ON THE EVENING OF THAT PHONE CALL, SOMETIME before dark and after the rains had stopped, Oscar Peterson, lay preacher, pig farmer, bolt seller, mechanic, merchant, mortuary worker and harmonica player, a man who loved his son Torrent Peterson and did not know that Torrent’s wife had lain naked five times with someone else, was pushing Darren Howl over the ruts of the barrens.
In the rural proclivity that defined both their natures, and the natures of so many around them, Oscar wore a pair of workboots, tied midway, an old pair of grey pants, a white T-shirt ripped and stained, a wallet with a chain in his back pocket, and having in his mouth a bolt of black Copenhagen snuff, while Darren, no less rural, was this evening dressed in a pair of white slacks, with braces on his legs, a blue short-sleeved shirt and a red bowtie, and a yellow fedora with a grey ribbon around its base. In his shirt pocket he carried a pen, in a white plastic pen holder with a logo from Benson’s garage.
They were both being plagued by flies—horseflies and blackflies that in hotter climes don’t multiply so rapidly. Darren was rocked by the journey but his bright eyes squinted at the sodden ground Oscar pointed to.
“Here is where they were found,” Oscar said, stopping beside the weeds along the side of the dirt road, in a seemingly endless area of nowhere at all. A sky hawk flew in the brilliant night, and a little bat flitted out almost beside them. Above to the left was a huge rainbow in the evening sky, as if Arlo and Arnie were telling them they were fine and at peace forever.
“Arnie was down on this side. Arlo was somewhat beneath him, we figure. Arlo fell first and Arnie fell soon after. But his arm was out—Arnie’s left arm was out—hooked up, in a fashion like this.” And Oscar crooked his arm. “I was the one who came out to identify the boys. So I figure even if Constable Furlong didn’t notice it—and the bodies were removed before any other police came—that Arnie had his arm up in a gesture.”
“Trying to stop the cold?” Darren said.
“No, no sir, not at all, sir. Trying—to get someone to stop.”
“Someone to stop?”
“The car to stop—someone who watched them. Look—up there—that pole—just up at the turn—Mile 17.”
“Yes.”
“Come along, I will push you there. I want you to see something.”
“How long has it been that you have been trying to solve this?”
“Years.”
“And will you?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
There was no answer for a moment. They came to a muck hole and Oscar had to push around it, to the left side. Finally he said: “Yes.”
“Are you dealing with dangerous people?”
“Yes,” Oscar said. “I’m dealing with the very most dangerous—the worst. A man who would defile himself and God by killing young boys.”
Then he said: “I want you to believe me—that I never intended to hurt anyone.”
“I know.”
“Well I will find out what happened to Arlo and Arnie and after that I will be recognized like Sherlock Holmes—or someone as big.”
“Yes.”
“I found something here last week—it had been here for a long time. Most of the evidence is long gone, but miraculously, I suppose, not this.”
They came to a birch windfall that lay out over the road, with its branches still shimmering softly in the coming evening. All was quieted by a jay bird somewhere now, making it quiet with her chirp, and then the small rustle of some small animal going home made it longing and sad.
“One thinks of murder in a place so quiet,” Oscar Peterson said.
“Did you know that was a thought in a poem by Alden Nowlan?”
“No,” Oscar said, “but one doesn’t have to write a poem to know that it is true—I have been here too many times. I have followed him with my mind’s eye. Or love—”
“Yes, that too.”
“Splendour in the Grass.”
“Yes.”
“Who with your mind’s eye—”
“Stroud, of course. Stroud. As I told you, Stroud, who had these boys rushing about for him, Stroud, who had them believing he was doing it all for them, Stroud, who hoodwinked my Mary Lou into thinking it was me who had those boys run away—Stroud, who that cold night waited—here.”
He stopped the wheelchair with a jar, and Darren Howl went forward, and Oscar held him in the chair with his right hand, his broken fingernails black with dirt.
Then he turned the wheelchair to the left, up a small nineteenth-century wagon lane, hidden from the empty dirt road.
“Here,” he said, “here is where he waited—one hundred yards away from two freezing-to-death children and watched them—die. He drove them out here, put them out of the car—the cold was thick, and he said he would be back in an hour or so. Never left—just went here, and waited. But you see, he had the knife on the seat beside him in case they did not—die.”
Oscar bit at his fingernails—he was always doing so—and then, in the sleeping quiet of evening he said: “Here, let me show you—what I found.”
And he went to the woods nearby and looked about here and there, and then picked up some piece of old poplar stump, brought it out, and holding it up he took out of his pocket a pair of tweezers.
“Embedded—I saw it glint—it was embedded. Most of it I suppose has melted away, but not this—a few pieces are left.”
“What is left of what?”
“Now,” he said, wiping his mouth quickly, “you will see.”
And within a second he had taken with his tweezers, from the little pile of orange and reddish poplar rot, a small sliver of bluish glass.
“There,” he said, and he held it for Darren Howl to inspect. “Oh—I have a tiny bit more of it in a basket at home. These are the shards of glass from his windshield that went through the air in a thousand ways on a dark night—and were embedded in the earth, where man continually embeds his misery. You can tell where that branch was—on that maple there”—he pointed to the left where a branch had been broken away some years before, its stump blackened by weather. “Right through the car—and out he goes following those boys. Later, worried and a little brilliant, he came out and chopped that branch away.”
“Can you prove it?”
“No—of course not. Nor can I prove that they sold that mescaline to he who gave it to your sister—who killed herself by accident—and when you jumped in after her you smashed your legs on the rocks below, as if they were awaiting you for eight thousand years. I cannot prove that either. But perhaps your Becky Donaldson can, for she has not let it go. I believe Stroud is working himself up to the biggest crime—the enormous one—you see, men have to do so, once they start out—all sin is an imitation of the greatest sin—and the greatest sin, the sin which all other sin aspires to, is murder. And all people who need power, sooner or later need murder, in some way or the other—in some way or the other. Maybe more the mental kind than the physical kind. It is what plagues mankind from top to bottom. And the smaller, more intense devil with him is his brother Shane Stroud. He attacked my son one night on the road—furious over Torry and Eva. You see he believed Eva was his girl. But he just did not know how strong Torry was. Right in the middle of the road. And then the next night he got in a car and raced up Load Road to try and find Eva, and runs over a girl, a child—then heads to Moncton. All of this surrounds our family like the Black Death.”
“I see—I think I see.”
Oscar was now in the mood to talk.
“You see, elderly matriarch Mrs. Lampkey long ago demonstrated this to me. For she is no different than Stroud. Oh she might think so—but wait, until I explain—”
“Explain what?”
“There was a young girl who was pregnant—her name was Mary Lou. The night she waited on tables at Ben Mott’s wedding she was already knocked up. She was a simple girl—maybe not very bright. Whenever they had a test in school Arnie or Arlo would make sure they sat beside her or behind her and whisper the answers to her in code. The only problem was, she sometimes disremembered the code they had worked out with her. She was scared and alone and became pregnant, soon she was big as a butterball—but by who, we didn’t know.”
“Not by you?”
“No! I am so sorry not by me. People wanted to think that and torment me still, for being an old man and knocking up a youngster, but not by me. I never told anyone it was not by me—for her sake. And maybe if I want to tell the truth, for my sake as well.
“You see they told her she was going to a party with them—the kind of children that come here in the summer. But this night they turned a corner in their car, and were driving back to the wharf, and there she was picking flowers by the Ladies Auxiliary hall, with the sun just going down. To them she was an hilarity, a girl of fifteen growing into a young woman who did not know enough to as yet wear a bra, whose underwear was ripped, who had a T-shirt with a picture of Minnie Mouse on it. Oh their concern now—for women’s rights.
“They put her in the middle of the back seat, with two shining young boys on either side, and drove away, she still with the smell of earth on her body, and hay straw in her beautiful hair. And that is how Torrent Peterson came into being after a bottle and a half of golden nut wine.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes. Now one of those boys at that party was Edgar Lampkey—son of the judge and he now an MP.”
“Is that right?”
“What I discovered, yes.”
“Was he the father?”
“Who in hell knows,” Oscar said, irritated. “Still, I was discovering who it was that might be involved. I went to Judge Lampkey’s house. I stood before them in old boots, my hat in my hand, with her beside me.
“But they offered what people did in those days, six hundred dollars—and God forgive me I took it. I took it for her. But you see they did not want to profit by it any more than I did. The father was ashamed, the priest I consulted was useless, and the boys were scared. The terror of an unborn child had drifted over us—but by whose authority does terror come? Christ you see was born almost in the same manner—an unwed mother and a father who knew the truth—in a stable—like my old trailer—and yet there was joy to the world. So who caused the terror?”
“I don’t know,” Howl said.
“Ha—the devil causes the terror—Satan—Satan wants our children in garbage cans.”
“You believe it?”
“On certain days I might. Sometime after, Mrs. Lampkey came to me, to the old trailer, and offers to take the girl away. Now she came without anyone else knowing—she came by herself up the back path, with a hat over her eyes, and asked to take the girl.”
“Where to?”
“She didn’t say. She smiled and asked me if I wanted a job. She said if I allowed Mary Lou to go with her I would have a job as junior supervisor at asbestos mine because she knew people there. She asked me what I earned now—I mean when she spoke—and I told her I earned forty-eight hundred a year and earned every penny. ‘Give the girl to me for a week and you will have twenty-four thousand a year,’ she said. ‘I will make sure you get a job.’
“Now she wanted, with her learning from McGill, to take the child away. To do what? I didn’t even want to ask. The child was almost five months along—so what would she do. I think I froze at the suggestion that the world she had been trained in could be that open-minded. To throw the unborn child in the garbage.
“It was an unfamiliar world to me. In some ways I’d rather have the Pentecostals browbeating me. I stared at her flat white shoes, her rather thick legs, and couldn’t lift my head for a time. She looked at me and asked if I minded that she smoke.
“ ‘Smoke. Oh God, smoke,’ I said, as if this natural plea was the only good thing said in this moment. She stared at me quite coldly—and who was I to go against a person like her? I was nothing—well a flea—compared to them.
“ ‘God Almighty,’ she said, glaring at me, ‘this is a disaster waiting to happen. You can’t let this happen to this child.’ She was almost hysterical. Her eyes showed desperation. Christ does not cause such.
“How I found my voice I do not know, but I did find it. I was shaking, but I found my voice. You see I relied on the Raskins for about three thousand of that forty-eight hundred by extracting waste from that tailings pond and pouring ten thousand pounds of bulldog lime into the surrounding area or it would all seep into Riley Brook. I did not want to lose that job. Now I was suddenly frightened of her.
“ ‘You can see what I am saying?’ she said, calmly. The little girl was in the back bedroom, and was poking her nose out, listening to the conversation about her and shaking.
“ ‘But you see—here is something you do not seem to understand, Mrs. Lampkey. It already has happened, but I will not allow anything else to happen.’
“ ‘What do you mean?’
“ ‘I mean I will not allow it to happen to the child she is carrying—that would be a crime.’
“ ‘A crime—my soul, it is not a child yet,’ she said.
“ ‘It is not?’
“ ‘No, of course not.’ Here her smile was conciliatory and bemused. She wanted her look to reveal how less cultured I was.
“ ‘Then you really believe in miracles, don’t you.’
“ ‘How is that?’ She was startled. I think surely she had given all miracles up.
“ ‘Because the way a child is made is so unimportant to you. It is never a child until it flies full-formed from the cunt of woman.’
“With that she was utterly mortified—I utterly mortified her, I guess. That is, abortion at five months was a fine and noble thing for a middle-class Protestant lady to offer poor ignorant Catholic Mary Lou, but never dare ever say the word cunt.”
“But Lampkey was never mentioned by you?”
“Never. Still it happened in Judge Lampkey’s summer place. But they were kids too—it is the adults who washed it away. You see I am not angry at boys trying to take a piece of tail—but the girl must be wise to what is being asked. In her case and in your sister’s case, neither did know. Both were helpless. Now, after this time, all must be atoned, they must come back now and say we are sorry, and if they do, well I would gladly forgive the world, but if not, if they do not now come back and say I apologize, I was a stupid young boy there is no hope for them.”
“That is my problem too,” Howl said. “Who do we blame for my sister—who was seventeen. A boy of nineteen who was callow and vain? I too think of God and wonder why.”
Oscar took the brake off the wheelchair, and swung it around.
“I have two caps of mescaline for you—it came from the batch Arlo and Arnie did for Mel Stroud. It was what I was going to take to the police, but after they died I didn’t, for there was no longer proof. If you want those responsible for your sister, start with them.”
“I will—yes, I will,” Howl said.
Then Oscar pushed his friend along on the silent road, and tears came down his eyes, and he said: “But she is gone now, the love of my life—she is gone. And there was no reason for any of it, if only she had listened to me. Of course I gave her a big black eye—and I know I was a fool, but that was to get her to stay.”
And the sweet night descended over the winding weed-strewn road.