The Last Witness (3 page)

This was the site of the original mill dating from the nineteenth century. Christine knew all about it. In 1832 the founder of the town purchased fourteen thousand acres near the falls for two and a half dollars an acre. He wanted to build a mill, but died. Ten years later, when the village had two dozen families, a carpenter became the fledgling community’s first miller and did his thing on two acres set aside for him. These two acres. When the U.S. Civil War broke out south of the border, Elora had a thriving population of twelve hundred people. It was all there in the historical record, and Christine knew as well as anyone that history mattered.

Further along where the water was even louder – its dull rush had mushroomed into a boisterous thrashing – stood the gates to the lookout. Here, amid the pungent smell of lavender and the mighty roar of rapids below, she could peer out onto the gorge. It was spectacular, but not as spectacular as further to the west where the Grand and Irvine Rivers met. If you had never seen it before, the site was something to behold.

Christine parked her car and grabbed the old hardcover book she had placed in the seat beside her. She walked into the old building where the mill once stood and headed downstairs to
the dining room with the rushing water running just outside the window. She could hear it. The sign on the doorway with Rules of This Tavern bid a quaint hello to all who ventured in:

Four pence a night for Bed

Six pence with Supper

No more than five to sleep in one bed

No Boots to be worn in bed

Organ Grinders to sleep in the Work house

No dogs allowed upstairs

No Beer allowed in the Kitchen

No Razor Grinders or Tinkers taken in
.

It was called The Gorge Lounge and its stone walls, cosy fireplace and grand piano offered the ambiance of a country retreat. The waiter arrived and Christine ordered her favorite meal – organic green salad, a main course of tomatoes filled with chickpeas and spinach, all of it washed down with a glass of red wine. So delicious and sad. The wine tasted good and made her a bit queasy, and then she was finished, leaving not a thing, not a morsel, and it was almost as if no one had eaten off the plate at all.

She placed her tip on the table, left the building and walked two minutes up Mill Street before turning onto Metcalfe. One block north she turned again, passed a string of old homes and ventured into the park. She waded through the thick underbrush, dodging in and out among the long narrow trees, and headed for the gorge. A wire fence was at the pathway’s edge, but it was easy to lean over and look onto the rocks below. There was a warning. UNSUPERVISED AREA – USE AT OWN RISK. Then she walked down the six slab steps to the end of the concrete where a low-lying, stone wall served as the barrier.

It was called Lover’s Leap Lookout, but that was just a name. Still, Christine knew that people had jumped into the gorge. It was a serene place to end it with the trees, the sky and the water. She was all alone, accompanied only by her thoughts.

Her great-grandfather Jack was a hundred years old and he more than anyone inspired her to become a history teacher. He had so much history in him, a hundred years of it, and while much of it was good – the life he had built, the family he and his wife had raised, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren – there was that other part. The nightmare. That was how he once described it to her. The total nightmare of his childhood. But then it wasn’t a childhood, was it? That had been stolen from him, cut off and snuffed out before it even began. When he first told her about it, she found it hard to believe. Who could believe such things? Who would
want
to believe such things? No one wanted to think things like that really happened. It was better, safer, easier to simply forget and pretend it wasn’t so.

She had the book, the one she hated so much. She lifted it over her head as if passing sentence, and with smug satisfaction tossed it over the wall right into the gorge. The pages filtered through the air, slowing the speed of descent, and it seemed such a long time to drop a mere hundred feet or so. Such a long time to die. She watched the book strike the rocks and skip into the water before disappearing below the surface. She heard it, too. The fluttering of the windswept pages as the book fell. The harsh
thud
when its spine hit the rocks. The soft, but sharp
plop
when the river swallowed it whole. She stood there, looking into space, drawn to that familiar stone wall, and realized just then that the time had come.

A young girl was sitting on the ground behind the trees eating a sandwich. Off in the distance through the thick brush, she could see someone standing at the edge of Lover’s Leap Lookout. She thought it was a woman. The girl saw her throw something into the gorge, but she
didn’t know what. Peering through the trees, through the slender rising columns of bark and panoply of leaves, the girl watched the solitary figure stand there for the longest time and then she saw her climb up onto the ledge. The girl put her sandwich down.

Standing on the narrow ledge, Christine steadied herself with her arms at her sides as if she were a bird. That’s what she was. A bird. It wasn’t easy, but then she knew it wouldn’t be. She had always known that, ever since she was little. How odd that one’s sense of balance is suddenly so precarious when you look down and it’s such a long way to the bottom.

The girl watched as the solitary figure kept standing on that uncertain ledge. It was hard to see. And the girl stared in disbelief at what happened next.

For a few seconds, Christine’s life hung suspended between two worlds. It was an in-between place. She would never know if it was a sudden rush of wind that came from behind or what, but it was just enough to lift her into that space where her arms became her pages. Her wings. Just like the book, they, too, fluttered in the air, and for one precious moment engulfed in absolute peace she found herself in a state of complete euphoria. It was perfect. Nothing but sheer freedom with only her body and the air to guide her. How wonderful. How strange. And just like that it was gone.

5

The knee was made of titanium. It wasn’t a new substance, but it was still the best. It had been a few weeks since the surgery and the thing felt stiff, but the doctors said it would be like that. The pain had been terrible the first few days, but has since subsided and now the biggest problem was getting used to the feel of a new joint. It didn’t feel like the old one. The old knee was in bad shape, tired and worn out from holding up that big load all those years, and why it was the right knee and not the left no one ever knew. There was constant pain in that knee from the arthritis – severe arthritis they called it – and one thing they all agreed on was that it wouldn’t get any better. A knee replacement was the only tangible option – the surgeon had stressed the word
tangible
– and besides, Jack Hodgson still had a lot of years left.

“How are we doing, Lieutenant?” the doctor said.

“Not bad. Considering I have a new leg.”

“Not a new leg. Just a new knee. I don’t do legs.”

Hodgson squeezed his massive frame into the chair. It was a chair built for a normal human being, not a man who stood six-foot-five and weighed three hundred and thirty pounds. At least, that was what he weighed before the surgery. Walking into the room, he dwarfed the doctor – he did that to people – and it wasn’t so much his height but the bulk that he carried around with him. It was his ball on a chain. The load had become his prison.

“Eating well?” the doctor asked.

Hodgson nodded. “Back to normal.”

“Then that’s not good. The whole point was to eat better, exercise and get control of your weight. I believe our goal was two-seventy-five.”

“Our goal?”

“You know what I mean. It was two-seventy-five, wasn’t it?”

“Doc, I haven’t weighed that since I was eighteen.”

“Look Lieutenant, I gave you that chart. Have you been following it? With all the fruits and vegetables?”

“I eat fruits and vegetables.”

“Yes but what else are you eating?”

Hodgson didn’t say anything. The doctor smirked.

“Let’s check your weight,” he said.

“Not on that scanner. I don’t like that thing. It takes half a second and tells you how much you weigh. It doesn’t give you any time to prepare yourself.”

“I have a scale if you like. It still works. Want to use that?”

Hodgson said he did. The doctor led him into the next room and said to take a seat. The old scale was on wheels, and apart from a little dust, in good working order. The doctor took a cloth and wiped it off before giving a nod to Hodgson who grudgingly got up from the chair. His right knee with the new titanium joint didn’t take to the task with the dexterity of his left.

“I think I need a little oil in there,” Hodgson said, climbing onto the scale with the two balance beams.

The doctor slid the first weight over to the far end of the scale, the three-hundred-pound marker. Then he started playing with the smaller, second weight. He kept nudging it across. Bit by bit.

“Let’s see what we have here. Uh-huh. Three hundred and twenty-seven pounds. And you were what? Three-thirty before the operation? You have a knee replacement which is pretty
invasive surgery and after all is said and done and you’re starting to feel better we’ve lost a grand total of three pounds.”

“We?” said Hodgson, staring at the two weights in front of him. “At least that’s something.”

“Lieutenant, you don’t fool me. We both know you lost a good twenty pounds after the cut and now you’re putting it back on. You’re not following that chart, are you? What did you have for breakfast this morning?”

“I didn’t have breakfast. Just coffee.”

“One coffee?”

“Two.”

“Sugar?”

Hodgson didn’t say anything. He was still looking at the two weights.

“Lieutenant, a knee replacement is serious business. You put your life on hold. You put your job on hold and I’m sure you want to get back to being a cop, don’t you?”

“That’s for sure. The past few weeks I’ve been going crazy sitting around doing nothing but I’m pretty well healed now. Tomorrow is my first day back.”

“Well that’s good news but it’s not so good if you don’t follow the rules. And the first rule is to gain control of your weight or you’re going to be right back in here with your other knee.”

“My other knee is fine. It was always the right one that bothered me.”

“Lieutenant, believe it or not they’re both connected to the same body and your body is just too damn …” He searched for the word. “Huge. It’s too huge for your own good. That’s what got you into all this trouble in the first place. Your weight.”

He glared at the big man.

“Doctors call it morbid obesity but that’s really a fancy way of saying you eat too much. Too much of the wrong food. And you don’t get enough exercise. Not nearly enough. You’re still a young man. You’re only …”

“Fifty-four.”

“Fifty-four years old and you have a knee replacement. What’s it going to be like when you’re sixty-four? Or seventy-four? We’ll have to do your whole body over with new joints and that won’t be easy. Not for a man your size. Why I think that knee of yours was the biggest one I’ve ever done. What are you smiling about?”

“What you said. About doing my whole body over. I’d be a cop made of titanium. Think of the possibilities.”

The doctor shook his head and told him to step off the scale. It was a good thing because Hodgson didn’t want to keep looking at that number with the two threes and the zero staring him in the face, the smaller of the two weights a crack to the left of the ‘thirty’. Three hundred and twenty-seven pounds. He dropped his great bulk into the chair.

“Lieutenant, you have weak quads. Those are the muscles in front of the thighs. You have to build those muscles up and you have to lose some weight. That’s the only way you’re going to avoid having another knee replacement.”

“I hear you, Doc.”

“But what are you doing about it? Hey it’s your life. If you want to be back here in two years for your other knee I can always use the work. Are you still wearing those compression stockings?”

“No. I got rid of them after a few days. As soon as the pain started going away. Actually, the knee feels pretty good now. Just a little stiff. That’s all.”

“That’s normal. It’ll loosen up. What about the cane?”

“Gave that up too. After a couple weeks.”

The doctor took out a light pen and scribbled on his mini before closing the file on Lieutenant Jack Hodgson of the NYPD.

“It’s up to you, Lieutenant. Make some changes in your life and you won’t be coming back here to see me again.”

He stuck out his hand. Hodgson’s thick fingers embraced it and the doctor’s hand all but disappeared.

6

The
NYU Hotline
was a daily blog for students. It had views on a wide range of issues, everything from the value of a college degree to how current economics impacted one’s ability to pay for tuition. The price of tuition was always too high. There was a piece about how the presence of a Christmas tree in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development – a proud faculty whose beginnings went back to 1890 – impinged on the very human development that was supposed to take place within its hallowed walls. There was a profile on the new President-Elect of the United States and a short piece about an old man who claimed to be a survivor of the Jewish holocaust from the Second World War. Jack Fisher was a hundred years old, and the writer made it clear at the outset of his article that anyone of such advanced age could expect to suffer from memory lapses.

As he recalled these events of 95 years ago, I was immediately thrown into turmoil. Are his brain cells in crisp working order? Is his concept of time suspect? Should I just believe everything he says and not dispute any of his claims, as incredible as they may sound? Should we all accept that less than a century ago, not long in the human scheme of things, one of the most advanced societies on earth, Germany, selected all the Jews of Europe for extermination while the rest of the world just watched and did nothing? Even if you accept all that he says and trust the writings of those who agree, the figure he mentions of six million people dead … murdered … is beyond comprehension. It’s more than 120 times the number of Christians killed in the Great Holocaust of 2029. One hundred and twenty times! The year 2029 is imprinted on my memory as the darkest chapter in human history and anyone with a conscience would agree. It would be a travesty for that to be expunged by stories, facts and figures about another event that still
remains open to scholarly debate. Let us not forget that there are substantive arguments about this issue in terms of just how severe it was and when that is the case the truth is often somewhere between two extremes. Let us also not forget that the Great Holocaust of 2029 targeted Christians. No one else. It leaves the door open for non-Christians to forever dwell on what may have befallen them in earlier times for fear of being relegated to second tier in the annals of modern history
.