A Crowbar in the Buddhist Garden

by Stephen Reid

  My case management officer informed me that I was eligible for a leave of compassion to attend her service. I was tempted to go. The funeral might give me some solace, the permission to grieve openly. I might see something, a sobbing aunt or the courage in my father’s face, or hear a cousin’s joke, something that would touch me, connect me communally; make me not so alone, so unsure of what to do. Then I was told I would have to go under escort with two guards and I would be wearing leg irons. I chose to stay in my cell, to participate in the rituals of bereavement through memory and my most familiar companion, imagination. I conjured up old man McNalley wearing his grey, felt gloves, driving his black hearse that would carry my mom over to the little red brick United Church on Imperial Street. My five sisters, in dark muted dresses, supporting one another. My two brothers, uncomfortable in suits, directing the traffic of mourners towards their pews. Most of the citizens of our small town would gather later in the graveyard under the whispering pines. Our family would stand nearest the damp mound of earth, the clean rectangular edges of the freshly dug hole, my father leaning on his cane and probably on one of my brothers, Mom’s casket being lowered, a handful of dirt, and another.

  The leg irons alone would have kept me from going, but there was another complication. I was estranged from my brothers and sisters at the time of Mom’s death. They had phoned the prison chaplain, asking him to let me know. They were stingy with details. I was being punished for not being there for Mom when she was alive, for all the times I had let her down. In their consensus I had lost the right to be a part of their mourning for her. I accepted their anger; there was no one to argue with but myself. I loved my mom as much as any of them but I had to live with the consequences of my actions. I gathered up what scraps of dignity I could and laid shame atop of sadness. I let them sink down to that place where those things go to exist, the place where we don’t hold grief, it holds us.

  A few years after my mother passed and I was still in prison, I was called to the phone. My brother told me that our dad wouldn’t be coming out of the hospital this time. A week later he died. I wrote my brother to thank him for that courtesy. When we were both quite young, whenever we fell down, banged an elbow or scraped a knee, we each, with all the fierce determination of little boys, tried hard for Dad not to see us cry. Which in a way was curious, because if tears did spring forth as they sometimes would, Dad was never harsh about it. But for me I think I would have done anything, bit clear through my lip, pinched the flesh until it was black and blue, anything other than having to make him look away. My father, born in the thirties, brought up in a working-class family, was silent, wounded by war. Like too many men of his generation, imprisoned by circumstance, he was deeply afraid of tears.

  I’ve read books and essays, texts on loss, and I’ve wondered why philosophers and holy men often anguished so much over the purity of their grief. All grief is pure; all grief is self-serving

  Coast Salish women will sit in a darkened room, long before the sun rises and the household stirs and collect their tears in a bowl. Once the day breaks they won’t be seen crying. This is to allow the spirit they are mourning to pass over to the other side, not to be held back by the sorrow of the living. I have kept my grief in a darkened room too, but for much less noble reasons. In doing so I fear I have become in some ways less of a person.

  But Pat’s dying changed the way I saw death, and that in turn changed the way I held grief. For the first few weeks I walked the big track every night, kicking stones. I could feel the familiar loss, but there was the odd, inexplicable flash of dread, too, as if something was wrong, and then I would really remember.

  Other times I would cloud over with anger and indignation that Pat had to die in that place, that sick as my friend was, Stockwell Day, Justice Minister, would not sign his transfer papers and allow him to return to a Canadian prison via the Prisoner Exchange Treaty. He could have been visited by family during his final days. But were those feelings anything more than a way of invoking pity for him, along with a dose of self-pity, a sentiment we both hated?

  When Pat was first scheduled for surgery and there was still hope, he was transferred to the federal medical facility in Butner, North Carolina. I suspect that even then he carried a homemade handcuff key under his tongue as he passed through the gates of what would prove to be his final penitentiary.

  He was also looking forward to his son Kevin coming down from Canada for a visit. Kevin kept his promise, appearing with his two sons. It was the first time Pat was able to see his grandchildren. They were allowed two, two-hour visits on two consecutive days. Pat was shackled to the bed throughout and four guards stayed in the room. Kevin wrote later that Pat never uttered a word of complaint about pain or circumstance. “But Dad has never complained, has he Stevie?“ No he hasn’t, not in a lifetime of it. Kevin had to return to Canada with his sons, the surgery was ultimately unsuccessful, and Pat was alone with his imminent end.

  Pat and I shared a life so intertwined that his death seemed to open a way for me to reconcile with the inevitability of my own dying. It became possible for me to hold my gaze on the end of life. Through Pat, I became curious about how it all ends but stayed just one step back of letting this persuade me — through the shared bad habit of all gods and religions — towards romanticizing my notion of his, or even my own death

  It took a long time for me to see his dying in that place clearly, but finally it made an almost poetic sense. His death was honest to his life, completely unsentimental. In a barren cell, uncluttered by comfort or distraction, he had to lie there on his back and stare up at a concrete ceiling. There was no dodge, no escape, no new identity to slip into. The only tombstone in the room had his own name on it.

  “We’ve had a life haven’t we.” No more tunnels, no more banks, and no more letters. It wasn’t a question, it was his way of introducing me to the end.

  EPILOGUE

  (The Beachcomber)

  A FEW DAYS EACH YEAR, in the fiercest storms and the highest tides, the sea will give up messages from the past, the long-forgotten artifacts of the depths. There has been a rotted plank with the encrusted plaque from an old sailing ship, the rusted remains of a cooking pot, the occasional shard of pottery with faded Chinese characters. At the turn of the last century the immigrant ships from Europe and Asia anchored here in the big bay to unload the smallpox victims or those with leprosy. This place was a quarantine station long before it became another kind of prison. There is a graveyard on the southern side, the final resting place of those travellers who never quite made the last leg of their journey to the New World. Their graves are marked with a name, a date, and the name of the ship they sailed in on — like the one I often go to sit by: Liza Gentel, 1901–1911, Empress of Russia.

  There are also prisoners here who, like Papillon on Devil’s Island, sit and contemplate the tides, not for what they bring in, but for how fast and far they will carry something out. It is common knowledge how treacherously cold the waters that surround us are. An average-sized man will last only eight minutes before the rate of body heat loss accelerates to the point of hypothermia, followed by loss of limb function, then death.

  Men have greased their bodies from head to toe with lard stolen from the kitchen and then slipped into the inky darkness, never to be heard from again. One year the prisoners staged the play Count Dracula for the guards and their families — after the show the lead paddled to freedom in the specially built coffin. Those left behind try to maintain the illusion that those who disappeared were successful in their attempts, but everyone knows, in the bottom of his convict heart, that for most, if not all, it was a final escape.

  A pre-op tranny, Trinket, and her soon to be released boyfriend arranged a rendezvous off the point. The boyfriend got out and, at the prearranged time, Trinket dog-paddled out to meet him in his powerboat. Trinket didn’t have the strength to pull herself out of the water and the splashing and commotion alerted the guards. The boyfriend panicked and g
unned the outboard motor. The propellers caught Trinket, though she somehow managed to clamber aboard. She was found dead the next day by a motel chambermaid — the bed a bloody mess from her stomach having been churned open by the blades.

  A one-legged friend of mine fashioned a wetsuit out of polyurethane bags, string, and duct tape. After dark, on his big night, Ian hobbled down the rocks, unstrapped his leg, climbed into his makeshift suit and jumped in. He planned to swim to the nearest beach, half a mile across the bay, where his getaway vehicle would await. Ian told me he had been a good swimmer in high school, before the motorcycle accident. He seemed so determined and confident I didn’t have the heart to give him the obvious news — that he was one leg lighter and twenty years older.

  At about fifteen minutes to the 10:00 pm count I was lying on my bunk on the second floor of the dormitory wing saying prayers for Ian, when I heard my name being called from the ground below. Ian wanted a towel and some dry clothes so he could slip in past the guards in time for count. Turned out his getaway vehicle hadn’t shown up, and with one leg and a twenty-mile trek to the nearest lights, he’d turned around and swum back. We retrieved his wooden leg from the rocks the next morning. Ian finished his bit, was released, and died the same day from an overdose.

  The years have passed and I have watched the tides come and go, carrying their debris, real and imagined. I have grown old in prison and I am only interested in beginnings these days, but the string becomes harder and harder to find. It seems I am losing the plot of my own life.

  There is one trail, though, a footpath that wends its way down to a patch of grass, bordered by a flower bed and two driftwood benches. In the warm days of summer I shared this space sometimes with the occasional prisoner — a copy of Kahlil Gibran or Carlos Castaneda tucked under his arm, he came here to commit philosophy.

  But the subtle varnish of autumn has given way to the songs of winter, and the philosophers are all indoors watching television. The garden is empty today, and above me the bare branches of an old Garry oak claw the sky in wild precision.

  Back in October when I was tidying the place, raking the leaves, deadheading the last of the flowers, the tines of my rake caught on something heavy, half buried under the matted grass. A small dirt-and-rust-encrusted crowbar. With the heft of it in my palm I realized how it must have come to be here. Directly across the cove a low, squat building was half hidden in a stand of arbutus — the old disassociation cells. The last escape, several years ago, had been from that place. The wire that enclosed the small exercise yard out back must have been pried open by this very bar, smuggled in by another prisoner. The two men had slipped out the opening and entered the water below me, tossing the crowbar up on the bank.

  They were both recaptured within days, but their escape — from the Hole — affected the lives of hundreds, if not thousands, of people. The institution, a medium-security facility, was redesignated minimum because no one can legally “escape” from a minimum. One hundred and fifty prisoners were transferred to the mainland; upwards of sixty guards and staff were relocated across the country. Families had to uproot, sell their houses; kids changed schools.

  My first thought was to return the crowbar to its rightful place on the shadow board in the tool crib. But it had been missing for too long and besides, it would have been replaced. Like some other things in life it could not be returned. It would no longer fit.

  I buried it there under the Buddha’s impassive gaze. The most glorious things a prisoner can do is escape but the days of coffin boats and one-legged swimmers were gone forever. When I tamped down the earth over the instrument of that last escape, I felt good that, although there was no future, there would always be a past.

  So it is — on these days when war breaks out in my heart and my only memories are those of a boy being shoved into the shadows of an old tractor shed, or trembling in the passenger seat of a car coming to a slow stop on a dark country road — that I can come down here to sit on this uneven patch of earth and cultivate a vacuum, a place of stillness and safety where nothing moves and no one gets hurt.

  I sit on the hard ground of the prison and stare out at the hammered pewter surface of the sea. What lies beneath? I float out on these connections, escaping inwards. There is a moment when nothing moves. There is no wind, no faraway shore. Deep places draw me down. I sink slowly, lazily, like old grief, and finally come to rest at the bottom of the world.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  These essays have appeared in The Globe and Mail, Maclean’s Magazine, the National Post, the Ottawa Citizen, Out of Bounds (Canada’s oldest continuously published prison magazine) Playboy, salon.com, the Vancouver Sun, Vice.

  “Junkie” was first published in the anthology Addicted: Notes From the Belly of the Beast, edited by Patrick Lane and Lorna Crozier (D&M, 2001).

  My thanks to my editor, Seán Virgo, without whom these essays would remain behind bars. And to Barry Palmer, who’s always been there for me.

  The epigraph by Johnny Cash, as imagined by Michael Blouin in Wore Down Trust (Pedlar Press, 2011), is reprinted here with permission by the publisher.