Rosie O'Dell by Bill Rowe Read Free Book Online Page A

I disturbed
     you, Rosie. I’ve got to go out and use the bathroom. I’ll be back in a minute.
     Go back to sleep.’ I woke up at dawn and his sleeping bag was empty. I thought
     he was out with Steve and Derek getting the fire going but when I went outside,
     Steve said, ‘How’s the skipper this morning? Hope he hasn’t got a big head.
     Don’t want your canoe to be too top-heavy.’ When I told them I didn’t think he
     came back from using the bathroom hours ago, they couldn’t believe it. We ran
     over to the edge of the bank. It dropped twenty or thirty feet right into the
     river. Derek spotted a place where the ground juniper was trampled on right to
     the edge. There was poo there. I asked if that was bear droppings. Derek said,
     ‘No, my love.’ Then I heard him whispering to Steve, ‘Jesus Christ, he fell in
     the river taking a crap.’ Back in our tent, we saw his big flashlight. One of
     the men said, ‘He went out in the dark next to the river without his light? With
     black bears, and bull moose, and lynx and God knows what prowling around all
     night.’ I was frightened to death and started to cry and they said, ‘Don’t
     worry, your father is a very powerful swimmer. Remember how he swam across the
     tickle from Portugal Cove to Bell Island a few summers ago? That was three miles
     of frigid ocean with icebergs still dotting Conception Bay. We’ll find him
     downriver sitting on a rock waiting for us in a few minutes.’ We toted a canoe
     down to a launching place. On the way, I heard one of the men whisper to the
     other, ‘Did you hear him bawl out or anything?’ And the other said, ‘No, he must
     have been too embarrassed at being so effing stupid as he went over.’ We put on
     our life jackets, pushed off and shot the rapids. It only took us a few minutes
     to spot him. He was partly on a beach in a little cove in the river lying on his
     back, and my hopes went up sky high because someone who is drowned lies face
     down, I thought, and he looked like he was just peacefully sleeping.” Rosie
     paused and turned her eyes to me. They were welling tears, as, I realized, mine
     were too. Then she returned her gaze to the ceiling and said with a terrible
     sigh, “But he was dead, Tommy. Icy cold and dead and gone.”
    I disguised my shivering with some shifting in my chair. Rosie then said, “I
     can’t believe it. Not that he’s dead. I believe that. But that one minute, he has big brilliant plans for years ahead and the next
     minute he falls into the river in the middle of doing his poo and he’s found
     dead with his underwear down around his ankles. No matter how great you are, or
     everyone thinks you are, you can be snuffed out like a disgusting insect any
     second in the most ridiculous way possible. We are the same as stupid insects.
     That’s all we are—silly meaningless ridiculous insects.”
    I had no answers. I sat and waited. When she didn’t begin again, I asked,
     “Would you like me to stay with you at the funeral home when it starts? Mom told
     me she was going to be there the whole while with your mother.”
    “I’d like you to stay there with me very much, Tommy. I don’t know how I’m
     going to get through all this without somebody nice’s help.”

    AT CARNELL’S FUNERAL HOME the room containing Joyce O’Dell’s
     body swelled full of his colleagues and friends. I stood next to Rosie and
     watched them. Nearly all went over and looked down on the corpse in its open
     coffin and wept. Then drying their tears they talked in close camaraderie with
     other mourners and laughed. I saw only two exceptions to this weep-and-laugh
     routine. One was a stranger, tall and elegant, who came in without a word to any
     of the other mourners, skirted the coffin, and went directly to Nina
     O’Dell.
    “Who’s he, I wonder?” Rosie said to me.
    “Maybe someone your mother knows from the library.”
    “She must know him really well from somewhere, the way