The Girl in Saskatoon

by Sharon Butala

  Alex was nursing at City Hospital in 1962, had been since late September of the year before, and that night she had to be at work for the 11:30 p.m. shift, although nowhere is it recorded on what ward. She had just turned twenty-three the month before, and it was the May long weekend, Victoria Day (which Canadians still celebrate, although I doubt there is anybody left who was alive during Queen Victoria’s reign, and not many more who actually care, yet we all love the holiday). Lucky people who owned cottages at the nearby lakes—Jackfish or Emma or Christopher, or farther north at Waskesiu—would be packing their cars that night in order to head out first thing Saturday morning to open them for the summer. City kids might be driving out to Pike Lake, a half-hour to the southwest, to go for a swim, or else, car-less, wishing they could. Alex was unhappy about having to work; she’d wanted to go to her sister’s cottage at either Emma Lake or Waskesiu, and had probably tried to trade shifts with somebody, but of course, everybody wanted to be off that weekend, and she’d had no takers.

  She’d been on the graveyard shift the night before too, and had spent most of the afternoon of this gorgeous day sound asleep in the basement suite (as we called apartments then) that she shared with three other nurses, young women with whom she’d attended nursing school in Yorkton. Now, awake, having shared a light supper with a roommate, Alice, and a neighbour, having washed her hair and set it, then having sat under the dryer, during which time she’d written a couple of letters, one to a friend in Edmonton and one to a sister in Ontario, she changed her clothes and went out to mail the letters. That errand done, and probably not wanting to return home until it was time to go to work, she’d crossed 33rd Street at Mead’s Drugstore on the corner of 7th Avenue and 33rd, only a half-block from where she lived at 1223—7th Avenue North, and walked down 33rd—not on the sidewalk, but along the grassy verge against the railway embankment, east toward Spadina Crescent and the river.

  It was only a few minutes’ walk, ten to fifteen at the most, although because she’d stopped to chat with someone it had taken her longer. Having arrived at the river, she turned to her right, walked under the CPR bridge, crossed Spadina Crescent to the riverbank, then the narrow, sandy parking area, stepped over the low rope-and-post fence, walked down onto the centre of the concrete apron next to the weir, and sat down, bringing her knees up to her chin and hugging them with both arms.

  That was the last anyone saw of her alive. Except, of course, for her killer.

  Now, as I drove past the area where she’d been killed and where nearly two weeks later her body was found, I felt a prickling unease, a fear that had transmuted into a diffuse anger that at the place where she had been murdered there was no trace left of what had happened. I was reminded how, in central Paris, there are engraved brass plaques on buildings telling everyone that at that spot in 1944, for example, two resistance fighters were shot by the Nazis. Although that plaque is there to remind people of the heroism of those men, it is also a reminder of evil, that it is always present, and that all of us need to be ever-vigilant against it. But in our civilized civic-mindedness, we don’t like to be reminded of the bad things that happen, of their randomness, because we don’t want to frighten children or have people develop a distaste for such a charming spot, because we don’t wish to be reminded of our failures, or of the sobering, constant presence of evil.

  But in that lovely, greening place that night in May 1962, with the soft whisper of the river running by, and the moonlight glistening on the water, youth, innocence, and beauty, in the person of one small Ukrainian-Canadian girl, had been stamped out. Evil had done it—pure evil—and it seemed to me then that it would continue to win, as long as Alex’s killer remained unidentified and unpunished.

  Chapter Two

  Endeavour

  Looking back now, more than ten years after my thoughts first turned to what had happened to Alex, I think my connection to her may have begun long before I realized it. In 1986 I had a strange dream. I found myself in a building I recognized at once as the Ukrainian Hall on the west side of Saskatoon, the “west side” being the west side of the river. I once knew it well; I spent a year there attending St. Mary’s School on Avenue O, and lived my life within its boundaries and also within Riversdale, a sub-neighbourhood of the west side, one of the oldest in the city, with its row after row of neat, two or single-storey, small, often already worn frame houses set close together on thirty-foot lots, with tidily trimmed caragana or lilac hedges out front or low picket fences with securely latched small gates. In those days, 1953 to 1954, all my friends lived in those houses on Avenue G or Avenue Q or on 19th or 18th or even 23rd Street, all of which ran perpendicular to those avenues.

  In the dream, the Ukrainian Hall had become a museum, and just in front of me, down three wide steps from the entrance area, stood a polished, pale-oak, waist-high display pedestal with an object lying on it, and a clear glass dome placed over the object. Any other display cases or furniture that might have been there, even the walls of the hall and the entrance behind me, were dissolved in shadow. There was only silence, the golden, narrow-boarded hardwood floor, and the pedestal below me. I went slowly down the steps, and I saw that the object under the glass was my journal. It was a particular journal, as I now have more than twenty-five years of them, a thick but small one whose thin paper is narrowly lined, its cover red silk with little pagodas, deer, trees, and flowers embroidered in blue and gold. It was a journal which I still think of as the heart of my journal-keeping, the one in which I recorded in the smallest detail, and on both sides of every page, the year of my deepest attempts to make my way into whole life.

  There are also quotations from the many thinkers I was reading in my search for explanations of life, for guidelines as to how to be a person: Carl Jung, William James, Evelyn Underhill, Simone Weil, Thomas Merton, D.T. Suzuki, Robert Graves, Erich Neumann (from whom I learned that wood—a wooden vessel, a wooden room—is a symbol of the Great Mother). I suppose it could be said that that journal is a book about my search for soul.

  When I woke, I was struck as much by the way I knew at once where I was as by the strange contents of my dream. It was clear in the dream that I had entered the Ukrainian Hall, the one that still exists on the west side on Avenue G South, between 20th and 21st streets, even though I’ve never actually been in it. I was surprised, too, to have found myself in my old neighbourhood, which I no longer thought of, and where I hadn’t been except accidentally, driving through it on my way to somewhere else, for something like fifty years. And yet so deeply familiar to me was it that I felt as though I had somehow dreamed my way back to a place I didn’t even know was home.

  Trying to understand the dream, I focused on two things: first, that it was my journal under the glass case in the museum, which seemed to suggest that there was something very special about it, that it might be telling me that my books would be remembered. But I felt no particular surge of pleasure at that. In my experience, prophetic dreams tend more often to be about unforeseen disaster, not unforeseen success. The second was the Ukrainian element: I’d never been in that hall, I’m not Ukrainian, and I have never been a part of Ukrainian immigrant life in any way. And I couldn’t see any connection between the two ideas: my writing and Ukrainian life. I knew little, even, about Ukraine, with its very long, tumultuous, and complicated history, and nothing about the language. Of course, I knew—we all knew, because in Saskatchewan we all went through school with Ukrainian-speaking kids—two or three words in Ukrainian which meant “shut up,” and “go away”—schoolyard rudeness in a more innocent time.

  In the end, despite the dream’s power, I simply stopped thinking about it. But it had served to remind me of those early days when we first arrived in Saskatoon, a country family without urban experience and no good sense about how to live in the city, about safety, or day-to-day practices that the urban don’t even think about but just do—or don’t do—and how during that first year on the west side, where the city’s working c
lass people lived, the immigrants, and a small contingent of the criminal element, I lived in a state of amazement and fear, as if I had just been born and was seeing the world for the first time.

  But soon after, the dream made me recall interesting events from that time: the huge excitement of the ice on the South Saskatchewan River going out in the spring, which the whole city rushed out to watch and made bets on and that some years nearly took out this bridge or that bridge; the east—west elementary school hockey game that packed the civic arena with kids from both sides of the river one fateful Saturday morning each year, and that Roy Romanow, then a “boy broadcaster,” before too long to be our premier, used to call for the radio; my crushes on boys and my first date at the old Roxy Theatre when I was fourteen, and my girlfriends, more important to me at a certain age than God or my mother or my sisters. The memories began to tumble out, vivid and emotion-laden, and filled too with a kind of wonderment at how I once lived, who I once was. Almost at once I remembered that among the significant or shocking things that had happened during that period, 1953 to 1962, was the murder of Alex Wiwcharuk.

  I thought vaguely that maybe I could use it in a novel I was planning. But it was so odd, so out of the normal flow of things. Still, my memory had been stirred, and I thought, But they never caught the killer, did they? I was not even sure of that elementary fact because a year after Alex’s murder, I’d left the city and the province and stayed away for five years. I was curious enough that, one day when I was in the city on other business, I stopped at the public library and searched out the microfilmed copies of the Star Phoenix.

  I found lots of interesting facts, including that another girl Alex and I had been in high school with, many years later had been charged with being a “madam.” I’d run into her in the eighties and when I expressed dismay at hearing what she was doing—she was perfectly blithe in telling me about it—she retorted angrily that it wasn’t illegal (I think she meant something about the way in which she went about it), and that a certain policeman from the United States had set her up in business, or had shown her how to run such a business, which I had immediately thought was a lie, if an inspired one. But, when the newspaper did not mention that she had been fined, or sent to jail, when I realized that as nearly as I could tell she’d suffered no punishment, I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe the police officer story was true.

  It was a good story, all of it, and it could be made to work in my novel. And what happened to Alex would have to be worked in somehow as just one item, one incident, in what would be a long book thickly interwoven with all the stories I could remember from those days. I suppose that it would have been a kind of coming-of-age novel, but disguised—I hoped—so that it wouldn’t be taken as a record of my own girlhood.

  I had found a reprisal of Alex’s story published in the eighties. The details were as I remembered them, but I had forgotten the specific dates, and a few other aspects such as where her poor, battered body had been found, and a little about its condition. The fact I was most interested in was reported too: that more than twenty years after her death, nobody had been accused of her murder, nor caught, nor tried, nor sent to prison. I wonder why, I asked myself, staring at the microfilm on the screen and feeling, for the first time, a sense of unease. Once somebody is caught and put in prison, people lose interest, but if no one is ever caught—well, that is a different story. Forgetting is harder; forgetting is near to impossible. But I didn’t know that yet.

  Another year or two passed, during which time, although occasionally I thought about that novel I might write, I was immersed in other projects. But then I spent much of the winter of 1997 in Saskatoon looking after a dying sister. One evening, my friends from years before, when I was still living in Saskatoon, invited me to a women’s dinner, and although I had never before met some of the women there, I was seated beside one I had known since she arrived from central Canada in the early seventies. During our conversation—What was I up to? What was she up to?—I mentioned to her (and it was the first time I’d said it out loud) that I was thinking of tackling a novel about growing up in Saskatoon during the fifties and early sixties. I added, probably more in an effort to sound interesting than anything, that one of my high school girlfriends had been murdered. She said, “You mean Alexandra Wiwcharuk?”

  When I got over my surprise that she would even have heard about this, she went on to say that she knew a retired policeman who had been, in some small way, involved in the original investigation and was “as obsessed with it as you are.” She told me, “I can give you his name and phone number. You really must talk to him.”

  I was barely interested. And I was surprised, too, to hear that someone else, someone who’d actually been involved at the time, was “obsessed.” I didn’t think I’d ever call him and so I thanked her, not taking his name or phone number, telling her that I wasn’t yet ready for that, and doubting, privately, that I ever would be. I did not, for one second, remember the strange dream about the Ukrainian Hall-Museum and the red journal under the glass dome.

  After that, whenever I mentioned this book idea I had, and the fact that a girl I had known during high school had been murdered, I was careful to explain that she had never been a close friend of mine, that we’d never been in the same class, that she was only an acquaintance among many. We had been in contact with each other for four years, and then, to the best of my memory, after graduation night we never again saw each other. After some thought, though, I remembered that we’d been in drama club together for two years, although I don’t think we ever acted in the same one-act play, one-acts being all we ever did in those days. Then I recalled that we’d also both been in choir, with maybe another thirty or forty kids. I could remember her clearly, her dark colouring, the neat and unassuming way she dressed—nothing flamboyant, nothing out of the ordinary—and a kind of stillness about her, which might only have been a result of the times and places where I would have seen her—at school, in group practices, when keeping quiet and paying attention was mandatory.

  But I didn’t remember her voice, her laughter, who her friends were, if she dated or whom, whether she was a good student or a poor one. In grade eleven and grade twelve (as with all high schools) there had been a group of girls who were the social elite, whether they were class presidents or on the students’ representative council or athletes, or all three, or not. It has always been a mystery to me how these people single themselves out for such positions; I still don’t know exactly what the ingredients are: they weren’t necessarily the prettiest girls, or the best-dressed, or the smartest, or the best athletes—and richest wasn’t even a category in our school. In any case, Alex wasn’t one of that group (nor was I), and she wasn’t a school leader of any kind.

  As to precisely where Alex had come from, I knew only that it was a farm, but not where the farm had been. The newspaper reports said that at the time of Alex’s death, her parents lived outside the city to the south, and I assumed that that must be her home, but I was uncertain, because I thought of her as someone deeply immersed in the world of Ukrainians and south of Saskatoon was not one of the places in our province where Ukrainians had settled in large numbers. Or maybe I remembered something from high school about where she had come from and I knew, in the back of my mind, that it wasn’t near Saskatoon.

  I can’t recall when I decided to become serious about writing that book. I remember only that I felt nagged, that I couldn’t seem to lose my interest; it didn’t wear away as I’d expected it would. I’d finished my other projects and I was ready to begin something new. One day, I phoned the woman who had told me that she knew a retired police officer I should talk to, and asked her for his name and number. And then I wrote him a letter asking if he would be interested in meeting with me to talk about the unsolved murder of Alexandra Wiwcharuk. I was a bit nervous at my own daring, but almost at once, and to my surprise, he phoned me, pleased at my interest, and we set up a date when I would be in Saskatoon to meet f
or coffee. I had made no decision about a book; I was still holding off on that, waiting for something, although I wasn’t sure what, but waiting for the story, the real one, to come into view.

  As the date of our meeting drew closer, I phoned a couple of friends from our high school days, to ask them what they remembered about Alex. Nearly everyone said that he or she remembered her clearly, but there were no anecdotes, no vignettes, no conversations with her that they could tell me about. I e-mailed my sisters and they responded with stories from that time, gossip and rumours about who was responsible and why whoever it was that had killed Alex hadn’t been charged, and with other stories about scandals of the same or a later era: the discovery of a brothel, in one of the city’s best districts, run by a lawyer (who eventually went to jail for the crime), a former city police officer caught in a major drug-smuggling scandal in another province (also ending up in jail), stories about a bootlegger and a bookie—who seem not to have been charged with their crimes—and other stories I’d once known but had forgotten, stories that seemed to me, at least then, to smack more of the incompetent and foolish than of real evil.

  But nothing about Alex and that night.

  One friend did remember the name of the town Alex’s family farm had been closest to: Endeavour, Saskatchewan. I looked it up. Endeavour was not far as the crow flies from where I had come from in east-central Saskatchewan. The north—that area nearly empty of roads and villages (although not necessarily of people) and covered with forest broken only by dozens of lakes, rivers, and streams—begins in Saskatchewan above the fifty-third line of latitude, but on the east side of the province this area extends a long, wide finger southward a hundred miles or so and in about a sixty-mile-wide swath. That area, too, is known for its forests, lakes, bogs, and swamps, its plagues of mosquitoes, and black and deer flies. The Wiwcharuk family farm, a little north of the fifty-second line of latitude, was set on the Swan River Plain, bordered on the north by the Pasquia Hills and to the east by the Porcupine Hills, both of which are beautiful but in agricultural terms impossible. North of the farm Alex was raised on, there are only three major east-west roads and a mere scattering of people living in villages and towns along them.