Reparations

by Stephen Kimber

  Reparations

  Stephen Kimber

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Dedication

  For Jeanie

  Chapter 1

  July 1976

  He shouldn’t have been in this hellhole on a summer Sunday morning. He should have been home sleeping it off. So why was he standing here in his one, drizzle-dampened suit trying desperately not to let his brain process the smell of shit and salt that wafted up from the sewer outfall down the block? Those queasy-making odours were stirring up whatever remained in his stomach from Saturday’s stew of beer, and rum, and grease. He almost wished he could just puke it all away. Almost.

  The worst, he knew, was that he didn’t need to be here. He could have handled all of this by phone a few well-slept hours from now. One call to the cops. Hit and run. Coloured kid dead. No name pending notification of next of kin. No suspects. Under investigation. Two paragraphs, three at most, for the “Briefs” section in Monday’s Tribune.

  No, the only reason Patrick Donovan was standing here in the wet and stink this morning was because Tom Harkin, the weekend City Editor, believed he was talking up the union. He wasn’t. He wanted to tell Harkin about last night at the Victory, and how Saunders had tried to get him to sign a union card, and how he’d told him to go fuck himself. Patrick wasn’t in the least interested in joining a union. Why should he? The old man had been good to him. Given him a five-hundred-dollar bonus when he got married, then an interest-free loan to cover the down payment on the house he and Emma bought after Moira came along.

  Moira. Lovely little Moira. She was the reason he was in such sad shape this morning. No, check that. The real reason? Donovan had spent all day Saturday on the roiling waters off Peggys Cove, bobbing up and down in an old Cape Islander under a face-lobstering sun, chugging quart after quart of Schooner beer and not even pretending to care whether he caught a fish.

  It was the something-th annual Imperial Oil Fishing Derby, a grand piss-up the company staged every summer to curry favour with local reporters. Teams of four reporters each from all the local media outlets got to spend their Saturday on the ocean, supposedly competing to see who could catch the most and biggest fish but mostly just drinking, shooting the shit, pissing—and occasionally puking-over the side.

  At the end of the day there was an awards ceremony, and more drinks—hard stuff this time—back at the local Legion. Biggest Fish, Most Fish, Ugliest Fish, Biggest Fish That Got Away, Fewest Fish. Donovan’s team tied with three others for the Fewest Fish caught. None. The PR guy emcee presented them each with a plastic fish—“so you’ll know what they look like”—and a forty of Captain Morgan to share. Aye, aye, Captain.

  He and the three other “Tribune Trojans,” as they called their team, demolished the forty on the drive back to Halifax. Donovan couldn’t remember driving but he was certain he had; his VW Bug had been in the driveway when he woke up this morning. He couldn’t recall either whose idea it was to stop in at the Victory Lounge for a victory drink—or two—to end their day, but it must have seemed like a good idea at the time. By the time he finally got home—after one last side trip to Claudie’s for a takeout order of two greasy plops of battered fish on a soggy bed of french fries—it was after midnight.

  Emma was pissed. Understandably. She’d been home alone all day with a teething, crying baby and no car, and why the hell hadn’t he called, anyway? Donovan stood dumbly by the door as Emma handed him the baby, declared she was now “officially off fucking duty” and disappeared down the hall to bed, not inviting him to follow. He had been exiled to the couch in the baby’s room. Again.

  Moira, of course, was wide awake. And baby-eager to play with her daddy. Donovan did his best, even got down on the floor with her, but he could barely keep his eyes open, let alone focused. He put Moira in her crib. She cried. He scooped her up, carried her to the bathroom, got some Ambusol from the medicine cabinet, rubbed it on her gums. Still, she kept crying. He went to the kitchen, warmed some milk for her bottle, rocked her in his arms, tried not to fall down, finally sat on the couch—better—and held her as she sucked on the bottle. Did Moira fall asleep first? Or did he? The next thing he knew Emma was standing in the doorway.

  “Tom’s on the phone.” Her tone was still icy; there would be at least a week’s worth of couch penance ahead. “Says he needs you to come in to work.” She stepped into the room, scooped the still blissfully sleeping Moira out of his arms, turned on her heel and was gone.

  “There’s been an accident.” Harkin’s voice was almost as frosted as Emma’s. “Down near the projects. Sounds like hit and run. Check it out. I’ll see you when you get in.” Donovan looked at his watch. It was 5:45 a.m.

  Donovan hated Sunday shifts. Everyone had to do them, of course. One Sunday in four. No extra pay. During the week, Patrick Donovan was the Tribune’s legislative reporter. He lunched with Cabinet ministers at Chez Henri, drank with senior bureaucrats at the Victory Lounge and could get in to see the Premier himself if he needed a quote for a story. But one Sunday in every four he was back in the bullpen, chasing ambulances and scrambling to find something—anything—to fill up Monday morning’s paper.

  He’d been thinking he might spend the day cobbling together a spec piece. One of his sources had told him the Liberal brain trust wanted to replace O’Sullivan before the next election. Donovan doubted his source’s insistence that Ward Justice was the man who would take the Premier’s place. The Fisheries minister was a rising star, no doubt of that, but he was just twenty-seven and had won his first election only two years ago.

  Still, Donovan could certainly believe someone in the Liberal backroom was plotting a coup. Electricity rates were going through the roof and, though that was really the Arabs’ doing, O’Sullivan had won re-election by promising to keep rate increases in check. Plus, it seemed there was a new scandal every week. Cabinet ministers caught driving drunk. Millions in government money poured into a cruise ship venture that looked like a scam. It would make a good story, but not today.

  It had taken him a while even to find the inappropriately named White Street, which was squeezed between Black and Grey streets. It was an alley really, little more than an unpaved gash between Barrington Street and the harbour. It was home to a dozen or more black squatter families, all squeezed into a few paint-peeling, plywood-shuttered buildings that might once have been privateers’ warehouses but had long since been abandoned to displaced Africvillers, Africvillians? Who knew? Who cared? But judging by the mob milling about this morning, there were plenty of them.

  So how come, he asked himself, you never saw any of those black faces downtown? It was, after all, just a few blocks from here. And why were there no black faces among the dozen or so uniformed cops congregated in front of the last building on the block? Maybe he could make a story out of that. Maybe pigs could fly.

  “You a cop?” a kid asked him. He was about twelve with a coal-black face and a kinky Afro.

  “Reporter,” Donovan responded.

  “I knew you wasn’t from here.” The kid smiled, satisfied with his powers of deduction. “You on TV?”

  “Newspaper. “<
br />
  The kid looked less interested all of a sudden. “Where’s the TV?”

  “It’s Sunday,” Donovan explained. “They don’t work on Sunday.”

  The boy took that in, rolled it around in his head, made up his mind. “I saw it happen,” he said.

  “Saw what happen?”

  “The accident, what you think?”

  “So what happened?” Donovan was only half paying attention. He could hear the cops laughing at some private joke. A hearse picked its way through the crowd along the potholed alley to where the officers were standing.

  The boy eyed the hearse with renewed interest. “I heard this big noise,” he said. “So I went to look. This car, big car, white, I think, kept backing up and smashing into this garbage can. Bang! See? There it is over there by the side of that building.” He pointed. Donovan kept his eye on the hearse. “The guy kept spinning his wheels . . .” Donovan watched as one cop led a tearful young black woman over to a lumpy white sheet on the ground near the cluster of cops. He knelt down, pulled back a corner. The woman screamed. The kid at Donovan’s side kept talking. “Anyway, he finally puts it into drive and guns it up the street past me. And that’s when I looked back and I seen . . .” He paused, looking for encouragement from Donovan, got none and continued anyway. “I seen little Larry in his pyjamas, all bloody, on the ground right where the car was.”

  “When was this?” Donovan knew he should walk over and see if the woman would talk to him, but he hated doing those kind of interviews.

  “Middle of the night. I don’t know. Why?”

  “Just asking. Did you see the driver?”

  “Yeah. White guy. Old, older than you.” The kid smiled, as if to say that was a joke. “He’s been around here a lot. I seen him coming out of Rosa’s place lots of times.”

  “Thanks,” Donovan said absently. He hadn’t taken out his notebook. The woman was being ushered into a police cruiser. It was now or ever. He moved away from the kid, hurried to the police car. The cop was closing the door.

  “Tribune,” he announced, as if that were sufficient explanation. “Is there anything you want to say, ma’am?”

  The cop looked at him, incredulous. It was a stupid question; Donovan knew that. But he didn’t know yet who she was or why she was crying. The mother? The accused? The accused’s mother? A relative? She looked at him wordlessly. He could see the wet rivulets of tears on her cheeks.

  “Why don’t you go see the sergeant?” the cop said, as much to shoo him away as to assist him. “He’s in charge.”

  The sergeant was, as sergeants are, determinedly unhelpful.

  “Some kid called it in. Four forty-five,” he told Donovan in his fiat, official voice. Was it the kid he’d been talking to? Donovan wondered. “We found the dead boy in the street over there. Looks like he got run over.” The sergeant laughed his black-humour laugh. “Yes, sir, that’s what it looks like. Car tire went right over his chest. Flattened it like a pancake.”

  “You have a name?” Donovan had finally taken out his notebook. The kid had called the victim “Larry,” but Donovan knew he needed an official source and a full name.

  “Yeah, but I can’t give it to you. You know better than that. Call the station in a couple of hours. They’ll probably be able to release that information then.”

  Donovan sighed. “What about the woman?”

  “Kid’s mother,” the policeman said. “She’s a whore. Arrested her myself couple of times. What the hell’s she doing letting her kid wander around outside in the middle of the night anyway? Stupid nigger bitch—and that’s off the record. I catch that in the paper and you’re a dead man.”

  Call the station . . . Off the record . . . What the hell was he doing down here anyway? Donovan wondered again. Damn Harkin. But he was stuck now. So he tried again. “Kid over there told me he saw a white guy in a big car run over the kid.”

  The cop’s eyes hardened. “Don’t start messin’ with that shit, Mister Reporter. These coloured guys’ll tell you anything just to stir stuff up. Ever since them Black Hands bastards came here, it’s like they’re all looking to start a race riot. Like in the States. So don’t you go playing along just to sell some papers.” He paused. “And that’s off the fucking record too.”

  Donovan closed his notebook. He wanted to go back to sleep.

  Chapter 2

  May 2002

  Of course it was insane. Insanity, in truth, might be the young man’s best defence. It would never work. And yet? Uhuru Melesse reconsidered the intense young man sitting stiffly, expectantly in the rickety, coming-unglued, straight-backed wooden chair across from him.

  The young man, whose name was James Joseph Howe, was Biafran thin. His bulging, milky-white eyes strained to take flight from the tight, dark-chocolate cage of his face. His two-sizes-too-large black wool suit made him appear even more emaciated and, if possible, more out of sorts with himself and the world he’d suddenly found himself in.

  That world, Uhuru Melesse’s world, was a holding room in the bowels of the Provincial Court House where legal aid lawyers met their clients, usually for the first and only time. The small, windowless room reeked of stale sweat, the smoke of a thousand furtive cigarettes and the unmistakable odour of urine.

  Uhuru Melesse wasn’t a legal aid lawyer but he occasionally hung out at the courthouse on mornings when there were no wills to write or deeds to transfer. He would troll the corridors for clients who earned too much to qualify for legal aid but who needed someone to plead them guilty to whatever lesser offence the Crown prosecutor would reluctantly okay. But this time, for whatever reason, Melesse had been asked for, specifically.

  Thanks to his familiarity with this particular room, Melesse knew better than to sit down on the room’s only other piece of furniture, a wooden chair identifiable by the fact that some of the plastic webbing on the seat was missing. Though not apparent to the casual observer, the glue holding the legs fast to the seat had long since dried up. The sheriff’s deputies amused themselves with it, banging the legs into place in order to catch new lawyers or their clients unawares. Melesse ignored the chair, perched one polished black shoe on the edge of a broken radiator and wondered at what he was considering.

  The young man looked like one of those preternaturally beatific young men who occasionally showed up at Melesse’s door wanting to know if he knew the Lord. But he was really a bookkeeper for the Halifax Regional Municipality. The City claimed he’d stolen $323,456.56 worth of taxpayers’ dollars. Howe didn’t deny taking the money. But he insisted it wasn’t theft.

  “Are you sure this is really the way you want to go?” Melesse asked.

  “Absolutely. That’s why I asked for you.” Melesse looked puzzled. “I saw that film,” the young man explained. “That Film Board film, about Black Pride. I knew you’d understand.”

  Melesse understood. The young man did not. That film was from another life. Melesse was no longer that person. He didn’t even carry that man’s name.

  Still, Melesse could appreciate the young man’s confusion. After all, hadn’t he “shed” his slave name—he’d probably claimed that himself in some interview or other—and taken on one that better reflected his African roots? And hadn’t he shaved off all the hair on his head, lending him the menacing persona of the aging but unbowed black radical? Melesse didn’t want to confess, not to the young man and certainly not to himself, that he’d decided to change his name on a drunken whim one night five years ago. The whim had involved a blonde and a bottle of white wine. Shaving his head? One of the TV reporters—a white woman, of course—had made a big deal of it when she’d interviewed him last year for a story about Kwanza (which the headline referred to as “Black Christmas”). Truth? He was trying to hide the fact that his hairline was receding, and what was not receding was turning white.

  “Even if we go the way you want to go,” Melesse sa
id finally, “there’s no guarantee the judge will buy it. Chances are he won’t.”

  “But it’s true.” Howe seemed almost childlike. “So we must.”

  “Okay, we can try. But let me ask you a question, Mr. Howe. It’s not that I don’t believe you, you understand, but I have to ask because the first thing the Crown is going to do is root around in your life looking for evidence. You’re telling me they won’t find anything. You’re sure about that?”

  “Absolutely. Not a penny went anywhere but where I told you.” He reached into the breast pocket of his suit, pulled out a sheaf of papers, all neatly folded into a packet, and handed it to Melesse. “See?”

  Melesse carefully unfolded the papers, read the names: Square Meal . . . Seaview Children’s Trust . . . African-Nova Scotian Pensioners Association . . . Save Our Neighbourhood from Drugs Committee . . .

  “You show this to the cops?”

  “No. Just you.” Howe’s smile was full of expectation.

  Uhuru Melesse didn’t want to do this. It would mean more work than he wanted to take on. And he was no longer a fan of lost causes. Not to mention that Howe was probably lying. Melesse could not remember the last client who wasn’t lying about something. Even—or especially—since he’d begun to specialize in real estate transactions.

  There was a knock on the door.

  “Okay,” he said, looking toward the unseen door-knocker. “Be there in a sec.” He turned back to the young man, more eagerly expectant now. “What the hell,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

  As the deputy led the young man out of the room to the elevator that would take them to Courtroom 1 for the arraignment, Uhuru Melesse hung behind, took a deep breath, seemingly lost in thought. But he wasn’t thinking about what he was going to say in the courtroom; he was thinking about last night, about what had not happened. Again.

  How do you plead? Guilty. Three hundred dollars or thirty days. See the clerk on your way out. Next case . . . Still not the case she was here for. So Moira Donovan resumed the less than artistic rendering of an unidentified, unidentifiable flower taking shape on the front cover of her steno pad. How many more peace bond breakers, break-and-entry makers, probation order violators, pot puffers, drunks and other assorted minor-league miscreants would she have to sit through before the judge finally got to the case she was here for?