The grass was trampled at the Ouellette end, nobody stayed on the paths, probably because they were muddy and traced with bicycle tire marks. And why did dogs always shit on paths? Vivian didn’t seem to notice, even though she was the one wearing white shoes. He guessed she also didn’t see the squares of waxed paper caught in the shrubbery, or the coloured couples entwined on the benches in broad daylight. She walked with her arm through his, looking up at the trees as though they were on a country lane.
“Isn’t it amazing,” she said, “how one tree can be perfectly still and the tree right beside it is trembling in the wind?”
“Just like you and me,” he said.
They sat beside the fountain, downwind of the spray so the freshened air blew over them, and then they walked again. They could hear traffic from Tecumseh Boulevard. When they reached the sunken garden without being mugged, she led him down the steps. Flower beds lined the paved walkways and she stopped at each one, stooping to sniff or to cradle a bloom in her cupped fingers. Masses of rose petals fell off into her hands, and she lifted them to him. “Just smell their bouquet,” she said, but they reminded him of his mother’s face powder and he turned his head away. Through the trees they could see Kennedy Collegiate, which backed onto the park from McDougall Street.
“My old high school,” he said, nodding at the back of the turreted, red-brick building. “We used to call it the Castle.”
“Were you a good student?” she asked him.
“Oh, sure, straight As. Captain of the baseball team, all that.” He stared at the deserted diamond behind the school.
“Actually,” he said, “I didn’t finish grade nine.”
“Why not?”
“I had to help my father.”
“Building houses?”
“The war was on, the Depression was over. Anyone who didn’t have a job had joined up, so wages were high. Dad couldn’t afford to hire anyone except coloureds, so I quit school and worked for him as a plasterer for next to nothing, room and board. Didn’t you ever work in your father’s store in Ferryland?”
“No,” she said. No, of course she wouldn’t have.
“That’s why I joined the Navy,” he said. “I got tired of working for nothing.”
He could see this information puzzled her. He had told her his father owned a big company and could have afforded to hire lots of workers, but now she’d seen enough to know that that hadn’t been entirely true, and he had to give some other reason for his leaving Windsor. What he’d told her might have been true. Just as it might have been true that he had gone to Kennedy Collegiate, which was an all-white school, instead of Patterson, which was mixed. He should have gone to Kennedy, so what was the harm in saying he did? He knew his family didn’t believe he was white, but he believed he was, and that was all that mattered. He didn’t know how it had happened and he didn’t care, but he knew it was true. You only had to look at him to see it was true.
He hadn’t thought about Jackson Park in years. When he was a kid he’d believed the park had been named, like him, after his grandfather, Andrew Jackson Lewis, and that, although the park didn’t exactly belong to him, he had a special right to be there. As he grew up, Jackson Park had been one of the few places where he felt he belonged. In the summer, when the other kids on his street gathered there to play baseball, he used to wander to the pavilion, climb up to the grandstand and look out over the gardens, imagining himself conducting an orchestra or singing into a microphone. He preferred singing because a singer stood before both the orchestra and the crowd, and both sides looked up to him. People strolling along the paths would wave at him, coloured couples in their Sunday clothes, unaware that they were waving goodbye.
The big celebration in Jackson Park was always August the first, Emancipation Day, the anniversary of the end of slavery in the British Empire. When he was little, he’d thought slavery was illegal only on that day, and that the rest of the year people could treat coloureds any way they liked, since they did. His parents would dress him up and give him a nickel. The park, his park, would smell of horseshit and barbecued pork, and there would be gambling tents and watermelon tables and more coloured people than he’d ever seen in one place before. His father would park their car on the grass just off Tecumseh Boulevard, next to other cars with licence plates from all over the northern States, from Indiana and Ohio, Michigan and Illinois. By nightfall everyone would be drunk just to show how free they were, and Benny and his friends would swig stolen beer and check car doors and watch out for the police, who mostly weren’t around. He remembered his father singing in the grandstand with the Garden City Quartet, and Alvina, who was barely into her teens, wearing high heels and lipstick and smoking cigarettes given to her by men in tan suits and wingtips, men with southern drawls and skin so dark that if they shut their eyes at night Jack was sure they’d disappear.
In the morning there would be blood on the pathways, torn shirts in the garbage cans, men and women sprawled under picnic tables. Before going to First Baptist, he and Benny would collect as many bottles as they could fit into their wagon and take them down to the sheeny man, who gave them a dime a load. That was during the Depression, when you could still buy something with a dime. He’d always felt as though the dime, earned only once a year, was a gift from his grandfather. At First Baptist the pastor would preach about Sodom and Gomorrah, two cities on the banks of the Jordan River, as near to one another as Windsor was to Detroit, destroyed by Jehovah in a shower of fire and brimstone for the wickedness of their ways. What that wickedness consisted of was never spelled out, but the reference to Emancipation Day was clear and the congregation squirmed in their seats.
When he turned eight and found out that Jackson Park had been named for an old mayor, he felt as though he’d been kicked out of it. The knowledge had lowered his grandfather in his eyes. Of course, he’d thought, why would anyone name a park after a barber?