The Bay of Love and Sorrows
Read The Bay of Love and Sorrows Online
Authors: David Adams Richards
ALSO BY DAVID ADAMS RICHARDS
Mercy Among the Children
Lines on the Water:
A Fly Fisherman’s Life on the Miramichi
Copyright © 1998, 2011 by David Adams Richards
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First published in 1998 by McClelland & Stewart Inc., Canada
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
ISBN: 978-1-61145-587-8
For Alistair MacLeod
and, too, for our Lady of light
P
ART
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Karrie’s father owned the gas bar just above Oyster River, a small gas bar, a hang-out for kids, with a penned-in mass of dark, worn tires in the back yard — tires worn by miles of travel to places going nowhere along the hard-bitten coast — and with the grass unkempt and bordered by a rundown fence, A circular drive led to their gas pumps and small store that sat dead in the heat on summer days.
Tommie Donnerel was a neighbour. He was busy renovating his house, building a new room for his brother and restoring the front porch. Sometimes he would come down to the gas bar for a moment. Or he would be seen at the dances at the community centre. Karrie liked him, but he never seemed to pay much attention to her.
He had the run of the farm now that his parents were dead, and people seemed to empathize with him, because his older brother was retarded.
Karrie liked to think of him as heroic, and to think that she was willing to invest in him because of his sterling qualities, which were apparent to everyone.
The trouble, if it could be said to be trouble, was that his best friend was Michael Skid. Michael was the person who helped him with the renovating of his house, the one with him after the death and during the funeral of his parents, who were killed in an accident at Arron Brook, Karrie had to weigh this as a serious problem, for, all in all, she wished to be liked and side with the right people on her road. And Michael Skid was well known as wild and unpredictable. Besides this, she didn’t like the way he looked at her. And there was that fling he had had with Nora Battersoil. And what became of it no one knew. But Karrie’s stepmother said he was awful, and that like most rich people from town he loved to argue about the world and used some kind of drugs.
So Karrie bided her time and waited. And just as she suspected, the summer following Tom’s parents’ death the two men had a falling-out of some kind. In fact, she heard they had almost had a fistfight Michael went away, and Tom was left to finish the porch and the room alone.
For a long while, Tom seemed to be unmoved by Karrie or her reddish blonde hair. She had invited him over to the local graduation party at the church centre — as soon as she had heard about the falling-out between him and Michael — but he had not come.
She then sent him an invitation to come to her graduation, which took place a week later. Yet, in the cramped auditorium with so many sweaty people, the gowns of the graduates half-askew, and the outside June evening pale with gusts of heat, she couldn’t see him.
She won the prize for Home Economics, but when she received it she felt that no one clapped for her like they did the others.
Then she went to the prom with a boy from her class, who wore an audacious white tuxedo and kept saying he knew where all the parties were. They ended up driving the roads in his father’s car until after midnight, finally finding a party at a house of a boy neither of them knew. The boy, whose name was Lyle McNair, saying: “Come — get acquainted — please don’t stand back, now”
They spent the evening sitting in the kitchen with Mr. and Mrs. McNair, who tried to make them feel welcome.
But after an hour Karrie insisted that she go home. She let her date kiss her once, smelling stale aftershave on his white chin. Going up to her bedroom she combed the perm out of her hair, and got into bed with a romance novel.
Sometimes that summer she would go to the first Mass on Sunday instead of the late Mass, because Tom was known to do so. After Mass one morning she stayed behind to light a candle, just to see if he would stay behind too. But he didn’t. And she left the church by the back way and ran home down the narrow path.
Later, in July, she walked the highway when she knew he would be bringing hay up from the lower field. She would pretend to be surprised every time she saw him.
This, in fact, went on for a long while. She was very sad about this, and quite sensitive. And she would write in her diary: “How can he go out into the middle of the bay alone? I went out to the shore — but as always — he came in on the far side of the wharf and didn’t even notice me — why is he so cruel?”
It was very strange, but all this made her feel somewhat special She found her stepmother cruel to her too, and bossy. Especially once when Vincent, Tom’s brother, came by the gas bar with a note written on his shirt that Tom had pinned there. There was a great deal of gaiety about this note, and everyone had joined in this gaiety except her. Her stepmother had laughed the loudest, looking around at everyone with her face beet-red and startled.
“Please send home by ten o’clock,” the note read. Vincent started laughing also, without knowing why
And then one night, Karrie invited Vincent into the house for a Coke. The house was very warm, had a miserable quality permeating it, which Karrie herself had understood from early youth. It was not that the house, with its pink shutters and long wainscotting, was a violent house. It was the absence of affection.
Karrie wandered about, as if sleepwalking, got Vincent a Coke and a dish of ice cream, and watched him eat at the kitchen table. It was her stepmother, Dora’s, quart of strawberry ice cream, and Dora watched her to see how much she was going to take.
“Do you like that, Vincent?” Karrie said.
He looked up at her, wiped his mouth, and said, “I gotta come home by ten.”
“Would you like me to walk you home, Vincent?” she declared suddenly, as she rested her pretty head on her hand in a bored way There was a fly walking up the wall behind him, and watching it made her eyes brilliant and bright.
“Let him find his own way,” her stepmother said, in characteristic meanness that Karrie was so familiar with. She looked over at Dora, who was only eleven years older than herself, and said nothing.