by Susan Swan
We were halfway down the aisle when an announcer said over the loudspeaker, “John Pilkie has escaped. Please disperse as quickly as possible and let the police do their work.” The fans stampeded for the exit. Cursing John’s name, they streamed around my father, who stood gazing down at the people rushing by; he was too big for anybody to push out of the way, although some in the crowd threw him dirty looks. Not that it mattered; he didn’t seem to care if he was being jostled. He stayed frozen to the arena floor, looking all for the world like a broken down dam trying to hold back the rapids. Little Louie and I tried to push our way over to him, but too many people held us back. There was nothing to be done. Breaking my father’s trust, John had walked out on his team and ruined their chances for the Pickering Cup.
OUTSIDE THE ARENA, THE FAINT red gleam of taillights broke the darkness as the cars left the parking lot and crawled along the main road. My aunt and I tramped over to the Oldsmobile, using Morley as a windbreak. “Nobody can predict what John will do,” Sal muttered as we got into the car. “He’s not right in the head. You said so yourself.”
“I never said John was crazy,” my father snapped. “I said he had a problem with authority. The NHL gave him a bad shake. But Rob will fill us in.” He pointed at Dr. Shulman headed our way across the parking lot.
“Morley, will they find John?” Little Louie asked.
“Let me talk to Rob for a minute, will you?” Morley said in the same irritated tone. Little Louie tucked her head into her collar, looking as if she might cry. I reached over to squeeze her hand and she lowered her eyes and moved her hand away. As Morley started the engine, Dr. Shulman leaned his head in the window and explained that the referee had found Jordie tied to a bench in the dressing room. John had taken Jordie’s twelve-gauge shotgun. Holding my father’s eye, Dr. Shulman said, “Pilkie found out you didn’t go to Toronto to argue his case.”
Morley frowned. “You know why I couldn’t. A clerk died in the town hall fire that day. He died.” Clearing his throat, my father added, “John promised to sober up and come back on the ice. He was on his third cup of black coffee when I left him.”
“I know, I know,” Dr. Shulman replied. “It’s just bad luck, isn’t it? For all of us.” There was a quaver in Dr. Shulman’s voice, and I thought of what my father had said about how John and his hockey playing would help Dr. Shulman with the town. Now that John was gone, things would be a lot harder for Ben’s father.
“Okay, Morley, we’ll talk about what to do in the morning.” Head down, Dr. Shulman hurried off.
“John didn’t mean to let you down,” I cried. “He was just too sad to play.”
Morley gave me a white-faced look. Nobody said a word as we drove off. The snow was coming down too fast to see the divider line on the highway. Sal turned on the radio. The newscaster said the Toronto Maple Leafs had beaten the Montreal Canadiens three to one.
“Well, that’s good news,” Sal said.
“I don’t care about those bums,” Morley replied. We lapsed into silence again. The snow kept falling wild and thick, the wind driving it at the windshield of our car.
I thought of John’s face as he followed Morley off centre ice. He and Mrs. Pilkie had counted on Morley to persuade the Toronto doctors to undertake a review. But Morley had had a crisis on his hands; he couldn’t take care of everybody at the same time. Nobody knew that better than me.
BY THE TIME WE REACHED Madoc’s Landing, the snow had stopped. The plow hadn’t come yet so Whitefish Road was impassable. My father shut off the engine and a car slowed down to see if we were in trouble. Morley gave the driver his Morley wave, his right hand floating up from the wheel, his index finger shooting out. Then he started up the car again and turned off the road. It took me a moment to realize what he was doing. He was going to drive down the snowy meadow between the guards’ houses and Whitefish Road. While we watched horrified, our car started down the hill, its fender throwing up mounds of fluffy snow that poured in waves across the hood and up over the windshield. “You’re going to hit something,” Little Louie cried. Sal didn’t speak. She knew there was no point asking Morley to stop.
“We’ll be fine. You’ll see.” My father pressed his foot on the accelerator, and we ploughed on, bouncing over the ruts hidden under the snow. My aunt hid her eyes, while I sat dumbstruck. Nobody talked as the Oldsmobile rolled on down the hill until at last it burst through a snowbank and we came to a full stop, a few houses down the road from our home.
My father shook his head. “I gave John a second chance. How could he let me down?”
I waited for Sal to say “I told you so” but she stayed quiet.
“John is a no-good bum, just like his old man,” Morley said, answering his own question. Then he got out of the car and the three of us waded through the snow to our house. I wanted to tell Morley how mistaken he was, but I knew better than to argue.
45
THE NEXT DAY THE CHRONICLE HEADLINE JUMPED OUT AT ME “THE Houdini of Brebeuf County Escapes Again!” I had to force myself to read Kelsey’s description of John leaving Jordie Coverdale “tied up like a pig in the poke.” The idea of John turning on Jordie filled me with grief because Jordie liked John, and John liked him back. The quotes from Dr. Shulman made me feel even sadder. Dr. Shulman said John’s success playing hockey had led to “a marked improvement” in his psychological health, but the failure to get his case reviewed destroyed Pilkie’s trust in the hospital staff.
“He felt he had nothing to lose,” Dr. Shulman was quoted as saying. Kelsey also quoted Dr. Torval, who said Pilkie’s behaviour showed the characteristics of a full-blown persecution complex. “Pilkie has no ability to identify with the needs of others,” according to Dr. Torval. “He’s unable to value the feelings of anyone other than himself.”
The photograph of John on his old hockey card appeared beside the article. He was gripping his hockey stick menacingly and wearing his Red Wings sweater. The caption underneath read: “Pilkie Lets the Town Down.”
The next day, The Chronicle ran an editorial about John. It said that Pilkie should be kept locked up for the rest of his life because he had betrayed the town’s trust in him. When nobody was looking, I tore up the editorial and stuffed the shreds into the coal stove in the kitchen. Scowling, I watched the coals flare; then I went up to my bedroom, and sat on my bed, turning John’s old Detroit Red Wings card over and over in my fingers. A strange, flat sensation settled over me as if the meaning had gone out of things. I stowed his hockey card carefully away in my jewellery box, put a pillow on the floor to cover the crack under the door, and cried as hard as I could.
FEAR TOOK HOLD OF MADOC’S Landing. The cruel urges and malicious notions that lurked in every home now belonged solely to John. It was as if the town had gathered up all the evil in the world and deposited it in his person. John may have frightened some people before, but now he was the bogeyman on everybody’s tongue and a handy way for mothers to get their children to do what they said. “Come straight home from school or the hockey killer will get you. Don’t go out at night in case you meet the hockey killer in a dark alley.”
Our neighbours cancelled their bridge parties and stayed in their homes. They said John had double-crossed them. He made them believe in him again, and it was hard to know what was worse: their fear or their shame about being fooled. Two days after his escape, the mothers of the Bug House kids lobbied Dr. Shulman to put a police officer on the hospital van that took us to school. Every morning, the policeman politely helped me up the van steps. Inside the van, the Bug House kids couldn’t stop talking about John. Sometimes they said they saw him in the schoolyard wearing his ankle-length raccoon coat and carrying Jordie’s shotgun, or they claimed John was living in a shed behind the guards’ houses. Or they spotted the hockey killer up on the top of Bug House hill howling like a wolf at the full moon.
In the hospital van, Sam whispered: “My dad says Pilkie has a cousin in Vancouver. So he’s heading west. Nobody wil
l know him out there.”
“You mean he isn’t famous in Vancouver?”
“Maybe Pilkie’s a big shot to you, Mouse,” Sam snorted. “But he’s just a no-good killer to us.”
I turned my back on Sam and pressed my face as hard as I could against the iced-up window. Somewhere outside our warm bus he was shivering in the cold and I wanted to feel as if I was freezing, too. Closing my eyes, I ran my mind back over what had happened. When did John decide to walk out on his team? When he drank his coffee in the dressing room? Or did he plan it days before? I imagined him stealing out the arena door and then stopping to listen to the game inside. He must have had his doubts before he walked off into the storm, floating away into the falling snow as only he could.
After school that day, I pulled out John’s old hockey card and placed it next to a lighted candle on my bedroom window. Slowly, carefully, I drew a circle in chalk around the hockey card and chanted Old Man Beaudry’s rhyme, “One for the mouse, and one for the crow, one to rot, and one to grow ...” But the words sounded dumb, like something made up for babies.
46
TWO WEEKS, ONE DAY AND NINE HOURS AFTER JOHN WALKED OUT on Morley, Ben burst in on Little Louie helping me with my homework in our kitchen. Ben said he had something important to talk over, and the three of us trailed upstairs to my bedroom where Ben handed over his father’s file on the patient called J.P. Little Louie and I read it together:
February 20, 1960. Met Ptn again in my office. Told Ptn the committee had turned down his request for a review, and he became extremely agitated. He said Dr. Bradford, one of our local doctors, had promised his mother that he would get a review of his case. Pointed out that one man couldn’t deliver a review since the outcome depended on the judgment of several doctors, not just one. Ptn asked if Dr. Bradford had met with Dr. Torval. Said that Dr. Bradford had been unable to make a special trip to Toronto to speak on Ptn’s behalf. Ptn grew despondent.
Ptn was reminded of his episodes of aggression. One, with the guard Sib Beaudry, who reported Ptn had tried to strangle him after Ptn asked to go for his tb x-ray. Second incident involved a flare of temper with my colleague, Dr. Henry Torval. Ptn became withdrawn, refused to answer further questions. After several prompts, he informed me that his wife had thrown the match on the floor of their bedroom, causing the fire. Ptn said she thought he was going to leave her. Ptn claims he had been hard to live with after his head injury. Reported his wife had mistaken this behaviour as indication that he had lost interest in her. He was unable to convince his wife otherwise. Wife had suffered postnatal depression following birth of daughter and found Ptn’s lack of attention devastating. Ptn reports he had neglected his wife due to money worries and concern over hockey career. Am recording this conversation in approximate fullness at Ptn’s request.
“I’d like to be able to use your notes when my request for an appeal is heard,” he said. I complied. His request was reasonable given his report of events that led to the charges against him:
R.S.: Your wife was the one who threw the match?
Ptn: She was angry with me for drinking beers with an old teammate, and said that I left her with the baby when she wasn’t well. I told her my injury had set us back financially, and we couldn’t make our next payment on the mortgage.
R.S.: How long had your wife been upset with you? Ptn: Since the baby was born. Peggy got polio when she was a kid. She never was strong like other women. She did all the looking after of the baby while I sat around. I didn’t lift a finger.
R.S.: What prompted her to throw the match?
Ptn: I called her a bitch. She lost control of herself and threw a lighted match on the floor. There was a boom, like a firecracker going off. The flames spread through our bedroom. Peggy wouldn’t let me near the baby. She screamed that I was going to pay, and she picked up little Sheila and locked herself in the bathroom …
R.S.: Didn’t you say you were in the bedroom?
Ptn: There was a bathroom off the bedroom. That’s where she went. She wanted to get away from me. She didn’t mean to kill our kid.
(There was silence while Ptn struggled with his feelings.)
Ptn: Peggy was one of the kindest people I know. But the baby … didn’t sleep very well. Peggy had a hard time soothing her.
R.S.: What happened next?
(For several minutes Ptn was unable to speak. Ptn was in tears.)
Ptn: Peggy wouldn’t open the bathroom door. I went outside to get a stepladder. There was another explosion. The top floor of the house went up in flames. Peggy had sprinkled more coal oil in the hall to get rid of the bugs and that made our house a tinderbox. I called the fire department at our neighbour’s home. He said he heard Peggy shouting I was going to pay for what I did.
R.S.: Are you suggesting that what your wife said led to your guilty conviction?
Ptn: It made my lawyer think I should plead guilty to a count of insanity because I was known for roughhousing. He said my history of hockey fights was against me, and that I would be locked up, and possibly executed if I told the truth. He pointed out that nobody was going to believe a young mother would burn up her own child and herself with it.
R.S.: And now you’re in here,paying for a crime you didn’t commit. Is that correct?
Ptn: It sure is. I am boxed in. My lawyer didn’t tell me that mental cases were locked up for life. I trusted him and did what he said.
R.S.: I understand your feelings and I will look into this for you.
Here Ptn bowed his head and fell silent, and I was no longer able to coax him to talk.
Dr. Shulman’s report ended with these sentences: “Two days after our last interview, Ptn escaped while playing hockey at the local arena. At present, his whereabouts is unknown.”
I IMAGINED DR. SHULMAN’S ROUND, kind eyes as he tried to comfort John, and John bowing his head while he took in the bad news.
“What are we to going do?” I asked my aunt.
“You know it’s too late, Mouse. We can’t do nothing, ” Ben said. “We can’t do anything.”
Ben threw me a look. He turned to Little Louie. “Can you write about it in the newspaper?”
“They let me go.” Tears slid down Little Louie’s cheeks.
I patted my aunt’s shoulder and told her everything was going to be fine.
PART SIX
THE AGE OF ACHING
47
NOW IT’S TIME FOR ME TO GET TO THE PART OF MY STORY WHERE I learn what I needed to learn all along: most of the truths we seek lie in the extremes and although we have to travel to that rugged place to feel them in our bones, the extremes are no place to live. Three weeks and twelve hours after John walked out of the arena, leaving Morley and the Rats stranded, I inform Hindrance that I don’t want to talk with her anymore. I also give Ben my book of true facts. Then I write a three-page letter to Big Louie explaining that I will soon be a teenager so I’m changing my name to M.B. Bradford. My grandmother phones me immediately.
“Congratulations, Mouse. You’re about to reach the age of aching,” Big Louie says. “Let’s hope your aching doesn’t last very long.”
I don’t know what to say to such a strange birthday wish, so I tell my grandmother how much I like the two-hundredand-fifty-page history of oil in North America that she sent up, especially the chapter on my great-grandfather titled, Mac Vidal, Oil Baron of Canada West. She tells me that next year I will be going to a girls’ boarding school in Toronto. It’s time I left home and saw the world beyond Madoc’s Landing.
My grandmother gave me this startling news three weeks and three days after John walked out into the blizzard, although my family doesn’t talk about John anymore. Not Little Louie or my father, and especially not Sal. Nobody wants to hear her say she was right about him. Maybe Sal doesn’t want to hear herself saying it either.
A few days later, Little Louie and I go with Morley on his Sunday calls. Ordinarily, my aunt would stay at home to work on a newspaper story. And, ordina
rily, I would play my old guessing game in which I close my eyes and try to guess where my father’s car is on the road. I would know by the racket under the car’s wheels that we were crossing the wooden bridge outside town and the engine’s throaty hum would mean we were climbing up the headland overlooking Madoc’s Landing.
Now I sit watching the snow-covered trees and meadows flash by with new appraising eyes. One day soon, I’ll be leaving Madoc’s Landing. And then, I won’t go on boring drives in the countryside, or live in a place where it snows half the year. In the fall, Big Louie is sending me away and I’ll never go through another icebox winter again.
From the backseat of our car, I can see the frozen bay. I can also see the road across it that the shore people have marked with dead Christmas trees. After freeze up, everybody takes their cars on the ice, or they use scoots, the flat-bottomed boats with steel runners that can sail on both ice and water. Occasionally, people go by snowmobile, a new invention that looks like a bobsled on skis. No matter how you travel, the Christmas tree road stops you from losing your bearings and, if the cold weather holds, you can safely travel across the ice until early April.
My father pulls into the farmhouse lane. After he tramps through the snow to the farmhouse, I get out of the car to look for signs of spring. There are one or two: the March sun is hot on my face and I’m sweating inside my snowsuit. Dirty icicles drip from the wooden trim on the farmhouse gables. The snowbanks near the barn are burned with deep, yellow pee-holes left by the farm dogs. I turn my eyes north, hoping for a telltale line of blue on the horizon. But the Bay is a solid sea of white all the way to the horizon. Near Towanda Lodge, where Old Man Beaudry lives, there are still icebergs by the shore. So it looks like Sib can keep on driving his snowmobile over the ice without worrying.