What Is Left the Daughter (18 page)

"I'm grateful you met my bus," I said. "I didn't expect it."

"Well, I'm hardly grateful to see you, Wyatt, but nonetheless I've put supper on the stove. Only because Mom would have." She could have said much, much worse.

She turned the ignition and started off for Middle Economy. I wanted to remark, "Beautiful evening," but refrained. And we hadn't traveled more than a hundred feet when she stopped at the side of the road. Staring straight ahead, Tilda said, "You
do not
mention Hans's and my ghost child. You do not ever refer to that. Not once, not ever." Then she drove on, and when the road curved close to the water, we saw two cormorants flying, and Tilda said, "Since you've been away, my thoughts have coarsened even more toward that bird."

As soon as we got to the house, we carried the trunk in and set it on Constance and Donald's bed. I retrieved my suitcase, and when I got back inside the house Tilda said, "Try and make yourself at home." First off, I put my suitcase in my old room. I took off my shoes, just to better feel the creaky wide-planked floor again, with all the knotholes sanded to level. "Your old overstuffed chair's in the town library," Tilda said from the hallway. "They needed a comfortable chair for people to read in, by the fireplace."

I made a little tour. The rest of the house felt at once familiar and unfamiliar. She'd rearranged all the furniture, had different wallpaper put on the parlor walls and had replaced the white kitchen paint with yellow. I noticed some gramophone records in a three-tiered iron shelf. "Steven Parish designed that for me," she said. "The albums are from Randall's shop. He moved to the bottom of Morris Street, cheaper rent. Those RCN were allowed to ship out, no punishment at all for practically killing Randall. The newspaper said they were just hotheaded. But do you know, Randall lost the hearing in one ear from what they did to him. But he told me when he thinks of how Beethoven was deaf a good deal of his life, he can't feel too sorry for himself, Randall can't. I've been to his new store five or six times."

"How are you living, Tilda? How are you paying for things?"

"Mourning professionally all over the province."

"I imagine that scarcely makes ends meet, though."

"Mom and Dad had some savings. Some little savings. But you know how frugal I am anyway. I cut the apple in half and save three-quarters for later."

"What's on the stove smells good. I'm starved. Do you mind?"

"Help yourself, Wyatt. I won't sit down with you, but it's Mom's French stew recipe. And by the bye, along with the other changes in décor, you'll notice there's no radios. They both went off to church charity."

"But the gramophone's still here. That's nice."

"Play it all you want. You have my permission."

"Maybe I'll just sit here for a while. In the kitchen here. It's bigger than my cell at Rockhead."

"Good idea. By tomorrow, you can graduate to the great outdoors. Why not drive over to Advocate Harbor, take a long walk, get reacquainted with the driftwood beach and breathe the sea air, eh? You always keep things close to the vest, Wyatt, so I don't imagine you'll much want to talk about what Rockhead was like for you. Anyway, painful to tell's painful to hear. That's a Highland platitude."

"I'm glad it's over—that's all anyone needs to know," I said.

"I'm in the rooms over the bakery again. I didn't want to be in the same house with someone I still have such hatred toward, you know?"

When Tilda left the house, I sat down for supper. I ate at a hurried prison pace, which habit I felt, given time, would probably change.

There's a saying, "A murder doesn't keep hours." I heard it a few times from a Reverend Oostdijk, a second-generation Dutchman in Halifax who used to counsel prisoners at Rockhead. He meant that if you'd participated in such a crime, don't be surprised if it comes back to haunt you at unpredictable moments. That's your punishment and salvation, as he put it. (I understood the
punishment
part.) Day or night it might happen. Morning or afternoon. Or, in my case, while eating the stew Tilda had prepared. I looked up from my plate and saw—or thought I did—myself and Uncle Donald standing in the doorway, clothes soaked through, wild-eyed, the truck's headlights swirled in fog behind us. The thing was, I was viewing us from the exact chair and place at the table Tilda had that October night, 1942, Hans Mohring already in the Bay of Fundy, rain like it was riveting Braille into the puddles on the road out front of the house.

It's one thing to hear "A murder doesn't keep hours," quite another to experience its content, like I just had. I fairly reeled from the table to the sink, turned on the spigot and threw cold water on my face. If this happens again, I thought, I can't stay here. I wondered if it happened to Tilda. And if so, how often. Every night?

By nine
P.M.
I was worn to a frazzle and fell asleep in my clothes, in my old bed. In the morning I was amazed to hear birds. I found my car keys above the driver's side visor. I turned the ignition and the old buggy started right up, which meant Tilda or someone else had kept it shipshape in my absence.

I drove to the bakery. This was about seven-thirty, and Cornelia was washing her front window. She had swirled thick white cleaning liquid in overlapping eddies on the glass so that you couldn't see into the bakery, except a little where the liquid had caked to lace patterns. Cornelia was a kind of shadow figure on a stepladder, opening up a new clean area with every tight sweep of a sponge. I stood there as she stretched overhead to arm's length, then worked her way down, finally clearing a space that offered a view of the street, and she saw me. She half smiled, lifted the sponge to her mouth, obviously an invitation for me to come in and have a cup of coffee or tea. I went inside and sat down at a corner table and watched her complete the window. She stepped back, appraised her work and said, "Now I can see this fine June day like I'm right out in it, eh, Wyatt, my long-lost friend."

"You did a good job there, Cornelia," I said.

"The only problem with so clean a window is, now and then a sparrow or blackbird collides with it, just flying along la-de-da, the end of its days. Did you have a window at Rockhead?"

"The prison library had two."

"Well, you can come sit and look out this one at your convenience. During bakery hours, of course."

"That's welcoming to hear, believe me."

"Just who else in Middle Economy have you talked to so far? Tilda, I imagine."

"You and Tilda, that's it."

Cornelia slipped off her rubber gloves, tossed them in the sink, then brought me a cup of coffee and sat down at my table. "Got any plans?" she asked. "Past finishing your coffee, I mean."

"I'm going to go out to the shed and see what shape the sled-and-toboggan concern might be in. That first and foremost, I guess. The accounts have to be delinquent, all of them. Honestly, I don't know what's left. Maybe nothing."

"Oh, I forgot to ask. How about a scone? I'm out of practice with you."

"Cranberry?"

"Three of those left. Do you want all three?"

"Yes, please."

"Breakfast's on the house, but don't tell anyone."

"I won't even tell you."

"You're thin as a rail. I'm going to slather some extra butter on those scones."

The scones were delicious. Coming out of all those months of drab prison food, I practically wanted to bite into the pat of butter, dappled as it was with scone crumbs from the butter knife. But having such a clean, clear window was best of all. And just sitting with Cornelia was nice, too. But then she looked at her watch and said, "Wyatt, I need to give you some advance warning. In October last year, Leonard Marquette fell and broke a hip and was laid up for weeks. He quit commercial fishing—doctor's orders—and now he's sitting on a forklift half of each day in a warehouse in Truro. According to him, he's pretty much his own boss and gets to give his hip a rest any time he wants. The reason I'm telling you this is because Leonard comes in for coffee and a blueberry muffin eight o'clock on the dot, sits for fifteen minutes, tops, so he's on the road and on time for his shift. His warehouse gets a late start but stays open later than most at the other end of the day."

"So Leonard will be here any minute—so what?"

"So, from Leonard you might experience some harshness, is what. You might experience it right to your face. There's no predicting Leonard's moods ever since his nephew was killed in France."

"Philip Marquette?"

"Yes, Philip, who was a student where Hans Mohring was a student. Dalhousie. The first Marquette to go to university, and that's a big family. Born and raised in Pembroke, where Leonard's sister and brother-in-law still live. But growing up, Philip was often to my bakery. My, my, my, that young man artistically carved wood like he was born to it."

"I think my uncle once tried to employ him."

"That's right. But Philip went to university."

"What was he studying?"

"Marine science, I believe it was called. In Pembroke he must've looked at the ocean every day for seventeen years, then took classes to find out the nature of what he'd been looking at. There's a nice continuity to that, eh?"

"I remember he carved bowling pins," I said.

"Here's something. When he was ten, he carved the smaller pins, called duckpins, for an alley up near Shediac Bridge, and what was unusual was, in that particular bowling establishment the lanes actually crossed into New Brunswick. Of course, there's no dotted line between provinces, is there, and besides, who cares, anyway? Nobody was smuggling bowling balls across the border. Back then, duckpin alleys had fallen in popularity, but not near Shediac Bridge, apparently, because Philip Marquette was paid handsomely to carve fifty duckpins. His parents put the money away. Come to think of it, he might've used it at Dalhousie to purchase textbooks. Who knows?"

"Are you saying don't mention Philip, it'd be too painful?"

"No, it's not that, Wyatt. It's that Leonard's lately been brooding all over again—he might never have stopped brooding, come to think of it. About Donald and you using his boat that night."

"But I didn't know we were going to use Leonard's boat until we got to the wharf."

"Most people understood that."

Indeed, at eight o'clock, give or take a minute, Leonard parked his dilapidated dark green truck with side gates in front of the bakery. He couldn't
not
have made me out through the newly washed window.

Once inside, Leonard stood at the counter. Cornelia set a blueberry muffin and a cup of coffee on the table closest to the counter. But Leonard kept standing, and he reached over, picked up the coffee and took a sip. "Wyatt, your time in Rockhead must've seemed an eternity to you," he said. "But it went far too fast for my liking. Personally speaking."

"I was sorry to hear about Philip," I said.

Leonard looked at Cornelia. "Knowing you, Cornelia, you probably gave Wyatt Hillyer those scones gratis. Welcome-home present, knowing you."

"None of your business, Leonard," she said.

Leonard gobbled the muffin in a few bites and then, holding his cup of coffee, sat down at a table. "Wyatt, did you notice I walk on a slant?" he said. "Permanent limp, all because I slipped on the deck of my boat and broke my hip and now I take a pill for the pain. In fact, I'm going to swallow one right in front of you and Cornelia." He reached into his jacket pocket, took out a vial, twisted off the cap, emptied a pill onto the table, set the pill on his tongue and stupidly displayed it there for five or so seconds. Finally, with an exaggerated gulp and a loud slurp of coffee, the pill disappeared. "It takes me a full minute to get out of bed in the morning, let alone limber up, just so I can get into my truck."

"Boo-hoo, Leonard," Cornelia said. "It takes me
three
minutes to get out of bed, and neither of my hips has ever been broken."

Leonard frowned and said, "It's not just that I slipped on the deck of my boat. It's that I slipped on invisible blood. Far-fetched as you might think that is, Wyatt, you didn't slip on it, so how in hell would you know?"

"Leonard, pay up and get on out of my bakery now, please," Cornelia said.

"I was out on my boat," Leonard said. "It was a clear day. No waves to speak of. The Bay of Fundy was between storms. Deck was dry as paper. And I slipped. Now, even a mesmerist at twenty-five dollars an appointment could not persuade me out of believing the deck of my own boat hadn't become ghoulish. No, sir, that German boy's blood was there—I just couldn't see it. And down I went. Thank the Lord that Tom Ekhert was working nets with me that day, or I'd've had my very first and last swim lesson, seeing as I'd started to roll right into the soup when he caught me."

"I hope the forklift breaks your other hip, Leonard," Cornelia said.

"Always a pleasure to see you, Cornelia. And the muffin was good as always," Leonard said. He set some money on the counter. "I'm a paying customer."

After Leonard drove off, Cornelia and I sat drinking coffee, not talking, admiring the new day out her window for a few minutes.

"Whew, what'd you think of your homecoming parade just now?" she asked.

"Not so harsh that I lost my appetite and can't finish these scones," I said, which made her laugh. "Have you seen Tilda this morning, by the way?"

"She has a rendezvous about this time every morning," Cornelia said.

"Where—with whom?"

"At the Parrsboro Wharf with her late husband," Cornelia said. "And I mean
every
morning. Mourns her husband. And she doesn't care who's watching—school kids to fishing crews, she doesn't care. You do something on that regular a basis, people not only get used to it, some eventually come to rely on it as a fixture. From what I've been told, she's very dignified about it."

"Every morning makes sense to me, since Hans was the love of her life."

"Hard to know what to think, really. She talks out loud and tells Hans about how things went for her yesterday. Things like that."

"When did these rendezvous begin?"