The Carpenter (11 page)

She looked speculative, said: Maybe. I don’t remember me or Judy ever wanting to break bottles on people’s heads.

—That’s why I don’t know how it is for girls. Anyhow, your uncle Darien was one of the best natural fighters I ever saw. Your uncle Remi was good too, but Darien was something. He was just barely a middleweight. They didn’t have a whole lot to eat out at
your grandmother’s place, and your uncles never filled out right, but Darien still classed as a middleweight. He could throw these hooks like a machine gun. A lot of the other boys in the club quit sparring with him.

—I never met my uncles.

—I know you didn’t. They’ve been gone a long time. Would you walk a ways with me? I guess you’re not working at the bank today.

—No. Not today.

Stan took a last look at the windows where he’d trained local boys in the art of boxing. Then he and Eleanor walked along Chippewa in the direction of the river.

—I thought Darien had the makings of a professional fighter. He’d of been, oh, maybe seventeen at the time. Those were pretty lean years. Your uncle made a bit of a name for himself. The men on relief, they had a lot of love for a kid like Darien who came from nothing. They’d come out by the dozens, fifty of them, a hundred, to see him fight. We couldn’t fit them in the clubhouse any more. Anyway, we got going so as I was coach and trainer and Father O’Leary was the manager. We brought on my old cut-man. For a little while things were pretty good. Pretty good. Then there was this fight at the Orangemen’s Hall in Orillia.

—Orillia, said Eleanor. Yes. My dad talked about that a little bit.

—Jack Watts, said Stan. He wasn’t any kind of goddamn middleweight but he made the weigh-in for it. He had this haymaker he’d throw. I should of known better. It got to the fourth round and your uncle Darien was on the ropes and he dropped his guard. Just for a second. Watts hit him so hard he … well, that was the fight. The trouble was, your uncle got hit a lot harder than any of us knew at the time. He was never really right after that. I should of known better, Ellie. But I was thinking about winning. I guess maybe I wished it was me in the ring again.

They’d turned onto River Street and were passing Victory Appliances. On the other side of the street was the library. It
was a squat building, with walls of thick limestone blocks and deeply recessed windows. A plaque describing the building’s history was fixed to the wall beside the entryway. They crossed over and Stan led them up the stone steps and through the doors. The interior of the library smelled like dusty books. A directory was mounted on a pedestal just past the front doors. Stan consulted it, squinting, tracing his finger along it. He led Eleanor down a flight of stairs. They came into a room with filing cabinets and a row of microfiche viewers. He brought them as far as a door marked S
TAFF
O
NLY
.

—We used to have our offices on the other side of this door. The holding cells were just past that.

They went back up to the main floor and found a reading room behind the fiction stacks. There was a window looking out of the back of the building. A short downslope to the river. He told her how there used to be a yard enclosed by a block wall out there. At one time it had been stables and then the yard was converted to a vehicle compound for the patrol cars.

—They used that yard, said Stan.

—What do you mean?

—For your uncle.

—When he died. And you were there.

—I didn’t kill your uncles, Eleanor, I didn’t. There were some hard years. The boxing clubhouse didn’t last long after that fight in Orillia. Father O’Leary moved to a different parish and the man who replaced him didn’t have any interest in boxing. I don’t think we were two more months at it after that. The farm where your dad lived, your grandmother, your aunts, Darien, Remi, they couldn’t afford to keep it going. They were in some money trouble. There was this one night Darien and Remi got into a fight with some boys at a dance. I brought them in. They came with me easy enough because they knew me. They got locked up in the holding cells. I was on the beat that night so I went back out. What ended up happening here was some kind of dust-up. Your
uncles got out, and Darien, he shot the cop who was on duty. Charlie Rayfield was his name. Darien shot him with his own pistol. I don’t know how much of this you might know.

—Some, she said. I know some of it. But this is different. Hearing it from you.

—Well, Darien shot this policeman and he and Remi walked right out the door. Pretty quick it was two boys who were in a hell of a lot more trouble than they’d thought of. It wasn’t much more than a day or so before a half-dozen Provincial cops were up here from the city. They took over from us town cops. They hired on a bunch of local boys—men I knew, friends of mine—to help them track down Darien and Remi. There was one thing that the inspector figured out. Charlie Rayfield had a little .22 pistol he wore on his ankle and he’d fired a few shots off. The Provincial inspector, he figured maybe Remi or Darien had gotten shot on the way out, and if that was the case, maybe they didn’t get so far as everybody thought.

—My dad used to say it was you.

—I know what your dad would of said. Thing was, I knew your uncles pretty well. I didn’t want it to end in more shooting, and I figured with the Provincials looking for them, that’s what would happen. So I went over to an old bootlegger’s place I knew of, where your uncles used to like to go to have a drink. And sure enough, that’s where they were. The inspector was right, Remi was shot. He was in bad shape, Ellie. He had a .22 bullet in his stomach.

—What did you do?

—What I did was I talked them into turning themselves over to me. They were scared. Remi was sick. But while this was happening, Charlie Rayfield died in the hospital. So the charge became murder. The way it turned out …

—Please. I want to hear it.

—Your uncle Remi died from blood poisoning. Darien got charged with murder. The murder of a policeman was a serious
thing. He went to the penitentiary for a few years. Then in 1944, when your dad was serving in France, they brought Darien back here to town. Right back home. And just out there, where the yard used to be, that’s where they did it.

—Where they executed him.

—Yes. He was the last person in the county to be put to death. I spoke to him, your uncle, the night before. He was scared, but not so scared as he could of been. Mostly he wished his ma would of come to see him. But things were different for her. She didn’t have the farm any more. I was there the next day when Darien was hanged. And I was a cop for another almost thirty years after that but there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think of that morning. Of your uncle up there on the platform. Every day, Ellie.

She was quiet for awhile.

—I don’t know what to say, Stan. I knew some of this but I didn’t know it. I guess I think for all my dad was or wasn’t, how could he have two brothers who ended up like that?

Outside the window where the vehicle compound and the wall used to be, they’d landscaped a couple of footpaths overlooking the river. A man in coveralls came into view, raking leaves under a red maple. There were some odd characters who hung around the library in the afternoon. A man in a plaid jacket was snoring quietly in a study carrel. A man with mole eyes behind mended glasses was sitting at a table close by, bent over an anatomical textbook, looking at images of the female reproductive organs.

—It was all a long time ago, said Stan.

They stayed at the library for awhile and Eleanor held her end of their agreement. She moved into the telling as if it were something that lifted a burden from her. That she and her sister were twins did not give her any great insight.

—You can know someone better than anybody else knows her, and still you don’t know her at all. How is it that everything went bad for her, but not me?

Nobody gave Judy’s ailment a name for many years. Troubles with their father, Aurel, were enough. What had no name warranted no sympathy. It wasn’t when their father died but when Eleanor went to college in the city that Judy suffered the most. Telling this to Stan, Eleanor had to pause between her words and look away. She said she felt guilty about that.

A doctor paid a visit and made a referral. The psychiatrist to whom Judy was referred gave her condition a name.

While Eleanor went to college, Judy went to a hospital east of the city, where she lived in a residence with some other girls. They were ex-junkies, they were girls with scars in their arms, they didn’t eat right, they didn’t say the right things. But Judy herself got along at the hospital after her first few months. There was a farm on the grounds. There was a new gymnasium. There were things to do with your hands and with your time.

Eleanor visited when she could. She was going to college and she was not far away. Some of these girls at the hospital were suicidal. They slugged through their time under a constant state of scrutiny.

—But Judy, said Eleanor, bad as she might get, she wasn’t ever, like, she wasn’t the kind to kill herself. That wasn’t part of it. So that’s why, Stan, that’s why …

Judy was admitted to hospital again after their mother died. Eleanor, back home between terms, started going with Tommy Spencer. He was a local boy, his dad did roadwork contracting. Then the doctors at the hospital started releasing a lot of the patients to reintegrate them with the community. Judy was discharged two years ago, the same time Eleanor started at the National Trust. Judy and Eleanor moved together into their parents’ old house, the house they’d grown up in. Eleanor’s benefits covered a prescription for amitriptyline.

The pill was called Elavil and it kept Judy level. She put on some weight, but not much, and before that she was really too skinny anyway. She slept a lot. But for once she was even-tempered.

Still, Eleanor considered that Judy might grow bored. One thing about the hospital was that they kept you occupied. So Eleanor talked to Alda Shipley at Busy Beaver Janitorial, who’d had the cleaning contract at the National Trust for a long time, and for the first time in her life, Judy had a job. Busy Beaver was a bonded local outfit. They’d arrive in the afternoon before the branch closed and they’d clean until eight o’clock at night. The bathrooms, the carpets, the wastebaskets. Alda reported back to Eleanor that Judy didn’t have much to say but she usually smiled faintly and she worked steadily and didn’t object to any of the tasks.

Then Eleanor told Stan about the man who’d come into Judy’s life. Around May or June, Judy started getting agitated. She was quick to put you off if you asked her anything. She would say, I’m fine, why do you want to know? It wasn’t any kind of agitation Eleanor had seen in her before. Eleanor was already guessing what it might be.

And why not? Judy wasn’t unattractive, and since the medication had taken the swings out of her mood, she was good company. She wasn’t forthright about whoever the man might be and Ellie didn’t press her, but then she happened to meet him at the bank one day in the summer. The Busy Beaver crew had started their work in the late afternoon. Eleanor had a dentist’s appointment and was given leave fifteen minutes early. She went down the rear corridor and said goodbye to her sister and went out through the back door. She was halfway across the parking lot behind the bank when a man got out of a car and said: Hey, Judy.

This man was kind of singing an old song,
It’s Judy’s turn to cry, it’s Judy’s turn to cry. Judy’s smile was so mean
, sang the man.

Eleanor guessed it took her coming closer, twenty feet or so, for the man to realize she wasn’t her sister. They looked enough alike until you got up close.

—You’ve got to be Ellie, said the man. I’m sorry to have mixed you up.

Eleanor said it was okay, it happened from time to time. She let on that she knew about this man in Judy’s life, that he wasn’t something she’d only guessed at. So that was probably why he didn’t tell her his name. Eleanor couldn’t exactly say what he looked like. He wore jeans and a T-shirt, she remembered. Good for the weather but not like he’d come from an office or anything. He had sunglasses on, the kind with mirrored lenses. The car he was leaning up against wasn’t anything special. He was older than Judy, maybe even ten years older, but otherwise he just looked like anybody.

He was nice enough. He seemed easy to talk to. He asked how Ellie liked working at National Trust and how she liked living in town. He smiled. Eleanor might have been late for her dentist appointment if Judy hadn’t come out the back door just then. She was surprised. She chewed at her bottom lip and spoke in singular phrases, and the three of them—Eleanor, Judy and the man—made the points of a triangle as they stood talking to each other. So Eleanor, laughing a little, pleased for her sister, took her leave. As she was going she heard him sing it again,
Judy’s smile was sooo mean.
And Eleanor heard her sister laugh.

That weekend they had a barbecue over at Tommy Spencer’s house. Judy didn’t bring the man and didn’t make any mention of him. But then Eleanor got Judy to herself for awhile in the lawn chairs at the back of the yard. They watched Tommy horsing around with his brother’s kids.

—So when were you going to tell me? said Eleanor.

—Tell you about what? said Judy, not meeting her sister’s eyes.

It took a bit of pressing but Judy eventually told her. Once she got talking about him, she had a hard time stopping. The last six
weeks or so, since the weather got nice, Judy had started walking to work every day. This was a big thing for her, a twenty-five-minute walk, but it was good exercise that was managing the weight the Elavil wanted to put on her frame. The midpoint of the walk was a little joint called Donut Line, and she’d started stopping there for an early meal before work. And this is where she’d met him.

Eleanor told Stan she could imagine it. Her sister at a table by herself. Bowl of soup, sandwich, day-old tabloid. There’s this seasonal labourer who comes in around the same time every day for a coffee. This guy with the nice smile passes Judy at her table, the first time just saying hello, the next time asking how are you, and the day after that asking if this seat’s taken.