Dropped Threads 3 (30 page)

We listen to an addict talk about how frightened she is about trying to quit crack, and the movie star rambles incomprehensibly in beautiful, carefully chosen language. Then, over the PA, someone announces it’s time for drop-ins to leave. We clear away the saltine crumbs and wet tea bags and most of the women scatter without saying goodbye or even collecting their work. Often I feel deflated at the end of our writing session, rattled by the litany of misery I’ve just heard, but today I’m oddly buoyant as I gather the pens and papers together. Liberated, perhaps, by my confession, thankful for the good-natured embrace of these women. The loud one, the woman who had her baby taken away by the CAS, helps me return the supplies to the staff room. As I’m gathering my coat and bag together to go home, she waits by the door and stops me before I leave. She puts out her arms and pulls me in toward her substantial bosom, squeezing gently. “Good luck,” she whispers in my ear.

I walk home feeling light, even graceful, despite my lumbering gait. For the first time, I can see myself as I’ve always seen other pregnant women—strong, vibrant, beautiful. I talk under my breath to my baby. I want him to know about this unlikely community I’ve found, about the women who shared their struggles with me and made all of us feel stronger. As if in response, the baby jabs me in the ribs with a tiny, powerful foot. I rub the spot he kicked with the heel of my hand, and smile.

My thoughts
are a mother’s thoughts as Jo strides toward our little family group in the parking lot in front of the grey institutional building, the sunlight on the mountains behind her. A faint breeze lifts a few strands of dark hair across her cheek. I’m glad she made it around that construction on the highway. She’s too thin, I note, and her cheek is swollen from the dentist this morning. But here she is, bending to hug her great-aunt Lois, at eighty-four the sole survivor of the three siblings who grew up in Winnipeg during the Depression. The oldest was my mother, Jo’s grandmother, Sheila.

Lois was always the shy one, haunted by secret fears, outshone by older sister Sheila, the beautiful and talented one. Lois was there with us fifteen years ago to bury my mother, struck down by Alzheimer’s at a young age. Now Larry, the adored, fun-loving and risk-taking baby of the family, is dead too. And Lois, the last of the three, is here to bury him.

Jo reaches up to embrace Lois’s husband, Tom, who will give the eulogy at this afternoon’s service. My daughter Jo is twenty-nine and gorgeous (a mother’s opinion), muscles toned by Pilates and marathons in Vancouver. She has worn simple black pants and a light sweater today, no jacket. We agree that her cell phone should be locked in the trunk and then remember we should leave our bags there too, for we know they would be searched at the door.

The last time Jo and I were in this parking lot, Uncle Larry came out to meet her. That was back in the spring, just before Larry’s eighty-first birthday. He told us he really wasn’t supposed to go as far as the parking lot but he wanted to say hello to his grandniece and her new husband. No one stopped him.

Uncle Larry collapsed in his cell in the Ferndale Institute in Mission, British Columbia, after surviving seven years in a federal penitentiary. He died in an Abbotsford hospital on Thanksgiving weekend. He would have been eligible for parole in another year and a half. Our family dream was that we would take him back to the Lake of the Woods in Ontario where he had built his own cabin retreat he called Larry’s Last Resort when he was in his twenties. He was my favourite uncle back then, blond with soft blue eyes and a smile that promised an adult world full of fun. He had been a bomber pilot in the war and, when I was growing up, he had glamorous girlfriends who had jobs and drank beer on weekends, a red Alfa Romeo Giulietta Sprint sportscar and a 25-horsepower outboard motorboat that pulled water skiers bouncing over the waves. To us kids, his life was full of everything we dreamed about.

Aunt Lois had not wanted a service of any kind. This wasn’t the way her brother’s story was supposed to end. But the prison chaplain had persuaded her to attend a simple service in the Ferndale chapel. He said it would be “important to the men.” The family agreed to come. I found an eight-by-ten portrait of Uncle Larry in his RCAF uniform, taken when he enlisted at eighteen in 1942, and brought it with me from Winnipeg. Lois and Tom worked on a simple message from the family for the service. We joked that Tom, a retired university professor, would finally have his dream: a captive audience.

Jo’s arrival from Vancouver completes the group of about a dozen family members and friends and we file in together.
While we wait to sign in, we read the names of other inmates on a chart on the wall. We recognize one: Colin Thatcher, son of the former Saskatchewan premier, convicted of killing his wife in her garage, in a celebrated criminal case many years back.

The Anglican chaplain who will be leading the service is wearing long black-and-white robes that flap in the breeze as he leads our tiny family group to the chapel. I feel Jo beside me. Although she is looking around with curiosity, she is quiet. We hear the sound of inmates lazily batting tennis balls back and forth on the nearby courts as we move between prison buildings. At the chapel door, an inmate has been posted to greet everyone, to thank us for coming and shake our hands. The simple gesture is calming, a welcome human touch. The usher guides us into the dimly lit chapel with its rows of folding chairs, a red hymnbook on each, and a whiff of fresh flowers and candles in the air. The familiarity of this church-like place steadies me. Jo picks up a hymnbook and begins to leaf through it. Candles and flower arrangements adorn the altar at the front and the picture of teenaged Larry in his airforce hat, smiling with youthful enthusiasm as if the world were not at war, reminds everyone why we are here.

Jo and I sit together, Lois and Tom in the row behind us. The room holds about fifty and gradually the chairs fill up, leaving some of the men, dressed mostly in jeans and sweatshirts, lounging against the back wall and in the aisles. One man directly across from us has tied his shoulder-length hair loosely with a bandana; beside him another with a shaved head crosses tattooed, muscular arms over his chest. The men stare silently straight ahead at the altar, some clutching their hymnbooks, while the organist plays solemn church music.

Jo and I tense as the last family member slides into the row behind us. Larry’s son, who lives in a group home nearby, has arrived. Today, he is accompanied by a guard and his social worker.

We all know the story. When the police arrived at the West Vancouver apartment in May 1992 in response to Larry’s frantic 911 call, they found him covered with blood cradling the body of his wife of thirty-five years, blowing air into her lungs. It was a violent murder; she had been struck repeatedly with a knife sharpener and tinsnips. In the five years of trial after trial, Larry never allowed his defence to focus on the evidence that their son lived around the corner, suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and had a history of difficulty with his mother. Larry never let his lawyers tell the jury that like many parents he and his wife had never got around to telling their son he was adopted. It also went unmentioned that, the week before the murder, their son was deeply upset when his birth mother showed up after somehow managing to find him. Larry’s calm insistence that “it must have been an intruder” could not be backed by evidence, and he was convicted in the third trial and sentenced to life—ten years without parole. He arranged through friends to make sure his son was well cared for and could come and visit him regularly. He always maintained in discussions with me that the justice system did not show an understanding of mental illness and, consequently, the mentally ill were not protected or given proper treatment inside. When I tried to disagree, he would remind me that he was side by side with the mentally ill in prison. I had no response for that.

Sitting in the chapel, our family is feeling all the sadness and seeming futility of Larry’s sacrifice; comfort doesn’t seem possible. But we have agreed to come, so we sit
through the first reading and dutifully rise to sing “The Lord Is My Shepherd.” The inmate in charge of transparencies switches on the projector light to reveal that the words to the hymn are upside down on the screen. The chaplain pauses, glowering through bifocals down at the offender, and waits, tapping the lectern with his forefinger. The inmate fumbles with the pile of transparencies but they are slippery and escape his hands, landing scattered on the floor. He scrambles to pick them up and throws another on the projector plate. Now it’s backwards, still unreadable. He tries once more and, finally, we are able to read the words right side up. We begin to sing, our voices hesitant and flat. “Yea, though I walk through death’s dark vale yet will I fear no ill …”

Tom is invited to the front to give his eulogy. The men chuckle when he says Larry wrote a story called “How to Escape.” It turns out the story is about escaping in the mind, transcending physical barriers with imagined journeys. We assume this family message will mark the end of the service. Then the chaplain says, “If anyone else wishes to speak about Larry, please do so.” He looks pointedly at the men across the aisle from us and nods to an anxious-looking, short, stocky man with a day-old beard. “Yes, Robert.”

Robert shuffles to the front. He doesn’t use the lectern but stands unprotected in front of us with a paper in his hands, which are visibly shaking. “I was illiterate when I met Larry,” he begins. “I started in his creative writing class and now I’m a poet.” He shares a poem with us that he and Larry worked on together. Each of the seven stanzas begins with “to my brother of words.” Robert ends with the line “the spikes that come out of my mouth will be sharp as arrows and cutting like a hot knife through butter” then returns to his seat, his face flushed with pride and relief.

Next is Deltonia, a muscular, handsome man with a big grin and a wide white headband around his forehead. “I had a prepared speech I wanted to give the family,” he says. However, it seems he couldn’t get the printer to work, so at the last minute he decided to “speak from the heart.” Until Thanksgiving weekend, he had shared a house with Larry and two other inmates. He tells us how, just last week, he was troubled and depressed. Larry noticed and asked what was wrong. Deltonia explained that his one-year-old daughter had been having seizures and he was worried about not being with her, about how his wife would cope. “Larry taught me to meditate and relax. He said to start from the top of my head and slowly work down to my toes, concentrating on relaxing each body part. And, you know, it worked. I started to feel better.”

The next speaker, an older man with a soft voice and calm expression, talks about Larry as a father. “He was a devoted father. He was determined to find out every medical fact about schizophrenia. He was sure he could cure his son.”

They come to the front one by one, six of them, to speak about Uncle Larry and what he meant in their lives. Because visiting was difficult and always under surveillance and because Larry didn’t write about these men in his letters, our family, before this moment, knew almost nothing about Larry’s life over the past seven years. As the men tell their stories, we slowly begin to understand the profound effect Larry had on their lives in that world hidden from our view. We sit in rapt attention as this touching picture emerges, and gradually the cloud of sadness and futility hanging over us begins to lift.

We are invited to stay for coffee and dainties after the service. The inmates have been baking and a table at the back is piled high with Nanaimo bars, iced cupcakes, chocolate
chip cookies, banana loaf and lemon squares—like the ladies’ auxiliary table at any church bake sale on the Prairies.

As we chat and help ourselves to cookies, I watch my daughter. A young man in baggy black pants, with metal studs in his lip, nose and ears and Walkman earphones draped around his neck, is earnestly talking to her in one corner, his face leaning close to hers. My first thought is that he might be bothering her. I quickly join them only to hear her suggesting movies he might like. An East Indian inmate tells us Larry was great because “he had been in the war and he knew things—like how to make bombs.” Everyone laughs and we suggest perhaps he shouldn’t be saying that in here. He adds, seriously, that he couldn’t speak a word of English when he was sent here and that Larry taught him ESL.

Deltonia, a former U.S. Marine, now standing near us, says some of the older inmates have a rough time on the inside, but not Larry. “We felt respect from him and so he got our respect right away. No one would dare touch Larry with us around—we took care of him.” Another gift for the family.

Our initial trepidation gone, Jo and I are now eagerly sharing stories with the men. We tell them about the time Larry got in trouble in university when he flew his rented plane dangerously close to the ground trying to drop pamphlets for the campus election. They tell us Larry was given a motor scooter when his legs got weak and he drove it like he flew a plane, with speed and precision. As chapel was about to start on Sunday mornings they would hear the scooter roar up and stop within inches of the wall and, moments later, Larry would limp in grinning. When the time comes to leave the reception, we wish everyone good luck.