The Boy (21 page)

“Danny, don't.” She stands too and puts her hand on his sleeve. “I know you won't hurt them. But how will you get back to the city?”

“Same way I got here. I'll hitch. Farmers are good about picking you up.” He pulls away and turns to leave, but stops suddenly. “I want to go to the cemetery sometime. Paul said Dad's buried in the city, beside my mom. Can you write down how I find them?” He looks toward the phone desk where they always kept paper and pens.

“Give me a minute,” Louise says. “I'll just change my clothes and drive you in. We'll go to the cemetery.”

Mount Pleasant Cemetery is neither a mountain nor particularly pleasant in Louise's opinion. Apparently it is the highest point in this quadrant of the city, giving an exceptional view from the graves. Those were the exact words of someone in the City of Edmonton's cemetery department when Louise idly questioned the name the day she came with Paul to make the burial arrangements. She would have walked away, had Jake cremated and spread out in the fields instead, but this is where Brenda was buried, and Jake owned a plot next to her. And his family needed to bury him in their own way.

Danny has been silent through the drive. Louise finally gave up asking mundane questions. She parks the car at the entrance gate and she and Danny climb the long hill to the farthest corner of the graveyard. “I think it's about three rows from the fence,” she says. “I haven't been here in a while,” she starts to say, and then she takes a deep breath. “Actually, I haven't been back at all. My mom and dad's graves are on the other side of the hill, and I meant to walk over here after we buried mom, but I just couldn't. I felt so tired.”

“I didn't know your mom died,” he says.

“You'd probably forgotten she was still alive,” Louise says. “But don't feel bad about it. Why would you?” She looks around. “Phyllis comes once a year. She has done ever since your mom died, to leave flowers.”

It's Danny, not Louise, who spots the flat stones from two graves away. Louise half-expected to see flowers against the stone, but incongruously there is a plastic chrysanthemum blown against the back side of Brenda's marker. Definitely not Phyllis's offering. A runaway from some other grave. She snatches it up and stuffs it into her pocket for lack of a nearby trash barrel. Dan doesn't notice. He's standing well back from the graves, as though reluctant to tread on them. Looking from one name to the other, chewing his lip, hands thrust deep into his pockets.

He squints at her against the evening sun. “What do you figure this does to the real estate value?” he asks, waving his arms at the rather unpicturesque view of the backs of houses on the other side of the fence. There's a woman on the back step at one, pegging clothes to a line. She glances their way, then back to her work. She must see many like them, Louise thinks, standing, staring, wondering why they're here.

“Well, it's a green space. Pretty quiet.”

He snorts. “Did he tell you this was where he wanted to go? I mean did you talk about that stuff? I don't remember ever coming here.”

She nods. “When my dad died, Jake told me your mom was buried here, and that he had this plot beside her. He wondered what we should do about that. Whether I wanted him to get another spot for the two of us.” She shudders. “I told him I didn't care, I didn't want to talk about it. Whoever was left could make sure all my useable parts were donated, and they could do whatever was easiest with the rest of me.”

“Are those the orders you're going to leave the kids?” Jake asked her that day, ever so quietly.

“Not now, okay Jake?” she said. “Let's talk about it another time?” She'd had some other time in about twenty years in mind.

Dan moves now to stand in front of his mother's grave, still well back. He sighs, a deep long lonely sound and again, Louise feels like she's seeing him as he will be for the rest of his life. A man at the graves of his parents.

“Maybe we shouldn't have come,” she says. She won't tell Dan that she feels nothing at all. Jake isn't here. They buried his dark blue suit here, and a white shirt and a rather loud tartan necktie that he'd loved and always worn, he said, when he needed a lift. A bit of a joke. What bones and dust there are between the clothes is of no consequence. Maybe it is of consequence to Daniel, though. Everyone has urged Louise to come back here, to cry, to let herself grieve. Don't be so stoic, Phyllis said. The thing is, though, Louise has kept right on talking to Jake in her head, and she doesn't want to stop. It's only in the past year that his voice has grown so faint she can barely hear him at times, and she will fight “closure” as long as she can. You need closure, they keep telling her, all part of the vernacular around death and loss. She doesn't need it, she doesn't want it, but maybe Danny has a right to closure of his own. She's the wrong person to be standing here with him. Maybe someday he and Jonathan will visit their dad's grave. Except that Louise has always felt that Daniel considers himself to be more Jake's child than either of her two children. In his wonky processing of information, half-brother, also means half-son.

Robert Raymond Cook was not allowed to attend the funeral of his family, never visited his father's grave. When her clandestine reading about Cook had finished, it seemed to Louise that Cook was indeed a victim of a flawed and misdirected system of justice. He was entirely right when he said he was guessed into a guilty verdict. But while his lawyers laboured to find the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, Robert Cook's inability to tell the truth himself, seemed to have sealed his fate.

And that, she feared, will be her stepson's destiny. She crosses her arms, shivers. It's getting late and a sudden damp has settled over this shaded landscape. Daniel doesn't have a jacket, and no bag of any sort either, she realizes with a jolt.

As though he feels her eyes on him, he swings his head around suddenly. “No, I'm glad we came,” he says, back to the question she'd all but forgotten.

“Where are you staying, Dan? Do you have clothes somewhere?”

He shakes his head. “Nah, I figured I still had some stuff at your place. I was going to throw some clothes into a suitcase. You still have some old luggage down there in the basement, don't you?”

Of course. She hasn't thrown out a single thing since Jake died. His clothes are still in the closet in their bedroom. Danny's are in the makeshift bedroom in the basement that Jake had just begun to finish when it became obvious that Dan wouldn't be back. Never permanently at any rate. She nods. “It's all down there. But look, Dan. It's getting late, and there's no point your staying in Edmonton without your stuff. Let's go back. I'll drive you out to the farm and you can spend the night there.”

He doesn't seem surprised, in fact doesn't seem to have heard her. He's looking up at the road, his jaw working. She waits another minute. “Dan? Are you ready to go?”

He sits down on the grass, legs crossed, his back to her. “No. I'm going to stay for a while. I've got some friends here on the south side. I'll hop on the bus.”

She crouches behind him, her hand on his shoulder. “That's not necessary, is it? Just come home.”

When he doesn't answer, she lets her hand trail across his back and stands up. When she's halfway up the hill, she looks back and he is still sitting there.

Roads Back

June 2009

We were on our way to a writers' retreat at Emma Lake in Saskatchewan. My friend, Myrna Garanis, and I had spent the night in Saskatoon. I was carrying the Cook story along with me, my goal for the week to make some progress on the rewrite. I had completed a first draft in my work at UBC with Terry Glavin, but I had a long way to go. I knew that I had to go deeper into the story. My friend and mentor, Dave Margoshes, had read the manuscript for me a few months earlier, and I was working from his comments and suggestions.
Another friend, Barb Howard, had also supplied fine feedback and the consistency of the responses from all three of these people told me what I'd known all along. I was
avoiding the questions that had been compelling me all these five years. Fear was at the heart of my obsession with the story. Fear kept pushing me away.

We left Saskatoon in torrents of rain, and I was tempted to forget my plan to have a quick look at the penitentiary in Prince Albert. But I needed to acknowledge Robert Raymond Cook's departure point from that prison as the beginning of the story, because I had finally accepted that I was not going to be able to trace the tragedy of the Cook family back to any other incident or event. I could not rewrite that story.

The Prince Albert penitentiary is on the south side of the river, on the perimeter of the town. Brick, windowless walls, chain link fences topped with coiled wire around an area at least two city blocks square that I assumed must be the exercise yard. There was little to see, nothing to photograph but walls, the historic guard box at the side of the road. We stopped, took pictures, stared a few minutes. Enough of this. My only sense of the place was that there were no signs of life. Few cars in the parking lots, so probably not a visiting time. Although I doubted that the parking lots of prisons were ever over-crowded with the cars of visitors.

From where we had stopped at the side of the road, we could see as far as the next bend, where there seemed to be yet another cemetery, iron gates, old trees. The day before, on the way to Saskatoon, we'd stopped at the Hanna cemetery for one more visit to the Cook family graves, and then at the Asquith cemetery so that Myrna could visit the graves of her parents. This project of mine, I thought, had become an endless circling around the dead.

Still, I turned in at the iron gates, thinking only to do a quick drive through and turn-around. As familiar as every other country cemetery, except that from the farthest graves, beyond a large area of meadow, we spotted rows of white crosses. Who was lying there, and why the distance from the other graves? The rain had begun again, so we decided to add a second visit to St. Mary's Cemetery to the return itinerary.

Through the week at Emma Lake, the rain continued, with only the occasional sunny break to distract me from my work. Louise had gone silent, and I was relieved. Her story was ended. At the end of the notes he'd sent me after reading the last draft, Dave had penned: “this closing chapter, focusing on Louise and Danny is excellent. We get no closure on the BJ story, though.”

I plodded through the books, my interview notes, reams of clippings, checking dates and cross-checking facts. Looking for clues? Trying to decide whether the right man had been hanged? That wasn't even a question for me, my opposition to the death penalty so ingrained. Had justice been served? Jack Pecover's exhaustive examination had pointed to so many holes in the trials of Robert Raymond Cook that this question was purely rhetorical as well. But did it matter, these fifty years later? I knew by now that investigative journalism was not my calling, that I would return to fiction; to spinning, polishing, weaving the strands of yarn into loose endings that bore little resemblance to the tight noose around Bobby Cook's neck. If I had donned a super-sleuth's hat, gone beyond Pecover's speculation on the pieces of evidence that should have been enough to cast reasonable doubt on Cook's guilt, if I had tracked a suspect, found solid proof that someone else had committed the frenzy of shooting and bludgeoning in the Cook family bungalow on the night of June 25/early morning of June 26, 1959, would it have mattered to anyone? Not a single family member stood by Bobby Cook through his trials or at his execution. Lila Larson cared and was with him nearly to the end, but she seemed to have vanished and when I tried to take her perspective, I imagined that I would only feel deeper sadness and bitterness if I learned that someone I had loved had died for a crime he didn't commit.

The ending to my own story? Each time I'd read the descriptions of the blood- soaked mattresses, the spattered wallpaper, the tangle of bodies in the pit, I'd reared back in horror, not just for the Cook family, but because my imagination was capable of transposing the faces of all the boys I knew onto that figure in the cheap jailbird suit. The Cooks were an ordinary family, Bobby Cook a punk of a kid, but no more so than many another black sheep. Ordinary life is full of sorrows, but tragedy of the magnitude of the Cook family murders is extraordinary in the extreme. That it happens shakes us to the core. That it happens infrequently and without warning has to be enough to allow us to move on. That is where I had to rest my need for redemption.

We drove away from Emma Lake, back to Prince Albert, on a sunny day and I could easily have sailed past the turn for the jail and the cemetery beyond. Robert Raymond Cook was not buried there. I had felt no compulsion at all to visit the Fort Saskatchewan jail were Cook was hanged. The photos and descriptions in Jack Pecover's book were enough. Nor had I tried to find out the final fate of cadavers donated to medical science. But the image of those rows of crosses we had spotted in the rain a week earlier was still vivid, and I knew that I would eventually spend unnecessary time on research to satisfy my curiosity.

We trudged across the field, making a beeline for a large stone that marked a section of rusty lichen-covered headstones in front of the rows and rows of crosses. Canada Corrections. A list of some sixty names, some of them just surnames, others initials, the occasional one a full name: Anderson, Frosty Eric; Baumont, J.C.; Rogers. And one that when it caught my eye, lifted off the grey stone in sharp relief: McCorqudale, Ronald. Here was the final resting place of the man whose sentence John Diefenbaker had commuted to the rage of the community. The political mistake that he was advised he could not make again when the request for clemency for Robert Raymond Cook crossed his desk. Here, at the Saskatchewan Penitentiary at Prince Albert, Ronald McCorqudale had taken his own life, according to Jack Pecover's book. And the other men? How had they died? Was this a boot hill of sorts? The resting place of men executed here?

I watched Myrna walking thoughtfully through the rows of crosses, reading the inscriptions, none of them more than a surname and a number. She turned and waved at Ronald McCorqudale's grave. Someone tended this field, kept the grass neatly clipped around and between the crosses, but I wondered how long it had been since anyone had scanned these rows for a familiar name. If anyone ever came searching.

Two days later, I sent an email through the Correctional Services Canada website, asking for information about the cemetery. The quick and courteous reply:

I am responding to your email received via the CSC Internet Website. I am limited as to what information I can share with you in
accordance to the Privacy Act. The cemetary that
is located next to Saskatchewan Penitentiary is the property of the St. Mary Anglican Diocese. All of the inmates buried in the inmate section died while in federal custody and their remains were unclaimed by family.

No one has ever been executed at Saskatchewan Penitentiary.

I trust that this information is of assistance to you.

These were the graves of Robert Raymond Cook's fellows. Men who had died incarcerated as he had predicted for
himself in the letter home just before his eighteenth birthday: “I mean everything I say for if I get into another jam, it will go on and on until I kick the bucket in a pen or some dirty provincial jail.” Men who had been boys in families of one sort or another, but in the end, were unclaimed.

And this is where it ends. In the real world. In a cemetery.

But what about Danny? Where does he end?

Ah, you are still with me.

Of course. You know very well that I'll keep coming back.

I do. And that's why I will give you this closure. Danny will end in the Mount Pleasant Cemetery. But not yet. He will hold down a job in a welding shop, find someone to love, and look back ruefully in his old age on the years he wasted as a punk. In the end, his family will claim him.