Elizabeth and After (40 page)

He turned towards what had once been his dock, his shore, his road up to his house. Five years ago, even one year ago, he couldn’t have come back to Dead Swede Lake this way, practically a tourist, and stood looking at what had once been his and before that his father’s without feeling loss twisting through his gut like a knife. The only way he could have returned was the way he had: in Luke Richardson’s white bomb, with his foot on the floor.

But now, with Carl back, it was almost beautiful—the snow-covered frozen lake ringed by leafless trees, the blue-grey dome of the sky, even Carl’s fishing shack. That had to be the most unlikely building, or unbuilding, that he’d ever seen. Strange, the way the sun shimmered and rolled in all that curvy plastic, and just as Carl had appreciatively raised his eyebrows looking at the label of his single malt Scotch, McKelvey had to admire this bizarre construction of his son’s. That was the thing about Carl. You just never knew where he was going next. All the way to the Pacific Ocean or straight into an oak tree.

For New Year’s Eve, Luke Richardson gave the R&R money to throw a special New Year’s bash. The occasion was the senator’s one-hundredth birthday. Two hours before midnight he arrived in his van, got wheeled in, a fur rug draped over his knees, and Reeve Fred Verghoers presented him with a big old skeleton key he said was the key to West Gull. The senator
drooled just a bit, a few whispered jokes were made about what graveyard or coffin the key might or might not be intended to open, the senator had a glass of champagne and was wheeled out again.

Adam Goldsmith saw it all. Positioned at the mantelpiece like a ship berthed in a familiar port, Adam stood tall and pearish, radiating his usual deferential courtesy. Tonight his attentions were concentrated on Dr. Albert Knight. Since his daughter’s departure, Dr. Knight and Adam had rekindled their old friendship. “You’ll forgive an elderly man for speaking his mind,” he’d said to Adam on the evening he came over to mend fences, the “elderly” adding that touch of ironic exaggeration Adam was known to appreciate. On this occasion, suitably unsuited in shapeless grey flannel and a hairy tweed jacket, Dr. Knight puffed at his pipe and amused Adam so well with his comments on the passing crowd that Adam almost forgot to spend the evening bemoaning his lack of Elizabeth.

But when he got home it struck him in a way he hadn’t experienced for years. Even walking through the snow, his left side was burning and tense and by the time he got his coat and boots off and had collapsed in an armchair, his chest was so tight he was certain he was having some kind of heart attack. That’s how it had been after Elizabeth was killed: attacks of the heart, where it cramped and constricted, as though unable to stop clutching its emptiness in search of what used to be there. The first few times he believed he was having some sort of cardiac emergency, even if grief was what had brought it on. He would be curled up on the floor with pain, pounding his ribs to release the cramp in his heart while waiting for death to take him. Not that,
in extremis
, such a wait was obligatory: Albert Knight had long ago provided
him with a means of escape should his situation become intolerable.

Once, a much more ideal departure had almost been assured—that last night, exactly eleven years ago, when Elizabeth told him she was going to leave with him New Year’s morning. “Adam, Adam, you must believe me.” And he had, or almost had, or had at least been willing to pretend.

What a New Year’s that had been. Barely able to keep from howling his good fortune to the sky, Adam had rushed home from the party, his heart cavorting like a moronic puppy, and run up and down the stairs to prepare his suitcases, too excited to sleep but making himself stretch out in the easy chair with his feet up on the same hassock his mother used for propping up her swollen feet in the heavy heat of summer. With his head back and plans whirling through his mind like clouds of asteroid dust, he’d been able to taste the taste of Elizabeth on his lips, hear the cosy sound of her voice, sink into the coming luxury of a life spent with her. The future: a carefully planned and furbished treasure chest of bank accounts and hidden investments that Adam had spent twenty years waiting to open and enjoy. That night in the half-darkness, nursing a drink in his easy chair, Adam imagined himself somehow communing with his mother. Triumphantly broadcasting that after everything, he had finally ended up with the Glade daughter, the daughter Flora claimed he had inspired into existence. Although she would not have approved of him stealing her from another man. Adultery, deceptions, such sins had not been her stock in trade.

When the pains in his chest eased, Adam took up paper and pen to indulge in his annual New Year’s ritual, his substitute for their evenings of gossip by the hearth: writing a letter to
Elizabeth recounting the year’s events. This year’s letter was longer than usual. Carl’s return to West Gull, the state of his relationships with Lizzie and Chrissy, the events with Fred, all required long explanations. Then there was the video. It was hard to know whether minor-key porno deserved a place in an essentially dignified medium—a letter to a dead person—but in the end, because Carl had given him the video for safekeeping and its presence in his house was an endless irritation, he divulged. Adam described how their world had become an absurd parody, how an event that between them had been so romantic and so satisfying had been transformed by Chrissy and Fred into a series of celluloid impressions depicting various unimaginative acts, carried out by two near-animals apparently equally hungry for pleasure and pain.

When he finished it was almost morning, almost the time of night eleven years ago when he had started wondering if he should begin to expect Elizabeth or prepare to be disappointed, almost the time when Luke Richardson had called to tell him about the accident. He made himself a hot chocolate to wash down his sleeping pill, watched the letter burn in his wood-stove, went to bed.

In the beginning were the voices. Adam was a child then, with the innocence of a child. The innocence, the craft, the cunning. At night he would awake crying out in unknown tongues, nightmare legions flaming across his walls and ceilings, and his mother would carry him to her bed and fold him into the hot flannel of her nightdress until finally the voices stilled and Adam was asleep again, asleep among the marching legions of old empires. And then the dream would start again and in the dream Adam was a child of those legions, a soldier’s child was the child he was, and one night his father
took him in his arms and told him that the empire had called, that the empire had need of his legion, that he would be marching on to other countries, other wars, and then in the dream it was dawn and Adam was alone on a cold hill watching the legions as they disappeared in the direction of the rising light, and only he was left behind to remember, to preserve, to await the return.

In the beginning were the voices and Adam was nothing until the voices filled him and when they woke him in the night he screamed out their scrambled message while his mother held him close and tight because Adam had become his father his father’s father his father’s father before him. Adam was the father of all fathers the voice the sun the son the tongue of the Church of the Unique God and then the voices left and Adam was nothing again, just emptiness waiting for a memory he could no longer speak until Elizabeth came and spoke his name and hers was the voice Adam heard and then she was gone and Adam was empty again.

In the end it was easy. Adam called Fred at work and said Luke had something for him that he’d asked him to arrange.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Fred said, his voice full of suspicion.

It was a few days into January and the serious cold had begun. There was a familiar minus-thirty-degree crackle on the line. “Something he got from his son,” Adam explained. “A copy. You have the original.”

Fred hung up. The next day he called back. “You want to explain yourself?”

“I think I did,” Adam said. “We’re all just looking to do the right thing here. I want you to be in possession of this item.”

“You can bring it by the office.”

“I wouldn’t be comfortable doing that,” Adam said. “I don’t even have it with me. It’s hidden in one of Luke’s houses. We’ll go get it, then you’ll have it.”

The next day Fred came to the dealership a few minutes after closing time. Adam was waiting for him. He extended his hand. Fred shook it. In the months since becoming reeve he’d developed a new ingratiating way of slanting his head and smiling. “What now?”

“It’s out at the old Fennerty place. We’ll go in my car.”

“I don’t mind driving.”

“Mine needs a run. Gets all gummed up just going back and forth from the house to the office.”

When they went outside it was after six. The Timberpost was still open, and security lights were glowing in the real-estate office and the supermarket. It was clear and cold. Adam was wearing fur-trimmed gloves but he still had to clap his hands together. January weather: there were always a few weeks like this, minus thirty at night, block-heater weather.

They drove out of town past the West Gull Elementary. Despite the cold the spots illuminating the outdoor rink were on and the sound of frozen pucks deflecting off the boards banged angrily through the darkness.

“Still play?” Adam asked.

“Just old-timer hockey now,” Fred said. “Too busy for the real thing.”

As they left town Adam was still hesitating. The previous week, in preparation, he had put the video cassette under a kitchen floorboard at the Fennerty place, which Luke Richardson had bought and was now selling, but except for the first fuzzy images of Chrissy in bed, the tape was now erased.

The Pontiac warmed quickly but Adam kept his gloves on. Somehow that was reassuring, as though leather might be capable of more than skin. On the way he asked Fred about his plans for the township and just before the high beams picked up the old oak tree, he asked Fred if after a term or two as reeve he was planning a move to the national political stage. Fred took off his hat and looked into it, as though it might hold the answer. The sides of the road were banked with snow but where the road jogged at the oak tree, the wind always kept the shoulder bare and icy.

“I don’t suppose they’ve already been calling you,” Adam said, his voice purring with the hum of his tires on snow, purring with the sly tone widely known for sixty years as Adam Goldsmith’s way of starting one of his inoffensive jokes.

“Just once or twice,” Fred replied, smiling, and as he did Adam pushed the accelerator to the floor, “goosed her” as Luke would say, put so much gas to his V-8 special that his very new and very expensive French snow tires skidded for a frightening fraction of a second, just enough to start a high whine that ended as they clawed and gripped the snow, slamming Adam and Fred back into their seats as the car exploded forward shot along the icy road Adam’s gloves locked to the steering wheel and holding firm even as Fred’s elbow hammered into his face tore through the pagewire fence and into the oak tree where in a still more frightening fraction of a second it stopped.

The coroner’s report noted the multiple fractures to the passenger’s skull, lacerations on the arm thrown up in self-protection, internal injuries unenumerated since an autopsy was not deemed necessary, and other outrages to what had been a healthy living body before it took an unplanned trip through a suddenly stationary windshield attached to a car that had accordioned into a large oak tree.

The driver had also died, though he had been retained by the steering wheel, a padded collapsible model intended to prevent impalation. The report also noted that the alcohol content in the driver’s blood was high enough to cause the loss of a Province of Ontario driver’s licence; had they also tested for drugs they would have discovered that the driver had ingested a lethal dose of sleeping pills. As it was, Adam’s death was ascribed to cardiac failure caused by the shock of the impact, an analysis strengthened by the fact that his physician, Dr. Albert Knight, stated that he had twice treated Adam for minor heart attacks. The report also noted that Adam sustained a fractured nose, though it remained silent about the curious fact that blood from this fracture was present on the passenger’s coat, leading others to speculate that the accident had been caused by a struggle between driver and passenger.

When Albert Knight checked Adam’s medical records he found that Adam had been killed on the eve of his sixty-fourth birthday. Those who remembered such things also noted the fact that Adam Goldsmith and Fred Verghoers were killed on the same corner, against the same tree, as had Elizabeth McKelvey eleven years before. The centre of impact was halfway between the driver and the passenger side. Both airbags had been disabled and neither passenger had been wearing his seatbelt.

The anniversary was not exact: Elizabeth was killed early New Year’s Day, Adam Goldsmith’s car lost control the night of January 11. Because Fred was a newly elected politician, someone who had made a certain public splash, the tragedy of his sudden death received wide coverage. There was even a wire-service story that showed Chrissy standing over the wrecked car, wiping her eyes.