“I couldn’t imagine myself as Grandma and anyway, Maymie—we called her Maymie—she seemed to think of me as Mom, right from the start. Rosalie went to live in Windsor right afterwards. She’s married now, you know. A nice man who works at Chrysler. They have three of their own. They were all here for the funeral. I don’t think you ever met Rosalie, did you?”
I shook my head. “Remind me, what year was Rosalie born?”
“1966, October 29,” she said, and looked away again, toward a window and the cobalt sky, a contrail streak behind a speck.
“This was Jack,” she said, removing another photo from the top of the piano and handing it to me. “I don’t think you knew Jack, did you?”
I shook my head, surprised by a feeling similar to resentment. Jack was conventionally handsome, mostly because of the smile that transformed his entire face, the kind of smile that made everybody smile, even looking at a picture of it, even knowing that he could never smile or laugh again. I handed back the picture. Caddy was nodding, rubbed a finger across the glass. “I must dust someday,” she said.
She guided me across the room. “And here’s our little gallery.” I counted eight photographs of her dead granddaughter: a high school graduation, various grade school poses, one of her juggling a soccer ball on her right foot in the middle of a little scrum, hair flying. Crossing a finish line, arms high in exultation. Step dancing on a stage. Wearing a tiara and a fancy dress.
“She had perfect teeth. No need for those braces they’re all wearing now.”
“She was very pretty,” I said.
“Jack would tell her she should get the braces anyway, half-joking. Smooch-prevention, he called braces. That’s the way Jack was. His big concern was sex.”
She looked away again, toward the window, but not before I saw the crimson on her cheeks. She crossed her arms and sighed. “Drugs never crossed his mind, poor Jack. Not for an instant. But I had my suspicions.”
I leaned close to the photograph of Maymie wearing the tiara, looking for a resemblance. “I think she had your eyes,” I said.
Caddy smiled. “Princess in the Homecoming, just last summer,” she said. “It was around then himself resurfaced. You knew him, from before?”
I nodded. “A terrible waste.”
“She was something else,” Caddy said quietly. “In her personality, she reminded me a lot of yourself at that age, how she loved to laugh. And she had a smile just like …” she clasped my wrist, looking stricken. “That was thoughtless of me.”
“No, no,” I said. “Not at all.”
“I can’t imagine what you thought when you found out that I was … that Rosalie was on the way. Your Caddy up the stump.” She studied me.
It was my turn to look away. “I can’t remember exactly how or when I heard. It was sometime afterward, I recall. You were wise to go away. To Windsor, was it?”
“Yes, Windsor. I had an aunt there. In those days you just had to disappear. I often thought I should have told you. Just let the chips fall where they may. But I didn’t have the heart.”
“It all worked out for the best,” I said, and instantly regretted it. We both studied the dead child for a moment. Rosalie’s daughter. Caddy’s grandchild.
“For the longest time, it did work out,” she said. “She was like an angel in the house.”
Another silence, broken by the distant roar of a passing truck.
“We’ll go back to the kitchen, then?”
She’d refilled the teapot. “You became a prison guard?”
“Sort of.”
“You always planned to be a cop, I think.”
I shrugged. “It was complicated.”
“Yes. Tell me about complicated. I wish you were a cop, in a way. So many things I’d want to ask you. Though I never thought that you were cut out for that kind of work. You were too nice.”
Then there was more silence for a while. “You have a lovely place here,” I said to end it. “I understand that Jack built it, from the ground up.”
“Yes,” she said. “He was great at the carpentry. It’s hard to believe he’s been gone two years now. Almost exactly. I’m almost glad he wasn’t here for this latest. He worshipped her. She was all we had, you know. Rosalie was like his own, in spite of everything, God bless him. But Maymie, the sun rose and set on her. They were inseparable. She took it awful hard when he died. I think that was when she started to get a little wild.”
“It was a heart attack, I heard. Jack.”
“Yes. He never knew a thing. I hope, when it’s my time, it’ll be like that.”
I had not anticipated struggling for words. So I sat there studying the face I once knew so intimately, surprised by how familiar it remained. Some crinkling in the fine skin just below the pale, pale probing eyes, microscopic lines above the upper lip.
“Jack wasn’t from here, was he?”
“I met him in Toronto. I moved there right after Rosalie was born. Then he turned up here to work at the heavy water while it lasted. After that he set up a small construction outfit. We did well for a while, but there was a lot of stress. Especially when Rosalie came home to live with us.”
“She came back here from Windsor?”
“Yes. Ten she was. Spoiled. I hate to say it but it’s true. My aunt spoiled her rotten. It was tough on Rosalie, coming here from a place like Windsor. But Aunt Sadie and her husband were getting old and they couldn’t handle her. We thought we could. Then, when she was only seventeen, she dropped the bombshell. Knocked up. It must run in the family.” She laughed.
“A shock, I’m sure.”
“Well, yes, been there, done that.” She laughed again and I imagined she was waiting for some generosity from me.
“Poor Jack nearly had a stroke. But then the baby, Mary Alice—I told you we always called her Maymie? She turned out to be such a joy. A gift from God, Jack always said. How’s your cup?”
“It’s fine.”
“After his business went under poor Jack had to go away like everybody else. To Alberta. That was hard on him. And the timing was bad, especially as far as Maymie was concerned. I have to say it, they need a man around.”
I nodded. Another truck roared by on the nearby highway.
“So how well do you know this Dwayne Strickland? He grew up here you know.”
“I knew that, but I first met him in Millhaven, four years ago I guess. He was there for robbery.”
“He’s always been a piece of work, that fellow. I know it wasn’t always easy for him, but there’s no excuse.”
“No,” I said. “There’s no excuse.”
“You must have met a lot of evil people in your work.”
I studied my tea mug for a moment. “Once you get to know them you realize that ‘evil’ is a complicated word … more an adverb than an adjective.” Realizing instantly I sounded pompous.
“I’m glad you think so,” she said, and got up and walked toward the stove. “Can I freshen you?”
I shook my head. “I’m sorry,” I mumbled. “I didn’t mean that the way it came out. It was something somebody I worked with used to say. I’m still not entirely sure what it means.”
Her expression was suddenly weary. “I hope he knew what he was talking about, the fellow who came up with that.”
“It was a woman,” I said. “A psychologist.”
“Ah. One of those.”
She sat down. She sipped.
“You never had any, yourself? No kids.”
“Not that I’m aware of,” I said.
She laughed. “Isn’t that the way.”
“So you’re here alone now?”
“I am,” she said. “Alone with the memories.”
“That makes two of us.”
“Ahh,” she said. “I’m sorry to hear that. Death or divorce?”
“Divorce,” I said. “I suppose there’s worse things that can happen.” And again I felt infinitely stupid. And so I stood. “Anyway, I just wanted to drop in. Say hello.�
��
In the sudden silence I heard a clicking sound. “Well look who’s here,” Caddy said. I followed her eye line and found a small dog standing in the door to the hallway leading toward the parlour. He was grey with irregular black patches. “Come over here,” she ordered. The dog just stood, then gave a small brief bark.
“Listen to yourself,” she said. “The first sound out of you in weeks. So you came out to see the visitor.”
The dog walked toward me, stopped and nosed my knee. “Honest to God,” she said. “That’s the first time he’s come out of the parlour since the funeral. Except to do his business outside the front door. Then he’s right back in, God love him.”
“I didn’t see him there.”
“He stays behind the couch. We had to move the couch out for the casket at the wake. So that’s where he stays, right where the casket was, poor little fellow. Come here, say hello to Caddy.” But the dog stayed put, staring at me as if trying to remember something, someone.
“He looks like a Jack Russell,” I said, stooping down to scratch his ears.
“Is that what he is?” she said. “Somebody in Halifax gave him to her when he was just a puppy.”
“He’s mostly Jack,” I said. “I had one. What’s his name?”
“She called him Birch, because of the colour of him. Mr. Birch Bark.”
The dog yapped once again. “There you go,” Caddy said. “That was their trick. When he hears the B word, he does that. You had one like him?”
“Yes,” I said. “I named him Jack Daniels because everybody was calling him that anyway.” I squatted, ran a hand along the ridge of his back. He sat.
Caddy tipped her face, eyes asking the unspoken question.
“Anna got custody,” I said, smiling. I stood.
“Anna,” she said. “Now I remember.”
“I don’t think you met.”
“Once,” she said. “It was at an outdoor concert. I remember thinking how glamorous she was.”
“I don’t recall.”
“You had a bit of a sgleo on. It was the first time I’d seen you since … ages. You looked happy. I was glad. I always wanted that, Tony, no matter what you thought.” Her hand was resting lightly on my wrist.
“Sgleo,” I said. “I can’t remember the last time I heard that word.”
“So you’re home for good now?”
“You never know.”
“Come back sometime,” she said. “I promise to be happy.”
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”
“We’re both single now,” she said. “You come back and we’ll give them something to talk about at the store.” She smiled and again I saw the teenaged face, the captivating eyes.
“Ah yes,” I said. “The store.”
She laughed lightly and pushed me toward the door. “You know where I live. Don’t be so long before coming back.”
The little dog was at my heels. I slid the door shut as he looked up at me.
Another day was fading fast. The amber evening light emphasized the polished oaken desk in front of me. I opened the drawer, fished out a slim packet of letters. She wasn’t much for writing, Caddy. They were usually one page long, brief little chronicles from home. And then the last one, Holy Week, 1966.
I’ll be short and to the point. There isn’t any easy way to say this but I have to try. I won’t be here when you come home this weekend. I promised myself that I wouldn’t say I’m sorry even though I am. It’s such an easy thing to say, sorry, such a common little word. Too, too easy. But being sorry really hurts more than such a little word implies. And you deserve to know why I’m going but I just can’t bring myself to tell you because I know how you’d react and your reaction would be such a big mistake in the long run. You’ll find out soon enough at any rate. And maybe you’ll hate me then. I hope so. It’ll make things so much easier for both of us. Goodbye Tony. Love, Caddy.
And I sat staring at that unfamiliar word. Love.
3.
I was awake most of the night. The ATVs, the ubiquitous four-wheelers, didn’t help. Young people, boozed up, smoked up, invading private property, the entitlement of darkness, anonymity—as if anyone in this place could ever be anonymous. Finally, sometime after four, silence. I fell into a groggy slumber and I dreamed of Strickland.
We were in the woods across the road from the high school and we were smoking cigarettes. “You’re adopted too,” he said. “Who told you that?” I asked, irritated. “Everybody knows,” he said. And then we were walking deeper in the woods and Caddy was there but she was holding Strickland’s hand and I seemed to have been excluded and the day was growing darker. “We should go back,” I said. “We’ll be late for chemistry.” But then Caddy was Anna and she was saying, “We can’t go back, we’re already late for chemistry, we’ve gone too far.”
I woke then. Through my dormer window I could see a flaming red horizon, smeared as if by smoke. And I resolved to call the lawyer Sullivan and to tell him that Dwayne Strickland could go to hell, which is what I’d said back in ’96 when Clarke, his case manager in Millhaven, first told me that the inmate Strickland was asking to meet me.
“He claims the priest back home suggested that he connect with you. It’s a good sign that he wants to.”
“I don’t have time for this,” I’d said. “I really don’t. Trust me, I’ve been there once. I’d be wasting his time and my own.”
“Maybe if you had a word with him,” Father MacIsaac had said, clutching my sleeve. A word? I’d been gone from the place for years and I was home on a hard-earned vacation in the summer of 1988. Even so it was hard to say no to the priest. He gave my arm an insistent little shake, speaking softly: “Maybe give him the facts of life from your point of view.”
“My point of view.”
“Inside the prison system. What it’s really like. A lot of the young ones see crime as glamorous. TV and the movies. I’m sure you have a different perspective.”
“So, Father, what you’re really asking is that I try to scare him.”
“I wouldn’t go that far, Tony. But it wouldn’t hurt to sit down with the boy, just talk. People here look up to you. You’re quite the success story.”
I laughed. “I’m doing life in prison. Some success story.”
And he laughed with me. “I can relate to that,” he said. “Life is a prison of one kind or another for most of us.” And then he seemed a little bit embarrassed. “But I feel bad for his poor parents. They’ve tried hard to give the boy a chance to make something of himself.”
“Well, how bad can he be? He’s what?”
“Fifteen, I think. You heard about the store?”
“They found the stuff he took …”
“Yes. The poor little fellow—I gave him credit for having more brains. He had everything in his room. Of course it was the first place they looked.”
“One-kid crime wave” I’d overheard someone saying in the store. First time in perhaps a hundred years anybody’d ever violated the village store. It had been a co-op in the early days, everybody’s business. Had to be someone who knew the place, but not belonging to the place, not really. Someone inside from the outside. Mostly movies and cigarettes gone missing. Didn’t have to look far for the culprit.
“I’ll see what I can do,” I said.
I called and told his mother that I’d be dropping by and she seemed glad but when I got there the kid was nowhere to be found.
“Dwayne got called out this morning,” she said.
“Called out?”
“Some days he helps with the hay. Somebody called this morning and he took off.”
“And where would they be making hay?”
“He didn’t say.”
“Maybe I’ll try again.”
“Yes. I’ll tell him.” She looked old and tired, her heavy body propped up by the doorframe. “I’m trying to place you,” she said.
“MacMillan,” I said. “Tony.”
“Tony M
acMillan from the mountain road?”
“The one.”
“But the name you said on the phone …”
“I changed my name,” I said. “Back to what I was born with.”
“Ahhh. That’s right,” she said. “You were adopted too. Can I offer you a cup of tea?”
“Thanks just the same, but I have to be somewhere.”
“Ah well.” She sighed. “It’s never easy, is it?”
“What’s never easy?” I said.
“Growing up nowadays, with all the pressures.”
“I’ll call again,” I said, and squeezed her hand.
“We’d be awful grateful if you would.”
And when he wasn’t there the second time I visited, I confess I felt relief.
“Still haymaking?”
His mother seemed uncomfortable at the door. “Who’s out there,” a gruff male voice called from inside. She turned her head slightly. “It’s young Tony MacMillan,” she replied. “Looking for Dwayne.” There was no answer. She shrugged.
“No problem,” I said. I told her I’d be going back to Ontario soon, probably wouldn’t get a chance to call again. “Give him my best,” I said.
She nodded and shut the door.
——
The store decided to not press charges. Restitution, Mary said. She’d been hired to help to run the place after the co-op went under and Collie became the owner. There were rumours Mary was a silent partner.
“He’ll pay for everything and clean up around here for a few months,” she told me just before I headed back to Kingston. I thought that seemed fair, being cautious with my opinion. It was Collie’s decision, she said. “I’m just sayin’, but if it was up to me. Then again I suppose he’s got enough going against him without a record.”
So first it was the priest. Then, in 1996, it was Clarke, Strickland’s case management officer. “Maybe if you had a word with him. You might get through to him where others are failing.”
“A waste of time,” I said.
“Just hear me out,” Clarke said. He told me that Strickland was withdrawn, vulnerable, but simmering. He was terrified of the chicken hawks hovering around him, pretending to be his guardians. He was much too pretty. Would I oblige before he broke? He’ll survive, I said.
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