George & Rue (16 page)

The Casket
—Fredericton, N.B.
Friday, May 20, 1949, 4 p.m. edition

George Hamilton and Rufus Hamilton, Brothers, Were Given Death Penalty for Killing Taxi-Driver Nacre Burgundy of This City—George Made Statement

FREDERICTON
—First to be tried for the diabolically calculated and most brutally executed murder in the history of this provincial capital, the dapper Rufus Hamilton was found guilty following a four-day trial, as was George, despite the fact the comical, local colored man took the stand for the Crown and blamed his younger brother for striking the death-blow, at the close of a three-day hearing.

Evidence brought out by newly named Deputy Attorney General and trial Crown Prosecutor Alphaeus Boyd disclosed that after slugging Burgundy with an iron hammer and robbing him at the foot of Poplar Hill, the negroes left the taxi-operator’s body under a tree for some time before stuffing it into the trunk of the car and
throwing the keys away. Later, after dropping his brother off in Barker’s Point, George Hamilton drove to Saint John and back with Burgundy’s body in the trunk, before ditching it off the Wilsey Road, not far from the Saint John River.

When asked if he thought his brother George was “trying to pin this murder on you,” Rufus replied, with chilly gravity, “Under the circumstances, one could arrive at that opinion.”

When asked if he was “trying to pin Burgundy’s death on George,” Rufus declared, “I’m definitely not.”

Before sentencing, George Hamilton said, “I want the citizens of Fredericton to know that I have nobody to blame but George Hamilton himself for letting my brother Rufus come home and lead me into this. I have been converted and have been reading the Bible in the Gaol.” His Lordship replied, “You engineered the scheme that resulted in Burgundy’s death. Counsel has done all he could be expected to do on your behalf. You state you have converted; now, make your peace with your Maker.”

When asked by His Lordship to offer a statement of his own, Rufus Hamilton replied, in a low but clear voice, “I have nothing to say.”

Unable to obtain a seat in the courtroom, a feisty, local colored lady, Mrs. Mossy Roach, not only demonstrated her resourcefulness but brought a smile from men in the corridors when she left the building and returned about 15 minutes later with a chair of her own, which she planted firmly at the main entrance to the court
and remained there throughout the morning.

In the accompanying photo, Rufus is obscured, his face—a ghost—utterly shrouded in black, save for a slight pale profile rising out of the ink. He appears in a vertical rectangle, cropped to suggest the frame of a coffin. In contrast, George appears affable, smiling, with a handkerchief peeping from his coat pocket. He has long arms and hands. His rectangular photo is also cropped to suggest a stand-up coffin.

M
AY 29, 1949. Georgie put pencil to foolscap and wrote longingly to the Governor General of Canada, Harold Rupert Leofric George Alexander, or Viscount Alexander of Tunis, or His Excellency, the Administrator of the Government of Canada, to beg for his life. His tone: a supplicant’s saccharine mixed with a suicide’s cyanide. “So Sir that why I am humbling my self to You and Bagging you for my wife sake and two children Sake and for the good that in me and the new life I found in our Lord and in the name of Jesus Christ I Bag you sir to Spear my life.”

Unfortunately for George, Mr. Harold Alexander—once the British army’s youngest major-general, one who helped defeat Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Corps, and the cool engineer of two celebrated troop evacuations during the Anti-Fascist War—loved fishing in Manitoba and hunting in Quebec: a kind of Group of Seven outdoorsman, he was not the type to expend mercy on a snivelling killer.

In his letter, George swore to be “a good Canadain and preach the Word of God to others” because he was “a christian at heart” who’d given up “smoking and Reading filthy books.” He was “praying night and day so that you will see the truth in my Latter to you Sir” because “I am no murder or had no
intention
in my heart for it my brother kill
silver
with out me noing about it, and I no if I had not drop the hammer my Brother would of hit him
with the beer bottal he had but I had comited a sin a mixed up in a crime witch in breaking the English Laws of Canada and I sin against God.”

Georgie was “constantly Reading my Bible … the book that brought peace and joy to my Sole.” George asked Alexander of Tunis to “pordon my wrighting Pleas Sir and my Spelling” and to let him have a second “Chanch.” He “amitted” that he did call the taxi, though he’d “never hit a man in my Life so when it came time to that I was
supposed
to hit him, I could not do it.” He clarified that “I am not guilty of hitting any Body in my LIfe, and I never planed with my Brother to kill any body …” but “I did planed Sir to go out and get some money and hit a man that is the truth.”

Georgie pleaded for his dream future and that of his children: “I am a good man at Heart I never wanted to hurt any body in my Life, Sir my two children and my wife I am setting here thinking what my children is got to face if get Hang people will tell them your father was a murder and was hang I am not no murder sir but I was found guilty, but I ask you sir please think about what will happen to my children, this is something I did not want to happen to them, I wanted to give them thing I never had and bring them up wright and give them a Schooling, and learnt them wright from wrong and build them a house, for my wife and children, but my Brother Rudy lead me into a trap and spoild all that.” George pleaded with His Excellency, “the Wright Honarble Govner General,” to save his life. He signed off as “your Truely Slave George Albert Hamilton I thank you sir with all my Heart and Soul.”

George’s letter overlooked, however, what Viscount Alexander—who’d just toured the University of New Brunswick and snagged a doctorate—could not: the body of Nacre Pearly Burgundy had spawned a host of bitter citizens clamouring for two black boys to swing from a beige fake
tree. (Indeedy, Fredericton was anxious to see “shiftless, murderous niggers” hanged—in tune with the racket of hammers hitting nails, the crescendo of piano keys—hammers—striking chords and the machine-gun of typewriter hammers striking paper.) The greatest ex-general (since the Duke of Wellington) of His Majesty’s forces would bow to New Brunswick public opinion, which could be polled, while reserving respect for God’s opinion, which no one could divine.

G
EORGE began now to keep a journal, erratic Grade Three spelling and all, for his Sally Ann brethren. Still, after a couple of months of steady Bible reading and letter writing, his style had improved. Too, George adored the supreme, democratic equality of majuscule letters. There was an implicit salvation in lending Bible verses and personal talk this
gravitas.

“I DIE AT MIDNIGHT ON JULY THE 27, OF 1949 ON WEDNESDAY MORNING EARLY. WHEN YOU READ THIS I MOST LIKELY WILL BE DEAD, BUT DON’T BE ALARMED AT HEARING FROM A DEAD MAN…

“I DON’T MIND TALKING ABOUT DYING … I’M REALLY HAPPY.

“READ YOUR BIBLE AND YOU WILL GET ALONG IN THIS WORLD AND IN THE NEXT WORLD TOO. Eat every Honeyed page of the Good Book …

“YOU SEE I WOKE UP ONE NIGHT SWEATING ALTHOUGH THE CELL WAS COOL I NEW SOME BODY WAS IN MY CELL AND THAT WAS THE
SPIRIT OF GOD HE SPOKE TO ME AND SAID TO ME WHY DON’T YOU BELIVED IN ME IS IT BECAUSE YOU CAN’T SEE ME You BELIEVE THERE IS A KING george vi AND YOU HAVE NOT SEEN HIM, SO NOW WHY DONT YOU BELEIVE IN ME, WELL I COME TO YOU TO NIGHT IN YOUR DREAMS AND HE DID AND HE WAR A LONG WHIT ROBE A THORNY CROWN AND WAS BLEEDING IN HIS BROWN HANDS, SIDE, AND GOLDN FEET AND THEN I KNEW THAT GOD WAS REAL AND MERCYFUL TO SINNERS, NO BODY HAD SEEN ME CLIMB FROM MY BED AND FALL ON MY KNEES AND CRY LIKE A BABY TO GOD, I DONT REMEMBER JUST WHAT I TOLD GOD THAT NIGHT ON MY KNEES BUT I ASKED HIM TO BE MERCIFUL TO ME AN EVIL SINNER, HE SAVED ME THAT NIGHT I KNOW I’VE BELIEVED ON HIS SON JESUS CHRIST EVER SINCE THERE WAS A SMELL LIKE CINNAMON AFTER WORDS …

“NOW AS I SET HERE IN THE COUNTY YORK JAIL, I AM GOING TO TELL YOU ABOUT HOW CLEAN MR LION THE SHERIFF KEEPS IT, HE ALL SO RUNS THE JAIL, AND LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT THE GOOD FOOD HERE YOU GET STEWS AND BEANS AND SOUPS AND JAM AND CHEESE AND MILK TEA MEATS, AND I DONT CARE IF YOU GO ALL OVER CANADA THIS IS THE BEST JAIL I HAVE BEEN IN FOR CLEANESS, MR LION THE SHERIFF IS THE GREATEST MAN IN THIS WORLD TO LOOK AFTER A PRISONER, AND HE LET ME A RADIO IN MY CELL AND A CLOCK, AND ANY THING THAT MY WIFE (BLONDOLA) BROUGHT ME IN …”

O
N MAY 30, 1949, the very same day Chaud wrote the Secretary of State advising the judicial murder of the Nova Scotians, Rufus James Hamilton, just twenty-two years old, and “sorry to say” that he had two convictions, dashed off his own sally to the “Guvnor General of Canada.” For his bit, Rue was “sorry to say this but I must: I have served 2 years in Dorchester penitentiary for a crime I was not at all to blame for…. I returned to this city only to marry a girl I realized I loved.” He applauded his “able attorney,” Carl Waley, for his careful “inventory of the events so that people would be convinced I, Rufus Hamilton, am innocent. I, the accused, did not take the life from a human being. I am sorry to say that I haven’t a clue who killed Burgundy.” Rufus was “a Young Man who had planned to get married on the 15 day of June 1949 and live a happy life because I was very much in love with the wonderful girl I was going to marry.”

Rue could not fake “humbling,” so he was brazen: “My Honor, the people of this City do not believe that I took a man’s life—all for a couple hundred dollars.” Such allegations were “lying evidence.” Suspicion ought to be directed on Plumsy Peters, “a plain liar” who’d claimed to be “a Friend of Mine,” but what a friend! “My Life Depends on You, Sir: On Rejecting False Evidence Presented Against Me in the Court.”

A
BSALOM Tombs, a man who tore apart houses for a living, was the carpenter appointed by Sheriff Lion to construct the spindly wooden instrument to kill George and Rufus. The splendid gallows grew spidery, then elephantine, inside the prison’s barn. Tombs had to saw and hammer together a contraption—a dextrous machine—that would snap two necks elegantly. His work did not end until—like a tailor—he measured both Rue and Georgie for their separate box-suits of plywood (dead men’s overcoats), which he also had to knock out. This latter task was simpler and cheaper than the first: that had been architecture; the second duty was just a hatchet job.

Mr. Arthur Ellis, the Dominion Executioner, based in Montreal, now had to mastermind a double hanging. Always snazzy, he sported a jaunty bowler hat and a Scottish wool suit in winter and a Brazilian linen suit in summer, and aptly white gloves. When on the job, Ellis secreted a pistol in the waistband of his pants. He liked big cigars, lemonade, beer (never when working), and Dixieland jazz. He’d retire in a few years—after officiating at more than six hundred “danglings” in Canada, the United States, Great Britain, the West Indies, and Palestine—to the Okanagan Valley, in pastoral British Columbia, where he’d become a first-rate cultivator of peaches.

W
ANING July light infiltrated maple leaves and one-foot-thick back-wall cement to sift through barred windows and spill shadowy across two telegrams confirming that Mr. George Albert Hamilton and Mr. Rufus James Hamilton must hang early the morrow. His Excellency must let Dominion Law take its local, provincial course. Sorry. Quite.

The quality of that light was yellowish and hellish, but it was still light, and the brothers prayed it would last forever. But the afternoon’s shadows reminded George and Rue of the spectres of the previously hanged. These wraiths seemed to dangle from the ceiling pipes and to smile back from the reflections of themselves displayed in the water in their toilets. They were shades of spooks looking at spooks of shades, amid siftings of light like the dust of blossoms.

Outside, the green grass glittered; ants moved quickly. They seemed huge and fast to Rue’s eyes. He sat and scribbled his one and only poem, “Three Killers”:

George was most content. He had his Xn resignation. He heard the lush, velvety voices of singers amid wheatfields and tasted the sweet, pure wellsprings of the Bible. He figured his soul was polished pristine. He dreamt a Heaven with feasts of Syrian apples and Israelite quinces, almond-flavoured peaches, jasmine of Aleppo, cucumbers, lemons, sultana citrons, apricots and cottage cheese, pumpkins and pomegranates, white roses and rose-flavoured pastries, rum-laced pound cakes, iced nougats, lime sherbet, tarts, oil of lavender, caviar, grappa, champagne, red wine, eggs, roast turkey, venison stew, rhubarb pie, sausage, clams, lobster, any soup he could imagine, Montreal smoked meat…. Death would thin out his body, but Heaven’d fill his belly eternally.

Unlike George, Rue was coming to his death with an empty heart and empty hands. He wanted to believe he was beset by a demon that’d created a preposterous lie about him. (He thought heresy might displace hearsay.) Once the almost—Duke Ellington of Three Mile Plains, Rue’d now perform a
danse macabre.
He’d practise the art of being dead, his
head splashed against hard air. After hanging, personally he wished he’d just be cut down, not dissected, disgraced, but flung into the closest marsh.

Rue thought—wildly—of India. He almost believed—had to believe in this sole redemption—that he had only desperately wanted to love, like breathing in fiery, milk-sweet air. If he could have interrupted India in her maternity, if he could have brought her bodily—beautifully—before him in her gold flesh and golden ways, Rue’d've said that she could take light and give it new meaning and he’d've admitted to her that when she sang out those fatal words,
I love you,
her heart was broken and his was not whole.

The alarm-clock hammer berated him, announcing, “You will die, you will die. Tomorrow, July 27th, in the a.m., you will die. You will never see the p.m. of that day.” It wasn’t hardly worth Rue’s while to wake up.

Father Bataille from St. Dunstan’s Catholic Church, across the street from the York County Gaol, was porcine, greasy, with a turpentine smell and a vile face. His sermons was worse than his hygiene. Still, the flushed, spectacled, peach-faced priest tried to preach to Rufus. He spoke of the ruins of love in some broken words, of the terror in the soul that no sermon expiates. Only Christ Jesus could help now.

“Don’t you know the need of the Church in days like these?”

Rufus replied, “Don’t you know the need of a man for a woman?”

Bataille persevered. “Be yes in the eyes of God and
no
in the eyes of Man, not
yes
in the eyes of Man and
no
in the eyes of God.”

“ Father, stand me on the gallows. I prefer it to lying in shit.”

Rufus remembered those good times when he’d been alone, with half a piano, but a whole heart, creating, creating. Oh what he wouldn’t give for a taste of rum! Bataille asked Rue if he had
any remorse for the murder. Rue teared up, rueful: “I stole two hundred dollars once. I tell you it required nerve. I used to complain about cockroaches and mice. Georgie and me lived in a shack, dirty, cold. Our flowerbeds were graves.”

Bataille shrugged, crossed himself, then exited. He would play Rue’s keeper, not his liberator.

Lion told Rufus India’d come down from Halifax, was waiting downstairs. “Want to see her?”

Rue shook his head no. “I don’t want her to see me shut up like some slave. Tell her I wish hear … I wish her happiness.”

What did Rufus want for his last meal? “Make it blueberry pie, Sheriff. A whole blueberry pie. I’ll wash it down with two bottles of Sussex ginger ale.”

Outside in the hot night, Salvation Army singers fountained voices like rosewater. Tambourines rustled like rivers.

George knew he’d never eat another Moir’s chocolate. Now he wanted to be where he could breathe endlessly and see the sun eternally. Major Pretty and other members of the Fredericton Corps of the Salvation Army visited his cell. They composed a band whose members included Brothers Olds and Hoyt on trumpet and tambourine, Mrs. Hoyt, Omar Bird (feeling sorry for Rue), Mrs. Pretty, and James Synge on tambourine. They sang songs the death-empowered Georgie chose. The inmate even joined in at times on absurdly ecstatic harmonica. Everyone kept weeping while laughing, then laughing while weeping. Even the most calloused psalmist would never forget this night. Believers sang:

George was so calm about his dying he was certain he wouldn’t shame himself by pissing his pants when the rope wrung his neck. The moon rent the sky with light, shivering.

George’d been unfairly angry with Blondola for leaving the court when his cheating was exposed. But she’d still come to see him off. She’d brought Otho and Desiah. George just had tears coursing down his face and that of Blondola too. There were sobs, snuffles, flurries of the tissue paper Lion kindly provided. George told Blondola, bravely, his voice unbrave, “The Spirit of God was in my cell. I don’t care anymore about the gallows.”

Blondola was not mollified. “What about us, Joygee, yer babies an me?”

George just wept. “I’ll be watchin over ya from above.”

Blondola aimed fruitlessly for calm; Otho was looking like he wanted to cry and Desiah was wailing. She sobbed, “We was happy till Rue come out the pen. Rue’s torn us down, ripped us apart. How’ll we live, Joygee? How’ll we live?”

George sobbed, “It weren’t all Rue’s fault. I was readin bad comics and gamblin and drinkin. I was a bad husband, a poor papa.”

Blondola cried terribly, “You were
my
husband and
their
pa. We loved you just as you was, with all your silliness an sins, Georgie.”

Then George handed Blondola a gift for the grown-up Otho: the silver-buckled belt Rue’d received from Easter. They hugged a last time. George asked, tenderly, “Blondola, how’d ya get that name? You’ve never said.”

Blondola smiled through her tears. “Ma loved her blond Jesus, and she loved her dark Coca-Cola.”