From the Chrysalis (30 page)

She had chosen Maitland University so she could get closer to him, but now he seemed so far away. The new complex, a monstrous squat of low brick buildings, was just outside the city limits. It was utarnished, but already rumbling with unrest. And Liza was in the wrong place as usual. Lovely little Maitland by the lake. Swell, she thought, burying her face in her arms. Just swell.

Liza, Janice and Mel settled back into residence and two girls left, one because she needed to marry her high school sweetheart and the other because she had a nervous breakdown.
 

The
Maitland Spectator
reported almost the same news throughout the rest of January and February 1972. A publication ban on the riot was rarely observed. The first prisoner was released on Valentines Day in a previously agreed probation. He gave an interview to the CBC, speaking about prison conditions. Although Liza almost never watched television in the lobby of the residence, where the
Waltons
always seemed to be on, she had caught the news that day.
 

The released prisoner was a small, nervous man with stringy, chin-length hair and pale eyes that lingered just a little too long on a group of pubescent school children touring the television studio. Coached by his female interviewer, he reported some of the highlights of the riot. When she failed to look sufficiently wide-eyed, he embellished his stories.

It was crazy, but with
The Maitland Spectator
as Liza’s only window into the prison, she found herself quickly becoming a slavish devotee to their post-riot coverage. She also saw more of investigative reporter Joe Accardo, because in January he’d replaced a tutorial assistant in her Journalism class. He was planning to finish his long-neglected Masters, he said, although at age twenty-seven he was old enough to have completed his PhD. After attracting several of Liza’s nineteen-year-old classmates by hinting he would like to marry them, he zeroed in on her.
 

He fed both her obsession and her quest, and she knew it. No matter how fascinating her courses, all she really wanted to study was Dace. Once upon a time, reading had transported her to other worlds, but her small library of classics and childhood favourites was still unpacked. She hadn’t borrowed any new books for fear her course work would suffer. Not to mention that the reading tastes of most of her dorm-mates ran to the likes of “
Coffee, Tea or Me?”
 

With the campus in a deep freeze, the rest of the student body turned inward as well. Beer bashes still took place on the weekends and an all night film festival was held in the Great Hall. She attended it with Mel and Janice, and the three of them stayed up until dawn, watching
Wedding in White
and
Kamarouska
.
 

Mel hated both movies. He couldn’t understand why Genevieve Bujold had immolated herself. Liza had found
Wedding in White
to be more disturbing, even if they were no longer living in the forties where a sixteen-year-old could be raped and forced into marriage with an old man.

Maitland was in a snow belt, but even so, there was an unusual amount of snow that year. The snow was like a drug to Liza. Her mind emptied when she looked at all the white. Physically, Mel had no trouble, plowing through with his long, lean legs, but Liza and Janice could barely make it to class as the snow piled up outside the student residence complex. A snake of sidewalks transformed into icy, unsalted slides. The paper boy, a young man with a loud singing voice and a blaring transistor radio, didn’t have any trouble either. If he had, Liza might have been able to ignore the rather suspicious inactivity in Maitland Penitentiary, and she might have felt less nervy, less unreal.
 

If anything else were happening—and there really wasn’t much in the winter of 1972—the
Spectator
didn’t care. Just as long as they could pander to their readers’ tastes in a prison town. Most of Maitland’s indigenous people were employed by the penitentiary in some capacity, or their relatives were, so they shared similar opinions. If their opinions differed even slightly, nobody liked to say. Men got sent to jail for good reasons and when you considered how they lived for free in quite nice surroundings and decent folk struggled to make ends meet, well, it was goddamn galling.
 

Day passes were even more controversial. Citizens threw up their hands with consternation when some cons actually enrolled in courses at Maitland University—a totally lamentable situation. Why should the public pay for an inmate’s education? Imagine sending your impressionable young daughter to school to take classes with a convicted felon! At least the riot had put a stop to that.
 

The seasonal occupants of the university and the semi-permanent residents of the military base shared a similar mindset, try as they might to be different. A handful of free thinkers sprouted in the enriched soil of the university, but these tended to be the more eccentric professors who had grown up in privileged homes and could afford to think differently from everybody else.
 

For this reason, Liza fanned a small flicker of hope when the
Spectator
interviewed a radical political science professor. Unbelievably, the professor criticized the Solicitor-General for refusing to release a conciliatory statement sent from the inmate committee during the height of the riot. Instead, they’d sent in the army.

Naturally the Solicitor-General responded in a general press release the next day.
What would anyone else have done?
Given in to madmen?
he asked, adding—to Liza’s horror—he had half a mind to charge the ringleaders of the riot as well. Sure, they’d tried to end the riot peacefully, he implied, but hadn’t they started the whole damn thing in the first place?

Not to mention the stupid fucks killed two of their own men
.

Really?
people chattered.
Is that what happened?

To their credit, the
Maitland Spectator
published one counter argument: a hostage’s account appeared the same day as the Solicitor’s General’s press release.
 

Liza read this account eagerly. From what she remembered about one of Dace’s letters, their stories sounded the same. The moment Janice left the room Liza sat down to compare both accounts. The guard relayed how the ancient cruciform had been destroyed while drunk, deluded prisoners ran amuck, screaming, “We’re free! We’re free!” Some of the inmates had grabbed the hostages, stuffed them into a huge heating duct and wired the grate shut until some more responsible men came and got them.
 

If only the guard’s tale had named the “more responsible inmates”, but of course the poor devil couldn’t, not if he wanted to keep his job. On the second day some of the rebels had tried to restore order. They had even set up an inmate police force to protect the hostages, who were transferred from the heating duct to the fourth floor.
 

One member of the inmate police force had even promised to protect the hostages from “the donkeys” downstairs. This was a reassurance convincing enough that the hostages relaxed a bit, played some cards and dispensed unsolicited advice. One of those pieces of advice included instructions to break into a prison canteen for extra toothbrushes, toothpaste and tobacco to meet the needs of the unexpected guests.

He emphasized repeatedly that the hostages were threatened “in no way, shape, or form”. Hope had faded when Ottawa refused to concede anything to the rebels, not even when they released a nervous young hostage as a show of good faith. All the prisoners had wanted was to delay the move to the new Supermax and for the authorities to provide better prison conditions, the guard said. They hadn’t even asked for amnesty, for God’s sake.

Ha!
Dace had noted at this point in his letter, for all the good it had done.
 

The guard said their food supply had started to dwindle about the same time they heard some agonizing shouts and screams. The riot ended on the fourth day almost as precipitously as it had begun. Their protectors came and told them, “It’s all over, boys. We’re quitting, and you’re going home.”

Possibly the interviewer was dissatisfied with the ex-hostage’s answers, for he’d inquired: “But those screams. Why did they kill their own men? Do you think they killed them because they couldn’t kill you?”

The ex-hostage diffused his question immediately. “The inmate police force was too busy looking after us to knock off anyone, [expletive deleted].” Unfortunately, only a handful of readers would have gotten that far in reading his interview. They would be sidetracked by the criticism of the Solicitor-General’s actions—apparently laudable actions if subsequent
Letters to the Editor
were any indication. None of the letters mentioned the guard’s tale. In the end, his story was just filler to people like Joe and his fellow reporters so they could keep the riot alive.
 

Not that they had to work hard. True, the prison authorities were stingy with leaked information, but with any luck an anonymous source usually claimed firsthand knowledge of the damage as well as the atrocities committed during the four day riot.
 

At least the authorities were generous in their release of black and white photographs, so there was no doubt in anyone’s mind about the amount of sheer destruction that had occurred. The old prison, including
four chapels, had been destroyed. The bell that had measured out all their lives was cracked beyond repair.

In time there were titillating rumours of forced sex and bloody castrations, and a heated debate flourished regarding why several prisoners were tortured in the dying hours of the riot on the final day. The
Maitland Spectator
labeled the tortured men
The Unwanted.
The castrations were later denied by both the incarcerated men and the outsiders, but it didn’t matter. Two men—well, child molesters—were indisputably dead. That didn’t seem to affect the general public all that much. It was the hostage-taking that really bothered people, not to mention the destruction of the prison and the fact that taxpayers would once again be forced to foot the bill. How much time would the bad guys get for that?
 

The coroner finally announced an investigation, although he voiced concerns about the feasibility of laying charges in a situation like this. For one thing, there had been six hundred inmates in the prison when the riot took place. It was going to be difficult to pin the murders on any one person or group of persons. Convicts weren’t reliable witnesses at the best of times.
 

And he was right. Plus, the public wanted to believe every inmate was guilty. Otherwise the person wouldn’t have been in jail in the first place. Logically speaking, some people had to be in the clear. After all, they couldn’t
all
be murderers, Liza pointed out to Janice, Mel and anybody else who would listen, although most people just walked away when she started to talk about it. Some of the inmates had even been in the public eye on committees and had met the press. Dace’s friend, Rick Lowery, for one.

“Look,” Joe crowed when, in a moment of weakness, she agreed to coffee after class. They were in the new Social Sciences building, and he’d bought the coffee this time. He pulled a paper out of his pocket as they sat down at a table, and pointed to the headline: “There’s A Hero Even In This Mess!”
 

Liza wriggled closer to him so she could read and he put his arm around her shoulders. He pretended to be hurt when she shrugged him off.
 

Rick Lowery was a high profile committee member, so he probably would have been lionized by the press even if his lawyer hadn’t thrust him into the limelight. The lawyer claimed his client had saved six guards’ lives, an action applauded by the political science professor, who was re-interviewed by the
Maitland Spectator
one slow news day.
 

“A hero, eh?” Liza said, jealous on Dace’s account.
 

Yes, she thought, all Dace had done was keep the wolves at bay and watch his friend’s back. She examined Rick’s picture. Dace always said Rick wasn’t at all camera shy, but in this photograph he looked like a man in flight—a person always looking the other way.
 

Joe shrugged.

“So who’s the villain?” she asked.

“You think this might be some kind of book? I was thinking the same thing.”

“Well, it’s a story all right,” she replied vaguely, reminded of her embryonic novel.