DECEMBER 8. SO SACKVILLE, MCCAUSTERE, MCLEISH AND Raskin were the real vanguard. The renegade professors and McCaustere the student. Professor Dykes too, the old Bolshevik he likened himself to, to the few remaining students who knew of his fervid exploits in 1968.
Joining these people would be three union men who had worked inside the asbestos mine trying to get better rates for their workers. They had been fired for vandalism some years before and made an impression on both McLeish and Ms. McCaustere.
Two had stolen large industrial batteries to sell, and were fired. The third, a tall, hard-boned man of fifty named Clement Ricer, had claimed land belonging to the Raskin works. But he said he was forbidden to access it. He was also the man who had sold the acres on the ridge to Torry Peterson. Besides that were the pensions. The dividends had been paid out to men in Montreal who had helped the company years before. They were paid up until a few years before. They did not know that Albert was paid from the trust fund set up for him when he was a boy, and that he too collected the very dividends he said he was against.
Ricer and the First Nations needed to demand the rest of the land they both now claimed from Raskin works. And the press needed to be there to vouchsafe this demand, to be sympathetic, for the press is always sympathetic over scandal.
McLeish was a union Scotsman, hating all the upper classes, and never tiring of attempting to initiate dissent and strikes in the university itself. Small of stature but robust, red-haired and vainly offended, he had alienated himself with Tracy McCaustere. McLeish was really offended by the way he was not accepted as a visionary; that there was an old class system still in place in Canada. And he saw this horrid class system most deliberately in the Raskin works.
He had never been to Canada before he stepped off the plane, and he did not know that the university he came to would be over a thousand miles away from the centre of the country where he thought he would belong. He often thought of entering politics and running, without bothering to take up Canadian citizenship.
Albert wore a new winter coat, with the hood fur-lined, winter boots and thick white mitts.
So they came together now, in comprehensive solidarity with the students and Natives.
But as always everything would be decided by things very much out of their control, things they did not know about until all things were over.
December 7. Henrietta Saffy picked up the car, to take for a test drive, though the snow was blowing across the road, and a watery blue sky filled with ice pellets seemed to materialize when you stepped out of any building here. The buildings were dull green, the marquee waved, the hedges were covered in sacks of dark burlap. Beyond them across the iced-over parking lot, in a ridge of indigo, the shadowy outline of the barrens were seen. It was as if those boys, Arlo and Arnie, were still walking there, somewhere on that ribbon of snow-covered road that cut through all the way to Chaleur Bay. They were walking and holding on to each other and never, never letting go.
“And your husband, is he coming along?” Mr. Mott said, all his features a nervous jumble, with a black cap with black earflaps and blue borders pulled down over his ears, rushing back and forth. Other than his black cap over his narrow little head, that seemed to be even more pointed, he wore a pair of rubber boots with his suit pants tucked into them, and a suit jacket with a blue shirt and yellow tie. He wore the rubber boots because he had to go out and check the car they wanted.
He had worked here three or four weeks. His brother-in-law had gotten him the job.
This would be his very first sale. Today, late on a Saturday morning, he was the only salesman in the shop. But she had been so nice, talking to them about her lost baby, bringing his wife King Cole tea, and yes, Mr. Mott, a nervous jumble, did hit them up for thirty dollars and heaven forbid they took out forty and gave it to him.
“Yes, I am picking him up. We’ll just drive it along Arron Road and bring it back—and I’m sure he’ll want to buy it. He’s been looking at this car for weeks now.”
“Yes, yes. Well then, this is the one you want to test, the sky-blue Corvette. You know the new models will be in soon?”
She nodded, looked down at the paper he was filling out. “This one is fine—is fine. Time passes.”
“Yes,” he said, looking up and smiling, so you could make out two big buckteeth. “Time passes. Not long ago I was your age.”
“There you go,” she said. It was the third time he had tried to fill out the forms and got mixed up. His pleasantries she found offensive. So her patience was worn. She often had no patience with dull people. Her eyes were small and her face had a fierce aspect to it, her hair pulled back from her forehead and tied in a small ponytail. And who could blame her for being somewhat impatient. She had things to do. When he asked for her licence she took it out and handed it to him. So he could put it on file.
Glena Brewer. Her sister’s picture was close enough—and if he had questions he did not wish to be impolite. Besides, they lived right above him, so there was never a worry about her taking the vehicle.
“There we go,” he said. “You’ll like it, I’m sure.”
“Absolutely I will,” she answered.
“Oh, don’t forget the temporary licence. Just put it on the dash.”
December 8. The little porch light reflected on the snow. The dog was sitting up on top of his house. The barn light was also on, and shone down directly to the ground. Oscar Peterson lay halfway over the porch rail, his arms outstretched as if he was about to pick up something that had fallen. His ears and face were covered in hoarfrost; his feet were bare and covered in a smear of blood. His eyes were half-opened.
Two police officers, Darren Howl, who arrived late, and a group of bystanders who had been told over a dozen times that there was nothing to see here but kept crowding up the old drive toward the lot, were there to witness the aftermath of the murder of Oscar Peterson.
The gun cabinet was opened by Becky Donaldson and another constable with a torch, and the pistol, which Becky had been told about by Darren Howl, was gone.
Only a shotgun, a .22 rifle with the bolt missing and a .308. There was also a fairly decent bow. But no pistol. So who had taken it? When Donaldson got to the trailer the cabinet door was locked, but the place inside was even more of a shambles than previously. And there was blood, all along the floor, and on the door handle from when Oscar was trying to escape.
To both her and Darren, Oscar seemed to have run around the table, initially in a clockwise direction and then a counter-clockwise direction. But they decided that he had been stabbed as soon as he had opened the door. By the first person to enter. The second person, a female, entered a moment later. She must have been surprised because she stood where she was—her footprints in the blood showed this—perhaps startled at what was happening. Then she picked up a steak knife and came forward.
Oscar tried to make it out the window, where he was again stabbed—he had been stabbed in the counter-clockwise direction; and then he tried to make it to the door again. There was a smear of his blood on the handle, so he been stabbed many times by then.
But the cabinet was closed. Which meant Donaldson decided, after an initial inspection, that those who murdered Oscar very likely did not take the pistol. For if they left the place like it was, and the body in its frozen repose, why then did they close and lock the cabinet door so graciously?
There was a picture of the pistol tucked on the top shelf of the cabinet, and it was an authentic police issue six-inch Colt .45, made in 1908. There was even a document on how it was manufactured, and how the early 1895 version had the sanction of Teddy Roosevelt to be used as the New York City Police issue. In the small cramped space of that small cramped trailer, that pistol had sat for many years. Corporal Donaldson was certain the murderers did not take it, but they had ransacked the place for the key. And they had hit the cabinet with a hammer and an axe, so Corporal Donaldson knew they were looking for it and were amateurs. So Mel Stroud was not here. She decided this almost instantly. The key was in a cup in the cupboard.
The idea of the pistol gave her a strange feeling—that odd felt sensation of something immaculately kept, pristinely fussed over, in this disorganized backwoods place. And it gave her a deep, deep sadness for crazy brilliant Oscar Peterson who had mourned Mary Lou for years. Who in fact had predicted his own murder, from a packet of tarot cards.
Darren and Corporal Donaldson had spoken over the weeks about Arlo and Arnie and how they might make an arrest in the case of Mrs. Wally. Mel and Shane could be linked to both now, with the silver watch, the photo from Saint John and the belated testimony of the mechanic Mr. Benson.
Donaldson then went over and spoke to the Raskin brothers about Torrent. Did they believe he lighted the fire?
“Not a word of it. A lie for sure,” Dexter said.
Chester said Torrent worked hard. His wife had borrowed money to help him start a little business.
“What happened to the business?” Donaldson asked, startled that there was someone named Torrent.
But she never got to know what happened, because a bell rang, the dining room door opened outward, and a maid stood at the table, with the white tablecloth, holding a ladle, ready to serve them soup, and the two of them got up, cast a suspicious glance at the corporal in her big hat that came over her ears, and the flip of blond hair under it, and on tottering legs left the room.
So she left the old men and went back to Peterson’s junkyard.
Donaldson now walked out over the yard, Oscar’s grim dynasty, ambivalent to his death in the weak sun, the dog now whining in the scowl of wind, jumping from the top of the doghouse to run on its heavy chain. Across upper Arron Brook the land went flat, and was covered in ice and snow—and far away, some trail of white smoke came up and dissipated in the flat white sky.
Oscar had been stabbed multiple times and had lost two fingers. They lay in the snow just at the bottom of the porch. A knife the man used was in the kitchen. The steak knife she felt the woman used was left on the porch, covered in blood. Then the two, a man and a woman, went back inside and began to hammer the gun cabinet. But they could not get it opened, could not free it from the floor, and left in a hurry, startled by a man who pulled his truck up near the gate.
She had the first direct inkling that Mel Stroud was not involved in this, because he wouldn’t have hammered the gun cabinet like that. He would have found some way to unhinge it from the wall and carry it away.
She went and looked at the body again.
There were heavy stab wounds on his neck and back, and lighter ones on his arms and buttocks. He had stopped bleeding three hours before.
Donaldson spoke to the coroner, a Mr. Whittaker, who then phoned the undertaker.
Darren Howl had been alone in the university. The entire building had stopped. Exams were over. The offices were empty, the desks bare, the lights on in only one corridor, the students gone, most gone home. One of the students had come to him to tell him of the protest the students were organizing in support of the First Nations. It was the fourth anniversary of John Lennon’s death, so they had to take action.
“I see,” Darren said.
“Are you coming with us, Professor? We can have someone to push you along with us?”
“No, I don’t think I am,” he answered.
The young woman smiled at him and disappeared down the corridor, whispering to another young woman: “No, he isn’t coming with us tonight.”
Strangely, from his window he saw a brand-new Corvette rushing through the slush, and glancing off a telephone pole, without stopping, disappearing toward the road that led to the barrens. He watched it disappear.
He had been waiting for a telephone call. It was the young man from Newcastle they had teased for not celebrating Karl Marx. He was home from the States for Christmas for the first time in years.
At first he didn’t know what Darren was so insistent about. Then he began to remember.
“Oh, that stupid party. I hardly remember it. There was a lot of people there.”
“A young girl?”
“Oh—well, yes. The one with the headache. That’s what I remember.”
“Did she have a headache?”
“Yes.”
“Did someone give her aspirin?”
“Well, someone gave her something.”
“But you don’t know what?”
“Oh yes. I’m pretty sure it was Albert.”
“Pretty sure?”
“Yes. Pretty sure. She said, ‘Why are you naked?’ ”
Winston (his name was Winston) did not know the girl had died; he was certainly incensed that she had.
Donaldson got a call at ten after five at night that a Chevy Corvette had not returned from a test drive, and a certain Mr. Mott was involved. She arrived in the dark. The snow was wisping down over the lighted lot; the cars sat apathetic with frozen windows and doors. The little man Mr. Mott was rushing about, here and there, back and forth, stopping in the middle of the office to take a dressing down from Bruce Fletcher, then nodding and continuing to pace, stopping again to nod while he was called a nincompoop, and then pacing again.
“That is a forty-thousand-dollar car, you nincompoop.”
“Yes, I know, I know, yes.”
When Donaldson entered he stopped, looked and continued to pace, his grey suit pants pushed into rubber boots covered in salt.
“You have to help us,” Mott said hysterically. “They took our car—they did—they took our car!”
“Shut up,” Fletcher said.
“Who took the car for a test drive?” the corporal asked.
“A woman name Glena Brewer.”
Donaldson said nothing, looked over the papers that were signed, looked at the man with his thin head and blue hat, with his rubbers and his mildly naive expression, and said: “You sure her name isn’t Henrietta Saffy?”
“No, she lives right above us,” Mr. Mott said. “Her name is Glena Brewer.”
“Where does she live?”
“Right at our apartment near Dunn’s Crossing.” Here he looked at Mr. Fletcher and smiled weakly and nodded.
“How long has she lived there?”
“Oh, a few months, I think.” Again he looked Mr. Fletcher’s way and nodded.
“Is there a man with her or does she live alone?”
“Kindest man you would ever want to meet. Gave me forty bucks when I was short.”
Becky went back to the police car, brought forward the picture and said: “Him?”
“Yes. A little different but I think that’s Mr. White.”
“Mr. White?”
“Yes. Mr. White.”
“Mr. White is Mel Stroud.”
“Oh. Well who is he?”
“I think he is a serial killer, Mr. Mott—a serial killer.” Then she said, “But since this afternoon, I am not at all sure if he is still alive.”
Eva Mott was now moving along Connell Street.
All was silent in the wisping snow, all was bleached, with mounds of ploughed greying ice; the trees waved at their very tops, there were frozen lights on the porches of houses. Her cousin, the cousin who had bought her the brassiere because they were embarrassed by her, the woman who had her doctorate, who had married into the local Howl family, was waiting for her. She was on her way to visit that cousin but later she had something else to do.
It was snowing again. A numb, penetrating cold seemed to sit on the air itself.
How she had wanted to love. But the world had gone on. It all became clear when Ms. Sackville met her two days before. It was then, after Sackville simply glanced at her seductively and walked by, that she knew what to do.
Eva did not know that travelling by train to that house, to that party, would make her feel left out in the great world (it was such a pinprick of dissatisfaction, she did not notice it right away), and yet everything she tried to do, to make restitution—to allow herself that grand portico to happiness—seemed unfulfilling. She, you see, had tried to be perfect. She had followed in the footsteps of others, and she loved—yes, she did love, many people.
The strange embarrassment she felt over her parents had started then. It would last a lifetime. And then she found little Albert (this is what she called him now) or he found her. Each was the other’s victim. She knew this, remembering his angular smile, and his talk. All his illusive vanity which she did not understand, did she listen to and believe?
No, she could not liveth another day. The delayed reaction to her daughter’s death had immobilized her now, except for one part of her, a part that was not evident in anything one might notice. She was in a world where little Albert had put her—a world of terror. All she heard now in her ears—and since the trial was over—was the little girl speaking to them through the doorway:
“I have a lot of buttons on my dress—help me, Daddy—I have too many buttons on my dress and it is caught—so I have to get my new dress off.”
It was the dress Eva had made for her. And yes, it had forty little blue buttons. That’s all she heard now, those words. All she would ever hear for years to come.
Too many buttons because she had made a dress with them. Dread: it seemed the world wished that for others. It is what Albert had given to her, what she had in turn given to Torrent, and what he faced now in jail.
It was the same dread those who were marching on the Raskins wanted to create. The truth is, most of the First Nations marching were like people everywhere: they had no will to stop themselves from doing what the majority told them was in their best interest, even when they saw it was not. But for many years they had been given dread as well—for centuries they too had faced dread.
They were all gathering at the end of Bloody Field. Old Professor Dykes the blind activist being supported by the fresh young rugby student with the exhilarating beaming look. And Eva was heading toward them, as soon as she delivered her letter.
Her cousin had started a foundation, to help children, and this is why she had called Eva to her tonight. It was because of little Polly.
Nor did she have to put the slightest bit of money into it. Her cousin and her husband had seen to it. This would allow money to help children who were sick or injured in accidents. Of course other children would be helped as well, Clara assured her. It would be named the Polly Peterson Children’s Foundation.
The little doorway beyond the streetlight looked rust-coloured. That is where the kind and good Clara Bell Howl lived, whose own grandfather had risen to rule the province for nine years.
But she was not going there to visit. Nor to see anyone ever again. She was going there to deliver a letter. She would say in the letter exactly what she intended to do. She carried the old pistol in the pocket of her coat. She had not even fired a pellet gun before. But she realized she had only now to pull the trigger and her life would be altered forever. But you see—one must see it already had been.
Tonight Eva wore a tweed hat pulled down over her forehead. She wore a greatcoat to her ankles and high soft leather boots. Clara and her husband had felt an obligation, a responsibility, or both to her. They cared for her and her husband. They had told her this for the last nine months. Eva did not know why, except that Clara was a decent human being. Since the fire started in the barn, the reasoning was they were burning the barn for insurance. Of course she, Eva, was the only one who knew she herself had not lighted the fire. The theory was that she too was complicit in it, and that in the confusion when the fire jumped to the house itself little Polly was left inside, with the front door locked.
She looked up at the frozen trees, the black wind coming over the river ice and catching her still cleverly beautiful face and seeming to pierce her skull. The one thing in her life she must forget she could not. How her beautiful body still moved others to desire.
“I am sorry for what I am about to do,” she had written on a piece of scribbler page. “God if there is one forgive me. Clara say a Hail Mary for me please, at the church of Saint Peter and Paul near the black Madonna that you donated last year, and tell Her I believe in Her now more than ever before. I haven’t been to Mass in a long time. But I know you still go. Tell Her I weep before Her and ask Her to forgive me”
She went toward that door, that portico of the inner circle, which is so desirable until one finds themself inside. There she placed the letter in the mailbox, and turned and hurried into the dark black night.