Slow Fade (17 page)

Wesley felt a quick slice of pain in his shoulder and a shortening of his breath and he leaned against a bulkhead and waited until the sensation passed. “I’m not feeling all that well,” he said. “I’m going to lie down in a cabin somewhere. You do whatever you have to with Toulouse. I don’t care. Just don’t tell me about it.”

“That’s good enough for me,” A.D. said.

He helped Wesley go below and find an empty cabin. Then he went back to Toulouse and tried to make a deal.

AS SOON
as they docked, Toulouse’s chauffeur drove Wesley back to his hotel. Evelyn had not arrived yet and he sat for a while on the living room couch with the lights off. He was still numb and disoriented, but much of the dread had slacked off and suddenly he just wanted to get out. He wanted to leave this darkened room and then the hotel and then no doubt the city and after that it wouldn’t matter. He went into the bedroom and packed a bag. He had three thousand dollars in cash and he left five hundred for Evelyn and wrote her a check for five thousand more. “Going North” he wrote on a room service menu and left it on the bed. Then he took the elevator to the street and walked aimlessly down Fifth Avenue. After forty blocks he took a cab to the airport, but it wasn’t until he told the driver to stop at Air Canada that he fully realized he was leaving the country. The first flight available was to Montreal and when he arrived it was ten at night.

He booked a room at the Holiday Inn and slept all that night and the next day and night, and when he awoke the following morning he knew what he was going to do. In a department store he bought a large duffel bag and filled it full of long underwear, wool shirts and pants, and other durable clothes suitable for the far north. Then he took a cab to the airport, booking a flight to Stephenville, Newfoundland, where he hired a float plane. The float plane took off straight into a vicious sunset, and thirty minutes later Wesley recognized the blunt shape of Slab Island squatting in the Gulf of St. Lawrence like a massive battleship. There was still enough light to distinguish a small pod of finback whales making their way north toward the Strait of Belle Isle. When he was a child the Inuit had killed them just for muktuk, the slabs of skin and blubber they loved to chew on, and it moved him now to see the whales passing the island. The plane flew over French Tickle, the long narrow fiord cutting into the heart of the island. Beneath him were forests of fir and black spruce and the same barrens where he had slogged through miles of bogs and lichen heaths hunting for caribou and moose. He thought about the island and how little it had changed. Fewer changes than he had gone through in his life. No doubt. First there had been the Portuguese whalers who had been forced to winter there. After them had come the trappers and shipwrecked sailors, and then the Inuit and Beotucks, attracted by all the action, had drifted in to trade. The only change after that was a hundred years later when the Brethren of the Moravian Church, unable to resist one of the bleakest places on earth, firmly planted their message on the simplicity and total practicality of God and never left.

It was the white frame structure of the Moravian Church that Wesley looked for as they banked and flew in directly over the long wooded bay. When it wasn’t there he panicked and thought of his namesake, the eighteenth-century convert John Wesley, who had witnessed the profound calm of the Moravians on a voyage from England to the New World. Faced with a violent storm off the coast of Labrador, the ecstatic pilgrims had sung hymns in terrifying transports of joy as the sea poured over the gunwales and the mainsail split in two.

Wesley took a pull from his half-empty bottle of rum and quoted John Wesley’s observation of the Moravians to the pilot: “I can conceive of no difference between a smooth and a rough sea, except that which is between a mind calmed by the love of God and one torn by the storms of earthly passions.”

The pilot nodded pleasantly at the old drunk as the pontoons settled gently over the water and they sped across the bay toward Tilt Cove, a settlement sheltered from the north wind by somber granite cliffs.

There was only one boat out, a small open dory, and the young boy standing at the tiller waved to them as they passed.

“Going home?” the pilot asked.

“Going home,” Wesley said.

“You’d have to pay me to live in a place like this.” The pilot feathered his engine and brought the plane around so that it glided up against the wooden dock.

The usual crowd of kids and old-timers were waiting for the plane. One of the old-timers recognized Wesley.

“It’s Wes Hardin.”

“Well it is.”

“Been on the outside a good long time.”

“In the States, from what I heard.”

“He’ll be going to the house.”

“I guess. Where else would he go?”

One of them called out to him and Wesley was afraid to look, nodding and tossing the bottle over as he climbed out of the plane. A sharp wind came in gusts from the northwest, and his entire body felt the chill as he walked down the dock, behind him a gang of kids fighting for the privilege of carrying his bag.

All was not as he remembered. The first change was the gutted cannery at the end of the dock and past that the Moravian Church, which looked like a movie set, nothing remaining but the front wall, a TV satellite disk standing among the rubble where the building used to be. A thick silence hung over the town which made him oddly apprehensive until he realized there were no dogs, that snowmobiles had done away with the need for them. Before there had always been a constant howling and barking, but now there was only the odd sound: a shout, a burst from a chain saw, the slam of a front door. There were prefab houses now and the Hudson Bay Post was new, a large Quonset where the old barnlike structure had stood, but everything else seemed the same. The town was still divided between whites on the west end and Inuit and Indians on the east end. There were still no streets, the houses scrambled about in gullies and declivities among the pitted black boulders and rocks. Salmon and char hung from clotheslines and a variety of new and busted snowmobiles, boat engines, and water pumps lay scattered everywhere.

He walked through the town, past the Hudson Bay Post and the old shingled houses that had held the same family name for over a hundred years. Stopping to rest after every few steps, he climbed the steep hill in back of the town until he stood winded and dizzy before an ancient two-story house whose paint had long since peeled off and whose peaked gabled roof was exposed to patches of black roofing paper. Two of the upper windows were covered with plywood and a two-by-four had been nailed across the front door, but a thin line of smoke rose out of the chimney and a light was on in the kitchen. He gave the kid carrying his bag a dollar and went inside the kitchen door.

The kitchen smelled of spoiled fish and the floor was caked with dirt. Kindling had been dumped in a loose pile near the door and plastic was nailed over two of the rear windows where the panes had been broken. Wesley recognized the Enterprise woodstove and the black kettle on the back burner, but there was a man sitting in a chair near the icebox that he had never seen before. He was very old, with a curtain of thin white hair framing his face. Half his teeth were missing and a long scar slanted one eye, pulling down the corner of his mouth. His heavy cord pants were held up by rope suspenders and the top of his long johns was stained with grease.

He looked at Wesley with pale rheumy eyes. “If you be government, you can leave right now. I got no regrets. The man cheated me on my pelts. I’ll bust him in the windpipe again if’n I feel like it.”

“I’m Wesley Hardin.”

“You ain’t.”

“I am.”

“I’ll be the last man in hell. Come in and set.”

Wesley put down his bag and sat on a chair. Accepting a bottle of rum, he took a long pull and handed it back.

The old man drank and shook his head, his eyes never leaving Wesley. “Meat’s meat but you don’t look like no Hardin.”

“I suppose not,” Wesley admitted.

“You ain’t knowin’ me?”

Wesley shook his head.

“Long Hatcher, that’s who.” He looked at Wesley with his mouth open, a hollow whistling sound pumping through his toothless gums.

“Long Hatcher?”

“The same. You ain’t looking good, Wesley. Not worth the price of powder, my son.”

“I’m tired,” Wesley admitted. “Figured I needed a change.”

“Don’t we all, my son, don’t we all. But the Slab be the wrong place for change. Everything be going the other way. Cannery shut down. Ten cords of pulp won’t buy a pair of boots and a bottle of rum. Salmon fished out. Government telling us we can’t hunt the seals. Oh, it be hard times, all right.”

“Will you put out your traps?”

“Not this winter. Don’t make a whole lot of sense, price of pelts being what they are. No, Wes, I’m telling it straight. Feels like lately I don’t own nothing but my own breath, and that’s going fast.”

“How long have you been in the house?”

“Since your mama and daddy died. A good thing, too, or they would have stripped her down past the nails. Word has it you’ve been down to the States.”

“Mostly.”

“People say there’s work there. You must have done all right to have stayed this long.”

“I made enough to last me to the end.”

“A man can’t ask for more’n that.”

“I don’t suppose.”

Long’s breathing had become labored and he was unable to speak, shaking his head and spitting up gobs of phlegm on the floor. Wesley sat with him, smelling the room and starting to open up to it and then pulling back. He took an ax leaning against the table and split up a pile of wood into kindling. When he had finished with the wood Long’s breathing had evened out.

“I’ll sleep upstairs,” Wesley said. “You don’t have to bother with me.”

“And don’t you bother none about me,” Long wheezed. “I’m squeezed in at the end of the pantry. Got me a mattress and it’s right handy.”

Wesley went up the wide stairs, which were worn in the middle, and turned into a large room with a peaked ceiling and a dormer window that faced the sea. The only light came from an uncovered bulb on the ceiling. Dust covered everything, and there was the smell of urine and a stronger, bitter smell as if a small animal had died. Black glass from Captain Morgan rum bottles drifted up against one wall and the window had been nailed over with punctured plasterboard. A brown army blanket full of mouse holes lay twisted on the bed. He recognized the chest of drawers and the large oak desk that had been taken from a French schooner wrecked off Tilt Cove a hundred years ago, but initials other than his had been carved into the headboard of the bed. Turning off the light, he lay down and pulled the blanket over him. Where were his children this night? he wondered. He had trouble breathing and he turned on the light and went over to the window, punching a hole through the plasterboard with his elbow, enough to allow a cold rush of air into the room. On the way back to the bed he cut his foot on an angle of broken glass. Making a crude bandage with his shirt, he huddled beneath the blanket, trying to remember how it had been getting up before dawn and going down to the kitchen, where he and his father would eat silently and then walk to the dock. Other men would be there and they would take the boats far out into the night so that when dawn came they would be out of land’s sight. Sometimes they would stay out through that day and the next night before they would come in. But now it was another night in another time, and he was forever separate from all that but no more separate than from the day that had just ended. Toward dawn, he fell asleep and when he woke a few hours later he felt calm enough to make his way to the kitchen.

Long Hatcher was still sitting by the stove.

“I’ve been waiting for you for some time,” Long said. “Since your mama died anyways. I wanted to sing my song for you before I went under myself. I heard your mama’s and daddy’s song and now you’ll hear mine. It’s only right.”

Wesley agreed and they drank tea in silence and then Wesley went upstairs and fell asleep. He slept until midday and when he came down to the kitchen again Long was lying drunk on his mattress. He tried to prop himself up on his elbow, looking at Wesley with rheumy imploring eyes as if he had something of great importance to say, but then he fell back and passed out. Wesley was grateful to sit in the kitchen unobstructed, to let the feel and memory of the room settle over him. But there was still a gnawing restlessness inside him, still this forlorn sense of futility and despair, as if the actual sameness of the room, the same chairs and cupboards and the same oak-planked table and yellow bone-handled knives and forks, conspired to make him feel even more separate, as if coming back had been nothing more than cheap sentiment, another ludicrous dodge against confronting whatever inner layers of himself still remained. He drank another cup of tea, adding a large dollop of rum, and then it was no longer possible to remain inside. Changing into long underwear and woolen pants, he put on his new fur-lined boots and Hudson Bay parka and, taking a shotgun down from a rack over the door, he stepped outside.

Climbing up the hill in back of the house, he made his way inland, skirting a long U-shaped bog and heading for a dense thicket of elderberry bushes. The day was windy, full of bleak rain-filled clouds scudding off toward the northwest. Years before, at this same time of year, he had followed in his father’s footsteps as they went hunting to lay in meat for the winter. They would go out every day for weeks until the weather turned too raw and bitter, and even then they would sometimes continue if the game had been scarce. Those were the only times he had felt a bond with his father, although they rarely talked and then only at night, after they had skinned a rabbit or partridge and sat eating around the warmth of a fire. Sometimes his father would permit him inside the rigid boundaries of his fierce containment. Talking slowly of the past and his father and his father’s father and how they had always hunted this land and how as long as there were Hardins the land would belong to them. What great failing had caused Wesley never to allow his own son to follow, however briefly, in these same footsteps? Or strength, he thought savagely. Because it was over, all of this, it was only sport now and an old man’s ambiguous anchor to a past that Walker could and should have no use for.