The Pumpkin Murders

by Judith Alguire

  “To be spies,” we said, “in training to be spies, like Mata Hari, only a million times more beautiful.”

  “Hardy har har har,” they shouted and pelted us with snowballs as we ran shrieking down the lane.

  Anyway, that Friday before supper I watched my dad sleep. I admired his snores and the way he could drop off in a matter of seconds. He was an expert napper.

  He didn’t have the cushion on his chest that Friday, so I placed it there for him, as gently as I could. His eyes opened when I did this and he smiled and removed it.

  “Thanks, Cherry, honey, but the cushion feels kind of heavy on my chest these days.”

  That scared me a little, but not too much. I was in grade four by then; Pete was in grade one. Dads of kids that age didn’t die. Sometimes they disappeared. There were two kids at school that I knew of whose dads weren’t around. Joanne and I suspected something sinister, like divorce or desertion.

  But no one I knew then had a dad who died.

  Except us.

  It was one week later exactly, a Friday in early May. The crocuses were up in the yard, but not yet blooming. Spring seemed late in coming that year or maybe I was more impatient than usual.

  I was wearing my Explorer uniform, which I put on before supper so I would be ready to head out as soon as I finished dessert and brushed my teeth.

  Apple crisp was on the menu that night. It was Murray’s favourite, not mine. I preferred blueberry or rhubarb crisp but it was too early in the season for either of those. Nora never put enough topping on the dessert, enough brown sugar and butter. That was the best part. I told her a thousand times. It seemed to me her heart was never in her cooking.

  She was in the kitchen, pulling a salmon loaf out of the oven when she told me to wake up my dad and tell Pete to wash his hands. I was tempted just to yell out their names from where I stood next to her, there by the stove, but I knew that would infuriate her. Sometimes that was what I wanted more than anything, but not on that particular day. I didn’t always feel strong enough for Nora’s furies.

  When I entered the living room Pete was on the rug in the middle of the floor playing with his Tinkertoys. He was building a space ship. He should have been on bare floor. The brown rug with its soft worms interfered with his progress.

  This was before shag carpets. We had what must have been the precursor: a thin rug with inch long protuberances throughout. There was space between them and they were limp, like night crawlers. Nothing held the rug in place; there was no underlay like at Joanne’s house where everything seemed more civilized, more modern. I would take runs at the rug early on Saturday mornings and slide from one end of the living room to the other. I had to move a coffee table and a stool to do this and it drove Nora to distraction but it was one of my favourite games. It would have been more fun if my brother had joined in, but that was next to impossible considering the state of our relationship.

  “Wash your hands, Pete,” I said.

  He could hear me; he just appeared not to see me and seldom spoke in my presence. So far he had never spoken directly to me.

  Carefully, he fastened one more piece to the space ship and then he stood up and left the room.

  I moved to touch my dad’s arm. The first thing I noticed was that once again, he napped without his cushion. It lay propped up between him and the wall. His right arm reached across his chest touching his left one.

  Then I noticed the smell of pee. I wondered if Pete had taken a leak in amongst the worms of the rug or even if I had wet my pants inside my crisp Explorer uniform. Wild thoughts: we were both long past that. And then I saw that my dad’s eyelids were part way open, but that he wasn’t awake.

  When I touched his skin it was warm. I knelt beside him, but I couldn’t, no matter how hard I looked, see the rise and fall of his chest.

  “Dad?” I whispered.

  I didn’t tell him that supper was ready.

  “Mum!” I screamed and a terrible clatter exploded from the kitchen.

  He wasn’t dead when I first walked in the room. The life left him in the few seconds that I stood there looking at my brother. I know that. For a long time I tortured myself with the thought that if I’d come sooner, I could have saved him somehow.

  Pete didn’t seem to have noticed anything. He was focussed on his Tinkertoys. It was hard for me, to think that my dad couldn’t warn me with something, a soft cry or a moan before those last quiet moments. He would have, if he could have.

  There was no funeral. Nora said she didn’t feel up to it. Maybe later, she said.

  A man with very red lips delivered Murray’s ashes to us in a golden urn. Nora placed them on the mantel above the fireplace.

  I wasn’t sure how to feel about this. It scared me at first, the idea of my dad in an urn in the living room. I wouldn’t look inside it, in case there was something there that I couldn’t bear to see, a recognizable fingernail or a part of his baby toe.

  No one else had a dad in a jar; how would I explain it to my friends? I was also terrified that the urn would get knocked over and Murray would scatter. Parts of him would disappear. So I found myself guarding the ashes, sitting in front of the mantel in a chair I carried in from the dining room. No living room chair was close enough. I pretended to read while on guard, but I couldn’t concentrate on anything but the urn.

  When I came home on the last day of school before summer holidays the ashes were gone. There was a framed picture of Murray in their place, one of his school pictures. It had been enlarged.

  “The urn is in my closet in the bedroom,” Nora said. “I think it’s better to put it away. We wouldn’t want the ashes to spill.”

  I think my guard duty had made Nora uncomfortable. I went to look in her closet. Murray seemed safe enough in his new spot. I didn’t disagree with this move on Nora’s part, but I still didn’t get it.

  “Why don’t we bury him?” I asked. “In a cemetery like other people do?”

  “We will,” Nora said. “We will, but not yet. One beautiful summer day you and I and Pete will take him out to St. Vital Cemetery and dig a hole and bury him next to…”

  “Next to who?” I asked.

  “Nobody,” she said. “Next to a big tree.”

  This was no good. There were supposed to be other people involved: Murray’s friends, his fellow teachers, our neighbours—people who would say what a fine man he was. And we weren’t supposed to dig the hole ourselves! That was the gravedigger’s job. I was convinced that Nora was missing vast areas of knowledge.

  So I visited Murray in my mum’s closet, every day for a while, then every second day. Before long it was just now and then. I knew he was there, in an urn in a box and as safe as could be expected under the circumstances.

  CHAPTER 4

  A huge sadness washes over me now when I think of what Pete and I missed out on by not having each other to lean on. After that one time when I took things way too far and bit him on the cheek, what I felt for my brother was mostly a contained kind of love and, I guess, frustration at his avoidance of me. I wanted to be friends with him, although I didn’t try very hard. His complete rejection of me did its job.

  When Pete was in grade two, in the fall of the year that Murray died, Nordale School had an air raid drill. This happened from time to time because of the threat of nuclear war. Even I, in grade five by then, knew it was a useless exercise. I’d seen the pictures of Hiroshima; we all had.

  My classroom was across the hall from Pete’s. I could see his small form sitting on the floor against the wall, arms around his knees, head down. He was shaking, sobbing. I went to him against the shouts of the grade four teacher, Miss Pratt, who was in charge of the drill. It was an automatic gesture on my part; I didn’t think.

  “Pete,” I whispered and touched his back through his little plaid shirt.

  He stiffened at the sound of my voice. His body became a plank beneath my hand.

  After a few moments I stood up and walked back to my spot on
the floor. It wasn’t easy for me to let him go, but he embarrassed me as well as hurt me. What must people think of a gangly girl who a sweet little boy hates so much?

  Later that afternoon I was called down to the principal’s office over the public address system. Miss Pratt was there and she watched with a smirk on her face as Mr. Austin, the principal, strapped me three times on each hand for disobedience. I had liked Mr. Austin up till that day. All he had was Miss Pratt’s word that I had ignored her. I remember thinking that he was probably just punishing me because she had great big pointed tits and he wanted to squeeze them.

  I saw that trying with Pete would open me up to bigger hurts than the ones he sent my way by ignoring me. But we needed each other, especially after Murray died. Nora wasn’t enough family for anyone.

  She went through the motions: planted flowers in the flowerbeds; joined the women’s church circle; she even became a CGIT leader for part of a year, but she couldn’t pull that one off. She had to quit—made up a health problem and weaseled out of it. All her motherly activities were acts, and not for Pete and me, but for the other women in the neighbourhood. She fed us and she clothed us, but I couldn’t help feeling it was just for show.

  CHAPTER 5

  I have never been an ambitious person. I just liked going to school. History was what interested me in high school, recent history, so that’s what I ended up studying. After I’d gotten my bachelor’s degree I just kept on going till I had a master’s and then my Ph.D. It could have been Henry’s influence. He was my first real boyfriend and a history nut. We talked a lot about wanting to understand what went before, getting down to the actual reasons that led men and women to do the things that they did.

  As a fifth-generation Canadian on Murray’s side I wanted to know why men like my great-great-grandfather left Armagh to come to such a strange and stormy land. Was his Irish life so terrible? Or was it restlessness? And what about my great-great-grandmother? Was it love that made her follow? Duty? How hard did she fight against the plan? Or was it she who grew restive? How could anyone be so brave and strong and naive? Yeah, I know: famine in the old country, promise of land in the new. But still. I feel so far removed from anyone who could have set out on such an adventure.

  That I come from such stock is a source of pride for me. I wonder what they pictured as they clung to the ship’s rail and peered out over the dark waves. How different were their dreams from what awaited them on the distant shore? Quite different, I’ll bet.

  It wasn’t hard for me to imagine Pete on one of those ships. I was physically stronger than my brother, but he was a tough little guy in his way.

  He was slight and very pale. It didn’t take much to flatten him. He was one of those kids who went to the doctor once a week to get needles because he was allergic to so many things: dust, cats, tomatoes, strawberries, nuts, pollen. It seemed to go on for years, that desensitization process. Maybe that’s why needles were so easy for him to take in later years.

  During grades one to six he missed many weeks of school with one childhood disease after another. He got chicken pox, measles, mumps, scarlet fever, all the things that young kids got. Nora fussed, of course, but supposed it was just as well he contracted them early on. She wished I had come down with them at the same time, to get it all over with at once, but apparently I had an immune system like Mighty Mouse.

  Pete’s strength came out in other ways. For instance, he wasn’t afraid to take a dare. I thought of it as toughness at the time, but as I look back now, I see it could have been foolhardiness, not giving a hoot.

  He stole from Norbridge Pharmacy all the time, with his friends Ralph and Timmy egging him on. He insisted on going in alone.

  “Hi, Mr. Fisher,” he said, as he pocketed a small bottle of Evening in Paris perfume. He was in grade four by this time.

  “Hello, Pete,” said Mr. Fisher, one of the pharmacists.

  He didn’t call my brother by his nickname; no adults did. They thought it was disgraceful.

  “What can I do for you today?”

  “Nothing, thanks. I’m just browsing,” Pete said.

  Sometimes he sat at the counter drinking a chocolate milkshake, thin and frothy, reading Superman comics. Mr. Fisher always gave him the silver container that the milkshake was made in, with the extra bit to top it off. He liked Pete, didn’t have a clue about the Evening in Paris or the pen set or whatever contraband he had hidden in his parka pocket. And he didn’t seem to mind that my brother returned the comics to the stand, never buying one. Pete did pay for the milkshake, of course, just twenty-five cents in those days.

  He wrapped up the perfume—it was close to Christmas—and put it on his teacher’s desk. That wasn’t even part of the dare. He liked to take things a little further.

  His teacher was Miss Pratt, the same one who had turned me in and watched gleefully as I got the strap. No one liked her.

  He used one of the tags Nora had bought to attach to Christmas presents. On it he wrote:

  in morning light

  your eyes are like the sky

  from Mr. Dupont

  It was his first haiku. No one knew it; not even me.

  Mr. Dupont was a grade seven teacher who some of the older girls, including me, had a crush on. He had greasy hair and a lump on his forehead, but his eyes were always half closed and that caused my friends and me to think about how a man might look when he was about to stick it inside you. He made us wonder what that might be like. We did our best to ignore his stringy hair.

  I was impressed with Pete when I found out from the kids at school the details of what he had done. Even at his age he knew that Mr. Dupont was the right guy to pick. Miss Pratt had blushed and stuck the package in her purse. There was no way she was going to question it; she was too smart for that.

  Pete would do anything. Once during the spring breakup of the Red River, he hopped onto an ice floe and rode it along from the monkey speedway to the old rowing club. A small gang of boys cheered him along. The escapade could so easily have gone wrong.

  That type of thing made him exciting to be with. So Pete was a popular boy, in spite of his frailty and his nickname. And his inability to speak to his own sister.

  Miss Tufts, the school nurse, caught on to this. She saw most of us at one time or another and she saw a lot of Pete. She must have spoken to him about me and received an unusual response, because she asked to see the two of us together. I turned up, but Pete didn’t, so Nurse Tufts called my mother in. Nora must have hated that. She wanted so much to appear normal, even special, in a good way, and the fact that her kids had an unhealthy relationship would have reflected badly on her parenting skills.

  Miss Tufts suggested a child psychiatrist named Dr. Bondurant who had an office in the Manitoba Clinic. Nora agreed, of course. Anything for the health and happiness of her children, she said. I sneered inside and even Pete made a face. But we didn’t sneer together.

  The visits were fun. The doctor saw us both separately and together. When we were together Pete didn’t speak. I don’t know if he spoke when he was alone with Dr. Bondurant. I’m inclined to think that he did, but I haven’t a clue what he might have talked about.

  “My brother doesn’t like me very much,” I blurted out one day when it was just me and the doc. I drew as we talked. He encouraged that.

  “Why?” asked Dr. Bondurant.

  “I don’t know.” I lied.

  It was drilled into me not to talk about the incident: it was a rule in our house. Pete was not to know of his sister’s cruelty. He didn’t remember the biting episode, as far as anyone knew; he was only one when it happened. But he wasn’t unaware of something dreadful having taken place. He remembered the terror and connected it to me. We all knew it.

  “Do you think it might have something to do with your biting him?” Dr. Bondurant asked.

  His words stunned me into silence. I worked on my drawing of a beautiful lady with flowing hair; that was my specialty. I used the golden c
rayon for her hair.

  “Your mother told me about it,” he said.

  “Pete doesn’t remember it,” I said. “We’re not supposed to talk about it.”

  “It’s okay for you and me to discuss it,” he said. “Your mother said so.”

  I found out later that Dr. Bondurant thought the biting incident should be brought into the open, discussed with both Pete and me, but that Nora wouldn’t allow it. She made him promise. He was the only one outside of the family at that point, besides my friend Joanne, who knew what I had done.

  It puzzled me why Nora had confided in him if she wouldn’t let him use it. I came to the conclusion that she wanted him to know that it was my fault and not hers that Pete was weird.

  The tiny scar on Pete’s face was explained away to the world at large by a fall he’d had at a very young age. The skin taken from his bum wasn’t a secret, thanks to me and my big mouth and the constant curiosity about his nickname. Nora hadn’t been able to control that part of it.

  No one could force Pete to talk to me. Dr. Bondurant tried his best, but Nora thwarted his efforts with her need for secrecy.

  Pete still wouldn’t look at me either. It was more like he looked through me or at a point just in front of me. There was a hole in my heart on account of it, but I didn’t let on. And I didn’t want to appear pathetic by loving someone who didn’t love me back. So I was inclined to go too far the other way.

  Sometimes he bumped into me.

  “Watch where you’re going, you little simp!” I would shout and Pete would say nothing in return.

  One day he drove over my bare foot with his toy fire engine.

  “Mu-um!” I shouted. “No Eyes ran over my foot with his stupid toy and it really hurts.”

  “Why aren’t you two playing outside, for heaven’s sake? And Cherry! Don’t call your brother names!” was all Nora said.