The Prison Book Club (22 page)

What stunned me was how quickly some of the men decoded the symbolism of other seemingly mundane sights along the caravan's journey. Drawing on their familiarity with the Bible, Peter, Dread, Roman and Gaston recognized the poem's foreshadowing of the crucifixion when near the end of their journey the Wise Men observe three trees on the horizon and men gambling for silver. It was Roman who pointed to the silver as a reference to Judas Iscariot betraying Jesus for thirty pieces of silver. And it was Peter who reminded us of the second meaning: how Roman guards cast lots to win Jesus' clothing.

Carol pointed subtly to the parallels between the journey of the Magi and the inmates' own journeys. In the poem, the Wise Man who is narrating recalls lavish summer palaces where women served them sherbet, Eliot's delicious image of earthly pleasures, and seems to recognize that those material preoccupations might have been the wrong path. Ben expanded Carol's point, saying that the Magi were also no longer comfortable praising different idols. He pointed us to the final lines about the Magi returning home and feeling out of place.

“That's what happens on journeys,” said Carol. “You're forced to go one way or the other way. The question is, do we get wiser on our journeys or not?”

The journey.T.S. Eliot.And then a flickering memory intruded— of another king, another journey and another T.S. Eliot poem, “Little Gidding,” from his
Four Quartets
. How sharply my chest aches when I think of it, because of my own journey with my father to the little church and farm in Cambridgeshire described in that poem. My father had come to visit me in Hampstead with a plan to spend one of the days driving to Little Gidding to recall his own visit there in the 1950s and to make a new pilgrimage with me, as father and daughter.

A short distance before we arrived, he had me stop the car on the side of the road, beside a gnarled hedgerow whose twist of hawthorn branches was choked with other plants, likely dog rose and bryony. My father said nothing about why we had stopped. We stood for a minute beside the tangle of the hedge and then returned to the car. A few minutes later, when we found ourselves beside the windowless stone facade of the church, which looked more like a tomb than a chapel, I understood something of the mystery that had gripped T.S. Eliot and my father.

And inside, as we read the poem aloud, I discovered the lines about the hedgerows white with snow, then white with hawthorn blossoms in May, and the lines about King Charles I fleeing the battlefield broken. But most of all I found new understanding of the lines about journeying and arriving at Little Gidding not knowing what you were looking for. Eliot makes it all intensely personal to the reader by using the second person, how
you
didn't know why you were there, or that the reason is beyond what you had imagined. And then Eliot's observation about how the reason changes when it is fulfilled and you know what it was that you came for.

As I looked around the room at the men that Christmas, I suddenly knew I was on a similar journey, and I was not yet sure what I had come for. It was not just to help with book selection, not just to encourage the men in their journal-writing, not just to discover books together and write this book, but to touch the web of meaning that connects our lives—the men to me, me to my father, me to my own elusive courage. The men's journeys ahead were precarious and would require much courage. And then that line in the poem about how the dead communicate with fire and how the things they couldn't tell you in life they can tell you now that they are gone. I felt my father with me in that soursmelling prison room, everything he had given me through nature and poetry and the tiny ember of courage that he was fanning in me now.

I looked up and saw Gaston with a raised hand wanting to answer Carol's question about whether we get wiser on our journeys. “The Magi know that it is no longer acceptable, the way they live,” he said. The comment settled over everyone, because it was the bare-knuckle lesson of prison. Something about the way each man had lived previously had led him to this place.

Before the chaplain could call Count, Carol told the men that we had gifts for them. It wasn't the fruitcake she made and distributed to friends each Christmas, which would never have passed prison protocol. When she told me she was buying them presents and asked for my suggestion, I recommended tree ornaments. She questioned whether the men would be able to hang them in their cells and whether a Christmas tradition might offend the non-Christian inmates, but she went ahead and bought lamb-shaped ornaments made from tufts of unwoven wool from Topsy Farm sheep. “They've been through the security screener,” Carol said, as if to answer an unasked question. We told the guys that they could hang the lambs on the tree in the years to come—to remember us and the book club.

The men crowded around and she handed one to each. They cradled the balls of fluff in their hands. No one joked that the gift was silly or useless, at least not in front of us. They looked as vulnerable and innocent in that gift-giving moment as children on Christmas morning.

That giving season, Carol was agitated about people failing to open up their wallets in support of the book clubs cause. The inaugural Oysters & Champagne fundraiser for Book Clubs for Inmates Inc., at her condo in Toronto in late November, had yielded cheques totalling only fourteen thousand dollars from the many lawyers in attendance, despite the presence of the fundraiser's special guest, Ian Binnie, a newly retired Supreme Court of Canada justice, and Vince, one of her first book club graduates. It was far short of the forty thousand needed to buy the books for the eight book clubs she had founded by that point.

Following her family's tradition of tithing 10 percent of earnings, Carol set the bar high for others, and was not above urging her friends to also be generous. Just six days after the fundraiser, she called one invitee who'd taken home a pledge card after having sipped her champagne and eaten her oysters. “John, John, John,” she said to him. “Matthew 6 says that you cannot store up your riches in barns.” She got biblical when she was trying to raise money. And saltier too. “It's a bit of a lousy trick to offer your wife as a volunteer instead of making a donation.” John laughed and agreed to give five thousand dollars.

Five thousand dollars was enough to buy the books for one book club for a year. At that giving level, John was now a “Patron” of one of Carol's book clubs and would receive a card of appreciation from the inmates. The funds would purchase new books because it was important to Carol that the inmates all receive the same edition. That way, when one member wanted to discuss a specific passage, the others could find it easily. The book shipments also had to conform with prison security requirements and a uniform set of new books was less likely to be turned away.

Christmas came to Collins Bay eleven days after book group. The West Indian men got their cayenne. And in the week between Christmas and New Year, Gaston got his wish for a cell transfer. It was a smaller, colder cell, but he was more comfortable with his new range mates, who included another man from the book club. He celebrated by having one of his trademark high and tight haircuts.

Back in Toronto, I got my wish: to have my family around me—the best gift of all. My adult children had designed and baked a Mayan temple out of gingerbread. My son, an engineer, drafted the pattern for the components, and my daughter and my son's girlfriend mixed and baked the dough. It was a long-standing Christmas tradition in our family to create a gingerbread house— each year a new architectural design. We ate roast capon with squash and Brussels sprouts while a fire burned in the fireplace. And we lit the brandy on the Christmas pudding. I was newly aware of the stark contrast between my Christmas and Christmas for those behind bars.

Then we sat quietly with the new books we had found under the tree that morning. Someone had given me Malcolm Gladwell's
Outliers: The Story of Success
, so that I could read it before the Beaver Creek Book Club discussion in January. I lounged on a living room chair, immersed in Gladwell's cleverness, while my husband was absorbed in Ian Kershaw's
The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany 1944–1945
. A happy Christmas.

That evening, as I cleared up the dishes after dinner, I looked at the Christmas card on the fireplace mantel. Graham had given it to me on my last visit to Beaver Creek before Christmas. It was the first and only Christmas card I've received from an inmate, let alone a convicted drug trafficker and former Hells Angel. “Ann, Your friendship and support is the best gift anyone could ever receive,” it read. “I am extremely grateful for both! I wanted to wish you and your entire family a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.” The final letter in his signature ended with a confident three-inch-long flourish of the pen. I had known him for only nine months and he, like Ben, now counted me as a friend. I was moved each time I read it.

Still, I felt undeserving because I had come empty-handed that day. I had had no card for Graham. It was like Dread had said during book group: what if only one of the Dillingham Youngs had made a sacrifice to buy a gift for the other?

13

A BOOK CLUB OF THREE

T
HE MUSKOKA WINTER at Beaver Creek brought much heavier snowfalls than Frank was used to at home in Toronto. In his prison job as the grocery shopper for his unit, he had to carry bags of food from the on-site canteen along shovelled walkways between high snowdrifts. He observed in his journal in early January that only a few squirrels were active while the many other squirrels and chipmunks had disappeared. He surmised that the active ones were youngsters who might have been born that summer and hadn't yet learned about hibernation. I had encouraged the men writing journals to make observations about the natural world and I was pleased that Frank had begun to do so. The institution was readying its outdoor skating rink for the inmates and Frank wrote that he was hoping to be able to use it before he had to go for knee surgery later in the month. I guessed that the staff would be careful to count the skates after ice time.

Over Christmas, Frank had been denied a pass to go home to see his wife and two children, which he found particularly hard given that Graham had been granted a pass earlier on. The criteria for a pass to go home (an Unescorted Temporary Absence) were strict and often included soliciting the views of the community. But his pass to write a real estate exam in a nearby city had also been cancelled. “How can they justify a UTA for Graham and not for me?” he complained to me. “His withdrawn charges are probably worse than mine.” But in his journal, he was philosophical to some extent about the disappointments, saying that at this late stage in his incarceration he chose to ignore those setbacks and that he didn't take it personally. He was even resigned about the outcome of his upcoming parole hearing in February. It helped that he had just read a book from the prison library called
Twenty Thousand Years in Sing Sing
, written in 1932 by Lewis E. Lawes, the former warden of the historic New York State prison. Frank described Lawes as a critic of nineteenth-century prison methods and took the position that many of Lawes's recommended changes still had not been implemented. He also observed that convicts with long criminal records had changed little since Lawes's time and still engaged in “cunning” to try to get around prison regulations.

In those snowbound and frustrated months, Frank's journal became a new focus as he read book after book and captured his thinking about each one in short book reviews. He'd finished the book on mobster Crazy Joe Gallo, which he'd first read thirty years ago, and found that he no longer revered Gallo for his glamorous life with movie stars, but instead despised him for his deeds, including his treatment of women. Ironically, I remember reading somewhere once that Gallo became a big reader in prison and could discuss the works of Hugo, Camus and others.

Frank liked the four books he'd just read that all pertained to women:
Nomad
by Ayaan Hirsi Ali,
The Glass Castle
,
Mafia Wife
and
The Woman Who Walked Into Doors
. He had an eye for plausibility when it came to female characters. He'd concluded that Lawrence Hill was better than Roddy Doyle at getting into the head of a woman. He'd noticed it when reading Doyle's description of Paula Spencer's sexual longings for Charlo. Paula seeing Charlo across the yard and falling for him—that was credible, he told me later. “But the other part about ‘oh I'd like to rip his pants off' doesn't seem to be the way a woman thinks,” he said.

A few days after Frank wrote those journal entries, I drove up to Beaver Creek to meet with him and Graham.The remote country roads that I'd negotiated in the fall looked different in mid-winter, making it difficult to recognize the turnoff to the prison. Worse, blown snow from snowplows had formed a thick crust over the road signs. A wrong turn could lead me down a bush road. Then it dawned on me that I now had a smart phone with GPS. I quickly identified where I was and soon found myself at the prison.

After checking in with the guards, I met Graham and Frank in the chapel. Graham was commiserating with Frank about not receiving passes home. Graham reminded him that it was always harder to get passes or parole back to your home community if that was where you'd committed the offence. The problem was, Frank's family home was not far from the spot where he'd committed the crime that had landed him in prison for his latest “bit.” Frank had never spoken much about the incident and I didn't want to pry. All I knew was that the newspapers had called it a “brazen” daytime shooting in a restaurant.

But that day, because he had been denied passes, Frank wanted to tell his story. It took place more than a decade earlier. At the time, he was about fifty. As he told me, he'd walked into a popular Italian restaurant in Toronto to say hello to a waitress who was a friend of his. One newspaper account said the conflict erupted when the owner refused to serve Frank because the restaurant wasn't open at that hour of the day for business. But Frank told me that's not what happened. In his account, one of the male staff grabbed him because he didn't want him speaking to the waitress. Frank then fell on the ground and held a stool in front of himself for protection. The man threw it aside, followed Frank out of the restaurant and hit him. Frank left, but came back a short time later with a .40-calibre semi-automatic handgun and began firing. Staff and patrons ran for cover, and in the chaos of ricocheting bullets, one bullet hit the proprietor in the back and another hit someone in the foot. No one was killed. Other bullets struck other surfaces. I listened to his story intently. It was hard to imagine Frank wanting to scare people. He was so reasonable in all my dealings with him.