Blackstrap Hawco (102 page)

 

Book Four

2007

 

Home, a House

(53 years old)

The last thing Blackstrap Hawco sees when he steps across the prison yard is the Newfoundland flag flying on a pole near the visitors' compound. His attention is drawn by the ruffling sound of it flapping high against the blue sky that he has watched from a narrow window for fifteen years. The flagpole next to that one is empty. The Canadian flag is usually flown there, but the Tory premier, Danny Williams, ordered all the Canadian flags taken down to protest a broken promise made by the Canadian Prime Minister, a Liberal, about offshore oil revenues. It was a stroke of political genius, in Blackstrap's mind. Take down the Canadian flag, and burn the fucking thing.

Blackstrap had heard that the Newfoundland flag was designed by a man named Pratt. Karen had told him as much. The man was an artist, a famous Newfoundlander whose work sells for tens of thousands of dollars on the mainland.

As the Newfoundland flag waves lightly in the breeze, its design appears like something broken up and fitted back together. The geometry of peculiar lines that makes Blackstrap feel uneasy because it gives him the sense of symmetrical perfection. But there is something about it that he admires, too, that anchors in him. Perhaps the idea that the flag is a singular creation and theirs. The glimpses of the Union Jack, patterned after the British flag, would have pleased his mother. He knows his father hated the flag. His father's decree when it was first sighted, flying in a yard that they drove past down in Bareneed: ‘Looks like someone got a turned stomach on what he already had in 'is head 'n t'rew up a bunch of snotty nonsense.'

As the steel door is opened by the guard, Darren Quilty, Blackstrap sees an RCMP cruiser parked in the empty visitors' lot.

‘Looks like ya got a ride,' says Quilty, maybe joking but seeming to know more.

Blackstrap glances back and nods.

Quilty touches the bill of his hat. One thumb missing from where it had been lopped off in a winch when he was fifteen. That was years ago and here he stands now. One hand covering his throat. Just another dead man in a uniform about to shut a door.

‘Take 'er easy,' says Quilty, going back inside.

He could walk home from here. It would take no more than twenty minutes. He wonders why the RCMP cruiser has come for him. If that's what it was there for.

A young officer is seated at the steering wheel, observing Blackstrap with a plain look. The officer couldn't be more than twenty-five. A young pup still on his fist dick. He probably still squats to pee.

Blackstrap walks by the car, heading for the paved road at the end of the parking lot. The cruiser follows after him. There comes a toot from the horn, the driver leaning to peer out the open passenger window.

‘I'm supposed to drive you home.'

‘Says who?'

The officer just smiles.

‘No need.' Blackstrap keeps walking. The trees never so lushly green. The barrens awash with colours: burgundies and browns and blondes…The low brittle bushes with tiny leaves. The huge grey and beige boulders deposited there since the withdrawal of the ice age. They haven't been moved since then. His feet on the flat pavement, softer than cinderblock, and softer still, once warmed by the sun.

A pleasure to be walking with no end in sight. He checks over his shoulder to be certain. His body drifting away from that compound.

The cruiser, inches ahead, while the officer leans and watches Blackstrap.

‘Please, get in. I'd like to drive you.'

Like to.

Blackstrap continues walking, then he stops while still staring ahead at the evergreens. He knows he shouldn't get in, knows that he does not
need to, but feels that he must, because he is being asked, being told by being asked.

When Blackstrap climbs into the vehicle, the officer nods in a practically friendly way. ‘Thanks. I'd like to talk to you.'

Blackstrap stares through the windshield as the car rolls off. Then he glances through the passenger window at the landscape gliding by. It is a gift to his eyes; an expansiveness that is almost frightening in its clarity. He makes a point of naming the brush and the swamp trees to himself. He remembers what he has learned about the barrens, the name reindeer moss for what he had looked at all his life but never knew exactly what it was called. The population of the island. The resources. The areas where soil is good for farming. The types of farms. The types of mines. Where the people came from. The Walshes and Powers and Taylors. The inlets and coves and bays around the island, and who settled them. From what county in Ireland or England. Poole. Limerick. Kilkenny.

The counsellor had taught him, had read to him from books when he visited his office. Blackstrap returning twice a week for the view through the window. The lake and the boats with their rowers, practicing for the annual regatta. Then the counsellor turning the book toward Blackstrap and carefully setting down a finger on the page, on a word. And because Blackstrap eventually was willing to learn, the counsellor had treated him better, had made certain that he was given particular liberties. Behind the locked door in his office, the counsellor had given Blackstrap consolation.

Blackstrap looks at the side of the officer's face, a young man with no recognizable features, who licks his lips anxiously. A plain man you can see right through. He feels the urge to reach out and touch him, to see if his hand passes beyond. Such an entirely different face from the ones he has watched for years. Not a face changed by cruelty or harsh incident. Nothing of consequence has ever happened to him, except his own death.

The cruiser glides off the asphalt and down the dirt road that will lead to Blackstrap's house.

The officer glances at Blackstrap. ‘Good to be out?'

‘Yes.'

A few moments later, the officer says: ‘I guess you knew him, hey?'

‘Who?' Blackstrap is thinking of his father, watching ahead for the sight of his house, but it is slow coming, as though the land, the trees and sky have filled themselves back in to erase the house.

‘Hotel Room Pope.' The officer grins and his face changes for the worse. ‘The serial killer? I saw in your file how he was one of the arresting officers.'

Blackstrap thinks it over.

‘He died in there. When you were in, right?'

‘Yeah.'

‘Suicide, they said. Birds of a feather.'

The car takes the slow corner and to Blackstrap's relief he sees the two houses down the incline.

‘They made a movie about him. You see it? The guy won an Academy Award. He was involved with your girlfriend, right?'

The cruiser pulls into the cracked paved drive with patches of grass growing up through it.

The two houses. The two doors.

‘Here we are,' says the officer, his hand reaching for something between the seats. A thin case with a picture on the front. It's sealed in plastic. ‘I got you a copy of the movie. DVD.'

Blackstrap scans the cover. A picture of a man in a police uniform. Not the uniform of the RCMP, but a uniform that he recognizes as traditionally American. A pregnant woman with long black hair is stood behind him in ropes. He says nothing more, merely opens the door.

‘Live and learn,' says the officer, his eyes darkening to slits.

‘Keep it,' Blackstrap says, then carefully closes the door, pushing it shut until it clicks.

‘Okay, stay out of trouble,' the officer says, with a newly boyish smile and a laugh to please himself.

The voice in Blackstrap's head, coming from where? Before or after the door shut. When he looks back, he sees the nervous glitch in the young officer's eyes. The law, but from where and of what?

And the car is gone, just like that.

Not that man's fault, he decides.

He never knew there was so much to be learned about blame.

Blackstrap hesitates, making certain the car is gone, a lapse of time he has lost track of. Faced by these two structures, he finds his son and daughter brought to mind. They had been living with foster parents from what he heard. Patsy dead from cancer years ago. They had given him a pass to attend the funeral. A prison guard on either side of him. His two children there with their foster parents on either side of them. Grown more so that he barely knew, but never would he not.

Him on one side of the grave.

Them on the other.

His children raised by…

His daughter.

His son.

Not his to have.

Raised by…

His original sentence served. He would have been released when they were still children. He could have tried then. But that was when his sentence was shorter, before he attacked the Indian, and others, too, before the problem of Pope. His sentence extended, again and again, complicating any custody fight. His children grown now. Junior twenty-one just last month, and Ruth soon to be seventeen.

The place for his children.

Junior. He spells the name in his head: J-U-N-I-O-R.

Patsy. P-A-T-S-Y.

His daughter: R-U-T-H.

The new house has a few smashed windows. He notices how the vinyl siding is stripped in places. The big window taken out completely. A hole there that gives no reflection. Blacker than expected is why he knows.

But his father's house.

A sound to his right, a rustling and snapping of twigs. Someone coming for him through the trees to take him back. He jerks his head to see a moose lumbering out from the trees near the edge of the road. It stands there with its head dipped, eating the new sweet grass in the ditch.

M-O-O-S-E.

Blackstrap stands with his right foot on a bit of a rise, higher than his left. Finally, he swallows and the moose sways its heavy head up to look at him. Rubbing its back legs together, it shifts its rump and urinates, then stares a while longer before stepping in reverse, along the exact path it came from, into the woods.

The rustling and crackling of branches and twigs under one hoof, then another…

There is not a trace of the moose, except for the patch of grass that had been torn from its roots and chewed, and the urine that had gushed through the air, onto the grass and into the warming earth.

Again, Blackstrap sees movement, this time lower, closer to the ground, hearing no sound. A dog. A cat. A rust-coloured fox trotting out a few feet away from where the moose had appeared. It pays Blackstrap no mind as it scampers across the road, a limp kitten in its jaws, and into the bushes beside where Blackstrap's backhoe used to be parked to the left of his father's house. The backhoe has since been seized by the courts as partial payment to settle lawsuits brought against him by a few of Isaac Tuttle's distant cousins. The new house taken too, but who living in it now? No one by the looks of it. Everyone having moved away.

F-O-X.

K-I-T-T-E-N.

J-A-W.

 

The ground rumbles beneath his feet. He thinks of a missing locomotive, then turns his head in the direction of the unseen ocean. The distant sound quaking from Bareneed. The quarry company finally granted a permit. He heard from Darren Quilty. The headland being demolished and dug up, the gravel, dirt and stone transported to other places for fill. The faultline soon to split, releasing so many from its hold.

Those two houses: one old with its top storey torn off, its narrow wooden clap boarding grey in patches, in need of a few coats of paint, the other house rectangular with the bay window gone and white vinyl siding, made to last forever, masking and sealing in the rot.

Deciding, he steps up the bank, his boots along the uneven beachrock path, past the old tires and automobile debris, an engine, rusted wheels,
and a transmission off further. He reaches into his pocket for the keys that the man in prison had returned to him, then checks over his shoulder, expecting to see his father behind him, following him up the path with a headful of intentions – but – instead – seeing the expanse of the evergreens and barrens gradually rising and falling off for miles in all directions.

The exact same view he had witnessed before being taken to confinement.

What do you want with any of this? he asks himself. Go.

Returning to the task at hand he finds the key and is about to fit it into the lock when he decides to try the knob.

It turns in his palm. Unlocked.

Stepping into his father's house, he discovers everything in its place. No one would think of entering his father's house. No one would be so heartless as to disturb the placement of a single artefact. For a moment, amid the articles collected, Blackstrap feels painfully out of place, and calls out to his father, ‘Dad?' the sound of his own voice jarring in the emptiness.

And with the unexpected voice in return, the hope that time might not have tormented him so mercilessly.

Stood in the cluttered living room, listening for the voice that most occupies him, he finds that he is not breathing. Again, the voice sounds, and he looks toward where his hand rests against an old roll-top desk.