Reparations

by Stephen Kimber

  “I thought you had a contract with them,” Moira said, incredulous.

  “I do,” Todd snapped back. “Of course I do. But not everything is as simple as it is in your newspaper.”

  Another unsubtle dig at her job. At least he wasn’t suggesting she quit any more. Who knew? She might soon be the sole breadwinner in the family.

  “But now they say they won’t honour the contracts,” Todd continued. “And they’ve got an army of lawyers preparing to tie us up in court forever.”

  Most of Todd’s financing had been contingent on the condos being pre-sold. Now that it looked as if the companies might find a way to wriggle out of their contracts, Todd’s investors were threatening to pull the plug. They were already holding back on an interim payment he was supposed to have received three months ago, which meant he couldn’t pay his contractors and suppliers, which meant they were threatening to slap liens on the property, which meant he could soon be pushed into bankruptcy. Moira hated the idea of bringing their baby up in an apartment, hated Todd because it might happen.

  She still hadn’t told her father what was going on. He’d inquired, though. “What’s all this talk about the oil companies mean for our Toddy?” he’d asked a little too quickly, too smugly, at their last lunch.

  “Nothing,” she’d said. “He’s got signed contracts.” And she’d quickly changed the subject. At least her father would be pleased to know she was now planning to take just three months’ maternity leave after the baby was born. But Moira couldn’t tell him that yet because she’d also have to tell him about Todd’s business problems. And listen to him gloat.

  She hadn’t told Morton, either, probably because she didn’t want to admit to herself she’d have to come back to work so quickly. And she wasn’t sure how he’d react to her request to get off the court beat when she returned. She couldn’t handle the courts any more. She’d been thinking a lot about child murders, child abductions, child sexual assaults and all the other bad things that can happen to children. In fact, last night she’d been woken up by a nightmare that she was covering the trial of the man who’d abducted her child. She couldn’t see his face but she thought it was Todd—Stop it, she told herself. She couldn’t think about that. What was the question? When did she want to come in and listen to the audio tape? She didn’t.

  “Ah, I’m really busy this week, Mr. . . . Astor.”

  “Oh.” He sounded hurt. Why did that upset her? Hormones?

  “What about next Monday, then? Say, around lunchtime?” Damn. Why did she do this to herself?

  “That would be wonderful.”

  David Astor was excited again. “And, Miss . . . Moira, you won’t be disappointed, I promise. There’s some very interesting material on the tape . . .”

  Oh my God! Moira grabbed for her notepad, began to scribble furiously. David Astor wasn’t kidding. She’d heard the voice on the tape often enough to be certain it belonged to Ward Justice. He didn’t sound drunk, certainly not as drunk as the man who’d introduced him.

  “One more, just one more,” Ward Justice was shouting now as the furor in the room threatened to drown him out. “What word starts with ‘N’ and ends with ‘R’ that you never want to call a black person?” There were scattered cheers but more jeers.

  “Siddown! Siddown!” Was that her father’s voice? She would need to rewind the tape, listen to it again. How had it all started anyway? Justice had been talking about . . . what? About how he supported his leader, and how proud he was to be a member of the Liberal team, and then something happened. What?

  “Have the waiters all left?” he asked for no reason she could fathom. There was a pause, and then his question began to make sense when he asked, “Do you know when a black man turns into a nigger?” There was an embarrassed silence—even back then, Moira noted with some surprise—at the mention of the “N-word.”

  “As soon as he leaves the room!”

  The laughter was awkward. No one seemed sure how to react.

  He kept talking. “What does NAACP stand for? . . . Niggers Are Always Causing Problems . . . What do you call a nigger in a courtroom in a three-piece suit? . . . The defendant . . .” The delivery was staccato now. There should have been a cymbal crash to coincide with each new punchline. “What do you call a nigger with a Harvard education? . . . Nigger . . .” That’s when the boos really began.

  “One more, one more . . .” Ward Justice pushed on with his bad stand-up comic routine. “What word starts with ‘N’ and ends with ‘R’ that you never want to call a black person? . . . Neighbour!” he shouted after a suitable pause.

  The audience was in a complete uproar now. She could hear a scuffle, someone bumping against the microphone and then silence.

  “Thank you, Mr. Minister, thank you very much . . .” Another voice she didn’t recognize. “Enlightening as always. But the hour is late and I’m sure our friends in the press”—he had to be a politician, but which one?—“need their beauty rest so they can be ready for another day of scandal-mongering in the morning. For those of you who are beyond beauty rest—Danny, that means you—your friends in the Liberal Party are pleased to offer you complimentary liqueurs and cigars in the lobby.”

  With that, there was a shuffling of chairs and a cacophony of shouting. Then, suddenly, the recording stopped.

  Moira Donovan slumped back in the chair. It was much worse than she’d expected. Worse? Or better? She looked over at David Astor. He was grinning.

  “Interesting?” he asked.

  “Very,” she answered.

  “If you think that’s interesting,” he replied, the grin now a smirk, “I think you’ll find what I have to tell you even more so.”

  Strangely, knowing he was dying had given him a new purchase on life.

  “So,” Ward began pre-emptively as the doctor walked into the examining room clutching Ward’s red medical file folder against her chest and staring at the floor, apparently deep in thought about how to tell her patient the worst. “It is prostate cancer, then. How bad?” Ward had been reading up on the stages of the disease. He was sure it must be at least Stage Three by now: “the cancer has broken through the covering of the prostate and may have grown into the neck of the bladder or the seminal vesicle”—or worse (better?), Stage Four: “spread to another part of the body.”

  Dr. Thomas looked at him, startled, then smiled. She put the file on the white countertop, turned and closed the door.

  “No, Mr. Justice, your prostate is fine. In fact, you have the prostate of a much younger man. Which is good, very good.”

  “But why—?”

  “Frequent urination can be a sign of many things, Mr. Justice, or of nothing. I didn’t detect any abnormalities when I examined you, and the blood tests indicate your PSA results are well within the normal range. So, while your PSA score is not a 100 percent guarantee, the reality is that none of the tests we have at our disposal suggest prostate cancer.”

  “But—”

  “But that’s not to say we shouldn’t be vigilant. You should schedule an annual prostate exam so we’ll know quickly if there are any changes in the size and shape of your prostate, or in your levels of prostatic specific antigens.”

  “I really don’t have prostate cancer?”

  “No, you don’t Mr. Justice, but . . .”

  Ward Justice had been so sure of his own diagnosis that he was still having difficulty rearranging his thinking to accommodate this new reality, this new . . . disappointment.

  How could he be disappointed? Was it that he naively saw his own death, or at least impending death, as an easy, perhaps even romantic way to pull positive attention toward himself? Look at me, look at me, I’m dying. Or could it be that his life had been such a failure that jumping out of it now in the middle of middle age seemed preferable to staying the course? Or could it be that knowing he was dying liberated him, gave hi
m a free pass to do that which he’d wanted to do for so long but had been afraid to pursue? Could he live now with not dying?

  “. . . some anomalies in some of the results that I think we need to explore further.” Dr. Thomas was still talking. She opened his file, withdrew a number of forms that were already filled out. “I’d like to send you for some more tests, Mr. Justice, just so we can—”

  “What did you find?” He could feel the panic bubbling up. Why was he panicking? Wasn’t he, just a moment ago, eager to welcome death? And now he was afraid of what he wished for?

  “It may be nothing,” she answered, her tone soothing. “It probably is nothing. But”—she looked at him, smiled reassuringly—“one of the benefits of socialized medicine is that we can send you for tests to be sure.”

  “What tests?”

  “A second chest X-ray to begin. The radiologist detected a slight abnormality in your left lung. So he thinks we should get another X-ray, using a higher resolution this time, perhaps with an injection to increase the contrast so we get a better look.” She paused. “And I’d like to set up a consult with Dr. Bennett—he’s a pulmonologist—and with Dr. Hussein. She’s a very well-regarded oncologist.”

  Oncologist? “That’s cancer, right?”

  “Mr. Justice, there’s a saying we were taught when I was in medical school. The saying is this: ‘If you hear hoofbeats, think first of horses, not zebras.’ There are many things that could cause the anomalies we noted. Most of them are benign. Because we don’t have any recent baseline chest X-rays to measure these results against, it could very well be that this is simply a pre-existing tumour that’s been around so long it’s not a major concern. But since we don’t have that historical data, we need to err on the side of caution, to rule out any of the more serious possibilities.”

  She paused, waiting for Ward to ask another question.

  Oncologist? Abnormality in his left lung? Lung cancer?

  “But I don’t smoke. I haven’t for years. I stopped. Ten years ago. At least. How—?”

  “Giving up smoking is good, Mr. Justice, but it isn’t a guarantee. There are no guarantees. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.”

  “What else? How else can you get lung cancer?”

  “There are all sorts of ways people can get lung cancer. Smoking is the best known, of course, and we focus on it because it’s the most preventable. But there’s also second-hand smoke. And exposure to asbestos. And family history. There are also factors we still don’t understand. African-American men, for example, get lung cancer at a rate that’s one-and-a-half times greater than white men, but we don’t know why. So there’s . . .”

  Smoking? It had to be from smoking. Damn that Manny Soloman. Ward had been just eleven, and he and Manny had been hanging out one summer night in the parking lot behind the Steadman’s in Eisners Head. Ward could still vividly recall how Manny had hauled the half-crushed package out of his ass pants pocket, opened it, removed a cigarette, tapped the non-filtered end against the pack like Ward had seen movie stars do, then tucked it into the left-hand corner of his mouth so it hung just so. Then he lit a match, cupping the flame between his palms and raising it to the cigarette, nonchalant, as if he’d done it all a thousand times before. Ward was impressed, more so when Manny blew smoke out of his mouth and nose at the same time without coughing.

  “Here, have a puff,” he offered, extending the hand with the cigarette toward Ward.

  “No,” Ward answered, as if he’d been threatened.

  “Yuh scared?”

  “No.”

  “Well, do it then.” Manny put the cigarette up to Ward’s lips. Ward turned away. “’S’not like it’s going to kill you. Just one puff.”

  Ward turned back then, tentatively opening his mouth in a small “O” to accommodate the cigarette. He breathed in. The hot smoke burned the back of his throat, tickled the passages of his nose. He coughed, sputtered. Manny laughed. Ward felt dizzy, light-headed.

  He took the cigarette from Manny’s hand, took another puff, and then another. He didn’t cough.

  “Hey, don’t smoke the whole thing,” Manny said finally.

  And that was the beginning. By the time he was in his twenties, Ward was smoking a pack a day, sometimes two. He’d tried to quit when Victoria did, when she was first pregnant. And then again a year later. And a year after that. He’d lost count of the number of times he’d quit before he finally gave them up for good. But it wasn’t ten years ago, as he’d told Dr. Thomas. It was six. And now he had lung cancer.

  Should he tell Victoria? When he believed he had prostate cancer, Ward had decided he wouldn’t tell her. Was he trying to be a martyr? Or did he want to punish her for wanting a divorce? Think how sorry she’ll be after she finds out . . . But now that the doctor had told him he had lung cancer—she hadn’t said it exactly, but Ward knew—his first instinct was to call Victoria and tell her the news, let her take care of him. Tell her. Don’t tell her. Happy to die. Not happy to die. Why couldn’t he keep his emotions straight?

  “. . . usually long waiting lists to see specialists these days. But Dr. Bennett’s office says he can see you late Thursday afternoon. And we’re waiting on Dr. Hussein. Her nurse says she’ll fit you into the first cancellation she has.” Dr. Thomas gave him her best reassuring smile.

  He was not reassured.

  Chapter 8

  1974

  Ward should have been downstairs partying with the others. So why was he up here on the roof, alone, leaning against the railing on the seaward side of Junior’s widow’s walk, blowing smoke rings into the still, salt-damp night air and staring out into the inky blackness, trying and failing to make out the outline of his family’s house in the distance, trying and failing to be happy?

  The election was over. He’d won. No surprise there. The incumbent, a dentist named Dauphinee from Holden in the Tory end of Cabot County, who’d sat on the back-est Tory backbench for three undistinguished terms during the Stanfield era, had become even more marginal after Seamus O’Sullivan’s Liberals formed the government four years ago. With the fishery in a mess and everyone in Cabot County in need of government assistance, voters understood they needed to be with the winning side this time.

  Dauphinee had not helped his own cause, either. A few years ago, he’d taken up with a much younger woman in Halifax. That wasn’t the problem—he certainly wasn’t the only MLA on either side of the House with a wife at home and a mistress in the city. The problem was that Leila, the mother of his three grown children, was raising holy hell and not caring who knew. The Liberals were happy to heap manure on her garden of gossip, even adding spicy, if untrue, details, such as the fact that the mistress had borne Dauphinee a son and was now threatening to sue him for support.

  The Liberals didn’t have to make everything up, of course. The tale of Dauphinee’s serial car crash wasn’t a tall one at all. One night last fall Dauphinee had got falling-down drunk at the Holden Legion, poured himself into his car and proceeded to pinball into four different parked vehicles during the half-mile drive to his house, stopping at none of the accident scenes. Not that there was any doubt the next morning who’d done the damage. Dauphinee’s recently acquired Ford Mustang—more evidence the dentist was going through a late mid-life crisis—sat in his driveway, looking like the loser in a demolition derby.

  Holden’s police chief, a friend of Dauphinee’s who was also treasurer of the local Progressive Conservative Association, investigated but refused to press charges. His inquiries, he said, determined that Dauphinee had had only one drink that night. (He never questioned the bartender at the Legion, who told a different story.) The problem, the chief insisted, was an unfortunate combination of that single shot of alcohol with a painkiller the good dentist had prescribed himself (for reasons unknown), resulting in his accidental impairment, which had led to the multiple accidents. “You can’t arre
st somebody for taking medicine,” the chief said. That Dauphinee agreed to pay the owners of the cars he’d hit for all necessary (and some unnecessary) bodywork kept him out of the courts and his name out of the papers. But that didn’t keep people from talking.

  During the all-candidates debate in Eisners Head two weeks ago, Old Jimmy Parsons, who knew a thing or two about drinking and driving himself, stood up to ask Dauphinee why he hadn’t done anything to help the fishermen in Eisners Head. After Dauphinee huffed and puffed up his modest accomplishment in getting the government to extend the lobster season by three days, Jimmy thanked him, then added, as the crowd tittered, “You have a safe drive home now, Dr. Dauphinee.”

  Ward couldn’t help but notice Junior sitting in the front row, a satisfied smirk on his face, as if he’d orchestrated the whole thing. Which he might have. Strange. The man who had blacklisted his father and sent the Justice family into exile in Halifax more than a decade before was now Ward’s chief financial backer and main behind-the-scenes supporter in his election campaign.

  Ward’s candidacy had been Jack’s idea. Of course. Jack and Junior were friends, though Ward didn’t know much about the history of their relationship. Had they simply grown up together in the Liberal Party, both sons of prominent party power brokers, or was Jack, as many speculated, the brains behind Junior’s wildly ambitious corporate expansion plans?

  Whatever the basis for their friendship, Jack was now on the board of Eisner Fisheries International (Junior had dropped the J.F.B. from the company name within days of the old man’s death and added the International after he struck some joint-venture deal with a fishing company in Argentina). Jack was also in charge of the company’s legal and financial affairs. His duties consisted primarily of buying up struggling Nova Scotia fish companies using as little of Eisner International’s cash as possible. Preferably none.