TORRENT HAD GONE TO SAINT JOHN WITH THE LOAD OF scrap and asbestos from the mine. One of the last trucks. And all the way down he thought of his mom, of how she was, and who she was. A tiny little girl—that’s how he thought of her. So when he got to the docks he left the truck and taking the address he had found in the wall—for he had been given the letters from Mary Lou two weeks before—he walked toward it. There in the fog and cold of a late summer day, past Queen’s Park, past a small corner store with a neon sign, past the gloom of faded brick and asphalt, was an old clapboard apartment half-hidden down a side street. He went there, thinking calmly that he would confront Mr. Mel Stroud. He would have it out with him, just as he had had it out with his brother Shane some years before.
He had the letters from his mother, though the letters were so cramped he didn’t know what they said. He had been given a watch that he thought was hers, so he had given it to his wife, Eva. But then he realized that the letters might be important, so he had left them in a box at the trailer. Maybe the police might need them. He was thinking this as he walked.
The night of the wedding of Ben Mott and his bride they all danced as if dancing through hell. They were jiving, the men with broad backs and plain expressions, not knowing how to react to the music that came from Detroit and London, used always until then to music from Nashville and P.E.I., and the women—yes, Mrs. Wally who had won that watch, and women in the kitchen and on the dance floor almost an age ago now. All of them together that night. She, Mrs. Wally, would be Torrent’s aunt. He at that time was in Mary Lou’s belly, just as Eva was in her mom’s. They, Mrs. Mott and Mary Lou, at one point danced side by side.
Torry was walking the street toward this backstreet apartment building when he was stopped by a man seated on a bench in a small little park near a bus stop. The man called him over.
“You are him?”
He looked and saw the Black man sitting there.
“You are him?” he asked again.
“I’m Torry Peterson.”
“Yes. Your mother spoke to me about you. He is gone.”
“Who is gone?”
“Mr. Stroud. I came to see him get arrested, but no such luck. I didn’t know how much he controlled her, or I would have gotten her away.”
“I came to see him too.”
“Well, it’s best if the police handle it.”
Years ago this man was the porter who had given little Eva Mott that 7Up, and years before he tried to befriend the frightened girl who lived in the apartment across the street from him. He disliked Mel, and the brother who sometimes came around. Of course Shane called him the N-word but never clear enough to react.
So he waited today because he had heard Mel would be arrested.
A police officer, Corporal Becky Donaldson, her blond hair tucked up under her cap, with just a slight tinge of greying, her boots solid and her gun belt snug around her waist, had been after Mel Stroud for some time. She had come here with a City of Saint John detective and an RCMP officer.
This had all been set it in motion some little while ago. But Corporal Becky Donaldson, the woman at the cottage on vacation who had smiled at Albert with that same knowing smile she had at his door that rainy afternoon, knew if she arrested Mel for the overdose of Mary Lou, he might give Shane up for Mrs. Wally. This is what she had been working on, since that child was killed in a hit-and-run and Shane fled to Moncton.
Eva went and stayed with her parents, thinking she would run away. But then she went back home the night before Torrent returned from Saint John. The little kitten half-starved jumped at her out of thirst and fear. So little Polly sat beside the kitten as they fed it, and Eva wandered through the house. After she put Polly to bed, she came into the hallway and saw her darkened evening reflection in the mirror far down at the end of the hall. Suddenly she remembered Mr. Raskin’s exultant look when she kept trying to do favours for him, and remembered where she had seen this look before. It was in the look of hilarity on the face of that strange woman, Henrietta Saffy.
She sat in the chair deeply chastened. She had eaten nothing in four or five days.
The drawer of the desk Torrent had made her was opened. He had been trying to find the contract that he had signed.
Later that night going through the papers in the old desk in the dining room, looking at pictures from the birthday party she had at Clara’s when they had turned thirteen, tears flooded her eyes. She found a picture of Torrent taken when he was working on the house—the day before he saved her. She placed the pictures on the table. The floor was still unfinished here, and the table was one he had made. She took out their insurance policy and set it on the desk, and taking a glass of white wine sat back and read it. The phone rang in the upstairs hallway. The evening was dark.
Professor Raskin was on the phone. Yes, he was going to apologize to her finally, and she would tell him off.
He said he had a proposition for her. It would release her and Torry of all they had ever owed him, and her world would be back the way it was. If she did this he would go to the paper and say he would not take their house, as a gesture of fidelity and good conscience, and leave it at that. Nothing more would be mentioned about their house and they could live in peace. He would intercede with the First Nations, have a sit-down with them and see if it couldn’t be ironed out. He would never ask for any of his money back.
“What is it? What is it I have to do?”
There was in the past a moment that evoked the future, that foretold it—that telegraphed what it might be for Torry and her.
You see, I was the one she had come to see the week before she was married. I had gone to school with her (she was three grades behind, however) and I knew her very well. I knew her father and her mother, and when she was a young woman in grade twelve, I sketched her one afternoon sitting on a drift log on the shore. I tried to catch the whimsical sadness of her face, in her smile.
But that day, long ago, before her marriage to Torry, she had come to see me. It was a strange moment. The idea that she just turned up at my door showed something of her inner makeup, something that in fact was made up: she had to have a good male friend because this is what someone told her, that in this age a male friend she could confide in was a notable part of one’s attire, but more than that, someone she could hold up to her boyfriend was the optimum tactic. In her own country way she had to do what she had been led to believe. So I was chosen, and in she came, to speak to me about her impending marriage and her worries about Torry.
Oh, she said he had many flaws, many of them, and wanted my advice. He was uncouth and didn’t know the least thing. When they went to a restaurant he talked too loud. And when she wanted him to be sensitive he didn’t know how. What did I think? I was a painter, so I should know what she meant. I was startled she was there. I had not seen her in eighteen months, and I did not know why she chose me, except I might have made a little bit of a name as an artist. My work had sold well enough here.
But I saw suddenly—not instantly but suddenly—the invention as she spoke. I was the devised male friend. The device that was ultimately cruel but sad as well. Her childlike sadness was also a part of this. Right in the moment of planning the wedding at the small Saint Peter and Paul church, she said to Torry: “I have to meet a friend.”
“Oh? Who?”
“It’s just a friend.” She looked at him seriously, searching his face. “You don’t know him.”
“I don’t know him. Well, who is him?”
She looked at him again with an immensurable potency that lasted only a brief second. “He is a friend.”
Suddenly what dawned inside him was exactly what she had wanted to create: the realization that she had another life, a parallel world. How instantaneously this was given to him was what was so overwhelming.
“I did not know you had a friend,” he stammered.
She wore a white blouse and a locket from her mother, a blue skirt and a pair of white nylon stockings. She had a pair of loafers on her feet, and a small bracelet on her arm. Yes, what effect it all must have had, for he too could almost see through it, and almost knew it was a sham. More worrisome with her little purse in her hand because it was a sham. That it might have predicted a future time and place where it would not be.
She again looked very solemn. She did not smile. She took his hand and squeezed it. “I will be back in a while.”
“But where—where is this friend of yours?”
“You don’t know him. I will be back in a while.”
He went down and sat on an old scow at Savage’s Shore, staring in glum and numb forbearance. What was this unexpected turn of events in Torrent’s life, two days before a wedding, where it showed that he did not know her?
And so she came to see me in my small house at the back of two houses, on a side street, with a pleasant enough stone fence, and an old garden with dry, blackened soil and some ceramic pots that were cracked. And I believed she would never see or count me as her dear friend again, that in fact this was an imitation of something she had told herself about liberation. Worse, she knew she could do it to him and to me.
We sat for forty minutes in the back patio that was shaded by poplar and elm trees, and where an old broken lane passed just behind the house. There she told me about him, and I realized I was very gullible before—that is, very gullible in how I thought she perceived me as somewhat wise.
“What do you think, after all those flaws he has?” She smiled. Her smile was delightful, as if she and I had a bond against the brutishness of the world. “Should I still marry him?” Then she sighed, put both her hands out in front of her, spread out her fingers as if inspecting them.
“No,” I said.
“No? Oh! Why not?” She was astonished. She thought I would say yes. That is what she was waiting for. That is what the male friend was obligated to do.
“Because,” I said, “you came here to see me. You do not love him enough. Not to marry him—and you will never forgive him if you do. He is not educated and you want someone who is. It will hurt him, and maybe you too. Shane Stroud is a bad man. He followed you in his car, he tracked down where you lived, and all because of a kiss. But you see, you were alone along Arron Ridge and Dunn’s Crossing, but you allowed him to kiss you. You could not tell who he was. So I am afraid for you.”
“Afraid for me?”
“You allowed Shane to kiss you. That is a telling moment. Torry protected you from Shane Stroud—and I hope you know this. But you will either know or don’t know, and if you don’t know, especially here in this sometimes dangerous place, you will make a mistake somewhere along the line.”
“I don’t understand. I am talking about his flaws. I came here to seek advice—”
“Shane would still be seeking you if it wasn’t for him. Torry is in awe of you. He wants to know things. He wants to be better. See, his mother left, and he had Oscar for a father. But he was not destroyed by that. He has never betrayed anyone. But he would be destroyed by betrayal.”
She looked at me insightfully, carefully nodded and left.
She went back to who he was, flaws and all. She went forward, took his hand, swung her arm with his as they walked up the lane.
“You saw yer friend?” he asked now.
“Oh…yes…I did,” she said slowly and mysteriously. And then looked over her shoulder once, twice, and then stared straight ahead.
I have become convinced that this is what started her on the road to Mr. Raskin. It was the beginning of their mutual despair.
Before he had left for Saint John, he spoke of bankruptcy. It was not only a new word, it was a revelation, a paradigm of exotic monies and travel, the kind which she had never experienced in her life.
“Bankruptcy?”
“Yes,” he said. “I will ask Mr. Raskin to take the house. He can have it. I can’t pay back that money. And I will never think of cabinets or chairs again. I will lose everything in the shop. I can sell the oak though, I think, or maybe I will just give it away. No one wants the old tools I work with but I will sell off my truck. There it is. I will simply work for Chester and Dexter Raskin. You’ll have to put up with me smelling like a piece of asbestos or a lime bag. But you can go to university—you can do better than I did. You get along with those people anyway. Then after a little while I will go away and leave you to it. I can’t even pay the taxes now that the eighteen thousand is gone.”
When he said this, she was not happy. Mr. Raskin had told her to go away. She had been so certain the future had been opened to her, like a portico she would squeeze through.
Desperately she had tried to make it up to Mr. Raskin (this was before his phone call). She drove by his house. She sat on his doorstep. She snuck to a party where he was, and sat at a table, and ordered a glass of red wine.
But no one knew her at the university. No one spoke to her when she went to the registrar’s office the next day. No one waited for her. She found Professor Raskin’s door. It was closed and locked as well; on the chair outside the door was an article left by someone: Trotsky, Societal Revolution, and Its New Vanguard.
She did not know what that meant, and perhaps she would never know.
Now, Mr. Raskin had phoned her, clandestinely, and asked her to meet him to discuss something. A proposition. At first she had been happy about a proposition, of any kind—but now again a feeling of trepidation crept over her.
Suddenly she took Torry’s hand, covered in lime burns still, and kissed it. She kissed it with tears in her eyes. Perhaps the tears were not for him, but for her.
“I am so sorry,” she said.
“About what?”
“About those old lime burns whatever,” she said.
He laughed at this, and then he took out a book, a small copy of Tom Sawyer, and opening it he began to read to little Polly. (He had been saving this up now for three months.) Now and then he looked over at Eva, and then swiftly looked back at the page. Little Polly, her blond hair in braids, sat on his knee, and suddenly as if sensing something immaculate and precious and even holy in her mother’s gaze, a newness of expectation, she clapped her hands.
I had not thought she would ever come to me again. But she brought the contract over for me to look at. The contract that said the loan of fifty thousand would become active after three years, and that payment would be sought if financial returns from the business were inadequate. That any false disclosure would result in the contract being nullified and the money being repaid.
The only thing I told her was that they might be able to challenge the word inadequate. But there was a dispute over the land he cut, and that was the problem. To keep heart I told her even that might be resolved. It might be a compassionate reason to drop it if they had not known what they were signing.
But looking carefully at the contract, seeing they had both initialled this, even Torrent, and witnessed by the lawyer, I knew that there was no recourse with this. That clause about false pretences was also italicized. The entire river was saying they had stolen timber. The money would have to be paid back. She spoke about the taxes on the house and land, and how she had not thought of them. He would even have to pay taxes on the disputed land to keep his claims on this land valid.
“Raskin wants our house. He is giving us a month more. He says that is fair. He plans to give the land to the Peace and Security people,” she said. “Then he said he would give the land on the hills back to the Mi’kmaq.”
“Well, Clara could help you, maybe. I can loan you three thousand dollars. That would take care of the taxes, or some of them. Pay it back when you can—in twenty years. I can’t speak for them, but maybe just maybe Clara and Darren will loan you the money to pay back. They are well off, or at least doing okay.”
“No,” she said. “I have to save him—from me—from all I got us into now. I have to save him.”
“Who?”
“Torrent. Yes, I swear I will save him, even if I have to kill myself and get the insurance and never harm him again. You know,” she said, “they are so important and so intellectual they don’t even care for Polly. They think I should have aborted her, because we couldn’t give her the life they said they could give her. This is what Ms. Sackville said to me. Yes—she even said that as she was massaging my shoulders. And like that there too. How can one deal with people like that? And yet I tried to deal with them and I will tell you a secret. I did bad things with Mr. Raskin.”
Her eyes were burning bright, self-fascinated, anxious and filled with tears.
“Please, we won’t talk about it.”
“But I did bad things, sir. I am sorry.”
“Yes. Please—I know—we won’t speak of it.”
And so she left me. Gone was the earlier triumphalism; now she was a sad little creature who had been used by her friends and her father, and was yet still cherished by her husband and her daughter. I saw her walking to her small red Honda. Nothing in the world seemed more sorrowful.
I did not know at that moment, as the wind blew her dress, that she was planning to save her husband by meeting Shane Stroud. And that she was hoping all would be well.
Their argument that came that very night came because of Torrent insisting she go to university.
Now she was adamant that she would not go. She would never go. He kept asking her why. He had a final four thousand he could give her and she could take a student loan for the rest. The taxes would not be paid, and the land and house would be open for sale.
If they were going to lose everything, what did it matter? This would help her pay her first year.
He kept walking behind her in the house. He kept imploring her to tell him what it was, that was wrong.
Finally she went to the very corner of the house, the smallest, tiniest corner, and slumping down after eight in the evening with the very last twitter of the birds, she said:
“I’ve had an affair or something. I am not sure what you call it, maybe or something like that there.”
He had been walking toward her, and he stopped. There was the tick of the stove, the smell of sweet pickles in a jar, the sound and then the silence from the last bird, and then rain started to hit the window.
“With your friend,” he said after ten minutes.
“Yes. I thought he was my friend.”
“The friend you went to see before we were married?”
“Yes,” she said, and then realized something. “No, not him. No, someone else.”
He said nothing. He sat in the chair. Rain came down against the flat window.
There was silence except for the rain. The stove ticked. The jars of pickles she had made. She had tortured him—even his notion of himself had been shattered now.
“The one with all the money,” she said. “I sold myself to him, I was his, and am humiliated. I was going to say it was because of you, and you were always away—or you was with Clara. I want to run away into the ocean. It wouldn’t take long for me to drown in the ocean.”
He said nothing.
“I am real stupid,” she said. “And he did nothing but laugh at us—laughed at me. Nothing but laugh. But I will take care of it, I want you to know. I will take care of everything. I promise I will.”
For two weeks he went to work at Raskin works pouring lime again, and when he came back he discovered she had gone to work at Zellers. Sometimes when Clara came into the house to see how she was, she would try to hide. She did not eat, except when Torrent made her soup when he came home.
But she refused to see Clara, and Clara would leave the food on the counter.
One night he came home he saw a Band-Aid on her wrist, where she had attempted to cut it. So he hid the knives and took his rifles and locked them away.
She hid on Torrent as well, in various closets in the house. And she phoned Mr. Raskin for one last time for some explanation about the money. How much did they still owe? And she was amazed that they still owed it all. They only had a few more weeks to pay the taxes. But if she helped him with Mr. Stroud, and no one had to know, nothing would be charged.
It would make her free.
So as a last resort or retort, the last hope at dignity, she said: “And I’m not going to university, so there. I wouldn’t go to your old university, so there. And you can tell Ms. Sackville who I think—well, I just think is a big bully, so there, and she leers at me as if she wants me to take all my clothes off in front of her, if you think I don’t know. And you—you are a bully too, and I’m sorry I got to know you—so there. Because I don’t even know if you even knows you is a bully—I think you is too unthinking to knows.”
In fact this was as mean as she could ever manage.
“I wanted a catharsis for you and we’ve all been betrayed,” Albert said.
And all poor Eva could say to that, as she was blinded by tears and rubbed her nose, was: “Well, I’m sorry. I’m very sorry and so is Torrent—so there. And you use big words and I don’t even know what catharsis is but if it means a heart attack over you and your handsomeness, I DID NOT HAVE ONE. So there!”
Torrent never spoke to her about the affair.
That night he was in Polly’s room, and when she went to him his eyes were filled with tears.
“We have lost everything, Eva,” he whispered. “I shouldn’t have gotten us into this. I can’t even pay the taxes now.”
“I will save you,” she said.
“How?”
“I will save you because I love you and let people say mean things about you—and I heard them mean things and laughed right along with them people and I am so, so sorry. I will do whatever it is I have to do. And I will save you—and we will live together in peace.” And her eyes blazed, blazed suddenly in deep sacrifice and love.
The next day she walked to Professor Raskin’s cottage:
“Where will he be?”
“I will ask him.”
“No. He will be here, here in this place. Once. Then the debt is all over! And you pay our property taxes for this here year too, and the vet bill for Pete the Second because Torry can’t even pay that,” she said, not looking at him but staring into the hallway that led to the bedroom.
“Fine. Okay.”
“Well fine, okay. I am not telling Torrent ever,” she said, still not looking his way.
“No, of course not.”
“Because he would kill you, he’d snap your neck like a twig, and he would kill Shane Stroud—and I don’t want my sin on him anymore.”
He tried to touch her but she backed away. He comforted her by saying she must understand that from his reading and researching he had discovered there was no real sin. That he had come to that conclusion.
“Well then, if there isn’t, stop committing so fucking, fucking many.”