So when George bought the Examiner, he’d asked Grover to join him, acquiescing immediately to his demand for a six-month advance on his pay, in case, as Grover suspected, the paper would be just another dead end in a lifetime of the same.
“Of course,” Grover would then add, laughing and shaking his head, “it never occurred to me when I’d accepted his offer that I’d be the only black man in a town where civil rights was a four-letter word and was rarely mentioned without a shotgun being alluded to somewhere in the conversation.”
Deacon, himself, had been the only “Indian” for the two years he’d attended Tildon Public School. As such, he’d run into his own fair share of “trouble,” and he knew that, regardless of Grover’s attempt to make light of his own, there was no doubt he’d had a rough go of it.
“Is a time a’right,” was all he’d say about that, his voice taking on a southern drawl and his eyes a certain twinkle as if to suggest he wouldn’t have expected to have been treated much different had he relocated somewhere south of the Mason–Dixon.
In the end, what he called his “Respectability Politics” had won over most of his detractors. The only notable exception Deacon knew of was a Mr. Robert Grieves. Mr. Grieves was the principal at the Tildon and Mesaquakee Lakes Secondary School for thirty years. He’d cut his teeth shepherding the youth of yesteryear through the turbulent ’60s and had worn them down to the gums by the mid-’80s when the leather strap he so proudly displayed on a hook behind his desk gave the school board reason enough to force him into early retirement.
Grieves was also the father of three daughters. The eldest, Loretta, had earned a degree in Library Sciences from the University of Toronto and had returned to her hometown in 1974 to assume stewardship of the newly constructed Tildon Public Library. Aside from boasting the only elevator in town at the time, it was equipped with a climate-controlled room in the basement to house the town’s archives. It was in there that Grover spent most of his free time while researching They Came Here to Be Free, a history of black settlers in the area. That had given him the impetus to stick out the six months, but it was Loretta who gave him a reason to stay.
He’d taken a picture of her too, the very one that presided over the checkout counter during her tenure as head librarian. And though it would be decades before Deacon would make her acquaintance, she’d appeared in the photograph much as she did in her later years, which is to say exactly as one would imagine a small-town librarian should look, though perhaps a little less stern. In the picture she was wearing a simple blue dress she’d stitched herself and a smile that, Deacon often mused, was that of a young woman who’d just made love for the first time and wanted nothing more than to shout her joy to the world. It was something her younger variant would have been unwilling to do, fearing that the rancour her relationship with Grover might elicit in her father wouldn’t have seemed out of place in To Kill a Mockingbird, the book that, incidentally, had topped “Loretta’s 25 Best Books of All Time,” a full tabulation of which appeared in the first of the monthly columns she began writing for the Chronicle shortly after assuming her duties.
A decade later, when she revised the list for the library’s ten-year anniversary, Harper Lee’s classic was still number one. But the observant amongst her devoted readers couldn’t help but notice that The Invisible Man, absent on the previous list, had since assumed the number five position.
“For you see,” Grover had added at this point in the telling, “The Invisible Man was one of only three books I’d brought with me when I followed George to the Chronicle.”
His expression had all of a sudden taken on a pensive air, as if he was trying to imagine the man he might have been if things had gone another way. He shortly snapped out of his trance, though there was a most sombre cast to his eyes as he glanced up at the shelf across from the desk in his office where The Invisible Man served as a buffer between the other two books he’d brought—Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice and Martin Luther King’s Conscience for Change.
When he spoke again his voice had taken on an uncharacteristically wistful air so that Deacon knew, for all his struggles, he wouldn’t have had it any other way.
“And until the birth of our first son,” he said, “the photograph and The Invisible Man’s inclusion on Loretta’s anniversary list would be the only public expressions of the love the two of us had shared, all alone together, into the wee hours after the library had closed for the night.”
16
Daylight was fading when Deacon reached The End of A Bad Man’s Son, though it seemed he’d barely read a word, his thoughts having drifted so far from the page.
He returned it to the shelf, taking down his copy of George’s second book, The Passage. While he read it, he didn’t think much about anything, all thoughts, as they were, swept aside by the creeping dread that always descended upon him the moment he’d come upon its opening lines:
Black snow, swirling like ashes windswept from a fire.
It was the only thing he could remember from the dream when he awoke, the world tilting around him as his body sagged in the saddle atop his old mare, trudging through the drifts remaking the forest into an endless ocean of billowing white.
The he in question was an anthropologist named Edgar Frost who, in 1871, had set out to make an ethnographic survey of the tribes along the eastern fringes of the Rocky Mountains before the civilizing influence of the TransCanada Rail Line would forever mar the perfection of their noble ways. Accompanied by his guide, a member of the Piegan tribe named Chojan, they’d arranged to winter at a Blackfoot village. When they arrived, it was razed to the ground and they were forced to seek shelter from a blizzard in a nearby trading post dubbed Fort Whoop-Up by the whiskey traders who’d built it to exchange their wares for fur. Huddled within its walls, they’d find the survivors of the Blackfoot village, comprised solely of two dozen or so women and children. The only sustenance they’d had for a week had been three of their dogs.
The one they’d spared was as emaciated and weak as his masters so that he barely had the energy to lift his head to growl at Edgar and Chojan staggering through the front door, their frosted beards and snow-encrusted leathers lending them the appearance of grim spectres, perhaps come to lead the souls of these soon-to-be departed into the netherworld.
With only a bit of pemmican and some dried strips of venison left from his own stores, Edgar was forced to slaughter his prized mare. While he roasted the meat, Chojan translated the tale of woe recounted by the eldest of the women. She spoke of how after the men of their tribe had traded in their furs for “firewater,” they’d become drunk and enraged. Convinced that they’d been taken advantage of, they’d launched an all-out assault on the fort. In reprisal, the whiskey traders had opened fire on them with the Gatling minigun they’d brought along for protection. They’d killed every last one of their assailants and then sought out their village to satisfy their blood, and other, lusts on those who remained behind. A young woman, who had witnessed the slaughter, ran back home to warn the others and they’d hid in the woods, watching as the whiskey traders burnt their village to the ground. An early winter storm was approaching and the whiskey traders fled south against its advance, leaving the remaining Blackfoot no choice but to seek shelter in the fort that, mere hours before, had spelt their ruin and now provided them their only hope of surviving the winter.
The old woman had just finished speaking when the whiskey traders returned. They’d lost two of their party in an avalanche and the six that remained had barely made it back alive. The moment they barged through the door, the dog, reinvigorated by its share of horse flesh, attacked their leader, an ex-Jesuit priest still garbed in the sacraments of his order. He killed it with his pistol and then shot Chojan a moment later for the sin of palming the hilt of his knife and staring at Brother Marée with a defiant sheen glossing his eyes.
Edgar would have met a similar fate had the ex-Priest no
t found the notebook in his bag. Brother Marée had taken this as proof that God had set him in his path so that he might chronicle his great deeds; a bard, so to speak, to his knight-errant. Manacled and chained to a wall, Edgar was helpless but to watch the whiskey traders have their way with the survivors. What followed was a nightmare of unbridled misery and despair, no child too young nor woman too old for the whiskey traders’ savage lusts. There was only one moment of reprieve. Having managed to escape his restraints by chewing off his thumb, Edgar killed the whiskey traders whilst they slept and freed the remaining survivors who, by then, amounted to a teenage girl and her ten-year-old brother, both of whom Brother Marée had claimed for himself.
But the relief was short-lived. No sooner had he released them from their bondage than the older girl had taken up the ex-priest’s knife and slit her brother’s throat before turning the blade on herself.
The book ended with Edgar setting fire to the fort.
Watching it burn, the ashes swirling around him like black snow reminded him not so much of his dream but of how, less than a year ago, he’d stood at the train station in Oxford, his studies behind and the promise of a future filled with adventure perfectly rendered in the fume of coal exhaust bent over the locomotive speeding towards him. Recalling the up-swelling of hope he’d felt as the train screeched to a halt at the platform, its black plume enveloping him the same as the billow from the fire before him was doing now, the thought reared in his mind that maybe the civilizing influence of the TransCanada Rail Line wouldn’t be such a bad thing after all.
This would prove to be wishful thinking, as George’s next book was plain to point out. My Brother’s Keeper started with three young Cree brothers waiting at the station in Long Lac for the train that would take them on the last leg of their journey to a residential school in Kenora, some six hundred miles from home.
It was the first time any of them would see an “iron horse,” but they’d heard plenty of stories about them from their uncle, who’d earned a Victoria Cross fighting the Germans in WWII. Each were thinking of the same story as they huddled together at the edge of the platform. It was about the time he was scouting behind enemy lines and he’d come upon a train pulling an endless stream of cattle cars. It wasn’t livestock they were carrying though, it was people. He could see their fingers poking out from within the air holes and hear their ghastly cries as they sped past.
“Why were they in cattle cars?” the eldest of the brothers had asked, hearing him relate this.
“Because they were taking them to the slaughterhouse, I guess.”
“But you said they were people. Why would they be taking people to a slaughterhouse?”
Their uncle had thought on that for a moment.
“There ain’t no rhyme nor reason to it,” he’d finally replied. “It’s just the way of the White Man. I seen enough of his doings to know that wherever he goes, the devil ain’t never too far behind.”
And here they were, waiting for the White Man’s train to take them to god knows where, maybe hell itself.
Unbeknownst to them, the train that would take them west was carrying two brothers—William and James—who were fleeing Toronto, hoping to find work at a logging camp. Their futures would become intertwined the next winter after the youngest of the Cree boys dies from tuberculosis and his brothers retrieve his body from amongst the dozen or so in a common burial pit, determined to carry him home so that he may find peace amongst the spirits of his ancestors. Along the way, they happen upon William, the eldest of the other brothers, who himself was fleeing the logging camp after shooting the man who’d killed James for cheating him at cards.
Aside from its rather grim beginnings, My Brother’s Keeper was the most hopeful of all of George’s Fictions, the only one that didn’t end with a world on fire, in one way or another. The bulk of the narrative had the two boys teaching William to survive in the woods during the dead of winter and ended with William recounting the tale to the Cree villagers gathered around their communal hearth, the flames contained within the ring of stones murmuring in warm contemplation along with the villagers as William told them of how two of their sons had saved him from no uncertain death.
It was a welcome balm from The Passage’s unrelenting despair and also so intrinsically linked to The Pines, which came after, that Deacon couldn’t possibly imagine reading the others without the one in between. But the only copy of that was on the bookshelf behind George’s desk in the barn where Deacon himself had returned it six months previous, unwilling, if what Dylan said was true, to leave the only remaining copy wedged so ignobly between a bathtub and a toilet.
17
Ten minutes later he was walking up Baker Street.
There was an upside-down garbage bin at the end of the Cleary’s driveway. Habit had Deacon taking the latter by the handle and dragging it to the garage’s side door. It was locked, and he left it there, skirting up the brick walkway and following it into the backyard, coming into sight of the barn and hurrying across the lawn, recalling the last time he’d done so.
He’d been after a sneak peak of what George had been writing.
And even though there was an urgency in the recollection, his pace slackened as he came to the rock on the windowsill, each step, like one taken in fresh cement, weighed down by the fear that George’s children, Edward and Louise, had spent the last three days sorting through their father’s stuff. The only key to the barn Deacon knew of was under the rock on the window ledge. They must have known about that and, if they did and had used it to let themselves into the barn, it was a good bet they’d found the manuscript too.
But the key was still under the rock and when he’d reached the desk there was indeed a stack of pages on the left-hand side of the typewriter, though the shock he felt coming across it was hardly lessened. There couldn’t have been more than thirty sheets in the pile, whereas George’s rewrite had numbered over a hundred pages before, and beside it there was only a faint square outline in the dust to say that his rough draft had ever been there at all. The pages that did remain were sitting face up and prologue was clearly outlined along the top of the first. As he peered down at it in torpid dismay, he saw that even that was only a photocopy of the original.
What in the hell? he thought, and when an answer wasn’t forthcoming, he circled the desk, still thinking it must have been some sort of mistake.
He rifled through all six of the desk’s drawers but found nothing but a dozen or so pens, three extra spools of ribbon, two unopened packages of paper, and a half-empty forty of Canadian Club. He only bothered taking out the latter and by the time he was placing it on the desk beside the stack of photocopies, his alarm had faded into a bitter sort of resignation.
Gathering the pages up with little of the care that had afforded him his first glimpse, he sat in the chair, setting on his lap what was left of the manuscript, and scanning down towards the opening line.
* * *
Prologue
How long it had been following her she couldn’t say.
It had been a half an hour since she’d walked out of the Baileys’ driveway, casting one last glance at her father’s pickup truck and cursing asshole under her breath as she set off down the highway. Her twelfth birthday had been last Tuesday and her grandmother had given her fifty dollars. She’d been after her dad all week to drive her to the Walmart in Tildon where she had in mind to spend her windfall on a new pair of jeans and a T-shirt, maybe a bag of Hershey’s Kisses if she had any money left. After five days of pleading with him, he’d finally relented, telling her at dinner that evening that he’d promised his sister he’d stop by Bailey’s Auto Wreck to see if they had an alternator for her Tercel, the old one dying just that afternoon and a new one costing more than the car was worth.
Won’t be but a moment, he’d said as he stepped out of the truck.
She’d brought a Walmart flyer with her and read over it
for what must have been the hundredth time, waiting for him to return. When a half hour had expired and he still hadn’t, she got out and walked past the dozen or so vehicles that were scattered about the front yard, all of them with For Sale signs in their windshields. Their owners had sold them for scrap but Clarence Bailey had seen a little life left in them yet, so, instead of towing them to the ten-acre field behind the house where he kept the wrecks, he had fixed them up, selling them for cheap, mostly to high school kids buying their first car and single moms who couldn’t afford anything better.
Beyond them: the Baileys’ two-storey brick farmhouse. A bare bulb projected from the wall above its front door, shining over the stack of cinder blocks they had in place of steps. As she came into the light, the smell of skunk drifted through the open window that looked into the kitchen and she heard a blood-curdling scream shortly given way to an undulating wail—her father, she knew, imitating an Indian war cry.
Laughter greeted it and then there was the scrape of a chair’s legs against linoleum.
You want another beer? a voice she recognized as Clarence’s son, Duane, asked.
Her father answered, I’m sitting here, ain’t I?
That got another laugh and she turned around and walked back to the truck. She sat in the passenger seat, stewing as the sun faded between the trees on the far side of the barn that had once housed the Baileys’ herd of Jerseys and was now where they kept their store of auto parts. It had been dark for a good while when she finally said, Fuck him, not so much angry at her father as she was at herself for thinking this time might have been any different.
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