On the Head of a Pin

by Janet Kellough

  II

  The courtroom was packed. As the bailiff cleared a path down the centre aisle for him, Lewis took note of the people who had crammed onto the rows of benches and were spilling over the ends, some of them holding small children and squalling babies, others with their market baskets tucked under their feet. Still others perched on the wide window ledges, craning for a better view, or stood on tiptoe at the back of the hall, digging their elbows into their neighbours’ ribs as they tried to get a look at the murderer. The crime had been described in graphic and substantially erroneous detail by the local newspaper, and for weeks speculation and rumour had trumpeted from its front page; the news of local sensation for once edging out the affairs of both the Province and the rest of the world.

  Lewis’s name was called, and he was asked to swear on the Bible that he was speaking the truth. He was to give his testimony before Spicer gave his. This was a tactic decided on by the lawyer for the prosecution. As an ordained minister, his word was unlikely to be contested, and whatever embellishments Spicer chose to add to his own role would not in any way tarnish the truth of the matter: Simms had been caught red-handed. Quite literally red-handed, Lewis thought idly, for the dye from the book of Proverbs had been on his hands when he was wrestled down, red dye and red blood mingling together to proclaim his guilt.

  When asked to describe the events of the day in question he had been encouraged to tell only of discovering Simms in the act of choking the life out of the woman in the cabin. He had described all of the murders and the reasoning that had led him to suspect Simms to the lawyer who had spoken to him beforehand. He had held nothing back, but the man had fixed him with a steely eye and said, “You have only to say that you witnessed Simms running out of the cottage and that you went inside and discovered that the woman was dead. Anything else will simply confuse the court. Do you understand?”

  Lewis recounted what he had seen in a calm voice, and then the lawyer who had been appointed to defend the accused stood up. Lewis truly expected the man to question why he had been in that neighbourhood when he had no business there, why he had followed Simms, why they had burst through the door of the cottage without cause, but the man did nothing of the sort.

  “How long have you been an itinerant preacher, Mr. Lewis?” he asked.

  The question so took him by surprise that it took him a moment to answer. “For over twenty years,” he said finally.

  “And this is with the Methodist Episcopal Church of Canada?” he asked, and barely bothered waiting for Lewis’s nodded reply before returning to his seat.

  “No further questions, Your Honour.” And with that he was dismissed.

  The lawyer had given it all up as a bad cause, he realized. He was simply going through the motions, not interested in the whys and the wherefores, just in getting the whole thing over with so that he could go home to his dinner. There was no doubt what the outcome would be: Simms would hang.

  He didn’t bother waiting for Spicer. Word would spread soon enough about his testimony, and what the court had decided. Instead, he walked down by the river to watch the water trickling over the rocks. The rains had finally stopped — there had been none for nearly a month now — and the river was low again. One could almost have walked across it, unlike during the spring when the sheer weight of the water threatened to sweep away the bridge where the river emptied into the bay.

  There were men working on this bridge as he watched, heaping up great boulders and rocks around the pilings, strengthening the banks that channeled the stream toward the outlet that led to the open water beyond. Every year they piled their rock and fortified their beams and some years it was enough; but a spring of heavy rain or a sudden torrential outburst could swell the river all along its course, from the far backcountry to the bay, and then the water would spill over its banks, flooding the streets and the cellars and leaving behind a greasy, gritty film that stank and festered.

  Every year there was someone drowned in the river’s torrent, most often a young boy, for the boys seemed unable to keep away from it. There were enough dangers for them in the course of life, you would think they would know enough not to court the ones they could avoid. There was the cholera that swept through Canada in devouring epidemics, malaria that came from the swampy areas being cleared, unexplained fevers and quinsies and convulsions, sharp axes that could remove a limb in a twinkling, horses that could throw, bulls that could gore; you would think it would be enough without adding drowning to it all. Or war. Or murder. Life was fragile, vulnerable in this place, and no effort seemed able to hold it in place, no words could stop it from slipping away, no prayers seemed able to protect it.

  He had hoped that Simms’s trial would offer him a sense of closure, lift the weight of Sarah’s death from his soul. He was relieved, it was true, that he no longer had to worry that he would again ride into some secluded clearing and find another young woman dead. He was glad that this particular madness had been bottled up, could no longer threaten the world. But he knew, too, that hanging Simms could not bring the young women back, and he wondered at the waste of it all. Five, soon to be six dead, because one man’s hatred and loathing had turned inside out and taken them all down to destruction. And yet, in spite of any reassurance he was offered, he still held himself responsible in part. He had suspected with no grounds for suspicion, made judgments on less than fact, prevaricated, assigned guilt where he wanted to find it. He had believed all the time that he was right, and seldom did he stop to consider that he was as subject to prejudice and intolerance as the next man. One of the major tenets of his faith was a constant striving toward sanctification, toward a state in which it was not possible to sin, to know the very grace of God. It distressed him to realize how far short of this ideal he had fallen. No, not fallen … stumbled, slid … one downward step at a time.

  As he stared at the trickle of water in front of him he began to reach a new understanding of the questions that plagued him, although it was not knowledge that he particularly welcomed. There was no sudden rush, just a slow dawning, and the kernel of it lay in what he had said to Martha: “The badness is always there, in everybody, and you have to struggle not to let it out, and not to act on it.” There was no denying of evil, no final shutting of it away. It would lie there forever, like the destructive potential of the river in spate, ready to roil up and rush over its constrictive banks, and all you could do was build on as high a ground as you could find and hope that your foundations held against the torrent. And that was enough. He knew what he had to do. It was a lesson that he had needed to learn, and it was only his own stubbornness that had made it such a difficult one.

  III

  Surprisingly, there was little in the newspaper about Spicer’s testimony, although they had given over the entire front page to the trial. Apparently he had described his efforts to apprehend the accused in a factual and low-key way, and it was reported in the same manner. A great deal of the space was again given to a gruesome description of the dead body and the bravery of the constables who had attended the scene. There were also a couple of paragraphs about the accused, and an account of the way in which he seemed to sit quietly one moment, his head down, as if he weren’t listening; the next he would be slavering at the mouth, his eyes rolling, his whole body shaking. It was obvious that he was criminally insane, the editor of the paper wrote, but he had taken the life of an innocent woman, and so must pay the price.

  The court agreed and the magistrate set the date of execution for a month’s time.

  “There’s one thing I don’t understand,” Spicer said as they rode the circuit together. “If everyone agrees that he’s insane, then how can he be held accountable for his crime? I find this very troubling.”

  “As do I,” Lewis replied. “All I can say in response is that now you’re beginning to understand that life is never straightforward. Often there is no clear right or wrong, and our duty is to think hard and long before we pronounce any kind of definitive judgm
ent.”

  “With the Bible as our authority?”

  Lewis hesitated. “I prefer to think that my conscience is the final arbiter.”

  “I wish it were easier.”

  “If it was easier, we wouldn’t have to think so hard, would we?”

  It was an excellent point that emerged, and Lewis decided to use it as the basis for his next sermon. He was a little disappointed when his words seemed to go over the congregation’s heads somewhat, for he could see the puzzled looks on their faces. This was not what they wanted from a preacher, this measured approach that put the onus on their own judgment and called upon self-discipline and reason to guide their days. They wanted fire and brimstone, the threat that if they trespassed they would burn in eternal hell, but that if they followed the rules of their faith, they would go to their reward in a heavenly paradise. Suddenly, Lewis felt very old, and very tired.

  At the end of the service he stood by the door to say a word to each of the congregation, and for a moment he was taken aback when a girl stopped before him to speak. It was not the reaction that had so long plagued him when he saw someone who looked like Sarah. This girl did not have chestnut hair or grey eyes; her hair was a dull yellow paired with eyes of a washed-out blue; she did not carry herself in a sprightly way, but rather slouched as she walked along. What she did have was a little green book that was leaching dye onto her palms.

  “May I see this?” he asked, and she handed it to him. This one was the Book of Acts, not Proverbs, but the size and the binding were the same. He leafed through it, paying special attention to the front fly-leaf, but there was no sloping inscription written there.

  “Read it well, and understand,” was all he said when he handed it back to her. It reminded him that he had one still-unanswered question.

  “Morgan, do you remember the meeting at Gatrey’s farm? The day you found the Lord?”

  “Of course I do. It was the most momentous day of my life.”

  “Just after the first hymn was sung, you asked me if I had seen Rachel Jessup. Do you remember? You wanted to give her one of those books.”

  “Yes. The Proverbs. I gave it to her.”

  “You did?” He looked at the boy with astonishment.

  “Yes. What’s the matter?”

  “Then how did Simms’s handwriting get into it?”

  Spicer blushed. “I asked him to write the inscription for me. I didn’t write well enough to do it myself. I still don’t, but I’m getting better. He threw in a Lord’s Prayer pin as a bonus. Why are you asking all this now?”

  “Because I couldn’t figure out why Simms would have written in the book. He didn’t write anything in any of the others. Just that one. It’s been puzzling me.”

  “He didn’t know. Who I was giving it to, I mean.”

  “Of course.” And yet the handwriting was the thing that had finally convinced him that Simms was the murderer. How odd, he thought. He had missed so many clues, yet the one that had led him to the culprit had turned out to be no clue at all.

  IV

  The roads were dry, the weather sunny and bright, and Moses and Nancy were ready to head west.

  Minta had been delighted that they were to be married at her house, or at least in one side of it, and although it was a quiet affair as weddings go, she and Betsy spent long hours preparing the breakfast. Betsy kept trying to shoo her away, as it was by now evident that Minta had another child on the way. This one seemed not to be taking the same toll on her as Henry had, and she was cheerful and full of energy, her face aglow from the new life inside her.

  Lewis chose to speak of the bond between man and wife, and the partnership that comes with a strong marriage, and he made Betsy blush when he praised her for her support and faithfulness over the years. He thought Moses had chosen well, and said so. Nancy seemed a very sensible girl, her parents both hard-working people who in turn appeared pleased with their daughter’s choice. Already he could see that the young couple were acting as a team, their eyes firmly fixed on the goal of owning their own farm.

  “You hate to see them go off so far away,” Nancy’s father said. “But I can understand it. It’s a new country they’re building. The future is in their hands, not ours anymore. I just hope they do a better job of it than we did.”

  Nancy’s cheeks coloured prettily when he pronounced Moses and she united, then Martha made everyone laugh by applauding loudly. It was a propitious way to start a marriage, he thought.

  And then, too soon, it was the next day and the new couple was making ready to leave. Moses had acquired an old wagon and mended the wheels on it. He had built a frame over part of it and covered it with a piece of canvas.

  “That should keep things dry if it starts raining again,” he said. Lewis could see that Moses had been planning this move for some time, and had slowly accumulated the things he figured he would need: tools, lengths of rope and chain, and several iron pots. As a wedding present, Nancy’s parents had given them an old draught horse to pull the wagon. Lewis hoped the beast could make the journey, for it was sway-backed and tired-looking.

  “I just want him to get us there,” Moses said. “If he’s still in decent shape, I’ll keep him for ploughing.

  Otherwise, I’ll sell both the horse and the wagon and use the money toward stock.”

  Nancy’s trousseau chest was full of bolts of cloth and seeds for the kitchen garden, and Betsy had made up a sewing kit for her: thread, needles, scissors, lengths of lace and trim and a paper of pins— none of which had the Lord’s Prayer on them.

  Luke was beside himself with anticipation and excitement. This was an adventure he had scarcely dared hope for and he scurried around helping Moses load up the wagon as if he were afraid that some event might intervene that would keep them from setting off after all. Martha was excited, too, mostly because everyone else was, and made a nuisance of herself, getting in the way until Minta swooped down and took her off to play with Henry.

  “I’m sorry to see you go,” Lewis said to his youngest son, echoing the words said by Nancy’s father, and Luke had a moment when the anxiety of leaving his family warred with his desire to follow his brother. “You’re a good lad, and I’m sure you’ll make a great success of this enterprise.” The boy reddened at this unexpected praise, and Lewis wished he had given it out more freely in the past. He had spent too much time mourning his girls; he should have looked up and noticed that his boys were becoming men. “There is one thing I want to say before you go.”

  He could see that Luke was expecting some admonition, a warning against falling in with bad company perhaps, or a caution to be careful with his money, and so his surprise was almost comical when Lewis said, “I know it hasn’t always been easy being my son. I know it was hard moving all the time and not ever having any money and having so much expected of you because you’re the preacher’s son. And I just want to let you know that I understand that, and I thank you for turning into such a fine young man in spite of it all. Your mother and I are very proud of you.”

  Luke blinked back a few tears and smiled.

  Lewis felt he had no need for similar words when it came to Moses — he had received the blessing he craved on the day he had announced he was going west. He merely wished the boy good luck and, at the last moment, thrust a letter into his pocket. “It’s for Will,” he said. “And Nabby.”

  Moses looked wary and Lewis laughed. “It’s all right. It’s not a tirade. I’m just opening the door a crack.”

  It had taken him nearly an hour to compose the short letter. He was a man from whom words flowed easily as a rule, and yet his emotions on this topic were so complex and confused that he found it difficult to summarize them into any sort of coherent statement. In the end, he kept it short, and hoped that it would be received in the same spirit that it was offered:

  My Dear Will and Nabby,

  I sincerely regret the terms on which we parted and I would like to proffer my apologies for any offence I may have given. I
am unwilling to let our differences of opinion come between us any longer, and I would like, at the very least, to see a restoration of communication within our family. Your mother and I are anxious to know how you are getting on.

  If there is any way in which I can assist you, now or in the future, I hope you will not hesitate to call upon me.

  With great love,

  Your father

  The letter cost him dearly in terms of his pride, and he feared it would quite probably cost him money in the future, but he was determined to make peace with his eldest son. He would let this boil fester no longer.

  V

  The brick house in Belleville was shuttered and empty when they rode past. He knew that the Simms family had removed themselves to Kingston after selling off a great number of their belongings, for Sally, the girl who had taken up with Spicer, reported it all in great detail.

  “They went without giving me the last of my wages,” she said. “I was tempted to set the law on them, but they were such a sorry looking lot that I didn’t have the heart.”

  Lewis felt that Sally was the perfect match for Spicer. She was rough in speech and manner, but a hard worker and a generous soul. She teased him mercilessly in a good-natured way, and Morgan would sputter and protest until he realized that she was joking with him, and for a time his too-serious demeanour would lift a little.

  She had already found another position with a family that needed help with their heavy tasks — the laundry and the scrubbing — and the woman she worked for was instructing her in the kitchen. It was obvious that Morgan adored Sally, and she him, and she confided to Lewis that they were just waiting until he received his appointment and she had saved a little more money, and then they would be asking him to officiate at their marriage ceremony. Lewis had no doubt that this would take place in the not-too-distant future. Spicer had proved himself, and with a little more instruction, Lewis would have no hesitation in recommending him to be received on trial.