16 Thinking that when people break up, they should have to write out a statement about their feelings of what happened, what went wrong, who was at fault, and how they feel. Purely subjective. These statements should be kept together on file down at the archives for anyone to look up. Both for curiosity and for personal interest (you can look up the history of a man or woman youre interested in seeing).
17 The police invite Lydia and me to come by. We walk over to the station. The station is behind a doughnut shop, but the police, we hear, are not allowed to use that shop.
We watch the edited surveillance tapes. We see a man enter Lydia’s porch door with a full garbage bag. We cut to the kitchen. He empties the bag into the washer and starts it up. He opens up the fridge door and helps himself to a can of apple juice. He goes to the living room with the can of juice, flicks on the television, and sits himself down in the recliner. There he sits until the wash cycle is over.
The man is Boyd Coady.
18 Lydia’s called. She doesnt want to break up. But I’m broken. I’m sad and exhausted. She’s not a bad person. We just dont get along. We both love the talents we have. She’s funny. She’s wilful in a way that is good for me. But being together is destructive. Moments build until the smallest things irritate us.
I’m taking a road trip around Conception Bay. I just dropped off a hitchhiker in Bareneed. There is a set of stairs left by the side of the road, like a huge tired accordion. The old oilcloth runner. Loads of trap skiffs. I can see the back side of Bell Island and Kelly’s Island. But all the old houses are going. The new bungalows with treeless lots. Occasionally you’ll see a saltbox close to the road with a bunch of fruit trees overgrown and choking the garden. A shed in back painted the same colour. But sagging on the foundations. Too late to save them. They needed to have been kept up ten years ago.
19 The trees on Long’s Hill have crosses painted on them. I just called city hall.
The mayor: The arborist has been by. Said those trees are 90 percent gone, boy. Carolina pine and two elms. Ninety percent gone, like me.
Me: We all gotta go some time.
When I pass those trees behind the kirk’s retaining wall I can feel the weight of the hill, the slope, the inertia pulling down the hill, the job that wall has to do. The work of a wall happens below ground. Beams of cement that creep under the road to counter the raised surface.
20 On the footbridge over Waterford River I watch the ducks. They know that to cross, they have to swim at an angle to the current. Dogs dont know this. A dog will cross a stream pointed directly at the far side, and end up downstream. But a duck calmly paddles at two oclock or ten oclock. Their beaks the green of unripe bananas.
I am a dog. I am stupid.
I pick partridgeberries and blueberries above Shanawdithit’s monument and below the Irving oil-tank farm. But I end up collecting colours. Alders, berry bushes. The sun is lower and the leaves are like tiny red ears aflame. I segregate patches of colour by looking through my curled hand. How Helmut used to direct his camera lens at small areas of caribou moss and rock pools. Looking for the particular.
As I’m driving home I catch Maisie holding hands with Earl Quigley. On this day, anyone would be happy in anyone else’s company.
21 Max comes by for a game of chess. He says he was driving by during the murder. He heard the shot. A brother shot another brother outside Theatre Pharmacy. It was over a woman, or drugs, or it was a hit sponsored by another brother in jail.
He crushes me in zugzwang.
We walk down and see the corner of the hill cordoned off with yellow police tape. The stain where the dead man lay. A mother is crying into a television camera. Along the hill, all the Carolina pine that had X’s have been sawed down. They look like a field of butchered elephants.