by Kurt Palka
Sully was still red in the face. He looked from Aileen to Margaret and back at Aileen.
“Then please don’t do that kind of thing any more. Interfering like that. This is a very serious case. And while this investigation is going on, and from now on in general, you might want to think of me as Sergeant Sullivan and call me by my rank. Maybe the both of you should do that. We spoke to the owners in New York and so we know it’s Danny who’s looking after the property, and I also notice that you failed to mention Crieff Island among the names you gave me. If you want to help him, then help us find him. You can start by describing his truck and his boat for me.”
* * *
—
That evening they sat in the living room in Aileen’s house, Margaret on the corduroy sofa and Aileen silent and worried in the green velour chair. The window by Margaret’s side looked out onto the ocean, and if she leaned forward she could see her property with the little forest planted by her father, and the white boathouse. When she’d been in law school, her father had bought it cheaply from a place up the coast, and he’d taken it apart and rebuilt it down there, anchored on solid rock well above the tide line. For a while it had served as her study during the summers and holidays; later it became a bunkie for guests and for Andrew and his friends, but it was always called the boathouse.
She looked away from it, out past her own reflection in the glass. The sky was the deepest purple and it was covered in stars all the way to the horizon, where they flared in clusters before they drowned in the phosphorescence of the sea.
Behind her Aileen said, “If I don’t hear from the boy, there isn’t much I can do, is there? He’s got nothing to do with those poor dead kids, I’m sure of it.”
Margaret turned around. “Tomorrow we’ll drive into Bridgewater and talk to the police. Let’s find out exactly what it is they want from Danny. If Sully won’t tell us, maybe someone else will.”
After a while Aileen said, “Danny’s never been the same after Don left, you know. Not really. It did something to him. I know it’s a long time ago, but it was kind of like a switch in the rails and the track not going straight any more. I mean, Don was his Daddy. And he was a good man early on, or I wouldn’t have had any hopes ever. He never lived in this house except off and on, it’s true, but once I had Danny he’d often spend the night here. You’ll remember that. It all started to change when the fishing got poor and he went to work in the tire factory. The stench of boiling rubber in that place, he used to say, and I could smell it on him.
“You know all that, but I’m just thinking and I’m not defending him, because it was all right for years until the day he heard about the money people were making out west in construction. In the fresh air. Some of his buddies from town had already gone there. And that was that.”
Margaret nodded. Don Patterson hadn’t worked out for Aileen, and Knaus-Ogino hadn’t either. At least not exactly as planned, because one month Aileen had miscounted. That had been the story for the longest time, anyway. But then there had been an evening like this, the two of them in this parlour with a little blueberry wine,and Aileen had admitted to Margaret that she’d wanted a family and had become a bit impatient and careless, letting fate decide. And fate gave her Danny but not Don.
“Thank God I always had a good job nursing,” Aileen said. “And I still put in half days and quite often even full days when they call me, and I have the house and my rock and I’m glad I never put a mortgage on any of it. I gave the boat to Danny to help him make a man of himself. Without his dad. Give the boy a reason to stay here and not move away like all the other young people.”
For a while they sat in silence, then Aileen said, “The fox didn’t come tonight. Or maybe we just didn’t hear her. This is usually her hour. This, or a little earlier. I hope she’s all right.”
“Why wouldn’t she be? Have you seen her lately?” “Yes. Often. A couple of times a week. She still has her two cubs. Sometimes I see them out playing in the sun. Maybe there were too many cars today, yours and then Sully’s. All that coming and going.”
Nine
THAT NIGHT, OVER IN her own house, she couldn’t sleep. She lay in the big bed in her and Jack’s bedroom, and through the half-open window and through the very walls she could hear the ocean and the wind in the trees.
She lay listening, not wanting to think of the pale images of the two young people, but the images would not leave her. Those dark eyes. Their pure faces and the young girl’s naked shoulders. And both with their hair so black and combed straight back, showing all of the forehead.
At some point she picked up the flashlight on the bedside table and put on slippers and robe and walked through the house. In Andrew’s room she sat at his desk, on the driftwood chair he’d made some time ago. The room was almost exactly as it used to be when he was alive. A year ago he’d practically moved here. CFB Greenwood was not far inland, and often he and one or two colleagues from the base would stay here on short leaves.
She looked around at his bed, the desk and chair, Grandmother’s old chifforobe with his clothes in it, and the bucket of lead net weights that he used to work out with. The only thing different was the medal they’d given her, the Silver Cross for Mothers, commonly known as the Mother’s Cross.
She shone the flashlight on it, there on the wall where she’d hung it, framed behind glass.
* * *
—
Barely out of university and as an observer still in early training to become a co-pilot and eventually a pilot, he’d been on three flights to Africa already, always on United Nations peacekeeping and relief operations for which Canada had been asked to provide support. There were no incidents, and the newspapers didn’t even report those missions. But then came the war in Ethiopia where Somali troops had invaded the Ogaden region and laid claim to it. The conflict grew, and soon it involved Russian and American interests as well.
On that last assignment, he’d been on a transport aircraft that carried a field hospital and medical supplies to help ease the suffering among civilians. The landing zone was supposed to be secure, but when the crew climbed out and lowered the ramp, they came under heavy mortar fire.
At CFB Uplands in Ottawa, his coffin came down the tail ramp of the same kind of airplane he’d been on, a Lockheed C-130. But a week or two later a report on an American channel said that ever since Vietnam, many coffins were coming home secretly empty, but with flags on them and salutes, just to make the parents feel better. A TV reporter had snuck into a hangar and opened two of the draped coffins, and the camera had shown them to be empty.
The story was denied by a military spokesman, but in a studio interview on that same channel two veterans said that it could easily be true, and that it probably had to do with the way many soldiers were dying. Not from mere bullets passing through them, but from deadly accurate mortar and artillery fire. In those massive explosions, some soldiers simply disappeared.
“Literally blown away, ma’am,” the one veteran had said to the interviewer. His lower legs were gone, and he sat strapped into a wheelchair with a microphone around his neck. “Shredded and evaporated. The human body being mostly fluid, you see. Which doesn’t compress, just becomes vapour. The gas expansion and initial speed of shrapnel from a shell being some twenty or thirty thousand feet per second. Sometimes they can’t find not even the boots, never mind the dog tag.”
It had been as a result of that report that she escaped for a while into the notion of the empty coffin. Only Michael knew about that. He’d listened to her and opened his hands and composed them again and said nothing. Until a few weeks later she herself came to the end of it.
* * *
—
She clicked off the flashlight and sat in the dark for a while. So many gaping holes in her life. Her mother, dead of an aneurysm when Margaret was only eleven. A doctor had made a drawing of it on a piece of paper to help her understand. Like a red river with a bulge in it from all the heavy flow, an eddy getting
wider and wider and one day just bursting the bank and flooding all the land.
Then Grandmother. Then her father. Then Andrew and his empty coffin.
And now her wild, true, besotted love of Jack, and perhaps her marriage. She had so loved being married to that man. What had happened to that feeling? Where did it go?
But enough of this. Enough now.
Grandmother had died in this room. In this very bed. Andrew never knew that. It had been a long time before him. Margaret had been twenty then. Twenty, and back for the summer after her second year at university. After all the youthful philosophizing and playing with ideas about life and death and meaning in the absence of God, suddenly came her first loud wake-up call, her encounter with real dying, followed by real death. All of it. The terrible sounds, the disbelief, the panic, and finally the silence.
She would go down to the water and sit in her favourite place on the rock shelf with her eyes closed and the salt wind hard in her face, and try to understand. Sometimes her father would come down and sit with her for a while, and then he’d get up and leave and get to work again, distract himself in his beloved forest.
After Grandmother had been taken away by the funeral people, the bed had remained unmade for days and the slippers had remained on the floor, side by side, ready to receive the feet that would never come again. In the silence of the room, the orphaned slippers more than any other thing bore a message, and she puzzled over it for days until it came to her that if she applied the thinking she was learning in Paris now, the message could be seen to be not about death but about life. It could be seen as a reminder that life was to be used while one had it, used absolutely, used up like firewood in the flames, as the more interesting new writers and philosophers were saying.
On that one notion they all agreed, that there was no use for life other than to live it; to make it into whatever adventure or imaginary game one chose, and when your time was up, it was over and done with and you could take nothing with you. Nothing. Not even your trusty slippers.
She’d sat listening for the ring of truth in that, all those years ago on her rock. And she sat listening for it again now. In this burdened room, for the echo of it.
She turned the flashlight back on and swept his bucket full of lead, the bed, the fancy brass hook shaped like an eagle that he’d found in an antique store and had polished until it shone and then mounted it on the wall as his special place for his uniform.
She stood up from the unbelievable chair he’d made. Sweetheart, she said to him. Sweetheart.
* * *
—
During her time at the Sorbonne she’d lived in a furnished flat in a war-damaged house. Tank shells had passed through the building from front to back. The great holes had once been boarded up, but the boards had since been pried off and people had climbed in and out and stripped panelling and light fixtures and furnishings from the damaged half. But the side with her apartment was liveable and the lock on her door worked.
It all lent an element of adventure, and the rent was cheap. All the café crowd lived in similar accommodations, or in unheated hotel rooms. Often on Saturdays in the spring and fall, she and Franziska and Anne went out to stroll the streets and to spend hours window-shopping and at the counters at Bon Marché. In the evenings they often sat with others in the noisy cafés. Their favourite haunts were Le Boeuf d’Or and Les Deux Langoustes. They loved Paris by night and by day, and they loved the new ways of thinking they were learning, ideas that could help you see things differently and in this way could change your life.
They lived a few streets from each other, and they studied French and English literature and history and philosophy. They practised as-ifness and absurdism and phenomenism, keeping notes on their progress. They bought black turtlenecks and they wore lipstick and kohl or no makeup at all, and they bought purple berets and put them on in front of mirrors and set them just so.
They learned a great deal from one specific teaching assistant in philosophy, an unpaid Ph.D. docent, young and intense and brilliant. His name was Jean-Charles Manssourian, French of Armenian extraction. For a while Franziska had a crush on him, but he already had a girlfriend, a tall, thin one with a nice smile, who wore only black and no bra.
What Manssourian taught was thinking imported from the ruins of other European capitals and sifted for truth and reinterpreted. Especially now, after the war, he said, when one had learned to see through life so completely, one needed to make the effort to rise above things, in order to see what one had missed before.
Among the established writers and thinkers, he liked best the few who, in his words, were not fixated on existential nothingness, like staring into a hole that everyone knew was empty, but rather they chose to examine the notion of Now what? Here we are, and how do we go forward?
And even something as simple as finding beauty in nature, said Manssourian, or making the effort to brew a very good cup of coffee or to tie a shoelace exceptionally well was more interesting than the empty hole. Courage and a sense of humour had a lot to do with it, he said.
That kind of searching had been everywhere in Paris in those days. So soon after the war, with buildings in ruin on many a street. The smell of rust and wet rubble in the air. With young men on crutches and in wheelchairs, and the most unfortunate of them without any limbs at all, being wheeled about in barrows or carried in backpacks with their heads poking out, set down on designated café chairs where the uprights protruded above the top rail so that the straps could be hooked over them and keep the bagman from falling over. Someone, most often his mother or father, would put a glass to his lips and let him sip.
Sometimes a wife. There was one blond woman in American jeans and a pilled black sweater and tennis shoes who did this regularly. She still loved her husband, she said brightly right in front of him. Loved his mind and spirit. And understood him, now more than ever. So much so that not only did she still want his child, who would have arms and legs as strong as his used to be, but if one day he were to ask her to help him die, she would do that for him as well. Of course she would.
Throughout the evening she’d crumble tobacco and roll brown-paper cigarettes and tap them and light them and get them going, and then hold them for him between thumb and forefinger. She’d hold the glass to his lips at just the right angle. If liquid spilled, she’d dab his chin with a handkerchief folded to a dry spot. And when it was time to go she’d put down coins for the drinks and a tip, and she’d say good night and shake hands with everyone around the table. She’d crouch and someone would help her into the straps and she’d stand up and walk away bent over, with her husband on her back.
Everyone a philosopher, a seeker, and new thoughts or old, in her days in Paris the investigation into how to live right, how to make a work of art of the brief absurdity that the war had once again shown human life to be was like a virus, an infectious mood. It in itself gave startling colour and immediacy to every moment of the day.
Ten
IN THE MORNING she and Aileen drove inland to Bridgewater, along narrow roads through a world scraped and tumbled by ice ages and hurricanes, past delicate wooden cottages and stands of tall marsh grass and witch hazel with its white and yellow blossoms and seed pods ready to burst this late time of year. Red-winged blackbirds fluttered. Soldier birds, her father used to call them, because of the red stripes on their wings.
At the police station she gave the desk officer her card and said they wished to speak to Inspector Sorensen. The inspector was not in, said the desk officer. He was not based here and came down from the city only when cases demanded it. Could someone else help them?
“The station chief, then,” said Margaret.
The officer walked down the hall and knocked on a door, opened it and leaned in.
A moment later they sat facing the station chief across his desk. He was a man in his forties with short brown hair, and he had his tunic off and his sleeves rolled up. His desk was covered with paperwork.
Margaret explained why they were there, and while he listened he looked from her to Aileen and back at her. When she had finished, he nodded and thought for a moment. He picked up her card and read it once more. He looked up. “You’re an Ontario lawyer. This is Nova Scotia.”
“I’m aware of that. Is there a problem?”
“Well. I guess not. Mrs. McInnis here hired you?”
“Yes. Or not exactly hired, but she asked me to come along. We are neighbours.”
He hesitated, then picked up the receiver and dialled a number and said, “Bring me the Crieff Island file.” He listened. “At the morgue? I see. Do we have copies of the photographs? Okay, bring them.”
The photos and a handwritten note were brought and they watched him study them. He looked up at Aileen.
“I can tell you that we picked up your son two hours ago, and now we’ve got him over at the morgue for questioning and to see if he can identify these people.”
He held up the photographs for them to see, different photographs from the ones they’d glimpsed in Margaret’s kitchen the day before. In these the boy and the girl lay naked to their waists on narrow steel tables.
“They were found dead in the dock cribbing of a property that we know your son is looking after. The owners of the property are Americans. We called them and wired the pictures. They were here only for July, then they flew back to New York. They don’t know these two. Would you, by any chance?”
Margaret looked at Aileen, who shook her head.
“No,” said Margaret. “We don’t know them.”
He put the pictures aside and looked at Aileen. “Just so you know, we haven’t charged your son with anything. At the moment we’re merely asking him if he can identify the bodies and to tell us about the island property. Maybe he can help us figure out what went on there.”