Doc lit the Zippo lighter in his right hand, as if he was performing a sacred ritual.
He even mumbled words as if they were sacred, as if he was a deacon at some ceremony in the church.
“Hear ye, hear ye” was what he actually said. “Hear ye, hear ye now on this day, July 21, 1986.”
Mary made a lunge to stop him, but he tripped her and she fell forward.
Then he lit little, joyous, waggy-tailed Muggy Muffs on fire, and dropped it to the floor. Doc’s own hand caught on fire as well, and he had to rub at it to put it out, and then lick it.
At first it did not move at all. But the fire started to blossom, from bluish to orange flame, from its tail to its head. Then suddenly the dog, making howling horrified sounds, ran all around the house in a blaze. You could not help but stare at its bulging, perplexed eyes. “Muggy,” Mary called to it.
Bobby screamed, and screamed and said:
“Stop it! Stop it!”
And he hid his terrified face under the edge of the rug, so you could still see half of his body, trembling.
The dog ran to its chair, the favourite one it slept on. It tried to hide there—and then fell through an open window. Mary ran to the window and called its name.
Suddenly she saw the yard light up in various places. You could see a maple branch begin to burn, and then the roses, and then sparks fell on the walk that the little thing crossed. So like a demon it ran about the yard, blazing and yelling. Finally it stopped screeching in horror, ran all ablaze into a bush, kicked twice more and the night was still.
“Snow,” Mary said. “I want it to snow.”
6.
OF COURSE SHE KNEW WRITERS OF ALL SORTS, POLITICIANS, opera singers. She knew most of the living prime ministers—some said she had an affair with one. She sat in her room with Bobby. They lay about playing checkers, singing and making up stories. Bobby had his own Ferris wheel. Albeit a small one. Some days he just sat in it, at the top.
Doc left. The marriage was annulled.
She and Bobby would walk the road at night—just like vampires did. They would wait until the children his age went inside, after their games, their cries of confusion and delight, their yelling and laughter had subsided. Then a child would emerge just as the sun was going down over the bay, and his mother, looking not much bigger than he, both wearing ball caps. They would emerge and turn right, away from the great cottage, and go though the path that she had covered with soft pine nettles gone red in the setting sun. They would visit Jabaroo the horse; they would visit his “pile of goats.” They would sit in the barn’s hayloft and she would tell him a story about Denise Albert or Debby Dormey—her two bestest friends. She would laugh—laugh and laugh, like a little girl. They would play hide and seek among the soft worn timbers 120 years old—or if lucky see just at dawn the phantom Man O War riding the waves on its way to Quebec in 1763.
Then she would quote her favourite Nowlan poem. She would tell him the poem was better than Chaucer. But that someday she would read him Chaucer too.
He would listen to her, his mouth open in wonder at his mother—this very great lady. One night they did actually meet a she-bear roaming out near the cove. It came out on their little path, and without a second’s hesitation Mary Cyr stood in front of her son, and stared the she-bear down.
Near dawn they would come back, to this great home, and when the sun was rising Mary would tuck her son into bed, and lie beside him and sing him to sleep, and he would sleep until afternoon.
Perhaps she didn’t handle it right at all. Both the Catholic Church and social workers said she hadn’t, after Bobby died. Perhaps there never was a good way to handle it.
* * *
—
This was the year that Mrs. Cruise was publishing her great book.
It chronicled her advocacy for change. A feminist in the age of feminism. No one could be braver, Mary once said.
Perhaps Ms. Cruise did not know it was Mary Cyr’s family’s publishing house. Perhaps Mary Cyr who knew much about her by the detectives she hired, knew enough to care about her. Knew enough of her own betrayal.
Mary discovered that it was there, one day when she and Bobby were making a great castle with Lego. The castle was going to be big enough to sleep in—have a moat filled with crocodiles and snakes—some man-eating tigers too.
She had to protect him, and Lego was the best retardant against all things wrong.
But she left the Lego where it was.
She went to the publisher. It was a cold November afternoon and she arrived unannounced in Ottawa—on the date she had lost her virginity long ago, to a man she once worshipped in a childish way.
The editor had refused the book, but since her grandfather had major interest in the company, she asked them to please reconsider. The book was meticulously bound and ribboned. It was such an innocent affair in the end. And Rory assumed it was groundbreaking, assumed there was actually something new in it.
She picked it up, flipped through the pages—made a mark in the middle with her pen, and said: “Reconsider.”
“Reconsider—Ms. Cyr,” the editor said. “It is not the kind of book we consider here—we do mostly political books—this is a sociological study—And—” here he whispered gravely “—it calls for the government to have a policy of national euthanasia. The poor woman believes in that way she will help the world.”
“Well, so what?” Mary said flippantly.
“Well, people like your son—not in so many words but surely in the implication.”
“I am almost certain that it would. You see it’s all the rage now.” “What is?”
“Liberal Lunacy.”
“Well—what is your relationship with her?”
“I knew him once when I was young.” Mary said, and here her voice faltered.
“But he is much older than you are.”
“By centuries, it seems.”
“I had planned to send it back with a rejection slip.”
“Publish her, please. Do it for me—I will pay the publishing costs.”
“And who will I say gave the acquisition go-ahead?”
She simply wrote on the top page of Ms. Cruise’s grand opus: “Stet, Mary Fatima Cyr.”
Then turning away, she said:
“Euthanasia of Bobby—why, of course. Why didn’t I think of that.”
So she secretly helped to save Mrs. Cruise’s book with the Ottawa publisher. It was published that year. It made a splash among certain advocates. She did this for revenge against her beau. It was something she kept secret.
“I never read the fuckin book. She strikes me as a sad creature—”
She felt guilty. This started her wild excessive binge drinking, her solitary parties with Vogue magazine, and a forty of gin. In fact she ended up in detox on a summer night. Poor little Bobby watched the ambulance take her away. And Perley kept the boy for her during that stay.
Once out of detox she disappeared from view with Bobby in tow, for over eight months.
7.
THEN ONE SUMMER DAY, WHEN JOHN THOUGHT HE WOULDN’T hear from her, two years or more after the crisis on the reserve, she and Bobby appeared again. People said she was now erratic like her mother had been—obviously scatterbrained. And as crazy as an eel.
Even her old friends, and she had few, felt she was very different now. She communicated with no one.
She pulled the teakwood motorboat out, and began to repair it. She spent half the summer doing this. She had a friend of hers, Packet Terri, lift the engine out and place it on the big side table in the barn and there she worked, all day long. She had been taught enough mechanics by those people who loved her, taught how to cast a fly rod, hand-tail a salmon, shoot a buck on the run across the field. She did this not because she wanted to compete with men but because to her, this was a natural thing for her to do.
That teakwood boat, bought in the late forties, was going to be her escape. She and Bobby would go to their small cottage ac
ross the bay, where her grandfather used to go to hunt duck—they would stay there together all August. She would fish and dig oyster and clams.
That is what she told John in a phone call. The teakwood inboard motorboat was what could save her and Bobby. It was the only thing she had seen during her birthing pains. So the engine was worked on, manuals were brought out, people were consulted about the crankcase, about gaskets, about replacing the spark plug wires, and new piston rings, but she was determined to do the work by herself. And then one late night, about eleven o’clock, there was from across the grand manicured lawn the sound of the engine starting.
“Eureka!” she wrote.
And the next day she had that name put on the front of the boat.
She left a note, which said:
“Don’t worry—Bobby and I know what to do to make this right.”
And:
“If Doc wants his flip-flops, mail them to him COD.”
But she did not get away until late, after four, and the swell had started.
They said the air was cold—the spray froze her face because the windshield had broken—and that she had a catatonic stare. (Or those who said they saw her, days later when people were questioned, did.) She put a blanket over Bobby and placed him up against the engine housing to keep him warm. It all looked to observers as if she needed help, and there was no one in the world to help her. So people gathered at the wharf to watch her go. Just as people have always done to those eccentrics during the cottage months when all people seem to have a more tenuous grasp on reality.
Yes, a great adventure to her grandfather’s old duck-hunting lodge, where they would roast marshmallows, and he could bathe on the beach, and make sandcastles without being looked at.
She stood up at the wheel, looked over her handiwork, smiled and waved to those seeing her off.
“Bon voyage,” she shouted to herself.
She was not much more than a child herself; Bobby hidden from everyone so no one would make fun of him. She had plastic pails and shovels, a beach towel, ten packets of Kool-Aid, hot dogs and hamburgers.
She arrived across the bay to the small family island about ten that night, and waded the boat in. The wind was from the south, the last bell-buoy light was faint, another five kilometres away.
She unlocked the small cottage door and unloaded the box of groceries and the beer and gin. Then she went to get her son, but couldn’t wake him. His face was pressed toward the engine, and his arms had not been strong enough to move away. She called his name many times. She stroked his face.
There was no response. She looked at him strangely. The stars were now out, and it was August and meteors fell and dazzled the black night air.
She tried to find out what was wrong. Perhaps this sickness caused him to go to sleep.
“Bobby?” she said. “Bobby, dear Bobby?”
But he did not wake up.
Ever again.
There had been a leak in the engine that she had worked on, to get the boat in the water. She had been too stubborn to ask for help from one of ten mechanics she could have phoned. Yes, in her own way she had been too stubborn—too silly to think she must do it all by herself. As Packet Terri said later:
“The lady needed a good kick in the rear.”
But that was for another time.
Bobby had died of carbon monoxide poisoning. He had just gone to sleep of a sudden—just like that, lying up against the engine she had worked on all that summer. She had put him aside the housing in order to keep him warm.
“Bobby died,” she wrote. “I put him near the engine and he fell asleep. I held him in my arms for nine hours. I sang the Big Rock Candy Mountain to him, I am sure he will go there now.”
Then in agony she was furious with herself—two dozen times people had asked her to let them help, and each time she was too stubborn—oh yes, she was going to do it all—and she hated herself now! And worse, the boy had trusted her, trusted her to know what she was doing when she really did not know.
That was the sting that in fact would never end.
But then there was another sting—so it became a triumvirate of stings—and it was this: Bobby knew in his own way that she did not know what she was doing, and yet was loyal to her to the end.
She placed him in the water and watched him float away from her. And then, lying on the floor of the boat, she remembered the Scottish writer who said:
“The cheapest way out of Glasgow is a bottle of Bols gin.”
So she opened the pint up, and drank and cut her wrists.
She lay in the dark floating over the River Styx, right into the Canadian Coast Guard vessel Cape Tormintine.
She spent two days in ICU in Saint John. When she came out, she was driven to the police station. Why? Because it was obvious to everyone she had committed murder—and then tried to take her own life. Impossible not to think otherwise.
8.
YET SOMETHING HAPPENED THAT SEEMED FORTUITOUS FOR Mary Cyr’s defence.
There had to be a scenario where the killing of her son, which seemed indisputable, was also acceptable. And her lawyer found it, and made it the prima facto of the case.
That it was tried in the public domain was, for her, at this time, looked upon as a good thing. The boy, especially among at least the more vocal, was a societal burden. He should not have been born. This thought was especially prevalent among certain quasi-freedom seekers.
Especially to one or two who sometimes travelled to the edge of moral obscenity in order to prove to others that they were free.
“Look how she suffered—forced into a pregnancy.”
So the country watched and waited.
It began to take the papers by storm—it became for the majority a daily source of debate, titillation and entertainment. The farther one got from the centre of her little province the more unimaginable the theories were. In England, especially; where they called her the “Femme Fatale of the Forest.” And the “Bitch in the Backwoods.”
It was outlandish, slovenly and deceitful, but since these reports were supposedly from the “most hip and sophisticated” of British journalists in the most advanced places, it was taken as a given that these things could be said. So once more she seemed to be fighting the world on her own. Nan sang in the house for the first time in months. She was happy again. Not because she was vindictive but because she was vindicated—the girl was as mad as her British mother had been.
So she sang “Frère Jacques,” and opened up all the upstairs windows to the sun.
But Perley reacted differently. In fact he was the only one in the family to think her innocent. He brooded over the case for two weeks, and then hired a lawyer—one of the sharpest in the country, a man with many roots in progressive positions to defend her. (Well, the Toronto lawyer had no progressive opinions—every opinion he held he elevated to the stature of being progressive.) He was short, he was rotund, he had a flow of white hair, he said bellicose things.
(What was more striking is the fact that many women took the lives of their children over the years because of depression or being driven mad, and were treated with compassion. But the lawyer said he was not looking for compassion, but justice—for Mary.)
Perley was not as sophisticated as he should be. He should have guessed looking at this lawyer that her defence would be a circus.
One of the reporters who came to report on this was named EL. He got the job for a Windsor, Ontario, paper because he was the lawyer’s nephew. And for weeks you could see him in one of the little restaurants in town, staying at one of the small bed-and-breakfasts, taking notes and talking to the locals about making a movie of the week about the case.
So, and John knew this so well, what they first had to do was make her guilty—hope she would be charged—and then defend her right to be guilty.
It would be truthful to say she was completely innocent of it all, she had no hand in the death of a child she loved, but it was far better for all concerned to say
they were defending her right as a woman to terminate the life.
So what Mary later called the giants of social awareness took over.
On one side the prosecution was saying what Mary Cyr herself would have said, that the child was a human life, while the defence was saying she had done what she would never think of doing, because she had been driven to it.
The entire country and in fact many countries took a position.
“He was not at all hopeless,” the prosecutor said. “He had a good mind and a good heart and he loved the woman who betrayed him out on a cold bay at midnight.”
“Yes, yes. Yes, I betrayed him,” Mary Cyr said. “I betrayed little Bobby. I betrayed him and killed him, and I wish to die. Is there an electric chair here—could our good friends in the US spare one for a few hours tomorrow afternoon?”
(Unfortunately this very line was printed in New York and Paris, and was now reprinted in all its glory in Mexico.)
The boy was wrapped too meticulously, put in a position where it was impossible not to breathe carbon monoxide from the engine, for it to be anything but planned, deliberate and calculated, the prosecution asserted.
(This too made its way to Mexico, which strengthened the idea of poison in some people’s minds.)
For the sake of the defence—she, Mary Cyr, pale and withdrawn, had no say. She was overwhelmed and burdened by this child. That she had taken it to Switzerland hoping to find a cure, but it was hopeless. And so everyone decided she was a young woman alone with a terribly impaired child—a woman who had an impaired childhood; the child coming, it was suggested but never stated, from incest.
For some months the talk of a trial, and when it would happen, filled the papers. The Montreal doctor she consulted was interviewed, and would provide evidence for the prosecution; the New York and Swiss doctors were interviewed, and would counter for the defence. And all would say much the same thing.
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