Deluded Your Sailors by Michelle Butler Hallett

to indicate English settlement in this area before 1760.
    Seth stopped lighting his cigarette, quite serious. —He the same Winslow who started the whole Settlement 250 thing?
    Nichole nodded.
    â€”Dorinda’s into Settlement 250 up to her tits, too. Jesus, Nichole, there’s fuckin millions on the go here, and that’s just what’s on the books, never mind what’s stashed in the pork-barrels. Stakeholders, they call themselves. Stake through the heart is what they need. You all right? You wanna get a drink?
    No, I want a two-litre pail of ice cream, a big bag of chips, and my own toilet. —We’d have to go to Harbour Grace. Port au Mal’s dry.
    â€”Ain’t that the fuckin truth.

8) BOWGRACE
J ULY 3, 2009, S T J OHN ’ S .

    Gabriel Furey – that Gabe Furey fellah, as Seth Seabright called him – lived in Dorinda Masterson’s basement apartment. Dorinda had been sweet on Gabriel since both were in their twenties but drifted away when she heard he’d not only shacked up but had a baby on the way. Now, each nearing sixty, they lived in the same house, assumed by many to be a couple, but no: separate doors and separate keys. Gabriel settled into a calm relief, making no move on Dorinda and believing she would make no move on him.
    Gabriel had grown up in the Christian Brothers’ St Raphael’s Home for Boys, and he treasured both the concept and the reality of personal space. St Raph’s had left marks predictably tragic and tragically predictable. When younger – dyslexic and usually drunk – Gabriel could not hold down what other men called a real job. He managed to fall in love with the prime minister’s daughter, Callie Best. They had a daughter, Claire, but Gabriel remembered very little of Claire as a youngster. However, he did remember drunkenly studying Claire one evening the way paedophiles had once studied him. Monsters’ hands not only bruised but stained him, tainted his heart and mind? The nightmares graced that fear with flesh and bone. Would he ooze poison? Touch his daughter like that?
    No fuckin way.
    So he’d run.
    1979.
    Claire had been young, but not so young that she forgot him, old enough and young enough to blame herself. Gabriel left a note to Callie, trying to say he’d felt smothered, that he needed to be an artist. Bullshit, but semi-plausible bullshit. Gabriel the janitor, Gabriel the rent-a-cop, he got the means to sculpt and paint and send some money home. He also kinda lied about his citizenship – his mother had been Canadian – getting several Canada Council grants after sweet-talking various women into filling out the forms for him. The City of Ottawa commissioned a statue, installed it on Sparks Street. Gabriel had called it Sea Angel . Then someone in the NDP asked him for a sculpture of Louis Riel, which he delivered, Riel life-size and looking at the ground, hesitant, but the sculpture had gone missing and remained so. When Gabriel returned to Newfoundland in 2005, he met Claire by accident, or at least without planning to, and a little late. Already sick then, Claire died within a few months. Watching this, Gabriel talked to Callie about the real reason he’d left. Callie – God love ya, girl – had guessed the most of it. But she wanted nothing to do with him. Gabriel listened – his turn. Callie had endured derision and then silence from her father for living common-law with Gabriel. Then Gabriel had beaten her and abandoned her, left her with a girl to raise on her own. The forces of Gabriel’s past had strung him up and yanked him about, fed his demons. Callie knew that, but she said What the hell was I to you, a fish to split and splay out in the sun? A blow-up doll that made breakfast? He couldn’t answer.
    At their daughter’s deathbed, Callie and Gabriel spoke civilly, shared tears. That was all.
    Life continued to surprise him. A few years ago, Dorinda