October Ferry to Gabriola

by Lowry, Malcolm

  “That’s what I said to him, it’s no good.”

  “No good.”

  “No good.”

  “And you have omitted to state that there have, in fact, been many protests.”

  “Yes. For example, I said: as a mother of two boys and a girl I feel you should do all you can to prevent the gross injustice that has been wrought on the condemnation of Richard Chapman hanging. Let him have a chance to learn as all must learn.”

  “Hang him!”

  “And for that matter, you have forgotten the counter-protests. As I wrote: Under Canadian law we all know that persons accused of murder are given every opportunity to defend themselves, irrespective of the cost to the public. If there are any extenuating circumstances the sentence is commuted. If none whatever, the death penalty should be imposed, regardless of age—”

  “Hang him!”

  “And I said: There is something seriously wrong not only with Canadian justice but with ourselves, if children such as Richard Chapman can be sent to face the horrors of an execution without more than a whisper of protest from the general public—”

  “Spare him!”

  “But I countered: In reply to ‘End Barbarous Punishment,’ personally I think she should have her head examined: she writes about how the cruel delay must touch the hearts of every father and mother. Doesn’t she think that rape and murder also touch the heart of every Canadian father and mother? I think I would gladly take the hangman’s job myself. Like it says in the Bible, an eye for an eye—it’s true, is it not?”

  “Hang him!”

  “What with all the filthy magazines that are allowed to overflow our newsstands—I have been hoping that a more able pen than mine—”

  “With so many potential murderers around by the way of drug peddlers and drunk drivers, it is a crime to wreak vengeance on an immature youth——”

  “Hang him!”

  “Spare him!”

  “—If there is a difference between a mind warped by sex and a mind warped by drink, I fail to see it, as the results are the same.”

  “Hang him!”

  “It’s no good, this kind of life.”

  “No, that’s what I said to him.”

  “How do you feel there, Shorty?”

  “Oh, shut up!”

  “Every passing day brings nearer the doom of the fifteen-year-old youth, and I should like to plead with all my heart—”

  “And I said: It would be a Christian and honorable gesture on the part of our government, in honor of the prospective visit of our Princess Elizabeth to Canada, to grant a reprieve to those who have sinned against us and now wait for the hangman’s noose. Life imprisonment must, of course, be given those poor creatures in order to protect society, but in honor of our future Queen, let us temper justice with mercy.”

  “Save him!”

  “Oh, shut up!”

  “It’s no good, this kind of life.”

  “But you, Ethan Llewelyn, what did you say? What did your able pen do, your pen more able than mine, or your still small voice, the one voice, the one pen still able to save him?”

  “Hang him!”

  “Hang him!”

  “The appeal for clemency of Richard Chapman, the fifteen-year-old rapist has been refused by the Cabinet today. Richard must keep his date with the hangman next December thirteenth.”

  “Hang him!”

  “Hang Ethan Llewelyn!”

  Chapter 32

  Twilight of the Dove

  …YES, HANG HIM, ETHAN thought. He eyed his own uneasy shifty figure in the mirror, still buttoned up to the neck in the long grey overcoat, seated sidewise to the table in the same uncomfortable frozen attitude, squinting at the several uneasy reflections in the mirrors; the other men, sitting in similar attitudes, some pretending to read newspapers, each with that sidelong corner smile; smiles of hope that one would be recognized as unique by some fellow being; smiles of depravity; smiles of despair. People did not come into this room either, as sailors come up on deck, but “made entrances,” their bodies muscle-bound and out of step with self-consciousness, all of them with this unctuous smile flickering at the corner of their mouths. And yet, should one speak to any of the denizens of this loneliest of homes, with what friendliness would one be greeted, more likely than not, so great was man’s need for love. Hang Ethan Llewelyn, but what good was that going to do the boy Chapman, perhaps wearing such a smile himself, half thinking he was doing, or even had done, something heroic, half smiling at the shadowy impossible knowledge that, most heroic of all, he must hang.

  But hadn’t he already left it too late? That figure in the mirror seemed to be saying to him, aren’t you beginning to lose the courage to make any decisions at all? Was it not much as if the new life of his which was set toward a rebirth had become an abortion? Fear—to be sure it wasn’t always on the surface, but neither was it a sudden or occasional thing—fear had essentially dominated his days, as if it were a moon: a moon of fear ringed by doubt. Ethan doubted, and not for the first time that day, whether he’d been seriously looking for a house…All you think about is the next drink and perhaps all you’re looking for, all you long for, is your own death. Perhaps essentially he was afraid of finding his real self, afraid of discovering himself to be a criminal, a murderer even, or one whose destiny was suicide, in which case there’ll be no need to hang Ethan Llewelyn, he’ll do it for them…

  How could one set at naught such thoughts? In Eridanus he might have defied them. But now he felt he couldn’t find any strength for defiance, any source from which to draw that strength. You’ve lost your faith in yourself, old boy. But then, for the matter of that, he had no faith in anything else, in anything at all, to speak of, except Jacqueline of course, though he wouldn’t say he hadn’t searched for one—both of them had—and with far greater persistency than they’d ever searched for a house.

  Ah yes, the search: in the Gospel Center, the Backslider in Heart, in the Faith Thriller at the Reel Pulpit, and at the metropolitan Tabernackle, Does it matter, Virgin or Young Woman, and at the First Baptist, “No Prowl Car comes for the social snob but if we avoid our fellows in need we shall one day hear the condemnation of the Judge of Life”: the search in the Unitarian Church, “Beautiful are the gasworks in the evening light, beautiful is the humility of a strong man,” and, “Sportsmen, also those who doubt miracles, are invited to hear Rev. A. Dinsbury in Grace United, who Sunday evening will speak on A Big Game on Poor Ice,” and in the terrors and comforts of the Spiritualists’ trumpet: in the Theosophical Society: the search within oneself; in love…

  But it was as though this search for faith too had become like a longing for death, if not death itself, a certain knowledge that soon he was going to die: and it was as though, suddenly, in this hell Ethan felt the warning of this now—perhaps it was not by accident that they had found themselves following a funeral—felt this warning, and it was a good thing, too, that he was going to die, he felt it at the very center of his visceral consciousness. And a moment it was almost as if he were dead already, surrounded by warden, prison doctor, sheriff and guards…

  Ethan was aware of another waiter, hovering near, who, catching his eye, now came directly over.

  Ethan stood up, took a step forward, feeling a sense of complete unbelief, as must that Calgary farmer on the prairie, who suddenly had come upon his brother, struck by a bolt of lightning, while controlling the harrow’s four horses from behind, his brother in the saddle, the horses lying in pairs to left and right, his clothes spread over the surrounding prairie, his cap cut in two as with a pair of scissors.

  “Mr. Llewelyn, isn’t it? Don’t you remember me, Henry Knight?”

  “Well. What do you know. Well, son of a gun. Henry Knight,” Ethan said at last, holding out his hand, which the other grasped firmly.

  “The same, sir. Well and happy too…thanks to you, sir,” he added in a low tone.

  “Well, what the hell, Henry, you old bastard. I don’t kno
w what to say. Will you have a beer?”

  “Not on your life. You have one with me.”

  “Son of a gun.”

  “Son of a gun.”

  From the horrible to the absurd was but a step, as Henry himself might have said. As Henry went to get the beers, Ethan chuckled to himself. A murder charge would hardly seem the subject for humor, but the case of Henry Knight had been, from beginning to end, a source of mirth. It had also, back in 1936, been his first murder case, strange though that was to reflect on now. Henry came from New Toronto, and his specialty was making barrels for people shooting the rapids in the vicinity between Queenstown below Niagara Falls, and on occasion for shooting the Falls themselves (he had helped to construct the barrel in which Bobby Leach, later to be killed by slipping on a banana peel, had successfully negotiated Niagara) and he had been arrested in a church. People living near the Church of the Nazarene in Oakville had complained of weird noises coming from the building at midnight, and Henry, who not unnaturally resented being interrupted in the midst of a recital, and who moreover considered that the Church of the Nazarene should provide him with the privilege of sanctuary, had not only resisted arrest in the church itself, but had escaped on the way to the police station. In the scuffle one of the policemen, struck, it was averred, by Henry, had collapsed and later died. Henry Knight was charged with murder, it was later proved that the constable had died of heart failure. Ethan finally had successfully defended him from the second charge of manslaughter, and he received a suspended sentence. The case had not been made easier by the defendant himself who had prejudiced the jury against him by loudly expressing the opinion that churches had no right to be closed, that a country that was so full of interfering miserable busybodies and stool pigeons, as he put it (he was an Englishman) that they would inform on a man playing the organ in church, better think twice before calling itself free—an opinion that was interspersed with gratuitous quotations, and misquotations, from Thomas Hardy and Dickens, many of whose passages he had by heart, and repeated vociferously at the most inappropriate times.

  “But the church was shut. You could be charged with breaking and entering anyhow.”

  “The church should have been open, Mr. Llewelyn my lord. All churches should be open, in my humble opinion, or they’re not churches.”

  “To every drunk who comes along?”

  “Well, I was a bit organized, you might say, and I don’t remember it overwell. But I can tell you this—what got me mad was that anyone should be so mean a rag of a thing as to inform the police of something like that. What kind of a country is this, I ask you, where a man can’t play the bloody organ in peace?”

  “If you were sober enough to remember whether you struck the policeman or not—”

  “I was sober. And I didn’t strike the policeman. If he fell down it was his own fault.”

  The conversation of two human beings, meeting by accident, under happier yet obviously delimited circumstances, after such crucial times, often tends to resemble the irresponsible running patter of comedians.

  “Well, I’ve been in the can since I last saw you,” Ethan said, as they raised their glasses.

  “Saw a nice little bit in the paper about that…Were you guilty, sir?”

  “Guilty as hell. Well, technically, in a way.”

  “Nothing to that…” Henry was silent, then: “Well, I was a bit organized that night, as you might say…I saw where you lost your home. Worst thing that can happen to a man.”

  “You ever burnt out?—ah yes, I remember.”

  “Twice, don’t you remember? Well, I got my brother here with me now. He’s been on the ships. Came over from England after the war.”

  So it was Henry’s brother in the Ladies and Escorts. “I thought his face seemed familiar.”

  The sailors were trying to attract Henry’s attention and he started to go, but another waiter came to the rescue.

  “Well, you’re not making any barrels in these parts, are you, Henry?”

  “Well, I was over a barrel, you might say, if it hadn’t been for you—and you ’ave my undying gratitude, sir.”

  “Think nothing of it. Are you playing the organ these days, Henry?”

  “Well, you know, I don’t tell people I play the organ.”

  “You couldn’t play it in here, anyhow,” said Ethan, standing up, as Henry prepared to take his leave.

  “Ah, there’re worse places than this,” Henry drained his glass, “where there’s no untried refuge left for a moment’s shelter from the terrible truth, as Charles Dickens says.”

  “Sounds more like Hardy. But maybe sometimes we’ll have a duet if we settle down in these parts. I’ve taken to the clarinet…”

  “If it’s no worse than that, sir, you won’t come to no harm!”

  Henry Knight rode off on Rosinante a little way, but since he always, Ethan remembered, liked to make a good exit, cantered back again almost immediately, as if to pick up, on the fly, an empty glass.

  “Nothing will speak to your ’eart with the sweetness of the man of strings, as Thomas ’Ardy said,” he began.

  “Hardy? I’m surprised at you. Isn’t that Kipling? Or maybe even really Dickens this time.”

  “No. Serpents is serpents, sir, as Thomas ’Ardy said. And harmonious and barrel organs be miserable sinners. But clarinets were not made for the service of Providence, you can see it by looking at them.”

  —Well by God, he would do it, he would do something, not do nothing, cost what it might. Chapman’s appeal had been refused, but there still should be time to organize powerful and intelligent public protest. And to do so he must get himself really fit as soon as possible. He would certainly do it, and in that case he’d have to sacrifice building a house. He would buy the old skipper’s house, letting Eridanus go altogether, putting the whole thing behind him, and this, if he were to be completely honest, and all of a sudden he meant to be completely honest, not merely for Chapman’s sake, or Jacqueline’s sake…For he knew only too well the nature of the work that lay ahead should he build the house himself, with just one carpenter to help, if he could get one. Digging into the hardpan of these shores would be like digging into cement. Yet even that was preferable to pouring cement for the foundations, he thought with a sigh. This last was such an unsympathetic job to him, perhaps because unfamiliar, familiar only through having seen others do it, that Ethan could almost take pleasure in thinking beyond it to the strains and mishaps incident in hoisting, by himself, the heavy stringers and foundation posts. No, there would be no beer. One thing led to another: cut it out altogether. Well, perhaps there would be one little beer. Or at least there would be now…The winter ahead would not make it any easier. And stupid to have thought of it cooling: it would scarcely be beer weather. For if he really proposed to build in the spring, he’d have to put the foundations in during the very worst of the weather, with the hardpan frozen (one little bottle of whiskey was more like it, tilted, concealed in a dark crab-swarming hole between granite rocks where also stood propped his cold clawbar) sodden with icy rain and sleet, or God knows, if it was a bad winter, lying, until March, under three feet of ice and snow. And on top of this (and in spite of all this talk of coming prosperity, of fabulous riches and development) would be the inevitable delays at the sawmill, the difficulties for the “small man” of getting materials, as Henry Knight was just saying, wiping the table:

  “So you’re going to try and build, sir. But hell, Mr. Llewelyn, you can’t even buy enough nails to build a chicken coop…Everything goes to the big fellow these days.”

  “No, I’m not going to build, on second thoughts…But we were thinking of buying a place on Gabriola. By the way, Henry, do you know if the ferry’s still running?”

  “Gabriola ferry goes at five, weather permitting. Just go down the ramp and turn left where it says Newcastle Island.”

  —No, he wouldn’t build. For there were doubtless a host of other, hitherto unforeseen objections and difficulties,
such as those at this moment suggested by the complete momentary abandonment by all the waiters of the Men’s side of the beer parlour, leaving him and the other infernal drinkers alone. Even Henry Knight had vanished before he had time to ask him another question. Yes, these were the days, perhaps these were always the days should you come to think of it, when everyone took his own time and people let you down without explanation. Ethan saw again the unfinished houses on Nanaimo’s outskirts.

  But at the same time, suddenly, perversely, he saw the thin slanting shafts of November sunlight striking through their forest as Jacqueline, from a moss-covered log, watched him admiringly at his work of undercutting. There was the steady ringing smack of the axe, a tree shuddered (he hated more than he loved to cut trees, all trees, all trees but this one, but it would not be spring, the sap would not be running, they would deprive no birds of their home), cracked and fell thunderously. Their home grew before his eyes. And at the thought of these things, of judgment proved balanced, vigilance rewarded, of Jacqueline’s joy when their dream actually began to take shape—the first windows—he was filled with an extraordinary happiness. To hell with the skipper’s old shack. He would build the goddam thing himself, alone, if need be…

  “Mr. Ethan Llewelyn wanted at the bar, please!”

  “Ethan! There is a ferry.” Ethan came up beside her as, already seated she put her hand on his arm, shaking it. “Listen, darling, listen, I’ve found out all about it.”