Minister Without Portfolio (16 page)

It's not much wind, Martha said, for the house to be doing this. I mean, it gets windier, doesn't it?

The wind can blow the milk out of your tea.

They were unsafe in the house, was Henry's feeling. The house would not last another winter and they would have to abandon any thought of living here. Martha rolled over and held him tight and he realized he was inside her, she had made him hard and pushed him in and he hadn't done a thing.

He felt the baby move.

He pulled out.

What's wrong.

He said it felt like Tender was in the bed with them.

But Tender
is
in the bed with us. We've said that. He will always be there. Is that something we can live with?

This wasn't something that made him happy. Not this time. But he understood. Henry had simply misjudged how complicated being with her was. He thought he was throwing himself, like a martyr, into a situation. And then when duty presented itself he realized he was in fact enjoying himself. Martha was full of independent life and he loved that life. He enjoyed seeing her active in the world. And so, when Tender made an appearance, it caused a conflict in him, that he wasn't sacrificing himself at all, but astounded at his luck.

You have to remember, Martha said, that Tender is happy with this. He's happy to know this.

I will try to adopt that way of looking at it, he said.

There will always be the three of us, Martha said.

4

Wilson Noel said did you feel that last night?

Henry paused to think if he'd heard correctly.

I've lived here fifty-four years and that's happened once before, you must have felt it. The sea pounding the bedrock.

He couldn't wait to get back to Martha with the news. As he drove past the shore road the sea had a run of high surf and the curtains of water were being pushed in by some distant force. These were not young waves. After hundreds of miles of movement they had reared up to plunge into the headlands, waves that had been born in another hemisphere entirely. The sky was bright blue.

It wasn't the wind, he said. It's the sea. And it happens twice in a lifetime.

But Martha was preoccupied or she was upset. It's nothing, she said. But he knew it was something he'd done. Just say it, he said. It's ridiculous, she said. Then she turned her shoulders and faced him. Okay, it's the pillowcases. I found your buckets with the pillowcases in them.

He wasn't expecting that. We're not going to save the pillowcases, he said. Or anything off that bed. I didn't ruin anything.

I know it's foolish of me to feel this way I just—you put your hands on them, on that dead bed and then you handled me, she said. You should have washed your hands, she said.

This made him exhausted. She was right, of course, but the work was getting to him. The labour was mixing in with their pleasure. I'm sorry, he said.

I'm sorry too, she said. I'm sorry for feeling it. I wish I didn't feel it, it's just creepy sometimes to be living in a house that's—

I know, he said. It's alive this house.

It's not though. It's a lovely warm house but it's Tender's house and Tender's relatives' and he's dead and they're dead.

Nellie's not dead and this is not Tender's house. This was a part of Tender he didn't know existed. We're building a brand-new extension of Tender. I wasn't thinking last night, he said. I was tired and solving a problem and I wasn't thinking.

I know you were, and you're good at that you're really good just think a little more, okay? I know it's hard but we've got to think about everything, okay?

MARTHA COULD NOT STAY
. She had clients. What can I say, she said. I'm good at what I do. They kissed and he felt the baby in her. This time it delighted him. She looked up at him and fixed her hair in a buckle behind her head. She phoned someone and said she was on her way and they kissed again and she pushed him towards the hallway and then did a violent gesture and said no I have to go and she was angry with herself for having given in
to this roughhousing but was also possessed with the notion that she deserved this type of passion.

It was the height of summer now and it was pleasant to be outdoors in just a shirt. The sun ripped the mood out of you. Martha shut her car door too hard and jerked the car out of the drive and up onto the road. She was a fast, erratic driver who did not look in all directions but she managed to not have accidents and he listened to her car accelerate down to the main highway and then slow up fast to the stop sign. He could not believe it. Almost as soon as the sound of her car had gone, so too was the truth of what had occurred. Had anything occurred? He smelled the air and she had been there. He walked back upstairs and studied the bed and yes something had happened. There was a green elastic hairband by the flashlight and in the double bed were a few strands of hair. Her hair. She had on a pretty bra. She took care to wear good underthings. Or had that been an expectation, that something might happen when she came out here. Yes. He knew now that she had thought of something before it had even occurred to him.

It is complicated to love someone, he said to the house. As he loved Martha he also felt he was losing his love, for the person he loved was staining her own dignity by loving him. What did Gandhi do in the face of British acts which stripped Indian dignity? He did not belittle them, he marched for salt.

He set about beating apart a Canadian-made solid wood coffee table but he couldn't stop thinking about her. Of the little white pearl buttons on her shirt, it was a turquoise prairie shirt with pockets that buttoned down. Of how she felt against him as she was tying up her hair. He thought less of them in bed than in the moment when she realized she had to leave. The force of leaving
him made more of an impression than her giving in to him, or was it she that took him. Martha had been on top of him. She had really enjoyed herself, but it was almost as if it had nothing to do with him. She had been selfish but he had committed. He was glad he could allow her that enjoyment. Perhaps it was the house that had allowed it.

The arrangement was it was all up to her. He was here for her. But he realized this was not fair to himself. Also, to her. No matter how much he implored her to be in control, she would take his feelings into account. Or the possibility that he might realize he's a fraud and run.

He carried the top of the table to the burn barrel. He shoved it in and stepped away from the flames. This was what they did in Afghanistan. The truth about war is there is a lot of garbage. Since his return to civilian life he was moved at the efforts of recyclers. The care that went into separating plastics from metals, and the idea of a compost heap. I wonder if it's possible for an army to manage a compost heap. They burned plastic by the ton, we dump waste by the tandem load. They'd once cooked a meal pouring gasoline over a mound of sand and lighting it. More damage has been done with waste than with bullets. The open burning of everything, the raw exhaust of modern components buffeting into the air. Hardly any effort to even position these heaps downwind. What did we inhale.

A truck honked—John was here! And ten minutes later he came over. He had a piece of the lawn mower pullstart with him. He needed duct tape.

You weren't in there with the widow were you?

She's not married, John. They weren't married. She doesn't like that term.

John was winding the coil tightly in his fingers. I mean it's impressive, he said. Henry handed him the strip of duct tape.

We're thinking of going public.

Trust me buddy, you're public.

5

An old place should have drawers filled with precious ampoules in balsa tubes plugged with cotton, but Henry had been shitting in a big yellow plastic bucket lined with white garbage bags. That's how crude it was here. The extension smelled of wild roses and there were plenty of large, overgrown rosebushes with stems as thick as bamboo. The smell of roses found its way into the room. There was a rotting sill and a gap between the wall and that was how the scent got in. It made the decrepit nature of the room and the squalid situation of having to shit in a bucket pleasurable. He laughed at the luxury of a good bath, and he knew how Nellie Morris must have felt when she'd left the house and moved into a seniors home that had running water.

He was tying off a garbage bag and replacing it with a new one when he realized he was wrong about where the scent was coming from. It was in the bags. The bags were scented. It was the scent of garbage bags he was smelling, a cheap scent of flowers. He was crouching over a bucket that had been there when he bought the house. He hadn't even bought a new bucket and now all he had was the knowledge of how much
his shit weighed. This was worse than how he'd taken a shit in Afghanistan.

He went to Wilson Noel's and bought a sheet of plywood and two pounds of wood screws, a quart of white interior paint and a nylon paintbrush. He drew a plan and cut the board with a hand saw and screwed the boards together and recessed the front panel so that it angled in as it fell to the floor. That way, he explained to Baxter Penney, you can tuck your heels in.

Baxter looked at his sawdust toilet without taking his hands from his pockets. He sort of dipped one knee to get an angle on it. Fancy, he said. But you got the electrical in here. Code one means a bathroom into her. You could hook into next door's septic system (he meant John and Silvia's). What you should be concentrating on is a roof.

Henry painted the box white and drove into the Goulds to find a toilet seat.

He found one with cartoon tropical fish swimming in a clear gel layer. It was a toilet seat for kids, and he thought about Clem and Sadie visiting and what they'd think of this seat. But he needed a seat for everyday use. He had to think, too, of adults. He settled for a lid that slowed on a hydraulic piston. It seemed to be arguing with itself, and trying to calm down gracefully.

He bought four identical buckets at a marine supply store. He was making a composting toilet, he said with enthusiasm.

John and Silvia were unsure about the sawdust toilet.

What do you do when it's full, John asked.

You carry it to the compost and dump it and then use two buckets of water from the rain barrel to rinse it out with a teaspoon of pine-sol.

That's the compost nearest us.

You're upwind.

We have a dog.

They walked over to John and Silvia's and it was a relief to sit in one of their wide chairs. I don't think, John Hynes said, you even have a chair over there. Does he have a chair?

He was sitting on an overturned kerosene bucket when I saw him yesterday, Silvia said.

That's the thing he used to shit in.

The wetsuits hanging on the clothesline. The wind had blown all the clothes pegs together. John and Silvia had taken the kids down to a stretch of good beach. Henry had planned to do this when he bought the house, sort of live in the house as it fell down around him, sleep in the old bed upstairs until the floor gave way then sleep downstairs in the parlour and keep up a relationship with the beach until he was forced to buy a tent and live outside. That's what Colleen Grandy had suggested. A spiritual life. But the house possessed him and, unwittingly, the thought that Martha Groves owned half of it and was keeping an eye on him made him appreciate the good timbers it was constructed from and the private history of a family that was contained in letters and photographs in that ammunition box and it made him fall in love with the idea of preserving something of Tender Morris's house and his family. We are living in a time where it is easier to know more about a stranger's family by researching online than it is to know one's own. History is the constant upheaval of peregrination. Henry's family hadn't stayed put for more than a generation. The truth is neither did these families, but the houses stayed in the families and the families
were so large that there was always one member who kept up the house and passed it on down to a ninth son who did not see the need to move. It had more to do with the size of families than their predilection for staying in one place. Tender Morris, look where he died.

6

Baxter was right. He had to concentrate on the roof. The sunlight drove him to climb a ladder Melvin Careen had built out of scrap lumber. He measured the roof and wrote the dimensions on an envelope. He could borrow a wand and he had propane, he just needed the material. Down the road Keith Noyce was spraying garden seed on Colleen Grandy's new front yard. He hadn't seen much of Keith or Colleen. The spray was like the green paint Henry had seen some richer Afghans use to paint their rocks to look like grass. Perhaps the boy was embarrassed to have seen him cry. He picked him up when he was hitchhiking with his gas can, but they didn't talk much. Keith listened to music with earphones. He had that stoned way of being surprised. His finger full of nicotine.

Nice to see him getting work, though.

But what of Colleen? Had she been walking?

A dumptruck pulled into the side of the house. It was Leonard King. I was searching for rock for your well and I come upon this.

Leonard patted the side of the dumptruck as if it was obvious what he had inside. Henry, from the roof, saw the yard of soil.

It's an old potato garden, Leonard explained.

Henry asked him to elaborate.

There was a garden by a cellar so I thought I'd lay it down in behind your house.

Leonard was an enthusiastic person, but he also appreciated someone listening to him as he told these stories. He enjoyed finding out what struck someone as interesting. Leonard wasn't quite sure what part of himself, or the way of being himself, was the bit that engaged the curiosity of an open mind like Henry's. He spread his hand out and then waved his arm slowly about. You got no soil here, Leonard said. The garden that goes with this house is across the road. In fact, this house belongs across the road. They used to have their vegetables right up by Baxter's. My father told me that. That's the Morris garden in behind those alders. By rights you should be over on that.