Minister Without Portfolio (17 page)

But no one owns it and the house is here.

Someone owns it. I think this land you're on is someone else's.

Now that's only what I heard. I don't know who would make a claim on you, but if they ever do, you got land over there that must be yours. Anyway I can put this potato field right in back where the sun shines.

Nothing, in Leonard's mind, could be solved if it couldn't be solved with a backhoe and a dumptruck. He raised the truck bed and out slid the yard of topsoil. Then he sized up the work Henry had done. He caught the eyesore. Let's haul that garbage Henry, take it right now while the dump is open. I'm on my way to Aquaforte, Leonard said. Leonard hated carrying an empty tandem. How much. Leonard said don't bother with that— twenty dollars would be too much. How about forty, Henry said. No I couldn't do it for forty. He handed Leonard a fifty and
Leonard hated taking it. Henry found a pair of cotton gloves and Leonard said he preferred to work bare-handed. They spent an hour loading the truck. Henry told him the house had no well. I can dig you a well. And by the time Leonard was pulled out, they'd arranged a time to excavate. Amazing to think an afternoon could break a hundred years of no water. He watched Leonard drive off and then saw Keith Noyce pushing the lawn mower up the road, intensely listening to music, looking for more work.

Go no further, Henry said. What's your rate.

7

Henry went inside and collapsed on the bed and listened to Keith Noyce mow his lawn. His father was coming, Keith had said. It'll be nice to meet him.

It was a comforting, uniform sound, the lawn mower. The drizzle of a motor exercising and I don't have to lift a finger. He thought the boy must be liking it here now. Keith had told him he'd always felt a little lonely on these visits to Newfoundland. In New York they'd had a dog, he said, and the dog was run over. She was badly wounded, his father explained to him. They couldn't save her, his mother said. It would be wrong to save her, or to prolong the life for the son to see her. There was too much pain and so they put the dog down. Keith had cried in bed and in the morning panicked. He was twelve years old. He went to the vet's to see the dog. Henry understood this is what compulsion is and compulsion is what makes a person fall in love and generate hate. A woman in a green environment apron hesitated while feeding a rabbit with a beaker, she was sorting in her mouth the proper words and then came up with it. I'm sorry, she said, but your dog has passed away. I know that, Keith said. I'm here to
see her one last time. They walked down a yelping corridor. The sounds of animals dampened as the woman opened a door on a spring and lifted up a sheet of heavy freezer plastic. In a cooler vault in the rear, she unfastened a hatch on a grey fridge. Your dog is in there. It shocked him. The dog was fine. She looked completely unhurt except her fur was shirred in places where it looked like she'd been pushed along surfaces. She looks good, he said aloud.

Keith was comfortable saying that because this was his dog. You could get away with saying inappropriate things if you loved and if you possessed and made it obvious your clutch was from commitment. But I love you. The woman said the dog felt nothing. She had a tone of pride in her work in not causing pain. We inject in the hind leg, she'd said, right here. She put a fingertip on the joint. But I don't see any damage, Keith said. Is the damage on her other side? The woman was puzzled. It's a needle, she said. There's nothing more to it. My dog was hit and run over by a car, he explained. You're mistaken. The woman was delighted to be able to tell him this. Your dog arrived in perfect health, she had no injury at all, she left this world very peacefully. And as she said this something clicked in her. She had gotten through all the verbal obstacles of breaking bad news but now another level of awareness had struck, one that no teacher had ever briefed her on. Keith had the facts now though not arranged properly and for a second he thought perhaps it's possible they have dogs that are not the dog in question, but made-up dogs that are not his dog after all, and he had exposed this truth, but he looked again at the angle of the dog's face, how the spots were on the nose and this was his dog. The dog looked stuffed and that was what rigor mortis did to you. This dog walked in here, the
woman had said. She was a fine dog and we hate having to put down fine dogs. We had a family lined up but then they changed their minds and we waited three days and, as you can see, we are above capacity.

Then he saw the truth pass out of her face. Sometimes truth is like a physical liquid that can leak out, or when it turns into liquid there is no container for it. His dog had been fine. His parents had argued. His parents were splitting up, he knew that, but what he did not know until this moment was that no one had a practical answer for the dog. The pure truth of the event leapt off the orb of her eyeball, it was a visual story that bounced off his eyes.

That was when he was twelve and that summer his mother moved to New York and shared an apartment with an old school friend. Keith continued his schooling near Lake Placid and lived with his father. His father brought home styrofoam bowls of soup from the cafeteria in the basement of the building where he had his healing practice and they ate their lunch together before both went back to school and work. They continued this even though it may have been more convenient for the boy to stay at school all day. They had not missed a meal together, and the boy would have to be a lot older, much older than his father was now, before he appreciated that, Henry thought.

Keith visited his mother and knew he was more like her than his father. He was, in fact, most like his grandfather—his mother's father. He did not sleep as he lay on their couch. And at three in the morning he left her and her female lover a note to say goodbye. The garbage trucks hurled down Fifth Avenue. A man dropped off the back of the truck and whipped out the white bag of garbage sponsored by the Doe Fund then ran across
a crosswalk and jumped back aboard the rear lip of the truck. The garbage bin empty. Someone else must put in a new bin liner later in the morning.

The silver tower on the Empire State Building like a picture tube in a TV, or the filament in a lightbulb. The lightbulb broken off. Some silver in the Chrysler Building too. In Madison Square, park staff cleaned up sidewalks, green coats with a white maple leaf on the back. One was wearing homemade cardboard shoes over his personal shoes.

His mother kept grudges, but limited them, so she got over much grief by drying out the grievances on a clothesline then stacking them in a little drawer behind her ear. She lived carefree and immediately. A grievance her son kept in his own little box behind the ear was this very method, a method kept to manage the mortal life. I want to be an actor, he said to his mother's lover, Althea. She was brushing her teeth and Keith had walked in on her and Althea had not asked him to leave. But there was no money for theatre school and his parents were preoccupied with work and transitions and hauling the infrastructure of two professional lives around the world.

His father had set up a pattern and Keith appreciated the routine. He found himself lured into his father's work. His father's trips to Peru. Summers in Newfoundland. How much is decided not by the intentions of a people but by how close the sun revolves around the soil layer of a particular geography. It would take Keith years to understand that it was not the content of his father's work that interested him, but a person's dedication to a set of limitations. Conviction and commitment. But he was only eighteen now and so he followed, with animosity, his father's spiritual path to Peru and then to Newfoundland—a good
solution to anger but one that did not provide a heavy bag in front of him to lash out at, only miles of open air that infuriated him. This hinterland or frontier—this place of the close-knit family—did his father acknowledge his neighbours in Renews? Colleen Grandy, the woman whose husband was away in Alberta, she cooked them both a boiled dinner and carried it over, two plates covered in tinfoil, and his father had her in and set her down and talked about what he was doing while revolving the chunky amber beads on his necklace. This lonely woman who someone should be cooking for, is what Keith thought, lonely and starved enough that she was engaging with the Americans. When she was gone they tore off the tinfoil and devoured the hot plates of food.

After thirty minutes the sound died and Henry Hayward woke up and thought Keith might be out of gas. But he was finished. He came in to get paid. Henry ran downstairs and acted overly awake. He saw the fifty-dollar bill on the table. Leonard.

Tell me, Henry said. Why do you hang out with Justin King?

He's my friend.

He's got lots of friends.

Yeah well I don't.

Henry picked up the bill and gave it to him.

That's too much, Keith said.

Be lavish to someone. Make their day.

I've got a real one for that.

Keith pocketed the fifty dollars and stepped outside to collect his jacket and the lawn mower and push it up the road. It was getting close to suppertime now. It takes time to make money this way. Henry had been through it, summer jobs, manual labour. It was what had bonded him to John for life. Friends with no end.
Henry watched the boy push the mower back to John's shed and then walk briskly down to the lightkeeper's house. Past Colleen Grandy's house and he saw Keith look over. Did Keith know about the rumour. Henry recalled the times he'd picked him up. How Keith stuffed taxi vouchers into his denim jacket pocket— vouchers that he traded for pharmaceutical drugs. There was a house in the Goulds, Keith said, that was a grow operation and part of the boy's occupation was as a mule along the shore. The money was a lot easier than manual labour. He's a good person, Henry thought, yet he's unaware that it doesn't matter if he's good if others see him breaking the law. Self-confidence. Did his father or his mother give him that.

8

Henry stopped in to the Goulds for groceries—Martha was coming that weekend. The thought of her there for any duration made him nervous. He didn't know what to cook. He drove to work and was entertained at the store by Wilson Noel walking out into the street with the end of a roll of white electrical wire. Cars slowed to a stop as Wilson paced off a hundred feet. In other stores you weigh the coil of wire and subtract the weight and you know how many feet you have, but here they don't mind walking across the road with a tape measure and making traffic stop.

He drove the dumptruck and Leonard King told him stories. You know Colleen Grandy, he said. Not that I know anything. And Leonard made a gesture with his shoulder that suggested something.

She's going to Peru, Henry said. She's having a spiritual awakening.

He did not mind saying it like this. It cost him nothing. He was not mocking Colleen, merely providing a defence.

It's not Peru people are talking about, Leonard said.

At the end of the workday there was still a lineup of customers at Wilson Noel's. Henry needed roofing, so he got in line. Justin King was at the counter but he wasn't doing anything. There was Emerson Grandy, helping himself to four-inch nails. The man could do anything with those hooks. Henry looked outside to see if his horse was with him. Emerson was throwing the nails into the scale. Then he spilled the bucket of nails and Justin stooped over to help him and Emerson said, sternly, No I'll do it. He spent the next half hour while Henry waited to be served picking up every nail with excruciating patience. He placed three pounds of them on the scale. Then Justin slipped the nails into a paper bag. You wouldn't think a paper bag could hold that many sharp nails but someone early on created a weave for pulp that withstood four-inch nails.

Wilson Noel came in and wrote up an order. Got your nails, Emerson, he said. Then, Justin take this, and handed the young man a slip of paper. Justin darted out the door. Wilson had to leave that counter and walk around to the other counter where the calculator was. The dark paint on the sheet of plywood counter had worn away here and the meat of his hand sat on the knots and grain of the wood. He tallied the list of items and then punched this number into a cash register and then spoke to the customers about their mothers while opening up an alphabetized ledger—there were about sixteen of these well-thumbed ledgers on the counter—and writing down the customer's name and itemizing, once again, the things he was trying to buy. Wilson stopped writing to think about what was the best diameter pipe to be used for a surface well, they had agreed on three-inch but some people prefer the two-inch and he stopped again when a customer in the back corner of the store was asking if he had to
use the all-weather plywood or could he get away with the D grade. Wilson asked him many questions to diagnose the severity of the construction and came to the conclusion that the work on the inside could conceivably be done with D grade but the exposed outer shell must be all-weather.

It came to Henry finally and his order for six rolls of torch-on roofing was handed to Justin King who had arrived back with many lengths of vinyl eavestrough. Go get Henry some torch-on, Wilson said and Justin ran out the door and hopped in the passenger side of Henry's car.

Drive around the back, Justin said, and he did that and backed up to a garage door and Justin jumped out and ran in and was gone for a minute. Then he returned. He was trying his best to lift a roll of torch-on but he was lifting it end over end in the gravel, destroying the clean edge of the butt end, the end you wanted to hang over the eaves by an inch very neatly.

Henry said, I wouldn't be buying that roll what with the butt end all dented and small pebbles driven into the bitumen finish.

Justin looked shocked. They weigh seventy pounds each and Henry helped him carry it back into the dark warehouse. Together they found six good undisturbed rolls and lifted them one by one to the car and put one in the well of the passenger seat as they were heavy. Then Justin tore up the hill on his own steam. Henry drove back up to the parking lot. He had to stop for Wilson who, for some reason, was in the gravel parking lot operating a forklift to delicately raise a dozen lengths of one-by-eight tongue-and-groove from a pallet on the back of a fourteen-wheel flatbed that had just pulled up and was still idling, dust settling from the shoulder of the road, the driver unclasping the nylon stays on his load. Henry parked beside the load. They all
waited for this manoeuvre and Justin jogged out into the road to halt traffic while Wilson Noel changed gears and made the forklift beep and lurch. The yellow machine twisted around, the two hundred pounds of lumber almost slipping off the forks onto Henry's car. But then all was balanced and Wilson proceeded to delicately place the lumber in the back of an open hatchback, angling the forklift sideways to push the lengths of tongue-and-groove, still wet from the sawmill, through the back seats and over the stick shift, just shy of touching the pebbled veneer on the glove compartment. Wilson was leaning over the side of the forklift to peer into the hatchback and size up his progress. He thought he could do a little better so he withdrew the lumber entirely and began the procedure again. The customers inside the shop had the same lean in their torsos, all staying where they were but tilting their hips to get a good look out the open door, their hands still half in their pockets, to appreciate Wilson's manoeuvre. Henry stepped inside and joined them. Wilson climbed out of the forklift and had a talk with the flatbed driver about the area he'd drawn for his moose licence. He had an either-sex licence and Wilson wanted to know what pool he'd been in to get so lucky. There was no orderly lineup but the men inside knew who was next. Finally Wilson Noel returned and Henry paid for the roofing while Wilson answered the phone with four other men waiting in queue. Now how's your mother doing, he said into the phone.