The Prison Book Club (37 page)

Gaston listed with exasperation all his other obligations from that time in the halfway house: attending weekly Community Maintenance Program meetings, AA and NA meetings, relapse prevention meetings, case management team meetings, urinalysis testing and parole officer meetings. His chores at the halfway house included vacuuming and yardwork. “Then of course my wife, my four kids, my job, my responsibilities to the church. Holy macaroni.”

So when Collins Bay released him to his own home in Toronto, not a halfway house, it took him two full weeks to stop reaching for the phone out of habit, thinking he had to call someone to report in.

Gaston's cellphone rang during our conversation. It was his contact for the interview. He handled it professionally, and when the interviewer asked how he knew Carol, he said he had been in her book club in prison. After it was over, I told him how great it was that he had told the truth.

“I didn't want to, but when he asked me, I can't lie,” he said. That was a change. I recalled another story he had told me about a different job interview back in the spring, several weeks before Collins Bay was about to release him for the first time. He did the interview by phone from prison with his parole officer in the room, and he told the potential employer a little white lie: he couldn't take up the job immediately because he had a “big project in eastern Ontario” and didn't want to leave his current employer in the lurch. He said his parole officer rolled her eyes.

“You know, Annie,” he said, using a name I hadn't been called in more than thirty years, “if I had to tell you what my dream job was, it's to work in the addictions field. Not get calluses on my hands, but put on a nice suit and tie and help people. You know I like to talk.”

As we finished our sandwiches and headed out, Gaston and I talked about his reading
Shutter Island
at the halfway house, then about his search for books that he and his wife could read together. “And you know what I want for Christmas?” he said, as we shook hands to say goodbye. “I told my wife I want a new reading lamp so I can read at night.”

In the months that followed, Gaston enrolled in a two-year university program in addictions and mental health and began volunteering at the addictions centre. He left landscaping and began working in a sign business, making sales calls, driving a truck and organizing the warehouse. Like many former inmates, he remained on the police radar and wound up in jail twice more for brief periods though, to the best of my knowledge, he was never convicted.

Frank's life was so hectic that we didn't have a chance to talk at length until some nine months later. He and his wife spoke to me from an arena where their son was playing hockey. His son's team won the game but Frank observed that Malcolm Gladwell was right in
Outliers
when he said that hockey players born early in the year had an advantage over teammates born later in the same year. His son, born in November, was suddenly six inches shorter than his good friend on the team who was born in February. “He's disadvantaged,” said Frank.

Lots had changed for Frank. He was working as a builder on a project to convert a six-car garage into a guest house on a property north of the city. It was a complete gut job and included elaborate reframing. During his six years on the lam, when he spent most of his time in the main branch of the Toronto Public Library, he had researched construction methods and materials at length.

He was still living in the halfway house and enjoying the book club there. Just like at Collins Bay and Beaver Creek, his new book club met about once a month, on a Wednesday evening after work, and they discussed books that many other mainstream book clubs were also reading, including Yann Martel's
Life of Pi
and Anne Michaels's
Fugitive Pieces
. They held their meetings off-site at a bubble-tea house or a donut shop. Because there were usually only about eight members, they could generally find a corner in which to talk. “It's a little diversion from everyday things, and it's interesting to hear those guys talk,” Frank told me. He had no recruiting role in the book club. Renata ran it all, and did a good job, he said. He liked that she posted notices at the halfway house advertising each book club meeting, with accompanying blurbs from inmates who had read the book before. What a great way to promote a book in-house, I thought. Not quotes from Amazon or
New York Times
book reviews, but from the guys themselves. If there was a film associated with a book, like
Life of Pi
, the book club would screen it together sometime after the book discussion.

“
The Thirteenth Tale
is what we're reading now,” he said. “It's pretty good. It's about a voracious reader. She was raised in a bookstore.Then there's a famous writer in England that's dying and wants her to do her biography. The problem is, she's had different biographers before and it's always a lie. This one's supposed to be the truth.” Frank's mini-review made me want to read it.

“How would you compare your book club at the halfway house to the one at Collins Bay?” I asked.

“It's smaller. The Beaver Creek Book Club was probably the best one. You've got serious readers there, who've read a lot of books.” As for the Collins Bay Book Club, “It gave me something to look forward to, 'cause I was bored out of my head there. At least once a month you could talk to normal people from the outside, not criminals.” I recalled that he had once told me that the book club meetings were a respite from the prison yard, where most conversation involved boasting about crime.

Ben agreed to meet me several times, including one cool April day two years after he had left Collins Bay. I waited for him at a café near his halfway house in Toronto. When he walked in the door, he was almost unrecognizable, having shorn his dreads into a short head-hugging layer of hair, revealing his forehead. A curly moustache and goatee encircled his mouth and when he came toward me smiling, his teeth blazed white. He was wearing a black leather-sleeved hoodie with its hood down. I was only finally sure it was him when he removed his reflecting aviator sunglasses, revealing his familiar downward-slanting eyes with their heavy lids.

We took our coffees outside into the sunshine, grateful for our warm jackets. I knew Ben had had a succession of jobs since leaving Collins Bay, including warehouse work for a retail store and a pretty gruelling stint staining cabinetry, which had paid eleven dollars an hour. According to Carol, he had briefly run a Cash for Gold business until a customer conned him with a fake diamond ring, setting him back seven thousand dollars. That spring he was buying cheap cars at auctions, fixing them up and selling them, making two or three thousand dollars per car. And he'd been talking to a Jamaican coffee company about a business venture to sell their products in Canada.

“You know, Ben,” I said. “I keep looking at these storefronts across the street and wondering which could be a bookshop café.” I told him I'd always hoped one of the book club members might open a bookstore. The coffee tie-in sounded ideal to me. He looked dubiously at the row of two-storey brick shops. It would be all he could do to make the coffee deal work, he explained, because he had no capital up front to invest. There was also a sizable tax bill to pay first. He took a drink from his mocha coffee and wiped the whipped cream and chocolate syrup off his beard.

Ben had continued to write his journal regularly for about a month, recording all the happy reunions with friends and family. But his writing also contained descriptions of conditions in the halfway house that made him uneasy. His first roommate talked to himself, was heavily tattooed and wore white socks so dirty that they were black. The poor health and hygiene of some of his housemates made him fastidious in the kitchen and bathroom. “You have to clean, wipe, bleach, wash before you use anything,” he wrote in his journal. As a result, he showered at the houses of family or friends.

Then we talked about books, how Carol had given him
Alias Grace
to read when he first entered the halfway house, and how he was now reading
And the Mountains Echoed
by Khaled Hosseini. He mentioned the scene where Abdullah was left behind as his father took his three-year-old sister to Kabul to be adopted by another family. It had stayed with him, he said. I told him it had lingered with me too, stirring up a sharp feeling of loss and confusion. I pulled a gift for him out of my satchel: my copy of Juan Gabriel Vásquez's novel,
The Sound of Things Falling
, which I had read with my women's book club. “We have to talk about it after you've finished,” I told him. “One of the women in my book club identified something symbolic in the novel that the rest of us had missed and it's a thrilling insight.”

Finally I asked him to tell me about the manslaughter charge that had landed him at Collins Bay and in Carol's book club. Ben told me his version of events. He said that people wearing courier uniforms attempted a home invasion at his townhouse. He was already suspicious about the delivery because he wasn't expecting a package. When they first knocked, he didn't answer the door. But when they rang the doorbell twice, he responded. He knew something was up when the courier driver didn't have a pen for him to sign the signature pad. As Ben went back into the house, a man came running through the door with a .380-calibre pistol. “My mistake was leaving the door open,” said Ben. “So basically I had to shoot him.” He used the Glock semi-automatic pistol that he kept in his house. He told me that the robbers knew he was involved in drugs and had assumed he had money and drugs in the house. The Crown acknowledged that there were elements of self-defence in the case, but Ben was nevertheless convicted of manslaughter.

I asked him about Dread. “All I know is that he was deported to Jamaica,” I said. Ben said he had heard that Dread was building a house there and that his children were going to move to Jamaica to go to school. I remembered that Dread had once told me his dream house would have a “king's bedroom” for the man and a “queen's bedroom” for the woman.

“And his wife?” I asked.

He didn't know.

“Is he still reading?”

Again Ben didn't know. It was time to go, and we shook hands. I wished him well, as always, and reminded him to call me when he had finished the Vásquez book.

I first heard from Peter months later. He called me a couple of times from a halfway house, returned to prison for a while after what he called “a dirty piss test,” and was then back out and keen to invite Carol and me for a coffee in his small town. We agreed to meet, but Carol had to cancel at the last minute. So I packed my copy of Lisa Moore's
Caught
, which I'd read in two days flat, and a copy of the children's book
Goodnight Moon
because he had a friend with a child who loved books, and I drove out of the city alone to meet him. As I drove I recalled my last visit with him, in which I'd asked him to describe the room in Collins Bay that we were sitting in from a writer's perspective. It was a different storage room from the one we usually used—one that also contained guitars, chairs and music stands but had no outside windows. Peter told me, “It's empty, even with stuff in it. Because it's jail.” He had a writer's sensibility.

I arrived at the coffee shop first and found a booth by the window. When he walked in, it seemed to me that he had aged a decade beyond his thirty-eight years. His hair flowed almost to his shoulders and was significantly grey. He had grown bushy sideburns that mingled with his hair. His face was mottled—perhaps his old psoriasis problem—and he seemed a little confused. It was 11 a.m., so I had bought him a turkey sandwich and myself an egg-andbacon bagel. Then when I only ate half of mine, he asked if he could finish it.

“Of course,” I said.

He was not working and had no interest in looking for work, although he was a skilled millwright. He lived at no fixed address. And he wasn't reading, even though in the months after I'd stopped participating in the Collins Bay Book Club, he had been an outstanding ambassador for the group. Just as he had back at Collins Bay, he was up all night and asleep during the day. I was probably disturbing his schedule. Of all the men I had met in prison, he was the most promising writer, one of the most insightful readers, and yet at that moment seemingly lost. Music had become his main interest. He had played a few guitar gigs locally. He opened his phone and played me a few tunes that he was into. He looked so vulnerable and innocent as he stared down at the screen. I was very distressed to find out months later that he had been arrested and charged with first degree murder. His application for bail had been denied. At the time of writing he was awaiting trial.

As for Carol, her energy for expansion continued. She found it easier to open book clubs in more prisons when another charity called First Book Canada partnered with her to help reduce the cost of the books. That was in 2012. After she had complained to me about the many delays in opening a book club at Fenbrook, it finally happened that fall. And when Warkworth medium-security prison opened its book club also that autumn, Carol finally achieved the milestone of operating a book club in every federal prison in Ontario. The following year she added book clubs in Winnipeg at Stony Mountain Institution and at Bowden in Red Deer, Alberta. A memorial donation from the late Ontario court judge Madame Justice Joan Lax enabled Carol to open book clubs in all the remaining federal women's prisons in Canada, including her first francophone book club at Joliette Institution in Quebec. By the spring of 2015, she had seventeen book clubs in fourteen institutions and plans to open more in the fall of 2015. Among her many new book club members was a former Guantánamo inmate. She has also coached volunteers in New York and California in her model so that they could open book clubs in prisons there. Given her energy and drive, it's hard to imagine when Carol will finally feel satisfied that she has accomplished what she set out to do.