Lament for Bonnie

by Anne Emery

  I was just about to ask Morag to tell me about Maggie, but Mum came in and said there were tiny little pizzas being served in the kitchen. So I figured I’d better go back in. Morag did, too. But I still wanted to know what Cornwallis did to burn my hands, and what Maggie Cameron Beaton had to say about it all. Daddy and Father Burke were sitting at the table yakking with Dougald and Pierre, so I waited till they were quiet, and then I asked Morag about Cornwallis. I knew she would keep a secret of my break-in at the house.

  “Well, our people, the Highlanders, were defeated at Culloden, and Cornwallis went after them all, whether they had been part of the rebellion or not. He and his men ran the Highlanders down and killed them. Flogged some of them. . . .” She looked at me for a minute and then seemed to change her mind about whatever she was going to say. “Attacked the women. Doing unspeakable things to the women was one of their weapons of war. Wolfe was like that, too.”

  “They called him a wolf?”

  “James Wolfe, I mean. The fellow that conquered Quebec. Oh, the English could be proud of the commanders they sent over here!”

  “That’s awful! What about Mrs. Beaton who used to be a Cameron?”

  “Cornwallis unleashed his forces against the Camerons because Cameron of Lochiel had been a leader of the rebellion against King George. Cornwallis’s men stormed up to the Cameron homestead at Achnacarry. They ransacked the place and then set it on fire. It burned for days, destroying everything the Camerons had.”

  “Mrs. Beaton has a picture on her wall. It says Achnacarry. She said it’s the new house.”

  “It would be, because Cornwallis torched the old one. The British troops moved through the Highlands burning houses, driving away cattle, leaving nothing in their wake. And a law was passed that the Highland way of life was now illegal. You couldn’t wear a kilt or a tartan. Our music and our language were outlawed. He tried to wipe out all our people. And those who survived all this were kicked off their land and replaced by sheep, which would make money for the new owners of the land. That’s how so many of the Scots ended up over here. The Fuadach nan Gàidheal.”

  “What does it mean, Greatgran?”

  “The Expulsion of the Gaels.”

  “You were expelled, vous autres?” That was Pierre the Mountie. “My people got expelled by the English, too. Le Grand Dérangement. The Expulsion of the Acadians.”

  “Where from?” I asked. I was supposed to know because I had heard that expression before, or I had seen a sign about it. But I wasn’t sure what it was; we hadn’t studied it in history class yet.

  “Here,” Pierre said, “in Acadie. Acadia. New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Cape Breton, which was then Île Royale, and Prince Edward Island, which was Île Saint-Jean. The Brits kicked us out starting in 1755, but we’re here again. Les têtes carrées can’t keep us down.”

  “Têtes carrées?” asked Morag. Nobody knew what it meant.

  Pierre looked kind of embarrassed. “Uh, well, that’s what we call the Anglos sometimes. Square heads.”

  Everybody just laughed.

  But I wanted to get the story straight. “They kicked the Highland Scots out of Scotland and they kicked you guys out of here?”

  “That’s right, little one. Our people wouldn’t agree to sign an oath that meant we might have to fight against France. So the English gave us the boot. Took over people’s farms and their livestock and destroyed their homes to make sure they didn’t come back. But here we are!”

  “That’s what they did in Scotland, too!”

  “As a police officer, I’m starting to see a pattern here!”

  “And well you should,” Father Burke said.

  “You’re an Irishman, right, Father Burke?”

  “I am.”

  “Well, I’m a Maguire, so I’m part Irish, too. Another part of the pattern.”

  Then Daddy said, “The Gaels and the Gauls. Anything to add to this discussion, Brennan?”

  I looked across at Father Burke, who was behind a cloud of smoke from his cigarette. He picked up his glass of booze and took a drink and then said, “Don’t get me wound up on that subject.”

  “Go ahead, get wound up,” Daddy told him. “What would your IRA family think of you if you remained silent about the Brits at a time like this?”

  The Mountie looked at Father Burke and said, “Whoa!”

  I had heard about the IRA on the news, and I heard about them when I was over in Ireland on our trip two years ago. There is still some kind of a war over there, but there are so many armies and groups involved in it, I’m not sure what’s going on.

  Anyway, Father Burke answered Daddy. He said, “The Brits spent eight hundred years ‘pacifying’ us, slaughtering us, starving us, expelling us from the fertile lands of our country out to the west coast. ‘To Hell or Connacht,’ Cromwell said. In other words, get out to the edge of the island or we’ll kill yez. Like all the other thousands who had been massacred. So yes, I could make myself part of a roundtable discussion on this topic.”

  “Welcome to the club,” said Morag.

  The Irish, the French, the Scottish. And my hometown of Halifax was mixed up in it, too. “So the guy that started Halifax was the same guy that killed the Camerons and all those other people in Scotland!”

  “That’s right,” said Morag. “He came over here to New Scotland and got up to his old tricks again. Tried to get rid of the native people here, the Mi’kmaq.”

  “That’s terrible! How come there’s a statue of him in Halifax?”

  “Oh, don’t go by that. Half the people in the world that they built statues of are roasting in hell right now and always will be!”

  This was unbelievable. “Maybe I should study history when I grow up and go to college, so I won’t be fooled by this stuff again.”

  Pierre the Mountie said, “Be a surgeon. Less bloody!”

  But then the music started up, and they all sang songs that protested what had happened to their people. One guy — I didn’t know his name — had a tin whistle and played along. Pierre said he couldn’t sing but they talked him into it anyway, and he sang “Évangéline.” It was in French, but I made a point of finding out afterwards what it meant; it was a really sad song about two people who loved each other and were separated when the Acadians were forced out of the country. He didn’t sound too bad singing it. After he was finished, all the Scots in the room sang:

  On dark Culloden’s field of gore,

  Hark! They shout “Claymore! Claymore!”

  They bravely fight. What can they more?

  They die for Royal Charlie!

  No more we’ll see such deeds again.

  Deserted is each Highland glen,

  And lonely cairns are o’er the men

  Who fought and died for Charlie!

  Then it was Father Burke’s turn. Nobody had a bodhrán handy, so he took a wooden box and moved a bunch of apples out of it and kept the beat with that. He did a song called “Foggy Dew.” That name doesn’t sound scary or warlike, but you should have heard him when he beat on that box and sang about the English sailing into Dublin through the fog in a ship with great big guns turned on the city. I pictured what it must have looked like, the big grey ship with its guns, slipping in through the fog, and I got shivers. He looked and sounded as if he was going to get up and march to war to get revenge.

  They did another round of rebel songs, and other tunes, and it was great. But when old Morag got up and left to go to bed, I followed her out because I wanted to talk to her again.

  I sat down on the chair near the bed and said to her, “Now I know why my hand was burning when I picked up that news story. It was about Cornwallis. And now I’ve heard the truth about him, about all those wars and the ancestors of people we know being murdered and expelled!”

  She seemed to be looking at something else, far away, but then she
turned her eyes towards me and said, “No, m’eudail, that’s probably not the reason.”

  “Why then?”

  “You remember I had a bad feeling about that place. I wasn’t inside the house and never saw the news clippings, but just going by the property gave me the horrors. You, wee bairn, were in the presence of evil.”

  Just the way she said it made me turn cold all over. Again. I couldn’t help it. “You mean there was a bad spirit in there?”

  “Maybe. But I think more likely there had been a very much alive person in there who was evil through and through.”

  “Whoever put the news stories in there was evil, you mean?”

  “I think so.”

  I didn’t know whether I wanted to ask this or not. Didn’t know if I wanted to hear the answer. But I asked anyway. “Greatgran Morag, do you think Bonnie is still alive?”

  She turned those fierce black eyes on me and looked at me for a long time. It was more like looking in my direction but not seeing me there. Finally, she said, “I do.”

  “Oh, thank God! That is so great!”

  “But that doesn’t mean it’s true, Normie.”

  “You see things, though. So if you see her still alive . . .”

  “There’s no calendar that comes with my visions. No clock. When I see something, that doesn’t mean I’m seeing something that is happening right now. I could be seeing the way things were yesterday or last week or last year.”

  I could feel myself slumping down in my chair. I could feel myself giving up the idea that I most wanted to hang onto: that Bonnie was still all right, wherever she was. I might as well get the rest of it. “What is it you see, Greatgran?”

  Her face had a look as if she was haunted by something. “Bonnie is surrounded by great evil.”

  “No!”

  “I fear what’s in the room with her, that it will settle on her like corrosive dust, the corrosion becoming part of her, leaving her scorched forever. And the thing that is out there, around us all the time like poison gas, will find its way in. Will breach that thin, thin wall that separates us from the dark savagery that lurks there on the other side.”

  Old Morag had me terrified. Shaking. But I know she didn’t mean to do that. Her eyes came back into focus, and she looked at me and realized that what she was saying was scary stuff. She put her arms out, and I got up and went over to her. She stood up and brought me close to her in a hug. I was afraid I would feel spooked being that close to her, that close to someone who can see into the dark side of things. But she felt warm and good like any other great-grandmother in a family.

  When we sat down again, I said, “But the stories I saw weren’t about bad things, except Cornwallis, I mean, and that seemed to be because Halifax had been founded two hundred years before. It was the anniversary of that year. And one story was just about hockey . . .”

  I wound down then because the expression on Morag’s face was even scarier than usual.

  She said in a very quiet voice, “Two hundred years? What year was the hockey story?”

  “It was 1949. All the stories were.”

  “God save us” was all she said.

  Pierre

  Wednesday night we got a call about an incident at Collie MacDonald’s place up the hill on Drew Street. He had a view of the water. So far, so good, even if the view included the wreckage of the heavy water plant. But his house, doux Jésus! It used to be a really nice little family home. Now look at it. All the other properties on the street were attractive and well kept. You’d think a guy who picked up the occasional job on construction sites could patch it up a bit, nail the shingles in place, wash the mould and soot off them, get rid of the two rusted-out vehicles in the driveway. But Dougald and I weren’t there as decorators. We weren’t there to prosecute the guy for unsightly premises. We were there because he said his house had been broken into. Collie was piss-drunk when we pulled in.

  “What happened, Collie?” Dougald asked him.

  “I stopped in for a quick one at the Pithead, and somebody busted in here when I was gone.”

  Quick one? Anybody who knows how many hours Collie clocks in at the Pithead Beverage Room would know he — the burglar — could take his time going through the house, make himself supper, try on some clothes, and watch a full-length movie on Collie’s VCR, before he had to make his escape with the stolen goods. First time I ever met Collie MacDonald was when I stopped him on the number four highway. I was in an unmarked, and there was a Chev Malibu ahead of me on the road. The Chevy driver blew his horn and pulled out and passed an old Dodge pickup truck. Started to pass and then stayed out there, and swung in close to the truck. Next thing I saw was a hand coming out of the passenger window of the Chev, a hand with a can of beer in it. The driver of the Dodge took the beer, raised it to the Chev, then took a big swig of it. That was Collie MacDonald in the truck. When I pulled him over, he said to me, “Welcome to Cape Breton, b’y. Have a drink.” He knew he was fucked, so what the hell. I remember telling Dougald about it, and he just laughed. Said almost the same thing had happened to him right after he joined the force. He was stationed in Antigonish. He stopped a car on the landing there, a little road out on the water. Two old ladies were in the vehicle, passing a pint of rum back and forth. They offered him a nip. “Have a little dileag.” At first he said no. Then he went native and got in the back seat and took a drink. Called it “community relations.”

  Now, in the foyer of Collie MacDonald’s house, I focused on the task at hand and said, “Anything taken?”

  “I don’t know.” No surprise there. He had been on such a binge the kitchen stove could be gone and he wouldn’t know the difference.

  “Okay. Show us what you found.”

  “Down here.” He opened the door leading to the basement and started down the stairs. He stumbled and ended up on his hands and knees at the foot of the staircase. He let out a string of curse words that would have sent my maman running for the rosary beads.

  “Are you all right, Collie?” I asked him.

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m just fuckin’ lovely. Couldn’t be better.”

  “No need to be so — what’s the word? — bellicose, MacDonald.”

  “Belligerent,” said Dougald.

  “Right, I guess so. Whatever he is, his attitude is not helping matters here.”

  “Are you guys finished talking about me as if I’m not in the room?” He was dusting off the knees of his pants, and he started calling down curses on the Holy Name again when he discovered the right knee of his jeans was ripped open.

  We didn’t say anything more. Just waited until he walked over to a window, which was all smashed in. The floor underneath it was covered with splintered glass.

  “The guy came in here.”

  “All right,” I said, “so he came in the window, dropped down. Did he do anything here in the basement?”

  “This stuff is all knocked over.” It was a bunch of old household items. Lamps, old shelving, a toaster, things like that. “This lamp is broken. It wasn’t like that before. And the bookcase was upright before this happened.” A bunch of books and magazines were lying in the dust on the floor. Other things had been moved out of place, he told us.

  “Can you tell if anything is missing?” He shook his head. “Is that no, you can’t tell, or no, nothing missing?”

  “It’s the basement, Maguire. Look at it. There’s years of junk piled down here. I can’t tell right away if anything’s been taken or not.”

  I looked around the scene. It didn’t look like vandalism to me. More like the place being tossed, as if the guy was looking for something. Something to steal, or something for another reason? I went back and examined the window. There were jagged pieces of glass still in place in the frame. Bit of blood on them. “Whoever he is, you can be sure he’s got some cuts on himself or on his clothes from coming in through
there.”

  “Good enough for the fucker.”

  “Okay, let’s go back up, see what he did up there.”

  When we were back on the main floor, Collie waved a hand at the kitchen. “Nothing in here, I don’t think.” He grabbed the back of a chair to steady himself and then walked into the living room. “I can’t see anything different in here either. It was only in my bedroom and —” he cleared his throat “— and in the girls’ bedroom. The room the girls sleep in when . . . when they come to visit. No sign of any trouble in my boy’s room.”

  “Do the kids come and stay here often?” Dougald asked.

  “Yeah, they try to get over here a couple of nights a week. Usually, anyway, depending on what’s going on.”

  “Pretty rough, anh? Only seeing them part of the time.”

  “Not my idea, Pierre.”

  “I know, I know.”

  We followed him along to the hall and into one of the bedrooms. It was a bright, cheery room with golden yellow walls and white trim, and two of those beds with the things over the top.

  “How do you call those?” I asked.

  “Canopy beds,” he answered. “I made them myself.”

  “Good job.”

  “Yeah, the girls love them. I put them together and then waited to see the look on their faces. Just like Christmas! Bonnie’s has the angels and the pipes.” I didn’t know what he meant, so he pointed to the wooden border at the top of the four poles holding up the canopy.

  “Did you make that?”

  “Yeah, I carved them all. Took me a while. A labour of love.”

  “Ça, c’est bien bon!”

  “Well, I did the carving, but I stole the idea from an old church in England. One time we went to Scotland with the band, and we drove down through England and went to Bath. Beautiful city, magnificent buildings. And the abbey there has these carvings.” He pointed to the figures on the wooden border. He was sounding more and more sober now. “In the abbey, they have a row of angels playing musical instruments and they all have their wings spread out, except for the angel next to the bagpipes; she has her wings down, as if she’s trying to cover her ears! Like that.”