A BOOK CAME OUT CALLED LEAVING CRUELTY BEHIND: The Story of Systemic Rural Abuse. It came out that autumn and that’s why Eva’s light was on at night. It was published by the university and fifteen hundred copies were printed.
The main contributor was Faye Sackville, with Albert Raskin. The picture of their farmhouse was on the cover. Eva read the book.
Everything was silent, except the pain, the pain of someone taking over her husband’s role, even saying he loved her child in a book, and how they had tried to do right by the child.
At dawn she would dress and go to work. She would do her work and walk home in the cold night air. Then she would eat a cold supper and go to bed.
I will kill Professor Raskin. I will kill him. I will, she thought one day. It simply flashed through her.
It was almost as if the thought was a knife that pierced the centre of her brain. It was so forceful she almost fell over. She looked at her small right hand, red from the cold, with chipped red fingernail polish on it, and when she closed it, it was as if she was closing it on a knife.
Clara asked her to sue him and Sackville.
“No, I will not sue,” Eva said. It would cost too much of her soul.
She looked strangely at Clara as if trying to make her cousin, the one she had once wanted to be like, understand. Yes, if she had not wished to be like the talented Clara Bell, whose grandfather might have been the greatest premier in our province, she would not have ended up the lonely, humiliated Eva Mott.
“No,” she said again, “I will not sue. I had everything, blueberries and our horse Pete and Peaches the cat, and old Matilda and poor brave little Polly—and he took it all, and I will die.”
“No, you will not die. You will not die. I promise, you will not die.”
And Eva smiled like a lost little girl.
“Remember we went to the grade nine dance, and danced and danced together because all the boys were too shy to ask us?” Eva said. “Remember that?” And she began to laugh hysterically as if in distress for a time now gone. “And my father—remember he picked us up in that old car? I was so embarrassed!”
“Yes,” Clara said, “I remember, sweetheart. I remember.”
“Remember our wedding? Torry was some nervous at the altar—and my father whispered to me, ‘Do I have to pay for it all?’ So Torry and I tried to scrounge up the money—and Oscar—poor old Oscar paid for it without batting an eye. I was so scared something would go wrong!”
“Yes, Love”
“And remember you had to buy me a brassiere because your dad was some embarrassed by me and I didn’t have one! What did Torry ever see in me—I was so, so—silly.” And she still laughed and laughed.
“Shh. Shhhhh.”
She wrote Becky Donaldson a letter thanking her for saving her life that awful day: “You are as strong as a man,” she wrote “But far prettier, and kinder than most. And you burned your hands, and poor Mr. Hammerstone got smoke in his lungs all trying to save my little girl—I am so, so sorry.”
Torrent had pleaded guilty to save her. He was sure Eva had lighted the fire.
In prison he heard about the murder of his two uncles, in detail.
“It was Mel,” a man told him. He said that Mel followed behind the boys with his lights out.
“He’s a real prick,” the man, Gary Percy Rils, said, troubled by it all. “Hey Torrent, he’s not the nice guy everyone says.”
Then he said: “But his brother Shane is worse.”
Of course Clara and Darren Howl and Torrent himself thought little Eva had lighted the fire in the barn for the insurance. But they were wrong. And Gordon Hammerstone knew they were. His nephew had lighted the fire. He had tried to steal a grandfather clock with the backing of his new best friend Henrietta Saffy. She had watched them come and go, knowing their farmhouse was often empty, their barn locked with a simple padlock.
She had befriended Roderick in August and by September he was doing exactly what she said. He was a little elf with a strange old face and flashing pretty eyes. She laughed at his antics because he had no mental capacity to control himself. From the time they left the hospital and went in different directions, Torrent’s and Roderick’s lives were destined in this small place to meet again. It only took Henrietta Saffy to enter the apartment building with one Mel Stroud. Mel Stroud told her a dozen times not to have anything to do with him, that he didn’t want Roderick around, that he was a nuisance and would bring too much attention.
“He’s such a cute little guy.”
“Keep him away from here.”
“He’s my pet,” Henrietta said.
So she and Roderick decided on robbing the farmhouse for Native rights.
They were hauling chairs and settees and clocks out of the barn, and were going to put them on Torry’s truck and steal it all, and go to Saint John and sell them, but Roderick for some reason simply decided to light the entire barn on fire. One never knew what he was going to do from one moment to the next. No one knew this better than Gordon who had loved and protected him. But who would protect him if he ever went to jail?
Gordon had a terrible moral decision to make, and he wondered if he could. And time, time was passing. But yes, he knew he would have to. When he did, not only would they be looking for Mel Stroud but they would be looking for Roderick as well.
It took a few weeks, but this is exactly what happened.
Mel Stroud had no reason to burn that house or draw attention to himself. But now police were everywhere, the case was being reopened, people were being interviewed. And it was not only the local Corporal Becky Donaldson but the RCMP. That is why he went to the back of Oscar’s trailer and watched. Yes, all of this had come about because of the fire.
That is, though Torrent was in prison, Becky Donaldson, after speaking to Gordon Hammerstone, who told her about poor Roderick coming home in soot and paint, was certain Mel and his brother were at the root of it all, and she would not give in. Now he couldn’t even go out to a store without worrying.
So he would never trust Henrietta for doing this. He wanted to retrieve the pistol, sell it and leave, and he wanted to leave now and he planned to do it without her.
Now that the police had taken things from Oscar’s trailer he realized it had to be things Mary Lou might have sent to her son.
“What things?” Henrietta asked.
“Oh nothing—”
“We can see to it all tomorrow if you want.”
“No. You and that little Indian nutcase of yours are out of this. You’re a jail cell waiting to happen. I’ve put up with him for weeks—ketchup on the couch and everything else, dirty dishes. Peanut butter left open on the counter. Pick up after him.”
“You’re a fuss-budget. A terrible fussy man. You brought me here. You told me to come, so don’t blame me. Roderick’s a bit unhandiable,” she said. And she was unmoved when he said he might not trust her again. She shrugged when he brought out his knife and put it to her face.
“It’s because of you every squad car in the fuckin province is here searching for me. They know Torry is innocent or something and they are trying to find me and prove it—and if they do I will give you up.”
As Henrietta spit a sesame seed she said: “So unfriendly over a little fuckin barn.”
“What do you think?” Chester asked, about the old woman who had caught Albert Raskin with his hand in the till, the morning after her funeral.
“She was a nice enough lady. Blue hair at the end. Lots of the ladies end up with blue hair at the end.”
“I know. But sometimes she acted like she had just been hit over the head with a paddleboard.”
“I know, but it wasn’t her fault.”
“No. She was religious—so she will probably go straight to heaven.”
“Yes, straight up the stairway. With her can of Pledge.”
“Dusting the stairway—up to heaven?”
“Oh yes, I do think so. Her husband was an invalid after the war.”
“Which war?”
“The big one. The big one.”
“The First World War?”
“No, the Second.”
“Oh yes.”
“No one answered us from Ottawa. No one seems to know anything about us anymore.”
“Remember when the elderly tried to explain their dealings when we were young—when Beaverbrook did? With that investigation? Who believed him? Who ever believes anyone like us?”
“So let us be unmoveable. Let us in the end stand up, together, and say nothing.”
“Yes. Let us do that, then.”
“Like we did when we were young. We stood against so much when we were young. ’Member?”
“Yes, I ’member.”
“Against the takeover bids from Thetford.”
“Oh yes.”
“No one believes us.”
“No, they do not.”
Then they began to complain like old men will about what new men didn’t seem to know.
“They plan to march against us here soon.”
“I know. I thought it would all come after that truck got burned—”
Chester, sitting in an expensive orange sports coat, and wearing a white silk shirt and bowtie, while his brother Dexter wore a pair of Humphrey pants and a woollen shirt, waiting for the cataclysm to trench against them across a field they could just make out from the top window of their house. They just were not too sure when it was coming.
“Damn them,” Chester said.
“Damn them,” Dexter said.
They sat there. It was pissing down rain, and in the afternoon the first sharp pickaxes of snow began to fall against the window. Their little maid was moving about them with the earliest of Christmas decorations. Sometimes they took sneak peeks up her dress when she was on the stepladder, even though they knew it was wrong. And she worked on the ladder even though she knew they did.
There would be a protest near the statues I had helped carve with the sculptor Jonathan O’Dell. I was commissioned with him to do so, and it took us two years to get it done. I worked them through sketching, he carving, and then in the fall of 1973 he cast them in bronze and they were placed at the front of the Raskin gates, the two men standing side by side, their heads turned in opposite directions, a little smaller than they were in real life, though they had shrunk some by now.
Now these two grand statues were going to be at the epicentre of something the old men did not fully comprehend.
The students and the university professors were coming out in support of the First Nations because the courts said the Wigwam Blockade was unlawful twice in the last year.
Tracy McCaustere wanted Albert to carry a sign. It would show solidarity by a man standing morally firm.
“You’re just like Trotsky,” Dykes told him. He was tired of Dykes now. He was tired of them all. When he passed bridges he couldn’t help looking up at their highest point. If truth be known every morning he arose, dressed impeccably and wanted to die.
Nothing interested him now, even the fact that he had bought a new Mercedes, Sackville demanded it be sky blue, not the baize one they had on the lot, so they had to order it all the way from Toronto. At times she wore a gold coloured hijab when she drove it to town. In fact he hardly drove it at all.
The death of little Polly had shaken him to the core. He knew it bothered Sackville as well. He was old now, and great things were involved in the world he had not thought of before. Guilt and love and sin and soul. In some way he had given up his soul in order to carry a briefcase with important papers and remain well adjusted. He knew this now.
Twice he had tried to commit suicide in secret. Both times as far as he knew, he had failed.
He waited in his grand house on Water Street. He waited for some impossible moment he himself never wanted to happen.