The Piano Maker (25 page)

SHE NEVER TOLD HIM
that she’d let the dogs go. She’d stumbled away from the tent and gone to talk to them. They rose in their snow holes and nuzzled her hand looking for food, but there was none left. She’d already chopped off some of the last vertebrae from the skull and given them to the dogs; how removed from reality she must have been already to imagine that the dogs might accept an eighty-million-year-old bone as food. She had watched them sniff as they might sniff a stone and look back up at her.

When she unshackled them from the trace lines, they shook themselves, and they took a few steps away and stopped to look back at her. They raised their noses and sampled the air for directions of scent. And then when she waved her arms at them, they took off. Only Jack did not. He stood and looked at her, and he bounded away almost playfully and came back.

“Go!” she told him. “Go, Jack. Please go.” She waved her arm in the direction the others had gone. Already they
were mere dark spots in the distance. “Jack,” she said, and she went down on one knee. “Don’t look at me like that.” She held his head with both hands behind his ears. He tried to pull away but she held him. She put her nose close to his and said, “Go, Jack. Please go now. Leave.”

She straightened up and waved her arm with the same throwing-away motion. And he took one last look at her as if to make sure, and then he ran off.

In the tent Nathan was still breathing, but his face was a grimace pulled apart with steel hooks and then left that way. The smell of rot from his leg was thick and damp like a fog. They’d eaten the last of the Long Trail food, rice boiled with the last soup cube.

He woke and moved his lips and said, “Water.” He saw her and said, “Helen, you’re still here. I thought you’d left.”

She held the cup to his lips, which looked as if they’d been cut with a dull knife and had never healed. “Drink,” she said. He tried to, but most of it ran down his chin.

She looked out the tent and there was nothing. No future, no past, just an everlasting emptiness. Snow and ice fog and the end of another day with another horror night to come.

He had passed out again. She sat and picked up the gun, and it was so heavy she could hardly lift it. She raised one knee and rested the gun on it and leaned away from it and put the stock to her shoulder. She wished she were dead herself.

His clothing had shifted over the mark he’d scratched for her on his chest, and she put down the gun and crawled
forward and with both hands picked apart the tunic flaps and the two other layers of fabric underneath, down to the scratch on his white skin.

She backed up on hands and knees and sat and raised the gun again. She clicked off the safety and hinged open the receiver to make sure there was a shell in it. There was. She moved the selector to the lower barrel and raised her knee and rested the gun on it. And then slowly she crabbed forward and forward until the muzzle covered the mark over his heart.

She closed her eyes and pulled the trigger. The recoil slammed into her and her ears rang, and with her eyes still closed she dropped the gun and patted the ground for her sleeping bag and covered herself with it.

Please
,
God
, she said in the darkness.

Now she stood away from the chair, and they were all staring at her naked foot. All except for the people who perhaps cared for her. Mildred in the front row and Father William and David Chandler not far away were looking at her face. Young Mona the foundry girl, with her hand covering her mouth, was too. And Mr. Quormby was. Even the strict and honourable Sir James F. Whitmore had glanced down at her foot only briefly, and now he was looking into her eyes.

But the assistant Crown had the stage and she stood feasting on this, pointing with her index finger. “Mrs.
Giroux,” she said in mock surprise. “What happened to your toes? How did you lose them?”

She looked down and raised the hem of the dress right up to her knee, and then she backed away and sat on the chair and started on the stocking. She rose and turned to the wall and rolled it up all the way and straightened the seam. She slipped shut the two garter clips and stroked down the hem.

“Mrs. Giroux,” said the assistant Crown. “I asked you a question.”

She ignored that while she stepped into the boot and sat on the chair to lace it up.

“Your Honour,” said the assistant Crown. “Shall we remind the accused of the meaning of the term
contempt of court
?”

But the judge waved a hand. “You are not the court, Mrs. Tancock. I am. Let her get dressed.”

With her shoe back on her foot she looked at Mr. Quormby, and he opened his hands wide and nodded at her as if to say,
It is time
.

The assistant Crown said, “Mrs. Giroux, I have here the medical report from the hospital in Silverdale, and it says that the three outside toes on your right foot had to be removed due to necrosis from acute frostbite. How did that happen?”

“It happened because I took off my boot and socks on that foot in order to operate the trigger on the gun. Exactly the way the gunsmith told you. I heard him.”

“ ‘In order to operate the trigger on the gun.’ Now wait, Mrs. Giroux. Are you telling us now that you
did
want to kill yourself? After you’d unshackled the dogs and shot Mr. Homewood, you wanted to do away with yourself also?”

“Yes,” she said. “I did.”

“
You did!
So you did shoot him. Did you?”

“Yes, I did.”

“At the beginning of this trial you were asked how you pled to the charge of murder, and you said ‘not guilty.’ Are you changing your plea now? Would you please speak up and repeat for the record what you just said. That you were trying to kill yourself after you shot Mr. Nathan Homewood. Are you admitting to us now that you did murder the man?”

“No. Helping him die was the most difficult thing I have ever done. It was an act of kindness.”

“An act of
kindness
? Hear, hear! Are you mocking us, madam? ‘The most difficult thing.’ Is that perhaps because you did have a lovers’ pact, a murder-suicide pact, with the man after all?”

“No. Because we had been through so much together and I’d come to know him so well, I did love him in a way, but not in the simple way you keep suggesting.”

“Whatever that means,” said the assistant Crown. She stood savouring the moment. “Well, thank you. Your Honour, in the previous trial in Edmonton, the gun was dismissed because it had been found well outside the tent and had been handled by the trapper and by the police. Also, because
it was still loaded in all three barrels and no bullet was ever recovered, it could not be proven that this was the gun used in the murder. Also, the accused’s injury was not connected with attempted suicide. In addition, the memory of the accused was impaired, and she was judged mentally unfit. Your Honour, the prosecution now submits that today’s expert testimony and the confession by the accused are proof of her guilt of murder in the first degree. I may have more questions for her later, but I have none at this time.”

The judge had been using one hand to cup his ear under the wig; now he took that hand away and turned his head and looked out the window. People followed his gaze to see what he was looking at, but there was nothing to see. Those were industrial-grade windows of untrue glass with old wire mesh on the outside, and because it was snowing again, all one could see was the wire and the rust on it and snowflakes coming down and settling ever so gently on the wire.

Eventually the judge turned and made a motion with his hand. He said, “Proceed, Mr. Quormby.”

Mr. Quormby stood up and said, “Mrs. Giroux, you told us you were intending to kill yourself. And yet you are here with us today. What happened?”

“I tried,” she said. “I knew that the rifle was now empty but there were two shot shells in the chambers. I put my forehead to the muzzle and I pushed with my bare toe, but the second trigger did not work. I remembered about the safety and I clicked the barrel selector forward and back,
and I opened the breech and closed it. I tried again, but the gun would not fire. I dragged it to the sled and looked for more rifle shells, and I did find some. I put one in the breech and closed the gun. I stood in the snow by the sled, but when I tried to raise my foot to put my toe to the trigger, I could not do it. It was as though some power other than myself were holding down my foot and would not allow it. And then, as I stood there, it was as if I could see myself and all my life until then, and the tent and the sled and the gun from above, and what I was thinking of doing seemed so irrelevant and wrong in all this solitude. An eighty-million-year-old skull on the sled, Mr. Quormby. And without even thinking about it, I dropped the gun and turned away from the sled. There was snow and ice everywhere. I crawled back to the tent, and I must have been simply too shocked and maybe numb with cold to put that boot back on. I talked to him, but he was dead. I was glad for him. I thought it was my duty to stay with him and to wait until someone found us. I know that by then I was not myself any more. I do not remember much after that.”

“You were glad for him.”

“Yes, I was. And I was relieved that I had found the courage to help him. He’d been dying in a terrible way from the injury. The entire leg had gone black. His gums and his tongue and lips were a deep, cracked black, and there were black spots on his face. He had been begging me for days to help him end his life, and finally I’d been able to do it.”

Mr. Quormby waited for a moment and then he said, “Is there anything else you wish to tell the court?”

“No. Not really. What I did was so difficult I lost my mind over it. Right then, and for a time afterward. You have the report from the hospital and from the asylum in Edmonton. It was not murder, Mr. Quormby. I know it in my heart. It was the right thing to do. It was an unbearable act of kindness.”

The Honourable Sir James F. Whitmore asked if there was anything further from prosecution or defence, and there was not. The assistant Crown was first to address the jury. “She confessed,” she reminded them, and then she built her argument around that fact. Mr. Quormby came second. His address was much shorter.

Afterward the judge dismissed everyone in the hall except for the jury members, who were told to sit and wait for their instructions. The people filed out, all turning their heads at her, and the assistant Crown picked up her files and strode away.

Outside there was a mob of reporters and photographers. They shouted questions and snapped pictures. The matron held her elbow and steered her past them to the police car, but Mr. Quormby stopped and faced them. He told the reporters that the jury would now be deliberating. There would be no news until the verdict.

At the
RCMP
Ford, Mrs. Doren got behind the wheel
and Mr. Quormby sat in the backseat with Hélène. At one point he put his hand on hers and left it there for a moment before he took it away.

It was late afternoon by then, and lights had come on in many of the houses. The snowplow had been through and the road was clear, but there was only one lane. A great deal of snow had been banked against the cars alongside the road.

In the mirror the matron’s eyes were on her. “You need to stay in your apartment, Mrs. Giroux,” she said. “Until I come and get you, whenever that is. Mr. Quormby, you can stay with her, but no one else. All right?”

A room for the jury’s deliberations had been prepared at the hotel, rooms 202 and 203 with the connecting doors folded wide open and several tables pushed together. Mildred and Marie-Tatin carried up trays with dinner and pots of tea. The special that night was venison in a mushroom sauce with a choice of side dishes. The court clerk in his black suit and with his wig still on sat on a chair outside the jury room door. He’d ordered the venison with white-bread dumplings and green peas from the valley. He ate from a tray in his lap, cutting up the food and then switching hands and eating with the fork while listening to the noises in the room, the clatter of plates and cutlery and then less and less clatter but voices, some of them louder than he felt they ought to be.

Marie-Tatin came up and collected his tray. “How’s it goin’ in there?” she asked him. She stood there in a halo of red hair under the ceiling light in the hallway, holding the tray against her hip.

“It’s going quite well, I think,” he said. “Is there any dessert?”

“Oh, sure. You can have puddin’ or the apricot compote. Which would you like?”

“What kind of pudding?”

“Chocolate,” she said and smiled at him. “And it’s real milk, not powdered.”

“The pudding then,” he said.

“What are they talkin’ about in there? Can you hear?”

“I’m not supposed to. My job is to make sure the door is closed and they don’t get out.”

She brought him a generous serving of pudding, and while he ate he let her stand by the door and listen.

“Which one is that?” she whispered.

“I wouldn’t know her name. She’s the jury foreman. They all have one vote, but she’s in charge.”