The Bay of Love and Sorrows Read Online Free

arse.”
    Michael turned and waved, and laughed.
    Gail Hutch lived far down the road past Oyster River bend.
    She had a child of five, had come back from Quebec, where she and her son had lived for three years, and she now paid rent to Dora Smith. She had also had asthma and kept an inhaler, which she would haul on at intervals. Sometimes in the night she would begin to suffocate, and her child, Brian, would wake, frantically searching the room until he found the inhaler for her. He would sit beside her smiling and wiping perspiration from her forehead as she took her puffs.
    Now her brother, Everette, talking and happy, sat at the table. His eyes flitted here and there. He was just finishing a long monologue about religion, which he liked to discuss. These discussions invariably worked their way around to the nature of power, and what made him, Everette, violent. He was fascinated by his own violence, and always held the belief that he would commit a great crime, that he was a man who didn’t like to be violent, but could not help it, since people got in his way Any other reasoning was beyond him. Everette’s most telling trait was his conviction that everything else was beyond him. As if, in lacking compassion, he proved himself.
    Twice in the past few years, Everette had been in jail for assault and robbery. He had got out of jail this day. He owed a large sum of money to his cousin Daryll, who was both younger and even more volatile than himself, and Everette’s mind was racing, trying to decide how best to get something from someone while giving nothing in return. He could stall Daryll because of Daryll’s respect for him, but only for so long. The five thousand dollars had been neither his nor Daryll’s to begin with. It had been stolen by them in a series of robberies, the last one, two years ago, at Wholsun Breau’s store on the inlet. When Daryll went to jail, Everette had spent this money on a motorcycle and accessories before he was sent to jail himself. Now both of them were out. So Everette had to pay back his cousin, who was serious business. He felt the best way to do this was through selling drugs. He could market the drugs for triple the profit, and he was calculating this as well. But in order to bring in the money for Daryll, Everette wanted four-thousand-dollars’ worth of uncapped mescaline. He would cap it, then up the price, selling it for fifteen thousand and make some ten-thousand-dollars’ profit himself. But he had no means of earning the initial four thousand as yet. In his wallet was twenty dollars, which he always kept. So he needed some way — besides bullying and frightening his sister — to get the rest. This was what Everette Hutch was thinking two minutes before he met Michael Skid on the night of November 19, 1973.
    A table and a heater sat in the biggest room of the small two-room shack where Gail Hutch lived. On the table sat a pot of stew, with bone-ridden stewing meat and two potatoes. The smaller room contained a portable toilet, and Gail, twenty-four, was trying to tape some plastic over the one window at the back of that room where the air and snow filtered through.
    Gail’s welfare had been cut off recently, and was “between two provinces,” lost in bureaucratic red tape.
    Her husband, who had been an assistant manager of a small Sobey’s store where he wore a white shirt and a bowtie, had died at nineteen of a brain aneurysm, when Gail was eight months’ pregnant. Since that time she had been on her own, with a grade-four education.
    Gail’s little five-year-old boy lay sleeping on the one bed, sunken down in the middle like a folded piece of paper.
    A statue of the Virgin and a picture of the Madonna and Child rested on the table as well, which gave precedence to the idea of religion being an opiate of the people, a controller of the poor. It certainly controlled much of Gail’s life and thought since her husband’s death. And when it did not, Everette’s