Fit Month for Dying (12 page)

“I know. I know.” He shuffles his cap on and off his head. “But after my troubles with Christine, my wife, I never wanted to get tangled up with a woman again. Christine wouldn't give me a divorce even though the marriage was over. You could really say it had never begun because it was a shotgun marriage. She was pregnant with our son. We had four children in all. I loved them very much. She held that love over my head. Said if I divorced her she would never let me see the children.”

“But if the marriage was so bad, why didn't she want a divorce? Why didn't she want out just as much as you did?”

“She didn't want to be a divorcée. Back then that would have been a real stigma. Not like now. And she liked my salary coming in every month. I was in construction — a heavy equipment operator. I made good money. But as soon as the war broke out in Europe and Uncle Sam began building bases outside the States, I joined a construction crew to get away. That's how I got shipped to Newfoundland.”

He stops talking long enough to wipe more perspiration from his face. The sun is getting higher, and the airy-leafed lemon trees offer little defence against it.

“Do you want to go inside?” I ask partly out of compassion and partly out of selfishness. I don't want to be responsible for an old man dying of heat exhaustion.

He counters, “Do you? I'm conditioned to the heat.”

“No. I'm fine,” I lie, although I'm practically at the point of seeing a mirage of icebergs in the Narrows. I feel that what he has to say and what I have to hear is better said and heard out of doors, without the confinement and intimacy of walls. I judge that he feels likewise because he makes no attempt to get up out of his chair.

“When I went to Newfoundland,” he continues, “I felt single and, for the first time in years, alive. And I was filled with a recklessness I had never before known.” He shrugs, not expecting me to understand. “You had to live those times, the world foundering underneath your feet.”

By the time he met Carmel his marriage seemed to be behind him and, besides, there was a lot of talk about Uncle Sam entering the war, making his world even less certain than it already was. And he was madly in love with Carmel, but she wouldn't consent to live with him unless they were married. So between the ups and the downs and the ins and the outs, he said, he decided to go through with a bogus marriage — an act he can't explain now even to himself, much less to me.

“How did you get caught?” I rush in, feeling queasy over so much confession even though I had commissioned it. Besides, I can see that he is relishing the telling — not what I intended. I want his explanation capsuled and paraphrased, not made into a glorious epic.

“I'm not sure to this day how I was found out. I applied for base housing in the married quarters. They may have contacted Christine regarding that. And I slacked off on sending her the money we'd agreed on. I needed it to keep the second household going. So she may have smelled a rat. Or maybe someone who worked on the base from my hometown found out and told Christine when he was back on leave. The upshot of it is that I got careless about covering my tracks. With the world out of kilter and the threat of being swallowed up in a war, ordinary ways of behaving went out the window. And it wasn't as if I was all that conniving. I was just a simple construction worker from the wrong side of the tracks in Portland. Maybe if...”

“Did you go to jail for bigamy? Did you get court martialled? Is that why you never got in touch with Carmel? Is that why you never came back? Or was it because she annulled you?”

“Annulled!” He jerks up straight in his chair. “She had the marriage annulled?”

“Right from Rome!
Void ab initio
, that was the term. From the beginning it never was.” I disappoint myself because I feel no pleasure in this revelation or in the fact that it seems to disturb him. “Did you have to sign papers?”

He shakes his head slowly, thinking back. “Don't recall. I signed lots of papers back then. For a while there, with my divorce from Christine and child support and joining the Seabees, someone was always shoving a legal paper in front of me. I signed everything, I didn't want to do anything to make the situation worse than it already was. But I don't remember papers about an annulment.”

“Maybe you didn't have to sign anything,” I say, rushing him along. “She had enough legal evidence to make her case. And what about jail? Were you court martialled?”

“No. No. Nothing like that,” he says, negating the rumours. “I wasn't part of the military at the time, so it wouldn't have been a military concern. Became part of the navy later on when the Seabees were formed. Christine divorced me in exchange for most of my salary. And as far as I can tell, Carmel never pressed charges. I just thought the marriage would be wiped out once it was uncovered that I was already married. I didn't know she had to get it off the records like that. I didn't know she had to get it officially annulled.”

“Maybe she wanted it that way. The slate wiped clean.”

“Maybe so. And as I said, there was the war, and I was needed to build bases, not to fill up a jail cell. Anyway, nothing came of it. I carried on working for Uncle Sam.”

He looks away, and his shaky hand wipes his eyes. This time I am certain it is tears that he wipes away, but he regroups quickly. “I didn't get off without a price, if that's what you think. I gave up the children. Never saw them again until they were grown.”

He had gone to Europe around the time the bogus marriage was exposed. “Anywhere,” he says, his arms wide-arcing the space between us to take in even the remotest parts of the world. “Anywhere there was a base to be built.” His enthusiasm rises as he leaves the episode of Carmel behind. “Joined the Seabees a short time after that. Like I said, we were a construction battalion that was formed to build bases. A branch of the navy. When the war heated up, they thought we'd be more secure in combat zones if we were part of a military unit. I went to Bora Bora in the Pacific. Constructed a fuel tank farm there. I was with the first Seabee unit in a combat zone — September l, l942. I'll never forget it.”

He stoops and picks up his half-full glass of lemon water and drinks it. He refills my empty glass, and when he passes it to me he no longer looks old and frail. Pride in himself and in his unit is transparent on his face. And it is transparent in his voice as he resumes his story.

“We were part of the 6th Naval Construction Battalion. We went ashore at Guadalcanal. We had to use captured Japanese equipment, but we finished Henderson Field. It was a hellhole, I tell you that much. A real hellhole. Rain, mud, sniper fire, artillery and bombing. But we finished it. After that I took part in almost every island invasion in the Pacific. We were always working under fire. Always right up there with the Marines. We were afraid of nothing. Nothing! Absolutely nothing!”

He squares his shoulders and holds his head high, confirming his lack of fear, his dedication, his conceit. Irritation once more circles my stomach and creeps up my spine. I didn't come to Arizona to listen to him tell succulent war stories.

“It's awfully hot,” I say in the hope of sidetracking him. “Think we should go in?”

“Nonsense! A dry heat. I don't mind it if you don't. But then, like I said, I'm used to it.” Impervious, he takes up where he left off. “We hauled artillery guns up mountains, repaired bomb-damaged runways while we were being shot at from all sides. We built an artificial harbour in Normandy immediately after the invasion. We were older than the fellows in other branches of the service. I don't believe there was anyone in the Seabees under thirty-five. We joined the Seabees because we wanted to. Not because we had too. They respected us for that. In fact, the Marines put up a sign at Bougainville to tell us how much we were needed.”

He shuts his eyes and recites the words on the sign as if he were reading them for the first time.

So when we reach the Isle of Japan,

With our caps at a jaunty tilt,

We'll enter the city of Tokyo,

On the roads the Seabees built.

“Yes ma'am,” he says, rousing himself. He gives his own cap a jaunty tilt. “On the roads the Seabees built.”

I recall from whispers and unguarded conversations in our household that at this very same time — at the height of his war adventures — Carmel was home in the Cove refusing to leave the house, ashamed of her marriage, ashamed of her pregnancy, ashamed of the passion that had led her so astray.

“What about Mother?” I ask. “Didn't you ever try to get in touch with her? To explain?”

My questions unnerve him, and he looks as dazed as if I had just rousted him out of Bougainville or Normandy. He wipes his face once more, wiping away the sweat brought on by hauling artillery up a mountain.

“I did try,” he says, “I truly did. But just once. I wrote to her. Years afterwards. But it came back. From what you told me last evening, your grandmother was dead by then. And Martin, too. And you had moved away. I don't even know now what I said in the letter. I knew it was no good expecting her to marry me even if she was still single, even if she could forgive me. You know very well that in her books a divorced man was no different than a married man. But I wish now I had tried harder.”

He removes his cap, rakes his fingers through his sweat-matted hair and then replaces the cap. “I would have liked to have had you for a daughter. I really would have.”

I am as unnerved as he was earlier. I hear truth in his words, and when I look at him I see truth in his face. In that same face, I can also see traces of myself: nose not as straight as the Corrigan nose. Lips not as full as the Corrigan lips. Hair suggesting it was once black. Only the eyes are different. His are dark grey, the colour of a sky hunkering down for a rainstorm. Mine are Corrigan blue, the colour of the wild blueberries that grow on the hills behind the Cove.

“If you're thinking I got off scot-free, you're dead wrong,” he says, inaccurately reading my thoughts. “Like I said a while ago, I lost my children, and I spent a lifetime trying to bury ghosts. And I never managed to get them buried. Or at least I never managed to keep them buried.” He lets his breath out in a heavy sigh. “Sometimes I even think I'm the ghost.”

He touches my hand with his index finger as if he is nudging me to pay attention. His finger barely skims my knuckles. My flesh burns.

“Do you know that ghosts are dead people who can't cross over because they have some unfinished sorrow? They can't get from here to there because of some incompleteness in this world, something unforgiven or unabsolved.”

“I don't believe that,” I counter, although a shudder passes through my body like the one that had wrapped itself around Philomena when she stood beside Uncle Ned's grave. Ed Strominski looks so flimsy it would be easy to believe that he has spent his life amongst ghosts or that he himself is a ghost. He looks so insubstantial it is easy to believe that the spirit world has sucked the soul out of him and turned him into this ramshackle old man whose face carries traces of my own. What is not easy to believe — what I don't want to believe — is that if I persist with my steadfast unforgiveness he will be forced to wander forever on this earth, forever in the company of deceased but not departed souls.

“Believe it or not,” he says, “it's true nevertheless.”

Again he looks away. I am certain he has returned to Bougainville or Normandy, or he may have gone back to the Cove. At any rate, when he speaks his voice sounds far away and years ago.

“I'd give anything to be able to undo some of the things I've done in my life and to do some of the things I never did. I'd give forty years of my life to be able to do that. Even more. That's the God's honest truth.”

When I leave Arizona early Sunday morning, my emotions are gutted, splayed like a slaughtered sheep. But at least I have good news to carry back to Philomena. There is nothing lurking in the Strominski gene pool readying itself to spring out to harm her grandson.

Apart from our memories of Carmel, the only link between Ed Strominski and me is to be the knowledge that we shared in the burial of ghosts. Before I leave Arizona I offer him my forgiveness. It is a stingy, selfishly motivated forgiveness meant to allow him to cross over when his time comes. I want for him what he wants for himself: his bones to dry brittle under the relentless Arizona sun and his spirit to settle wherever spirits settle. I have no wish for ghostly sightings of him wandering through the Cove, shuffling along the foggy landwash, crisscrossing the manure-covered meadows while he waits upon absolution from the last of the Corrigan women.

Chapter Six

By eight-thirty Monday morning I am back at work, suffering only from climate shock. During the night an ice storm moved inland, and when I woke up it was to a city covered in icicles.

When the House of Assembly opens, it opens in an uproar, and the uproar continues throughout the day. Indeed, it is easy to predict that this uproar will continue until the House prorogues in mid-June. Part of it has to do with rumours revolving around Hibernia, the offshore oil-seeking project that is getting underway in the Grand Banks area. The juiciest of these is that workers from other provinces are going to be brought in to take over the most coveted jobs. Island workers lack the expertise to fill these jobs. Members from both the party in power and the opposition are demanding that institutions be set up to train Newfoundlanders and keep out workers from away.

Early on in the development of Hibernia, I had registered my concern over just such a problem, and at the time I proposed that the trade school in the Cove be enlarged for this advanced training. I used question period after question period to drive home the point that if the government wouldn't act immediately, qualified help would have to be imported and Newfoundland workers would be idle.

On top of the Hibernia situation, blame is being heaped on the government for not forcing the federal government to establish a two-hundred-mile offshore limit for foreign trawlers, which still gouge the northern cod despite the fact that the stocks are almost depleted. Because I am my party's official fisheries critic, I am front and centre in the burgeoning conflict. This morning someone told me that late Friday afternoon, just after I left for Arizona, fishermen dumped their catches to protest the government's inaction. The fish they are catching are too small to fillet, and they are too small because foreign trawlers have scooped up anything bigger than a capelin. A moratorium is now being called for to keep the resource from being totally plundered.

The afternoon session opens as a Tory member discloses that “Burn Your Boat” protest rallies are being organized around the island, and he calls for a Royal Commission on the fishery. I shout out — at the risk of being called to order by the speaker — that fishermen cannot feed their families on Royal Commissions, that something constructive has be done. Applause bursts from both sides of the floor.

Later on in the afternoon, a group of fisherwomen and wives of fishermen sneak into the House as visitors. When they're all in the gallery, they stand and begin to sing protest songs for a way of life that is unjustly being taken from them. They don't stop even as they are being hustled from the House. Once outside, they give a loud rendering of “Ode to Newfoundland” and start chanting “Fisheries package — another kind of dole!” The whole House applauds them, too.

Just before the session ends for the day, the seal problem flares up, probably lit by the women's protest. It's a problem that keeps surfacing but never gets resolved. Fishermen and members on both sides of the floor view the ban on sealing and the now-enormous seal population as a major cause of the ruined inshore fishery. When this ban was enforced, the fishermen predicted the outcome, but no one paid attention. Now the problem is too vast to ignore, and hardly a day goes by that it isn't brought to the floor.

Fortunately for me, I no longer have to fight this problem alone. Conservatives as well my fellow Liberals have come alongside. In fact, the first person whom the speaker acknowledges is the Tory member from Capelin Head.

“Mr. Speaker,” she says, “the Member from Capelin Head rises to tell you that there are no capelin heads in Capelin Head. There aren't any capelin heads because the seals have gobbled them up. And, Mr. Speaker, they've gobbled up the tails as well, and if we don't soon do something about culling those seals, there won't be any voters left in Capelin Head. The seals will have gobbled them up, too.”

The members laugh so hard that the Speaker has to call for order several times. When the Member from Capelin Head begins again, she points out that between the yelping of the seal saviours from away and the unrestrained whelping of the seals, we're in big trouble. If the government doesn't hurry up and do something about this problem, she predicts, the people of Newfoundland, just like the cod, will become infested with parasites and worms from having to eat seal excrement. There won't be anything else left to eat — the seals will see to that.

Again laughter, again a call for order. She turns more serious. The government must counter the propaganda that the seals are being bludgeoned solely for their penises, which are then sent to Asia. And it must do so immediately. The government also must dispel the myth that seals weep for their killed offspring, the myth that inspires the “bleeding hearts.” Tell the truth, she charges the House: seals shed copious tears, not out of sorrow, but to protect their eyes against the harsh, cold air.

Despite the day's commotion, the spring session holds a promise of good fortune for my party. There are definite signs that our period of dormancy is ending, signs that the Tories are falling into such disfavour with the voters that the next election, expected in the spring, will destroy their majority. In the foreseeable future, we will take back the government.

In the weeks before I went to Arizona, the notion of a Liberal leadership race had circulated, and it was understood that the new leader might well become premier. I was approached to allow my name to stand. Although I was flattered and honoured, my first reaction was to refuse, but after much encouragement from Greg and Brendan, I finally had agreed. My main concern over assuming the leadership — especially if this leadership were to be converted into premiership — was the increased amount of time I would have to spend away from home. Greg and Brendan both scoffed: they were quite capable of looking after both themselves and each other while I was away. Brendan assured me that he was so busy between his school work and his Altar Servers' Association duties that he would hardly know I was gone.

That Brendan has a full and busy life cannot be argued. Shortly after the New Year began, a young priest by the name of Tom Haley came to our parish, and he breathed new life into the Altar Servers' Association, a group of boys twelve and upwards who serve the altar during Mass. Brendan joined right after his twelfth birthday and he instantly became involved in one activity or another: bottle drives to make money for camping trips, food drives for the soup kitchens, visits to shut-ins, singsongs at the old age homes, jamborees.

From its onset, Brendan's newly acquired full life has caused the first serious dissension that Greg and I have experienced in our marriage. To say that Greg does not share my delight in Brendan's involvement in the association is at best an understatement.

“Why does it have to be an either-or situation?” Greg had demanded one evening when I had rather simple-mindedly asked, “Would you rather have him hanging around malls or going to the Association?”

“Why does it have to be either-or?” he had repeated irritably when my silence told him I was refusing to argue. “Isn't there a third option? He used to love playing hockey. He doesn't even play road hockey anymore. All I ever see of him now is the back of his neck as he goes tearing out the door to go to something or other for that association.”

With no response from me, the dispute had ended there, and since I was leaving for Arizona the next day, there wasn't time to pick it up again.

When I leave the House at the end of my first day back, worn out by the uproar, I am feeling the effects of jet lag and the emotional drain of having met with Ed Strominski in Arizona, and I am looking forward to a peaceful supper and early to bed. Greg is already home in the kitchen, getting a salad underway. I can sense his tension by the arch of his shoulders as he stands by the sink, his back to the door. Almost before he says hello, he says, “Guess what? You won't believe this.“

“Believe what?” I say, my own shoulders tensing.

“The firm gave me two tickets to that semi-pro hockey game tonight, but Brendan says he can't come with me. Father Tom has arranged for the Altar Servers' Association to go over to Holy Heart to see the play the students are putting on to raise money for gym equipment.”

“Well, if he's already promised...” I stop in mid-sentence as Brendan races past the kitchen, announcing on his way by that Father Tom is in the driveway waiting for him. “Can't wait for supper,” he calls out from the porch as he grabs his coat and tears out the door.

Brendan's hurried departure only fuels Greg's grievance, and long after Brendan has gone, he grumbles over and over again how the Altar Servers' Association is dominating Brendan's life.

“Like I've said before, we used to go to hockey games together. And like I said, he used to play road hockey with the guys on the street. He used to go skating with them. Now there's always this or that going on with that damn association. And what's even worse, you don't see anything wrong with what's going on. In fact, you encourage it.”

Too tired to think up something original, I fall back on my hackneyed defence. “It's better than hanging around the malls.”

“That same stupid comparison. As if there's only two choices, hanging around in the malls or hanging around with that priest. I want my son to have a touch of balance in his life, something you don't seem to be concerned over.”

His tone implies that Brendan's life is so far out of balance that even hanging out in the malls would be a welcome leveller.

“And I
don't
want his life to be balanced? You make it sound as if I've been scheming to have him locked up in a monastery or something.”

“I only said what I said,” he snaps, the muscle in his jaw flexing, drawing it taut. “Take it whatever way you want.”

Just at that moment the telephone rings and Greg goes to answer it. He has to go back to the office. The hockey ticket issue is left unresolved, like many others on this same subject. I go upstairs to the bathroom to see if a shower will revive my energy. I am bone weary — not only from the trip, not only from the day at the House of Assembly, but also from defending Greg to Brendan and Brendan to Greg. Under the pelting water I reflect that no matter which path I take, I am going to end up lost in the same forest. I think of a woman I once met when I lived in Montreal. Newly divorced, she had come to Montreal for a visit. She told me that her husband had been a US Marine and her son — their son — was a conscientious objector to the Vietnam war. Somewhere in the process of defending her husband to her son and her son to her husband, she had ended up losing the love and respect of both of them. It is not a prospect I relish for myself.

March folds into April and April folds gently into summer and summer folds into autumn. Seven months since I went to Arizona and met with my biological father. One year and eleven months since Hubert's death and a little over nine months from the time Brendan joined the Altar Servers' Association.

The days, the weeks, the months pass, little problems ebb and flow, but for the most part there are few creases or crinkles in our lives. They mirror the passing months, no unbridled highs, no unsettling lows. Even the conflict over the Altar Servers' Association appears to have reached
détente
. Greg tolerates Brendan's involvement in the association and Brendan manages to take enough time away from it to go to a few sports events with Greg.

The autumn of 1986 comes to us like all autumns on the Avalon Peninsula. It comes without strut or boast. No maple leaf reds, no chokecherry oranges, just here and there a few splashes of water birch yellow interspersed with the garnet clusters of berries that droop from the dogberry bushes. The South Side Hills in St. John's are a haze of magenta, the remains of withering blueberry bushes.

Philomena is well and adjusting to Hubert's death far better than we would have thought. Danny is still working in the lumber woods in British Columbia. Greg is in line for partnership in his firm. Brendan is busy and content. I am preparing myself for the leadership of my party.

Someone once said to me in the course of an otherwise unmemorable conversation that a family tragedy, especially one of cataclysmic proportion, is usually set in motion by the most improbable circumstance, the most innocuous situation, the most benign word or the most inoffensive statement. At the time I had agreed wholeheartedly. The remark brought to mind two brothers in the Cove by the name of O'Connor whose lives were forever changed by a word, by all accounts benign: “turnips.” Apparently, one day as they sat across the supper table from each other, one O'Connor brother said to the other, “Turnips! Let's talk turnips,” and thereby started a feud that got passed down through several generations, ending when one branch of the family dropped the “O” from O'Connor to distance themselves from the other branch.

Apparently, the brother who initiated the conversation had recently read an article in a farmer's almanac that someone had brought home from the States. The article said that for best results, crops should be rotated every so many years, and he, believing what he had read, suggested that they stop growing turnips for a few years and grow cabbage instead. The other O'Connor brother refused to go along with this idea. He maintained that for the past ten years they had grown wonderful turnips on their jointly owned piece of rocky land, and he saw no reason to make a change. Indeed, he said, he wasn't going to be persuaded by any folderol in a farmer's almanac printed in the United States. What, he asked of anyone who would listen, did people in the United States know about working a piece of hilly ground in Newfoundland? Sides were soon drawn, words were hurled, land was divided and brothers and cousins and nieces and nephews split apart, never to come together again.