Reparations

by Stephen Kimber

  “Can I see you again?” He’d blurted it out. Now he looked away. What was he doing?

  “You’re sweet,” she said again. “You really are.” She closed the car door. And was gone.

  Chapter 9

  Spring 2003

  Ward slumped into the chair he now kept near the door to his office. He needed to catch his breath. There was nothing like being told you were dying to make you feel like death. These days, Ward rooted around inside every ache, pain, twinge, tickle and breath, examining it, turning it over, searching its insides for hidden meaning. Had the tumour grown? Had the cancer spread? Conversely, he rarely noticed when he had to pee. Perhaps this cancer, too, was only in his mind, not in his lungs and his bones.

  “How long?” he’d asked. But they couldn’t, or wouldn’t tell him.

  “I can tell you the course this disease usually takes,” Dr. Hussein had said, “but there is no usually with lung cancer. Everyone is different and will experience the stages and the progression in different ways.” She was professional, careful, cold. She had to be; she was, after all, sentencing patients to die. Like a judge. Ward admired her professionalism.

  “But what do you think?” he insisted. For some reason—he knew the reason—the timeline seemed important.

  He’d spent two days undergoing tests. At one point, they’d stuck a tube with a mini-camera up his nose, down his throat and into his chest, and snipped off a few pieces of tumour for testing. He’d been awake, but they’d given him a sedative to dull the pain, which had also dulled his memory.

  The only thing he could remember from the procedure was somebody saying something about golf balls. It was only later, when Dr. Hussein showed him the X-ray—“That tumour there,” she said, pointing to something Ward’s unschooled eyes saw only as a cloudy mass, “is the size of a golf ball”—that he understood. The golf ball was inoperable. And it was not the only tumour. In their poking and prodding and snipping and slicing, they’d discovered other enemy soldiers hunkered down inside his bones. The war was lost.

  “What I think,” the doctor answered, “is not important. I have seen patients presenting in much the same way as you who have survived six months, and others who’ve lived two years or more. So . . .” She let that hang in the air. “The fact is that medicine is continually developing new and better treatment options that can help to extend and enhance life—”

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “No treatments. No chemotherapy, no radiation. If I have cancer and I know what the outcome is going to be, I’d rather just let nature take its course.”

  “But—”

  “Pain management at the end. Okay. I’m no martyr, I don’t want to die in pain. So fill with me drugs, whatever, but when I can’t cope any more.”

  The doctor smiled. “Well,” she said finally, “I see you’ve been thinking about this.”

  He had. He’d been thinking about it since he’d first convinced himself he had prostate cancer. It was different now, of course; he was more frightened knowing than he’d been merely imagining. Part of him wanted to rush off to Mexico or wherever miracle cures were on offer to swallow the seeds or bathe in the springs or rub mud all over or whatever he had to do to make himself whole again. But another part, the logical part, answered: Why bother? What are you living for? Not in some melodramatic, what-is-there-left-to-live-for way but in a clear-headed, what’s-the-difference-if-it’s-now-or-thirty-years-from-now way. He saw himself as a man in a canoe without a paddle, floating down a fast-moving river, being raked by a rock outcropping here, twisted around in an eddy there, flipped over a

  falls, shunted off to a quiet pool, sucked back into the current and now, the canoe leaking, hurtling toward a Niagara of a final falls. Over. Beyond his control.

  Life, he now believed, had always been beyond his control. He would never have become a politician if Jack hadn’t put that idea in his head. He would never have realized he liked being a politician if it hadn’t suddenly been snatched away from him. He would never have chosen to be a judge. Does any little kid dream of growing up to become a judge? Whatever happened to being Bill Mazeroski? Ward had been a judge for twenty-five years now. He had been a good judge, judicious, conscientious, scrupulously fair, an upholder of all that is right and just . . . but he couldn’t think of a single decision he’d made or opinion he’d written that would cast a shadow when he was gone.

  So what difference would living longer make?

  The doctors decided his resistance to treatment, his passivity in the face of death, indicated depression. They sent him to a shrink, who prescribed antidepressants. Ward didn’t take them. Just as he didn’t take the shrink’s advice to confide in someone.

  “Perhaps you’d like to have your wife join you when you talk with the doctor,” the nurse had helpfully suggested when she’d set up his appointment with Dr. Hussein.

  “We’re separated.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Well, perhaps another family member, or a friend, then.”

  “No, I’ll be fine.”

  Dr. Hussein made the same suggestions again after she told him he was dying. “Patients usually find it helpful to have someone to confide in,” she said.

  “Will it be obvious to anyone else that I have cancer?” Ward asked her.

  She smiled again. He seemed to amuse her. “Well, there won’t be a ‘C’ tattooed on your forehead. In the beginning, people may only notice that you’re losing weight. You’ll probably be coughing more, and your breathing may become more laboured.”

  “Can I keep working?”

  “If you want. For a while. But you may not have the energy for a full day.”

  “So I don’t have to tell anyone?”

  “Again, not in the beginning. But there will come a time . . . Are you sure there isn’t someone you can share this with?”

  “I’m sure.” He smiled back. “I’ll be fine.”

  At first, he was. He spent his days juggling medical appointments around judicial obligations, and coming up with excuses for Kathleen in order to explain why he would be late returning from lunch this afternoon or why he would have to leave work early again today. His medical appointments provided all the opportunity he could want to discuss his condition. “Could you tell me again about . . . ?” Or, “Why do I feel this pain in my . . . ?” But when it became clear that Ward really had no interest in treatment, the doctors lost interest in him.

  Which is when he began to rethink his decision not to tell Victoria. She had moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Clayton Park while she waited for her new three-bedroom Harbourland Estates condo to be completed. She needed the space, she’d explained, for when their daughters came to visit. That they would not choose to stay with him was a given, accepted if unacknowledged. Ward got along well enough with his daughters, but he had kept them at a distance while they were growing up, so their first loyalty was to Victoria.

  He knew he should tell Victoria, if not to have someone to confide in, at least so there would be someone to discuss the practicalities with. Cremation? Burial? Halifax? Eisners Head? Should he write his own obituary? In writing that, how should he deal with his sudden departure from politics? And his will—could he still leave everything to Victoria and let her deal with it? How would their separation affect her survivor benefits? For a man whose career had been the law, there were remarkable gaps in his legal knowledge.

  So yes, he should tell her. But if he did, would his resolve falter, would he change his mind about not raging at the closing of the day, or whatever saying it was that people trotted out whenever they talk about impending death?

  His decision to go gently into that good night, he knew, was fragile. If he did tell Victoria, and if she decided to come back to him, even to nurse him through his final days—which she almost certainly would—his resolve would shatter. Strange. For twenty-five years,
he’d imagined their separation as a Tom Rush song. In his imaginings, there were “no regrets, no tears goodbye.” That’s how much he knew.

  With the time he had left, he would make things as right as they could be with Victoria, maybe reconnect with his children. And, oh yes, he would also do that other thing, the one he’d put off for too many years. What was that guy’s name? He stood up finally, went to his desk and picked up the phone book.

  “What’d I tell you?” Shondelle said triumphantly, her voice rising as it inevitably did whenever she scored a debating point. Sometimes she annoyed him. “I was right. Wasn’t I right? I was, wasn’t I?”

  “You were,” Uhuru said without enthusiasm. He knew this was going to be like his father’s diary all over again. Shondelle had talked him into filing a federal Freedom of Information request for files the RCMP might have kept on him in the seventies.

  He’d trapped himself; he had been trying to impress her, telling her stories of his days with Black Pride. And Shondelle had interrupted him in full flight. “It’s a long shot, but you never know,” she’d said. “We could find something to use in court. There could be stuff in those files that sheds light on the official view of Africville at that time.”

  There wasn’t. So Shondelle wasn’t quite as right as she was now claiming. In fact, there were only two reference to Africville in the 750 pages of reports and notes and transcripts. One was in a background memo on Raymond Carter early in the file: “Subject born and raised in Africville, black ghetto on edge of Halifax. Moved to Toronto 1967.”

  Reading the complete file on himself had disturbed Uhuru. While he’d known he was being watched, he was stunned that so many trees had been cut down to so little purpose. And he was intrigued that the Mounties, perhaps mindful of the cost of his surveillance, had done their best to make him seem like an important target—a dangerous radical preparing to lead a full-out insurrection against the established order. Chance encounters became clandestine meetings. The innocuous was made to seem ominous.

  70/10/17. 12:45–14:30 hours. Downtowner Tavern. Subject met with [name blanked out for privacy reasons]. Topic of discussion unknown. Possible links to other strategy meetings of radical groups noted by officers in other Can. cities. Note to file: War Measures Act declared 70/10/16.

  14:30: Subject left rendezvous, proceeded on foot to payphone corner Gottingen & Cogswell Sts. Made call. Approx. 2 min. 30 sec. No info available. Proceeded to 27 Cornwallis Street, Subject’s domicile. Remained inside until 09:30 70/10/18. Trace team reports no phone calls from apartment.

  It had taken Uhuru a while to figure out whose name had been blacked out. It must have been that reporter—he couldn’t remember his name—who’d written the vote-buying story the Tribune wouldn’t publish. A few days after the election, he’d called Ray, asking to meet him at the Downtowner for lunch. Ray had assumed he was working on another story, but all the guy wanted to do was apologize that he hadn’t been able to get the story into the newspaper.

  “If you want, I’ll quit. I’ll call a press conference and tell everything that happened.”

  “No, man, don’t be stupid,” Ray replied. He’d never expected the paper to print the story; he’d just wanted Eagleson to know he was on to him, a none-too-subtle answer to Eagleson’s suggestion that he abandon Black Pride for law school.

  Ironic how that one had ultimately turned out, Uhuru thought now. The only thing he hadn’t expected at the time was that Ward Justice would have been in the middle of it all. He wondered, just for an instant, if those photos of Ward handing out turkeys still existed somewhere. He’d better not mention that to Shondelle or she’d be off on yet another wild . . . turkey chase.

  Uhuru couldn’t help but marvel at the Mounties’ thoroughness in documenting his life. There were even cryptic reports on his various meetings with Jack Eagleson. Eagleson’s name wasn’t blanked out in the files; the documents referred to him instead as CI#1376, which Uhuru eventually deduced must have stood for “confidential informant.” Jack Eagleson a police informant? Was that why he’d contacted Ray? To fish for information for his Mountie masters? But why Eagleson, a white, well-connected downtown lawyer? And, if he was looking for material to pass on to the cops, what had he learned? Not much. CI#1376’s reports of their meetings were bland. Interestingly, the reports never included references to Eagleson’s attempts to convince Ray to apply for law school. That remained another mystery to Uhuru.

  The identity of CI#223I was no mystery. CI#2231 appeared only once in the files, but Uhuru knew immediately who he was. “CI#2231 first met Subject in 1963. Both teenagers. Became friends, spent time together, mostly at Subject’s Africville domicile . . .” The second reference to Africville. And the first and only to Ward Justice! If there was any doubt, it was dispelled by the detailed story of the initial “contact between Subject and CI#2231” when Ray saved Ward from a beating at the hands of Jeremiah Black. There was nothing in anything Ward had said to the Mounties that was incriminating. The closest he came to even a negative suggestion was that “he and Subject did not continue friendship in high school; Subject preferred company of his own kind.” His own kind? Were those Ward’s words, or some Mountie’s interpretation of them?

  He knew that as soon as Shondelle figured out CI#2231’s identity—and she would—she would also see this as just more damning evidence to support her argument that he couldn’t allow Ward Justice to preside at J. J.’s trial.

  Uhuru would respectfully disagree.

  There would be another fight.

  He wasn’t certain why he persisted in defending Ward Justice. No, that wasn’t true. He just wasn’t sure he wanted to explain his reasons to Shondelle. There were, of course, arguments he could, and did, make.

  “Here’s a guy who spent time in Africville when he was growing up, who saw it as a real community—”

  “But look what he’s done since those good old days,” Shondelle countered. “Remember, this is the same guy who was directly involved in the plot to buy off your father, who treated you like shit that day in court, and who we now find out ratted you out to the cops.”

  “Don’t be so dramatic. He didn’t rat me out. All he did was tell them we’d been friends.”

  “But what was he doing talking about you to those guys?”

  “I don’t know.” He was retreating now. “What’s the difference?”

  “The difference is that this guy holds the key to our whole fucking case. If he says we can’t argue justification, we’re fucked.”

  “Look, why don’t we just forget it for now?” he said. “We have the documents. We can use them if we need to once we see what happens in court.”

  “Fine,” she said, though he knew from the tone of her voice it was anything but fine. “But just answer me one question, will you, Mr. Magnanimous? Why—why really—are you protecting this guy?”

  “No reason,” he answered. But of course there was. Uhuru had known about Ward and Rosa. Aunt Annie had told him. She’d also told him. Ward got Rosa off the streets and provided financial support for her and her child. At first he’d been jealous, but then, after the tragedy and Rosa’s sudden disappearance, he’d begun to see Ward as the man who’d done his best in difficult circumstances to help Rosa and her son. Perhaps Ray’s defence of Ward was just because he felt guilty about his own behaviour. What had he done for them? Whatever, he didn’t/couldn’t/wouldn’t tell Shondelle about Rosa and Ward, Rosa and him.

  When Shondelle had asked him about former girlfriends, he’d skipped over Rosa. Which meant that the sum total of the rest of his life confirmed Shondelle’s view that he was “one of those self-hating black men with a thing for white women.”

  Uhuru wasn’t certain she was wrong. Why had it always been so much easier with white women? Could it be because he understood those relationships weren’t going anywhere—that he was in it to burnish his own self-image, to prove
to himself that he could have a white girl and walk away?

  Could that be true with Shondelle, too? Could he just fuck her and forget her? There’d been opportunities. He’d drive her home, she’d invite him in for a drink. He’d say yes but, once inside, could never make the next move. Was it because that next move might lead to another, and another, and soon there’d be no walking away? Did he suspect he was falling love with this woman? Damn right. Was he scared? Damn right.

  R-i-n-g . . . r-i-n-g . . .

  Moira was sitting at her desk in a corner of the newsroom, intently reading her horoscope and trying to stay out of Michelle’s sightline, when she heard her phone. She tensed. There was a time when she would have grabbed it, knowing it had to be a callback on one of the half-dozen or so stories she was juggling at the time. Today, there were no calls out. So . . . it had to be the babysitter. Or, oh God, the police calling about the babysitter.

  She’d come back from maternity leave much too soon. But what choice did she have? She and Todd had split up. The end had come early in the ninth month of her pregnancy over the issue of what to name their child if it was a boy. Moira had wanted to call him Patrick, after her father. Todd had insisted on naming their son Todd, Jr.: “You know, to carry on the family name.”

  “Todd is an insipid name,” Moira had shot back, knowing exactly what she was saying, and saying it anyway. At least she hadn’t said Todd was an insipid man, though she believed that was true, too. Todd had moved out the next morning.

  The baby was a boy, and Moira named him Patrick. Her father was thrilled, more so when his daughter told him that Todd was out of her life. Patrick Donovan considered it a bonus when the Daily Journal reported that Todd’s condo project was in receivership.

  Except that it meant his daughter, like his ex-wife before her, was now a single mother with an undependable ex-spouse. Patrick had volunteered to help out by babysitting his grandson, but Moira, whose memories of her father’s parenting skills were not especially positive, demurred.