Slow Fade (18 page)

A rabbit scampered in front of him and he raised his shotgun only to lose his aim as the rabbit darted off to the side. As if to test his resolve, he fired a round at the sky, the report shocking him and for a brief moment emptying his mind. He walked on, through the elderberry bushes and into the dense spruce forest that stretched for sixty miles to the other side of the island. It was quiet now inside the refuge of stunted windswept trees, and he sat down against a lightning-split trunk. He dozed and when he woke there was a light rain falling and there, through the trees, stood a slender doe, her head and flank exposed.

As he raised the shotgun, she turned toward him, her eyes and nostrils shuddering with fear. And then he fired, the pellets striking her head and neck. But she wasn’t fully dead, and plunging through the woods, she disappeared from his line of vision. He followed her to the edge of a steep ravine. He could see the trail of blood and hear her shuddering death agony beneath him, but the ravine was too steep for him to descend and once down he knew he would never be able to get back.

He sat on the edge of the ravine until he couldn’t hear her any more and then as the day turned suddenly, almost brutally dark, he made his way back, his body shivering under stinging gusts of rain.

Long wasn’t there when he got back, and he built up the fire in the stove and dried himself off, hanging his clothes on the drying rack overhead. Then he went up the stairs once more and lay in the dark listening to the rain until sleep finally rescued him.

In the morning when he came down again Long Hatcher was sitting by the stove.

“Is there still a boat?” Wesley asked. “I’d like to go out in a boat for a short while.”

Long walked over to the highboy and took out a full bottle of rum. “For the boat. The best of the rest.”

Wesley made a pot of coffee and fried up some potatoes while Long returned to his chair and fell asleep, snoring loudly. After Wesley had eaten, he stepped outside and walked around the house. The house had been built and added to over the years with lumber taken from wrecked ships, and its joists and beams were all solid oak. Although Long hadn’t bothered to bank it, the foundation seemed firm enough. Wesley sat down on the front steps and watched narrow avenues of fog drift in from the sea. Once in a while the sun broke through, lighting up the frost-shattered rocks.

Long came out. He had put on wool pants and a yellow mackintosh and was holding the bottle of rum. Wesley went back into the house and returned with his down jacket and a black toque that he put on his head, and then he and Long walked down the steep hill into the town. A few figures nodded and called out but he didn’t recognize them. Fish had been washed and lay stacked on wooden racks waiting for the sun to dry them. Long stopped to take some squid out of a barrel for bait, wrapping it in newspaper. Then they walked halfway down the dock to the
Angie D.
, a wide-beamed dory with an open cabin. An old woman wrapped in a black coat sat against the Chevy motor in the middle of the boat, drinking coffee from a thermos.

“Get out of my fuckin’ boat,” Long stammered.

“I have a right to see Wesley Hardin,” she said calmly. “More than you, that’s for sure.”

They stepped down into the boat and Long primed the motor. The old woman ignored him, taking off her wire-rimmed spectacles and looking up at Wesley with a toothless grin.

“You don’t remember Annie Mae?” she asked.

Wesley didn’t remember.

“You and me and Long been down the river a time or two,” Annie Mae said knowingly. “We were in goddamn grade five together. Then there was that time we were swapping spit up at Huckle’s Point and old man Poultry come by, him that got caught on the ice in Thunder Bay.”

Wesley cast off and Long guided the boat slowly into the harbor. A loon flew over, disappearing into a pocket of fog, and then puffins and a razor-billed auk passed by. The boat cleared the harbor and they went past a line of breakers into the open sea. There was a gentle swell on, and they sat quietly as Long cut the engine and dropped anchor.

“You must be bringing TV to the Slab,” Annie Mae said as they set their hand lines with squid, jigging them fifteen fathoms down.

“Not me,” Wesley said.

Annie Mae chose not to believe him. “Heard you was bringing in twenty-eight stations. All from the States. I think you came back to the Slab to do just that and it’s a great thing and it’s what I come to tell you. I’m an old girl and when I can’t get about no more TV is goin’ to be my company. I ain’t goin’ to turn it off until they find me stiff as a salted cod.”

Annie Mae poured coffee from her thermos into tin cups and Long added large dollops of rum and they drank and waited for the fish. A migration of murres, looking like diminutive penguins, cackled maniacally as they flew past.

“You surely must be some wizard of wrong notions to come back to the Slab,” Annie Mae said. “Nothing here to do but die.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” Long said.

“You’re goddamn right.” Annie Mae shook her fist at both of them. “Take Wesley Hardin’s own grandpa. I was a little bitty thing, but I was there. Times was hard. Nothing to eat. Takin’ bets on who would make it through that winter. Now old Granddaddy Hardin knew he wasn’t worth a lick in hell. Never helped out. Never had nothin’ good to say about nobody. Was ugly to boot. Finally he seen the light. Got properly likkered up and commenced to go to each and every family. He had his tell on those he knew and they on him and everyone had to have their share of eating and drinking and passing out so it took more than three days and nights for everyone to wind up at the Hardin house. I know you recollect the night, Wesley, because you was right there when your own pa took a sealskin rope from a chest and threw it over that stringer you got running across the living room. Most all the town was looking when Granddaddy Hardin stood on a little table and put the noose around his own neck and said he’d done the best he could, take it or leave it, and that he looked forward to never seeing their goddamn faces again. Then his own son kicked the table out from underneath him and he swung free, dead as a stone.”

“That’s the way it was,” Long affirmed. “An April night and warm, too.”

“Course the TV will change all that,” Annie Mae said. “Different kind of entertainment going on now. Not many around knowing how to go out the old way.”

Just then the fish started to hit and they spent the next few hours laying in a quintal of cod. After they had rolled up their lines, Annie Mae split up two big tom cod, taking the airsacks and backbones out with swift cuts and throwing them overboard. She made a little fire over some rocks in the bottom of the boat and put the fish in a pot with fatback pork and onions and potatoes and cooked them in their own juice. When they had finished eating and were working on the last of the rum, a plane flew over, sliding down through the fog for a landing.

“Not a month goes by when you don’t see one,” Long complained.

Long lay down and fell asleep while Wesley and Annie Mae sat staring off across the sea, with their backs on opposite ends of the Chevy engine. It was very still and they were content just to sit there. Their peace was broken by a cool breeze that stirred up the swell and caused Long to wake up and start the engine.

Three hundred yards from the dock the fog lifted, and they could see the plane and a large crowd on the dock.

“God’s grace,” yelled Annie Mae. “It’s the TV folk come to plug us in.”

But it wasn’t the TV folk. It was A.D. and Sidney and another man working the sound. They were wearing new camping outfits and they had the camera on a tripod, pointing it toward the
Angie D.
like a weapon.

“I don’t want nothing to do with it,” Long said.

He sat down and it was left for Wesley to steer them in. He didn’t succeed, the bow slicing into the dock with a loud ripping sound and the boat immediately filling with water. The end of the dock collapsed and two people slid into the freezing water. Everyone else stood at the safe end of the dock applauding and calling out advice.

The camera crew continued shooting as Annie Mae and Long were helped out of the boat. Wesley got out on his own, crawling up on the dock on all fours.

“An historic approach,” Sidney said, zooming in on Wesley.

“We made the deal of a lifetime with Toulouse,” A.D. explained to Wesley. “He’s passed on the Indian project, but he’s picking up the entire tab on your footage. He thinks it’ll be a great film.”

“He’s not picking up my tab,” Wesley said.

“Your tab, everyone’s tab. It’s carte blanche.”

“It’s my film and it’s not carte blanche.”

“We can iron all this out later,” Sidney said. He put down his camera and began to change film. “We’ve been getting the crowd ready for you. Most people don’t know what the hell you’ve been up to all these years. But now that we told them you were bringing in the TV satellite they’re crazy about you. You’re the lord of TV, the holy messenger bringing the outside inside. We’ve laid out three cases of booze for a party tonight in your honor.”

Before Wesley could object, a florid-faced man in a Sears, Roebuck hunting jacket shouldered his way through the crowd and shook his hand. “I’m Pagels, the Hudson Bay man. One of your producers just now filled me in on the film you’re doing and how it ties in with the TV and all the benefits that will be coming our way. Wesley Hardin, I just want to say for all of us that you being back on the Slab is the best thing that ever happened, and we’re putting on a big Welcome Home to prove it.”

Long poked Wesley in the stomach. “I seen all this coming years ago. I been second-sighted all this time, but you’re the one that’s lit the fuse.”

He took Wesley by the arm and guided him through town to the Hudson Bay Post. Rum and Scotch and beer were lined up on the counter and there was already a large crowd inside, with the rest of Tilt Cove coming in behind them.

“I been down this road, too,” Long muttered.

He took a bottle of rum and went over with Wesley to sit by Annie Mae, who was propped up on a pile of feed sacks on the other side of the cavernous room. The movie people were interviewing old-timers on what they remembered of Wesley and picking up background shots. Wesley watched them maneuver toward him, the camera panning over to include him.

“How do you feel about being home after all these years?” A.D. asked, shoving a microphone in front of him.

Long answered for him. “He don’t feel a goddamn thing. Can’t you people see he’s already got one foot in the misty beyond?”

“In that case,” A.D. asked Wesley matter-of-factly, “what are your last words?”

Wesley turned away, experiencing underneath one of his many blankets of humiliation a ludicrous little tug of joy. Meanwhile the rest of the party was gaining momentum. An old Indian was tackled from behind as he tried to stagger outside with a hundred-pound bag of flour. Inuit and Indian children threw food at each other while Pagels and his wife tried to secure as many canned goods as they could before they disappeared off the shelves. The crowd applauded each antic, word having gotten around that the tab was on Wesley and the TV people. Someone turned a radio all the way up, John and Yoko singing “Every Man Has a Woman Who Loves Him,” and no one paid much attention when a large fat woman fell through a window.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, Wesley passed out. A few hours later he awoke to find only half as many people present, but they were there for the duration. The kids had gone and it was quieter, with more steady drinking going on. A few people had already passed out on the floor and a fight had broken up a display counter, but the Hudson Bay man and his wife had managed to protect most of their goods, sitting up on the counter near the cash register with shotguns cradled in their arms. The camera crew was shooting from the floor at an old man climbing up on a stove by way of a wheelbarrow and a water pump. He wore greasy bib overalls, rubber boots, and a snap-brim leather cap. His long block of a face was bitter and sad and no one listened except the sound man as he stared out across the room and spoke his piece:

“I’ll say this about Wesley Hardin. I knowed him them days, never since, but I was one of the first to see him go astray. We was twenty years old and working as oil rats down in the whale factory at Poke Harbour. We was boiling out the oil from whale in twelve-hour shifts and making good money, too. We worked all that summer and into the fall and then we went over to Newfoundland, figuring to trap all winter and come back on the spring thaw. It was the first time either one of us had been that far away and we was raw about it but we knew what we was doing. We portaged in a hundred miles, carrying two canoes and four months of food. Built a first little tilt for me and then Wesley went on forty miles with the idea we’d meet up after a few months. As soon as I had put out my traps I noticed Wesley took damn near all the sugar with him. You understand what I’m saying? Anyways, I lit out after him. Damn right. Walked three days to get to his place. When I come into his tilt mad as a teased snake, he was laying on his bunk and you could see right away he wasn’t right. He didn’t even look at me. He just lay there staring at the ceiling. The whole place was a mess. Mice and coons were all over the place. He had him a nice little stove of galvanized metal and there was a terrible backdraft and he hadn’t bothered to fix it. It’s a wonder he didn’t freeze. I fixed the place up for him and all the time he didn’t say a damn word. Not that I wanted him to. When I finished I asked him was he going to set his traps. He says: ‘Lemuel, I’m going to go as far from here as possible.’ And I says: ‘Wesley, you’re already as far away as possible.’ Then I walked out, but not before I took all the sugar and a few other doodads as well. I figured he wouldn’t be needing them. I took the man at his word. He said he was going on and I let him go. As for me, I took most of his clothes, rifles, ax, and a sack full of food. That was the last I heard or seen of Wesley Hardin until he showed up just now looking the same as when I seen him last. So I say: Howdy, Wesley. How you be, old son?”