Alone in the Classroom (15 page)

The chokecherry, like Ethel, never grows very tall. Dangling white fingers of flowers make it conspicuous in the spring. Then in early August the cherries ripen in clusters, like grapes. An early traveller to the New World wrote that “if they be not very ripe, they so furre the mouth that the tongue will cleave to the roofe, and the throate wax horse with swallowing those red Bullies (as I may call them) being little better in taste.”

Ethel entered the field through a farm gate. She knew where she was going, for only the day before, a civic holiday, she and her parents and sisters had walked this very road, something they often did, and spoken to a young man on a cane who was coming down the hill with a heavy pail of chokecherries. Her father had asked him where the best picking was and he had mentioned Ivey’s bush farther up the road, the fence on its far side straddled with chokecherry trees.

From the farm gate a beaten path led across the field to the fairly open bush, then continued along the edge of the bush, inside the rail fence. On the other side of the fence lay a field of oats. It’s not impossible that Ethel, being a reader, was privy to Hardy’s startling thought in
Tess
about the countless times we pass back and forth over the day we will die without having the slightest premonition. Just ahead, the chokecherry trees were twittering with birds.

Before his arrest and after, John Coyle maintained his innocence. He did so publicly and at some length at the long-delayed inquest that took place two weeks after he was jailed and five weeks after the murder, in early September. By then school was already under way.

“You would come in from the lake, having had a coolish August,” my mother said to me a year ago, her voice relaxing into clarity as she remembered those times. “The east wind would come down over the lake and blow in over us at the cabin, and the weather would just then change. It would reverse itself and you would have days of warm, sunny weather. It wasn’t high summer. It was September.”

“The beginning of school,” I said. “Without fail, the weather is perfect.”

She laughed with me as the first days of school flooded our minds, uneasiness and perfect weather going hand in hand, as all schoolchildren know.

The coroner and his jury assembled in the old Temperance Hall on Raglan Street, and over the course of
the afternoon they heard a series of witnesses, expert and otherwise, lay out the story.

Johnny recounted that on the day of the murder he got up around nine o’clock and did some work for his mother, then he left the house at 10:45
A.M
. (the coroner had put the time of the murder at somewhere between ten and eleven in the morning) and went to the Russell drugstore, where he bought the
Ottawa Journal
(Connie’s paper being the most popular one in rural eastern Ontario). He went on to the Odd Fellows Hall and read the paper. From there he went to Peever’s butcher shop and bought meat for dinner and took it home. At 11:25
A.M.
, he said, precise to the minute, he took a small tomato tin and went over the bridge on Opeongo Street, saw children picking cherries on his left, stopped and spoke to them, then turned to his right over a sag in the fence and, heading northwesterly across Ivey’s fields, picked a few cherries, then continued more directly north to the right-of-way of the National Railway, ascended to the high trestle bridge across Smith’s Creek, and returned home over the bridge, a distance of just under a mile. He arrived home at five minutes after twelve, when his people were sitting down to dinner.

In the evening, he went to a softball match on the grounds of the Argyle Electric Company, across from the
CNR
train station, and there he first heard of the disappearance and search for the girl, whom he didn’t know, he said, making a claim that was later shown to be untrue. With three men that he met at the game, section men who worked for the railway, he went up the hill to the Ivey
farm and saw a woman walking in the fairly open bush, calling out, “Ethel, Ethel!” It was Miss Rosamond Ivey, who knew him, and would testify in turn that he joined her in the search, sharing her opinion that terrible things were happening in the world and expressing his own fear that they were going to find something. They separated, she said, at the big stump a few hundred feet in from the northern edge of the bush. She went to the right, he went to the left. About two minutes later, he called out, “I have found her, and she is dead!” He would tell Police Chief Reed (when he arrived twenty minutes later) that he had stumbled over something, likely the large, round stone that proved to be the murder weapon, and then fallen over the girl, getting her blood on his hands.

The evidence was largely against him. The police chief said that daylight still remained when he got to the scene; it was unlikely anyone would have “stumbled” over a body. The railwaymen who had accompanied Johnny said he told them he had seen the girl on the bridge at ten that morning and warned her against going out alone after cherries, contradicting his statements that he was nowhere near the hill until after eleven-thirty and that he didn’t know the girl. The railwaymen agreed that it was coming on dusk when Johnny found the body, but quite clear. A neighbour, a housewife, said she saw him at seven-thirty the next morning hanging out a pair of trousers and a shirt that had just been washed; never before had she seen him thus engaged. Another neighbour, a schoolteacher, was reading on her veranda the morning of the murder and saw Ethel pass by on the other side of the hedge, heading
towards Ivey Hill. A little later, she saw “somebody carrying a cane” go by in the same direction, walking hurriedly, and it had to be Johnny - for everyone knew he relied on a cane, having been injured three years earlier (by a baseball driven into his leg, curiously enough) and having been operated on more than once by the very doctor who recently had died on the operating table. Then a medical expert from Toronto, Dr. Hugh Norman, sealed the young man’s fate by saying that the hairs in the dead child’s clenched right hand corresponded with hair from John Coyle’s head. They were similar. He could not swear they were the same.

Connie was at the side of the room taking copious notes. It was a warm and cloudless day. At six o’clock the coroner’s jury withdrew, and at seven they returned and delivered their opinion that the evidence pointed towards John Coyle.

Connie stood up and saw Parley Burns in the far corner of the packed hall, the glint of his glasses, the cloth of his good suit. She made her way over to him and it was a malicious question, but she asked if he believed the guilty person would ever be punished.

“I feel sorry for the boy,” he said.

A young man who was lame and had no history of misbehaviour, who had listened intently and without apparent shame throughout the inquest. But how do you read anyone, how can you possibly know? She had asked almost everyone she talked to what they thought of Mr. Burns, and he seemed to be held in universal respect: he ran a good school, he was articulate and well spoken
in public, he was a regular churchgoer and supporter of community life. Among the schoolboys she asked, there was fear mingled with fondness. Among the schoolgirls, uneasiness and alarm. My mother told her that Parley Burns gave her the creeps. My grandmother, on the other hand, called him a great gentleman; she was impressed by his manner, appearance, education, success. But my grandmother and Parley Burns were similar, perhaps, in their anti-social self-esteem. My grandmother was a most fastidious woman, yet my mother had once come upon her in the bathroom using the family-shared facecloth to wipe her bottom.

“John’s a good, respectable boy,” Parley said. He fingered his tie and smoothed it.

Parley would make himself very unpopular by defending Johnny Coyle. Only a few people in Argyle spoke out for the young man. Another was his minister, who happened to be Parley’s minister as well. People hated them for it, these two outsiders: Reverend Dunning from Toronto, whose sleek car moved silently down the street, and who lectured his congregation on their shortcomings; and Parley Burns, who taught French and gave the derivation of
tolerance
when he urged it upon the school assembly as a virtue to be prized. Neither man was silenced by the immense sympathy for Ethel’s family.

All her life Connie would veer between wanting to understand Parley and believing that no explanation would ever suffice. But then explaining and understanding are
different things. The former requires beady eyes, and the latter, the kind of long look that gazes out the window and sees the troubled sky extending over the troubled world.

At the trial in November, a summer story unfolded as winter took hold and snow fell on the woods and fields and pathways in question. Johnny pleaded not guilty, but never took the stand in his own defence. The jury consisted of farmers and barbers and storekeepers from the surrounding area. Spectators filled all available space in the courtroom for the ten long days of the trial.

Everything already learned at the inquest came out again, but more exhaustively. Ethel’s small, proud mother remembered exactly what her daughter had worn. A light-blue dress with pockets and a little white tie at the neck and a little belt at the waist. A green slip, a pair of white panties, white broadcloth cotton panties with elastic at the top. No socks. Brown sandals. Ethel had risen about nine o’clock, her mother said, and for breakfast
she had eaten a bowl of cornflakes and drunk a glass of milk.

“Did she by any chance eat any potatoes that morning?” the Crown prosecutor asked.

“No, she did not.”

“Was she not rather dressed up to go berry picking?”

“That was a favourite dress, handed down from her older sister. And she planned to go afterwards to Mrs. Handford and Mrs. Davis and sell them whatever cherries she had picked.”

“I am awfully sorry to have to question you, Mrs. Weir, but might she have gone outside without her panties on?”

“No, absolutely not.”

“And were you with her all the time she was dressing?”

“I was not in the bedroom, but she had on part of her garments as she came out of the bedroom, and she was in the act of slipping her little dress over her slip just as we were alone in the house.”

The potatoes remained a mystery too: the semi-digested potatoes found in her stomach, along with cereal and a few chokecherries. Had hoboes shared a potato with her before following her into the bush? Certainly at some point she had tried to run away. Over a hundred and fifty spilled cherries were found on the path about forty feet from where her body lay. Her two pails - preserving kettles with handles - were upright on the ground four feet from her right shoulder.

How late children slept during the Argyle summer. None seemed to rise before nine. You get the sense of a long,
timeless season when children were left entirely to their own devices. And so it was when I was a child. Days were green pastures of imaginative plenty when we amused and fulfilled ourselves in the wide world of a small town. Distances were as nothing, since they led not to school but to water. The taste of it suddenly sloshing up your nose, a gulping, sputtering, half-drowning pleasure that was part of being afloat and over your head.

An eleven-year-old girl giving unsworn testimony (she was deemed to be too young to understand the full import of taking an oath) said that on August 3 she had left home at ten o’clock to pick apples in Ivey’s field. Pointing out her route on the enlarged map of the town, she said, “I crossed this here railway track, and there was a field here and a field there, and you had to go over more, and there was the apple tree.” At about twenty-five minutes to eleven, she said, she heard a scream coming from Ivey’s bush.

“What was the scream you heard?”

” ‘Help’ without the ‘p,’ ” she said clearly.

“Could you tell whether it was a big person’s voice or a little person’s voice?”

“No - it was a child’s voice. I told the girls I was with, ‘Are you coming home? Because I heard someone in the bush.’ “

Guided by the judge, who was a former local politician, the jury would disregard the girl’s bright testimony because it was uncorroborated, unlike the similarly unsworn testimony of three even younger children who were picking chokecherries on the left-hand side of Opeongo Street and claimed to have seen John Coyle go up the
hill and come back down, and then go up the hill again and come back down again. They told their story after the police inspector took them on a candy-buying expedition. But since it tallied, partly, with the next testimony, it was given weight.

The bread delivery man was next. He said he had seen John Coyle from his horse-drawn wagon at 10:40
A.M
. heading home from the direction of the bridge in “a blue shirt, kind of a faded blue and I am not sure, but I think he had a pair of greyish trousers on.”

Johnny had said at the inquest that he didn’t leave his home until 10:45, when he went out the back door and downtown. So he shouldn’t have been anywhere near the bridge.

Connie didn’t believe the bread man actually remembered what John Coyle was wearing on August 3. Even she, who loved clothes, couldn’t say what someone in passing had had on days after the fact. Far more to the point was the delivery man’s testimony that Johnny looked normal and was walking “at an ordinary pace.” He didn’t see Macbeth walking by, and yet the body in the woods would have been lying in a pool of blood, the left side of her head pounded in by a big stone, her shoulders bloodstained, her hands bloody. There wasn’t an inch of her that wasn’t scratched or bruised. Upper lip, left arm, hips, buttocks, legs, groin - an abrasion of the skin above her clitoris, an abrasion on the left side of the vagina, and a slight one at the bottom of the fold. Bruises the size of a bean on the outer surface of her right arm two inches above the wrist. A bruise on the right ring finger in front
of the knuckle, a bruise on the left thumb just above the thumbnail - where she had been grabbed and held, one assumed. The upper lip bruised where her mouth had been pressed shut.

In her left hand, some debris of grass and dirt. And in her right hand, some grass and clover leaves and bits of fibre and more than a dozen hairs.