THE INVESTIGATION INTO ARLO AND ARNIE WAS BEING conducted by Clara’s husband (a lame man in a wheelchair) who was the brother of that child who had taken the mescaline at that party some years before. He had been in touch with one person especially about this—Oscar Peterson, who knew those boys were selling drugs at that time and who in his own way had tried to protect them.
The evening after his sister had taken the drugs Darren had tried to rescue her. When they were driving her home she had left the car at a traffic stop, and jumped onto the bridge rail to see what she said were thousands of goldfish in the water. It had rained very heavily early that day, and putting her legs on the second rail she suddenly slipped. Without a sound the little girl, full of hope two nights before, fell. At that moment none of them knew anything about drugs—had no idea about them at all.
Without a thought, Darren, strong and athletic, had jumped in after her, crushing his legs on a lay of rocks.
His sister died that night. She simply did not surface for an hour, caught up in a bale of chicken wire. Clara’s boyfriend Darren Howl was left disabled. The investigation had gone on for a long while now and then petered out; whispers about drugs were simply spoken about in retrospect, and over time forgotten. Young kid got on drugs and died over at the university. Others said that Darren had accosted his sister in the car and she was trying to get away from him. Others said she knew they were taking her home to whip her, and they had before. Others said they found out she had been selling drugs and was involved with a married man.
So Darren, spurred on by these accusations, interviewed people, and on a hot, lazy day in August last year someone he contacted said: “Oh, Shane used to bring drugs down to the parties here.”
“Shane who?” Darren asked.
“Shane Stroud.”
He contacted Constable Becky Donaldson and she renewed her interest in the case, but as yet had not come up with any definite results. Becky would let people at the university solve the problems of the world. She had no interest in them. She had her twenty-six-year-old lover, the young veterinarian Sandra Poke from Nova Scotia. She had her dog Muscles, she had her banjo that she played quite well. She had a four handicap in golf. She would solve the case.
Darren hardly knew who to speak to, and then someone came to see him about it all. Like many Mi’kmaq men he arrived after many years of silence.
His name was Gordon Hammerstone. He had fought for the rights of his sister and her daughter to have their band cards. His wonderful happy-go-lucky sister Melissa, who Byron had sent to music lessons long ago, on the third floor of the convent in Newcastle, had been addicted to drugs and alcohol the whole time she was pregnant with Roderick, the boy who had been born the same evening as Torrent Peterson. Taking drugs and wine, she had a son who was diagnosed as having severe fetal alcohol syndrome. She died in shame and hatred of the world.
This and other matters plagued Gordon, and one day he showed up at Darren’s office to talk about Mel Stroud.
Gordon was an excellent carver, maker of small figurines he sold, tied a hundred dozen salmon flies a year to sell in town, had a good grasp of history, never to be outraged easily. He also made bows, and was a furrier of some reputation. The reserve was to him hectares of misery given to them by another people. But he also felt the Mi’kmaq or anyone else had to decide their own lives by their own conscience. In fact he felt they had to concentrate on schools and universities. They had built New York and Toronto walking on skyscrapers above the earth—why not partake in the glory of them? They had to move into the world.
So one night listening to certain band members speaking of how much they were owed and how much was taken, he spoke out, thinking he was doing nothing wrong. But the wrong he did was not able to be mended:
“Who is not subsidized for their oil? I know you want to protect the land but remember some of us exploit it just as much as others. The world is going to the stars—get your kids educated. Our kids are more important than anything else. I think of what my sister might have been—I think of little Roderick.”
There was silence and the silence remained, and remained.
Now his nephew Roderick had found other friends and could not be handled anymore, and was told his own uncle was a traitor. That his mother had died because of racism, that the young First Nations men must take action. It was now time to retake the land. Gordon heard all of this in dribs and drabs over the last few years. He and some others continually tried to protect Roderick from the one who harmed him most—himself.
Gordon went to see Darren on a windy cold day in late August. For many moments he did not speak of anything in particular and then he said almost out of the blue: “I think Albert Raskin gave your sister the drugs, just as his friend Mel gave my sister drugs.” But Hammerstone said, if he remembered, she asked for them, and he couldn’t be positive of anything.
“Why?” Darren asked. “Why? She wouldn’t even know what they were—why?”
“I was on my way home when she arrived. She said she had a headache.”
So then Darren after ten years knew what had happened. And yet in the trauma of it all he had all but forgotten what had plagued his sister: migraines.
She had developed them at the age of fourteen. At times coming back to the farm, in youthful exuberance over a ball game, the soft sweet nights of late May, with daylight still clinging in the air, the house would be silent and dark, smelling of spring in the evening, the last twittering of birds before silence, and yet in silence not reposed, the drapes of her room drawn, and not a sound allowed. It was Annie—she had been in her room since three that afternoon because of her headache. She couldn’t go to the game, and she was still in her room in the dark.
Later she would come from her room, pale, thin and trembling.
This was the spell put on her by young womanhood that had come with her first menstrual cycle she could not escape.
So it was after many years that he, Darren Howl, had discovered why all of this had happened.
Oscar at this same time was going to Saint John to ask questions, and discovered that in the early seventies Mary Lou desperately wanted to come home, back to her child. She was taking cocaine, was thin and ragged. They lived on Britain Street in Saint John, and Mel made friends among very strange people, some of whom she was terrified of.
She missed her mommy, who was ill, and she cried often over Arlo and Arnie, and Stroud would say:
“That’s enough crying now, I know but we can do nothing about what Oscar did to them, they are dead and gone. That’s why I brought you here, to forget.”
She sent letters, addressed to Torrent, in her childlike handwriting. To Master Torrent V Peterson, 175 1/2 Arron Turn, Back Settlement, Lower Newcastle, Miramichi.
Oscar had told Torrent his mother had died, so he hid these letters in the back wall.
In one of the letters she placed a picture of herself and Mel Stroud near the Saint John Harbour. And in another envelope the day she turned twenty-one, she placed something else—a little silver watch; the one Mrs. Wally had won in the raffle the night of the wedding—chipped a little, but still ticking away the seconds of time.
“Give this to your girlfriend, Torry—when you get big and tell her it is from your mom who loves you stronger than four hundred push ups.”
The day after she sent the watch away Mel asked her where it was. She was eating her cereal. She remembered the loud music, Mrs. Wally’s “Oh dear” when she had discovered she won the watch, the accordion music.
“How did you ever get that watch?” she suddenly asked with her mouth full of cornflakes so she looked like a chipmunk.
“It just turned up. Where is it?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
He realized she had been giving the landlady letters to mail.
“No more of that,” he said. “I don’t need people from up on the river knowing where we are.”
“Why, for heaven sakes.”
“Just be quiet—eat your cornflakes. It’s bad if they know—I’m working for the government.”
“You’re working for the government? What are you doing working for the government?”
“You’d be very surprised.”
She was unsure what it all meant. But she wanted to go home. She sat in the room and listened to the wind over the great Fundy bay and wanted to go home.
She didn’t know how to hide things well. She didn’t know how to outsmart anyone, except poor Oscar. And Arlo and Arnie were no longer there to help her.
He had her too scared to talk to anyone. And twice the nice coloured man (for that’s what she called him) who they had met at the market came to ask about her, because he had seen her and had worried how she was.
“Oh don’t worry about her—worry about your own,” Mel said.
The landlady was told to mind her own business as well, that poor Mary had escaped from a brutal husband, who was looking for her with a hatchet.
“Poor little thing,” the landlady said.
Mary didn’t know how to escape and had no one to help her plan. So most of the day she sat in the chair, the window nailed and the curtain closed. Now she said she wanted to know what had happened to Mrs. Wally.
“I want to know what happened to Mrs. Wally.”
“Whatever for?”
“Because of her watch.”
“What watch?”
“The watch you give me—after Shane give it to you—I’m not so stupid.”
“You’re pretty stupid.”
“Yes—but not that stupid. I’m starting to figure things out. So if you don’t tell me, I will tell Mr. Freeze.”
“Who is Mr. Freeze?”
“The coloured man—”
“Strange name for a coloured man.”
“I don’t care—he told me to see him if I wanted. So I will go to Mr. Freeze—he told me to is what he did, and he calls me Miss Mary Lou—not all the mean names you call me. And I want you to tell me about Arlo and Arnie—and I want you to tell me too.”
So she closed her little fists and closed her eyes, and stamped her left foot.
That’s why other plans were devised for her. They had to be. Soon she would say something to someone about something that would cause trouble.
That last letter was delivered the very day Mel Stroud discovered she was pregnant.
“That’s the last thing we need. I told you—didn’t I tell you—you have to get rid of it.”
“No, I will not—I won’t. It’ll be like Torry—it’ll be Torry Two.”
“I have no need for a Torry Two,” Mel said. He started screaming and yelling.
And she went and hid in the closet for the rest of the day.
These arguments took place in a cold foggy city. In a place of torment, where she worried for the child she was carrying and some days planned her escape out the window.
But she didn’t escape out the window. She didn’t escape out the door.
One day, after Mel gave Mary Lou her insulin, she felt so weak, and her heart seemed to fade little by little. She tried to sing the Big Rock Candy Mountain but forgot the words, and Mel had never sung it to her. It was dear half-mad Oscar who always sang her that song. Mel sat in a chair, and when she reached out her hand toward him he didn’t take her hand. It was such a betrayal—you see he didn’t take her hand.
They sent her body home for burial.
The landlady stood out in the hall, the ambulance came. Mel had gone out and came back up the stairs as if he had just gotten home from the dock.
“Oh my good God,” he said, and he fell—poor man he fell to his knees. The landlady never given to emotional outbursts nonetheless put her hand on his shoulder and wept.
The birds too wept in the trees, as they seemed to all take flight together across the dispassionate sky toward the dark water beyond.
Mary Lou was now gone, and forgotten by almost everyone in the world.
It was two months later Mel’s other family came to live with him, a docile woman named Glena Brewer, and her younger, wild, abused and violent half-sister Henrietta Saffy who had been released from a Saint John halfway house two weeks before. She in fact was exceptionally bright, not extremely pretty, but with small penetrating, somewhat beautifully intelligent eyes, blond hair, a flattened nose, white skin with small orange freckles and hated most of the things Stroud hated. Still she had a macabre and vicious humour, and could see through most things with remarkable ease. When she had done cognitive tests for the psychiatrist at the institution she had been committed to when she was fourteen he discovered her IQ to be about 170. That is, she was forty points higher than he and fifty points higher than most of the staff. He tucked this document away.
Mel was deeply attracted to her intelligence, just as he had been to Arlo’s and Arnie’s.
He told her of the pistol Albert Raskin wanted .He said someone owed him that pistol—he would sell that to Albert Raskin for twenty-five thousand. That he had a deal to make with Albert himself. It was the pistol that had killed Jesse James. This stunning grasp of mythology was not unusual. It was a way to compare himself to Jesse James. He had compared himself to men of danger, gunslingers of old, and heroes of war, even detectives in the night.
Henrietta said nothing. She had no reason to. She knew he actually meant blackmail. For that was his best quality. She knew he had someone on the hook who lived up there. She knew something else too. One day when she was combing her hair in her bra and panties, and he glanced at her.
That is, she would replace Glena her sister, tic tac toe.
She was incredibly bright, had forged cheques, mailed false insurance claims and burned cars for the insurance by the time she was eighteen. The last thing she ever thought about was a soul. She had never yet met a person who believed in one who was half as brilliant as she was.