Read The Big Why for Free Online Page B

the house. I borrowed a green tent from Rupert. I set the tent up in the main bedroom above the kitchen. I did a romantic thing. I lit three stout candles and took out my father’s flute. It’s a silver flute that my mother gave me. I dont really like the flute. It’s a bit ethereal and tight-assed. But I wanted to learn how to play it. I knew playing the flute was the opposite to how the main waters of my character flowed. In the tent with the candles and the window’s three little panes of glass over the frozen harbour, it sounded good.
    I woke up in the morning. I woke up to light filtering through the fabric of the tent. But I had forgotten about the tent. I was looking at the effect of the canvas. My father took me once on a train for a weekend in the Adirondacks, and a snow had fallen. We were staying in a cabin. Snow had caked against the cabin windows. I remember waking up to the pattern of light breaking through the snow on the window.
    I braced myself to the cold. The stove was out and I could easily roll over for another hour. But I flipped off the blankets and pushed my feet into socks, untied the tent flap, and wrestled on a shirt and sweater. I walked down the stairs and pissed on the snow near the front door. I had a brown wool hat. I took to wearing the same clothes.
    The floors were frozen. Frost on the coffee pot. A pair of gloves I’d left on a chair surprised me for a pair of hands. I love the cold. It was the reason I had come here. Discomfort had become an obsession. Or it may be that I hated discomfort so that I got a kind of exultation from the effort of overcoming it. Truth: I had wanted to live the rest of my life in Newfoundland. But it turned into sixteen months. It was enough to consider love and heartbreak and commitment and humour in the face of the crushing ache of being alone in the world.
    There was snow in the firs, and the branches were heavy and solemn. There were valleys of trees, with arms of snow frozen up into the valleys. If you must have it all culminate. If you insist. It came down to a small chunk of time that broke me. It formed me. It pried apart my backbone and left me beached. It shucked me. I will tell you of a desire to live with a rural people, to love them and be loved.
    The mornings were bright and clear. I had kindling and I shivered until the stove was hot. I had ordered seven tons of coal and a collier was on its way — Rupert told me that his brother, Bob, was captaining it. But I laughed at my cold bones and I kept opening the stove door to see the orange faces with their grey noses in the flames. I love being on my own.
    Tom Dobie had learned a lot from his father. He had his father’s tools and the fate of the father was a story I pieced together from Bartlett and the Pomeroys. It was a story of starvation and a rifle in Labrador. But I could not ask Tom about it. It would come, I thought.
    My own tools — my father’s tools — were on their way from New York. Kathleen was sending them. And so I made do with the Dobie tools. I ordered wood from St John’s and then found out that the Pomeroys had a pit saw just over in Cupids.
    Why didnt you tell me, Tom.
    I thought, Tom said, you wanted wood from town.
    I imagined a large enterprise, instead a shed with Stan Pomeroy and Tom Dobie inside. A hole in the ground and Tom in the hole wearing a veil of crepe, sawdust on his shoulders. I had plans to build on to the south end and also shore up the sills and footings. A studio and an extra bedroom for the children.
    Each morning at eight Tom arrived carrying half a pie or a large piece of cake or some fresh bread wrapped in a cup towel. This was from his mother. I made coffee, and if he had cake we broke into it for breakfast. The brook was my fresh water and the outhouse was at the north end, near the trail to the naked man and the lighthouse. If it was cold out Tom suggested we split some wood.
    He’ll cleave better if it’s frosty and it’ll warm us up.
    The