Free Minister Without Portfolio by Michael Winter

past.

21
    An hour up the shore in wicked snow conditions. In Newfoundland, south is up. Henry had the radio on for company, stopping in the Goulds to fill a grocery cart and withdraw cash from a bank machine. When he got back out to the parking lot the afternoon was dark.
    The radio helped him drive the slow road out to Renews. The wind lifted the car off the road. This driving in the winter reminded him of touring through Afghanistan, the road our convoys took south of Kabul towards Kandahar. Not that he’s an expert, but one does experience things even when one is in a foreign situation ever briefly. Sand and snow both obliterate a landscape, turn it into something artificial, or a borrowed place. It does no harm to pollute this sort of landscape. Renews in winter was the Kandahar of Newfoundland, if you can think of the island as a Pashtun province and the Atlantic ocean standing in for Pakistan, which was a thought right up Henry’s alley. Tender died at home. The difference in the world rests mainly in moisture and latitude.
    He saw then lost the lighthouse beacon out on the head. Thesnow and the dark. Being driven to a place is much different than driving there yourself. The world involved in its own copulation.
    The side road was ploughed and the headlights lit up the high banks of snow along the road. There’d been a lot of weather out here since the funeral, or at least a lot of snow had drifted in from the sea. There was no place to park except on the road. He left the car running and knocked on a neighbour’s door. The house front encased in a new brick veneer. An elderly man in a clean shirt leaned himself up in the doorframe and Henry remembered John telling him that this was Baxter Penney. He could feel the tremendous heat from a woodstove barrel out the open door, the heat had a density to it. Baxter Penney looked over at Henry’s idling car, the confident shafts of headlight catching the descent of snow and said he could store that car in the lee of his barn. Baxter’s house and barn and driveway were lit up by a five-hundred-watt outdoor lamp that beamed a cruel anti-criminal light on the neatly shovelled lot and the brick veneer siding. How did you come to settle on brick?
    The answer to that, Baxter said, wears a dress.
    Henry parked the car and shut off the engine and, for the first time, realized he was now at the mercy of the sound of weather. The ocean was roaring. He crossed the road to John’s summer house and jumped the snowbank and plunged into darkness and noisy wind. He’d never been here in winter, only a handful of times in summer.
    He waded through hip-high snow to the storm door and knocked the ice from the padlock. The key. He had it in his pocket. The shackle of the lock leapt out of the chamber and that was very satisfying. Inside he tried the porch light but it did not work and he reached into the kitchen and that switch did notwork either. He kicked off his boots and felt around for the fuse box and it took ten minutes to discover it out in the front porch. He pushed on the main breaker and the lights came on. Artificial light that you have no part in creating, the system of deliverance of light is one of the cheeriest joys of the past hundred years.
    The floors were cold in his sock feet. Henry set the thermostats on several baseboard heaters and grabbed a handful of splits from the back porch and crumpled three sheets of newspaper in the kitchen woodstove. He struck a match while jumping up and down on the cushion floor and bent his elbows and laughed at the fierce conditions he was volunteering to be in. Make a cup of tea, he yelled out, but the water was shut off and the blue container that had water was frozen. He had not thought ahead. What he needed was a few packets of self-heating food. The active packaging in the army. He enjoyed that, pouring water into a bag and sealing in the meal and allowing it to heat.
    He filled a pot with snow and melted