes, loaves of bread, leather belts, hand-painted cards, lamps make from twisted driftwood off the beach, velvet paintings, stacks of old
National Geographic
, and books dedicated to the art of seeing the future in crystals, tea leaves, palms, and lizards tossed into a campfire.

The booths appeared to have been set down at random, without any thought of creating rows. Since the forest floor was a natural mess it was not surprising that those who lived within the forest should follow suit. The few customers working their way through their hodgepodge of tables may have come off the ferry but they might also have walked up one or another of the trails from the shacks or trailers or houseboats few had ever seen— the invisible islanders rumoured to be living in hidden bays in order to write a screenplay, plan a takeover of a rival company, receive shipments of Colombian cocaine, or honeymoon far from paparazzi interested in minor royalty.

Someone approached him from behind, feet swishing through the young alder, twigs cracking underfoot. “You timed out for misbehaving?”

When she'd come up beside him he saw that this was Gwendolyn Something from the Free Exchange, the young mother of the six indigenous flowers.

“Just waiting till I see someone I recognize.”

“Well, you should recognize me, after all the time you spent pawing through Hammond's books.”

She had Susan Hayward's slightly turned-up nose and tiny waist. She may have been aware of this herself—she always wore dresses with tight waists and loose gathered skirts to the knees. And white high-heeled shoes, even here in the bush.

“What will they do with that pyramid, do you think?”

“Goodness knows,” she said. “You can't expect this bunch to follow through with anything. They'll wake up tomorrow and wonder how the damn thing got there!” Her laugh had little humour in it. “Their brains went up in pot smoke long ago.” She was so pleased with this that she put a hand on Axel Thorstad's shoulder while she wheezed. She had never even said hello in the Free Exchange.

“Well, I better get a move on,” she said. “I was back in the bush for a pee. No way am I going anywhere near their toilet.”

She paused after just a few steps through the tangled twigs and clumps of grass. “You're going to sit there like a bump on that log, aren't you?”

There was no point in getting indignant. Staying here was exactly what he'd prefer. “I can think about poor Hammond better here than down amongst the money-changers.”

“Don't brood about
him
. At least he had a life. Travel? Adventure?” This was wistfully said. Gwendolyn Something was envious?

“But murdered.”

She might not have heard this. “At least he did some good while he was out there in the world.”

“Not everyone would think laundering drug money was doing good.”

She shrugged, as though indifferent to such fine distinctions. “There are poor people out there grateful he risked his life skimming off the top for them while he could. That's what I heard, anyway. He wasn't sending it
all
to the bad guys.”