Minister Without Portfolio (21 page)

I've looked across the Syrian border, Henry said.

Oh yes, what did you see?

A lot of communication towers.

And heavy industry, I hope. Afghanistan, the doctor said, is downwind.

He was prescribed a pill for infection and a topical cream. A nurse gave him a cup of milk and a pill. When they were done, Henry drove to Gas Land in Aquaforte. He bought a twenty-six-ouncer of rum and two cans of Pepsi. Then he stopped at the pharmacy and filled the prescription. What happened to you?

He drove home with both Pepsi cans open. He found the oldies station and cranked it, opened the window and allowed the wind to massage his face and arm. He was delirious with life. He had decided not to call Martha—how can you hear what had happened without imagining the worst? It was a gorgeous, sunny day.

He arrived in the driveway and Martha came around the corner and stopped.

You look different, she said. An evil twin. Your hair is shiny.

She noted the bottle of rum in one hand and the prescription bag in the other. Then he told her what had happened.

She took him over to John and Silvia's. She was trembling. He had a bath and turned the bathwater black. He kept drinking and Martha made him a fast dinner and he ate that and kept drinking and shouting who the fuck falls into an incinerator?

That night, in bed, he kept repeating the fall. He added the mulching equipment or a spray of oil to keep things burning. Sometimes he landed on a long spike and the spike drove up through his leg and chest. There was a bucket of boiling tar he landed into and it splashed over his face. Mr Burden had said he was lucky. Half an hour earlier, a dumptruck had come with a huge load of carpet ends and stove oil. She was going pretty good then, Mr Burden said.

He dreamed he was in the jeep, rolling into the incinerator. All of them aboard, Martha too, and Tender was dressed in his goalie equipment. His big pads and wire-mesh hockey helmet, looking back at them with great hilarity. The handbrake jammed, a gun in the way. Tender could not stop the vehicle from falling in.

18

I can't do this if you're going to be so careless.

It was an accident.

I'd rather be alone. I'd rather be alone than go through what I've already gone through again.

I wasn't thinking.

You have to be more careful. Make a special case of it.

I'll try.

It's important!

How much danger made a dangerous life unacceptable? Why did a life have to be dangerous. Should it be? What was that all about. He wanted to feel safe, especially now, when what remained to him felt precious.

She had to drive back into town to work. She only had one month left. They were not living together. Henry realized they wouldn't move in together until the baby was born. The baby was the wedding ring. He was the last one to hold the ring finger of Tender Morris. That tattoo of the house of gold. Tender wasn't a religious man. But spiritual. That's what Larry Noyce would
say of Tender if he'd met him. House of gold—Henry shook his head. He'd been inside the house of gold. Commitment is the danger.

That night he turned off the lights and walked up the stairs to the bedroom. There was no hall light at the bottom of the stairs— he had not wired one in and the Pooles had not insisted. He was in the dark on the stairs and felt the presence of something. He understood that he was being watched. Clem, he said. It was not a boy or a real person but there was something standing on the stairs above him. There was no material but an overlapping. A girl in a white dress but it was not Sadie, he did not even think of Sadie. She was standing on the stairs or hovering within the stairs. It was not visual but something residing in his chest, an understanding that ran into his knees and up to his heart. He bolted. He ran through her and reached the light switch at the top of the stairs. He flicked it on and the lightbulb flared and blew out with a pop. He kept moving to the bedroom and stretched up for the pullchain, but the chain was not there. His hand made a wider arc to find the chain but there was nothing at the end of his hand. He understood his sense of the world was drifting away. He was not in a house now but some larger place, some fathomless atmosphere that was not of any time or location. He hardly felt the floor. He panicked and was losing even his sense of self and then he felt a tickle brush his wrist and he pulled and the light arrived all around him—the room.

19

He phoned Martha and told her about the girl in the stairs. It felt like a reaction to the incinerator. Somehow this small ghost in the stairs in the dark was a retreating wave from the high tide of the incinerator. Martha absorbed this. She did not like the idea of a ghost. She walked around with the thought for a few hours and then called him back, cheerfully, you need to have a party. You need to invite people. Invoke a residency. Establish your identity. Make noise. Keep all the lights burning!

He phoned Emerson Grandy and a man answered. Henry asked if it was him.

Who wants to know.

It's the fellow you pulled out of the incinerator.

Oh, Henry, he said. We thought you were a goner.

He explained about the party.

No, Emerson said, that's all right. And if it's all the same to you don't call here again.

Which astounded him.

When Martha arrived he told her Emerson's reaction.

He's shy, she said.

Trust me, that man is okay in the spotlight.

But they had the party anyway. They invited John and Silvia and Larry Noyce and Colleen and Leonard King and the Poole brothers and the people of Renews. Henry mixed three jugs of watermelon rum. The wiring in the house was well used and the corners of the rooms were inhabited with life and something about the mix of ages reminded Henry of the parties they'd had at the base in Kandahar. John Hynes was telling them of a man down the road selling firewood but it was just old boards for sale.

Board is no good, John said. You can't stack it to get air through it. Do you need board?

Jesus no, Henry said. I got boards coming out of my ass.

They drank the watermelon rum.

Colleen: I shy away from Pepsi.

I got to keep my pants on, John said, or that rum will go right through me.

Silvia: It's the caffeine gives you the hangover.

Henry: That's why I drink with juices.

John: I'm after putting on some weight with the White Russians.

Henry felt the warmth of his friends. He was grateful that the one closed paragraph of his life—pouring out of a jeep in the morning, Henry holding Tender Morris's Sig Sauer when the shit hit the fan—was beginning to slacken. The heat had melted the wax seal on that and now he was back in the fresh air of the world with the scar of the event he had never really told Martha about. How could he, when John was saying aloud right now that he was putting on the song that he'd lost his virginity to. He's asking Martha now what was her song.

Song? Martha says. You mean album.

Great laughter.

The truth is I don't have the guts to say it, Henry thought. Have I ever had the guts to say anything that was awkward and makes me guilty? When they were teenagers they stole things from a hardware store and John's father questioned them and they could have lied, Henry was prepared to lie, but instead John told his father the truth. He told him, Henry realized, because I was watching.

John: Quit mocking me, inwardly.

They drank and danced and ate a paella of crab and shellfish that Colleen Grandy had made. There's three pounds of crab in it, Colleen said. And lobster. And shrimp. But it's the crab. It's loaded with crab. There must be I'm not lying there's three pounds of crab meat.

Henry asked Colleen about her father. Why he didn't come. He hauled me out of that incinerator and he asked me not to call again.

Dad's an alcoholic, Colleen said. If mother hears he was there with a bottle of Lamb's she'll leave him.

This stunned Henry. A man's heroism not to be celebrated because of a weakness.

Larry Noyce came over and commended Henry on all the renovations. It's hard to get a skilled man to do any work for you, Larry said. They're all working their tails off in Alberta pulling seventy-hour weeks.

Henry: And when they do come home they do not look for work.

No, Larry said. They jump on their quads and hunt or pull
two kitchen chairs into the sheds with the barn doors open, staring down a hundred feet of straight paved driveway to the main road.

He doesn't know, Henry thought, there's been an embargo placed on him.

Wilson Noel came in and Henry remembered the garbage in Kingmans Cove. He hated to rat on Leonard but Henry could be blamed, it was his garbage. He explained to Wilson what happened and Wilson was puzzled. I told him to fill in the old gulleys, Wilson said. He'll cover the garbage with good fill, don't worry about it. Did he charge you?

So it was on purpose, everyone knows that garbage is fill. Only Henry feels it's an outrage. He said to Wilson that Leonard wouldn't take a dime.

Finally Baxter Penney arrived. This party is for you, Henry said, quietly. I didn't know about Emerson. Colleen just told me.

Baxter: I've been a lot of places with that man. He gets up in the morning and sits in the woods waiting for it to get light out. He wants to get further away from Fermeuse, out into the ponds of Butterpot. Someone told me he has land out there. But Emerson doesn't let you know everything. He keeps some things to himself.

He allowed Henry to pour him a rum and said I guess you heard what happened to Nellie Morris.

20

Henry found Martha. Let's go outside, he said. Just for a minute. People can look after themselves here.

They left the house and walked down the road and turned to look back at the party as if they were rowing away from the house and they heard the music and laughter and the light in all the rooms shining out these bright crisp rectangles. Then he told her what he'd just heard about Nellie Morris.

Not to be cruel or anything, Henry said, but at least that settles the house and who owns it.

We've made this house come alive, Martha said.

It's come alive on the day Nellie Morris passed away. Here's to you, Nellie. And thank you for your house.

They walked back into their own celebration which felt now like the passing of a torch.

John was remembering to drink sparkling water and elderberry juice. He was not happy to be leaving his family again for work in Alberta. But he was also eager to do it. Embrace the suck, is what they say in the army, and the truth is both
compulsions exist in us: to stay and to leave. It's for the family, John said, which makes leaving some kind of commitment to stay. It's not easy, we all know, to keep things going. To make a living.

21

They buried her in Renews, right next to Tender Morris, on that road into Kingmans Cove. The most surprising part was to see Baxter Penney in a suit—and to finally meet his wife. All this time and Henry had never met her. Hello Mrs Penney, he said.

Call me Sarah.

After the funeral Henry dug the garden where Leonard had dumped the potato soil. He was moved by what had happened. He had been forcing himself to adopt this life, much like this garden had been transplanted here. That's what I am, a transplant. Though I've been baptized by fire, he thought. And I've delivered electricity to this place. A baby is coming don't forget and I've passed the ashes of my own life. Those ashes were a girl on the stairs and I stand here now with a rusted spade once used by Melvin Careen and perhaps Aubrey Morris. To plant potatoes late in the season. To watch a new thing grow. To eat it.

The Poole brothers came by. Wayne said their grandmother told him about Nellie Morris. The last thing Nellie said was Mrs Poole, call an ambulance. Put the milk in the fridge, get my pills, I'll see you later, Mrs Poole.

Nellie left on a stretcher. She knew Mrs Poole would get an ambulance and the nursing staff may not. Her brain was ticking over.

He built a cold frame from wood and plastic and dug out the grass. Rocks, shards of glass and heels of slippers. John came over with his curiosity. He was scratching his armpit with a car key. I feel like I'm living next to a civil war arrangement, he said. Man returns to marry dead brother's wife.

If I was to make a period movie, a civil war movie, of what people did in the past? I'd have them washing their bodies with no running water, walk in slippers just to discard them, break bottles in the corners of their gardens. I'd fling coils of ancient wiring around and empty vienna sausage tins. You're growing a beard?

They went inside and Henry made them stiff, cold drinks and John shook the paper cup into his mouth, rattling the ice cubes against his teeth.

When you're young you should meet old people, he said.

I woke up to a knocking, Henry said. It was a woodpecker. Big round hole in the clapboard.

That's your northern flicker.

It was Nellie Morris, knocking on my head.

Don't let her build a nest in here or she'll never leave.

John couldn't stop himself from stroking his chin. When you have a beard, he said, you have to eat more carefully.

A beard makes you fussy.

Letting yourself go means you become, in time, more prim.

John looked exhausted. Are you sure you know what you're getting into, John said, with this relationship business?

If you know more than me let me know.

We just fought for three days, John said. Thank god we made up. We were sick of each other. Silvia took that healing workshop with buddy down the road. She and Colleen took it. At the community centre, the one for the dead hockey player. Her laptop was in the back seat in the sun. I must have lost my mind. I opened the door and flung the laptop down the hill. Why I couldn't tell you but I was furious. That'll teach her something, is all I said. I was supposed to get Clem's plastic suitcase that has a deck of cards in it for playing coddoddo.