Blackstrap Hawco (38 page)

He regards his father. Thinking this the wrong thing to do in the presence of a woman. To stare at his father only highlights the man's weakness. He turns toward the window and steps there. The cool of the locket felt against his chest. Fingertips on the low cream-coloured dresser beneath the glass. Blackstrap scans the crocheted doilies and the old bottles and cases of powder. His mother's. The smell still with them. Nothing moved from its place. Jacob Hawco railing so fiercely against change that change overtook him.

The familial throb of defeat. Who's responsible for this? Blackstrap wants to know. Only the anger that needs directing toward some other thing or body.

‘I'll look after 'im now, me love,' says Mrs. Shears. A voice behind him. A slight struggle in the way she says it. Pulling her arms from the sleeves of her coat.

Blackstrap leaves without word or gesture. His scuffed and nicked steel-toed boots sounding against the runner in the hallway. Over the
bare hollow-sounding floorboards where the carpet ends. Out onto the unevenness of the path. Made from rocks hauled from the beach in Bareneed.

III

There is no understanding

Being wheeled to the operating room. She remembers lying face-down. On the carpet. In the spare room. A place far away now. Feeling far away. Back in Cutland Junction. Feeling numb. The sedative. If only she could be this way. A staring blank. Her cheek against the soft blue pile. The shameful aching between her legs. The afterthrob. Eats up her entire body. No period. No blood. A baby. The desperate, enfeebling plunge. Toward disgust. And anaesthesia. A video. A baby. Gone.

The door to the spare room had opened. Blackstrap stood in the light that spilled across his wife. Her orange T-shirt and naked lower body. The heaviness of her white skin. The thickness of her legs. He had listened to her sobs. Stood silent. Not knowing which way to move to give comfort. Not understanding what had changed her. Only discouraged by his lack of control. Over things. He had lifted the cigarette from his lips and held it pinched between the tips of his thumb and index finger. Wondering what to say to her.

‘I hurt,' she had cried into the carpet. After the fact. After crawling from the kitchen. To this room and collapsing. Knowing that Blackstrap was standing there. Knowing and hating that his eyes saw. But could not see. The battered baldness of her thoughts. ‘I hurt…so much…'

Blackstrap had stared down at his wife's naked backside. The dark pubic hair showing through. Her pale flesh shivering.

What's the matter, woman
? he had said to himself. Never facing anything like this before in all of his memories of his mother and his
grandmother, Catherine. Nor his first wife, Patsy. Wondering what it was that made his wife so sad. Something she had seen on the television. Things she saw there often made her cry. She looked like a woman he had seen in one of those movies that she rented at the video store. A desperate woman never happy. More nervous by the day. This person sobbing on the floor.

Blackstrap took a draw on his cigarette and thought of bending down to her. Trying to say a few words that might make her feel better. But she would probably slap him away. Explode in a rage. Not wanting him close at all. Not wanting him saying anything because he never did understand.

The thought making him angry. Karen thinking herself the centre of everything. Thinking herself more complex than anyone could ever possibly be. All the attention she tried to get. Concerned about no one except herself. And proving just that the next day by being so selfish as to disappear. Without so much as one word to Blackstrap. Not so much as a scribbled note. Nothing.

They had already sucked the baby out of her. Yesterday. At the clinic downtown. A taxi there. A taxi back to the hospital. Who would ever know? It took only a few minutes. She had been awake. She had watched the doctor. He had not said a word to her. He had done what he was trained to do. She thought of having a car fixed. Up on a ramp.

She is not scared. Moving through the hospital corridor. The nurse who wheels her along might be her friend. The nurses seem like friends here. Nice people trying to be always kind. Taught to be kind. They will put her to sleep. They will watch her eyes shut. Like a child. Like a baby. A hum like a sing-song. The gurney hits the operating room doors. A number of people in masks. Stood there preparing. They look at her. Like she is something to be welcomed, something to be done.

‘How are you feeling?' one of them asks. The mask fabric moving over the hole.

‘Okay,' she says.

‘Good.' The mouth hole hidden.

All of the mouth hole hidden. Except hers open.

A needle slipped through the skin on the back of her hand.

‘I want you to count backwards from ten.'

‘Okay…Ten…'

IV

Missing persons

Karen Hawco, age 32, 5 feet 5 inches, heavyset, black hair, blue eyes, has been reported missing. Constable Pope thinks over the reported details. Then holds the soft features of her face in his mind. An attractive woman. Quiet. Not what he would call ‘heavyset,' but mildly plump. He is surprised to learn he has genuine feelings of concern when he hears she has gone missing. He had been thinking of her when he entered the detachment. The news is an affront, as though he has been caught in the act.

Karen Hawco's husband once missing, now the woman herself. They must be fighting, he suspects. They always run off and turn up later. Absence and the heart growing stronger. Back for more.

Pope is sent to talk with Blackstrap because of the officer's prior contact with the Hawcos. Blackstrap is under suspicion. His history of violence. A confrontation at sea with foreign boats recently. People in the community, even some of the officers at his station, look on him as a hero. A lunatic would be a more fitting word.
Fou.
The damage done to Isaac Tuttle's house with the backhoe. Rumour has brought him here. The boys at Wilf's New Place passing stories around. Karen unseen for some time. No one dare ask Blackstrap. They know he will not talk about family. Personal talk is no one's business. His wife could be missing for ten years. No one would hear a word of it from Blackstrap.

The boys pass around possibilities: Maybe she went off to her mother's in St. John's or maybe to her brother's. But, no, Aggie Coombs saw her being taken away by a man in a car. A strange man. Maybe her
brother, someone suggests. Naw, he never looked like her brudder, says Aggie. The way he was getting on. That was the last anyone saw of her. This from Constable Pope's notes. Not like Blackstrap to harm anyone though, Aggie had insisted. He never raised a hand to no one. And he wouldn't pay anyone to make away with her. Not like him to do that sort of thing. Maybe that woman of his, that townie, just packed up and left the way Patsy, Blackstrap's wife, had, although some claimed that Blackstrap had kicked her out. The true story. No one knows for certain. ‘No,' said Aggie, with a sorry intake of breath. ‘No one ever knows da trute of udder people's misery.'

 

Blackstrap's eyes are trained on Constable Pope's cruiser. Where it pulls up along Cabin Road. Stops no more than ten feet away from the idling backhoe.

Blackstrap sits atop a large grey boulder. Jutting out from a barren hill adjacent to the site. He follows the officer's step from the car. Observes the officer moving around the cabin site, unaware of Blackstrap's position. Blackstrap smiles from his vantage point.

Closer to the machine, Pope glances around, hands on his hips. Blackstrap sits still. His expression levelling out again. Until the policeman scales the landscape. Sees Blackstrap sitting up there, using one heel to kick mud from the other boot.

‘Hello,' Pope calls up.

Blackstrap nods without offering Pope any particular attention. Finished with the dried mud. He glances up at the light grey sky. Trying to find the sun. But sensing the clouds are too thick. He raises a hand to shade his eyes against the muted brightness.

‘I think you say your wife is missing,' Pope calls outright, having no patience for Blackstrap. For this sort of Newfoundland man, how Blackstrap believes that RCMP officers are nothing but a nuisance. No right telling him what to do.

‘I don't think so,' Blackstrap says plainly. ‘I never said such a thing.'

‘I think people say she is not home. They say that.'

‘You think?' With this, Blackstrap glares at Pope. Stares through a moment of harsh silence.

‘You file a missing person report?'

‘No.'

‘Maybe someone want to.'

‘Who?' Blackstrap wipes at his nose with the back of his hand.

‘To find her.'

‘Not why, who.'

Constable Pope shrugs. ‘Is she gone or no?'

‘If she's gone, she'll find her way home.'

‘Maybe she needs help, is lost somewhere.' Pope glances across the land.

Blackstrap frowns at this. Stares off at the breadth of the barrens and evergreens. Rising toward low hills and grey skies. The tower of the penitentiary. A stray glimpse of walls through the thinner patches of trees. He turns his head back. Straining to see the view behind him. Holding the rock with his hands and searching the distant deep-blue water beyond the wilderness. Miles off. Thinking of his father, once a fisherman. Not a fisherman anymore. Not anything.

‘I would like some information.' Pope's voice impatient. ‘Could you give that for me?'

‘Go get some,' says Blackstrap.

‘From you, I mean.'

Blackstrap shakes his head and spits off toward the grassy bank studded with large and small boulders. ‘Lost,' he says with disgust. ‘She's no more lost than that Christly rock.'

‘She not a missing person for you?' Pope shifts on his feet.

‘No,' says Blackstrap. Almost growling out the word.

‘People say she is missing.'

‘No, you're the missing person, buddy.'

Pope laughs dismissively. ‘Very good.' Straightening, he glances at his car. ‘You think I don't know what that mean?'

‘You speak English?'

‘I am speaking English. You see. Speaking it. Now.'

‘What you're speaking is something I wouldn't have da gall ta serve up as English. It's da dog's breakfast.'

Constable Pope does not understand this remark. But he assumes, by Blackstrap's tone, that it is not complimentary.

‘Maybe you would come to the office with me.'

‘Office? It's called a detachment.'

‘You can come then.'

‘You got no reason for that. Don't gimme yer bullshit, Frenchie.'

‘What about Isaac Tuttle? The hole you put there.' Pope points toward the distance, in the direction of Tuttle's house.

Blackstrap checks the road. A pickup truck passing by. He doesn't recognize who it is. He pulls on one of his doe-skin gloves, the worn fingers sealed with silver duct tape. ‘Fucking mainlander.'

‘What?' Constable Pope takes a step forward. ‘What you just say to me?'

‘Where you from anyway?' Blackstrap asks, fitting his other hand into his second glove.

‘Quebec.'

‘Kaybec, eh? You got the pissy face of someone from Toronto.'

‘No, Quebec.'

‘Kaybec.' Blackstrap chuckles. ‘You must be French then. I could hardly tell.'

‘All RCMP officers speak—'

‘I wasn't asking about
all
of nothing. You speak French, or what?'

‘Yes, I do,' Pope admits.

‘Kaybec. Bunch of frogs always get'n their way, ruling the fuh'k'n country. Separatists.' He stabs a gloved finger at his own chest. Above his heart.

Pope shakes his head. ‘That's none of my business.'

‘What?'

‘I need to ask questions about your wife. That's everything today.'

Blackstrap Hawco turns his attention to his machine. He knows by the lagging sound that it will soon stall. The idling pin in need of adjusting. He watches it. Like his stare alone might set it right. But it dies. Cursing, he climbs down the rock. Jumping with one gloved hand against the boulder. Landing perfectly upright on his boots. He strides toward the backhoe.

‘
My
woman,' says Blackstrap, brushing close to Constable Pope. ‘Just in case ya got no idea where ya are, yer in Newfoundland, Frog, so don't fuh'k widt me.'

Karen's chest exposed. Breasts the only thing of her body seen and drawn upon. Lopsided Xs and uneven lines toward the shoulders. The scalpel slices a round incision. Mimics the shape of the left nipple and areola. The flesh is lifted away. Still connected to its underlying blood vessels and nerves. All intact. It sits by itself to the side. Another slit. From the bottom edge of the areola. Skin splitting apart. The gash running vertically to the crease underneath the breast. Yellow red purple innards. A curved slice across the breast's bottom round. An incision in a gentle arc. Mirrors the shape of your breasts. The fat, glandular matter and skin cut out. Removed. The nipple stretched by gravity is reduced. Your nipple and areola are relocated to their new spot. Skin from above and below the original incisions is now pulled together. Sutures installed. Your recovery will be brisk.