But today I lit up as soon as I got in the car and drove away immediately, waving at Arthur in the scout truck as I passed him on my way out to the highway.
From that day forward, win or lose, there were no further Scrabble problems.
ONCE THE WEATHER HAD WARMED UP, we could go outside and sit at one of the picnic tables. We usually chose a table to the left, overlooking the parking lot and the forested area behind the prison, hoping to catch a glimpse of the wildlife. At Frontenac there were always the groundhogs to keep us entertained and the ungainly geese waddling around the grounds; here there were prehistoric-looking wild turkeys and three or four elegant white-tailed deer. Here the squirrels were not fat glossy pets like they were at Frontenac, but death-defying tightrope artists scampering fearlessly through the razor wire. As the months passed, I began to identify more and more with those squirrels. Much as Shane liked to think of himself as a wolf longing for the wild, perhaps I was a squirrel dancing on a wire.
In the yard, there were more rules as to how we must sit. Visitors and inmates must remain seated on the bench of the picnic tables. Straddling the bench or sitting on top of the picnic table is not permitted. Lying on the grass is not permitted. Although I was not any more likely to stretch out on the grass outside than I was to lie on the floor inside, I did have trouble sitting on the benches properly. To alleviate the discomfort of sitting too long, some couples walked laps around the yard, around and around for hours, the perfect synchronization of their steps a testament to how long they’d been doing this in one prison visiting yard or another. We seldom walked the yard because of Shane’s bad leg. But the benches were so uncomfortable that often, without thinking, I would lean sideways up against him with my legs stretched out on the seat in front of me. With little physical contact allowed in the visiting room, it was comforting to feel his body against mine. Several times when Stanley, the head V&C officer, was taking his regular stroll through the yard to keep a closer eye on things, he shook his head and pointed at my feet. I quickly put them down. But somehow they always crept back up again. Until finally one day Stanley, in relatively good-natured exasperation, said, “Do you think you’re at the fucking beach?”
Teasing back, I said, “What? You mean this isn’t the beach? No wonder I couldn’t find the fucking lake.” He guffawed, and I put my feet down and kept them there.
THE RULES FOR WHAT AN INMATE COULD WEAR to the visiting room were stated clearly enough: no kitchen whites, no track pants, no cut-offs, no muscle shirts, no jackets, coats, or bulky sweaters, no workboots or any other kind of steel-toed footwear. The rules for what a visitor could wear, however, were unwritten, unclear, and unpredictable. How these rules were interpreted or enforced seemed to depend on who was on duty and what mood they were in.
Despite the several large fans installed around the room in the summer, V&C became extremely warm, and I often wore a sleeveless shirt. Not a tank top, not a halter top, just a loose-fitting buttoned cotton shirt with no sleeves. But then one Saturday afternoon, Stanley came to our table and told me I had to cover up my arms. I thought he was joking.
“You mean this?” I said, grabbing the flabby underside of my right arm and shaking it at him. “I call them my flappers.” When brushing my teeth before bed, I tend to avert my eyes or gaze up at the ceiling so I don’t have to watch my arm jiggling in the mirror.
“Yes,” he said, laughing. “We’ve got all kinds in here. You never know what’ll turn them on.”
It had been cool enough that morning that I’d worn an overshirt too, so now I put it back on to conceal my aphrodisiac arms and sweated through the rest of the visit.
The next day, Sunday, there was a different set of guards on duty, and the dress code for female visitors had apparently changed overnight. There I was with my arms now carefully covered, lest they incite who knows what manner of mayhem among the men. And there all around me were see-through blouses, skin-tight tank tops, crotch-length skirts, a pair of white pants so tight you could see the colour of the thong beneath. But no one said a word to these young women about their wardrobe choices. Clearly their voluptuous and amply displayed assets didn’t hold a candle to my flappers in their ability to drive a roomful of locked-up sex-starved men right round the bend.
“Of course they don’t,” Shane teased. “You are the sexiest woman in the room, no matter what you’re wearing.”
AMONG THE MOST ANTICIPATED EVENTS in prison life are the socials. Frontenac didn’t have them at all, but Bath, like most prisons, had two a year: one in early December and another in mid-July, held in the visiting room and attended by inmates and their visitors. Due to my unfortunate encounter with the ion scanner in the fall, we hadn’t been allowed to attend the Christmas social, but Shane bought our ten-dollar tickets for the July party as soon as they became available. The ticket money was collected by the Inmate Committee and used to buy food for the party, this year’s menu featuring jumbo buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken and vats of pasta salad and coleslaw from Loblaws, along with cake, ice cream, and Popsicles for dessert.
As is customary for attendance at any party anywhere, everyone got dressed up, especially the women, most buying new outfits and taking extra care with their makeup and hair. I bought a floaty new summer blouse in various shades of blue and a pair of dangly turquoise earrings to match. I even wore the fancy sandals I’d bought for the revocation hearing and hadn’t worn since, because I never did get used to those three-inch-high wedge heels.
Behind the festive atmosphere, though, there was also an increase in security. There would be a much higher number of visitors than usual that day, many of whom didn’t otherwise visit and who would come from out of town for the party. Prison socials were notorious as occasions on which visitors attempted to smuggle drugs inside. This meant, Shane warned me, that for sure there would be a car sweep that morning. These were staged at random on other days throughout the year as well, so I’d already been through a few and knew what to expect. Just to be on the safe side for the social, the evening before, I spent an hour in the driveway, washing and vacuuming the car thoroughly. I cleaned out the glove compartment and the trunk, polished the windows inside and out, and wiped down the entire interior including the ceiling.
The next morning, when I turned off the highway and headed in, yes, there they were: trucks, police cars, officers, and dogs, all set up strategically at the T-intersection where the road to the left went to Bath, the road to the right to maximum-security Millhaven. All cars heading to both prisons were being checked. There were already five or six cars in line, and I pulled in behind them. An officer I didn’t recognize came to my window, asked which prison I was going to, and checked my ID against a list on his clipboard. He told me to unlock all the doors and the trunk, and he handed me a pamphlet called “Keeping Drugs Out: A Visitor’s Guide.” I thanked him and put it in the glove compartment from which just yesterday I had removed several copies of the same pamphlet.
One by one, the cars were directed to the left or the right, and then, in an orderly fashion, the drivers and their passengers were instructed to get out, leave all belongings inside, and put the keys on the hood. We were then lined up in small groups to be sniffed by the dogs. We remained in our lineup while the dogs were put inside the cars to continue searching. I managed not to laugh at the sight of a large German shepherd trying to get into the trunk of my little Echo. Fortunately, clumsy though he was, he wasn’t interested in either me or my car.
Not everyone was so lucky. The car that came in right behind me had now been moved to an adjacent parking area for further inspection. The young driver and her two passengers were wobbling across the gravel in their high heels towards a picnic table where several guards and a police officer were waiting.
When I finally pulled into the Bath parking lot, there was still the rest of the usual security procedure to get through. But finally I was in, sitting at our usual table in my pretty outfit, and there was Shane coming across the visiting room
towards me. He was grinning and so handsome in his best clothes, black dress jeans and a short-sleeved white shirt I’d bought him in Peterborough.
“Hello, darling,” he said, putting his arms around me. “May I have this dance?”
There was no music, but we took a few quick twirls beside our table before heading to the coffee machine.
By noon the room was crowded, and the party was in full swing. Mostly that meant being able to eat food that didn’t come from the vending machines and being allowed to mingle more freely with the other inmates and their visitors. The guards came out of the bubble and mingled from table to table too. This was all enough of a change from the normal routine to make it feel like a celebration.
In fact, we did have something to celebrate. A week before, on my fifty-sixth birthday, Shane’s security classification had been lowered back to minimum, and his application for a transfer back to Frontenac finally had been approved. He’d now been at Bath for seventeen months. The transfer was such good news that we could hardly stop grinning. But after being reminded by one of the V&C officers that envy and jealousy run rampant in prison and it was not inconceivable that one of the other guys might try to sabotage the move, we were keeping the good news to ourselves.
The prison photographer was at the social all day. Shane had paid for three pictures at a dollar each. We took our turn posing outside in a shady corner beside the building, three more photographs to add to my growing collection of prison shots. There we were, just another happy couple smiling for the camera on a bright summer afternoon, squinting into the sun, our arms around each other’s waists. If you look closely, you can see my turquoise earrings and my fancy shoes. If you look closely, you can see the ghostly reflection of the razor wire in the window behind us.
BECAUSE THERE WAS NO SPACE available at Frontenac, Shane wasn’t moved until four months after his transfer was approved. Having never been long on patience, he did not handle this wait well, becoming ever more irritable, quarrelsome, and twisted as the months passed. Finally one morning at the beginning of November, he was told it was time to pack his stuff. He’d been packed for weeks. He was back at Frontenac by noon.
It was immediately apparent that there had been many changes there since we’d left three years before.
Despite much public protest, the prison farm had been closed. A money-saving measure, the Harper government said, completely discounting all evidence to the contrary. Not only did the six farms at various Canadian prisons have multiple proven rehabilitative, therapeutic, and environmental advantages, but also all the food produced on the farms had gone to feed inmates throughout the federal system, making them economically advantageous as well. The government had also outraged all farmers everywhere by saying that the skills the inmates learned on the farms were no longer important in modern society.
For fear of repercussions that might directly affect my security clearance, I was reluctant to participate in the protests, much as I believed strongly in the cause. Shane said they were pointless anyway, would make no difference in the end. I tried to explain to him about the importance of civil disobedience regardless of the outcome. He was not convinced.
I attended only one large rally, held on a Sunday afternoon in early June 2010, a protest that began at a downtown church with music and several speakers, including farmers, environmental activists, the General Superior of the convent, the current Liberal Member of Parliament, Stuart from LifeLine, and Margaret Atwood, all on stage in their SAVE OUR PRISON FARMS T-shirts. By bringing her international reputation to the fight to save the farms, Margaret had helped raise the campaign to a new level. It was, after all, not just a local issue but one that affected all Canadians and regularly made the national news. I’d met Margaret many times over the years, and after her address, we had a brief chat. Then we all marched several kilometres from the church to CSC Regional Headquarters, where signs were posted on the door and more speeches were made. We numbered in the hundreds, led by a large red tractor bearing a sign at the front that said HARPER ASLEEP AT THE WHEEL, and pulling a hay wagon carrying Margaret and the other speakers and more signs, including PRISON FARMS MAKE OUR COMMUNITIES SAFER. The most popular member of the protest was a donkey also bearing a sign: CONSERVATIVE PRISON FARMS CONSULTANT.
Throughout the summer, several more demonstrations had been staged at the entrance to Frontenac. All I could do was honk wildly and wave helplessly as I drove past on my way to and from visiting Shane at Bath. The largest blockades were held at the beginning of August—a hundred and fifty protestors, and an equal number of police officers in neon vests lined up across the entrance. Two dozen protestors were arrested and two hundred and fifty cattle removed from the farm to be sold at auction elsewhere. The youngest calf was bought by a Kingston area farmer and named “Hope.” All the farms were closed.
Sometimes public protest does work. After many years of it, the only halfway house in Kingston had also been closed. Housing mostly sex offenders, it was located in a residential neighbourhood near schools and playgrounds. CSC had finally closed it and moved the residents into Frontenac. The Phoenix living units where Shane had been previously were renovated and turned into an on-site halfway house. This was to be a temporary measure until a new facility could be built elsewhere on the sprawling prison property. There had been no progress yet on that front. In the private sector a building intended to house forty or fifty people could be completed in a matter of months, but with CSC at the helm, it appeared it would take years. When it was eventually completed, it would be named the Henry Traill Community Correctional Centre, in honour of the first Kingston prison guard killed in the line of duty back in 1870, the son of Catharine Parr Traill, the nephew of Susanna Moodie, the man whose grave Shane and I had passed by many times at the Cataraqui Cemetery.
MUCH AS I’D BECOME COMFORTABLE AT BATH and friendly with many of the officers, I was happy to be going back to where we started, back to the familiar and more predictable minimum-security prison, where the general atmosphere was more relaxed, and the living, if not exactly easy, was somewhat less stressful for both of us. I’d had a pleasant enough rapport with most of the guards at Frontenac the first time. Shane was ambivalent about the fact that I got along so well with them—alternating between resenting it because he said it was an ideological betrayal of him, the convict, and appreciating it because them liking me might be an advantage for him.
The truth was, I had more in common with most of them than I did with him. Going in, I’d often chatted with whoever was on duty about mortgage rates, the price of gas, gardening, car troubles, home renovations, vacation plans, children, pets, aging parents, that week’s great deals at Loblaws or Costco, and once at length about acid reflux. The truth was, given a different set of circumstances, I could easily have become good friends with several of the guards I got to know at both Bath and Frontenac. I intentionally never adopted the adversarial stance with them that many of the other visitors seemed to take. I had come to the conclusion that just as the only thing all prisoners truly have in common is that they’re in prison, so the only thing all prison guards truly have in common is that they work in a prison. The guards, like the visitors, seldom fit the stereotypes featured in movies and on TV. When interacting with the few who remained consistently surly, imperious, and uncommunicative, I tried not to take it personally and assumed they would have been like that no matter where they worked.
Three days after Shane was moved back to Frontenac, I made my first visit. There were several familiar faces around the horseshoe that Sunday morning and much laughter when I slapped my driver’s licence down on the counter and announced, “We’re ba-a-a-ack!”
WHEN AN INMATE IS TRANSFERRED to a different institution, there is a thirty-day window in which he can receive clothing and other personal items up to a certain dollar value. I offered to go shopping and deliver the box to Frontenac. Shane was initially resistant to this idea because of the cost. I promised not to spend more than two hundred
dollars, but still he was reluctant.
“No, no, save your money,” he said. “My clothes are fine. It’s not like I’m going to a fashion show or anything.”
Finally I said, “Listen, honey, I’m not doing this for you. If I have to look at you in those crappy old T-shirts and bleach-spotted sweatpants very much longer, I’m going to scream.”
He got me a copy of the list of what he could have: “National List of Personal Property of Men Inmates.”
Most of the clothing items on this detailed list were unremarkable, if, in my opinion, a bit excessive. I could understand the need for ten pairs of socks and ten pairs of underwear. But did he really need twelve T-shirts, six pairs of jeans, four pairs of sweatpants, and a bathing suit? Where was the fucking beach anyway?
Neck chains were allowed but only with no heavy pendants and links no larger than six millimetres. An inmate could have one musical instrument, stringed, wind, or keyboard—however, in maximum security, stringed instruments were allowed only at the discretion of the warden. A reading lamp was allowed provided it didn’t have a gooseneck or a weighted base. Boots and shoes must have no steel inserts; belts must have no oversized buckles; sunglasses must be non-mirrored only; bandanas (up to four) must bear no gang-related insignia. Among the permitted miscellaneous items were one coffee mug (maximum twelve ounces, non-ceramic only), one stapler, one jump rope, one pair of scissors (six inches maximum, blunt-ended only), one geometry set, and two prayer mats (no larger than eighteen by thirty inches). It was that geometry set that worried me. When was the last time CSC had checked out the contents of a standard geometry set?
In the box of new clothes, I also included the T-shirt I’d brought back for Shane from California. In mid-October I’d attended a symposium there, a three-day event called “Mary in the Modern World” that took place at Saint Mary’s College of California, a small private Catholic school located in the town of Moraga, a half-hour drive east of San Francisco. I was invited to speak about and read from my novel Our Lady of the Lost and Found, which had been put on the curriculum there. I was picked up at the San Francisco airport by one of the De La Salle Christian Brothers who lived and worked at the college. As we drove across the Golden Gate Bridge, I had a good view of Alcatraz out on the rock in the bay. I wouldn’t have time to visit the prison while I was there. I found myself telling Brother Charles all about Shane.
This Is Not My Life Page 24