Road Ends (18 page)

And like two pieces of a jigsaw suddenly coming together, that was that.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Struan, February 1969

The thermometer read thirty degrees below zero this morning. It was so still out there, so silent, it was as if the air itself was frozen. You felt it might crack at any moment and shower down around you in infinitesimal slivers of ice.

In the summers we get a lot of tourists up here and there’s no denying it is very beautiful then, what with the lakes and the forest and the long hot days. You hear people—Canadians, Americans, even some from overseas—say they’d love to buy a place in this area when they retire, and live here all year round. I’d suggest they come and spend a winter first. Cold is one of those things it’s very hard to imagine in the abstract; you have to experience it for yourself.

And it isn’t just the cold that makes the winters hard; the snow means communities like ours are effectively cut off from the rest of the world for significant stretches of time. Now that there are Ski-Doos and decent snowploughs it’s better than it used to be, but we’re still frequently snowed in and the sense of isolation can be profound. A few weeks ago—on Christmas Eve, in fact—American astronauts orbited the moon, arguably
the most significant achievement in the history of the human race, and I read afterwards that “The whole world” had watched it on television. Not us. For a start we don’t have a television—we do not need another source of noise and irritation in this house—but even those in Struan who do saw nothing. The first blizzard of the winter hit us that week; all the power lines were down and the roads and the railway were blocked for three days. By the time we read about it, saw that staggeringly beautiful photograph of our Earth suspended in the infinity of space, the event itself was already history.

The photograph made me feel lonely. Not just for myself but for all of us, living out our insignificant lives on this small planet. For the first time I understood why people the world over feel the need to believe that we are part of some great purpose, that somebody “up there” cares what happens to us. Unfortunately, wanting something to be so does not make it so. My feeling is that we are very much on our own.

Personally I think there is dignity in accepting that. Whatever the once-Reverend Thomas might say.

At lunchtime today I braved the cold and went to the library to order Gibbon’s
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
. He wrote it between 1776 and 1788 and I thought it might be interesting to read it alongside more modern texts.

Betty was wearing a sleeping bag, one of the old army issue ones that go right up over your head and cover everything but your face. She looked like the caterpillar in
Alice in Wonderland
. I had been feeling out of sorts—this business of shouting at the boys has been on my mind—and it lifted my spirits in the most remarkable way. She’d made slits at elbow level so that she could get her arms out to stamp the books and so forth. I asked if she’d be able to get out of the bag quickly if there were a fire and she said she wouldn’t
bother, she’d just stay where she was and get properly warm for the first time in six months. That reminded me of Robert Service’s
The Cremation of Sam McGee
. I asked Betty if she’d read it and of course she had. That in turn reopened our discussion about books I would want to rescue before she burns down the library. I told her I would like the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
and all of the Year Books to date. I asked if she were intending to take anything herself and she thought for a minute and then said everything ever written by Margaret Laurence plus
Gone with the Wind
and
Little Women
. When I confessed that the only one of those I’d heard of was
Gone with the Wind
, she looked shocked and said, “Mr. Cartwright, you’re not seriously telling me you haven’t read
Little Women
!”

I don’t think there’s anyone else in Struan I enjoy talking to as much.

After Reverend Thomas gave his sermon on the iniquity of those who set themselves up in judgment over their fellow men (about which I was not going to think ever again), she was one of the few members of the community who seemed to have no trouble meeting my eye. I know she would have heard the sermon—she’s a regular churchgoer. But Betty thinks for herself.

She says his wife has left him. Apparently she’s gone to stay with a brother in Ottawa, whether as a permanent thing or not nobody knows. So he’s alone in that house. Betty says she has knocked on his door several times and various other members of the congregation have done so as well, bearing food. (Women seem to think the answer to everything is food.) He answers the door and thanks them for the food but he doesn’t invite anyone in.

I still cannot find it in myself to pity him.

This afternoon, not an hour after my talk with Betty about burning down the library, Sergeant Moynihan came to see me for the second time in two weeks.

“You got a minute, Mr. Cartwright?” he said, standing in the doorway of my office. He pretty much fills it, excluding the corners. The doughnuts have something to do with that, but he’s a big man anyway.

“Of course,” I said. “Come in. Take a seat.”

He shook his head. “Somethin’ to show you outside.”

So I pulled on my coat and followed him out of the bank, through the parking lot at the side and around to the back. There’s no reason for anyone to go around there, so it doesn’t get ploughed and the snow was more than two feet deep. There were three sets of footprints—except they were more like “leg” prints—marching across the snow, leading to a trampled area under my office window. Right up against the wall there was a bundle of charred sticks.

I stopped dead when I saw them.

“Three people this time,” I said after a minute. There was an odd, hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach.

“Nope,” Gerry said. “One set of tracks is mine.”

“Oh, of course. When did you find it?”

“Just now. I was walkin’ through your car park—shortcut to Harper’s, haven’t had lunch yet. Saw tracks leadin’ nowhere so I followed them.”

“When do you think they were made?”

“Last night. Gotta be. It snowed yesterday afternoon, stopped about six, so sometime after that.”

“At least you’ve got good footprints to work with,” I said.

“Nope. They stepped in their own prints on the way out, did a good job of messin’ them up. Anyway, wouldn’t help much. We all wear the same damned boots in this town. Even mine are the same.”

“Yours are significantly bigger.” Gerry’s prints wouldn’t have shamed a polar bear.

“Mine are bigger’n everyone’s,” Gerry said. “That’s why I’m not a criminal, I’d be caught’n ten minutes flat.”

I laughed but the truth was I didn’t feel any too happy. “It looks kind of personal,” I said. “That’s my office window.”

“If they’d wanted to hurt you they’d have set fire to your house during the night, not the bank when it’s shut. They just want to scare people. That’s a pretty amateur fire, not like the one at the Giles’s farm. That one went up like a torch. This one they haven’t used no gasoline, nothin’—I reckon it was out before they got ’round the corner of the building. Kinda strange. But I wanna catch them before they make a mistake and somebody does get hurt.”

“So what’s the next step?” I said.

“You made any enemies recently?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“You know anyone else who’s had a run-in with the Picketts? Not sayin’ it’s them, just wonderin’.”

“I haven’t heard anything of that nature.”

He nodded. “Okay. So. Next step is I go to Harper’s and have lunch. Can’t think on an empty stomach.”

He’s right, I know: if Joel Pickett and/or his sons intended me actual bodily harm they wouldn’t target the bank knowing I wasn’t in it. But still. Fire is my particular terror.

It is Sunday night already. I’d intended to spend the whole weekend in classical Rome, in a manner of speaking, instead of which I have spent it in Northern Ontario circa 1920. All to do with my father, of course. This business of his anger, which he seems to have bequeathed to me.

Anger was his defining emotion, you might say. I’m not sure what lay behind it. In fact, considering his influence on me it’s remarkable how little I know about him. I suspect even my mother didn’t know much. I think he arrived in the North sometime in
1919 claiming to be a war hero, though there is no reason to believe the latter is true. (There is no reason to believe anything my father said was true; he lied as naturally as breathing.) My mother told me that he was from Hamilton and that while he was off winning the First World War his brothers had cheated him out of the family business, but that would merely have been what he told her.

She didn’t say what brought him north, but I can hazard a guess. Silver was discovered up here in 1903 when they were building the railway. According to local folklore a blacksmith who was working on the railway came out of his tent one morning and saw a fox prowling around the camp. He picked up a hammer and threw it at the fox, missed, hit a rock, chipped off a chunk of it and exposed a vein of pure silver lying underneath.

Whether or not that tale was true, the find triggered a spectacular silver rush. If my father hadn’t heard about it before he went off to war he certainly would have when he got home. By that time everyone in North America had heard about it. The largest chunk of solid silver ever discovered—the so-called “silver sidewalk”—was found less than thirty miles from where I’m sitting now. The ore lay close to the surface—in some places you could literally pick it up off the ground—so in theory at least, even men who knew nothing about mining had a chance of striking it rich.

Easy money. The kind my father liked best. I can just see him, newly arrived from the civilized south, stumbling around in the bush in his cheap city shoes, feverishly chipping away at bits of rock without the first idea of what raw silver even looked like. He wouldn’t have asked anyone because, firstly, that would have meant admitting that there was something he didn’t know, and secondly, he would have assumed whoever he asked would lie to him. My father had the lowest view of human nature of anyone I have ever known. In later years, when he made one of his many soon-to-be-proved-worthless discoveries and had to leave his
claim in order to go to the recording office down in Jupe to record it, my brothers and I would be recruited to stand guard until he returned. He used to arm us with sticks of dynamite to chase off claim-jumpers. I’d have been about seven the first time. He made us practise lighting the fuse and throwing the stick at a tree. If he hadn’t been so deadly serious—“Aim for the head,” he’d roar, having notched the tree at head height—we might have considered it fun. As it was, I was so terrified I didn’t sleep for nights afterwards.

As it happened, he and the others who joined the rush at the end of the war were too late. Men had been crawling over the area like ants for well over a decade by then and the time of picking up raw silver on the surface was long gone. Fortunes were still being made, but only by the cigar-smoking “Silver Barons” from the south—Toronto, Chicago, New York—who came up to visit the area now and then in private railway carriages decked out with dining cars and libraries. They could afford to sink shafts and follow the seams of silver down into the ground. For the solitary prospector, though, it was over.