I Was There the Night He Died

by Ray Robertson

  As a last resort, read the instructions—or get someone who knows what they’re doing to show you how. By my second attempt, I swear I’m stoned. As if on cue, it starts to snow: large, lazy flakes fluttering, falling, softly landing. The girl, swinging in her seat, wordlessly hands me back the joint and I puff and pass it back to her. I watch the snowflakes—falling harder now and blowing sideways in the escalating wind—illuminated underneath the street light.

  “A Petri dish of hysteria,” I say.

  The girl looks at me, but I point until she sees what I’m staring at, joins me in looking at the frantic activity beneath the light.

  A long moment later, “You’re right,” she says.

  I nod, benignly accepting the compliment. Poetry isn’t big words saying not all that much, isn’t flowery fakery stitched together to remind the reader to LOOK AT ME, I’M A POET. Isn’t supposed to be, anyway. Poetry is a magnifying glass that makes the stuff that makes up the world come closer so that the reader can see it better and know it better and live it better. Even the bad stuff. Maybe even especially the bad stuff.

  “Did you just make that up?” the girl says.

  “Make what up?” I’d forgotten I wasn’t alone.

  “‘Petri dish of hysteria.’”

  “Oh. No.”

  “Oh,” the girl says, obviously disappointed. She takes her hands off the chains of the swing and folds her arms across her chest.

  “It’s from my first book.”

  The girl stops swinging; unfolds her arms and turns to me. “You wrote a book?”

  “I wrote that book in … 1997. At least that’s when it was published.”

  “You’ve written more than one book?”

  Even taking into consideration the brain-baked banter that ordinarily goes along with what we’re doing, this is a little too mush-headed much. “I write novels,” I say.

  Not I’m a novelist or I’m a writer because you’re only a writer when you’re actually sitting in front of your computer writing. Only amateurs and over-prized professionals call themselves writers. Right now I’m a forty-four year old man sitting on a swing set getting stoned with a teenage girl.

  “If you’re a writer … why are you here?” she says.

  Here means Chatham. “I was born here. I grew up here. This was my parents’ house.”

  “You’re just visiting.”

  Visiting. Well, that’s the idea, anyway. “Sort of. It’s complicated.”

  “I didn’t think anything about Chatham was complicated.”

  That’s all Chatham is, I want to say. That’s all anyone’s hometown is. But that’s what novels are for, scarcely saying in 80,000 words what everyone else thinks can be summed up in eight.

  “You don’t seem like”—or look like or sound like—“you’re from Chatham,” I say.

  “My father came here for his work last year.” Nose nearly in the air, “I’m from Toronto.”

  “Really? Which part?”

  “Oakville.”

  Which probably does impress her Chatham classmates who don’t know enough to know that Oakville has about as much to do with Toronto as Bogota, New Jersey has to do with New York City. But let her have her hometown haughtiness. Growing up in a small town is bad enough—being parachuted in at eighteen and knowing what you’re missing is probably worse. “What does your dad do?”

  “I have no idea.” The girl appears almost proud of her ignorance.

  “You know your father came to Chatham for his work but you don’t know what he does?”

  “I didn’t say that. He’s a lawyer. I said I don’t know what he does. Or care.”

  Pass—Ms. Toronto’s family fissures aren’t my row to hoe, I’ve got my own domestic dramas to tend to—so please just pass me that jay, okay? Which she does, which I dooby do correctly the first time around this time, which presently nicely negates all of this all-of-a-sudden logic. Fuzzy-headed and nicely thoroughly fuddled once again, look at that: snow. It was there the entire time we were talking and I hadn’t noticed. Marijuana makes you notice things. I hadn’t noticed that before.

  “What are you … now?” The girl has taken back the spliff and is as obviously spaced as I am.

  “Exactly,” I answer.

  “No, I mean, what … what are you writing now? A new novel?”

  “No, not a novel.” The girl waits, isn’t going to let it go, I can tell. “A music book. A book about music.”

  “What—like your personal Top Ten or something?”

  I give her as brief a brief as possible, to which she responds, “Awesome,” sounding for the first time like an actual teenager. She pulls her iPod out of the pouch of her hoodie and immediately begins thumbing it. “You’ve got to check this out, it’s total dope. Do you know Maps? They’re from the UK. They’re kind of like Spiritualized and Galaxie 500 but so much better.” She finds what she’s looking for and hands me the iPod. “Check this out.”

  I stand up. “I better not. It’s getting cold.”

  “Now you’re suddenly cold?”

  I’m high enough, I almost tell her the truth. That just like you should never mix alcohol and night-time swimming, I never mingle a good buzz with bad music. Or even music I don’t know for sure is good. And certainly not music recommended, no matter how heartily, by a transplanted teenager from Oakville. “I’m a grown-up, remember? I’m just being a responsible adult.”

  “Whatever,” the girl says, jamming her iPod back into her pouch and pulling on her hood and walking away from the swing set.

  “Thanks for the lesson,” I call out after her.

  Still walking, and without bothering to turn around, the girl raises a statuary hand goodbye until I finally make out that she’s not, has been giving me the finger the entire time.

  I don’t know why, but even when I’m in the house, even later when I’m in bed, I’m smiling.

  Chapter Three

  It’s not the girl’s fault. Unless you were born here, why else would you care? Although care isn’t quite the right word. Obsess—that’s closer—although even that implies some sort of conscious act of concern when what it really comes down to is not being able to forget.

  It’s the fields—still rich and alive and giving. Corn, beans, squash, peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, radishes, potatoes: every spring planted and every summer harvested and always on local dinner tables all year long regardless of what the newspapers or the television insist is this season’s big business boom or bust. Bank loans and broken tractors and bad weather, but still the land. And sundown of an August evening—the hot, humid air finally cooling, the shadows of the tall corn stalks stretching, the exhausting day’s work almost over—the peace of the land, too, the sun-burnt earth’s long, soft exhale.

  It’s the town. Battered, yes—economic winds blowing in from who knows where or why knocking down factory walls and boarding up storefronts and pushing people out of their homes—but not broken. The barber where your father and then you got your hair cut. The grocery store that’s still there, where it’s always been. The school that seemed so big when you were young but so small now that you’re not. The bar where everyone buys their first beer. The church where you learned what and what not to believe. The tattoo parlour you were warned to stay away from. The post office and the laundromat and the library. The Legion Hall, the Bingo, the Dairy Queen. The water tower with the town’s—your town’s—name written across it. The grain mill that’s sat silent for years now. The same cemetery where everyone buries their dead. The hockey arena and the baseball fields and the parks. The hospital where your mother was pronounced dead; where you had your tonsils removed. The houses that are the homes that are the families that are the neighbourhoods that make a town a town, any town. And the river that runs through all of it, for as long as there’s been a town.

  It’s the people. The t
eacher who taught you how to read. The dentist who helped make your teeth grow straight. The coach who made you try harder. The old man who gave you your first job, cutting his lawn for three whole dollars. The woman whose kids you babysat. The doctor who made you feel better. The old lady next door whose driveway you shoveled. Your first best friend. Your first ever kiss. Your first broken heart. First lies, last goodbyes, endless summer holidays. The cats and dogs and birds and fish you named and loved and lost but never forgot. The brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents whose faces and even names you sometimes forget but who will always have your eyes, just like you’ll always have their cheekbones. Your mum and your dad.

  Whether you stay and raise a family and die here. Whether you grow up and leave and never come back. Whether you call it home or say it’s just where you were born or don’t say anything at all, not even to yourself. It’s where you’re from. It’s your hometown. It’s you. Even if you’re from Oakville. Even if you’re from Chatham.

  * * *

  No Frills is close enough to Buttercup Village that I can walk there, a rare indigenous pleasure. I need food and Mountain Dew, but also cardboard boxes. It’s time to decide what’s a cherished family memento and what’s garbage. Aside from seeing more of Dad, putting the house up for sale is the real reason I’m here. Which doesn’t make it feel any more real.

  Around the same time that Uncle Donny started bringing up nursing homes—him staying over at Dad’s place every night by this point, the nurse we’d hired to help out coming by virtually every day—Sara was killed. I was involved in the move to Thames View, I still came home to visit, but I wasn’t there. Not really. A change may be as good as a rest, but not when numbing bereavement is periodically interrupted for disheartening parental concern. I wasn’t the son I should have been, I know that, and for making Dad’s move to Thames View as smooth as it was and for taking care of him before it came to that, I owe Uncle Donny. He may talk too much sometimes and buy things he doesn’t need because a deal is simply too good to resist, but he’s family—except for several cousins I probably wouldn’t recognize if I passed them on the sidewalk, all the family I’ve got left.

  “Sam?”

  I’m slouching at a traffic light and stoop to peer inside the driver’s side of the car that’s stopped beside me. A black BMW driven by an attractive blonde woman in big sunglasses: not anyone I would know in Toronto, forget about here. A dedicated reader? Unlikely in Toronto, out of the question here. I try to remember if there’s anyone in Chatham I owe money to that I’d forgotten about.

  The woman grins and takes off her sunglasses, appears to be enjoying my cluelessness. “It’s Rachel,” she says.

  I smile back, pretending to finally be in on the joke, but not any nearer to actually knowing who she is. I’m almost ready to admit defeat when she says, “Rachel Turnbal.”

  Impossible. Simply impossible. But then my brain gets busy, begins adding width and weight to the thin arm holding the sunglasses; appends an additional couple chins to the one that’s already there; discerns a neck where there once was just shoulders directly melded to head; registers the kind, lettuce-green eyes that were always Rachel’s. Rachel Turnbal’s.

  ‘My God,” I say, “I’m sorry, it’s been … How are you?”

  “Do you want a ride?”

  “That would be great.”

  Waiting as long as the honking traffic behind her will allow, “Why don’t you get in, then?”

  I jog around to the other side of the car and get in.

  “Where are you going?” Rachel says, putting the Beemer in gear and rocketing us off.

  “No Frills.”

  “No Frills it is.” Which, after she shifts gears again, will be in approximately seven seconds the way we’re flying down Lacroix Street. I double-check to see if my seat belt is fastened.

  By determinedly avoiding looking at her, I’m sure I’m only confirming her suspicion of what I’m thinking, which she seems content to let me do. She probably gets this a lot. How many people, after all, get to become another person?

  “So the famous writer comes back home. The famous novelist.”

  Unbelievable: someone from my graduating high-school class of nearly a quarter-century ago has actually read my books. With an exaggerated grimace like she’s just turned around at the bar and spilt her drink all down the front of my shirt, “Although I’m afraid I haven’t read any of them,” she says. “I’m a public school teacher. I haven’t had time to read something I didn’t have to teach in ten years, and when I do finally have some time to myself, the last thing I want to do is look at words on a page. I didn’t actually know you were a writer until I saw that article in the Chatham Daily News the last time you were here, when you were doing something at one of the high schools, I think. What was that, a couple of years ago now?”

  “About that,” I say. “Actually, I was at CCI.” CCI is Chatham Collegiate Institute, our alma mater. “No one left from our time, though. Except for Mrs. Adams.”

  “Mrs. Adams: Mrs. Creepy Crawler.” Mrs. Adams was CCI’s biology teacher when Rachel was my grade ten lab partner. We dissected our first worms together.

  “She looked pretty good,” I say. “About as good as she did back then, at least.”

  “And here we are,” Rachel says, and she isn’t kidding, whipping into the No Frills parking lot on what feels like two wheels before stopping directly out front of its doors. “I’d love to get caught up, but I was supposed to be at my parents’ house for dinner half an hour ago.”

  “No problem,” I say.

  I’m standing on the frozen blacktop with my hands in my coat pockets when Rachel says, “I suppose you heard they’re trying to shut down CCI?”

  “No. I hadn’t.” Uncle Donny’s field of gossip extends only as far as personal misfortune and the flagrant misuse of taxpayer money. “Why would they want to do that?”

  “Oh, the usual reason—money. Here.” She reaches into her purse and produces a pen and a scrap of paper which she scribbles on, pen cap in mouth, before handing it to me. “Call me if you’re interested in being on a committee some of the alumni and parents are organizing to try and save it. It mostly means putting your name on petitions, but the more people involved the better.”

  “Sure.”

  “Oh, what am I thinking? You’re probably only in town for just a few days, right? Are you visiting your parents or something like that?”

  “No, I—Yeah, something like that. Anyway, I’m going to be around for awhile.”

  “That’s great. I guess.” Rachel roars the engine. “Anyway, good to see you again, Sam. And call me if you’re interested.”

  A horn beeps behind her, and Rachel waves goodbye. I fold her phone number into my wallet and head inside No Frills. I have no idea how many boxes I’m going to need. I guess I’ll just start with a few and see what happens from there.

  * * *

  If the weather is pleasant, if your health is perfect, if you happen to discover a ten dollar bill you didn’t know you had in the back pocket of a pair of jeans you rarely wear, it’s possible to pretend that drugs, alcohol, and loud, loud music aren’t the only things capable of making a person happy. Just one humidity-soiled, freshly-donned clean shirt, though; just one slightly achy arthritic knuckle or even a more-irritating-than-actually-painful midwinter sore throat, however, and a nose gets white-dust itchy and lips get hoochy dry. Ditto when you’ve spent nearly three hours going though your parents’ closets and drawers and a single metal filing cabinet and can’t come up with anything more memento memorable than four years’ worth of elementary-school report cards (mine), a still-polished pair of first baby shoes (also mine), the crappy Christmas gifts we’d annually mangle out of pipe cleaners and white glue and construction paper in grade school that I’d give to my mother and that she actually kept, and the single letter
I sent home during first-year university telling them how much I loved both it and Toronto and how much I appreciated their helping me get there, Talk to you soon, Sam.

  Wait: one more thing: a driftwood-encased dual clock and thermometer set that my dad received from Siemens on the day he retired. At first it had sat on one of my mother’s doily-topped side tables in the living room, but the clock always ran a couple of minutes slow, so Dad eventually banished it to the top shelf of their bedroom closet. All together, I’ve filled less than half of one small cardboard box. It’s a good thing I don’t know any drug dealers in Chatham. I get a beer from the fridge and a joint from my stash and exchange the heating blanket for my coat. It’s just after midnight—maybe I’ll get lucky and be accosted by a roving gang of crack dealers.

  Carefully recalling what I’d been taught, I manage to light up on the first try. I toke and sip and lean back on the bench and wait for the smoke and the suds to tag team my brain. In the time it takes a jigsaw-piece cloud to make the frozen moon disappear, I’m high, or, at any rate, as high as marijuana can get you. They should call smoking pot getting low. But at least I’m not normal, at least I’m below see-yourself level.

  Besides, apparently that’s the source of my entire substance abuse problem. When I’m up—whether because writing-well exhilarated or plain old chemically enhanced overstimulated (or a bit of both because the one doesn’t usually wander too far from home without the other)—I want to stay up. And when staying up inevitably leads to not just good work done or giddy times had, but involuntarily clenched molars and pin-wheeling pupils and the inability to sleep, eat, or sit still for longer than a single accelerated heart beat, maybe it’s time to consider professional help. People who quit using drugs seldom talk about the real reason they became addicts. It wasn’t your troubled childhood or the pressures of modern society or the depraved, enabling company you kept—it’s because being high finally feels like being alive. Unfortunately, being alive too much or for too long will kill you. Or make you wish that you were dead.