Living with the hawk

by Robert Currie

  My father sat down, suddenly. He looked as if I’d hit him.

  “Blake was sick about it. I said I wouldn’t tell you.” I took a deep breath, tried not to sob. “When Anna died — where she was beat up, the snow was all yellow. They’d done the same thing. That’s why I thought it was Blake. But I was wrong. He’d never do anything like that again.”

  My father had tears in his eyes. “I see,” he said. “That’s what was going on.” I could barely hear him.

  “I wasn’t supposed to tell. I promised.” And then I broke down, sobbing like a fool. I’d betrayed my bother.

  “The two of you,” he said, his voice louder now, “you were both going through hell.”

  “Yeah.”

  He stood up again, bent toward me and gave me an awkward hug in my chair. “You were right to tell, Blair. Some things need saying, or they just eat away inside.”

  I thought he was finished, but he sat back down, taking his weight on his hands, and pushed himself across the bed until he was leaning against the wall. “I know you loved your brother.”

  “Of course, I did!” Was he going to stay here all night and make stupid comments?

  “Yes.” He looked almost relaxed with his back resting on the wall. His eyelids slowly closed. “The thing is, I think you’re still angry with him.”

  “Maybe I am.” I was surprised at his statement, surprised at my response.

  His eyes were still shut, but he had more to say. “Judge not, and ye shall not be judged; condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned.” His eyes flicked open, held me like spotlights on a deer. “Forgive, and ye shall be forgiven.”

  “I don’t think I believe that stuff anymore.” I said it, angered by the way he was always going to the Bible now, but I might have been afraid that he was right. I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand.

  My father looked hurt. “It’s been serving people well for centuries, advice on how to conduct our affairs, how to live. It’s been good enough for more brilliant people than we can imagine, people a lot smarter than we’ll ever be.”

  There was something in what he said, I know, but his Bible-spouting inflamed me. I wanted to take him on. “How come every time you turn around they’re changing what it says?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s the King James Version, the New Revised Version, the Jerusalem Bible, the Good News Bible. I don’t know how many others.”

  “The language might change a bit, they make the same point.”

  “How do we know it isn’t all a load of crap? Every version of it pure bullshit.”

  “Blair! You’re angry. You don’t know what you’re saying.” He was rigid against the wall, trying to hold his temper.

  “I know exactly what I’m saying. If God had any power at all, he would’ve kept Blake alive.”

  “Don’t blame God!” he said, his voice rising as he heaved himself across the bed. “Don’t you dare blame God!” He grabbed me by the hand, squeezed it tight. “And don’t blame yourself. You mustn’t do that.” His grip like pliers on my fingers.

  I felt tears stinging my eyes again.

  He noticed, dropped my hand at once. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  I could still feel the pressure of his fingers, but it wasn’t that. He’d squeezed my hand exactly the way that Blake had squeezed it, the last time I’d seen him.

  If I didn’t say something, I knew I was going to cry again, but I’d done enough of that already, crying for Blake, crying for myself. “Whose fault is it then?”

  My father shrugged. Hesitated, ducked his head. Then he said something that surprised me, something I’d often heard from mouthy kids spouting off at school, something I never thought I’d hear from him. “Shit happens. It gets smeared everywhere. It’s just part of life. What matters is that we figure out a way to handle it.” He reached for me again, put his arms around me, held me, my head buried against his chest.

  If he looked he would see that my cheek was wet, but he wasn’t going to hear me crying any more. I let him hold me till I was certain my voice wouldn’t waver when I spoke.

  “I want to see where he died,” I said.

  After my father talked to him — I have no idea what he said to convince him, or even if it was difficult — Mr. Hammond agreed to show us around. It’s still the only time in my life I’ve ridden in a cop car. My father sat in the passenger seat, and I was in the back, a Plexiglas screen separating me from the front seat and the driver. My mother chose to stay at home. She said there was nothing there she needed to see. Or wanted to see.

  We drove through the city parking lot, past sites reserved for the mayor, the chief of police, the city commissioner, entered the police station through a huge grey door, which rose before us exactly like the automatic door in our garage at home. When Mr. Hammond shut the engine off, I glanced out the car’s rear window, the door dropping closed behind us. Mr. Hammond got out of the car and opened the back door for me.

  “Blake came down to the station himself,” he said, “through the front door, but this is where they brought the others in. It’s a secure bay.”

  I looked around me. Drab blank walls without a window, a wire cage full of bicycles, probably stolen, bikes that had somehow been recovered, another cage with three cases of beer locked inside it. Mr. Hammond saw me looking at the beer. “Evidence,” he said, but offered no further explanation. It was all new to me. When I’d been down to see Blake, I’d come through the street entrance with Ms. McKinnel.

  Mr. Hammond led us to a metal door, punched four numbers into a key pad, swung the door open, motioned for us to enter. When I hesitated, my father stepped into the station first. Following behind him now, I saw a brightly lit hall, the kind you might find in any office building. It didn’t seem like a jail.

  I felt foolish, holding back like that, and turned to Mr. Hammond. “Which way’s the basement?”

  He looked puzzled. “You want to see the basement?”

  “Aren’t the cells down there?”

  “No. Cells are this way.” He must have seen my ears begin to burn because he quickly added, “I guess in the old building they were in the basement. Before my time. I dare say, it wasn’t the best place for a lockup.”

  Was I thinking about a dungeon? Was that what it was? Stone walls and darkness, dank smells, prisoners clinging to iron bars.

  We walked along the hall and passed a central desk, a clerk doing paperwork, a monitor on a shelf in front of him. Mr. Hammond led us through a doorway, its metal door wide open. I noticed a video camera mounted high on the wall beyond the door.

  “No one in the cells today,” Mr. Hammond said. “That’s the case a lot of the time.” He motioned to another open door. “We can take a look at a cell if you like. They’re all the same.”

  The three of us stood a moment in the empty hall. I saw my father turn to Mr. Hammond and raise his eyebrows.

  “Yes, well,” he said, “I guess you might say this is where it started.” He took half a dozen steps down the hall and pointed to another sliding door. “Right here.” So that was the door he’d hit.

  We already knew what had happened.

  Mr. Hammond had come over to the house himself to tell us the story, to make sure we got the details straight. I remembered how hard it was for him, crushing his cap in his hand, seated in our living room on the same chair where he’d sat for my parents’ open house at Epiphany, my mother sobbing on the couch, but, although he glanced more than once toward our front door, he made no attempt to leave until he was sure he’d answered all my parents’ questions.

  I stared at the cell door. Metal hard and solid as a wall, the kind of thing you might expect to see on a bunker in a bomb shelter. We were standing where he had stood. I knew I could close my eyes and see it happen.

  The guys are wearing handcuffs as two officers escort them down the hall. They all walk slowly, as if they’d prefer to remain in their individual cells rather than have to face a judge tog
ether. My brother’s in the lead, Jordan Phelps a step or two behind him. Vaughn Foster and Todd Branton are even farther back. They shuffle along, seem to dawdle until an officer says, “Move along, eh. We’re not going to a picnic.”

  That’s when Jordan Phelps speaks, his voice so quiet only one of the men is close enough to catch the words. “Bastard, you’re the one who killed her.”

  But as he speaks, he lunges at my brother, ramming him from behind, his shoulder driving Blake into the metal door.

  Blake’s head slams against the door, snaps back. Before anyone can catch him, he falls over backwards, landing hard, his head bouncing on the floor.

  One of the officers shoves Jordan aside, the other pulls Blake to his feet, asks if he’s okay. Blake nods his head, and they lead him down the hall to face the judge. After that, he doesn’t speak to anyone.

  I was staring at the door. It was solid metal, not a bar on it. A window so thick, you suspected even a brick wouldn’t crack it.

  Mr. Hammond must have noticed me. “It’s a sliding door,” he said. “Once it’s shut, nothing budges it but us.”

  I had to ask the question. “Is this the cell where he — ?” But I couldn’t say it.

  Mr. Hammond frowned. He walked down the hall and nodded toward an open door.

  We stepped through the doorway. There were no bars anywhere; the cell was made of concrete. A stainless steel toilet on the far wall, a sink attached to it, also stainless steel. There was no toilet seat, I noted, and no handles, the water in both sink and toilet controlled by pressing buttons. The bed was in the corner, but there was no bed frame. The mattress, which looked thin, lay on what seemed to be a shelf of solid steel. The whole place cold and sterile. I couldn’t imagine spending a single night here.

  “Not much to see,” said Mr. Hammond. He looked uncomfortable. “It’s basically your bare room.”

  My father was already backing out the door, but I was staring at the vent on the wall above the sink. I had to be sure. “This is . . . where he did it?”

  Mr. Hammond took a deep breath, let it slowly out. “He must’ve been depressed as hell. That, and the knock on the head, maybe. We had his shoe laces, his belt, but he took off his shirt, ripped it into strips. Knotted them together, tied a noose in one end.” Mr. Hammond was talking faster now; he’d already told us what had happened, but he couldn’t seem to stop himself. “Only way he could’ve reached the vent would be by standing on the sink there. Somehow he got his line threaded through the vent. Clerk at the desk checks the cells on a regular schedule, saw him hanging there. Lord, he was still warm when they got to him, but they couldn’t bring him back.”

  Right here was where it happened — because I lost my patience with him, because I wouldn’t wait and turned the others in. Because Jordan Phelps figured Blake had ratted on him and labelled Blake the killer.

  I was leaning on the door, the metal hard and chill beneath my palm, my forehead resting on what seemed a slab of ice, when I felt my father’s hand fall upon my shoulder. He pulled me to him then and wrapped me in his arms. A while after that I heard his voice behind me.

  “Thanks, Ham,” he said. “I don’t know if it will help, but I think we’ve seen enough.”

  A few minutes later, Mr. Hammond drove us home.

  Another night of staring at the ceiling, my legs, my arms taut as the metal frame on the bed.

  I’d gone through everything — well, almost everything — tried to keep it all in order, see it as it happened. For three years after Blake’s death, my parents went about their business the same as usual, but they moved as if they were hypnotized, as if they’d been told what was expected of them, but they couldn’t quite get it right. For a while my father talked about leaving the Diocese of Qu’Appelle and applying for a transfer to Rupertsland, but my mother wouldn’t think of moving east to Winnipeg. This was our home, she said, we weren’t going to leave it.

  Sometimes in the evening when I walked by my father’s den, I’d see him hunched over his desk and wonder if he’d been crying. If he did cry, he made sure I never heard him, never saw his tears. Once or twice, when he was conducting a funeral I’d hear him hesitate in the middle of his homily, and I’d think that he was struggling to control his feelings, but I couldn’t be sure. He kept going because he had his faith to keep him going. So did my mother.

  I never saw her cry but once after my brother’s funeral. Late one evening they were at the dining room table, the last time my father talked about a transfer. “No,” she said, “we’re staying here.” They’d done nothing wrong, she added, and neither had Blake, not really. I suspect my father never told her about what had happened that night in Fosters’ yard. I knew I’d never tell her. She had enough to deal with.

  “Paul,” she added after a pause, “you gave Blair some advice one night, and he took it — nothing wrong in that.” Then she was crying, tears running down her cheeks, her chest heaving as she strained for breath. My father was so surprised, he didn’t move for a minute. By the time he got to her, she had her handkerchief out, was dabbing at her eyes.

  “It was me that was wrong,” she said as he bent awkwardly towards her, putting his arms around her. “I was angry, crazy with anger. Pulling away from both of you. When we should have been talking. We might have been able to help Blake. To help each other.”

  “I didn’t know what to do,” I said. I thought I was going to cry too.

  “Don’t know why it is,” my father said, “but sometimes it’s easier to talk with people in the parish you hardly know.” Although one arm was still around my mother, he reached toward me with his other hand and squeezed my shoulder. “Instead of the ones you love.”

  “Well,” said my mother, “well. I guess that’s sometimes how it is.” She leaned against his chest for just a moment. “It’s okay, Paul. I’m all right now.”

  When he released her, she reached for her coffee cup and took another swallow. “I was wrong about something else too,” she said, “saying what I said that night. As if Indians didn’t matter.” She dumped what was left of her coffee into the sink. “I’m going up to bed. I’ve got things to do tomorrow.”

  The next morning, she started phoning people in the parish, proposing that on the second Sunday of every month it should be a parish project to bring donations for the food bank. That very day she went up to Canadian Tire and bought a huge rubber tub to hold whatever food was collected. I wondered if she was trying to ease her guilt, but I thought it best not to ask.

  Amber Saunders came back to Palliser for the trial. Her family had moved to Saskatoon in the second semester of grade nine, Amber so cowed by events of that fall, by the talk that always swirled around her, she must’ve been glad to get away. At school in Palliser, it seemed, her eyes never left the floor. Even then, as green as I was, I was smart enough to see that whenever a guy or guys did something to a girl, it was usually the girl that everybody talked about, the girl whose reputation suffered. Saskatoon had to be a sanctuary after that. Still, when she gave her testimony, she was able to take the stand and describe how Anna Big Sky had angered Jordan Phelps. She didn’t look at Jordan, but her voice never faltered.

  It was a murder trial, of course, all three guys charged with first-degree murder, but the lawyers must’ve had some kind of weird influence on the jury, maybe the judge too, because even Jordan Phelps was convicted of nothing more than manslaughter. In his instructions to the jury the judge seemed to favour the boys who were alive over the girl who was dead. He emphasized that, except for a single liquor charge, these were boys with no criminal records, and they were all drunk, a fact that he said merited some consideration. He reminded members of the jury that the girl had been alive when they abandoned her, that she had, in fact, walked at least the distance of a city block.

  After the verdict was announced, a Sioux chief from Wood Mountain spoke to the press on behalf of the Big Sky family. “This isn’t justice,” he said. “The family’s outraged. It should be murde
r in the first degree. This one boy, he wanted to kill her, and that’s exactly what they did. It was clearly racism.”

  I have no idea what the jury considered in their deliberations, but you had to feel for Anna’s family. They couldn’t help but be furious.

  I thought it significant that, a week after the verdict, when the judge did the sentencing, he spoke of the repugnance of a crime so marked by brutality and degradation. The offenders, he said, were despicable cowards. He hadn’t used those terms before, and I wondered if he was trying to make amends for the influence he’d had with his soft charge to the jury.

  Jordan Phelps got the stiffest sentence, but it was only six and a half years. There was a series of letters to the paper after the sentencing, a big stink, in fact, but it didn’t change a thing. Anna was still gone, and my brother too — his life snuffed out in an instant, and it’s weird as hell, but for some reason I remembered that hawk in our backyard, falling on its prey, my mother startled, her hand at her mouth, suds dripping from her chin. There’s the fate we face, I’m sure. It can strike at any time. Somehow we have to find a way to live with it.

  “Forgive,” my father said, “and ye shall be forgiven.” Advice he found, I’ve long since learned, in the Gospel according to St Luke, and good advice it is, no doubt. Sometimes, though, it takes a while before you find a way to forgive yourself. When you know in your heart that if you weren’t so pig-headed, if you’d sat down and talked to your brother, if you’d only levelled with him, things might have been different.

  I’m older now than my brother when he died, and still I sometimes think I feel his hand gripping mine, his eyes imploring me, the moment already passing when I might have told him I understood his shame, his need to lie to me. The moment when I didn’t speak.