Murder Read online

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  —

  I know these things aren’t unusual or important whatsoever. But the memory of them has been with me for a long time. I have a kinder opinion now of the gentleman with the baby than I once had.

  Being under stress he was only trying to do the right thing, not knowing his thinking was muddled. Perhaps new to our country, and conscious of bureaucratic reports, he was only frightened of being sent away.

  Perhaps, too, it’s summed up by the man I met on the Plaster Rock, the man with his tie twisted about his neck.

  “Thank God you stopped,” he said, smiling that wonderfully kind, self-deprecating smile so many New Brunswickers have. “Tonight, I’m on my own.”

  1994

  LEE COULD NOT HAVE SPOKEN

  THE GRAND OLD MAN OF THE CONFEDERACY, GENERAL LEE, spoke his last words, in delirium, in 1870: “Tell Hill he must come up” and “Strike the tent.”

  The first, an order to A. P. Hill, the red flannel-wearing general who had saved Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia in 1862. The second was spoken to an unknown orderly to take Lee’s tent down.

  But now, after 120 years, they are being disputed. A College of Physicians insists that the damage Lee suffered in his stroke in the autumn of 1870 would not have permitted him to utter those words.

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  —

  The trouble is, the pedantics are always right.

  I have learned, however, that every time they stand on a point, they usually want to diminish someone else’s reputation, sometimes that person’s entire life. They never say this is their intent, but it is always evident in what they try to correct.

  Lee could not have spoken.

  In the fall of 1970, studying American history, I was told by an American professor that the Alamo had no heroes.

  He hated the idea of war, and I can truly say I understand this. But because he did, he begrudged the very idea of heroics in war.

  “There wasn’t a hero there,” he said to me. “They tried to surrender to General Santa Anna when the fort capitulated, before General Houston’s troops arrived.”

  He seemed more than pleased with himself because of this opinion. One might ask: if he didn’t believe in heroes, why was he so gleeful about what he obviously wanted me to consider a cowardly act?

  At a party one evening in Fredericton someone quoted a beautifully succinct line from one of C. S. Lewis’s essays on Christianity

  “How can you believe him?” someone said. “He was a cocaine addict.” This one phrase made him seem all-knowing and C. S. Lewis a foolish old man indeed.

  Another time, someone got angry and self-righteous because they heard Van Gogh had only cut off his earlobe, and not the whole ear. It seemed that this action was not worth Van Gogh’s life’s work and so made him something of a fraud. And this same person had heard that Churchill had decided not to warn Coventry it was going to be bombed, in order to prevent the Germans from discovering that the Brits had deciphered their code. This made him realize, he said, that Churchill was “no better than Hitler.” And felt appalled. Which is what he said:

  “I feel appalled.”

  The trouble is most of the rest of us tried to apologize to him. We were sorry Churchill did this, and could he forgive us for not being as appalled as he was.

  “No—I’m just appalled.”

  There are always ways in which being stingily correct will reduce everyone else to our level.

  We must get a great deal of pleasure out of it.

  A woman I know sat in a poet’s den one day and picked out the three or four spelling mistakes in his book of poems. She said nothing else about the book.

  Of course it reduced everything to where she sat. She was only being helpful. Not capable of writing a book of verse herself, she was genuinely interested in only what was wrong with his.

  “Oh—here’s a mistake” were her first words after she had picked up the book.

  “How right you are,” the poet said, looking at it.

  And she smiled around at us all.

  The poet smiled, too.

  When I knew this woman, she continually used the method of convenient empathy. Faint praise not to damn but to democratize. This is the same lady who, every time you told her of someone being up for an award, said, almost in tears, “Oh, I’m so afraid they’ll lose.” Until you realized that she was praying that no one ever win anything—but her.

  These peculiar people come in all shapes and sizes, all races and religious affiliations. Their thoughts are programmed by CBC Radio talk and Oprah Winfrey.

  You meet them at any party you go to, all summer barbecues and any skating rink, too, and it is reputation they are after. They are the highly educated, unthinking, literal minded. They always hold others accountable for the ability to think for themselves.

  Even in this essay, to say that you admire General Lee is, for some of them, to be in favour of antebellum slavery You will be accused of racism for saying that the rebels fought well, with little to fight with.

  (That is like saying that Churchill, who admired Rommel, was in favour of Hitler; or that thousands of troops, and generals who fought against Lee and called him an honourable man, were on his side. In fact, the first thing soldiers of the Army of the Potomac would say about a new commander was “He might be good, but he ain’t yet fought Bobby Lee.”)

  You never win. As Tolstoy comments, the stupid always have the initial argument. Yet somehow God gives us grace. The pedantic always fail. That’s the thing. Wait long enough.

  Those who ridiculed F. Scott Fitzgerald in those lonely thirties killed him but never destroyed him, and don’t matter a damn now. Or Dostoevsky, him.

  Or General Grant’s friends, who called him “a drunk” behind his back and went whining to Lincoln about him, never mattered much once Richmond fell.

  But of course, beware. These people just change tack and keep going.

  Not only do some of them change horses in midstream, they put on a different bridle and bit and change the stream itself.

  Some of them change opinion about people with the same grace as changing underwear.

  “He couldn’t have done that” or “She’s not as good as you think” is forever on their lips, as a way to explain you to me, and to shore themselves up for tomorrow.

  They never meet you on even ground, these ladies and gentlemen. They are forever at your throat, or at your feet. They are on every Passion window in every church. But it is never themselves being nailed to the cross.

  1990–2009

  THE TURTLE, THE HANDBOOK, THE DARK NIGHT AIR

  I WAS WALKING ALONG A SPANISH BEACH WITH MY SON. IT WAS December and the clouds had formed darkish pink spirals above us, far away and beautifully made. Above those clouds the sky was still and frigid. The air was sharp, and a man had lit a fire under a palm tree, burning off garbage to keep warm. The gardens were still, the lights from the rows of white villas shone in a peculiar winter way, while whole blocks of apartamentos were boarded shut. Waiting for the German, Swiss and British clientele to arrive in April.

  Night was coming and we were searching the beach for bamboo sticks to take back to our villa. Some we would use to start the fire—others, the best ones, we would use to play our game of hockey. The best ones were sturdy, with knots at the bottom, hooked out like the blade of a hockey stick.

  My son wore his Montreal Canadiens sweater, and sweatpants and sneakers, running in and out of the water, not at all worried about getting wet. He was four years old. Far off in the Mediterranean the black outline of the island of Ibiza made me remember other trips here, while against the mountains and wintry haze to our north was the illumination from the far-off city of Valencia.

  I remembered Ibiza because I had visited that island twenty-five years before with my brother. At that time we had travelled all along
this coast by ship, living for two weeks in a Spanish Civil War bunker on the Canary Islands, off the coast of Africa. On the way back our tramp steamer ran into foul weather, a hurricane, which knocked all the passengers out of commission.

  There were many African students going up to study in Spain or France in March of 1971. Everyone except myself and a London boy named Dennis Mahoney took seasick. For four days and nights the waves came up over the ship, the ship moaned and tossed, and Dennis and I made our way up to the galley to eat our meals—two people at a table set for forty.

  I remembered this while on the beach with my son, and thought that time was obligated to pass—just as our parents told us it would—too fast. I will never see Dennis again, or his friend John Cruise, who did two tours in Northern Ireland for the British Army. At night he would sit up, still asleep, and swish his Bowie knife in the air above our heads.

  “They aren’t coming,” Dennis would whisper. “John—John—they aren’t coming.”

  He had bad dreams.

  We go along the beach and my son is a master at finding sticks. The sand is cold and the beach is built up with bars and restaurants specializing in local seafood dishes. Paella during the afternoon. Sometimes it is hard to get paella after a certain hour of the day, and I have always considered it an evening meal.

  There is a sense you have here of restaurants and bars and cafés dominating the world. After a month in Spain the idea of being a waiter strikes my son as being the best job in the world.

  We have collected our sticks. The beach seems deserted, far as the eye can see. It is almost night. Yet I see something in the waves. A body of some sort. I turn and walk toward it. And then step out into the cold December water, where I detect its outline.

  A woman begins to talk very quickly in Spanish to me, and then, when her eyes meet mine, she recognizes me as not one of hers. She smiles.

  She is struggling in waist-high water with a giant dead turtle that has floundered in front of her small bar. And at first I think that the young woman—whose blouse and jeans are now soaking wet—wants to put the turtle farther into the sea. But then with some hand direction and broken English and Spanish, I realize she wants to haul it up on the beach, where my son is watching, and where the tractor will come and clear it away on Tuesday. But she can’t make any headway with it alone.

  I grab one of the turtle’s back flippers and we haul it in. It is a large, old turtle. At one certain place something on its flippers or broken shell is rough enough to cut open my left hand—though not my right one. My left hand is my “bad” hand, as my son named it, and although my right arm is quite strong, I have a hard time picking up a cup of coffee with my left. Not that it is so weak—it is not. I just have no coordination or any real control over its movement.

  The secret is my left leg, too, is “bad,” and has almost gotten me killed half a dozen times or more. Usually from falling. From tripping on anything. From tumbling over a cliff when I was a child. Or from falling under trains when I jumped them as a kid. From falling off logs while fishing, to missing ice floes when I jumped them in the spring breakups long ago. And once slipping out from under me, when I was wearing chest waders, alone in the middle of the Northwest Miramichi. I went floating and flailing about, upside down for a while.

  I think of these things as we haul the turtle to shore. I don’t know how it died, or what has ripped open its shell: age, disease, a dogfish or shark.

  My son and I walk farther up the beach under those golden-tinged clouds spiralling above our heads.

  “¡Gracias!” the young woman shouts after us, wiping her brow, in the final dusk of the Spanish evening. “¡Muchas gracias!”

  “De nada, señorita—de nada.”

  In the night air outside my villa, drinking a Bitter Kas, I wash and wrap my bleeding hand, while my son watches me with the hope that I will wrap and bandage his hand, as well. And so of course I do, and he runs back and forth with his left hand bandaged just like mine. In the winter in Canada when I wrap my left hand because of arthritis, he does the same thing. I, too, have often, like a lost child, imitated friends and loved ones I admired. At least for a little while. As long as I thought they admired me.

  It has always caused me problems—this hand—my left side. I should have come to terms with it long ago, because a wooden leg is an excuse for nothing, Thomas Wolfe said. And I firmly believe that he is right. But it wasn’t him as much as me who would know.

  Of course, in most ways I have come to terms with it, as with everything else, the injury I suffered when my mother fell off a porch when she was seven months pregnant, landing on her stomach and causing me to be born that night. I have made fun of it a lot more than others; I scorn it every day. Yet I can’t ignore it.

  One photographer put it this way: “Most people worry about a traumatic experience interrupting their lives, but freaks have suffered their trauma at birth.” Something at least a little like that.

  I have never been frightened of injury or physical violence, and certainly not death, so much as ridicule because of it.

  Anyway, it is not so readily noticeable to those who don’t know me. Yet everything I have done has been done with my right side, aware of my left side being limited, non-existent.

  Because of this I have squared myself to the world with one side, doing things I might not have done or not doing things I should have. At least, I think this is the reason. Other factors are involved.

  I have struggled across rapids, canoed rivers and been stranded in the middle of the Miramichi Bay at midnight, drifting slowly out to sea, and have always been secretly afraid of water.

  There are always other factors.

  The old turtle reminds me of my youth, and remembering some bigger boys who teased a poor old turtle with a hole through its shell, chained to the backyard fence. There were yellow leaves on the ground, and it crawled to the corner of the yard to hide.

  Later when I was older, some boys were tormenting a porcupine, and I came along with my shotgun and killed it. I don’t know if I killed the right animal, but something had to be done.

  There is music. It goes on and on. But like all music it only lasts so long, and later, much later, you will hear the shutters being drawn, the sound of laughter in the dark night air like boys and girls on the Miramichi.

  A man I know walked into a party on the Miramichi one time and was hit in the face with a shovel. It was a case of mistaken identity.

  One night when I was nineteen and in the wrong town, I was mistaken for someone else, and ended up fighting two men. I was arrested by the brother of one of these men and thrown into a cop car. The brother was arrested with me, or for appearance’ sake brought to the police station and then let go.

  He would hit me, swinging cross the chest of his brother, sitting between us, and each time I went to hit him back, his brother, the police officer, would whack me with his billy club across the knees. It became a game of paddywhack. With me being whacked. I knew if I could hit him with my right hand, he would feel it, but they had cuffed my right hand to his left, around the back of the seat, and I only had my left to swing with.

  I have been often asked why I became a writer. I had to. I had no choice. There was nothing else I could do. I had a need to write about and remember, and give some voice to my terrible youth.

  In the air, the Spanish air, I think of the turtle. I think of the moose chased across ice by dogs years before. Another moose I shot and had to climb inside to gut.

  The Miramichi and Spain are not such awkward places to correlate the connection between act and compassion, or act and violence.

  There is a great swell out in the sea. I hear it crashing away against the painted slips, the lawn chairs turned over and filled with fallen leaves.

  I often think of the young man herring-fishing in our bay a number of years ago. A storm came up and he couldn’t make it bac
k to the wharf. His last words to shore, out into the cold, foul dark, were: “Can’t talk no more boys—I’m goin’ down.”

  In some ways I modelled my favourite character, Ivan Basterache, from Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace, on him.

  People live through terrible experiences and experience full lives and never recognize anything.

  Others see while throwing down pulp from a truck stuck on the bridge over Little River, helping a truck driver who’s had a heart attack and his frightened ten-year-old son, everything that ever needs to matter about the world. It is never the action, but why the action, that must be understood by us all.

  It is cold here in December. My child freezes under his blankets, and we have to keep a heater going. However, in the day, by noon, the sun warms us enough that we can walk about in a T-shirt.

  In local and regional literary circles I became well known by the time I was twenty-two. As time goes along I see it much clearer than I once did, realize I was cared for by some but resented by others. The problem was that for a time I was too young to know, because I was resented or envied by many I truly admired.

  One idea my critics used was that I wrote bad things about my river and my people. No other writer in the Maritimes that I can think of has ever suffered this maligning of intent more than I.

  Far over my head the December sky, and palm trees glisten in the lights from the bar up the street. My son is in bed and I’ve come to Spain to write a novel, hoping as with every novel I write that this novel will be my last—and then knowing that as long as I live it cannot be.

  In the literary world I once knew, compassion and radical thought played out on the surface, like coins off the skirts and tweeds of women and men. Very few, however, jumped trains. They promoted ideas of motherly non-violent compassion without ever coming close to a reason it was needed. They might not jump trains, ice floes, spear fish or kill or injure anything in the world, some of them believed. Most of them had never had a punch to the head as hard as I had when my mother fell at seven months.