Rosie O'Dell

By Bill Rowe

Warning: Graphic Content and Mature Subject Matter Rosie O’Dell is a creature of beauty, brilliance . . . and unspeakable secrets. When she was young, terrible crimes had been committed against her. Tom Sharpe became Rosie O’Dell’s high school sweetheart, and in revenge for the transgressions against her, the two young lovers committed their own crime of passion together, which ultimately ripped them apart. Thirty years have now passed since Tom has seen his Rosie O’Dell, and the intervening years have been a source of endless torment for him. He has been torn between yearning for his lost love and wanting never to see her again. These days, Tom is a successful lawyer in the city of St. John’s, but trouble seems to have a way of finding him. And now here she is: Rosie O’Dell has returned to ask for his help once more. Tom Sharpe will soon find out that his troubles are just beginning. Critically acclaimed author Bill Rowe’s political memoir, Danny Williams: The War With Ottawa, was a Globe and Mail Bestseller. The novel Rosie O’Dell marks his long-awaited return to the realm of Canadian fiction, where fans will agree he is a master at the game.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Flanker Press
• Release date: Aug 31, 2012
• ISBN: 9781771170215

Bill Rowe

Bill Rowe lives in Maryland with his wife, Sharman. Both are passionate advocates for literacy. When not writing, Bill is most likely planning for, or going on, one more adventure of his own. 

Book preview

Hamlet

Chapter 1

ROSIE O’DELL, GO BACK to hell, a poet had penned on the washroom wall. Beneath that rhyming couplet, a more prosaic hand had scrawled, And take Tommy, your little dildo on feet, with you.

The aforesaid Tommy would be me. I was standing there in the boys’ lavatory beside some smirking fellow students. They scanned my face for vexation or hurt over the portrayal of my Rosie as lower than angelic and our love as less than sublime. But I stayed stoic. I’d endured worse before and, moreover, I knew in my heart there was truth in this writing on the toilet wall. Rosie was as good a devil as she was an angel, and I was a willing mate in both her incarnations. Those were the days when together we inflicted our brutal adolescent revenge on her childhood predator, and we knew our love could never end…

THAT REMEMBRANCE CAME BACK today, decades into the future when all had been lost and long hopeless between us. But unlike my other random memories of Rosie—images of our ardent love that still flashed in my head every day and promptly evaporated—that one remained lodged there and made me ponder our teenage trauma and its straight-line connection over the years to the present catastrophe of my life.

I was still in that fog of memory and reflection on this sunny summer day when I answered the knock on my front door. I opened it and through the doorway, in the soft air and the gentle tree-dappled sunlight, I beheld an astonishing vision of my first and last love herself. Naturally I could not at once believe the sight. She had to be an apparition. I hadn’t seen the woman in thirty years, and she looked the same now as she had back then. It took me a moment to accept that she was indeed there in front of me, my exquisite Rosie O’Dell.

She had stepped back on the ochre bricks and was leaning towards a former wife’s rhododendron bush, touching a luxuriant deep-pink bloom with four spread fingers. She was in jeans and blouse, not body-hugging, but close-fitting enough, as had always been her wont, to confirm the splendid construction beneath, and her posture had the effect of accentuating her comely rump. I heard in my head the remark from her high school coach that got him suspended: Rosie O’Dell is such a good athlete because she’s high-assed like a coloured girl. I felt in this moment as if I’d been transported back over the decades to that day.

Rosie turned her face away from the rhododendron now and fixed those eyes on mine, smiling at me, or maybe at my startled lurch backwards. I felt the normal court-hardened calm leaving my face while my heart bounced about my rib cage as if I was that lovestruck and horny stripling again. What was she doing here? Was she here to say that she had forgiven my thoughtless, insensitive, callous behaviour, was finally accepting my apologies, and wanted to take up again where we had left off? Wait now. What the hell was I blithering on about? The woman was long married. A broad deep gulf of time and experience divided us. There was no hope of that. Yet, Jesus, Jesus, I cannot lie: the hope rose in me.

Hello, Tom, she said as she turned and walked my way. It’s me.

I know, I murmured. If an intelligent designer in the universe was responsible for engineering those hips and thighs to move like that, he ought to be taken out and bloody-well shot. Hi, Rosie. I was just thinking about you.

What? My goodness, that’s an amazing coincidence after all this time.

Why hold back? Not as amazing as it seems. I think about you every day.

Oh God, Tommy, is that still true? She could have added, after what you did? But she only said, "Well, you’ve got one up on me there. You only pop into my head four or five times a week."

We smiled at that and I said, Besides, as you used to say, there are no coincidences, only cosmic jokes.

I was so wise when I was fifteen, she said. What the hell happened to it? She rested her hand on my arm and pecked my cheek with her lips, her eyes wide open. She was examining me up close. And up close herself, she did not, in fact, look the same as back then. There were fine lines of maturity on her face and neck which made her look even more attractive and intelligent now than in her adorable and brilliant youth. My arms encircled her waist on their own and hugged, the action entering an old accustomed groove, as it used to do ten times a day over a thousand days, when she would melt into my embrace and push her pelvis and breasts against me the way she knew I liked, cockteasing me silly for later. However, she still knew how to destroy a mood too. Today she pulled her head and shoulders and hips back, studied my face for a couple of seconds—it felt flushed and tense—and said with a playful grin but way too loud: Don’t look so anxious, Tommy. You’d swear we were planning to kill someone.

My arms dropped right off her, and my eyes swept up and down the sidewalk nearby. Not a soul. But still an old dread swept through me with the same urge to bolt that I’d had three decades ago. I took a step back, wanting to hiss, Shut up, Rosie, for Christ’s sake. Instead I mumbled gently, That’s risky. Someone might hear you.

Sorry, I was just trying to break the ice with a little foolishness—Tom, there’s no one around to hear anything.

There could have been someone right behind me in the house. I pulled the door shut for emphasis.

There’s no one in your house but you.

Huh? What have you been doing, Rosie, spying on my place of residence?

Yes. And your law office. I’ve been secretly observing your habits and mode of life.

What? How long have you been in town?

Oh—eight days? This being Saturday afternoon, I’d say you’re on your way to visit your mother at Agnes Pratt Home.

You know, you could have telephoned or dropped by when you first got here. You didn’t have to go undercover for a week.

Yeah, I know. I was a bit timid about approaching.

That doesn’t sound like the Rosie O’Dell we all knew and loved.

Well, there’s something else too. I wanted to have a private talk with you about a problem. I had to steel myself to it. It’s kind of delicate. I had to see what was going on in your life before I asked. I need your help on an informal basis if possible.

This was starting to sound hazardous to health and sanity. I’d moseyed onto the minefield of informally helping Rosie on a delicate problem once before. That was all I needed now on top of everything else. Where’s the hubby? I asked. Did he come back with you?

Yes. But I need to talk to you before you and he get together.

I pretended to hesitate before responding in absurd professional tones: By all means, telephone my office at your first opportunity on Monday and I’ll endeavour to grant you an appointment at our earliest mutual convenience wherein we can discuss your area of concern and ascertain whether it would be appropriate for me to become involved on your behalf.

Rosie laughed. That was impressive. I feel easier about everything already.

Oh, a little sarcasm, now, is it? I laughed too. Didn’t I tell you back in high school that sarcasm is the lowest form of wit?

Yes, and I said that when I’m with you I couldn’t help it. I don’t suppose it had something to do with the quality of my audience—no-o-o.

We both laughed again, gazing straight into each other’s faces, just as we used to do back in the days of wonder and awe. You’re looking great, Rosie. You haven’t changed a bit.

You too, Tom. Still the handsomest guy in grade ten. A few more cute laugh lines, that’s all.

"I don’t know where the hell they came from. Because I can assure you—nothing has been that funny." We giggled once more but I had to look away. I’d felt a tear, maybe of laughter but more likely of loss, welling in my eye.

And talk that day we did, she and I and then her husband and I. We talked the afternoon away, dovetailing their dire need for help with a possible solution to my desperate money problem. But that night alone, as I contemplated the nasty scheme they’d pitched for unblocking our access to some riches and brooded on reviving her love for me, both notions grew in my mind as more and more prone to disaster. I forced myself to recall hard-headedly, not romantically, not mushily, but ruthlessly, how dangerously rash our love used to make me. And I had to remember without soppy music in the background what she and I had been truly like together…

I SAW HER GLOWERING at me in defiance when we were youngsters. I had just remarked how weird it was that her father’s first name was a girl’s name, Joyce. Daddy is not named after a girl, she was saying to me. Daddy is named after the grooviest writer in the world, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce. See? You little know-all. A man, not a girl. Everyone knows the great James Joyce was a man except you. You never know anything. I bet you don’t even know Daddy is a famous poet?

Yes, I do. Because I’m a poet too. Just listen: ‘Do your balls hang low? Do they wobble to and fro? Can you tie them in a knot? Can you tie them in a bow? Can you—’

"Oh don’t be so dirty all the time, Tommy. And you’re saying it all wrong anyway. It’s ‘Do your boobs hang low?’ Not ‘balls.’ God! You weren’t so smart-alecky at soccer last week when Brent made your nose bleed. I heard that everybody was reciting their favourite poem, ‘Tommy, Tommy, wants his mommy, ’ because you turned into a little crybaby."

They were not. And that was an accident. Brent is my best friend. You can’t stop your eyes from watering when you get it in the nose. I dearly wanted to give it to her in the nose, but too short an interval had gone by since the last time our mothers had come running in to pull us off each other. I looked away from her.

She leaned in front of me and stared me full in the face. You’re not going sooky baby again, are you? Because I’ll have to recite that poem again, ‘Tommy, Tommy, needs his mommy.’ She kept staring into my eyes with that tormenting saucy face on her.

I am not going sooky baby, I yelled, feeling the giveaway tears of rage forming, and I roundhoused a punch to her stomach which she evaded with an infuriating quick twist, and ten seconds later when our mothers rushed in again to quell the mayhem, Rosie was astride my chest and had all but succeeded in pinning my hands back to the floor.

My mother and Rosie’s mother Nina were great buddies from their university days, and that’s what used to place me in the O’Dell house often. Mr. Joyce O’Dell always made a point of chatting with me when he was home and I felt open and comfortable with him. One day when he was in the kitchen with Rosie and her younger sister, I said, You must be awful disappointed to have only two daughters and no son.

He gave his chuckle and put his arm around my shoulders, but before he could reply, Rosie butted right in as usual: What’s wrong with having two daughters and no son? You should ask your own father why he only has one son and no one else. Ask him if it’s because he gets stomach sick at the thought of more of the same.

Mr. O’Dell coughed a couple of times and said gravely, You’re all priceless, all three of you. Any parent would feel blessed to have either one of you. He put his other arm around Rosie and squeezed us both. Then he walked out of the kitchen, shoulders shaking, probably angry, I figured, despite having hugged her, at his daughter’s rudeness. But he looked back and I saw his eyes meeting Rosie’s. She was grinning gleefully and he was in fact shaking in laughter. A bizarre pang of jealousy went through me. These two were best friends in a conspiracy, and I was the outsider.

At home that evening, I asked Dad, Was it because you didn’t want any more like me that you and Mom didn’t have any more kids?

My God, we would have loved to have two or three more like you, said Dad, dropping the Evening Telegram in his lap in shock. And he explained that Mom had had a miscarriage a year after I was born and had been advised that it would be too risky to her health to try to have any more children. We were very lucky to have you. He frowned. How come you’re asking about all that right now, my man?

I was just wondering.

That night in bed I heard sharp words between Dad and Mom downstairs when they thought I was asleep. My mother’s voice, raised unusually high, had awakened me: "Joe, you’ve got to go with me to Nina’s birthday party for heaven’s sake."

Dad growled back, I’m not going, I said. That husband of hers has got their daughter poisoning our son’s mind with anxiety over being an only child now.

Oh that’s just silly, my love. They’re two smart little kids who dream that stuff up themselves to try to one-up each other.

No nine-year-old is that smart. Or that asinine. You know damn well where she gets it. I’m having nothing else to do with that sick prick.

How did this animosity start between you and Joyce O’Dell anyway? Didn’t you start it by calling him our prize-winning poet of modern porn?

What the hell are you talking about, Gladys? I never said a thing about his perverted poetry till he called me a bean-counter with an adding machine’s concept of literature.

Well, we’ve got to go to her birthday. Nina is my best friend.

Yeah well, maybe you should rethink having a best friend who would marry a whisky-fuelled rhymester of smut.

I didn’t hear any reply from Mom. Her footfall sounded on the stairs, and she walked up to their bedroom and closed the door. A few minutes later Dad came up too and I heard quiet murmuring from the bedroom till I fell asleep. The next morning they were as affectionate to each other and to me as usual, and from then till the night of the near-brawl at our Christmas party, I never heard Dad say a word, mean or nice, about Joyce or Nina O’Dell.

Now, Mrs. O’Dell, whom I’d called Auntie Nina from time immemorial, I really liked. Her face was so beautiful I found it hard not to stare at her. Whenever she looked at me she broke into a big smile. You’ve got your mother’s eyes, she often said. And the other daughter, Pagan—Jesus, poor little Pagan—I liked a lot too, even though she was two years younger. She was way prettier than Rosie and a hundred times nicer, never saying anything spitey to someone. Pagan had her mother’s shiny dark hair and brown, fawnlike eyes, while Rosie had ended up with her father’s orangey mop and brazen face and straight-ahead greenish-blueish-hazel eyes like a stalking cougar’s or something, all of which looked all right on a man, but definitely not so hot on a girl.

I could tell little Pagan had a crush on me from how she hung around all the time blushing whenever I noticed her, and it was too bad the two sisters’ ages were not interchanged because Rosie I hated. But since she and I had been born to the two best friends in the same week in the same hospital, me four days ahead of her—which made her contrary again whenever I lorded my elder status over her—our mothers considered us natural playmates from birth. What gradually undermined this maternal illusion was our wholehearted attempt at least once during every play date to massacre each other. Before we were ten years old our moms had mostly stopped dragging us back and forth to each other’s homes.

Although we lived in the same neighbourhood, we started out attending different elementary schools. I went to Smearies and she went to Snagnesses, which was how the kids said the names of our schools no matter how often teachers urged us to enunciate St. Mary’s and St. Agnes’s properly. To my thinking by the start of grade five, the segregation of myself and Rosie O’Dell between my Protestant Smearies and her Catholic Snagnesses was the chief benefit of the old denominational education system. Then, two weeks into grade five, I walked back into my classroom after recess and thought for a moment I was having a really bad dream. Right there, in the middle of the room, two rows away from my desk, sat Rosie O’Dell. She was smiling at me and gave me a little wave as if she was actually glad to see me.

The teacher welcomed her as a new student without explaining her abrupt appearance. Some of the kids asked Rosie, but she answered only that her parents had decided to move her and her sister here from Snagnesses. This struck every child in the class as wacky. Oh, we could understand why the two girls themselves might want to come to the best school in the world, our Smearies, but their parents? We were all acquainted with our own mothers’ sighs over how good the music and singing were at Snagnesses under the nuns.

That night when Auntie Nina dropped in to see my mother, I put together from my listening post upstairs the whole story. Last year, the parents of a child at St. Agnes’s had written the principal to complain that Pagan’s name was too contradictory for a Catholic school environment, and that "the name ‘Pagan’ as a Christian name was absurdly oxymoronic and doctrinally confusing to the other pupils." They suggested asking Mr. and Mrs. O’Dell for permission to stop calling her Pagan and to use her second name, Ivy. That name was equally secular, they said, which proved they were not fanatical about pushing religion down anyone’s throat, but the name Ivy was less jarring than Pagan on the nerves of those of more devout religious sensibilities. Everyone could be happy, they claimed, with a little compromise on both sides.

Getting wind of that initiative, Joyce O’Dell had fired off a letter to the principal detailing his revulsion on several levels. The principal replied that neither she nor the staff intended to pay any attention to the name-change suggestion. Then, soon after Pagan had entered grade three, she came home and told her father and mother that from now on she wanted to be called Ivy; some of the kids in her class at Snagnesses wouldn’t play with her because her name Pagan was going to make them all go to hell.

Joyce O’Dell went off his head and stormed the school the next morning. Finding the principal in the staff room with the teachers just before classes were to start, he roared at her standing there nonplussed in her nun’s habit that "this place is as full of superstitious fanatics as a Spanish auto-da-fé. Then railing that my daughters’ psyches will be safer among the Protestant bigots," he whisked both Rosie and Pagan out of their classrooms and enrolled them at St. Mary’s.

From that day, I experienced frissons of impending doom. Since the end of kindergarten till this year I had held the title of Smartest Kid in the Whole Class. And I would hold that title in everyone’s view, including His own, by divine right, up to the end of time. But just before Christmas break, the year Rosie arrived at Smearies, in a bloodless coup as painful as if I’d been impaled on a bayonet, I was ousted. Rosie O’Dell beat me in every test, just barely beat me but beat me nonetheless, and became the new and undisputed Smartest Kid in the Whole Class.

Meanwhile, gym sessions were providing their own measure of chagrin. I enjoyed my status as one of the best half-dozen athletes of my age group in the school. Brent Anstey was the top athlete, but I didn’t mind that because he was also my best friend. Soon, the physical education classes in grade five placed Rosie in the elite also. And as the weeks went by she won every race and every game against all the girls and nearly all the boys as well. All except Brent. They were neck and neck. Her overhand throwing of a ball was the skill that astonished the other students most. She was left-handed and with that left hand of hers she threw faster and harder and with better aim than any boy in the class but Brent.

What’s a girl doing throwing like a boy, anyway? I sneered to Brent one day at gym, loud enough for everyone to hear.

No need to get jealous, Tommy, Rosie shot back. "Give me a couple of years and I might be able to teach you how to throw like a boy too." The gym teacher’s face went cherry red and she burst out laughing before she could turn her back. All the kids, including Brent, joined in the merriment. My best friend’s face carried a look of frank admiration.

I could’ve died, I heard the gym teacher tell another teacher in the corridor that afternoon. She’s so quick and sharp with her comebacks for someone so young.

That Rosie was smarter, faster, and sharper than them didn’t bother the rest of the class. Even Brent didn’t seem to mind that she sometimes got close to overtaking him in speed of running and height of jumps. Many of the boys were smitten by secret love, judging by the way they showed off so grotesquely in her presence, and most of the girls thronged around her during breaks, vying for her notice. But all year long I ignored Rosie O’Dell except to sneak looks at her sitting at her desk in the classroom, as poised and controlled writing or drawing with that left hand as when she threw a ball in gym, and I would loathe her with all my heart.

Then, in the last period of the last day of grade five, as the teacher was completing the report cards to hand them out, she asked if some students would fill in the time by describing what they were going to do during their summer holidays. I jumped in with my plans to stay for a couple of weeks with Brent and his parents in Twillingate. I looked at Brent, and when he didn’t say anything—he always seemed shy about speaking to more than one or two persons—I described from our discussions how we would explore the tickles and runs and isles of Notre Dame Bay in his father’s boat, jig codfish, look at icebergs close up, swim in the pond, catch connors off the wharf. Murmurs of envy rose. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Rosie listening quietly. She was smiling pleasantly at me—oh it looked like a smile of pleasure but it was no doubt contrived to hide her jealousy. Then the teacher asked her what her plans were.

Now that she had turned eleven, Rosie replied, her father was taking her camping and canoeing with two other whitewater friends on the Main River that flowed from the Long Range Mountains into White Bay. That would be the high point of her summer, not only because of the pure adventure, but also because it meant her father considered her equal now to the currents and rapids of this challenging class three river. As she described the thrill and risks of shooting the rapids, so many questions flowed from classmates that the teacher pulled the big map of Newfoundland down over the blackboard and asked Rosie to stand in front of it and trace the river with a pointer. The final bell rang while she was in the middle of some event—criminally overdramatized, I thought—and kids had to scramble to get their report cards. I was glad of this commotion at the end because it was the moment I’d been dreading and I wanted no one to ask me if I’d come first or second. Rosie and I had been too close in too many tests for me to know before this instant, but I feared the very worst.

I glanced at position in class on my report card and closed it as quickly as the stab of pain bit into my heart. I slid my eyes towards Rosie. She was over there grinning faintly at her card while girls pressed around her asking, What’d you come? What’d you come? She displayed her card to them as I shoved mine into my bag and walked out the door. Brent came running up behind me. I’d forgotten him in my mortification. We heard the squeal of voices in the classroom telling each other: First. Rosie came first.

Brent and I said goodbye for the summer to friends in the corridor and walked out of the school without lingering with the many others who were gabbing. Outside, Brent said, When Jakey Power, buddy at St. Bon’s, got more goals in hockey this year than me, Dad told me not to let on how pissed off I was—just come up with a secret plan to beat him next year.

I’m not pissed off, I said. It’s only a shagging old report card. I carried the aching knowledge throughout me that, with all the secret plans in the world, I would never beat her.

Brent and I parted to walk home to lunch, agreeing to meet that afternoon. All the way home I nursed one fervent prayer in my soul: Please make Rosie O’Dell, on her trip down that river with her father, tip over her canoe. Again and again with increasing intensity, with all my heart and soul, I wished and prayed and willed: Please, please, make her tip over and drown in that river.

BEFORE I HEARD THE headline in the morning news on the radio, I never really believed in my heart that my fervent prayer for the destruction of Rosie O’Dell would be answered. It was too much to ask. The idea of her being dead and gone from my life forever was so delightful that it could not come true. This was the third morning of my two-week stay with Brent at the old family homestead in Twillingate, which his parents used as a summer country house. Previous mornings when the news began, Brent and I had to go quiet or risk the ire of his father who wanted to listen carefully to every item. Brent and I leaned forward in our chairs at the kitchen table, chewing the too-big bites of toast and jam in our mouths as fast as we could so that we could take off outdoors. I averted my eyes from Brent’s so that we wouldn’t burst out laughing at nothing again, and I gazed out the window at the forget-me-nots and daisies nodding in the breeze-rippled meadow, the wavelets down on the harbour shimmering in the radiant sun, the cathedral iceberg glistening white-green-blue in the sea beyond. We’d be out there soon, enveloped the whole day long in all that enchanted loveliness…

Canoeing mishap claims one on a Northern Peninsula river, shot from the radio, piercing my vacancy. Did I hear that right? Could it have meant what I thought it did? I stopped chewing to listen better. Details after this, said the announcer. I looked at Brent whose eyes were wide as he looked back.

I turned to Brent’s father at the other end of the table, sucking on his cigarette and studying the lame old Labrador in the corner who was studying him right back. Yes, yes, my pup, we’re going to have you put down soon, yes, yes, he said in the tone of one encouraging his dog to go for a walk. Don’t be one bit anxious about that. Yes, yes, soon as we find a vet who’ll do it cheap, it’s curtains for you, yes, yes. And the Lab wiggled his entire body and wagged his tail with all the force his stiffness would allow. I gulped down my half-chewed chunk of toast to ask my urgent question. The heaps of Brent’s mother’s homemade raspberry jam I’d spooned on managed to keep it from choking me, but an edge of crust scraped my throat. I swallowed some milk, but I would feel the rawness there for days, and a ghost of that pain would visit my throat at times for the rest of my life, reminding me of how eager I’d been on this beautiful childhood summer morning to confirm my wishful thinking: Mr. Anstey, did that mean someone in a canoe got drowned in the river?

By the sounds of it, Tommy. We’ll hear in a second if we listen.

It could be her, then. She’d been bragging her head off in school that they were going canoeing around this time on some wild river up there. A thrill, the delicious anticipation of a wicked secret hope actually happening, rushed through me.

Every week some other idiot ends up drowned, Brent’s father muttered around his Lucky Strike while the commercials pattered on. He removed the cigarette and blew a smoke ring towards us boys. How do you guys figure it? Nature’s way of cleaning out the polluted human gene pool?

It must be, I said, grinning so wide my cheeks hurt.

How about you, Brent? said his dad. Do you even know what I’m talking about?

"Yes, squeaked Brent, his indignation making his alto ascend into falsetto, I know what you’re shaggin’ talking about."

Mrs. Anstey’s lips fluttered with the force of the air she blew out in exasperation. Leave him alone, Dad, she said. And you, Brent, stop saying shaggin’ every second time you open your mouth.

I didn’t know why, but I’d begun to feel strangely agitated. As the commercial ended, a mighty urge rose in me to jump up and run outdoors into the perfect day and just ignore the newscast and everything in it. I suppressed it. I didn’t want to know, yet I had to know, who’d drowned.

The victim was a member of a group, the announcer intoned in tragic mode, canoeing on the Main River in White Bay. The geography bolted me upright. That was exactly where she’d said she was going. My prayer had come true. A sensation went through me that was not the pure pleasure I’d expected. It started out bittersweet at best and ended like acid. Then a picture more horrible than anything I’d ever seen or imagined before in my life rolled through my brain: strands of her flaming hair streamed out on the current while her face, with her wide eyes on me, sank deeper and deeper into the black water till the fading paleness vanished utterly.

My heart gave a sickening leap and my chest constricted so much I could not breathe. I felt as if I were myself drowning in a deep river of guilt. Over the roar of blood in my ears I strained to hear the name that would confirm what I already knew. The radio sounded like it was on the other side of a torrent: … withholding the name pending notification of next of kin.

Oh that’s great, Brent’s dad growled. Now everyone who knows someone up there will be worried to death until they finally find out who it was.

Tommy, sweetheart, what’s wrong? Brent’s mother paused in picking up my empty plate and placed fingertips on my forehead. Do you feel sick? You’re white as a sheet. She turned to her husband with a soft reproach: Dad, you’re not supposed to smoke those old cigarettes at the table while the boys are trying to eat their breakfast.

These are good expensive tailor-made fags, missus, not those cheap, sickly roll-your-owns filled with the next thing to cow dung I had to smoke when I was their age. The little buggers are lucky.

It’s not the smoke, Mrs. Anstey, I said, dragging her glare off her husband. Someone I know is gone canoeing on that river where someone got drowned.

Who is it? Someone from school?

One of those O’Dell girls.

The one in your class?

Yes, she’s up there with her father.

But why do you think it’s her, Tommy? I’m sure there’s lots of other people up there it could be.

I just do. Torture wouldn’t have dragged out of me my secret reason. I had willed it, I had made it happen.

There’s not much chance of it, though, said Mr. Anstey. How old are you now, Tom, thirteen? Mrs. Anstey swivelled her head in surprise and he said to her, I know, I know, he’s eleven like Brent, but he always seems older to me, with all the smart grown-up stuff he can talk about. Now then, in your eleven years of life, how many drownings have you heard about?

A nice few, I murmured. I wished he’d go back to listening to the news, but he seemed to have forgotten all about it.

A nice few pretty well covers it, he said. Small boats capsizing in ponds, snowmobiles plunging through ice, vessels foundering on the high seas, for God’s sake, death by drowning is a way of life here in Newfoundland. It’s our sacred culture. So, that could be anyone, which means there’s very little chance of it being her.

And besides, said Brent’s mother, she’s too intelligent to do anything foolish on the water. She’s the one who comes first in your class all the time, isn’t she? I felt the chagrin registering hot in my face. Brent must have told his mother about my humiliation at Rosie’s hands.

Luckily, Mr. Anstey piped up again. That O’Dell girl, now her mother is your mother’s friend, I know. But her father, isn’t he the gentleman with the unusual first name we met at your parents’ cocktail party last Christmastime?

Yes.

Now, Dad, said Mrs. Anstey, Don’t start that again. There’s not a thing in the world wrong with Mr. O’Dell’s first name.

No, not one thing wrong. The first name of ‘Joyce’ on a big hairy-arsed man, that’s just dandy.

Even Brent laughed with me and he wasn’t normally amused by his father, however funny. Mrs. Anstey tried to glower her husband quiet, but a big grin forced its way onto her face as he continued. And I suppose there was nothing in the world wrong with how he carried on at that Christmas party, either, the way he staggered up to Tom’s father and fired a drink of scotch in his face.

Mrs. Anstey did her best to use the episode as a teaching experience for me and Brent. I heard him apologizing to Tom’s father for that, which is only right and proper when you do something wrong.

Yes, and a good apology too: ‘Sorry, Joe, my mistake, that dirty look you gave me when I was topping up my glass again made me think you were the wife.’

Mrs. Anstey squelched her guffaw in mid-squawk and glanced at me. She probably thought I’d be blabbing all this back to my mother and her friend Nina O’Dell. You’re making too much of that, Dad, she said. The man had a drop more to drink at a party than he should have, that’s all, and anyway he’s a writer or something.

Oh a writer, is he? That makes it okay, then. I’m sure Tom’s father is sorry now he wanted to smack him in the gob.

I recalled hearing from my bed after that party my father pronouncing to my mother downstairs, Gladys, that Joyce O’Dell, that psychotic goddamn drunk, is never setting foot in this house again. And the same goes for that nasty arrogant nouveau riche bastard Anstey—thinks because he’s made a few bucks ripping people off at his used car stand the sun shines out of his hole. To a protest from Mom that he was going overboard, Dad roared in a whisper, No. We only invited him and his wife in the first place because Tommy and Brent are best friends.

Mrs. Anstey said now in Twillingate, The tide is out, boys. Why don’t you go down and pick some snails off the rocks and catch some connors and tomcods from the wharf? When neither Brent nor I leapt up at the mention of our favourite pastime, she said, "It won’t be her, Tommy. She’d have a life jacket on. Not like the boys around here who think it’s too sissy to wear a life jacket."

It’s got nothing to do with sissy, Mom, said Brent. When that longliner out of Fogo Island went down last winter between the Offer Wadhams and the Funks, the two dead bodies they found had their life jackets on. So, what odds if you’ve got a life jacket on or not? When your number comes up, that’s it!

"‘What odds?’ and, ‘That’s it!’ said his father. Where’d you hear that old foolishness, Brent?"

I heard you saying it.

"Exactly. And when I shoot off foolish, stupid old sayings like that I’m teaching you what the good old Newfoundland culture used to be. But you youngsters in the new generation are not supposed to pay any attention to that old nonsense anymore. For example, here’s some more Newfoundland culture from the olden days for you. When I was about your age, my dying grandfather told me that his old grandfather boasted to him that when he was a young man he shot one of the last of those penguins called the Great Auk. And I said, ‘He shot it, Poppy! My God, what’d he shoot it for? There’s no Great Auks left now!’ And he said, ‘He had to shoot it, boy. They were getting so scarce by then he might never have had another chance.’"

Brent didn’t laugh and I tried not to. We’d learned in school how tragic had been the extinction of those once countless birds by indiscriminate slaughter, and we were at the self-righteous age. But I couldn’t help having one little chuckle, before going sober again.

Yes, go ahead and laugh, Tommy, said Mr. Anstey. How can you not laugh at the good old Newfoundland culture? It’s so beautiful and insane.

Brent’s mother said to me, Phone home to St. John’s, my ducky, and relieve your mind over who got drowned before you go out.

I saw myself, when my mother or father verified my premonition, bursting into tears and blurting out how it was all my fault. I’ll wait and see if they call here, I replied. They’ll let me know if anything’s wrong.

And save me two bucks for the long-distance call, said Mr. Anstey. Besides, your father would have called already if there was anything wrong. No one lets you know faster than him when there’s something wrong.

As we got up from the table, Brent’s father said, Don’t go near the dump today.

Brent said, Why would we go near the dump? I’ve never been near the dump in my life.

Well, just don’t go there today.

Why not?

Because I’m telling you not to. Who’s the father here, you or me?

Good effin’ question, said Brent under his breath before heading out the door.

On our way down to the landwash with our hooks and lines, Brent said to me, After we catch a few connors, let’s go in to the dump.

What for?

"What for? said Brent incredulously. Because prick-face up there said don’t go near the dump."

You figure something good is going on in there?

You can mark that down. I thought you’re supposed to hate that one O’Dell’s guts.

I do. I can’t shagging stand her.

Then it can’t be her who drowned then. If you liked her, and definitely if you were cracked about her, then that would be her who got drowned, guaranteed. But if you can’t stand somebody, nothing bad ever happens to them.

For some reason Brent’s excellent logic, no doubt paternal in origin, left me more uneasy than before. Then I recalled hearing Mom on the phone with Nina talking about how Pagan and she would be joining Rosie and Joyce in Sop’s Arm a few days after their start for a driving trip. Maybe, owing to Brent’s logic, God had deflected my death-prayer onto little Pagan. Oh Jesus, Brent, Pagan O’Dell was supposed to be going up there too, I said.

Frig, said Brent before his next paternal cause-and-effect argument came to him: But they’re girls, boy. Don’t look so worried.

What has being a girl got to do with getting drowned, Brent, for the love of fuck?

He jumped ahead and faced me, walking backwards: Okay, this is how it works. It’s exactly like Dad said to Mom. He said: ‘You hardly ever hear tell of a woman getting caught for drunk driving. It’s always men who get nailed.’ So now he makes Mom drive the car home whenever they go out to the club and she’s never been stopped by the cops yet, even though, like Dad says, she always has just as much to drink as him. But before he started making Mom drive home, he got caught and lost his licence for six months and the judge said next time it would mean weekends in the clink. And it’s exactly the same with girls drowning. You never hear tell of a girl getting drowned in a river or a pond from a boat or canoe. When you hear the name of whoever it was who drowned on that river, any bets? It won’t be them, it’ll be a man or a boy. Mark it down.

I conceded the merit of Brent’s argument, but inside I felt the return of an intuitive certainty based on my privy prayer which no amount of powerful reasoning could overcome.

The two of us lay on our stomachs on the warm wood of the wharf in the delectable morning sun, dangling our baited hooks over the edge into the placidly swelling sea water below. It was so clear and transparent we could see the bottom sloping out and precipitously dropping many feet away, and the small fish and jellyfish suspended in between. The usual three cats weaved over and between us, purring and rubbing against our legs and shoulders. One animal, a grey female barn cat, half the size of the other two, would poke her moist nose into our ears in passing, making us laugh and swear and push her hard little body gently, vainly, away. I loved her.

Within two minutes Brent pulled up his line to display a connor wriggling at the end. He got to his feet above the mewling, chittering cats and yanked the hook out. Then he threw the fish towards the end of the wharf and we watched the cats race for the prize. The little female beat the two big males and crouched over the flopping fish and took it into her mouth. One of the males tried to snatch it from her but she emitted a ferocious guttural growl and cuffed him, claws out, across the eyes, forcing him to slink back a step. Then she scurried off the wharf with the fish tail wriggling from her mouth and disappeared behind a rock. Yesterday, I’d wondered to Brent if the man up the road who owned that great little cat would let me take her home to St. John’s with me when I left next week. Brent said probably, and we could ask him today. But today, it didn’t seem very important.

I turned over on my stomach again on the warm wharf wood and peered through the pellucid depths to the stones and starfish so defined and vivid on the bottom. The pale doomed face, eyes closed now, appeared among them down there. A yelp from Brent roused me from my tragic meditation. He laughed, That’s two connors for me and you haven’t caught shag all yet. He wrenched the connor off the hook and threw it ahead of the scampering cats who batted it about as soon as it landed until one of them seized it between its jaws and bellied along the ground. I turned away from the sight of the poor fish helplessly twitching, its life purposelessly and heedlessly ripped out.

I can’t concentrate, I said. That accident on the news keeps bugging me.

But like you said up at the house, your mother or father would’ve called you by now if it was one of them. Let’s go to the dump and see what’s going on.

Okay.

As I started to stand up, my name came wafting over the air. It was Brent’s mother singing out from the back porch that I was wanted on the telephone. Brent looked down at me, eyes full of foreboding. Jeez, that’s your mother now.

I sprang ahead. The agony of collision. It was the first time I’d thought of that since my Uncle Bill, visiting us from Halifax where he was in the Navy, told me that the most horrible feeling he’d ever experienced in his life was standing on the bridge of one ship as it headed straight for another, with nothing at all that anyone could do to stop them from colliding. The helpless watching and waiting for the unfolding, unavoidable disaster to happen. "‘The agony of collision, ’ they call that interval between the certainty, and the actual occurrence, said Uncle Bill, and they didn’t wrong-name it!" Running off the wharf now, knowing what I was going to hear up at the house, I could feel the emotion Uncle Bill had described in my bones and guts.

The rhythmic swishing of the tall grass against my legs as I raced along the path from the wharf to the house evoked in my brain a chant: Rosie O’Dell is dead and gone. Dead and gone. Dead and gone.

When I pushed open the screen door, Brent’s father was standing in the kitchen with the telephone receiver in his hand, looking pained. Less than an hour ago he had insisted it couldn’t be her. He spoke into the phone, Here he is now. Yes, he had to come up from the wharf. I know, long-distance charges are wicked. He turned to me. It’s your father. Here, sit down at the table. He passed me the phone with a mien as tragic as if he were handing me a chalice of hemlock.

My heart was beating madly again, but not from the running. Hi, Tom, Dad replied to my squawked hello. Mr. Anstey told me you heard on the radio that someone drowned. Mom and I figured you would, so we wanted to let you know who it was before they put the name on the news. I heard my father’s voice in the roar of blood in my ears saying, Rosie O’Dell… Mom is over with Mrs. O’Dell right now.

But suddenly I was not sure what I’d heard. Who? Who? I shouted, Did you say Rosie O’Dell?

Good God, Tom. Dad sounded greatly wronged. "I specifically said it wasn’t Rosie O’Dell, because Mr. Anstey said you thought it was her. I said it was Mister O’Dell, not Rosie. What made you—"

I was scared it was Rosie. She’s up there with him.

Yes, right. I know. No, it wasn’t Rosie, thank God, that would have been terrible, I mean it’s all bad enough, but no, it was her father, not her, poor fellow. This is all a big shock to everyone… Hello, Tom, are you still there? The receiver was resting on my shoulder. I could hear my father but I could not answer him for the moment. I hadn’t burst into tears, but tears were streaming down my face. Tom, are you there or not? This is long-distance.

I lifted the receiver again and said, Mr. O’Dell. God that’s awful. Where’s Rosie now? Is she home yet?

Not yet. She’s driving from Sop’s Arm to Deer Lake with the other men who were canoeing with them. An aunt from Corner Brook is meeting her in Deer Lake and flying with her to St. John’s on the first flight they can—

Dad, I’ve got to come home too.

My father paused. Pardon? Come home, my man? You?

I’ve got to. Rosie is in my class.

Yes, I know she is. But I didn’t have the impression you and she were… Why do you need to come home? That would mean someone having to get you and drive you back in the middle of all this—five or six hours one way. What—

I can fly in like Rosie is doing, but from Gander. I can get a taxi from here. I’ll pay for that and the plane ticket myself out of my own bank account.

Dad said nothing for another moment. It’s not a question of money, Tom. Though money is always a consideration. I didn’t think that these days, or for months now, you’ve been close enough to any of the O’Dells, especially Rosie who’s your own age, to make you—

Dad. I’ve got to. I sat there trembling.

"You’ve got to! Why have you got to, Tom? We didn’t want you to go way out there to Twillingate in the first place, but you kept on and on until we said yes, and now after a couple of days you want to come back. Your mother and I were going to spend next week over in Bonne Bay hiking around Gros Morne, and then pick you and Brent up on the way back. Now how are we…? How is he…? Why have you got to come back now, Tom?"

I couldn’t say why. But I had to go back. Mom was always trying to make me and Rosie friends. Mom would want me to.

Oh for the love of… Sometimes I got the idea I really annoyed my father. I waited as he got over huffing and sighing to say at last, Put your Mr. Anstey back on.

BRENT’S FATHER DROVE ME to Gander for the flight that afternoon, and his wife took advantage of it to be dropped off at the Gander Mall for an hour. Brent and I sat in the back seat. I loved that drive along the Gander River with mile after mile of tall silver birch trees lining the bank. On the way, Mr. Anstey said to his wife, They had to shoot that bear. She tried to attack Wince Elliot’s young fellow. He only got away by the skin of his teeth. It was lucky Wince had his rifle in his pickup.

What bear was that? asked Brent’s mother.

The one hanging around the dump. The mother bear with the cub.

Brent and I looked at each other wide-eyed. We would have been up there this morning, probably all by ourselves,