The Western Light (2 page)

AN INTEREST IN BOOKS AND ideas was what I believed I shared with Morley, so I was preparing myself for the day when he and I would sit down together and have long, soulful talks. After my night with Morley and Little Louie, I realized that day was still a long way off. In the meantime, I threw my efforts into my composition about my great-grandfather Mac Vidal, who had struck it rich when he hit an oil gusher in 1862. The Petrolia Chamber of Commerce was giving a prize for the best student essay about the early days of oil in southwestern Ontario, and my grandmother believed my composition could win the prize, although Big Louie had been known to overstate things.

My teacher let me work on my composition in class since I finished my lessons before the other children. She told my father she had never seen a harder-working child. I was doing it for him. As I wrote, I thought how impressed Morley would be by the way I had packed my composition with historical facts such as the mention of petroleum found in Genesis chapter six, verse fourteen, when Noah was commanded by God, “Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shall thou make in the ark, and shall pitch it within and without with slime.” I was sure Morley would be surprised to learn that Noah's slime (the Bible sometimes called oil “slime”) came from Hit on the Euphrates River, one hundred miles west of Baghdad, where to this day there are heavy seepages of petroleum.

Still, there was a problem with my plan to impress my father. In self-defence, I had developed two vocabularies: the one-syllable words I used at school and my private reading vocabulary made up of long words I'd learned from books. I couldn't pronounce most of the long words, since I never said them out loud in case the kids in the schoolyard called me a brown-noser. Sometimes, I tried out a word like “S-O-TERICK” (for esoteric) in front of my aunt and she tried to hide her smile when she corrected me.

M.B.'s Book of True Facts

 

My bedroom, the smallest in the house, was tidier than Little Louie's; I made my bed with hospital corners, exactly the way Sal had taught me. It was next door to my father's bedroom, although Sal wanted me to sleep in the bedroom next to hers. Sal's room had once belonged to the maid, and it still had the simple ironstone washstand that the maid had used and an oldfashioned sleigh bed.

Sleeping next door to Morley made me feel safe. But I could see the Bug House from my bedroom window. Of course, the Bug House wasn't really a house, but a group of buildings hidden behind a large maple sugar bush. It included Maple Ridge, a high security prison where insane murderers were locked up; a six-storey office building; the staff houses, with back kitchens and sheds; the nineteenth-century cottages that housed the harmless patients; and, last of all, the working farm where patients grew turnips and potatoes.

At night, a row of lampposts lit up the prison, which had started off as a reformatory for delinquent boys. The shadowy light falling on its large shuttered windows made Maple Ridge resemble a sleeping face. I used to complain that we were the first in line if a patient escaped until Sal pointed out that a house by the hospital was the very last place an escapee would visit because that's where the guards would look first.

I kept my crime scrapbook on my bedside table. Using LePage glue, my friend Ben and I pasted in news stories about bank robbers and criminally insane murderers. As far as Ben and I were concerned, reading crime stories was the best way to discover the frightening potential in your neighbours who could look as worn and ordinary as last year's rubber tires. The goriest crime stories were in the late night editions of the Toronto
Telegram
, printed on pink paper. After he read the stock listings, my father gave me the front section folded down to the stories about bank robbers like the Polka Dot Gang and Edwin Alonzo Boyd who once apologized to a female teller for dirtying her blouse.

On my bedside table, I also kept
M.B.'s Book of True Facts
. In my opinion then, a true fact was one you were glad to know whereas most facts lacked the sheen of that conviction. I was making a book of true facts because Sal had a low opinion of Canadians, her own people, and Little Louie wasn't much better. For instance, neither Little Louie nor Sal believed that Tonto (the Lone Ranger's companion) was a Canadian named Harold J. Smith who grew up on the Six Nations Reserve in Brantford, Ontario. Both Sal and my aunt laughed when I pointed out that the world's biggest cheese had been manufactured in 1866 inside a lean-to in Ingersoll, Ontario. On the trip to England for an exhibition, it stank so badly the crew had to toss it overboard.

In my bedroom cupboard, I stashed the books my grandmother wanted me to read — classics like
The Bobbsey Twins
, which bored me silly — along with some ancient Baby Wet'um dolls, whose arms were still in the slings that I used to make out of Morley's linen handkerchiefs. When my mother was sick with the brain disease that killed her, I would tear the dolls apart and fix them the way Morley patched up his patients. I popped off their heads the way I used to pull apart the beads of my mother's plastic necklaces. My dolls were far harder to fix than I realized. Their heads didn't go snugly back into place and their broken limbs stayed broken. Only Morley could fix smashed up bones.

But he couldn't fix my mother. Nobody could. And that's how I ended up with Little Louie as a companion eight years later.

3

THE MORNING JOHN PILKIE CAME TO MADOC'S LANDING I WAS in my aunt's bed, reading her the front-page story about him in
The Chronicle
, our local newspaper. My aunt lay next to me eating apples and smoking one Sweet Cap after another. It was two weeks before Easter Sunday, and only thirty-one days after my all-time faves — Richie Valens, Buddy Holly, and the Big Bopper — died in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa. The Cold War was ongoing, along with the Hula-Hoop, although we didn't see much about either in the newspaper that day. While Little Louie listened, I read out the headline: “Mad Killer Pilkie Comes to Town.” The town newspaper often referred to him as Mad Dog Pilkie, as if he was a dog with distemper. That's how people talked in Madoc's Landing. There was a kind of poetry to it, and John Pilkie had more nicknames than most. Sometimes the newspapers called him “The Hockey Killer” or “Gentleman Jack Pilkie” on account of his debonair clothes.

I was still on the first paragraph of the news story when Sal yelled at us to get moving. Morley was taking us to the train station to pick up my grandmother, who was coming early for the Easter holiday — coming not only for a visit, but to inspect the job that Little Louie was doing on me.

“Did you hear me?” Sal shrieked. “Time's a-wasting!”

Neither Little Louie nor I answered. We were too absorbed in Kelsey Farrow's newspaper story. Kelsey said that John Pilkie and three other insane murderers were being transported by train to the psychiatric hospital in Madoc's Landing. According to Kelsey, the murderers were travelling under armed guard. They were in civilian clothes to avoid attracting attention, although how they planned to do that was anybody's guess.

The three other killers travelling with John Pilkie were: a Latin teacher, who split open his wife's head with an axe after she asked him to change his shirt for dinner; a potato farmer, who had stabbed his field hand for giving him a dirty look; and a seventeen-year-old boy, who shot his mother dead when she wouldn't lend him her car one Saturday night. John Pilkie's crime was mentioned too, although by that time he was better known for his escapes than for the murder of his family. Kelsey listed John's escapes in the newspaper as if he were a creature with supernatural powers:

The Escapes of Mad Killer Pilkie

• 1. Disappearing from a work crew while haying a field.
  

• 2. Scaling the twenty-foot wire fence around a Vancouver psychiatric ward.
  

• 3. Unlocking his cell at the Whitby psychiatric hospital using a key he had carved out of a jam jar.
  The Chronicle
  claimed he held some paraffin wax in his palm when he shook the hand of a guard holding the key, and made a copy from the wax impression.
  

• 4. Slipping out the back door of a hospital chapel before the service ended and (this was the amazing part) watching the departing churchgoers from a tree.
  

“That killer is a regular Houdini!” my aunt exclaimed. She blew three smoke rings from her Sweet Cap cigarette and waited while I tried to poke my finger through her wobbly creations.

“John Pilkie used to be Canada's Most Wanted Man,” I confided after the rings floated away. “That's what Kelsey said.” “Mouse, we don't have a ‘most wanted list.' It's something the Americans invented.”

“Well, I guess Kelsey wants Canada to sound as interesting as the United States.”

My aunt laughed. “Then Kelsey has his job cut out for him,” she said, reaching over me to get another apple. “I wouldn't believe everything Kelsey writes. Sometimes newspapers shade the facts. I'm a reporter, remember?”

Undeterred, I showed Little Louie an old news story about John Pilkie that had been written by a Toronto journalist, and not by Kelsey Farrow. On the day she was murdered, Peggy Pilkie, John's wife, had sprinkled kerosene on the bedroom floor to kill cockroaches. That night, in a fit of temper, John threw a lit match on the oil-soaked boards and ignited an explosion called a flare fire. His wife was heard to shout that John would pay for his crime. She couldn't make her way through the flames to save their baby girl, and the child died in the hospital of smoke inhalation. Mrs. Pilkie herself died a few hours later of shock and severe burns to her legs and torso.

I still shudder when I think about it. To set your wife and baby girl alight is unimaginable now, and it was even more unimaginable then. The courts said John Pilkie had been abandoned by reason and sent him away for life to a mental institution.

Accompanying the article was a black-and-white drawing that depicted the former Pilkie home in Walkerville, a Windsor suburb named after a local liquor baron. A large X marked the second-storey bedroom where the fire began. Next to the drawing was a photograph of a young John Pilkie and a dark-haired woman leaning on a crutch. Its caption said: “As a girl, Pilkie's young wife suffered from polio.” I had forgotten that John Pilkie's wife had polio. It made me feel uneasy and somehow implicated. Did he kill her because she limped like me?

“Why did he leave his wife and baby behind to die?” I asked. My aunt pointed to the last paragraph. “It says here that Pilkie suffered from a paranoid delusion that his wife was an enemy out to hurt him. That means he thought people were out to get him even if they weren't.”

So he was overcome by a crazy notion. Maybe John Pilkie wasn't a true killer, I told myself. A true killer would know it was his own wife and child he was burning up. But I kept my doubts to myself and told Little Louie about the day I read my first story about John Pilkie. The story's headline read: “Hockey Killer Stopped in His Tracks”; it described Pilkie's capture in Montreal. It claimed he might still be at large if he hadn't come down with pneumonia and gone to a Montreal hospital where a doctor spotted his Ontario hospital underwear and phoned the police.

On the same day, my grandmother, Big Louie, had walked into Sick Kids hospital carrying a vial of convalescent serum for me made from the blood of recovered polio patients. I told my grandmother about Mad Killer Pilkie making headlines, and my grandmother said John Pilkie sounded like a knock-off man who didn't want to work for a living.

“It's as if Big Louie already knew that he was going to be sent to the Bug House, and she wanted to stop me from liking him,” I told Little Louie.

“So Mom was right. You got better.” Little Louie grinned. “And now the hockey killer is coming to Madoc's Landing. She must be tickled pink.”

From the stairwell, Sal yelled up at us again. “Louisa, if you don't make Mary do what I say, I'm telling Doc Bradford.”

“Shut up, you big B-I-T-C-H!” Little Louie muttered, spelling out the letters without saying the word. When she saw my face, she shouted back, “Okay, okay, Sal, we're coming!” Little Louie pulled on a pair of old jeans and a torn turtleneck sweater and I put on my best tartan kilt and clean white blouse with a Peter Pan collar; then she helped me on with my Boston brace. If you've never seen a Boston brace, it was quite a contraption. I wore an abbreviated version, custom-tailored to me. The top half fit around my pelvis and buckled up under my clothes. The second part was the long metal bar used to stretch and strengthen my left leg, which didn't move as fast as my right leg, the one polio hadn't touched.

A Useless Conversation with Hindrance

 

Me: I hate it when the kids at school whisper, “Here comes Peg Leg.”

Hindrance: You'll just have to lump it, won't you?

Me: Over my dead body.

Hindrance: Say that enough, Mouse, and your wish will come true.

NEXT, I PUT ON MY blazer and the Lone Ranger hat Morley gave me. It had a black braided chinstrap. I refused to wear my winter coat or galoshes, because Little Louie said it was spring so she wasn't wearing hers.

“Where's your coat?” Sal yelled as I rushed past. “Upstairs,” I shouted over my shoulder. Our springer spaniels, Joe and Mairzy, thundered after me, barking their heads off. We clambered into the back seat of my father's green Oldsmobile convertible. According to Sal, I had been named after the first springer spaniel, Mary, because my mother was so crazy about her. I had every reason to believe Sal was serious.

A moment later, my father and Little Louie got in too. His dove-grey fedora was still on his head. He liked the 1953 convertible because even with the roof up, it was the only automobile big enough to let him to drive with his hat on. Halfway down Whitefish Road, he stopped unexpectedly.

“Who lives here?” my aunt asked.

“Cap Lefroy. Sal says he's dying of lung cancer,” I whispered as Morley got out of the car. My aunt scoffed and lit up a Sweet Cap to show me how little she cared about the disease. Together we watched Morley plod up the drive, Joe and Mairzy bouncing at his heels. I had dreamt about Cap's three-storey brick house the night before, and my dream depicted the same scene I was looking at from the back seat of the Oldsmobile: fat, puffed up snow clouds swarming around Cap's place. I had no idea what kind of menacing energies the clouds in my dream suggested, and I didn't want to guess. It was bad enough that a snowstorm was coming our way and we had gone out minus our winter coats and boots. Inside the car, the chilly March air was drifting up through the floorboards, making us shiver. There was no heater in the Oldsmobile, just the warmth from the engine.

At last Morley came back, bringing Cap, who opened the door to the back seat and peered in. “Our town is sure lucky to have Doc Bradford,” he said, winking at Little Louie and myself. “He's the town saint, eh Mary?”

“I guess so,” I said shyly.

“You guess so? Our country was built by men like your father! They don't make 'em like him anymore.”

“That's enough guff, Cap. We're off to see the hockey killer,” Morley said. Cap whistled, long and low, and we drove off, the uplifting strains of Pat Boone singing “April Love” blasting from the car radio.