The Western Light

by Susan Swan

  He pointed up at the snow drifting down from the heavens. And, like sheep, we looked up, too, expressions of awe and fear on our faces, although some people had started to laugh. One or two men clapped. John Pilkie took off his brown fedora and held it out as if he expected people to drop money in it. “Stand back! Let us pass!” The guard shouted and began herding his prisoners in our direction. Next to me, Morley stirred. My father rarely exerted himself, because he saved his energy for his patients; but, kicking the freshly fallen snow off his wingtips, Morley shuffled forward. “Hello, John!” Morley boomed.

  Mid-stride, John Pilkie stopped. “Hullo, Doc Bradford!” he cried and shook my father’s hand.

  “This is my late wife’s sister, Louisa,” Morley said. “And my daughter, Mary.”

  “Why, you girls are shivering!” John Pilkie smiled at my aunt, who lowered her eyes and didn’t smile back. “Would you like to share my coat?” He opened it so wide we could see its dappled silk lining.

  “We’re fine,” Little Louie replied, her cheeks reddening.

  “I can see that.” He shook Little Louie’s hand, then reached down and shook mine.

  “John, it’s been a while,” Morley remarked, shushing Joe and Mairzy, who had started to growl.

  “A coon’s age,” John Pilkie agreed, turning towards some noise in the parking lot. There were wild shouts and a gang of boys raced across the platform throwing snowballs at the prisoners, who ducked or covered their faces. It was Sam Mahoney and the Bug House kids. At school, I was known as a Bug House kid too, because we lived in “the doctor’s house,” which had stood on hospital property until one of its owners subdivided the lot. Sam let another snowball fly. John Pilkie stood his ground. What came next felt like a movie camera had tripped its switch to slow motion, so each second lasted a lifetime. Sam’s snowball hit John on the side of his head and knocked off his hat. He didn’t move. Two more snowballs smashed against his shoulder. He made a playful half-lunge in the air, while we held our breath and waited for him to demonstrate the murderous side of his character. A final snowball hit him in the middle of his chest, near his heart. Instead of knocking over the railway guard and running after the boys, he carefully brushed the snow off his raccoon coat.

  “Aim low and you hit something, eh, Doc Bradford?” John Pilkie said.

  My father grinned. “See you around, son.”

  As the crowd watched, Morley clapped the hockey killer on the back and then Morley lumbered off with Little Louie, our spaniels racing ahead, their ears flapping. The sight of my father sent the boys clattering down the station stairs and into the crowd by the Dock Lunch stand.

  My fingers still tingling from his touch, I watched John Pilkie climb aboard the hospital’s van, and I imagined his broad, dimpled face smiling at me through the window before the van disappeared into a cloud of whirling snow. Behind me came a series of sharp, crackling pops and the smell of burning cap-gun paper. Ben shoved his smoking six guns into their holsters. “Let me feel where he touched you, Mouse,” he whispered. Giddy with pride, I extended my right hand and Ben’s stubby fingers pressed my skinny ones in wonderment. Somewhere in the crowd my father was calling my name.

  “Ben, I have to go.” I yanked away my hand. Dropping my eyes so I couldn’t see people staring, I trudged after Morley. I was used to people looking, although I didn’t exactly limp. I walked with a slight roll, like a sailor, because my weight sank down onto my good foot, especially if I was tired. That day my roll was jerkier than usual because I was trying to step into Morley’s footprints where the snow had been beaten down. He was too far ahead to notice, and that made me go faster although the space between his footprints felt a mile wide. Down by the last coach, my grandmother had spotted me. Big Louie waved excitedly, one hand on her hat to keep it from being blown off. “Mouse! Over here, Dearie!” I waved back and shuffled forward, the freezing wind whipping my hair into my eyes, my fingers turning to ice in my pockets.

  5

  MY MOTHER’S FAMILY WAS GOOD AT PRODUCING POWERFUL women and Big Louie was our second matriarch this side of the border. The first was my great-great aunt, Louisa Vidal, or Old Louie, as she was known inside our family, who, at the age of 74, followed my Yankee great-grandfather to southwestern Ontario to keep house for him. My grandmother Big Louie was my great-grandfather’s daughter and, like my own father, my grandmother stood out in the crowd. It wasn’t just her jolly patrician face, but her clothes, which she ordered from New York designers. That afternoon, she wore an orange sack coat with a collar of fox heads, and a matching orange hat spouting upside-down pigeon feathers. My grandmother’s extravagance was a sore spot with Sal, who sewed her own outfits.

  “Hello there, favourite grandchild!” Big Louie hugged me to her bosom and I took a grateful sniff of Ode to Joy. She applied her favourite perfume so lavishly I could smell it on her egg salad sandwiches. When nobody reacted, Big Louie poked my father in the ribs. “Get it, Morley? Mouse is my only grandchild!”

  Morley smiled faintly.

  “This is for your composition, Mouse,” Big Louie said, thrusting a book into my hand. It was a beat-up leather history book of southwestern Ontario.

  “Say ‘thank you,’ Mary,” my father told me.

  “Hold your horses. I haven’t finished.” My grandmother pointed to a bundle of papers sticking out of her purse. “I brought up dad’s picture and some of his early letters for Mary to quote in her essay.”

  My grandmother bent towards me, exuding more Ode to Joy, and I took the small tintype she handed me. It was dated “Oil Springs, Ontario, 1864,” and the clean-shaven young man standing by a wooden oil derrick was my Yankee ancestor.

  “I wouldn’t kick him out of bed, would you, Mouse?” Big Louie said, lighting up a Camel.

  “Mom, what a thing to say!” Little Louie giggled like anything. I giggled, too.

  “It’s a nice photo, Big Louie,” I mumbled. “Thank you from the bottom of my heart.” I placed the tintype inside my grandmother’s history of southwestern Ontario.

  “By the way, I’ve invited the prisoners and their guards for tea,” Morley said as we strolled across the parking lot. “The water main froze at the hospital.”

  “Did I hear you right, Morley?” Lifting up the veil on her hat, Big Louie puffed angrily on her cigarette.

  “I told Dr. Shulman there would be hot drinks at our house.”

  Big Louie gave me a shocked look as she slipped into the front seat of Morley’s convertible. Morley climbed in next to her and I slid into the backseat with Little Louie and our spaniels, keeping one eye peeled for the van and its cargo of killers. We had never entertained insane murderers before, although we were used to mental patients. In the forties, the hospital gave art classes to its patients in our home, and some of their weird oil paintings still hung in our upstairs hall. By “weird,” I mean that none of the people in the paintings by the hospital’s mental patients had eyes or mouths.

  I should also point out that a slight stigma was attached to anyone associated with the Bug House; at school this shadow fell across me. It didn’t help that Morley supported Dr. Shulman’s liberal practices and made Sal and me hand out prizes at the hospital’s embarrassing track and field contests.

  In the years before Dr. Shulman, there had been a good relationship between the Bug House and the town. For instance, it had been common once for some of the harmless patients to shovel snow off the walks of homes near the hospital grounds. Dr. Shulman had put a stop to using patients as free labour, although Archie Beauchamp, who was the second cousin of Sal’s father, still raked our leaves, and sometimes Sal sat down with Archie and had a cup of cocoa with him.

  6

  MORLEY’S OLDSMOBILE CONVERTIBLE BEGAN ITS CLIMB UP BUG House hill and we quickly left behind the town, whose mix of French and English neighbourhoods I’d noted in M.B.’s Book of True Facts.

  Sal herself came from French Town, the overgrown tract of land behind Bug House hill. Its winding str
eets had been built on old Indian trails, and its roads and old log homes were hidden in the same stand of maple forest that shielded the psychiatric hospital from Madoc’s Landing. Sal and her friends enjoyed gossiping about what went on there. In French Town, people could live the way they had a hundred years before and not be criticized for it. Old cars and furniture sat outside rotting, people ran booze cans in their houses, and bootleggers plied their trade. A call to Thompson’s taxi, where Sal’s father worked, would get you illegal beer or a bottle of cheap wine called “Zing.” Madoc’s Landing was dry in the fifties; in the wet towns nearby, liquor board salesmen kept a list of how much you drank, and refused to serve you if you went over the limit. So citizens up and down Brebeuf County went to French Town for their liquor.

  We lived in the English section; its leafy streets were lined with red brick houses and bungalows with aluminum siding. The English section, with its neatly mown grass boulevards and maple trees, ended at the harbour near the Dollartown Arena, our most important public building, more venerable than our Protestant churches or the Catholic cathedral with its twin spires. Every winter the Madoc’s Landing Muskrats played hockey under its dome roof, and every spring the Rats lost another season and broke my father’s heart.

  Morley coached the Rats. He loved hockey more than anything, like most of the men in Madoc’s Landing — and some of the women, too. Hockey had been a family passion for the Bradfords, who lived ninety miles north of Madoc’s Landing, near the French River, where Morley’s relatives fished Georgian Bay and logged its trees. Their grim faces in old sepia-tinted photographs suggested they had a hard go of things, and hockey was how they entertained themselves. Hockey wasn’t important to the Vidals, who lived in Petrolia, once the oil capital of North America. The town was still prosperous when my mother had been a girl, so families like the Vidals went to Atlantic City or California if they wanted a good time.

  SOON THE HUMBLING WIDTH of Brebeuf County stretched before us. To the north shone the navy mass of Georgian Bay and the slab of headland where Samuel Champlain performed the first Catholic mass in Ontario with his Huron guides, although I would be lying if I said it was easy to find the wooden cross that marks the spot.

  Brebeuf County was named after Father Brébeuf, the seventeenth-century Jesuit priest tortured to death by the Iroquois. According to Hansen’s Handbook of the Georgian Bay, Brebeuf County had always been dangerous and was dangerous still, especially the Great Bay, whose plainspoken names describe what you see: One Tree Island, Strawberry Inlet, Pancake Rock, Hole-in-the-Wall, Turnaway Reef, Steamboat Channel, and, more ominously, Grave Island. Its lonely stretches are one of the worst places for lightning in North America. Canoes overturn in waves at the drop of a hat, and swimmers are sucked to their deaths by undertows; in the off-season, the ice-cold water will take your life in three minutes. Back then, I knew all these dangers and a few more besides. If you went sailing without a long-sleeved shirt, the sun could give you a third-degree burn. If you fell out of a motorboat making a turn, the boat would keep making smaller and smaller circles until the blades of the propeller shredded you to bits — unless you knew how to duckdive, that is, and could hold your breath while the boat passed over you.

  The landscape seemed to ask for physical giants like my father and the Jesuit martyrs; even Jesus with his long-suffering nature would fit right into Brebeuf County.

  NO SOONER DID WE WALK in the front door than the phone rang. My father took it, cupping his hand over the mouthpiece. He had to go, he told us, setting the black Bell phone back in its cradle. A man had been knocked unconscious after he fell into the hull of a barge.

  “Mary, ask Sal to serve the prisoners tea,” Morley called as he rushed out the door. “You’ll see, girls. Everything will be fine.”

  “Little Louie, you help Sal,” my grandmother said, taking charge. “Mary, you stay in the kitchen and stack teacups.”

  “Do we have to, Mom?” Little Louie whined.

  My grandmother stared her down. “You know the answer,” Big Louie replied stiffly and went off to find Sal.

  We quickly did what Big Louie said. It was a waste of time arguing with somebody who could make grown men on her oil rigs cry real tears of shame over disobeying her. After I finished helping, I cleared off a space for myself on our kitchen table, already crowded with plants and old recipes. Satisfied, I opened Big Louie’s book to a chapter titled, “The Romance of Oil in Canada West.” I was glad to see the author supported Big Louie’s claim that North America’s first commercial oil well was dug by friends of my great-grandfather in 1858 in Oil Springs, Ontario, one year before the Americans drilled theirs in Titus, Pennsylvania.

  From outside came the noise of car doors slamming. Peeking around the kitchen door, I saw Dr. Shulman coming into our living room with the prisoners and the hospital guards, Jordie Coverdale and Sal’s boyfriend, Sib Beaudry. The men took off their coats and loosened their ties. With their slicked-back hair and shaved faces, the prisoners resembled travelling salesmen. Nobody would guess they were insane killers, except for the fact that Sib Beaudry looked scared to death. His big hound dog eyes were trained on John Pilkie, and I wondered what the hockey killer would say if he knew that Sib had brought beaverboard to the train station along with hammer and nails in case John Pilkie broke the windows of the hospital van.

  In the living room, Little Louie’s yellow hair and heavy-lidded eyes were drawing smiles from the men. “What can I give you, gentlemen?” she asked in her high, girlish voice. “A little milk and sugar? Or do you prefer cream?” The prisoners blushed or grinned and took a teacup from her tray, while my aunt helped them to lumps of sugar.

  John Pilkie took off his brown fedora and pushed his cowlick back from his high, rounded forehead. As he slipped off his raccoon coat, he started to cough. It was a low, hollow-wheezing sound like the noise of a rubber plunger going into a human chest.

  “That’s a nasty cold you’ve got,” Little Louie said.

  “Sorry ma’am. I’m just getting over one.” He gave her his big, dimpled grin. “They don’t heat the rooms where I live, eh?” Then he said something in a lowered voice. She smiled back a little reluctantly and hurried off with her tea tray. When he realized my aunt wasn’t returning, he glanced around. I held my breath, waiting for him to knock down Sib Beaudry and make a break for it. But he stayed where he was, so I let my eyes follow his around our comfortable living room, and it was as if I, too, were seeing it for the first time: our two big bay windows along with the double parlours with the matching coloured tiles on their fireplaces; the plump chintz furniture whose print was slightly faded because my grandmother believed bright chintz was vulgar; our brand-new black-andwhite Zenith television with a mahogany console; the soft red tongue of carpet unwinding down our front stairs; and the life-size oil painting of my mother, Alice. Hanging near my mother’s portrait was a glass cabinet holding my father’s hockey trophies.

  John (I began thinking of him as John long before I called him John to his face) stared longest at my father’s cabinet. Was he thinking about his days with the Rats? Or did he miss playing hockey? He must have sensed someone looking. Turning around, he caught my eye and winked. I stepped back into the kitchen, and sat down at our kitchen table. Breathing hard, I opened Big Louie’s history book again and forced myself to read about the Indians using crude oil to seal their canoes. They didn’t understand oil’s potential and neither did Upper Canada’s first Lieutenant Governor, Colonel John Graves Simcoe. He barely mentioned the oil seepages he saw in 1793 near Bothwell, Ontario, not far from my mother’s hometown of Petrolia. It was up to Mrs. Simcoe to scribble in her husband’s journal: “a spring of real petroleum was discovered in the marsh by its offensive smell.” Nobody knew what to do with the oil seepages until a man named Charles Nelson Tripp used the crude oil to make asphalt. In 1857, Tripp sold seven boats of asphalt to the French government to pave Paris streets. “Seven boats of asphalt! How about that, Sal?” I asked as sh
e swept by with a fresh pot of coffee.

  “Mouse, I don’t have time for your studentin’!” Sal pronounced “studentin’” the same way she said “touristin’,” her word for what summer visitors did in Madoc’s Landing. She didn’t worry about dropping the “gs” from her “ing” verb endings, although Big Louie said it was the mark of an uneducated person. After Sal left, I scribbled “not bad for us Canucks” in my Scholastic notebook, and underlined “seven boats of asphalt” three times. I didn’t hear the kitchen door swing open.

  “Mouse, do you want to meet a killer?” Sal asked. When I looked up she was standing there with John and smiling as if she were introducing me to a movie star. John and I stared nervously at each other. Then he started coughing again, making that low hollow-wheezing sound. I waited, half-embarrassed for him. After he stopped, I nodded yes, and he smiled his big, dimpled smile and sat down in the chair opposite. Sal poured me a ginger ale and opened Cokes for herself and him. “A ciggy, John?” Sal offered him her package of Matinees.

  “Makes me cough, Sal.” He trained his big, dark eyes on me. Did I mention his eyes? They were slightly exophthalmic, the term for bug-eyed that I had found in one of Morley’s medical textbooks. I’d added it to my list of words like “execrate,” which sounded thrillingly like defecate, and “vainglorious,” an adjective even the grown-ups misused, not realizing it meant boastful.