The Western Light (16 page)

25

BEN CAME BACK CARRYING OUR NEW STICKS AND TWO EATON'S catalogues he had borrowed from Sal. He strapped the catalogues to my shins with Sal's leather belts and tapped my homemade goalie pads authoritatively. “Okay, let me take a shot at you.”

The blade of my hockey stick wasn't quite wide enough and Ben easily slammed the puck past my padded shins. Sometimes he lifted it as high as my head. I protested that hoisting the puck was illegal, and Ben said it wasn't. As we argued, John came out of the bushes, smoking. He winked when he saw my face.

“It's okay, Mary. I shouldn't have snuck up on you. But I wanted to see you play. Exercise is good for your leg, eh?”

“My grandmother says exercise will hurt me.”

“No kidding. Why?”

“Because I get exhausted too fast. And then it takes me a long time to feel better.”

“Well, fine. But I see it differently. You can do everything other kids do. It's just going to take you a little longer. You're an athlete, eh? You have to build up your endurance so you don't tire easily. Do you follow?”

“I guess so,” I replied.

“Good. Now let Mary have a turn.” He squatted down beside Ben, and I took off the straps and handed the catalogues over to John, who strapped them on Ben. Kicking the puck my way, he shouted, “Take a shot, Mary.” I did what he said, but I fanned and missed the puck. He picked up the puck and tossed it back at me. “Again.” I raised the stick and this time I connected. The puck made an oomph sound against Ben's shin, like somebody getting punched in the stomach. Ben fell down.

“Most girls have weak arms, eh? But you've got a wicked wrist shot. Let me feel those muscles of yours.” Shyly, I held out my arm and he gently pinched the flesh under my cotton blouse. “Hmmn … pretty strong, all right. Maybe Doc Bradford will make you a rink this winter.”

“He's too busy.”

John butted his cigarette in the sand. “Is that so? We'll see about that.”

Over by the farmhouse, the men were getting into their cars and going home. “Hey, Pilkie! Let's go, eh?” Sib shouted in our direction. “Oh-oh. I gotta run or Frenchy will have my head.” John made a throat slitting motion as he handed me back his old hockey card. “Thanks for showing it to me. I looked a darn sight better then. Right, son?” Ben grinned up at him. “Thanks for our sticks, Mr. Pilkie. Will you tell us about playing for the Red Wings?”

“Sure, one of these days. But it's John to you and Mary. Okay?” he asked.

Ben exclaimed, “Okay, Mr. Pilkie,” but by then John was already climbing into the hospital truck.

I HID JOHN'S HOCKEY CARD under my pillow. Then I put on Ricky Nelson's 45 and listened to him sing “Poor Little Fool.” And, even though nothing could come of my feelings, I imagined what it would feel like if I were Mrs. John Pilkie and lived in a rambling Victorian house with a widow's walk like Cap Lefroy's place, and John played hockey, not for the Rats, but a team like the Toronto Maple Leafs. Naturally, I would be in the stands every night cheering. He would kiss his picture of the Queen and then he would blow a kiss to me, his young wife. The crowds would look my way and, although they would be shocked by my age, they would clap and grin.

After the game, he and I would go upstairs and he would sing Ricky Nelson's song about giving away his heart. Then he'd take off his jeans with the press down the leg and look at me the way Joe, our spaniel, looks when he wants to lick the roast beef platter. Of course, he wouldn't take off all his clothes; he'd keep on the crisp white shirt that hangs over his Fruit of the Loom underwear, and his shirt collar would show his black chest hair. I'd know I had to respond, but what would I say? I didn't want to strip naked so he could see me close up, because I was like Elvis Presley on the
Ed Sullivan Show
— I couldn't be viewed below my waist. And it was impossible to imagine him pressing his lips against mine, or his hand roving across my breast, which was what happened when Max kissed Little Louie on the mouth in my grandmother's living room. (Of course, in my case, there was no breast to speak of. Not yet.)

26

LITTLE LOUIE TOOK OVER A WEEK TO WRITE UP HER STORY ON John Pilkie. She said she was out of practice and she wanted to get it right so
The Chronicle
would assign her more stories. I worried secretly. What would she say about John? Maybe she wasn't sure if she should praise or criticize him, although she knew that my father and Dr. Shulman were hoping the Rats would win the Pickering Cup because John was playing for the team. Naturally, Ben and I told Little Louie that we were all for John. I reminded her that Morley thought his concussion made John violent. Little Louie scribbled what I said down on her notepad. When I peeked at it, I caught the words “head injury” followed by a row of question marks. She asked me about the day I talked to John in the maple tree and if I thought Dr. Shulman was right to give John so much freedom. Of course Dr. Shulman was right, I said. Little Louie wrote down my answer, looking interested.

A FEW DAYS LATER, BEN burst in on me drinking hot chocolate in our kitchen on Whitefish Road. He had something important to show me. I knew by the look on Ben's face it had to do with John. We went upstairs to my bedroom, where Sal couldn't hear us, and Ben brought out a typewritten document that he found on his father's desk. Dr. Shulman was encouraging Ben to read psychiatry textbooks, which meant Ben spent more time in his father's office. That afternoon, Ben had stumbled across the file when he was reading one of his father's books. The date on the file was April 20, 1959. Inside it were several typewritten pages that described a conversation between Dr. Shulman and a patient called J.P. When I noticed the initials, I couldn't help grinning.

 

 

WHEN LITTLE LOUIE CAME HOME from the newspaper office, Ben and I took her upstairs to my bedroom where Ben showed her the file. She read it once through, and then she read it again; something shifted in her expression. I couldn't put my finger on it, although it seemed she saw something she'd refused to look at before. I hoped it had to do with John.

“Where did you get this?” she asked.

“Ben found it on his father's desk.”

Little Louie laughed. “Ben stole it, you mean.”

“I'm going to put it back,” Ben said stiffly.

“Yes, do that,” Little Louie replied. “But why don't I talk to Dr. Shulman? And if he won't level with me, I'll pretend somebody at the hospital gave me John Pilkie's old file from the Whitby hospital. An informed source. That's what a person like that is called in my business. We don't need to give their names.”

“You won't tell on me?” Ben asked.

“Reporters have to protect our sources, Ben. You have nothing to worry about.”

Ben's eyes searched my face. I nodded. Then he nodded. Little Louie nodded, too. Something important had been decided among the three of us, and nothing more needed to be said.

27

LITTLE LOUIE'S STORY ON JOHN APPEARED ON THE FRONT PAGE of the newspaper under the headline, “Local Boy Sprung from Asylum to Play for Home Team.” Her write-up drew an excited reaction from the town, although I was disappointed because there was nothing in it about John's head injury being behind the murder of his wife. In the very last paragraph, my aunt said that psychiatrists like Dr. Shulman thought head injuries could sometimes lead to personality changes, but this paragraph was buried inside the newspaper. I wondered how many people would put two-and-two together if they bothered to read that far.

Mostly John came off sounding dangerous, because her story repeated in “lurid detail” (as Sal put it) the story of John's wife and child dying in the flames. It said John threw the match “fully aware” that his wife had spread kerosene on the floor to kill cockroaches and it described the court testimony about John's wife shrieking that John would pay for what he did.

The day after the story appeared, I quizzed Little Louie about it while we drank our nighttime cups of hot cocoa. Little Louie told me what had happened. The editor at
The Chronicle
refused to let her put the information from Dr. Shulman's file in her story. Little Louie wouldn't tell him how she got the information, since she didn't want Ben getting punished, and the editor said Little Louie's information was hearsay and that suggesting a connection between head injuries and violence could ruin his newspaper's credibility; besides, when she interviewed them, neither Morley nor Dr. Shulman could vouch definitively for the connection, so the editor had cut out the information and inserted in its place verbatim sentences from old newspaper stories about the death of John's wife and child.

“Newspaper editors make the rules, Mouse. It used to drive me crazy at the
Free Press
.”

“You mean you didn't quit your old job on account of Max?”

Little Louie fixed me with her heavy-lidded eyes. “Let's not talk about him.”

“Okay. Is his wife nice?”

She snorted. “No. Well, maybe. Anyway, I'm sorry about the story.”

“I don't think the editor should have changed it.”

“I don't, either. It makes John Pilkie look heartless. I hope he won't blame me.”

I reassured her that John would understand, although I doubted if Dr. Shulman would like my aunt talking about how he ran the mental hospital. Our town was suspicious of his policies, and people like Sal believed the shrinks were as crazy as the N.C.'s (i.e., nut cases). So Little Louie wasn't doing Dr. Shulman any favours when she described his ideas. For instance, my aunt quoted him as saying that even psychopaths could be cured. She also said that Dr. Shulman used a new drug called lithium on patients with depression, and a drug referred to as DDT (Defence Disruption Therapy) to break through the defences of the prisoners in Maple Ridge. According to my aunt, John playing for the Rats would help reinforce Dr. Shulman's theory that mental patients suffer from an illness that could be cured.

Her news story was the start of my sympathy for Ben's father, whose mind worked along parallel channels to mine, although I wouldn't have put it exactly that way then. Like Sal, I, too, was suspicious of anybody who went against the regular way of doing things, and I had to examine their actions carefully before I accepted their behaviour. For instance, I felt shocked to think the mentally ill could be cured. The idea was new to me. I had always considered them hopeless cases.

So it didn't surprise me when Little Louie said that Dr. Shulman had to be careful about what he told people about the hospital. Already his policies had created problems with the town (i.e., our neighbours were against the harmless patients being allowed to wander although these patients rarely came into town, and when it happened, they asked to be taken back to the hospital. Most of them had been there so long the place felt like home). But our neighbours kept complaining and, eventually, Dr. Shulman had to put locks back on the rooms of the harmless patients although the bars stayed off their windows.

Then there was something else, something more astonishing. Ben had told me his father believed that mental patients should have their cases reviewed, which is what John had been arguing for since the day he arrived in town. Two things were stopping it from happening. Number one, it hadn't been done before. And number two, it cost money to set up a regulatory body to review the cases of mental patients, and the government was cutting back their costs. It was bad enough, Ben said, when his father tried to squeeze out a few more pennies to improve the living conditions of the harmless patients whose nineteenth century cottages lacked hot water. Dr. Shulman had made a habit of showing government deputies the decrepit wooden houses, hoping the men (and they were usually men) would give the hospital more funds. But Ben said the state of the cottages didn't worry the government people. They would say, “Maybe next year.” And that would be that.

Still, there remained one more important thing about Little Louie's article — it got the town even more interested in the Rats. Pretty well everybody showed up to see what John could do the night of his first hockey game.