George & Rue (14 page)

A
T THE ROMP DEPOT, Evans and Stark lorded it over a small room made tinier by just one table, three chairs, one searingly bright light, and many shadows. George was given coffee regularly, but was not allowed to smoke because Evans and Stark wanted him to sweat for each cigarette he’d be allotted later. They were dressed sharp as usual. Evans’s suit was blue serge, and he had a grey tie and shoes. Stark was also natty, but in the usual black clothes, a skinny black tie, and a white shirt. George was outclassed: he had on hobnailed boots and looked like a lumberjack. The detectives hulked around him, scribbling, taking notes, sipping coffees, and casting larger-than-life shadows. They were composing a
res gestae,
a spontaneous statement, a script that, with Georgie’s embroidered answers, would one day be pressed into death-sentence paper and then wrung into hangman’s hemp. The pair untangled every riddle, every puzzle, of this cheerless violence that was now being woven into True Crime literature of the most official and fatal sort.

Evans and Stark had foolscap sheets with typed notations verifying George’s screwy army service, his Montreal fracas, his drab tool theft in Fredericton. They could look at the sheets, look at George, and not look happy.

Evans said, finally, “Georgie, Georgie, Georgie, everything you done before last week was chickenshit compared to this homicide.”

Panic blizzarded hotly inside George.

Georgie asked, pretty please, for a lawyer, but Stark swerved abruptly on his black patent leather heels, his grey suit flashing, and glared, Rufus-like. “You can’t purify this murder by hiring a lawyer!”

Georgie sank back, choked out, “I didn’t do it!”

Evans, cordial, calm, commented, “We’ve got the unburnt head of the hammer, the charred head about the size of a hummingbird (but much, much heavier—and far deadlier than that weightless creature), from the ashes in
your
stove.”

Stark interjected, “Tell us about the hammer.”

George shrugged, gulped his coffee, and explained (omitting his past legal troubles with O’Ree), “I used this hammer for banging iron, breaking cast iron and selling it to people I was working for. I flattened the hammerhead by banging it on harder iron. I did it, flattened that hammer, breaking iron when I was working for the Jew, Abe Klein, here in Fredericton. I flattened that hammer myself and pounded one side. I used to knock up old stoves.”

Evans leaned over the table and winked. “Like you knocked up your ol lady, eh?” George laughed: he thought it was a joke.

But Stark retorted, “Or like you knocked Silver in the head.”

George replied, “Not me. Rufus.”

Evans returned, “One of you did slay Burgundy.”

Stark sneered: “Oh yeah, one of ya’s ‘innocent’; the other one’s bad. Sure, sure.”

Evans continued, “Was that hammer the one you—or Rufus—used?”

George bowed his head. “I know which hammer is mine because I only have two hammers.”

“And you helped Rue hammer a man for his money?” Evans sipped more coffee.

George blurted: “The money we took off Silver—it was Rue’s, it was mainly silver.”

Stark bluffed: “Silver’s death was a big murder done by a big fool. You let Silver freeze—or bleed—to death, and then you stuck him like a carcass—a carcass!—into his own car trunk.”

George winced at hearing the word
carcass:
he saw Asa pointing accusingly at him.

“You were a huge idiot, Jawge, to travel with a hammer in your overalls with the likes of Rue about.”

“Maybe,” George answered Stark, “but I don’t know what my story is. It isn’t over yet.”

Evans scraped back his chair. It sounded like an avalanche of boulders. “Why’d ya do it, Joygee?”

“I—I didn’t do nothin. It was all Rue, I’m tellin you. I had nightmares filled with blood, knives, and being chased—just ahead of the murder,” George sobbed. “Also, Blondola was in the hospital, and our first baby was crying and crying and crying. So I needed money, so I helped Rufus.”

Evans now asked, “Was it light or dark?”

Geo explained, “Well, it was pretty dark, real dark. I recollected. Quite dark then.”

Evans pressed on: “How was the murder executed?”

George blubbered. “So we—Rudy and me—hemmed and hawed as to who was going to hit.

So Rufus said to me, ‘You got the hammer, so you hit him.’ But I took scared, shaking inside of me, and I dropped the hammer in the snow, and I said, ‘I know Silver. I can’t.’” It was hard for Georgie to get his breath.

He sobbed wheezingly, sighing, “Ahhhhhh,” “Ooooooh,” but Stark shouted at the shaken-up, shaking man: “A convenient story—quite suitable after smashing Burgundy with a hammer!”

George shook his head negativizingly. “I ain’t sittin here to make a good story.” He elaborated: “All Rue said after he hit Silver was, ‘I felt
his hands and face and they were ice cold.’ Me? I can’t be blempt. I would spend my life selling cream from cows I’d milked, if it weren’t for Rue and his schemes. I could’ve red-capped; I could’ve gone to the Boston States! I didn’t want him to sock Silver. We got in a half dispute. We had a little dispute over it.”

Stark walloped Georgie: “What numbskull helps a brother to hammer a cab driver in the head for money to get his wife and innocent baby out the hospital, but insists on driving all night, like a hellion, all over the risky, icy roads of this province, to buy stockings for a slut instead?”

George was exposed. “Nothing. I did nothing. She spoke and offered me a drink of wine.” Even as he lied, he could see, suddenly, Lovea’s lovely rump. But, hearing his adultery put so starkly
and
mockingly upped his despair. He’d have to let Rufus down, let Rufus hang. He blurted through his racking sobs, “Rue was the person who influenced me to do this so we might take on a white man and take his livelihood.”

Stark growled: “Sure, sure, this murder doesn’t come with your fingerprints, your mitts, all over it, eh?”

Evans rested a hand on George’s slouching, shuddering shoulder. “Georgie, aren’t you concerned you’re hanging your brother out to dry?”

Stark guffawed: “Naw, just hanging him out to hang! You and Rue are as dumb as two chimps typing out Darwin’s
Origin of Species.”

George bawled. “I was scared Rufus’d put that hammer in my head next.”

Having helped to break Georgie, Stark became conciliatory. He removed the hanky from his own tailored pocket and handed it, with flawless, practised chivalry, to the slobbering George. “We was disgustin—I mean, discussin—this here conversation. Why don’t we clear up a few other things?”

George blew into the hanky, quaffed coffee, drew a deep breath, looked around, red-eyed, sniffling: “Okay.”

Evans asked, “Did anything touch Silver before he expired?”

George could only shrug. “The hammer touched him.” Then Evans handed George, compliant and eager and grateful, a cigarette.

T
HAT VERY Thursday morning, January 13th, Rufus was arrested. Evans and Stark recovered from his effects a pistol
(sans
ammo); chewing gum; Player’s Navy Cut cigarettes;
Cane,
by Jean Toomer; a Classics Illustrated edition of
Titus Andronicus;
and sheet music, bloodstained. They also confiscated Rue’s suitcase containing a black suit, three bottles of wine, and a quart of rum.

Rue shouted at the grey gabardine topcoated and grey fedora’d Mounties, “You guys are picking on me because someone killed some white bastard? All this shit because of one lousy dead white bastard! Shit! Shit! Shit!”

Plumsy Peters went into the cooler too. Just for good measure.

George, Rue, and Plumsy was all herded—separately—into the east entrance of the jail, a two-storey grey-stone structure with wood-planked, tin-clad ceilings painted either cream or indigo, and placed into one of the four separate second-floor cells, with 1840-era solid wood floors hammered down with homemade nails. Each cell had white-painted radiators, redbrick walls painted black, and black-painted, inch-thick iron-bar doors, and back windows, generously sized at three feet high and two feet wide, but bisected and segmented by a double row of iron bars painted cream. Here light could sluice in; no one could slide out.

Torture was wrought by the jail’s location—adjacent to the
grounds where the weekly farmers’ market was held. That good food roasting, frying, right under the jail windows enacted the curse of Tantalus. Although their prison fare was tasty, George, Rue, and Plumsy could glimpse and smell, but could not touch or taste, that fresh-barbecued outdoor food—chicken, steak, beef, sausages.

Inside the York County Gaol, everyone’s face got branded with the shadows of the bars on their cells. At night, like flowers, three inmates lay dead-like and curled. Not much to do in the joint but think and squabble with guards and pray. Those jail doors clashed shut as noisy as shotgun blasts.

George saw himself as distinct from Rue, for he, the elder, was testifying against Rue. Disquietingly, though, he and his brother were always brought to court in a pair—and always handcuffed together. Padlocked and shackled, the boys listed to starboard, then listed to port, as they shuffled from the jail to the court. Sheriff I. B. Lion and the police were telling Georgie they considered him as guilty of first-degree murder as the man George was doin his best to see hanged alone. So, together, the Hamiltons got used to the weight of shackles and the cold, grisly wrist kiss of handcuffs. The two brothers staggered; they were so cluttered and clattered with chains. They had to walk chained in the street, degraded, flanked by two jail-an-nail-ems. Rue tried, as often as possible, to trip up Georgie as they lumbered along. He hated to see his brother so nonchalantly trying hard to get him hanged. Their fighting was as soft as shadow-boxing, but no less fierce. Rue tried to swing himself about to trip and bruise George, to make that fool understand their chains were all his fault.

George say, “Rue, it weren’t my arm that struck out a life, but yours that made a ruin.”

Plumsy yelled from his cell: “Joygee, must you jangle with your brother so?”

Rue laughed bitterly. “Joygee, you think em laws gonna cut you some rope, and they will: but just one you gonna hang from.”

George said, “No, you just talking bout your damn self.” Plumsy yelled again, “Joygee, you just a cocksuckin, bootlickin Uncle Tom, actin all sissy for the cops.”

Rue guffawed.

George was furious. “Listen up, Plumsy. I just hate the way the cops hate us.”

Rufus snorted: “Don’t hate their ways; hate them back.”

Instead, George deviously secured religion. He was already a Crown witness; now he’d witness for Christ. So he signed the Articles of War, confessed his sins and love of Christ, and enrolled as a Salvation Army soldier, thus joining the same faith whose members had befriended him when he was locked up in London and Montreal. He figured he’d have more success in this army than he’d enjoyed in the Canadian one. Besides, the Sally Ann was—just like Christ—used to treating with thieves, prostitutes, gamblers, and drunkards.

The Hamiltons entered the York County Courthouse like a deuce of devils, with George’s piety contrasting unhelpfully with Rue’s disdain, and with George’s religiosity disguising a Rufus-like rufous and ferrous disdain. But nothing could allay public outrage. Whites were feelin shaky now round their Coloured cleaners and cooks and maids: “Negroes could be annihilators—despite their giant smiles!” Whites didn’t like the idea of grinning, killer niggers. So the boys became solid idols for popular fury.

Newspapers thudded like slabs of beef against the jailhouse floor. They warbled lustily of this murder drama. “Negro thugs with hammers”; “Coloured crooks with blonde tarts.” Reporters called the brothers Scarface Titus and Pretty Boy Macbeth; they mixed “God Save the King” with a few bars of “Dixie.”

Letter writers to opinion pages cried for blood, as did at least one poet:

“The brain exploded. The occipital busted ugly /—as if the hammer were of such a gross calibre of overkill, /it was a Hiroshima-style bomb: /Violence to devastate not only a big city, /but much of a country besides.”—
The Fiddlehead
(Fredericton, N.B.).

The tabs used scowling photos of them condemned boys. The pics were silvery formaldehyde fixing the cons in brilliant infamy. But editors knew that no matter how bad those negatives were, Silver’s autopsy photos were worse.

The two Hamiltons appeared as black as sin. No one could whitewash their atrocity into a mere mistake. Two scions of Three Mile Plains had to perish,
suspensus per collum.
They had to die at the speed of light, shadowed.

P
LUMP, GRIMACING, his Conservative skin tweeded over, Mr. Justice Jeremiah Chaud, under his black robes, presided over York County’s fake Grecian courtroom like a squat smokestack stabbing through a plaster Acropolis. He bossed his realm like a slightly less portly J. Edgar Hoover. Raised in Miramichi, his parley was as beautiful as italic script, but also as dark-edged as letters on a Gothic headstone. Sharp words aimed like knives. As an utterly English Acadian, with not one particle of French that he could pronounce properly, as a soul who was now sycophantically subordinate to the remnants of the original Anglo-Saxon empire, he felt it was his duty to ensure that the poor—and all those who were not purely white and English—stayed in their fetid stations: the Mi’kmak, the Acadians, the Negroes…. Under the twisting fan above his big head, useless in the May heat, he swept his perspiring face incessantly with his napkin.

For Chaud, as for anyone, the Hamiltons’ alleged crime was senseless; it had left a young father dead on a deserted road. Silver had been struck like he was a domesticated beast, just for a zoot suit, and bejeezly-bad wine. Then followed that Kafkaesque spree with the body. But the killers’ colour was not immaterial: it made a black crime even blacker. Chaud had to wonder, “Is a Negro’s laugh pastoral—or pathological?” That the Hamiltons were Coloured didn’t alter the clear facts
that two men had slugged, robbed, and murdered an innocent husband and father, and then outraged his corpse, all in cold blood.

Chaud’s understanding was that the Hamiltons had got some beer and got fired up with a deadly lust for money to splash on wine and women. The ugly results of an unhygienic paternity, they were a strain of tramps, laggards, dullards, retards, with violent, cotton-picking hands that, if permitted, would level the Parthenon to a sty.

Chaud also understood that the brothers, if found guilty, would both hang, even if George’d never hit Silver a single lick. Under the
Criminal Code of Canada
it didn’t matter who’d, individually, killed: the law was remorseless here. It took the view that Silver wouldn’t’ve come to harm later if the boys hadn’t planned on robbery initially, regardless of whether they’d wanted violence. “Good intentions” didn’t count. That George may not’ve meant Silver to die, that he may not’ve struck Silver, that he was remorseful about what Rufus did, all these facts—if true—meant nothing. Section 69 of the
Criminal Code
was fatally clear on the point.

Whether or not Silver died instantly or after he was first laid down in the snowy woods for any animal to sniff and gnaw on or whether it was after he was lugged and jammed into the trunk of his own taxi, it was still homicide. Once the brothers formed the common, illegal purpose to use a hammer as a weapon to effect robbery, they should have known that murder would issue: hit a man with a hammer and it’s just blood everywhere.

Thirty-year-old Crown Prosecutor Alphaeus Boyd—bearded, bespectacled, sleek, silk-suited—viewed the two brothers as one deadly criminal: Rufus-George, with suspect clothes, dirty looks, shifty grammar. Boyd heard a scintilla of Africa, of bush, in the boys’ talk; also a hint of red men’s hatchets, from before Europe’s guns and cannons thrust Christ
and Shakespeare upon the savages. Considering the case in his law offices, he scrupled to philosophize in his heart: “Are the Negroes oppressed? Yes. But they are not trampled in the streets or brutalized in their houses. Did the Hamiltons impiously procure Silver’s death? The charge is more than credible.” It was his job to coax George’s testimony into a death writ against Rufus—and against the star witness himself. He could not forget either that his looming appointment as the deputy attorney general of the Province of New Brunswick could be withdrawn if the jury was not persuaded by the evidence and his arguments to bring mortal convictions against the boys.