Punishment (37 page)

“I’m not there just now.” And I explained that I was recuperating at Caddy’s. “You probably remember Caddy Gillis, now Stewart.”

“I remember Caddy well,” he said smiling warmly. “Saint of a woman, Caddy is.”

“So what’s new at the store,” Caddy asked, as I unfolded newspapers on the table. And checked by an instinctive caution I said, “Nothing. The usual.”

And then, “I suppose I should be thinking of getting back to the Shore Road one of these days. These hands are almost useful again.”

“I noticed,” she said. I couldn’t see her face. “I thought you liked it here.”

“I do. I love it here. I just don’t want to end up like the dog.”

She performed an exaggerated double take. “Dead, you mean? No danger of that here, unless …” She smiled.

“I meant getting too attached,” I said.

“Well, why don’t you let me worry about that.”

“I think I’ll lie down for a bit.”

“You do that.” Neutral tone, expression.

That afternoon, lying on her bed, it all came back, the awful night, March 22. The images emerged around me slowly like wisps of fog, or smoke seeping underneath a door, small scraps of particular memory hovering—the dazed and desperate expression on his face as he lunged with the baseball bat, the stunned shock when I hit him with my fist, the baseball bat clattering in hypnotic slowness on the floor, the grip end rising slowly toward my outstretched hand, the feral violence in his face, a look I’d
seen a hundred times in a hundred faces. And then he was crumpled on the floor and I was standing over him, Neil crouched and roaring:
“Grab a fucking leg.”
And me, dazed, wondering who or what had done this thing.
“Grab that fuuuuck-ing leg!”

I rose from the bed, struggling to breathe, paced the floor for a while, trying to suppress the rising panic. I breathed deeply several times then walked downstairs. Caddy was at the kitchen table, the newspaper open before her, and looked at me over the top of her reading glasses. “That was an efficient nap,” she said.

I sat in what had become my usual place.

“I was thinking of pouring a drink,” she said. “Could I interest you in joining me?”

I nodded. And the relief flowed through me, the prospect of a drink or simply being in her healing presence.

I’ve often asked myself: What makes an ordinary man a killer? But am I so ordinary? Did I intend to kill? I responded to an immediate danger from instinct, training and experience. The baseball bat became a baton. How often have I wielded a baton against a man who believed that by brute force he could gain control of some small aspect of his life or, in extreme cases, an institution by disabling or killing me? The prison system taught me that the margin between life and death is frequently as narrow as a hesitation. Had I intended to kill Strickland with the baseball bat? Another question for perpetuity.

That evening over dinner I said to Caddy, “Sooner or later we’ll have to talk about it.”

“About what?”

“You know.”

Her eyes were full of kindness and she touched my hand gently. “In due course.” Then she smiled. “Hey, you didn’t flinch when I touched the hand. You must be getting better.”

“We’re going to have a visitor,” I said.

She looked puzzled.

“You remember Jimmy MacInnis? We all went to school together.”

It took half a minute for her to work it out. “What does he want?”

“He didn’t say. I met him at the store. He said he’d like to drop by.”

“I’ll be out,” she said. Then she stood and started gathering the dishes.

Before we went to sleep that night I asked: “Do you think we could make this work long term?”

“What does ‘long term’ mean anymore?”

“You have a point.”

“How about one day at a time.”

“That’s good enough for me.”

Jimmy MacInnis called three days later, just before noon. Caddy answered, handed me the phone. He asked if two o’clock would be convenient. I covered the mouthpiece. “He wants to come by at two.”

“Sure,” she said. “I have to go to town anyway.”

“You wouldn’t consider staying?”

“What would you want me here for?”

“Moral support.”

She laughed. “What do you need that for? You’re the guy who got half-burned to death trying to save the asshole.”

Was that sarcasm or the official story? Was that how March 22 and Strickland’s death would be remembered? I felt a wave of nausea.

“Suit yourself,” I said and I left the kitchen to sit alone in the living room, watching the road as she drove off toward town.

He arrived in a rental SUV. When he knocked on the front door I led him through to the kitchen. She had put a pot of coffee on to brew before she left and I felt my spirits lift a little.

“Caddy Gillis,” he said. “If she’s the one I’m thinking of, everybody had a crush on her. Remember how we’d say somebody had the ‘notion’ for somebody or other. We’d call it the
naw-shun
. Every so often the old expressions come back like that.” He shook his head, drifting back through memory. “The old Gaelic people would say that if you were sweet on somebody. We all had the
naw-shun
for Caddy, if I recall.”

There was a long silence as each of us attempted to find a place to start, one of the free ends of a tangled piece of rope.

“I don’t suppose you had much Gaelic yourself, growing up,” he said at last.

“No, it was pretty well gone by then.”

“Sad,” he said. “Those old people were solid, man. Built this
place to last. Integrity was what they had, I guess it’s what they left for us. Gave us their example. I suppose we can forgive them for taking the language with them when they went.” He sipped his coffee, studied the ceiling for a while.

“I heard plenty of it as a kid,” he said. “Hung on to a few fragments but that’s about all. Their gumption though, the ability to make something out of nothing. That stayed with me.”

“Yes,” I said, boredom creeping in around the apprehension.

“Life, eh. Looking back on it I guess that’s how it’ll seem at the end—a bunch of fragments.” He chuckled. Another long silence.

“Anyway,” Jimmy said, sitting straighter, taking a sip of coffee. “I’m not here to rake over what happened up at the old place. I’ve heard enough to get the picture.”

I made a dismissive gesture with my pink and scabby hands, but said nothing. Just listen, I thought.

“I talked to Neil Archie. Jesus, he hasn’t changed a bit.” He laughed. “Neil was telling me how you tried to save poor Dwayne, how you almost ended up … yourself.”

I shrugged. “I don’t remember much.”

“I understand … but I just wanted you to know, I appreciate what you tried to do that night and before that.”

He tilted back, studying his cup. His hands were large and seemed permanently stained by work. “Dwayne used to tell me back when he was doing time that you were one of the few people in the system who took an interest in him as something more than a number. I thought to myself, I hope someday I’ll get a chance to express my appreciation, never expecting the circumstances, of course.”

I nodded, studying the floor. I glanced over his head at the kitchen wall clock. It said 2:20. “Dwayne,” I said finally, “was in many ways his own worst enemy.” And I felt an instant flutter of relief at the sound of truth.

“Oh man,” MacInnis said enthusiastically. “Truer words were never spoken.”

And I realized then that he hadn’t come with perilous, unanswerable questions, but to seek some form of absolution.

“I can’t begin to tally up the sleepless nights, the pages and pages I wrote to Dwayne, trying, I suppose, to be his dad. No criticism intended, but my brother was old school. Hands-off to a fault, if you know what I mean.”

“Yes,” I said.

“I mean, we all let him down, one way or another, and we have to live with that. But at the end of the day, everybody, including poor Dwayne, has to face up to the consequences of his own actions. And boy, poor Dwayne had plenty to face.”

I stood. “Let me get you some fresh.”

“Appreciate it,” he said.

And then for a while we relaxed into a comparison of memories of how we left the place, little more than boys. The chat was smooth and easy. How I ended up in prisons, how he, like so many young men from here, found his way to northern Ontario, used a connection from home to get work in hard-rock mining. “It was up to yourself then, boy. Some old contractor or mine captain would look you up and down, his face saying, ‘If you weren’t from home I wouldn’t give you the fuckin time of day.’ You had one chance and that was all I asked for.”

He started as underground labourer, then became a timber man in shaft development. He gradually learned to handle all the complex new machinery for driving drifts and raises, excavating caverns called stopes, but all the time watching and learning bigger things—geology and engineering, leadership. Eventually he won a subcontract from someone else from home, someone big in the specialized work of sinking mine shafts. That was the break he needed and it came at the exact right time.

“I could be as wild as anybody, but right around then I was settling down. Which is what we all do, sooner or later. Right?” Afterwards he continued the tradition, making it his policy to share his good fortune. “It was just good sense, anyway—guys from here are the best miners in the country. By far. So I was really doing myself the favour, taking on the young fellows from here who’d be showing up like I did with the arse out of their pants. Any more of that coffee?”

I stood.

“I don’t know how often I begged Dwayne to come on up, even after the penitentiary, I was ready to give him a chance. He’d have been good at it I know, strong and smart, no lack of initiative there. Brains to burn. But like I always say, a fella can be too smart for his own good. Poor Dwayne. It seemed he was always looking for the shortcut to where guys like you and me got taking the long way around.”

The clock now said three o’clock. “Christ,” he said. “Look at the time. Let me get to the point of why I came here.”

He told me he’d spent a lot of time thinking since Dwayne’s death and had concluded that what the place needed more
than anything else was a facility that the young people could consider theirs, a community youth centre.

“I love that concept—community,” he said. “It takes in everything we’ve been talking about. The continuity of quality, the gifts the old-timers left us with, all preserved in the community. People getting by, sharing and helping one another. Every chance I’ve had I’ve tried to put something back into the community.”

Now, he felt, it was time to put some serious money into a community centre for the young people. Maybe save one or two from turning out like Dwayne. He said he’d want extensive local participation because he’d learned that top-down charity never works. People need to feel they have a stake in something. And there’s also the practical reality that building something is the easy part. The challenge is the long-term operation, the maintenance, the continuity.

“What do you think?”

I fought the skepticism. I really did. “I think it’s a very generous thought.”

“Maybe name the place after Dwayne. I was thinking how that would look to people driving through—the Dwayne Strickland Community Centre.” His voice broke slightly as he said it.

Mercifully it was nearly over. I could imagine Caddy’s response—and heard it shortly after: that plan has about as much chance as a fart in a windstorm. But for the moment, Jimmy Joe MacInnis and I were united in some kind of plan to keep Dwayne’s rehabilitated memory alive.

“He was really determined to turn his life around this time,” Jimmy said, standing in the middle of the kitchen, ready to
leave. “I’ve learned to read guys, to recognize the bullshit when I hear it. He was serious this time. When I was talking to him, just before he died, he’d decided to move up to Sudbury, take a job there, fresh start. He was genuine. You could see it in his eyes. The eyes don’t lie, man.”

“You were here just before he died?”

“No, he was up.”

“Up?”

“Up to Sudbury, a flying trip to check the place out.”

“Do you remember when?”

“I think it was March 19 he arrived. I remember all the talk was about the Iraq business. Dwayne had some interesting theories about that. Yes. It was on the twentieth, him and me and a couple of other guys were in the Nickel Range having a few beers, watching all that go-ahead on television. Next day, March 21, he came back. Never knowing, eh.”

“Strickland didn’t kill my dog!”

Mary was studying me from behind the counter with an expression of confusion and alarm. “I could have told you that,” she said.

“How did you know? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It didn’t cross my mind that you’d have blamed him.”

“Jesus, Mary.”

“I thought you knew. He wasn’t even here. He was gone somewhere. He didn’t tell me where he was going but he came over and asked me to keep an eye on his place. I know he was worried about people breaking in. He’d mentioned that there
were people always snooping around. Then after that business with the drugs, he was really paranoid.”

“I was sure he did it.”

“No, Tony,” Mary said. “Dwayne loved dogs.”

Caddy was back from town when I returned from the store and suddenly I dreaded seeing her, telling her what I had learned—and then the story of what really happened, the nauseating truth: how I’d become an accessory to a crime that will haunt me until I die.

I quietly backed my truck out of her driveway and drove down to the Shore Road. My little house had the abandoned look of the many summer places that dot the coastline now. The kitchen door was stuck again. I shouldered through, swearing quietly, resentful of the chill, the dampness, the unimaginative utility of the place. I stood in the middle of the kitchen assessing the haphazard collection of cast-offs that passed for furnishing. The new television screen loomed in the living room, an alien intrusion of modern design and purpose. Old Charlie would have been perfectly at home with all the rest. I sat. I couldn’t stay much longer at Caddy’s place but living here alone was little more than survival. The worst bachelor dive I’d lived in during my days before Anna had been models of contemporary style and comfort compared to this.