The Prison Book Club (34 page)

He confided that he would be leaving the prison in early July. He didn't want the other men to know but said I could tell Carol. I had assumed he was moving to a halfway house. But sometime that summer, the chaplains told Carol that he had been deported to Jamaica. News clippings revealed that a person with his name had already been deported from Canada on four previous occasions. Of all the book club ambassadors, Dread had been the least known to me. Almost a ghost.

That evening, Carol and I took the ferry to Amherst Island. It struck me that her house and Kingston Pen were both built at about the same time and both constructed of local limestone. Just thirty metres from Lake Ontario, Carol's property attracted water snakes from the lake for a brief period that spring. I wasn't surprised because water snakes in the area were drawn to limestone formations. She told me that the snakes had migrated indoors through a sump pump intake and wrapped themselves around the water heater for warmth.

I was apprehensive about what would greet us this time. Two months earlier, in March, when Carol and I arrived at the back door of her house, we saw a garter snake easing itself through a crack in the house's stone foundation. I had assumed that it would hide in the wall or slither down to the basement. But it was in the kitchen, head elevated and looking around. I rolled my overnight bag quickly past it and climbed the stairs, while Carol picked up a broom to brush it back outside.

This time there were no snakes inside. But on the front stoop I spotted a pale grey snake with dusty yellow and orange stripes and orange eyes, like a garter snake that had been washed with bleach. This fellow was happily coiled and gave no indication of wanting to come inside. But Carol, upon spotting it, took her straw broom from beside the fireplace and attempted to sweep it off the stoop. As she did so, the snake flipped around to face her— elongated, challenging. I would have stopped at that point. But she prodded him several more times with the broom till he landed in the adjacent flower bed. Carol had developed a hard shell where snakes were concerned. “Last week some snakes ate the eggs from the mourning doves' nest,” she said, by way of explanation.

We brought out cold bottles of beer and salty snacks and eased into deck chairs to talk about the day's book club, the following week's visit of author Lawrence Hill to the women's prison at Grand Valley, the only federal institution for women in Ontario, and Carol's campaign to open book clubs at the final two federal institutions in the province: Fenbrook and Warkworth, both medium-security prisons. I admired her imagination and energy.

It was my chance to ask her whether she was just playing devil's advocate that day in the meeting, arguing that Grace was innocent, or whether she was trying to make a more subtle point. I had a feeling that she was encouraging the men to see that people on the outside are more inclined to assume that an individual is innocent, while the prison population is swifter to condemn.

“I'm always trying to bridge their inside world to the outside world,” she said. “And I want them to realize that we on the outside are not all redneck types.They are acutely aware of the judgment of others.” She said she would never forget an inmate at Beaver Creek saying to her once: “Carol, do they think we're all monsters?”

As the sun lowered toward the horizon, we prepared supper. I set out leftovers from the previous night's meeting of the board of Book Clubs for Inmates. Then I followed Carol to her vegetable garden, where purple-grey asparagus stalks were sprouting. She bent at the waist and snapped off a handful or two and snipped some daffodils for the table.

The lightly steamed asparagus was sublime. “What do you think?” asked Carol as we took our first bite. “You don't have to talk. Close your eyes.” I tasted layers of green, like eating spring itself.

As we ate, we debated the merits of books to recommend the following week to the Beaver Creek Book Club. She told me about the previous week's book club meeting at Joyceville prison where she observed the men discussing Hemingway's
The Old Man and the Sea.
“The old man wins,” she said. “He looks as if he's a loser, but he wins. They all love that. They talked about what it is to be a man. One aboriginal man talked about the fish he had caught and the fish his grandfather had caught.” She wanted more books like that, more classics, for the book lists.

When we finished the meal, a look of distress appeared briefly on her face and she told me that the rapid expansion of Book Clubs for Inmates meant that she would have to surrender leading the book group at Collins Bay after the summer break. It had been her baby—the book group that had started it all. She had even invested personal time in helping many of the men by facilitating help with legal representation, marriage counselling and other supports. Now the demands of fundraising, running the charity and overseeing the other book groups left her no time. So she had picked a new person to lead the Collins Bay Book Club. The decision had been a hard one, given how much she cared about the men. “You know I'm really, really sad that somehow or other I can't be part of the book club at Collins Bay,” she said. “I mean it absolutely breaks my heart.”

Perhaps she would have felt differently if she'd known how lasting her impact was. Just downstream, Peter was in a cell at Kingston Penitentiary, possibly near Grace Marks's cell, writing a journal entry and reflecting on
Alias Grace
:

May 2, 2012
So here I am at the Penitentiary I just finished reading about.
    I climbed the caged stairs to the level I was directed, the barrier opened to a long and narrow range with two tiers of cells down one side, 36 in all, and tall barred windows on the other side.
    I was comfortable, in contrast, exact opposite, of what I was a few hours earlier while in line to get tea at Tim Horton's.
    My cell is small but liveable for one (in my way), but has two bunks. It has been painted so many times that there are no longer any definitive edges left unrounded by the paint. The cell is barred, instead of the new style solid door barriers, so it has an open feel to it, seemingly less confined, but no good for noise.
    There is a toilet paper shortage. People have been tearing strips off of sheets and stuff ... I lucked out as there was about 25% of a roll left in the cell. Not so lucky with soap though.
    I am very tired.
    It is only almost 5:30 pm.
    … I now have a decent pair of shoes and a clean watch … I smoked a cigarette. I saw my mother. I saw my sister.

20

MY LAST BOOK CLUB

A
LIAS GRACE REMAINED on my bedside table because it was up for discussion just a week later at Beaver Creek. I was interested to see whether the men in the Beaver Creek Book Club would have a different gloss on the protagonist than the men at Collins Bay, and different reactions to the themes of criminality, conscience, prison life and gender.

It had been sixteen years since I had first read this novel and discovered the voice of Grace speaking so believably about her inner life as an Irish servant girl in Victorian Canada. I could never have imagined then that I would be looking forward to sitting down with men who had committed murder and other crimes to find out what they thought about this unforgettable character, with her practical world view, her sense of dignity and her lilting run-on sentences. And yet here I was on a beautiful May morning, certain that I would find the most insightful and unpredictable discussion of this book at Beaver Creek.

At the same time I had feelings of sadness. It was the season's final book club meeting before the facilitators took their annual summer hiatus. When meetings resumed in the fall, Frank would be out on parole, and Graham would likely be out as well. He'd been on so many Unescorted Temporary Absences, it was hard to imagine the Parole Board of Canada would turn him down at his hearing the following month. With both men gone, this was likely to be my last time to sit in on a book discussion at Beaver Creek because I had originally requested access at that prison primarily to follow Graham and Frank.

Just as I was about to leave home, my cellphone rang. It was Carol. She'd had word that there could be unrest in the prison that day—perhaps in all the federal prisons across the country. The federal public safety minister, Vic Toews, had announced a slate of cutbacks that were bound to make inmates angry: increases to the levy that inmates paid for room and board, the elimination of incentive pay for inmates working in the prison industry workshop, CORCAN, and new administrative charges for telephone use—on top of the toll that inmates already paid for telephone calls (which Graham told me was eleven cents a minute). Toews said the measures would save taxpayers more than ten million dollars each year and were designed to “hold criminals to account.” It reminded me of the scene in
Alias Grace
when Grace hears talk that the prison might change the bathing rules so that female prisoners would have to bathe in groups, rather than in pairs, to save water and money. Carol and I conferred. We decided we would drive up to Beaver Creek and take our chances. After all, the cutbacks were not scheduled for implementation until the following year, so the inmates' reaction might not be immediate.

When we pulled in to the parking lot, everything seemed calm. I signed in and made my way to the chapel to meet Frank. He said the inmates at Beaver Creek were so happy to be in a minimum facility, they would be unlikely to create a disturbance to protest changing prison conditions. He himself was blasé about the proposed pay cuts. His job was shopping at the on-site grocery store for the other men on his unit. “I'm not worrying about my $6.90 a day,” he said. “They could keep it for all I care.” But he predicted that the changes would cost the government money because inmates in medium-security facilities would strike, forcing the government to hire contract workers at much higher rates to do the jobs the inmate workforce did: cleaning, cooking, electrical, masonry, garbage disposal and prison industries.

What was more on Frank's mind was the parole board's decision about his future. He'd just heard that he would be released in late May to a halfway house in Toronto, about five kilometres from his house, but not to his own house, which was what he wanted. I said that I understood how upset he was about the limitations on his freedom. It seemed a small consolation, but I told him that I'd heard that Gaston, another former Collins Bay Book Club member, might be billeted in the same halfway house. They could conduct their own mini–book club there.

Frank had one last batch of journal entries for me. Touchingly, he had devoted some of it to talking about a self-help book he was reading to brush up his parenting skills in preparation for going home. It was
Every Family Needs a CEO
by a psychiatrist named Reuven Bar-Levav. “'Cause my daughter's growing up,” he said. “Like she's almost fourteen and she's talking about boys. The author says the father's attitude changes and these are subtle things that can balloon into big things.” He wanted to be a good dad.

“It's important for her to know that she can talk to you,” I said.

Eleven members showed up for book club: Frank, Tom, Doc, Earl, Jason, Raymond, Byrne, Bookman, Richard, Pino, Hal. It was too bad that Graham couldn't attend. He was in Toronto on an Unescorted Temporary Absence, staying with his mother. But I had plans to meet him for coffee in Toronto the next day to talk about the book. The windows were open and between the sounds of planes taking off from the small airport nearby, we could hear blue jays calling out: “Jay! Jay!” The atmosphere was relaxed around the table. By now, after eight meetings, the men knew each other pretty well and could even anticipate what each other might say about a book.

Carol was attending that day only to help pitch books for the next year's reading list, and so Phoebe moderated the discussion of
Alias Grace
. Although Phoebe suggested analyzing the book character by character, some of the book club members couldn't wait to deliver their overall reactions to the book.

Richard seemed to share my love of the novel. “I thought it was beautifully written,” he said. “It was reminiscent to me of Dickens. I thoroughly enjoyed it.”

Raymond, on the other hand, complained that the story left too many loose ends and predicted that Sarah Polley's anticipated film adaptation of the novel would be “a bore.” It would, however, make a great opera, in his view.

Then Tom startled me with a sharp visceral reaction. “If I were to have any problem at all with this book,” he said, “I hated the fact that it was in the first person for the most part. It's because as a prisoner and convict myself, I've had people telling me what I think for most of my life. ‘This is why you did your crime,' or, ‘This is what you're doing,' and I've looked at them my whole life and said, ‘You don't know what you're talking about.'” In essence he was challenging Atwood's right to fictionalize Grace's motives and invent Grace's personality. “The audaciousness of thinking, ‘I know what made Grace Marks tick'!” he said. He had raised an astute point about the limits of the imagination when dealing with an historical figure. Although Tom never told me why he was in prison, I learned from a newspaper report that a man with the same name was serving a life sentence at Beaver Creek for second-degree murder and had been incarcerated for more than a decade.

Byrne allowed that it was a bold move by Atwood to use the first person, but said she got one thing right about Grace: the lack of trust, which he said was pretty accurate for anyone who had been in prison.

With that, Phoebe directed everyone's attention to the deeply flawed Dr. Simon Jordan, the novel's would-be psychologist who employs free association to try to unlock Grace Marks's memory sixteen years after she was convicted. As a writer, I could see why Atwood invented him. He was a perfect vehicle for allowing Grace to tell her story, including the crossing from Ireland, during which her mother died, her earlier years in service, her fateful time at the Kinnear household and her years in prison and a lunatic asylum. But Atwood invented him as an equally good candidate for psychoanalysis. “A degenerate,” was Frank's assessment. He pointed out that Dr. Jordan nurses sexual fantasies about his patient. “And he gets into this relationship with his landlady, who's a nut and wants him to kill her husband,” said Frank. “I mean a guy in that position you'd think would go to the police.”