As a Thief in the Night (19 page)

The statement took almost two hours to finish. Nothing of what it would all mean, or of what would now happen, passed between them, and the silence oppressed him. Ezra signed it at the bottom of the final page.

Gord signed the papers himself and gave them to the officers. Packages containing the same paperwork were on the desk for the other two boys. Their parents had not arrived yet. After making certain that there was nothing else to be done, Gord returned to the cell where Ezra was waiting. He stood just inside the doorway.

"Okay Ezra," he said, preparing to leave. He had given all the comfort he intended to give.

"What's Elsie going to say?" Ezra asked desperately, breaking the seal of his silence. Tears streamed down his face.

"I can't believe you've done this, Ezra. How am I even going to tell her?"

Ezra's features rippled with fear and shame as he grabbed at his hair and sobbed loudly.

"I have to go now. I've got to wake up early to get my son out of jail." Gord turned and walked out of the office, leaving the door open.

"Uncle Gord," Ezra said to his back as he moved away.

"What is it?" Gord asked, stepping back into view.

"Did you bring me shoes?"

"No, I didn't." He looked at Ezra's bare feet.

"I don't have any. They took mine."

There, on the other side of the door, Gord slipped off the brown boat shoes he was wearing, placed one beside the other with his foot, and slid them across the floor to Ezra. Gord walked out of the station in his stocking feet.

Ezra sat there alone for a long time. They had told him that a police van was coming to move all three of them to proper holding cells in Essex, where they would spend the night. He guessed that it must be after midnight. It was quiet while he waited and all he could hear was the two men moving around outside the door. But then, here of all places, he heard someone playing music on what he thought must be some kind of horn.

Two police cars came to take them to the cells in Essex where they were to spend the night. When they brought Ezra outside it was very dark, and Alex was already in one of the cars with Adam. They made eye contact through the back window and Alex smiled at him. Ezra searched his face for signs of malice, for some hint that he might know that he'd been betrayed, but found none. Apparently, they hadn't told him yet.

They put him in the other police car, by himself, and the two cops who would be driving him sat on the hood and smoked cigarettes before leaving. After they were done smoking they got into the car and pulled out of the station lot. He began to feel drowsy. Sleep tempted him as it often does when we feel we have been emptied of all emotion and have nothing left to give, or left to lose.
 

They drove past the hardware store and over the small bridge. Ezra looked downriver at the waterway that Papineau had called 'Belle' in the storm. The last of the ice had melted now and it flowed out in pieces toward the lake.

Ezra fell into fantasy—one he had cherished since he'd first visited the small river in the Walpurgis woods as a boy. He lay on a small, flat raft with a single sail. It was made of small trees that had been cut down and tied together, and Ezra imagined that he was staring up at a warm sky. The easy river bore him toward the lake, and as he saw himself carried downstream, he laid his head against the window of the police car and surrendered to the current's fate.

Ezra Mignon was dreaming of his mother. She had been reading on her swing when the goat ran hard and fast through the area that enclosed it. It tore through the fence like an efficient blade. The animal's movement pulled her eye away from the book. It didn't stop running after it cut through the fence. Beyond the yard were the vines, and it disappeared amongst them.  His gaze went from its speed to her ease. She used her toes to idly push herself back and forth and did not seem surprised by what had happened. Instead, a subtle and satisfied smile faded into her features, as if something for which she had been waiting finally happened. After another moment of appreciation, and a breath of resolve, she laid down her book and stepped behind each of the other three swings, each belonging to one of her sisters, drew them back in turn, and set each in motion without a rider. All three swung back and forth under the tree. Hers was still among them. Then, without a backward glance, she walked across the carefully kept lawn, and into the vineyard. She disappeared from his sight into the grapes, those great mysteries of adaptation and complexity and intoxication, at the same place the goat had.

He did not want her to go. His crimes now dominated his thoughts, and she became his only hope for solace. But she was gone, and he began to weep, and then to sob. As quickly as his dream would allow, he ran back and forth along the edge of the vines hoping to see her again. He searched for some clue of her between the trellises and plants, a piece of clothing, her footprint on the soil. Something in him was certain that if he could find her, then she could be his again. He could breathe her back to life, restore the beat of her heart, and put out the fire that had taken her. If only he could see her again, and she him, his hands would pull apart the woven pattern of fate and fashion it again according to his need. Ezra yelled across the vineyard to her, but heard no word that was not his own.

He found himself sitting up in the tree. Below, the swings were still moving back and forth.  The house, the vineyard, and barns were silent and still. Only the leaves playing back and forth in the breeze could be heard. The sound comforted him.

"Whattcha be doin' up there, boy?" The voice was familiar to him. It came with a mix of menace and good-humored scorn. Ezra looked through the branches and saw the old black woman. "Well? Come on down now, stupid boy. Ya want ole Tituba to be getting' in trouble with the boss again, do ya?"

Past her the tree's roots, gnarled and twisted, came out of the ground, like snakes with hidden heads and tails, then disappeared again into the earth. Their shape and pattern made him remember the witch's hand, the one from the tree at the Walpurgis Church that had reached up out of the ground and grabbed at him. He leaned back on the branch he was on and saw where the lightning had split the upper part of the trunk. Disoriented, he looked round to make sure his dream had not taken him to the Walpurgis churchyard and away from his mother. The shade on the walls of the house, the sprawling field of vines, and the sky all stood still in the declining light. Tituba hit the tree's trunk with her walking stick to gain his attention again.

"Do ya hear me, boy?"

"Yes," he said, "but I don't want to come down."

"Tituba sees. Tituba sees, boy. Ya feel safe up in your tree."

"Yes."

"But that's one thing that it can't let ya go on with, boy. Nah, it won't have ya sittin' there safe. It's gone and told Tituba, boy, and it would tell ya too, but you're too stupid for it." The old woman placed the end of her walking stick against the tree's trunk, and without effort began to shake the tree. Ezra fell forward and threw his hands out to brace himself against the upper part of the trunk. The wood under his palm felt strange, and he lifted his hand to see why. Words he could not make out were carved into it. They were faded with weather and age and he brought his eyes closer to them. The only words he could make out were:
Rex Ivdaeorvm
.  She poked him sharply with her stick. He pulled back in pain. "Fool boy, enough now!  What he done wrote, he done wrote. What will ya do for yourself now?"

Her walking stick had now grown to three or four times its original size. There was no way she was going to let him be. He was sure she would climb up and drag him down if she had to. Gathering his courage, he grabbed the branch he'd been sitting on and swung down to the one beneath it.

"That's it now," she said. "Come down and Tituba will give ya the way now. Step onto the stick now. That's it!" She held her long staff up and gestured for him to step onto its rounded end. Then, as if they were a pair of acrobats, he reached out, first with one foot, then with the other, and stood easily, without struggling for his balance, on the end of the long staff.  She carried him away from the tree, standing alone now in the twilight sky, across the yard, to the place where the shallow property line between the grass and vines was dug. She lowered the staff toward the ground at an angle, in the same way a clock's hand would fall from twelve o'clock to nine o'clock, and he stepped off and stood at the edge of the field of ripe grapes as if before a forbidding ocean.

"Get ya goin' now, boy."

"But I don't want to go..."

"It's not you doin' the choosin'." She hit him on the back with the staff and he suddenly found himself among the vines.

The music seemed to come from the distant hills that rolled up out of the earth just beyond a small group of trees. As he walked towards the goat's song, he crushed fallen grapes underfoot and they bled willingly into the soil. That song is one I have heard before, he thought to himself in that foggy yet lucid way one does when something one has dreamed before is dreamt again. But the animal's song had sweetened, and it no longer frightened him. In fact, he was not even sure it was the animal singing and thought he might be listening to a woman's voice. A woman's voice, but not hers, he knew hers as if it had been a beautiful flavor once tasted as a boy and searched for ever since but never again found, through all the pains and winter loneliness of his strained growth. No, it was not her singing, but he knew she was there, out among the hills with the music.

Ezra heard footsteps as he walked into the trees. Two men walked past him. Long rifles rested on their shoulders. They were hunters, dark, bearded men, and they did not notice him as they walked past. Large colored leaves floated down from the treetops above him. Still, the steady song tainted the air.

He walked out of the trees and up onto the hills toward the music. The grass was long and wet, and young, timid trees grew where they could. Ezra followed the music to an area of high weeds just to the side of the hilltop. The goat lay there on its side, as if wounded, upon the long matted grass. It looked up at him as he approached, and the song trailed out of its throat. Ezra knelt beside it and placed his hand upon its head. When he saw the blood he jerked his hand away quickly and fell backwards. The grass underneath the animal's stomach was stained red, and as his heart and hands shook at the sight of it, he knew. He knew why he had been seduced and summoned to this place, and what his seductress wanted from him.

Everything in him pulled away from it, but still the music dragged him through the terrifying mire of his fear towards the goat. As its breathing became rapid and panicked he was raised onto his knees in front of it, as if forced into pagan prayer. "Ah hands! Do not act against me!" And yet they did. As if it were not his own, his left hand reached out and rested upon the goat's wounded belly. He pushed his fingers into the wound, into the blood, and the music then surrounded him with its menace. Slowly, he pulled at the flesh and felt it tearing in his hands.
  Hot blood splattered onto his face and clothes as the animal's hide finally gave way and its belly tore open. As she could be only in a dream—a willful vision that cares nothing for the symmetry and logic of the waking world—his mother lay with her skin and hair slick and painted in blood inside the goat's silenced body.

He awoke as the police car came to a stop. It felt like early morning already, and his neck hurt. They lead him inside and he was photographed and fingerprinted. Without giving him a chance to wash the ink off his hands, they led him to his cell. Everything was very much the way he had seen it depicted in the movies.  Dark steel bars, a small single cot with a thin mattress and starched, stiff sheets, and a stainless steel toilet stood alone against the wall. They led Ezra inside and removed the handcuffs from his wrists. He listened to the cell door slam shut behind the officer, and he was alone in jail. He lay down on the cot and stared up at the ceiling. In a lot of movies he had seen prisoners doing push-ups and sit-ups in their cells, so he got down on the floor and did forty of each, then felt stupid for having done so. Crawling back onto the cot, he listened to the cops shuffling papers in the office and wished that he had his radio to listen to the music he listened to at home. He wished that he was in his bed, the only one still awake, and that Gord and Elsie and Layne were all asleep in their rooms. Knowing that everyone was sleeping and safe had always made him feel peaceful.

He kept his eyes closed, pretending to still be asleep, when Elsie's sobs woke him the next morning. She was outside his cell and he was thankful that he had fallen asleep facing away from the bars. He hoped that she could not see his face. She would know he was awake if she saw it.
  It was too much for him to look at her with prison bars between them. Everything that had happened the night before rushed back at him, and he remembered Gord's shoes sliding across the floor toward him. He heard Gord trying to comfort his wife and guessed that he was probably standing behind her and holding her shoulders. She yelled at the police officers down the hall through her sobs.

"Take him out of there!"

One of them, a well-built black man, stepped into the doorway. "Miss—"

"You can't tell me that this is necessary for a sixteen-year-old boy."

"Elsie," Gord said calmly, "it's not up to them." She slapped his hands off of her. "Come on, let's go.  It's no good for us to be here." Elsie only cried harder. Gord had not wanted to bring her, but she had insisted. "Elsie, let's go." She gathered her pride and wiped her eyes.