“Man, who’s the dream machine?”
“A friend.” Stoney’s on a need-to-know basis.
He grins. “I gotcha. Guess you ain’t coming down to hear Metal Zombie.”
I can already hear them, faintly, beyond the more salubrious music of tree frogs. I wish Stoney and Dog a happy time and remember to grab my bags and briefcase before they race away in a swirl of dust and smoke. I check to see that my Fargo is still moored to the utility pole.
“We’ll let Marie sleep,” April says, startling me by approaching suddenly and bussing me lightly, sweetly, before helping me with my bags to the veranda. “She has the room downstairs. I’ve made up the cot in your upstairs study. You don’t mind?”
“Absolutely … I mean, of course not, my dear.” I’m definitely feeling a bit high.
She takes my hand. “It’s a magic night. Let’s sit out here and count the stars.” She leads me to a rise above the pebble beach, and we settle on my wonky handmade wooden bench. “Remember,” she says, “no matter where you go, there you are.”
I ask Ms. Enigmatic what that Confucianism means. She just smiles. I tell her I have given up parsing the one about why a bird sings. She shrugs, as if to say that explaining just takes the fun out of it.
The windless sea is like wobbling glass. Lethargic waves lick the shoreline with a gentle swish, the only other sounds distant wails and bass thumps, like heartbeats. An all-nighter – Abraham Makepeace is probably taking advantage of this lawless time to get out from under his punitive mortgage.
I have many questions to ask but must abide by April’s fancy for dramatic waits. Finally: “Marie was adopted into a respected family at the Lac La Ronge Reserve – employees of the provincial park service – and she lived there until going to Saskatoon for a nursing degree. She returned to La Ronge to practise. At twenty-three, in 1996, she married Samson Dubois – I met him: quite shy, quite handsome. They have one child. Kestrel was born in 1997. I gather she was a handful. They stopped there – they had careers.” She shrugs. “I stopped before I started.”
A wistful pause. I want to hug her but worry that the desire is cannabis-induced, and that she will read it as going beyond avuncular. On the other hand, she hasn’t let go of my hand. I have never known quite what to make of this woman. I am well over twice her age, so she can’t possibly have romantic feelings.
“Let’s go back to when Marie was seven. That’s when Sebastien Snow arranged for her adoption, after his wife died and while he was in prison. With all his troubles, he was a caring man. Marie says he met with her adopting parents several times, wanting to make sure they were right for his daughter. He told them his history as his mother had told him: that he was Dermot Mulligan’s son, by rape – statutory rape, they called it.”
And that was to have remained a secret, but like most great family secrets it wasn’t kept. When Marie attained maturity, she was told about the famous professor whose genes were transferred unwillingly to Caroline Snow, then Sebastien, then Marie. Thence to Kestrel.
In her turn, Marie also swore never to tell her daughter. But that became too challenging a task in this era of Native truth-telling and redemption. Kestrel, who had been brought up to be independent, tough, and loving, and to respect her heritage, demanded the truth.
“Marie has a cellphone. Kestrel promised to call her this weekend. Is that enough for now? I’m almost too tired to sleep. Are you tired, Arthur? Do you want to go to bed?”
I feel incapable of answering any of these questions. They’re either banally straightforward or too complex and cryptic.
She puts an arm around me as we meander back to the house. I cannot fathom her apparent feelings for me – they seem beyond teasing – and am made nervous by them, but also thrilled. I try to suppress silly imaginings prompted by her choice of my studio to bunk in, just off my bedroom. Ridiculous imaginings. April knows Margaret, and that I’m devoted to her.
In the kitchen we dally over tea, and talk turns to the personal. She asks if my ex-wife is still pursuing me. I’m not sure, I say, but I may have been given a breather. More awkwardly than delicately, I remind her I’m concerned about keeping my current marriage on solid ground, and recall her favourite aphorism: “If you don’t want anyone to know, don’t do it.”
She looks at me oddly, as if missing my allusion. I’m embarrassed now with the turn our conversation has taken, and prompt her to talk about herself. She tells of her upbringing in mainland China, then Hong Kong, where she lived with her beloved grandmother, her inspiration, a student of Eastern philosophies.
I dare ask why she hasn’t mentioned her parents. She says, “Tiananmen Square, 1989. I was nine when they were taken away. They died in jail.” A long, melancholy pause. “My father was a great man, an intellectual, like you. I am in such pain when I remember him.” Tears fill her eyes.
I hug her then, unutterably sheepish about the ludicrous thoughts I’d harboured.
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2011
I wake in the early hours from a dream I can’t recall well. Just a snippet of speech: “He’s here, darling,” as flashbulbs pop outside and I scurry for my clothes but find only frilly underthings. I stare outside at the starlight for a long while, listening to the annoying thump-thump coming three miles from the bar at Hopeless Bay, wondering if that bit of dream is asking me to look once more at the photos by Jimmy Fingers.
Metal Zombie is still distantly pulsing at four a.m., a tribute to the staying power of the musicians, their fans, and their drugs. Also conspiring to keep me from sleep are Caroline and Sebastien and Marie and Kestrel. How does their familial history connect with the puzzle that has haunted me for almost fifty years? Is there salvation to be found for Gabriel Swift in this journey of generations? Yet another presence, quite near by, keeps me from subsiding back into the arms of Morpheus: April Wu on the cot next door, parentless April, veiling long-held sadness behind her saucy, cryptic persona.
When I awake a second time, the sun is streaming in, advertising another balmy day. The Zombies still haven’t pooped out, but I can hear only a sole guitar. The more comforting sounds are of honking geese and prowling chickadees, and several women’s voices downstairs. I recognize Yoki’s and Niko’s, their laughter.
I sense a presence in my doorway and blink away the sleep fog. April, with a portable phone and a mug of coffee, which she places at my bedside. “Good morning. Margaret called. She said not to wake you.” She whisks off before I find my voice.
Margaret answers immediately, in a chirpy mood. “How enterprising of you to surround yourself with a harem of young women while I’m away.”
April has filled her in as much as she can, and I embellish: a synopsis of my two tough days in court, which produces sympathy, and a rendering of Bully’s party and the stripping away of Caliginis’s sham show of expertise that produces delight.
“That did it for his prospects with Annabelle, I’m afraid. She walked off with Hubbell. Who knows what to expect from that?”
“Hmm,” she says, communicating absolutely nothing. She changes the subject to Ottawa. She and her friend Leslie Falk took two days off to holiday in the Gatineau Hills. Parliament is in the helpless grip of ennui. Rumours abound that the prime minister’s wife is having an affair with a policewoman.
“Also,” she says, “I love you. I felt I needed to tell you that.”
I don’t ask why but suspect Margaret feels anxiety over Annabelle. An awareness she ought not to take good old Arthur for granted. Nobly, I will forgive this overburdened eco-warrior for her recent standoffish manner. Meanly, I thank Annabelle.
I sign off with Ms. Browning’s famous avowal: “I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach, when feeling out of sight.”
Feeling like an outsider in a world of women, but showered, shaved, and combed, as ready as I can be, I descend to find them making pancakes with Saskatoon berry jam, a gift from Marie Dubois. She looks younger than in her TV interviews, and slighter,
probably from weight-reducing worry. She greets me with a smile that isn’t forced, one that must often comfort her patients.
Over the pancakes – ambrosial, I declare, a life-altering experience – I entertain with tales of yesterday’s preposterously overdone birthday party. A tune interrupts this: the opening bars of “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To,” and I realize that Marie, poignantly, has set that as her ringtone. It’s her husband, Samson, from La Ronge; she finds a quiet corner to talk to him.
Afterwards, when the WOOFers go out to woof, I invite Marie into the parlour and offer some consoling thoughts about her missing daughter, followed by a dose of hearty optimism. “I can hardly wait to meet this amazing, strong-willed young lady. And so bright. Top of her class, I hear.”
“I’m sure she will call today,” Marie says. April stands apart in the room’s shadows, a listening ghost.
Gently I pull from Marie her perspective on Kestrel’s quest. She begins by regretting she’d divulged her grim family secret to her daughter. “I didn’t want her to know she was descended from him … from an act of criminal intercourse; it was long over, decades ago. She knew I was adopted and that my people came from the Fox Lake Reserve, nothing more. But all that truth-talking got to me – the truth and reconciliation stuff – and she was into it.”
Kestrel researched the residential schools as a class project, read oral histories prepared for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission – maybe Ethel Brière’s, but Marie isn’t sure. “She pestered me, and I felt she had a right to know, so I sat down with her. And we had a fight. She was angry because I’d kept such a secret. I was part of the problem, I’d blinded myself to the past, a victim of white racism – that’s what she said.” She brushes away a tear, and April is suddenly there with a tissue. Marie thanks her and continues.
“She wanted to know more and more about her great-grandfather, even read some of his works. It was if she was after something, looking for clues about him, about why he did such a horrible thing. There’s a book about Dr. Mulligan she read. And hordes of stuff about Gabriel Swift. Even a book written about you, Mr. Beauchamp. She was obsessed by it … her heritage, her dark heritage.”
Yes, Arthur Ramsgate Beauchamp turns out to be a player in this teenage Homeric odyssey – Achilles storming the gates of Troy in pursuit of justice. My reopening of the case set Kestrel on the hunt a month ago, backpacking to British Columbia with two sets of clothes and six hundred dollars.
Marie believes Kestrel’s resolute investigation explains her visit to Squamish and gives credence to reports of her daughter’s sighting on the UBC campus. Clearly Kestrel was checking out Mulligan’s former stamping grounds, probably surveyed his former house in Point Grey. We speculate about whether she tried to track down Irene – still alive, though a century in age. I remember reading somewhere, in a “Where Are They Now?” article, that she’s being cared for by a full-time nurse in a cottage in a seaside village on Vancouver Island: Fanny Bay, up the coast from Nanaimo. That might account for Kestrel’s having been seen on a ferry.
But what does she expect to obtain from all this? What answers, to what questions? It seems more than a means of satisfying curiosity. Revenge? Making a claim to her birthright? Marie admits to being stumped, and I am too.
She is startled when I tell her I represented her birth father, Sebastien, and eager to hear more. Then she is saddened by the circumstances I relate, the purposeless shattering of car windows. Yet she smiles when I repeat his dry comment: It seemed to be the most sensible thing to do at the moment.
“Do you have any idea if Sebastien ever contacted Dr. Mulligan?”
“No. I was told some of his history. I know he was with his mom when she died. I know he tried to pick up the pieces; he gave it his best shot, and didn’t make it. Didn’t want to live.”
More tears. Some are mine.
To allay the tension of waiting for Kestrel’s call, I lose myself in the myriad tasks of the field for an hour or so while April and Marie, her cellphone at the ready, explore the shoreline and the gentle bluffs above it. Then, equipped with rucksack, I tramp off to the Hopeless Bay store and bar – a health walk, to be followed by some light engagement with the locals to let them know the old gunfighter isn’t quite done yet.
I have no sooner got to Centre Road than I have to step off it to make way for a speeding, swerving minibus with a crudely painted logo: Metal Zombie. I assume its freaky-looking occupants are late for the eleven-thirty ferry. Their catch of the day is with them, waving from the windows, bleary and besotted: an omnium-gatherum of Nine Easy Pieces. In hot pursuit, a pickup with, I assume, a few irate boyfriends.
A sorry sight greets me as I begin the descent from Breadloaf Hill. Stoney has missed his driveway, driven his topless muscle car onto the Shewfelts’ lawn, and dug himself in while trying to back out. He is passed out on the front seat. Dog is hard to pick out among the leprechauns, among whom he’s found a grassy bed. On returning home from church, the Shewfelts, observant Pentecostals, may suffer an incalculable loss of faith: God is not always good.
Farther along, Cud Brown’s beater sits in a ditch. Closer to the bar, Ernie Priposki on foot, wandering, lost. Baldy Johansson is literally being pulled by the ear by his spouse, down the steps from the bar to their car. To Baldy goes the award for last man standing – the bar is empty but for some fellow under a table and the girls from Mop’n’Chop cleaning up. The damage includes a shattered guitar and drum set. The cash register is open, empty. I am put in mind of the lawless West of the movies, after an outlaw has shot the sheriff. What they say is true: you never miss the police until you need them.
The bar’s cash tray has not been rifled, as I suspected. It’s on the store’s checkout counter, where barkeeper Emily LeMay, bedraggled and exhausted, is counting out the take for Abraham Makepeace, who has just shown up, his normally solemn face gleefully lit by prospects of profit.
“Gets the mortgage out of arrears,” he says. “Downside is we ran out of supplies. Have to wait for the beer truck tomorrow.”
He catches me looking longingly at Blunder Bay’s well-stuffed mail slot. “Not a snowflake’s chance. This here’s the Lord’s Day.’
“And the Lord bade us be charitable. I’ve been away all week.”
“Rules ain’t made to be bent, or you got anarchy.”
“I see a special delivery there.”
“That’ll be the packet of Danish pipe tobacco you ordered. Available Monday. The rest is mostly bills and periodicals. Canadian Goat magazine. Postcard from Costa Rica – Brian Pomeroy, your former legal associate. Kind of a mental case, as I recall.”
“And how is he?”
“Looks like he got into some jam down there. I ain’t quoting him exactly, but he wonders if maybe you’d like to come down for a holiday and consult. And what else … oh, yeah, another card, from Wentworth Chance. He’s teaching a biography-writing seminar. Mulligan House. Thought you might be interested.”
“He deludes himself.”
“I guess you’re busy with other things.” That sounds like a dig, but I don’t get it.
Emily gives me a pat on the bottom as she edges past me. “You old dog.”
Now I get it – their allusions are to the dream machine Stoney didn’t get introduced to. Secrets distort quickly into base rumour on this island of genial busybodies. Fere libenter homines id quod volunt credunt, wrote Caesar. People readily believe what they want to believe.
The only customers in the store are the tank-topped organic growers we call Wellness and Wholeness, with their uncompromisingly furry armpits. I find myself unmoved by the sight – my paraphilia, so recently unloaded on Margaret, may be in robust remission.
By later afternoon I am back in my parlour, the Swift file out again. Still bugged by that dream – “He’s here, darling,” the flashbulbs going off – I am studying one of Jimmy Fingers’ photos with a magnifying glass: Mulligan standing barefoot on the bedroom rug. Though the picture is da
rk and grainy, I’m persuaded I see a toenail on his small toe, where there should be only a hard little bud.
I’d focused so hard on the likelihood of suicide that I’d neglected the possibility he’d died at the hands of another, that in fact he may have been done in by his wife. Yet it seems incomprehensible she would be capable of such a deed, this reclusive, mousy collector of international bridge points. But have I been blindly resisting the possibility? Ignoring a glaring motive? His affairs, his trysts with Rita Schumacher …
I’ve always prided myself on recognizing guilt and evil when I look them hard in the face, but truly I didn’t know Irene well – just those few conversations over the years. I don’t know what darkness may have resided in her soul, what hidden anger, what simmering fires. But I ought not to be thinking of her in the past tense; she lives on, comfortably, on his insurance, pensions, royalties, the invested sales of home and hobby farm.
So there’s motive and also opportunity. Irene usually took a late afternoon walk down Squamish Valley Road if it wasn’t raining. She took such a walk on Saturday, April 21, 1962, at around four o’clock. A walk that could have taken her on a detour to the fishing hole whose location she disclaimed knowledge of. And what might have happened there between introverted Irene and her vigorous, outdoors-loving husband? The heap of clothes, the spermy panties … My mind can’t come to grips with that; it defies credence.
All these thoughts I confide to April Wu when she joins me after her hike with Marie to Gwendolyn Park. I show her the photo of Mulligan’s foot and she peers at it, magnified, a long time. “Really hard to say. Could be an imperfection.”
I'll See You in My Dreams: An Arthur Beauchamp Novel Page 39
