This All Happened(86)

            22 It’s midnight. I am drinking cold vodka with Max, staring down the hill where the murder took place and the trees lying on their backs like dead elephants. You can see the spire of St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church now. I’ve never been in the kirk, Max says.

            Neither have I.

            Max wants a length of the pine, so we drive down in his truck. He says the arborist was wrong, the wood is solid. We balance a length on his tailgate. It must weigh five hundred pounds. There’s a fine veil of rain hovering in the air. The billowing police tape still circling the murder scene at Theatre Pharmacy. Their slogan, beneath a turquoise woodcut of a bedridden patient, on prescription bags: When illness comes, next to your doctor you depend on your druggist.

            Max says, I’ll put the pine in hay. For two years. This will prevent the wood from checking. Then I’ll carve it.

            He has blocks of wood at the shop in various stages of drying.

            Max says the murder may have to do with territory. The pharmacist sells to dealers in the early morning.

            The police tape, the crime, the chunks of trees, I can empathize with this carnage. A part of me has been murdered.

            23 The sun, low in the sky, hits the walls flat on and the floors are dark. Light through a piece of stained glass can travel through two rooms and pin itself on the panel above the phone.

            I walk by Lydia’s house. I see her planting a hundred and one bulbs. She has kept the bulbs in the front porch. I have seen Lydia store beer, cooked ham, turkeys, undeveloped film, thawing fish, bicycles, cases of soft drinks, dormant plants in this porch.

            Hi, I say.

            Oh, hi. Want to help?

            We find a trowel, a planter, a pick in the basement. Work gloves. We look at the key and discuss the height of allium, grape hyacinth, dutch iris. We dig among tree roots, we exhume previous bulbs. Harvesting potatoes with my father, spiking one with the pitchfork. Bright flesh in the dirt.

            There are the black skins of chestnuts, split to reveal the smooth, varnished knot. The grass still green. There is new grass, even when snow approaches.

            We spend the afternoon gardening and it is easy and sad. We are kind to each other, but our hearts are heavy with rain.

            24 Tonight my house is full of industry. Dark windows and desk lamps. Radios on low. Iris is polishing up her thesis on sperm physiology in yellow-tail flounder. But I ask about the floating eye, the change in colour. She says most flounder are left-eyed, meaning the left eye floats over to the right side. But some are right-eyed, for no apparent reason.

            Iris should be scanning Internet sites for new articles on the role of olfaction in the social behaviour of harbour seals. But she is sending an e-mail to Helmut. They are in Hawaii. In six days they set sail for San Francisco, then south through the Panama Canal. They are replacing the mast. She describes the design, injecting the material with plastics.

            But it’s still wood?

            She pauses. Gabe, there’s nothing from nature in these boats.

            Her door ajar. I see her glowing blue from the light of her laptop. The soothing clack of a keyboard. There’s a moon breaking through the top of the sky, but fog has settled over the hills. Shipyard lights, clustered like ballpark lights, burn through in a haze of urine. The fog a beard. Sky a bald, shining pate.

            25 Today I picked up my father’s jacket. The cuffs were frayed, so I brought it to Tony’s Tailor.

            Tony: You have your ticket? It’d be easier.

            It’s that coat hanging there.

            Tony: Youre the one with the cuffs.

            Yes.