by Mark Lisac
He was relieved that she was no longer living her last days in fear. Fear had been replaced by sadness, then a grudging acceptance. Now, as the pain and debility increased, she was starting to think that death might not be the worst of alternatives.
Neither of them talked about what might have been. She told him that he made her feel there was hope in the world, even when none existed for her. He told her she made him feel at peace, even when he knew he was going to miss her.
That was in April. She was buried in May. Asher did not attend the funeral. It was a quiet affair with her brother, her two closest friends among the other teachers, and a handful of old family friends.
He was surprised to hear she had been buried in Rosemont, an hour and a half drive southeast of Barnsdale. The Finleys came from around there. So did the Attersons on her mother’s side. Finley told him that Angela had always felt more at home there. She had also loved the landscape.
The cemetery was bordered on the north and west sides by caragana bushes. The other two sides, looking away from the small country church, opened onto grain fields and a coulee. Buckbrush and wildflowers grew toward the top edge of the coulee. There was dry grass and sage toward the bottom where the creek began. The grain fields were white in winter and golden in summer. The sky was vast, a shining blue in winter, paler in summer.
Finley said Angela especially liked the sight of hawks soaring over the fields in summer but felt she could watch the sky and listen to the silence for hours at any time of year.
He was spending most of his time in rehabilitation and preparing to get an artificial leg fitted. He expected to be walking — or learning a new type of walk — by late fall. He told Asher the prosthetic would be inconvenient but would make him feel part of the group of wounded veterans he had known in the army. Not that he wanted to join that club. But if you had to join a club, there were worse ones.
“Survived Afghanistan with only one scratch, got shot on a farm at Barnsdale,” he said. “If it wasn’t funny, I might cry.”
Asher forgot how to either laugh or cry. The pain of losing Angela had partially obscured his daily memories of Sandra. The unfairness of Finley losing a leg to a hillbilly with poor impulse control and careless aim galled him.
He accepted that he shared some blame for what happened. But the person who had set everything in motion was sitting safe in a legislature office, when he wasn’t eating late-night pizza or calamari with Karamanlis.
Asher had listened to Angela talking about not leaving the world steeped in anger. He had given himself an exemption. He felt free to be angry because he was nowhere near leaving the world. He needed more than a sketchy description from a low-life thief. He also knew he would have to find out sooner or later whether Karamanlis was involved.
He smothered his frustrations by throwing himself into his legal work. He still made plenty of time for his daughter. Once when he was picking up Amy, Sandra said he looked distracted. He heard that she had started going out with a bank vice-president but was waiting for her to mention it first.
The cemetery outside Rosemont occupied his mind. Finley’s description had been vivid. But Asher did not want to visit Angela’s grave. He did not tell Finley that he had what felt like a compulsion to visit graves, and that not wanting to see Angela’s grave was unusual. Finley told him that seeing the cemetery and the spot where Angela lay buried could help him accept Angela’s death and put it past him. There was hardly a more peaceful place imaginable.
Asher remembered how being with Angela had made him feel at peace. He worried that visiting her resting place would make him feel like she was still there, just around the corner of the church or below the rim of the coulee.
Finley said they could go together sometime. He would show Asher some of the local history — the flat patch of ground where a small grain elevator had once stood; the spot where the house of ill-repute had entertained lonely miners; the old railbed that was now a path by the creek; the patch of hillside that yielded bits of fossil if you looked closely at the striated layers of clay and low-grade coal; the bowl-shaped hillside at the end of the coulee. The hillside still occasionally yielded slugs fired into it by Finley’s great-uncle and by other members of the high-school rifle club who had gone on to shoot at more dangerous targets in Italy and northern Europe.
“There’s a lot of history in that dirt,” Finley said.
Asher did not press Finley on the subject of John Apson’s furtive research. He did ask about the phrase “Mary’s little lamb.” Finley knew Apson had mentioned it, but otherwise knew it only as a nursery rhyme.
Morley Jackson stopped in at his office at least once a week. Asher was aware that the visits reversed Asher’s habit of visiting Jackson’s office. He saw a bland expression on Jackson’s face that could have been a screen for something else. Asher felt too tired to tell Jackson that he did not need moral support. He also appreciated the visits, even if they were short.
In the end, he drove down to Rosemont.
It was the first Saturday in June. He left the city during one of the month’s regular drizzles. The car stereo played Jr. Gone Wild’s “Rhythm of the Rain.” Asher turned off the music as the showers gave way to blue patches and high cloud. He did not want any sound to distract him from the sight of the young wheat, barley, and canola along the highway. The hissing of the tires on the asphalt seemed like part of what he saw rather than an intrusion of noise. The grain fields were interspersed with pastures where Hereford and Black Angus calves stuck close to their mothers. Closer to Rosemont, some fields were dotted with box-like metal structures and pipes at the heads of gas wells.
He found the church and the cemetery. He parked under a tall elm and walked past the caraganas and into the graveyard.
Some of the tombstones were decades old. Small bouquets of flowers, both artificial and real, lay in front of a handful of the newer stones, the ones that had been placed during the last twenty years or so.
He followed Finley’s directions and found Angela’s plot. The simple beige granite slab she had wanted would not be ready for placement at the head of the plot for a couple of months.
Asher stared at the rectangle of light brown dirt. He did not feel the chest-heaving jerk of emotion that he had feared when he left the city. He still felt drained. There was sadness but no tears.
He looked up, his gaze sweeping over ranks of more established graves. He looked back at Angela’s small rectangle of ground and was happy that she had a beautiful resting place. It was a quiet beauty. Most cemeteries were just silent or thick with a sense of abandonment. This one was peaceful, as Finley had said — not in the sense of nothing happening, but in the sense that the place conveyed a feeling of harmony. But it did not bring the peace he had felt when she had been alive and with him.
Angela Finley. He had known her for a few months as Angela Apson, an identity she seemed happy to shed as a pointless encumbrance. She had connected with him in a way that he had not known with anyone other than Sandra. Yet she had not erased Sandra from his thoughts, not nearly.
He felt he had known her for a lifetime but also felt the people who had been here for her burial remembered a different person, or perhaps aspects of her that he had not had time to encounter. What, after all, did he know about teachers?
After a time that he could not estimate, he walked over to the rim of the coulee. The planted grass of the cemetery gave way to drier, more spindly native prairie grass.
He looked down the coulee’s length, deepening into the layers of soil going back hundreds of millions of years but lit by the ever-present sun. He looked into the vast blueness of the sky and walked back to Angela’s grave. He stared at it for a few more minutes. Then he turned into
the light breeze coming from the west and walked back to his car, wondering if he would ever visit here again after the headstone had been placed.
Heat had built up inside the car despite the elm tree’s shade and the windows being down. He started the engine and pulled out of the parking lot, listening to the tires crunching on the gravel, and turned down the secondary highway to Rosemont. He thought he would find a locally owned café where he could buy a lunch.
He wondered if driving down the main street in his vintage Jaguar would turn heads and start people gossiping about who he might be. Old machinery was familiar in the town, though. He parked in front of a western wear clothing store, got out, and saw a nicely restored Packard from the late 1940s or early 1950s parked across the street in front of the seniors’ centre. He remembered that the people out here were always a little more sophisticated than many outsiders thought.
He strolled into the Flowerpot Café and found a small table. The other customers were middle-aged farm couples in town for a little shopping. There were a few older groups. Two young women who looked like store clerks had decided to come here to have sandwiches with bean sprouts rather than burgers a block up in the fast-food joints. He ordered a Denver sandwich and a coffee from the blank-faced young waitress who didn’t know she looked sullen and probably wouldn’t care if she did. Her cropped hair was dark brown with harsh blonde streaks and she had three metal studs in one ear. Asher wondered what her life would be like when she was in her thirties. Then he wondered how long seeing kids like that would remind him of Angela, who had claimed to enjoy trying to teach them, about English literature and about life.
He finished his sandwich, enjoying the egg and ketchup taste and thankful that he did not have to worry about cholesterol. More than half the older members of the firm seemed to be taking drugs for that. Of course, it helped that he never got his cholesterol measured and had no intention of doing so unless he started gaining a lot of weight. He pushed the last few fries around on his plate and left them. In a few years he would probably not even start them. It seemed a reasonable tradeoff: cut out the fries, keep drinking the brandy.
The late spring sunlight made the front window a bright screen on which a few people occasionally walked by. They were the main characters in their own lives. Seen through the window, shaped like a theatre screen, they were extras in the uneventful movie of daily life on Rosemont’s old commercial strip.
At least there were people. The new commercial strip on the highway was all motels, gas stations, a hangar-like building where big rigs could be repaired and washed, real estate offices, fast-food franchises; instead of people, there were only trucks and cars.
Asher realized he was enjoying the break from the office routine and the city. He also decided the break had been long enough. He could be accomplishing something. At least on the drive home, he could be enjoying his car. He reached quickly into his pocket for money to pay the bill and stood up abruptly.
On his way out, his eye wandered to a corner booth to the right of the front door. Faces still attracted him; he was not sunk completely into himself.
An older couple were talking to a woman across the table from them. Something about their profiles registered in his memory. The woman across the table was smiling as she listened to the man telling a story. She had medium-brown hair going grey. She had an oval face and small chin.
As Asher approached, she glanced at him. He saw eyes like burnished chestnuts, and stopped.
27
THE WOMAN TOLD HER COMPANIONS, “I MUST LOOK BETTER than I did in the mirror this morning. This fellow’s struck dumb by my beauty. Looks like he’s paralysed, too.”
Asher was grateful that she said it almost with a laugh. He said, “Excuse me. I’m sure I’ve seen you before. All three of you.”
He was sure now the woman sitting alone had been in the courtroom the day he sat in on Turlock’s trial. The couple seemed familiar, although he had seen them only in profile. The man was at least Asher’s height, halfway between thin and stocky, grinning under a broad moustache. He had eyes that said he was happy to meet people. The woman beside him looked placid and was well groomed and neatly dressed, a far cry from the revolutionary crone that Asher had imagined in the courtroom. He found himself looking more at the couple than at the woman across the table from them; he had not had as good a view of them before.
“My name’s Harry Asher. I was at Victor Turlock’s trial. I think all three of you were sitting down the bench from me.”
“Could be,” the man said.
The woman with brown eyes said, “I remember you. You did a good survey of the spectators. And you looked like you were only half-listening, but near the end of the day you perked right up like someone had just rung the dinner bell.”
“I didn’t realize I stood out that much. I don’t want to intrude, but can I talk to you about the trial?”
“Sure,” the man said. “Go ahead and sit down. I’m Fred Jensen. This is my wife Olivia. And this is Kathleen Sommerfeld.”
They exchanged handshakes. Asher said he was a lawyer who had been asked to monitor the trial for a client. He asked if they were all from Rosemont and what would have drawn people to drive about three hours to see a trial, notorious though the case might have been.
“Pretty much the same as you,” Jensen said. “Although we weren’t getting paid and the trial had some interest for its own sake.”
Asher listened to the bounce in Jensen’s voice and saw the light bouncing in his eyes. He thought it likely that Fred Jensen never heard or said anything that did not seem to cause him delight.
“Watching the way things happen in a courtroom was a real learning experience,” Jensen said. “It’s different from the movies. We didn’t learn much about Victor Turlock, though. We knew he was small-minded and bad-tempered with anyone who didn’t agree with him. Didn’t hear him say anything about why he did what he did, either.”
“He was close-mouthed, all right. He was angry at John Apson for some reason. The only reason I could come up with was that Apson had been digging into private business and may have been turning up information that Turlock or someone Turlock was close to would have found embarrassing.”
“You don’t say.” Jensen’s eyes were still set permanently on twinkle but now he was also staring straight at Asher, his gaze hard and unblinking. Asher decided to offer more.
“The only person Turlock might have wanted to protect, other than himself, was George Manchester. I started thinking maybe it had something to do with Orion Devereaux, if you remember him.”
“Those are two names you don’t often hear together.”
“Maybe that was the point — never to hear them together.”
“You’re certainly an original thinker, Mr. Asher.” Jensen’s wife and the Sommerfeld woman were both looking into their teacups, listening attentively. “What brings you down to Rosemont? We get tourists here but not usually lawyers travelling by themselves.”
“I came to visit the cemetery. A friend was buried there recently. I wasn’t able to go to the funeral.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Jensen said. “Your friend’s name didn’t happen to be Angela, did it?”
Asher was not completely surprised. “Angela Finley,” he said. “Formerly Angela Apson. Did you know her?”
“We knew her quite well,” Jensen said. “Olivia was a close friend of Angela’s mother.”
His wife spoke up. “We didn’t see much of her after the family moved to Barnsdale and after her mother died. But when she went to university, we happened to be living near the campus and she would visit often.”
“Olivia was a bit of a stand-in mum or au
nt,” Jensen said. “Big sister on her more playful days. Angela learned some cooking at our place. And she was always willing for a game of cribbage. That girl loved playing cribbage.”
Asher wondered what else he did not know about Angela Finley. He was happy to learn more, but felt regret at not being able to see her afterward. He hoped regret would not turn to pain.
“I have to tell you we’re not really surprised to hear that you came to visit Angela’s grave,” Jensen said. “She told us a little about you. And a little about how you were involved with that Turlock business.”
Asher sat back and looked at the three of them in turn. He realized the conversation between the older couple in the booth behind him had subsided.
“Is there someplace more private we can talk?” he said.
“You can come to our place for a coffee,” Jensen said. “We got our grocery shopping done this morning. It’s not far. You can follow us, but Kathleen, would you ride with Mr. Asher to make sure we don’t lose him?”
“Thank you,” Asher said. “And please, it’s Harry.”
They drove the several blocks to the Jensens’ house. Asher discovered that Kathleen Sommerfeld was the local head librarian, although she planned to retire soon. She also proved to be more reserved than her initial comment in the restaurant had indicated.
The house was a two-storey affair in a newer neighbourhood on the east edge of town — big enough to let the two Jensens pursue their own interests and have space to themselves when they wanted, not so big as to flaunt wealth and status. There was stone on the front but wood siding the rest of the way around. There were no visible nicks in the stain on the wood and the windows were clean, which Asher guessed took some effort, given the area’s dustiness.
Going into the house, he passed what he took to be Jensen’s office, decorated with oilfield memorabilia. Jensen said he had been an engineer before retiring the previous fall. He had always been interested in how things work, was good at math, and hadn’t wanted to take over the family farm. Now he busied himself with woodworking and other small projects in the garage, and took on the occasional consulting project. He still owned one of his father’s original two sections of land and rented it out; that gave him an excuse to drive up above the valley and survey the crops now and then. Olivia had dabbled in real estate, but for the last several years had concentrated on her environmental organization and volunteering at the United Church.
