The Bay of Love and Sorrows Read online

  Madonna bent over to take the buck’s testicles in her hands and cut them off, but then frowned: “Tom — you do this — will you? — and I’ll give you some steak.”

  When they were finished, he helped her drag the buck out to the road near her property where she had left her sled.

  “Are you going to tag this?” he said.

  “Tom, why don’t you give me your tag? I used mine up.” The wind blew stiff against her old orange cap, and against the deer’s dull, sad, staring eyes. Again she looked at him and, with her scarf pulled up over her face, she resembled the bandit she was.

  Tom made his way back along the path to his house after dark. Snow came out of the sky in large, wet flakes. There was blood on the path, and the intestines near the river were golden in the cold sharp air.

  He for one couldn’t travel the world. He liked it where he was. An old piece of machinery covered in new-fallen snow, off on the side of the path, and the old tombstone sunken into the earth with white snow falling on it proved this to him once again. He breathed the air, was happy with his lot. And then suddenly a small flame of angry thought flickered inside him, as he turned towards Arron Brook. Because, having known Michael for three years, things remained unresolved between them.

  The first was the remark Michael had made about Karrie, two winters before.

  They had gone to the Christmas party at the community centre. Tom walked the floor all night, going by her table. Yet he couldn’t find the courage to ask her for a dance. Finally, she got up and began dancing with another girl and Tom, embarrassed, left the building and started home. The snow was piled very high on the side of the road, and snow was still falling out of a black sky,

  Michael came outside and, walking behind him, teased him all the way home,

  “If you can’t ask her to dance, how’ll you ever get it in her?”

  The remark was forgotten the next day, because Tom knew Michael was so drunk he hadn’t remembered anything. And Tom never mentioned Karrie to him again,

  The second issue was the way Michael spoke about his past that Christmas night. He told Tom about his former girlfriend,

  “Don’t laugh,” he kept saying, as if he was used to people laughing at true emotion in his life, or as if he laughed at this himself, at the private school he had gone to as a boy. Then he cursed her to the ground, in a show of bravado,

  But Tom found nothing at all to laugh about, and felt pity for Michael cursing her. Her name was Nora Battersoil.

  “I was wild, I guess. I told her we could go away I waited for her to come and meet me — we were going to run away together, We were seventeen, eighteen, I had flunked out of school that year, and had fourteen hundred dollars saved, God knows where we would have ended up. But she should have contacted me — the fuckin bitch, I never would have betrayed her!”

  “I know about it,” Tom said,

  “Well, then — do you know why she broke up?”

  “No,” Tommie said, but he was lying.

  Michael did not speak about her any more. He drank from a pint bottle of Captain Morgan’s white rum, and, holding a piece of meat pie in his hand, he began to wave it about half-angrily, half-jubilantly. He spoke about being forced to go to private school and having to wear a uniform when he was eleven years old. How his mother and father were small-town snobs to send him away. And how it had ruined his life, because he couldn’t make friends there, and was bullied, and then found it hard to make friends here. He stared at Tom a long time, his eyes glittering with drink, his meat pie with a bite out of it, his head cocked sideways. “Yes,” he said suddenly, “I’ll show you it!”

  “What will you show me?”

  “You’re the only one I’ll show it to, you’re the only friend I have.”

  And he took an envelope with the draft of an article he was working on from his inside coat pocket. It was written on regular lined binder pages, in red and blue pen, scratched and scribbled over. Tom initially felt privileged that Michael would show him this article. But as he read it he discovered dark secrets, which ultimately took the form of tattling on others.

  “You can’t publish this, Michael,” Tom said, embarrassed.

  “No — I will get them back,” Michael said simply. “I don’t care, for myself. I just have to wait for the right time. I have taped a dozen of them — I started when I was there. When the time comes — I was eighty-five pounds when I went there and had no one to look out for me.”

  He spoke about the dorms, the prevalence of deceit, the mean suppers, the sanctioned sexual bullying of other boys, the drama teacher, Mr. Love, who himself was sexually harassing boys, and had forced him to play Juliet and wear a smock and dress.

  The night of the play, with the mothers in attendance, during the balcony scene when he was supposed to say, “What’s in a name,” Michael had bent over, lifted his fine dress up, and wiggling his bum had said: “Lookie here, Romeo — pure Capulet”

  He was given a month’s detention. Tom looked once again at the article and smiled kindly.

  “I wouldn’t publish it — if people are going to be hurt by it. It’s just not right. If it’s going to hurt innocent people as well as — “Tom broke off. Who was he, with his grade-eight education, to say anything? Still, for some strange reason he was very adept at picking out what was wrong with the article. And what he had picked out immediately, which he couldn’t articulate, was Michael’s ego, his lack of introspection.

  Michael took a drink of rum, with great self-esteem, and said: “Well, what do you know — have you been to Ryerson?”

  “Well, no — nothing,” Tom replied simply, handing the article back. But he did not like the way Michael used his education against him to end the discussion.

  The third and most important issue, the one that bothered Tom more than the others combined, involved a suit. This happened at the time of his parents’ death. Tom was going to wear the only suit he had, an old light-brown suit of his father’s, to the funeral. But Michael took him aside.

  “Let me give you mine,” he said, and loaned him his new black one. Tom was extremely grateful. Just as he was grateful for everything else Michael did during that period. Unfortunately, he forgot to get the suit cleaned and give it back.

  One evening, a few months later, after Tom had worked all day, Michael visited with the idea of going out to the bar in Neguac. He was intoxicated, delighted with frivolity, yet Tom still had had all the inside work to do on the room he was building for Vincent. Michael began to walk behind him playfully, attempting to ruin Tom’s concentration.

  “You’re wasting your whole life,” Tom said, after he had warned Michael three or four times to stop. “And you can’t recapture it once it’s gone, boy.”

  It was at dusk and because of the yellow sawdust a strange light filtered through the new double-paned window. Tom smiled and playfully grabbed Michael’s ear.

  “You might not have wasted your life but you still can’t afford a suit for a family funeral,” Michael snapped.

  As soon as Michael said this, Tom knew he wished he hadn’t. There was a pause. A board that had been lying across the sawhorse at an angle dropped to the floor.

  After Michael’s comment, Tom never felt the same towards him. And he could never feel the same again. He walked across the room, to the kitchen, took money from the drawer, 426 dollars, and handed it to him, but Michael refused to take it, saying the suit was not important, and left the house. The next day, Tom had Michael’s suit dry-cleaned and sent back to him. They had not spoken since.

  Thinking of all of this, of Michael’s cavalier attitude towards Karrie, of the pettiness of the article, of the meanness about the suit, Tom frowned, spat, and felt homesick even though he was so near to his house.

  Madonna got home dragging the buck on the sled, the rope frozen to her mittens. It was now well after dark, and sparks flew up from her chimney, and a cold wave of snow fell over the field. In this gloom she saw Michael Skid standing near the shed
in his long coat and high insulated boots.

  She and her younger brother, Silver, hauled the buck inside, sliced holes in its back tendons, and hung it from a rafter. Then she began to scrape the hide from it, starting at the rump and moving down towards the head. As she worked she walked about in her tight boots, and had her scarf pulled down across her mouth, with bits of blood on her face.

  Michael came in.

  Silver sat in the corner with a small pickle jar of moonshine, sharpening a knife on a whetstone.

  “I met Tom,” Madonna said.

  “I hope he’s well,” Michael said.

  “Seems to be,” Madonna answered. The three of them, at one time or another, had relied upon Tom for advice. But they had drifted away from him, each in their own way, and had come independently to the same conclusion — that Tom was too reasonable, too practical, and youth never had time to be reasonable. Still, he was the only man Madonna trusted.

  It was sometimes painful for Michael not to go over and see Tom — but he would stand on his blood oath not to, unless Tom made the first sign. He knew he had hurt Tom because he’d spoken rashly about the suit. Yet he pretended to others that in some way Tom had belittled him.

  Unknown to both him and Tom, they frowned at these memories at the exact same moment.

  “I haven’t seen Tom in over a year,” Silver said. He was a small man of eighteen, with a strangely old face, like an elf. When he smiled his face crinkled.

  He had spent close to a year in hospital because of depression. Madonna had taken care of him, travelled back and forth to the psychiatric hospital in Campbellton, and now regulated his medication. He had been teased a lot as a child and was beaten by his father, and at sixteen had had a breakdown. But now he’d been home for the last few months and things had returned to normal.

  Madonna was secretly very happy about getting to know Michael Skid. For Tom, whom she had once loved, had gone off with Karrie.

  Her idea was that in some way, no matter how slight, Michael’s superior knowledge of the world would rub off on her. He would take her picture and it would be printed in a magazine. She had battled a long time to make some kind of a life for herself. This life was fine, for now, but there was another, more brilliant life that she expected. And her beauty and her body would get it for her.

  This was Michael’s third trip down in two days. When he came downriver before, he had always stayed at Tom’s place. Now that he was coming to see them instead. Madonna didn’t want to risk ruining it. And so she had begun to flirt with him, and tease him. As Madonna had once told the parish priest, there wasn’t a man she couldn’t have as soon as she decided to. This was perhaps very close to being true. She knew it was true with Michael She knew it would be true if she wanted, with the parish priest.

  She worked for a while in silence, and now and again Michael would come over and help her haul the hide away from the fat, and stare at her as the lantern glowed against her face and old woollen shirt fastened with one pin at her breasts.

  “What’s that?” Michael said after a while, looking at the pickle jar full of liquid.

  “Shine,” Silver said.

  “Moonshine — where did you get it?”

  The wind blew, and the light flickered as Madonna took the hacksaw and started to saw the buck’s head off.

  “Gail Hutch’s shack,” Silver said.

  “Take me down and I’ll get some,” Michael said.

  Madonna looked at him, her eyes giving a slight perceptible start, as if to say: Why would you want to go there? But he picked up his gloves, which were lying on the bench near an old can of mosquito repellent, and put them on.

  They set out on their way, walking the road in the cold wind, Michael walking behind Silver at about three paces.

  “For Christ’s sake, help me get this cocksuckin head off,” they could hear Madonna roar. “And don’t go down and wake up that little boy! — You mind what Gail says! And if Everette is there, you two stay away from him. He just got outta jail and is crazy as arse.”

  Michael turned and waved, and laughed.

  Gail Hutch lived far down the road past Oyster River bend.

  She had a child of five, had come back from Quebec, where she and her son had lived for three years, and she now paid rent to Dora Smith. She had also had asthma and kept an inhaler, which she would haul on at intervals. Sometimes in the night she would begin to suffocate, and her child, Brian, would wake, frantically searching the room until he found the inhaler for her. He would sit beside her smiling and wiping perspiration from her forehead as she took her puffs.

  Now her brother, Everette, talking and happy, sat at the table. His eyes flitted here and there. He was just finishing a long monologue about religion, which he liked to discuss. These discussions invariably worked their way around to the nature of power, and what made him, Everette, violent. He was fascinated by his own violence, and always held the belief that he would commit a great crime, that he was a man who didn’t like to be violent, but could not help it, since people got in his way Any other reasoning was beyond him. Everette’s most telling trait was his conviction that everything else was beyond him. As if, in lacking compassion, he proved himself.

  Twice in the past few years, Everette had been in jail for assault and robbery. He had got out of jail this day. He owed a large sum of money to his cousin Daryll, who was both younger and even more volatile than himself, and Everette’s mind was racing, trying to decide how best to get something from someone while giving nothing in return. He could stall Daryll because of Daryll’s respect for him, but only for so long. The five thousand dollars had been neither his nor Daryll’s to begin with. It had been stolen by them in a series of robberies, the last one, two years ago, at Wholsun Breau’s store on the inlet. When Daryll went to jail, Everette had spent this money on a motorcycle and accessories before he was sent to jail himself. Now both of them were out. So Everette had to pay back his cousin, who was serious business. He felt the best way to do this was through selling drugs. He could market the drugs for triple the profit, and he was calculating this as well. But in order to bring in the money for Daryll, Everette wanted four-thousand-dollars’ worth of uncapped mescaline. He would cap it, then up the price, selling it for fifteen thousand and make some ten-thousand-dollars’ profit himself. But he had no means of earning the initial four thousand as yet. In his wallet was twenty dollars, which he always kept. So he needed some way — besides bullying and frightening his sister — to get the rest. This was what Everette Hutch was thinking two minutes before he met Michael Skid on the night of November 19, 1973.

  A table and a heater sat in the biggest room of the small two-room shack where Gail Hutch lived. On the table sat a pot of stew, with bone-ridden stewing meat and two potatoes. The smaller room contained a portable toilet, and Gail, twenty-four, was trying to tape some plastic over the one window at the back of that room where the air and snow filtered through.

  Gail’s welfare had been cut off recently, and was “between two provinces,” lost in bureaucratic red tape.

  Her husband, who had been an assistant manager of a small Sobey’s store where he wore a white shirt and a bowtie, had died at nineteen of a brain aneurysm, when Gail was eight months’ pregnant. Since that time she had been on her own, with a grade-four education.

  Gail’s little five-year-old boy lay sleeping on the one bed, sunken down in the middle like a folded piece of paper.

  A statue of the Virgin and a picture of the Madonna and Child rested on the table as well, which gave precedence to the idea of religion being an opiate of the people, a controller of the poor. It certainly controlled much of Gail’s life and thought since her husband’s death. And when it did not, Everette’s presence did.

  The place smelled thickly of spruce bark and tar.

  Everette was about thirty-six, bald, had a scar on his cheek that was black and red, and wide, dark eyes. He moved slowly — his hands now and then made signs for something and Gail woul
d run to get it. She had prayed most of the month of November for him not to come to her when he was released from jail but he had made it directly to her shack that afternoon. And now he was half-drunk. So none of her prayers had been answered.

  The door opened. Michael and Silver entered. Everette looked at Michael as he sipped from a small pickle jar of moonshine.

  “Your father put me in jail,” he said. The air was hot where they were. There was in Everette’s look a peculiar expression of outraged morality that is the bare bones of every criminal face. Michael sensed he had to do or say something to prove himself very quickly.

  There was a moment when Silver started to go to the door. “C’mon, Michael,” he said. He put his hand on Michael’s arm, but Michael shrugged him off.

  “You’ll find I’m not my father,” Michael said, moving towards Everette as he said it.

  Michael then took out a slab of hash wrapped in paper, and cut off a chunk.

  “I'll give you this for some shine.“

  Everette was startled by this. He picked up the hash, smelled it, touched it with his tongue, and said, “The case against me was for that new prosecutor, Laura McNair, to get her wings. A just-out-of-college quiff. I’ll get her back the last thing I do.“

  Everette was talking about the assistant prosecutor who had helped send him to jail. Michael knew Laura McNair. He had taken her to a dance one Christmas when he was home from private school (the date had been arranged by his mother) and had kissed her on the cheek. Now, at this second, he had seen the underworld and how it spoke about his world, but he was unperturbed by this, because he felt he had the wit to side with the underworld. Men like Michael always felt that by holding no judgement they could flit back and forth from one world to the other.

  “That’s how things go,” Michael said, shrugging. He then moved his left hand towards the white jar. “Won’t blind me, will it?” he added, with it close to his lips, glancing over at Everette.

  “Means it’s good,” Everette said, not looking up from the block of chocolate-coloured hash and waving his hand. In that wave was the one other trait he exhibited as much as rough power — a certain indefinable hatred for those about him.