Free Given by Susan Musgrave

alcoholism over our future.
    My window had fogged making me feel that no other world existed, for the moment, outside the car. We drove, each of us wrapped in our own silence — Vernal wiping his side of the window with a rag he kept on the dashboard just for that purpose — along the Bend, the winding, cratered road, named after a pioneer, Orbit Bend, that led from the Port of Mystic all the way to the Yaka Wind First Nations village of Old Mystic on the northern tip of the island. Islanders’ favourite pastime was enquiring of tourists, “What you doing today, going round the Bend?”
    Grace Moon lived in Old Mystic, Vernal said. He wondered if her baby was going to be a boy or a girl. When I said I wouldn’t hazard a guess, he went on to say he regretted not having had at least one child of our own; he wished he had had his vasectomy undone. When I’d married him he hadn’t told me we would never be able to have kids, he saved that surprise until after we said our “I do’s”. He’d told me he hadn’t had the courage to say anything before we got married because, back then, he had been too afraid of losing me.
    Our marriage hadn’t been altogether childless. There’d been Brutus, with Canine Attention Deficit Disorder, dog acne, a pacemaker, and low self-esteem. It probably hadn’t helped that Vernal had named her Brutus. After she drowned in our swimming pool, Vernal had vowed that he’d never again fall in love with anything or anyone capable of loving him back.
    The sky, as we drove north, became more foreboding. The paved road ended and I saw a sign in the middle of a field where a small herd of horses, with ribs like radiators, stared at the dead grass: “Christian Vegetables Ahead”. As we hit the gravel Vernal swerved, but too late, and I felt the hearse juddering beneath me. “Potholes,” he muttered, then swerved back into the right lane to avoid another one, turning right off the main road at the honour stand where a plywood square nailed to a stake bore the hand-scrawled message, “Count on the Lord ,” next to another, a list of commandments: “No Loitering. No Trespassing. No Soliciting. No Dogs.” Vernal said I could count on one thing and that was getting a new self-serving platitude there every week. A man wearing a green beret and army fatigues stood guarding a bin of zucchinis the size of incendiary rockets. Yet another sign — this one not homemade — had been bolted to the bin and warned, “Video Surveillance”.
    â€œSo much for honour,” Vernal said. “I make it a point never to buy any of his wretched Christian vegetables.”
    He slowed over the washboard surface of the unpaved dusty road and then turned left at
    PARADISE FARM B&B
Stay Here for the Rest of Your Life.
    I recalled that after our aborted trip to the interior, Vernal had said “remind me to avoid any place that uses ‘paradise’ as an enticement .”
    â€œThe previous owner’s sign, not mine,” Vernal said, as if he knew what I was thinking. “I keep meaning to take it down, but . . . well, it’s on my list of things to do around here. I still get people driving in, wanting a room for the weekend, asking if we take kids or pets. I even tried locking the gates but that didn’t stop them.”
    The long driveway, overhung with dark evergreens, ended in front of a barn. A marmalade cat sat washing himself, and didn’t move until we were almost on top of him.
    â€œAged Orange. The only cat I know who plays chicken with a hearse,” Vernal said, as he eased the Cadillac, with wet, white feathers still sticking to it, into the barn, as if bringing it home to roost.
    The barn had been constructed of bottles, what looked to be 26er’s. I assumed Vernal had found a creative use for his empties — before he found AA — one that didn’t require him lugging a Blue