On the Head of a Pin (32 page)

After a time the guards had come to know Lewis by sight, and usually waved him through to see the prisoner without question. He was surprised when he was stopped one afternoon at the gate.

“His sister is there now, Preacher,” he was told. “This is the first time any of 'em has showed up. We'd best give them a little privacy, don't you think?”

Lewis agreed and was about to go on his way when the sister emerged. As he expected, it was Esther. She held a fine lace handkerchief over her nose against the jail's smell of urine and feces and unwashed bodies. He stepped forward and introduced himself.

“I know this is a terrible time for you,” he said. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

She looked at him with open disgust. “So you're the one! You're the one who did this to us.” Her face was set in lines of hate, the cruel mouth twisted in an ugly sneer. He wondered how he could ever have thought that she looked like Sarah.

“Whatever is going to become of us now?” she spat at him. “Did you ever ask yourself that question, preacher, before you started to meddle? Get out of my way.”

He was speechless. Five young women deprived of life, and all this girl was concerned with was what would now happen to her. He watched as she left, not bothering to hide her contempt when the guard tipped his hat to her.

He went inside. Simms was again huddled in the corner of his cell, but he looked up and seemed to recognize his visitor. “Did you see her?” he said. “Did you see the whore of Babylon? ‘Her end is as bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword.'”

“Esther?”

He shuddered. “‘Her feet go down to death; her steps take hold on hell.'”

“Isaac.” He said it quietly, almost in a whisper. “Isaac, listen to me.”

He shuddered again, but Lewis was sure he was listening, that he had heard. “Isaac, I know about Esther.

I know about the two of you. I know what weighed you down. I understand what happened.”

Simms looked up. “How could you understand? Do you know what a vile, dirty thing I am? I tried, oh, you don't know how I tried to remove myself from her door, and yet, every time, I was lured back. ‘His own iniquities shall take the wicked himself and he shall be holden with the cords of his sins.' Five times, Thaddeus, five times I thought it was at an end, that someone would take her away and that would be the end of it, and yet each time I was thrust back into iniquity. Five times she was denied, five times I was damned. ‘He shall die without instruction; and in the greatness of his folly he shall go astray.'”

And suddenly it all became clear. Five times he had killed, five times to match his fury when he discovered that the release he so greatly desired had been thwarted. And with each denial his rage grew, his madness increased, his caution diminished. At some level he had wanted to be stopped, Lewis knew now, else why would he have left the Book of Proverbs open to the chapter that described his torment? Why else leave the pins that could surely lead only to him. And yet the clues had been missed, the desperation unchecked, fed by fire and gunshot and the groans of dying men, his sin growing ever bigger, his blood thirst never slaked.

He tasted the bile in his throat; this was what Sarah had died for — this man's displaced revenge on a sister he could not shed himself of — Sarah and Rachel and all the others. A revenge that left in its wake a trail of motherless children, wifeless men, daughterless fathers.

Simms was raving again, which at the moment was as well, for Lewis wasn't sure that he could bring himself to offer this demon any comfort. Not now. He knew that at some point he would have to make his peace with this thing, this awful thing.
But not yet, O Lord, not yet.

II

T
he courtroom was packed. As the bailiff cleared a path down the centre aisle for him, Lewis took note of the people who had crammed onto the rows of benches and were spilling over the ends, some of them holding small children and squalling babies, others with their market baskets tucked under their feet. Still others perched on the wide window ledges, craning for a better view, or stood on tiptoe at the back of the hall, digging their elbows into their neighbours' ribs as they tried to get a look at the murderer. The crime had been described in graphic and substantially erroneous detail by the local newspaper, and for weeks speculation and rumour had trumpeted from its front page; the news of local sensation for once edging out the affairs of both the Province and the rest of the world.

Lewis's name was called, and he was asked to swear on the Bible that he was speaking the truth. He was to give his testimony before Spicer gave his. This was a tactic decided on by the lawyer for the prosecution. As an ordained minister, his word was unlikely to be contested, and whatever embellishments Spicer chose to add to his own role would not in any way tarnish the truth of the matter: Simms had been caught red-handed. Quite literally red-handed, Lewis thought idly, for the dye from the book of Proverbs had been on his hands when he was wrestled down, red dye and red blood mingling together to proclaim his guilt.

When asked to describe the events of the day in question he had been encouraged to tell only of discovering Simms in the act of choking the life out of the woman in the cabin. He had described all of the murders and the reasoning that had led him to suspect Simms to the lawyer who had spoken to him beforehand. He had held nothing back, but the man had fixed him with a steely eye and said, “You have only to say that you witnessed Simms running out of the cottage and that you went inside and discovered that the woman was dead. Anything else will simply confuse the court. Do you understand?”

Lewis recounted what he had seen in a calm voice, and then the lawyer who had been appointed to defend the accused stood up. Lewis truly expected the man to question why he had been in that neighbourhood when he had no business there, why he had followed Simms, why they had burst through the door of the cottage without cause, but the man did nothing of the sort.

“How long have you been an itinerant preacher, Mr. Lewis?” he asked.

The question so took him by surprise that it took him a moment to answer. “For over twenty years,” he said finally.

“And this is with the Methodist Episcopal Church of Canada?” he asked, and barely bothered waiting for Lewis's nodded reply before returning to his seat.

“No further questions, Your Honour.” And with that he was dismissed.

The lawyer had given it all up as a bad cause, he realized. He was simply going through the motions, not interested in the whys and the wherefores, just in getting the whole thing over with so that he could go home to his dinner. There was no doubt what the outcome would be: Simms would hang.

He didn't bother waiting for Spicer. Word would spread soon enough about his testimony, and what the court had decided. Instead, he walked down by the river to watch the water trickling over the rocks. The rains had finally stopped — there had been none for nearly a month now — and the river was low again. One could almost have walked across it, unlike during the spring when the sheer weight of the water threatened to sweep away the bridge where the river emptied into the bay.

There were men working on this bridge as he watched, heaping up great boulders and rocks around the pilings, strengthening the banks that channeled the stream toward the outlet that led to the open water beyond. Every year they piled their rock and fortified their beams and some years it was enough; but a spring of heavy rain or a sudden torrential outburst could swell the river all along its course, from the far backcountry to the bay, and then the water would spill over its banks, flooding the streets and the cellars and leaving behind a greasy, gritty film that stank and festered.

Every year there was someone drowned in the river's torrent, most often a young boy, for the boys seemed unable to keep away from it. There were enough dangers for them in the course of life, you would think they would know enough not to court the ones they could avoid. There was the cholera that swept through Canada in devouring epidemics, malaria that came from the swampy areas being cleared, unexplained fevers and quinsies and convulsions, sharp axes that could remove a limb in a twinkling, horses that could throw, bulls that could gore; you would think it would be enough without adding drowning to it all. Or war. Or murder. Life was fragile, vulnerable in this place, and no effort seemed able to hold it in place, no words could stop it from slipping away, no prayers seemed able to protect it.

He had hoped that Simms's trial would offer him a sense of closure, lift the weight of Sarah's death from his soul. He was relieved, it was true, that he no longer had to worry that he would again ride into some secluded clearing and find another young woman dead. He was glad that this particular madness had been bottled up, could no longer threaten the world. But he knew, too, that hanging Simms could not bring the young women back, and he wondered at the waste of it all. Five, soon to be six dead, because one man's hatred and loathing had turned inside out and taken them all down to destruction. And yet, in spite of any reassurance he was offered, he still held himself responsible in part. He had suspected with no grounds for suspicion, made judgments on less than fact, prevaricated, assigned guilt where he wanted to find it. He had believed all the time that he was right, and seldom did he stop to consider that he was as subject to prejudice and intolerance as the next man. One of the major tenets of his faith was a constant striving toward sanctification, toward a state in which it was not possible to sin, to know the very grace of God. It distressed him to realize how far short of this ideal he had fallen. No, not fallen … stumbled, slid … one downward step at a time.

As he stared at the trickle of water in front of him he began to reach a new understanding of the questions that plagued him, although it was not knowledge that he particularly welcomed. There was no sudden rush, just a slow dawning, and the kernel of it lay in what he had said to Martha: “The badness is always there, in everybody, and you have to struggle not to let it out, and not to act on it.” There was no denying of evil, no final shutting of it away. It would lie there forever, like the destructive potential of the river in spate, ready to roil up and rush over its constrictive banks, and all you could do was build on as high a ground as you could find and hope that your foundations held against the torrent. And that was enough. He knew what he had to do. It was a lesson that he had needed to learn, and it was only his own stubbornness that had made it such a difficult one.

III

S
urprisingly, there was little in the newspaper about Spicer's testimony, although they had given over the entire front page to the trial. Apparently he had described his efforts to apprehend the accused in a factual and low-key way, and it was reported in the same manner. A great deal of the space was again given to a gruesome description of the dead body and the bravery of the constables who had attended the scene. There were also a couple of paragraphs about the accused, and an account of the way in which he seemed to sit quietly one moment, his head down, as if he weren't listening; the next he would be slavering at the mouth, his eyes rolling, his whole body shaking. It was obvious that he was criminally insane, the editor of the paper wrote, but he had taken the life of an innocent woman, and so must pay the price.

The court agreed and the magistrate set the date of execution for a month's time.

“There's one thing I don't understand,” Spicer said as they rode the circuit together. “If everyone agrees that he's insane, then how can he be held accountable for his crime? I find this very troubling.”

“As do I,” Lewis replied. “All I can say in response is that now you're beginning to understand that life is never straightforward. Often there is no clear right or wrong, and our duty is to think hard and long before we pronounce any kind of definitive judgment.”

“With the Bible as our authority?”

Lewis hesitated. “I prefer to think that my conscience is the final arbiter.”

“I wish it were easier.”

“If it was easier, we wouldn't have to think so hard, would we?”

It was an excellent point that emerged, and Lewis decided to use it as the basis for his next sermon. He was a little disappointed when his words seemed to go over the congregation's heads somewhat, for he could see the puzzled looks on their faces. This was not what they wanted from a preacher, this measured approach that put the onus on their own judgment and called upon self-discipline and reason to guide their days. They wanted fire and brimstone, the threat that if they trespassed they would burn in eternal hell, but that if they followed the rules of their faith, they would go to their reward in a heavenly paradise. Suddenly, Lewis felt very old, and very tired.

At the end of the service he stood by the door to say a word to each of the congregation, and for a moment he was taken aback when a girl stopped before him to speak. It was not the reaction that had so long plagued him when he saw someone who looked like Sarah. This girl did not have chestnut hair or grey eyes; her hair was a dull yellow paired with eyes of a washed-out blue; she did not carry herself in a sprightly way, but rather slouched as she walked along. What she did have was a little green book that was leaching dye onto her palms.

“May I see this?” he asked, and she handed it to him. This one was the Book of Acts, not Proverbs, but the size and the binding were the same. He leafed through it, paying special attention to the front fly-leaf, but there was no sloping inscription written there.

“Read it well, and understand,” was all he said when he handed it back to her. It reminded him that he had one still-unanswered question.

“Morgan, do you remember the meeting at Gatrey's farm? The day you found the Lord?”

“Of course I do. It was the most momentous day of my life.”