I flip through the rest of the scrapbook pages—there aren’t very many—only lists of names and dates of sentencing, along with the cuttings. A newspaper headline catches my eye: “Man Once Hanged in Colquitz Yard.” I am just about to read the article when Attendant Cooper reaches over my shoulder and takes the scrapbook away. His hands are roped with veins that run strongly into his forearms.
I follow him to the cafeteria. When we arrive, Attendant Signet is there, drinking coffee. He sets his cup down on the counter then picks it up again. Everyone else is at work on the farm or laying the new steam pipes. Behind him on other counters are the dirty food containers from the hot table, and next to these are mounds of soiled white crockery at the sinks. “Best get your sleeves rolled up, Sandy,” he says.
Attendant Cooper pours himself a coffee and adds cream to it. He spoons in sugar, stirs it, tastes it, frowns and puts in more sugar. I roll up my sleeves. “Hey, Sandy,” he says, watching me begin to fill the sinks with hot water, “did Ron here tell you his robin story?” He snorts as he sips his coffee, then walks over to Signet leaning on his elbow at the counter; he pushes at his arm.
“Don’t, Pete,” Ron Signet says. “You’ll make me spill.” He drinks up and puts the cup down for good.
“Did you, hey, Ron, I bet you did. You do that with all the new guys.”
I try to catch Ron Signet’s eye but he avoids my gaze. “Is that true, Ron, was it just a story?” I ask. I drop dishes into the steaming water and add a measure of soap.
“Well…” Ron says.
Attendant Cooper explains that the story isn’t true. It has nothing to do with us. The incident took place elsewhere, when they were building the cathedral downtown.
“Why would you tell me a lie, Ron?” I ask. He explains that there are general truths and particular truths. His story is a general truth; he’d hoped, by telling it, to make me feel at home.
“But what would you have done when I asked to see the carving?” I say.
Ron Signet shrugs.
Attendant Cooper laughs. The buttons on the white shirt he wears under his jacket strain, showing his grey undershirt. “You stupid bugger!” He says it “booger.” “Once they start your treatment you won’t remember anything, including what Signet here tells you. He could say whatever he wanted and you’d never know the difference.” He finishes his coffee, throws the cup into the sink as he passes, then bangs out through the swing gate and crosses the cafeteria floor, the keys at his belt striking against the baton tied there.
“Is that true, Ron?” I say. “That’s not what Dr. Frank has led me to believe.” I trust Dr. Frank, but I’ve had glimpses, on the way to the baths, of the corridor to the East Wing. The floor is tiled black and white, the hallway is lined with cells. I’ve not met any of the men from there.
Attendant Signet sips at his empty drink. He polishes his glasses on a handkerchief. “Well, Sandy,” he says.
—
That night, as I am falling asleep, two pictures come to me. In the first I see my father building a veranda on the back of our house. He tacks wire screening around it to keep out the mosquitoes. I remember that I slept well out there, and I woke up every morning to the singing of birds. I could see the silver gleam of a river when I climbed onto the windowsill.
The second picture is of a little girl who used to play with me. She has blond curls. Her house was beyond a fence and nearer to the river than ours. To get to our house, she had to pass by the henhouse. My father had built a large pen for the chickens, but the big rooster always managed to fly up and out, jump on her and chase her away; so my father took the bird into our basement and killed it with an axe.
THREE
May 6 and following, 1941
It begins to rain before I reach the rabbit hutches. I don’t have my hat, but I don’t mind the damp. In winter, when I was small, I went with my father, and the grandfather who owned a butcher shop, to watch the ice-cutting on Elk Lake. The men would cut the blocks, load them onto sleighs and pack the blocks in sawdust in the sheds in town. The cold doesn’t bother me. I’ve always liked to be out in all weathers. I feel the cool rain run down my face and rejoice at its cleanliness.
There is, as Dr. Frank says, pleasure in work. There’s the path from the kitchen door past the newly dug kitchen garden, and then the walk up the grassy rise to the outbuilding where the rabbits and other small animals are housed. My socks are still in the laundry and so I can feel the grass blades as they slap wetly over my ankles above my shoes. Ron Signet is with me; he whistles and jangles his keys. He likes to talk about his family—his wife and daughter. They live nearby in the married quarters. His daughter is four years old and loves horses. We can see her, beyond the fencing, riding a pony in one of the fields.
Most days there are blue skies and small white wafers of clouds scudding over the farm as the spring weather moves through quickly, but today the soft lowering grey cumulus suits my mood.
I have begun to dream frequently, and although very little of these dreams stay with me, their auras remain. In one of these fragments, somebody cut through the wire screening of the veranda I have already mentioned. I told this to Dr. Frank. “Not thinking of leaving us, are you, Sandy?” he said. That was yesterday.
I pick up the rabbitry register from the slot beside the door. I know the names of all the does and bucks; we have just four bucks—one to every ten does, although there are plans to acquire more. I walk quickly round to make certain all the rabbits are well. The hutches stand in two tiers, with wire mesh bottoms that allow the droppings to slip through. The top tier droppings fall onto the sloped galvanized iron roof of the lower tier, then onto the ground. My first morning chore is to sweep beneath the hutches, place the sweepings in a barrow and from there wheel them to the dung heap beside the field compost. I am doing this, rain now falling heavily, my head down to follow the board trail laid across the mud for this purpose, when I hear someone call my name. I look up.
Attendant Cooper waits at the top of a rise ahead of me. He sports a grey fedora and a dark blue overcoat, and I surmise he is on his way out for the day, for some of the staff use the farm gate on their way to the parking lot. I didn’t see him earlier, but I suppose he has been on night shift. When I finish dumping, I lower the barrow and walk over to him. Ron Signet expects me back at the rabbitry, so I cannot be long. But Attendant Cooper knows this.
“I’ve something to show you, Sandy,” Pete Cooper says as I come up to him. He hasn’t shaved, and I smell drink on his breath. Myself, I do not drink, and my own whiskers are fine and pale, my skin too sensitive to shave every day, which is just as well, as we are not permitted our own razors. Once, when we sat outside in the grounds, Georgina, who had come to see me, and to give me news of her son in the RAF, leaned close and put her gloved hand on my face; I felt my whiskers catch on the silk. “Give me a beardy,” she said, placing her cheek against mine, but she was joking and so I didn’t.
“Come over here,” Attendant Cooper says.
He leads the way down the little hill past the stables and carpentry shop. He moves quickly ahead of me, not looking back. I turn to see whether we can be seen from the rabbitry, but the slope and a screen of rain shield the hutches from sight. “I’m in the middle of work,” I say.
“Don’t worry, Sandy, you won’t be missed,” he says. He walks on until we reach a knot of firs, interspersed with alder. This is the farthest from the main building I have been. When we stop, he says, his breath steaming in puffs of garlic and whiskey, “You know we read your file?”
I don’t know that. In fact, Dr. Frank has assured me that our conversations and the writings I have done for him are private.
“I don’t believe you,” I say. “Dr. Frank said my file was confidential.”
Cooper faces me; two rivulets stream from the front fold of his hat. “Then, Sandy, I suppose it’s as ‘confidential’ as he can make it, eh?” He winks. One of his eyelids sits lower over the iris than the other
anyway, but it is definitely a wink. His pale lashes fringe colourless eyes, and wisps of light-reddish hair show from under his hat. At this moment he appears scrubbed pink and blind like the pigs that hung in my grandfather’s butcher shop.
Somewhere, there’s a photograph of me standing in front of a row of fresh carcasses, holding my mother’s hand. It isn’t a happy memory. I hadn’t cared for my grandfather and I’ve always hated to see dead animals.
“You know where we are?” he says. I look around me, but still, all I can see is the green grove of trees. Gold threads of resin stripe the fir bark; the scrolled-up buds of the alder leaves are ready to open. “We’re standing on a grave,” Cooper says. I step back quickly and I look down at the raised ribs of the tree roots where they spread over the ground. There are the usual undulations, the rusty sponge of decayed leaves and pine needles. No stone, no marker of any kind.
“I don’t see anything,” I say. “There’s no grave here.”
“People die here all the time, Sandy, what do you think happens to the bodies?”
“You don’t place them in unmarked graves,” I say. “That would be inhuman. Dr. Frank wouldn’t allow it.”
“Dr. Frank? You stupid booger.” He spits at my feet. He rocks forward, almost losing his balance. His face, underneath the sheltering hat, is wet. “You think you’ve got it worked out, nice and cushy, and you’ll be out in a couple of years when you and Dr. Frank are finished talking and the war’s over. You’re here for life now, boy, and there’s nothing you can do about it unless I decide to help you. And you know, and I know, I’m not going to do that. Things for you can only get worse, you bloody shirker.”
“I’m not a shirker!”
He tries to spit again, but the spittle drools down his chin. He wipes the back of a hand across his nose and mouth. “You wanted a nice safe place to hide while other boys, boys like mine, are overseas giving their lives for your freedom. You ugly little bastard.”
“No! That’s not true! I wanted to go!”
“But you’re right about one thing, Grey, nobody gets buried here now.” He draws his lower lip up over his top lip, and his chin quivers. Some kind of noise is trapped in his throat. Attendant Cooper kicks a small hole in the humus. He kicks and kicks.
The smell of the spraying wet fir needles, and the turned-over rotting alder leaves, reminds me of the wooded roadside where I’d abandoned my father, hoped to leave him forever. The hole grows deeper. I loosen my clenched fists and look back in the direction of the rabbitry. Nobody is coming to find me. “I have to get back,” I say.
“No, sir,” Pete Cooper says. He’s stopped kicking now. “We sell the corpses to students who dissect them at the university. It’s a funny thing, Grey, what with some of these treatments—you take insulin—people go into a coma and they don’t come out of it; or you think they’re dead and they’re not. They might come out of it, but how would we know? They’re already packed into a box and sent off, the next thing’s the knife.” He stares straight into my eyes.
“I’m in the West Wing. Nothing like that happens in the West Wing.”
“Not in the West Wing. No, that’s right,” Cooper says, “but you won’t be in the West Wing long.”
I turn to go.
“I’m not finished with you, Grey,” he says, gripping my arm. “I told you I had something to show you.”
I try to find a smile, to stay calm. “That’s right, so you did.”
“People do get their just desserts, sooner or later. You’ll get yours, and that cunt who comes to see you will get hers.” He grins as he registers the shock on my face. His words are meant to be knives. He knows how I feel about Georgina: She has been kind to me, even when I was a stranger, and now she is a friend. I have seen him watching her when she comes to visit me, with his blind pig gaze. There is, truly, as my father insists, evil in the world, but it is not confined to unbelievers, and it is not confined to Hitler.
“Under this sod lies the body of Alan Macaulay, hanged by the neck until dead in the exercise yard, when this was a prison. I saw you reading about it in the library. I’ve read what you wrote afterwards for Dr. Frank. How you couldn’t sleep that night, and when you did sleep you saw yourself handcuffed to his corpse. You felt like you’d been buried with him. You even wrote that his skin was like hen’s skin. Puckered from fear. Like your balls pucker, Sandy.” He blinks his white lashes. “But you know all that, I don’t have to tell you about your twisted mind.”
I look away from him, into the rain. I remember the strawberry birthmark on the inside of my left elbow. I remember I am Sandy Grey.
He takes a step back and laughs. “Alan Macaulay’s ghost haunts the East Wing, Sandy, did you know that? You can hear it at night. It cries and begs for someone to help him. Macaulay committed a crime and deserved his punishment. He begged for mercy, his friends and his family petitioned, but it did him no good. Justice is blind, Grey. Justice gets it right.”
Cooper’s fist lashes out and he hits me. I fall, gasping, to the ground and spit out a tooth. Blood and mucous glisten on it in strings. I gaze up through the lank wing of my hair over my forehead. My ear and jaw burn. A spark of curiosity glimmers in Cooper’s small, faded eyes. “You’re on my mind now, Grey,” he says. He straightens his hat and the lapels of his coat and goes.
—
Upon my return to the rabbitry, I lay down a scattering of fresh hay in the hutches, then I set to putting out the feed and water. For now, we use large tin cans tied with wire to the sides of the cages, but I have planned, with the rabbitry overseer, a Jap, to see about constructing a self-feeding system. This would be better for the meat rabbits. The pregnant and nursing does would still have to be hand-fed, but even so we’d have more time to care for the kit conies or any sick animals. When all is done and I’ve marked off the appropriate boxes in the registry, I take one of the younger rabbits and sit with it on my lap and stroke it while Ron smokes a cigarette. He gave me a hard look when I first came back, pushing the empty barrow. “That’s the second time somebody’s been careless and stepped on a rake,” he said. “Now I’ll have to write it up.”
—
It is not that I’m particularly fond of small animals, I only once ever had a pet—a collie dog that my substitute mother had put to sleep when I was ten—but they are living creatures and deserving of our care. I’m well aware that the fate of most of these rabbits is to be used for meat and pelts. Ron shows me how to lift them, so as not to bruise the carcass or damage the hide, by grasping the loose skin over the shoulders with one hand and using the other hand to support the hindquarters. “I wonder if we could exhibit some of these,” I say. “Dr. Frank thinks showing that we can breed prize stock is good for the reputation of the institution.” I say this, although what I am thinking is that even a grown man—let alone a child or an animal—can suffer from lack of affection. I begin to groom the rabbit from head to tail with a soft bristle brush. The rain has stopped, weak sunlight paints the small table, covered with a burlap sack, that I brought outside to serve as a grooming table. Handling a rabbit is, perhaps, a poor substitute for human contact, but Ron Signet, who has finished his third cigarette, appears to approve.
“You’re the spitting image of St. Francis, son,” he says.
—
Today, after supper, they cut off my hair. I had hoped to look like a soldier or airman but, instead, I appear as what I am: a prisoner, an inmate. What is it that makes the difference? I ask the cook, when I am washing dishes. “They don’t bleeding use a bowl on the soldiers, do they,” he says.
FOUR
May 20 and following, 1941
Above my bed is a picture of the King and Queen and their family. Although I do not pray for them, they are in my thoughts. I no longer pray at all, since when I do, instead of the face of God (or what I imagine God might be), I see my father’s. Perhaps one day I will regain my faith—Dr. Frank says we often revert to the principles of our upbringing as we age—although
I cannot see it for myself. On the shelf at the head of the bed I keep my notebook and pen and a small shortwave radio that Georgina gave me. At night I listen to broadcasts from around the world, and sometimes my roommates listen also. One of these men, Winchell, likes to interrupt with his stories of fighting in Spain, and of the women he made love to there, but the others aren’t too bad.
Bob, who is two years younger than I am, comes from Alberta, and he is visited by his mother who travels by train once every month or so in order to see him. He plays practical jokes, most of them harmless enough, such as turning back the date on the calendar, but aside from offering unwanted advice too often for my liking, he is a pleasant enough fellow.
Karl is the third man, older than the rest of us and with a tendency to be morose. Perhaps it is because he is an enemy alien. Even if he were released, he would not go free but be interned in a camp. I heard him tell Attendant Signet that he had been working as a steam engineer at the Mage Theatre in Vancouver before he was apprehended. I asked Ron Signet why Karl was here and he said I should ask him myself.
Tonight, Bob and Winchell are at the bingo in the cafeteria. I do not go, as I do not know how to play and have no money with which to gamble. Winchell said, as he left, that it was run by Catholic nuns and some of them were good-looking. He liked to imagine how they appeared beneath their habits. This appeared to enrage Karl—I watched the veins of his temples swell where they vanish into the pale outposts of his receding hairline—and I saw him direct a murderous glare at the Spanish Civil War veteran. He restrained himself, though, and got down to the work with which he occupies himself every spare moment, writing in longhand on foolscap paper. I sat and watched him for a minute. He works consistently and doesn’t look up. The light glints off the gold rims of his glasses. If I didn’t know better, I’d think him Swedish instead of German; he seems, in general, more refined than the average Hun. His nails are clean, he presses his trousers under the mattress, he washes his teeth several times a day and he is always after the attendants to allow him extra baths. Winchell says Karl is a Nazi…but I don’t know.
What It Takes to Be Human Page 3