“Now you two,” Aunt Annie looked sternly from Shondelle to Uhuru, “you be working together on this. ’Cause you know that two heads is better than one . . . and two black heads be better than a thousand white ones!” Everyone laughed. Uhuru and Shondelle exchanged glances. Uhuru couldn’t tell what she was thinking, but he knew his own mind.
Ward Justice could sense the pseudo-solicitousness in the Chief Justice’s earnest, I-care-about-you tone. David Fielding wanted Ward off the case, but he didn’t want to have to order him off.
“It’s not a problem,” Fielding offered. “I can juggle the schedule and get you out of it. I’d be happy to do that. If you’d feel more comfortable, that is.”
Ward smiled, didn’t even nibble. He knew Fielding had read the stories in the papers. Who hadn’t? He knew, too, from courthouse gossip, that the Chief Justice’s secretary had ordered a transcript of the arraignment so that Fielding could study it, search for the reasons Ward should not preside at J. J. Howe’s trial. Fielding, in fact, had admitted as much earlier in their conversation.
“When you just look at the words on the paper”—the Chief Justice often chose the second-person pronoun in order to distance himself from anything he was saying that might be construed as critical—“you get the sense that you may have been abrupt, perhaps even unfair, to both lawyers. But especially to Mr. Uhuru.” Ward did not attempt to defend himself, or to correct the Chief Justice’s use of “Uhuru” when he meant “Melesse.” “And we”—now the inclusive we—“both know what the papers have done with that.” Without, of course, ever saying out loud exactly what it was the papers had done with that.
Both local papers, as well as The Globe and Mail and CBC-TV’s The National, had made the Howe arraignment their lead story. Given Melesse’s declaration that he planned to raise the issue of reparations for the former residents of Africville in his client’s defence, that was probably inevitable. But Ward’s handling of the arraignment had added spice to the initial story and gave it legs.
The next day, the Daily Journal had another item quoting Calvin Johnstone, a spokesman for the Africville Descendants’ Association: “Mr. Melesse may be too polite, or he may have to be careful for reasons of legal etiquette,” Johnstone told Daily Journal reporter Moira Donovan, “but we are under no such constraints. So we can call it what it is. Racism, plain and simple. We have a racist judge in a racist legal system making racist decisions involving African Nova Scotians. “
The Tribune, perhaps stung by its failure to follow up on the initial story, outdid itself the day after that by publishing two front-page articles, one quoting different black leaders saying much the same as Johnstone had, the other offering an interview with Dalhousie University law professor Shondelle Adams, who said the judge’s outburst should be a reminder to everyone that Nova Scotia’s judicial system had not changed much since the Marshall report. Donald Marshall, Jr., was a Native who’d spent eleven years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. A royal commission set up to look into the miscarriage of justice concluded that Nova Scotia had a “two-tier system of justice,” with one law for the politically powerful and another for Natives, blacks and poor people. Part of the problem, the commission said, was that the process for appointing judges was corrupt and rife with political cronyism.
“Given that the judge in this case is a good-old-boy appointee from those bad old days, no one should be surprised by what happened in court,” Professor Adams said.
The day after that, the Tribune weighed in with a thumb-sucking editorial that carefully steered clear of criticizing Ward personally—Victoria’s cousin was the publisher—while obliquely noting that “Nova Scotians want justice not only to be done, but to be seen to be done as well.”
All of which, of course, eventually made its way to the desk of the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice and, even more eventually, to this awkward conversation in the Chief Justice’s office.
“I’m not saying I pay attention to what the papers have to say,” the Chief Justice continued, after yet another silence that had lasted too long. “I don’t.”
Ward knew he did. David Fielding was the first Supreme Court justice appointed under post-Marshall reforms to the judicial selection process, and he wore the fact that he’d never belonged to a political party as a badge of superiority. Since his elevation to the job of Chief Justice three years ago, he’d been praised for his stirring speeches touting the importance of judicial independence and the strides Nova Scotia had made in cleaning up its appointments process. He didn’t need one of his own judges, even inadvertently, resurrecting the Marshall issue.
Ward may have been a “good-old-boy appointee,” or whatever it was that professor had said, but he was proud of the judge he had become. At the time of his appointment, his legal experience admittedly had been—to be more charitable than precise—limited. But he’d worked hard, attended every conference, convention, seminar and professional workshop on offer, eventually graduating to seminar leader and even, at last year’s provincial bar convention, keynote speaker on the subject of sentencing white-collar criminals.
The lawyer introducing him, a prominent criminal defence attorney, had called him “tough but fair—and I should know: he’s sent some of my best-known clients to jail.” Ward knew it was flattery, but he also believed it was true. He did try to be scrupulously fair, and, while he stayed within the federal sentencing guidelines, he made sure to reserve the harshest penalties for those he knew knew better—the lawyers who bilked clients, the stockbrokers who used inside information to fatten their bank accounts at the expense of others, the politicians who abused their public trust.
There was an irony in that, of course, one that was not lost on Ward. But it would take a lifetime of shrink appointments to sort it all out. And Ward didn’t believe in shrinks. Sometimes, he wished he did. Whenever he thought about the unlikely twists his career had taken, which he was doing more and more often lately—his prostate worry playing with his mind?—it would come flooding back, seemingly out of nowhere, to whack him. Guilt. It would wash over him at the most inopportune times. For reasons only he understood. Like that moment during the arraignment when he’d looked down at J. J. Howe, all skin and bones and big, open eyes looking back at him, so confident, so serene, so young. Ward tried to do the math. What if . . . ? And at that moment Ward truly believed that he should not be up on high, sitting in almighty judgment on others. He should be down there, the one being sentenced, made to pay for his sin. Which was far greater than anything J. J. Howe might have done.
“But I know you’ve been under a lot of pressure lately,” David Fielding said.
What did the Chief know? Ward wondered. That Victoria wanted a divorce? That the saw palmetto hadn’t worked, that he was now peeing four times a night and that, as a result, he was more tired than he’d ever been and had developed a chest cold he couldn’t shake? And, oh yes, that he couldn’t stop thinking about how he’d become a judge and how much he needed to do penance before he died? Ward was sure Fielding didn’t know that.
The divorce? Perhaps. Victoria and Fielding’s wife were in the same book club. But he didn’t think Victoria would have confided in anyone yet. She was much too private and proud for that, and besides, nothing had been settled. Had it? They’d not spoken of it, or anything else of substance, for that matter, since that night in the restaurant.
Ward looked at Fielding. The Chief Justice didn’t know. He couldn’t. “Pressure?” Ward said. “Not really. Nothing out of the ordinary.”
“No, of course not,” Fielding answered, disappointed; Ward seemed determined not to make this easy for him. “But this is a pressure-cooker job. People just don’t know what it’s like. The case-load. The demands. The decisions. So it’s understandable, you know. We all get fed up from time to time—”
“Exactly,” Ward cut him off. Fielding had given him the opening he needed. “You’re absolutely right
. I did have a bad day that day. But it happens, right? I’m fine now. I’ll be fine.”
The Chief Justice exhaled slowly. He had trapped himself “All right then,” he said slowly, looking for another way, and finding none. “You’ll handle the trial. But if you change your mind, or run into any concerns, or, you know . . .”
“Yes, yes, I won’t hesitate to call you,” Ward said, rising from his chair to go. “But I’m sure it will be fine.”
“Right then,” Fielding replied uncertainly. “That’s settled.” He paused, not knowing how to end this conversation. “Hope everything else is okay?”
“Fine, thanks. Everything’s fine.” Ward was perfunctory. He needed to pee. And then he needed to call the doctor. He couldn’t put it off any longer.
Moira Donovan looked again at her watch. It was ten past one. Didn’t these guys know that other people have deadlines to meet, jobs to do? Fucking civil servants. She’d be late for work.
In fifteen minutes, Dr. Earl Cathcart was scheduled to take the stand at the Law Courts Building across town to try to explain the inexplicable: why a prominent, well-respected family doctor, who’d practised medicine for forty years without one single patient complaint, had gone home after work each evening for at least fifteen of those years and had his sexual way with one or the other of his twin daughters. The abuse had begun before the girls reached puberty and lasted until they left home. They were in their thirties now.
Moira had cried so uncontrollably listening to the women testify that she’d had to leave the courtroom twice. That had never happened before. Neither had she ever before experienced the blinding rage that had boiled up in her yesterday morning as she watched Cathcart blandly watching one of his daughters describe, in graphic, horrific detail, exactly what she said he’d done to her. Moira would have happily gone over to the prisoner’s box, cut off his dick and shoved it up his ass . . .
Whoa! She couldn’t believe she’d even thought such thoughts. It had to be the hormones. She’d stopped throwing up in the mornings, but now she felt as if she were living her life like an insect under a magnifying glass in the sun; everything was intensified, larger than life. Painfully so. Her anger, her sadness, her fears. She’d wake up in the middle of the night convinced the baby inside her was dead. She’d understand—know even—that this wasn’t so. The rational part of her could label this panic as irrational, understand it as one more unpleasant side effect of her pregnancy. But that didn’t make her any less frightened, or any less sad, less angry.
As a court reporter, Moira had, in fact, heard everything the daughters claimed happened to them—and worse, much worse. And she’d seen more than a few accused, even innocent men, reacting inappropriately while listening to themselves being described in monstrous ways by their accusers.
And the Cathcart case was certainly no slam-dunk. The lawyers were still arguing over whether the defence should be allowed to introduce similar fact evidence that the daughters had previously accused their parish priest of sexually molesting them. The scuttle-butt around the courtroom was that Cathcart’s lawyer might even call the girls’ mother to testify on her husband’s behalf, perhaps later that afternoon.
Moira needed to get back. Now. She looked again at her watch. One-twenty. She couldn’t wait any longer. She started to get up—
“Found him!” The woman’s voice was shrill, triumphant. It intimidated Moira back into her chair. “Hiding in the stacks,” she offered as she led a sheepish-looking man in a rumpled suit and unfashionably oversized horn-rimmed glasses to the table where Moira was seated. “Whenever David goes missing, that’s usually the first place we go to look. But he was supposed to be in his office today doing his monthly reports. Weren’t you, David?”
David, who looked as if he was used to being talked to—and about—in such patronizing ways, gave no sign the woman’s tone irked him. It irked Moira.
“Anyway,” the woman said, turning back to Moira without waiting for David’s response, “David’s the man to see. He knows everything there is to know about our audio collections. Don’t you, David?”
David grunted, whether in acquiescence or irritation Moira couldn’t tell.
“I’ll leave you two to it, then,” the woman said. “And don’t forget those reports, David. I need them by the end of the day.”
David grunted again. But when he looked up at Moira, he smiled. This woman had come to the Archives to look for something and he was, as always, eager to help. He looked like a ferret, Moira thought. Bits of green—lettuce from lunch?—flecked his top teeth.
“Shelly says you’re interested in the Lambie collection?” he began.
“Uh, yes. But just one item, really.” Moira wasn’t sure why she was even bothering. She didn’t have time for this and, besides, what difference did it make if Ward Justice made some racist joke a hundred years ago?
“Oh, that’s too bad.” The archivist looked deflated. “Just one item, eh? Well, here’s the problem then, Miss . . . ?”
“Donovan. But please, Moira is fine.”
“Miss . . . Moira, then. Well, Moira, here’s the problem. Mr. Lambie was a wonderful collector and, of course, it was generous of him—most generous—to give his tapes to the Archives. I only wish others cared as much about our history. But that’s the problem, you see. Some people don’t care in the way Mr. Lambie cared. And some of those people who don’t care, unfortunately, are the politicians downtown. They’ve been cutting our budget, and cutting our budget, and then cutting our budget again. As if history didn’t count for anything.” He paused to let that sink in. “That means we’re years behind in cataloguing donations. It’s got so bad the director has said we can’t accept any more until we clear up the backlog. But we can’t clear up the backlog because we don’t have the people or the time. We—” He stopped suddenly, aware he was off topic. Moira, who’d gotten caught up in his emotional outburst, had already made a mental note to tell the Sunday Editor about Astor. It might make a good human interest piece.
“I’m sorry, Miss . . . Moira. I get carried away sometimes. But it is an important issue. Maybe you’ll write to your MLA about—there I go, off track again. Bad habit. Anyway, the tragedy of the Lambie collection is that Mr. Lambie never catalogued his tapes. And there are thousands of them. One of the summer students counted ten thousand before he had to go back to school. But we haven’t had the funds to hire anyone to count the rest, let alone listen.”
So that’s it then, Moira thought. Well, at least I tried.
“But perhaps . . .” David saw disappointment in her face, disappointment which might actually have been relief. “I have listened to a few of the tapes,” he continued helpfully. “Perhaps if I knew what you were looking for . . .”
What was she looking for? “Ah, it would be a tape from the mid-seventies. Nineteen seventy-four, or perhaps -five, maybe even seventy-six.” She paused then, unsure what to say next.
“Was it of some specific event?”
“Yes. A press gallery dinner.”
“Oh, dear, there was nothing like that on the tapes I listened to . . .”
“Oh, that’s okay.”
“Why were you interested in those dinners anyway?”
“Well,” Moira improvised quickly, “my father was a reporter back then and, well, you know, his birthday’s coming up and I was just trying to find him something different as a present. I know he enjoyed that time of his life.”
David smiled. “What a lovely idea, Miss, er, Moira. I wish I could help.”
“Oh, no, that’s—”
“Would a tape from any of the years you mentioned work, or—?”
“No, not really. There was an after-dinner speaker he keeps talking about. A man named Ward Justice. He was a Cabinet minister back then. Now he’s a—”
“Oh, the Judge.” David Astor beamed. “It just so happens,” he said, leaning towa
rd her and speaking in a conspiratorial whisper, “I’ve been working on a project myself involving the Judge.”
As he leaned forward, Moira recoiled instinctively. His hot breath smelled of onion, garlic and undigested food. “That’s very interesting, uh, David, and I’d love to hear more, but I’m late for work.” She stood up and backed away from him, glancing furtively at her watch. One thirty-five. She really was late. And had nothing to show for her wasted lunch hour.
“Why don’t you leave me your card?” David said. “That way, if I happen to find what you’re looking for, I could give you a call.”
She fumbled in her purse for a card, handed it to him. “Oh, a reporter,” David said, smiling again. Moira turned away. “I guess I should have been more careful about what I said.”
Moira didn’t reply. Coming here had been a dumb idea. The only thing she’d really learned was that she wasn’t completely past the nausea stage yet.
The doctor sat opposite Ward Justice in a white plastic chair in the middle of her small, windowless examining room, speed-reading the contents of the slim file the nurse had left for her. The file represented Ward Justice’s entire adult medical history: a pesky flu here, a wart removed there, an allergic reaction to penicillin, a few annoying sinus infections that had led to an operation to straighten a deviated septum and, six years ago, Dr. Wilson’s final cryptic notation that Ward had developed adult onset asthma. Ironically, Ward had been diagnosed soon after he’d given up smoking and taken up running (after which he gave up running, but never resumed the smoking). The final page of his file, which the doctor was examining now, contained the results of a complete physical—his first and last—which indicated that, in early 1976 at least, Ward Justice was a healthy human specimen.
Ward sat across from Dr. Thomas now, willing himself not to think about what she would tell him. As the doctor read, his eyes darted around the room. The examining room was a sterile study in black and white that reminded Ward of a Psychology Today poster popular when he was in university. He tried to remember the details. There was a black man—or was it a black boy? He would be how old now? Stop it. Maybe a girl . . . dressed all in white and sitting in a white room full of white furnishings.
Reparations Page 15
