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This All Happened(5)

By:Michael Winter


            Lydia: Youre sure she doesnt want more than poems.

            It’s a collaboration. I’m going to do the seven deadly sins. I’ve remembered them with an acronym: scalp egg. Except there’s only one G.

            What?

            The first letters: sloth, covetousness, anger, lust, pride, envy, gluttony.

            Babe, you won’t fall for Alex, will you?

            It’s work is all.

            I show her the key to Heart’s Desire. Imagine, Lydia says, writing a novel there. Who would believe it. Too corny for words.

            But I want, this year, to write a historical novel, set in Brigus, where the painter Rockwell Kent and the northern explorer Bob Bartlett both lived. I want a boy who is fourteen to meet them. To have these men inform the boy of the outside world. The boy will be the last person born in the nineteenth century.

            I shove a piece of cardboard between Jethro’s radiator and grill, to help keep his engine warm. I drive by to pick up Tinker Bumbo. I hold Lydia by the shoulders and we kiss and I love her shoulders. She almost decides to come.

            Well, visit me.

            I will, babe.

            10 There is a moose on the highway. I wake up Tinker Bumbo, and a youthful transformation slips over his frame. He sniffs at the lip of the window. The cow stares at me in the snow, waiting, patient. And then a grown calf emerges from the woods. They trot off together, wedge open the spruce, and are gone.

            Heart’s Desire. A Catholic town nestled between two Protestant ones (Heart’s Content and Heart’s Delight). The fishery closed. I pass a man pulling logs out with an all-terrain vehicle. He waves and I honk.

            Maisie and Oliver’s little red house is beyond the bridge. The key will not work, so I have to force the side door. There are boys on cold bicycles hauling sleds, watching me. There’s no water.

            I lug in wood from the shed and get the stove going. I open the vent and hear the fire roar. I turn on a radio. It’s less desolate with a radio. The same radio voices you’d hear in St John’s. There’s a distant rush of water, under the house. A frantic sound. I turn on a tap and get the hollow sound of air.

            11 Heart’s Desire is not a pretty town. The modern bungalows clutch the road, the abandoned saltboxes are pilfered for lumber. The church was torn down and relocated in a complex that includes a bingo hall and the mayor’s office. There’s no vista here; a bare inlet, a spruce backyard, and flat land. I phone Maisie to ask about the water. She says, Look under the house. But a storm has begun, and I decide to ignore it. Gallons of water are escaping somewhere under the floorboards. The faucets are all dry. I sit in the living room, near the woodstove. The walls and windows buffer the wind, but you can still feel it. There’s a slight current of cold, wet air. The sky darkens and I peer outside. I have no flashlight. The storm is so thick I can’t see the lights across Trinity Bay. The wind whips the porch door from my hands, smacks it against the house so hard it is wrenched off its hinges. I step down off the porch and crouch into the crawl space. I feel around, I feel water charging through the kitchen drainpipe. A boy comes by on his bicycle and I tell him.

            Light a kerosene lamp, he says.

            I go inside and light one. But when I bring it to the door, it douses in the wind.

            He says, Light it when we’re under.

            The lamp coats a false, cheerily maniacal face to the vicious pipes, the fall of water ice forming savage stalactites around the main sewer line. I am in awe at nature’s lack of shock. That a process will not stop when a situation becomes horrendous. There is no fairness, no honour. I break off chunks of smooth ice from the mad clown. I find a tap and turn it until the water ceases.

            I’m Josh.