This All Happened Read Online Free PDF Page B

burnt to the ground, only chimneys left standing, the sides of churches. These same churches.
    Iris is downstairs. She’s making coffee for Helmut. Helmut has large hands and his longest finger is his ring finger. You notice the ring fingers when he’s gesturing. It’s an attractive gesture.
    31     Lydia’s off to Halifax for a week. So we spend the day together. We sharpen our skates and drive to the Punchbowl. Max and Oliver and some kids have cleared the ice. There’s a hockey game and there’s a loop ploughed off the ice. I watch Oliver lean into a turn and cross his skates. A fluid hockey player, a product of the minor leagues. I never played hockey, except in the backyard on a rink made out of water from a hose. I skate behind Lydia, tuck down and hold on to her hips, and she leans ahead and tows me.
    Max has a fire going in the woods beside the pond. He’s having a boil-up, hot dogs and coffee. He’s brought birch junks from home. Life is good.

February
    1 Lydia left this morning for Halifax to work on a script. It’s not her script, but the money is good and she feels better when she’s working. I am at the Ship, having a drink with Max and Maisie. Max is holding his shaved head. The stubble is coming through and right now there is the outline of a cat’s ears at his temples, so it’s like he’s stroking a cat. It gives him a devilish look, as though faded horns are burning through his scalp and he is trying to tame them. Max is building cabinets or Oliver and Maisie. But he is articulating one of his dreams, his hands up, gesturing wildly. He wants to make moulds of men’s asses and hang the moulds in a row in a gallery.
    Max: Also, I want to bolt a giant erect fibreglass cock onto the Royal Trust building. The cock would be a sundial.
    Maisie: That’s funny. I just wrote today that the protagonist acts as a gnomon for the action.
    Me: All over town, little strips of snow are hiding in the shadows of chimney stacks. The white strip angled north away from the sun. The chimney is a gnomon.
    Maisie: When the world is a sundial, everything looks like a gnomon.
    Max: Can I take a mould of your ass, Gabe?
    You can have my ass, Max. And that’s my limit.
    2      I should be writing the novel, but instead I concentrate on Lydia. Remembering how she smelled a pair of gloves and knew who owned them. How can I turn that into a historical moment? Moments never attenuate. Moments are compressed into the dissolve of real time. I will never forget how she looked when she smelled those gloves. They were Wilf’s gloves. She could smell cigarettes, she said. Mixed in with an indefinable personal scent, unmistakably Wilf’s. I will have Rockwell Kent’s wife have this ability. But Kathleen Kent is nothing like Lydia. Lydia is firmly planted, no-nonsense, strong clavicles and shoulders. She is attractive because of her mixture of gumption and beauty. Whereas Kathleen has a silent, introspective quality. She is serene. Lydia would never have thought that identifying an owner of gloves by smelling them was a special gift, unless I told her so. Kathleen Kent would know it was a skill worth prizing.
    3        From my bedroom window I can watch Maisie walk down Parade Street with groceries. She’s wearing a yellow raincoat. Una skids down the ice ahead of her. On the southside, skiffs are bunched together, hiding from the weather behind a rusting trawler. Two coast guard vessels, the Henry Larson and the Sir Wilfred Grenfell, are nose to nose, having a conversation about the cold.
    I wait until Maisie is in her porch. I can see her run for the phone.
    You should close your front door, missus.
    Who is this.
    I’ve frightened her. It’s Gabe, I say.
    Jeez, boy.
    I tell her I’m reading about the barber who noticed Midas had big ears. The barber has to tell someone, though he has sworn to Midas that he