The Guardians (4 page)

    321
Caledonia Street. Once the Thurman place, though who the Thurmans were, and
when it was theirs, we didn't know. Although it was red-bricked and wide-porched
like most of Grimshaw's older homes, it was distinct in our minds, broader and
higher, set farther back from the street. We saw foreboding significance in its
broken weather vane, a decapitated rooster spinning around in the most mild
breezes as though panicked, a literal chicken with its head cut off. Yet other
than this, it was its sameness that left it open to stories we could dream
taking place in our own kitchens and bedrooms. It was a dark fixture of our
imaginations precisely because it appeared as normal as the houses we lived in.

    The
house was occupied only for brief stretches. Outsiders who'd been recruited to
be the new bank manager or Crown attorney and thought a place of such character
was worth an attempt at restoration. The money pit it inevitably turned out to
be chased such dreamers away. Or, if you went with the versions we told each
other, they were sent out screaming into the night by furious spirits and
bleeding walls.

    Ben
McAuliffe lived across from the place. It allowed us to look out from his attic
bedroom and through the maples that darkened its double lot, trying to catch a
flash of movement—or, worse, a toothily grinning ghoul—in one of its windows.
It spooked us. But no more than the werewolf and vampire comics we traded among
ourselves that delivered brief, dismissible chills. Even then, we didn't think
there was such a thing as a real haunted house.

    Of
all the things we ended up being wrong about, that was the first.

    All of
us had families. Parents, from the long-gone to the present-but-only-in-body to
the few (all moms) who tried hard to make contact but didn't know, when it came
to teenage boys, where to start. There were siblings too. My older brother had
already left for college in Kitchener. Ben was an only child of the kind given
miles of his own space by his mom, who rarely left the house after Ben's dad
died. Randy, on the other hand, came from a big, red-haired Catholic brood,
five kids who, viewed together throwing dinner rolls at each other or
administering Indian sunburns in their rumpus room, seemed to number closer to
a dozen. But with the possible exception of one, none of the other familial
players in our lives figured in what was to turn out to be Our Story.

    We
were boys, so you're supposed to look first to our dads in having a hand in
making us the way we were, but for the most part, they were as absent as our
teachers and the other elders advanced to us as "role model" candidates.
My own father was an accountant at the town's utilities office. Compromised,
mildly alcoholic. An essentially decent man possessed of faults some children
might have chosen to be wounded by, but for me were just the marks that living
the better part of his life in Grimshaw had left on him, and therefore were
forgivable.

    But
we had another father. One we shared between us. The coach. He had a name—David
Evans—that struck us as too unutterably bland to belong to someone like him.
For us he was always "the coach," a designation spoken in a tone that
somehow combined affection, irony and awe.

    The
coach wore wire-frame glasses, Hush Puppies, hid a receding hairline under a
wool cap on game days.

    He
looked more like an English teacher—which he in fact was between nine and three
thirty, Monday to Friday—than a leader of anything more athletic than the chess
club. But his rumpled-scholar appearance was both who he really was and a
disguise. We all got him wrong at first, which was how he wanted it. We were
always getting him wrong. And then, out of the blue, he would say or show
something that struck us as so essential and unguarded and true we became his.
We believed. We wanted more of
that.

    The
league's other coaches considered our success a freakish series of flukes. It wasn't
any tactics or motivation our coach brought to the dressing room that lifted us
to the top of the standings. How could it be? He didn't
look
like a
hockey man. He didn't even
swear.

    They
got him wrong too.

    But
what was it to get him right?

    We
knew he was married. Childless. Moved to Grimshaw five years earlier from
Toronto. There were questions we had about him. Not creepy suspicions (of the
sort we had about Mr. Krueger, for instance, the knee- patting driver's ed.
instructor), just a handful of missing links in what we could gather about his
story- Information that might explain why, beneath the coach's calm surface, we
could sense something being held down, a muffled second voice. It might have
been anger. Or a sadness too unwieldy to be allowed free run within him. There
was, we sensed, something he might be helped with.

    But
he was the one who helped us. Our guardian. It was hard to see how this could
ever be the other way around.

    Our
school hired a new music teacher at the beginning of our grade eleven year. Mr.
Asworth, the old music teacher, had left over the summer. (Yes, we had much
obvious fun with his name, as in "Hey, what's his
Ass-worth
?"
whispered between us as we filed out at the end of class, an insult he seemed
to think he deserved, given the way he pretended not to hear.)

    Naturally,
we'd tormented him. Makeout sessions in the drum-kit storage room, blowing
cigarette smoke out of the tuba, snapping Melissa Conroy's bra until a red line
was blazing across her freckled back. And as for Asworth teaching us to
play
music
? His attempts to coax a melody out of Carl's flatulent trombone or
get Randy to stop ringing the triangle and hollering "Come 'n' get
it!" in the middle of "The Maple Leaf Forever" met with nothing
but cacophonous failure.

    Asworth's
replacement, Miss Langham, was a different story.

    In
her presence we called her only Miss, but between us (and in our dreams) she
was always Heather. At twenty-three, the youngest teacher at Grimshaw
Collegiate by a decade. Long, chestnut hair we imagined slipping a hand through
to touch the solitary mole on her throat. Green eyes, at once mirthful and
encouraging. Tall but unstooped, unlike some of the senior basketball girls
when they walked the halls, ashamed of their commanding physicality. Until Miss
Langham arrived to teach us a surprisingly moving brass-band version of
Pachelbel's Canon, we had witnessed only
prettiness, tomboys, the
promise of farmer-daughter curves. But Miss Langham exceeded any previous entry
in our schoolboys' catalogue of feminine assets. We had no name for it then,
and I hardly know what to call it now. Grace, I suppose.

    I
believe I can say as well that we were all instantly in love with her. Desire
was part of it, yes. But what we really wanted was to rescue her one day. Show
her our as yet unappreciated worth. Grow into gentlemen before her very eyes.

    Sometimes,
after school, we would head up to Ben's bedroom, gather at his window and wait
to watch her go by. She was renting a room at the nurses' residence up the hill
on the hospital grounds ("No Male Visitors After 8 P.M.," a sign at
the door declared). Most days she would take Caledonia Street, advancing with
long strides up its slope, a leather satchel bumping against her hip. Alone.

    When
I think of the Thurman house now, what comes to mind isn't a horrific image or
stab of guilt. Not at first. What I see before any of that is Miss Langham
walking home along the sidewalk past its brooding facade. A juxtaposition of
youth and poise against its clutching shadows. Her sure step, the hint of smile
she wore even when no one was coming the other way to wish good day to. Heather
Langham was all
future.
And the house possessed only the wet rot, the
foul longing of the past.

    This is
how I try to hold her in place as long as I can, before the other pictures
force their way through: Miss Langham clipping past Grimshaw's darkest place.
It was, for all the moment's simplicity, an act of subtle defiance. We never
saw her cross the street to pass it at a safer distance, as we ourselves did.
In fact, she seemed oblivious to the house altogether. A refusal to acknowledge
the rudeness of its stare.

    But
in this, of course, was the suggestion that she knew she was being watched. She
was a woman already well used to being looked at. Usually, this looking
inspired admiration and yearning in the observer. But we could sense that the
Thurman house—or the idea of whatever inhuman thing lived in it—instead felt
only bitterness. A reminder of its place in death and hers so vividly in life.

    There
are moments when the tremors disappear all on their own. Whole chunks of time
when my body and I are reunited, warring soldiers clinking tin mugs over a
Christmas ceasefire. I'll be looking out the window, and the hands that had
been squeaking against the glass will be calmed. Or now Sitting on the milk run
to Grimshaw, the train starting away from the platform with a lurch, my heart
giving enlarging shape to Randy's announcement of the end of things:
Ben's
dead, Trev.
As we pick up speed, I can feel the closing distance between
myself and the past, an oncoming collision my newspaper-reading and
text-messaging fellow passengers are unaware of. And yet, I am still. Silently
weeping into the sleeve of my jacket but physically in control, my limbs
awaiting their orders.

    
You
can't help anyone,
a voice suggests within me
.
You can't help
yourself. Why not do what Ben did while you're still able
?

    Not
my voice, though it's instantly familiar. A voice I haven't heard in
twenty-four years.

    The train
rolls out from under the covered platform and the city is there, the glass
towers firing off shards of sunlight in a farewell salute. All at once, I'm
certain I will never come back. I escaped something in Grimshaw once. But it
won't let me go a second time.

    
Ticket,
please,
the voice says, laughing.

    "Ticket,
please," the conductor tries again.

    It
was thought, when they built the four lanes running west between Toronto and
the border at Detroit a couple years before I was born, that the highway's
proximity to Grimshaw would lend new purpose to what was before then not much
other than a service town for the county's farmers. But there was no more
reason to take the Grimshaw exit than there had previously been to limp in its
direction on the old, rutted two-lane. Like many of the communities its size on
the broad arrowhead of farmland stuck between the Great Lakes, it remained a
forgotten place. Never industrial enough to be outright abandoned in the way of
the ghost towns of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Upstate New York, but not alert
enough to attempt re-invention. Grimshaw was content to merely hang on, to take
a subdued pride in its century homes on tree-lined streets, the stained facades
of its Victorian storefronts, its daughters or sons who met with success upon
moving away. Now, entering it as a stranger, one might see a gothic charm in
the wilful oldness of the place, its loyalty to the vine-covered, the
paint-peeled. But for those who grew up here, it was only as it had always
been.

    There
are times of the year when certain places seem to be themselves more than any
other time. Springtime in Paris, Christmas in New York. Toronto frozen at
Valentine's. Even before the bad things happened, I saw Grimshaw as a Halloween
town. Sparsely streetlit, thickly treed. The houses never grand but large,
built at a time that favoured rear staircases, widow's-peaked attics, so that
they all had their own secret hiding places. Founded by Scots Presbyterians and
consistently conservative in the backbenchers it sent to Parliament, Grimshaw
had little sympathy for the mystical. Any mention of the supernatural was
considered nothing more than foolishness, the side effects of too many matinees
indulged at the Vogue. Ghosts? "Catholic voodoo," as my father put
it.

    Yet
at the same time, it was its dour Protestant character that endeared its
inhabitants to the everyday tragic, to the stories of broken lives and cruel,
inexplicable fate. For our parents, the dead lived on, but only in dinner-table
and church-tea tales of misfortune.

    Grimshaw's
adults could never see their home as haunted. Their children, on the other
hand, had no choice.

    The
train slows as we approach the town limits. The hardened fields yield to weedy
outskirts, the low-rent acres of half-hearted development: the trailer park,
the go-kart track, the drive-in movie screen with "See U Next
Summer!" on the marquee (a promise that, by the vandalized look of things,
has not been kept for a dozen years or more). Then the more permanent claims.
Shaggy backyards crisscrossed with laundry lines. A school with paper witches
taped to the windows. Dumpsters left open- mouthed, choking on black plastic.