by Michael Rowe
“Oh, hey—of course,” Elliot said, recovering some composure. “Chris! Good to see you. I was sorry to hear about Jack.”
“Thanks, Elliot.” Her neutral gaze never left Elliot’s face. “You look well.”
“Thanks, Chris,” he said. “You, too. It’s been—what, fifteen years?”
Christina nodded. “About that. So,” she said. “You joined the police force. I’m not surprised. Good for you. I knew you’d make something of yourself.”
“So—how's Jeremy? It’s been at least as long since I’ve seen him. How’s he doing?”
Christina smiled again, but Billy noted that there appeared to be subtitles to the entire conversation between her and Elliot. This particular smile didn’t seem entirely friendly.
“He’s fine, I guess. I could have sworn he told me this morning that you and he had a beer together last night at O’Toole’s, out on Davenport Road? Did I get the name wrong? Was it one of his other friends he ran into?”
Again, Elliot blushed. “Oh, yeah, right! Sorry, Chris—yeah, I did run into him there last night.” He indicated the takeaway coffee on the counter with a sideways jerk of his head. “Long day yesterday. Not enough coffee yet today.” He laughed, as though he had made some sort of joke. When Christina said nothing in reply but only continued to smile that peculiar, knowing smile, Elliot cleared his throat and said, “Well, back to the station. Good to see you, Christina. Welcome back. I wish it were under different circumstances, though. Again, I’m sorry about Jack. He was a good man.”
“Yes, he was,” she said. “Thanks, Elliot. I’ll tell Jeremy I ran into you.”
This seemed to fluster the cop even more. He nodded briskly and went back to the counter to collect the two cups of coffee. He didn’t look back at either Christina or Billy when he pushed open the door of the café. In silence, they both watched the cruiser drive off down Main Street.
Billy exhaled. “Whew,” he said. He looked at Christina and said, “So, friend of yours?”
“He is—was—a friend of my brother-in-law’s,” she said, her eyes still on the departing cruiser. “I haven’t seen him for a long time. I’ve been away.”
“Not the friendliest sort,” Billy said neutrally. If there was a backstory here, he didn’t want to get off on the wrong foot with her by accidentally putting that foot in his mouth. He was still wagering that there wasn’t one, but there was no point in risking it. It had been a long time since he’d been as attracted to a woman as he was to this Christina Parr.
You’re an idiot, Billy chided himself. You’re not a romantic, you’re a cynic. And this woman isn’t just out of the cop’s league, she’s out of yours. She’s too beautiful for either of you.
Christina shrugged. “This is a hard place,” she said sadly. “Life is tough up here in these little northern towns. It’s mean. It does things to people. It’s one of the reasons my husband and I left. My late husband, I mean. I’m sorry. I’m still not used to saying ‘late husband.’”
“I’m sorry,” Billy said sincerely. “For your loss, I mean.” He half-rose from his seat and extended his hand. “I’m Billy Lightning.”
“Christina Parr,” she said. Billy was acutely aware of the softness of her hand in his, and of its apparent fragility. Everything else in Parr’s Landing had been hard, or rough, from the people to the topography. Her hand felt like a sparrow had landed in his palm, one he might accidentally crush if he squeezed it too hard.
“Forgive me if I’m being too forward,” Billy said, “but would you care to join me? I’m not from here. I’m just visiting.”
Christina glanced around the café. While she and Elliot had been talking, the two remaining tables had been taken and she had no desire to sit at the counter with her back to the rest of the patrons. Some residual sense of small-town sensitivity to gossip rolled over in its sleep in the back of her mind, but since nothing good had ever come to her from this particular small town—and because if her “reputation” was that vulnerable to gossip, it was likely already toast when she got pregnant and ran off with Jack Parr—and mostly because she’d never been lonelier or more eager for a neutral conversation with another adult that wasn’t fraught with subtext—she found herself saying to Billy Lightning, “Thank you, yes. I can’t stay—I’m just going to have a cup of coffee. I have errands to run.”
“Please,” Billy said, indicating the empty seat in front of him. “I’d enjoy the company.”
Christina sat down at the booth. For a moment the two of them sized each other up in the way that men and women meeting for the first time under potentially complicated circumstances do—Christina trying not to be conscious of the looks they were getting from a few of the patrons of the café, and Billy not giving a damn about them, except for her sake. He hoped he hadn’t made a mistake in inviting her to sit down like this. Of course, all of this happened without either of them giving each other any clue of what they were thinking.
“So,” Christina began. “You’re not from here, obviously. How do you like it?”
“Not much,” Billy said honestly. “They’re not very friendly to outsiders.” He didn’t add, especially outsiders who look like me, but Christina seemed to understand what he meant. She favoured him with a smile that was sympathetic but noncommittal, as though she were acknowledging the root of his problem—the fact that he was an outsider, and a Native outsider at that—but allowing him the space to elaborate, or not, as he saw fit or was comfortable. He was touched by her sensitivity.
“My husband and I left when we were very young,” Christina said. “We moved to Toronto just before our daughter was born. We raised her there, so nothing about this place is familiar to her. It has no memories.”
“Did you come back to be with family?”
Something passed over Christina’s face. “In a way. My mother-in law is here,” she said. “My daughter hadn’t ever met her, and I thought it would be a good time for her to get to know her a bit. It’s a big house, so we’ll be staying for a while.”
“Of course—the big house on the hill. The one that looks a bit like a Norman chateau.”
Christina raised her eyebrows. “A Norman chateau? I have to say, I’ve never heard it described that way before. Lots of ways, but never like that.” Her curiosity was piqued and she took a second, closer look at the man in front of her who spoke so politely and made references to Norman chateaus. “Where are you from, Mr. Lightning?”
“Please, call me Billy,” he said. “I’m originally from Benson, a tiny little town way outside of Sault Ste. Marie. When I say ‘way outside,’ I mean ‘way outside.’ I was adopted when I was twelve by a family from Toronto. I grew up there, except for graduate school—so basically, I guess, the short answer to that question is, Toronto. Like you,” he added.
“Graduate school?”
“You sound surprised.”
“No, it’s not that,” she said. Now it was Christina’s turn to be flustered. “It’s just . . . my husband—my late husband, Jesus I need to get used to saying that—and I never went to university. We barely escaped high school here by the skin of our teeth. What did you study in graduate school?”
“Lots of different things,” he said neutrally. “A lot of history. I’m a cultural anthropologist at Grantham University, in Michigan.”
“Now I’m impressed!” she said, laughing.
She has a beautiful laugh, Billy thought, feeling absurdly flattered to be the source of it.
“So, you’re not ‘Mr.’ Lightning, you’re ‘Professor’ Lightning.”
“Only to my students. And then, only in the classroom. I’ve always preferred ‘Billy’ to anything else. My father was the first person to call me ‘Billy.’ At the residential school, they always called me ‘William.’ It took a long time for me to hear ‘William’ without a lot of bad memories.”
“Billy it is, then. So, Billy, what on earth are you doing here? I know why I’m back, but what would bring a university professor to this
shi . . . I mean, godforsaken town? Sorry, I’ve only been back a couple of days and my language is already starting to suffer.”
“It a shitty town,” he confirmed. “There you go. I said it so you don’t have to.” He signalled to the waitress, then said to Christina, “You still don’t have any coffee.”
When the waitress had refreshed Billy’s coffee cup and brought Christina a cup of her own, Billy continued. “To answer your question,” he said, “I’m here because my father passed away recently. He’d done an excavation up here at Spirit Rock in the early 1950s, on the site of the St. Barthélemy Ojibwa mission, the Jesuit mission from the 1700s. My father was a cultural anthropologist as well, at the University of Toronto. I was on his crew in 1952. Some strange things happened on that dig. My father’s death . . . well, my father’s death wasn’t accidental. I have some notion that it might be somehow connected to the work he did in Parr’s Landing in the fifties.”
She paused. “Not the kid who went crazy and heard voices coming from inside the cliffs and killed all of those people?”
“The very one,” Billy said. “He was on our crew that summer.”
“You mean that really happened? I mean, we all heard that story, but I always thought it was just made up to scare kids.”
“No, it happened,” he said. “But he didn’t kill any people—that part must be from the campfire story version. But he did attack one of the other guys on the team and hurt him pretty badly.”
“But why did you come back? What does this have to do with your father’s death? I’m sorry,” she said, chastened. “I don’t mean to pry. I know what it feels like to be asked these questions. I should know better. I’m sorry.”
Billy’s first impulse was to tell Christina the story he’d shared with the two cops, Thomson and McKitrick, but thought better of it. He had no doubt that Christina would treat it with respect, unlike the two officers had. At the same time, he realized that every time he told the story in Parr’s Landing, it stood a better chance of getting circulated as gossip in a way that didn’t flatter him. While he didn’t give a damn whether or not he was thought of in flattering terms by the residents of the Landing, if he was going to find any answers here, his personal credibility and status would have to stand on its merits and history in the face of people’s prejudices. His encounters with McKitrick and Thomson had shown that the ice was thinner than it looked where that was concerned.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Just a hunch. Probably nothing to it.”
“You don’t want to talk about it, do you?”
“Not really,” he said, sighing. “Is that OK?”
“Sure,” Christina said. “But can I at least ask about what happened in ’52? I’ve never had a chance to hear the story from anyone who wasn’t actually just trying to scare me with some dumb ghost story.”
Good compromise, he thought. And I don’t really want her to leave, anyway. “Of course. What would you like to know?”
“Well—what happened?”
“In a nutshell,” he said, “the young graduate student, Richard Weal thought he heard voices coming from inside Spirit Rock. He attacked one of the team members and put him in the hospital.”
She sounded disappointed. “That’s it? That’s all there is?”
“Pretty much,” he replied. “The interesting thing is the history behind Spirit Rock. That’s something that would make a good campfire story for the locals.”
Christina perked up. She leaned forward, and Billy caught a whiff of violets when her hair moved. “What history?”
“Well,” he said, “there have been some similar incidents reported over the years—and by ‘the years’ I mean over the course of the last three hundred years or so, so we’re talking in historical terms now, so maybe ‘legends’ is better than ‘history,’ since the source of some of the stories are a little obscure, not to mention unverifiable.”
“Now you really sound like a professor,” she teased, but it was teasing of an unmistakably gentle variety. “Go on, please.”
“The St. Barthélemy mission was attacked and decimated by an Iroquois raid in 1629 or 1630,” Billy explained. He was trying not to sound professorial, but doubted he was succeeding very well. “Everyone was killed, including the priest, a Father de Céligny, There seems to be precious little information on what actually happened, which is odd considering what great historians the Jesuits were when it came to their missions in New France. They never rebuilt on that site—as far as my father could tell, the site encompassed the area around Bradley Lake. More or less where Parr’s Landing is today.”
“Go on,” Christina said again. “Please.” This time, there was no teasing, only what appeared to be genuine interest on her part. “This is really interesting.”
“Well, it’s interesting stuff,” he said, warming to the topic. “Around 1702, two members of a brigade of trappers were camping on the shore of Lake Superior and wandered inland—the area in the account suggests that if it wasn’t actually nearby, it was close to here—and disappeared for a week. Only one of the pair found his way back to his brigade, and he was half-starved and raving about demons—do you know what a ‘Wendigo’ is?”
“I think so,” Christina said dubiously. “It’s some sort of evil spirit, isn’t it?”
“Something like that,” Billy said. “It’s a spirit that possesses a man and makes him crave human flesh. Anyway, the trapper told them he’d murdered his friend and drank his blood. At least that’s what the story says happened. The other members of the brigade were terrified and they turned on the fellow and killed him. When they returned to Québec, they were exonerated at trial because all of them testified that the man who murdered his friend had been insane. The court believed them. It wasn’t unusual in those days for people out here to lose their minds because of the isolation.”
Christina shuddered involuntarily. “What a horrible story.”
“There are more,” he said. “In 1850, a minor British men’s adventure writer and explorer named Timothy Gentry came to this area to produce a revised map of the lake systems and islands in this part of Lake Superior. His brother, Adam, came with him as a sort of secretary and record-keeper. When neither they nor their guides had returned by the expected time, another set of guides was dispatched. The guides found Adam roaming the forests at night with his brother’s head in his rucksack. Adam’s fingertips had literally been worn down to bloody stumps. Before he died of his infected wounds, he told the Indians that he’d been trying to claw a hole through the rock.” Billy pointed to the window of the café. “Up there. Those rocks.”
“How do they know it was those rocks?”
“There were Gentry’s maps and diaries—none of which mention what happened to him and his brother, mind you, because the entries stop after they landed. But the Indians described the area perfectly, including the cliff paintings.” He paused. “There is at least one verifiable account from the nineteenth century of occurrences involving miners working up there, including one that dates from the early years of the Parr family—your family—buying the land and starting to develop it.
“In the 1895 instance, the miner in question disappeared. It was considered to be an accident, and the mining company was held liable. In another separate instance in 1902, a brawl apparently erupted underground between two of the men. One man killed the other with a rock and hid his body for three days before another member of the crew found it. They charged the miner in question—Rod MacNeil, I think his name was—with the murder. They hanged him in 1903, even though his lawyer argued at trial that he was insane. The body was described as ‘torn and plundered, as though by furious beasts.’
“And yes,” he added, winking. “That’s a direct quote from the Port Arthur Chronicle in 1903. I don’t talk like that in real life.”
“Jesus,” Christina said in a hushed voice. “I had no idea. I grew up here all those years and didn’t have a clue about any of this.” She took another sip of her cof
fee. It was cold, so she put the cup down. “Is this what your father was studying in 1952?”
Billy laughed, a big full-hearted laugh that made Christina smile, and made a few of the other patrons of the café turn around to see what the ruckus was about. Billy waited until they’d turned back to their own companions before answering her. “No, he was studying the settlement itself, looking for artefacts,” he said. “My father had a great passion for that part of Canadian history. He always felt that the Jesuits, though well-intentioned, did a lot of damage when they arrived on these shores.”
“May I ask . . .” Christina began, then blushed. “I’m sorry, it’s too personal and invasive. I apologize. Never mind.”
“No,” he said kindly. “What is it?”
“Is that why . . . well, is that why your father adopted you? Because of what . . . well, because of history?”
Billy was quiet for a moment. Christina was sure she’d offended him and was ready to apologize again, and leave before she said anything else equally stupid. Then Billy said, “No, he adopted me because he loved me. Really. Don’t feel bad, it’s a natural question after what I just told you. Don’t worry about it. It’s OK.”
Christina was moved by the simple, unadorned love implicit in Billy’s statement. She thought of Jack and Morgan, naturally, and how much he’d loved his daughter. She looked down at the plain gold wedding band on her left hand and, when her eyes began to fill in a way that was becoming altogether too familiar and commonplace, she mentally shook her head, No.
“Oh, I really have to get going,” she said briskly, looking at her watch. “It’s later than I thought. Billy—thank you for the coffee. It’s so nice to speak to somebody from Toronto.”
He hesitated, then thought, What the hell? Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
