River of the Brokenhearted (12 page)

“But she keeps movies,” he reminded Jimmy. “The very reason you crossed her out of your life.”

“Yes—that is true,” old Jimmy said, looking up. “But even so, who am I or you, Brother Henry—I mean, who are we to Judge?”

“But they are movies,” the lay preacher reminded my greatgrandfather, who had drunk every day of his life since his twelfth birthday.

“I know they are, Brother Henry—but—well—it’s Christmas. Many a Christmas that child had nothing at all—nothing—nor her mother. And now with her big house … What friend does she have, and why does she not have them—because she is true to who she is. Isn’t that something in the eyes of God?”

“She is not a saint—she cannot forgive anyone. And until she is reborn in the blood of the lamb, she is condemned to hell.”

“Oh, no,” Jimmy McLeary said, and he began to shake.

“Condemned to hellfire—black as night—blacker than night—and pitchforks burning like coals.”

“Ah,” Jimmy said, looking about the place and spying the knife he had cut the preacher’s bread with. He shook his head and looked down at his feet and growled like a dog.

The preacher became uncertain, and Jimmy mumbled and glared at his shoes, rubbing his hands together.

“Out!” Jimmy yelled, pointing toward the door with his head still down and shaking it back and forth

“Why?”

“The bread and cheese you are eating are hers—are hers!”

“I don’t see—”

“I have not thrown a punch in twenty years, but I can flatten you, you prickless wonder. You are talking about my daughter, a woman I should have had courage enough to respect—and I will make you respect.” And he grabbed the carving knife and took a swing at the preacher’s ear, yelling as fierce as any Irishman at the Boyne.

The ear heard the swish, and the preacher ducked and fled into the grey night, yelling: “I’ll get the police!”

“And I’ll get my fairies and St. Hemseley and we’ll met ya at the door—and you’ll be the first I kill. You hear me? You’ll be the first I kill, you fuggin’ prick!”

For he always said fuggin’, like an Irishman.

But Jimmy was not going to stay there, not when the preacher would return with the police—whom Jimmy had had run-ins with before. So he put on the suit he had pawned, and got his old hat out of the living-room closet—a hat his father wore in the 1880
S
, a huge top hat called a skyscraper—for he had no other respectable hat, I am told, being a newspaper boy most of his life. He left and went into the dark little streets, passed buildings swept away from our river decades ago, his feet in small leather boots, each with a buckle, and his face shaven and haunted. He would make it up to her. He had to, for he was an old man. He would go to supper, he would laugh, he would hold the boy. And if he could he would take the pledge: he would promise never to drink, he would kneel before her, and ask her forgiveness, for he was old, and he was dying. And some of the things said about her in his presence made him less than a man should ever be made. He would never do that to her again, for her crime was marrying an Englishman who was as fine a man as Jimmy had ever known.

Why had he belittled her? Fear! Why had he mocked her? Fear again!

But no more fear—no more.

The blood of the lamb was right, and any man could find it—all they had to do was seek it. To say yes once, and mean it—that was all God required.

He came to one of Estabrook’s lumberyards and sat for a moment on a pile of snow-covered boards. Before him, the little mill (Estabrook’s third smallest) lay dormant, and wet snow fell on Jimmy’s big hat. He caught his breath, and stood, and walked off into the dark. Two women he met, and he tipped his hat to them.

“A merry Christmas to you,” he said.

“And a merry Christmas to you, Jimmy,” they said.

He smiled at this, and because they crowded him a little on the snowy sidewalk he decided to turn up the first hill instead of walking to the second. Doing this, he passed Janie’s theatre. It was strange. The door was open, and the theatre was black and cold.

More than likely Janie was there, he thought, and he would drive off with her to the house. Late for Christmas dinner but not too late, he hoped, to make amends. But did he have a present for the boy? He searched through his pockets and was surprised, and overcome, to find a present. He lit a match and looked. Ah—it was a present from the boy to him. Miles had snuck it into the pocket when Janie brought back the suit.

“To Grampie—Love, Miles.”

How terrible his life. How miserably he had treated others. He blew out the match before it burned his finger, and saw in the pitch darkness of the building another match go out.

“What is that?” Jimmy thought. “Reflection of my own match or someone downstairs?”

He proceeded inside.

“Hello,” Jimmy McLeary, my forbearer, my great-grandfather said, and then walking down the steps to the furnace room, added, “Oh, hello—Merry Christmas.”

Leon Winch, a Norwegian who had played an Irishman, hugely gutted, squat, and broad-shouldered came back without doing what he was told to do. For something terrible had happened. And it was the key—the key was responsible. For without the key, what would have happened? Nothing.

The old man had come in, Leon told Elias in a strange hellish kind of whisper.

“Who? Walter?” Elias asked.

“No,” Leon said, “it was just as you told me—Walter wasn’t there. I had gasoline, and was lighting a match—when just as I did, another match was lighted on the steps. I could see this through the window. When that match went out, I blew out my own.”

Jimmy started down the stairs. And there was no place for Leon Winch to hide.

“Oh, hello—Merry Christmas.” His skyscraper touched the ceiling; he held Miles’s present in his hand.

Then his face went ashen as he smelled the gasoline.

He turned his feeble old body and started up the stairs, holding his hat in place with one hand.

“I hit him over the head with a maple chunk—that I threw away in the snow—”

“He is dead?” Elias asked.

“I don’t know.”

“And the key—where is the key? I have to get the key back into her stocking.”

Leon said, “I left the key in the door.”

“You have to go back and see if he is dead—now that you have done this—it is kind of an accident—but you have to for all our sakes. I will give you a house—I promise the house I took from the Drukens. You have to go back and get the key.”

“You go back,” Leon hissed.

And Leon left him.

That was over an hour ago.

How sad this Christmas was.

For a long time, Elias did not know what to do. He sat in a stupor in the large room looking at his brother’s boots, frightened to death. He couldn’t bring himself to go and check for the key. He prayed—actually prayed—for the man to be dead. For only if he was dead could he not talk. But Elias hadn’t done anything—it was Leon Winch. Leon did it, that was certain. He, Elias could say he had no idea of the key. But then this idea came. Putsy would tell on him. He had to do something.

He stood trembling, and went to her. She was sitting, half-naked, staring at him as he opened the door. For a fleeting moment he thought he might tell her what had happened. But he was weak.

“Will you marry me—now?” he asked. “As soon as you can. You will never regret it”

He talked to her for an hour, and when he left, she still hadn’t decided. But he felt her being swayed. If she was married to him she would not testify against him. It was nearing ten at night. He promised he would injure no one else.

But when he came back along the corridor a hand reached out, and touched his shoulder. He turned very quickly and grabbed the person by the throat.

It was Rebecca. She had come to see him, and now he remembered having asked her two weeks before to visit him tonight.

“You have to do something for me,” he whispered harshly into her face, so she turned her head away.

“What?”

“You have to go to the Regent and see if the old man is dead—and find a key—and throw it off the Morrissey Bridge.”

“What old man?”

“Old Jimmy.”

“What happened to him?” she asked.

“I can’t tell you—well, he was struck. It was an accident—we just wanted to scare Janie a little—but he came along—”

“Scare her how?” Rebecca smiled teasingly.

“I don’t know, a little fire or something. But then Old Jim came along. You have to see if he is dead—you have to take the key and throw it away—for my sake.”

“Why me?”

Her smile unnerved him. It was the same smile she used to have as a little girl when she was frightened, and he was teasing her.

“Because—you need to. They won’t suspect you of anything—you were just trying to help—you’re just a child. That’s if anyone spies you. Go—go.” He held up two ten-dollar bills. She grabbed them as if snatching at a fly.

“Kiss me first,” she said. “And promise me you will take me to Fredericton the next time you go!”

He nodded, kissed her, forgetting that he had just proposed to her sister.

Rebecca went down the stairs. He ran to the window, terrified she might go in the opposite direction toward the police station. But he saw her slink away toward the Regent Theatre. Beyond her, in the park, a youngster was moving away also. Elias knew him. It was the boy who had driven the old horse when Walter fell. But he was going in the opposite direction, so that was fine. Elias lighted a cigarette and waited.

Putsy sat alone all night. She vacillated from one position to another. But finally, having her third glass of gin, she thought they would get married. Like true lovers, they wouldn’t care. Because true love does not care for anything—God or mountains or oceans in between, not real love. She couldn’t wait to see him, to tell him this.

Dawn was breaking when he came back into the room.

PART III

ONE

My great-grandfather was found early on Boxing Day. The skyscraper was lying on his chest, his eyes were half opened, while his hands, bent and twisted by the years, were gnarled together. He was at the last of his life, and weighed only a hundred pounds. He could not have fought without benefit of his fairies or his saint, even if he wanted to.

A dull snow was falling and the area was roped off; two constables had been called to the scene. Their finding was simple: the old man, angered by the “truancy” of his daughter, had come in with an idea to set the place ablaze, but his drunkenness caused a vanguard against him and he slipped and hit his head upon the step.

“Death by misadventure,” they reasoned within ten minutes, and the sad old body was finally removed.

The word spread throughout the town and spent itself in backrooms and barbershops. It reached Putsy, hung over and sitting in her house, at quarter to nine that night.

Old Jimmy McLeary was killed trying to burn down the place—and it would have just been right, for Janie King was not a good woman.

Initially people believed the story that it was part of an internal squabble among the theatre management. But early on, even though the case was closed, there was a rumour circulating. Somehow the old man had surprised an intruder or intruders in the building. The possiblity that these intruders might have been looking to murder Janie McLeary was appalling. Yet some people still believed it was her own arrangement with the world that had caused it all.

Rebecca informed Miles about the rumour at supper hour a few nights later.

“It’s the Dime,” Rebecca said.

“What do you mean, Rebecca?”

“All sorts of crimes happen at the Dime,” Rebecca said. “That’s what the people are so mad at.”

“Who are they mad at?” Miles asked.

“Why, your mother, of course—and you too, I think.”

“Me?”

“Well, aren’t you the Englishman’s boy and didn’t he start the theatre? And didn’t he bring that kind of music, and all of that? And the movies, and all of that? And the loud pictures from Hollywood, and all of that?” Rebecca asked, cutting some gristle off her chop.

“Who says so?” Miles asked.

“Well, not me, Miles, dear—I am not the one to say you are a sissy. It’s people downtown. I’m not the one to say it’s Janie’s fault—it’s people downtown. I just sit and listen, a fly on a wall, I am. I don’t think I’m better than youse is—it’s people downtown. I don’t think Janie betrayed her Irish heritage by marrying a Limey. As I say, it’s people downtown. But as long as you give me things and be nice, I’ll be nice to you!”

“What can I give you?”

“Well, don’t you have an allowance? You can give me that. And don’t you have a medal of the king? You can give me that. And don’t you have Janie’s picture in your room? You can give me that. You see, I haven’t decided yet what you can give me, but it’s all up to me and not up to you at all. So when I decide what I want you will have to get it—or I won’t be able to help you with people downtown.”

——

Meanwhile, Putsy asked her father what gossip he was hearing around town. Many still thought it was an accident and the old man had set out to do the theatre in.

“How did he get in?” Putsy asked.

“Everyone is saying he had to have a key,” Phil told her.

She gave a start, and looked away. Dull cold clung to the window, but the sky was forebodingly clear. She knew the old man had no key, and her key was gone—and that was exactly why she had asked the questions.

“But some say it was Leon Winch and me,” Phil said proudly, “but it weren’t me.”

“Well who was it, then?” Putsy asked, tears beginning in her eyes.

“No one is saying,” Phil said, “and many think it an accident anyway.”

That night the snow glittered under the moon. Stars filled the sky across the river, and the wind was soft. A night for a sleigh ride into the future.

It was seven o’clock, mass was over. She had gone and prayed—like a child she had prayed for a conscience as clear as the sky. She walked down the town hill to Joey Elias’s house, large and dark, with a queer sense of foreboding in the windows. She tapped on the brass door knocker, and when he opened the door she clutched at him and told him about the key—the key she had wanted to return to Walter. Had he seen it?

“No,” he said.

It was soon to be a new year. He looked pale and his head was balding.

“Where did my key go?” she asked.

“Like I say, I do not know.”

There was silence, and they heard the wind. Some boys yelled across the street.

He put sugar in her tea, and as he handed it to her he said, “I have no idea what you are talking about, but if you had a key you had better keep it quiet. The last thing you want is to get involved in this. The police might think you are culpable of something.” He tapped the spoon against the cup. “Or,” he said, “I can get a lawyer for you tonight if you feel you need one.”

The talk of a lawyer cast cold in her gut.

“I never did anything. But what should I do?”

“If I can believe you—that you had nothing to do with it—I’ll protect you,” Joey said. “Act straight. Go to the funeral and act innocent because you are. If you are innocent we will get married.”

Leaving the house, going down the steps to the road, laying her hand on the brass railing, all of this that just a day ago had been pleasant now filled her with dread. Suddenly marriage seemed terribly anticlimactic.

The funeral home where old Jimmy was taken was ten houses from the police station. At the police station she stopped, looking at the footprints through the snow. Just then out came Rebecca Druken.

“Why were you in there?” she asked.

“Oh, they just asked me if Janie was in the house all night—that night. Well, you see, everything is now up to me.”

“What do you mean?” Putsy whispered.

“Just what I said. Now people are asking me things, and I am more important than a lot of people ever thought, and I was at the funeral home where I paid my respects—and you should go too. People know now that everything is up to me, and people are being nicer to me than to you—simply because it’s up to me.”

There was a look in her sister’s eye that Putsy had seen very early on, when they played in the wood chips at the mill. With wood chips over her freckled face and in her hair, it would come and go, this look. Putsy would call her into the house at night, and saying prayers with her would pretend that she had never seen this look.

One Christmas, when Rebecca was seven, she was upset with the priest.

“Why?” Putsy had asked, putting her sister’s nightgown over her head.

“Because he said we would get a present at Christmas—and I was waiting for this special present—and it turned out to be nothing—it was just the Host—at communion!”

Rebecca smiled as the nightgown was being put over her head, but when the head appeared again, the look Putsy had seen at certain times had come back, strikingly intense—smart, illusive, predatory, and sad.

As they stood near the police station, Putsy Druken remembered this.

“Do you know anything?”

“Do I know anything? Hah! You might be scared of what I know.”

Rebecca turned her head away in a sign of dismissal, the consequence of which was measured only by herself.

The effects of his house are by no means legendary, but I do have a copy of the inventory handed down by my grandmother herself. There was a globe that produced snow when turned upside down and when wound played “I Wish You a Merry Christmas.” In the drawer was a tavern account from 1901 that had gone unpaid. There was a card sent him by Joe Tardy before Tardy went overseas—Joe Tardy being one of the fighting Tardy brothers. Nothing is known of them outside of my town. Five brothers—the youngest aged fifteen—who because their mother had died followed their brother to war, and died as well. Their house, in good Canadian fashion, was seized for unpaid taxes. The note to my great-grandfather was recognition of his kindness to their mother when she was sick.

In the box upstairs, where in more exuberant moments he said lay his saint, sat a lone paper bag that had held his newspapers and the twine that bound them.

It is strange to me that a man like my great-grandfather would have a friend—or, rather, friends who looked up to him.

But he had more than one. And they gathered in the house, and told stories about his bravery in fighting the Drukens by himself, and sent him to his reward as best they could. Putsy went to both the wake and the funeral, but spoke little to Walter, who refused to look in her direction.

Janie received a card from a man who had done her a favour some time before. “Remembering you in your time of grief,” Lord Beaverbrook wrote.

I cannot find his grave in the old cemetery beyond the tracks, but I have been assured it is there, among my other ancestors who followed the sea to Canada.

Late in the week, Walter had a meeting with Putsy. She demanded one, and he relented, for rumours were rampant, insoluble like vapours. She came to the door of his apartment shivering in her blue coat with the ermine collar. She told him that she hadn’t meant to harm him. He knew this was true, though it was no great comfort to him. There was an inch of grime on his window. She asked him how he could live with all those collectibles, old one-sheets, pictures of Tom Mix and Buster Keaton. They were once fascinating to her, but now they were just sad. The world had turned sad for her all of a sudden.

He asked her to return her key.

“I can’t find it anywhere. I have nightmares to think of what might have happened if it had fallen into the wrong hands. If I find it, I will return it to you, I promise.”

He stared at her for a long time. Then, standing on his canes said, “How can you marry him? Don’t think because my leg is crippled I could not break him apart! But I can’t prove anything—unless you come forward. I can go to church and pray you come forward, but I cannot make you—no one can. You had the only key—besides myself and Janie—and Janie does not know about yours. I could go to the police—I should go. Soon he’ll take to beating you again, just as he did before.”

She stared into the corner, saying nothing.

But for all his threats he could not bring himself to harm her. Old Jimmy’s death lay on his conscience, but no one could find the key.

The meeting with Putsy took an hour. When she left he stood and took a small drink of rum, to help ease the pain in his foot. He went and changed the marquee, and the one-sheet behind its wired frame. Angry that Frankenstein’s creature reminded him of his own plight, his own dull mob that chased him with torches, he took the one-sheet and placed it in the wall behind his sink.

After this he became like the hunchback of Notre Dame, as played by Charles Laughton—burdened, alone, and swinging from his gargoyles in the dark.