This All Happened(74)

            11 I see Boyd Coady talking to a little guy. Boyd has the guy pressed up against Jethro. A van line, he says, kindly moved me from Mount Pearl to Long’s Hill.

            As I walk past Boyd yells out: And as the saying goes, I’ll take you down to Casey Street and beat the face off ya.

            I stop. Boyd walks up to me. He recognizes me. He says, Just twenty minutes ago, Gabe, the U.S. military flew over the city leaving a line of smoke this long in the sky.

            If I closed one eye I could make a flaming maple come out of Boyd’s head. And the man by the car could have a deep green oak. How an orange tree is so much more festive, and summery. Yet the green tree is summer and it stands to the left of the flaming maple. How time shifts to the right, like writing.

            Now let me finish, Boyd says. Left a streak in the sky, the U.S. military, over the city. I’ll say no more on this.

            He pushes his hands into his jeans pockets and walks back to the little guy, who is still leaning backwards over the hood of my car, as if he enjoys it.

            12 Max Wareham’s father collected stamps. In 1944 a surcharge of two cents was printed over the old stamps. A group of them on Merasheen set out to buy up sheets. You were allowed two sheets at a time. Mothers, kids, everyone had to buy sheets. The cartel lasted a couple of weeks and then they sold them to mainland collectors. Max’s father, Noel, made $1,500. He bought a cabin and land, a clothes washer for the wife, a phonograph mahogany, plastic buttons. Macpherson, a rich man, bought one. Macpherson heard a second had been sold. To whom? Oh, to Noel Wareham, the fisherman.

            The house Max grew up in was moved to Arnold’s Cove. He visited it and could smell the same smell.

            His parents’ bedroom had seemed huge (it was two rooms knocked together) but now it was average, although it had two chandeliers.

            Max left Newfoundland to work in a Christian camp in Manitoba. He lived in the basement of a church and worked in factories. He got to know the working class.

            As he tells me this he loses a contact lens in the car. I find it perched like a dish on his knee.

            13 Lydia calls to see if I’ll drive her to the airport.

            Sometimes, I say, I feel like a humourless curmudgeon. Something very ill at ease about all of this.

            Then Lydia kisses me at the automatic doors. And I can tell that it’s okay that I’m unhappy. She gives me a key to her house. To check on it. And I’m to take care of Tinker Bumbo. The first time I have a key.

            14 I drive out to Brigus to meet the man who lives in Rockwell Kent’s cottage. He’s an odd American. He owns the house but lives there only in the summer. He says the big difference between cities and the wild is you have to make your

            own happenings in the wild. You have to act if you want one moment to stand out from another.

            I tell him I’m writing about this house, about Kent and his time in Brigus. He says the carpenter’s name is on all the studs. And it isnt the man noted in the books, but a man named Percy.

            There is one weed beside us, and I guess it. Plantain. I had found it in my wildflower book: seaside plantain. And here I am, beside the sea. This is how the world is ordered. The categories were working.

            I take a tour of Kent cottage. Named after Kent, England, not Rockwell Kent. The ceilings are low and the hill so steep and close behind the house, I feel tense, that a rock slide could do me in. Things seemed to be 20 percent smaller than they are now.

            15 I am sitting in the kitchen while Iris is compiling data on olfactory responses in seals. Tinker Bumbo is snoring beside her. She notices my drawn look. She says, confidently, that Lydia will never leave me. And I won’t leave her. And you’ll have a baby. Trust me, I know these things. My first five senses arent that hot, but my sixth and seventh are superb.