Punishment (12 page)

“What’s the look for?” I said.

“Christmas Mass and you won’t be able to receive? It’ll be a
scandal. They’ll all think you must have committed a mortal sin. And they’ll be after looking at me.”

“But you’ll be receiving …”

“Yes, but they’ll be wondering just the same.”

“Okay, for your sake, I’ll go to Communion anyway. My soul is pure.”

“You’re sure?”

“Nothing a good act of contrition can’t repair.”

“Okay,” she said.

“So were you talking to Neil Archie?”

“Briefly. You should have seen him, in his army uniform. I have to say, he was something to look at. Out of the movies, he was. He was asking about you.”

“And what was he asking?”

“What you were up to. I told him you were slaving away at the books.”

“And that was it?”

“Well.” And she tilted her head and looked at me with mischief in her face. “He wanted to know if I’ll go out with him while he’s home. He said he’ll probably be ending up in Vietnam soon.”

“And you said?”

“I said I’d have to check with you first.”

I laughed. “You didn’t.”

“No. But isn’t that what you’d have wanted me to say?”

I stared out into the night. The snow was thickening. Then a puff of wind scattered it around.

“There’ll be carols before the midnight Mass,” she said at last. “The choir has been practicing for weeks.”

I nodded. “So what did you say, really?”

“Say about what?”

“About a date with Neil.”

“A date with Neil Archie? You’re cracked in the head, Tony MacMillan.”

Then she slid up close beside me, snuggled, grabbed my hand and draped my limp arm over her shoulder, pressed her cheek to mine.

“I think ‘Tony Breau’ is neat.”

The wind outside was rising and along the shore white foam was rolling farther up the gravel.

“Hey,” I said, and pulled her even closer.

“What?” she said.

“When did you start saying ‘neat’?”

When I awoke Christmas morning for once the silence of the house struck me as a measure of my privacy and not a reminder of my exile. When I stretched I felt a weight on the bed near my feet and realized that the dog was there, head up, watching me.

“Hey,” I said. And he rose unsteadily, moved carefully toward me and licked my face. The sudden emotion that I felt was shocking. Then he jumped to the floor and left the room. I could hear the click of claw on the wooden stairs. The room was awash in a pale light and from what I could see of the meadow through the window the snow had carried on overnight.

Downstairs the dog barked. I swung my legs over the side of the bed. The floor was cold as ice. I imagined other houses, people stirring to the sounds of children already mobilized. Christmas trees and wrappings, music, fragrant kitchens noisy.
I had considered a tree but there’s something pathetic about a Christmas tree in a silent house.

Briefly I let myself imagine Sophie with her children. Christmas morning chaos and Sophie’s face transformed by the exclusive ecstasy of family and celebration. Odd how easily I could imagine Sophie there among her darlings even though I’d never seen her in her home, never known her children or her husband except as happy images in plastic picture frames.

The dog barked again, a bit more urgently. I knelt on the cold floor, looking for socks under the bed. Realized I hadn’t vacuumed in a month. Finally went downstairs in bare feet, opened the door for Birch and felt the cold fresh blast of winter.

He darted pointlessly around the yard sniffing the ground as if in search of some lost treasure, then stopped by my car, lifted a leg briefly at a wheel, then ran into the field and squatted. No need for little plastic bags and poop-scoop here. Then he dashed up the long driveway until I could no longer see him. There were rubber boots near the door and I slipped my bare feet into them. So clammy I winced. Plucked a hooded jacket from a nail and stepped outside.

There was a patch of blue above the far end of the meadow and on the horizon the flutter of what might have been the banners of an approaching army, or another blizzard preceded by a cavalry of prancing cloud. Where was the damned dog? I shivered, squinted up the lane and there he was, trotting resolutely back. Amazing that I should feel such affirmation from a dog who isn’t even mine.

The hardest aspect of disintegration is all the ordinary things we have to relearn in the aftermath. Time and toilet seats and
toothpaste, the solitary life. So much becomes instinctive when a person lives alone. Reason and reflection become imperatives only when we must accommodate another.

When we went back inside, he went straight to his water bowl, slurping noisily. I fetched three Oreo cookies from the cupboard, tossed them toward him. “Merry Christmas, fella,” I said. He pounced, gobbled them, then stared at me expectantly. I retrieved the electric coffee pot and plugged it in, half-filled the urn with water. The dog whined.

“Uh-uh,” I said. “You’ve had your Christmas.”

I doubt if I’ll ever quite recover the ability to make a decent cup of coffee. In my pre-Anna existence, my coffee would be remarked upon, my bean selection, my technique for grinding, how I frothed the milk so it delivered the texture, taste and visual appeal of cream. I was proud of my coffee. But then Anna usurped the coffee making, as she did so much of my domestic independence, and my skills atrophied. And soon I came to think of coffee the way my former colleague Tommy Steele referred to it: stage-one urine.

Smell of brewing coffee, smell of life awakening for most. Smell of death to me. Death of a life I knew, a life presumed to be endless. The name hit me like a diagnosis—Pittman—a forgotten lump, now revealed to be malignant. We were in a coffee shop, summoned by the Keeper, Tommy Steele.

“What the
fuck
,” Tommy said, slapping down the tabloid paper. “Pittman! No mention about what
we
put up with. Makin’ him sound like a fuckin martyr.”

Everybody was silent. Meredith picking at a fingernail. The mindless morning coffee shop around us clinking, chattering.

“You okay, Tony?”

“Yeah. What’s this about Pittman?” My stomach churned. “That was last May!”

“It’s in the papers. Look at the headline:
Execution on Upper G
. For Chrissake. It makes it sound like
we
killed him.”

“Well …” I said. They ignored me.

We’d only faced routine questions in the immediate aftermath. Another inmate rumble on the range, which had been noticeably quieter since Pittman’s death. Con-on-con violence resulting in another one of scores of inmate deaths that go unremarked in the outside world, barely noticed on the inside except in paperwork that goes unread.

“Christ,” said Meredith. “Isn’t there anything else to write about?”

We huddled round, studying the picture of a younger, pleasant-looking Pittman. “Anybody remember the cunt looking like that?” asked Tommy.

“It’s the family,” Wilson said. “Goin’ on about brutality.”

“Well,” said Tommy leaning back and folding his arms. “One thing I know is we better remember what we said at the time and get on the same page and stay there when the new questions start.”

There was a quiet murmur of agreement around the table. I see that moment now as a point of no return.

I returned shaken to my office and after sitting for what felt like an hour just staring at the wall, I picked up the phone.

Sophie answered on the second ring.

“I need to talk to you,” I said.

——

I shut her office door behind me. Then I locked it. She seemed to stiffen. “I don’t want anybody walking in here,” I explained.

“What happened?”

“It’s about Pittman,” I said.

“Ahh.” She stood and came from behind the desk, sat in the chair beside me and clasped my hand. “That was a year ago. What happened?”

“I’m not sure. It got in the papers. The family …”

“But you guys are okay, right? You did what you had to do.”

“No,” I said. “I’m afraid not.”

“Tell me what you need to tell me, Tony.”

I did, making sure to emphasize my own responsibility. “I could have stood up to them,” I said. “But I went along with it. I chickened out. I hid behind the power structure. Tommy was the boss and it wasn’t up to me to intervene. But it
was
up to me, wasn’t it, Sophie? Any one of us could have called him on it. But nobody did. And now there’s going to be accountability.”

She folded her arms. Her legs were crossed at the knees and her foot was bobbing. She seemed to be studying her shoe. I stood to go. “I just wanted you to hear it from me before it gets around the place.”

She caught my hand again. “Sit,” she said. So I sat and the silence closed in around us.

Finally she said, “There can be no going back. There’s only going forward now. The issue isn’t what happened. It’s what’s going to happen. You know what I’m saying, Tony?”

I nodded.

“You can’t make a bad thing better. But you can keep it from
becoming worse. How you do that will be up to you. But I’m sure you’ll do the right thing. I know you will.”

“What’s the right thing, Sophie? Pittman is dead. There’s no bringing him back.”

“It isn’t about Pittman anymore, Tony. And it isn’t about you and Tommy and the rest. It’s about a whole lot of vulnerable people. Vulnerable to each other, vulnerable to us. And it’s about how the system works to protect them from each other. And from us. You know that.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

“Have you spoken to Dwayne?” she asked.

“Dwayne?”

“He might have heard things. Just a thought.”

“I’ll think about it.”

She stood then. “You need a hug, Tony.” I stood, too, and she put her arms around me.

“I could happily become dependent on hugs like this,” I murmured.

She stepped back and stared at me for some moments. Then she went to a bookshelf. “Do you read poetry?” she asked.

“Only when I have to. And it’s been a long time since I’ve had to. What do you have there?”

“A poem,” she said. She had the book open to a page she’d bookmarked. “I don’t suppose anybody made you read Anna Akhmatova.”

“I’d probably remember a name like that.”

“I’ll copy this one for you,” she said.

“What’s it about?”

“It’s called ‘And after we damned each other.’ ”

——

The phone rang and the dog barked almost simultaneously. I picked up to a cheerful “Merry Christmas.” It was Neil.

“I was thinking I’d stop in on the way home from Mass,” he said. “It’ll be about noon. Unless you want me to pick you up on the way there.” He laughed.

“I’ll pass on Mass,” I said. “Why don’t I just drive myself to your place a little later in the day?”

“Nope,” he said. “We’re going to have an early dinner, about mid-afternoon. I thought it’d be nice for you and me to do some catching up beforehand. You can stay the night. But if you really want to go home I’ll drive you. I know the local constabulary pretty well, in case they happen to be out.”

I was surprised by a tiny tickle of elation, perhaps the Christmas spirit that we used to talk about.

“See you soon,” I said.

T
he Seaside B and B was set back off the road at the end of a long lane through trees, mostly evergreens. It had been a farmhouse once, perched on a hilltop and surrounded by fields that were now grown over. I remembered it as distant, derelict, abandoned. Neil had obviously spent a lot of money to restore it. There was a new section attached that almost doubled its size.

“Got eight guest rooms,” he said, “set up so we can close up six of them come winter when there isn’t much business.”

“Do you get a lot of business in the summer?”

“She pays for herself. It’s basically something to do and a way to meet people. You get some pretty interesting folks passing through. You wouldn’t believe some of them. Movie stars.
Hockey players coming around for the golf and the scenery. You can’t beat the scenery.”

I hadn’t expected such a view. You could see the shore, waves breaking silently and the sprawled gulf writhing, flecked with anxious whitecaps.

“Some view, eh,” said Neil. “This was all farm in my father’s time. In the family for generations, came down to an uncle but there was always a lot of friction. Passed to a cousin of mine but he got a little careless with the taxes and it went up for sale by the county back about twenty-five years ago. I got a tipoff from the courthouse and bought it at the tax sale. Good thing too. Some big real-estate outfit from Toronto was going after it but I had first dibs because of the family connection.”

“And what about the cousin?”

Neil shrugged. “I guess he learned to pay closer attention to his mailbox after that. There was a bit of legal hassle but it’s done now. Let’s go in.”

We were met by a blast of warmth laden with the fragrances of cooking. On the left of a large reception area was a living room dominated by a richly decorated Christmas tree, ablaze with multicoloured lights. A central stairway led up.

“We redid all this,” Neil said, “but you’d never know it. I used local carpenters, old-timers not afraid to work with an old place like this.
Hannah!
”

A woman materialized, wiping her hands on an apron. She was small and thin, dressed stylishly, modestly pretty but with a head of over-bothered blonde hair that I found distracting.

“Hannah,” Neil said. She extended a small hand and I grasped it.

“This guy and I go back a hundred years. You’ve heard me talk about him I’m sure. Tony MacMillan.”

“Welcome,” she said.

“How’s the dinner coming?” Neil asked loudly. “Hannah stayed home to cook. Can’t get her to darken the door of a church anyway, not even at Christmas. Figured I might as well put her to work getting a head start on the dinner.”

He was struggling out of his overcoat. Hannah was smiling at me. “Don’t listen to him,” she said. “I’m Jewish.”

“That’s not the point,” Neil said, pretending to be cross. “It wouldn’t kill you to go to church.”

“Lovely to meet you, Hannah,” I said. “And for the record, my name is Breau. Tony Breau.”