The Glass Harmonica (12 page)

And I have a restraining order now, an order that says I can't go near Chris Wheeler, but it certainly doesn't mean he can't come near me.

I understand that justice isn't perfect, and I understand that the police don't care if someone climbs up over my fence or just throws their garbage into my yard from the laneway out back, and I understand that the police have better things to do than to come promptly when someone, some ordinary citizen like myself, makes a complaint about someone doing something as simple as vandalizing a flower garden.

But I don't break beer bottles or swear or shout people down, I don't sneer and call anyone “old man” and tell them to “get away and stay on the other side of the street where you belong.” And I have certainly never called anyone a “fucking old busybody,” even though plenty of things like that have been said to me.

I am much more reasonable than that because I understand the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, because I have read it completely. And I understand the Bible and turning the other cheek, and believe me, I have done that a good few times as well.

But the instigators know that it was four people saying one thing and me saying something else, even if my word is good and theirs are worthless, and that the courts understand four against one better than they understand the truth sometimes.

I have paid my taxes my entire life, and I have a copy of each of my tax returns to prove it, and they are stored upstairs, chronologically and in brown envelopes, should anyone doubt my word and want to come see them.

I have paid my taxes completely and in a timely fashion, and I should remind you, with all due respect, that you both work for me just as much as you work for instigating Chris Wheeler, even if his lying words seem to mean more than my honest ones.

I may have talked to him with the shovel in my hand, certainly I may have done that, but I don't remember doing it. It certainly would have been a mistake in judgment to cross the street with a shovel, but they are young and strong, and an old man can be frightened too.

Because they have tormented me for years, carefully and deliberately, and anyone can lose their temper once in a while.

Everyone should have the ability to enjoy some quality of life in their home, a home they have bought and paid for with sweat and hard labour.

Since the police seem unwilling to investigate, I can tell you that I have watched lying Chris Wheeler and his friends from my upstairs windows, and I have kept careful track of their movements, both in the night and the day. I have thorough records, thorough and diligent and timely and exact.

My watch no longer keeps the best time, but every afternoon I listen to your National Research Council time signal, and I reset my watch even if it is only a few seconds out. Not much escapes me when I am on watch: I write down anything unusual and it stays with me for years—for example, I can remember all the way back to when I saw Keith O'Reilly driving Glenn Coughlin's green truck with a strange girl sitting next to him, both of them lit up under the street light like that. I didn't see the licence plate to be absolutely certain, but I don't think there's another truck like that one. It was years and years ago, but I don't forget.

Things like that stay in my mind, when things show up where they shouldn't be, things that don't fit. And if I wanted to, I could go back and find the exact day, even the time. I am sure it is in one of the notebooks. I recognized her—that girl who went missing. She had been ringing doorbells, probably begging for change. As if people on this street were made of money or something. I looked down at her from the window upstairs, but I didn't open the door.

And I kept a record. I am thorough about things like that.

But I am especially thorough about Wheeler and his friends. I have notebooks full of their hours and their activities, and if they claim to be looking for work, their unemployment insurance should be cut off immediately, because they are never doing anything for the summer months except sitting on lying Wheeler's steps, staring at the young girls in the neighbourhood and drinking beer.

Dominion beer, in red and yellow cases, and they just twist the caps off and throw them out on the street. And twelve beer rarely lasts for more than an afternoon, and at least once a week they have enough empties to put them in the trunk of Wheeler's car and cash them in for more. When I can sneak the window open, I can sometimes catch a few words of them speaking, and I record those too, in case they might turn out to have some value.

“Chris, you bastard, I can't believe you took the last one, when I bought it, too.”

“The skank you were with last night was the ugliest one I've ever seen you with.”

“Roger, you said you cracked Alma, but you never.”

(I think they were talking about giving Alma Jones drugs then—she is only tiny and young, just a stick of a thing, and I'm sure as impressionable as anyone else that age, willing to do whatever it takes to be accepted.)

I should mention that they appear to be using drugs, and they are probably selling them too. To the young ones, to teens like Ronnie Collins, to the Haydens and Chaulks who buzz around there like anxious busy little flies.

I am not sure, but it seems to me that lying Chris Wheeler has far too many visitors, and I am sure that there is some kind of exchange that takes place there, hand to hand, and there would be proof of it in my notebooks, careful records, if only my eyes were better and I could make out what they were doing when they got in close.

I have seen him talking to children, children who could hardly be more than eight or nine years old, children who are just bicycling by those steps, and who knows what sorts of crimes Wheeler is doing with such innocents, and what kind of behaviour he and his slovenly friends are inciting.

When I am at the grocery store or if I have to go to the pharmacy, I know that Wheeler or one of his cronies is likely to come into the yard behind my house, walking down the laneway and coming through my gate as easily as if they actually owned the place.

I know that they saw the sunflowers back there on one of their thieving explorations, probably coming into the yard to peer into the two windows in the kitchen to see if there was anything inside worth stealing. A waste of time, that errand, because I am on a pension and have little that would interest them.

But I did have sunflowers.

I had sunflowers all along the back fence, such beautiful sunflowers, and the spring is so cold here that when they were just seedlings, a single strand of green growing up with two unformed and hesitant-looking leaves on the top, I would go out on the cool spring evenings and put styrofoam coffee cups over each one, an individual insulating cover to protect them from the frost, and every morning I would go out again and lift those small shelters so the sun could reach them.

The sunflowers that escaped the slugs grew taller and taller, and when their big green buds finally opened and turned upwards, I could look down from my bedroom on the back of the house and see those cheerful nodding faces up against the sun, and they were the kind of thing that can lift your heart when everything else conspires against you.

I had such dreams for those flowers, that in the fall when their flower heads browned and tilted down, the city chickadees would come and hang upside-down from them and pluck out the seeds, one by one. The chickadees don't eat them all at once—when I've left seeds out for the birds, I've found them tucked away in torn-up spider's nests under the lip of the clapboard along the back of the house, carefully saved for winter.

But the chickadees didn't come, the chickadees won't ever come, because on the 17th of August, while I was getting my prescriptions filled—I have four regular prescriptions, all properly given on my doctor's advice, a diuretic and a heart drug and two for blood pressure—lying Chris Wheeler and his friends came into my yard and ripped all of my sunflowers out by the roots, and they must have run around the yard swinging them at each other, because when I got home, the sunflowers were strewn all around the yard and the stalks of the flowers were so battered that they were limp like old green rope. And the sight was so shocking that I sat down in my yard, I sat down right there in my yard, and it was all I could do to keep from crying. I know my hands were in front of my face, because I remember seeing it all through the frame of my fingers. And wouldn't Chris Wheeler have liked to have seen that?

They must have watched me come home from the store from where they were sitting on Wheeler's steps, their eyes following me the whole way, and I think I knew that something was different about their reactions. I knew something was different about the way they were looking at me, even before I went out back and found the flowers.

I am sure they heard me yelling, but I was not swearing—no, I was not swearing. I was angry, and I was yelling, but I was yelling about the Charter of Rights, and I'm sure I need not tell you about this, but it was Section Seven, and I will copy it down for you, just so that you know for sure that I know what I am talking about—that “everyone has a right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.”

And that is really all I am asking you to protect for me—my life and liberty, and my faith in fundamental justice.

Because I do not think it is just that I should be persecuted by lying Chris Wheeler, that I should have to be on my guard all the time, that the security of my person should be at risk while the likes of Chris Wheeler get to make decisions about what the quality of my life will be like.

When I looked out the window at them that afternoon, that 17th day of August, I could see from their smug faces that they thought they were pretty smart, just as smart as they must have thought they were in April when they put cold chicken bones and chips and gravy into my mailbox, just to see if they could get me in trouble again, just to see if they could make me come after them.

When I found the chicken bones, I stayed calm, but I carefully looked around to see if I could see anyone watching me, looking to see my reaction.

Wheeler's car was across the road, but there was no one in it.

I am sure they were watching from inside, from Wheeler's basement apartment with the small windows, standing there like they were watching a movie or something. I could not see them, but I had to be careful not to be caught staring—that's all I need, for them to know that they were getting to me.

When you deal with bullies for long enough, you know how a sign of weakness will set them off.

Cocks of the walk, they are, and it seems there is nothing that anyone can do about it.

Daring me to do something, and the restraining order was barely restraining anything. I can tell you more serious things, tell you about how they killed my cat Marble, a sweeter cat you will never have seen.

I was in the front room upstairs, the small room with the desk where I keep all my papers, and I couldn't help it—my hands were bunched tight in fists and I was even shaking. But when you've already got a restraining order against you, well, it's never that far from your mind that it doesn't take long for the police to show up and pull your hands behind your back for the handcuffs, even if they can never seem to find the right address when it is me who is calling them.

They do not like me here because I came from a different part of the city, because I bought this house cheap before anyone else had a chance to, and I freely admit that, but we live in a capitalist country, and it is my choice to invest my capital in the ways that I see fit.

I shouldn't have to live like this. And I shouldn't always have to expect worse, just waiting for whatever it is they choose to do next. I am not stupid, and I can see the weaknesses in my own house.

There is a small window at ground level in the front of my foundation, and what used to be a coal door, boarded over now with old wood. On the back of the house, there is only the door and the kitchen windows, and I barricade the door at night so they can't get in.

It's darker back there, but I imagine they will wait until I am sleeping, until everyone on the street is sleeping, and then force their way in through the scuttle into the basement. Both the scuttle and the window are on the street, so I can hardly reinforce them without being seen—and if I'm seen, I know they will only change their plans.

For two weeks, I collected jars and broke the glass with my hammer, carefully, the bottles lying on their sides on newspaper I'd spread on the counter in the kitchen. I carried the shards downstairs still wrapped in the paper, and I could feel the sharp edges grinding against themselves inside the paper, and I filled the concrete valley under the coal lid with them—five trips in all, and even in the gloom of the basement, the glass shards looked wickedly sharp. Lying there, it looked as if they were just waiting to bite, like hungry teeth.

If Chris Wheeler's friends come in that way, they will get a fine surprise.

They might still come through the window, but it is very small—I hope I will hear them coming, even if they wrap something in soft cloth and use it to smash the two small panes of glass.

I have to confess, I did one or two other things to be sure that they can't surprise me. Either way they get into the basement, they will still have to come up the basement stairs. So I have cut the stringers under the treads right at the top near the door. I've cut them very carefully, and I even swept up the sawdust so that they wouldn't have any kind of warning at all.