The Weight of Stones

by C. B. Forrest

  “I apologize for the surprise today,” he said, “but I appreciate your hospitality. You have a real nice place out here, Peggy. A real nice place.”

  Emily was down for a nap, and Jessie was out on the porch having a smoke. He took out his wallet and put a hundred dollars in cash on the kitchen table. Peggy shook her head.

  “With all due respect, Charlie, I don’t need your money…”

  “Please,” he said, “for diapers and all of that. It’s not much, but it’s all I have on me.”

  She shrugged and left the money sitting there.

  “Thank you, for all that you’ve done. For Emily,” he said. “And for Jessie. I’d like to stay in touch. I’d like to visit again, too, if that’d be all right with you.”

  “You’re welcome to visit any time, Charlie.”

  He put his hand out to shake, and she looked him the eye as they shook hands. He limped to the porch, the blood rushing to his head, dizzy, and he stepped out into the early evening. He found Jessie in a wicker chair, smoking a cigarette with her little feet tucked up against her bottom. It was the sort of slow and warm country evening perfect for sitting in a chair and counting cars on the highway.

  “I’m going to get that money you saved up, and I’ll wire it.”

  “You won’t get it back,” she said. “Not from those people.”

  He said, “I’ll get it back. And with interest. Should be enough for your tuition.”

  She nodded, and her eyes welled up.

  “You have my number. You ever need anything, or if you come back to the city and need a place to stay...”

  It was harder to leave than he’d imagined, or it was the exhaustion and the wound, or perhaps it was simply his getting older that made a lump form in his throat as he moved to her. He put an arm around her and smelled the cigarette smoke clinging to her young body like all the bad memories.

  Twenty-Eight

  At a gas station phone booth on the side of the rock-cut highway, he slipped his credit card into the machine and called his wife on the west coast with the news. Tractor trailers roared past or downshifted as they slowed to pull in for fuel or food. Caroline was slow to comprehend, to absorb the information, and she cried, then they cried together, and he told her how sorry he was for all of the things that had happened to them. It was like a dream, a story someone told you on a train.

  “She’s real, Caroline,” he said. “I held her with my own hands.”

  He looked up to the darkening sky, cloudless and still, and he felt tired but strong. He was stronger than he knew. He could keep going if he had to, go on forever for his wife and his son and the idea of this family he had made. He thought of his father, and he wished the old man were alive to see how he had come through.

  He hung up and dialed Hattie. She answered before the first ring was completed.

  “Jesus murphy, Charlie. Where are you? Are you all right?”

  “I’m okay,” he said.

  “They’re ready to put a bulletin out on you,” she said, “but I promised Aoki that you were coming in with your lawyer. She’s been handling this whole thing like a bulldog. “

  “I just held my granddaughter. My granddaughter,” he repeated. “She’s beautiful. Her name is Emily…”

  “God,” she said. “Charlie.”

  He could hear Hattie’s soft crying, the emotion coming uncoiled, and he reached into his shirt pocket to take out his cigarettes. The lighter flicked, and he took a long drag, his chest whistling. He was so tired, the weight of the years slipping from his shoulders. It was as though he had walked a thousand miles, and only now, at the end of the long journey, could his body finally admit its true exhaustion. What a strange trip, this life. It’s a dream we live, he thought.

  “Charlie,” Hattie said. “You have to come home now.”

  “I guess I’m in some trouble,” he said.

  He sounded like a little boy, the simplicity of it all, and it made her laugh through her tears.

  “You’re in a little trouble, yeah. But we can deal with it. It’s self-defense. Just come home safe. Aoki’s already been talking with the Crown, Charlie. Professional Services is all over Balani’s house, his files. There’s talk of a full internal investigation,” she said. “We can work through this. I’ll be there with you.”

  “I have a picture of her,” he said. “I think maybe she’s got my nose or something.”

  “The poor girl,” Hattie said. They listened to one another breathing across the static line. He took the small picture from his pocket and looked at it until his eyes watered and his throat felt tight. Finally, Hattie said softly, “Come home, Charlie.”

  He filled up the little truck and bought a day-old coffee at the gas station. He bought a package of Tylenol and sprinkled four tablets into his palm then swallowed them down with a snap of the head. The road was wide open, and it was where he wanted to be, where he belonged with his head full of thoughts. His thigh was burning again, and he was lightheaded. Tired, so tired. He lit a cigarette and rolled the window down. The air smelled of early summer evenings in the country, freshly mown grass, wild flowers. And the wind felt good on his face. It would help keep him awake on the long drive home.

  Twenty-Nine

  Upon his release from the prison in Kingston, Pierre Duguay moved through the underside of life, carving out a place for himself in rented rooms in other cities, in other towns. He made some good money for a few years cutting his own deals. But the work and the life became harder, then it was impossible. He was old at fifty-two. He worked the door of a tavern in north-western Ontario, manhandling drunken tradesmen, miners and peddling dope by the gram. He took a job working construction for a time, then got on with a painting crew, mostly ex-convicts looking to stay out of the system. He moved across the yellow and brown landscape of the prairies like a pioneer seeking new frontiers, finally coming to the oil camps of northern Alberta, where a man could re-invent himself without raising questions. He let his hair grow out and kept a beard most of the time, lines of steel grey laced within the black. He drifted from the life he had known, and those he worked with or drank with learned to respect the deep silence within him. He went by a different name, and in time it no longer stuck in his throat or sounded foreign when called out across a room. The polished crease across the flesh of his neck sometimes brought inquiries from the bold and the curious, and he invariably dreamed a different story until the truth was distorted even to himself.

  He was often with a woman, but it never meant anything beyond a warm body and a break in his loneliness. None of them held a light to Chantal LeClair, who had ruined him for love, for she had known him, known his potential. He understood he was in a holding pattern of sorts, biding his time. He could lose hours sitting on the edge of his bed in his rented room, hovering there, lips working in silence as he sorted through the details, what he would do if he could relive those years again, where he had gone wrong. In this way Duguay became an old man who never stopped looking over his shoulder as he manoeuvred through the days of a life lived beneath the surface.

  Now and then, Duguay would think of his mother, wondering where she was or if she was even alive, calculating her age against his own. And it was during these moments that Duguay truly understood that he had fooled himself into believing he had escaped the fates of the men in his old neighbourhood. He had watched them stumble through lives filled with prison records and bad teeth, poverty and despair, living for Saturday night quarts of beer. Eventually the muscles slackened, and the stomach began to hang, no matter how tough you were. He thought he was smarter than all of them, faster and stronger. But he was exactly the same, because he was their son.

  In the middle of a winter’s night. Dark and quiet. He finds himself standing barefoot on cold tiles in the bathroom taking a long piss, head back, fingers tickling his belly. He yawns, closes the toilet lid and moves to the sink, splashes warm water on his face, slicks the water through his hair with his fingers. He pats his face dr
y with a hand towel. Then he notices it, an extra toothbrush in the holder on the counter. He picks it up, turns it in his hand. Pink, a perfectly traditional match for his blue toothbrush, and he sees the bristle ends are frayed where Hattie has brushed too hard, like a little kid. He sets the brush back in its place. It looks good there, he thinks.

  Earlier the room had been filled with the scent of their love, but now the dark bedroom smells only of linen and closed air, the way any bedroom smells in winter. He lifts the heavy comforter and crawls inside. Slides against Hattie’s body, warm and soft. She is still half asleep, and she adjusts her body so that a strand of her long hair falls across his face. He reaches up to move the hair, and he smells the fruit shampoo she uses. He notices everything. The freckles on her shoulder blades, the curve of her hips, the feel of his big hand across her soft belly.

  “Charlie?” she says in a sleep-thick voice.

  “I’m right here,” he says.

  “I had a dream about you,” she says, her voice drifting.

  “Was it a good one?” he says.

  But she is already gone again, lightly snoring. He closes his eyes and listens to the sound of her breathing, and after a while he can make out even the faintest ticking of his wrist watch on the night table. He holds on to her body beneath the winter blankets and believes that he can measure out the time that remains to him in easy moments such as this. He sees that it can be done, that a man can believe himself destroyed, and yet still find something, anything—a single blade of grass—to clutch. He understands something profound has been forever altered within his being, within his very heart of hearts, and there will never be another family like the one he made from the ground up. But he sees that it can be done, that a man can in fact be annihilated, yet rise from the ashes, rise up from the depths of hell itself and learn to breathe again, and yes, even smile, and never again take for granted the simple luxury of a woman’s touch.

  Earlier, fingering the patch of flayed grey flesh at his thigh, Hattie had said, “Does it hurt?”

  He’d said, “Not too much. Only when I pick at it.”

  “Then don’t pick at it,” she said with a laugh.

  “I can’t help it,” he’d said. And it was true.

  Now Charlie McKelvey closes his eyes and lets out a long breath. His arm is falling asleep, turning to pins and needles. He adjusts himself so that he will not wake her, slips his arm from beneath her side. He rests a forearm across his forehead, the way he remembers his father doing when they took midday naps to escape the apex of the summer sun up at the camp in the woods of the north, his silent father’s strength there with him now, and he feels an unsolicited tear roll from the corner of his eye as an image forms, a flashing arc. His one and only boy. Gavin is turning slowly, smiling up at him. They are skipping stones across the green-blue water of a lake. He feels the presence of their bodies as strong as the sun on a hot day, hears each of their hearts beating, just slightly out of time.

  C.B. Forrest began his career in Journalism and currently works in Communications and Marketing. His fiction includes the award-winning short story “The Lost Father” as well as the novella titled Coming To, which was adapted to the stage in 2001. His poetry has appeared in Contemporary Verse 2, Bloodlotus Journal, Bywords Quarterly Journal and Ascent Aspirations, and has earned praise from writers as varied as George Elliot Clarke and Stephen Reid. He lives in Ottawa with his wife and daughter. He is currently at work on a second McKelvey novel.

  He can be visited online at

  www.cbforrest.com

  With gratitude

  to Sylvia McConnell and Allister Thompson

  Acknowledgements

  The author wishes to gratefully acknowledge Gary Marsh, Chris Nuyens, and Gord Rowland for providing invaluable reader comments on early drafts; Pauline Braithwaite for reading those stones and never losing faith; Greg Poulin for the adaptation; spiritual encouragement from Patty Brundritt; mom and dad for the first typewriter; and B.W. Powe for the condensed MA in Creative Writing.

  Several sources of information were helpful during the writing of this book, including offline conversations with a few ex-convicts, most notably P.M. and R.D.; knowledgeable former C.O.’s at the Kingston Penitentiary Museum; an interview with inmate ‘S.D.L.’ at Collins Bay Penitentiary; observances at Courtroom #5; and solid crime reporting in the Montreal Gazette, the Toronto Star, the Toronto Sun, and llo Police.