During their visits to St. John’s to market the catch of salmon in the old days, he and Harry Miller stayed in rooms let by public houses for as long as a week. They drank hard after the day’s business was complete and each night Miller availed himself of the services that were at a man’s disposal in the island’s capital. At first John Senior had resisted the undertow of his own loneliness and lust, holding himself apart from the women who circled the tavern tables like gulls over a cutting room. “I was beginning to wonder,” Harry Miller said, after finally goading his younger partner into bringing a woman back to his room, “what sort of oil you required to set a flame to your wick, if you follow my meaning.”
John Senior never shared the obvious relish with which Miller engaged in his annual ritual of debauchery. Miller’s drunken propositioning of every female he encountered, his howling orgasms that could be heard on all three floors of the public house, embarrassed him, pricked at his sense of propriety in the sober light of day. But for a time they became partners in this, as in all other things.
The two men had once spent part of an evening in St. John’s at the tavern owned by Cassie’s father and after joining their table for several rounds he’d brought them next door to his house. Miller shouted propositions to the two women who’d taken refuge upstairs and Cassie’s father, far from being insulted, laughed and urged him on. He got up from his seat then and leaned low over Miller, as if he was crying on the man’s shoulder. They nodded together and Cassie’s father slapped Miller’s shoulder several times and then went drunkenly up the stairs. Miller sat on the edge of his chair, paddling at his thighs with the palms of his hands. He was singing tunelessly, wordlessly, de dee dee dee, de dee. He fingered at his crotch, leaning back in the chair as he made adjustments.
John Senior stared across at his partner. He experienced a peculiar moment of heaviness, as if the strangeness and uncertainty of the world suddenly weighed in on him. If things had gone differently, he knew, his father would be sitting beside Miller now with the same look of drunken, predatory expectancy.
John Senior’s mother had accused her husband of sleeping with prostitutes all their married life. When he was thirteen she moved into the room his sisters shared, in protest. It was a change that was never spoken of, the necessary accommodations and compromises within the family made silently, like sleepers shifting to make room for another body. But he felt the humiliation it was for both of them. It was like a sickness they passed back and forth, a virus surviving first in one host, then the other, and kept alive for years in this fashion.
Without setting out to, he had satisfied himself as to the truth of his father’s habits through remarks from neighbours and friends, through a more explicit awareness of the man’s routines and whereabouts. He said nothing to either of his parents but felt as if the knowledge made him complicit in the whole affair.
In the last weeks of his life, his father was bedridden, withdrawn and uncommunicative, babbling, incontinent. John Senior sat up with the dying man through the night while his mother and two sisters slept in the adjoining room. Morning and evening he changed the square cloth diapers, scraping the inevitable mess of feces into a chamber pot. It was a kind of penance for knowing, an indignity he was determined to spare his mother. She came into the sickroom early one morning as he squatted over the pot with the diaper. The smell beneath him was putrid, an undeniable proof of rot at the world’s core. His mother said, “A man is all stomach where women are concerned, Johnny.” She shook her head then with a wounded contempt that he had never thought might have included him in its dismissal.
Miller’s endless racket was making him feel nauseous. He could hear voices from the upstairs rooms, a hushed argument. He stood up from his seat. “Miller,” he said, starting towards him. His stomach roiled and lurched, like a salmon writhing at the end of a spear.
“Jesus Christ, Peyton!” Miller yelled.
John Senior had him by the hair, hauling him across the room. Cassie’s father called from the top of the stairs, but they were already going through the door. John Senior pushed and kicked and slapped Miller ahead of him.
“Are you mad, man?” Miller screamed. “You Christly devil-skin,” he said.
They continued in this fashion down the tiny dirt alleyway, then along the entire length of Lower Path until they’d reached the public house where they were lodging.
John Senior went back the next afternoon and waited near the house until he saw Cassie’s father come out the door and nip across to the tavern. He stood before the two women with no notion of what needed to be said or why exactly he had come. He rambled stupidly about the book Cassie held and offered an awkward apology for Miller as if he was a dog who had piddled on a good rug. The women clearly distrusted him and their distrust was heightened by what they could see of his own fear and uncertainty. They looked away and said nothing. And before he could settle on a proper way to take his leave of them Cassie’s father returned.