Punishment

by Linden MacIntyre

  I thought of Caddy all the way home and about how strange it was that in spite of nearly forty years and all the living in between I’d still feel this nagging adolescent mix of sadness, anger and embarrassment just from seeing her. I had thought about calling on her since I’d moved back but, each time, had been restrained by memory and a cautious nature. Considering my confused reaction on seeing her at the courthouse, I realized that my caution had been prudent.

  After I filed away the tax receipts in a drawer I sat back to contemplate the ancient desk I’d brought with me from Kingston. It’s an old roll-top from an age when ideas turned more slowly into words, when words were written by hand. I’d also taken books, although there had been some tension over texts that Anna said she needed for her legal practice, dense volumes that mostly dealt with deviance and criminology, which were, I pointed out, my specialty as well as hers. I’d also somehow ended up with the conjugal bed. All sentiment aside, it was a good bed and when she indicated her intent to send it to the dump I said I’d take it. She kept almost everything else.

  We’d sold the Kingston house and split the equity. I kept the place in St. Ninian, the coastal village I’d grown up in, and where Anna always seemed to be vaguely miserable. Now I was here alone, for good. It was a disturbing thought—being at a dead end, in a way—but I was vaguely comforted by the desk’s connection with a time when I was relevant and busy. And I admired its obvious antiquity and quality as I sat in front of it with my fingers laced across my stomach the way an old man sits. The stomach, I noted with some chagrin, had become substantial.

  I’d been told the upside of divorce is often weight loss but, if anything, I’d gained. The Kingston doctor had cautioned me that two life changes close together—retirement and divorce—might constitute a psychic overload and to be careful with the comfort food and booze. He offered pills. I’d never needed pills before, even in the most stressful periods of my working life. I didn’t trust pills. He said I needn’t worry. The pill he had in mind would be innocuous—it might cause some dryness in the mouth, a fuzzy brain at first and perhaps, occasionally, an inappropriate erection which, at my age, might not be entirely a bad thing.

  “At my age,” I asked rather sourly, “what would you consider ‘inappropriate’?”

  He laughed. “You’ll have to be the judge.”

  I’ve been on the pills ever since, with no apparent side effects.

  ——

  I remembered that I had a photograph of Dwayne Strickland buried somewhere in a desk drawer, a coloured eight-by-ten that I found easily. A friendly inmate snapped it for us on the day I introduced young Strickland to my wife, back in 1998. It was August, I believe. The backdrop was a whitewashed prison wall and they were crouched while I was standing. I was frowning slightly, which was appropriate for my status as an institutional parole officer. Anna was still building up her practice at the time. They, being much younger than I, were more flexible and so looked quite relaxed, squatting in what I would have found to be an awkward pose. Anna was smiling like a girl and afterwards she gushed about the con—Strickland was so engaging; “a waste,” was how she put it. What was he like once one got to know him?

  I had pointed out to her that one rarely ever gets to “know” an inmate but as far as I could tell he had no discernable personality disorders. He had a fairly high opinion of himself. He wasn’t especially violent, just a garden-variety drug dealer who had strayed beyond his expertise by robbing banks for which he was serving eight years. He was in Kingston Pen, far more custody than he required, but only for a psychological assessment before a likely reclassification to medium security. His case managers were also trying to assess the fallout from an incident that might have got him labelled as a rat—a fatal designation in the world we occupied. All that aside, he had a lot of life ahead of him if he had the character to rise above the consequences of his past behaviour.

  She had shrugged. “He’s awfully good-looking anyway.”

  Four years had passed since that sunny day in 1998 but I remembered quite clearly how young and carefree Anna seemed back then. It’s amazing how anger strips away a woman’s youthful qualities. She was beautiful, even squinting in the sunshine that was bouncing off the glaring walls, her fine auburn hair ruffled by the August breeze.

  I’d had to visit Strickland there that day and Anna had asked to come along. She’d acquired her interest in criminals quite naturally. Anna grew up in or near a lot of prisons. Her father was an officer who had worked his way up the corrections food chain to warden in another institution. She’d heard me speak of Strickland, and the fact that he and I were from the same small place in Nova Scotia seemed to excite her curiosity. Maybe I was mildly flattered by this rare and unexpected show of interest in where I’d come from.

  “If we had a son,” she’d once said, after she’d become better acquainted with Strickland, “I’d have been happy with someone just like him. In any case, the way he turned out has everything to do with his family background. Discipline without love. Being adopted.”

  “Take him and everything he tells you with a grain of salt,” I’d warned her.

  I put the photo back in the drawer. The telephone saved me from another slide into the wasteland of remorse.

  The caller asked if I was Mr. Breau. I told him that I was. “Tony Breau?” he stressed, sounding friendly. I confirmed it by staying on the line.

  He told me that his name was Sullivan, Stanley Sullivan, and that he was a lawyer representing Dwayne Strickland.

  I said I was acquainted with his client. Sullivan then proceeded to assure me that he was calling me at Dwayne’s request. Strickland wanted to reconnect, given all our history.

  “It’s all behind me now and I’d like to leave it there,” I said.

  “I understand,” he said. “But I think you were friends.”

  Naïveté annoys me. “I know him,” I said at last. “We both grew up around here and we had some other things in common. We talked occasionally when he was inside but the relationship was hardly personal. Given my line of work, ‘friend’ would be a bit of an overstatement.”

  “Whatever the relationship was,” Sullivan said, “even if you weren’t friends, you were friendly. Let’s say he respects you. And for people with his background it’s rare to see respect for someone in the so-called system. He’d like to talk to you. That’s why I’m calling.”

  “Did he tell you what he wants to talk about?”

  “You’ve heard about the allegation, the death of the young woman. I think he’d like to present his version of events. He said he wants to tell you exactly what happened.”

  “And why would I believe him?”

  There was a pause, then he said, “It would be as much for my benefit as his. Given your history with him and your background I think it might be helpful to hear him tell it again. There might be small details, even inconsistencies.”

  “From my point of view,” I said, “I’m not sure what I could contribute.”

  “Mr. Breau, you and I have been around long enough to understand these kinds of situations.”

  “He got himself in a jam. He wants to get out of it. There’s really nothing I can do.”

  “Look. It’s my job to help him deal with his predicament. How to do that isn’t clear yet. Do we go for broke or cut our losses …”

  “Around here he’s already guilty …”

  “I don’t give a shit about ‘around here.’ He’s innocent until the system says otherwise. So will you help or not?”

  “Let me think about it.”

  “Here’s my number,” he said. “We don’t have a whole lot of time.”

  I wrote down the number, thanked him, said goodbye. I’ve learned from long experience the peril of a hasty answer to a lawyer or a con.

  After hanging up the phone I reopened the desk drawer, looked again at the photograph of Strickland and my former wife, then slammed it shut again. I stared for a while through my living room window
at the sunny afternoon. It was a surreal vista of bucolic loveliness, the amber fields, the blue sea glittering.

  I first met Anna at an evening class at Queen’s. I remember it was sociology. I was still a CX-2, a guard, and after nearly twenty years, nearing burnout. My long-term ambition had always been to upgrade my career. Now or never, I decided, then signed up for classes.

  She was trying to enrich an undergraduate degree to improve her chances of getting into law school. We were both older than the others so we’d often sit together and during breaks share little insights over coffee and, over time, bits of personal disclosure. When she learned that I was single she seemed shocked. I was forty-three. She was thirty, also single, but she had lived a fairly vivid life, lots of travel, a hippie phase, several intense relationships, any one of which in more conventional circumstances would have qualified as marriage. She had, she confessed, a mild aversion to commitment and a fear of bearing children. She didn’t tell me right away that her dad was also in my line of work, at that time assistant warden in a medium-security establishment called Warkworth. I stepped back a bit when she did tell me later. Her father had a reputation in the system—an old-timer, feared equally by con and copper. But looking back, the outcome of our chats and coffee seemed preordained.

  I don’t recall a swell of orchestral accompaniment as our friendship crystallized, or when on a pleasant weekend trip to Montreal in 1991 (during le Festival de Jazz) we broke through the barriers of caution, entering what we both acknowledged to be “a relationship.” But that weekend would, in my crooked, two-faced memory, mark the true beginning of a nine-year phase of unrestrained (some would call it reckless, even selfish) happiness.

  Oh Anna. Where are you now? Are you alone? Unlikely.

  And then as I watched the sun go down I thought of Caddy. Anna and Caddy, the end and the beginning of my journey from here to there and back again—an emotional odyssey, I suppose, if I wanted to sound grand. I had banished Caddy from my consciousness decades earlier. That’s the way it often happens when you’re young. In time the pain and passion are forgotten. But today, when she turned and smiled, the protective ice just melted, leaving me exposed, and Anna, at least temporarily, forgotten.

  2.

  A month passed before I summoned up the nerve to visit Caddy. Why not, I reasoned. After all, at the courthouse she’d invited me and it had been more than thirty years since our last meaningful communication, if you want to call it that. I think there had been one encounter since, a superficial social moment long since lost in the confusion it had caused. We were different people now, I told myself. But I’d already made it my business to find out where she lived—a tidy bungalow in what I remembered as a hayfield, not far from Collie’s store.

  Though Collie saved a metro daily for me faithfully, I frequently forgot to pick it up. Faraway events didn’t seem to matter much anymore. But that day I remembered to get the paper. Or maybe I was having second thoughts—I hadn’t had the nerve to call her in advance. A call to set a time would sound too purposeful. Best if I just dropped by unannounced. Or maybe not at all. Or maybe she’d not be at home.

  There were cars and pickup trucks in front of the store. Inside, half a dozen men were gathered around his complimentary coffee urn. Neil Archie MacDonald was among them. I’d have recognized him anywhere though I’d not set eyes on him for decades. He was just as tall and straight as he’d always been, the shoulders still formidable. Obviously meatier around the middle and he still had the aggressive confidence of an all-American big-city cop, Vietnam War vet, local hero.

  He was expounding on Iraq as I was paying for the papers. Collie said, “It’s starting to look bad for Saddam. Neil thinks the Americans are on the warpath over nine-eleven.” He nodded in Neil’s direction but Neil didn’t seem to notice.

  “I didn’t realize Saddam had anything to do with nine-eleven,” I replied, loud enough for Neil to hear.

  I could feel his eyes, the sudden silence, measuring the moment. “There wouldn’t ’a been a nine-eleven if they’d done what they had to do in ’91,” he said carefully.

  I pretended to be scanning the front page of the paper. “You were in Vietnam, weren’t you, Neil,” I said. I could feel that he was struggling to remember who I was.

  “Two tours.” His tone communicated the unspoken who-the-fuck-is-this?

  “Two tours,” I repeated, nodding. “Well, well. And you still believe in war?”

  He was smiling but the face-flush and eye-glitter were warnings that I remembered from a long time ago.

  Then he laughed. “Ahhhhh. Now I remember. Tony Mac-fucking-millan.” And he walked over and threw an arm over my shoulder. “This guy and I … he’s just pullin’ my leg. Tony, you know and I know that Saddam is only a part of a bigger problem. Like the whole fuckin world is a jungle now. I’da thought you of all people would know that.”

  “The name is Breau,” I said. “Maybe you’ve got me mixed up with somebody else.”

  “No chance of that.” And he walked away and out the door.

  “Where did he come from?” I asked, struggling to seem amused.

  “You didn’t know?” said Collie. “He’s been home for about a year. Runs a bed and breakfast for tourists, down the road. Ever since the shooting in Boston.”

  “Shooting?”

  “Well, you knew he was a cop?” said Collie. “I hear he’s still got a bullet in his body somewhere. It was big in the American papers. They made it sound like the O.K. Corral.”

  I realized Collie and the others were waiting for a comment—sympathetic or sarcastic—but I knew how, in quiet places like St. Ninian, memorable commentary travels. So I gathered up my papers, smiled around and left.

  Caddy hadn’t heard my footsteps as I crossed the patio to her back door and she didn’t notice that I now stood paralyzed, hand raised to rap on the sliding glass between us. I almost turned away, she looked so sad. She was seated at her kitchen table, one elbow resting on it as if balancing her cup of tea, the other forearm on her thigh. From where I stood it looked as though she might have been examining the decorative detail of the cup. It was elegant, a fragile mug made of what appeared to be fine china with small blue flowers, violets maybe. But she was staring past it, through a window just above the kitchen sink.

  It was a lovely day, early October, the sky cobalt with fluffy cloud. The cool wind rustled dried leaves in a nearby maple tree. In the few moments I stood there I noted that her hair, once chestnut, was streaked with a steely grey I hadn’t noticed at the courthouse. Her eyes, of course, were always her most distinctive feature—the palest blue I’d ever seen in a human face, but somehow warm and always, always searching, seeing through me. Hard to imagine she was only seventeen back then. I rapped lightly.

  I was worried that she’d flinch, maybe spill her tea, but she turned her face slowly toward me and smiled and waved me in. She didn’t stand, there was no embrace of greeting and I was somehow pleased. It felt a little like a welcoming reserved for someone who had never really gone away, someone who was still familiar. “Pour yourself a cup,” she said, nodding toward the stove. And, reading my uncertainty, she pointed. “The cupboard, there, beside the fridge.”

  I fetched a mug from a shelf and poured. She held hers toward me and I refilled it. “Milk?”

  “In the fridge,” she said. “I’m fine with mine the way it is. Then sit.”

  I was suddenly speechless. The reality of why I’d come rose like a wall between us along with a flood of memories. After we had sat in silence for what felt like minutes, she said, “I doubt if you ever met her. I’ll get a picture.” Then she stood and left the kitchen.

  She returned with the photo that was on the poster in the store. She placed it on the table and we sat silently before it.

  “Does anybody know what happened?” I asked finally.

  She shrugged. “How can anybody ever know? She died. Why did she die? Isn’t that always the question? And there are probably so man
y answers. I’m not sure any of us want to know.” Her voice quavered slightly. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I have to find a way to be stronger.”

  I placed my hand on hers. “Don’t be sorry.”

  She nodded, still staring at the photograph. Then she smiled and stood up. “You must think I’m a wreck, making you pour your own tea. Get up and give an old woman a hug for God’s sake.” And so I did.

  With my arms around her, face touching hers, I was nineteen years old again—away from here, at university and very lonely, staring at a glass and metal wall, row on row of mail slots, looking for a letter. In memory it seems she was the only one who ever wrote to me.

  She let me go, and said, almost whispering, “I was a grandma when I was only thirty-five. Isn’t that a hoot? My Rosalie was only seventeen when she announced that she was pregnant.”

  I’d always read her letters upstairs in the dining hall in the clatter of cutlery and dishes, the clamour of adolescent student voices. Before the last one, the closest that her letters ever came to intimacy was “I miss you, xo, Caddy.”

  I stepped back. Our eyes locked briefly. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said, then looked away.

  I asked, “Are there more pictures?”

  “Of course,” she said. “Come, and I’ll show you some of Rosalie too.”

  I hesitated, afraid of this journey back in time. “Come,” she said gently, and looped her arm through mine. We passed through a darkened hall, past the bottom of a stairway, and into a parlour where everything seemed new. “Poor Jack,” she said. “He’d just finished the renovation when he went.” She stopped by an old upright piano. “He promised me that he was home for good. Little did he know.” There was a photo on the top of the piano, a pretty woman with a careful smile.

  “Rosalie,” she said. “She was eighteen when the child was born, way too young for motherhood. Abortion was out of the question. Especially around here, back then. Even now, it would be difficult. Jack and I told her up front, ‘If you want to give her up, it’s okay with us. But if you want to keep her we’ll do everything we can.’