EVA WAITED UNTIL TORRENT CAME HOME THAT WEEKEND. She met him at the wharf. She drove him in her dilapidated Honda, and then suddenly inside the door of the house she began crying, half-hysterical, for fear this would not happen. So she began to tell him, she blurted out that they had a new partner. But he could not go back to work on the dredge. He had to quit a job and work in his shop. She told him she signed for him, and he could write his initials on the side of the pages. If he did not, the contract would be moot.
She ran and got him the documents. He asked if they should take it to Clara. “Clara has everything—she is a lawyer married to a professor,” Eva said to Torrent. Because she was instantly terrified Clara would find a ruse in this agreement, and Eva wanted to convince herself and him that there was no ruse.
She shut her eyes tightly as if she was a child, and stopped breathing, and then said: “Listen to me, will you, please! Listen to me. He will sell your furniture all over the place—okay?”
There was something frantic about her that issued an alarm in him, an idea that he wasn’t her ideal—that something or someone else must have been, that she had been waiting for him to change—that her life was one of an obligation she now needed to escape from. Polly sat in the highchair looking at both of them, her simple kind eyes seeming to wonder at her mother.
He was exhausted, and he began to wash up.
“Oh yer not even listening and it’s such a big thing—and I told you—I told you.”
“I am listening. I thought you had forgotten all about this—it’s too much money.”
“But he will do everything—he will sell them for us—you won’t have to—and he will find buyers—we will be able to do what you said you wanted to—own your own business!”
“But I work alone—I told you that a hundred times—it’ll not make the money back and we’ll be stuck with the loan. For that’s what this boils down to—a loan. It might sound different, but it is just a loan!”
“What—are you crazy?”
Then she closed her eyes again and held her breath and when he didn’t answer she stamped her feet, twice.
“What about Polly?” she said. “Do you want Polly to grow up like me or you, with not even a pair of pants to put over our arse?”
He now remembered Professor Raskin on the wharf standing alone—a figure so removed from him, the lobster traps piled up on one side of him. All was quiet, below him the green waters of the bay. Why was he suddenly frightened when he thought of it?
Because he briefly (not fully yet) saw how he had taken shape in her mind, how she had been determined from the very first moment he, Torry, mentioned that he would like to have his own business and he wished he could buy the lot on the ridge. It became her portico into the world she believed she wanted.
She was the one who had talked him into going to the banks, to fulfill this dream.
From that moment on, this dream constantly trumped any other wish in her. She refused to drive by Clara’s house and refused as well to speak to their old friends. She was planning a life commensurate with her older cousin’s—fourteen minutes older.
One evening after they had come home from haying she had berated him for not wanting more.
He said nothing as she spoke. And finally she said:
“Yesterday Clara’s name was in the paper—someday, if my name was in the paper once, I would—just faint, I suppose.”
So he now knew he must move in her channel in order to stay with her. All of this was controlled by tethers invisible to the naked eye, and flashed before him so fleetingly that he almost did not catch it.
How when they went to the banks, her fists were closed and her little knuckles were white, hoping against hope as the loan officer went over their application. She was on the verge of tears, her face pleading without her voice speaking.
How one bank and then another satisfied themselves as to their penury. Then—and this was the point—what if Albert hadn’t took it upon himself to come haying, to tell them he could help—might she have forgotten it? Or if Albert had been someone else—might she then have forgotten it?
Now she was someone else.
Slowly she opened her eyes and stared up at him, with an almost cold otherworldly look as if she had just caught on to what he was thinking, and as if he had caught her because of her insistence; that she did not want him any longer—she wanted others. She had been overtaken already by Albert Raskin, already she had tried not to think about him—already she had dreamed about him, and didn’t know why.
“You promised,” she whispered. “You promised.”
“Yes,” he said, “I know. But let’s go out west like we planned—I’ll find the money—in three or four years we can come back and start it up by ourselves.”
“I am so, so sick of living like this here,” she said quietly. “You said you wanted it. You said.”
“I wanted a business—but, well, what say will he have?”
“I don’t know what say—you are the carpenter, the craftsman, not him! Think of how you took me up to that ridge—those are the trees you wanted, that is the timber you want—”
He sat on a kitchen chair and looked at her, his large hands on his knees, his shirt torn at the collar and the top of the right sleeve. She was in a housedress, bluish white with a button missing, and worn sneakers on her feet, with a small dark hole near the right baby toe, and white socks to her ankles.
It was night now, and outside they could hear the croak of frogs down over the hill in the pond. They could smell the fresh pine night through the side screen, and hear the bluebottle fly buzz.
“Your idea was to have your own furniture business—it is what you always said.”
“Yes—it is what I said, yes. But I have to make a living doing other things at the moment.”
“Not if you get that money.”
“It won’t work like that, Eva.”
“Why won’t it! You never ever take no chance. What about Polly—what about our little girl!”
He looked at her sadly, with this new knowledge of who she was. She had distanced herself now by the curious craving to have him succeed. How their eyes met at that very moment said in some way she had deeply betrayed him.
“When will we have to pay it back?” he asked.
“Well—he will get his money back over the course of a few years—as long as you make your furniture. Torry, he’s a Raskin—for God sake—a real honest-to-God Raskin.”
“A few years—fifty thousand—how is that possible?”
“But it is—I know it is!” she said. “Fifteen pieces of work will do it—and it’ll be our business and our timber.”
“What are these signatures here?”
“I already signed—you just have to initial—so you just initial!” She tapped the page where the ink marks were a little smudged, and walked to the counter, looked out at the black hole of the night and then turned to him.
She did not tell him about the lien on the house if it was signed in bad faith, for that was mentioned to her so quickly and as such an afterthought and seemed to her so unlikely and so untrue it didn’t matter.
Torrent signed as best as he could. She watched over his shoulder as he struggled. Outside that night there was the smell of new-mown hay, the stars came out, the trees waved in the warm breeze from off the bay.
The phone call the next morning was from Oscar. He told Torry he did not believe the coroner report. He said: “Son, your mother was murdered.”
Mel Stroud telephoned Albert the next day as well.
“You gived all that money away—that’s a little disappointing. Shane and I had long expected you would give it to us—as your good friends and partners—”
The first few months everything went well with the partnership. As always things at first looked rosy and promising. They got together and Albert stood and watched Torrent work. Eva would sit on a bench and talk too much. Sackville at times would drop by. They even went to Albert’s cottage once, and met certain people from the university.
“Helping out: A Raskin promises changes” was an article that appeared in our paper.
Then more than a few times Sackville insisted Eva go somewhere with them, sitting in the middle of the front seat.
“Let’s go and do something,” Sackville would say, then hesitating she would add, “Come with us, my dear, and leave your manly macho man to chisel. We will go back to our place and have a glass of wine.”
They took her twice to the university and showed her around the campus.
Once in a while, out of the blue Sackville would buy her something nice to wear, and give her advice on university.
“Woman studies for you, my lady. You’re being picked upon, you know—yes—don’t speak—you are—you have to overcome it.”
She, Eva, was overwhelmed by this attention and yet frightened by it—because there was something wrong with it that she didn’t quite know. Well, she did. They were leaving Torry completely out. She had to be in the barn with him for at least part of the day, even if it was just to clean and sweep up.
One night she came home late, Torry had left off working on a cabinet. It looked so lonely, that cabinet, in the middle of the barn, the tools on the bench; the air was still, the evening going dark in the opened barn.
Yet in the moment it all seemed—for her among these bright people—impossible with Torry there.
Once when they were alone Ms. Sackville—she insisted Eva call her Faye, but Eva refused—grabbed her, put her head on her lap and said: “I’m going to massage your temples—just lie here and relax—yes, relax. No, close your eyes—yes—yes—yes.”
They were supposed to go to Chatham for a few minutes but were all the way down in Escuminac and the wind buffeted the car. Still Eva almost fell asleep, as she felt the woman’s hands upon her. Sackville then stroked her shoulder, and then her breasts, and slowly down along her leg to her knee, and giving her a little slap on the thigh said: “There. Now arise, madam, you are a new woman—under my control. My job is done. Anytime I want you—I can have you. I can always tell, you know. Do you want me to have you—do you?—say it—”
Eva didn’t want to.
“Say it—my little bitch.”
“Yes,” Eva said, her eyes still closed, “Yes yes. Have me”
“Take you?”
“Yes.”
But then coming out of a daze she sat up straight, blushed and looked straight ahead. Hoping it was all a joke. She told Ms. Sackville she wanted now to go home.
She knew Torry resented Ms. Sackville too. She called him macho man. She said once: “No wonder Clara Howl likes you.”
He felt embarrassed. Only Eva knew he went to Clara’s to learn how to read—so how did Ms. Sackville suddenly know?
Within two months Albert was giving him suggestions, and Eva would be seated between them in the car when they drove back to the barn. And she herself had started smoking again.
One night he said: “This can’t last.”
“Why?”
“They don’t—”
“Don’t what, Torry? Things are nice.”
“They don’t respect my work!”
So little by little Torrent was upset with Albert, with Ms. Sackville and with Eva.
He hated it when Albert said “Oh come now” and patted his shoulder.
And there was something else. Raskin berated Torry one day in front of a buyer.
“Oh damnit, Torry, you are so precious—you are going to lose this sale.”
“Fine, then I am not selling to him.”
“But he has come over from Woodstock.”
“Well I am sorry but he can go back to Woodstock.”
Torry came from the barn, closed it up padlocked it, and told Albert to go to hell.
“Stop taking Eva away—she has duties here,” he said.
“Are you jealous?”
Torry didn’t answer.
“She comes with us by her own volition,” Albert said.
“Whatever that is,” Torrent said, and suddenly smashing a fence board with his fist.
Afterwards nothing could go back to the way it was.
Then Mel phoned Albert from Saint John.
A friend catching up, a man concerned about him and asking about his health, for he had a health scare—his blood pressure had risen a few weeks before and he couldn’t stop his palpitations. So he had been sent to the hospital. And Mel seemed quite concerned.
Then he said: “I know why you got so sick—all that money gone to that Torrent Peterson. Peterson who stoled that Eva Mott from my brother too.”
Then he phoned again a week later. “I told you Eva was up in love with Shane and then Torry come along—I thought you understood.”
“Look, it’s a small business arrangement.”
“I don’t like it at all,” Mel said.
The third phone call came a day later. Mel was agitated and angered.
“You come and give me the money and be partners—I will get that pistol for you too at a good price—just like you want—but I don’t like being cheated out of money. I want to start up a bottle exchange. I was your partner long before him—so I want my money too. I need it to protect Shane in jail—and I want as much as Torry Peterson. You do that and it will be okay—I promise. No more small change.”
Albert sat all night in the dark smoking one cigarette after the other. He knew why he wanted Byron’s pistol. Though he had never fired a gun, he wanted, and needed, to protect himself.
When he finally mentioned the Strouds to Ms. Sackville two days later she said: “Do you want to kill them?”
“No, of course I don’t.”
“Then shut up about them.” And she lighted a cigarette and went back to correcting papers. She looked up, suddenly took his hand and put it under her shirt, under her bra next to her heart and said, “Feel that, feel my heart—yes—I know what you desire. And you will have it soon. But I have long ago stopped being afraid.”
Things went on and became more and more depressing for the business. Both for Torrent and him. One night they met in the big field below Raskin Enterprises to iron out what they might do. It was called Bloody field. Named so by the great Byron Jamison when he was scouting Good Friday Mountain. But Torry said he had done all that he could—he had worked to exhaustion, and had at that moment not slept for thirty-four hours.