NO ONE KNEW HOW THE BLAZE STARTED. IT WAS CERTAINLY a mystery, so therefore as with all mysterious events everyone had an opinion. But it was Torrent Peterson charged with the arson. He said he would burn the house before he lost it.
He had come back from church, an hour after church was over because he had been at the grave of his mother—for the very first time, at the grave of Mary Lou Toomey. He had decided when he was in Saint John that he would visit her grave.
Then he walked up the path alone, in the early afternoon. It was funny—he had not been to church in months and had gone back in the last few weeks.
His best cabinets had been hauled outside, so people said he made sure his work was safe before the fire. She was away, Eva, and was seen earlier going somewhere. But where was Polly?
The varnish, the paint, the boards all in a heap on the floor, and one match was all it took. Once that started it spread to the back of the house. People ran up from the beach near the Arron Tickle—but not many, for it was September, everyone had gone.
Torry and Eva fought desperately to save the house. Becky did as well, and some neighbours, both white and First Nations—they fought desperately to save the barn, but the dry season and the dried timber he had cut for his great cabinets and clocks made a mockery of his life.
Then there was nothing at all left.
They lost the house and barn, four chairs, three secretary desks, four cabinets, and a settee that had been delivered back to him by people who couldn’t sell them. He had lost three acoustic guitars that he had secretly been making for musicians in Saint John (one of the reasons he took the trip down there).
It was soon recognized as arson. It only took two days for the report to come back, but they waited two weeks, for the coroner’s report on Polly.
As Torrent tried to get the best pieces he had done away from the flame, he heard a small voice behind the locked door. Eva had locked it, so Polly would be safe.
“Hello—Hello—Hello—Daddy, hello. I’m going back upstairs to get my dolly and then will get Peaches, okay?”
He believed she had been with her mother, who arrived just as the girl started calling. He didn’t even realize Eva was soaking wet, with one sneaker on. When Torry discovered she was inside, the child was calm. But the whole house was on fire. He had no key on him, and neither did Eva. She had lost it, not in the water but on the bed in the bedroom, at the cottage.
Polly said: “Daddy, I will go around the back—”
“Yes. Go to the window around the back,” Constable Donaldson said, and she ran in that direction.
“Wait till I find Peaches.”
“No—don’t find Peaches! Go around to the window. I will go there and break it.”
And both the constable and he ran to the window—smashed it, and flame and smoke billowed out, and Becky fell backwards because of the heat, and the little girl said:
“Oh my dress is caught—wait—I am undoing—my dress—I am going to take my dress off—it’s my blue dress—”
Then she said: “Buttons, Daddy, please help me—I have too many buttons.”
Eva tried to get into the house, and Becky Donaldson had to grab her—she simply picked her up and tossed her like a doll—and Gordon Hammerstone managed to break into the back door but he was too far away and could get no further.
Eva screamed like no one had ever heard when Polly said: “Mommy put on too many buttons.”
And these were four-year-old Polly Peterson’s last words.
Oscar the evening after they buried the child took the pistol to Eva, wrapped in cloth. He handed it to her.
“For Torrent’s defence,” he said. “Sell it to someone, and get all the money you can.”
Clara took his case. She wanted no money. But Torrent said he had lighted the fire, to get the insurance money. She said she did not believe him. Polly had been given two sleeping pills. That she had even woken up was surprising.
“I gave them to her too,” he said.
Eva said she did not believe him. She said she gave the sleeping pills. But Torry said that was a lie, and he would not stand for it.
Clara asked him to change his plea. He did not want to live, and Eva said he must, he must live, there was too much goodness in him not to.
The prosecutor hated him—it was very evident that this case of greed, intended or not, caused the death of a sweet child. A child it seemed from and because of her progenitors no one seemed to want in the first place. They had a video of her singing in playschool, and one of her playing with her cat Peaches, which survived the fire. Why then, if he could not care for her and did not want her, did they have her in the first place? Better to have aborted her.
Eva went to the courthouse every day—the picture of the burned farmhouse on an easel in the centre of the courtroom, near the court secretary and the bailiff who weighed two hundred and eighty pounds and stood with his arms folded. It looked in its ruined dimensions like an eerie remnant of some Civil War battle with a beautifully pristine grandfather clock standing alone behind a house of ruin. Some farm after the Battle of Gettysburg.
The prosecutor laid out his reasons for the fire and the reason he was asking for twelve to fifteen years in jail, because of the death of the child.
Torrent was found guilty, sentenced to six and a half years—which was reasonable—by Judge Lampkey, the man, his grandfather, who had given Torrent’s mother the six hundred dollars years before because of certain actions at his house, with a naked girl, Torrent’s long-lost mother.
“I can sell something I have and get you money,” Eva told Clara. “I know Torrent would want me to.”
“No. You will not ever do that.”
“And we will pay off Raskin,” Darren said.
“No,” Eva said, startled and ashamed. “No.”
“Why not?”
“It is done. He is paid.”
And that’s how the pistol came to be in her possession. She tucked it in the cloth and put it under the bed, in the small apartment on Layton Street. Someday she would sell it for money for Torrent. And then she would go away—far away. She would kill herself, she was sure. She would not bother anyone again. She wouldn’t fall in love with anyone else. She might decide to drown. Yes—if she had to die, she would drown. That was the only way. Though twice now it hadn’t worked.
It was known she attempted suicide twice more. Both times she ended in hospital, both times she was under psychiatric care, both times she was released from hospital. Both times people prayed for her, sat with her, loved her back to health.
She continued to work at Zellers, and she visited her husband three times a month in jail.
She was hit upon by many men, for she was beautiful and alone, and her apartment light shone in the night and so many men wanted to protect her. But she walked by them like stone. Yes, she would protect herself. Shane came back once more. She glared at him as if she was made of stone, told him she had informed the police, and he left before they arrived. For the first time in his life, the way she looked at him made him deeply frightened, and he drew his hand back—it was an inch from touching her—and walked as if on eggshells down the stairs.
“What a terrified demon you are,” she said, laughing hysterically. She suddenly believed in demons once again.
He did not know how lucky he had been that night. She had the pistol under her coat, and the determination to pull the trigger if his hand touched her. That is why there was a slight smile of acrimony on her face as his hand reached out toward her coat.
“I am not frightened anymore. I will never again be frightened of demons,” she said.
Henrietta Saffy waited in the corner of the apartment building. And far after dark on November 2 a man approached from the old railroad track, from the direction of Oscar Peterson’s. He had been hidden in the wood behind there most of the afternoon, and now a cold spell had entered, the frost made the ground hard, the trees stood tall and empty on all sides of him, and he never liked the woods. People were on his trail too, people like Constable Becky Donaldson, who had reopened the long-dead cold case of Arlo and Arnie. You see, that’s why the man was in back of Oscar Peterson’s trailer. Oscar was a blabbermouth and things had been taken away from the trailer over the course of the afternoon—clothing, and dishes—why, one might never know—and a box. What was in that box? Letters Mary Lou had sent her son? He didn’t know. He only knew that Oscar told him he no longer had the pistol. Mel was obsessed with getting it.
He yawned, fidgeted and waited for them to go away so he could speak to Oscar politely. But then, worried, he turned and made his way home in the dark.
He had changed his looks, dyed his hair, and possessed an identification that claimed his name as a Mr. White.
Two months before, he had already been paid for the pistol by Albert, who was frightened not to pay him—paid him in an out-of-the-way Catholic churchyard, near the graves of Arlo and Arnie Toomey. It was a cold rain that was falling too and Mel had a heavy heart when he noticed those little graves.
Mel had convinced himself that he already owned the pistol and had convinced Albert to give him the money. But when Albert came that night Mel did not have the pistol on him—nor had he seen it himself in years.
The rain lashed their faces as they stood in the dark. Albert was giving Mel fifteen thousand dollars to start his bottle exchange. He waited to be handed the pistol.
“No worries. I know where it is,” Mel said, and he simply took the money and left.
And Albert, who had thought he would get the pistol that very night, was once again left empty-handed, and without the money he had brought. He even cursed Mel for the first time. For the very first time he stood his ground.
“Oh come on,” Mel said, “I’m your friend—”
Mel Stroud didn’t tell Henrietta about this meeting or the money. Oh, he was going to.
Someday soon.
But now our newly minted Mr. White believed he could get much more by taking it to the States and selling it there. That is, once he had it. That is, once he convinced Oscar to give it to him. In his mind it had already gone up past a million dollars, and the price was climbing.