Sunny Dreams (18 page)

Two things happened that crossed each other in time.

When my dad phoned next he told us that he had seen Jackson: that was the first thing.

We told him that Jackson was dead.

He said, “No, he’s not.” He told us he’d call back after he had spoken to him again.

The second thing was that Jackson’s uncle, Bernard Shirde, his dad’s brother, came to Winnipeg and confirmed that the dead vagrant was not his nephew. Not even close. And then he went home again; we never got to meet him.

I phoned Frank and asked him to ask his dad some questions.

“Mr. Shirde could have saved himself a trip if someone had mentioned to him that the dead man was a Negro,” said Mr. Foote.

My dad phoned back and told Jackson’s story to Helen the way it had been told to him. He told it nervously because of the long distance charges. And then Helen told it to me. I hated Jackson’s story.

“What about Sunny?” I had asked repeatedly in the background when Helen was on the phone.

“What about Sunny?” she finally said to my dad.

“He has her,” she whispered to me after listening for a moment or two.

“Come home, Will,” she said next. “Come home as soon as you can.”

“What do you mean he has her?” I asked when my aunt finally hung up.

“Your father has Sunny with him. They’re coming home,” Helen said. “Jackson’s mother is still in the rest home.”

“What about Mrs. Dunning?” I asked.

“Your dad saw both of them, talked to them both. He’ll explain it all to us when he gets home.”

“It sounds like no one put up much of a fight to keep Sunny,” I said. “Not that I wanted it to be hard for Dad, but…”

“I know what you mean,” said Helen. “It’s hard to imagine.”

My chest hurt and I tried to breathe through the pain. I couldn’t get a satisfying breath. “Dad will be really nice to her, won’t he, Helen? He’ll know what to do? How to be with her?”

“Of course he’ll be nice to her, Violet. He’s doing the absolute best he can. The best he knows how.”

“I wish I’d gone with him,” I said, gasping for more air.

“You’ve got university,” said Helen in her new absent way.

I didn’t mention that I hadn’t been attending. I was always heading out somewhere, so she hadn’t noticed or at least hadn’t let on.

The papers then reported that the man found dead by the tracks wasn’t Jackson Shirde after all. He was a Negro and they didn’t know who he was. They revealed that he had been covered with tar and thistles and that the police believed foul play was involved but had arrested no one. He was naked under the tar and his clothes had been found nearby, cut to shreds, with Jackson Shirde’s identification in a pocket. Hence, the mix-up. That was all the paper had to say about it other than that he was very thin.

Foul play indeed. Play didn’t get much fouler.

It was Tag; I knew it; we all knew it. Benny stepped up to identify him and it was then that one paper reported: The thin Negro has been identified as Taggart Woodman of Detroit, Michigan. Age: eighteen. The other paper didn’t bother.

I went over to see Benny the day of the identification. He was still living at the construction site on Crawford.

He told me that Tag’s head was gone and that the tar had made a terrible mess of his body. Benny told the officials that he recognized Tag’s hands and his overall size. That had been good enough for whoever was in charge.

“They didn’t clean him up very well,” he said now. “I hate to think of his family seeing him like that.”

“Will they be sending him home to Detroit?” I asked, deciding to wait a while, maybe a good long while, before thinking about the state Tag Woodman was in.

“They haven’t found his parents yet, but I’m going to pester them till they do. Maybe I’ll take him home when they find them. I would talk them into burying him without looking at him.”

“That’s very kind, Benoit.”

He grunted — a French-Canadian grunt.

“They let me sit with him a while,” he said. “That is how I knew it was Tag. No one would have been able to know, to…rec…”

“Recognize,” I said.

“Yes, to recognize what was left under that sheet, except maybe the boy’s mother.”

“Oh, Benoit.”

“Yes. But he spoke to me, Violet. Not out loud, of course. But Tag spoke to me and he seemed, how do you say? at peace.”

I nodded.

“He wasn’t angry or hurting. I felt a little sadness from him, maybe, but mostly a quiet peace.”

“That’s good, Benoit.”

“It was Tag all right.” He sighed.

“I’m glad you were here to identify him, Benoit, and that he didn’t just get lost in a pile of….”

“Dead tramps,” said Benny.

“Yes.”

“You asked me one day, you said, how do your trances help?”

“Yes?”

“I am not sure how to explain it, Vi. I know I cannot go back through time or anything. But I swear my training put me in touch with Tag there in that cold morgue room. I swear. If I keep at it, something more could happen. And if it does not…well, I liked very much saying goodbye to Tag.”

“Why did it happen, Benny?” I asked. “Why would anyone kill him?”

“I do not know, Violet.” He sighed again. “Maybe we will never know. Some people do not need a very good reason to kill.”

Not good enough, I thought.

Benny told me then that Tag had been a religious man, heavily into everlasting life, Jesus, the whole thing.

“Good,” I said. “That probably helped him meet his death.”

“Yeah,” said Benny. “He was an Episcopalian.”

When I left Benoit, I caught a streetcar that would take me to the King George to see Warren. I was mad at that shitheel Jackson for being alive. I looked out the window and tried to decide on the words I would use to tell Warren about Tag. Getting nowhere with that, I realized I would just have to let it happen. Warren would help me. Besides which, he had already told me. He already knew, thanks to that awful Nurse Parnell.

The streets of Winnipeg had changed; it was more than just the autumn light. It’s me, I thought; I’m seeing things differently now. Some edges appeared sharper, pitch-dark against the light, others were blurry, like I needed glasses. I could have sworn some things were missing entirely from the landscape while others were brand new, without a speck of dust on them.

Warren had already done his crying, he explained, when he didn’t shed a tear.

Robert came to join us but Warren asked him to leave us for a while. We had some private things to talk about.

Jackson had told Benoit, Benoit had told Tag and Tag had told Warren that Jackson’s mission while in Winnipeg was to inform the Palmer family that their daughter, Beatrice, was alive and living in Montreal. He wanted to put things right.

But he had struggled. He was afraid of causing trouble for his mother, whom he described as fragile. And there was finding out that my own mother had killed herself after the baby was snatched. That added another layer of horror. Also there was fear of the consequences of his own involvement after all those years of knowing and not speaking up.

It surprised me a little that Tag had confided in Warren. Surely the age difference would have limited the kind of talk that passed between them. It turned out that Warren had heard the three of them talking about the situation: Jackson, Benoit, and Tag. He heard enough that he wanted to know more. He pestered Tag till he told him the whole story, that day I had found them whittling outside Tag’s tent.

“Why didn’t you tell me, Warren?” I asked now.

“I wasn’t supposed to,” he said.

How could I blame Warren for anything? It wasn’t his fault three grown men were careless enough to get him involved in something so sinister.

“How did Jackson find us?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said Warren.

It wouldn’t have been hard, I realized. With all the publicity surrounding Sunny’s kidnapping a matter of public record, it would be easy enough for a curious teenager to find out what he was looking for.

Jackson came back on the train with my dad and Sunny. Helen drove the Buick to the station where I laid eyes on my sister for the first time in eleven years. There aren’t many hallowed moments in one person’s life: this was one of mine. She smiled shyly at me and I loved her instantly and completely.

She wore loose comfy trousers and a modern haircut. The word fashionable came to mind. Someone had been taking care of certain of her needs, anyway.

We all went back to the house where Helen and I served tea and tomato sandwiches and angel food cake with butter icing.

Sunny sat close to Jackson and it occurred to me then that I would have him on the edges my life for the long run. This brother and sister were not going to let go of each other. I looked at Helen, wondering if she was realizing the same thing. We were practically related to Jackson. She was brisk and busy, giving nothing away but kindness to Sunny.

Words fell out of Jackson’s mouth like miniature dead sparrows and landed on the hardwood floor in front of the chesterfield. Helen’s words fared better, but she was trying for Sunny’s sake. I don’t think I spoke at all and my dad said very little. He was exhausted. He did ask Jackson to tell his story again, which he did.

Jackson had gone looking for Tag and found him at the river, on the other side, below Dominion Envelope and Cartons. They sat and talked and were approached by three men. He recognized Dirk Botham from the W.C. Fields night at the movies. The other two were unfamiliar to him but they looked alike so he assumed they were brothers.

Dirk did the talking. He told Jackson to get lost forever. They forced him to hand over his
ID
and they put it in Tag’s pocket. Tell no one. Leave town. Don’t even go back to your camp and get your stuff. They talked about what they would do to Tag: they wouldn’t hurt him if Jackson left; they would hurt him very badly if he didn’t. They also described what they would do to Benoit and even to Helen and me. Jackson didn’t go into detail and we didn’t ask. Their scare tactics worked.

Why couldn’t Tag just have gone home to Detroit? I wondered. Brother or no brother. I couldn’t bear that Jackson had left him with Dirk Botham and the Willises. I hated him for that.

Jackson went on to say that Tag had tried convincing the criminals that he was preparing to leave Winnipeg the very day they had caught up with him. He had found no trace of his brother and the hope of finding him had been the only thing keeping him here. He assured them that if they let him go they would never see him again. His plea fell on deaf ears. Tag encouraged Jackson to leave, told him he’d be all right.

“Both of us knew it wasn’t true, but I didn’t guess how bad it would be,” Jackson said. “Maybe Tag did. So I left him with those men. God help me, I’m ashamed of that,” he said. “I’ll be ashamed till the day I die.” Tears streamed down Jackson’s face. He looked like he hadn’t slept since he left Tag at the river

Sunny took one of his hands in both of hers.

My dad phoned Mr. Foote and then he and Jackson went down to the police station to see him.

Nothing about Jackson Shirt was extra good. But he wasn’t bad either. He was just a boy. And he did bring Sunny back to us. That was as good as good could get.

Helen and I took Sunny and her small suitcase up to the spare room, which was no longer spare. It was Sunny’s and we had painted it a pale yellow while we waited for her to come home.

“I’ll rest till Jackson comes back,” she said. Her voice was so sweet I wanted to swallow it.

When Helen asked her what she would like to be called she said, “Sunny, please. I like the name Sunny.”

Helen showed her the bathtub and we let her be.

We took cups of tea out to the verandah, where we sat in silence.

A few minutes later, Bill, the girl hobo, trotted up the street towards us with Tippy at the end of a leash.

“Oh, thank God,” I said and ran out to meet them.

Tippy squealed and jumped up on me.

“You crazy girl,” I said. “If you’re so happy to see me, why didn’t you just come over here in the first place?”

Helen gave Bill food and drink and a small amount of cash. She offered her a bath, too, but the girl said no and went on her way.

Dirk Botham was soon rounded up and he was quick to finger the Willis twins and Gert Walker, too, who he insisted put them up to it. She was as guilty as any tar-wielding teenager. I wanted everyone but Warren to know that. She blamed our family and our strange men for Warren’s polio. Specifically, she blamed Tag. I witnessed her reaction that day in her kitchen when she saw her little boy frolicking in the field with the coloured man. In her mind he may as well have injected Warren with a syringe full of the paralyzing disease.

There was no logic, but she didn’t need any. She just needed someone to blame. So she and Dirk Botham gunned for Tag and they enlisted the dirty Willis brothers to help them.

But there was a connection to Sunny. A contorted, misinformed, unseeing connection that Isabelle discovered at Jimmie’s Coffee Shop. She overheard part of a conversation between the Willis twins. She reported it to me and I passed it on to my dad and Mr. Foote and it was folded into the admixture of evil.

One of the Willises had eavesdropped on Tag and Warren one day as they sat together in Tag’s camp. He hid behind a bush just for the heck of it and listened in. Tag had been talking about Jackson’s mission to tell us about Sunny.

Those good words, those brave words, those right-thing-to-do words entered that Willis head and sat there a while, changing shape a little. By the time they made their way to the other Willis they held little resemblance to their original form. They were all wrong.

The twins remembered that time long ago when they had helped search for a stolen baby. They hadn’t forgotten that reward money. Maybe there was still a chance for them to claim it. When they were finished with their talk, Tag was the kidnapper and it was their job to put him to rights. Never mind Gert’s theory that he had given Warren polio. They didn’t get that he would have been five years old at the time of Sunny’s disappearance. A fact like that wasn’t applicable in the Willis world.

“Well, someone to do with him then,” Lump Willis cried out in court. “If it wasn’t him it musta been someone to do with the nigra.”