by Don Hunter
Rachel had been surprised at how many details the young charmer had taken from their conversation over tea and raspberry scones, and she was impressed by the piece he had written. And now it had impressed at least one other, and was being put to use. The profile had been packed with detail about Rachel and her war experiences.
“I think we should meet,” Rachel said. “Where are you staying in Vancouver? I could catch the ferry, or you could come …”
“No, you don’t have to do that … and I’m not going to be here long enough. I just need a little help …”
“I would like to meet you. Jack was very important to me.”
“Yes, I know about that. It was terrible.”
“How was Jack known among his pilot friends? What did they call him?”
“Taffy.”
As any Welshman was called, and as Rachel had heard over and over in the pubs that she and Jack visited with his flier mates: “Hey, Taffy, it’s your bloody round!”
Rachel chuckled.
“So …?”
“How much do you need?”
“Enough to get me back home. To Toronto. Soon as I can. I’ve had some problems.”
Rachel waited. Memories arose. Walks down country lanes, grassy banks with wild primroses, daffodils, holding hands, a kiss, and another … and then, nothing, just another name on a long, sad list.
She sighed. Then, “I will help you.”
“Thank you!” And quickly, “I’m near a Western Union office, on Hastings Street.”
The Downtown Eastside. Of course. Dealers, users, sidewalk overdose deaths.
“Two things though.”
“What?”
“I cannot do it until tomorrow, until our credit union opens.”
“But the internet …”
“Tomorrow.”
Finally, “All right.”
“And the second thing.”
“What?”
“Promise me that you will do what you say—go home, to your family. They will be missing you.” She added, “Not everyone gets a second chance.”
She put the phone down. Then she went online and checked the price of one-way airline tickets to Toronto. Then she called Constable Ravina Sidhu.
The next morning Rachel was at the credit union when it opened, as was Ravina.
It had not taken Ravina long.
“That is her real name, Sally Thomas. And she is from Toronto.”
Rachel nodded, and waited.
“But she is a pro. She’s been scamming seniors across the country and skipping just ahead of the police. She’s an expert at online researching, a real whiz apparently. She was kicked out of the University of Waterloo when she did her first job on the head of her computer studies department. She said she was just experimenting. Her specialty is looking for obituaries, and building a family connection from there. She can start way back, old newspapers, stuff like that.”
Rachel smiled. It was one of the avenues her own genealogy searches took her down and had done for years. It took her a long time to learn it. Sally Thomas, it seemed, was a quick learner.
“What do you want me to do?” Ravina asked and frowned and shook her head at Rachel’s reply.
Rachel walked home, made herself some herbal tea, and smiled as she studied the photographs of Jack and herself.
Ravina returned a couple of hours later. “My Vancouver Police Department buddy checked. Sally Thomas cashed a transfer for four hundred bucks.”
“Right.”
“She took a cab marked ‘Airport Service.’” Ravina poured herself a cup of tea. “Maybe it’ll work out …”
Rachel looked at Jack’s photo. Was the smile a bit broader in the afternoon light?
“Maybe it will.”
Burns Night
The Tidal Times had made the declaration a month ahead that there would be a Grand Burns Night celebration at the community hall, “in memory of the Bard of Ayrshire, and everything Scottish.”
Silas Cotswold himself had designed the front page, which was replete with thistles, lions, and a blue-on-white St. Andrew’s cross—a saltire—in each top corner. The page had been reproduced on posters that Silas hung around the community, most of which had been removed by unknown hands as soon as they were fastened up. Silas denounced the vandals in a half-page editorial and said the guilty would get their comeuppance.
The Bell-Atkinson geeks, who were the vandals, carried a smug look. They had recently returned from a two-week trip to Great Britain and had seen some old posters exhorting the citizenry to “Keep Britain Tidy,” which they had removed in their belief that the posters themselves were anything but tidy—as were, they decided, Silas’s Burns Night posters.
The night started with Sheila Martin delivering Burns’s “Address to the Haggis,” the words of which, for anyone not raised five hundred miles north of Carlisle, are largely incomprehensible. The chief reason the audience stayed with her to the last line—“But, if ye wish her gratefu’ prayer, Gie her a haggis”—was that many of them had gone through her English classes at the high school and remained acutely aware of the consequences of inattention.
Silas next read from the program. “And now an open mic performance on a Scottish theme. Volunteers … anyone?”
Samson Spinner muttered, “Ah, Christ,” as Finbar O’Toole rushed to the stage and unfolded a printed sheet before grasping the microphone.
“A limerick,” Finbar said. “An original one,” and launched into:
“There was a young lass frae Dundee
Who desperately needed a pee.
She stopped at the vicar’s …”
Julie Clements raised her eyebrows at Alun and Jillian, but the kids ignored her and, along with the three O’Toole siblings, joyfully assisted with the rest of it:
“Then lowered her knickers,
And said, ‘Just pretend you don’t see!’”
Sheila Martin, trying and failing to make a stern face, told Julie, her daughter, “You have to keep them away from that O’Toole house.”
“Shut up, Mom!” Julie snapped.
Always ready with a line from the actual Bard, Sheila replied, “Sharper than a serpent’s tooth …”
Alun won a coin toss with Jillian for who should do the thistle piece. He jumped onstage and took the microphone.
“The thistle,” he declared. “Would you like to hear about the Scottish thistle?”
He carried on, undaunted by the silence. “The thistle you might think is just an old prickly pointy thing. But that’s the point.” He paused, grinned. “Point, get it?” And after a further void, “Anyway, the prickles came in useful way back when some attackers were creeping up on Scottish soldiers who were sleeping. The enemy took their shoes off so the Scots wouldn’t hear them—but they stepped on thistles, and that was them done for. The Scots jumped out of bed and killed them. I think they were English,” he added. “And they haven’t been back since.”
At this point a side door crashed open and Scott McConville, the Inlet’s veterinarian, marched in holding aloft a platter with what purported to be the evening’s pièce de résistance, a haggis, though this steaming, amorphous lump bore little resemblance to the real thing, mostly because Scott had dumped the ingredients into a bowl shaped to create Christmas plum puddings. Scott claimed Highland blood back to Robert the Bruce. Rachel Spinner, skilled genealogist, had been tempted to press him for details but decided to let sleeping dogs lie, given that Scott was caregiver to her kennel of beloved Irish setters.
Jillian asked, “What’s actually in a haggis?” Samson explained, “You take a sheep’s stomach, stuff it with its heart, lungs, liver, and whatnots like oatmeal and salt, and cook it. It’s a bit like a meat loaf, but basically, it’s boiled guts–offal.”
Jill
ian performed the gagging thing with her forefinger, and sound effects.
It is traditional at Robbie Burns nights for the haggis to be piped in, but invitations to the Greater Victoria Police Pipe Band, the Vancouver Firefighters Pipes and Drums, and the internationally famous Simon Fraser University Pipe Band had all been graciously declined.
“They have a reputation to protect, after all,” opined Annabelle Bell-Atkinson, whose offer to cook the haggis had been also graciously declined by Cotswold, who believed she got her name in the paper enough as it was.
Instead of a pipe band, Scott was led in by RCMP Constable Sammy Quan from the Salt Spring detachment playing “Scotland the Brave” on his bugle, freshly polished for the occasion and decorated with a tartan tassel. Sammy said that was the McQuan plaid of a branch of the family that had its roots in a Hong Kong-based quartermaster sergeant-major of the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders, who had passed through the crown colony at some point.
Annabelle Bell-Atkinson took to the stage and, with a signal to the geeks who started hammering on the piano, she roared into the “Skye Boat Song”: “Speed, bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing, Onward! the sailors cry …” She followed with a lecture about Bonnie Prince Charlie and his Jacobites and their defeat at the hands of the despicable Duke of Cumberland at the Battle of Culloden, in which she managed to suggest that early Bell-Atkinsons were involved, though she failed to clarify which side they supported.
Sheila Martin remarked that Annabelle’s affection for her two corgis suggested a strong affiliation for the establishment, so her family probably did not support the Young Pretender.
A voice from the back corner of the hall announced, “Scottish dancing!” In no time the place was awhirl with flying kilts and bouncing sporrans, exposing sets of knees and other items that would have been better left covered.
Randolph Champion’s sudden contribution was to shout, “Sword dancing,” and start to wave around a claymore he had ordered from Amazon for the occasion. The thing was five feet long and weighed about five pounds, in US measures, and, given Randolph’s condition courtesy of the early and short-lived free bar, could have caused decapitations. However, Constable Ravina Sidhu jumped in, handcuffed him, and stuck him in a corner with a warning to “Stay!”
The microphone crackled, and on the stage Hyacinth Jakes demanded attention. She announced that residents at the seniors complex had been rehearsing “the Scottish play” and were about to present some selections, if everybody would pay attention.
Someone asked where the other two witches were.
Hyacinth said she would portray Lady Macbeth. “Who, as you will know, was sleepwalking, and declaims, ‘Out, damned spot! Out, I say!’” She stopped, looked down at her hand, and sputtered, “Out, goddammit!”
Her recent swain, Willard Starling, rushed onstage to cover for her, but the retired heavy equipment operator became confused as he spread out his hands. “Is this a digger I see before me?”
There was noise from a corner where Erik Karlsson was arguing that the haggis had been actually first created by Vikings on their way to invade Britain and in need of sustenance for the long journey in their longboats. “They brought sheep with them just for that,” he explained. “They knew that the sheep’s stomach would be the perfect container and …”
Jillian shouted, “Hey, look,” and pointed to where the haggis, apparently forgotten, had fallen from its platter due to the dancing’s reverberations, rolled under the piano stool, and was being attended to by the aforementioned corgis.
“Good dogs,” Samson muttered.
The evening was beginning to deteriorate and could have gone in any direction until the youth factor stepped in, in the form of Connie Wilson, Charlie’s daughter, who had just received word that her application for the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York City had been accepted for the fall. Her singing especially had convinced the audition judges.
Connie took the microphone and began, a cappella,
“O my Luve is like a red, red rose
That’s newly sprung in June …”
Charlie was beaming with pride as the crowd began humming along. But when she reached the final verse,
“And fare thee weel, my only luve!
And fare thee weel, awhile! …”
he noticed that she was gazing in a particular direction. He followed the look and found himself staring at the adoring eyes of Liam O’Toole, Finbar’s oldest and of an age with Connie. Finbar also made the connection. To Charlie’s dismay, he winked at him and gave a thumbs-up.
With alarming thoughts of such future nuptials in his head, Charlie decided then and there that Connie was going to New York, no matter what, and wondered if perhaps there might be an earlier, spring semester.
The day after the event, Silas Cotswold offered fifty percent off annual subscriptions (fifty dollars) to The Tidal Times for anyone joining The Tidal Times Spinner’s Inlet Robbie Burns Society by the end of the month. Membership in the society was recently set at a hundred dollars per annum.
On the Run
It was Jack Steele’s idea. The Kiwi exchange teacher had read another report about the increasing obesity epidemic in Canada and most of the rest of the developed world, and decided that Spinner’s Inlet should set an example. There would be a community “Run for Your Life”: five kilometres for kids, ten kilometres for “others.” The kids would be given an earlier start, to clear the course.
He first went to Silas Cotswold and asked that the event be publicized in The Tidal Times.
“Like an ad, you mean?” Silas asked, and showed Jack his rates sheet.
When Jack demurred and said it would be a gesture to benefit the community, Silas said he was not a charity, but he would, if Jack preferred, give it some space on the condition that it would be known as “The Grand Tidal Times Annual Community Run for Your Life, Sponsored by The Tidal Times.”
“There hasn’t been one before,” Jack pointed out.
Silas offered to add “First” before “Annual” and to give free entry for any new subscribers to the Times.
“It’s already free. We’re hardly going to charge people for getting fit.”
Silas said that may be how things are done in the Antipodes, but perhaps Jack should recognize an act of generosity, a gift horse if you like, when it appears, especially to a foreigner, and if he couldn’t, well …
Jack muttered something about “higher authorities,” went home, and dispatched an email to the premier of British Columbia with a copy to the Inlet’s MLA, Jethro Wallace, explaining his plan and noting that so far, local support had been less than hearty.
Someone in the premier’s office replied immediately, wishing Jack the very best of luck, and asking him, “How long have you actually lived in Spinner’s Inlet?” With a rolling-on-the-floor-laughing emoji.
Jethro Wallace’s executive assistant responded soon afterward, explaining that as much as the MLA would have loved to join in and/or assist, a recent attack of gout made even slow dancing beyond him, “… so it is with regret …”
Jack recalled what a teacher friend from the mainland had said about how in the village of Fort Langley, notices of their annual run were printed and hand-delivered to the doorsteps of all those along the route, advising them of an early start that might, without a heads-up, alarm normally late risers and high-strung mutts.
He chose in his case to co-opt the Clements kids to go door to door and verbally advise citizens of the happening. When Jillian asked how much it was worth, he lectured her on community spirit and sent them on their way.
The two were particularly well received at the seniors residence, where Hyacinth Jakes immediately got onto the recently installed intercom early warning alarm system and shattered the afternoon quiet with a blaring announcement that “A new day is coming!” This brought into pl
ay Hyacinth’s sometime-beau Willard Starling, who stepped from his apartment waving his Bible and shouting, “Hallelujah!”
Hyacinth told him to go back to bed.
She told Alun and Jillian that she would guarantee a good cheering section from the old folks, and volunteered to have the lawn at the residence set up as the third and final refreshment and check-in site.
Alun asked Jack if pets were allowed to compete in the race, saying their new pup, a rescue spaniel-border collie cross from the SPCA in Victoria, would benefit from the exercise, and that its two breeds were known for both stamina and speed. They had named him Marathon.
Jack shrugged but corrected them, saying that just as at school now, competition was not the point; rather, it was all about participation and inclusion. “If you call it a race, everyone will try to be first and heaven knows where that might lead.”
“Possibly a sense of achievement,” Samson Spinner provided, happening to overhear the discussion. “Although we would not want to declare a winner and leave everyone else suffering a diminished sense of self-esteem, would we?”
Jack wondered, not for the first time, what retro part of this new country he had landed up in. He snapped that there would be no blue ribbons at any event that he was organizing.
Samson responded, “Right. Give them white ones, saying ‘I was there.’ Christ,” he added.
Jack had things to organize.
He needed to set up three refreshment points along the course, with bottled water available. He had alarming memories of the film from Vancouver’s 1954 British Empire and Commonwealth Games that he had watched in teacher training at the University of Auckland. The British marathoner Jim Peters had presented a nightmare state of affairs as he reached the stadium in first place, seventeen minutes ahead of the next runner and ten minutes ahead of the record, but, seriously dehydrated, staggered and collapsed repeatedly, and failed to finish. After covering just two hundred metres in eleven minutes, he was stretchered away and never raced again. “I was lucky not to have died that day,” he later said.