by Gail Bowen
The man from the poultry association opened a metal ice chest, pulled out the last bags of fresh broilers and began laying them on the grills. It was a little after four o’clock. The ballplayers were coming off the diamonds tired and hungry. The poultry man wouldn’t be taking any chickens back to the city with him tonight. For a moment Howard was still, watching, absorbed. Then he shrugged and grabbed my hand.
“Let’s go, lady,” he said. Hand in hand we crossed the road and moved through the crowd toward the stage.
When we got close, Dave Micklejohn ran out to meet us. He had been Andy’s executive assistant for as long as I could remember, and his devotion to Andy was as fierce as it was absolute. No one knew how old Dave was – certainly he was past the age suggested for the retirement of civil servants, but he had such energy that his age was irrelevant. He was fussy, condescending and irreplaceable.
That day, as always, he was carrying a clipboard. Also, as always, he was immaculate. He was wearing white, white shorts and a T-shirt imprinted with a picture of JeanPaul Sartre.
“I like your shirt,” I said.
“I tell everyone he’s running for us in the south end of the province,” he said. “You two were certainly no help. I run my buns off getting that bunch up there at the same time –” he waved at Andy’s family and friends, sitting like kindergarten children on folding chairs along the back of the stage “– and you two vanish into thin air.”
“Howard wanted to watch his hero, the chicken man,” I said. “Anyway, we’re here now. Did you find Andy to give him the fresh shirt?”
“Of course,” he said, “I’m a Virgo. I know the importance of details.”
I reached over and touched his hand. “Dave, don’t be mad at us. You’ve done a wonderful job. How did you ever get Eve to come?”
I could see him thaw. Then, unexpectedly, he looked down, embarrassed. “Well, it wasn’t easy. I had to agree to sneak a piece of quartz onto the podium today. She says the electromagnetic field from the crystal will combine with Andy’s electrical field to erase negativity and recharge energy stores.”
“Oh, God, Dave, no.”
He squared his shoulders, and Sartre rippled defiantly on his chest. “She’s here, isn’t she? And look.” He held up a sliver of rose quartz that glittered benignly in the sunlight. “You can put these things in water, you know. Eve says they charge up the people drinking it and bring them into harmony with their environment. Actually, we had quite a nice talk about it.”
“Why don’t you make Roma a nice cup of water on the rocks?” I pointed to the far end of the stage, where Andy’s mother, Roma, was sitting stiffly, as far away as she could get from her daughter-in-law. “She looks like she could use some harmonizing. Actually, what we probably need is a slab of quartz dropped in the water supply for the whole city – take care of all our problems.” Beside me, Howard gazed innocently in the direction of the ball diamonds.
Dave snapped the clip on his clipboard. “You don’t have to be such a bitch, Jo. In fact, if you could manage to let up a little, I could tell you about our real triumph.” He smoothed the crease of his shorts and looked at me. “Rick Spenser’s here today.”
I was impressed. “What’s he doing here? I know this is big stuff for us, but it’s penny ante for the networks. Why would those guys at CVT send their top political commentator to cover a little picnic on the prairies?”
“I don’t know,” said Dave, “but I’m ecstatic. There are a lot of nice visuals here today – all the little kids guessing how many jellybeans are in the jar, and the old geezers throwing horseshoes and reminiscing. How many points do you think all this heartland charm will be worth in the polls, Jo?”
“You’ll have to ask Howard. He’s the expert.”
But Howard was heading behind the stage, where the major players, as they liked to think of themselves, were talking politics and drinking warm beer out of plastic cups. It didn’t matter. We couldn’t have heard Howard anyway because Craig Evanson had finished, Andy was walking across the stage to the podium, and the crowd was on its feet.
They had waited all afternoon for this, the moment when Andy would stand before them. Now he was here and they were wild – clapping their hands together in a ragged attempt at rhythm and calling his name again and again. “Andy, Andy, Andy.” Two distinct syllables, regular as heartbeats until throats grew hoarse and the beat became thready.
We could see Andy clearly now. He was wearing an open-necked shirt the colour of the sky, and when he saw Dave and me, he grinned and waved his baseball cap in the air. The crowd cheered as if he had turned stone to gold. Finally, Andy raised his hands to quiet them, then he turned toward Dave and me and made a drinking gesture.
“Water,” I said.
“Taken care of,” said Dave, and he ran behind the stage and came back carrying a tray with a glass and a black thermal pitcher. When he went by me, he stopped and pointed to a little hand-lettered sign he’d taped to the side of the Thermos: “FOR THE USE OF ANDY BOYCHUK ONLY. ALL OTHERS DRINK THIS AND DIE.”
I laughed. “So much for the brotherhood of the common man.”
Dave passed the tray to the woman who was acting as emcee for the entertainment. She was a big woman, wearing a flower-printed dress. I remember thinking all afternoon that she must have been suffering from the heat. She handed Andy the tray with a pretty little flourish, and he took it with a gallant gesture.
I moved to the side of the stage. There was a patch of shade there, and it gave me a clear view of Andy and of the crowd.
They were arranging themselves for the speech – trying to find a cool spot on their beach towels, pouring watery, tepid drinks out of Thermoses, slipping kids a couple of dollars for the amusement booths that had been set up. Afterward, even the police were astounded at how few people had any real memory of what they saw in those last moments. But I saw, and I remembered.
Andy filled his glass from the Thermos, drank the water, all of it, then opened the blue leather folder that contained the speech I’d written for him. It was a sequence I’d watched a hundred times. But this time, instead of sliding his thumbs to the top of the podium, leaning toward the audience and beginning to speak, he turned to look at Dave and me.
He was still smiling, but then something dark and private flickered across his face. He looked perplexed and sad, the way he did when someone asked him a question that revealed real ugliness. Then he turned toward the back of the stage and collapsed. From the time he turned until the time he fell was, I am sure, less than five seconds. It seemed like a lifetime.
As I looked at the empty podium, I knew it was all over. I hugged the portfolio to me. In it was the last speech I would ever write for Andy Boychuk. The solid line of family and friends shattered into dazed groups. Eve Boychuk, Andy’s wife, moved from her chair to the portable staircase. She was blocking the stairs, trying to keep the ambulance attendants from taking her husband away.
The August sun was getting low in the sky, and as she stood blocking the stairway, Eve was backlit with golden light. It was a striking picture. She wore a short sundress made of unbleached cotton and she seemed to be all brown limbs – powerful athlete’s shoulders, strong arms, long, taut-muscled legs. She looked strong and invulnerable. But her face was dead with disbelief, and her eyes were terrible – vacant and unseeing.
The sirens were getting closer. Dave Micklejohn came up behind Eve, moved her from the staircase, and started giving directions to the ambulance attendants. “Bring him over to the side of the stage,” he said, then he turned to me. “Come on, Jo, let’s jump down over here and they can lower Andy to us.”
And that’s what we did. When she saw what we were doing, Eve came over and grabbed Dave’s hand, and we all jumped down together. We must have looked like actors from the theatre of the absurd, but it was right that we were the ones who took Andy from the stage that last time.
They hadn’t brought the ambulance up to the stage. There were so many people on
the grounds, and I guess someone had told them there wasn’t any hurry. We wouldn’t let the ambulance people take over. They tried, but Dave, who was usually the most courteous of men, snarled at them to get away. As we began carrying Andy toward the ambulance, a woman dressed in blue came over, wordlessly took one corner of the stretcher from Dave and walked along with us.
I had noticed her earlier because she was a genuine beauty. She was, I think, close to sixty, but auburn-haired still, and she had the freckled skin of the natural redhead. As one of the attendants slid Andy’s body into the ambulance, she reached her hand out toward the open doors in a gesture so poignant that Dennis Whittaker from our city paper, the Sun Examiner, took a picture of her that the paper used on their front page the next day.
We should have counted our lucky stars when we opened the paper and saw that heart-stopping picture. It could have been worse. Seconds after that photo was taken, the nightmare of that afternoon turned another corner.
Eve Boychuk had climbed into the ambulance before the attendants put Andy’s body in. She was hunched over, sitting on one of the little jump seats ambulances have so family members can go along to the hospital with their loved ones. The ambulance had begun to pull away when a small, dark figure broke through the crowd and ran after it. She was shouting, but in a language I couldn’t understand. It was Andy’s mother, Roma Boychuk.
Eighty-three years old, brought from her neat little home in the west end of Saskatoon to watch her son’s triumph, and we had forgotten about her. She had lived in Canada for seventy years, but she was still uneasy with English. Ukrainian was the language of her heart, and it was in Ukrainian she was crying out as she tried to stop the ambulance that was carrying her son away.
The scene was like something out of a silent movie: the round little figure in black running across the field, dust swirling around her heavy legs as the sun fell in the sky and the ambulance sped away. But the movie wasn’t silent, and you didn’t have to know Ukrainian to hear the anguish in her voice.
I didn’t recognize the man who ran after her. He was tall and very thin. He looked like the singer James Taylor. The auburn-haired woman and I stood and watched as he reached Roma, enclosed her small body in his arms for a few moments and then, still holding her, walked across the dusty field toward us. When he came close, we could hear that he was saying to her the soft, repetitive nonsense words you use to soothe a child.
She was crying freely now, and her pain hung in the air like vapour. The auburn-haired woman felt it and reached out to Roma. She placed her fingertips under Roma’s chin and gently lifted the old woman’s face so that Roma could see her. They stood there looking into one another’s eyes for perhaps ten seconds – two women united by grief and pain. Then Roma made a terrible feral sound, a hissing growl, the sound of a kicked cat, and she leaned closer to the woman and spat in her face. The man grabbed Roma and I reached for the auburn-haired woman, but she was running across the field toward the parking lot. I started after her, but when I’d run a few steps I was hit by a sense of futility. What was the point? Andy was dead. And so I just stood there as sirens sliced the air and police cars screamed over the hill.
Then someone was holding me. Suddenly my daughter, Mieka, was behind me; her arms, suntanned and strong, were around me.
“Oh, Mummy.” She buried her head in my neck the way she had when she was a little girl. Over her shoulder, I could see Howard Dowhanuik with his arms resting on the shoulders of my two sons. They were still in their baseball uniforms, and I remembered they’d had a game before Andy was scheduled to speak.
“So who won?” I asked them. The automatic question. Andy would have approved.
“Us,” said Peter, my older son, who was a head taller than I was. He had cried only once since he was a child, but he came running to his sister and me, and wept.
In the west a bar of gold separated sky and land. Over Peter’s shoulder, I could see a grove of poplars. Already their leaves were turning, and the golden light caught them and warmed them to the colour of amber.
I closed my eyes and there, in memory, was another day of golden light. My classics professor was standing at her desk while the September sun streamed in the window, and she told us about the myth of the Heliades. Phaeton, she said, shaking her head sadly, had tried to drive the chariot of the sun across heaven, and Zeus had struck him down and turned his sisters into poplar trees. As they wept for their dead brother, the tears of Phaeton’s sisters hardened into amber.
As I closed my arms around my son, I knew that my heart had already turned to wood.
CHAPTER
2
At six o’clock the next morning I was walking across the Albert Street bridge, thinking about murder. The city was sullen with heat from the day before, and it was going to be another scorcher. Mist was burning off Wascana Lake, and through the haze I could see the bright sails of windsurfers defying the heat. Already the T-shirts of the joggers I met on the bridge were splotched with sweat, and I could feel the cotton sundress I’d grabbed from Mieka’s closet sticking wetly to my back.
The heat was all around me, but it didn’t bother me. I was safe in the isolating numbness of aftershock. It was a feeling I was familiar with, and I hugged it to me. This was not my first experience with murder, and I wasn’t looking forward to what came after the numbness wore off.
Three years earlier, in an act as senseless as it was brutal, two strangers had killed my husband, Ian. His death changed everything for me. The obvious blows – the loss of a husband and father – had left me dazed and reeling. But it was what Ian’s death implied about human existence that almost destroyed me.
Until the December morning when I opened the door and Andy Boychuk was standing there, shivering, telling me there was painful news, I had believed that careful people, people like me, could count on the laws of cause and effect to keep us safe. The absence of motive in Ian’s murder, the metaphysical sneer that seemed to be the only explanation for his death, came close to defeating me.
It had been a long climb back, and I thought I had won. I thought I had vanquished the dark forces that had paralyzed me after Ian’s murder, but as I stood on the bridge and looked at the sun glaring on the water and smelled the heat coming up from the pavement, I knew nothing was finished. I could feel the darkness rising again, and I was desperately afraid.
The snow was deep the night Ian died. It was the end of December, the week between Christmas and New Year. We always get snow that week, and the day Ian died was the day of the worst blizzard of the winter.
He had driven to the southwest corner of the province just after breakfast. He went because he had lost the toss of a coin. There were two funerals that day: one in the city for the wife of one of the government members and one in Swift Current for an old MLA who’d been elected in the forties. Two funerals, and the night before at a holiday party, Ian and Howard Dowhanuik had had a few drinks and tossed a coin. Ian lost.
We quarrelled about his going. I called him, dripping from the shower, to make him listen to the weather forecast. He dismissed it with an expletive and disappeared into the bathroom. Fifteen minutes later, pale, hung over and angry, he got into the Volvo and drove to Swift Current. That was the last time I saw him alive.
At the trial, they pieced together the last hours of my husband’s life. He had spoken well and movingly at the funeral, quoting Tennyson in his eulogy. (“I’m a part of all that I have met … /How dull it is to pause, to make an end/To rust unburnished, not to shine in use.”) After the service, he went to the church basement and had coffee and sandwiches, talked to some supporters, kissed the widow, filled his Thermos and started for home. It was a little after four in the afternoon.
It must have been the girl who made him stop. I saw her at the trial, of course: a dull-eyed seventeen-year-old with a stiff explosion of platinum hair and a mouth painted a pale, iridescent mauve. Her boyfriend was older, nineteen. He had shoulder-length blond hair and his eyes were goat
ish, pink-rimmed and vacant.
They didn’t look like killers.
The boy and the girl had separate lawyers, but they were alike: passionate, unsure young men who skipped over the death and asked us to address ourselves to the defendants’ state of mind on the night in question. The boy’s lawyer had a curious way of emphasizing the key word in each sentence, and I, who had written many speeches, knew that if I were to look at his notes I would see those words underlined.
“He was frustrated,” the boy’s lawyer said, his voice squeaking with fervour. “His television had broken down. And then his car got a flat tire on the night of the blizzard. And he wanted to take his girlfriend to the party. When Ian Kilbourn stopped to offer assistance, my client was already agitated, and when Mr. Kilbourn refused to drive my client and his girlfriend to the party, my client’s frustration just boiled over. He had the wrench in his hand anyway, and before he knew it, it just happened. Frustration, pure and simple.”
“Fourteen times,” the Crown prosecutor said, leaping to her feet. “The pathologist said there were fourteen blows. Mr. Kilbourn’s head was pulp. Here, look at the pictures.”
When I saw the dark spillage of my husband’s head against the snow, the old, logical world shattered for me. It was months before I was able to put the pieces together again, and it was Andy who made me believe there was a foundation on which it would be safe to rebuild.