The Breakwater Book of Contemporary Newfoundland Short Fiction by Larry Mathews

Author:Larry Mathews
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Breakwater Books Ltd
Published: 2015-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

After the third man takes the stand, Gerard decides he can’t keep thinking about the past. What good does it do, dredging up these old details? He’s got things happening in his life right now that need attention, and all because of this trial. His lawyer has told him to keep taking notes. But everything that is being said has already been said twice before and presumably will go around nine more times. The jurors are starting to look bored. They get sent out of the courtroom a lot while the lawyers argue whether certain lines of questioning should be allowed. Gerard has heard the sheriff’s officers say the women are knitting up a storm during the time they wait downstairs in the jury room and that one of them brought in this cappuccino machine they’re all going mad for.

The lawyers have settled into a steadiness, a matter-of-fact-ness. It has been five weeks now. They joke about being here for another three months.

Here I am just a bit taller than the door latch—I can feel it digging in back of my head—and here he is picking me up by my ears and telling me to clamp it or everything is going to hurt more.

More and more, all Gerard can think of is the pup and how it’s doing. He remembers the little squeaky sound it makes when it yawns. He doesn’t know why he got it with the trial coming up, but he did. He wasn’t going to, but then the trial was postponed for the second time, some conflict with the judge’s schedule. He just saw the pup—in a pet store, of all places—and took it home.

He’d felt like a new mother. Every sound led back to the pup. He was in the library one day when he was sure he could hear Brigus keening. Gerard had stood there waiting for claws to scrape white lines on his shins. But of course the dog wasn’t there. The sound must have been a pencil sharpener or some such thing.

Walking home the long way, the pretty way—along the Avon and its low-waisted willows, past Tom Patterson Island, past Stratford Festival Theatre, past the squirrels—another squeal from Brigus, except really it came from a gull. And the next false alarm was a scream of brakes from a bus.

When he’d returned home to the pup, a copy of The Power and the Glory warming his armpit, there was only the sound of his keys hitting the table and a metronome of tail hitting the sides of the crate. Thump thump thump thump, etc.

I never told no one until my lady put it on the line. She said, “Look, my honey, you’ve got something eating you all these years and it’s eating me too and I’m falling apart and I don’t even know why.”

He wonders how the house-sitter is making out. He calls her a couple of times a week and she says everything’s fine, but he wonders if that’s really the case. It bothers him, having someone in his house.

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