Alison Preston - Norwood Flats 04 - Sunny Dreams

by Alison Preston

  “What are you talking about, Warren?” I asked.

  “Tag told me about your baby sister,” he said.

  Robert walked slowly over from his bed to join us and Gwen came back at the same time.

  “Hi, Robert,” Gwen said.

  “Hi, Gwen,” he said. “Hi, Violet.”

  “What gives?” said Warren. “Who’s dead and who isn’t?”

  “Nurse Parnell’s not on duty but Nurse Miles said that Nurse Parnell’s brother is a cop and that he said that the man who was found by the tracks was a Negro.”

  I sat down in a metal chair and put my head between my knees, something Helen had taught me. My dizziness passed and after a few moments I sat up.

  “Are you okay, Violet?” asked Warren.

  “Yes, I think so,” I said.

  Gwen went into Warren’s tiny washroom and came back with a cold cloth that she pressed against my forehead.

  “So, are Jackson and Tag both dead?” I asked, still reeling from what Warren had said about Sunny. Did everyone in the world know way more than I did about me and my very own family? “Or is Jackson still alive or what? Jesus!”

  “I don’t know,” said Gwen, “but I told Nurse Miles to tell Nurse Parnell to watch her tongue around young boys.”

  “We’re not young boys,” said Warren. He included Robert in his statement.

  “What are you?” I asked, trying to act normal.

  “I don’t know, middle-age boys, I guess. We’re not young.”

  We promised him we would find out what was what.

  “Please find out it wasn’t Tag,” said Warren. “Or Jackson, either. I like him, too. Why does it have to be either of them?”

  “Maybe it isn’t,” said Gwen. “Maybe it’s neither and it’s all a big mistake.”

  I think we all doubted that.

  We were both quiet on the way home. I hadn’t told Gwen anything about finding Sunny. I didn’t want her mum knowing any more of our business than she already did, shadowing it as she had with her dark thoughts. But Warren knew about my long-lost sister!

  “Has your mum been to see Warren?” I asked, now dreading any contact between the two in case Warren spilled the beans. I needed to speak to him again.

  “No,” said Gwen.

  “What does your brother know about Sunny?’ I asked.

  “Who?”

  “My sister,” I said.

  “Nothing,” said Gwen. “Not that I know of. Why?”

  So Gwen wasn’t in the picture. I believed that.

  “I don’t want Tag to be dead,” I said. Maybe even more than I didn’t want Jackson to be dead, I realized, and then understood there had been a small amount of relief attached to Jackson’s death.

  “No,” Gwen said. “We’ve got to find out what’s going on. Maybe you could ask Frank’s dad?”

  “Yeah.”

  We walked along Bartlet Avenue in silence for a while. The street was empty except for an Eaton’s delivery wagon and a ’33 Plymouth parked on the road. And the tail end of a young boy on his bicycle turning the corner onto Osborne Street. A dog trotted along at his side.

  “Any sign of Tippy?” I asked.

  “No,” said Gwen.

  I remembered Isabelle then and her possible sighting of the dog, but I didn’t mention it. I didn’t want to get Gwen’s hopes up. Maybe I could see Isabelle today sometime.

  We leaned into the thin fall air; it was an effort for me to move forward. And in this pale new world of death and loss and middle-age boys, even the chrysanthemums and asters looked dull. I could barely see them.

  “Did your mum ever hear back from Mr. Roosevelt about going to that polio place?” I asked.

  “No, but Eleanor Roosevelt wrote Warren a letter wishing him well.”

  It became, not easy, but not difficult, either, to keep certain feelings at bay. Whenever they began to creep in, I recognized them as something to be put aside, dealt with later.

  I didn’t feel like talking to Mr. Foote. I went to see Isabelle instead. She was babysitting, but we went outside and sat on the steps of her apartment building.

  She was matter-of-fact about Jackson’s death. She had heard about it, although not from the newspaper.

  “I heard people talking about it at Jimmie’s,” she said.

  “Who’s Jimmie?”

  “It’s not a who. It’s a what,” she said. “A coffee shop downtown. But I heard that the dead man was a Negro,” she went on.

  “No, I don’t think that’s right,” I said. “It was Jackson. Wasn’t it? Could you please find out if two men died?”

  I realized I might have to go and see Fraser’s dad after all. He would know what was going on.

  “The Willis twins and creepy Dirk were at Jimmie’s,” Isabelle said. “They seemed really interested in the man named Jackson’s death.”

  “Interested like how?” A crawly feeling snaked up and down my sides beneath the sweat.

  I could see their ears perking up,” Isabelle said.

  “What did that look like?”

  “They were almost but not quite twitching.” Isabelle laughed. She could. This had no real connection to her other than through me. And who the heck was I? A rich girl from The Flats that she probably didn’t even like all that much.

  “But since then I heard that the man was coloured so I don’t even know if it was the same Jackson.”

  “This is crazy,” I said. “Tag’s a coloured man, but his name isn’t Jackson and we’re all hoping he’s gone home to Detroit.”

  I told her the news about Sunny. She took it in stride as she did pretty well everything, but she found it interesting.

  “You’re going through a hell of a lot right now, aren’t you, Vi?” She put her arm around my shoulders.

  My eyes burned. “It sure feels like it.”

  “I’ll keep my ear to the ground,” she said.

  When I stood up to leave she said, “That dog you’re looking for? The one I met at Happyland that night?”

  “Tippy.” I had completely forgotten about her. For a little while, anyway.

  “I’m pretty sure I saw her under the bridge,” Isabelle said, “and then again behind the hospital at the river. I think she’s living semi-wild, with some tramps.”

  “Thanks, Is.”

  Briggs Hardware was across the street on Taché. I stopped there and bought a dog collar and a leash. Then I followed the path by the river from north of St. Boniface Hospital, under the bridge, past the rowing club and the motorboat garage all the way to St. Mary’s Road.

  Some of the scruffy characters I spoke to seemed familiar with Tippy when I described her to them. One young boy tramp who I was sure was a girl knew her quite well, she said, and was glad to find out her name. I gave her my address and the collar and leash and a dollar and asked her to bring Tippy to me if she should see her again. The hobo’s name was Bill.

  Back home, I told Aunt Helen to expect a young girl hobo pretending to be a boy named Bill to turn up at any time with Tippy Walker. I didn’t have the strength to tell her anything else, especially about the possibility of Tag being dead. There had to be more than one Negro in Winnipeg. I just hoped it wasn’t Tag’s brother.

  Chapter 28

  Two things happened that crossed each other in time.

  When my dad phoned next he told us that he had seen Jackson: that was the first thing.

  We told him that Jackson was dead.

  He said, “No, he’s not.” He told us he’d call back after he had spoken to him again.

  The second thing was that Jackson’s uncle, Bernard Shirde, his dad’s brother, came to Winnipeg and confirmed that the dead vagrant was not his nephew. Not even close. And then he went home again; we never got to meet him.

  I phoned Frank and asked him to ask his dad some questions.

  “Mr. Shirde could have saved himself a trip if someone had mentioned to him that the dead man was a Negro,” said Mr. Foote.

  My dad phoned
back and told Jackson’s story to Helen the way it had been told to him. He told it nervously because of the long distance charges. And then Helen told it to me. I hated Jackson’s story.

  “What about Sunny?” I had asked repeatedly in the background when Helen was on the phone.

  “What about Sunny?” she finally said to my dad.

  “He has her,” she whispered to me after listening for a moment or two.

  “Come home, Will,” she said next. “Come home as soon as you can.”

  “What do you mean he has her?” I asked when my aunt finally hung up.

  “Your father has Sunny with him. They’re coming home,” Helen said. “Jackson’s mother is still in the rest home.”

  “What about Mrs. Dunning?” I asked.

  “Your dad saw both of them, talked to them both. He’ll explain it all to us when he gets home.”

  “It sounds like no one put up much of a fight to keep Sunny,” I said. “Not that I wanted it to be hard for Dad, but…”

  “I know what you mean,” said Helen. “It’s hard to imagine.”

  My chest hurt and I tried to breathe through the pain. I couldn’t get a satisfying breath. “Dad will be really nice to her, won’t he, Helen? He’ll know what to do? How to be with her?”

  “Of course he’ll be nice to her, Violet. He’s doing the absolute best he can. The best he knows how.”

  “I wish I’d gone with him,” I said, gasping for more air.

  “You’ve got university,” said Helen in her new absent way.

  I didn’t mention that I hadn’t been attending. I was always heading out somewhere, so she hadn’t noticed or at least hadn’t let on.

  Chapter 29

  The papers then reported that the man found dead by the tracks wasn’t Jackson Shirde after all. He was a Negro and they didn’t know who he was. They revealed that he had been covered with tar and thistles and that the police believed foul play was involved but had arrested no one. He was naked under the tar and his clothes had been found nearby, cut to shreds, with Jackson Shirde’s identification in a pocket. Hence, the mix-up. That was all the paper had to say about it other than that he was very thin.

  Foul play indeed. Play didn’t get much fouler.

  It was Tag; I knew it; we all knew it. Benny stepped up to identify him and it was then that one paper reported: The thin Negro has been identified as Taggart Woodman of Detroit, Michigan. Age: eighteen. The other paper didn’t bother.

  I went over to see Benny the day of the identification. He was still living at the construction site on Crawford.

  He told me that Tag’s head was gone and that the tar had made a terrible mess of his body. Benny told the officials that he recognized Tag’s hands and his overall size. That had been good enough for whoever was in charge.

  “They didn’t clean him up very well,” he said now. “I hate to think of his family seeing him like that.”

  “Will they be sending him home to Detroit?” I asked, deciding to wait a while, maybe a good long while, before thinking about the state Tag Woodman was in.

  “They haven’t found his parents yet, but I’m going to pester them till they do. Maybe I’ll take him home when they find them. I would talk them into burying him without looking at him.”

  “That’s very kind, Benoit.”

  He grunted — a French-Canadian grunt.

  “They let me sit with him a while,” he said. “That is how I knew it was Tag. No one would have been able to know, to…rec…”

  “Recognize,” I said.

  “Yes, to recognize what was left under that sheet, except maybe the boy’s mother.”

  “Oh, Benoit.”

  “Yes. But he spoke to me, Violet. Not out loud, of course. But Tag spoke to me and he seemed, how do you say? at peace.”

  I nodded.

  “He wasn’t angry or hurting. I felt a little sadness from him, maybe, but mostly a quiet peace.”

  “That’s good, Benoit.”

  “It was Tag all right.” He sighed.

  “I’m glad you were here to identify him, Benoit, and that he didn’t just get lost in a pile of….”

  “Dead tramps,” said Benny.

  “Yes.”

  “You asked me one day, you said, how do your trances help?”

  “Yes?”

  “I am not sure how to explain it, Vi. I know I cannot go back through time or anything. But I swear my training put me in touch with Tag there in that cold morgue room. I swear. If I keep at it, something more could happen. And if it does not…well, I liked very much saying goodbye to Tag.”

  “Why did it happen, Benny?” I asked. “Why would anyone kill him?”

  “I do not know, Violet.” He sighed again. “Maybe we will never know. Some people do not need a very good reason to kill.”

  Not good enough, I thought.

  Benny told me then that Tag had been a religious man, heavily into everlasting life, Jesus, the whole thing.

  “Good,” I said. “That probably helped him meet his death.”

  “Yeah,” said Benny. “He was an Episcopalian.”

  When I left Benoit, I caught a streetcar that would take me to the King George to see Warren. I was mad at that shitheel Jackson for being alive. I looked out the window and tried to decide on the words I would use to tell Warren about Tag. Getting nowhere with that, I realized I would just have to let it happen. Warren would help me. Besides which, he had already told me. He already knew, thanks to that awful Nurse Parnell.

  The streets of Winnipeg had changed; it was more than just the autumn light. It’s me, I thought; I’m seeing things differently now. Some edges appeared sharper, pitch-dark against the light, others were blurry, like I needed glasses. I could have sworn some things were missing entirely from the landscape while others were brand new, without a speck of dust on them.

  Warren had already done his crying, he explained, when he didn’t shed a tear.

  Robert came to join us but Warren asked him to leave us for a while. We had some private things to talk about.

  Jackson had told Benoit, Benoit had told Tag and Tag had told Warren that Jackson’s mission while in Winnipeg was to inform the Palmer family that their daughter, Beatrice, was alive and living in Montreal. He wanted to put things right.

  But he had struggled. He was afraid of causing trouble for his mother, whom he described as fragile. And there was finding out that my own mother had killed herself after the baby was snatched. That added another layer of horror. Also there was fear of the consequences of his own involvement after all those years of knowing and not speaking up.

  It surprised me a little that Tag had confided in Warren. Surely the age difference would have limited the kind of talk that passed between them. It turned out that Warren had heard the three of them talking about the situation: Jackson, Benoit, and Tag. He heard enough that he wanted to know more. He pestered Tag till he told him the whole story, that day I had found them whittling outside Tag’s tent.

  “Why didn’t you tell me, Warren?” I asked now.

  “I wasn’t supposed to,” he said.

  How could I blame Warren for anything? It wasn’t his fault three grown men were careless enough to get him involved in something so sinister.

  “How did Jackson find us?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Warren.

  It wouldn’t have been hard, I realized. With all the publicity surrounding Sunny’s kidnapping a matter of public record, it would be easy enough for a curious teenager to find out what he was looking for.

  Chapter 30

  Jackson came back on the train with my dad and Sunny. Helen drove the Buick to the station where I laid eyes on my sister for the first time in eleven years. There aren’t many hallowed moments in one person’s life: this was one of mine. She smiled shyly at me and I loved her instantly and completely.

  She wore loose comfy trousers and a modern haircut. The word fashionable came to mind. Someone had been taking care of certain
of her needs, anyway.

  We all went back to the house where Helen and I served tea and tomato sandwiches and angel food cake with butter icing.

  Sunny sat close to Jackson and it occurred to me then that I would have him on the edges my life for the long run. This brother and sister were not going to let go of each other. I looked at Helen, wondering if she was realizing the same thing. We were practically related to Jackson. She was brisk and busy, giving nothing away but kindness to Sunny.

  Words fell out of Jackson’s mouth like miniature dead sparrows and landed on the hardwood floor in front of the chesterfield. Helen’s words fared better, but she was trying for Sunny’s sake. I don’t think I spoke at all and my dad said very little. He was exhausted. He did ask Jackson to tell his story again, which he did.

  Jackson had gone looking for Tag and found him at the river, on the other side, below Dominion Envelope and Cartons. They sat and talked and were approached by three men. He recognized Dirk Botham from the W.C. Fields night at the movies. The other two were unfamiliar to him but they looked alike so he assumed they were brothers.

  Dirk did the talking. He told Jackson to get lost forever. They forced him to hand over his ID and they put it in Tag’s pocket. Tell no one. Leave town. Don’t even go back to your camp and get your stuff. They talked about what they would do to Tag: they wouldn’t hurt him if Jackson left; they would hurt him very badly if he didn’t. They also described what they would do to Benoit and even to Helen and me. Jackson didn’t go into detail and we didn’t ask. Their scare tactics worked.

  Why couldn’t Tag just have gone home to Detroit? I wondered. Brother or no brother. I couldn’t bear that Jackson had left him with Dirk Botham and the Willises. I hated him for that.

  Jackson went on to say that Tag had tried convincing the criminals that he was preparing to leave Winnipeg the very day they had caught up with him. He had found no trace of his brother and the hope of finding him had been the only thing keeping him here. He assured them that if they let him go they would never see him again. His plea fell on deaf ears. Tag encouraged Jackson to leave, told him he’d be all right.