by Myrna Dey
The gun used had been taken from his scruffier friend Billy’s uncle — well-known to us for drugs and theft — but it was good-looking Tyson who pulled the trigger. The rich kid needing diversion. Life was too boring and easy: why not try a break-in? Just to see how it felt. Tyson’s house possessed two of everything that was in the house they targeted, but what a mega rush to force entry into a perilous situation. And Billy’s family could have used the loot. The gun was no more than a prop that Tyson took charge of. Neither of them planned to pull the trigger, especially on a cop.
Would that reckless decision scar him permanently, or would the thrill of violence become a habit? Too soon to say. Tyson Ward was distinguished from Terry Dean only by cleanliness, affluence, and lack of excuses for his behaviour. How closely we’re all connected. I hated the phrase “I hope you’ve learned your lesson” and when the crying stopped, out popped: “May the force be with you.” Once again, I spoke before thinking, and this time I chuckled at the double meaning.
Jennifer Ward reappeared and thanked me for coming. She did not try to comfort Tyson or lecture him, nor did she apologize for him by saying he got in with the wrong crowd. When they left, I felt he might have a chance.
I spent the rest of the afternoon on paperwork. Back in my apartment after supper, I sat down with my phone. I dialled T Shybunka first. An older voice said hello twice, as if he were hard of hearing. I stated my name, then in a non-telemarketing tone, tried to keep him on the line long enough to ask if he were related to Katherine Hughes.
“Who’s calling?”
I repeated my name and explained that I was doing a family history; I believed Katherine Hughes might have been married to my great-grandfather. I hoped this would be a Wendell and not a Mona Mingus conversation.
“Kay Hughes was my grandmother.”
“And I am the great-granddaughter of Roland Hughes and his first wife Jane.”
“Is that a fact? Granddad thought his family was lost. Wait till I tell the kids. Too bad Rilla’s gone — she would’ve loved this.” I sighed in relief that it would be a Wendell encounter. “Who did you say you are again?”
I asked if I might come to visit on the weekend. Did he have any pictures?
“My daughter keeps them. I’ll get her over here. When did you say you’re coming?”
I set a time for Saturday afternoon and told him my father would be with me. I didn’t need to check with Dad about meeting the interloper who had robbed him of his Grandpa.
As with Wendell, the two old men proved compatible. Tim Shybunka lived in a seniors’ apartment in North Van, two blocks from his daughter Dorothy, where he could show up unannounced any time he felt like it. His son Daryl and his family also lived in North Van, farther away in Deep Cove. Dorothy was with her dad, waiting to receive us with homemade muffins and coffee. I took an immediate liking to the woman — plump, energetic, fiftyish — because she dispelled my doubts about being too attached to a parent at the expense of a life of your own. Seeing her kiss her dad’s bald head or pat his shoulder when she passed his recliner shamed me for thinking otherwise. She had two careers: music therapist in a hospital and bookkeeper for her husband’s plumbing business. Their two kids, one a deep sea pilot, the other a teacher, also lived within walking distance with their spouses — this was a family that wanted to be close.
Dorothy picked up the box of photos and began dealing them like a deck of cards, setting aside the few that might interest us. “I keep telling Pops we should put these pictures in order. We never knew much about Granddad before he married GG.”
She handed me the wedding photo. “GG tinted that herself. She made extra money colouring for a photo studio when she was on her own raising Grandma.”
A strange wash of emotion came over me as I stared at the tinted black and white studio photo, my first glimpse of Roland Hughes. There was no such record of him with my GG. Roland was the same height as Kay and half her size, his thin neck almost lost in the stiff collar of his dress shirt and suit jacket. A full dark moustache partially made up for the missing hair on his head, and he had a jaunty stance that showed his small frame to advantage. On his lined face was an apologetic smile, but a craftiness in his eyes kept him from seeming pathetic. Was Sara right in saying she had a lot of her father in her?
Kay looked anything but apologetic, grinning at the camera with warmth and confidence in a pink wedding suit and a matching cloche hat. Her corsage was the same red as their lips and cheeks, the tincture tubes probably limited. Like the wedding picture of Thomas and Lizzie, Kay clearly came across as the spouse in control. But the similarity ended there, because Kay’s face and posture held an ease and merriment that were completely absent in Lizzie. To have bred such an affectionate line, she must have been that way herself. A contrast to Mona Mingus, Laura Owens, even Dad, certainly no less dutiful or caring but physically undemonstrative. And was I the final link in that chain of inhibitions?
I passed the picture to Dad as Dorothy handed me another picture of Roland bathing a baby in a tub. “That’s Pops,” she said proudly.
When Tim didn’t hear, she repeated cheerfully, and he chuckled. “Granddad told me later I was the first baby he ever bathed.”
Seeing Dad’s and my faces might have caused him to add: “He felt guilty about his drunken ways with his first family. Grandma told us when she came to live with my mother — Maria was her name — that she rescued him from drinking himself to death. Saw something worth saving, I guess. Never took another drink after he met her. Smoked a pack a day, though.”
Dad asked it first. “Did he ever mention the twin daughters he left behind?”
“Not to me. I was fourteen when he died. But Grandma said it ate away at him all his life. Being sober made it worse.”
Tim Shybunka’s memory only held so many highlights of a step-grandfather who died seven decades ago, so Dorothy took over. She had spent a lot of time with her great-grandmother when she lived with her grandmother, again nearby.
“GG loved to talk about the early years.”
I thought wistfully of what I might have learned, having Jane as well as Sara.
Kay Hughes had said it was painful for Roland to speak of Sara and Janet. How they were taken from him by his wife’s brothers, and he was declared unwelcome to visit in his derelict state. Even the brother-in-law who had been his friend got in touch only once to inform him one of the twins had died of influenza. He moved to a rooming house in Nanaimo and started gambling after that. Kay Odgers met him at a dance. Said her first impression of him hooked her because he was such a good dancer. Light on his feet and too busy with all the women in the hall to drink too much that night. He wanted to see her again. She told him he’d have to quit drinking and gambling first. When he appeared two months later, shaky but sober with some money saved, she didn’t turn him away.
Timing and karma. Were they the same thing? Was Jane an unwitting accomplice to her own misery? Was she an enabler? Are we all? Did she believe she had to suffer Roland’s alcoholism to atone for the false start to their marriage? She spoke of sins in her deathbed letter — at last in a voice of freedom. I felt sure Sara would have been thankful to know her father found peace with a loving woman, having found the same thing herself with Miles Dryvynsydes.
Dorothy went on. “GG felt bad about that daughter of Granddad’s. She said they went to the island to her uncle’s funeral to see if they could find out where she was. He’d been her guardian, but his widow said she’d moved to the prairies and left no address.”
“You’ve got a good memory,” Dad remarked.
Tim heard enough to add: “My grandmother was that kind of woman. Made you want to listen to her.”
Dorothy handed us three more photos: Kay and Roland at Niagara Falls with Marie and her husband Victor Shybunka; Roland with Tim and Rilla as children on a ferry; Roland alone with a birthday cake — that one had a couple of lines written on the back: March 29, 1938, age sixty-five. The wizened face still
carried an apologetic smile under unshrinking eyes; were they the eyes of his twin daughters that looked past each other on a street in Medicine Hat around the same time?
“Oh, and here’s one you might like to have. It ended up with Granddad’s things.” Dorothy spoke casually, tossing a picture of two little girls with bows in their hair onto Dad’s lap. Dad’s utterance came from such a deep place I could see the hairs on his neck stand up. Dorothy sat back and watched us as he passed it to me. “You know this picture?”
I nodded. “That makes three out of four. The other is somewhere in Wales.”
Between us, Dad and I filled Dorothy and Tim in on the history of the photos, Dorothy sitting close to her father to repeat when necessary. At the end both were speechless, until Dorothy sprang up and coaxed us to stay and have homemade borscht with them. “Pops eats so much borscht, perogies, and cabbage rolls, you’d think he was a full-blooded Ukrainian, when his name is the only Ukrainian thing about him.” Tim Shybunka strained to hear what his daughter was saying and smiled.
It had been a long afternoon and we declined politely. When we stood up to leave, Dorothy offered to have copies made of Roland’s photos; we accepted on behalf of Janetta and Wendell as well. We promised to meet again soon.
Traffic crawled on the Lions Gate Bridge. Dad nodded off next to me. In the middle of Stanley Park, he sat up straight.
“Dreaming?”
“Maybe. Mother used to talk about the songlines in Australia among the aborigines. She read books about them and couldn’t contain her wonder at how they kept their stories alive for thousands of years, all orally. Each generation sang their sacred paths to life through rocks, trees, landmarks. I think I just had a dream about those songlines. Except the landmarks were all these people we’ve unearthed, including the ones under it. Each of them has offered scraps of memory to the same songline, thereby preserving it. Is this our sacred path?”
“Well said, Pops.” I gave him a light punch on his arm, as we turned off Denman to Davie, finally moving at a normal speed. “I’ve had an overactive imagination myself. Blamed it on lack of sleep.” I didn’t try to explain the circus I envisioned in Gastown.
When I dropped him at his house, he asked me in for supper. “Thanks, but I’ve got places to go. And you need a nap. Then open a can of sardines and get back to your musical.”
He slapped the air dismissively and got out. Maybe someday he’d get a kiss on his head — from Dorothy, for sure.
Within minutes, I was in the maze of False Creek streets off Spyglass Place and found a parking spot not far from my target. I stepped inside and pushed the button for 315, my stomach churning. The voice spoke, and I said “Arabella” into the speaker, wondering if the buzzer would sound. When it did, I pushed the lobby door open and took the stairs. At 315, I knocked. I would have deserved the half hour it seemed to take someone to answer, but it was only a second or two. Warren Wright stood in the open doorway, looking bewildered. Inside I could see sun streaming from the west through all the space he had chosen to leave around his few pieces of furniture.
“Come in,” he said, gesturing me past the galley kitchen and into the sunlit living room.
I stood fast on the sisal mat next to the door and shook my head. “If you’re not doing anything, I’d like to invite you to my place for supper.”
A smile started to curl one side of his mouth.
If bad timing were responsible for misplaced letters, photos, affections, and even sisters, this family was long overdue for a change of course. “You might want to bring your toothbrush.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Extensions is a work of fiction, although I have drawn upon many reports of the coal mining world around Nanaimo in the late nineteenth/ early twentieth centuries for its creation.
For inspiring my interest in this era, I credit my late aunt Olive Harper, who, thirty-five years ago, gave my family a copy of Ghost Towns and Mining Camps of Vancouver Island by T.W. Paterson and passed along the four letters she possessed in her mother’s handwriting. My ensuing vision has relied on many sources. Lynne Bowen, author of Boss Whistle, has provided not only a primer on coal miners, but also personal encouragement. To the late Peggy Nicholls I owe a great deal for sharing her vast historical knowledge and genealogical findings. Other helpful books and publications were Go Do Some Great Thing: The Black Pioneers of British Columbia by Crawford Killian, Old Square-Toes and His Lady: The Life of James and Amelia Douglas by John Adams, several essays on Sir James Douglas by Charlotte Girard in B.C. Studies, The Dunsmuir Saga by Terry Reksten, America’s Forgotten Pandemic by Alfred W. Crosby, The Great Influenza by M. Barry, The Silent Enemy: Canada and the Deadly Flu by Eileen Pettigrew, Flu by Gina Kolata, as well as various studies online. Among the many references I consulted on the Louis Stark family were articles from the Salt Spring Island Archives, including “Recollections of Sylvia Stark as told to her daughter Marie Albertina Stark Wallace,” the B.C. Archives, Nanaimo Archives, Lynne Bowen’s Three Dollar Dreams, and The Chronicle of Ladysmith and District compiled by Viola Johnson-Cull.
My own research trip to Nanaimo and environs was made possible by my dear friend Marilyn Martin and my cousins Irene Luknowsky, Jim, Carla, and Rick Harper acting as chauffeurs, hosts, and enthusiastic explorers. My thanks to them all.
Arabella’s story could not have been written without Annelisa Dey Thomas. She has been my daughterlode of information about police situations and protocol, and adjusted the contemporary narrative to reality throughout. To their sister’s expertise, Gillian Dunn and Phoebe Dey added discerning questions and comments on several drafts of the book. They were always up for a consensus in a dilemma, despite their busy lives. My gratitude for the three of them and their help goes beyond words.
I am deeply indebted to Carol and Jan Fishman for their patience and willingness to enlighten me on legal proceedings.
John Lebeau deserves high praise for his careful reading of the book and his thoughtful and heartening remarks. I am also grateful to Richard Lebeau and Louise Lacouceur for their suggestions. Others who have contributed prompt answers to research questions or offered relevant debate on various points of the book are Art and Doreen Alexander, Novell Thomas, Pat Gilkes, Renate Williams, Joan Jason, Valerie Richie, and Colleen Martin.
Sincere thanks to my NeWest editor Anne Nothof for her support of the novel from the start and her keen eye thereafter. My appreciation to Lou Morin for her warmth in the NeWest process, to Paul Matwychuk for his easy, knowledgeable manner, to Natalie Olsen for procuring the enthralling cover photo, and to Shawna Lemay for her early guidance.
Finally, I give thanks to my husband Cedric, for balancing my heart and art and keeping me on my grammatical toes.
myrna dey GREW UP IN CALGARY AND RECEIVED A B.A. AND AN M.A. FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA. FOLLOWING RESEARCH IN BERLIN, SHE TAUGHT AND STUDIED GERMAN AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, FOR TWO YEARS IN THE MID-SIXTIES. SHE ALSO LIVED FOR SIX YEARS IN GUYANA. SINCE 1976, SHE AND HER HUSBAND HAVE MADE THEIR HOME IN KAMSACK, SASKATCHEWAN, WHERE THEY RAISED THEIR THREE DAUGHTERS. HER SHORT STORIES, ARTICLES, AND ESSAYS HAVE BEEN PUBLISHED IN READER’S DIGEST, NEWEST REVIEW, CANADIAN LIVING, THE NATIONAL POST, THE GLOBE AND MAIL, AND MACLEAN’S.
