Road Ends (20 page)

I stuck my head out, letting in an icy blast of air, and saw Reverend Thomas climbing over the snowbank at the end of our drive. There is a streetlight beside the road and it was unmistakably him. As I watched he clambered down the other side and began walking down the road towards his own house.

I considered calling to him but he couldn’t have heard me. I’d have had to put on my coat and boots and go chasing after him, which, given that I have nothing to say to him and no wish to hear anything he has to say to me, seemed unwarranted. In any case, I hadn’t taken all that long to answer the door, so he must have decided against saying whatever he had come to say.

I had just closed the door when Tom appeared, bleary-eyed, evidently wakened by the knock.

“Who was it?” he said.

“Reverend Thomas.”

He looked startled. “What did he want?”

“I don’t know. He’d gone before I got to the door.”

Tom pushed past me and opened the door, letting in another flood of air. I said sharply, “Close the door—we’ll freeze to death. He’ll be practically home by now.”

He closed the door and turned around and leaned against it. He looked very strained. Very anxious. He closed his eyes for a minute and then opened them again and looked at me and said, “Dad, do you think he’s all right?”

He hasn’t called me “Dad” in years. It surprised me and also, I confess, gave me an unexpected surge of pleasure, suggesting as it did that he was appealing specifically to me rather than merely to whoever happened to be standing there.

The answer to his question was clearly “no,” but instead I said, “Tom, nothing of what happened in that family was your fault. You know that, don’t you?”

He closed his eyes again. I said, “Let’s go into the kitchen. It’s warm in there.”

For a moment I thought he would, but then he shook his head. “I have to get back to bed. I’m up at five.”

And he turned and went upstairs.

I should have called him back. I should have insisted that we talk about whatever it is that is worrying him so much. I think he would have, if I’d insisted, and it might have helped.

CHAPTER NINE

Struan, February 1969

A mouse drowned in the honey. Someone had left the lid off overnight. It had gone in head first and its tail was sticking out like the wick of a candle.

“He went to the bathroom in it,” Adam said. He was kneeling on a chair, peering into the jar.

“You’re right,” Tom said. There were ant-sized pellets in the vicinity of the tail.

“Was he hungry?” Adam said.

“Probably to start with,” Tom said, “but probably not by the end.”

“What will happen to him now?”

Tom thought about it. Would the honey preserve it? Candied mouse? Unlikely. There’d be enough air trapped in its fur for decomposition to take place.

“He’ll rot.” Death again. It followed him around like a dog.

Adam looked troubled; two short vertical lines appeared between his eyebrows. Tom wondered suddenly if this was his first acquaintance with the concept—the fact—of mortality. He didn’t want to traumatize him.

“It won’t hurt him,” he said. “He can’t feel anything anymore.”

The vertical lines were still in situ. “But can we still eat the honey?” Adam said. “From around the edges?”

Another blizzard. Out by the Dunns’ farm the snowplough slid into the ditch—the ultimate humiliation. Tom was rescued by Arthur Dunn, a case of the present being rescued by the past because Arthur Dunn still worked his land with horses. Huge animals, big as buses, they’d looked like something from a Greek myth when they loomed up out of the snow. Arthur tied a rope around the rear axle of the snowplough and the horses hauled it out as if it were one of Adam’s Matchbox toys.

“Thanks very much,” Tom said.

Arthur nodded. “Wanna come in an’ get warm?” He was a shy man and looked at his feet when he spoke.

“I’d better get on with it,” Tom said, “but thanks again.”

Arthur and his team dematerialized and there was nothing left but the snow.

By morning the storm had passed and the sky was a clear and innocent blue. Tom and Marcel worked overtime and managed to get the roads clear just as the first flakes from the next storm started drifting down.

“Dis is one stupid job,” Marcel said disgustedly. “Ever’ year I say to myself, Marcel, nex’ year you jus’ pack up de wife an’ go to Florida till Easter, an’ ever’ year I forget.”

The roads were now mere corridors between snowbanks four feet high. In the centre of town the sidewalks had been abandoned weeks ago; everyone walked on the road. There were gaps in the snowbanks outside the entrances to the stores and businesses, shovelled out afresh each morning, filled in again each
time the snowplough passed. People who needed their cars to get to work had to shovel out their driveways both morning and night. Leave a car parked at the side of the road and you wouldn’t see it again till spring.

At six fifteen in the morning, rumbling down Cleveland Road on the snowplough, Tom saw Reverend Thomas standing outside on the porch of his house in his bare feet. The porch light was on, otherwise Tom wouldn’t have noticed him. He appeared to be looking at his car—or rather at the three feet of snow that covered his car—down in the driveway. He was wearing pyjamas and no shoes or socks. Tom saw it clearly: there were three or four inches of new snow on the steps but there was less than an inch on the porch itself, and Reverend Thomas’s bare feet were unmistakably planted in it.

Tom’s heart began beating painfully hard. He kept on ploughing, unsure what to do. He should go back. But how could he go back? The last thing Reverend Thomas would want would be for the snowplough to stop at his front door and Tom, of all people, to get out and ask him why he was standing there in his bare feet.

But what if he’d had some sort of breakdown, had suddenly lost his mind? In the circumstances that had to be a possibility. And if you’d stand in the snow on your porch in your bare feet, what was to stop you from walking down the steps and keeping on walking until you froze to death in the street? At this temperature it wouldn’t take long.

At the end of the road he turned left, then left, then left again and rumbled slowly back down Cleveland, past the house. The porch light was off and a light was now on inside the house, which he was pretty sure it hadn’t been before. Which was good news. But though he couldn’t see the porch clearly, there now being no light, Tom saw something that had not been there five minutes ago, namely footprints in the snow leading down the
steps and across to the car. Two sets of footprints, one going there and one going back. The Reverend had waded barefoot through the snowdrifts to look at his car. There was no way he could have actually seen it without digging it out from under the snow, but he’d gone out and stood beside it nevertheless.

He couldn’t sell the car; Tom understood that perfectly. There was nothing wrong with it apart from the small dent in the front fender on the passenger side. It was in good running order, a solid, reliable Ford, black and sedate as befitted a clergyman, but Reverend Thomas wouldn’t be able to bring himself to sell it because the idea of somebody driving around with that dent in it would be unthinkable. Likewise he couldn’t get it repaired—get the dent hammered out—because it was impossible even to contemplate repairing a dent of that sort. A dent of the sort that would be made if a car going at considerable speed hit a small, light object such as a child on a bike.

Depending on your point of view it had happened either very fast or very slowly. From the point of view of the rider of the bike and her mother, who was running along beside her cheering her on (because as it turned out it was the first time the small rider had managed to ride her bike unsupported and, although she was a bit wobbly, she was quickly getting the hang of it)—from their point of view, because the car was coming up behind them around a bend in the road and they would have neither seen nor heard it, it must have seemed to happen in an instant. From the driver’s point of view it had probably seemed like an instant too. He was going very fast and, due to the large amount of alcohol in his bloodstream, his reaction time was slower than normal. When he rounded the bend and saw the child on her bike he
would have been on top of her before his brain had fully registered that she was there.

Whereas from Tom’s point of view, watching from the beach, with a clear view of the section of Lower Beach Road the little girl was on, it had seemed to happen very slowly, because he was able to see not only the child on her bike with her mother running beside her but also the cloud of dust churned up by the car as it approached the bend. Tall reeds obscured his view of the car itself, but from the dust he could see how fast it was going, and he also knew, though he wasn’t consciously thinking about it at the time, that although it was nine o’clock in the morning Rob was still drunk from the night before—all of them were still drunk because they’d been partying on the beach all night. So he’d been watching the car’s approach with a faint, almost subconscious shimmer of anxiety, and when the moment came, it seemed to him that he’d known it was coming for quite a long time.

The plan had been that the twelve of them would get together for a class reunion down on the beach at Low Down Bay, just as they’d done in previous summers. They’d make a gigantic bonfire and watch the sun go down, eat a bit, drink a bit, swim a bit, then watch the sun come up again. The guys would bring stuff for supper (hot dogs, hot dog buns, potato chips, booze); the girls would look after breakfast (powdered orange juice, instant coffee, French toast). They’d cook everything over the fire—the girls brought three big frying pans for the French toast—and generally make it a night to remember. And everything worked out perfectly: the night was warm for June and the bonfire kept the bugs away and, though the lake was still ridiculously cold, quite a few of them did go in. There was a stupendous amount of hooch, thanks mostly to Rob, who had contact with a couple of guys from the sawmill who’d set up a highly illegal distillery in a shack off in the
woods. They mixed it with Coke to hide the vile taste and sat around the fire and passed it around and talked and sang silly campfire songs that somehow didn’t seem silly at the time but kind of nice and nostalgic, reminiscent of their youth, which with hindsight had been special. Some of them rolled themselves in picnic blankets and got a little sleep and some of them rolled themselves in picnic blankets and got a little sex, though probably less than they let on. By morning they were all ravenous, so the girls brought out the ingredients for French toast, which was when they realized they’d forgotten to bring margarine or butter to cook it in.