Punishment

by Linden MacIntyre

  In time I learned that Caddy had given up the child to a relative in Windsor. And that she had moved to Toronto where she worked for several years, creating distance from her daughter so the little girl could bond, I guess, with the new parents, Caddy’s aunt and uncle. And at some point when it didn’t matter I heard that she was home for good and married to a lovely man named Jack Stewart. Salt of the earth, Ma said of Jack.

  There was inevitable speculation that Jack was the father, especially when at the age of ten, Rosalie came to live with them. But anyone who thought it through would realize that couldn’t be the case: Jack wasn’t even from around here, never met Caddy ’til after she had gone away herself. And they never had children of their own so it was clear that there was something wrong with Jack in that department. For a long time it was considered odd and tantalizing that Caddy never gave the slightest hint about the father of her baby. There were predictable jokes about the Immaculate Conception and even I could, eventually, ignore the crude insensitivity and smile a little. There would come a time when no one talked or thought of it at all. But I always knew that someday, somewhere I’d come face to face with the reality.

  9.

  December 29, coming back from our walk along the trail I saw Caddy’s car at the house. Birch saw it too and dashed off to sniff a wheel. Then he barked twice and trotted to the door. I felt a combination of elation and disappointment.

  Caddy was at the kitchen table, sitting with her coat on, car keys in her hand. She smiled when I came in but didn’t stand. Birch jumped up, placed forepaws on her thigh. She scratched his head. “None the worse for wear,” she said.

  I started pouring water into the kettle. “So how are things in Windsor?”

  “It was lovely,” she said. “A relief to be away.”

  “Everybody fine up there?”

  “Everybody coping. It was sad just the same.”

  “I’m making tea,” I said.

  “None for me,” she said. “I just wanted to take this fellow off your hands. I got in late last night. I’m beat.”

  The kettle was whispering. I stood, back to the counter, arms folded. The dog was lying on the floor, on his side, looking up at her while she scratched his ribs. Her face was sad, the dog reminding her of loss. “I didn’t know he liked that.”

  “Loves his belly being scratched,” she said. “I hope he wasn’t any trouble.”

  “He’s great company,” I said. “Went AWOL once but he was easy to find, looking confused on your back deck. Other than that, he settled right in.”

  “I can’t thank you enough,” she said, and stood. “It was a great break.”

  “Too bad you couldn’t have stayed longer.”

  “It was long enough.” She seemed to hesitate.

  “I could keep him for a few more days, ’til after New Year,” I said. “Just a thought.”

  She laughed. “Look at the face on you. I think he stole your heart too.”

  “No,” I said, feeling the heat on my cheeks, “It’s just I …”

  “I’ll bring him back for visits.” She moved toward the door. “Come on, Birch Bark,” she said. He yapped and followed her. Passing by me, Caddy caught my hand and squeezed, then leaned in and quickly kissed my cheek. “You’re a dear,” she said.

  I slept late the next morning. No reason to get up. And I’d stayed up too late, well into the wee hours, watching an American channel where people on a panel were haranguing one another about Iraq. I thought: So this is where Neil is getting all his big ideas. Staying up late, watching American TV.

  One man on the panel was a skinny, balding, whiskery academic, whose name was also Tony, I noted. He was talking about the United Nations, how non-violent measures were achieving the security everybody seemed to be concerned about. But he was mocked and shouted down. And I wished that I had told Neil the Pittman story, about what happens when we grow cynical about the law, abandoning the civility the laws protect, unleashing our own violent, fearful demons. The price we ultimately pay for chaos.

  After I turned the television off and went to bed, I couldn’t sleep for all the sounds and images: Hussein, Strickland, Pittman, thudding feet, violent noise and someone’s life a bloody puddle spreading on a dirty floor. And all the people who will die because of a consensus shouted by some lucky people on a television panel, people sleeping, eating, laughing at this very moment, and unaware that they will soon be dead. And Tommy’s voice, Stay solid, man; and why I couldn’t have told Neil what happened when I wasn’t solid, how I succumbed to weakness, ended up alone, in an old house on the edge of nowhere.

  I swung my legs out of bed, stood staring out the window. The sun was shining and the wind was out of the northwest. There was fresh snow on the ground and it was lifting and shifting, phantom dancing on the meadow. The agitation of the night returned briefly then faded in the relaxed murmuring of wind. The word “finality” occurred to me, the way that lawyers use it. It wasn’t weakness. It was strength. You did the right thing, I told myself again. And, This is the finality, the isolation that is also peace. And I thought of the poem by Anna Akhmatova: Strong as we are, memory punishes us, is our disease. Be on guard, I thought. Too much memory is toxic.

  I was watching coffee dribbling into the urn when I heard two sharp yaps just outside my door. I laughed out loud. Dog memory—memory without moralizing—a blessing.

  “The little bugger,” Caddy said impatiently when she picked up the phone. “I’ll come and get him.”

  “No,” I said. “I needed motivation to go out for a walk. This is good. I have to go to the store later anyway so I’ll bring him by.” On a sudden impulse I said: “Then again … what are your plans for tonight? I just realized it’s New Year’s Eve …”

  “You can imagine,” she said. “I’m picking up the new ball gown in a few minutes. Then the beauty parlour for the rest of the day.” She laughed. “What the heck do you think my plans are? Sitting in front of the TV watching a bunch of Mr. Bean reruns, waiting for the magical midnight moment.”

  “Okay, why don’t you come over here and I’ll make dinner. And you can take your little friend home with you when you go.”

  “I didn’t know you were a cook.”

  I almost said there’s a whole lot you don’t know about me, but I caught myself and said instead, “Well you can be the judge of that. Besides I’ve got a bigger TV than you.”

  She sounded wary when, after a long pause, she said “O-kay,” a kind of query on the second syllable.

  ——

  The phone rang at three o’clock that afternoon. Caddy was already laughing when I picked it up. “You’re serious about this?” she said. “You’re sure now?”

  “What?” I said, pretending to be hurt. “You don’t think I can cook a dinner?”

  “I’m sure you can, but I was thinking, why don’t you come over here?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m baking a ham right now. I have the fixings for a salad. I even found a nice baguette in town. And an expensive bottle of wine. There’s no turning back now.”

  “Ham,” she said. “I’m impressed. But I have to do something. How about I whip up a casserole of scalloped potatoes? You plan on that.”

  “My mother used to make it with lots of onions and cheese,” I said.

  “I have the same recipe.”

  She arrived at seven sharp. I had music on low, some Brahms. Making the selection I was reminded of how little I knew about her. I tried to recall if she drank alcohol. I thought I remembered Dixie cups of rye and ginger but it might have been like the cigarettes she’d smoke more out of curiosity than desire. I realized that I was nervous and badly needed something strong to drink.

  Her chestnut hair, thick and rich, faintly greying, was gathered up high on her head, giving prominence to forehead, eyes and cheekbones. Her face, I noted with a pang, was still extraordinary. She seemed slimmer than she was before she went away. She was wearing a long loose pale blue sweater that hung to her hips, t
ailored blue jeans, boots almost to her knees. She handed me a heavy object in a plastic bag—the casserole. It was warm. “Put that in the oven, on low,” she instructed. From a large shoulder bag she extracted a bottle of wine. One question answered. She sat then on a kitchen chair and struggled with the boots.

  “They’re new,” she said. “I did some cross-border shopping.”

  “Let me help,” I said, and knelt in front of her, seizing the heel of a boot, one hand on her calf. When I looked up she was staring at me, half-smiling, hands gripping the edges of her chair. Her eyes were shining. “Just look at you down there.”

  Boots off, she reached back into the shoulder bag and produced a pair of shoes.

  “And oh yes,” she said, reaching in again. “I brought dessert.” She was holding a small plastic container. “Some brownies,” she said. “They’d be great with ice cream.”

  “Ice cream I have,” I said. “I’m going to have a drink while the wine is breathing for another little while,” I said. “How about yourself?”

  “I’ll have some breathless wine,” she said.

  I poured myself a very large glass of Scotch.

  We were playful preparing dinner. Anybody watching through the window would have seen an extraordinarily attractive woman, age irrelevant, busy in a kitchen that was not unfamiliar to her. I guess all kitchens are more or less the same. Occasionally, though, she’d have to ask me where she could find something or other. “This place could use some organizing,” she said, then blushed. “Will you listen to me?”

  I checked my image in the window of the microwave. Hairline holding, hair steely grey on the sides, but still black on top. Swarthy face too fleshy. I regretted the shirt that I was wearing, an old denim thing that was a bit too tight around the middle.

  “If you don’t mind me asking,” I said. “How do you keep in shape? You look fantastic.”

  She cocked her head, “Thank you,” she said. “I don’t mind you asking at all.” She turned back to the counter where she was squeezing garlic for the salad dressing. “It’s mostly in the genes.”

  “That’s a part of my problem,” I said. “I don’t know much about my genes.”

  She let the comment pass and I resisted the temptation to pour another Scotch.

  “How’s the wine?”

  “Lovely.”

  I couldn’t see her face. I refilled her glass, poured one for myself.

  Dinner conversation was mostly catching up with the lives of people we once knew: who was dead, who was happy, who was married and unmarried, brief references to the children of old acquaintances who were doing well, or badly. Sketchy details of our own lives.

  “You and Jack met in Toronto,” I said.

  “We knew each other there,” she said concentrating on her fork. “Then after I moved back home, he turned up here.” She smiled. Enough disclosure about Jack.

  “And you. How did you meet up with—Anna, if I remember?”

  “Yes, Anna,” I said, feeling awkward. “We met taking night courses at Queen’s. She was hoping to be a lawyer.”

  “Wow,” she said, and daintily placed a slice of potato in her mouth, eyes interested and searching mine.

  “She pulled it off,” I said. “Now in a practice. Successful criminal lawyer.” I fell silent, caught in a warp between the two of them.

  “Funny about relationships,” I said. “One of the things that attracted me was that we didn’t seem to have much in common. It was kind of disappointing that we had more in common than I realized.”

  “How so?”

  “She more or less grew up in prisons. Her father was in the system, he’d worked his way up from guard to warden. He was running Warkworth when Strickland was there …”

  She stopped chewing for a moment, then looked down at her plate, stuck her fork into a morsel of ham, looked up and met my eyes.

  “I’m sorry to have mentioned him,” I said. “I’m an idiot.”

  “No, no,” she said. “It’s okay. So Anna would have known Strickland too?”

  “She took an interest in him, trying to help him through some university courses. We never really talked about how that worked. Things were kind of strained between us by that point.”

  “Thank God I was spared all that,” she said. “I couldn’t imagine the grief of that kind of situation.”

  And then there was a long silence.

  “It’s funny, looking back,” she said eventually. “New Year’s Eve we always remember. A year ago I went to bed before midnight. Maymie was out with a gang of friends. There was a big dance in the hall and they all went. Boys and girls together, no dates or anything like that. Not like when we were young and everybody would be paired off. Do you remember where you were?”

  “In an empty house in Kingston. Just about everything cleared out but boxes of books and a big old bed. I went to bed early too.” But I couldn’t remember going to bed. Just that I woke up there, head and body throbbing from an alcohol-induced unconsciousness.

  “I was just thinking,” she said, “how it’s kind of pathetic the way we indulge ourselves in hopeful expectations at times like this and, of course, on birthdays. I think you’re what, Tony, fifty-five?”

  “Yes.”

  “Two years older than I am,” she said.

  “You’d never know to look at us,” I said. “You look twenty years younger than me.”

  She laughed. “Now you’re just trying to get around me.” She looked away, face pink. “It’s kind of like a kid’s game, isn’t it. All the resolutions and predictions and expectations. Pretending that we can know one day to the next what’s going to happen, that we can actually have influence, somehow prevent the bad things by being optimistic. ‘Look on the bright side,’ they used to say.”

  She sighed. I placed my hand on hers. She studied my face and hers softened and became the face of many years ago, eyes searching. I was afraid to make a sound. After what seemed to be a very long silence I said, “It took me years to stop thinking about you.”

  She looked away but didn’t move her hand. “I can’t imagine what you thought. But believe me, I knew what you were going through. I must have written a hundred letters, then tore them all up.”

  She shrugged, raised her eyes to mine. “I admired your silence,” she said. “The word I used to think of all the time when I thought of you was ‘dignified.’ ”

  I laughed. “Dignified! I had lots of questions, lots of times I had to struggle to hold them back. I’d tell myself a day will come when I’ll have answers. Or maybe not. Maybe there will be a day when the questions and the answers don’t matter anymore.”

  “And so?” she said. “The questions? Now?”

  I hesitated, took a sip of wine. “For a while I thought it was me. I remember one night we were parked in the old truck. I think I got a bit carried away.”

  She looked off as if at something above my head. “I remember that little truck,” she said at last. “It was red.”

  “Is that all you remember about it?”

  “It was a red Ford F-100. I’m thinking 1955.”

  “My God,” I said, surprised. “I think you’re right.”

  “For the longest time I’d see a little red Ford and I’d be wondering what became of you.”

  I shrugged. “It’s one of the few great things about time passing. Everything diminishes. And then nothing matters anymore.”

  “Oh stop,” she said. “Jee-zus.” She pulled her hand away from mine but she was laughing. “Let’s just do the dishes.”

  “No,” I said. “Let’s sit in the living room and listen to the music. And wait for midnight. I promise, no predictions or resolutions.”

  “But we’re allowed to hope,” she said.

  “I can live with that.”

  So we went to the living room and we sat side by side. “I didn’t ask if you enjoy classical music.”

  “Actually, it isn’t classical,” she said. “It’s the Romantic period I think.”
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  “Wow,” I said. “An authority on music. So do you like Brahms?”

  “I like all serious music,” she said. “But my personal taste runs more to the baroque. You know our local fiddle music is essentially baroque?”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said. “And where did you pick up your expertise?”

  “Maymie,” she said. “She could play anything. Piano, guitar, fiddle, you name it. She could step-dance like nobody’s business. There was a great music teacher at her school. I got interested in the music books she’d bring home, theory and history and all that.” She sighed, retreated briefly into silence then said: “Something else I miss.”

  I took her hand and she moved closer. After a while she put her head on my shoulder and eventually we fell asleep like that.

  It was shortly after midnight when I woke up. She was curled up beside me, head resting on my thigh. The dog was on the other side of me. I was afraid to move. But she popped up quickly, rubbing at her eyes.

  “We missed all the hoopla,” I said.

  “What time is it?”

  I looked and said, “Twelve twenty-five.”

  “Yikes.”

  “Hey. I think that was the first time we ever slept together.” I squeezed her hand.

  “Better late than never,” she said, sounding groggy. Then it seemed to register and she stood up.

  “You don’t have to leave,” I said. “You can stay ’til the morning.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “Not now.” She leaned down and kissed me swiftly, softly, on the forehead.

  The dog was sitting up, watching us intently. She scratched between his ears. “I think I’d like to leave him here, if that’s okay with you. I think it’s better all around. I was hoping that his little holiday over here would change some things but the minute he got home it was back to his old spot, where the casket was.” She shook her head. “There are things I’m not ever going to get over as long as he keeps reminding me. So, would you mind?”