Minister Without Portfolio (5 page)

They all hugged one another, Colleen Grandy and Silvia and Martha, the women looking out for each other. The kids were with John's mother. The Morris and Hynes families have all known each other for generations. Across a field from John's was the old house that Tender Morris had inherited, that he'd hoped to fix up some day with Martha and maybe have a kid out there. Seeking roots in a rootless tradition. Well that was all over with.

THEY STAYED THE NIGHT
in Renews. Henry needed air and he walked around the Morris house. He walked out to the frozen brook and let the sky darken. He stood on the clear ice and the water ran under the ice. Bubbles of air. And then something spectacular, the flush of fur, a wide tail. A beaver swimming under him. The torso and tail of a beaver.

You could hear the wind splitting itself in two on the corner of the eaves. The house was dark and the clapboard had been blown clean of paint. The house utterly dead and Henry felt like he was standing at the House of Tender Morris, the snuffed candle, the end of a line and he, Henry Hayward, had caused that
end. He patted himself on the arms, trying to relieve himself of the upset he felt at being exonerated from blame. How the army had scrubbed very hard at his story and made up many new bits of language that Henry hadn't said to make Tender's death the result of an ambush by irregular forces. What a terrific minister without portfolio I am. Way to handle a case, buddy.

Then he turned around and screamed into the wind: Well I lived a dangerous life!

15

Snow fell horizontally and the plough raced past and curled up a brown wave of sand and slush. Silvia was standing on the porch wearing John's clothes and old boots as John and Henry shovelled the driveway. Snow, wind, sober.

John and Henry were wearing new steel-toe Kodiaks and quilt-lined flannel shirts. They were dressed for Alberta. John had talked to Silvia about it while Henry shovelled the driveway. John spoke it over his shoulder while she stood on the front step in his old parka and boots. Henry looked at her and realized when John was away she became him, and this parka and boots was the start of it. Then, when they finished the drive, they stood in the kitchen by the open fridge and drank the elderberry juice and popped the birch and juniper pills. They were flushing out the system—Rick runs a dry camp.

Silvia drove them to the airport.

They worked twenty-eight days straight. Rick had seventy-two men in his crew. They were employed on scoops and pumps and diesel engines half a mile underground at thirty dollars an hour. A guy Henry had never met before, a guy from Cape
Breton, came up to him on his third day and said, You give me motivation.

Henry felt something missing. It was one thing to be away from home in a war zone, but another to be away only because you are working. It's been a year now, he realized, more than a year—without Nora. Surely to god he was over Nora. What was it John had said? He had to break the relationship to the land.

On Christmas Eve they flew to St John's for ten days and there was a party. Silvia warned Henry that Nora would be at the party, and he remembered this was the town that Nora owned. Snow was melting in the hall. There had been no inkling of a party, no one had really thought to have a celebration, but trust John Hynes to begin the suggestion and the cars had to park on both sides of the street and around the corner in order to get into the Hynes house that night. The kids were upstairs in one corner bedroom watching a movie and other kids were with them for there wasn't time to get babysitters or all the babysitters were at the party and so, during the loud dancing to retro music in the living room, the kids would stream downstairs in their pyjamas and wriggle around the adults under a disco ball made from a pink buoy with squares of mirrored glass glued to it, something John had made with the kids one Sunday afternoon out in Renews. All you had to worry about was stepping on little toes as the kids were barefoot and the adults had left their wet boots on. They were all, mainly, in their thirties. There was three feet of snow touching the windowsills outside and snow traipsed into the porch and halfway down the hall to the kitchen with only the dog taking care of the snow by wolfing up chunks when he felt like it. A big dog that some said was part wolf, now that wolves were back on the island. No, John
would say. Coyote maybe. But we call him Wolf to encourage his prospects.

The snow drifting against the house sheltered the bass of the party and allowed the people who were recovering from the mourning of Tender Morris to really let loose. The heat was turned down for the rooms were hot with bodies. This was not a summer party. It was a party that requires grim conditions, the short days and the bitter cold and a death in the family and a dark night and very few reasons to go on but you do go on. Having kids was not enough. A party like this was necessary and John Hynes knew it. If life were to continue on this bald rock in the ocean, if a laugh were to be had, then this party at John and Silvia's was the dream that disturbs hibernation, that wakes you into a spring thaw.

Henry Hayward lifted six cold beers from the vegetable crisper and hoisted them with both hands high over the heads of the women who were drinking red wine (Hayward watch it with the beers, said Nora, being as warm as she could) to a voracious clump of men. Rick Tobin had begged the men to work for him in Alberta. His wife, Colleen, a hand taller than him. The men and women in this kitchen knew that Henry and John had been with Tender in Kabul and understood their role in the jeep when Tender lost his life, but you could not talk about these things. The event did not communicate itself well. Military tragedies were difficult to explain. There was no teaching model on the experience of modern warfare. Henry knew this about civilians even though he could not see the men for the wall of women in sheer tops who stood between them.

Silvia was talking to Martha Groves and Colleen Grandy and Nora Power and Henry sort of shifted his shoulders into
their conversation until Silvia drew her arm around his neck and pressed him up against a new sheet of drywall that had been replaced and only plastered but not sanded or painted yet. The drywall rasped on his shoulder and left dust on his sleeve as Silvia said Henry Henry Henry. Then over came Martha. Where is Henry these days, Martha said. She was dressed all in white. She was the opposite of mourning, or perhaps this was the new mourning. Martha had said, earlier, If you threw me in a snowbank you'd lose me. And John Hynes had replied, It's the belt that makes it. Henry told Martha he was on a flight in the morning back to Fort McMurray. He said this while Nora Power had forgotten about him and was absorbed in a man's description of a marine ecosystem. Martha had been Tender's girlfriend, partner, wife. What do you call it when they are not married. Tender is dead now, so what is she. Widow. He tried to listen to Martha while Nora's head was visible over her shoulder. Nora, who had broken up with him, paying attention to this biologist friend of Silvia's. The women were talking in that high positive tone that can break any depression from your shoulders. It gives you strength. Rick, in the middle of John's solutions for the local economy, said: I don't want to hear about aquaculture in Virgin Arm or mussels in Dildo Run or crabs in Backside Pond.

Martha: It's good to meet you.

Henry: We've met before.

I don't remember.

You don't remember?

John, interrupting: This is your chance, Henry, to say you don't remember me with all your clothes on.

Henry: Friends with a beginning but no end.

Martha: You were covered in flakes of cement and wearing a woman's fluffy slippers when I met you.

Nora's slippers.

John: Rick's looking good.

Henry: He is. Except maybe the vest is a little too much.

I meant physically.

Martha: You're all rough-hewn men.

Is that what the women are saying?

Martha: Colleen and Silvia are planning a women's evening in bikinis and drinking.

It's a spa for women, Silvia said, leaning in.

John: You're not going off the cock, are you?

No we're not going off the cock.

Martha: It'll be like the YMCA change room, John.

With drinks.

Henry: Take it on.

I'm taking it on, Martha said. One day at a time. One week at a time, actually. She rolled her hair up behind her neck, as though tying it.

Silvia (to change the subject): I used to have real vivid dreams—killed five times in one night, but now it's just ahh new shoes.

John and Silvia peeled away and Henry repeated to Martha he had a plane ticket to lay fuses for Rick Tobin and he appreciated how well she listened to him given her utter grief that he could read in her face. Martha was warm, she was pulling up the hill any sort of social manner that allowed her to talk to people without breaking up and falling on the floor in tears. She gravitated towards him because she saw, too, that he was having to deflect his attention from Nora Power. It had
been a year, but still. He had flinched at the mention of her slippers. They talked and stood close to one another. Martha put a hand on his arm.

Silvia was reeling a little now, saying aloud that she was annihilated—five glasses of wine and no substantial dinner.

Martha put her face near his shoulder, he felt her hip touch him while she studied Silvia, as if trying to remember how to be a woman who has not lost everything. How to enjoy abandon without feeling abandoned. She turned a little and understood the fabric of Henry's shirt. He felt her belly, she had a full figure. Her face was all one colour, a hazel colour, even her hair. She was like some minor animal that devotes its genetic material to cunning and can only provide itself with a simple coat and complexion.

She was looking at him because he'd been with Tender. She was looking at and holding on to Tender.

You're a capable man, she said.

Most people are capable. At something.

Martha was a physiotherapist and worked at the Health Sciences Centre. She treated a number of work-related injuries and, in the past few years, soldiers. She described this stainless steel tool she used for superficial tissue work. And then she got tired of explaining work.

That house around the bay, she said. Now that needs work.

You know how to make an attractive offer.

It was Tender's.

He's got family.

No one wants it.

Then knock it down.

Exactly.

Here's my advice: let them knock it down. Be done with it. Never think of it again.

Come on, she said, and grabbed him by his shirt buttons, where's your sense of adventure.

16

They fell into bed and rolled around and Martha asked him to be careful. She pushed him away and told him, sternly, to go and then grabbed for him and said please stay. She punched him in the chest and cried. She kicked him. They had called a cab and gone back to her place. They were not fully undressed and they held each other and both felt the alarm of serious damage and swept through the vast fields between desire and loathing. They kissed each other deep and hard. It was the embrace they both needed and with the pressure of a body they both managed finally to sleep.

A taxi hauled him to the airport in the morning and thank god he'd phoned for a wake-up call. After the phone rang he'd said to Martha I have to go. It was still dark out. Her eyes opened and she took her own bottom lip in her teeth and then with that wet lip pulled herself up to kiss him. You know where the key is, she said. They rolled together again. A fondness. A delicate prayer to the loss of a love. She closed her eyes and was very loud. She was absorbed in grief. She was crawling towards some physical release of her pain. Don't forget that, Henry. Do not fucking
forget it. She had been at the Hynes party working out an anger over the loss of Patrick Morris. And he was too, working out his guilt at Tender's death and a bad impression women had made on him—Nora Power. A new way to see the world.

On the plane he decided it was perverse. It sickened him, what had happened with Martha. It was a degradation of something sacred. What a fuck-up he was. He looked down at his own knees and was disgusted with where the knees had been. He was still dressed in the clothes he'd worn at the party. John, in the seat next to him, understood this.

If the world were not round, John said, we'd flee. We'd run. We'd just head west, buddy. We would always drive hard to the left.

They both had major hangovers and were quiet and doing their best to preserve their structures, sitting there on the plane, maintain the centre or if the centre be lost form a new centre and honour it. The king is dead long live the king. But Henry could not banish the truth that he was perverting himself. He had slept in Tender Morris's bed, with Martha. Had seen his bookshelf with a
History of the Machine Gun
and
The Tet Offensive
. I am a good man, Henry thought, but I'm not a good man. I'm following kinky side routes that do harm to the moral fabric of many lives. What was it Tender called me—a minister without portfolio. What a disparaging comment. Let me get a portfolio.

They were sitting in the emergency aisle and were relieved for the extra leg room. I'm going to do an over-wing briefing, the flight attendant said. Do you know you're sitting at an exit today? The window will fall in.

They flew west and settled into the basement apartment John rented in Edmonton and did their work for Rick Tobin just
outside Fort McMurray. They delivered pre-fab materials and threaded tubes underground and listened to hydrographic data on big earphones while a meter blipped on a laptop screen. In the mornings and evenings when they left the mine Henry could see the flares from natural gas and the caps of hills torn away by heavy equipment that circled down into pits to eat and truck out bitumen. He thought about Martha. How raw it was, what had happened, how out of the blue even though it felt, on another scale, inevitable. How wrong it was. A dead man's woman. A man he had helped kill. He shook his head. And what was it. Had anything happened? You know where the key is. House of Tender Morris. Instead of running away he had run directly for the centre. No, that wasn't Tender's house he was in. That was Tender's bookcase. His house was in Renews. I've been all around that house too, a beaver swam under my feet. And then something startling sat in the front of his mind: Martha was the house of Tender Morris. Of course. Upon his neck a house of gold. I have rubbed the exterior walls of that house but thank god I did not enter. He hadn't stripped the house down. Well, at least Martha didn't let him. Martha was sensible.