by Tim McGregor
The interior was almost as charming as the outside. A bannistered stairwell just off the foyer, a stone fireplace in the front sitting room, the mantel adorned with antiques and framed photographs. An aroma of cooking drifting from the kitchen. “I love your house,” she said.
“That’s Barbara’s talents at work,” he said, taking her coat and draping it over a peg. “I just try to keep the place from falling apart. Are you hungry?”
“Oh you don’t have to make anything,” Billie said.
“Just soup, warming on the stove.” Earl took another look at her, smiling. “My goodness, you really have a lot of your mother in you. The eyes mostly. The nose. She was a head-turner, that one. This way.”
Billie almost spit, her heart sprang into her throat so fast. No one had ever said that before. Earl led the way and she was grateful to be following behind. It gave her a moment to compose herself.
The kitchen was bright, even on a snowy, overcast day. Two large sash milled windows looked out over a glen hemmed by the stark branches of the woods. Rising from the dark trees beyond was the spire of a church.
“And how is Maggie?” Earl asked. They sat at the large wooden table, finishing their soup. Leek and potato. “It’s been ages since I’ve seen her.”
“She’s good.” Billie wiped her mouth, draped the napkin back over her lap. “A bit lonely at times, since Uncle Larry passed.”
“Course. She hasn’t met any one since then?”
“Maggie? God no. I’ve tried to hint at it, you know? That it’s okay to meet someone else, or at least be open to the idea. She gets frazzled, changes the subject.”
“Must be hard to even contemplate the idea,” he said. “After being with one person for so long.”
“Who’s this?” Billie asked, pointing out one of the black-and-white photographs.
Laid out before them were three bulky photo albums, all opened to different pages. A ramble of old snapshots of people that Billie had never seen before. The picture she pointed at was of a young man in a clerical collar.
“That is Samuel Finn. He entered the seminary, as you can see. A good number of them did back then.”
“Were they very religious, the family?”
“Staunch Catholics,” Earl said. “At least one out of each generation went into the clergy. Or were pushed into it. I think they felt a bit safer having an inside man. Mind you, everyone went to church back in those days, not just our family. Church was the centre of the community, especially in small towns. Everyone belonged to one.”
Billie turned the page in the album. Another sampling of strangers. Earl collected the dishes and set them in the sink. He returned with a teapot. “Do you attend church, Billie?”
“No. Maggie does. Always has. I’ll go for midnight mass, Easter, if I’m with her.”
“Just out of duty, then. You don’t believe?”
“I’m not sure what I believe,” she said honestly. Another photograph stole her attention. Two young women in a garden, from roughly the early 1920’s. Opposites. One was in a dark bob, a sleek flapper dress. The other woman’s hair was up in a tidy bun, her blouse buttoned high on the throat.
“Who are these two?” She tapped the picture under its plastic sleeve.
Earl adjusted his glasses, leaned in to get a closer look. “That, I believe, is aunt Elsie and aunt Lillian. Sisters. Your great-aunts, I suppose.”
“Sisters? They seem like polar opposites.” Billie tapped her fingertip against the woman in the flapper dress. “Was she the black sheep?”
“Bit of a free spirit, that one. Clashed with the family, as you can imagine. Girls weren’t meant to challenge tradition in those days.”
“Or now,” Billie suggested. “Did they not get along much?”
“Elsie and Lil? Not really.”
“No, I mean the family in general. The Culpeppers?”
Earl leaned back, the wooden chair creaking under him. “Not always. All families have their squabbles.”
“I know. But why I haven’t I met you before this? Or Judith or any of the other relatives.”
“I used to ask that same question. I remember your mother and aunt from when we were kids. We used to see them in the summers a lot. But after a while, they drifted apart. The parents, I mean. My father and, what would be your grandfather, lost touch or had a falling out. Brothers, you see.”
“What did they fight about?”
“I never knew.” Earl removed his glasses, poured the tea. “Kids are usually kept away from the squabbles. The skeletons in the family closet.”
Skeletons, Billie thought. And ghosts, psychics, gypsies.
“Sugar?” Earl placed a ceramic bowl before her, shaped like a squirrel clutching an acorn. “I think what happened to your mom distanced the family even further. Which is deplorable, really.”
“You mean her disappearance? Or what she did for a living?” Billie wasn’t sure if she was going to bring up that topic when Earl had opened the photo albums to reveal this legion of unknown relatives. She liked this smiling man who served her soup, and she didn’t want to spoil the visit. It had just blurted from her lips just now.
“Both, really,” he said. “That must have been so hard for you, when she disappeared. If there was ever a time to be surrounded by family, that was it.”
“Maggie was family enough. She really went to the wall taking care of me.” Billie turned another page, the pictures time-warping through the war years of men in uniforms and women in shirt-sleeves, to the postwar prosperity of the 1950s. Boys in pompadours, girls in saddle shoes.
“I found her, you know?” Another blurted out comment.
He looked bewildered. “Found who?”
“My mom,” Billie said. “We had a proper funeral in November.”
Shocked, he said, “How on earth did you find her?”
“I had some help. My—” Here she hesitated over the word, but didn’t know why. “My boyfriend is a police detective. And another friend, who’s just good at finding things.”
The pan of shock on his face tilted into astonishment. “I wish I had known. I would have come to the funeral. I always liked Mary Agnes when we were kids. She was different.”
That was no surprise. She wondered what her mom was like as a kid. It was hard to even conceive of it. “Different how?”
“She used to know all these neat tricks. Like how to locate a rabbit’s warren, or how to dig for arrowheads. And all the injured animals, my goodness.”
“Animals?”
Earl nodded, eyes glazing back to a foggy childhood. “She used to find injured animals everywhere. Birds with broken wings or baby rabbits that had gotten lost. Turtles on their backs in the middle of the road. It was the oddest thing. I never found so much as a soggy worm on a rainy day but your mother? These poor creatures seem to drop at her feet all the time.”
It was difficult for her to imagine. Her mother as a little girl, clutching a bird to her chest. “What did she do with these animals?”
“Tried to nurse them back to health. Not alway successfully, but she tried. There was, however, one crow that she mended. Its wing was broken and Mary Agnes kept it in the shed, its wing in a splint. It recovered and she let it go but it always came back. It would leave trinkets for her at her bedroom window. Marbles and bits of string, nuts and bolts. Anything colourful or shiny.”
All Billie could do was gape, unable to reconcile this unknown aspect of her own mother. Who ever thinks of their parents as being children? “I’ve never heard that before.”
“Where is she buried?” he asked.
“Holy Sepulchre. In Burlington.”
“I’d like to see it.” He looked at her. “Would you show it to me some time? Maybe when the weather’s nicer?”
A sharp intake of breath. The man in the flannel shirt had a knack for putting a lump in her throat. “I’d love to.”
“More tea?” He reached for the pot.
“Please.” She had barely touched
her cup but she needed a moment to push her heart back into place. “Earl, do you know much about the family origins? Where the Culpeppers came from and stuff?”
“A little,” he said. “Curiously mysterious bunch, us Culpeppers.”
“Mysterious?” Did he know about her? Or her mother? Maggie had hinted that they weren’t the only clairvoyants rattling around the family tree.
“The family tree,” he said, as if reading her thoughts. “Or the roots of it, I should say. Genealogy’s become a bit of a hobby of mine.”
She had her guess but wanted to know what he meant. “What’s mysterious about it?”
“Only goes back so far. I can trace most of the family to about four generations but then the trail stops cold.”
Earl reached for another book on the table. Not another album, this one a hard binder.
“Last winter, I started researching my mother’s side of the family. The Bouchards. Some of this work had already been done for me. Grandma Bouchard has this enormous family bible, a monster of a book with an extensive family tree inside it. Working from that, I was able to search municipal documents, church records and war office files for the family name. I also cheated and used one of those genealogical websites. The point being, I could trace the Bouchards back eight generations. From the village of Cornwall, back into Quebec, where the Bouchards had been since they emigrated from France in 1805. I can go back even further but that would require a trip overseas. Here, look at this.”
Opening the binder revealed page after page of photocopied documents, lists of resources and arcane government paperwork. Flipping through it, he plucked out a long sheaf of paper detailing a genealogical tree with a myriad of offshoot branches. He pointed to a name at the bottom of the page. Gisele Bouchard.
“This is my mother.” He traced his finger along the page, up toward the inverted roots of the family web. “This is the oldest ancestor I could locate. See the date?”
Billie leaned closer to read the calligraphic font. Gilles Bouchard, 1746. Earl had traced his mother’s family back almost three hundred years. “Wow,” she gulped.
“Goes back pretty far, doesn’t it?” Pushing the document aside, he fetched another paper from the binder. A standard letter-sized page. “So I started researching my dad’s family. You can see I didn’t get very far.”
A single page, names penned prettily along four horizontal lines. She saw her mother’s name, along with Maggie’s on a lonely branch of the tree. Another shoot revealed Earl’s name, their cousin Judith. The names scribed in fine calligraphy with parentheses, denoting birth and death. Tracing the dates to the root, the earliest date Billie found was 1905. A Culpepper named Arden, born that year, died in 1941. The patriarch of the Culpepper clan, according to the genealogical tree. Nothing beyond that.
“It all ends there, with Arden.” Earl leaned back, pushing his glasses up into his thinning hair. “There is no record of any Culpeppers in Canada before that date. There’s a few Culpeppers in the States but I can’t find anything tying them to our clan at all. A dead end.”
Dead end, indeed. Billie scanned the date of Arden Culpepper’s birth one more time. 1905. A year before the death of Poor Tom, the half-boy ancestor who watched over her. Tom’s younger brother. Back when the family name was Cleary, not Culpepper. Arden, direct ancestor to both she and Earl, had been born a year before Tom’s tragic death. Before the Cleary family fled the shanty town of inner Hamilton for the small village of Poole, where they changed their surname to Culpepper.
Billie frowned at the quaint diagram of the family roots. She could fill in a number of blank spaces in her distant cousin’s family tree but she had no tangible means of backing it up. All she had were the words of a ghost, the tale told by Katie Cleary, older sister to Poor Tom. Earl was clearly meticulous in his research, ensuring every detail was corroborated in some official document, moldy with age and therefore irrefutable in veracity.
“So, that’s the mysterious part,” Earl said. Hands raised, palm up in resignation. “Strange the way the trail just goes cold. As if the family didn’t exist before this.”
Because the Culpeppers were a fiction, Billie mused. A falsehood conjured up to bury a crime. How would this charming, sweet man react if she told him the rotten truth buried in the roots of their shared family tree? Would it help if she exposed the real story? How could it? Billie chewed her lip, swallowing down the truth, making herself complicit in the family lie.
“Must be frustrating,” she said. “Still, it’s fascinating, all this history.”
“I think so,” Earl said with a smile. “It’s important to know where you came from. Helps guide you on the path forward.”
Not always.
“Thank you for this,” she said, tilting her chin at the albums and documents spread over the table. “Showing me all your work. All this family I never knew.”
Earl smiled. “I’m happy to trot it all out. Barbara’s bored to tears with it by now.”
Billie took up the single page of the Culpepper family tree, scanning through the names written there. “Could I get a copy of this?”
Turning the pages in the binder, he slipped free a large manila envelope and presented it to her. “I have one ready. I scanned some of the old photos for you, too. Just in case.”
“Thanks,” she said, moved by her relation’s generosity. Despite the rotten roots, the Culpepper line had produced some nice fruit.
“It’s too bad Barbara isn’t here. She’d like you.” Rising, he cleared away the teacups. “You’ll have to come back for a proper visit. Maybe a Sunday dinner.”
“I’d like that,” she said, the envelope clutched in her hand like a prize won at a county fair.
“And,” he added, “you and I can plan a little excursion to see Mary Agnes’ gravestone.”
Farewells were repeated on the wide veranda and then Billie climbed back into the ugly Nissan, waving one last time as she pulled out of the tree-lined driveway. A queer feeling of elation carried her along as she drove through the town of Waterford. Despite the twisted roots, she was delighted to have found another family member in this sweet man with all the genealogical tables. Something more than kinship or blood bond but difficult to pinpoint. Accelerating past a stone church on her left, the churchyard dotted with tilting tombstones, she wondered if Earl, like herself and her mother, also had a whiff of the family curse about him.
Chapter 12
“THE GIST OF it,” Kaitlin said, strolling down the frozen food aisle, “is that psychics are basically social workers.”
Billie raised an eyebrow. “Social workers?”
“Or therapists. A working-class version thereof. But because it’s always been considered ‘women’s work’, it’s undervalued, dismissed, derided.”
Kaitlin had called earlier. Bored and needing to get out of her lonely condo unit, she suggested they hit the grocery store and make dinner. Maybe watch a movie, kill a bottle of red. Anything other than facing the still emptiness of her place. It was odd, Billie thought, pushing a cart down the aisles of the grocery store with Kaitlin. The best of intentions to make a hearty and healthy meal and yet the cart was filling up fast with nacho chips, jars of salsa, two bags of cookies and ice cream.
Odder still was discussing psychics as social workers. Kaitlin’s ongoing study of the history of divination.
“How is it social work?”
“Because it focuses on the client’s needs. Their problems, their worries, their current situation. What do most people go to psychics for?”
“How would I know?”
“Hello? You’re mom was one.”
“Yeah,” Billie said, “but I was never allowed in on the sessions.”
“Think about it. People want to know about their love lives, their careers, their family troubles. Questions about happiness, or the lack of it. And there’s always been the fortune-teller on every corner. So, rich people see therapists. The rest of us pleebs consult psychics. It’s called
emotional work. Or one person said psychics were part of a social support network for the working class.”
Clearly Kaitlin had been hitting the books on the subject. “Where are you getting all this stuff?” Billie asked.
“Articles on Slate or Vice,” Kaitlin shrugged. “A few podcasts, too.”
“Fish?” Billie suggested, looking through the glass at slabs of mackerel and tuna on ice.
“I never cook it right.”
They pushed on. Kaitlin snuck a bag of pretzels into the cart and Billie fired a look at her but didn’t remove it. “So what about our original question of why psychics are always women?”
“It was one of the few jobs open to them. The religious world or spiritual side, was controlled by men. Unless you wanted to be a nun, women were excluded. But the need was still there. So they turned to fortune-telling. Which isn’t so much about divining the future as it is about the client pouring their troubles out to a stranger. Someone they don’t know, who won’t judge them, but can offer some perspective. It’s not that different from the confessional booth, is it?”
“I guess,” Billie agreed. Looking at the contents of the cart, she said, “Do we really need two bags of nachos?”
“Should we get three?”
“No.” She pushed the cart onward. “So psychics are the poor man’s therapist.”
“I kept seeing this term, emotional labour, when reading about psychics. Like care-giving or social work, it’s traditionally considered women’s work and therefore devalued or dismissed. Like midwives, really. How they were pushed aside by doctors a hundred years ago but then they realized midwives were right all along.”
“Is that why psychics have such a bad rap? Being scam artists and the like?”
“Partly,” Kaitlin said. “Anything outside of mainstream religion is considered a scam. Or worse, outright witchcraft. That isn’t to say there haven’t been scam artists. There’s been lots of those. Like those psychic hotlines back in the nineties, which was a billion dollar industry. Or there was this big fraud case down in the States where this guy blew a million bucks on a psychic who claimed to help him find a lost love. Turns out she was dead the whole time.”
