Minister Without Portfolio (22 page)

I've played coddoddo with Clem.

He invented it.

He's going to become something.

I had the kids on the road on their knees pushing pieces of wood. The sun was over the cove and two kayakers were paddling out to sit in the sea and listen to an Ojibway elder at an outdoor microphone discuss abuse, abandonment, federal treaties, sexuality. Anyway we've been miserable for three days. She's been doing yoga and reading a book Colleen loaned her by Halfass Ramadan or something but it's pushing her further away from being cheerful is all I can say. And here I am prancing around telling jokes and cooking meals and taking care of the kids. She hauls herself out of this mood and she's met with what.

With cold resentment, Henry said.

I saw it, John said. Saw my own liquid iron sink into her.

There's a medicine for that, John.

I once had a prescription and it was the same medicine my father overdosed on. Fuck medicine is what I say. I'll take my chances with cancer and depression. But look this is what I know deep in my heart: if Silvia had kept up being sad for a fourth day I would have rolled up my socks and worked on all
fronts to keep the family rolling. Such is the chemistry of my temperament.

You're not worried about Larry Noyce, are you.

You mean am I worried the way Rick should be worried? I think not.

Rick should come home more often.

John took, from his wallet, a photo of his dead father. He keeps his wallet in his left back pocket, because his father was left-handed and kept it there.

The sun, John said, was shining on those kayakers, still hopeful for a cosmic change in their lives. You could see them silently slipping their paddles into the sea. Cars on the hill with their magnificent braking systems slowing dramatically as they noticed my children on all fours playing on the road.

And when Silvia got home she said where is my computer. You must have left it in the car, I said. The car doors were open. Someone stole my computer. In this town, someone took it. Jesus what am I going to do.

And she got lost in this passion, Henry. I tell you I could have nailed her to a wall and fucked the bejesus out of her. Then Clem shows up walking briskly, in that manner he has. Carrying Silvia's laptop. Clem found two kids with it. They said they found it in a field.

Silvia: It was stolen from the car.

I believe they found it in the field, I said.

It doesn't work. It looks like it was thrown.

You can get your work off the hard drive.

John opened a beer and looked at Henry. I'm such a bastard.

22

Rick Tobin arrived with a fourteen-foot dory roped expertly into his blue Toyota pickup. He jumped out of the truck and marched directly to Henry and hugged him. He was upset and he was hurting Henry the way he held him. It was the incinerator, of course. Henry kept forgetting that other people were living his event for the first time.

You can have this dory, he said. It was built in a shed with one electric light by my father. He built it for Tender Morris, Rick said. At least Tender ordered it and paid for it, so I guess she's yours now.

Baxter Penney was on his way into the Goulds but stopped his truck and came over immediately to look the boat over and said, You can tell she wasn't built around here. The lift in the bow. When Rick told him it was from Conception Bay he understood and was satisfied. Rick doesn't belong here, Baxter said, so why should his boat.

It was brand new but built traditional, the type of boat that had prosecuted the cod fishery: a banking schooner dory. Baxter was delighted to have his hands on it.

We'll leave it in the truck and find a place to launch it, Rick said.

Kingmans Cove is your best bet, Baxter said.

Of course it is, everything's better in fucking Kingmans Cove. Why don't we all still live there?

What pissed Rick off was the comment that he didn't belong here.

Baxter drove off then, and would be happy to tell someone in the Goulds about this Conception Bay dory. Henry went in to get a couple of beers while Rick stared at the house without saying anything. He had passed it many a time, he finally said, but had he ever considered it? It was more a thing from the past than a dwelling to be inhabited now. He strode inside and drank his beer. He passed the chimney and pushed his finger into the soft lime mortar between the bricks.

Martha should send someone out here to help you, he said. A representative to oversee her side of the investment.

I might have overpaid by a hundred dollars, Henry said.

If you got it for a song, Henry, then that song's a dirge. It's a song unfinished. A song that needs so much help you have to rewrite it. You are so outside of music on this here songsheet there is the possibility that you are deaf. Rick laughed and finished his beer and slapped the chimney. You can't even get insurance, a shale foundation. And you own half of it!

They walked to the back of the property where there was a brook. No well, Rick said. You could run a pump off that brook and bury the oil tank and use it for a septic system. There are cheap ways to have running water.

Rick knew a guy in Alberta who had a pump that worked off no power, it had a flap to it and the brook, it has to run more
than one mile an hour, pushes the flap and that flap pumps the water up the hose. A ram pump.

THEY DROVE THE DORY
, slowly, over the dirt road past little coves that looked too steep, out to Kingmans Cove. How did they get down to the water? Rick wasn't from this place, Colleen was, so he did not know how people launched boats. Years ago they fished here in Kingmans Cove. They had wharves and ladders and slipways and stores all over the treacherous rock. But there was not a stick of that left here now.

We could snake around this bank, Henry said.

They reversed the truck and Henry wondered what they must look like from a distance. What would Baxter Penney think. They used an area where, in old photos, there had been a slipway and they carried and rolled the dory to the water and threw the oars in. There was a tongue of pebbled beach that fed up to a dry brook and Henry could pull it up there for shelter.

Look at this, Rick said.

An iron loop that had been hydraulically punched into the rock.

You're not the first one to leave a boat here.

They left the dory and drove back. Rick had a red cooler full of T-bones from Alberta. John Hynes came over—he had shaved—and they barbecued the steaks and ate them with a stack of boiled corn and a pound of butter and three dozen beer. There were no women around—they were all over at Larry Noyce's, meditating.

You have to give that dory a name, Rick said.

John: How about the
Happy Adventure
.

At five in the morning Henry awoke to the sound of a truck
honking and it was Rick driving past the house with four hours to spare to catch the ferry back to the mainland and the long drive west over Canada. Henry did not, for one minute, see Colleen and Rick together.

23

All day he considered Colleen and Larry Noyce. Perhaps because he was staring in their direction as he worked. Was this part of my hundred people? After supper he carried the oars down the road, walking in the middle of the pavement. He had a jigger and reel and his rubber boots went up to his knee. He wore work gloves and an oiled cotton jacket and a trucker's cap. That's where he met Baxter Penney who was dumping garbage over the bank. What could you say to Baxter, please don't dump garbage? Your people have lived here for four hundred years but now I've waltzed in and would prefer you to get involved in a costly recycling program.

He asked Baxter where he might find fish.

You don't have to go out far, he said. You can catch them in there past the mouseholes.

The mouseholes.

You don't know the mouseholes. Baxter shifted his feet to turn his body. When you see that white rock in the cliff.

I've never noticed a white rock. In the cliff.

It's a rock it looks like a fish, Baxter said.

He said it as though God had made the rock appear like a fish for these are the ways we give sign.

How about Emerson Grandy's horse.

You want to take your bearings off a horse? Baxter thought about that and the type of man before him. Let's consider the church, he said. You line up the cross over your shoulder and when you eyeball the lighthouse, that's all you need to catch fish.

Henry walked down into Kingmans Cove with the oars and the yellow dory was hauled up against the low tide. What a happy, ageless prospect. He knew Baxter didn't like to speak of temporary things. A horse can move and then where would you be. When they'd bought the house and were drawing up a plan to submit to the registry, it was Baxter Penney who told them to refer to the cemetery for their base measurements of location. Fences move, he said. Dead people don't.

Sure enough, Tender hadn't moved an inch. Hello Tender. Hello Nellie.

He lifted up the bow and pushed the dory down to the water and then picked up a few of the log rollers and walked to the shore edge and threw them under the dory and rolled the
Happy Adventure
into the surf. As he did this he heard a sound that felt a long way off, some roar occurring in the ocean. He stood up and looked at the water. Three specks in the sky just above the horizon but they were moving fast. They were pummelling forward towards him and they screamed directly overhead, it made him duck. Overland now and gone, but they were towing a massive turbulence that filled the little cove with the bellow of a distant massacre. A little wave of wind passed through his body
like the ghost on the stairs and he realized he hadn't heard the sound since Afghanistan.

He tossed the four rollers up onto the high beach and realized he'd forgotten the plug and water was coming in. He jumped aboard and pushed the plug in the floor and shoved off with an oar and quickly settled the oars into the oarlocks. His heels got purchase against the knees of the dory and he spun the boat around and headed out to sea.

A strange feeling came over him. He was rowing away from the land and he saw where he lived. It wasn't just Kingmans Cove or Renews, it was the land of earth. This is how astronauts feel, he thought, to look back from space. He delighted in how cheap an experience this was, to understand space travel.

He rowed along the shore and studied the banks for what could be considered mouseholes. Then he remembered the white fish in the cliff face. He passed many things, nothing decisive.

He coasted and then decided he liked the look of the water just off the lighthouse. There were motorboats out further but he tried the jigger here. A whale breached out by the larger boats. The whales were after the caplin, which the cod were feeding on. He let out the heavy green filament until he struck bottom and then brought in a yard of the line. He jigged. The
Happy Adventure
rode high in the water. As he fished he got a little seasick. That was the swell. Some people lay flat rocks in the bottom so the boat doesn't ride so high.

He pulled up the line and rowed out a little further into the head of the current. He was in two hundred feet of water now— he could measure it in yards of line. He felt like he was floating in the branches of a very tall tree, dangling a line two hundred
feet below to the ground, trying to bring to the surface something from the deep past.

He fished so long without a bite that he was forgetting what it felt like to have a fish on.

Sometimes he had to pull up his line because he wasn't sure, the weight could be a cod. But the jigger clunked against the side of the boat and there was no fish.

It was a beautiful evening. He decided to row out to the motorboats. One or two of the boats had sounders and the other boats kept an eye on this technology and the sounders found the caplin which the cod were feeding on. The men were gutting the fish over the side and seagulls left their high-tide perches and wheeled in to grab the clots of stomach and intestine. All day long, from the shore, you saw this glint of fibreglass hulls and the whales spouting and the seagulls turning with one black wing high in the air, all circling around, deep below, the carpets of caplin.

The sun was still high and the sky was clear and it took him fifteen minutes of heavy rowing to get amongst them. They were drifting and then starting up their motors to realign themselves. There was one on a Sea-Doo. Starting and stopping and dropping line and pulling it up frenetically like he was riding a rocking horse. One boat came over close and an old-timer asked if he could take a picture of the boat. No one did this now, rowing out in a dory.

You rowed out of Kingmans Cove, the man said. And turned his head a little, like the past was making a comeback.

The sun was bright but it was getting a little foggy now down by the water. At first he could still see the other side of the bay so it wasn't bad. But then that disappeared and he only had the
lighthouse. Then that vanished. I can still pick out the rocks and cliffs below the automated signal.

There were no fish. The motorboats had caught their limit, even the Sea-Doo had bombed off for Aquaforte, for they said weather was on the way. Henry was alone, having to row further out. Several humpbacks arrived and snorted around the dory, just fifty feet away, playing with him, definitely diving under the boat—their long white flukes like blue arms—and coming up the other side to blow. He tried to stay calm. The shore had vanished now but he could hear the birds on the cliffs. He fished. Birds were out on the water too—the sound of birds was all around him. He listened further to the sea. It crashed up against the rocks below the lighthouse and he twirled the dory around fast and closed his eyes and listened, guessing where the cliffs were.

He caught five fish one after another. Big fish.

The sun tried to burn through the mist. It turned the fog a brilliant opaque yellow. It was very bright out there on the open water and yet no direct sun or any concentration of sun, the entire sky and sea turning a bright but dull particulate of golden light and it hurt his eyes, the brim of his cap was no good against it. He'd never seen anything like this before.