AFTER A TIME THE APARTMENT BUILDING WAS BULLDOZED to the ground. The boys were buried and forgotten, their mother died sometime later, and little Mary Lou was gone to Saint John where Mel Stroud tried to pick up work on the docks, working on the frigates. It was a time of great change for Dexter and Chester’s business. Though they still had markets in India and Pakistan, they had fewer markets in Canada and Europe. Dexter had taken a trip to Europe, trying to keep the doors opened in West Germany. He got lost for a whole day in the airport in Frankfurt. He spoke personally to Willy Brandt. Then he had travelled into Pakistan, just about the time of the outbreak of war with India. He was jostled about on a street in Lahore. He came home saying all the buildings were old and everyone dressed funny and were nuts.
They would often be seen sitting in the great den, looking over the papers.
Dexter would say: “They are—making trouble.”
“Who?”
“Students. All over the place, marching up and down.”
“Of course they are. Education gets the best of them.”
They had torn the small white clapboard apartment down and built a square brick apartment building. Two miles to the south was the east gate of Raskin Enterprises, with its floodlights shining twenty-four hours a day.
Five miles away, over broken and patched roads, the KO=2 bar sat. In the summer one could hear crickets in the weeds by the gravel parking lot. There men played slot machines, shuffleboard on the glazed pine table, and drank draft beer, rum and hermit wine, and ate pickled wieners.
Beyond that the long road across the barrens and blueberry flats, where those two luckless kids got caught out and froze.
“No matches,” Dexter said. “Should have had some matches. I always have matches when I’m out and about.”
They looked at each other with the same narrow, malignly bright eyes.
So the second apartment was where Eva Mott came to live with her luckless father, with the windows opened in the heat, and the smell of tar and wire, of sweet grey birds, and if it wasn’t for a boy named Torrent Peterson she would have drowned three weeks after she arrived.
Kaput.
Albert wanted to give some money away.
His lawyer insisted Byron actually wanted him to give it as a loan. So finally he said he would. But it had to be a worthwhile project.
He decided upon one person—actually one couple.
Both of them had come at night in the fall to his door sometime after that young girl from Load Lane was killed. Eva and Torrent had asked him if he might help them with a loan.
They had been to every bank, and every credit union, and must now try Household Finance if their dream was to come true. But he, haying for them, told them if they ever needed help, come to him.
So Albert said, to the two youngsters standing there, “I will see. There are many people here who would benefit from some money.”
“Yes, please think about it, sir,” Eva pleaded.
They went away, and the man, young Torry Peterson, said to his wife, young Eva Mott, that he no longer thought this a good idea, to start a cabinetmaking business, to make renovations to his barn, and to buy the timberland from Clement Ricer might be a pipe dream for him.
“No no no,” she said, “it’s our one chance—it is our one damn chance. We have to take it.”
“I am not good at asking for money.”
But it was a pipe dream Eva would not let go. She could be like her cousin Clara Bell after all.
Albert could get the money easily now. In fact even without Byron’s money he was quite rich because of certain payments from his uncles.
He would publicize it also, to make people aware of what he was doing.
He could loan the money to Eva, in order to empower her. (He did not really think of Torry here.) It would be a business venture.
Her wedding was a year or so before. She had married the man who had saved her life, the luckless Torrent Peterson.
There was a woodlot, a stand of timber above Riley Brook belonging to Clement Ricer that had remained untouched in the fire of four years before. And Torrent and Eva wanted it.
Torrent had all his grandfather’s tools—ancient tools, all types of saws, chisels, wood drills, a vise grip, planes, hammers, mauls. He was an exceptional carpenter but he worked for his father, in the junkyard under those lights that shone out from the barn.
At times Eva would be there as well, helping him move tin and iron, old stove parts and electric motors, in that grand frozen inventory of Oscar’s life. During summer gnats and mosquitoes spread their blood, and in winter the wind lashed upon them, and Eva’s hair froze against her cheek, her leggings under her heavy woollen skirt, and her heavy-soled boots tied with leather laces.
Oh, Albert thought, driving by one day, if only he could take a picture and show people who he intended to help.
He believed Eva was his ticket to redemption. But he needed Eva to help by him helping her.
Because if she succeeded without his help then his sociological book, which he told people he would publish, about Arron Brook, would fail. He must himself play a part, of supervision to prove himself. He would loan money and supervise what was done.
If she and Torrent were happy as they seemed to be now, then his thesis would be a moot point. He knew this too, as a seed in the forest of a million trillion seeds.
Once when he was driving down the hill of Load Road he came to the spot that young woman was hit and killed by Shane Stroud.
At the place where she was struck down the family had put a marker and a note from the Bible. The wind had blown the marker sideways.
There was only one problem. He was no longer that unattractive teenaged boy. He was now handsome and many women liked him, and it had made him vain. And this vanity was to play a devastating part in his attempt at redemption. And Eva Mott was beautiful. In fact she was both beautiful and susceptible.
That summer he made sure he walked along the gravel road toward his cottage instead of along the beach, he made sure he was at the beach where she still swam.
In the evening he wrote sketches of her, what she wore, how she dressed and spoke.
She often blushed when he spoke and often said: “Sorry, sir, I get some confused. Sometimes I could just die ’cause you make me confused.”
“I am not sir—”
“Well, I could not call you Albert.”
“Professor Raskin,” he said, picking up a piece of grass and putting it in his mouth.
“Yes, Professor Raskin. I never spoke to a professor so much before.”
A few days would go by, and he would decide not to see her. She was, as so many country girls are, disarming in her beauty.
“I won’t see her again—I will—yes, I will go to confession, I will just give the money to the Arron Brook Community Centre—Why oh why did that night happen—leave me alone!” he would sometimes say aloud to the clouds passing by.
Then he would come forward when he saw her alone. He would wave, walk up and speak to her.
One morning he told her that he was “thinking hard on your proposal.”
“Oh sir! Really? Do you know what that would mean to Torry?”
“And to you?”
“Yes, sir, to me too—to us all the way around.”
One day she came to him. He was sitting on the giant white drift log that was up the shore a way from the tickle and suddenly she was there. For a moment he didn’t know if she was laughing or crying, and she pressed a piece of paper in his hand, her face still with the same beaming red expression, and turned and ran up the pathway toward her home.
On the paper was a heart drawn in crayon like a child of eight might have done, with the words inscribed inside it: “Thank you so very much sir.” And signed: “Me and Torry.”
But there was a problem.
Who was this problem?
Well, the problem was—Church Bell. That was what people in his department called Clara Bell. An old-fashioned Catholic girl. God Almighty. She said the rosary; she had an aunt who was a nun! Her grandfather had been premier at a time when his uncles became rich. She infuriated Dykes, Dykes hated her—and Albert was influenced by Dykes.
Each time Clara saw him with her cousin Eva she would in some way try to intervene. She would call Eva to her, or try to catch up to them on the beach. She even stepped in between them twice, gingerly making Eva back away.
Then one night, lying alone in the dark, he thought: It’s that—she knows something about that!
Darren Howl and Clara Bell were married.
And a deep unease over came him. A deep fear. And he went to a bookshelf and picked up a book at random, and it was T. S. Eliot, and closing his eyes he opened it to a line. Opening them he read:
“I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”
Albert and Clara met because Clara Bell’s father worked for Raskin Enterprises, and there were certain things that Albert was now asked to do.
For three or four days over the course of a summer he found himself at Clara Bell’s. One afternoon they began talking about pregnancy and women, because of three unmarried women who were having children along the Load Road, and the two young girls here who were pregnant and only teenagers.
“Abortion is the only adequate solution,” Albert said ardently. “Even noble. Then the child doesn’t suffer.” Then looking at Clara he said, “I know Catholics might disagree.”
Clara responded: “Yes, the best way you have not to have a child suffer is not to give them a chance at it. But none of them that I know would give up a moment of their lives for your opinion about their lives.”
“Well, as I said, I know Catholics would always disagree.”
“So many along this road too did not have the luxury of being wanted either—Catholics or otherwise—but they made out okay,” Clara said.
“But you must admit, many are better off not born?” Albert said. “Look at Torry Peterson.”
“Torry Peterson?” someone said. “What’s wrong with him?”
“Nothing is wrong with him, it’s just I see his life—the life of his wife—”
“What’s wrong with his wife?” the same person asked, confused.
“Nothing,” he said suddenly, and felt embarrassed. Then he looked over at the woman sitting beside Clara Bell. She had not spoken at all.
He had seen her somewhere before but he was uncertain where. He kept trying to picture her someplace else, kept thinking of some feature he recognized. At this point she turned and looked at him as well, and gave the same slight smile he had seen before, tense and knowing. Then he knew, and his face flattened out to one of shock.
It was the police officer Constable Becky Donaldson—a good friend of Clara and her husband Darren Howl.
He looked toward the corner of the room and his eyes lighted on the small record player with the black ink stain—the record player that Becky Donaldson’s sister had at her little party years before.
Clara was now talking about two boys, Arnie and Arlo, who had frozen to death in each other’s arms, out on the barrens, in a scowl of wind one February years ago. It was a topic that had come up now and again, in the way elusive things do, because her husband Darren Howl believed that they were mixed up with someone at that time, and sent to their deaths.
Though Clara did not and would not tell this part of her husband’s theory, he believed they had to appear in court. They had been selling mescaline. Her husband’s contention, also not spoken of here, was not that Arlo and Arnie were trying to run away—as the police file stated from that long-ago night—but someone they must have really trusted had deceived them into going out there.
This was her husband’s theory, but it was also Constable Donaldson’s theory and Oscar Peterson’s theory as well—and Oscar was pivotal in the research being done by her husband Darren Howl. You see, a quarter horse can do a good deal—and in this case it made a connection between Oscar’s and Darren’s family. Oscar had rescued a quarter horse named Piny Wood and rode it back to them years before. It had been Annie Howl’s quarter horse. They had been in touch ever since.
Clara did not tell very much of this ancient story.
“You see,” Albert said, “you see—well that’s my point—and my point is this—that if they had not been born, their lives wouldn’t have been a torture for them or others!”
“Why is that?” someone asked. “I knew them and they were pretty good young lads.”
“My reasons are”—and here he counted on his fingers—“poverty, early pregnancy, lack of knowledge or understanding. Fatherless, probably—”
“Poverty for sure,” Clara said. “Lack of knowledge I doubt very much. Both had incredible intelligence.”
“You know, Albert, both of them were brighter than you,” Clara’s sister Joanie, the one who had the graduation party an age ago, said. And he hadn’t even seen her sitting in the room, at the very back near the stairs.
People began to laugh at this. The woman sitting beside him, who knew nothing of the ongoing war between him and Clara over Catholicism, who was on vacation from Nova Scotia, who left all religion to others, who was studying to be a veterinarian and who was Becky Donaldson’s lover, punched him on the arm as if it was a great joke.
“There you go, lad—you’ve been told!”
He laughed too. But he left his beer unfinished.
He passed the church. It was four o’clock on Saturday, the time the confessional was opened.