Ted Kersey had provided the St. Ignatius Easter Auction with a ham for thirty-three years running. Over time, it had become the centrepiece of the auction, a coveted prize that won Ted a reputation as the best hog farmer in the county, and fetched large sums that Sister Mary Beth relied on for the annual spring cleaning at the parish. But the macabre pedigree of this year’s ham made people nervous. In the days following Ted Kersey’s death, Sister Mary Beth had to field many questions from worried members of the congregation.
“Is the meat cursed?”
“Would it be sacrilege to eat such a thing?”
“Will the ham appear at the auction at all?”
These concerns and others would have been much simpler to assuage if not for the actions of Dale Westin.
On the night Ted died, after Sister Mary Beth hung up the phone on a wailing Helen Kersey, she called an ambulance, then immediately went to find Jeff Stooley, the church handyman. The Sister was as pragmatic as she was compassionate, and she hoped that while she calmed Helen by telling her that surely Ted’s years of service to the church would win him a prime seat in heaven, Jeff could clean up the blood and cart away the pig carcass, ostensibly to save Helen the trauma of doing it, but also to save the auction’s most lucrative item from turning into a feast for flies and marauding raccoons.
“I want you to take the ham straight to Girardi’s,” the Sister said, wagging her wimple in her bobble-headed yet no-nonsense way. The Sister intended to have Gerry Girardi, a regular reader at Sunday service and proprietor of the town’s oldest butcher shop, clean, eviscerate, and carve up the animal, making sure to take special care with the ham — which, based on what she had gleaned from her few visits to the Kersey farm over the past year, was an exceptional specimen, as fat and succulent a hog’s leg as had ever appeared in the service of the Lord and his small but devoted flock at St. Ignatius. Ted Kersey would be thanked for giving his life to the service of the Lord, and a plaque would be erected in his honour beside the geraniums in the church garden.
Dale Westin had a different idea. Dale was a wealthy former CEO from the city, who’d taken early retirement and moved out to Dufferin County to spend his golden years playing golf and shooting game birds on the fifty-five acres out back of the rustic sports lodge he’d had built just down the road from the Kersey farm. He told everyone who would listen how much he loved the country air. “Good, honest air you got up here,” he’d say. But some knew there was something off about Dale Westin from the start. Within weeks of moving in, he became notorious for a habit of keeping close tabs on the personal affairs of everyone in town, ostensibly in the spirit of neighbourly goodwill, but in fact, some said, because he needed an excuse to create spreadsheets now that his high-finance days were behind him.
Outside of his public exaltations, Dale Westin kept a tight lid on his own affairs, so there was no knowing exactly what went through his head as he looked out his window on that cool March evening and saw the ambulance parked out at the Kersey place. Just as Sister Mary Beth knew how to approach a situation from several different angles at once, Dale Westin had his own nose for finding opportunity where others saw merely offal, and whether it was divine inspiration or something more calculated, he took it upon himself to make the tragedy at the neighbouring farm his business. When he pulled his Range Rover into the Kerseys’ driveway that night, wearing the red-and-black checkered lumberjack coat he’d purchased to blend in with the locals, he nearly rear-ended Jeff Stooley’s pickup as it was backing out, headed for Girardi’s, the pig carcass prone and reeking and lashed to the truck bed with bloodied twine.
“Call me a jumper to conclusions, Jeff,” Dale Westin said as he hopped out of the Rover and went up to lean into the truck’s driver-side window before Jeff Stooley even had a chance to roll it down fully, “but it seems to me like there might be some kind of situation going on here that could require a little help. Jeff, I know you know that I value the well-being of every man and woman in this community, so I thought I’d come on by and see if I could lend a hand with anything that needs doing. Whatcha got there?” He waved his thumb at the truck bed, seeing full well for himself that there was a dead hog in it.
Jeff Stooley hesitated for a moment, but he was no match for Dale Westin’s polished-dime smile. “Uh, got Ted Kersey’s picnic pig,” said Jeff, leaning out the window of the idling truck. “I gotta take it down to Gerry Girardi to make sure it gets stored right for the auction.”
“What’s with the ambulance?” said Dale, breath billowing steam out in the crisp air. “A neighbour’s concerned, you know. Has there been an injury?”
“Teddy’s bit the dust,” said Jeff, a note of bewilderment in his voice, as though he’d only just considered the truth of the situation.
“You mean he’s dead?” said Dale Westin.
“That’s right,” said Jeff. “Keeled over in the act of slaughterin’ this pig. Sister Mary Beth’s down there consoling his wife.”
“God, that’s horrible!” said Dale Westin, removing his gloves. “Tragic. Poor Helen! I only knew Ted for a short period, but he was a stand-up guy and a damn good farmer, and of course I’ve heard nothing but raves about his pork.”
“Well, this fellow here will probably be the last of it,” said Jeff, waving a thumb at the pig carcass. “Ted’s got no kids, and I don’t rightly see Helen having it in her to keep the farm goin’ by herself.”
“The last ham?” said Dale. “It can’t be the last ham! The Easter ham is a Dufferin County tradition, Jeff! It’s part of what makes this community great.”
“Be honest with you, I never tasted any of Ted’s hams,” said Jeff. “Too dear for my blood, and I serve the church in other ways.”
“Well, I’ve never tasted one either, but I know them by reputation,” Dale said. “You come here as a keen observer, it’s pretty darned clear what the annual ham means to the good folks who live and die tilling this ground. As a humble citizen who is proud of what this county has to offer, and sees real quality in the way it upholds its values and understands the good things in life, I’m inclined to take it on myself to see to it that this ham gets the treatment it deserves.”
“I think Sister Mary Beth’s on top of that,” said Jeff, sensing some threat that he could not quite place. “Gerry Girardi’s been butcherin’ the Easter ham for years, and I expect he’ll give this one extra-special attention, under the circumstances.”
“Gerry Girardi is a fine fellow,” said Dale Westin. “Yvette cooked me up one of his chops just last night, and I’ll be damned if it wasn’t delicious. But this hog is not destined for the same old same old. This hog is singular. Why don’t you drive it on over to my place, and I’ll make the appropriate arrangements. We’re gonna have us an exceptional ham this year, in the name of Ted Kersey, God rest his soul.”
“Well,” said Jeff, “I’d better ask Sister Mary Beth.”
“Look, Sister Mary Beth will tell you that Dale Westin put a hundred bucks in the collection plate last time he was at Mass, so she knows Dale Westin has the town’s best interests in mind. It’s what the people of Bedford would want, Jeff. I don’t think you’re the type to want to stand in the way of that, are you?”
Jeff looked worried, but he was the sort to respect men like Dale Westin, who talked as though he was addressing a roomful of important people even when it was just the plain old church handyman he was talking to. Jeff eyed the carcass. He eyed the Range Rover, which was still blocking his pickup. He eyed Dale Westin, who was standing there staring at him with a grin wide and sharp enough to thresh wheat.
“You just follow the Rover,” Dale said, not moving.
“You’re gonna have to explain this to Sister Mary Beth,” said Jeff.
“You don’t have anything to worry about,” said Dale. “I have your back. I’m for the people.”
2. Although Jeff Stooley retained his job at the church, it was said that his penance for handing the ham over to Dale Westin involved several thousa
nd Hail Marys, a week of hard work cleaning out the church’s clogged eaves, and a tongue-lashing from the Sister that would have made Lucifer himself blush. But she saved her worst words for Dale Westin. Sister Mary Beth publicly refused to repeat the telephone conversation she’d had with Westin about what she termed “the abduction,” but her subsequent call to the police and statements to the newspaper made her position clear: the interception of the St. Ignatius pig carcass was theft of church property, a slap in the face to God, and a reprehensible response to a deep and genuine tragedy. She intended to pursue every possible course of action to see Dale Westin punished for his outsider’s indifference to the laws and customs that had always served the good, pious people of Dufferin County.
The police agreed to question Dale, but ultimately no charges were pressed.
Sheriff John Bays Jr., a Presbyterian who had been invited to shoot geese on Dale Westin’s back lot on more than one occasion, declared that the hog carcass had never been officially donated to the church and could therefore not be said to have been stolen, and that if anything it belonged to Helen Kersey, who, the day after Ted’s funeral, had flown to Los Angeles to spend an extended sojourn with her sister and whom no one had been able to reach since. And so it was that Sheriff Bays decided, until further notice and given the perishable nature of the item in question, that until the time of auction, the contested carcass would remain in the custody of Dale Westin, whose own statements to the police and newspapers maintained that he was only trying to do right by the taxpaying citizens of the county by preserving one of its most sacred annual events. It was no secret that, even as he was making these statements, Dale Westin had already been in contact with a butcher from the city about coming up to carve the hog and cure the ham (and almost certainly, the town gossips said in scandalized tones, to spend a day or two hunting ducks out back the lodge and having the woman called Yvette cook them up in a foreign style).
“Ladies and gentlemen, a scourge has come upon our town!” This was how Father Angus Merriweather, drunker than usual, began his sermon that Sunday, a particularly vitriolic screed about the evils of money and presumption that Sister Mary Beth Boultbee sat through with hands clasped tightly in her lap, murmuring what were either prayers or curses; the pinched look on her face gave no indication which. Dale Westin was notably absent from the congregation. Sister Mary Beth had put his donated hundred-dollar bill in an envelope and told Jeff Stooley to drive out and put it in his mailbox with a card, printed with an image of a burning heart and a quote from Psalms, “Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous,” so no one was surprised when he didn’t show up. A few old-timers milling around in the vestibule after Mass even speculated that, were Dale Westin to cross the threshold of St. Ignatius just now, it would cause either his own body or the church spire to erupt spontaneously into cold blue flame.
It wasn’t long before the gossip evolved into more toxic rhetoric. Anxiety seeped into the town’s soil like a chemical spill. Days after the sermon, the first letters sprang up in the Free Muskrat, turning the ham into a full-blown issue of public concern. The accusations were made with Biblical intensity: Dale Westin was a Satan from the city here to sabotage the town’s most beloved annual event. His business and political affairs had ended in disaster down south, so he’d come to Dufferin County to wreak havoc on its overly trusting, God-fearing people. He was a thief and a philistine, a shyster and an elitist, and, according to one especially intense letter, probably a pederast. Seven separate letters constituting a whole page were published, each demanding the immediate return of the ham to the church, one calling for the arrest and castration of Dale Westin, and one going so far as to suggest he’d engineered the murder of Ted Kersey so as to be able to take possession of the ham for use in some kind of disgusting pagan ceremony. A strange follow-up letter, published two days later and signed Anonymous, claimed that the ham contained Ted Kersey’s earthbound soul, and that its capture amounted to an act of spiritual torture that would only be forgiven when it was placed upon the auction block and all was made right in the world again. Another anonymous letter appeared in the weekend edition, ostensibly staying neutral in matters of politics or faith but implicitly responding to the earlier claim about Ted Kersey’s trapped soul, condemning the association of the imperfections of the physical realm with the finer qualities of the spirit, and asking why God would trap Ted Kersey’s ghost in a ham or the soul of Our Lady of Lourdes in a plain old tomato, anyhow.
Amid the accusations and uncertainties, one hard fact began to assert itself: with speculation at destabilizing levels, the ham would have to be revealed to a public starving for a sneak peek. Anticipation grew by the day. The main street of Bedford, which moved at the pace of a sun-drunk mule in summer and was swallowed by shadows and snow in the long winter, began to buzz with the tension of a city on the edge of great change. Every conversation in the town danced cautiously around the subject of the ham, and the mention of Dale Westin’s name was said to have set off a fight at McNulty’s Bar that got particularly violent, a window smashed out, blood on the sidewalk. The April thaw sent dirty water sluicing down the curbsides, and everyone stepped carefully, to avoid not just the slushy runoff but also the threat of being pulled down into the general argument, a tangle of wet, frayed anger growling in the gutter that could grab them at any time. Girardi’s temporarily suspended the sale of all ham products, fearing that the release of such contentious meat into the general gnashing might tip the town into flat-out chaos. Mayor Terry McMurrich made a plea for calm in the Free Muskrat, and Father Merriweather’s drinking became so bad that he showed up late for Mass and botched the words to the doxology. Of Sister Mary Beth Boultbee, no one heard a thing; the nun had locked herself in the convent behind St. Ignatius, emerging only to sit at the back left of the altar at Sunday service, her face hidden under a dusky black veil, the very image of mourning.
During this time, the collective energy of the town underwent an unmistakable shift, condensing and focusing like a spotlight on the lodge up by the Kersey farm, where Dale Westin had retreated into fortified silence. For days, nothing but the regular salvo of early-evening gunfire was heard from his property. The lack of communication on the status of the captive ham made the townspeople’s imaginations run wild, and rumours began circulating, saying it was being defiled, who-knows-what being done to it by the butcher from the city, some foreign glaze of flamboyant curing process, a trap set by Mammon, recipe as hex. The air in Bedford seemed on the verge of rupture.
Then, one day in early April, under the broad spring sunshine, Dale Westin’s black Range Rover pulled onto Main Street and rolled into the middle of town, as brash and surreal a sight as if the corpse of Ted Kersey himself had climbed out of the grave and lumbered into the drugstore to tell them there was something wonky with his heart. All along the street, eyes peered from behind windows, locked on Dale Westin as he steered the vehicle up to the church, emerged from the driver’s seat, and went around the back to pull from the trunk a wheeled dolly and a massive cloaked thing, which he placed on the dolly and rolled in through the front doors of St. Ignatius Catholic Church as though he’d dug up the skull of John the Baptist from the earth below Damascus and was now hauling it up to the altar to lay at the feet of Sister Mary Beth Boultbee, a gesture of deep penitence or gross blasphemy, or both. Safe in their homes, which many people had begun locking since the start of the queer happenings, no one spoke above a whisper.
The church doors stayed closed through the day and night. By dawn, Father Merriweather, who had fled the scene in chicken-heartedness, choosing a blind bender through the nighttime streets over a willing role in whatever Black Mass was unfolding within the seat of his debauched curacy, was drunk enough to go up to the doors and splay his hands before them, feeling for seismic vibration. But he would not dare touch his skin to their pressurized surface. It was seven a.m. by the time the phones rang in the kitchens of s
everal key members of the church congregation, who in turn spread the news to their neighbours, local shopkeepers, the cottage country radio station, the Free Muskrat, and the city newspapermen from the Star and the Sun who had taken rooms at the Bedford Inn: that day, at the stroke of noon, on the steps of St. Ignatius Catholic Church, with the plain light of midday and God as a witness, there would be a public announcement regarding the Annual Easter Picnic and Church Auction and the fate of the now-infamous Kersey Ham.
As the hour approached, a crowd of over a hundred gathered outside the church. There were middle-aged farmers with sunbaked faces and suspicious eyes, teens trying hard not to look as curious as they actually were, and old-timers looking as though they disapproved of the whole scene. There was Buck Henry from the Free Muskrat with his beat-up yellow notepad, newspapermen from nearby towns with their Dictaphones and cameras, and television trucks from the city bearing shellac-haired news reporters with logoed microphones. Sheriff John Bays Jr. had his two best men flanking the church steps, at the base of which someone had, for whatever reason, laid a bouquet of perfect white roses.
The second that the clock on City Hall across the square from the church ticked over to noon, a great clanging exploded out from the belfry, sending a wave of anxious muttering through the crowd. The doors cracked open, causing a collective inhalation, and the air seemed to thicken so that the entire scene appeared to those watching from afar to congeal into a wax display on the church lawn, stilled congregants awaiting their rapture: either blinding gold entry into the kingdom of piety and tradition, or the sentence of cold, hamless darkness.
The doors now parted, the stone rolled away, and into this electricity emerged the largest, pinkest piece of meat anyone in attendance had ever seen — a perfectly shaped leg with the girth of a beer barrel, tapering down honey-glazed skin to a polished white bone, pushing before it a haze of air kissed with smoke, rosemary, orange peel, and a hint of cloves, which made several photographers shoved up close to the doors swoon backwards, overwhelmed by the intense deliciousness of the aroma, their photos blurred forever by the ham’s sheer karmic presence. Following the ham out of the gloom were Dale Westin, beaming like a white shark, and Sister Mary Beth Boultbee, her cowl rumpled and her face drooping and her eyes as stormy and dark as a thundercloud. The photographers scrambled to regroup, firing off flashes to capture the moment when the ham, and Dale Westin, truly began to follow their strange conjoined destiny.
Different Beasts Page 12