George & Rue

by George Elliott Clarke

  Evans and Stark were pleasant, respectful, in flattering ways that white men almost never demonstrated to Georgie. Evans pointed out, even before they settled down to chat, just chat, “Georgie, it’s wrong to murder, yes; but history’s full of wrongs.” George felt vindicated, important. The slaying of Silver was sorry, yes, but not an earthquake.

  Stark nodded. “Some things gotta be understood as accidents, not evils.” What everyone agreed on was the need to preserve the beauty of family. Georgie could appreciate this, eh, bein a lovin father and a loyal husband. He could help Evans and Stark resolve this case and help Mrs. Burgundy and her children feel better about the “accident” that had downsized their family.

  His questioners were probing, gentle, and relentless, but not bullying. George never sweated his alibi. He said no incriminating word. His pursuers kept at him until five the next morning. They kept asking him questions gently, gently. Finally, George asked if he could see Blondola. The Mounties agreed, and an officer was dispatched to bring her from her bed, where she couldn’t sleep anyway, down to the station.

  Blondola and Georgie met alone in Evans’s stacked-up-file-ridden and cigar-smoke-saturated and Scotch-smell office. When Blondola saw her husband, lookin child-like in Evans’s swivel chair, and downcast, pain drilled her heart, for here she be, standin in the Fred Town Mountie keep, with her man in trouble, and two babes in her arms, sometimes looking at her and squalling, sometimes reaching for their father. She cried and she cried and she cried when George whisper her that story. She couldn’t believe she’d let that obscene jailbird, Rue, into her house. No, no, no. Only one thing to do: confess Rue did it. Everyone in Fredericton knew George was a rascal, but no killer. But Rue? He was bloody trouble from the start.

  Blondola say, “You and me, Jawgee, we was here for three years, doin well for ourselves, till yer brother come botherin us. Why should we suffer for what he did? Since all you did was take the dead man’s money, we’ll just pay it back, even if it takes you ten years. We’ll pay it back, and Rue can go to Hell.” Blondola sat beside Georgie, weeping. Her head rested on his shoulder like Silver’s had rested on Rue’s.

  George took Otho in his arms and looked into that tiny face so much his own and he thought of Silver looking so glad to welcome he and Rue into his car. The tears shot from his eyes to join those of his wife, and he was seeing Desiah now, his brand-new baby girl, through a veil of blurring tears. As his hands fumbled over his babes and his wife, and hers stroked his face, he could hardly breathe, but managed to croak, “You go home now, Blondola. I’m gonna come home too. After I tell these mens what Rufus did, I’m gonna come home too.” Blondola looked at him close. “You sure, Joygee? You sure?” He nodded and explained: “I took Silver’s money, but I never even scratched Silver.”

  Blondola and the children left. Then Evans lunged back into his office.

  George’s mens rea was fully engaged now. He asked the coppers to bring a pen and paper to take down his statement: he couldn’t print and weep simultaneously. Next, he told them everything—they pressed him to tell them everything—that incriminated Rufus, omitting only his own adultery. Lovea became a “friend” to whom he had kindly given twenty dollars and a pair of nylons.

  George led the amiable Evans and Stark to his house and dredged up, while a frightened Blondola observed (and while Rue was out, sporting or drinking), the charred ring, hammer head, and watch from the stove ashes. The watch was still silvery and the ring was still gold and the hammer was still black amid the heaped-up ash. Back in the gravel pit, George helped the detectives retrieve the smashed milk bottle shards where he had so feverishly scoured away Silver’s bleeding. They’d had snow kicked over them, but George pluck em up easily. He pointed out the site where he’d halved Silver’s dough with Rue; he mentioned he gave the cabby cap to Lovea Borden in Saint John. Later, George directed the Mounties to Minto, where he showed them to Junior Clarke’s place and to the house where he’d gotten liquor with Frenchy. At Oak Point, the cops combed the site where the car’d slid off the road. In Saint John, George had to beg an infuriated Dutchy and an anxious Lovea to answer intimidating questions from Evans and Stark. Back on the by-road near the Experimental Farm, George located the car keys in the brook. He fix a damning case against his brother, including the grisly detail about Rue picking up the dead Burgundy’s black rosary and crucifix and hurling em into the woods.

  George co-operated uncomplainingly with the Mounties. He confessed easily that Rufus James Hamilton murdered N. P. Burgundy. Still, the cops charged him with capital murder, despite all his charitable, earnest testimony and general good citizenship.

  When the Mounties rolled Georgie’s manual digits, all ten, in the fingerprint pad’s black ink, he knew he was indelibly, incurably, black. The ink tingled like acid.

  Then, too, the inescapable difficulty was that he and Rue had gone out for money and got a man killed. The saintly Silver—a veteran—’d been bludgeoned dead for the sake of $180 or so, his wallet depleted, his crucifix tossed wantonly in woods (where it ended up in a police dog’s jaws). George was deeply micked up in the affair. He’d admitted he’d called the taxi, but why couldn’t the police, the press, the court realize he’d never hit a man in his life? Didn’t they know that when it came time for him to bash Silver, he couldn’t do it?

  “I had intentions to hit. But I couldn’t—and didn’t—slug Silver.”

  Was it his fault Rue was a bad man to leave on a road alone with a hammer in his hands? He wished he were home facing his “fambly", not in York County Gaol facing the gallows.

  George had three motives for aiding the Crown: 1) he hadn’t brained Burgundy; 2) Rufus were a vicious drifter; he—George—be a daddy, a hubby, and a property’d taxpayer; 3) the police kept him well fed while he was singing. He was finally eatin good regularly. He didn’t like prison, but he liked jail food, much of it home-cooked by wives of cops and sheriffs, wives who felt sorry for young men who’d lacked good mothering. George had pies, muffins, cakes; all the pop in the world; orange juice, apple juice; milk, tea, coffee; sausage, turkey, mackerel, chicken, tuna, hamburger, beef; cookies—peanut butter and ginger snaps and chocolate fudge; fresh bread and beans with pork and lard; even pineapple rings. He’d'd no idea that some people ate so handsomely.

  The RCMP dispatched a car to get Rue, and it came back with a good-looking known felon who wouldn’t talk and didn’t want to talk to George. But Rue was most angry with himself for not foreseeing that George’d fuck up everything by driving the car back to Fredericton and parking it where it’d be spotted easily.

  III

  AT THE ROMP DEPOT, Evans and Stark lorded it over a small room made tinier by just one table, three chairs, one searingly bright light, and many shadows. George was given coffee regularly, but was not allowed to smoke because Evans and Stark wanted him to sweat for each cigarette he’d be allotted later. They were dressed sharp as usual. Evans’s suit was blue serge, and he had a grey tie and shoes. Stark was also natty, but in the usual black clothes, a skinny black tie, and a white shirt. George was outclassed: he had on hobnailed boots and looked like a lumberjack. The detectives hulked around him, scribbling, taking notes, sipping coffees, and casting larger-than-life shadows. They were composing a res gestae, a spontaneous statement, a script that, with Georgie’s embroidered answers, would one day be pressed into death-sentence paper and then wrung into hangman’s hemp. The pair untangled every riddle, every puzzle, of this cheerless violence that was now being woven into True Crime literature of the most official and fatal sort.

  Evans and Stark had foolscap sheets with typed notations verifying George’s screwy army service, his Montreal fracas, his drab tool theft in Fredericton. They could look at the sheets, look at George, and not look happy.

  Evans said, finally, “Georgie, Georgie, Georgie, everything you done before last week was chickenshit compared to this homicide.”

  Panic blizzarded hotly inside George.

  G
eorgie asked, pretty please, for a lawyer, but Stark swerved abruptly on his black patent leather heels, his grey suit flashing, and glared, Rufus-like. “You can’t purify this murder by hiring a lawyer!”

  Georgie sank back, choked out, “I didn’t do it!”

  Evans, cordial, calm, commented, “We’ve got the unburnt head of the hammer, the charred head about the size of a hummingbird (but much, much heavier—and far deadlier than that weightless creature), from the ashes in your stove.”

  Stark interjected, “Tell us about the hammer.”

  George shrugged, gulped his coffee, and explained (omitting his past legal troubles with O’Ree), “I used this hammer for banging iron, breaking cast iron and selling it to people I was working for. I flattened the hammerhead by banging it on harder iron. I did it, flattened that hammer, breaking iron when I was working for the Jew, Abe Klein, here in Fredericton. I flattened that hammer myself and pounded one side. I used to knock up old stoves.”

  Evans leaned over the table and winked. “Like you knocked up your ol lady, eh?” George laughed: he thought it was a joke.

  But Stark retorted, “Or like you knocked Silver in the head.”

  George replied, “Not me. Rufus.”

  Evans returned, “One of you did slay Burgundy.”

  Stark sneered: “Oh yeah, one of ya’s ‘innocent’; the other one’s bad. Sure, sure.”

  Evans continued, “Was that hammer the one you—or Rufus—used?”

  George bowed his head. “I know which hammer is mine because I only have two hammers.”

  “And you helped Rue hammer a man for his money?” Evans sipped more coffee.

  George blurted: “The money we took off Silver—it was Rue’s, it was mainly silver.”

  Stark bluffed: “Silver’s death was a big murder done by a big fool. You let Silver freeze—or bleed—to death, and then you stuck him like a carcass—a carcass!—into his own car trunk.”

  George winced at hearing the word carcass: he saw Asa pointing accusingly at him.

  “You were a huge idiot, Jawge, to travel with a hammer in your overalls with the likes of Rue about.”

  “Maybe,” George answered Stark, “but I don’t know what my story is. It isn’t over yet.”

  Evans scraped back his chair. It sounded like an avalanche of boulders. “Why’d ya do it, Joygee?”

  “I—I didn’t do nothin. It was all Rue, I’m tellin you. I had nightmares filled with blood, knives, and being chased—just ahead of the murder,” George sobbed. “Also, Blondola was in the hospital, and our first baby was crying and crying and crying. So I needed money, so I helped Rufus.”

  Evans now asked, “Was it light or dark?”

  Geo explained, “Well, it was pretty dark, real dark. I recollected. Quite dark then.”

  Evans pressed on: “How was the murder executed?”

  George blubbered. “So we—Rudy and me—hemmed and hawed as to who was going to hit.

  So Rufus said to me, ‘You got the hammer, so you hit him.’ But I took scared, shaking inside of me, and I dropped the hammer in the snow, and I said, ‘I know Silver. I can’t.’” It was hard for Georgie to get his breath.

  He sobbed wheezingly, sighing, “Ahhhhhh,” “Ooooooh,” but Stark shouted at the shaken-up, shaking man: “A convenient story—quite suitable after smashing Burgundy with a hammer!”

  George shook his head negativizingly. “I ain’t sittin here to make a good story.” He elaborated: “All Rue said after he hit Silver was, ‘I felt his hands and face and they were ice cold.’ Me? I can’t be blempt. I would spend my life selling cream from cows I’d milked, if it weren’t for Rue and his schemes. I could’ve red-capped; I could’ve gone to the Boston States! I didn’t want him to sock Silver. We got in a half dispute. We had a little dispute over it.”

  Stark walloped Georgie: “What numbskull helps a brother to hammer a cab driver in the head for money to get his wife and innocent baby out the hospital, but insists on driving all night, like a hellion, all over the risky, icy roads of this province, to buy stockings for a slut instead?”

  George was exposed. “Nothing. I did nothing. She spoke and offered me a drink of wine.” Even as he lied, he could see, suddenly, Lovea’s lovely rump. But, hearing his adultery put so starkly and mockingly upped his despair. He’d have to let Rufus down, let Rufus hang. He blurted through his racking sobs, “Rue was the person who influenced me to do this so we might take on a white man and take his livelihood.”

  Stark growled: “Sure, sure, this murder doesn’t come with your fingerprints, your mitts, all over it, eh?”

  Evans rested a hand on George’s slouching, shuddering shoulder. “Georgie, aren’t you concerned you’re hanging your brother out to dry?”

  Stark guffawed: “Naw, just hanging him out to hang! You and Rue are as dumb as two chimps typing out Darwin’s Origin of Species.”

  George bawled. “I was scared Rufus’d put that hammer in my head next.”

  Having helped to break Georgie, Stark became conciliatory. He removed the hanky from his own tailored pocket and handed it, with flawless, practised chivalry, to the slobbering George. “We was disgustin—I mean, discussin—this here conversation. Why don’t we clear up a few other things?”

  George blew into the hanky, quaffed coffee, drew a deep breath, looked around, red-eyed, sniffling: “Okay.”

  Evans asked, “Did anything touch Silver before he expired?”

  George could only shrug. “The hammer touched him.” Then Evans handed George, compliant and eager and grateful, a cigarette.

  IV

  THAT VERY Thursday morning, January 13th, Rufus was arrested. Evans and Stark recovered from his effects a pistol (sans ammo); chewing gum; Player’s Navy Cut cigarettes; Cane, by Jean Toomer; a Classics Illustrated edition of Titus Andronicus; and sheet music, bloodstained. They also confiscated Rue’s suitcase containing a black suit, three bottles of wine, and a quart of rum.

  Rue shouted at the grey gabardine topcoated and grey fedora’d Mounties, “You guys are picking on me because someone killed some white bastard? All this shit because of one lousy dead white bastard! Shit! Shit! Shit!”

  Plumsy Peters went into the cooler too. Just for good measure.

  George, Rue, and Plumsy was all herded—separately—into the east entrance of the jail, a two-storey grey-stone structure with wood-planked, tin-clad ceilings painted either cream or indigo, and placed into one of the four separate second-floor cells, with 1840-era solid wood floors hammered down with homemade nails. Each cell had white-painted radiators, redbrick walls painted black, and black-painted, inch-thick iron-bar doors, and back windows, generously sized at three feet high and two feet wide, but bisected and segmented by a double row of iron bars painted cream. Here light could sluice in; no one could slide out.

  Torture was wrought by the jail’s location—adjacent to the grounds where the weekly farmers’ market was held. That good food roasting, frying, right under the jail windows enacted the curse of Tantalus. Although their prison fare was tasty, George, Rue, and Plumsy could glimpse and smell, but could not touch or taste, that fresh-barbecued outdoor food—chicken, steak, beef, sausages.

  Inside the York County Gaol, everyone’s face got branded with the shadows of the bars on their cells. At night, like flowers, three inmates lay dead-like and curled. Not much to do in the joint but think and squabble with guards and pray. Those jail doors clashed shut as noisy as shotgun blasts.

  George saw himself as distinct from Rue, for he, the elder, was testifying against Rue. Disquietingly, though, he and his brother were always brought to court in a pair—and always handcuffed together. Padlocked and shackled, the boys listed to starboard, then listed to port, as they shuffled from the jail to the court. Sheriff I. B. Lion and the police were telling Georgie they considered him as guilty of first-degree murder as the man George was doin his best to see hanged alone. So, together, the Hamiltons got used to the weight of shackles and the cold, grisly wrist
kiss of handcuffs. The two brothers staggered; they were so cluttered and clattered with chains. They had to walk chained in the street, degraded, flanked by two jail-an-nail-ems. Rue tried, as often as possible, to trip up Georgie as they lumbered along. He hated to see his brother so nonchalantly trying hard to get him hanged. Their fighting was as soft as shadow-boxing, but no less fierce. Rue tried to swing himself about to trip and bruise George, to make that fool understand their chains were all his fault.

  George say, “Rue, it weren’t my arm that struck out a life, but yours that made a ruin.”

  Plumsy yelled from his cell: “Joygee, must you jangle with your brother so?”

  Rue laughed bitterly. “Joygee, you think em laws gonna cut you some rope, and they will: but just one you gonna hang from.”

  George said, “No, you just talking bout your damn self.” Plumsy yelled again, “Joygee, you just a cocksuckin, bootlickin Uncle Tom, actin all sissy for the cops.”

  Rue guffawed.

  George was furious. “Listen up, Plumsy. I just hate the way the cops hate us.”

  Rufus snorted: “Don’t hate their ways; hate them back.”

  Instead, George deviously secured religion. He was already a Crown witness; now he’d witness for Christ. So he signed the Articles of War, confessed his sins and love of Christ, and enrolled as a Salvation Army soldier, thus joining the same faith whose members had befriended him when he was locked up in London and Montreal. He figured he’d have more success in this army than he’d enjoyed in the Canadian one. Besides, the Sally Ann was—just like Christ—used to treating with thieves, prostitutes, gamblers, and drunkards.