Elizabeth and After (39 page)

He stood up and took a few steps. His feet flowed into the ground. This was him, what he’d once had, what he’d been born to, and he felt the edges of his body dissolving in the fading light, his centre of gravity dropping into the wet ground, into the deep place in this earth which was the only place that knew him. Then he took the shotgun from its hiding place under the juniper bush, stowed it behind the seat and drove until he came on Gerald Boyce standing in the middle of the road with his arms up in the air like a confused old soldier looking for someone to surrender to.

After sitting on Gerald Boyce’s porch and drinking two brandy-laced coffees, Carl got back into his truck. It was past midnight. As he drove by the darkened houses, he had an overwhelming feeling of having been shut out: from those curtained bedroom windows he was passing, from Chrissy, from whatever world she and Fred were smooching their way into. War Games. Maybe he was destined to spend his whole life alone like this, the old lonesome wolf, stalking his imaginary trails, hiding from imaginary hunters.

“At least Chrissy’s gone,” he reminded himself but it only made him feel that much more the outsider, unable to make any kind of promise to anyone. When he got to his place and saw a glow from the kitchen window, he had a wave of hope that Moira was there waiting until he remembered he himself had left the lights on.

Taped to the door was a big brown envelope and he thought of Moira again. The envelope held a video cassette, unlabelled. After he set it on the counter he started towards the refrigerator for a beer, then changed his mind. He seemed to have gone completely herky-jerky: every few seconds he was
off
in a different direction—reaching for a drink, putting some plates with toast crumbs in the dishpan, wheeling and pacing from kitchen to living room. He took out his wallet, held a piece of paper with Moira’s number to the light. She made elegant oval letters and numbers that reminded him of the way she had dressed for the Richardson dinner. He walked into the living room to the telephone, picked up the receiver. Then he saw that Lizzie had left some school books spread out on the couch. Around the room were scattered various sweatshirts, a pair of overalls, some Archie comics. He put
down the phone, gathered Lizzie’s things and took them up to her room.

The lamp beside her bed had a shade she’d decorated with animal decals. When Carl turned it on, shadows of teddy bears and squirrels were thrown onto the wall. He lay down on her bed. Her ceiling was wallpaper that he’d painted white and he could see that some of the seams were starting to peel. On one wall was a Superwoman poster, on another a rainforest poster she’d won at school for hard work on a project. The wall beside her bed was decorated with cat pictures she’d cut out from magazines. Quite a little kingdom she’d arranged. While her mother was getting beat up by her stepfather who was running for reeve, and while her real father was driving around worrying about shooting or getting shot, Lizzie had her official universe of innocence. Easy to think that one day she’d remember her childhood in a much more sinister way; but for right now, Carl considered, Lizzie’s world was a pretty good place to be.

He started to doze but decided to turn off the downstairs lights and go to his own bedroom. In the kitchen he saw the blank cassette which he’d forgotten about. He popped it into the VCR.

Later he would re-examine the envelope, see what he’d missed the first time, the lightly pencilled message: “To Carl, from your pal, Ned.” But for now what he saw was a room in bright sunlight, a bed, a woman’s face, Chrissy’s, jumping into focus, her mouth opening in surprise, then a stifled cry of protest as one large hand covers her mouth and the other jerks away the sheet.

T
HE FIRST SNOW CAME AT THE BEGINNING
of November before the ground was frozen hard. Using a sledgehammer, Carl was able to loosen the posts of Luke Richardsons election signs. There were sixty-six in all, enough to make a big mound in the back of the truck that he had to tie down so they wouldn’t blow free while he was driving them to the dump. Even so, they clattered and banged the whole way, a weird raucous chorus, Carl thought, to the sound of Luke’s voice when he’d called to ask him to gather the signs and added that the hunting trip had better be put off. “Or maybe we’ll just go alone,” Luke had finally said. “You and me and a couple of bottles of something.” After unloading the signs, tactfully placed between a truckload of green garbage bags and a rusted woodstove, Carl went and opened the Movie Barn. While he was still making the coffee, Arnie Kincaid appeared in a brightly coloured parka with fur trim around the hood that reminded Carl of Christmas.

“They say the first cup is the best,” Arnie offered, watching the coffee drip into the pot.

“You shovel your way out?”

“The lad next door does my driveway with a snowblower. Guess he’s going to have a pretty good year.” Arnie set a heavy briefcase on the counter. He unfastened it and withdrew a thick file.

“You ever see anything like this?” Arnie opened the folder. On top was an insurance policy.

“I never took out insurance,” Carl said. “You think I should be getting some for the Balfer place? I thought Luke took care of that.”

“This is life insurance.” Arnie leafed through it. Then he went to the next policy. “This is house insurance.” He quickly flipped through the other files. “Automobile, theft, disability, furniture and contents, animal—there must be fifty kinds of insurance I deal in and maybe another hundred in the city.”

“That’s something,” Carl said, pouring two cups of coffee. His hands were still cold from working out the election signs. “But I’m not in the market that I know of.”

“I thought you might like to read them over just the same. Something to do.”

Carl looked down. He thought he would have to be stuck at the Movie Barn for a very long time before he started reading insurance policies. “Sure. Let me just put them under the counter. I’m getting sick of crosswords.”

“I was thinking,” Arnie said, “I could use some kind of assistant. Someone who could eventually take over the business. Unless you’re planning to spend the rest of your life renting videos to horny housewives and old geezers like myself. What do you think of that idea?”

Arnie Kincaid’s face: grey, a bit loose under the ears, his eyes slanted down towards the policies. Carl was conscious of a desire not to hurt Arnie. “I don’t know,” Carl said. “I’ve never really thought—”

“You keep this place pretty organized,” Arnie said. “You’re good with figures. And the customers—well—just like here, it’s a bit of everyone. You seem to be able to handle that.”

Now Carl’s hands were on the policies. Touching them made Arnie’s offer more real.

“I know you didn’t grow up hoping you’d be an insurance agent. But it’s a good living. Reliable. It paid my mortgage and put my daughters through school. You’d have to take a course. Maybe two. Why don’t you think about it? We can talk again in a few days.”

Mid-November the snow melted, then the cold returned, hard, and the ground was like one huge slippery rock. Carl called Moira. That night he hovered over her and the icy light turned her skin to white glass.

Again and again he emptied himself into her. “Wouldn’t have thought I had that much juice,” he said afterwards, embarrassed. Moira curled around him until sun-up when he came into her one last time, at first stiff and sore, then moaning and groaning along with Moira until it turned into a song, the howling music he’d needed during all those long lonely drives in the truck, except that he wasn’t in the truck, he was in Moira and was naked and new and sweaty and for at least a few seconds nothing meant anything.

Later in the month the sky softened and it snowed again. One evening he and Lizzie made a giant snowman in the backyard. That Sunday Carl went with Lizzie to the West Gull
R&R and brought his father back for lunch. With the help of a recipe book, Lizzie baked a meatloaf that came complete with ketchup on top. “Like icing on a cake,” Lizzie explained. McKelvey ate three helpings. Sitting at the same table with his father for the first time in years and watching him as he methodically spooned up his food, Carl felt unsettled. Something about the way the old man’s head dipped submissively towards the plate with each mouthful. Lizzie, meanwhile, chattered on as though McKelvey being there was entirely normal. As soon as he had finished the meatloaf she rushed to the freezer and presented him with a giant bowl of chocolate ice cream decorated with two circles of chopped nuts.

After they drove him back to the R&R, Lizzie told Carl she was going to make his father a scarf just like the one she’d made for the snowman. Carl thought she seemed to take particular delight in saying “your father” to him. The knitting took Lizzie well into December and she was so pleased with the result she decided to make a toque as well. For hours every evening Lizzie worked at her grandfather’s Christmas presents. It was as though she was knitting McKelvey into their life. And on Christmas Day when he put on his new hat and draped the scarf around his neck, he announced that he was warm for the first time in ten years.

On Boxing Day, McKelvey, Gerald and Carl were sitting in the middle of Dead Swede Lake. They were surrounded by the fishing shack Carl had constructed out of lengths of two-by-four covered by double-sheeted plastic. A wavering grey-white light filtered through the plastic, which was so fogged up all they could see was the altered colour of snow and the vague silhouettes of the pine and willow trees at the edge of the lake.
For warmth, aside from Gerald Boyce’s five-star brandy, they had a kerosene heater going, and there was even a fishing line dropped through the hole in the ice.

William McKelvey had given up shaving. With his grizzled hair and beard he had the look of an old lion patiently waiting to die. Even walking the few hundred feet out across the lake had made the pain in his left knee spread all through his leg and hip.

“You know,” McKelvey said, “it’s pretty strange to be sitting here in the middle of Dead Swede Lake absolutely blind.”

“We got nothing but window,” Carl said, gesturing to the plastic around him. “If everyone wasn’t breathing so hard, we could see out.”

McKelvey looked at his son. He hadn’t believed Gerald when he’d called to say that Carl had made a shack on Dead Swede Lake and they were going fishing. “Impossible.” Meaning, first, impossible that Carl could find a way to drag out the ton of materials that went into an old-style fishing shack; and second, impossible that Carl would ever do something so … something so much for him. Like the crazy hope he used to have that Carl would grow up, marry, have a herd of grandchildren and transform the farm into a little heaven of carefully planted gardens, groves, a Noah’s ark of animals. He, the proud granddad, would walk through this miraculous paradise, grandchildren scampering about him like so many friendly little puppies.

“You shouldn’t complain,” Gerald said. “You probably can’t see that well anyway.”

“I
have
seen,” William said. “I have seen so much I don’t need to see much more.” Then he reached into his coat and pulled out a dark cardboard cylinder, opened it up to reveal a green smoked-glass bottle. With a penknife he slit the seal. He
read out the label before handing the bottle to Gerald. “You remember the bottle I brought back after the war?”

“Yeah,” Gerald said.

McKelvey had been twenty-three years old when he came home. Travelled down from Ottawa on the train, still wearing his uniform. It was September 1945. His father was away on a fishing trip when he arrived. Some neighbours took him back to the house. Like an overflowing privy was how his father had left it. McKelvey’d dumped his bag on the porch, then driven the tractor over to the Boyce house.

Gerald and Vernon had been standing in their yard. “When I came to your house you were trying to make a car go. The two of you. You were wearing matching pairs of suspenders. You remember those suspenders? I never saw anyone look so foolish in suspenders as you used to.”

They’d drunk the bottle, then McKelvey had driven his tractor home, thinking the whole time that if there was one thing he was not going to do, it was to sink back into this pile of mud and spend the rest of his life rotting away like the Boyce brothers.

“You see some foolish things around here,” Gerald said. “I’ve even seen people try to drive across this lake.”

McKelvey looked at his son. Carl was inspecting the label and had his eyebrows raised in admiration.

“Things aren’t so bad,” McKelvey said. “If you’ll excuse me for a moment.” He stood up and pushed open the blanket that was the door and went out onto the ice. There was a north wind that had given the snow a hard crackling crust and was so cold he could feel it biting through his beard. Those first winters back, before he got the money to go to Queen’s, he’d spent enough winter days out on the ice of Dead Swede Lake with the Boyce brothers, drinking, fishing, trying to invent a future.
But he’d always held back. Always known he was different, that having got away once he would get away again. Even that day he’d brought Elizabeth to meet his father, it had been just a visit to a country he’d escaped for ever. And yet here he was. His whole lifetime later. Standing with his back to the wind pissing out his brandy the way he’d pissed out his whole life.