Minister Without Portfolio

Michael Winter

She told him there wasn’t another person. Henry watched her
stand up from her kitchen table and push things around on a
counter. She peeled up the foam placemats that made that
satisfying sound. She was busying herself and of course he was
in her house, he was the one who would have to physically leave.
For three hours they talked it over and she told him how it was
and he fled through the spectrum of emotions and they were
both cleansed but she returned to what was not an ultimatum.
I’m leaving you now can you please leave.
But I love you, he said.
He was quite proud of how he said it. He did not know he
would begin a response with the word “but.” He hadn’t punched
a piece of furniture or raised his voice and now he said this short
sentence with mercy and with confidence and honour. It might
have been the voice of a messiah, the little messiah that runs each
of our lives. The statement was reassuring and he could tell it had
some effect. But they were broken and she knew he was a good
man but who can push through the hard times of the mundane
life any more? The idea of not enough on the line, he could
absorb that. But she had dismounted from the horse they were
both riding. One of the things she said was she wanted to live a
dangerous life.
He found his construction boots and bent his toes so the
joints creaked and said so long in his head, not out loud, it would
have been too casual. Also, he caught himself and understood
that the previous words were the best words to leave on. But I
love you. They would give him the high ground and he could
really dig a good ditch for himself now and remain unshaven and
unwashed and drink himself into a narrow hallway with no door
at the end, he could do that and search for commiseration.
It was bright out, a very happy afternoon in the autumn.
Astonishing. He put his heart on a little branch, hung it there,
and then almost skipped into the street. He knew that if she was
watching, that little hop would not be very attractive. But he was
cleaving himself in two, something he did often for sentences at a
time, but not for long days or weeks and that is how he spent his
time now, split apart. A stacked cord of wood that should have
been a tree.
Luckily he lived in a town that was built around a harbour
and Nora’s house was on top of a hill, so he had an easy walk down
to the bars on Water Street. The roofs of buildings swallowed the
hill and he would not have to walk past her house all the time
if he just stayed downtown. That is the logic people use when
they discover themselves drinking intensely. He had lived down
here just after trade school in a one-room apartment on Colonial
Street. He paused at the window now and the door where his
mail used to come—his life before Nora.
He found himself in one bar called the Spur and a man in
a corner was singing a country song which filled Henry with
loathing. The man had no right to pollute the air with that song,
a song from Nashville that understood nothing of a real life. He
knew the man, of course, had spoken to him perhaps three times.
Henry ate a pickled egg and chewed through the overboiled cold
and dull yolk and drank down a pint of pale ale and came around
on the song. Stripped of the production Henry was applying to
the vocalization, the core of the song was ultimately true and as
he left the bar he patted the old man on the shoulder. He was
humming it now, Henry was. There was a line at the end where
a man cuts off his lover’s head and kicks it against the wall. He
sang it the way the old man sang it and walked down further
towards the polluted harbour and stared up at the green and
marble monument to the war dead. The men up there with their
bayonets and loose helmets and kneeling and dying and forever
enjoying their patina. Was it brass? No one rubbed the nose of a
soldier on a memorial for good luck. Live a dangerous life.
There was the dark harbour to end his land activity. The
sleeping marine transports servicing the offshore industry and a
coast guard search and rescue vessel and a military tug of some
kind. Pure utilitarian boats all moored on very thick hawsers. He
stared at the serious hulls, empty of men, and saluted. The stink
of cooked diesel. Perhaps there is something here, he thought.
The thought of war, or not war but an expulsion from civilian
life. Or the hell with it, there is something noble in servicing oil
rigs. Oil will be the end of mankind but to be in service of it is not
without honour. What was it John’s son had told him? Oil was
the bones of dinosaurs. Civilization was something Henry had
not chosen. He was born into good manners and a life sheltered
from death. He could renounce it. What had it given him? What
were the benefits but a broken heart?

Excerpted from MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO by Michael Winter. Copyright © Michael Winter, 2013. Excerpted by permission of Penguin Canada Books Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher