Murder Read online

  “Oh my,” another said.

  Well, full disclosure, so have I—and tell me I do not love my children. And tell me my children do not know this. To argue, and at times angrily argue, with your child is supposedly not to love him. Nonsense.

  Still, for thousands this proves children are unwanted and unwanted children become a problem and a social issue.

  Although what was and is camouflaged is the fact that when you talk of children as a problem, the last thing you are doing is taking the child’s side.

  Yet at these parties the argument is often that we are now, as never before, a very sensitive people who find it inexcusable how the world treats children, so it is best not to have many of them around. Of course there are women and men who will always be counted on to make fun of it all, glibly because they have been taught to react this way.

  So I am always left thinking of at least some of the children I knew—the nine children whose dad, a fireman, was killed fighting a fire in 1959; or those other boys and girls, in the far-off time of the 1950s, waiting at the back door of the bakery, in winter, to get a piece of bread before they went to school.

  Little Emma Cook boarding a ship with a second-hand doll to travel to New Brunswick in 1884 because someone somewhere thought that she was a problem that could be solved.

  And I think of this at any dinner party when we talk of children.

  It is also interesting to me to note the pretension of these views in the face of people who are unable to have children. People who cannot have children of their own are often looked upon with rather comic artificial sympathy.

  Just as my mother was looked upon with sympathy—one that didn’t even care to hide that it was false—because she had six children.

  A professor once suggested kindly that my mother was a victim because she had a large family. He was shocked that I would for one moment hesitate to agree. It was not because of what he said that made me disagree but the inference he wished his remark to betray.

  The inference was that my mother was never educated enough to make up her own mind, and couldn’t, anyway, being as she was, a woman of the forties and fifties.

  Which made her exactly what he considered her: being less than him.

  And as an afterthought he told me in a whisper something he assumed I did not know: that children suffered, too.

  His reasoning concurs: if Emma Cook, holding the second-hand doll in 1884, ready to get on a ship to Canada, had not been born, she would not have suffered. As if anyone could guarantee the degree of suffering of any human being, even himself.

  To my professor, abortion was the new option, for Emma and her crew of unsavoury little rascals. To my professor, there was no real child in the procedure. But if that is the case, whose suffering was he stopping?

  To me, nothing is more blinkered and more smugly self-assured than this view. They should not be born, but he was; they would have no chance at education, but he did. They would have no love of life, but his was immeasurable. They could not decide his fate, but he, with a sniff, could decide theirs.

  I’ve also found that the stereotype that most conversations exhibit about the parents of large families is not better than the ones detergent commercials made of women in the fifties.

  The bare bones of their argument has always struck me as this: that there should be a proper economic and intellectual table for being born that will forgo our need for charity, and moreover, there should be some way to implement this condition. Any father who argues with his child, or hustles him upstairs to make him take a bath and go to bed when he refuses at twelve years of age because he is rebelling, is not a father?

  I make not one apology for it.

  That is, the condition certain sociologists and approval-seeking writers want and need is a condition that would neglect a good many of the friends I value and probably myself. And most assuredly, many of the people who uniformly spout this argument. A few I know have never in their lives been able to show anything but conceited self interest.

  It’s similar to the principled upper classes long ago considering the poor as not human. Let’s say, about the time William Blake was writing his Songs of Innocence and of Experience, or earlier still, when Jonathan Swift was writing A Modest Proposal.

  I don’t even think little Emma Cook would have given one second of her life for the casual opinion the professor had about her birth. Nor do I think that her suffering was not bountiful and filled with the same hope as his own children’s. Maybe more so, across those storm-drenched seas.

  What we really don’t want is any more little Emma Cooks. In a way, it comes from a misguided noble sentiment: we do not wish humanity to suffer as we know she did.

  If this is the sentiment, then the expedient measure is not to give her a chance at it. Cutting the head off a problem is one sure way to handle it. Setting her adrift on a ship to Canada is another.

  The whole idea is that thinking this way is a psychic act of self-sacrifice on our part.

  Rather like the portly overseer of some social program of the mid-1880s.

  But one should never be the recipient of a benefit from one’s own altruism, to the receiver of that altruism’s debt.

  I’m only saying this: It’s fine altogether not to want something, or to never want it for others, either. But don’t let us pretend it’s because we care for it or them. Let not the childless writer virtue-signal in his books by filching an argument about children that he would never himself have to put to the test.

  Let us not condemn so easily the young or poverty-stricken. Yes, some have made terrible mistakes as parents. So have the many sociologists and child activists who write so tenderly about it all. So have I. Just tell me to my face I wouldn’t sacrifice my life for my children.

  The real notes of hope come from the children themselves. Not those who garner them a problem. Come from Emma Cook, wherever that ship took her.

  The doubters are ourselves.

  Years and years ago, on the Miramichi, a tiny seven-year-old girl jumped off a dory into the bay to save her five-year-old brother. In spite of her courage she was unable to bring him to safety.

  When a diver found the bodies some time later, they were sitting upright in the sand on the bottom, holding hands.

  I’ve never yet heard dinner party concern about children that even comes close to such wisdom.

  1991–2008

  DRIVING AT NIGHT

  FOR TEARS, I WORKED AT NIGHT. SOMETIMES IN THE WINTER I saw nothing more of the sun than a slight glow. I never minded too much. But wanting to get onto a day schedule caused all kinds of trouble. Generally no matter how much I tried, I slipped back into my nocturnal habits, boiled a pot of tea at midnight and went to work. For a number of years this caused a problem. If I had to travel from place to place, I couldn’t start before the sun was down, because I wouldn’t be awake enough to go. Never, when driving through to Ontario from the Miramichi, did I get onto the Plaster Rock Highway until after dark.

  Sometimes in the winter, I travelled miles without meeting another car, and sometimes without seeing so much as a rabbit.

  I don’t think you see the world the same way anyway. Or the same things in the world. So often people are by themselves. And as we know from experience, there are few things in Canada that can kill, but the weather is one.

  So you don’t like to see people stranded.

  There was a young man my wife and I picked up one night who hauled a switchblade on us, his arms tattooed with nunchucks, and his insistence that he had a black belt in karate.

  My wife was driving, and as he sat behind me, holding the knife against the seat, he kept talking about going home to kick his brother in the head. The bumpy, battered road was empty for a long time.

  He kept railing on, about some great things he had lost, someone who had deserted him.

  Yes, I thi
nk all in all, tough boys are like drunkards. The less they say about it, the more you know they’re the genuine article. After a while I told him he had to put his knife away. And he looked at it as if he was recognizing it for the first time, nodded and smiled. For the rest of the trip we talked about country and western music. Both of us were fans.

  I don’t remember where I was coming from when at two in the morning I went around a turn and in the dooryard of a small house saw a man, stark naked, waving an axe. As if he was limbering up for the local woodsman contest next day.

  I saw him later on. In daylight he sat on the broken lawn chair fully dressed and stared benignly at the twisted road between Neguac and Burnt Church. And he’s gone from us now. One day he just wasn’t there anymore.

  The house eventually got more and more solitary and deserted-looking, patched with dried-looking bushes and weeds, and after a time was torn down. I never knew who he was or learned his name. Nothing marks his spot now except part of a foundation: a grey, desolate chimney frame.

  Being alone seems to be the thing about night travel. This is what I’m trying to say about it. Not only for myself but also for those I’ve met along the way.

  Even when I tried to and planned to daylight-drive, I still was on the Plaster Rock at midnight.

  It’s a better road now than it once was, but still there are miles of what some would call “nothing.” Trees and darkness. For a long time it wasn’t paved.

  * * *

  —

  One time in the late seventies I was travelling there:

  I saw what I thought was a wounded deer.

  It kept moving toward me out of the left darkness. I slowed down when it walked into the middle of the road and began to wave. He was covered in blood, wearing one shoe and holding the other in his hand, and his tie was twisted completely around. All the buttons of his shirt, except the one under his tie, were torn off, showing the friendly stretch marks of an enormous beer gut.

  “How are you?” I asked.

  “Not so bad—can you help me find my car?”

  “Where did you last see it?”

  “Somewhere in the ditch.”

  He should go to the hospital. But as you can guess, this wasn’t his idea. His idea was that he would find his car and go home as quickly as he could. And being drunk, he was determined to find it before the cops did.

  “It couldn’t have snuck away too far,” he said hopefully as to encourage my participation in the search.

  But it wasn’t anywhere he thought. That is, it wasn’t in either ditch, and he had been wandering both sides of the road for a half hour looking for it.

  His car was, we eventually saw, in the woods, about a hundred feet from the road, up against a spruce tree. He had no idea how it got there.

  I told him to take the half-dozen broken and unbroken beer bottles and try to get rid of them. He thought about the best way to do this. And then he offered me one and we leaned against what was left of the hood.

  “Weather’s nice,” he said.

  “Pretty good,” I said.

  “On vacation, are ya?”

  “I guess so,” I said.

  He hadn’t remembered anything about going through the air, crossing the twenty-foot ditch and sailing into the woods. He hadn’t remembered where he’d been, or where he was going. But what was worse for him was that he had lost the new teeth his family had gotten him for his birthday

  I suggested he must have lost them in the car, and looked about under the dash. A strange kind of invasion of privacy, I guess. But he kept searching the ground, swinging his shoe at the grass morosely, until another car pulled over.

  I did happen to find his teeth near the brake pedal.

  And we persuaded him to get in with those who had just stopped, to travel to Grand Falls, the closest hospital to us.

  In the dark we were a few spots of light on the edge of nowhere. His hair greying, and his tie twisted completely about, as if he’d recently attempted to hang himself.

  I never saw him again.

  * * *

  —

  There was another night:

  We were coming back from a wedding. It was after two in the morning. There was one other car in front of us. I told Peggy I couldn’t chance to pass him because I couldn’t tell when he might veer into the middle of the road.

  He would do sixty and then slow down to twenty. He went around turns on the wrong side.

  We were about thirty-five miles from Fredericton when he tried to go around a turn, crossed the centre line and went tumbling straight down a forty-foot embankment.

  I went walking along the road, trying to spot him, and was joined in a minute by a man from New York.

  Far down in the turn we could make out a feeble light and the sound of a woman—who I thought was speaking Spanish.

  Then we saw them coming up the bank, and we scrambled down to meet them, the woman carrying a baby in her arms. They were from India, and the woman was dressed in traditional Hindu dress. The man was absolutely, painfully sober. A fact he wanted us to know. Though exhausted, he hadn’t thought of pulling over.

  At any rate the young fellow from New York went on his way, and we all walked to my car.

  When they got into our back seat, I started to drive to the hospital in Oromocto (we were fifteen minutes from it).

  “No, no,” the gentleman said. “We must now go to the police station and make out the report.”

  The woman spoke to him for a second.

  And he spoke angrily back: “But we must make out the report to the police, about my car.”

  Then they spoke for a few more moments in their language.

  The woman told us she had been breastfeeding the baby, and it fell from her arms when the car went over the embankment.

  “And now it doesn’t want to wake up anymore,” she said.

  Everyone was silent. The night smelled sweet. It was in the middle of summer.

  “Let me see it—I’ll wake it,” he said.

  The man took the baby from her. And he began to flip him or her (I never found out which) into the air.

  In my rear-view mirror, I saw the baby being tossed to the car ceiling, hover for a moment and come tumbling back down. Only to be flipped up again.

  “I’ll wake it—and then we’ll go to the police and make out a decent report,” the gentleman said.

  We went to the hospital. The nurse got the baby to wake, and then a doctor took it. But I never heard from them again and am not sure what happened to their child.

  Insanity can happen, drunk or sober, in the company of strangers.

  And although I know the horrors of drunk driving, and have no sympathy for it, to tell the truth, between both men, I much preferred the drunk.

  * * *

  —

  The last two cases involve holding hands:

  The first one was on a train going through from Halifax to Newcastle some years ago. It was late at night.

  The train was almost empty.

  The moon shone down over the snow, and the sky looked like a grey chalkboard.

  “Stop trying to hold my hand” I heard a woman say in back of me.

  There had been a little fellow bothering her for some time, although no one knew.

  First he walked by and sat with her. Then, when she moved her seat, he followed her—this was when they were behind me—and tried to hold her hand.

  And after she told him that she didn’t want to hold hands with him, he got up and walked by me.

  He was about twenty-five, couldn’t have been more than five feet two inches and wore lifts.

  The train rocked its way through the woods, and everyone forgot about him.

  Ten minutes later the car door banged open and he went flying past me with a conductor chasing him.

&nbs
p; “That’s him—that’s him,” a second woman yelled, following the conductor.

  “That’s him,” the first woman said.

  And he ran down to the end of the car, as fast as his legs would carry him, as another conductor cut him off. It seemed to me as if he was trapped. I didn’t know how he’d get out of it. But never underestimate the value of panic.

  Thwack.

  He hit the conductor, who was trying to block his exit, square in the head, and the conductor staggered and went down.

  And then he did what seemed to me to be absolutely unexpected. He jumped off the train.

  We were out looking under the train for him at one in the morning. We did not find him.

  “I hope he’s not squished,” one of the young women said, as the train started up again.

  “He’s not squished—you would have heard the squish,” the other woman said.

  A few of us looked out the train windows, into the grey silence.

  * * *

  —

  The last case is similar to the others. Perhaps it is the archetypal case for those who drive at night.

  It happened to a friend of mine. At three in the morning—coming back from somewhere. He left the road, and was thrown from his car. He lay in the ditch, his life going from him. No one about.

  Until a young woman pulled over. They had never met before.

  She told him she would have to go get him help, because it was in the middle of the night, and they were all alone.

  “Oh no,” he said, smiling at her for a second. “I’ll be okay if you don’t leave me. Just hold my hand, please hold my hand—and don’t let go.”

  She took his hand and held on to it. Those were the last words he spoke.