The Girl in Saskatoon

by Sharon Butala

  Then I knew that if I were to properly tell Alex’s story, I would have to go to the place from which she had come. For more than thirty years I’ve lived on the west side of the province and down by the American border, while Alex’s home village, Endeavour, is on the opposite side and more than a hundred miles north. It would be a long trip, but on my way I would stop to talk to anyone I could find who had known her in Yorkton when she’d attended nursing school there. I was going alone, my husband would be haying—and being a fifties girl and a married woman most of the years since I was twenty-one, I was both a little scared and excited at the prospect of taking charge of my own thousand-mile-plus trip.

  I had booked into a bed-and-breakfast at Yorkton, a small city where, despite having spent nearly all my life in Saskatchewan, I had never been, and in conversation with the owners—one more time I wondered what Alex had had to do with my choice, this time of where I would stay—we discovered that he had known Alex very well, used to double date with her and their respective dates when Alex was a vivacious, strikingly pretty, young nursing student. It took my breath away, that coincidence.

  The morning after my evening’s conversation with the owner of the Yorkton B & B, I rose early and set out north for Endeavour. The day was clear and bright and warm and the road good, and I felt exhilarated. I could feel my car’s easy power under my foot as if it, too, couldn’t wait to get to Alex’s hometown. It took me almost an hour and a half, partly because I kept slowing down to make notes (which I would never use), and to stare at crops and trees and farm-houses and the villages and towns I passed along the way. But at last I arrived, and as I drove through Alex’s home village, my impression was of a clean, bright place, well-manicured up to the edge of the forest, which, in its blue-green, dangerous, and beautifully wild way, pressed in on three sides.

  Endeavour’s population was listed at 154, although only nine years earlier, in 1996, it had twenty more people (a drop of twelve percent). Like all Western Canadian villages, it had a small grocery store, a hotel and bar (advertising Wing Night, that day I drove in), a post office, and a liquor store located in the same building, a town office open only on Fridays, a couple of churches, one Orthodox and one Protestant, and a town hall. It was the frame hall that caught my eye: Its name, in large letters above the double front doors, was written only in Cyrillic, with a logo above it which I recognized as two stylized birds with a burning candle between them. Later, I was told that the sign reads, Ukrainian National Home of Taras Shevchenko.

  Having been raised in Saskatchewan among Ukrainian people, I knew in a vague way who Shevchenko was, but in 2005 to find his name still up, and in Ukrainian—well, I thought I’d better do some research. Taras Shevchenko (1814—1861) I found out, was born a serf, but because he was so gifted he was taught to read and write, and others eventually purchased his freedom and helped him to become educated. He moved to St. Petersburg where he studied, painted, and began to write poetry. But what would make this tiny village in a faraway country, all these years later, commemorate his name is that he wrote in Ukrainian, not in Russian or Polish, and by doing so, he created not only the Ukrainian language—considered up to then to be merely a dialect of Russian, and unworthy of literature—but also gave full voice to Ukrainian nationalism. Persecuted by the czar, he was only forty-seven when he died, but the very strong sense Ukrainians have of who they are, and of their rightful place in history, is mostly attributed to Shevchenko, who now has the status of Ukrainian national poet. His name on the community hall, and in Ukrainian, speaks volumes about the Ukrainian-Canadian community into which Alex was born.

  I drove up and down the few streets and studied the twenty or so frame houses on them. Then, I began to follow the narrow trail-like roads into the forest, not knowing what I would find, but there I discovered more small frame houses, which were, except for their neatly cleared, good-sized yards, set solidly in forest. I thought at first there were perhaps twenty houses in the village, but after following roads I saw leading into the bush, I realized there were more likely as many as fifty. Mostly the houses were well-maintained bungalows of the sort you see rows and rows of in city suburbs, but nothing very large or extravagant; these were either frugal people, or there is, as people had told me, little wealth in the area.

  I wanted to find the farmstead where Alex had grown up, and Marie had told me, more or less, its coordinates. I found the right road, and drove very slowly up and down it, staring at the small fields, some cropped, some in summer-fallow, some overgrown with thick, wild green grass, and all framed by forest. There were rotting log buildings in places, well back of the road, and ancient barbed-wire fences, and birds, and the occasional wild animal—a bushy-tailed red fox, a white-tail doe—but no home place that I recognized from the photos Alex’s sister Ann had sent me. And anyway, Ann had told me, their original home (of logs, like mine had been) was destroyed by fire, the bane of homesteaders in the early days, in which they’d lost a sewing machine, a big floor-model radio, and other precious items.

  I was overwhelmed by the great natural beauty of the place, and of the lushness of the growth, by the vistas of thick blue-green forest undulating for miles, gently, toward the distant horizon. Even today, even knowing what no Saskatchewan person can fail to know about the history of the place—the cruel displacement of the Aboriginal peoples, the often desperate hardship of settlement—I was overcome by this stunning, wild beauty. Knowing that Alex knew no other landscape until she was fifteen, I could only wonder how it might have forged her soul, her definition of beauty, her longings for the place she called home. And I imagined, too, that when she let her mind roam free, as I have thought she did that night, sitting alone in the moonlight on the weir’s concrete apron as the wide South Saskatchewan flowed in its near-silent, power-filled way past her, these were the scenes that floated, dreamlike, behind her eyes. And where were her guardian angels that night? Where, oh where, I wondered, was the warning system to tell her to go home before it grew dark, while there were still people around?

  As I drove back westward, to my country home, past field after field where crops ripened in the high heat of late summer, I could not stop thinking about Alex, how beautiful she was at twenty, and twenty-two and -three, and how I had never noticed that potential in her features when we were both small, dark, plump high school girls. Then I realized something that had been bothering me for a long time without ever coming squarely into my conscious mind. It was why anyone—any man—would punch this beauty queen, the very fact that made her so desirable, directly in the face.

  I didn’t want to think about it, because in doing my interviewing I had spoken to a number of men who remembered her and who sounded as if they were still weak in the knees at the memory of how pretty she was, and the longing, combined with regret, and pity, too, in their voices—as well as something I began to interpret as a sort of diffuse shame—never failed to shock me. These were men who fell into silence at her memory; I felt I could see them quietly accepting that such beauty was beyond them. Her memory called up their manhood in much more than the sexual sense, not just as designated protectors of womanhood, either, but in some dim and distant way, as making a connection with the power and ineffable beauty of the feminine.

  The killer chose Alex; whether he knew her personally or not, she was not a random choice. The neighbourhood was full of attractive young women, many of them nurses at the nearby hospital, and a large number lived in the student nurses’ residence next door to the hospital, none as pretty as Alex. But Alex was also “famous,” in that she’d been in the newspapers three times as a beauty contest winner or runner-up, and probably on television, too, and men were attracted to her the instant they saw her. Her desirability was such that she never lacked for male company. If she was stalked, then she was stalked for her beauty. It might have been any one of us raped, beaten, and murdered that night, but it was not. In the end, I think it was her beauty that got her killed.

  Travelling i
n Mexico one winter, friends took us to visit the artisans’ shops and studios in Tlaquepaque outside Guada-lajara. There I saw and bought a wooden bas-relief of Mary, but the Mexican Mary, the Virgin of Guadaloupe, the one of the story about the pious Mexican boy, now San Juan de Dios, for whom she performed a miracle. In this rendering, she is surrounded by what appear to be rays of light, but which are meant to represent the stripes of Juan’s serape, at her feet are two black horns, the horns of the moon, and usually there is also a cherub at her feet, I suppose to represent her son, the Christ child. The base of mine is dark blue and sprinkled with painted-on gold stars, her robe is red, decorated with gold designs, her cape is green and covered with stars, she wears a golden crown. Vivid and rich-looking, this depiction represents something much greater and of longer standing, something much more universal about womanhood, something I can relate to as a female, a woman, than the Mary I learned about as a child. And so, she stands in my office, gazing out boldly, not submissively, smiling. It isn’t much, it occurs to me, but it will have to do for wisdom about the world.

  There is one more detail I have omitted (there are others, but of less weight): The children who discovered Alex’s body did so because they saw her hand lifted up through the sand of her grave. I thought, in the way that one does, without thinking, that this must have been caused by rigor mortis, and that it was of no particular significance. But as I thought and thought about her death, and consulted an expert on that phenomenon, I began to think that instead, when she was still living, after the killer had left her there to die, she had lifted her hand through the dirt of her grave in an effort to free herself, in an effort to cry for help, and then she had died, her hand raised in that last anguished and pathetic gesture. If she had not done that, how long would it have been before she was found? Would she ever have been found?

  After I’d carried my roses to Alex’s grave that summer day, only to find that it had been disturbed, and I’d driven away in confusion, I had a second visit to make. I’d gotten word that after a fight—citizens against city hall and the developers—the high school that Alex and I had attended, Tech, was being torn down, and I wanted to see it one last time. But I’d had to put off my trip to the city for one reason or another several times, so that by the time I got there, and walked in toward it the way I always had, through the parking lot, past the Canadian Legion, and into the alley to the door we were required to use, I saw at once that most of the school’s three storeys of muted gold bricks had been reduced to an enormous pile of rubble and the pile was surrounded by a high, chain link fence well-posted with warning signs. The last time I’d been on that spot in 1997, I think, garbage cans had stood at the door, but this time, although the door—a fine French door, its frame now painted a glutinous yellow—was still standing and on its hinges, whatever the hinges had been attached to was lost in the heap of broken chunks of grey cement, of bricks tossed this way and that, some single, some still welded together by chipped and pitted mortar.

  Someone, for privacy, I suppose, had once pasted newspaper behind the door’s glass; it had yellowed and been water-stained, but despite every pane of glass being smashed, I saw that the newspaper, bizarrely, was still intact. Mr. McPherson’s social studies classroom—I’d last been in it when I did my interview with the fifth estate—Mr. Harm’s literature classroom, the library where I’d spent more and more of my time as the years passed toward graduation and where Alex and I sometimes attended drama practice, the room where Miss Hagerman taught typing and business practice, Mr. Chan’s drafting room, even—or especially—Ernie Lindner’s art room, where he had reigned from 1936 to 1962, all destroyed, gone, smashed into that tower of debris. And the debris sitting on top of what had been our combination gymnasium and auditorium where every Friday we jived our way through lunch hour at dance practice.

  A hard-hatted workman wearing a bright orange vest was sitting in the shade on a lawn chair across the alley on my right, and I feared he might rise at any moment to chase me away, so I kept walking away from him, to my left, purposefully, down the alley toward the front of the building. But the high chain-link fence extended half a city block out in front of the ruins, enclosing the trees and lawn as well, and when I walked farther, trying to circle the school, thinking to approach it more closely through the parking lot, I saw that it was fenced too, right up to the edge of the river that now flowed past a pile of ruins. The only way to get near would be to come back in the night and climb the fence. (Or to row up the river in the darkness and climb the bank.)

  Even though the small-gauge mesh of the fence obscured the view, I could see that all that was left standing was the central section of the front facade, the wide front steps of the main entrance, above them the ornate double wooden doors, glass-less now and sheeted on the inside with unpainted plywood, with the still intact and attached darkened bronze canopy over it, and above it, a tall panel of moulded, decorative cement, rising to the second storey. The large, once-graceful, many-paned windows on each side of the door were now gaping holes, the one on the right still with its interior framing, but no glass, and the frame itself misshapen, the upper right corner broken and the cracked brick around it bulging dangerously outward. The tall, old maples and elms in front of the building hid most of where the third storey had been, so that there was only a dark silhouette protruding jaggedly into the hot August sky.

  It was as if I were surrounded by those teenagers who’d gone to school there with me, now sober adults, perhaps still living—although I doubted it—in the small, frame houses set close together on tiny lots on the city’s west side. More likely, the older ones from the thirties dead now, and those closer to my age, given how the world has changed, scattered around the continents, or at the very least, living in pleasant, middle-class houses in Nutana, or in the new subdivisions that Alex had never seen, farther to the east, or to the north, beyond the place where she’d been killed, and beyond her grave in Woodlawn. It was as if all of them were there with me, viewing the remains of our old school, and mourning them, mourning our youth, thinking, too, of the friends lost to history, the boy-and-girl friends we’d thought we loved, or maybe really did, married to someone else for thirty or more years, living elsewhere—in the Okanagan, in southwestern Ontario, on “the Island,” meaning Vancouver Island—and gone forever from our lives.

  In fact, despite now living five hours away, I had been peripherally involved in the organized movement to save the school and to turn it into a complex of facilities that the people of the city could enjoy—a people’s market, a theatre, meeting rooms, a mothering centre, a children’s museum, a restaurant. Most recently, our old school had been the Gathercole Centre when Saskatoon’s board of education made it its headquarters, Gathercole having once been the superintendent of education. (This was after it had been for a few years a special school called Riverside Collegiate.) Closed down when the Board of Education had given up its attempt to build a new building and had moved into the old Eaton’s building a few blocks away (which had since 1973 or so been the Army and Navy store), in its most recent incarnation our school had been a set for an American television comedy, Body and Soul, sometimes directed and produced by Anson Williams, who had been “Potsie” of the popular television show Happy Days (set, ironically, in the fifties). Body and Soul had turned the interior of our school into a hospital, but for its exterior, used the newly built white and silver City Hospital—Alex had worked in the old red-brick City Hospital—with its super-modern styling. My son, married and a father, had become an actor and had had a small, recurring role in the few episodes shot of Body and Soul; that he had worked inside his parents’ old high school made me marvel once again at life’s coincidences, and also at how intertwined all our lives are.

  Two workmen passed by me going down the alley, staring at me as they went. A moment later, they came back again, and because they seemed so interested in me, I said, pointing at the rubble as if I were throwing something, “This used to be my high
school.”

  One of them said, “Would you like a brick?” Taken by surprise, I hesitated—Why would I want a brick?—then said, dubiously, “Yes, okay, sure.” He made his way through a break in the fence, climbed onto the pile, and asked me, “Which one?” Imagine him asking me which one, I thought. It was all such a peculiar marvel, the school that had stood there for seventy—three years now demolished, unsentimental me standing here mourning it, and some inextricable and yet unexplained connection between this demolition and Alex and her terrible story bedevilling me. But, having consented, I helped him pick a single brick, one without a scratch or a chip, and clean of mortar. I put it in my bag, and walked slowly away to my car.

  I had one more stop to make before I turned and headed toward my home. Once again, as I had that hot day in May a few years ago, the day I realized how, despite everything, I loved this city, I left the site of the school and drove down Spadina Crescent north to the weir, where I pulled into the parking lot and shut off the motor. Pelicans were feeding down below, their great orange beaks poking holes in the sky and water. They hadn’t been there when Alex died, but now they come every year, and their extravagant forms are one of the sights that draw people to this place.