As I set down the roses, I saw at once that the coffinsized rectangle of earth reaching out below Alex’s headstone was covered with what I estimated to be perhaps a two-week growth of weeds. Even though I’d half-expected this (I’d heard rumours that her remains would be exhumed, although I can’t remember from where), I was abruptly sobered, thinking, They really mean it; they really mean to find her murderer at last, which I had not fully believed until I saw this concrete evidence of it, because when I’d tried to determine what had happened, at every turn I had met a frustrating wall of obfuscation, of refusal, of continued secrecy. Now I felt also something that might have been fear at my own audacity, as well as an unexpected shock that my seemingly fruitless efforts might have, by chain effects, caused this to happen, “this” being that her last resting place had been defiled, and for this outrage, I might be ultimately responsible.
I was shaken enough, confused by all the ideas tumbling through my head, that when I left her grave, intending also to visit my parents’ graves and my sister’s, I’d been unable to find them, and after ten minutes of driving in circles around the large cemetery and seeming to be farther from wherever I’d thought I was than when I began, I abandoned the hunt and drove, uncertainly, away.
Hours later, I realized that in that meticulously kept, beautiful old cemetery, a patch of weeds would be allowed to stay only if the coffin had been taken away and was expected to be soon returned. I had been confused and dismayed enough not to have thought through what I was seeing. Now I was jolted by the conscious realization that I had left my roses on a rectangle of earth containing nothing but insects, the unsprung seeds of grass and weeds, and crumbling earth. Alex’s remains hadn’t even been there.
It took me weeks to get beyond the fact of that patch of weeds, and my casual, unexamined assumptions as to the reason, to give the purpose of the exhumation more thought. I knew that there had been marvellous advances in DNA technology, and the newest advance I had heard of would make practically anything possible, it seemed to unscientific me. That is, the advance called “low copy DNA,” by which a fragment as small as a single cell can be endlessly, exactly, replicated so that what previously would have been too small a sample to be tested could now be copied until there was enough to identify. I knew that previous attempts had been made. Later I would wonder, provided the thirty hair samples of the television documentary and the one hundred hair samples of the RCMP lab report were one and the same, if the larger swatch had diminished as, over the years, hairs were sent off for testing—and had failed because there wasn’t enough material, or the material had deteriorated too much.
It had been reported in the Star Phoenix, too, that before Alex’s mother had died, a sample had been taken from her, although the reason—I think to collect mitochondrial DNA that would match Alex’s—had been kept from her. And I remembered again that I’d been informed that in the nineties the then police chief had told reporters that he hoped to have a DNA profile of the killer soon, although nothing further had been reported on that front.
I went back to the January 2004 taped documentary Death of a Beauty Queen. The police officer then investigating Alex’s file had made a comment about this, and I wanted to review it.
“You have DNA,” the interviewer says, more a question than a statement. The officer replies, “We’re working on developing a profile from exhibits that indicate to us that there is possibly DNA there. We rely on the forensic lab people to tell us yes, we have a profile for you.”
I’m not sure whether the officer is saying yes, or no. He says that they are working on it. On what? “We’re working on developing a profile,” which means that there is DNA there, although the last part of the sentence, “possibly,” contradicts the first part. And yet, you wouldn’t work on developing a profile until you had DNA to do it with. The second sentence says what we already know, that it takes forensic lab people to develop the profile from the DNA material. Does his reply actually mean: We have DNA, we are waiting for a profile to be developed? I think it does.
But the grave was disturbed in August 2004, nearly a year after that interview had been conducted, and eight months after the airing of Death of a Beauty Queen. The lab must have declared that it needed more material, or different material, in order to verify its first findings, or because even with the new technology the material they had was too deteriorated to be useful. (The documentary also mentions “swabs” taken, presumably at the autopsy, although there is no mention of swabs on the 1962 RCMP lab report, or the autopsy report, nor what they are swabs of, but I am guessing they are of the material in Alex’s “vaginal vault,” although the pathologist notes that her fingernails are perfectly groomed and short, except for her thumbnails, which were long—I am thinking, because she played the acoustic guitar—maybe swabs were used to take out the material found under them.)
DNA empties the crime of its passion, its mystery, its motivations, of reports, rumour, speculation, suspicion. DNA—a swab, a hair, a particle of skin. All of it, everything, comes down to this: a laboratory, a latex-gloved scientist, a microscope, a computer, DNA samples. Forty-some years of questioning and remembering, rendered down to this still, quiet moment, when the scientist sees the two DNA patterns that match.
One night Alex went for a walk, she stayed at the weir until dark waiting for someone who probably didn’t come. Someone else came, a man who had been stalking her, and he was watching her the whole time she sat gazing at the river, waiting for it to grow dark, waiting for everyone else to leave, afraid to grapple with her on the apron for fear they might both tumble into the river, which at that place with water pouring over the fish ladder was dangerous, waiting for Alex to rise and start for home.
At last she did. She walked to the top of the concrete apron and turned right, going under the bridge, where he stepped out of the shadows and grabbed her and held her fast, while she resisted, pushing him away, and he began to drag her down to that little island of trees and she tried to escape from him, but he wouldn’t let go of her, and near the trees, struggling and failing to pull away, she began screaming. Infuriated, maybe even a bit scared, to stop her noise he punched her in the face as hard as he could, smashing her nose and blackening her eye, and because she was unable to breathe through her nose now, and stunned with pain and shock and terror, too, it was easy for him to throw her to the ground—perhaps she banged her head on concrete debris or on a rock as she fell—and he fell on top of her, trying to pin her down, and she roused herself to try to fight him off. Now she was seeing that she might die here, in this ghastly way—she was seeing all her dreams for her wonderful future, all the promises she read in the signs around her about what magic lay in the world for her, and how far she had to go and how much she would see and do and become—and he, this evil thing on top of her determined to take it all away, to end everything. So she fought him with every ounce of strength she had, tearing hair from his head, and raking skin from his face and neck, and when she wouldn’t stop, he grew beyond himself and his own desire, or his own fury, and he grasped her by the shoulders or her head and smashed her head as hard as he could against whatever it was that lay there, rocks, concrete debris, and she fell unconscious. Hastily he tore apart her clothing, he pushed her legs up and apart, he raped her, and then, satisfied, panting, he drew back, and as the tumult slowly stilled, as the thunder in his head dimmed, he held still to listen to the city night, hearing nothing that would tell him someone was near and about to set off an alarm, knowing now, himself, what he had done, and that she knew him, or had seen his face. Or maybe that didn’t matter at all to him, maybe his plan had always been to kill her if he had to. But perhaps she was already dead? No, he could feel her chest still moving, or maybe he put his ear to her mouth and felt the warm, moisture-laden breath—her nose smashed, she could breathe only through her mouth and maybe that was noisy—maybe he could hear her laboured, shallow, quick breath. Then, he thought, She will die soon—and more—in a still moment
of pure evil he thought: I can make sure of that. And he picked up a piece of concrete debris and set it carefully on her chest, maybe thinking that it would crush that last breath out of her, or else that even if she should regain consciousness she would be too weak to lift it off herself or to roll away from it. And then he threw dirt on her, he buried her, there, still alive, in the moonlight, among the trees, beside the river.
By Alex’s abrupt, savage end, the Wiwcharuks were brought to the edge of a chasm—the darkness of our deaths, the absolute loneliness of them—and have stood, in shock and horror, teetering on its brink ever since. As Marie says at the end of her documentary interview, in a voice that drops to a near-whisper in her effort to control her emotion after all these years of thinking, wondering, remembering, moving through rage and unbearable sorrow and back again, “I keep thinking…When…do you…forget?”
Chapter Ten
Fern Creek
It is true that you can only make sense of the present if you know the past, if you know how you got from there to here, that we need the past to keep us from forgetting who we are, where our souls reside, and of what they are truly made. And so, I have gone back-wards in this book to all our beginnings in Saskatchewan, during the war, and on the land, where Alex and I began. But for many years, since I came down here to the far southwest of the province to live, when people asked me where I came from, I would say, after a hesitation and without any certainty in my voice, as if I myself wasn’t sure, “From Saskatoon.” And then I would be pleased at having found an answer to that oft-repeated, ages-old question, an answer that sounded plausible and that satisfied people, so that they didn’t take a step closer to me, peer into my face, and say, “But, I mean, really: Where are you from?” although at first I half-expected them to.
But that was never their realization, it was always my own, that though I could reasonably say that Saskatoon was my hometown, my true feeling was that I hadn’t such a thing as a hometown, and this contradiction made me uncomfortable. The real place I had come from was always there, hovering in the back of my mind like a dark cloud about to spill rain, and I always had a sense of the impossibility of explaining what that place meant in my life, and how it had shaped me, and thus, maybe, deserved to be called home.
So when my sixtieth birthday was approaching, the gift I asked for was to return to the place from which I had come. This meant going to the homesteads north of Garrick, along the edge of the boreal forest, my grandparents’ and my parents’, to which I was brought after my birth. It was not just that if I returned there I might find a better answer to the question of where I had come from, but also that I needed to see the past for myself, as a grown-up, to see the scenes of my childhood, and that out of this I might, also, find a more satisfactory answer to that question about where my true home was. So one very hot day in late August, my husband and I set out on the three-hundred-mile drive north, in order that I would be at the places of my earliest memories of life, on the very day of my sixtieth birthday. We stayed overnight in a motel in the nearest big town, and on the morning of my birthday, we set out to find the homestead sites.
All day, as we drove, or walked—as we had to do to reach my grandparents’ homestead site, there being no roads in—I kept looking for something; I thought that I might catch some wisp of scent that would bring back to me, full blown, my own past and my family’s past; that perhaps I would hear a sound, a bird singing in the grass or calling from the forest, or the rumble of antique farm machinery, that would do it. Or I would see a sawmill at work, the master saw whining its way through pine or spruce, maple or poplar, growling furiously as it chewed up knots, spitting bark and splinters, the sunlight paled through dust as the pile of sawdust below the machine grew, and I would be transported to my childhood world.
Maybe I would see a rusted and flattened blue granite basin lying in the grass, one that I remembered washing my face in nearly sixty years before—the one in a black-and-white snapshot I have in which I sit in bright sunshine, a year-old child, fat and grinning innocently, the basin resting on a wide tree stump in front of our log house. It is the basin, I think, in which around that time a sibling tried to drown me, the sibling says, and about which I recall only my mother and father, some years later, laughing in a faintly astonished, faintly shamed way. Laughing, probably, because it was the only way they knew how to deal with such a thing, one that they didn’t dare to examine too closely. I hoped something would call up a picture, pure and true—visceral in its immediacy—of the past I needed to reclaim.
I wanted to see this northern world as it had been when I was a small child, when there were no built-up roads, and no frame buildings or sheds sheeted over with brightly coloured tin, and so, when we happened to pass a sandy trail with grass growing raggedly on its verges, I asked my husband to turn. Up we went on it, passing a spot where the sand was so deep we could see that someone had recently been stuck in it, until we reached a stand of four or five thirty-foot-high, resplendent white spruces in the corner of a plowed farmer’s field. I got out and looked around, and then, tentatively, pressed my palms to the bark of their sturdy trunks, waiting for something that never came. After that, we searched out the decaying, collapsing log houses—one of them had been a school, although I’d never attended it—from my pioneer past. They stood in hip-high grass, holes rubbed in their roofs by tree branches, their doors long gone, the boards once nailed over their windows to keep out birds and animals, hanging crookedly by one fastening. Their builders were gone, or dead, and I didn’t remember them anyway.
We visited an old lady who, we’d been assured, had been our neighbour, who said she had come as a young woman from the great distance then of fifty miles away to be my mother’s “hired girl.” A year later she left to marry, spending the rest of her life five miles down the road from the kitchen where she and my mother had laboured together in the sweltering, insect-ridden summer heat, and the frigid, snow-swamped winters. She made my husband and me lunch, served on a hand-embroidered tablecloth she said my grandmother had given her as a wedding present.
When eventually we found my grandparents’ homestead site, I was only half-surprised, given the woman my grandmother had been, to find how beautiful it was. The house, now gone, had been set on a grassy knoll facing southeast; at its base there was a stream named by my grandmother Fern Creek, which ran parallel to the house and to the row of tall, blue-green spruces with their reddish bark that my grandfather had planted, one for each grandchild, in front of it. How green everything was, how lush the grass sprinkled with pink wild roses, and yellow, white, and blue wildflowers, how dense with leaves the poplars and the ashes. The creek splashed softly over flattened grass and small stones; it was easy to jump across it, although I remembered from family stories that for weeks in spring the stream swelled until it was too deep and swift to cross.
Only about a half-mile behind where the house and barn once would have been, the farmer who was showing us around told us about the time, having driven out there to burn some garbage in my grandparents’ cellar depression, he had come upon four bears playing in the grass. Even though he had been here all his life, the four bears seemed to surprise and delight him. North of the spot where the four bears tumbled in the grass is still, as it was when I was a newborn, nothing but trees and more trees, until, many miles to the north, the barrenlands begin, and the tundra, and then the arctic. There were no roads going north from there and there still are none. There was, likewise, no road leading south from the homestead to civilization, but the trail my grandparents took that would lead them a mile south to our family’s house was still visible as wagonwheel depressions overgrown with thick grass of the brightest green, and running through a now-permanent clearing in the forest. All day I searched the wall of trees, quiescent in the humidity-laden heat, the lush green grass we walked through, the rutted, sandy road we drove along, the few tall spruces at its end.
At last we found the site of my first home. We saw at once
that the owner had torn down what was left of it. He had hauled away the rotting logs, the scarred wooden window-frames, the misshapen door I’d seen as background in the black-and-white snapshots. There was only a small pile of decayed and blackened wood, in front of a clump of trees that was all that was left of the forest that had been cleared away around it, and I remembered how one morning we’d wakened to see two bears making themselves at home in the grassy clearing around our settler’s shack, and how my father, in his pyjamas, had clapped his hands over his head loudly to scare them away.
But I stared at the spot where I had spent the first few years of my life. I looked especially at the trees—birches, poplars, willows—that grew around the hollow where our log house had been, and down into a darkly gleaming pond beside it, the existence of which I had no recollection at all. I gazed into the impenetrable, still surface of the water, in which I saw now, a lush, golden-green willow grew, its unseen roots clinging to the rich soil far below.
I saw then that this was the true place of my beginnings—this forest, this grass, these ruined settlers’ homes. I was surprised to feel a kind of satisfaction at the thought, as if I’d finally banished some doubt I’d held about having origins, that I had come from nowhere, had wakened one morning, full-blown, in Saskatoon, although that one year when I was a west-side kid, stunned by the roughness of the city, by its underlife, and by its possibilities, was indeed a true and vital awakening. But that dim, tumultuous past in the northern forest, those sometimes-brilliant mental pictures of it, those worn stories of our family life there, all of this tinged with sadness and with wonder—now they settled quietly into place. It was all so long ago, I thought, and although I will never deny this place, it was in Saskatoon that I grew into consciousness, that I began, so slowly, over the years, to make my life my own.
The Girl in Saskatoon Page 19
