The Pumpkin Murders

by Judith Alguire

  “I’ve been reading Nora’s journal,” I said and sat down in her second chair to watch.

  “No wonder you look as if someone knocked you on the head with a shovel.”

  “It’s hard to read, but I have to do it.”

  “I know you do, hon.”

  “Tell me again why I have to do it?”

  “Because you want to find out what made Nora tick.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  After she had finished cutting her hair Hermione got out her shaving equipment. “Okay, this is the part where you help me.”

  By the time we were finished, her beautifully shaped head was bare and smooth and her eyes looked enormous.

  “You actually look quite nice,” I said.

  Hermione laughed. “It would take a hell of a lot more than a haircut to destroy these looks, babe.”

  I laughed too.

  “Let’s drink,” she said.

  “Yes, let’s.”

  Hermione poured bourbon into two glasses and we sipped and talked for a half hour or so about the possibilities for tomato sauces. Everyone in our cooking class was taking a turn concocting a sauce and then presenting it with a small amount of pasta for the rest of us to taste. I dreaded my turn. I pictured noses turning up and comments like, what the hell went into this mess?

  The door opened and Hermione’s last customer of the day walked in.

  “Well, look at you!” he said.

  The new look suited her and she has kept it to this day. She still plans to let it grow when it turns completely white.

  She went back to work and I headed home with Spike leading the way.

  I cooked some spaghetti, did a pretty good job of getting it al dente, and stirred it up with butter and salt and pepper. That’s the way I like it best. Sometimes I mix a little olive oil in with the butter but today I couldn’t be bothered. I’m really not much of a cook.

  It was eight o’clock by the time I finished eating, too late to go back to the journal if I was going to stick to my plan of not reading it late in the day. But it turned out I wasn’t sticking to that plan. Maybe it was Hermione’s bourbon that caused me to throw caution to the wind and sit down with it again. Just one more passage:

  She gave me a blanket and a pillow but it was cold down there with the jars and the potatoes. I fell asleep before the men went home but the cold woke me twice. Also, when something crawled across my neck I woke to hear them still at it. It was morning before she came to get me. The stink of Darcy Root was on her. I’ve seen boys in the fields with sheep. I see what they do to the ewes. But Darcy is a girl too. I don’t know what she does to Luce. Something. That’s for sure.

  Aunt Luce was saving Nora from a nightmare of larger proportions than her most frightening stay in the root cellar but my mother didn’t see it yet.

  I let Spike out for a last scramble around the yard and then headed up to bed with a Robert Parker book. I needed to laugh.

  CHAPTER 11

  To think that it was only ten years between the summer that Nora smelled the stink of Darcy Root on her aunt and 1949 when I was born. This was my mother who was holed up with spiders on the dirt floor of a pitch-black root cellar.

  I know she was sent into the city after Luce died. It must have been soon after that summer of ’39 because I believe she was just twelve when Mr. Trent had the sense to get rid of her.

  What a handful she must have been for her foster parents—the Kennaughs, they were called—with her messy past and her rough country edges. A major project for them, for sure, and for her teachers. She was a success story though, if immaculate grammar and self-presentation to the outside world were the yardsticks.

  Maybe it had been a source of pride for Nora that I went to university. This had never occurred to me before. I attended the University of Winnipeg.

  Henry Ferris turned up in my second year Twentieth Century History class. His dad had been transferred again. We got back together, but it felt different this time. I wasn’t as interested in kissing him, not like I had been before my Duane experience, but I stuck it out because his friendship was important to me and I didn’t want to lose that. It seemed complicated and unfair, my merely moderate physical desire for Henry: one of life’s bummers. I struggled with it; I didn’t want to feel dishonest, but the spark was missing.

  “You’ve changed somehow,” Henry said.

  It was a windy fall day in1968. We were sitting on the lawn in the quadrangle at the university. “Helter Skelter” was blaring out of a window in the men’s residence. The Manson Family hadn’t done their killing yet.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  I smoked and Henry studied me.

  “No, it’s not bad or anything,” he said. “You just seem a little further away or something, sort of…secretive.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No, it’s okay, Cherry. It’s nothing you have to apologize for.”

  That was all he said. He never pestered me about anything.

  “Henry?” I put my cigarette out in the grass.

  “Yes.”

  “If we were ever to split up, you would never tell anyone all the secrets I’ve told you, would you?”

  “God! Of course not!”

  “Like stuff about Pete and everything.”

  By this time I had told Henry everything about biting Pete, about our visits to Dr. Bondurant, and some parts about the state of our relationship. I wanted him in the picture and besides, he saw a lot of it for himself.

  “Cherry, no! I would never, ever say anything to anyone.”

  He had risen to his knees and he took both my hands in his. He didn’t argue with me about the splitting up part. Maybe he sensed that we were doomed.

  Henry was in a local band by now. It didn’t take long for him to hook up with a ready-made group. Everyone needed a singer and Henry was good; he was often compared to Stevie Winwood. They even changed the band’s name from Prairie Lightning to O Henry. I disagreed with the change; it made them sound like bubble gummers, but I kept my mouth shut. Henry liked having his name up front like that. So far, they had played one school dance and a fashion show. Their dream was to play in pubs.

  It was odd, because everyone wanted to sleep with band members—it was a fact of life—but during that particular time, he seemed too familiar to me, and too good. I wanted guys with their own apartments downtown, places that stank of dope and sweat, guys who ignored me if I said it hurt. Henry still lived with his parents and cared too much about pleasing me.

  Nora’s man had been around for several years by then. His name was Dougwell Jones and he wore a hat when he was out and around. It was an old-fashioned hat like the one Humphrey Bogart wore in The Maltese Falcon. My dad had worn hats like that a long time ago. Mr. Jones seemed to me like a throwback. Maybe Nora was searching for her past, for the days before Pete and me, but after her move to the city, that slim period of time when she still had a chance.

  Mr. Jones taught science at the same school where Murray had been a teacher. Nora had known him before Murray died. I found that part of it distasteful. As though she had been lusting after Mr. Jones when my dad was still alive.

  I chose not to know him. He interfered with my memories of Murray. He appeared around corners when I least expected to see a grown man and I couldn’t get over my disappointment in who he was, or wasn’t. I didn’t go as far as to pull a Pete on him, but I just gave him the basics in terms of greetings and answering the odd question. That is one of my regrets: I wasted a fine presence for many years.

  Mr. Jones and his first wife hadn’t been able to have any children. I wonder sometimes if he had hoped to be a father of sorts to Pete and me. Neither of us gave him much of a chance.

  One day, not that long ago, maybe eleven years or so, I was sitting in one of Hermione’s chairs getting a trim. It was soon after I discovered her. It came out somehow that Dougwell Jones had taught her when she was in grade eight. She had lived in the inner city as a kid and gone to Hugh John f
or junior high. She was too young to have been in one of Murray’s classes but she remembered Mr. Jones. He was her all-time favourite teacher.

  I remembered the pictures of Murray’s classes and had no trouble placing Hermione there with the young ruffians and the wayward girls.

  “Man, I can’t believe you’re practically related to Mr. Jones,” she had said that day. “Does he ever come to visit you?”

  “No. He lives on the coast with my mother,” I said. “And I’m pretty estranged from her.”

  “I understand what that’s like,” said Hermione. “My mother’s dead, thank God.”

  We laughed.

  “Mr. Jones convinced me that I was smart enough to go to university,” Hermione said. “I had been getting all set to take the commercial course, you know, typing, Gestetner machines and all that. But he talked me into taking the university entrance course.”

  “What’s a Gestetner machine?”

  Hermione laughed. “I don’t know.”

  “Did you go to university?”

  “No. But I could have.”

  “Well, when I get talking to Dougwell again I’ll tell him about you and how you’re getting along.”

  “Yes. Do. Tell him I’m the best fuckin’ haircutter in Manitoba.”

  Sometimes I think that Dougwell’s goodness entered me through osmosis. I couldn’t keep him out entirely. He had a grace about him that touched the core of me and I feel that would have sat well with Murray.

  He pretty much lived with us by the summer of 1969. He was addicted to Nora, as I think Murray had been. I don’t know how else to explain it. She had something that both men wanted, that neither man wanted to live without. It was more than sex. The thing she possessed mingled with a certain energy inside both of them to create the powerful mists that ensnared them. It is the only way I can visualize it and the only way I can keep from laying blame. Oh sure, Nora tried to be sexy and she worked to keep her figure and all, but the thing that captured them wasn’t something she had control over; it just was.

  And that co-mingling of magical mists was what was missing between Henry and me. From where I stood, anyway.

  CHAPTER 12

  That summer of ’69 my brother got his driver’s licence. He was sixteen and I was nineteen, getting ready for my third year of studies at the university. Pete would be entering grade twelve at Nelson McIntyre Collegiate.

  Sometimes Nora lent him her car to run errands for her or to go out with his friends if he promised not to drink or carry on. Her car at that time was a 1966 Chevy Malibu.

  “If I find out you’ve been drinking and driving my car, I’ll have your balls in a vise,” she said to Pete more than once.

  She had a way of putting things that made my body shrink up into itself. I don’t know what her words did to Pete. Nothing, to all outward appearances; they looked to breeze right by him and his lazy smile. He reminded me of a silvery Airstream trailer with its hard surface and smooth shoulders, gliding down a shimmering highway to its end and on. Most things slipped off those shoulders.

  Pete loved driving Nora’s Malibu and he made sure she never caught him drinking.

  “When I drink, I drive more slowly,” he said.

  I heard him explain this to Henry, who was waiting for me at the kitchen table. It was an August evening and we were going out to see Midnight Cowboy.

  “It balances out with my slower reaction time,” Pete said.

  “Hmm,” said Henry.

  Pete was more of a doper than a drinker, anyway, and Nora hadn’t caught on to drugs yet. We were all sure that smoking pot turned you into a better driver, or a more cautious one, at least. And Pete was a lucky guy; everyone said so.

  Later that same night Henry and I were kissing at the back door pretty much as usual. He had twisted the light off and as I remember it, he was flailing about to an unprecedented degree. My heart wasn’t in it.

  “Your breasts are tremendous,” he said.

  Henry still said “tremendous.” It irritated me that he used the same descriptive words as he had used years before. Couldn’t he come up with something new?

  He undid my cutoffs. I did them up again. He undid them once more. And I did them up again.

  Pete was out in Nora’s car. He most likely hadn’t been drinking or smoking dope because the damage he did as he swerved into the driveway required a normal to fast speed.

  We didn’t hear him coming. I do remember hearing Thunderclap Newman singing “Something in the Air,” a song about callin’ out the instigators and haulin’ out the ammo. It must have been playing on the car radio when the front end of the Malibu slammed into me.

  Pete, of course, didn’t see me.

  He stayed behind the wheel of the car staring straight ahead. Someone was in the passenger seat; it was his girlfriend, Eileen, but I didn’t know it at the time. The headlights were on.

  Henry wasn’t hit. He held me in his arms and said, “Keep still, Cherry. You’re going to be okay.”

  I didn’t feel a thing.

  Eileen’s screams brought Nora and Dougwell running. And then I passed out for the most part; I was in and out. I recall the ambulance attendant telling me in an irritable voice to stop pushing. That confused me because I hadn’t realized I was doing anything at all.

  It turned out I needed a new hip as a result of the accident. My right hip was ruined. I was one of the first people to undergo that operation at the St. Boniface Hospital.

  But it was the back door light being out that was the part of the event that Nora wanted to dwell on. That way she could blame me.

  I stared at her in disbelief from my hospital bed. Dougwell stood silent. I wondered why he was there. How could he stand her? My theory about his attraction to her hadn’t yet been formed at this stage.

  My body ached and I shook with anger.

  “Have you even spoken to Assface about his part in all this?” I asked.

  It had been years since I had called Pete by his old name. I’d outgrown it. I hated that I used it now.

  “He didn’t see you,” Nora looked to her man for help.

  Dougwell shifted from one foot to the other.

  I liked him very much for not speaking right then.

  “The bulb was unscrewed in the bulb hole,” Nora said.

  “He didn’t see me because he chose not to,” I said. “Sister? Duh. What sister?”

  Nora sighed and walked over to the window. She lit a cigarette (you could smoke everywhere in those days) and gazed out, probably wishing she could leave the mess of her family behind.

  “Isn’t it time that my punishment ended?” I said.

  She didn’t turn around.

  “Punishment?” Dougwell asked. “Punishment for what?” He looked from one of us to the other.

  I don’t know why I was so sure Nora would have told him what I had done to Pete when I was four years old. As I watched a delicate blush creep up the side of her neck I realized that, of course, she was too ashamed to tell even him about what her daughter had done. It would reflect on her.

  What I wanted to do then was blurt it all out. But when Nora turned her eyes from their place in the distance to my face, I changed my mind. There was always darkness in her eyes; it never went away. But at that moment it turned black and it hurt my new hip to keep looking at her.

  How had she explained Pete’s behaviour toward me all these years? Maybe Dougwell wasn’t curious. Some people aren’t. No, that wasn’t it. Nora would have written it off to a typical rivalry between a brother and sister, glossed it over and then gotten snappish when he pressed her for more. That was the way she would have done it.

  Things changed between Pete and me after the accident. That’s what everyone called it: an accident. I called it attempted murder, but only to myself. And only some of the time. I couldn’t make up my mind. I vacillated between certainty that he had tried to kill me and belief that it was an accident. I think I know the answer to that now, but I still have doubts in the m
iddle of the night when I lurch awake in my sweat-drenched bed.

  Pete came to see me in the hospital where I spent fourteen days. And he did see me, for what appeared to be the first time, or the first time since he was one year old, anyway. He still didn’t speak, but he looked—man, did he look. Shyly, at first. At least, I took it for shyness; I don’t know what the hell it really was.

  I said, “It’s okay, Pete. Look at me long and hard if you want. I don’t mind.”

  And I didn’t. So he sat in a hospital chair when no one else was visiting, or even if they were, sometimes, and stared at me. Stared till he must have known the sight of me as well as anyone could know it, as well as Henry. He had to know every freckle on my smooth nineteen-year-old face, every nuance of colour in my auburn hair, looking at me like that.

  Sometimes Eileen came with him. I didn’t like my brother’s girlfriend. She was short and chunky, with a wide mouth and teeth so tiny they looked like baby teeth. They didn’t go with her mouth at all.

  Eileen was in training to be a practical nurse and I guess she figured this was a chance for some hands-on practice. She bustled around my hospital room, plumping my pillows, freshening my water, discussing me with anyone who happened in.

  “I think Cherry has more colour in her cheeks today,” she said to a nurse I’d never seen before. “Don’t you?”

  The nurse smiled at me, and I smiled back, conspiratorially, I hoped.

  Eileen even called me dear.

  Once, when I sighed, she said, “What is it, dear?”

  “It’s that I want to go to sleep,” I said.

  “Oh. Well.”

  I closed my eyes and she took the hint and shuffled off, after whispering loudly to Pete. He stayed on to look at me some more.

  It puzzled me that she was his girlfriend. He could have done much better. Myrna would have been better, although I wouldn’t have liked it. Maybe Eileen gave good blow jobs. Her teeth certainly wouldn’t get in the way.