Punishment (3 page)

“Let me think about it.”

“Here’s my number,” he said. “We don’t have a whole lot of time.”

I wrote down the number, thanked him, said goodbye. I’ve learned from long experience the peril of a hasty answer to a lawyer or a con.

After hanging up the phone I reopened the desk drawer, looked again at the photograph of Strickland and my former wife, then slammed it shut again. I stared for a while through my living room window at the sunny afternoon. It was a surreal vista of bucolic loveliness, the amber fields, the blue sea glittering.

I first met Anna at an evening class at Queen’s. I remember it was sociology. I was still a CX-2, a guard, and after nearly twenty years, nearing burnout. My long-term ambition had always been to upgrade my career. Now or never, I decided, then signed up for classes.

She was trying to enrich an undergraduate degree to improve her chances of getting into law school. We were both older
than the others so we’d often sit together and during breaks share little insights over coffee and, over time, bits of personal disclosure. When she learned that I was single she seemed shocked. I was forty-three. She was thirty, also single, but she had lived a fairly vivid life, lots of travel, a hippie phase, several intense relationships, any one of which in more conventional circumstances would have qualified as marriage. She had, she confessed, a mild aversion to commitment and a fear of bearing children. She didn’t tell me right away that her dad was also in my line of work, at that time assistant warden in a medium-security establishment called Warkworth. I stepped back a bit when she did tell me later. Her father had a reputation in the system—an old-timer, feared equally by con and copper. But looking back, the outcome of our chats and coffee seemed preordained.

I don’t recall a swell of orchestral accompaniment as our friendship crystallized, or when on a pleasant weekend trip to Montreal in 1991 (during
le Festival de Jazz
) we broke through the barriers of caution, entering what we both acknowledged to be “a relationship.” But that weekend would, in my crooked, two-faced memory, mark the true beginning of a nine-year phase of unrestrained (some would call it reckless, even selfish) happiness.

Oh Anna. Where are you now? Are you alone? Unlikely.

And then as I watched the sun go down I thought of Caddy. Anna and Caddy, the end and the beginning of my journey from here to there and back again—an emotional odyssey, I suppose, if I wanted to sound grand. I had banished Caddy from my consciousness decades earlier. That’s the way it often
happens when you’re young. In time the pain and passion are forgotten. But today, when she turned and smiled, the protective ice just melted, leaving me exposed, and Anna, at least temporarily, forgotten.

A
month passed before I summoned up the nerve to visit Caddy. Why not, I reasoned. After all, at the courthouse she’d invited me and it had been more than thirty years since our last meaningful communication, if you want to call it that. I think there had been one encounter since, a superficial social moment long since lost in the confusion it had caused. We were different people now, I told myself. But I’d already made it my business to find out where she lived—a tidy bungalow in what I remembered as a hayfield, not far from Collie’s store.

Though Collie saved a metro daily for me faithfully, I frequently forgot to pick it up. Faraway events didn’t seem to matter much anymore. But that day I remembered to get the paper. Or maybe I was having second thoughts—I hadn’t had
the nerve to call her in advance. A call to set a time would sound too purposeful. Best if I just dropped by unannounced. Or maybe not at all. Or maybe she’d not be at home.

There were cars and pickup trucks in front of the store. Inside, half a dozen men were gathered around his complimentary coffee urn. Neil Archie MacDonald was among them. I’d have recognized him anywhere though I’d not set eyes on him for decades. He was just as tall and straight as he’d always been, the shoulders still formidable. Obviously meatier around the middle and he still had the aggressive confidence of an all-American big-city cop, Vietnam War vet, local hero.

He was expounding on Iraq as I was paying for the papers. Collie said, “It’s starting to look bad for Saddam. Neil thinks the Americans are on the warpath over nine-eleven.” He nodded in Neil’s direction but Neil didn’t seem to notice.

“I didn’t realize Saddam had anything to do with nine-eleven,” I replied, loud enough for Neil to hear.

I could feel his eyes, the sudden silence, measuring the moment. “There wouldn’t ’a been a nine-eleven if they’d done what they had to do in ’91,” he said carefully.

I pretended to be scanning the front page of the paper. “You were in Vietnam, weren’t you, Neil,” I said. I could feel that he was struggling to remember who I was.

“Two tours.” His tone communicated the unspoken
who-the-fuck-is-this?

“Two tours,” I repeated, nodding. “Well, well. And you still believe in war?”

He was smiling but the face-flush and eye-glitter were warnings that I remembered from a long time ago.

Then he laughed. “Ahhhhh. Now I remember. Tony Mac-fucking-millan.” And he walked over and threw an arm over my shoulder. “This guy and I … he’s just pullin’ my leg. Tony, you know and I know that Saddam is only a part of a bigger problem. Like the whole fuckin world is a jungle now. I’da thought you of all people would know that.”

“The name is Breau,” I said. “Maybe you’ve got me mixed up with somebody else.”

“No chance of that.” And he walked away and out the door.

“Where did he come from?” I asked, struggling to seem amused.

“You didn’t know?” said Collie. “He’s been home for about a year. Runs a bed and breakfast for tourists, down the road. Ever since the shooting in Boston.”

“Shooting?”

“Well, you knew he was a cop?” said Collie. “I hear he’s still got a bullet in his body somewhere. It was big in the American papers. They made it sound like the O.K. Corral.”

I realized Collie and the others were waiting for a comment—sympathetic or sarcastic—but I knew how, in quiet places like St. Ninian, memorable commentary travels. So I gathered up my papers, smiled around and left.

Caddy hadn’t heard my footsteps as I crossed the patio to her back door and she didn’t notice that I now stood paralyzed, hand raised to rap on the sliding glass between us. I almost turned away, she looked so sad. She was seated at her kitchen table, one elbow resting on it as if balancing her cup of tea, the
other forearm on her thigh. From where I stood it looked as though she might have been examining the decorative detail of the cup. It was elegant, a fragile mug made of what appeared to be fine china with small blue flowers, violets maybe. But she was staring past it, through a window just above the kitchen sink.

It was a lovely day, early October, the sky cobalt with fluffy cloud. The cool wind rustled dried leaves in a nearby maple tree. In the few moments I stood there I noted that her hair, once chestnut, was streaked with a steely grey I hadn’t noticed at the courthouse. Her eyes, of course, were always her most distinctive feature—the palest blue I’d ever seen in a human face, but somehow warm and always, always searching, seeing through me. Hard to imagine she was only seventeen back then. I rapped lightly.

I was worried that she’d flinch, maybe spill her tea, but she turned her face slowly toward me and smiled and waved me in. She didn’t stand, there was no embrace of greeting and I was somehow pleased. It felt a little like a welcoming reserved for someone who had never really gone away, someone who was still familiar. “Pour yourself a cup,” she said, nodding toward the stove. And, reading my uncertainty, she pointed. “The cupboard, there, beside the fridge.”

I fetched a mug from a shelf and poured. She held hers toward me and I refilled it. “Milk?”

“In the fridge,” she said. “I’m fine with mine the way it is. Then sit.”

I was suddenly speechless. The reality of why I’d come rose like a wall between us along with a flood of memories. After we had sat in silence for what felt like minutes, she said, “I doubt if
you ever met her. I’ll get a picture.” Then she stood and left the kitchen.

She returned with the photo that was on the poster in the store. She placed it on the table and we sat silently before it.

“Does anybody know what happened?” I asked finally.

She shrugged. “How can anybody ever know? She died. Why did she die? Isn’t that always the question? And there are probably so many answers. I’m not sure any of us want to know.” Her voice quavered slightly. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I have to find a way to be stronger.”

I placed my hand on hers. “Don’t be sorry.”

She nodded, still staring at the photograph. Then she smiled and stood up. “You must think I’m a wreck, making you pour your own tea. Get up and give an old woman a hug for God’s sake.” And so I did.

With my arms around her, face touching hers, I was nineteen years old again—away from here, at university and very lonely, staring at a glass and metal wall, row on row of mail slots, looking for a letter. In memory it seems she was the only one who ever wrote to me.

She let me go, and said, almost whispering, “I was a grandma when I was only thirty-five. Isn’t that a hoot? My Rosalie was only seventeen when she announced that she was pregnant.”

I’d always read her letters upstairs in the dining hall in the clatter of cutlery and dishes, the clamour of adolescent student voices. Before the last one, the closest that her letters ever came to intimacy was “I miss you, xo, Caddy.”

I stepped back. Our eyes locked briefly. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said, then looked away.

I asked, “Are there more pictures?”

“Of course,” she said. “Come, and I’ll show you some of Rosalie too.”

I hesitated, afraid of this journey back in time. “Come,” she said gently, and looped her arm through mine. We passed through a darkened hall, past the bottom of a stairway, and into a parlour where everything seemed new. “Poor Jack,” she said. “He’d just finished the renovation when he went.” She stopped by an old upright piano. “He promised me that he was home for good. Little did he know.” There was a photo on the top of the piano, a pretty woman with a careful smile.

“Rosalie,” she said. “She was eighteen when the child was born, way too young for motherhood. Abortion was out of the question. Especially around here, back then. Even now, it would be difficult. Jack and I told her up front, ‘If you want to give her up, it’s okay with us. But if you want to keep her we’ll do everything we can.’

“I couldn’t imagine myself as Grandma and anyway, Maymie—we called her Maymie—she seemed to think of me as Mom, right from the start. Rosalie went to live in Windsor right afterwards. She’s married now, you know. A nice man who works at Chrysler. They have three of their own. They were all here for the funeral. I don’t think you ever met Rosalie, did you?”

I shook my head. “Remind me, what year was Rosalie born?”

“1966, October 29,” she said, and looked away again, toward a window and the cobalt sky, a contrail streak behind a speck.

“This was Jack,” she said, removing another photo from the top of the piano and handing it to me. “I don’t think you knew Jack, did you?”

I shook my head, surprised by a feeling similar to resentment. Jack was conventionally handsome, mostly because of the smile that transformed his entire face, the kind of smile that made everybody smile, even looking at a picture of it, even knowing that he could never smile or laugh again. I handed back the picture. Caddy was nodding, rubbed a finger across the glass. “I must dust someday,” she said.

She guided me across the room. “And here’s our little gallery.” I counted eight photographs of her dead granddaughter: a high school graduation, various grade school poses, one of her juggling a soccer ball on her right foot in the middle of a little scrum, hair flying. Crossing a finish line, arms high in exultation. Step dancing on a stage. Wearing a tiara and a fancy dress.

“She had perfect teeth. No need for those braces they’re all wearing now.”

“She was very pretty,” I said.

“Jack would tell her she should get the braces anyway, half-joking. Smooch-prevention, he called braces. That’s the way Jack was. His big concern was sex.”

She looked away again, toward the window, but not before I saw the crimson on her cheeks. She crossed her arms and sighed. “Drugs never crossed his mind, poor Jack. Not for an instant. But I had my suspicions.”

I leaned close to the photograph of Maymie wearing the tiara, looking for a resemblance. “I think she had your eyes,” I said.

Caddy smiled. “Princess in the Homecoming, just last summer,” she said. “It was around then himself resurfaced. You knew him, from before?”

I nodded. “A terrible waste.”

“She was something else,” Caddy said quietly. “In her personality, she reminded me a lot of yourself at that age, how she loved to laugh. And she had a smile just like …” she clasped my wrist, looking stricken. “That was thoughtless of me.”

“No, no,” I said. “Not at all.”

“I can’t imagine what you thought when you found out that I was … that Rosalie was on the way. Your Caddy up the stump.” She studied me.

It was my turn to look away. “I can’t remember exactly how or when I heard. It was sometime afterward, I recall. You were wise to go away. To Windsor, was it?”

“Yes, Windsor. I had an aunt there. In those days you just had to disappear. I often thought I should have told you. Just let the chips fall where they may. But I didn’t have the heart.”

“It all worked out for the best,” I said, and instantly regretted it. We both studied the dead child for a moment. Rosalie’s daughter. Caddy’s grandchild.

“For the longest time, it did work out,” she said. “She was like an angel in the house.”

Another silence, broken by the distant roar of a passing truck.

“We’ll go back to the kitchen, then?”

She’d refilled the teapot. “You became a prison guard?”

“Sort of.”

“You always planned to be a cop, I think.”