Blood in the Water Read online

  “Now, most of us would like to think that if someone we cared about were in peril, we would make a sacrifice for them. We’d jump in front of a car to save our kid. Fortunately, most of us never get tested. James Landry actually did it. James Landry tried to take the fall for a murder, and the police believed him for a while. And now the Crown is playing his statement, and asking you to pick out the portions of it which are convenient for their case—and believe those.

  “You have to remember that this is a criminal trial. You have to have proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Essentially what you have is testimony from two people on the Twin Maggies. It would appear that James Landry overstated what he did, and Craig Landry understated what he did. So where does that leave you?”

  The evidence confirms that James shot at Phillip; it does not confirm that he hit him. It confirms that James had reason to wish Phillip would “go away,” but it does not prove that James sent him away.

  “We’re talking about criminal acts,” says Craggs. “We’re not talking about morality, or about the right thing to do; we’re talking about whether James Landry’s actions tied him in to a criminal offence. My respectful submission is that he shot the rifle to scare him, and that’s where his criminal liability stops. There is no credible evidence before you that he encouraged or helped Dwayne Samson drive the Twin Maggies over Phillip Boudreau’s boat”—and it’s Craggs’s contention that Phillip died then, when the boat went over him. That, he says, makes sense; the whole gaffing and sinking story does not make sense. And, although Craggs does not spell it out, if Phillip died in the ramming, that also makes Dwayne the killer, not James.

  “James Landry did not behave well that day,” Craggs concludes. “James Landry did things wrong. James Landry lost his temper. What James Landry did not do, however, was commit a crime. I would ask you to find James Landry not guilty.”

  Thank you, says Justice Kennedy. He tells the jury that he will charge them in the morning, and that they should leave their phones and other devices behind but bring a change of clothing in case their deliberations keep them sequestered overnight.

  Justice Kennedy does want to say that he has reviewed his notes and “can see no evidence that Reggie Jackson was ever on that boat.” That brings a good laugh to end the day. And I go home to Brigadoon.

  10

  VISITING BRIGADOON

  “WE WERE STANDING IN front of the co-op store and it was closed,” said the woman from Southern California. “There were three or four teenagers across the street, and they came over towards us. I was scared. Teenagers terrify me. Where I come from, when a group of teenagers comes at you, you jump in the car and lock the doors. You get out of there, unless you want to be beaten and robbed.

  “But these kids came over and said, ‘Hi, that’s store’s closed, but if you want to buy some food or something, there’s a convenience store up the hill and another little store not very far down the other way.’ I thought I was dreaming. They came over to help us, can you imagine?”

  In May 2000, Charles and Peg Bosdet were visiting Isle Madame because his family came from the island. The Bosdet family home was the spectacular old mansion still standing at the very end of Bosdet’s Point Road in West Arichat. Charles, a journalist by trade, worked in the aerospace industry writing manuals for jet engines and the like; Peg was an artist and also a writer, the author of a couple of authoritative books about buttons as markers of social history. Somehow or other my wife, Marjorie, and I met them, along with another professional couple that had moved to Isle Madame from Halifax.

  We told Peg and Charles that the four of us had developed our own whimsical terminology to describe the deep security that stems from mutual reliance and trust between you and your neighbours. For instance, people don’t lock their doors because, as a neighbour once said to me, “If you lock your doors, how can we get in?” They’re not coming in to make off with your valuables or stifle you in your bed. They’re coming in to return a tool or a book, drop off some rhubarb or a loaf of fresh bread, borrow a cup of sugar. Neighbours spontaneously solve one another’s problems. If someone neglects to beach a rowboat properly and it’s beating on the shore, any passerby will haul it up. If a car’s interior light is on, someone closes the door properly so that the light goes off and the battery doesn’t run down.

  This is what we’d come to call “reverse vandalism.” You return from a trip, and your property has been improved. Your newspapers are stacked neatly at the back door, your plants are watered, and your boat cover is tied down snugly. One day I was writing about this very phenomenon when I looked out the window to see my own red flat-bottomed skiff chugging across the harbour. At the helm was Bill Martin, the retired mechanic next door. A few days earlier he had tuned up my ancient outboard, but later, when I took it out for a run, it stalled repeatedly. I didn’t tell Bill about this, but a friend happened to notice it and mentioned it to him. Now Bill was out there in the harbour trying to find the problem and fix it. Reverse vandalism.

  “Rustic engineering” is the combination of imaginative problem-solving and traditional techniques that neighbours come up with when they get together to accomplish some difficult task. We need to move a building. Okay, we’ll use rollers, levers, tackles, jacks, and wedges, and maybe a backhoe. We need to raise a pole? Put the top of the pole between the horns of an extension ladder and then extend the ladder. Somebody needs a wharf. Wait till the harbour freezes, bore some holes in the ice, and bang some pilings down through the holes with the bucket of a backhoe. Look what we can accomplish when we tackle things together.

  “Just in mind delivery” is when you’re vainly looking for something and a neighbour overhears. Hey, he says, I got three of those, I’ll bring you one. It happened all the time when I was building my boat. One time a neighbour named Eric Samson—“Eric the Puss”—dropped into my workshop to see how the boat was coming along. How are you going to move that one-ton block of lead ballast? he asked. I didn’t know. I got a couple of little industrial dollies, said Eric. Perfect for that. I’ll bring ’em over. Keep ’em till you’re done.

  The Bosdets hung out in Isle Madame for several days. Later, Peg wrote from Los Angeles to say she felt as though she’d been on a visit to Brigadoon, the enchanted Scottish village that rises out of the mists for a single day once every hundred years. She could hardly believe such a place existed.

  Isle Madame is not Brigadoon, of course; it’s present every day, all year round, a very real community with all the normal human conflicts. It was a bitter labour–management conflict in the fishery, after all, that brought me to the island in the first place. I had no real intention of staying, but I liked the place, I was writing a book, and I had no particular reason to go anywhere else. When the book was finished, six years later, I discovered that I had settled in to stay.

  One thing that held me was my curiosity about how people handled conflict in a community so small and long settled, where people knew one another so well. I had spent all my life in cities—Vancouver, Berkeley, London, Halifax—and in a city, if you don’t want to see anyone ever again, you can often dodge them indefinitely. Not so in Isle Madame. It didn’t take long to see that privacy was not much valued here, and was not easy to obtain.

  “Privacy?” cried a friend. “Privacy? I’m an Acadian, me—I don’t know what that is.”

  I came to realize that although I didn’t have much privacy, I didn’t greatly care. I wasn’t doing anything I was ashamed of, and my neighbours’ attitude towards one another’s foibles—and mine—was one of amusement. Over time, I came to feel that the two great Acadian values are truth and tolerance. Acadians want to know what’s going on, want to understand who you are and what you do. There had never been a freelance writer here before, and people were intensely curious. What kind of exotic bird was this, perching in their local tree? Eventually my neighbours decided I was a tradesman, like a pipefitter or an electrician worki
ng construction. My home was a base, I had no one employer, I was highly skilled, and I travelled a lot. It’s an excellent analogy—far better than the mystical nonsense about the tortured role of the artist so common in literary and cultural circles—and it satisfied my neighbours’ passionate need to understand.

  But they never used their knowledge to wound me. I was alone and I welcomed company, so people dropped in, invited me to parties and barbecues. One time, early on, the man filling my order in a lumberyard asked if I was married. No, I said, divorced.

  “But you got a woman wit’ you?”

  “No,” I said. He fell silent and looked out to sea for several long moments. I wondered what he was thinking. Then he turned back to me, looking apologetic.

  “I don’t know any women,” he said sadly.

  Acadians, I concluded, want to know you and understand you, not in order to judge you but to determine how they should conduct their relationship with you. They want to draw you into the web of mutual assistance that has been their greatest resource for four hundred years. Around here we look out for each other, they’ll say. You never know when you’re going to need a hand yourself. We’re like a family here. We all pitch in. Everyone benefits.

  So I joined the fire department, served on the board of the little local credit union, spoke at the high school graduation. When the cod fishery collapsed, I joined the effort to build a replacement economy, serving on the board of Development Isle Madame and, for its first seven years, chairing the board of Telile, the island’s unique non-profit community television station. The work was sometimes a strain, but it was mostly a pleasure.

  So what about conflict?

  Acadians on Isle Madame can flare right up, sounding terrifyingly violent. “If I catch you, you little bastard, I’ll tear off your arm and beat you with the wet end,” as I once heard a loving mother say to her defiant child. Fistfights? Yup. Beatings, sometimes fierce ones? Now and then. Brawls? Occasionally. A friend of mine once went to the Petit de Grat branch of the Royal Canadian Legion and found the door locked. He could hear a proper donnybrook going on inside. He went to the back door, tapped in code, and the bartender opened the door a crack.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Ah,” said the bartender, “the comrades are restless tonight.”

  But although Acadians tend to flare right up, they flare right down again too. When a squabble is over, it’s over, and there’s no point holding grudges. I’ve tried to learn that skill, with some success, but it’s not the way I grew up; my wise Aunt Ethel once remarked that in our Scottish family we have a habit of “nursing our wrath to keep it warm.”

  I rarely see any such brooding in an Acadian, but that doesn’t mean the contretemps is entirely forgotten. If someone rats you out you don’t forget it, and you don’t trust him with sensitive information again—but otherwise you treat him the same as you always did. The memory of the fight becomes encysted, so to speak; it’s not gone, but a membrane grows over it, and if nothing happens to rupture the membrane, the memory ceases to trouble you. You go on living together as you always did.

  You see this in people’s acceptance of Phillip’s depredations. Your four-wheeler is gone. Your rifle is gone. The groceries are stolen. The traps are empty. But Phillip is Phillip; he has no money, so there’s nothing to be done about it; you just get on with your life. You see the same thing in local politics. Isle Madame once had a stormy revolt of citizens against a planning bylaw proposed by the county council, a bylaw that was clearly designed for urban settings and made no sense in a rural community. At a loud and raucous community meeting, our local councillor—who could be quite pugnacious herself—stood up and said, “Hey, hey, everybody. Let’s all settle down. We’re all going to be here tomorrow. We all have to live together. Let’s take it easy.”

  What would rupture the membrane over the encysted memory of a quarrel? Repetition, I think. You took my chainsaw and brought it back damaged. We had a scrap: fine, we’ve put it behind us. But if you do it again, then it was a mistake to forget it the first time. Now we have a pattern, and that sore spot is open and raw again. It won’t skin over so easily the second time. And if you do it a fifth time, or a tenth, the sore won’t heal at all.

  * * *

  —

  Like other human societies, then, Isle Madame has an intimate knowledge of bitter conflict, violence, despair, and abuses of power—but those conflicts rarely result in homicides. How rarely? I doubt if there’s any official statistic about that.

  So I went to see Raymond LeBlanc.

  Ray LeBlanc is among my oldest and dearest friends. My first home in D’Escousse was right across the road from his, and I soon got to know not only him and his wife, Pearl, but also his parents and all five of his children. At the time he was the municipal clerk and sheriff of Richmond County, a job he soon gave up to become a paralegal assistant at the Port Hawkesbury law firm where he spent the rest of his working life. Liberal Party leaders, he says, implored him not to retire as sheriff until after the 1974 election, “because they’d promised the job to ten or eleven other people”—so for some months he held both jobs, despite the fact that he is what’s known in Nova Scotia politics as “a rank Tory.” On September 9, 2018, Pearl made a note that, after nearly fifty years of discussion, Ray and I had agreed on a political subject for the first time. We’d been discussing Donald Trump.

  Nevertheless, I knocked on doors for him when he ran successfully for the municipal council, and when I was once approached to run for the NDP, which he thinks is a silly party, I told him I wouldn’t even consider it unless he would manage my campaign.

  “Yah, I’ll do it,” he said, grinning, “and I’ll use every goddamn dirty trick in the book to get you elected, too.”

  For decades, Ray was the returning officer for Richmond in provincial elections, as his son Ronnie mentioned in his testimony about organizing the petition urging Dwayne Samson’s release on bail; Ray and Pearl also offered to post bail. The two have also been leaders in the North Isle Madame Recreation Association and the D’Escousse Civic Improvement Association, which operates the community hall. In its heyday, the hall made tidy profits from its Saturday dances; it used them to create a scholarship fund that supported any child from the village who went on to higher education.

  Raymond does the income tax returns for half the people of the community. He and Pearl operate the village’s only remaining general store, which is built onto the side of their home. Over the years they’ve carried many of their neighbours—including me—through difficult financial times by giving us food on credit, sometimes for months on end.

  In the early 1980s, when I wanted to explain in a national magazine why I love village life, I used my relationship with Ray as an example. I do business with Ray, I said, but I also dance with his wife, employ his son and his father as carpenters, buy firewood jointly with him, ask his help with my projects, and chase his goat out of my yard. I have seen his kids grow up. I know how hard he is to beat at chess. I know him drunk and sober, at night and in the morning, at work and at play. I’ve seen him angry enough to fetch his rifle and sad enough to cry. And he knows me the same way. I find some of his attitudes and opinions primitive, and he considers some of my ideas dreamily sentimental—but those differences do not dampen our pleasure in each other.

  After my article had been accepted, the magazine’s fact-checker called Ray, who confirmed all these things. Then the fact-checker said, “Just out of curiosity, Mr. LeBlanc, how do you feel about having someone write so frankly about you in a national publication?”

  At the time, Lech Wałęsa and Solidarity were struggling for liberty in Poland. Without missing a beat, Ray replied, “If that’s what he sees, that’s what he says. We’re not in Poland here.”

  Could there be a better defence of free speech? It’s Milton’s Areopagitica, in fourteen words.

  “So Raymond,
” I said, “I think the last time someone from the island was tried for murder it was Eugene Landry, right?”

  “Yeah, probably so.” We both remembered the shock of that killing. Enraged by a fierce family argument, Eugene went and got his gun, stuck the barrel through the kitchen window, and shot his father-in-law dead.

  “Now when was that, exactly?”

  “In the 70s,” said Raymond. “Come on in here. I think I got it in my genealogy.”

  We went into the cluttered room that doubles as an office and a living room. Settling himself behind a big desk, Raymond consulted his computer. After a moment he announced, “I got Eugene. He died on February 17, 1990. That doesn’t give me the date of the murder, though—wait now, the date of his father-in-law’s death would be the date of the murder. Henry Landry. Let me see—September 30, 1977.”

  Thirty-six years from Henry Landry to Phillip Boudreau. What about even earlier killings?

  “That would be in the 1950s, probably,” said Ray. “I remember one back then that people thought was murder, but I don’t think it went to court. They called it a hunting accident.” I wondered how many “hunting accidents” or “traffic fatalities” or “accidental drownings,” here and elsewhere, are actually murders. People do get away with murder all the time; the Halifax police website, for instance, lists seventy-two unsolved homicide or missing person cases.

  Ray also remembers a case where two men got into a scuffle in the tavern in Louisdale, on the Cape Breton side of the bridge to Isle Madame. One man knocked the other out and thought he’d killed him, so he threw the body off the bridge. The victim wasn’t actually dead, however, but he was unconscious, and he drowned. Legally that wasn’t murder, though, since there was no intention involved.