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Authors: Jack Hodgins

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The Master of Happy Endings (9 page)

BOOK: The Master of Happy Endings
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“Which is probably why he's no longer alive,” Thorstad said. There was no harm in letting his impatience show when what he felt was far too close to anger.

“At least he wasn't afraid. Me, I haven't made a single enemy but I worry myself sick every time I have to go across with the girls to that school! What kind of life is that?” She shuddered, hugging her arms to her chest, and started off through the young alder shoots and the mess of fallen twigs.

But she turned and came back a second time. “I thought you were supposed to be leaving us. If you've decided to stay, you may as well take over Hammond's job.”

He laughed. She really was an innocent. “You want to see me murdered next?”

But it seemed she was serious. “Hammond risked his life for others. What use are you and me to the world, hiding out in this place?”

“If Hammond risked his life for others, doesn't he deserve something better than a funeral pyre made of junk they're too lazy to haul away? If I don't go down there now it might be because I don't trust myself not to start tearing it apart.”

“Whoa there!” She held up both hands as though to resist an attack. “You can stay where you are till you turn to stone if that's what you want. We'll hang a sign around your neck:
‘This man took
too long to leave.'
” She chuckled to herself as she set off again through the young alder. Apparently Axel Thorstad was amusing.

The alarming thing was that he could easily imagine himself as that stone figure, solidly in place, with a warning for others hung around his neck.

At the same time, it wasn't difficult to imagine himself standing up to stride through the mess of fallen twigs and clumps of weed down to their ridiculous pyramid, and then to climb—he was strong enough for this—from one log to the next, up over tires and dead limbs (market-stall merchants and visitors rushing over to demand that he stop) and eventually getting close enough to the top to grab hold of Hammond's name and fling it into the woods, then beginning to dismantle the monstrous heap, dislodging one ridiculous piece of rotted lumber or rubber tire after another, rolling them down amongst the alarmed crowd of islanders and visitors from across the strait. Quite possibly, too, dislodging a linchpin log and causing the entire construction to dissolve and tumble down to crush and bury him.

But why would he do such a thing—or even imagine it? He would have accomplished nothing except to make an absurd spectacle of himself. If he survived, the police would be called, a certain incident with a gun reported, and any number of additional complaints hauled out to reinforce the charge. An “old-folks home” would be threatened once again. Doors would clang shut.

Of course they would not understand that for him the pyramid was as unsuccessful for its purpose as the stone on Elena's grave. Just as his “teacher of the year” awards were little compensation for the loss of his career, a heap of logs or a cold gravestone could never compensate for the loss of another human. Neither stone nor pyramid nor framed piece of paper could cancel an unwanted dispatch to an irretrievable past.

When he reached home, five of the feral sheep had come out of the woods to crop the grass between his shack and the retaining wall's drop to the beach, their unshorn wool long and ragged and decorated with twigs and moss and bits of blackberry vine. They paid no attention to him, a foolish old man who had, in a rage, imagined pulling down a pile of logs upon himself.

What did this mean? Had he left it too late? He was frantic, it seemed, with questions. Was he on his way to becoming that frightened old hermit who'd greeted him with his long-handled axe? That poor fellow had eventually done real damage, badly wounding a young father who'd poached a Christmas tree from his land. By the time the police arrived to investigate, the hermit was already dead by his own hand, the interior of his shack a bloody mess. Perhaps Axel Thorstad was in danger of becoming another of those mad loners known to be living invisibly in the timbered mountain valleys across the strait, men who'd fled the coastal houses to survive with a gun and maybe a dog beside some hidden lake, scurrying off to hide at the sound of a human's approach.

Beside his doorstep the yellow trumpets of Elena's daffodils had gone dry and papery, while hyacinths and tulips had shot up and bloomed more showily around them. Fawn lilies bloomed in the shade beneath the trees, and here and there throughout the woods the wild currant bushes were heavy with their red flowers. The thick upper branches of the double-trunked arbutus, stripped of berries by the boozy birds, had all but disappeared within its overcoat of full white blossoms. This had always been, for him, the year's most anticipated month.

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote
The droght of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veine in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;

April after April he'd begun a lesson by speaking those words aloud, rolling them so richly off his tongue that he could almost taste them, causing some alarm and confusion amongst the desks.

Whan Zephyrus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,
And smale fowles maken melodye,
That slepen al the night with open ye,
(So priketh him nature in hir corages);
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages . . .

Rows of startled adolescents, fearing at first that he meant to speak this way indefinitely, soon recognized his intent. Though indifferent themselves to the notion of religious pilgrimages, they had their own reasons for recognizing the effects of spring and indications of rising sap. Lights, so to speak, went on. Glances were exchanged. It seemed perhaps that Mr. Thorstad might have had some understanding of their restlessness, despite being an old man in his thirties, in his forties, eventually in his fifties and still not ready to retire. Every year, he'd leapt into April with Chaucer.

And so, for him there'd never been anything especially strange in the idea of
going
somewhere. Could it be called a pilgrimage if you simply returned to the world? He had nothing like a Becket shrine to visit. What had Mrs. Montana's letter promised? An opportunity again to
teach
, if only in the guise of tutoring. Though Elena had mocked him for thinking of himself as a “servant of love,” believing that he was meant for “better things,” he'd known there
were
no better things—though he could hardly claim to have demonstrated this while living here on this small island. Maybe you had to keep trying until you no longer could—whether because you'd passed away in your sleep on your hundredth birthday or fallen and broken your neck on your first day in front of the cameras.

5

He should not have trusted his life to this woman. Since leaving the walk-in clinic they had been racing south at a speed he had forgotten was possible—fleeing down a wide ribbon of highway through regions of second-growth timber, sometimes crossing deep canyons on slabs of concrete with little to prevent them from plummeting to the river below like the doomed travellers in
The
Bridge of San Luis Rey
. Tendrils of anxiety crawled in the pit of his stomach, already unsettled by a rough crossing from his little island to this larger one. If death didn't claim him at the bottom of a ravine it was bound to arrive in the tangled wreckage of a terrible crash. Mrs. Montana's silver Jaguar grimly overtook all convertibles, sedans, minivans, SUVs, buses, pickup trucks, and motorcycles as though she considered them the detested opponents in a life-or-death race—a contest that could never be won, since every corner revealed more contestants ahead, additional challenges for a determined woman's right foot.

Not only determined, Thorstad observed, but confident as well, confident that this highway had been constructed in order that she could pass unhindered down its length as on her private road. Her strong hands on the leather-and-wood-grain steering wheel conveyed this. She was, as well, a handsome woman, her short dark hair slicked back behind her ears. Her buttoned vest almost suggested a uniform.

During their telephone interview she'd described herself as a businesswoman, which should have meant she could be trusted to arrive in time to meet his ferry. But she'd driven onto the parking lot just as he was being helped to his feet by the driver of a blue Toyota van, blood still running down his face.

While walking up the paved slope he'd inadvertently got in the way of a youth in a hurry—his face half hidden inside a hood, his hands in his jacket pockets and elbows out like broken wings. Apparently unwilling to step around a preoccupied, white-haired geezer dragging his luggage, he'd snarled, “You want to die, old man?” and shouldered Thorstad aside. The shifting cello case on his back threw him off balance and he fell against the van, bashing his forehead on its front bumper.

Convinced this was obvious proof that he'd made a stupid mistake, he'd placed his handkerchief against the bleeding wound and started back towards the boarding ramp. When the van driver shouted, “Your luggage?” and caught at his sleeve, he pulled free and quickened his pace, determined to take the next ferry home.

But no one was allowed to pre-board.

Mrs. Montana appeared at his elbow insisting she take him to a medical clinic in the nearest village. His shouted refusal was, in his own ears, the roar of a great wounded animal. What a fool he must have looked! But he hadn't cared. Why should he care? He'd hurried along the planks and turned beside a seagull-splattered post to make his stand against the bullies. Below, oil uncurled in rainbow colours across the shifting surface of water. He would dive in and swim away.

“Two strings broken,” announced the van driver, who'd checked the cello for damage. The instrument itself appeared unharmed.

Mrs. Montana pleaded. “Otherwise I shall feel dreadful about this!”

By the time he'd emerged from the clinic, bandaged but still in pain, she again insisted he come with her as planned. “If you are still determined tomorrow, I promise to make sure you get home.” She'd appeared to take pride in the doctor's acknowledgement of his strength and good health, as though she were somehow responsible for this as well.

So they'd set out again on the highway to participate in this futile race—his legs braced for disaster, the thinning top of his hair touching the roof, the Jaguar's speed increasing as though it were running out of control. Everything seemed out of control— trucks and vans and sports cars and crowded sedans. This sense of hurtling in helpless free fall down a long unpredictable ribbon of pavement should have distracted him from reliving the “accident,” but the youth's words continued to run through his head, “You want to die, old man? You want to die?” The message was clearly “You ought to be dead by now, so why are you cluttering up my world?”

Lisa Svetic had warned him of this. According to her, the world was in a hurry to get rid of the old. Those who weren't in a hurry to get rid of the old felt they had the right to bully them. “It's what happens to the elderly when they're on their own.” He'd known this himself; he'd read the newspapers. He'd seen elderly friends bullied by those who claimed to be family. But he'd expected to control his own life as he had maintained control for forty-three years in his classroom. The impatient youth could have been sent by Lisa to remind him of the need to stay alert.

Yet she had decided to be happy with his decision. “No more wondering if you might shoot me. Life'll improve while you're down amongst the politicians and other crooks in the city. For one thing, I won't have to watch my grammar.”

The
maestro
, too, had been pleased. For him, the silence would be a welcome respite. “Only temporary, of course. I have spent my life with music so I know a journey is never finished until it has returned to where it began. Or tried to return, at least.”

In order to distract himself from the Jaguar's terrifying speed, Thorstad withdrew from his pocket the envelope Lisa had handed him as he was about to step aboard. She'd come thumping down the cleated ramp to the pier—“Hold it! Hold it!”—her flesh in a chaos of contradictory movements. “This was in the—” she bent low to catch her breath “—in this morning's bag.”

In a tight neat slanted hand, this woman writing from Fort St. James offered an excellent fishing lake
“if you are prepared to put
up with black flies and no-see-ums
.

If her son were to graduate next year and move south to a technical college in order to become a computer expert making big money he needed a tutor who could prepare him for life in the lower parts of the province.

I figure someone from down there could teach him the ways of
the world so he don't ruin his chances by saying or doing the
wrong thing at the worst time. What worries me is that he tends
to get lost if he's anywhere there's more than a dozen buildings
in a row. He disappeared three times last summer in Prince
George, so you can imagine how it could be like in Vancouver. A
response will be appreciated, even if you turn me down.

This had little appeal, but it was something to keep, in case Mrs. Montana's aggressive driving was only the first of unwelcome surprises.

When she veered off onto a secondary road in search of a gas station, he assumed they were entering a brand-new town he had never seen, but she assured him that this was where he'd taught school for all of his working life, subdivisions having replaced seven or eight more miles of farms. “Recognize the little brown church? It used to sit out here by itself.”

This meant that what they passed next had once been McQuarry's dairy farm. The fields had disappeared beneath blacktop and a collection of stores painted bright as children's toys. Thorstad shifted in his seat to identify them. Home Depot. Wal-Mart. Toys “R” Us. Michaels Crafts. Eddie Bauer. Starbucks. Dairy Queen. All of this had been pasture for McQuarry's holsteins. He might almost believe they'd somehow crossed the international border.

BOOK: The Master of Happy Endings
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