Punishment (40 page)

I could tell even in the gloom that they were elderly, the couple seated in the pew near the confessional at the front, to the right of the sanctuary. I stayed well back, not that there was any danger of recognition. I just felt uncomfortable, like someone showing up at a food bank when he could easily afford to buy
the groceries. A little voice had nagged, even as I parked outside, “You didn’t really believe in this when you had the faith … you saw it as free therapy.” But the voice of reason replied: So what’s wrong with that
? If you were Jewish, I’d tell you to go and talk to the rabbi
. Shouldn’t a priest be at least as useful as a rabbi? Confession is their main thing, right?

I sat, examining my conscience as I was trained to do at the age of six in this very place, trying to find language that was explicit and yet sufficiently evasive to prevent a prolonged discussion. I knew that the priest was fairly young—an aberration in these materialistic times—and well liked in the parish for a sense of humour and a pragmatic flexibility where so much of the doctrine as currently interpreted was exclusively rigid.

An old lady emerged from the small curtained space and an old man went in. He stayed considerably longer than she had and I tried to imagine why. What could he possibly have done that would require so much contrition? He eventually emerged, slouched into a pew and knelt. By then the older woman, probably his wife, was at the rack of votive candles up closer to the altar where, I remembered, once there had been a communion rail.

I’d been worried about the formulaic words, but they flowed easily once I was settled on my knees before the screen. “Bless me Father for I have sinned. I confess to almighty God and to you, Father.” I stopped there. And after a pause I came clean: “I’m afraid I can’t even try to guess the last time I’ve been to confession.” I thought I heard a stir, the priest, perhaps, sitting up more attentively—something out of the ordinary about to happen, something spicier than the routine lapses in charity and self-control that he was accustomed to enduring.

“I guess we’re talking years,” he said gently.

“Decades,” I replied.

“Was there a particular reason for your absence from the sacraments?”

“No dramatic reason,” I said. “There was no event or revelation that caused me to lose faith. It all just seemed to become irrelevant.”

“I see. So. What brings you back?” He seemed to say it with a smile though I couldn’t tell from the little bit of profile that I could see—the strong jawline, well-shaped nose, forehead propped against a hand.

I said, “I don’t want to pretend that it’s because of a sudden recovery of faith.”

He chuckled, shifted position. “Okay.”

“I was involved in something, Father, which was wrong. Very wrong. A sin by anybody’s definition. I’m not really here to be forgiven but maybe for whatever value there might be in talking about it to someone objective, who will keep it confidential.”

“I’m not a psychiatrist,” he said.

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay. When you came in, was there anybody else out there waiting?”

“No, I’m the last.”

“Okay. Why don’t you just get to the point? But first, I have to know—do you have honest remorse for this and all your other failings since your last confession?”

I considered the words. “Remorse would be an understatement.”

He laughed. “Good. I had to ask that, just to make sure that we aren’t entirely out in left field here. So what did you do?”

“I helped to kill someone.”

He was silent.

“It’s a complicated story but that’s the bottom line. Someone is dead for no good reason and it’s partly because of my actions.”

“Did you intend to cause this death?”

“No.”

“Okay,” he said. “We can start there. How did you get mixed up in this?”

“I was manipulated, but that isn’t meant to diminish my responsibility.”

“Except that, from my point of view, it does diminish your moral responsibility.”

“We could argue that. I ask myself why I didn’t do more to stop what was going on when it might have changed the outcome.”

“And the answer would be?”

“I reacted from instinct. Saving the victim became secondary to—other issues.”

“But you’re genuinely troubled by the outcome.”

“Yes.”

“Okay. We’re in a good place here. You knew this victim?”

“Yes.”

“Was he someone who might have anticipated the circumstances that led to his death? I guess I’m wondering if there was some betrayal here, someone who might have been unaware, perhaps because of trust, of the danger he was in.”

“He knew he was in danger. That was what caused the situation to get out of control.”

“He was afraid of you?”

“He was afraid. Probably more afraid of who was with me than of me. He knew me fairly well.”

“This other person, do you think he—I’m assuming it was he—feels the same kind of remorse that you feel, sees this situation as you see it?”

“Definitely not.”

“How would you explain the difference in your responses?”

“I wouldn’t know how to begin.”

“Well. In any case, it’s clear to me that you are genuinely remorseful. And I daresay not likely to commit this particular … action ever again. Right?”

“Yes.”

“You have to be sincerely determined at this moment that something like that won’t happen again. You know that?”

I thought of Neil and the new sense of the depths of his brutality conveyed to me by the woman who knew him better than anybody.
You don’t know how easily he’d come through that door
. I couldn’t help wondering—what if he comes after me, once he realizes Hannah isn’t coming back?

“I guess I have to say I’m human, vulnerable to all the human weaknesses.”

“I understand that. We all live with that. I’m interested in your present, honest, state of mind.”

“Yes,” I said. “I don’t ever want to be part of anything like that again.”

“Okay. But I have to say that true remorse, real contrition, must be demonstrated by, well … a good act of contrition—you know the words—but also by some penitential action. I’m sure you remember that from when you’d come in here as a boy full
of remorse for your impure thoughts and actions, bad words and uncharitable behaviour, and the priest would send you out to say a few Our Fathers and Hail Marys. If you’d been a real bad teenager, you might get a turn around the Stations. What we’re talking about here is a bit more complicated, right?”

“Yes, Father.”

“See, I can offer absolution. But it’ll be in the penance that you’ll find the comfort both in spiritual and practical terms. Do you follow me?”

“Yes, Father.”

“Do you know where I’m going with this?”

“Yes.”

“Like I said, I’m not a psychiatrist and I’m definitely not a lawyer. But I think we both know what I’m talking about here.”

I sighed. “I’m afraid so.”

“So I’m going to use the power Our Lord has invested in me to offer you the full comfort of the sacrament of reconciliation. But for true absolution you
will
have to meditate and I daresay pray long and hard on the proper course to follow. You must faithfully follow the conscience that brought you here, whatever agency it was that intervened to break the long spiritual hunger. Are you with me?”

“I am.”

And as we recited the remembered act of contrition and I then listened to his quiet promise of my forgiveness and to his blessing, I thought about ‘the agency,’ and prayed that she was safely back in her own country, safe from all the perils of the place that was supposed to have been her sanctuary.

——

I sat outside the RCMP detachment for a long time, daunted by the number of police vehicles and other cars and trucks in the parking lot. From the outside the place looked like a hive of enforcement activity, but when I went inside there was only one policeman in view, in shirt sleeves, wearing regulation body armour, gun belt loaded down with walkie-talkie, bullets, mace, taser, handcuffs and, of course, the gun. I stood at the public counter for a full minute before he shoved aside what he’d been reading, and came over.

“So what can I do for you,” he said breezily.

“I need to talk, privately.”

He compressed his lips, raised his eyebrows, looked around the empty room, and said: “Fine.” Leaned on the counter between us.

“I was, uhhh, present at a homicide, a while back. Last month. The Strickland … death.”

He straightened up, studied me as if I’d just arrived. “What’s your name?”

“Tony Breau. I live on the Shore Road.” He walked away, down a corridor and disappeared. When he returned he had his jacket and his hat.

The day was warm with a light breeze kicking up the dust and salt and trash until recently suppressed by snow. He remotely unlocked one of the cruisers and said, “Let’s go for a drive. Jump in the front seat.”

He was silent on the main highway that bypasses the town. Passing the Tim Hortons, he nodded. “If you feel like a coffee, we can grab a quick one.” I’d have loved a coffee but I wasn’t anxious to be seen in a cop car. “I’m good,” I said.

Just past the edge of town he pulled onto a side road that became rutted gravel. I remembered late night summer swimming expeditions somewhere out here. And we were soon stopped on a widening of the road overlooking a pond that I remembered as being considerably larger.

“You’re from around here,” he said, picking at a cuticle. He removed his hat, put it between us on the console.

“North of here, St. Ninian,” I said. “But yes. It’s more or less the same place now.”

“We drove by where I grew up on the way here,” he said. “Gone now, the old house.”

“I didn’t realize.” His name hadn’t registered as one that I’d have considered local.

“Grew up with an uncle and an aunt. Lost my parents young, in the States. They brought me back here. A pretty nice place for a kid to grow up, you’d agree.” Pointed straight ahead: “Spent summers swimming down there.”

“Pretty ideal,” I said. And then, “I was adopted and raised by an old couple.”

“Yes,” he said. “And then you worked as a corrections officer.”

I laughed. “You’ve done your homework.”

“After the fatality,” he said. “You were on my list of people I had to talk to. I was giving you some time, with the burns and so on. Any day now I was gonna come find you. You’re okay now, I can see.”

“It was nothing major,” I said. “Mostly first degree; there was one they were worried about on the wrist. But it all healed up.”

“Yes,” he said. “You were lucky.”

We fell silent, staring straight ahead at the pond. Then, as so
often happens, we both began speaking simultaneously, then stopped together. There was an awkward silence for a moment.

I said, “I was about to say how surprised I was that you guys hadn’t come around sooner to hear my version of what went on the night of the twenty-second.”

He nodded.

“It was a complicated situation,” I ventured. “Do you think this is the proper place for the discussion?”

“Don’t see why not.” He looked over at me.

“We might want a record of it,” I said.

“Of course. But you know how it works. Sometimes an informal … conversation … can get a fella closer to the real story than all the formalities of notes and recordings and stuffy little interviewing rooms. So why don’t you just start to talk. We can pick up on the important stuff back at the office. I’ve got a very good memory.”

“I’m not sure where you want me to start.”

“Why don’t you start with how you ended up at Strickland’s place that night?”

So I did. How Neil arrived with a story of a teenager whose parents were alarmed that she was at Strickland’s, and that there had been a previous incident there involving this particular girl. He was nodding as I spoke. And how when we arrived I was surprised to see that Strickland was alone.

“Working at the stove.”

“Well, here’s where it gets a bit more complicated than what you’ve heard.”

“How complicated?”

“Strickland was actually asleep when we got there.”

“Asleep, you say. You saw him asleep.”

“We looked through a window …”

“But by the time you actually entered the kitchen, he was at the stove, firing it up.”

“Well, no. He was just waking up when I arrived in his living room and that was when he attacked …”

“Yes, I know about the initial attack, but I thought that was in the kitchen.”

“No, in the living room.”

He seemed exasperated then, wobbling his head side to side as if to say “help me here.”

I said, “Maybe if I went back a bit. I take it you know the man I was with, Neil MacDonald. Ex-policeman from Boston.”

“I know quite a bit about the context already,” he said. “But maybe I can give
you
some context that’ll help us get to some mutual understanding. Okay?”

I waited.

“See, Tony … I’m gonna call you Tony. I mean we’re both peace officers and we both grew up around here and are both lucky enough to be living back here again. You know, back in the old days, I wouldn’t have had a snowball’s chance of ever living back here in God’s country. Back then, you remember they wouldn’t even let you get married for the first five years you were in the force. And they wouldn’t let you do police work anywhere
near
where you might know people or, God forbid, be related to somebody. It’s different now. You can actually be a cop in a place you really care about. And that, Tony, is in my opinion what policin’ is all about. Havin’ a connection with the people, really knowing and caring about the people you work for.”

I was nodding because he was right.

“I can see you agree with me.”

“I do.”

He waited for a while, offered me a Chiclet, I declined. Put one in his mouth, chewed thoughtfully.

“I’ve been a cop all over this great country. To be honest, this town is probably the biggest place I’ve ever worked. Mostly little rural places, mostly out west. Places no bigger than where you’re living, down the shore. Houses few and far between. One of the first things you learn, when you get to one of those little detachments is that in every case, without exception, you find out that, say, 60 percent of the police work is generated by a handful of individuals, like this Strickland. In many cases there’s one fuckin guy—and this one fit the profile perfectly: lived alone, young, smarter than the average bear, did time, figures the rules are for everybody but him. No respect for the law or the officer. Constantly … I mean
constantly
finding ways to fuck the system, whether its petty theft, taxes, fishin’ or huntin’ out of season, speeding, dope, bootlegging, sexual perversions. You name it and this guy will be into it. And
fearless
! Loves nothing better than to provoke an officer into a confrontation. Never anything interesting, just some clawing, tearing, rolling-in-the-mud bullshit to get you all sore and dirty. And next morning you’re serving the cocksucker toast and jam in the lockup and he’s all smiles before he charges
you
with assault.”