DECEMBER 8, 1:05 P.M. YOU DON’T MEAN TO DIE BUT YOU do. Everyone does. It is strange that one has no way of knowing the consequences of meeting a young woman at Market Square in Saint John the day it was raining and you had nothing but a rail-thin jacket, and went inside. They were there, Henrietta Saffy and her sister. So he was taken with them and they with him.
Soon in the darkness of the apartment in the quietude of afternoon when her sister was working Henrietta and he were left alone. He would tell her of his life, and she was impressed but not too impressed, and then one night, oh it was during Lent sometime, in the winter, when the snow was dark and filled with gas and soot and crusted along the damp uneven streets, she walked out of the bedroom and sat beside him, and he made her naked and took her on the couch or they slipped off it, and she came twice.
She had been in and out of foster homes and juvenile detention since she was eleven years of age, lost her virginity at thirteen.
How had his death happened? She had sent Roderick in to see if he was asleep, so they could leave, and Roderick, who had heard him yell at her and call her a little cunt, and heard her say “I wish someone would do something about that lad,” took Mel’s knife and stabbed him in the heart. Then he came out and sat in the chair grinning.
“You stupid dumb fuck,” Henrietta said.
But at his end flashes came back to Mel Stroud, of who he was, and what he might have done in his life. He remembered a squirrel trying to climb a tree with rocks tied to its tail, and he wanted desperately to reach out and take those rocks away, to relieve its suffering if only for a second, but he could not.
He tried to sit up, but he had been stabbed by Roderick. The worst of it was he didn’t even know why. He had just gone to lie down. He had told her the night before to send Roderick away, but he was still here.
“He’s my slave,” Henrietta said.
“Send him away,” he told her.
The day was getting on, and the snow was wisping in the parking lot. For some reason he saw the same rainbow the snow flurries made across it that he had seen when Arlo and Arnie were cleaning their fish tank. So then he lay back and was drifting to sleep.
But it was immeasurably desolate in front of him at this moment. Remorse like a black funeral cloth surrounded him.
Suddenly you see you are dead, and all of that lack of wisdom comes flooding across your last moments. A deep, dark sadness penetrated him, a deep, deep sadness he could not overcome. Arlo and Arnie—do you think he did not love them? Hell, they were his pals. He now tried to say help me but could not.
Worse, though he took it as almost nothing then, he heard the heart of Mary Lou’s fetus stop beating. It just stopped. It had gone on beating after she died, for almost an hour—and then it weakened, and went silent. And in his mind as he was reaching out to Mary Lou he begged it begged it to continue beating on—but it did not. Then there was this conversation in a tavern that he had overheard when he was twenty-two. You know, when he was living at the Toomeys’. He heard people speaking. Who was the most dangerous man on the river?
“Everette Hatch.” “No, Daryll Hatch.” “No, Jerry Bines.” “No, Gary Percy Rils.” “No—Mel Stroud is worse than them all.”
And he remembered smiling at that. And now he begged in his dying moment for his name to be erased from that horrible list but it shone before him in a haze of grey. He thought he could get up and run away but his blood had seeped all over the floor.
His would be the first of three murders this horrible day, the day when Satan wishes for terror to be performed in the name of man.
His name was Mel Stroud. He was murdered by Henrietta Saffy and Roderick Hammerstone, over a squabble that meant absolutely nothing, except that Henrietta said to her slave that she had to do something about that meddlesome old woman Mel Stroud or he would ruin her plans of going away to Florida for Christmas vacation.
Then when she discovered what Roderick had done she said: “Cripes Kate, I didn’t mean for you to murder him. Son of a bitch, you can’t seem to listen to reason.”
“I love you,” Roderick said. “I would do anything for you.”
Henrietta smoked a cigarette and wondered what to do. They would cover him in a blanket and rush to visit Oscar. They had to now that they had the car. One deed propelled the second, the second the third.
They didn’t even know what the pistol looked like or why they were doing it anymore.
Mel Stroud would be the last body discovered, covered in raw snow out on the barrens, near Mile 17, a day later. That’s where they were heading to when Darren Howl saw them clip the pole.
Interview with Henrietta Saffy, December 20, 1984
“Where did you get the wine?”
“At Oscar’s.”
“Did you plan to go there?”
“Yes—planned to go. Not really planned to go but yes, planned to go. If Roderick wouldn’t have been there, if he hadn’t been at the farm, the apartment or the trailer—you get my drift?”
“Yes, but you were the driving force?”
“Maybe—don’t know. Oscar didn’t suspect him. And perhaps he did not suspect either—that is Roderick—his mother drank all the time she was pregnant, two bottles of wine a day, almost two I heard, so he was born without any way to stop his impulses, that was what I discovered at the house when he lit the fire. You see it goes to show.”
“What goes to show?”
“It should show what we do.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Well, you might think I don’t care for people but I have a lot of compassion. It goes to show what we have done to the Indians—it does show—years of torment and abuse and desolation, and terror and being treated like animals, and given curfews, and forbidden to work in town. And there you have it, you see?”
“I see.”
“Well, you might say I see and not believe you do, but I have a lot of compassion. That’s why I took him under my wing—that is why I tried to help him. But as soon as you mentioned something he would be up and do it. So you couldn’t say anything. He was a product of the womb.”
“I am not sure I understand.”
“He was/is a product of the womb, a fetal alcohol syndrome baby, you see, so in the womb was where he was created, not outside. In his own way, he is the signature of life development. That pregnancy is sacred—he is the lesson to us. And that is why Oscar felt sorry for him, helped them, gave them money, bought him birthday presents. You see, Mel told me to befriend him. And then realized we couldn’t control him, that there was no way to control him, so wanted him to go. Oscar had a soft spot for Roderick because he was born the same day as Torry, and he was born with a brain injury because of his mother he had, so you had to talk him out of doing anything. But then he fell all in love with me and I showed him my boobs just to tease him. I used to walk out of the shower naked.
“Mel used to tease him about that. But then Mel was right—the little lad was dangerous and he told me to send him away. Roderick must have overheard it all. So he goes at Mel.”
“Did you know of the money under his mattress?”
“What money?”
“Almost fifteen thousand dollars—”
“What?”
“Where did he get it?”
“Where would he get it? I didn’t know he had it.”
“No? Do you think he may have gotten it from someone he was blackmailing?”
“No. Well he didn’t tell me a thing—not even a little bit.”
“And then?”
“And then?”
“After Roderick came out of the bedroom.”
“So off we went.”
“And you hid outside the trailer.”
“Yes I did, when Roderick went in.”
Then she said, “And within five seconds the place erupted.”
When Henrietta entered, Oscar was backed up against the wall, and had been stabbed twice in the abdomen.
“What did you do that for?” Henrietta yelled, but she knew going in that this would have to happen. And so she picked up the knife on the table, and when Oscar swung the frying pan she stabbed him in the lungs. He tried to get out the window, and then he ran to the door with Roderick yelling and slashing him. He severed his fingers when they were on the handle. Oscar made it outside, to the porch, and Henrietta came out and continued stabbing. Finally he said: “You don’t need to stab me again. I am dead now.”
And that would haunt her life forever. It would actually turn her life around after many years when she recouped and regained her soul.
Once the terror was over, Oscar felt so sorry for her as she stabbed him. He was rising up, he could feel it—and he saw his dog watching him and he smiled, and then he heard little Mary Lou Toomey and turned to her.
“Yes, hurry, come with me. Come with me, love. Come.”
Up he went with Arlo and Arnie, and the pain of his wounds seemed to melt away, and he was finally free.
They never found the pistol, and couldn’t break into the gun cabinet. They tried to haul it with them but they finally left it where it was.
They went out along the highway toward the barrens with Mel Stroud in the back, covered in a blanket, his face contorted and purple, his large hands stained by swollen blood. They threw him out somewhere in the barrens and made it back to town where they were stopped by the police.
“All that shit for this,” Henrietta said. But by the grace of God, the love of her sister, the help of a United Church minister, Reverend Bessie Cortes, she would someday, after many years, radically change. But it would be a struggle, a terrible battle against the odds. She would be let out of prison in 2007. She would live in Saint John and work at a halfway house. All the figures that anyone ever needed and the dates and times of special occasions she would keep in her head. She would read Sophocles and read about Socrates, she would read Milton and Tolstoy, the Brontë sisters and Emily Dickinson. She would speak to assemblies, visit prisons, and hold hands with First Nation women incarcerated for being outcasts.
When someone told her what her IQ was, she would simply say:
“I am not that bright anymore.”
And in the end her smile would return.
Two days later, when Gordon got to see his nephew, Roderick jumped up, hugged him and said “Why hello Gordon good old Gordon, my best old Gordon, how are you?” and was concerned that he had lost his Team Canada hat somewhere in the snow while he was running round and round in circles to escape the police. Roderick was never blamed. No blame was ever attached.
December 8, 9:45 p.m. She had to walk many streets, and the streets were dark, shadows played, and at the end of each street a snowdrift sat under the glow of a streetlight and snow fed up off it into the air. Her hat did not keep her warm, the wind pulled at it, her coat did not soften the wind but it hit her with a gale force.
The field that led up to Raskin works was through a stand of dark small spruce. You came out into a soft meadow and along a path, and then the field, Bloody Field, opened a quarter mile long and a half mile wide. Almost no one knew what was happening in town, for the news had not hit anyone here. They were concerned only in their exhibition. Many of these demonstrators were in fact true exhibitionists. In a way they had always been.
Eva had in fact become aware of this so painfully since the expunging of her only child that she hesitated to act out anything. But yet the pistol told her she should.
Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. She knew this, she had read it, she had a priest who she disliked because of his clever sociability tell her this when she sat with him for an hour.
“Now my dear,” he said, “just go home and try to be a better person.”
And the priest had that down to an art form, the pretence of new faith, and he smiled at her, touched her hand with his soft lily hand, and she felt ill. She felt he, that priest, had become Albert in his own way—both males who, though on opposite ends of the question of God, used their comfortable theories to hide.
So there was no God. Or was there a God who was angered with both men.
So she ran away from that priest yesterday afternoon. Her head was spinning; she could not eat or sleep. She thought of only one thing: to destroy him who had caused her so much pain.
And yet amid all of this was a voice that asked: Who, Eva, caused you the pain? You alone.
Yes, she knew, and she loaded the pistol with the shells that came in the black bag with it and headed out toward the field. She even giggled a little when a man she worked with, a man who wore the awful suit and tie at work and lingered in her section of the store after lunch hour, offered her drives home, stopped and grabbed her arm.
“Where are you going, love? Let’s get a drink. I’ve been wanting to take you for a drink for ages. We can celebrate Christmas tonight.”
“Oh,” she giggled, “is that right? Well you don’t want me tonight.”
“I want you any night, any night in the world. I would pay to have you.” (He knew he took a chance saying this but he would be more than willing to.)
“Ah, but tonight I really might kill you.”
And amid his chortles she moved off into the wind and around a corner near the centre snack bar. She remembered the letter written to her by her mother last week:
Oh you know Eva I will always love you—it’s not your unfaithfulness—it’s why you were unfaithful you must recognize—not some flight on one sweet night but a calculated betrayal of a man and little girl, who I think, and forgive me for saying both suffered agony on your behalf.
And she moved around the corner and came to a group of middle-aged men and women, who were leaning over a man on a park bench. He was a small man with a balding head, little owl-like glasses, and he looked distraught. He had been coming home, walking along the street with a book on Chatterton and two small goldfish in a plastic bag—the progeny of Arlo and Arnie’s fish tank, a hundred generations removed, in warm water—and he had been carrying them home for his niece Priscilla who was visiting, and when he asked earlier in the day the one thing she would like, little Priscilla said: “Fish—golden fish. I love to see golden fish.”
Amid the howls of wind he went downtown and happened to find in the pet store two wonderfully alive golden fish. He was bringing them home, around the corner, when a group of students and their professors walking to their destination saw him, and some animosity that had lingered in those sallow classrooms took hold against him. There he was, pudgy little soft-faced Eliot Slaggy. And they then ran over the little man on their way to Bloody Field, as if no one had more right than they to do so. The fish fell from his pocket but lay in the bag on the cold street, flapping their tails, and the students stepped over him and around him on their way to exercise their right of assembly and their privilege of dissent.
Now seated on the bench, holding the goldfish in his hand—only one seemed to be alive, the other seemed to have died in the altercation—his eyeglasses askew, he kept searching for his book on Thomas Chatterton. His nose was bleeding. The people, most of whom had never heard of little Chatterton, comforted him in worry and concern, and tried to find his book.
Eva looked at him, turned and continued her walk up the long hill toward Raskin works. Far behind her a siren bleated a moment and was still. They had pulled over a Corvette, its four-way flashers emitting a yellow light through the haze.
Now she remembered the train she was on, and how the nice Negro man (yes, she still thought of Black men that way) gave her the 7Up, and the crossroad lights shone through the bottle like those flashing four-way flashers. How strange to remember that now.
But you see, she did not know who that Negro man was. He was the man who listened to Mel Stroud berate little Mary Lou Toomey one day when she told him she was pregnant, and went over to them and said:
“You wish to come with me, young lady?”
“She won’t be going with no one like you,” Mel laughed.
“Oh, if she wants she can. And I would not berate her for being with child.” The Black man had fought middleweight and was once Canadian champion, and had no fear of Mel Stroud. “No, I would never berate a young lady for being with child,” he said.
“Being with child,” Mel laughed, taking Mary Lou by the arm.
So the man came back three times to that apartment, bringing her coffee and asking her if she was well.
And that was why Torry heard his mother had run away with “a porter from darkie town in Halifax.” Because a gentleman had taken up for her on the street and came to her house to see how she was.
And that man was now in touch with Corporal Donaldson about the woman named Glena Brewer, who had contacted him about the death of Mary Lou Toomey.
It was strange because six hours earlier at his last moment, Mel Stroud remembered that incident so clearly, of the man meeting them at the mall.
Yes, this Black man, Tom, if he was here now, what would he say to Eva, “the little lady” as he had called her when he had given her the chicken sandwich? He would say, “My dear girl, those who torment you only torment themselves.”
How sad her parents were, how she thought of them, how she remembered her uncle’s words. How sad the world as she heard the hopeful students begin their march. She pushed on toward the frozen barrens, toward the field where that ignorant army was ready to clash by night.