This All Happened Part 21

We watch the edited surveillance tapes. We see a man enter Lydia's porch door with a full garbage bag. We cut to the kitchen. He empties the bag into the washer and starts it up. He opens up the fridge door and helps himself to a can of apple juice. He goes to the living room with the can of juice, flicks on the television, and sits himself down in the recliner. There he sits until the wash cycle is over.

The man is Boyd Coady.

18 Lydia's called. She doesnt want to break up. But I'm broken. I'm sad and exhausted. She's not a bad person. We just dont get along. We both love the talents we have. She's funny. She's wilful in a way that is good for me. But being together is destructive. Moments build until the smallest things irritate us.

I'm taking a road trip around Conception Bay. I just dropped off a hitchhiker in Bareneed. There is a set of stairs left by the side of the road, like a huge tired accordion. The old oilcloth runner. Loads of trap skiffs. I can see the back side of Bell Island and Kelly's Island. But all the old houses are going. The new bungalows with treeless lots. Occasionally you'll see a saltbox close to the road with a bunch of fruit trees overgrown and choking the garden. A shed in back painted the same colour. But sagging on the foundations. Too late to save them. They needed to have been kept up ten years ago.

19 The trees on Long's Hill have crosses painted on them. I just called city hall.

The mayor: The arborist has been by. Said those trees are 90 percent gone, boy. Carolina pine and two elms. Ninety percent gone, like me.

Me: We all gotta go some time.

When I pa.s.s those trees behind the kirk's retaining wall I can feel the weight of the hill, the slope, the inertia pulling down the hill, the job that wall has to do. The work of a wall happens below ground. Beams of cement that creep under the road to counter the raised surface.

20 On the footbridge over Waterford River I watch the ducks. They know that to cross, they have to swim at an angle to the current. Dogs dont know this. A dog will cross a stream pointed directly at the far side, and end up downstream. But a duck calmly paddles at two oclock or ten oclock. Their beaks the green of unripe bananas.

I am a dog. I am stupid.

I pick partridgeberries and blueberries above Shanawdithit's monument and below the Irving oil-tank farm. But I end up collecting colours. Alders, berry bushes. The sun is lower and the leaves are like tiny red ears aflame. I segregate patches of colour by looking through my curled hand. How Helmut used to direct his camera lens at small areas of caribou moss and rock pools. Looking for the particular.

As I'm driving home I catch Maisie holding hands with Earl Quigley. On this day, anyone would be happy in anyone else's company.

21 Max comes by for a game of chess. He says he was driving by during the murder. He heard the shot. A brother shot another brother outside Theatre Pharmacy. It was over a woman, or drugs, or it was a hit sponsored by another brother in jail.

He crushes me in zugzw.a.n.g.

We walk down and see the corner of the hill cordoned off with yellow police tape. The stain where the dead man lay. A mother is crying into a television camera. Along the hill, all the Carolina pine that had X's have been sawed down. They look like a field of butchered elephants.

22 It's midnight. I am drinking cold vodka with Max, staring down the hill where the murder took place and the trees lying on their backs like dead elephants. You can see the spire of St Andrew's Presbyterian Church now. I've never been in the kirk, Max says.

Neither have I.

Max wants a length of the pine, so we drive down in his truck. He says the arborist was wrong, the wood is solid. We balance a length on his tailgate. It must weigh five hundred pounds. There's a fine veil of rain hovering in the air. The billowing police tape still circling the murder scene at Theatre Pharmacy. Their slogan, beneath a turquoise woodcut of a bedridden patient, on prescription bags: When illness comes, next to your doctor you depend on your druggist.

Max says, I'll put the pine in hay. For two years. This will prevent the wood from checking. Then I'll carve it.

He has blocks of wood at the shop in various stages of drying.

Max says the murder may have to do with territory. The pharmacist sells to dealers in the early morning.

The police tape, the crime, the chunks of trees, I can empathize with this carnage. A part of me has been murdered.

23 The sun, low in the sky, hits the walls flat on and the floors are dark. Light through a piece of stained gla.s.s can travel through two rooms and pin itself on the panel above the phone.

I walk by Lydia's house. I see her planting a hundred and one bulbs. She has kept the bulbs in the front porch. I have seen Lydia store beer, cooked ham, turkeys, undeveloped film, thawing fish, bicycles, cases of soft drinks, dormant plants in this porch.

Hi, I say.

Oh, hi. Want to help?

We find a trowel, a planter, a pick in the bas.e.m.e.nt. Work gloves. We look at the key and discuss the height of allium, grape hyacinth, dutch iris. We dig among tree roots, we exhume previous bulbs. Harvesting potatoes with my father, spiking one with the pitchfork. Bright flesh in the dirt.

There are the black skins of chestnuts, split to reveal the smooth, varnished knot. The gra.s.s still green. There is new gra.s.s, even when snow approaches.

We spend the afternoon gardening and it is easy and sad. We are kind to each other, but our hearts are heavy with rain.

24 Tonight my house is full of industry. Dark windows and desk lamps. Radios on low. Iris is polis.h.i.+ng up her thesis on sperm physiology in yellow-tail flounder. But I ask about the floating eye, the change in colour. She says most flounder are left-eyed, meaning the left eye floats over to the right side. But some are right-eyed, for no apparent reason.

Iris should be scanning Internet sites for new articles on the role of olfaction in the social behaviour of harbour seals. But she is sending an e-mail to Helmut. They are in Hawaii. In six days they set sail for San Francisco, then south through the Panama Ca.n.a.l. They are replacing the mast. She describes the design, injecting the material with plastics.

But it's still wood?

She pauses. Gabe, there's nothing from nature in these boats.

Her door ajar. I see her glowing blue from the light of her laptop. The soothing clack of a keyboard. There's a moon breaking through the top of the sky, but fog has settled over the hills. s.h.i.+pyard lights, cl.u.s.tered like ballpark lights, burn through in a haze of urine. The fog a beard. Sky a bald, s.h.i.+ning pate.

25 Today I picked up my father's jacket. The cuffs were frayed, so I brought it to Tony's Tailor.

Tony: You have your ticket? It'd be easier.

It's that coat hanging there.

Tony: Youre the one with the cuffs.

Yes.

It came out well.

Did you notice the back?

No.

It's all one piece of cloth.

Tony s.n.a.t.c.hes the jacket from my hands and holds it to the light.

I've seen that before.

It was my father's jacket, I say. He wore it when he was my age. Before he had me. I used to think he got married in it, but my mother said no.

That's the difference, Tony says, between men and women.

26 I walk down to the Fat Cat with Max. Earl Quigley makes his way to me. So how are you, he says. Never mind, dont answer can of worms, I know. Look, call me and I'll buy the coffee.

Yes, I said. A confessor would be nice.

Earl went out with Lydia for four years. And now I've seen him with Maisie.

Then Max. Max is such an affable man. He is the word affable. But then I am just another man and we have no obligation. So the freedom to be easy and drink and tell all.

Wilf asks Lydia to get up and they whisper and they sing the song I thought was our song, Wilf on guitar. Lydia sings with her thumbs hooked through her belt loops.

Earl Quigley wins the door prize. I never know where I've put my ticket. The pints are cheap until eleven. And I want to get plastered. I point to my empty gla.s.s.

27 For the first time, the black roof below is covered in white. I wake up to the branches, sparrows hurrying for seeds, their claws wrapped tight against bare trees mostly white. Bunches of dogberries slivers of red under caps of white. And I think of the first time I held Lydia, bowled her over in the snow when she came back for Christmas. Our first Christmas after a fall of courting, of letters, of plane flights. And now she is not here. Our first snowfall apart.

It's not that I return to the past; rather, the snow makes the past hurtle forward.

There is not much new to say about snow, or broken love. Lorca: I am thirsty for odours and laughs, I am thirsty for new poems, poems with no lilies or moons, and no love affairs about to fail.

28 At the s.h.i.+p with Max. It's 2 a.m. When Max lived in Merasheen they had no electricity. He salted fish, he caught fish, he killed cattle and chickens, the whole thing. And now, in a few days, he'll be a father.

29 The ground covered in torn leaves, mainly green, the violence of rain and wind. Dogberry leaves are stuck to the wet door frames. Already people are wearing their poppies. This bugs me.

The city has been ploughing in the public swimming pools.

I hear from Daphne that the police have found lots of evidence. Boyd Coady used seven houses in the neighbourhood. He'd break in, find a spare key, make a copy, and then study the patterns of the people who lived there. When he knew they were gone, he'd go in.

He left the television at Lydia's because she didnt have one, and he liked to watch TV while his laundry was on.

The underwear fit him.

He admitted he took small things. He liked the things. Sentencing is next month.

30 Walking Alex home from badminton. As always the night has grown calmer and a little warmer, as if heat is coming off the earth.

I'm having a conversation about everyone knowing everything. This is my belief, that instinct over body language is a sophisticated, primitive knowledge, as old as sharks. Our new found intellect thinks it can hide true feeling through omissions in language, but it forgets the body is talking the entire time. Anything we hide we are hiding only from ourselves. As long as someone is not practising obliviousness, he will know how you feel and what you feel about him.

31 Halloween and I'm dressed as Question Man. I have a pair of cardboard gla.s.ses shaped into question marks. I wear a belt buckle with a question mark. Alex is dressed as a sheep and she asks me for a light. She says, Question Man, do you have a light? I'd thought Alex was a rabbit, but she's Sheep.

I dont have a light, I say.

There is a freshly dug grave and a straw man with a pick through his head. The head is made of newspaper stuffed in a yellow sock. There is a thick-lipped sardonic smile. I see Lydia speaking to the pope, who wears a tablecloth and a tea cosy on his head. The pope is Craig Regular. When the h.e.l.l did he get back in town? There is no defining element in the men Lydia finds attractive. All shapes and character types. Always a surprise: Wilf breaks into big American musical numbers. Craig is goofy but smart. Earl has an academic intensity. Some are sweet, others are s.e.xy. Wilf has a charisma, that's undeniable. But he's an alcoholic.

I take a burning plank from the fire and hold it to Sheep. The plank has cinders and blistered edges. She bends towards it. The plank is hot on the fingers, but I still hold it. I know Sheep thinks this is dramatic.

The harbour is s.h.i.+ny. The planks we are burning are the same kind the house is made of. The updraft is making a ghost float.

Inside, Sheep takes me by the waist and says, Dance with me, Question Man.

Lydia comes up to me, and offers the final question of the night: What is the function of regret. And I say, it allows you to understand that there are other possible lives to lead.

No one, thankfully, asks me Leibniz's question: Why is there not nothing?

November.

1 I wake up. I wake up in the dark and there is someone leaning in to my room. It's a woman. Come on, she says. She must be tugging my shoulder.

Gabe, come on.

It's Lydia.

We're going to Max's, she says.

It's the middle of the small hours. Max is propped by the gatepost, giggling in the dark. The giggle tells me he's loaded. Maisie is sitting on the rock wall.

A boy, Max says. I've got a boy.

I'm afraid to take his arm from the gate. I am too sober to enjoy them. But we walk arm in arm up the road.

Max says there was a seam of black, the blood vessels breaking on Daphne's face. He cut the umbilical cord. The cord deep blue and red.

Shhh, Max says. He misses the keyhole with his key. He tries again. I try taking the key from him, but he resists.

Are they in hospital?

Max: Theyre upstairs. Let's go around the back.

And we sit on his deck and whisper loudly.

Daphne, he says. With a finger to his lips.

Have you got a name yet?

Havent got a name. Maybe Eli.

They are all about five beers ahead of me. Max and Lydia had called but my phone was unplugged.

Max finds us a round of beer. I realize they are in conversation. It's a conversation I can't follow, but there's a raw nerve of excitement, of the new boy in the world.

I drink my beer and let them gush on. At one point, Max says, Some people never become themselves because theyre afraid to be fools.

2 Sometimes, at night, late, I will see Boyd's pickup idling, parklights on, in behind the Big R on Long's Hill. Boyd Coady stands across the street, hands in jeans pockets, looking in a gallery window at a print on an easel. He was on his way home and had to have a look. Longing for something in the print. The print is nostalgic, an outport at dusk, yellow squares of light indicating windows, woodsmoke, a reflection in a still sea. Boyd is longing for this. He lived there once.

3 I'm at Maisie's house. From the porch I can see Maisie leaning into the sink to pour herself a gla.s.s of water. In the porch Oliver Squires says, I have two sisters. One's dead. There's one I'd love to drown, and she's not the one who's dead. Yes sir, I know exactly where I'm going to drown her.

And then Oliver leaves.

He leaves because he can't stand seeing Maisie. Maisie says Oliver gets into moods. He can't enjoy himself at a thing like this. He thinks he has no friends.

We all think, in the end, that we have no friends.