Back in the horse-and-buggy days, Laingford’s grocers knew a thing or two about service. Picture a butcher in a clean apron, offering you the choicest cuts, the freshest, the best. You can find the same Old Tyme courtesy at Kountry Pantree. Our fully trained staff are in touch with the past, and at the same time offer you the future. Service, the modern way!
—A particularly fulsome Kountry Pantree ad, playing on MEGA FM Radio
Many people believed that the Laingford Public Library had been ruined by its renovation in 1986. Originally a stately, red-brick Carnegie institution, it was now all open-concept, with soaring ceilings and nubby, burnt-orange sofas. The decorum was gone, they said, replaced by a notion Evan Price, the chief librarian, called accessibility. A few stiff and elegant leather chairs had been salvaged from the main research area and placed in the Kuskawa reading room, which was set apart from the rest by a wall of plexiglass, like the terminal ward in a rest home. That is where I found Herbert T. Reilly, Laingford’s resident historian. He practically lived there.
The reading room shelves were full of soft-bound, low budget books on local history, several of which were written by Herbert himself and presented to the library in small ceremonies to which, he once told me, nobody came. There were personal memoirs: Rick’s War, penned by Herbert’s old friend Richard Clarke, who had died last year at the age of ninety-two, and Maid of Honour, painstakingly researched by Edwina McHattie, who had worked as a servant in the grand Kuskawa hotels during the early 1900s. Family histories, typed on old Underwoods and photocopied, had been placed in three-ring binders and left to gather dust next to genealogical studies written in spidery copperplate. Against one wall, heavy steel cabinets (locked) held the Kuskawa files—clippings, grainy photographs, brittle playbills and advertisements for long-forgotten church socials. A yellowing notice instructed commoners to ask the head librarian for the key, but Herbert had his own.
In the main part of the library, the local history section included half a dozen slick coffee table books, beautifully produced with glossy photos and the kind of chirpy, poetic text designed to lure rich tourists to the area, but the documents in the Kuskawa room could not be taken away. They were there for good, safe under Herbert’s single, watchful eye.
When I walked into the Kuskawa reading room, Herbert was at the microfiche machine. He was nose-up to the screen, humming and clicking along with it, like they were playing music together.
“Umm . . . Herbert?” I said. His head turned slowly to see who it was. He wore an eyepatch, which covered the gap in his face where his left eye had been, once, before the war.
“Polly Deacon, I do declare! Long time no see, my dear. How have you been?”
“Good, thanks, Herbert. You’re looking well.” Herbert gave a brief bark, like a seal.
“That’s as may be,” he said. “I’m still alive—just. Working on a family history for the Campbells. Keep coming across police reports. All the old Campbells were crooks, but I hardly like to tell them that. Can’t find a respectable one anywhere.” He barked again.
“Never mind. There’s a certain cachet inherent in having criminals in your past these days,” I said.
“Really, now? I’ll have to tell Helga Campbell that. It’s hip, is it? The in thing?”
“So I’ve heard.”
“Congratulations on getting your picture in the paper, by the way. You look like a youngster I used to box with in the war.”
“Thanks. Actually, it’s something in the paper I’ve come to ask you about. In an old issue that I found. I thought you could help me.” I pulled out the old 1942 Gazette and placed it on the table before him.
“Say, now, that’s in good condition. Where did you find it?”
“We were cleaning out the storefront where Bergen and Bohm’s used to be,” I said. “It was in the bottom of one of the display cases.”
“Bergen and Bohm’s Men’s Wear,” Herbert said, looking off into the distance. “I remember it well. I got my first suit there. Too bad it went out of business. But then they all do, eventually.”
“Some faster than others,” I said. “Now, here, do you remember this man?” I turned to Silas Gootch’s obituary.
“Well, I knew of him, of course. Important man. He was involved in the making of this town, back in the 1870s. Was the mayor in, well, it says right here—1902, turn of the century. Now, he was the fellow who got Laingford electrified, you know.”
“Did you ever meet him?” I asked. Herbert gave me a look with his one eagle eye.
“Just how old d’you think I am, Missy?” he said.
“Well, er . . .”
Bark, bark, bark. “I was born in 1917, so he was quite an old man when I was just a lad. Nope, never met him. But he was kind of a local hero. I remember when he died. I was twenty-five or so then, just married. Didn’t go to the funeral, though. That was for the society people. I was just a lowly ink-rat, then.” Herbert had worked in the print shop of the Laingford Gazette all his life, until the paper finally ditched its old presses and started sending the paper down to Orillia, where the big machines were.
“Did you know his daughters, Kate and Selma?”
“Well, I never knew Kate. She died before I was born. Hers is a sad story, really.”
“I’d like to hear it.”
“All right then. Let me think.” Herbert had the histories of most of Laingford’s families tucked away in his brain somewhere. I’d discovered this by accident, long ago, when I was doing my own family tree for a high school assignment. Herbert and I had become friends then, back in the seventies. He was like an oracle or something. A walking, talking history machine. Watching him, with his good eye closed and a kind of humming coming out of his long nose, I realized with a little twinge that I loved this old guy, almost as much as I loved George. Then, suddenly, with an exhalation like a steam train, Herbert opened his eye.
“Okay. I think I’ve got it,” he said.
“Shoot,” I said.
“Kate committed suicide in 1914, Polly. She was twenty-five years old. Her mother, Edna, was a McGillicuddy, and the McGillicuddys were from way up north somewhere—Timmins, I think. Anyway, Edna died having Kate, they say. Edna was just a slip of a thing, according to what I’ve read. Just a child. So Silas Gootch was left with this newborn daughter and nobody to look after her. But he managed with nannies and housekeepers, I guess. Gootch had plenty of money. He came from England, son of a Duke or something. Kate was devoted to her father. Then, when Kate was a young lady, Silas started courting Rachel Bohm, the daughter of Ira Bohm, who ran the menswear store. She was only a couple of years older than Kate herself. They were married when Kate was twenty-five, and they say that’s what made her do it. Kill herself, I mean. She jumped into the Kuskawa river in the middle of winter, a few months after her father married Rachel.”
“Oh, how sad.”
“Yes, it was. Of course, it was hard finding out the facts of that one. Back then, if somebody took their own life, the details were not reported in the papers. I figured it out through the death notices, diaries and so forth.”
“So Silas married again when his daughter was twenty-five. A May/December thing.”
“Yes. Silas was sixty-two when he married Rachel, who was twenty-seven. That was in 1914. It was a scandal, I guess, but he was a powerful man by that point. People accepted it eventually.”
“So Selma was Rachel’s daughter.”
“That’s right. She was born in 1914, the year that her parents married, so there’s of course some question of how hurried the marriage might have been. That also could have had some bearing on Kate’s suicide. We’ll never know, of course.”
“No, we won’t.”
“Now, Selma was a wild one. Silas wanted her to marry up, if you know what I mean. Into Laingford society, whatever that was. Instead, she ended up marrying the local grocer, Gregory Watson. Nearly killed her father. He hardly spoke to her after that, they say.”
“So that was the Watson of Watson’s General Store,” I said. Aha. I knew it!
“Correct. One of the few old businesses that’s still going strong.”
“And Archie Watson is Selma’s and Gregory’s son.”
“Well, technically. Selma and Gregory had one son, that would be Victor. I heard he died a couple of days ago. Too bad. He seemed like a good fellow. Anyway, Victor was their natural son, born in 1938, I remember. Difficult birth. That’s when I turned twenty-one—my coming of age announcement was in the paper right next to Vic’s birth announcement.”
“And Archie?”
“Selma and Gregory adopted Archie much later, in 1950. Selma couldn’t have any more children after Vic. They were both very busy with their grocery business at that time. I heard a rumour that Archie was the illegitimate son of one of their grocery girls. Anyway, Archie was what you’d call a late child, in terms of his parents’ ages. Some say they adopted Archie to work in the store when he got older. By that time, Vic was coming into his teens, and I guess he never showed any interest in taking on the family business.”
“Did you know Selma?”
“She was three years older than me, but I knew her, yes. Had a crush on her for a while. She was a real looker. And, as I said, wild. She was one of those original flappers, you know? Short hair, short skirts. Golly, but her father did hate that.”
“Is Selma still alive?”
“No, she died in 1997. By then, of course, Archie had been running the grocery business for years. His father, Gregory, pegged out with cancer in the late seventies, when Archie was a young man. Selma hung in there, though, sitting up on a tall stool behind the counter like she always did, keeping watch.” Bark, bark.
“So, around February of last year, Archie and Vic would have been the only remaining descendants of Silas Gootch,” I said.
Herbert barked again, very softly this time, like a seal on an ice floe miles and miles away. “I figured you were coming to that,” he said.
“Surely dozens of people who knew the family must know that,” I said. “How come there’s all this secrecy about the parkland thing in the paper? How come Town Council is keeping its mouth shut about it? Anyone with half a brain could ask around and figure out, or remember that Vic and Archie are Silas Gootch’s grandsons.”
Herbert patted my hand. “Polly, dear,” he said, “people don’t have half a brain these days. They spend so much time watching the darned TV and listening to their techno-music, they’ve forgotten how to think. They don’t know how to dig for information. They expect it to be fed to them, piece-by-piece, like they get it on the news.”
“But there must be lots of people who knew Selma—who remember her sitting on that stool at Watson’s. They must remember that she was a Gootch.”
“Sure there are,” Herbert said. “But the kind of people who remember those things aren’t the kind of people who want to get involved with a messy business like this Kountry Pantree superstore your aunt is so fired up about. They would rather let sleeping dogs lie.”
“But I’m not that kind of person,” I said.
“I know, kid.”
“So, who do you think knows that the Watsons effectively own, or owned the KP property?”
“Well, Polly, it was Vic, you know, and not Archie, who would have got title to it last spring. He was the elder of the two, and there wasn’t anybody else. You’ll have to ask around to find out how much he got for it,” Herbert said.
“But he’s dead, Herbert. And, jeez, he was supposed to have been against the project from the beginning. He voted against it, or at least that’s what I heard. So what’s up with that?”
“If he voted against it, I’ll eat my hat,” Herbert said. “Dig a little, my dear. Use your half a brain. And you might want to talk to young Arly, Archie’s girl. She was in here asking me the very same kind of questions about a week ago.” Herbert seemed to decide that the interview was over. He flipped the 1942 Gazette over to the front page again, folded it carefully and handed it back to me. Then, winking at me with his good eye, he rolled his wheelchair back over to the microfiche machine and fired it up.