The Western Light (12 page)

18

AT FIRST, NOBODY NOTICED ME. THE DANCERS FLEW ROUND AND round the tennis court to the “Beer Barrel Polka.” How could I tell anyone about John stealing the Packard when they sped by me so fast? A dejected-looking Max stood at the bar with a red-haired woman who had linked her arm tightly with his. As soon as Max saw me watching them, he turned away, embarrassed. I looked around for Little Louie, but she had disappeared. Later, I found out she had hid in her bedroom for most of the party to avoid meeting Max's wife. While I stood wondering what to do, my grandmother emerged from a group of guests. “You got out of bed, Mary.” Her eyes lit on my pyjamas. “Is something wrong?”

“Yes, something is terribly wrong,” I replied, struggling to keep my voice steady. “John Pilkie is stealing your car.”

Big Louie did a double take. “Where, Dearie? Where is he?” “He's by the carriage shed. Hurry.”

Big Louie took my hand and shouted, “Everyone stay where they are! There's an intruder on the grounds!” Frightened whispers rippled through the crowd. “Is it the hockey killer? A voice asked. “It's Mad Killer Pilkie! I saw him on the driveway,” somebody answered. A woman cried: “I want to go home!” “Nobody's going anywhere until we find out where he is,” Big Louie announced in a firm, calm voice. She told Uncle Willie and Maurice to search the grounds, while Big Louie stared down anyone who tried to leave.

A few minutes later, Uncle Willie and Maurice came towards us with a man in a brown fedora and rubber boots. “Mary, is this who you saw?” Uncle Willie asked. I nodded, and a look of relief passed across my grandmother's face. “Donald is Maurice's brother,” my grandmother said. She turned to her guests. “False alarm!” she cried. “Strike up the band.” Then she noticed my mortified face. “No harm done, Dearie,” she whispered, squeezing my hand. “But it's time for bed.”

MY GRANDMOTHER TUCKED THE SHEETS around my shoulders, her face pink from the effort of climbing the stairs. “Tell me why you thought it was Pilkie,” she asked in an interested voice.

“It sounded like him. His cough, I mean.”

“You thought it was Pilkie because you heard a man cough?”

“He had on a brown fedora and John wears one too …”

“You call him John, do you? Well, it wasn't him, was it? It was Donald relieving himself in the bushes. He said you were talking a lot of nonsense about John Pilkie before you ran off.”

My mouth went dry. “I … I told him to run away.”

My grandmother sank down on the bed beside me, her eyes soft. “Forbidden fruit tastes sweet, doesn't it? But look here. I can't cope with Little Louie and you falling for the wrong men. All right, Dearie?” She stood up, yawning, and stretched, the lamplight glowing on the ripeness of her heavy breasts, her calves still shapely below the hem of her dress.

“I was wrong about John,” I burst out. “He would never steal your car. And he's kind too. He rescued me from the Bug House boys.”

“Ssssh. Not another peep out of you. Now go to sleep.” She left, and I lay there mulling over what Big Louie said. She compared my interest in John to Little Louie's feelings for Max. The thought shocked me. The idea of S-E-X with anyone felt embarrassing, like the bloody wads Sal wrapped with toilet paper and hid in the garbage. Sal called having her period coarse names like “the curse” or “going on the rag.” Yet the napkins were behind Little Louie and Sal's appeal. Women had some secret thing men needed, and this gory affair made men want to love and protect them. Would John Pilkie want me if I started having periods, too?

When I was sure Big Louie was gone, I stole a sanitary napkin from a box under her bathroom sink and stuffed the bulky napkin into a pair of underpants, fastening its ends with a belt I had found in the box. Then I walked around the bedroom closing my eyes and willing my body to spill over with blood so I could be a capital W-O-M-A-N instead of a N-O-N–B-L-E-E-D-E-R (i.e., N.B.). But how would the blood come out? Like the drip-dripdrip of a leaky tap? Or would it pour forth like the flood waters in Genesis chapter six, verse seventeen, drenching everything with Biblical slime? Or would it go glug-glug-glug like honey from an upside down jar? I walked around concentrating, but after an hour and forty-five minutes of hard thinking, nothing happened. So I shredded the napkin, pulling off the spidery layer of gauze to see what was underneath and all I found was a lump of soft material that looked like cotton batten or Kleenex.

AT BREAKFAST THE NEXT MORNING, Big Louie didn't scold me. “My guests will talk about the party for years,” my grandmother said. “Anyway, I was the one who joked about Pilkie stealing my car. I should never have said that in front of the child.”

Uncle Willie laughed. “Mary's imagination ran away with her.”

“
Quelle surprise
, huh?” Little Louie winked at me and I dropped my eyes so I couldn't see them smiling their heads off.

“Mouse, I don't want to hear that man's name again!” my grandmother said. “Do you understand?”

“I guess so.” I kept my eyes lowered. My grandmother could make me promise not to talk about John but she couldn't stop me from hearing about him. There'd been several Pilkie sightings. When Big Louie wasn't around, Uncle Willie read the newspaper stories out to Little Louie and me at meal times. One day he was spotted in Detroit — the next, in Dearborn, Michigan. Uncle Willie said if he were Pilkie, he would escape to the American side, where he'd support himself folding clothes in a Port Huron laundromat. I doubted Uncle Willie would be any good at folding clothes, but I didn't argue because it was a relief to know that John was still at large.

19

ON AUGUST 7, THE POLICE CAPTURED JOHN AT MITCHELL'S BAY, the fishing village where my great-grandfather anchored after his schooner ran into the oil slick. August 7 was also the day the United States launched Explorer 6 from Cape Canaveral; the story about John was on page two, so fortunately, there were plenty of photos of John and Mitchell's Bay, which was so small you could count the houses: twelve along with three fishing lodges and a motel sign that read, BASS FISHING AND DUCK HUNTING. The black-and-white photographs showed the beach where he was apprehended. Beyond lay the reedy sandbar where Pilkie went into the water when he tried to escape the cops.

Of course, it wasn't just the Petrolia paper that ran a story on him.
The Detroit Free Press
also covered his capture. John was acquiring the kind of fame that drove reporters to stay up all night composing sentences that inflamed the imaginations of readers like me.
The Detroit Free Press
described him wading out into the lake to avoid the police. When he realized he was trapped, the newspaper reported that he raised his arms like an Old Testament prophet and the crowd on the shore applauded. I could see the scene as clearly as if I had been there myself: The shallow lake, dead calm and hot as bathwater. The sun roasting everyone's faces, while he wades farther and farther from the crowds on the shore, the water no higher than his waist.

On the shore, the policemen wait, their hands on their holsters.

He dives into the lake. For a few minutes, there isn't a ripple. Then a head breaks the surface, and he stands up, water streaming down his face and chest. He raises his arms in surrender and a woman screams, “Hi, Gentleman Jack!” He blows her a kiss and walks back to shore as if he's wading through molasses, wearing the same smile he gave me when he rescued me from the Bug House boys.

In my imagination, he looked triumphant, but when I stared at the newspaper photograph that showed him leaving the beach, his head down, he appeared discouraged, as if he expected them to lock him up and throw away the key. I thought of his words that afternoon by the icehouse: “Don't let the turkeys get you down.” Did he have any hope of getting his case reviewed?
The Detroit Free Press
said that he intended to keep pleading his cause from inside the asylum, and that made me feel a little better.

ON THE LAST NIGHT OF our holiday, my aunt was talking in low tones to Max in the parlour below my bedroom. Per usual, I listened through the heating vent. At first I couldn't understand a word, because Max was playing the piano while they talked. His voice drifted up to me, singing the song my aunt liked: “List while I woo thee with soft melody. Gone are the cares of life's busy throng. Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me!” He sang the chorus two more times. He didn't use the same fake melodramatic voice that Uncle Willie did when he sang “Clementine.” He sounded serious and sad; Little Louie didn't laugh. I put my eye to the iron grille of the vent and saw the orange light from my grandmother's Tiffany lamps shining on their blond heads. How natural my aunt and Max looked together. With their bright hair and tall, athletic bodies, they could have been brother and sister and something else, although I had no idea what that something else was. Now the piano stopped. Max tilted up Little Louie's chin and kissed her while his other hand disappeared inside her blouse. I imagined it roving like a fox snake across my aunt's bare skin. (To be honest, I didn't know if Little Louie went around without a brassiere, but my grandmother never wore them or underpants either because Big Louie was a freedom-loving flapper.)

“Don't touch me like that,” my aunt said and jerked away.

He groaned. “You know how I feel about you.”

“Then why are you with her?”

“Louie, I can't walk out on her when she's pregnant. It's not right.”

“Your child's not going to thank you for staying in a bad situation. Not when he grows up. Your child will think you were unfair to yourself.”

“I'm aware of that. But what else can I do? Please try to understand my situation, darling.”

Little Louie raised her voice. “I don't want to understand. And I won't, either. You got yourself into this situation. Now get yourself out of it!”

Down the hall, a door opened. Heavy footsteps followed.

Leaning over the banister, my grandmother shouted, “Who's making that racket? I'm trying to sleep. Did you hear me, Little Louie?”

“I heard you,” my aunt called.

Satisfied, my grandmother disappeared down the hall, the floorboards shivering under her weight. A moment later, the front door closed and my aunt began slowly coming up the stairs. I peeked through the crack in the door and caught a glimpse of her face. She looked as lonely as a person could look and frightened, too.

The next morning, my aunt and I kissed Big Louie goodbye and the two of us set off for home in our station wagon, my aunt's face glum. She drove chewing Wrigley's gum and didn't offer a stick to me. Finally, I asked for a piece. “Why didn't you speak up sooner?” my aunt asked. “Too much pride, huh?” She smiled slightly when I nodded and gave me a stick of Wrigley's. Then she didn't say another word for hours. I figured that she was worrying about Max and all the dumb things that made up her life back in Madoc's Landing.

20

WE WERE BACK IN BREBEUF COUNTY. THE WIND FROM THE GREAT Bay blew its fresh damp smell in our faces as my aunt and I stood at the top of the headland facing Madoc's Landing. She said she wanted to put off our return for as long as she could, and I knew better than to pester her with questions.

Across the huge inlet, our town looked no bigger than a lone seed in a giant watermelon. You'd never know that people could live in the tiny houses lining the shore, or that somebody like me belonged to one of them. I imagined that I could see our house near the trees on Bug House hill, and that my father was there waiting for us, his calls done for the day. Maybe he, too, like my aunt and me, was looking at the horizon where the pale limestone tower of the Western Light lay in a hopeless muddle of shoals, twelve miles out in the open, as the open water was called. It made me happy to think about my father again and, before I knew it, I was telling my aunt about the generations of Bradford families who ran a fishing station near the lighthouse and brought the whitefish and lake trout over to Owen Sound, most of them never learning to swim. I wanted to cheer her up and make her love the Bay the way Morley and Ben and I loved it, and maybe the way John Pilkie loved it, too. For me, it was a deep-down feeling of lastingness that had to do with the water and the rocks. The Bay was closer than the stars, I explained, but every bit as remote and mysterious. It had the oldest exposed rocks in the world and its deep waters kept us cool in the humid summers of Brebeuf County. “The Great Refrigerator,” as Morley called it. It was so much deeper and colder than the shallows of Lake St. Clair where John had been captured. Little Louie listened quietly, but when I told her that the Bay reached a depth of 540 feet near the entrance to Lake Huron, she shuddered. “Mary, deep water scares the heck out of me.” She spoke in the sad, frustrated tone she had used with Max the night before. Then she climbed back in our car.

Stung, I got in too. If Morley or John were with me, they could have shown my aunt why the Bay was wonderful. They both grew up beside it, although you would be hard-pressed to find two more different men. They swam in its same cool depths, and felt the freshening of the same westerly winds. Morley and John were children of water, while my aunt came from a typical southwestern Ontario landscape with mile after mile of flat, furrowed fields. Like Morley and John, I was a child of water; I wondered if my aunt would ever be able to understand us.

I WOKE UP AS THE station wagon turned into our driveway, the broad shape of our house rising up out of the darkness. The yellow light from its windows spilled across the large lawn and illuminated the back of a man standing at our side door. The door faced the backyard, not the street, and there was something odd about him waiting at an entrance we didn't use. Morley's patients rarely came to our home after hours. When the man saw us, he pulled his fedora down to hide his face and ran off.

“He was one of Chief Doucette's officers,” I whispered.

“Ssssh, not now,” my aunt said. Squaring her shoulders, she walked up the kitchen steps, a suitcase in each hand.

I trailed after her, glad for the dark. I'd spent over seven hours in the car and Hindrance felt so stiff I had to drag my leg in a dumb half-limp-half-shuffle.

When he heard us, Morley rushed into the kitchen. “Make yourself a cup of cocoa, girls,” he said before he hurried back into the living room. “I'm not ready for you.”

Little Louie put down our suitcases, scowling, and lit a cigarette, while I peeked around the swing door. In the living room, Morley was sticking a needle into the arm of a man with a rolled-up sleeve. The man watched my father do it with a wondering, childlike expression. Then the man rolled down his sleeve and hurried out the side door. I ducked back into the kitchen.

“I left a message with Sal that we were coming home today,” my aunt said as Morley came in.

Morley shook his head. “I didn't get it.”

“What kind of shots were you giving the men?” I asked.

“Penicillin,” Morley said. “The drug cures all sorts of diseases.”

“And what disease do these men have?” my aunt said.

Morley hesitated. “It's not for young ears. And there's something else. I don't want you to speak of this to anyone.”

My aunt's face registered shock. “All right, Dr. Bradford.” Without another word, she took me upstairs to bed.

When my aunt went into her bedroom, I crept to the top of the back stairs and listened as somebody else came in by the side door. Perhaps it was the police officer who had been waiting outside, but I couldn't get a good look at the man's face. The patient didn't talk about what was wrong with him, and my father was careful not to mention it. The conversation was about the hockey season starting up in the fall, and I overheard my father say the Rats would do better this year. The Rats had lost the season before, but like all the hockey fans in Madoc's Landing, Morley was always hopeful the next year would be better.

Downstairs, the man said, “Pilkie pulled a knife on the guard.”

“Pilkie wouldn't hurt anyone intentionally, son. The knife was blunt,” my father replied.

Their voices faded away, and I hurried to my bedroom window in time to see a figure disappearing down the lane by our maple trees.

At breakfast Sal told Little Louie and me that the men had the love disease. “They get a shot every four hours. For thirty-six hours, eh? Or their noses will fall off.”

“The love disease hurts you?” I asked.

Sal snickered. “You're too little, Lady Jane. When you get the curse, you'll find out soon enough.”

I drew back as if Sal had struck me, and my aunt said quickly: “I realize Dr. Bradford means well. But I don't think this sort of thing is a good influence on Mary.”

“Well, it's typical of Doc Bradford,” Sal snapped. “He's the only doctor in town who'll get up in the night to give it to them.”

“I guess Dr. Bradford can do no wrong,” Little Louie said coldly. Then she went back to eating her soft-boiled egg. Sal started doing the dishes, making a lot of noise. I thought about telling them that one of Chief Doucette's officers had received a shot of penicillin from Morley. But I nixed the idea in case Little Louie told Sal about me imagining I saw John hiding in the cedars near the Great House. I didn't want Sal saying my imagination was running away with me again, although it usually did.