Alone in the Classroom (16 page)

Connie would write that there were any number of angles and levels to see things from. Through a thin hedge as you sat reading on your veranda; from the side door as you threw coffee grounds on your flower bed at seven-thirty in the morning; from a horse-drawn bread wagon on a hot and sticky summer’s day; from the side of the road as you picked the chokecherries you hoped to sell to rich housewives; through the undergrowth at dusk.

Much was made of the available light when John Coyle, having joined the search, stumbled over Ethel’s body a little before eight. Since he had come through the woods, there would have been less light than if he had come by way of the oat field. And those who came after him, once he set up the cry, had the advantage of seeing him standing there and soon surrounded by others. Naturally, Ethel’s body was apparent to them right away. These were details raised by Johnny’s lawyer, who made the more general point about the obscuring effect of dusk, known to anyone, he said, who has driven an automobile. He used the French expression,
entre chien et loup
. The hour that blurs dog and wolf.

Yet all the witnesses were steadfast in saying that it was still quite clear outside, especially since that part of the bush faced west and received as much light from the setting sun as the open field itself.

Among the few testifying on Johnny’s behalf was the high-school principal, Ian Burns, who said he knew the accused well and that he was a very good boy who provided him with a Christmas tree every year. (The one occasion when the tree wasn’t up to snuff, Parley had paid Johnny seventy-five cents instead of the usual dollar, after which the boy was very careful to search out the perfect tree.) Another was a neighbour who swore that she had often seen Johnny Coyle hang laundry on the line, it was not the unheard-of event that an earlier witness had claimed it to be. Yet another was an employee at the train station, who said that on the afternoon of the murder, John Coyle had shipped eighteen pounds of chokecherries to his brother in Northern Ontario, and he had acted quite normally, and yes, he did know the accused well enough to know what normal was. The last was the pharmacist in whose drugstore Johnny bought his daily newspaper. Mr. Russell didn’t remember if Johnny had been in that particular morning, but he agreed that it was his customary practice to read the paper in the store, talking all the while about the latest baseball scores, a young man who was unfailingly pleasant and polite. (The butcher from whom Johnny claimed to have bought meat for the midday meal had maintained an unhelpful silence about the boy; he couldn’t say, he had told the police, one way or the other.)

Examination of Johnny’s clothing, some of it recently
washed, had failed to reveal any traces of blood, and none of the fibres from Ethel’s hand matched any of his clothes. In the end, the burden of evidence fell upon the hairs in her hand.

They were hairs of two kinds, according to the experts, some similar to the hair on the girl’s head, others to hairs procured from the head of the accused. These last Johnny had given willingly upon being accosted in the street by the police chief, pulling eight hairs out of the top of his head and dropping them into the proffered envelope. They were then sent to the same lab in Toronto where a professor, an expert in textiles, a “wool man,” had examined under his microscope the fibres in Ethel’s hand and compared them with the fabric of the pants and shirts taken from Johnny’s bedroom.

Connie, and everyone else, was waiting for the professor to say whether the eight blond hairs from Coyle’s head matched, or failed to match, any of the twenty hairs found in Ethel’s hand.

In the courtroom a big clock on the wall above the judge showed the hours in Roman numerals. The judge himself had a pocket watch he was in the habit of consulting instead. He rolled it in his fingers and periodically opened the lid, sometimes to check the time, sometimes to inspect a spot of tenderness just above his left eye in the polished interior of the watch case.

The expert professor took the stand, a man of medium height with a profound crease in his forehead and an unfathomable way of expressing himself. He said, “I found a similarity in eight of those with the hair contained in the
envelope, whereas the other twelve were dissimilar in that they were of a blond type of hair, while the other eight, and those in the envelope were of the brunette or darker type of hair.”

The judge seemed unfazed, but a restless movement went through the courtroom. How was anyone to follow such testimony? The professor was saying, if you went over it carefully, that the twelve hairs that corresponded to the girl’s dark hair were blond, and those in the envelope, namely blond-haired Coyle’s, were dark.

The Crown glossed over the startling confusion that would never be clarified and asked if the blond hair in the girl’s hand could have come from the head of the accused. The answer was, “I would say they could.”

The defence was quick. “But you will not swear they did?”

“No, I cannot do so.”

During the break, Connie stood in the raw November wind on the courtroom steps and tried to think about everything she knew, and it seemed very little. A courtroom wasn’t the place to find truth. Neither was a newspaper. How could you ever find the truth when there were so many witnesses to everything except the crime, all of them with meandering memories and half visions guided by lawyers casting doubt and spreading quibbles. She breathed in the cold air and looked out at the iciness on the curb and the patches of snow. Her childhood home was twenty miles from here, close to the Ottawa River and still blessed with a big orchard, the brick house unchanged; she had driven by in her beloved Plymouth last summer.

Parley came out behind her and lit a cigarette. Her hair blew into her eyes. (She hated her hair. She had gone to a hairdresser two weeks ago and she hated the results.) She turned a little more into the wind.

“You visit him in jail,” she said. She had checked with the jail keeper and learned that Johnny’s parents had gone once, a brother had gone twice, but his regular visitors were his minister and Ian Burns.

“I bring him books. That’s all. It’s very little.”

“What books?”

“Call of the Wild. White Fang
. Adventures. A jail cell is pretty small.”

Parley returned her gaze with his underslept eyes. His formerly manicured nails were bitten, his teeth stained brown.

“You should be teaching,” he said to her. “You were a very good teacher.”

“That’s not what you said at the time.”

She had to remind him. “You said a good teacher would never allow herself to be monopolized by a demanding student.”

“You were excellent,” he said.

She felt her heart soften towards him. Not just the compliment, but the teeth stained by too much coffee, the sorry nails. She asked him what he thought of the professor, and he shook his head. “Gibberish,” he said. She asked what about the judge, and he said, “My father had shingles and they started with a pain right there.” He touched his eye. “That man is about to learn the meaning of misery. He thinks Johnny did it, of course.”

“But you still think he’s innocent.”

“I do.”

“I veer back and forth. I make up my mind and then I change my mind. Why doesn’t he take the stand? Why are there so many holes in his story?”

Parley looked out at the street. “I think he got excited on the day of the murder. He overstated things to impress the railwaymen. And then he got caught in contradictions. The real culprits are long gone.”

“Culprits,” she said. “More than one?”

Slowly, he ground his cigarette butt under his foot. He had toe rubbers on his shoes. He still didn’t wear gloves. “The hairs in her hand. Blond and dark. Why would she be pulling out her own hair?”

It was a good point.

He turned to go back inside and she said, “Wait.” He stopped, he waited.

“Every time I see you I think of Jewel. I think of Susan.” She kept her eyes on his face. “What really happened?”

He looked straight ahead and didn’t answer. She kept quiet, she gave him time.

“I handled her roughly,” he said. “I don’t excuse myself.”

“Roughly.”

“I went too far.”

“How far?”

“Not as far as you think.”

She understood him, she even believed him.

“Of course, you don’t believe me,” he said.

The knowledge of Parley going unpunished made her doubly fascinated when the Crown made its case against a young man with a blameless history. There is always a first time, the Crown lawyer said in his summation; a first time that doesn’t necessarily lead to a second time.

“Men who are not moral perverts, subject to passions, do things which they could not do otherwise. There may come a time when a good man, a saintly man, breaks down. History is full of such cases.”

The prosecution gave no example, and she couldn’t think of a single one.

He went on. “It was impossible for John Coyle to have been at home, gone to the drugstore, Odd Fellows Hall, butcher store, and back home, unless the children and the bread driver were lying or utterly mistaken. And I know the jury will not disbelieve the children.

“Regarding the stone, and regarding the stumble. The accused could not possibly have stumbled over that particular stone, since a larger one was in the way, and he could not possibly have stumbled at all, since it was still daylight.

“But we wish to be fair in this case,” he said. “We produced a fibre found in the clenched hand of the little girl, but we could not link it to John Coyle, though Professor Tippett said the hair could have come from his head.”

Johnny’s lawyer was also effective. He criticized the police for improperly influencing the children, who came forward with evidence two weeks after the murder, and only when a reward was offered, by giving them candy and suggesting to them what they might have seen. He reminded the jury of the spilled cherries forty feet from the
body, which indicated that the girl was running away. “It could not have been from John Coyle, because he cannot run.” He reminded them that on the evening the dead girl was discovered, the accused helped to carry her body from the bush to the road, then drove back to town with the police chief. “I suggest to you he was acting in a perfectly normal manner. Is it possible for a good, respectable boy to commit a crime like this, the crime of a fiend, at a quarter to eleven in the morning, and walk into the home of a neighbour two hours later, perfectly normal?” He ended by stressing, “Why should you be asked to say the hairs came from Coyle’s head when no one else can?”

Today happens to be another August 3. It is hot, bright, in blossom with white sweet clover, daisies, goldenrod, the flowers of the field, and all the old-fashioned flowers in the garden, hollyhocks, dahlias, coneflowers, phlox. Amid the blooms and all the fruit coming on like dusk (blueberries, tomatoes, apples, plums), I watch the evening light. At a quarter to eight, it is bright. At fifteen minutes after eight, very clear. At twenty-five after eight, the sun sets, and ten minutes later it is still quite clear. The whole expanse of time has gone by, from Johnny’s stumbling over the body to the coroner’s examination of the body and the crime scene, and the light has moved from bright to quite clear.

The prosecution maintained Johnny knew exactly what he was looking for. Certainly he headed directly for it. From the stump, where he parted company with Miss
Rosamond Ivey, it took two minutes, she said, for him to reach the dead girl. Later, when the police timed themselves going in a straight line over the same route, it took them the same two minutes.

He knew exactly what he was looking for
. It’s an assumption people are quick to make as they replace someone else’s doubt with their own certitude. Arguably, he went to where he knew the chokecherries were.

The jury retired at 3:59
P.M
. The foreman returned to the courtroom at 7:43
P.M
. to ask a question about the hairs. It was obvious that he was deeply troubled and hopelessly confused. The two experts were recalled and in a measure identified the hairs, and the juror seemed satisfied: the blond hairs in the envelope were similar to the blond hairs in the girl’s hand. Defence counsel then tried to cross-examine the experts, but the judge would not allow it. The foreman went back to advise the other jurors, and after that it took a mere thirteen minutes for them to return with their verdict.

John Coyle stood erect when His Lordship addressed him. His lawyer sat at his desk with his face almost buried in his hands. The judge consulted a calendar and sentenced Johnny to hang in two months’ time, on February 10, 1938.

The following autumn, Connie was on her way to the
Journal
offices in downtown Ottawa, Queen Street, when she saw her old teacher walking ahead of her, his squarish head and short neck and broad back, and she called out his name and caught up to him; but it wasn’t him. She felt moved even so, and the impression lasted. To find Syd Goodwin one moment and lose him the next doubled, rather than halved, the little shock of recognition.