Part 21 (1/2)

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 pa.s.s 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 zugzw.a.n.g.

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.

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 gla.s.s 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 bas.e.m.e.nt. 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 gra.s.s still green. There is new gra.s.s, 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 polis.h.i.+ng 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 Ca.n.a.l. 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. s.h.i.+pyard lights, cl.u.s.tered like ballpark lights, burn through in a haze of urine. The fog a beard. Sky a bald, s.h.i.+ning 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.

It came out well.

Did you notice the back?

No.

It's all one piece of cloth.

Tony s.n.a.t.c.hes the jacket from my hands and holds it to the light.

I've seen that before.

It was my father's jacket, I say. He wore it when he was my age. Before he had me. I used to think he got married in it, but my mother said no.

That's the difference, Tony says, between men and women.

26 I walk down to the Fat Cat with Max. Earl Quigley makes his way to me. So how are you, he says. Never mind, dont answer can of worms, I know. Look, call me and I'll buy the coffee.

Yes, I said. A confessor would be nice.