Friend of My Youth

her voice, dismissing and promising. “That’s a lie.”

Pictures of the Ice

    Three weeks before he died—drowned in a boating accident in a lake whose name nobody had heard him mention—Austin Cobbett stood deep in the clasp of a three-way mirror in Crawford’s Men’s Wear, in Logan, looking at himself in a burgundy sports shirt and a pair of cream, brown, and burgundy plaid pants. Both permanent press.
    “Listen to me,” Jerry Crawford said to him. “With the darker shirt and the lighter pants you can’t go wrong. It’s youthful.”
    Austin cackled. “Did you ever hear that expression ‘mutton dressed as lamb’?”
    “Referred to ladies,” Jerry said. “Anyway, it’s all changed now. There’s no old men’s clothes, no old ladies’ clothes anymore. Style applies to everybody.”
    When Austin got used to what he had on, Jerry was going to talk him into a neck scarf of complementary colors and a cream pullover. Austin needed all the cover-up he could get. Since his wife died, about a year ago, and they finally got a new minister at the United Church (Austin, who was over seventy, was officially retired but had been hanging on and filling in while they haggled over hiring a new man and what they would pay him), he had lost weight, his muscles had shrunk, he was gettingthe potbellied caved-in shape of an old man. His neck was corded and his nose lengthened and his cheeks drooping. He was a stringy old rooster—stringy but tough, and game enough to gear up for a second marriage.
    “The pants are going to have to be taken in,” Jerry said. “You can give us time for that, can’t you? When’s the happy happy day?”
    Austin was going to be married in Hawaii, where his wife, his wife-to-be, lived. He named a date a couple of weeks ahead.
    Phil Stadelman from the Toronto Dominion Bank came in then and did not recognize Austin from the back, though Austin was his own former minister. He’d never seen him in clothes like that.
    Phil told his AIDS joke—Jerry couldn’t stop him.
    Why did the Newfie put condoms on his ears?
    Because he didn’t want to get hearing aids.
    Then Austin turned around, and instead of saying, “Well, I don’t know about you fellows, but I find it hard to think of AIDS as a laughing matter,” or “I wonder what kind of jokes they tell in Newfoundland about the folks from Huron County,” he said, “That’s rich.” He laughed.
    That’s rich
. Then he asked Phil’s opinion of his clothes.
    “Do you think they’re going to laugh when they see me coming in Hawaii?”
    Karin heard about this when she went into the doughnut place to drink a cup of coffee after finishing her afternoon stint as a crossing guard. She sat at the counter and heard the men talking at a table behind her. She swung around on the stool and said, “Listen, I could have told you, he’s changed. I see him every day and I could have told you.”
    Karin is a tall, thin woman with a rough skin and a hoarse voice and long blond hair dark for a couple of inches at the roots. She’s letting it grow out dark and it’s got to where she could cut it short, but she doesn’t. She used to be a lanky blond girl, shyand pretty, riding around on the back of her husband’s motorcycle. She has gone a little strange—not too much or she wouldn’t be a crossing guard, even with Austin Cobbett’s recommendation. She interrupts conversations. She never seems to wear anything but her jeans and an old navy-blue duffel coat. She has a hard and suspicious expression and she has a public grudge against her ex-husband. She will write things on his car, with her finger:
Fake Christian. Kiss arse Phony. Brent Duprey is a snake
. Nobody knows that she wrote
Lazarus Sucks
, because she went back (she does this at night) and rubbed it off with her sleeve. Why? It seemed dangerous, something that might get her into trouble—the trouble being of a vaguely supernatural kind, not a talk with the Chief of Police—and she has nothing against Lazarus in the Bible, only against Lazarus House, which is the place Brent runs, and where he lives now.
    Karin lives where she and Brent lived together for the last few months—upstairs over the hardware store, at the back, a big room with an alcove (the baby’s) and a kitchen at one end. She spends a lot of her time over at Austin’s, cleaning out his house, getting everything ready for his departure to Hawaii. The house he lives in, still, is the old parsonage, on Pondicherry