Dorkin sat at the front of the restaurant by the window, looking out at the square with its neat, geometric criss-cross of walks, its ornate, Victorian bandstand, its old-fashioned iron benches that had survived five years of patriotic scrap drives. These things were to him as old as his memory of himself, the setting of summer walks with his mother, of summer concerts and summer games. The bandstand was boarded up now for the winter, and the triangles of grass between the walks were covered with a thin pack of dirty snow. In spite of the raw cold there were, as always, a few men on the benches—bums and merchant seamen pausing to reflect on their further peregrinations through the city in search of warmth or liquor or love. And on the walks they sat beside, there was a continuous traffic of shoppers. It was Friday, December 22, and Monday would be Christmas Day, the sixth Christmas of the war. And perhaps not the last after all.
On the table beside Dorkin’s coffee cup lay the morning news-paper, its front page full of calamity. Once more, as in the spring of 1940, the panzers had struck through the Ardennes. This time it was the Americans who had been smashed, and the headlines were ominous. NO HINT THAT GERMAN OFFFFENSIVE SPENT. GERMANS USING MORE TROOPS THAN WON BATTTTLE OF FRANCE. In the middle of the page, there was a photograph of long lines of American vehicles bumper to bumper pulling back. It was obviously a rout.
Whether as reward or punishment, Dorkin’s request for a transfer to regular army duties in Europe had at last been granted, and he was home in Saint John on embarkation leave. It was strange as always to be back among these familiar surroundings, strangest of all to be back in his own room with its relics of childhood and the haunting background murmur of the city outside the window, pervasive and elusive, like some quality of the air itself. Inside, pervasive and elusive also, there was the sad Jewish atmosphere with its sense of distances of space and time, those distances whose memory his father fought so furiously to deny and bury. But for weeks now rumours of unimaginable massacres had been filtering into the news reports, and Dorkin was aware that his father was more talkative even than usual, about nothing, about trivialities, filling the air with words. Behind this also, Dorkin knew, there was his departure, hardly ever mentioned. Dorkin did not believe for a minute that he would not be back. Soldiers never did. Parents nourished no such illusions, finding themselves almost daily on the edge of an abysm of grief, every arriving mail a heart-stopping moment of fear, every telegraph boy on the street an agent of terror.
The inquest for Zacharias and Elizabeth Clemens had been held two weeks after their deaths. Since there was nothing that Dorkin could add to the more official evidence that Carvell and Hooper would give and since it was not directly an army matter, it was not thought necessary by the army that he be there. The inquest was also in effect a trial, and when it was over, the Reverend Clemens stood condemned and Private Williams exonerated. But the law does not so willingly let go those whom it has decided to remove, temporarily or permanently, from the world, and it was another two weeks before Williams was released and returned to the army, his crimes expunged from his record, the papers ordering his dishonourable discharge made quietly to vanish.
One evening in mid-November when Dorkin was in the officers’ mess back at Utopia, a fellow lieutenant brought him a newspaper folded over to an inside page. The item was a single sentence, reporting that a body recovered from the St. John River below Wakefield had been positively identified as that of Mrs. Roseann Clemens. A week after that, a letter arrived from George Carvell, a long letter in a surprisingly elegant hand—by way, it said, of an epilogue to these late, strange events.
The day after Dorkin’s departure, Mrs. Clemens had been taken to the hospital. She was given a room by herself, and she spent most of her time just sitting. Sometimes when the nurses spoke to her, she acted as if she hadn’t heard. Sometimes she talked to herself, and sometimes the nurses had the impression that she was imagining that there were people in the room whom she was talking to.
Since there seemed to be nothing that could be done for her in the hospital, she was released and went to live with one of the families from the church. She stayed with them for a couple of weeks and seemed to be getting better. She helped with housework, and she started going out to do shopping. Then one day a man walking across the St. John River bridge from the far side saw a woman standing looking over the rail. She looked up at him, and when he was a dozen yards away, she climbed up onto the rail, let herself slide off feet first, and dropped the thirty feet into the river. About a week afterwards, some boys in a boat found her four miles downstream, wedged up against some bushes and frozen into the first skim of winter ice.
Constable Hooper had continued his search into her back-ground. He knew that the Clemenses had come to Wakefield from a church on the Miramichi, and the people there said that they had come from Ontario, but no one knew where. The Mounties checked in Ontario and found nothing. They sent descriptions of Clemens and the two women to the FBI and found nothing. The FBI checked with state police in the south and found nothing.
Hooper thought that they had probably changed their names, perhaps more than once. Both the women had apparently been married before they went with Clemens and perhaps were being pursued by husbands and relatives. Somewhere in the States, there were obviously people through whom the story could be pieced together, but it seemed unlikely that they would ever be found and that anything would ever be known beyond what was known now.
“If you believed in spirits,” Carvell wrote, “you might think they were a visitation from another world. As for Clemens, I suspect that his little room at the church was host to more female companion-ship than just Sarah Coile, and I wonder if there may have been other victims elsewhere.”
On the Sunday morning after the fire, when he had gone to the jail, Dorkin found Williams sitting by the table in his cell reading a book printed on cheap, wartime, pulp paper. The Seventh Angel. A trashy religious tract, from his spiritual mentor no doubt, with a cover lurid with the lightning of the final judgement.
“Sheriff Carvell has told you what happened?” Dorkin said.
“Yes,” Williams said. “When are they going to let me out of here?”
“I don’t know,” Dorkin said. “It’ll be a few days, I expect. There will have to be some ruling made in Fredericton.”
“Will I get compensated?” Williams asked.
“I don’t know,” Dorkin said.
“I should be. I shouldn’t have been arrested at all. It wasn’t fair.”
“No, it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair at all. But life isn’t fair. It wasn’t fair to Sarah Coile either.”
“She was a whore,” Williams said belligerently. “All she wanted was to trap me into marrying her.”
“No,” Dorkin said. “She wasn’t a whore. Just a poor, lonely girl life never gave a chance to. Now that you’ve been given a chance, you should start by showing some compassion.”
Williams ignored him.
“Reverend Limus always said that God would save me,” he said.
“It wasn’t God,” Dorkin said. “Don’t flatter yourself. God had nothing to do with it. It was blind luck and one of the local drunks.”
Back at the armoury, Dorkin had packed up his papers and his kit in preparation for his immediate and final departure from Wakefield. He had not been thanked, nor had he expected or wanted to be, and when he looked back on all that had happened, he felt more depressed than elated. He had, by mere luck, rescued an innocent boy, who was also a mean-minded, self-righteous little shit. Not that these were capital offences. But still. He had avenged Sarah Coile, but vengeance does not raise the dead. Louie Rosen, unavenged, was also dead. An end had been put to the Reverend Clemens, but his two wives in God had been taken down with him. Daniel Coile and his cronies were all alive and well. The irrepressible H. P. Whidden would no doubt go on to compensatory triumphs, the cool-blooded McKiel to still more.
The dark tower forever awaits, the knight errant forever rides out, and in the end the only thing he ever really changes is himself.
He finished his coffee, put on his great coat, and walked out into the cold. On the other side of the square, the movie theatres were advertising Going My Way with Bing Crosby and Hollywood Canteen with Barbara Stanwyck. He had no interest in either, but he noted the titles in case he might want to affect an interest in order to escape from the house for a couple of hours some evening.
He turned down King Street into the raw cold rising up from the harbour. At the corner of Dock Street, two merchant seamen, one very drunk, were arguing in a Germanic-sounding language, perhaps Swedish. A Canadian sailor and his girlfriend gave them a wide berth, and a policeman on the other side of the street had stopped to keep an eye on them.
Dorkin made his way past and walked out to the end of the slip and leaned on the rail to look across the harbour. The commercial docks on the other side were lined solid with merchant ships, squat, ugly, their paint peeling, leaving patches of rusted metal.
Down the harbour beyond the commercial docks, small clouds of mist shifted, dissipating, reforming above the ice-cold water. Once long ago, when he was in grade three or four, his class had been brought down here as part of an outing, and the teacher had pointed down the harbour to the place where nearly three and a half centuries before, Champlain’s little ship had anchored. Now in the place, or near it, Dorkin could make out through the mist the shape of a destroyer, grey, low, clean-lined, and deadly, riding at anchor, awaiting its charges.