This All Happened (2 page)

Lydia: Oh hi!

Alex opens a lavender umbrella to the snow and three nude women pop out, dancing across its ribs. And I cannot see Lydia for the umbrella.

9      Me: She wants me to write some prose poems on passion.

Lydia: Youre sure she doesnt want more than poems.

It's a collaboration. I'm going to do the seven deadly sins. I've remembered them with an acronym: scalp egg. Except there's only one G.

What?

The first letters: sloth, covetousness, anger, lust, pride, envy, gluttony.

Babe, you won't fall for Alex, will you?

It's work is all.

I show her the key to Heart's Desire. Imagine, Lydia says, writing a novel there. Who would believe it. Too corny for words.

But I want, this year, to write a historical novel, set in Brigus, where the painter Rockwell Kent and the northern explorer Bob Bartlett both lived. I want a boy who is fourteen to meet them. To have these men inform the boy of the outside world. The boy will be the last person born in the nineteenth century.

I shove a piece of cardboard between Jethro's radiator and grill, to help keep his engine warm. I drive by to pick up Tinker Bumbo. I hold Lydia by the shoulders and we kiss and I love her shoulders. She almost decides to come.

Well, visit me.

I will, babe.

10     There is a moose on the highway. I wake up Tinker Bumbo, and a youthful transformation slips over his frame. He sniffs at the lip of the window. The cow stares at me in the snow, waiting, patient. And then a grown calf emerges from the woods. They trot off together, wedge open the spruce, and are gone.

Heart's Desire. A Catholic town nestled between two Protestant ones (Heart's Content and Heart's Delight). The fishery closed. I pass a man pulling logs out with an all-terrain vehicle. He waves and I honk.

Maisie and Oliver's little red house is beyond the bridge. The key will not work, so I have to force the side door. There are boys on cold bicycles hauling sleds, watching me. There's no water.

I lug in wood from the shed and get the stove going. I open the vent and hear the fire roar. I turn on a radio. It's less desolate with a radio. The same radio voices you'd hear in St John's. There's a distant rush of water, under the house. A frantic sound. I turn on a tap and get the hollow sound of air.

11     Heart's Desire is not a pretty town. The modern bungalows clutch the road, the abandoned saltboxes are pilfered for lumber. The church was torn down and relocated in a complex that includes a bingo hall and the mayor's office. There's no vista here; a bare inlet, a spruce backyard, and flat land. I phone Maisie to ask about the water. She says, Look under the house. But a storm has begun, and I decide to ignore it. Gallons of water are escaping somewhere under the floorboards. The faucets are all dry. I sit in the living room, near the woodstove. The walls and windows buffer the wind, but you can still feel it. There's a slight current of cold, wet air. The sky darkens and I peer outside. I have no flashlight. The storm is so thick I can't see the lights across Trinity Bay. The wind whips the porch door from my hands, smacks it against the house so hard it is wrenched off its hinges. I step down off the porch and crouch into the crawl space. I feel around, I feel water charging through the kitchen drainpipe. A boy comes by on his bicycle and I tell him.

Light a kerosene lamp, he says.

I go inside and light one. But when I bring it to the door, it douses in the wind.

He says, Light it when we're under.

The lamp coats a false, cheerily maniacal face to the vicious pipes, the fall of water ice forming savage stalactites around the main sewer line. I am in awe at nature's lack of shock. That a process will not stop when a situation becomes horrendous. There is no fairness, no honour. I break off chunks of smooth ice from the mad clown. I find a tap and turn it until the water ceases.

I'm Josh.

I'm Gabe.

Josh: No one stays in this house over winter. Drafts and whatnot, the water freezing up on you. Though it's never good, he says, to have a house empty.

12     I drive to a grocery store in Heart's Content. Bright aisles and surprising sales. A fresh plump chicken, the whole plucked bird, for three dollars. I snatch it up. It's true I dont feel right about owning a whole chicken. I have a problem with my own deserving. There's fresh horseradish and ripe mangosteens. The cashier doesnt know what to charge me for the mangosteens. She looks at them as if I might have snuck them into the store under my coat.

I've never eaten a mangosteen. But I want to support the idea that a little place in Trinity Bay will import them. I want to encourage the mind that brought them here. Let the accounting show that three mangosteens were purchased on the road to Heart's Desire.

13     Lydia phones. She is spending a lazy day, loving me. She went downstairs and saw my photograph on the fridge and knew.

She says, Sometimes I feel shy.

Come and visit me.

I'll try.

Want to live together?

We'll see.

What else can I say? I cut short the call and brood around the house. I want to live with Lydia. I'm tired of separate places, and as it stands I dont even have a key to Lydia's. I want to rent her place and have her move in with me. Or the other way around, though I'd miss the view.

I thaw the freezer and get impatient. I lay a hammer to the ice and crack the freon tubing so I shut the door on it. I read one of Oliver's crime novels. I e-mail Alex and Max and Maisie. Each, I realize, encourages a different e-mail voice. For instance, Alex told me of a naked eye she's building. When you look at it, the pupil grows larger. She wrote: The pupil is not a thing but the absence of iris. It's the iris shrinking that makes the pupil grow. That's eros allowing in more light from the object in question.

When you abandon love, flirtation increases.

Max writes spoonerisms: All guns and fame until someone oozes a lie. And Maisie is literary. About the problems a novel presents over a short story. She wrote: A good story should be a door opening onto a scene already begun and closed before the last word said. A novel should be told by the voice of an authority, yet a voice that is still discovering the meaning of what the story is. There should be wonder. And all traces of the technical problem a novel delivers (that is, how do you keep the story afloat for three hundred pages?) should be erased or masked.

14          Two boys on their bikes knock at the door. It's Josh and his buddy Toby. They have a good laugh at Tinker Bumbo. Toby:Tha's a town dog.

How can you tell.

He got a collar and a dog tag.

I tell them it's my girlfriend's dog. And they are curious about Lydia. I remember Maisie had said that when she was out here, she'd never done any writing. She was a woman with a child and no occupation. You could drop in on her. When she said she needed time to write, they couldnt comprehend it. They invited themselves over. She gave into it.

Josh: So what's your girlfriend do?

She's an actor. And she makes films.

Josh: That's healthy. And what about you?

I try to capture people by their actions. By quick glimpses of how they do or say things. Moments.

Josh says he does that all the time. Except he'd call it gossip. Me: Let's do a project together. You tell me who lives in Heart's Desire, and I'll write it all down.

Josh and Toby look at each other and sit on the couch. All right then.

They stretch their necks to look out the window We'll start across the road. Madge is in the green house; she's a nun.

Josh: She's not.

Toby: No, but close to it. Next to her is closed up, but Et Coombs, she used to live there.

Josh: Lives in the graveyard now.

Toby: The Rumboldts, they got a little tiny house and a little tiny car. Tom Rumboldt we calls him Tommy Ginger, cause he's always crooked.

The boys rhyme off fifty-four families that live along the road. They are like old men in their depictions and knowledge. They are far more knowledgeable of the people they love than I am of my own.

15          I've asked Lydia Murphy to marry me. I've called her and asked her. On the phone her voice was little. Yes, she said, I think so.

When I responded that she sounded dubious, she said, nervous and excited, Okay, I'll marry you. I said, Are you sure. I said it as a statement rather than as a question. She hesitated. She had to go. She'd call me back. I waited for two hours. Then the phone rang. Maybe we should talk about it tomorrow, she said.

I e-mailed Maisie to tell her about the burst water pipe. And then I got into the issue of marriage. I felt a woman would be closer to another woman's ambivalence.

Maisie wrote back, You never meet hesitation with hesitation. That only fosters doubt. When Lydia says no, you say okay. When she says yes, I think so, you say okay. When she says no, you say okay. When she says yes, you say, again, okay. When she says no again, you say okay. And when she finally says yes, you say okay. And then you get married.

This, apparently, is how everyone gets married.

16          I watch Josh and Toby run from the school bus straight to my door. They want to pet down Tinker the town dog and tell me who lives on the Head. They are flaked out on the couch with Tinker between them as I type this. I close up my novel file and open the Heart's Desire one. I am going to use these boys in the novel. What they tell me I'll inject into the story.

I read what they told me yesterday and they crack up.

Jamie Groves just west of us, Josh says, he paints cars. And has a beautiful wife. Toby's grandmother died of a fluke. Renee Critch has a butt so big she walks through a door sideways. Smooth Jude drives the bus and he's so fat his car can barely carry him. There's Uncle Mary, who looks and acts and talks just like a man. Joey Langer couldnt walk before, then he had a operation and he walks perfect now.

John St George was captain of the SS
Eilleen,
a boat they blew the motor in her and smoke went flying everywhere and gas. Then it's Harld Powr.

Me: Why do you say it like that?

Josh: Cause he talks so fast and he walks so fast you can't pass him on bike.

They both laugh and slap each other's legs.

17     I've laid some snares and Tinker finds a dead grouse. It startles me (the snares are set for rabbits). Its long neck rubbed down to a red hose, brass wire wrapped several times around the branch. Feathers in the moss. A struggle, a large, long battle to get free. But now lifeless. His chest flattened a little to the moss. I set the snare again instinctively. I set the snare even as I feel shame.

I show the white grouse to Josh. He says it looks healthy. Let's go clean him, he says.

I've never cleaned a bird before. Cutting off the head and feet and wings. Beautiful plumage. Prying the beak open to see its perfect mouth. The feathers peel off like a pelt. Coiled black entrails flop out and stink. The heart solid and big, the fresh liver. The chunky flesh of the breast.

Tomorrow I'm taking those snares up.

The ruffled whirr as the birds ascend and disperse. In Peterson's guidebook: at a distance the grouse's muffled thumping is so hollow that sometimes it hardly registers as an exterior sound, but seems rather to be a disturbing series of vibrations within the ear itself.

The strongest socket is in the wing. The legs are like the front legs of a rabbit, no ball joint. The eye sunken but brown.

Josh says, With the cold, the meat should be healthy. He says Franky Langer was once lost in the woods and had to eat his dog. He was gone four days, Josh says. I mean, four days. He couldnt last longer than that before eating his dog?

18     I miss Lydia. When youre used to holding someone, a physical habit, you miss it. Is it habit to miss a voice too, to miss a response to your thought? I do no writing. There is nothing in Heart's Desire to fill the absence of Lydia. I stare at the road and wait for the school bus. Josh says, in an accusing tone, You wasnt up by lunchtime.

How do you know? You were in school.

My parents said at noontime there was no smoke coming out of your chimley.

Toby: What happened to Maisie's fridge?

I broke it trying to thaw the freezer.

Josh: You laid a hammer to it.

Yes, I went at it with a hammer.

Trying to break out chunks of ice.

Yes.

They both shake their heads.

Josh: Dad got a old fridge in the basement.

Well, I'd love to have it.

Josh: I'll see what I can do.

They take the axe and go out to the shed to cleave up some junks of wood.

19     Josh's father, Cyril Harnum, stands up on the grey flatbed truck, the garbage truck. With two men helping. The flatbed has a fridge roped to it.

The young driver, with a screwdriver, pops out the hinge bolts on the side door.

I can smell coffee, the other man says. You want her plugged in or thaw her out?

I should have kept the plug out of her last night, Cyril Harnum says.

I have paid fifty dollars for this fridge. The fat, heavy enamelled door that opens onto a salmon pink interior with two chrome shelves that swivel out. There is a pair of lightbulbs sunk into the bottom so the shine strikes up on your food, floorlights on a stage. It makes the food seem solid, planted, stars of the grocery world. The corners of the milk carton lit in a gold aureole, the spout silhouetted. I e-mail Alex about it and she responds that it was built in a time when kitchen appliances were treated as art.

All night I leave my work to go open the fridge door and admire the rich pink interior.

Cyril Harnum: Come over to supper tomorrow.

20      I call Lydia and beg her to come out. She says, I thought you wanted time on your own? I have no response. I miss watching her do things. She doesnt do things the way I do them. She makes a lot of ice cubes. I'm a man who forgets to make ice cubes. She makes sure there's air in her bag of lettuce. She sprinkles talcum powder in her hair if it's greasy.