The Book

FOR WEEKS, EXCEPT when we were eating, there was nothing on the kitchen table but the Book. My father put it in the middle of the table as if it were the family centre-piece. He pointed at it, referred to it as “he” or “you” as if it were the judge himself. “‘Friends as you and I would have been had we gone to school together.’ Oh, yes, I’m sure we would have been great friends. You and me. Bosom buddies. Inseparable. Shoulder to shoulder through life. If only we’d met in school, we’d be spending all of our time together now, hunting caribou in Labrador. The writer and the toter. What a pair we could have been.”

Sometimes, late at night, he pretended to be the judge addressing Charlie Smallwood. “I have deigned to acknowledge you, to indulge your delusions on the cover of this Book that I wrote and you did not, this Book that you could not have written, this eight-hundred-page masterpiece of mine, an accomplishment so far beyond your scope it reduces your whole life to insignificance.”

“Stop talking to that book,” my mother would shout from upstairs. “It’s not natural, a man talking to a book.”

“It talks to me,” my father said. “It mocks me, it affronts me.”

“You’re losing your mind, Smallwood,” my mother said. “It’s like your dreams. It’s not the book, it’s the booze that’s talking.”

But as if he had the judge tied to a chair and was giving him a dressing-down in nightly instalments, my father walked in a circle about the kitchen, back and forth, haranguing the book. He had become fixated on things before but never for so long and never on a solid object like the book. It unnerved us all to hear him down there addressing the book as if it were some late-night visitor that none of us had ever seen, denouncing the judge, then himself as if he were the judge.

He missed two days of work in a row, lying on the daybed in the kitchen until nightfall, lying there while we ate, waiting for us to finish so he could have the table and start in on the book again. “You’re going to be fired, Smallwood,” my mother yelled at him, standing over the daybed. My father muttered insensibly and turned towards the wall. My mother sat at the table and put her face in her hands.

Long after I heard my father go to bed at the end of his third day home from work, long after I had fallen asleep myself, I awoke to the sound of someone creeping down the stairs. I heard the back door open. I looked out the window. There was my mother in her nightgown, on the city-facing deck. She held the judge’s book in both hands and stared at its cover. Then, with the book in the palm of one hand, she reared back and, as though she meant to land it on the roof of the judge’s house, hurled it out into the darkness. I could dimly see it unfold in the wind, the pages flapping, and a couple of seconds later I heard it land with a dull thump far down the slope. My mother stood there silently staring after it, her chest heaving against the rail of the deck as if she were panicked to the point of breathlessness.

There was a low rumbling sound like far-off thunder that, from somewhere down the Brow, grew louder, then receded, though it continued for some time. She stood on her tiptoes, leaning out over the rail of the deck, craning her neck to see. Then, perhaps fearing the noise might have wakened the rest of us, she hurried back inside. Swiftly, almost silently, she went down the corridor and up the stairs, crossed the landing to her room and went back to bed.

The next morning, a Saturday, as we all sat at the breakfast table, my mother made an announcement. There had been an avalanche the night before, she said, an especially bad one that had started about a hundred feet below our house and had gone all the way to the bottom. A few fences had been flattened but, “thank God,” she said, no houses had been hit, though the avalanche had cut a swath between two houses and now the cross-Brow road was blocked with snow.

“Right between the two houses, it went, can you imagine? Your father is going down there soon with the other men to help dig out the road.”

My father, hungover, did not seem nearly so thrilled by the prospect.

“I’ll go with you,” I said.

Later, we went down the Brow and joined the men and boys who were going at the mound of snow from either end, working in towards the middle. Looking up at our house, I could see the path the avalanche had taken. The tops of the smaller trees had been snapped off and some larger ones had been uprooted altogether. In places, the hill had been scraped bare of even snow and ice, and the rocky yellow mud showed through. The avalanche, as my mother had said, had ploughed between two houses and left them undamaged, except that their facing sides were scraped, their clapboards splintered.

We had been at the site for about an hour when one of the men on the other side of the mound from us shouted that he had found something beneath the snow. “I think there’s someone under here,” he said. I stood and stared as everyone else hurried to where the man was standing and began shovelling furiously. “There,” the man said, “there, that’s someone’s arm.” An arm, elbow up, protruded from the snow. A couple of men took hold of it and tugged with all their might, without result. “He’s froze solid, whoever he is,” one of the men said.

Some of the fathers sent their boys away so they wouldn’t see. The boys backed off reluctantly, staring at the arm. “Go home,” one man roared, and two boys went racing up the hill, to break the news, I had no doubt. My father seemed to have forgotten I was there. They resumed shovelling. I kept watch from the other side of the mound. Eventually, they dug out and turned over the body of an old man, a “Mr. Mercer,” who they said lived on the Brow by himself. His eyes and mouth were wide open, his mouth stuffed with snow.

“Old Mr. Mercer,” my father said later that night. “Lived right at the bottom of the Brow.”

“But the snow never went that far,” my mother said, “and none of the houses was hit, you said so yourself this morning.”

“He must have been out walking on the road,” my father said. “Lived by himself. No one knew he was missing. Eighty-three years old he was. Imagine, to live to be eighty-three and then to go like that.”

“He was stuffed with snow,” I said, forgetting myself and the effect the words would have on my mother so vividly did I recall how Mr. Mercer looked. “It was like he was force-fed snow right down to here.” I indicated a spot between my stomach and my chest. His gullet stuffed with snow.

“Don’t talk about it, Joe,” my mother said. She sat down on the sofa looking frightened, stared wonder-struck into the fire. “Don’t talk about it. It wasn’t anybody’s fault, you see. It was an accident, that’s all it was.”

“An act of God,” my father said.

“No,” my mother said. “No. It’s not God’s fault. What was Mr. Mercer doing out at that hour?”

“What hour?” my father said.

Vaughan, meanwhile, known for his writerly reclusiveness, is nowhere to be found, though it is later discovered that he is writing The Newlander’s Cure, a tract of advice for settlers about how to survive the perils of life in Newfoundland, which, though he has never experienced, he, being a writer, is able to imagine so vividly that other people who have never been to Newfoundland find the book convincing and it sells quite well.