Murder

by David Adams Richards

  But it is a strange thing about the lesson of the turtle this black night in Spain, and how it painfully cut open my hand. It is this: That never does a second pass when you are ever certain of the comfort of a second ago. And that no matter who you are, nothing, not even the intellectual comfort and safety of a group, will last forever.

  My son knows the problem. Once when I helped him through the waves on the beach in Australia he winced:

  “Dad,” he said, “you got me with your badder hand.”

  I have little control over how much force I am using when I hold something with it. That is why my hand is often cut. I have cut it on windows and door handles, chunks of ice.

  I have bruised my son half a dozen times by accident, and have been brought to tears seeing the black bruises that he does not complain about, that my fingers have left on his arm.

  I share this affliction with others.

  A sailor I know fell from the top of the Angus L. Macdonald Bridge, in Halifax. When he hit the water, it sounded like a .303, and he now has no use of his left arm. He, too, wraps it in the winter, sometimes heats it with a small butane lighter and burns himself.

  When once I asked him about this, about my left hand aching now all winter long, he nodded:

  “Ache—oh yeah—it’ll always ache—no problem there.”

  And he smiled his toothless smile.

  He tries to drink it, and other things, away. For seventeen years, so did I.

  * * *

  —

  In so many books published it is all a package of social concern and neighbourly wisdom now, like crystals of instant soup. The trick is to pretend it’s your wisdom as you step up to the podium to read. If you do this well enough, you’ll win the Pulitzer Prize. Carry this handbook guide written out for you, and don’t misplace it with all the others in the crowded room:

  A single mother suffers.

  Men do not understand women.

  A drunken father is brutal.

  Fights in police cars are bad.

  Ignorance and violence are always male.

  Racists are always white.

  The age of intellectual comfort has come.

  You may believe it’s all true, though you might not know any of it well, or why it is. But there is a checklist in the handbook for all of these things now. It has all been prepared for you. Others, too, have had the same list prepared for them.

  Like instant coffee in a Styrofoam cup, it’s always all there, ready to mix up. It takes a lot of encouragement to swallow. But the payoff means you belong to the inner circle, the compassionate ones of gentle autumn book launchings and luncheons with privileged ladies who are bound to agree with you on what true suffering means.

  Suffering. That is of course the word, isn’t it? I began to write at the very moment the age turned toward this complete handbook of instant knowledge and compassion about suffering. There was always a way to buy the handbook. The checklist was always there. It was to deny that you were ever the one to humiliate or inflict pain and by this admission take yourself to task. Suffering was always caused by others, and you knew whom those others were. Nothing was better than to single them out, and exonerate oneself.

  Violence was always unthinkable in that certain little group I once knew. Social concern replaced charity. Today so much writing has become indifferent to suffering in any real way because it deals with all suffering, as with everything, in a way that accommodates the handbook. I’ve seen the handbook. You notice it in how certain people react over anything that cannot be controlled. You notice it more in how they instantly freeze out anyone who has really suffered.

  It goes a long way to relieve much of the responsibility of introspection.

  Most of them will never understand the tragedy they have partaken in.

  “I will never write about pain that isn’t mine,” Alden Nowlan once said.

  The truth is, you can’t. Eighty percent of the books published today prove this as an incalculable truth.

  I think of this now in Spain. That there was always an idea inherent with certain people I knew from that side of my life, that they are not the ones to be able to hurt anything. That they were in positions of a certain favour. That even angels would have their wings bloodied before they would bloody their hands. That they could not stomach to maim or hurt. A posture finally for all the others with the same handbook, the same set of rules.

  Still, I realize now that literature through the ages does not very often favour those who have the handbook, though they hold on to it like a treasure. But literature favours in the end Emily Bronte’s torch. The torch illuminates the one who remains steadfast in searching the foul night, either in laughter or in tears—searching, and knowing what it is they are searching for. That’s the key.

  All around, everywhere there will be cold and darkness. I’ll say this: there is no shame to recognize it as such. The world is and must be and always has been a brutal, mad and godless place filled with priceless moments of hilarity, sacrifice and love. That is what the torch is for. That’s the reason for it. To search this out. There is no shame to carry it. Someone will always have to. It’s just that you’ve got to be sure you know why it has to be carried the way it is.

  The best part, not the worst, remains with the man and woman who finally understand this, whether they write comedy or tragedy.

  The best part after all the hoopla is over, and the age does pass (for the age will pass), will not belong to those I have known driven by as frantic an urge to conform as I’ve ever seen. Who hold up their handbooks like passports in a crowded queue.

  Finally someday, the best part will belong as it always has, with the greater kindness and virtue, and love for life of an Ivan Basterache, a Cathy McDurmot, a Jerry Bines.

  The best part belongs, no matter how big or little, brave or frightened we all can be, the best part belongs to those who know that there is a reason to scorn the handbook, a reason to enter the sea, to cut open a hand or to hit back in defiance at the darkness that has reduced or tormented the neglected ones, be they rich or poor, good or bad.

  They are still the ones who rely upon us to acknowledge them. The turtle, the porcupine, the cripple thrown in jail. The tragedy is leaving them out by conventionalizing how they suffer; maligning those who know what their suffering really means; refusing to let go of the handbook that lies both about you and them. Telling untruth for the hope of immediate applause.

  This is what the dark night tells us, as pitched and worrisome as it is. It is after all the only thing writers like Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky or Emily Brontë would have us give a piss for.

  On that, boys and girls, I will stake my life.

  1996–2014

  AN ANECDOTE

  IT WAS A VERT WARM SPRING NIGHT IN PARIS, AND I WAS celebrating having a book published there. So I went with my French publisher to have supper at a restaurant near the Louvre. My host was not an expansive person. He was rather retentive, attentive, quiet. In fact I discovered over the two days with him that he bought his paper in Indonesia because it was cheaper, and therefore this would hold the printing of books, such as my book, up.

  So he was prudent. He was part of society seen in many artistic circles one would call more “diligent” than “inventive.” A person who, if he wrote lines of poetry, would struggle over the exact word rather than ever have that word come naturally. You find this among poets who have given their lives to academia, and believe in academia even when academia betrays them for the twentieth time.

  I suppose I make too much over searching for the right word. There is not a thing wrong with that, except we have seen many of those who have studied much and long in creative writing courses, some of them having pared poems down until there is no poem left. Diligent, yes, but there is a deficiency to it all, an absence of some sort, isn’t there? In fact the right word is
so often not found. Or at least, the feeling behind it is absent.

  How must we feel about a writer who gets good notices for a poem that has been fed through a group conscience? Well, let us feel about him the same way we would about a person who shouts shame when they are taught to or yea when they are told to, and are silent or confused over any idea that does not fit the affiliated symposiums. I do not know if this was entirely the prerogative of my French publisher, but I do know this: he felt privileged enough about his position to make statements and decisions concerning me.

  * * *

  —

  The dinner was pleasant enough. The Louvre was bathed in light; our restaurant was in a glass corridor that ran along the side of the courtyard. There was no sound of traffic, and Paris overall is a wondrous city at night. Actually, a wondrous city at any time. One walks about during the day and comes across a statue to Montaigne, a statue to Voltaire. The tomb of Napoleon, and the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, where I saw what was thought to be the armour of one of my favourite people from history, Joan of Arc. You marvel at the architecture, the brilliant symmetry of the buildings, the bridges crossing the Seine.

  One knows they are walking the streets Joan of Arc and François Villon did walk, and Van Gogh, and Picasso, Fitzgerald, James Joyce and Hemingway, too.

  * * *

  —

  Then you think: What if Hitler in his worming madness had succeeded in burning it? Or in lassoing those masterpieces from the Louvre that Göring salivated over? How despicable all of this would have been to the world. One sometimes thinks this when they are sitting looking at Vermeer. At any rate I did think this later that night and for many a night after.

  It was soon to be the sixtieth anniversary of D-Day. I did not mention this. I had no reason to mention it. But I had relatives and the fathers of friends of mine shot up on that day. I was good friends of a person who had lost his legs. My wife’s uncle was shot carrying a radio through a town a mile or so from the beach. He lived and his grandson visited the spot where he had been shot, met an old man who was a young man then, who for years thought the Canadian soldier had died until he met his grandson.

  My father went through the Blitz. His best friend was shot down in his Spitfire. Canadian boys died heroically on the beaches of Dieppe. Canadian women parachuted behind enemy lines and were captured, tortured for days, raped and executed. Canadian nurses held their positions under fire. The Canadians fought because it was morally right in a world gone mad. There was no other choice. Surrender wasn’t an option, not even for the French who surrendered. I did not mention it.

  My publisher had chicken and cauliflower. His partner had white wine and venison. I opted for chicken and potatoes and a black coffee. We were all dressed casually but well. I have a picture taken at that time by a French photographer. I was still youthful. I suppose I still believed in my career.

  The meal was almost over—we had talked of books, we spoke of Alistair MacLeod, and Coetzee, and John Ralston Saul. We spoke about John Updike and how awful were our Canadian winters. We spoke about European soccer and the European Union. We spoke about liberal politics and the world’s unity. Yes, it was my meal with my French publisher, so all the topics were about the same as with any of my other publishers. The world of literary men and women had come to a consensus of right and wrong, which I never seemed to be a part of. I said nothing.

  I was actually thinking of telling them about two men I knew who stopped in the middle of D-Day’s horror and violence to help deliver a baby because a young Frenchwoman in a house near the fighting had gone into premature labour.

  I was just about to mention this, when my publisher said, “Oh, I received a letter from the Canadian embassy for you.”

  “Oh?” I said.

  “Yes—I answered for you,” he said.

  “Oh? You did?”

  “Of course. Oui. There was no reason for you to answer it.” He poured himself a glass of wine and smiled.

  “Well, yes, but what was the letter about?”

  “Well, it is about their awful celebration,” he said.

  “I see—what awful celebration is that?”

  “You know—D-Day—they invited you to attend that celebration next month. But I simply said, ‘Anyone who writes as sensitively as Mr. Richards would never want to attend anything that glorifies war.’ ”

  He smiled at me, reached over and squeezed my hand. His partner smiled. They shook their heads at the inanity of the invitation. Yes, what a fiasco that must have been. War, and how right they were to bravely denounce it all.

  His partner poured herself another glass of wine, as well. Sometimes these subjects are so trying it is very difficult to speak of them sober. I stared at them both a long moment in silence. I could not speak to it. I had suddenly lost my voice and my appetite for the meal. I seemed to have lost a lot more by exclusion from a ceremony I would have been honoured and humbled to attend. But I would not tell them that—you see neither of them deserved to hear it.

  It is too bad they weren’t there at that time—you know, on D-Day to protest war the way they so heroically did now.

  My anecdote about bravery and goodness, and aiding in a young Frenchwoman giving birth on June 6, 1944, I left unsaid.

  2016

  DRIVE-IN THEATRE

  MY FATHER BOUGHT A DRIVE-IN IN 1958, AND RAN IT UNTIL IT went down in the sun sometime in 1983. From there we showed movies that were second or third run. The drive-in sat on a few acres of land strewn with gravel, the canteen and projection booth sitting out in the middle, white and desolate as an adobe, and during the afternoon the whole place had the strange effect of otherworldliness, of one being on an alien world, some strange planet at the end of the solar system, somewhere that was shown on the screen in 1959. The white speaker poles stretched back to the end of the lot, like strange, desperate soldiers; the grand, large plywood screen sat like a reflector, reflecting what we wanted or at least waited to see. And in the day it was so deathly still, and hot, with the sun’s glare on the flat earth; the on-again off-again clicking of grasshoppers made it even quieter. It was as if we were part of a movie somewhere, on someone else’s screen, and someone imitating James Dean would come driving up in his Lil Bastard. The grasshoppers would jump out of my way as I walked across the crunching gravel and during the daylight showed that another world was there, just beneath our feet, a world of grasshoppers, and small hills where ants still planned and conducted their lives, held meetings, went on trips. Now and again the summer wind blew the trees in the distance, or scattered the little mounds of dust, like the sad memory of watching Natalie Wood walk away from some young lover, of Joanne Woodward in No Down Payment laughing because her life is in ruins.

  It was all my father ever knew, the business, the hall—this is what we called the two theatres in town, that our family owned, the hall. We were the only people in town who did not call our business by the names they were known. Everyone else might say, “I am going to the theatre” or “I am going to a movie.” Or “I’m going to the Opera House” or “I am going to the Uptown.”

  I would ask my mom, “Where is Dad?”

  “Down at the hall.”

  That is because when our family started the business of glitz and glamour attracting the good townsfolk of Newcastle, to what many back then would call “sin,” my grandparents played in a hall. This was back in 1911, after my grandfather arrived on the Miramichi from London, England, at the start of his proposed North American piano tour. He planned on going from Halifax to Vancouver and then crossing into the States, and travelling back from Seattle to New York, where by then he was hoping to be famous. Well, it didn’t quite work out that way. He got to Newcastle, New Brunswick, without a violin accompanist, and had to advertise for one in the local paper. A young lady of eighteen by the name of Janie McGowan auditioned. He asked her if she could read music; she said no, that she
could not, but that she could play anything he could. And their partnership was cemented. They played together at the old town hall, and then opened a theatre together, and our livelihood was born. It was born of that union. We were the first independent theatre in the Maritimes, and probably the last. Out of that was born all our blessings and our agony, our nights of playing for the silent films of D. W. Griffith, and Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Fatty Arbuckle, playing talking movies, and owning two theatres, closing one down in the age of television, then opening the drive-in and playing second and third runs, dusk till dawn, our midnight specials. Our nights of praying in the church, of my sister being confronted about sin at the convent for running movies in the fifties—with a stern-looking, uncharitable matron of the cloth looking straight ahead as she spoke, enough not to fill us with dread, but to tell us we, like Gypsies, were to many always part of the outcast lot, the ones who did the show, not the ones who snuck into it. It is strange to think, but we were always in some way an outcast lot. That is why when I gave all else up to be a writer, the last thing that bothered me was that people would consider me different. I had been really since I was born. Starving was just an added obstacle.

  In the early years there were the internecine wars with other families who tried to take over our business, in the 1920s after my grandfather died. My grandmother trying to keep her head above water after they tried to at first buy her out, then foreclose on her mortgage with a corrupt and in-debt manager of the Royal Bank, and then finally bomb her out. All of this came in the twenties when my father was a boy; all of this left him with a certain devotedness to his mother, to the business, and a kind of ambivalence toward others. Years later, as I sat in the tavern, an older gentleman came in and bought me a beer, thinking I was Janie McGowan’s son. I told him I was her grandson. He was surprised that so much time had elapsed. When he left me, a friend of mine told me that he was one of the, at the time, young men who was hired to blow my grandmother’s business sky-high. He was, I think, saying he was sorry with that beer. At any rate I hold nothing against him.