An Old, Cold Grave

by Iona Whishaw

  Marla was standing in the corner of the room holding the baby close to her, her back to them. “He needs a doctor.”

  “You have to see to him. There’s no doctor.” Marla held her baby close and looked at Joe, as if he were already gone and she was trying to remember him. “You should never have sent her away. I need Isabel here now. She’d know what to do.”

  Henry held his hand, felt his breathing slow, and thought the crisis was past. “Now just let him be and sleep,” he said. “You keep an eye on him, mind. If anything happens to him, they’ll come for us for sure, and we’ll have to move again. Do you understand?” He got into the bed and pulled the blankets over his head.

  Marla stood holding the baby, who had settled into an uneasy sleep. In a few minutes she could hear her husband snoring. She could not remember ever feeling so alone in her life. She put the baby back into his crib and knelt by the bed, watching Joe, whose breathing was again growing painful.

  “NO. I DON’T know exactly what happened to him,” Charles Blake said, frowning. “Marla told me when she came to get me that Henry had made him go get wood and the wood had fallen on him. That was the worst night of my life. Izzy—Isabel, I mean—just left one day. Packed her bag and left. She wanted to take the others, but he wouldn’t let her. She said she’d be back for Andrew as soon as she found something. I wanted to take Andrew with me when I left after that night when Joe died, but Henry said Andrew was his. They were ‘his.’ Can you imagine? Like he owned us.”

  “Why did Isabel leave?”

  “She was that mad when Henry found me and Mabel together. I was crazy I guess. I think I was in love with Isabel all along. That’s when I knew it, that she loved me.”

  “He found you and Mabel together?”

  “Yes, I know. It doesn’t make sense, looking back. I thought. I was sweet on her then, and we were in the tool shed where I’d kinda set up my living quarters just to get out of that house.”

  At this Lane glanced at Darling. Gwen had told her she thought Mabel and Bob might have been something to each other. Had they been lovers? Was this the secret that was making Mabel so jumpy?

  “So you left the Anscomb household. Where did you go? How did Isabel and Andrew end up with you?”

  “Isabel found me. She sent me a letter because she wanted to get Andrew. So I left too, taking Andrew. Henry was a wreck and wanted to move again, and I couldn’t bear him no more. I went to Kamloops right off and found work on the railway.”

  “Tell me about the night the child Joseph died,” Darling said.

  THE KNOCKING WAS desperate. Bob woke, his heart beating, and took a moment to get oriented.

  “Bob, please.”

  It was Marla. Bob bounded to his feet, throwing his covers off. Marla almost never left her room. Why was she banging on the shed door in the middle of the night? He pulled the door open and he could see her figure in the dark. She was holding something large. It took a moment for Bob to see it was Joe.

  “There’s something wrong with him. He ain’t breathing right,” she cried, half sobbing. She held the limp bundle she was holding toward him. Bob came down the one step onto the ground and took Joseph. He could hear Joe’s wheezing breath, catching and staccato. Marla had wrapped a blanket around him, but having gotten him as far as the shed, she seemed unable to know what to do next.

  “What happened?” He sat on the step and pulled the blanket away from Joe’s face. Even in the dark, it seemed otherworldly, a deathly pale. He pulled him close and rocked him. “Did Pa do something?”

  “He just sent him for wood. The logs rolled down and he fell over. I woke up when I heard him like this. I think it’s bad. I think something is hurt inside. You have to do something!”

  Mabel! She would know what to do, or her mother would. “I’m going to take him for help. You stay here with the baby. Where’s Pa?”

  “Asleep,” she said. “You take him.” She had the aspect of someone who had given up. She turned as if Joseph had stopped existing for her and went back toward the house.

  Holding Joseph as tightly as he dared, Bob started to half run along the paths through the forest that would take him to the orchard above the Hughes’. He could hear his own breath coming now in increasing gasps. It wasn’t until the fork where you could go down to the road or along the final stretch to the orchard that he heard the pounding steps behind him.

  “Where are you going?” Henry Anscomb’s voice came out in a half-whispered hiss. He brought his face up close to Bob’s and took his elbow in a fierce and painful grip.

  Bob looked at him and began to sob, trying to pull his arm away. “He’s sick! He’ll die if I don’t get help. You near killed him!” He stumbled backward, freeing his arm, and tried to continue along the path.

  Henry made an angry sound and ran after Bob, getting in front of him. “It’s too late, you stupid oaf! He’s dead!”

  Bob shook his head violently, and looked down at where Joseph’s face had been covered by the corner of the blanket. He frantically pulled the blanket away and listened. The little face was still, the mouth slack. He could see a dark stain at the corner of his mouth. He shook the boy gently up and down, whispering, urging, “Come on, little Joe. Come on. We’ll get help. Please.”

  “He’s dead. Can’t you see that? Now stop this nonsense. Give him to me.” He reached out, trying to take the small body. Bob yanked his bundle away, turning so that Henry couldn’t reach him.

  “No! You can’t. I’m taking him. He might still be alive!” he said desperately, knowing already it was not true. The next thing he felt was like thunder. A blow so hard across the side of his head that he fell, still clutching the bundle that was the dead child.

  “You get rid of him! Do you hear? You take him in the forest and you bury him, and don’t you come back till that’s done.” Henry swung around and walked angrily back along the path, until he disappeared into the darkness.

  In the silence that remained, the ringing in Bob’s head seemed louder. He was sitting on the ground, Joe lying inert across his legs, the blanket half off him. Bob struggled to his feet and, wrapping the blanket properly around Joe again, he continued walking, dazed and only vaguely aware of his direction, until he was at the top of the orchard. He could see the dark outline of the Hughes’ house through the line of trees. He stumbled through the grass, holding Joe close and whispering over and over, “Please, Joe, please.”

  When he was outside the darkened house he stood and looked at it. He thought, his mind suddenly as clear as if he were outside the house of strangers, there is nothing there for me. He began to turn, with some idea that he must return home. Then the sound of Henry’s voice came back to him, “take him to the forest and bury him.” He pulled the limp body close again, feeling a wash of horror, of protest, tears running down his face.

  “I can’t leave you by yourself like that, Joseph. It ain’t right. I can’t,” he whispered. He saw him again, alone on the platform on that day so long ago, and suffered again the wave of anguish he felt at the sound of that cry. He pushed the blanket away from the little boy’s face and kissed him gently on the forehead. “It’s okay, little Joe. You won’t be alone, I promise. You’ll be here with Mabel and Gwenny and Mrs. H. They’ll look after you. You won’t never have to be alone again.”

  “I COULDN’T FORGET about Joe, though, lying all by himself,” Charles continued. “I wanted to see what became of him. Henry, I mean. I never lost the idea that he had killed him, whether he meant to or not. Fifteen years I looked to find Henry. I finally tracked him down when I saw in some obit that Marla had died in Creston.”

  “That was in 1930?”

  There was a long silence and then Charles finally spoke. “Yes. I went looking because all I wanted was to see if he even cared, or remembered Joe, but all I found out was that Henry was living alone in a rooming house, only when I got there he was in hospital. Weak heart, he told me.”

  October, 1930

  “Hey, Mr. A. Y
ou got a visitor.” Wendy said. She always had a smile in her voice, Anscomb thought.

  “I don’t know anybody. What visitor?”

  “Why, your son! How about that? You told me you didn’t have anybody. Here’s Bob. Now isn’t that nice?” She waved Bob forward and left the room to attend to other patients. Anscomb turned slowly in his wheelchair and looked at the man standing near the door holding his hat in his hands. He squinted. He could barely recognize him. He watched him as he came forward and stopped in front of him. It was hard to see him because the light from the window was behind him. Anscomb put his hand over his eyes, his arm moving slowly because of the pain.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  Charlie Blake looked around the room. There were only two other people, both asleep in front of other windows, in wheelchairs. “What’s wrong with you?” he asked.

  “Heart trouble. I don’t reckon I got much time.”

  “Heart trouble. I’m surprised to learn you have one. Do you ever think about young Joseph? Or that Charlie back in Manitoba?” Anscomb turned toward the window and looked out across the grass to the street beyond. Horses pulled wagons and carts, and a few cars moved around them. He could hear the distant bleat of a horn.

  Anscomb furrowed his brow. “Who’s Joe?”

  Bob could feel the beginnings of rage welling up. “Joe, the boy you practically killed. Don’t pretend you don’t remember him.”

  “Why are you dragging that up? He was nobody. He died. Nothing left to say. He was never going to grow up anyway. Too weak.”

  Bob dropped his head. This is what it’s like to lose someone, he thought, this pain in your chest. “Go away, would you. You were trouble right from the start. I don’t need to talk to you. I don’t ever want to see you.” He tried to turn his wheelchair, but it was lodged against the leg of the table.

  “Oh no you don’t.” Bob Anscomb was leaning toward him, his hands on the table, his face coming closer. “He wasn’t strong, but he wouldn’t have just died like that. I don’t believe it was the wood. You must have hit him.”

  Suddenly the older man was crying and shaking his head. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m sorry. I just sent him out to get some logs and the woodpile fell and crushed him. It was an accident. Something inside him broke. You know you couldn’t get any doctor out there.” Anscomb’s tears flowed down his face, his nose running.

  “You let him die! Like that other kid you claimed was an accident. I should never have believed you then, I don’t believe you now. You’re a liar!” Bob had grabbed a fistful of Anscomb’s dressing gown and was pulling him forward and rammed his head into Henry’s. He felt him go slack, and when he let him go, Henry fell back, unconscious.

  Charlie thought in the train home that the bruise growing on his head was because he’d rammed his head against Henry Anscomb’s, but he would never know if that was exactly what happened. He only remembered his own rage propelling him out the door of the hospital, and the sound of the door slamming.

  “YOU’RE ADMITTING TO the wrongful death of Henry Anscomb,” said Darling.

  “I suppose I am. I got nothing much to say about that. I didn’t mean to kill him. I thought I just knocked him out.” In the back of Charles Blake’s mind was the growing realization that everything he had would be over now. He thought of Isabel at home, hearing he’d been arrested. She could move in with Andrew and his family.

  “Did he tell you how that other child died?” asked Darling.

  “What?” Charles Blake only half heard the question.

  “You mentioned you thought he was lying about the other child in Manitoba that died in his care. Did he tell you how he died?”

  “He fell under a wagon. He told me that back in Manitoba, and I was never sure I believed him. He was careless. He told me that if I’d been a better son, Joey would still be alive.” Blake shrugged, all the fight gone.

  “I guess he was right. Maybe it’s my fault. He had no one else but that sickly Marla, and she had a baby she couldn’t begin to cope with on her own. I didn’t even ask him about that baby, I was that angry about Joe.”

  “If he’d lost a child in his care, how did you come to be placed with him?” Lane asked.

  “The authorities came out to them and investigated and seemed satisfied, so I guess they believed him too. Then I came to work there . . . I was glad to leave the institution. I could see he needed help. He didn’t know what to do with his missus. Then out of the blue a policeman came and arrested Henry. Apparently they said he’d lied about how the little kiddie died. I didn’t know that at the time, about the other boy. They even took me in for questioning, but that boy died just before I got there. All I knew is they arrested him, and he left us to manage how we could.

  “Well, the missus went to pieces then, and I had to keep everything going. Even Isabel and Andrew was more use than she was, young as they were.” Charles Blake sat with his hands folded on the table, head down, as if saying a silent requiem to the past.

  “How did you all come to move out here?”

  “I drove the missus into town to see Henry one morning. I sat outside on the wagon and waited, and she came out of the jail and she said, ‘We have to pack. We’re going.’ Just like that. She never said nothing more all the way back. It was like packing somehow pulled her together. We kept asking where we was going, but she kept packing. I was that scared they would leave without us. Then a night or two later Henry turns up and says they let him go, and we should leave. I’ll say this for them, they never once said, ‘You kids can’t come along.’ So we went the next night to some town where the train came through first thing in the morning, and we come here finally.” He shook his head. “It was going to be a whole new start, Henry told us, and for a while it seemed like it was. People were helpful and that. But you could already tell at the first winter it was going to be hard, even if the winters ain’t so hard as on the prairies. There was too many young mouths, and then when she had a baby of her own, and Henry didn’t know too much about farming or growing fruit, it was just sort of hopeless. Anyway, the fall of 1910 I could already see the winter was going to be extra hard. It was colder than I expected, and we didn’t have enough stores for a long winter ahead, and probably not much money to get through. And Joe weren’t never strong or well, and the missus seemed more and more unhinged. Well, that was about it.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  THE SILENCE IN THE ROOM pressed in. Lane listened, oppressed by the misery his story engendered. It was not the death of the child that bothered her so much, she realized, but the utter desperation of their lives. She felt a kind of shame, suddenly, about any resentment of her own life. Though her mother had died, she was brought up in luxury and privilege, given an excellent university education, and had grandparents who doted on her. I’ll never complain again, she thought, imagining the unhappiness of these children Charles Blake described.

  She spoke, finally. “Mr. Blake, can you tell me why you came here to the Cove?”

  To her surprise he smiled slightly. “Mr. Blake. No one calls me that. Just Charlie.” He turned sombre. “I tried to put Joe out of my mind, but I couldn’t. I never even knew Henry had died. Honestly, I was surprised nobody followed me after I hit him. I kept walking, got a ride out, and that was that. I believed I’d knocked him out, but if you’d told me I’d killed him, I wouldn’t have been sorry, that’s the truth of it. Then I read about the body being found. I had to come. I . . . I guess I wanted to make sure he would be buried proper like. I always thought Mabel must have known, that she’d do something. When I read he’d been found, well I knew she hadn’t.

  “He was wrapped in a blanket and buried face down. There was a gold locket around his neck. Can you tell me about that? Ames, could you bring that from the shelf over there and show Mr. Blake?”

  Ames got up, stretching a little from the long sit on the wooden chair to which he’d been assigned to write his notes, and brought down the locket and put
it in front of Blake.

  Blake looked at it for a moment and then picked it up, turning it over. Then he put it down, shaking his head. He wiped a tear from his cheek. “That were Isabel’s locket. She said that when she left, she told him, ‘Here. You have this. I won’t need it.’ Only he didn’t get much use of it after all. I guess I put him face down because he used to sleep like that. I wanted to think he’d just be sleeping, like.”

  Darling stirred, making as if to get up. “I’ll see if I can get our post-mortem man to square what he sees with what Henry Anscomb told you about the accident. In the meantime we have two further matters: your confinement of Miss Winslow and the death of Henry Anscomb. I’m afraid you’ll have to stay in police custody. You’d better tell us how to get hold of your wife.”

  Charles Blake took a deep breath. “Police custody. That’s how it’s all to end, then. I’m near sixty years, and I can’t barely remember my mother, because she died when I was a tyke. But I sure remember the police taking me off the street and putting me in homes. I couldn’t stand having no say, right from an early age, so I ran away every time. I didn’t actually mind the places they put me some of the time, but I couldn’t stand not having no say, that’s all. I got no running left in me.”

  Ames looked up from his notes. “By the way, what is the name of the boys’ home you were sent to in Manitoba? They might have some information about Joseph.”

  Bob shook his head slowly, as if trying to dislodge the memory. “Patterson Home for Boys. I reckon it’s still there, being a home for boys like me. I reckon the cities in the old country still got too many children and not enough parents and money to care for ’em.”

  Ames was commissioned to escort Charles Blake back to his cell. As they stood up, Charles caught sight of the boots and shirt on the shelf, where they had been placed next to the locket.

  “Look at that,” he said, reaching over and picking one of the boots. He looked at Lane “You found both of them? They was Andrew’s once, then little Joseph got them.” He put the boot back and turned back to follow Ames. He did not wait to hear the answer.