Sing a Worried Song

by William Deverell

  Arthur takes a deep breath of cool night air, and carries on, looking forward to watching a lovely sunrise from Lovers’ Leap and wondering why at this pre-dawn hour they are still partying below. His watch says ten-thirty. Time disorientation. Relax. He hears Stoney speak. “All you’re gonna get is a little peek into the spiritual cosmos.” Arthur looks around. No Stoney. No one.

  The narrow, uphill path is lit only by the moon and the distant yard lights of the hall. A dryland forest, firs like towering watchmen over the swirling skirts and tresses of arbutus and oak. They obscure the view until he reaches the wooden bench, with its carved graffiti, a safe ten feet from the rim of the narrow, mossy knoll.

  He sits on the bench. He would have a better view of the ferry snuggling into the Ponsonby dock were he to approach the edge. He’s not that muddled, after all. Actually, he’s feeling unusually sharp. His senses are not just working but alive, his mind keen, busy with intriguing notions that demand study but flee. About his role in the cosmos, about the vast good fortune of being alive, when he could be any mass of cells, a rock, a weed, jetsam on the sea.

  Yes, this is the peek into the cosmos, the infinite universe, of which he is a part. He’s also at its centre, an official observer of the universe from here on planet Earth, and his reign extends from the islands scattered in the Salish Sea to the distant snow-peaked mountains. Zoom to his own little island, to this knoll, to himself, to Arthur Ramsgate Beauchamp. He enjoys an odd, unprecedented sense of worth and well-being.

  But here is an unwanted visitor. Arthur makes out Sideshow Bob coming near, grunting as he sits to Arthur’s right. Bad vibes again. “Really opens up on you, doesn’t it?”

  The voice is familiar. It’s not Honk Gilmore. “Yes,” Arthur says, lamely. “It does.”

  “I heard they call it Lovers’ Leap. Are you a lover, Arthur?”

  “Have to go now, sorry.” Arthur rises, frightened.

  Sideshow Bob stands too. A soft, threatening growl: “Twenty-five years and six months.”

  Arthur struggles with the math, struggles to clear his brain. Twenty-five years and six months ago: April, 1987.

  “I’ve been waiting for this moment a long time, Mr. Beauchamp.”

  Arthur is flooded with relief as another notion comes. This is a joke. Arthur is being toyed with, a familiar pattern. “Go away, Brian. I’m not letting you into my head.”

  “It’s a long flight back, so let’s do this.” He moves in front of Arthur, blocks his way back down the path. Arthur grabs a rope of his spiky red hair, tries to rip the mask off, expose Pomeroy, expose his callous charade. As he tugs and twists the rubbery mask, he catches the merest glimpse of moonlight glinting on a metal surface, a knife blade, a butcher’s knife that is rising to the highest point of its arc and is flashing down.

  “Die, you fucker!”

  Arthur jerks to the side. Blind within his misaligned disguise, his assailant stabs the air, missing his target by inches. Arthur backs away, the wrong way, toward the edge, as the man pulls off his mask, and that is when Arthur knows for certain, in this ghastly sinister moonlight, that Randolph Skyler is honouring his pledge of brutal revenge.

  Skyler keeps darting to left and right, blocking exit routes, backing him toward the lip of the precipice. Arthur is unable to use his voice — terror has engulfed his entire being. But he has managed to draw his weapon, the sickle. He is still a few feet from the abyss as Skyler thrusts again, and he whips the sickle across Skyler’s knife arm, slowing its thrust but not stopping it, and the blade penetrates the tin-can body armour with a sharp cold pain.

  As Arthur falls backwards, the knife slips out and rattles across his armour onto the ground. He scrambles for it in the moss, but Skyler plucks it away. “I was never impotent! I had to fight them off!”

  Arthur is on his knees now and aware of distant laughter and of Scotty on the microphone, something about prizes. He’s also aware that he’s bleeding from a stomach wound, his groin is wet, his thighs. He’s aware, too, that he has crawled almost to the edge of the precipice. Above all, he’s aware that Skyler is hovering over him, about to plunge the knife into his back. He knows now that death is inevitable, and he resigns himself to it. His thoughts are on God and the afterlife, the truth of which he will soon know.

  There’s a shout from behind. “Get down, Arthur! Stay down!”

  Arthur turns and sees Ernst Pound emerge from the gloom in his crisply ironed uniform, running, flailing, weaponless, his arms outstretched. Arthur sees the knife descending. He drops flat into the moss. Ernst dives after him, shielding him, taking the knife in his own back. But then rising, roaring like a lion.

  There’s a crunch of colliding bodies as he takes Skyler over Lover’s Leap.

  Ernst’s bellow rises triumphantly over Skyler’s fading scream. A thud and a rattle of loosened rocks. Silence.

  Then, in the distance: “And the prize for best ensemble goes to … Somebody better go get Arthur Beauchamp.”

  SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 11

  REMEMBRANCE DAY

  With his free hand, Arthur stabs away a teardrop wending its way down between nose and cheek as the Garibaldi Highlanders lead the casket to the grave, mournfully piping “The Battle’s O’er.” Arthur is one of the lead bearers, and is feeling weak and dizzy, though trying not to show it. He has disobeyed orders to remain in bed.

  The Highlanders, vigorously augmented by Kurt Zoller on accordion, make a homelier sound than the lofty, sonorous lamenting of the full RCMP pipe band, which performed at yesterday’s salute in Vancouver, at division headquarters. Arthur watched it on television from his hospital bed.

  His breakout from Victoria General this morning was smooth and swift, engineered by Reverend Al and a collaborator nurse who unlocked a back door. On showing up here, he was chided by Doc Dooley, who has been keeping a wary eye on him. But Arthur could not live with himself if he missed Ernst Pound’s funeral — the island version, here at the graveyard at Mary’s Landing.

  Locals were astonished that their heroic constable had expressed a solemn wish to be buried on the island he claimed to hate. A will of sorts was found, dated a few weeks ago, a signed, scribbled note. “I have nothing to bequeath, Edwina, but my love for you. Please bury my remains on Garibaldi Island.”

  They were not divorced yet, so Edwina is formally his widow and heir, though he had no estate to give but a widow’s pension. She is here, not with her lover, but with their infant, six weeks old, and she is crying softly in the gentle rain.

  With the coffin lowered, Arthur stands aside as Pound’s family drop floral remembrances into the grave. A sister, two cousins — that is all, and Edwina. Arthur plucks a flower from a bouquet, and gives a silent prayer as he tosses it in, and others do the same, friends and neighbours, even the boys from the bar who’d taunted Ernst, all looking hangdog and teary.

  Arthur walks carefully over to join his friends and family, Al and Zoë, Yoki and Niko, and his unswerving life companion, the Member for Cowichan and the Islands, who has not left his side since rushing to it eleven days ago. His daughter, Deborah, has been here a week. His grandson, Nick, dropped in for a few days from California. Brian Pomeroy is somewhere in this vast throng. Almost the entire island is here. Press from everywhere. Top Mounties. Politicians.

  There’s to be a reception at the Legion, but Arthur won’t make it — his knees are weak from that slow march with the heavy casket and his wound hurts afresh. He welcomes the extended arms of his wife and daughter, who lead him to a bench near the church. Reporters eye him hungrily but none approach; Margaret has already lit into them once, forbidding any interviews.

  She ripped into Stoney too, on first arriving, after being filled in on the horrific events and his role in them, his doping of cookies with psilocybin. Stoney has been unable to look Arthur in the eye.

  Margaret kisses him. “Let’s get you home and stick
you in bed.”

  “A minute more. It’s almost over.” It would be rude to drive off just as the Highlanders launch into a plaintive version of “Will Ye No Come Back Again?”

  Deborah shares some tea from a flask. “Keep telling me you’re okay, okay?”

  “I’m okay.”

  Just okay. The mending is slow. There’s still pain, especially if he twists, or carries a coffin. The wound was only an inch deep, but the knife penetrated his stomach wall. His armour of flattened cans saved him from a deeper wound. The Tin Man.

  There’d been a search party to find the Best Ensemble co-winner, whose parked Fargo was proof he could not be far afield. Apparently Yoki and Niko were the first to find him. He was given emergency aid by a trained medic and a retired nurse. Doc Dooley soon arrived, in pyjamas.

  Arthur has no memory of any of that, or of the flight by helicopter to Victoria General. And for several days he had no memory of the events on Lovers’ Leap, but eventually reconstructed them from his nightmares.

  His one memory, on awaking at about noon the next day in a private ward, was of Stoney telling him it was only a little taster. He was dosed up with morphine but could still sense an aftertaste of psilocybin. Zone Ten, maybe. The never-to-be-repeated last stage.

  The mourners begin to disperse. Arthur gets to his feet and strolls off holding hands with his wife and daughter, one on either side. He sings softly: “I asked the judge, ‘What’s gonna be my fine?’ He said, ‘Twenty-one years on the Rocky Mountain line.’ I’m worried now, but I won’t be worried long.”

  Deborah says again, “Tell me you’re okay.”

  §

  Arthur’s doting daughter tucks him into the bed she has made on the parlour couch. He finds it hard to get up the stairs to the bedroom, and he gets too anxious when alone.

  He asks, “Have you settled on a date?”

  Deborah has accepted a marriage proposal from Grant Shanahan, her ocean scientist. She’s in love, and it’s wondrous to see. Deborah, once his little girl with the green hair, who’d jabber away about all the drippy schoolboys as he drove her to figure skating.

  “We’re thinking soon. In summer. Maybe January.”

  “Ocean scientist. You’re sure he’s not some cold fish?”

  She laughs. “He’s hot.”

  She’ll return to Melbourne in a few days. Annabelle’s disclosures about her formidable sexual history have not been raised during Deborah’s stay here. Arthur wants to put them to rest.

  He particularly wants to bury the issue of Hubbell Meyerson and his whoring with friends’ wives. He doesn’t want to talk to Margaret about him, doesn’t even want to think about him. A letter from Hubbell, begging forgiveness, was waiting for his return from hospital, and lies crumpled in his wastebasket.

  Brian comes from the kitchen with a Ziploc bag of chicken sandwiches, and puts them in his packsack. He is followed by Margaret and the Woofers, bringing more sandwiches, and, for Arthur, a bowl of chicken soup.

  Brian zips his pack. Tildy Sears will be coming by soon to take him to the ferry. Moose is on the northern seas again, and Brian spent the night in her Pan-Abode. “I couldn’t help it,” he said on returning this morning to fetch his gear.

  Margaret gives him a hug. “You crazy dope. Have a safe flight.”

  “I warned him,” Brian says, wagging a finger at Arthur. “I don’t mean to sound callous and uncaring, but I want that acknowledged with reasonable sincerity, and, if possible, gusto.”

  “You warned me, Brian. Thank you.”

  “I let my guard down in the last couple of days. I was fooled, I’ll concede that. Everybody was fooled.”

  Skyler’s disappearance went unnoticed for a night and a day. Authorities blame his father, who believed Randolph’s story that he met an attractive divorcee who invited him to stay overnight. His dad foolishly covered for him with the police and parole office, unaware that Skyler had booked an overnight flight to the West Coast. He arrived on Garibaldi on Halloween morning in a rented van.

  Presumably, he did careful research before buying his costume in Toronto. The Halloween dance was promoted in Garibaldi’s online events calendar. The Garibaldian of the Year would be named then. Arthur was high on the list.

  “I’ll pay you back pronto, Arturo.” Brian was pinched, predictably, and needed an “advance” to cover his air fare. “I’ll be rolling in it when my screenplay sells.” The horror script. Brian claims that recent events have inspired him to spice up the ending.

  §

  It is evening, dark, and the rains of November have begun, driven by wind, splattering on the upstairs windows. Arthur is lying in his own bed, upstairs, reading the rest of his mail, trying not to think of the discarded letter from Hubbell. Margaret was not mentioned in it, just Annabelle. That was suspicious in itself. Hubbell might at least have wished Arthur continued domestic happiness.

  He remembers his vow. Stop worrying. Be happy.

  Here’s a snivelling note from the author of the scholarly work on Euripides. Arthur’s review appeared in the online edition of the Journal of Ancient Drama. Arthur’s complaint about “lapses into unnecessary euphemism” has generated even more such lapses.

  There are dozens of friendlier letters and emails, expressing shock at the attack on Arthur, wishing him speedy recovery and a long life. He lays these notes down as Margaret enters with a mug of tea and his nutritional supplements.

  She explains she has winnowed out those that might irritate his stomach. She has been a comforting angel, careful not to chide him, never asking why he’d kept from her the terrible secret of Skyler’s threats. When he volunteered the feeble routine explanation, “I didn’t want to worry you,” she brushed it away.

  “Drink more tea. Liquid is good.”

  She perches on the side of the bed, contemplates him. “I have something I have to tell you, darling.”

  That sounds ominous. Arthur doesn’t want to hear it.

  “I need to get it out.” Seconds slowly pass. “I had a … relationship.”

  Arthur stiffens, feels a wrench of pain. He sets down his mug, fearing his shaking hands will spill it.

  “Please, Margaret, don’t tell me.”

  “I have to get it off my chest. I don’t want secrets. I love you.”

  “Then that’s enough.” But then he blurts, “Don’t tell me it’s Hubbell.”

  Margaret looks shocked. “Oh, God, no! That self-absorbed old lecher? Where would you get such an idea?” She shakes her head in disbelief. “I never got why you were so pally with him.”

  Arthur listens numbly as she confesses. A social scientist. Frank Chalmers. The name is familiar, maybe important. Yes, he’d seen him onscreen, a TED Talk she’d encouraged him to watch, about climate-change-denial neurosis. Craggy, long-haired, a sense of humour. Probably many other qualities Arthur lacks.

  “There were only a couple of times. Well, three. It’s over, I told him we had to stop. It was a fling, that’s all.”

  She begins to cry. “I do love you, really, oh God. You’re so solid and real and caring and lovely, but … I think … maybe your constant worrying … sometimes it drove me nuts. I just needed a … a reprieve, a moment or two with somebody with a sunnier outlook. No, it’s not that, not because of you. I was overburdened. I needed some optimism, damn it.”

  Arthur is hugging her now, she weeping, holding him so tight it hurts.

  “It’s okay, darling. Everything’s fine.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t worry,” he croaks. “Be happy.”

  AFTERWORD

  “Any resemblance to persons living or dead …”

  Though I practised mainly as a criminal defence counsel, I was on occasion retained by the Attorney-General of British Columbia to prosecute homicide trials, some of which attracted wide public attention.r />
  The trial featured in the opening section of this novel roughly recreates one of them, an alleged thrill killing in Vancouver of a lonely down-and-outer.

  The accused was John Wurtz, a bright young man visiting from Toronto. On his journey west, he’d been absorbed in The First Deadly Sin, a popular thriller by the late Lawrence Sanders, whose mentally warped serial killer uttered musings like “The murder of a stranger. A crime without motive … The act of killing is an act of ultimate love.”

  Morbidly inspired by such ruminations, Wurtz befriended the victim, a stranger to him, and found himself accused of a copycat murder, his quarry stabbed 56 times with a pair of scissors. The only evidence putting Wurtz at the scene of the crime, a humble West End flat, was a single print on a beer bottle on a window ledge.

  The chief Crown witness, Wurtz’s travelling companion, had originally cooperated with the police, but at trial changed his story, supporting Wurtz’s alibi. That involved a mysterious third man who’d shown up in the flat, the victim’s jealous male lover.

  The trial was a difficult one, well defended, but after a strenuous cross-examination of the accused, the jury convicted.

  As Wurtz, in handcuffs, was led past the prosecution table to begin his life sentence for first-degree murder, he paused by my chair and audibly whispered, “Some day, Mr. Deverell, I’m going to get you.”

  This, from the Vancouver Sun, is the last I heard of John Wurtz:

  Convicted of stabbing a homosexual playmate to death, John Richard Wurtz is now leading police on another, final run-around.

  Dubbed the “thrill killer” back in 1976 for killing the closet Vancouverite homosexual he had picked up while cruising Granville Street, Wurtz, 24, later vanished from a Kingston, Ont., jail.

  Now police are puzzled by the mysterious delivery of ashes said to be his remains to his eastern Ontario family from a Florida crematorium.