The Boy (5 page)

The Boy

July, 1995

In the first months of her pregnancy, Louise didn't have the energy to resist when Jake set out to find them the perfect house in Valmer. Right to the end of the school year, she was wracked with morning, afternoon, and best-part-of-the-evening nausea. When they moved at the end of June, she let Jake do the packing, most of her belongings still in their boxes anyway.

Although Jake insisted the move was for Danny, the boy was even less enthusiastic than Louise. He refused to help with any of the unpacking, wandering outside instead, sitting on the back step, staring at the wooden sidewalk that led to the garage. Or riding his bike up and down the street for an hour at a time, bouncing a basketball off the side of the house until the sound drove Louise mad. Or sometimes just disappearing, but leaving her with the feeling that he was hiding somewhere. Watching her.

The house, she has to admit, is charming. It was built as the parsonage for the Anglican church, but when there was no longer a priest the members of the dwindling congregation had gone to other towns to worship. For the past five years, the elderly widow of the last Anglican priest to serve the parish had lived rent-free in the house. When she was shipped off to a nursing home in Edmonton, Jake, as hometown boy, was given first bid on the house.

Nothing, Louise is sure, has been changed since the house was built, and if she were feeling better, she would be as excited as Jake over the possibilities for upgrading. Meanwhile, even though the place is old, dated, it's in pristine condition. Louise imagines a long line of pious women polishing the banister with Pledge, waxing the black and white tile floor in the kitchen with Johnson's paste wax each week.

When the nausea finally abates, Louise's legs and feet start to swell to elephantine proportions by the end of each day and it's clear there is going to be no radiance to her condition. None whatsoever.

On a sultry day in August, she enlists Danny to drag the boxes labeled “DEN” out of the garage and pile them on the screened front verandah. Here, she decides, she will sit in a wicker chair in the lovely cross-draft and sort through her papers. She's sure that after these months of storage, there is much that she will be happy to discard.

Among the cartons, though, are several labeled in Jake's bold printing and one that says “DEN (Brenda).” She hesitates. Danny disappeared as soon as he finished hauling the boxes. When she looked out the window a few minutes ago, she thought she saw the bike, a swaying dot, at the end of the street. But she can't shake the feeling that she's not alone in spite of the silence.

Letter knife in hand, Louise slits the tape and carefully peels back the flaps on Brenda's archives. At the top of the box there's a file folder of recipes clipped from magazines. Of course. Brenda the amazing cook was always trying something new, Jake's sister told Louise. So the second folder of quilting patterns is no surprise either. Then two photo albums, kittens cavorting on the cover of one, a pony-tailed teenager with a transistor radio pressed to her ear on the other. Pages and pages of friends, birthday parties, school field trips. Louise squints at them, trying to find a likeness to the petite blonde woman in the photos she's seen of Jake's first wife, but it must have been Brenda herself who was the snapper of pictures.

Louise glances at the empty street periodically, stands up twice to walk down into the front garden and look around the side of the house, but there's no sign of Danny. Almost to the bottom of the box, and about to re-pack the mementoes as carefully as she found them, she pulls out a yellowed scrapbook. The first five pages bristle with newspaper clippings, the rest of the book is empty. A series of articles from the
Edmonton Sun
, starting February 26, 1984, ending March 5, 1984. A chronicle of a crime. “The Bobby Cook Story: Part One. Did we hang the wrong man?”

She stares at the photo of a young, bare-chested man against a brick wall. Unshaven, muscular, arms held away from his body, he looks slightly brutish. “Bobby Cook: Was he innocent?” the caption asks.

“It was a quiet Sunday in June, 1959 when Mounties discovered seven mutilated, blood-spattered, decomposing bodies in a grease pit in the Cook home at Stettler. The victims were identified as Bobby's father, Ray Cook, 53, his step-mother, Daisy, 37, and Bobby's five step-brothers and sisters, aged between three and nine.”

Louise lets the scrapbook slide from her lap. What kind of morbid interest possessed Brenda to keep these clippings? People she knew? But 1959? The articles were written twenty-five years after the crime, and must have been in Brenda's keeping, then in Jake's for the next ten years. She picks the book up again, and flips through the pages. The last article: “The Bobby Cook Story 25 Years Later. Some Doubts Remain.” A photo of a gravestone. Seven names. Ever Remembered, Ever Loved.

She will ask Jake about this. Forget taping the box shut and pretending she didn't snoop. An innocent enough mistake to open a box accidentally—she'll admit that she was driven by curiosity, apologize for trespassing, ask him what this is about.

The breeze is picking up now, gusts rattling the leaves of the honeysuckle against the screen. The old Fahrenheit thermometer tacked to the doorframe reads eighty-five degrees. Jake tried to teach her the formula for converting back
to Celsius, but the pregnancy has reduced her brain to a bowl of mush. “Forget it,” she finally says. “It's just bloody hot.”

Coal-coloured clouds are piling up in the west, and there is the scent of ozone on the wind. She pushes the boxes against the wall. She needs to put her feet up again—should have done so an hour ago. These past two days, even elevating hasn't reduced the swelling in her ankles. It feels like there are donut-shaped cushions straining under the tight skin.

Louise wanders in to the deep shade of the living room. She settles into Jake's recliner, facing the window. It's been several hours since she felt the baby move. The gigantic maternity t-shirt is limp from the heat. She slides her hands underneath and rests them on her belly, fingertips gently tapping. Usually, this caress wakes the babe, but this time there is no answering flutter.

When she closes her eyes, she senses a flicker of movement on the other side of the room. Opens them, and the curtains are swaying. On the second window, just a foot away, the old lace panels hang slack.

Breathe, she whispers to herself. Get up slowly. But even so, the room spins around her, and she bends over, grabs the edge of the table, takes a deep breath. Another breath, and the whirling stops.

Another three weeks in this swollen state. She's scheduled for induced labour if the baby hasn't arrived by then. Or a C-section at any time, if her blood pressure spikes again. She plods to the other side of the room. When she leans across the sewing machine to press her face to the screen, to look out at the side yard, she drags pieces of flannel onto the floor. Kicks them across the room, and sinks onto the chair, staring out into the back yard. Nothing out there but the vegetable patch in need of water, and the garage wall.

Then she notices the protruding handlebar. He's come back. She wasn't supposed to let him ride his bike, not after he went missing last night, Jake almost crazy with worry when he finally found him after midnight, pedaling down a dark road two miles away, but coming home, he said.

“Danny!”

No sound but the raspy song of grasshoppers. The field behind the house is alive with them. When they walk there in the evening, Louise leaning on Jake, the grasshoppers dance off their legs.

“Daniel Peters!”

Why does she bother? This boy never comes when she calls. He makes a point of waiting, and then appearing from some other direction as though he's come of his own accord.

She should go back to the sewing machine, finish hemming the receiving blankets. She should do the lunch dishes, scrub the frying pan scorched from the grilled cheese sandwich she forgot when Jake's cousin phoned. She wishes she hadn't told Phyllis about the toxemia. Now she phones twice a day to tell Louise to put her feet up. She should tidy the living room, mix the hamburger for supper. She should pee. These days the urge is constant, she never knows if she really needs to go.

The bathroom makes her cringe. She keeps asking Jake to give Danny some instruction so it doesn't look as though he is standing in the doorway and pissing in the general direction of the toilet. She takes a cloth and a can of Comet out of the cupboard and begins to do a clean-up. When she straightens after putting the supplies away, the baby gives a sharp nudge just under her ribcage, and she draws a deep breath. She has her baggy cotton slacks around her knees, is lowering herself cautiously to the toilet, when there is a scrape of sound outside the window, like something, someone pulling themselves up the wall. She is looking at that square of screen when the top of Danny's head appears, and for maybe ten seconds the two of them stare. Then she grabs a towel and heaves it at the window, hears him scramble away.

The roaring in her ears is so loud she doesn't hear the phone until she's back in the living room. She races to the kitchen, snatches the receiver off the hook and as soon as she hears Jake's voice, she screams at him. “You come home right now!”

When she looks out the window, the bike is gone, and God help her, just as she did last night when he disappeared, she hopes that Danny will never come back.

Whoa! It's no wonder the baby's so still. He's afraid too! And what are those newspaper clippings doing in my story?

I'm still amazed that I placed them there.

You mean you don't want to write the Cook story? I've been waiting for weeks for you to either get over it or admit that there might be a book of non-fiction in your future after all.

Really? I thought you were nagging me to finish your story.

Of course. But now you're crossing wires. Are you dragging Daisy into my story, or me into Daisy's?

Neither. Shall we rewrite this last chapter?

No, don't do that. Daisy deserves the attention. I'm willing to give her some space.

Roads Back

Every time I stepped back to 1959, I wanted to open the door of that clapboard bungalow in Stettler, walk into the kitchen and imagine the evening of Thursday, June 25, when Bobby Cook came home from prison. I wanted to imagine Daisy, and what she was thinking, and what was said. I began to write those imaginings, and then I was torn with the sense that I was trespassing, arrogantly assuming the right to impose thoughts and words on someone who had lived a real life. I struggled with my fiction-writing sensibilities. It came like breathing to me to create scenes, and assign motive. To change outcomes. But this story had its own ending, and the only details allowed were the facts.

The most salient facts were missing. No one knew what happened in the house on late Thursday night, June 25, 1959. Or Friday. Or Saturday. But the Sunday discovery of the blood-soaked bed and spattered walls, the pit full of bodies, gave rise to lurid imagining. In fact, I had to put my books aside by late afternoon or I was kept awake by images of little children in pyjamas cowering in the corner of a shabby living room.

The best way to dislodge the grisly bits of information in my head, I decided, was to follow the story to its end, and let everyone rest in peace. I knew from experience that if I stayed too long with a story idea in my head, worked it around without putting all the words on the page, there was the danger that it would be finished before it was written. I found myself secretly hoping that this
would
be the case with the Cook story. And Louise was annoying me enough that I would have been happy to throw her story unfinished into the drawer as well.

What I discovered very early in my pursuit of the Cook family was that there were more questions than answers. Opinion was sharply divided as to Robert Raymond Cook's guilt. There were conflicting stories dredged up out of failing memories, but a deep-seated interest wherever I went. What became abundantly clear was that Robert Raymond Cook was part of the history of central Alberta. Equally clear, that few people remembered the individual members of the family. Even people who lived in the town of Stettler at the time recalled only that there were “several” children, and that they were pitifully small.

So I set out to find these people, restore them from their infamy as the “murdered Cook family” to seven ordinary human beings. And what of their relationship with their son, stepson, half-brother?

That's what I want to know.

Roads Back

Who were these people? I knew where they'd ended. The Pecover book had a photo of a snow-banked headstone in the Hanna cemetery as a frontispiece. So far my search had taken me to Stettler, Red Deer, and Lacombe, but there'd been no particular reason to visit Robert Raymond Cook's home town. It had been over a year since I picked up the Pecover book at the Hillhurst flea market. A long fall and winter of reading, some formal interviewing, a lot of informal talk—so many people who remembered this crime. But I had not felt inclined to trudge through a desolate winter landscape looking for graves.

Then came a day of prairie summer at her best; milky-blue sky a mile high, the scraping song of grasshoppers, dusty smell of gravel roads and new-mown clover, and barely enough breeze to dry the trickle of sweat down my neck. We'd been to Saskatoon for a weekend jaunt with the same friends with whom we'd dined at Longview. They knew I'd been digging around in the Cook case ever since. They were not surprised when I suggested a stop in Hanna.

Which cemetery, the kid at the service station asked when we stopped for directions. The Catholic one or the regular one? I made a blind guess. Regular. About ten miles north, he told me, pointing down the main road that ran through town. His guess was less reliable than mine. It was barely a mile to the wooden archway at the entrance to the cemetery. Like so many country graveyards, this one was set on a hill, bordered along the road by low-growing shrubs, and along the other perimeters by the barbed wire fences of the farmland out of which it was carved.

We fanned out, each to a quadrant. I started at the highest point, thinking there might be a pattern and I'd be able to work my way to 1959 by following the dates of death on the stones. I should have known better from previous
cemetery wanderings. There was always a mix of old and new, plots purchased long before the owners had taken up residence. After ten minutes of wandering, contemplated by a herd of cattle—black Aberdeen Angus and white-faced Herefords—now lining the fence on the town side of the graveyard, I made my way into a section that felt less tended, less visited. Here there were more single graves, many occupied in the early forties by young men shipped home from the war. Finally, with a sense that I was closing in, I pushed through a tangle of lilac and caragana bushes into another section. I found myself wanting urgently to be the one who found the Cooks.

I almost tripped over Josephine Cook's grave. Mother of Robert Raymond Cook. The slab of concrete that delineated the casket underneath was chipped and flecked with rust. Creeping charlie and chickweed had choked out the grass in this shady corridor. The headstone was small, unpretentious. Josephine Cook 1915-1946. Perhaps Ray Cook gave thought to being buried next to Josephine some day, owned the adjoining plot which seemed to be vacant. But who would have envisioned the size of the grave necessary to bury his entire family?

A quick scan of the surrounding area and my eyes were drawn to a slight rise perhaps twenty yards away. A headstone larger than any around it, two big slabs of concrete. I couldn't help wondering morbidly how many coffins were used, how the bodies were divided.

Seven names, one date of death. In touching contrast to the repeated formality of “Robert Raymond Cook” in my reading, the names of his family were carved here in their diminutives: Ray, Daisy, Gerry, Patty, Chrissy, Kathy, and Linda. Ever Remembered, Ever Loved. Someone had left a nosegay of wild purple asters against the stone. The blossoms were wilted, but given the heat of the day, relatively fresh. The fate of this family was so much part of the lore of the area, anyone wandering through the cemetery might have paused to leave the flowers. Then too, there was extended family—Ray's, Daisy's, someone among them who'd chosen the words for the epitaph. Someone who remembered all seven. Who?

With his father's remarriage and the quick arrival of five more children—all of them born between 1950 and 1956—Robert Cook gained a new family, but he spent little of the next ten years in their midst. His life played out with dizzying speed: jail at fourteen, sole survivor of his family at twenty-two, dead at twenty-three. Sixteen months from his arrest for the murders to his execution. Sixteen months without family. According to Dave MacNaughton, Cook's lawyer, after the murders not a single member of the extended family made contact with the boy who had been known as Bobby. No one came forward to choose a final resting place for the infamous grandson, nephew, cousin. Robert Raymond Cook left instructions for the donation of his eyes. One wonders if the doctors who performed the transplant knew what those eyes had seen. Cook's body became the property of the Department of Anatomy at the University of Alberta Faculty of Medicine. There it ended. No grave.

You went to the graveyard to convince yourself that this story was dead and you could let it go?

No. We just happened to be in the vicinity,
driving back to Calgary after a weekend in Saskatoon. I thought I might regret the missed opportunity later.

What was missing? You saw the picture of the graves. What more could there be?

Nothing, really. But I wanted to be reminded that there were bodies, real people buried there.

And? Are you any closer to letting them rest in peace?

Well, I may be getting closer, but I think you're becoming as curious as I am about Daisy and young Robert. Or you will be once you get back to those clippings Brenda saved.

Ah, yes, Brenda. And now we meet Josephine? Is that where we're going with this graveyard chapter, back to the dead mothers?

It seems like the logical direction.