The Wreckage (31 page)

In the tiny kitchenette he found a kettle and a package of tea bags. A bag of hard bread, Purity jam-jams. He put the kettle on to boil and sat on a milk crate near the window. He turned on a white radio sitting on the sill, plowing the dial through heavy banks of static without ever finding a station signal. Looked down at the street finally, trying to picture it as it was when he’d lived above it twenty years earlier.

The kettle whistled as it boiled, pulling him back to the kitchenette, to the smell of the present. 1960. His first time home to Newfoundland since he’d left to go overseas. He couldn’t say why something as meaningless as the turn of a decade would bring him here when so many other things had failed. It was a Catholic thing, he decided. Twelve disciples. Forty days and forty nights. The numbers were talismans, no different than a crucifix or rosary beads. Logic didn’t come into it.

From the line of empty bottles on the wash closet floor, from the state of the business affairs downstairs, Wish guessed Hiram was somewhere close to drinking himself to death and was dedicated to it now with a single-mindedness that precluded everything but the drinking. He had no idea if the man would even recognize him. He carried two mugs of tea into the bedroom and took the blanket down off the window. He propped Hiram up against the headboard and pinched his earlobes, shouting his name.

A gurgle in response, one limp hand trying to bat him away.

“Some fight left in you yet,” Wish said. “Hey, Hiram?”

Fifteen minutes later he’d spooned half a cup of tea into Hiram’s mouth and managed to get the man to speak in monosyllables. But there was still no sign of recognition from him.

“You know me, Hiram?” he shouted. “You know who I am?”

He fixed Wish with a heavy-lidded stare. “You’re dead,” he slurred.

Wish said, “I come back to haunt you, you bastard.” And something like a smile flickered across Hiram’s face.

“Did I ever pay you that fiver I owed you, Wish?”

They sat at a desk in the kitchenette that Hiram had been using as a table. Dark outside, the room lit by a small lamp on the desk. Hiram had slept a few hours more and was drinking another cup of tea, liberally laced with whisky.

“You gave me five dollars before I got off the coaster. You don’t remember that?”

Hiram bit into a stale jam-jam and talked through the gummy mess of it in his mouth. “I don’t remember half what I seen in my lifetime.” He raised his mug. “The drink catching up with me.”

“Where is she, Hiram?”

He looked down into his mug. “She left just after the war. Went to the States and married a Yank. Good fellow.”

Wish could see him considering how much more he should tell. “What?” he said.

“I think she was pregnant when she left here, Wish. I expect she was, anyway. And she went off and married him.”

“Where to?”

“Somewhere near Boston. Lovell or something kin to that. Lowell? Jesus,” Hiram said. “Wish Furey. Like Lazarus from the grave. You heard any news of Lilly?”

“No.”

“She was in here to the Waterford for a while.”

“The mental?”

“That was a year and more ago. She had one of her spells, a bad one by all accounts. No one knew what to do with her out in Renews so the priest had her sent in here. She’s probably gone home by now.”

“She’s mad?”

“What did you think?” the older man asked. He looked genuinely curious. “You thought she was a saint or some goddamn thing?”

Wish didn’t know for certain what he thought.
“Capo perduto,”
he said. A kind of relief raising goosebumps on his skin.

Lilly was long ago discharged from the Waterford, as Hiram predicted. Wish hitched a ride on the new road to the Southern Shore as far as Aquaforte and walked the rest of the way into Renews. Dark by the time he arrived. The highway passed directly in front of Tom Keating’s house, electric lights illuminating the rooms on the ground floor. Wish turned up the path that ran along the north side without stopping. He passed the cemetery and walked down behind the church across the brook. He stopped outside the low fence at the grotto, looking up at Mary. The Ocean Star. The bare rock walls half covered now in some kind of vine.

He’d touched the feet of the Virgin for luck the last time he went through the doors of the French Temple in Nagasaki, the day after the commandant surrendered the camp to Major McCarthy. The stained glass windows were blown out but the building was far enough outside the city centre that it stood relatively intact besides. It had been turned into a kind of refugee camp, the pews hauled from the floor and stacked on one side of the church to make room. Oil lamps were lit and hung along the walls with litters of the injured and dying laid beneath them. Several hundred people taking shelter in the open space. The smell of seared flesh.

“He’s camped out in the basement,” Wish said. “Down with the urns.”

The heads of those still awake in the church turned toward them but no one spoke or made a motion.

Harris said, “Let’s get this show on the road.”

The three of them picked their way toward the door to the left of the altar that led downstairs, stepping over people as they went. After the surrender of the camp they had access to handguns and they each carried one. But they had other plans for the interpreter. Wish and Harris recruited Spalding for the expedition because they were afraid they wouldn’t have the strength between them to give the man what he deserved. There was no light in the stairwell. Harris had a flashlight but didn’t turn it on for fear of giving themselves away.

“You sure he’s down here?” Spalding whispered.

“I seen him.”

“Suppose he’s scuttled off somewheres since then?”

“Shut up, Spalding,” Harris said.

Wish used a hand against the wall to follow along the corridor, counting doorways as they passed. He stopped outside the door next to last from the end. “Got that flashlight ready, Harris?” he asked.

Wish stepped around the low concrete wall at the front of the grotto and knelt in the grass below the statue of Mary. He said,
“Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus.”
But he couldn’t bring himself to go any further.

Lilly’s shack was abandoned and someone was using it to store firewood, piling the split junks in rows against the wall. He thought for a minute about looking for her at the convent but walked back down through Renews instead, taking the path along the water to avoid the grotto. At the Keating house he let himself into the light and stood in the doorway to the kitchen. The room was as crowded as ever and no one took much note of him at first. Tom Keating was sound asleep on the daybed with two youngsters sitting on the edge of the cot, picking at one another. Billy-Peter was dealing a hand of cards at the table and glanced up at the doorway. He set the cards down beside the crib board.

“Jesus in the Garden,” he said.

Wish lifted his arms away from his body for a second, a gesture that was almost apologetic.

Patty Keating came in from the pantry with a pitcher of water that she dropped on the floor when she saw him. She ran across to grab him, alternately hugging him and beating at his chest with her fists, screaming all the while. Tom sat up on the daybed, shouting questions with a hand cupped to his ear, trying to figure what all the commotion was about.

Wish spent the rest of the evening in the kitchen, drinking beer and talking to Tom and Billy-Peter about the fishing and the fate of everyone he knew in Renews and how things had changed on the shore since Newfoundland voted to join Canada in 1949.

“We all voted against it around here,” Tom Keating said. He had an air of surprise about him, as if he’d never expected to wake from his sleep again. Not a single tooth left in his mouth and he gummed his words like they were made of paste. “The Monsignor as much as told us to vote against it.”

“I didn’t vote against it,” Patty insisted. She was sitting in her nightgown with her grey hair done up in braids, her arms folded under her breasts.

“She’s going straight to hell anyway,” Billy-Peter said.

“We got the road out of it,” she said. “And a cheque from the government every month for the youngsters. I got no regrets.”

Billy-Peter’s wife sat off to one side, crocheting. Geraldine Bavis. A girl Wish had walked out with himself a few times before he left Renews. Deen she was called. The priest came on them down at Aggie Dinn’s Cove, hardly into anything by then, just holding hands and the shyest bit of necking. Father Power drove them out of it, shouting hellfire and whacking Wish across the shoulders with a birch walking cane as he hobbled after them. At mass that Sunday the Monsignor laid into Deen’s parents for the lack of spiritual direction in her life. The girl never so much as looked at Wish again.

The two youngsters sitting beside Tom Keating on the daybed were Billy-Peter’s and Deen’s. “What’s their names?” Wish asked.

“This one’s Billy,” Billy-Peter said. “And the little one is Peter. Got another one upstairs asleep.”

“You been busy,” Wish said and Deen smiled down at the doilie she was crocheting.

The oldest of the two was nearly ten, a high pook of hair at the crown and a quick way about him that made the boy seem birdlike, cautious and brazen by turns. “You was in the war,” he said.

No one else had mentioned the subject. “Hardly at all,” Wish said. “The Brits gave up Singapore just after I got over there. I didn’t get a chance to fire a shot.”

The boy screwed up his face. “You never even killed no one?”

Wish took a swig of beer. “I never said that now, did I?” He turned to Billy-Peter. “Where is Lilly to these days?”

“She’s up at the convent,” he said. “You heard she was in town for a while?”

“I heard.”

“She got the run of the convent these days. The nuns dotes on her like she was a newborn lamb.”

“She’ll be tickled to death to see you,” Patty said. “She never would believe you was gone for good.”

Wish glanced across at Tom, who seemed to have dozed off again where he sat. “I’m keeping you crowd up,” he said.

“Take him up to bed, Mother,” Billy-Peter said.

It was hours still before the last of the people in the room made their way upstairs to bed or out the door to their own houses. Wish and Billy-Peter sat with their beer for a while then, smoking cigarettes to have something to do with their hands.

They were altar boys together when Wish first arrived in Renews, following Father Power around with the crucifix, ringing the bell, kneeling, genuflecting. Repeating the Latin prayers sleepily, until a phrase caught their pubescent attention.
Aufer a me, Domine, cor lapideum, aufer cor coagulatum, aufer cor incircumcisum
. Take away my heart of stone, my hardened heart, my uncircumcised heart. Even in Latin that notion was enough to induce a fit of the giggles in them both. Father Power cuffing the backs of their heads to snuff the laughter before it got out of hand.

They hunted for a rare glimpse of cleavage as women came to the altar for communion. Rated the girls after mass as they removed their vestments, ranking them in order of desirability. The Wish List, he called it. “If I ever gets my hands on that Geraldine Bavis,” he said. “By the Jesus.”

Billy-Peter gave him a two-handed shove. “You needs to get your heart circumcised,” he said.

“You and Deen looks fine together,” Wish said now.

“We’re managing all right. You don’t look none the worse for wear.”

“Not a scar.” Wish held his hands out at his sides, that same apologetic gesture.

“You’re not sticking around, are you.”

“I’m going to leave you some money to look after Lilly.”

“She don’t want for nothing up there.”

Wish took out a billfold and counted out a hundred dollars. “All the same.”

“I’ll put it by. Just in case.”

“There’s more of this if you needs it. I’ll drop you a note when I settles somewhere.”

Billy-Peter said, “Your woman come out here during the war, you know.”

“Mercedes?”

“She was with another girl and a Yank soldier. She come looking for you, she said.” He paused there. “What become of her?”

“She married the Yank.”

Billy-Peter’s head jerked back slightly. “Is that right?” he said. That fact alone seemed enough to answer any questions he might have had about what happened to Wish after the war. “Where you planning on going from here?”

Wish shrugged. “I thought I might try my luck in the Boston States.”

3.

H
E WOKE EARLY WITH AN ERECTION
. Stared down at it when he got to his feet, surprised. He didn’t feel aroused in any sexual way but he could have hung a coat on the knob. “Hello, stranger,” he said. Tried to think of when he’d last found himself in that condition. He’d been living alone so long he’d hardly noticed the lack and couldn’t fix the time or place with any certainty.

He’d moved back to Newfoundland for good in the early 1980s, when Billy-Peter wrote to tell him Lilly had been readmitted to the Waterford. He was working as a mechanic at a roadside service station in New Mexico at the time, living on his own after the implosion of the latest in a long line of relationships with women no better at holding their liquor or their tongues than himself. He did oil changes and muffler replacements and pumped gas. Creeping up on sixty then and ready for a change himself.