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Authors: Michael Winter

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BOOK: Minister Without Portfolio
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The floors were cold in his sock feet. Henry set the thermostats on several baseboard heaters and grabbed a handful of splits from the back porch and crumpled three sheets of newspaper in the kitchen woodstove. He struck a match while jumping up and down on the cushion floor and bent his elbows and laughed at the fierce conditions he was volunteering to be in. Make a cup of tea, he yelled out, but the water was shut off and the blue container that had water was frozen. He had not thought ahead. What he needed was a few packets of self-heating food. The active packaging in the army. He enjoyed that, pouring water into a bag and sealing in the meal and allowing it to heat.

He filled a pot with snow and melted it on the electric stove and found powdered milk in the cupboard along with half a bag of cookies and scraped the frost from a window and stared across the dark white field at what must be Tender Morris's house. Dark against a dark sky and field. It was hardly there. It wasn't there except he knew it to be there. Drinking John's tea and eating his cookies made him feel like he was John looking out at this house he'd only heard of while on manoeuvres in Afghanistan. There had been a woman living in Tender's house, right up until she died a dozen years ago. An older woman. All alone—like me, Henry thought. This was Tender's great-aunt. John had seen her a few times when he was a teenager, walking down to the back of the property with a bucket. A house promised to Tender Morris. These houses all along the shore had been lived in for a hundred
years by families but now they were being torn down by the dozen or only used in the summer because this generation has gone soft. John Hynes only came out to turn off the water in October and then maybe once more to fire up the snowmobile and say, bravely, that he'd been skidooing. The house—Tender's house— was probably a wreck but his family wanted five thousand dollars for it, which is what the land is worth. He was buying land.

22

In the morning he found a pry bar in John's shed and hooked it into the tongue of the yellow padlock but the lock wouldn't give. What he ended up doing was wrenching the latch and screws from the frame of the storm door. Tender's house, inside, smelled good. You could see your breath. He stood there in the kitchen, wondering about being there. He felt like an intruder. Over the back of a chair was a woman's wool coat. In the parlour a sifted hill of snow—it was part of a larger snowbank that had come in through the front porch. The wind had blown snow particles under the door and into the parlour. It was pointing itself towards the chimney. Snow lived here now. Tender Morris had never spent a night here. He had inherited this house and, while he had plans for it, the truth is he wasn't going to get around to those plans. Tender had admitted that himself. This house required an energy too large for the type of life Tender Morris was planning on living. Martha Groves lived in town and Tender would be in the army until he turned fifty-five. There was no chance of much attention finding its way to this place. Unless they had a kid.

Pregnant. Silvia said she's pregnant. What do you think of that, Tender Morris? Dead three months now thanks to me and your wife pregnant.

He opened the hall door and swung it in his hands. A heavy well-hung door. He walked to the staircase and stroked the varnished newel post. He took the stairs and they did not creak. He had to lower his head to enter the bedrooms. The ceilings were low and the wallpaper was peeling off in thick sheets.

He was trying to connect to the impulse he had to be here. He felt like he was starting a new life, venturing into new but old places.

Newsprint and flour paste sleeping under the wallpaper. He searched for dates and found them, between the world wars. He read of fashion and baked beans and the religious judgment of loose behaviour. There were beds that were thirty years old and expensive when they were new. The aunt had a taste for the modern. The laminate bubbling off because of the damp. On a hook behind the door were hung three dresses. A pair of lady's pumps. Under a seat cushion a leather pouch. A letter. It was typed, from an American military fellow on board a ship docked in St John's: Dear Nellie. Her name was Nellie Morris.

On the back of the pale blue paper a red mark—lipstick. It was a mouth. He read the letter. The letter was asking for a walk.

He stood there in the room, utterly alone, and looked out the window. Others had looked out this window but how long ago and who. What was a window doing, framing how you look at the world. What you saw was a hill with not a tree near it. He got up close to the window and his breath fogged it. And in the breath he saw something grow: the print of a child's hand.

HE SAT DOWN AND FOUND
other letters in a drawer and read them. There was an old radio and he turned the knob and it leapt alive. Batteries that still held power. It was an oldies station. He turned the knob to get some modern music and then he remembered the old man in the Spur singing that song of the woman whose head he kicked to the wall. He turned the raspy knob back to the oldies station and listened. This is what Nellie Morris had listened to before she left the house. The station was run by volunteers in their eighties and they spoke gravely of religion and there were public service announcements that warned seniors of the dangers of identity theft and the commercials were for dentures and funeral homes—Muirs has been carving monuments since 1841. Tender has a monument from Muirs on the road to the lighthouse. They call them monuments.

Henry figured out, through the letters, an entire family. The structure of the family involved a widower, Melvin Careen, who had married the aunt, Nellie Morris, but the aunt already had a girl—out of wedlock is the term—with the serviceman on the ship anchored in St John's harbour. When Melvin Careen died the children from his first marriage had tried to push the aunt out of the house—there were legal letters, threatening her. Henry thought of the aunt, all alone here, perhaps her nephew—Patrick Morris—had helped fend off the legal threats. Henry stared at the pumps and her dresses and her letters in the drawer and the notes she kept in the leather pouch. He was letting all this affect him.

I am concerned, he realized.

He bent down to smell the bedframe and there was a rank scent of mould. He surprised himself with this motion: his own reflection caught in a bureau mirror. His torso hovering over
furniture. He realized, in a fussy instant, that this figure in the mirror was a bully. He had bullied Nora into leaving him. He didn't know how to be himself. He found he was shouting at Nora Power. When you shout you don't know you're shouting. But it can ambush you later and that was happening to Henry now. He never liked that Nora was being herself. He confused her being herself with disloyalty. And now he knew she was right— she had been bewildered and surprised. Why does he think this way. Think ill of her motives. Think of her as judgmental. It had driven him insane with a rage he couldn't gauge for he had no mirror, no one ever looks in a mirror when in full fury. Perhaps all the mirrors fold away on little hinges. Until she left him. Or asked him to leave. And in that sorrow, or realizing he did not know how to be himself without being angry at others, he had decided to capitulate.

But I love you.

This man in the mirror has never owned a house, all he's owned are contents. I've never owned people, and people have never owned me.

He turned off the radio and walked downstairs. He looked out the window to see if anyone was watching him. The glass in the windows was the old kind that warbled. His breath fogged the window but there was no child's hand here.

The woman's coat on the chair. Tender had been late so Nellie took off her coat and laid it over this chair. This was her last afternoon in the house. She had collected a teacup and her slippers and a pack of cards and stowed them in a green box made of papier mâché and then Patrick Morris arrived and took her by the elbow and helped his aunt out the door and around the house to the car. They got in the car and reversed up onto the road and
he drove her out to the Aquaforte seniors complex Rick Tobin had built where she lived until she died.

But she had forgotten her coat. Her coat lay over this chair. It was a light yellow wool coat and the lining was exposed on one sleeve, a pale pink sheen to it and half of the maker's label, the white buttons down the length of it stopping five inches from the floor.

Henry whipped open a contractor's garbage bag and plunged the coat in. He laid it on the seat of the chair. He left the house and walked over the field and slept the night at John and Silvia's summer home. In bed he thought about the house across the field holding hands with this house under the earth. Their heads above the sand. The people who had lived and died in these houses. Why does this matter to me, he thought. I am no kin. Kin, he thought, an ancient thing.

23

He got a lawyer in the Goulds involved. The lawyer, Bill Wiseman, said who owns this house. He said it rhetorically. What he was saying was a lot of people owned this house. It was left to Tender Morris by an aunt, Henry explained, and I'm buying it off Tender's wife with the blessings of the Morris family.

Bill Wiseman rolled about the carpet in a black steno chair, with a ballpoint pen between his fingers.

Yes, he said, you're buying a house off this Martha Groves. You're to give her money, a wife you call her but there's no marriage in the books and a woman who hasn't even stated on a tax return she's common-law. She's to hand you a key to a lock on a door. I'm unfamiliar with the term widowed girlfriend and so too, I'm afraid, is the registry of deeds. That's like me selling you that field where my Impala is parked. Bill Wiseman pointed out the sheers with the ballpoint pen, as if he needed to. I can sell it to you, but is it mine.

Henry explained that Martha Groves was acting as agent for Patrick Morris's bereaved family.

Bill Wiseman shook his head. That house, that aunt. What about Melvin Careen?

Melvin Careen? He had not thought of Melvin Careen.

Bill Wiseman leaned in now and put the pen on the table, for he had information. There's two families, Henry. I know you're dealing with Patrick's immediate family, with a girlfriend he was to marry, and she means well. But the blood of family spreads further than brothers and sisters.

The aunt, Henry said. And he remembered the letters. You're talking about that man she married.

I'm talking about Melvin Careen.

I don't know the Careens.

Married the aunt like you said, Bill Wiseman said. And that's your problem right there.

Bill Wiseman pushed his short fingers together, gathering up Melvin Careen and corralling him between the two families. Melvin Careen wouldn't move into that house he didn't own half of it. Trouble is, he was married before. Had a wife and child and that child has family now, three sons, and those sons are not five miles from where we're sitting, hating Patrick Morris's guts.

It was impossible to follow this lineage without a diagram. It was impossible and absolutely boring to try and relate. No one in his right mind, Henry said, can hate Tender Morris's guts.

Bill Wiseman picked up the pen again and rolled away on his steno chair. Patrick Morris, he said, died in honour for the sake of our freedom but that hardly makes up for robbing the Careens of a birthright.

It was Tender's grandfather what built the house (Henry said “what built the house” in a gesture of idiomatic camaraderie).

Bill Wiseman checked his papers. Aubrey Morris, he said. Bill Wiseman did not acknowledge Henry's word choice.

Aubrey Morris, yes, he built it for Tender's great-aunt.

One letter separates aunt from a swear word that labels what women do to the records of possession and inheritance, Henry. It don't matter who he built it for. No will, no deed, nothing. She only has a right to hand down half the house.

Bill Wiseman severed his connection to the pen with one finger. The pen, and the house, were set adrift in the cosmos. How on earth did he come up with that swear word business so quickly?

Who's to say, he continued, one of those men ten years from now will come walking into that house and ask what the hell are you doing sitting at his table. A man who in the previous thirty years didn't have a single thought about the property—no sir this deal is not going to fly.

And with that the pen landed back on Bill Wiseman's desk.

24

Henry sat in the car, bewildered, and turned on the old-timer station and listened to music that actually skipped—they still played vinyl records at this station. He stared at Bill Wiseman's office window blinds. He rehearsed a little monologue. He counted off his fingers and corrected his language. Then he drove to a payphone outside a coffee shop and phoned the home of each of the three Careen grandsons and said he understood their loss. He did not want them out of the picture when it came to selling their grandfather's house. He hung up between each call and enjoyed the weight of a payphone receiver, payphones that were now being ripped out or added onto with screens for some reason he had yet to figure out. He phoned Martha Groves on his own phone and said look what am I going to do here, can we split the money between the families. I'm talking about the Careens. She wasn't there, he just left a message on her machine. He made out a cheque to her for three thousand dollars and bought a stamp and an envelope at a postal outlet and found her postal code and mailed it.

He drove back to Renews and walked into John Hynes's backyard and stared at the low hills and the community pasture where nine cows were standing in the failing winter sunlight. This is what you saw from that bedroom window. Cows, hill. He thought about what would be the best approach to get Tender's house. He turned to face the house in question, sitting in its own shadow, and realized how often he'd seen houses falling in on themselves and wondered why no one fixed them up. Now he knew. Bill Wiseman is right. I can't mention Martha or Tender or the Morris side of things. It has to be the Careen house entire. He laughed at his own consideration, the amount of energy he was channelling into this house and to the past. For what purpose. Do I plan to live in this house? Am I, he said aloud, doing this for Tender Morris? Tender Morris had no intention of living in this house. It's all a muddle, emotions and intentions, I could be living in London or California. How often will I see Argentina, living in this house. But what isn't refutable is you only have one life and you better make the most of it.

BOOK: Minister Without Portfolio
2.33Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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