Reparations

by Stephen Kimber

  “I understand what you’re saying,” Ward replied, sounding far more understanding than he felt. “But you also have to understand that it will be difficult for us to show the benefits of all those interest-free loans and exemptions if there’s no employment for our fishermen, our fish processors.”

  “There’d be taxes,” Junior said helpfully. “We pay taxes.”

  “You haven’t for the last five years,” Ward pointed out. He’d checked.

  “That’s because we haven’t been profitable.” Junior looked miffed. “This will make us profitable and, when we’re profitable, we’ll pay taxes.”

  Ward knew better than to believe that. His department’s officials were convinced Eisner International was already making money and using dodgy accounting tricks to obscure the fact.

  Ward wondered what the fishermen of Eisners Head, the people who elected him, would have to say if they knew he was even considering such a proposal? What would his father think?

  Ward knew exactly what his father would think, of course. Which was why he’d invited him to meet him at Claudie’s last week. So that he could tell his father what Junior had in mind. And hear his father’s response. His father had not let him down.

  “Bastard!” Desmond Justice said through clenched teeth. “He’s worse than his old man, that one.” He looked at his son accusingly. “And you? You gonna let him get away with this?”

  “No.” Ward had not been sure precisely how he would answer that question until he spoke the word out loud to his father. “No,” he said again, more strongly this time, “I’m not going to let him get away with it.” The words felt good on his tongue. Saying them to his father felt even better.

  But speaking them had served another, more important purpose; he knew he had to follow through this time. He couldn’t disappoint his father. Not again.

  Now Ward speared a breaded clam with his fork and looked directly into Junior’s face. He could see his “I don’t think so” had not been strong enough.

  “No,” he said. And then, again, “No, I won’t support you.”

  Junior was incredulous. “What do you mean, no?” His voice was becoming louder again.

  “Just what I said,” Ward replied, his voice as cold and even as his thinking. “I’m not going to support your proposal for a factory freezer trawler fleet. So there’ll be no need for an interest-free loan or crew exemptions or anything else. I said no and I mean no.”

  Junior’s eyes hardened then. “That’s not what I wanted to hear from you.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ward said. He wasn’t.

  “Sorry? Sorry! You’ll be more than fucking sorry!” Junior was shouting. Some of Claudie’s other patrons looked over at them. Jack, who hadn’t said anything to this point, put his hand on Junior’s forearm as if to calm him. Junior lowered his voice then, but there was still an urgency to it. “Look, we have way too much tied up in this for you to fuck it up. We need you to eat shit and say it tastes like ice cream if that’s what it takes to get this deal done. We need you to push this in Ottawa, and we need that loan. Do you understand me?”

  Junior looked like he was about to reach across the table and throttle Ward. Ward was eerily calm.

  Finally, Jack intervened. “Let’s not be hasty,” he said. “Why don’t we just step back for a second before we talk ourselves into a corner we can’t get out of, or do something we might regret?”

  Ward had just walked out of the corner. He had no regrets. “Sure,” he said. “Why don’t we do that?”

  Chapter 11

  Winter 2003

  “So . . .” Aucoin flapped. The private detective’s unflappable demeanour had become frightened, flitting, almost bird-like. Ward could sense his discomfort in every twitch. And his once inscrutable face had become, to Ward, suddenly very scrutable. Aucoin was nervous. He’d never had a judge for a client, and he didn’t know what this judge knew, or wanted him to know, or—most important—wanted him to say. Gerald Aucoin knew only that he’d discovered far more than he should have.

  “Wasn’t that complicated, Your Honour. Routine, really.” He was staring at the floor in Ward Justice’s kitchen, not making eye contact. He coughed nervously. “I got lots of stuff in my notebook, but maybe you should tell me what you’re looking for. Do you want me to go back to the beginning”—here he did finally look at Ward, then quickly resumed his examination of the grain in the hardwood floor—“or, you know, from when she left Halifax?”

  “From when she left Halifax,” Ward replied.

  “Okay. Well. Let me see then.” Aucoin seemed relieved. Ward knew he knew. Ward didn’t care any more; he just wanted the information.

  Aucoin consulted his notebook, more for show than to discover what he’d written. “Seems Miss Johnstone left Halifax in August 1976. She showed up almost immediately in Boston, where she found employment as a maid for the family of Charles O’Sullivan, a Boston lawyer and investor who is related to Seamus O’Sullivan.” Aucoin glanced furtively at Ward as if seeking a sign, found none. “Became an American citizen September 1986. Never married. One child, out of wedlock, while still resident in Halifax. Father, according to the birth certificate . . .” The pause was profound. At least it felt that way to Ward. Aucoin kept his eyes fixed on the notebook, riffling through its pages without reading anything. The pause ended. “. . . Raymond Carter, a law student. He and Miss Johnstone never married. The boy—named Lawrence George, apparently after the paternal and maternal grandparents—died two years later . . . the result of an automobile . . . accident in 1976. Hit and run. Still unsolved. My sources at the police force say—”

  “Where is she now?” Ward cut him off. Aucoin had told him something he’d only previously suspected, perhaps assumed, but certainly didn’t want to know. He’d never asked Rosa about Larry’s father, and she’d never volunteered. So Ward had, in fact . . . Don’t go there. Not yet. Find Rosa first.

  “That one’s easy enough, Judge, though it may not be the answer you were hoping for,” Aucoin replied, as relieved as the Judge to have been derailed from the issue of the police investigation. “Miss Johnstone is in Our Lady of Sorrows Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the O’Sullivan family section, the first non-O’Sullivan to be buried there, according to the obituary in the Boston Globe. She died of heart failure, September 19, 2002. Obituary’s sort of interesting. Lots of stuff about her role as a nanny and maid, and her ‘lifelong’ love of the Red Sox, but it doesn’t list a single surviving relative, even though I know for a fact some of her brothers and sisters still live here. And no mention of a son. Seems like she wanted to bury her past pretty deep . . .”

  Rosa dead? Ward had not considered that. He had no Plan B.

  “Christ, it’s cold,” she said. Because it was, and because there was nothing else she could think of to say. She stomped her feet on the sidewalk to try to shake off the damp November chill. “Bastards could at least let us wait inside.”

  “Now don’t let the Father be hearing you talking that way, Moira, my dear,” Mac upbraided her gently. “Or you’ll find it’ll be warmer than you want when you’re in the eternal damnation of hell.”

  No wonder she had nothing to say. Mac was a moron. And not a very good photographer. How had she lucked into him for this assignment?

  Michelle had called her that morning to tell her she didn’t have to come into the office. She could just meet Mac at the Basilica at nine-thirty. Of course, Michelle hadn’t told her the funeral didn’t begin until ten-thirty, or that the family had requested no press inside the church. Michelle didn’t even have the correct name of the deceased.

  “He was big in politics in the sixties,” Michelle had explained by way of background briefing. “Morton knew him. Anyway, he says it should be a big send-off. Lots of old pols and such. He wants a name-dropper for page three.”

  Lovely, Moira thought. Except she didn’t know the
names of any sixties politicians and wouldn’t recognize their faces if she did.

  “Let me see,” Michelle had offered when Moira asked for details, “his name is, where’s that note . . . Jeffrey Joseph Eagleson . . . Hmmm . . . Yes. And that’s about all I have right now. You should be able to find something on the Net.”

  Thanks. Moira skipped breakfast and didn’t even feed Patrick—“Why don’t you watch Sesame Street until May gets here, honey? I’m sure May will make you something delicious for breakfast”—in a fruitless effort to find information about the late, and seemingly elusive, Jeffrey Joseph Eagleson. The closest she came was a reference to a legendary secretary-treasurer of the Nova Scotia Liberal Party in the forties. But he’d died in 1964. She’d only finally found the person she was looking for by accident.

  She’d come across a listing for an Eagleson Charitable Trust, which turned out to be irrelevant—it was based in Savannah, Georgia, and gave money to “worthy Christian causes”—but its executive director’s name was “Jeffrey Joseph Eagleson, ‘Jack’ to his many friends.”

  On a whim, Moira typed in “Jack Eagleson,” et voilà, two web pages popped up that mentioned the Nova Scotia Liberal Party’s chief strategist of the sixties and seventies. There were no useful details in either story, but at least she now knew the name he was known by, which might save her embarrassment when she began asking the mourners to talk about the late Mr. Eagleson.

  As soon as May arrived, Moira grabbed a cab to St. Mary’s Basilica, only to discover she was an hour early and consigned to watching from the sidewalk for people whose faces older readers might recognize but she would not.

  Perhaps that was why Michelle had assigned Mac as her shooter. He’d been a news photographer since her father’s time and knew most of the old politicians by first name. Or greeted them that way. Her father claimed to like him—“Mac’s a great Cape Bretoner”—but he probably hadn’t spent much time with Mac since that fateful night he’d got lost on his way to a bar and found the Lord.

  “True as I’m standing here.” Mac had told his tale—yet again—this morning. “God is my witness. There I was, on my way for another night of drinking and debauching when the Lord spoke to me. Just like me talking to you. ‘Charles Macintosh,’ God said, ‘Repent ye of your sins, offer up your soul up to Mine hands and I will make room for thee in the Kingdom of Heaven.’” The Lord apparently spoke in Shakespearian English. “And I haven’t had a drink since, Moira. Not one. Nor,” and here he looked meaningfully at Moira, “blasphemed His name.”

  Oh fuck off, you Christly Jesus old fuck. Moira didn’t say that, of course. But she did think it.

  “Seamus, Seamus.” Luckily, the arrival of the ex-premier distracted Mac before he launched into another proselytizing routine. Even Moira recognized Seamus O’Sullivan, a Liberal Party elder statesman whose successes were legend and whose failures were forgotten. His hair had turned the dull yellow-white of dirty, pissed-on snow. Moira wasn’t sure if the former premier recognized Mac or if his vacant smile was merely a politician’s Pavlovian response to the mention of his name. Mac did not wait for him to reply.

  “Good to see you again, Seamus,” he said as he brought the camera’s viewfinder to his eye. “Only wish it were under happier circumstances. But at least we know Jack is now in a better place.”

  O’Sullivan looked fleetingly into the camera lens, and then moved on.

  “Those two were quite a team,” Mac said to her as the big wooden church doors swallowed the former premier.

  Moira wished she knew more about the interconnectedness of the Nova Scotia Establishment. There were mourners she recognized, lawyers from the big downtown firms, a couple of real estate developers, even the Premier and the Mayor. Surely, they were too young to have worked with Eagleson. Perhaps she should call her father when she got back to the office. He’d know.

  But then she’d have to listen to him berate her again for not following up on that Ward Justice racist-joke story. She’d made the mistake of telling him about the tape recording. But she’d learned her lesson; she hadn’t mentioned what else the archivist had shown her, or the papers that woman who worked with Melesse had given her. She knew she should do something with it. But she didn’t have the energy. Or perhaps she was afraid of asking the Judge for an interview.

  My God, Uhuru Melesse! Moira hadn’t expected to see him here. How did he know the dead guy? Melesse nodded solemnly in her direction as he walked past. He was accompanied by that woman from his office (Shauntay? Chenelle?) who saw Moira, flashed a face full of hostility—was she still angry Moira hadn’t written about the Judge’s decades-ago meeting with the Mounties?—and quickly looked away. Instead of going inside, the two of them huddled near the church entrance, talking as though trying to decide whether they really belonged among the parade of white politicians, lawyers and politicians streaming past them into the church.

  There was a slight stir among the TV camera operators on the sidewalk when a limousine pulled up in front of the church. The Nova Scotia Lieutenant-Governor and her husband got out and solemnly followed her uniformed aide-de-camp into the church. Whoever the dead guy was, Moira thought, he must have been important to merit the presence of the Queen’s representative at his going-away party. She had to stop being cynical. She sounded like her father.

  Speak of the devil . . . there he was, her father, slipping into the church behind the official party! He hadn’t seen her. What was he doing here? She’d barely begun to try to sort that out when she saw Ward Justice himself approaching along Spring Garden Road.

  “Ward, Ward . . .” Mac again. “You’re looking hail-fellow-well-met this morning, my man.” Moira thought he looked old and frail. “How about a little look at the camera for old times’ sake?”

  The Judge ignored him, his head down, shuffling slowly up the stairs.

  “Stuck-up prick,” Mac muttered. Moira only hoped she and Mac didn’t end up in the eternal damnation of hell together. That would be true hell.

  The Judge paused at the top of the stairs to catch his breath. Or was it because he saw Uhuru Melesse standing off to the side? The two men waved tentatively at each other. Melesse approached and shook the Judge’s hand. They were too far away for Moira to know what they were saying. She stole a quick glance at Shondelle—that was her name—but she’d remained rooted in place. Moira would have to find the courage to call the Judge. She would. Someday.

  The Judge’s wife suddenly materialized beside him. Moira recognized her from a couple of Barristers’ Society social functions Mrs. Justice had attended. What was her name? Victoria. As in Queen. Moira was surprised to see them together. Hadn’t she just read a few weeks ago in Frank that the Judge and his wife were “splitsville,” in Frank-speak? “Neither party returned our phone calls so we don’t know the reasons for the marriage meltdown,” the story said, “but friends insist there are no other parties involved. All anyone will say is that the Judge’s wife recently stopped bedding down with the man who’d been her horizontal jogging partner for more than thirty years.”

  Moira was thankful the magazine’s scandal radar, usually just as finely tuned to gossip involving younger members of the media and their liaisons, had missed her own marriage meltdown.

  The Judge and his wife certainly didn’t look splitsville. After the judge had introduced his wife to Melesse and they’d smiled and shaken hands politely, Victoria Justice fussed over her former horizontal jogging partner like a . . . well, a loving wife. Or perhaps a nurse. She turned up his collar to protect him from the wind and then inserted her arm in his and led him into the church.

  Once the Judge and his wife were safely inside, Shondelle rejoined Melesse and, after another short discussion, they went in, too.

  Maybe, Moira thought, she would approach the judge after the service.

  He shouldn’t have come here. And he certainly shouldn’t have brought her. Uhuru an
d Shondelle sat down in the last row. Back of the bus. Heads turned. Curiosity? More? Their surprise—shock?—inevitably morphed into polite nods whenever someone accidentally made eye contact. Uhuru nodded back, felt Shondelle’s silent disapproval. She’d been against this from the beginning. “You don’t owe that man,” she’d said. “That man owes you an apology from the grave.”

  They were at that stage of their relationship now.

  They’d finally got over the hurdle of the first sex. It had been far less traumatic than Uhuru had anticipated in the knowing-it-must-happen-but-not-knowing-when-or-how lead-up. They’d gone for a Sunday drive in Shondelle’s old Volvo. To see the leaves. “Everyone at the law school tells me I have to see the fall foliage in Nova Scotia,” Shondelle had said. Uhuru could not remember the last time he’d even noticed this annual changing of the colours. When he was a kid in Africville? It was more spectacular than he’d imagined. And he said so. Which pleased Shondelle. As if she’d arranged the show herself.

  But the leaves, of course, weren’t the only item on Shondelle’s agenda that day. She’d also arranged for them to visit Gloria Paris, a former resident of Africville who’d moved to a small black community in the Valley after her house was levelled. Shondelle had been told the City used a dump truck to move Mrs. Paris’s belongings and then—once the truck got to its destination—the driver raised the front of the truck bed up and let all her furniture slide off the back, smashing most of it on the sidewalk. When Mrs. Paris complained, some City official—she’d have to find out who—told her she should be grateful they’d even put “that junk” on the truck at all. Her request for compensation was turned down. Shondelle hoped Mrs. Paris might make a compelling witness at trial.

  She would not. She spoke to Uhuru as if he were his father and they were back in the 1940s. “Alzheimer’s,” explained her caregiver. When Shondelle tried to ask her about the relocation, Mrs. Paris acted as if Shondelle weren’t even there. “Now, Lawrence Carter,” she said coquettishly to Uhuru, “when are you gonna settle down with some nice young girl and start a family?”