Road Ends (33 page)

“This case is a bit unusual in that you’ve come to tell me rather than the other way ’round, which I appreciate. And because of that and because I know you, I’m not inclined to do anythin’ more.” He paused, studying my face, and then added, “Unless you want me to, of course.”

I sat for a minute. It wasn’t only a matter of how much control
I had over the boys, it was also a matter of how much control I had over myself. I was still so angry I didn’t want to be within ten miles of them. Added to that, I strongly suspected they would pay no attention to anything I said.

“If it’s all right with you, I’d like you to talk to them,” I said at last.

“Do you want me to bring ’em here? Into the jail?”

“Maybe at home—at our house. If you would do that.”

He nodded. “Sure,” he said. “Fine by me. I’ll come knockin’ on your door tonight.”

“What if they’re not in?” I realized I had no idea how the boys spent their evenings.

“I’ll find ’em.”

He would too. The relief of handing the whole business over to someone who knew what he was doing was indescribable.

“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you very much.”

I started to get up but Gerry said, “One more thing I should say, Mr. Cartwright. Arson’s a serious crime and you were right to come in and tell me about it, but your boys, if it was them, aren’t the first to do somethin’ like this. They’re young and they’re male and that means they’re stupid, it doesn’t mean they’re criminals. I’m just telling you that in case you’re feeling a little … upset.”

He came at eight, in uniform, looking as if he meant business. The boys were in. I hadn’t seen them—I took care not to see them—but the usual thumps and yells were reverberating through the house. I called them downstairs and when they saw Gerry their faces went almost green. Frankly, I felt a bit sick myself. I showed the three of them into my study—Tom and Adam were in the living room—and retreated to the kitchen. I couldn’t sit down. I paced back and forth, back and forth. I kept thinking about what Gerry had said: if it was a good family, he told the parents and let
them handle it. He classed ours as a good family and no doubt anyone from outside would say the same. But what people actually mean by that phrase, when you take it apart and look at it, is a family that lives in a nice house with a father who earns a decent wage. I was thinking as I paced that if you knew what went on inside our family, by no sensible criteria could you call it “good.” Right now, in my study, a policeman—who as it happens isn’t married and has no children of his own—was talking to my sons because I, their father, was afraid that I might do them actual bodily harm if I tried to do it myself, and also because I was afraid that they would pay no attention to me regardless of what I said. Meanwhile, upstairs, my wife had just produced another son, on whom she would dote for a year and whose upbringing thereafter she would totally neglect. A son who might well turn out to be a disgrace to us and a menace to society. I thought about this community we live in and how hard I have tried over the years to be a useful and respected member of it. I thought about my good name. It is hard to say whether rage or shame was uppermost in my mind.

After a while I heard the boys come out of the study. I waited until I heard them go upstairs and then went in to see Gerry.

“Well, we had a little talk,” he said easily, leaning back in my chair. “It was like I thought: they did the fires at the bank and the sawmill, but not the barn. I doubt they’ll do anythin’ of that sort again. They’re not bad kids, Mr. Cartwright.”

“Thank you,” I said. I wanted to ask him what I should do now. How I should go about managing them from here on, because I had absolutely no idea. I wanted to explain to Gerry that I had never wanted to be a father and lacked the qualities necessary to do the job. I wanted to ask if he’d do it for me, if he’d just take them off my hands.

I offered him coffee but he declined. I showed him to the door and thanked him again and he gave that salute of his and set off into the snow.

I went back in. As I passed his chair Tom looked up from his newspaper.

“Trouble?” he said.

It was the first time in a year and a half that I’d heard Tom initiate a conversation but I was in no state to be encouraged by it.

“Arson,” I said, bitterly.

He raised his eyebrows. “Anything major?”

“Not yet. But only because they’re incompetent.”

“They were probably just messing around,” he said. “You know them.” He watched me for a minute and then added, “Anyway, he read them the riot act. They looked pretty scared when they came out.”

He went back to his paper. I went into my study and closed the door.

I sat at my desk, remembering the first time I heard the police knock on the door. I’d have been about ten. There were two of them and sagging between them was my father, mumbling drivel and stinking of vomit. It happened many times after that but I remember that first occasion vividly. The shame of it. I’d wanted to deny all knowledge of him, all connection. I’d wanted them to lock him up and throw away the key.

Now, sitting in my study, I thought, Here we are again. From the police knocking on the door back to the police knocking on the door in two generations. Never mind that I’d asked Gerry to come; in essence it was the same.

After a while I heard Tom and Adam go up to bed. I stayed where I was, in a kind of daze of confusion and incomprehension, trying to figure out how my life had become what it was. I thought about the five sons I had sleeping upstairs. Two more on the far side of the world. One in the cemetery beside the church. One daughter, three thousand miles away.

I wondered how I had come to father all those beings, having wanted none. I wondered, for the hundredth time, how I had come
to marry Emily, given that I didn’t love her. I decided there were many reasons, none of them good. I married her because she was in love with me and I was amazed and flattered by that. I married her because I mistakenly thought we wanted the same things out of life. Because she was beautiful. Because I was grateful to her parents for accepting me as a suitable partner for their daughter despite my father being a drunkard and a fool. Because I was about to go off to war and would be killed and wanted to have sex before I died. I married her because she asked me to and it would have been impolite to say no. I married her because the stench of the fire was still in my nostrils and the balance of my mind was disturbed.

We seem to be programmed to seek answers. Something happens and we need to know why. We chase around inside our heads, trying on this theory and that theory, searching for one that fits. But often there are no answers, or too many. You could say, for instance, that what happened during the fire was a consequence of my doing well at school. You could say it was a consequence of my brothers Alan and Harry going off to war. They may seem like tenuous links but they’re real and they’re important. Without them, what happened wouldn’t have happened.

That bit in her diary where my mother wrote that she didn’t dare tell my father how well I was doing at school because he was “taking against” me more and more: that was true. The others came in for their share of abuse but I was the one he hated and it was at least in part because I was a whole lot smarter than he was and he knew it and knew that I knew it. Worse still, I was smart in the way he despised and envied most: I was book-learning smart.

My mother was book-learning smart too but she took care not to let it show. I’d have had an easier time of it if I’d done the same and I knew that; I just couldn’t put it into practice. My
hatred of my father for the way he treated us—my mother in particular—was so great that when he came into the room I would start to shake. It was loathing, not fear, but I knew it looked like fear and for my own self-respect I had to find a way of standing up to him. Physically I stood no chance—he was a big man and his fists were hard as stone—so I fought him with my intelligence. I fought him with irony.

In the evenings I’d do my homework at the kitchen table and he’d come in after a hard day drinking or chipping away at rocks—the last man in Canada to realize there was no longer a market for silver—and find me with my head in a book and instantly he’d be furious. It was like flicking a switch. He’d say, his voice low and dangerous, “What you sittin’ there for, doin’ nothin’ like you own the place?” and I’d quickly get to my feet and stand almost, but not quite, to attention, hands at my sides, willing my body to be still, and say something like, “I’m sorry, Father, I need to work out these equations for school. But I can do them later if there’s something you want me to do.” Very earnestly, very respectfully, with not the faintest hint of sarcasm in my voice—or only the faintest hint. He’d look at me with eyes like slits. Not sure.

I loved that look. The suspicion, the uncertainty in his eyes. I paid a high price, but it was worth it. I never did it when my mother was in the room, though. Which I suppose is another way of saying I knew it was wrong.

The twins saw what I was doing and they thought I was crazy. I remember one night in our bedroom when I was studying my bruises, Harry said, “Just stay out of his way, for Christ’s sake, Ed! Do your bloody homework in here where he can’t see you.”

I said I had a right to do my homework wherever I liked. Harry shook his head in disgust and said, “Thought you were supposed to be smart.”

With hindsight the twins were remarkably good to me. We had nothing in common but it didn’t seem to matter. Both of
them left school at sixteen to help with the farm, whereas I stayed on. It meant I didn’t do my share of the farm work but they didn’t hold it against me. School was my refuge and I guess they knew that. I had my eye on university and had decided that when I had my degree I would do what Mr. Sabatini had done: teach my way around the world. When Emily arrived on the scene I confessed my dream to her and thereafter she dreamed it too, or let on she did. The two of us were going to travel the world together.

The dreams of the young. They’re particularly tragic, it seems to me, because they are based on the assumption that you control your own destiny. On the third of September 1939 a lot of dreams came to an end, including ours. I was seventeen, too young to sign up, but the twins were eighteen. I remember the evening they told me they were going. “It’s your turn now, kid,” Alan said, meaning my turn to quit school and look after the farm.

I felt as if I’d been kicked in the stomach, and it must have shown, because he punched me lightly on the shoulder and said it wouldn’t be for long; the war would be over by Christmas and if it wasn’t, then as soon as I turned eighteen I could join them.

I knew that wasn’t so. There was no way all three of us could go, leaving our mother with only the girls to help with the heavy farm work and, more than that, leaving her at the mercy of our father. It felt like the end of everything, the end of the world.

I hadn’t realized the extent to which the twins had acted as a buffer, shielding me from my father. Once they left, things became very bad between us. I was big enough by then that he hesitated to attack me when he was sober but he was sober less and less of the time, and when he was drunk he was savage. I couldn’t stay out of his way because I didn’t dare leave my mother alone when he was around.

My schooling was over, and with it my contact with the outside world. Emily and I saw each other only at church on Sunday
and for an hour or two in the evenings if I was sure my father was off on one of his prolonged binges. Those few hours aside, I was a prisoner on the farm.

I prayed every night for the war to end so that Alan and Harry would come home and rescue me. I don’t know why it took me so long to work out that they never would. It finally dawned on me one night when I was sitting in the doctor’s office in town. My father had arrived home raging drunk and when I tried to bar the door he smashed his way in and came at me with a broken bottle. I raised my arm to shield my face and the glass sliced through my arm from wrist to elbow. With my other hand I grabbed a kitchen chair and hit him so hard I knocked him cold. I believe I would have gone on to kill him then, had my mother and Margaret not stopped me.

Margaret drove me to the doctor’s and it was while he was stitching me up that it suddenly came to me that, even if they survived the war, Alan and Harry would not be coming home. Why would they? The farm wasn’t worth much, certainly not enough to compensate for life with our father. They’d made their escape and I couldn’t blame them; they’d have been crazy to come back. That was when I realized that while my father was alive I was never going to be able to leave. So that was when I started lying awake at night planning how to kill him.

The phrase “every cloud has a silver lining”—I’d like to know who thought that up. One morning late in the summer of 1942, almost three years after Alan and Harry went off to war, I stepped out onto the porch and saw a strange cloud on the horizon. At first I thought it was a storm cloud and I was glad to see it—there had been no rain for six weeks and the fields were parched. During the morning the cloud continued to build and when I came out after lunch the underbelly had taken on a lurid
light. I called out my mother and Margaret to have a look and the three of us watched it uneasily. We live in a tinderbox up here. We’re surrounded on all sides by thousands upon thousands of square miles of grade-A firewood.