by Michael Rowe
Morgan allowed Jeremy to hold her hand for a brief moment, and then pulled it gently away as though to avoid hurting his feelings. Her love for her uncle was unquestioned. The question for Morgan seemed to be how much of that love she could show without feeling disloyal to her father, at least for now. Christina observed their interaction and saw that Jeremy understood. She sent a silent prayer of thanksgiving for Jeremy’s presence to whichever divinity took under its wing the families of fatherless girls and husbandless wives.
When the food arrived, Morgan took a bite of her toast and asked Jeremy, “Isn’t it weird having a town named after you? I mean, I’m going to see my name everywhere, aren’t I? That’s going to be weird. Wasn’t it weird for you and Daddy?”
“It was weird,” Jeremy admitted. “But you get used to it. Your dad and I never thought twice about it. You won’t either, after a while. And the town wasn’t named after us, it was named after our great-grandfather— your great great-grandfather. He founded the town in the late nineteenth century. That was a long time ago, and nobody thinks about it anymore. We’re just like anybody else.”
“Then why did you leave? Why did you move to the city? If it’s so great, why didn’t you stay?”
Jeremy glanced around the diner, which was slowly filling with people. He lowered his voice slightly. “Morgan, you know why I had to leave. There were . . . problems. I know you know what those problems were. Your dad and mom and I have told you about them. We don’t need to discuss it again here, do we?”
Morgan looked chastened. “I’m sorry, Uncle Jeremy,” she said. “I didn’t mean to make you feel bad.”
“It’s fine, Morgan. But we have to remember that we’re not in the city anymore. Things are a lot different out here. There are things we can talk about in public and things we can’t talk about.”
Time to nip this one in the bud, Christina thought. “Sweetheart, I know you’re nervous about today. I know you’re nervous about meeting your grandma for the first time, especially after everything we’ve told you about her. Try to remember that the bad things we told you about happened a long time ago. Your dad and I were very young and your grandma and grandpa were very mad at us for running away together and having you.”
“They didn’t want you to have me?”
“Morgan, we’ve talked about this before. They didn’t think it was right for us to have you since we weren’t married.”
“But you did get married. You are married.”
“They wanted your daddy to stay in Parr’s Landing, go to university, and take over the mine. When the mine shut down, they blamed him for not being there to help save it. They were mad at both of us, honey. But they weren’t mad at you.”
“I don’t think we should go there. I think we should go home.”
“That’s all in the past,” Christina said, ignoring Morgan’s last comment. “Your grandma Parr was very nice to invite us to come and stay with her for a while.” Christina saw Jeremy wince. She pursed her lips to signal to him to keep quiet. “We need to get back on our feet.”
“Why couldn’t we get back on our feet in Toronto?” Morgan’s bottom lip began to tremble. “Why did we have to come here? Daddy didn’t want us to come back here. He hated it here. He told me so. And now you’re making us move here. It’s not fair.”
“I know, Morgan. But we have to make the best of it when there’s no alternative. And believe me, there’s no alternative. It’ll be what we make of it.”
“It’ll be fine,” Jeremy said. “It’s a beautiful part of the country, Morgan. And your grandma’s house is very old and very big. There are wonderful log beams on the ceiling and lots of paintings on the walls. It’s on the top of a hill with a great view of the town and the river below it.”
She brightened. “So, are we rich? I’d like to be rich.”
Christina and Jack had never been the beneficiaries of any part of the Parr fortune after they’d left the Landing together, so there had been no reason to inculcate Morgan with any illusions of wealth. As a result, it had simply never occurred to Morgan that her new life in Parr’s Landing would be any less hand-to-mouth than her old life in their house in the Cabbagetown district of Toronto.
“Morgan—” There was a warning edge to Christina’s voice.
“Your grandmother is rich,” Jeremy corrected. “Well, she’s not as rich as the family used to be before the thirties. But yeah, she’s rich.” Jeremy looked across the table at Christina. This time, she was the one who winced. “But she’s very stingy, so it doesn’t matter if she’s rich or not. It doesn’t matter to us, anyway. But you’ll get to stay in a beautiful house, one that’s so big you won’t hardly have to see the rest of us unless you want to.”
“Beautiful, beautiful,” Morgan said sullenly. “I always know when you’re lying because you say things like ‘beautiful’ instead of describing them properly. It’s not beautiful at all, is it? It sounds like an old witch’s castle or something. Daddy said she was an ogress. He said she ate her young. I bet it’s a horrible house.”
Jeremy smiled. “I think your father was speaking metaphorically, sweetheart. Did he really say that she ate her children?” He laughed. “Did he actually use that phrase—that exact phrase?”
“Yeah, he did. Why?”
“Because that was my line. That was something I said to him once about your grandma. I was kidding, of course. I don’t think she literally eats her young. Although, she might want to eat her granddaughter. You never know. You’re delicious.” Across the table, Christina felt Morgan relaxing. Jeremy had succeeded in distracting her from her fretfulness. She’d started to giggle. Jeremy continued, his voice ominous. “The winters are very long up here and Parr’s Landing is in Wendigo country.”
“What’s a Windiggy?”
“Not ‘Windiggy,’ Wendigo. It’s an Indian legend. The Wendigo was a cannibal spirit that possessed men and made them eat human flesh.”
“That’s disgusting,” Morgan said, her nose wrinkled in distaste. “I bet it’s fake anyway. There’s no such thing.”
“When we’re settled in, I’ll take you up to Spirit Rock,” Jeremy said. “I’ll show you the Indian paintings on the cliffs above Bradley Lake. You can see for yourself. They’re supposed to be paintings of a real Wendigo. Your dad and I used to swim there when we were kids. Everyone in town has seen them.”
“For real?” Morgan’s blasé façade of adolescent disinterest slipped momentarily. She’d loved legends and stories ever since she was a little girl, something Jeremy had clearly remembered and was now using to his advantage. Christina again met his eyes but this time she smiled. He smiled back.
“Well, the paintings are three hundred or so years old,” Jeremy said seriously. “And they’re pretty faded. But yeah, that’s what they’re supposed to be. There was a Jesuit missionary settlement on the site of the town sometime in the seventeenth century. There are lots of stories about it. Parr’s Landing is a pretty interesting place if you know what to look for.”
“Mom, why didn’t you tell me any of this stuff when I was growing up?”
“Oh,” Christina said, affecting nonchalance. “I don’t know. It’s something you really need to see for yourself.” I didn’t tell you any of this stuff because I didn’t want to think about any of it. I wanted to forget it all. And I never wanted you to be curious enough about it to go find out about it on your own. You were supposed to be my city girl. And instead, here we are. “It’s really a beautiful town in its own way, Morgan. I think you’re going to like it a lot. At least let’s try to give it a chance, shall we?” She looked hopefully at Morgan. She laid her hand on top of her daughter’s, much as Jeremy had done earlier, but this time Morgan didn’t pull her hand away.
She squeezed her mother’s hand. “OK, mom, I promise. It’ll be OK, you’ll see.”
The waitress came back to the table. “All done? Can I get you folks anything else?” She looked at Morgan’s plate. “Honey, you didn’t eat very
much. Not a big eater, eh? Would you like something else? Some pancakes or something?”
“No, thank you,” she replied. “I wasn’t very hungry. I’m not much of a morning person. But the food was great.”
“Just the bill please,” Christina said, reaching for her purse. “We have to get on the road. We still have a long way to go.”
They took Highway 17 north along Lake Superior towards Montréal River.
Christina drove steadily, her eyes on the road. After half an hour, the silence in the car became oppressive and she turned on the radio, hoping that music would, at the very least, act as some sort of mental bridge by which the three of them could come out of their private thoughts and meet each other halfway. The reception was terrible. She’d forgotten the degree to which the igneous granite of the Precambrian Shield, covered with the thinnest layer of soil, interfered with radio transmission in this part of the country. She turned the radio off and pushed an America eight-track into the deck, humming along to “Horse With No Name” until Morgan asked her to stop so she could enjoy the music. Christina smiled at that, but she stopped humming. At the very least, it meant that Morgan’s mind was temporarily occupied by something other than how much she missed her father, or her dread at the thought of starting a new life in as alien a place as a teenager from Toronto could imagine.
Through the windows of the car, the landscape grew wilder. The original Trans-Canada route had been Highway 11, called “The King’s Highway” in a colonial forelock-tug to His Majesty King George V. The unforgiving terrain of the two-billion-year-old Precambrian Shield had been so resistant to taming when it was being built in 1923 that the Algoma Central Railway, which had connected Sault Ste. Marie to various northern Ontario mining towns, including Parr’s Landing, bypassed the 165-mile gap between Sault Ste. Marie and the Agawa River. The “Big Gap,” as it was called, had been a treasure trove of virgin timber surrounded by deep gorges and rivers bracketed by steep-walled granite canyons. In 1960, the newly completed Highway 17 made the route shorter and simpler, but no less dramatic than its antecedent highway, along which Christina remembered driving with Jack—and with Morgan slumbering in her womb—nearly sixteen years ago. Of course, sixteen years ago they had been driving in the opposite direction, towards a new life. Perversely, she reasoned that she was still driving towards a new life, but in a completely different sense.
Ironic, she thought. Ugly, tragic, but ironic nonetheless.
On either side of the car, the highway rose and fell, bracketed here and there by soaring granite cliffs of rose and grey stone. Forests of maple and birch planed off from the highway into the distant badlands like great wings of red and gold. Christina saw the edges of algae-encrusted swamps laced with dead logs and slippery rock, and deep pine everywhere. As they approached the town of Wawa, the maple and birch gave way to a mélange of birch and various other deciduous trees, as well as conifers, adding the blessed rigour of dark green to a palette from which Christina felt nearly drunk with colour. Through the window, Morgan squealed with delight and pointed to a moose standing back from the road beside a tamarack swamp. As the car swept past, the moose ambled back into the deeper brush, either cautious or indifferent to their passing.
In Wawa, Morgan made Christina stop the car so she could look at the twenty-eight-foot tall metal statue of the Canada goose that had been built twelve years before, in 1960, and dedicated to the town that had taken its name from the Ojibwa word for “wild goose.” After Morgan had taken a few pictures with the ancient secondhand Kodak Brownie 127 Jack had bought her for her thirteenth birthday, she said she was hungry. They drove through the town and stopped at a roadside chip stand run by a taciturn old man and his wife, the two of them virtually indistinguishable one from the other, with short-clipped grey hair, ruddy skin, and wrapped in denim and lumberjack flannel.
Jeremy bought beer-battered fish and salted chips wrapped in newspaper. Morgan fetched blankets from the car and they sat down to eat at one of the nearby picnic tables.
As they devoured the surprisingly delicious fish and chips, Christina mentally calculated how much money she had spent, including moving out of their rented house on Sumach Street, plus gas, food, and lodging since they’d left Toronto, and realized she was dangerously close to depleting what funds remained.
She looked up at the sky, less bright and blue at two in the afternoon than it had been when they left Batchawana Bay that morning. They were still about three hours away from Parr’s Landing, off the main highway and deep into the northern Ontario badlands at that. Christina felt another flare of anxiety as she realized they would need to fill up the Chevelle’s gas tank. She hoped they didn’t run out of gas or break down before they got to Parr’s Landing. She calculated that they would arrive near five p.m. when it was beginning to get dark.
There would be nothing for miles if anything happened. Christina had no desire to spend the night on the side of the road, miles from nowhere in Ontario bush country while the forest came alive around them in the impenetrable blackness she remembered well from her childhood.
Beside her, Jeremy Parr, lost in his own thoughts, remembered the blackness, too, though his blackness, while different from Christina’s, was no less implacable.
Jeremy didn’t regret accompanying his sister-in-law back to Parr’s Landing—not because he was ambivalent about returning to the locus of the worst emotional pain of his life, but because he knew there had been nothing else to do. He’d been fired from his bartending job the previous week, and even if he hadn’t been, there was no way—at least in the short term—that he would have been able to support the three of them. Christina had no job skills, and Morgan’s mourning had been such that there was no question Christina had to be there for her daughter.
Jack and Christina had saved his life. He felt he owed it, especially to his dead brother, to try to keep Christina and Morgan safe. And right now that meant going home with his sister-in-law and his niece and watching over them while they were in his mother’s house.
Jack and Christina had taken him in without question after his mother had sent him to the private clinic in North Bay to get help for his “problem” after he tried to kill himself in his seventeenth year. Adeline Parr had signed all the requisite papers, and Jeremy had been loaded into a limousine in the middle of the night and told not to resist, or he’d be restrained.
“This is for the best, my darling,” Adeline had told him, standing back, delicate and ladylike, as he fought with the two burly orderlies who were holding him by either arm and pushing him towards the car. “This is all for your own good, you’ll see. You’ll be safer there, too. The town is too small, and you’ve made it too dangerous for yourself to live here with the things you’ve done. When you come back, you’ll be cured. Things will be different—you’ll see.”
A sympathetic maternal smile never touched her eyes. They were cold and practical, the eyes of a widow used to issuing orders to inferiors—orders she expected to be obeyed. Adeline had been entirely unmoved by Jeremy’s tears and his pleading to be allowed to stay, that he would be good, that there would be no more trouble with other boys, that what happened hadn’t been his fault. Adeline had stood in the hallway of Parr House, immaculate in a black wool suit and pearls and watched her younger son dragged out of his home in the middle of the night and shoved into the back seat of a black Cadillac Fleetwood with blacked-out windows.
Turning to the driver, who had obviously been summoned to wait by the front door in case Jeremy put up too much resistance, she pointed a manicured index finger towards the drawing room off the main hallway and said, “His bags are in the other room. Please see to it that they’re loaded immediately. Tell Dr. Gionet at the clinic to telephone me if there’s anything else.”
And with that, she’d turned away, her high heels clicking on the black-and-white marble entryway, without ever turning back.
At the Doucette Institute, the psychiatrists set about attempting to cure him of his aff
liction. For six months, Jeremy endured icy baths, and electric shocks applied to his hands and genitals while being forced to watch black-and-white films of naked, oiled, muscular men. He was strapped to chairs in darkened rooms for hours, and injected with apomorphine, after which he was forced to drink two-ounce shots of brandy to induce nausea. When the nausea became nearly unendurable, the room was heated and bright lights were shone on large photographs of male nudes, and he was told to select the one he desired the most. At that point, Dr. Gionet played a tape describing his “illness” in graphic, sickening detail until Jeremy vomited out the drugs, and was given more. The tape was played every hour. After thirty hours, detecting dangerous levels of acetone in Jeremy’s urine, he was sent back to his room to recover.
But the treatments always began again. Other nights, he was awakened every two hours by congratulatory messages about how different his life would be once he’d conquered his “inversion” and been rendered “normal.” Every morning he was injected with testosterone propionate and made to listen to records of women’s voices, lush and frankly sexual voices that, to Jeremy, merely sounded whorish and insectile through the scratchy speakers of a turntable.
In sessions, his psychiatrist, Dr. Gionet—who, Jeremy noted with fresh disgust at every session, had terrible pitted acne scars on his face, and eyes that were even colder and more censorious than his mother’s, and breath that made Jeremy think of an open grave—forced him, over and over again, to repeat every graphic aspect of every sexual fantasy he’d ever had. In the end, Elliot made them up, which seemed to satisfy Dr. Gionet, who seemed unable to distinguish between fact and fantasy when it came to what Jeremy told him.
Worse still, he forced Jeremy to reveal every intimate detail of his discovered friendship with Elliot McKitrick. He made him describe Elliot’s body—every part of it, what he’d done with it, and what Elliot had done to him by way of reciprocation.