The Second Son (33 page)

I am almost certain. Down deep my mother knew what had happened up there at the dam, and she came to the conclusion that only one of us could be protected. She chose Andrew. And offered me a trade — her love in exchange for saving him. I have no logical explanation for what I did when she finished that tearful entreaty. I only remember what I felt, all those agonizing moments I stared at my beautiful mother, longing for her to reach out for me at the same time as I was repulsed by the very sight of her. I know it was both love and hate I was feeling. But I don’t know which of them moved me to answer, “Okay, if that’s what you want.”

I think I knew as soon as I said it, that I would stick to the lie. It felt right. Maybe it was the look on her face — relief, gratitude, love — that justified my anger at the same time as it confirmed my new-found power over her. Oh sure, I had second thoughts, as soon as they left me alone in that cold damp cell. And later that night when I looked out the window toward the Pond and realized the silence I heard was the cancelled fireworks. It was dumb to let the whole town hate me, I decided, and resolved to start telling the truth at the first opportunity.

Then I saw her waiting to see me the next morning, by herself in the chair in the waiting room, her hands in her lap, the same dark circles under her eyes. I knew she must love me now, as much as she ever loved Andrew, whose whole future lay in my hands. Was there any love for Andrew in my decision? Was the fact that he was fifteen playing on my mind, like it must have played on hers? I have never been able to answer those questions. I don’t know if my mother ever fully understood what she did — what I did. One thing for sure, once the lie was set in motion, it took on a life of its own. And I was much too young to ask the right question: Did I own the lie, or did the lie own me?

After that day a wall went up around me, a wall that very few people ever tried to break through — including that useless lawyer they brought all the way from Ottawa because everybody local was suddenly very busy. When the guy who’s supposed to be defending you looks at you like a piece of dog dirt, it gets easier and easier to keep your mouth shut. There were times I actually opened my mouth to speak, and found only silence within. It was as though I had sold my soul to the lie and there was nothing left, there, inside me. And as much as I felt compelled to live with the consequences of my choice, I felt justified in exacting my price. For the first time I was at the centre of the family and they were circling round me, drawn by the power of our shared secret, relying on me to keep them from disaster.

And that became the terrible, elegant simplicity of my life, once Chief Kennedy came back into the room and Miss Cowan wrote my statement down. I told them what they wanted to hear, that I had killed Gail MacDonald. That it was an accident. It wasn’t hard to tell a convincing story. I just left Andrew out of the picture and substituted myself in his place. They had all the evidence they needed. Half the town had seen us go off together. They had my shirt on her face. And that mess in my bathing suit. As for that mysterious phone call I continued to deny, it was only too easy to let that slide as more evidence of Mike Landry’s perverse stubbornness.

In a way it was true. Here I was, ready to accept all of Andrew’s burden for killing Gail, except for that mean, sneaky trick of phoning the MacDonalds. As for Saint Andrew, if no one is looking for you in the picture they’re not likely to notice you’re missing. I’m sure my mother kept him in the house until that scratch disappeared. And my father’s grey Plymouth? No one even reported seeing it on the Second Concession, let alone connected it to Gail MacDonald’s death.

I was old enough to sense that nobody wanted her death to be deliberate. As much as they gathered information about me having a crush on her, and the rumours about the fire swirled around town, most people in Alexandria didn’t want something as ugly as rape and murder being connected to the mayor’s only child. After all, there was no evidence of rape, no matter what tales were told by the worst of the gossipmongers. I think for everybody’s sake the authorities were ready to see me as a troubled teenager who accidentally crushed a fragile bone in a girl’s throat and watched panic-stricken as she choked to death. Childish lovemaking gone wrong, they decided, which was almost true. And they had me, a willing accomplice to that convenient lie, never straying from my story, ready to confirm their preconceptions about the Landrys’ second son — always a problem, always in trouble, a leopard and his spots.

There were a few people who didn’t like the story I told, like that tall, lean, son of a bitch from the Provincial Police who kept asking me to repeat it. He hammered me on the small inconsistencies, like why we went across the dam. And that phone call business. But he could never get anything out of me that sounded like I planned to do something to Gail before I went up there. First of all, I didn’t know enough about sex to have planned anything specific, no matter what lies that rat Paddy Dolan told. And second, it wasn’t me that hurt her. So how could he ever catch me planning it? At one point he threatened to get me committed to the insane asylum in Penetanguishene, where I could be locked up forever, he said. Even told me some bullshit about how they would have hung me if I was just three months older. All that did was give me more reason to stick to my bargain and leave Andrew out of it.

I heard that some people in town thought I got off too lightly. There wasn’t much to the trial, just me and a judge and some officials. I guess they wanted more of a show, at least enough to make up for ruining the town’s reputation. The Crown Prosecutor must have listened to some of what the OPP said, because he convinced the judge it was manslaughter — not purely an accident — and I needed to be locked up for a long time. As for those people who suspected there was more to it than manslaughter, they were right. But for the wrong reasons. And those who thought the punishment was insignificant in the face of what happened to Gail? They were right, too. They just didn’t realize the price that was actually paid by those responsible. And was yet to be paid.

I have no single, clear recollection of my reaction to the sentence — to be locked up in a reform school until I reached the age of majority. It was four or five times what my mother and Chief Kennedy had led me to believe when I “confessed.” On the other hand, that OPP cop had been whittling away at that particular illusion for months. At first I was distracted by my mother’s hysterical crying. They practically dragged her out of there. So I was stunned, I think, at the same time as I was suddenly aware of how difficult it would be to change my story. Four months had gone by. They had all that evidence against me, and none against Andrew. I mean, how big a liar was I? That’s what they would say. And maybe part of me thought I
belonged
in jail. You can’t spend all that time listening to people talk about the girl you loved choking to death and not feel guilty, at least for being the sick pervert that watched it happen. And what if they did believe me? Would it change anything important? I had no burning desire to go home, not after what my mother had done. Besides, I could tell from the treatment my parents were getting around the courthouse that staying in Alexandria would have its own price.

I never saw Gail’s parents again. They weren’t called to testify — they didn’t have victims’ statements in those days. Years later I heard that they went to see the judge and told him they thought it had to be more of an accident than anything else. Maybe they saw how I turned to mush the minute I got within five feet of their daughter. I often wondered if they suspected the truth. It must have been rough, living across the street from the Landrys. That might have been part of why Don MacDonald resigned as mayor and sold all his businesses. They moved out to British Columbia, I was told, taking Mrs. MacDonald’s mother with them.

Every time I got a notion to get in touch with them, I talked myself out of it. It didn’t make it any easier to get Gail out of my head, though, knowing what a nice person her mother was. For a few years there, I thought about Gail all the time, dreaming up lots of ways I might make it up to her mother after I got out. But those were just a child’s fantasies. You could never replace what our family had taken from hers. And the bad feelings over Allied Food Stores? That only made the whole thing worse. I figured if I was in their shoes, I would have had some pretty ugly thoughts about the Landrys. It was best left alone. Like I was.

I GOT USED TO COLD
, stone buildings pretty quickly. They sent me to the reform school just outside Kingston. At first my family came to see me once a week. I wasn’t long in poisoning that well. For all my bravado, my big plans for my mother and me fell apart by the end of the first visit. I would only talk to my dad. All I could manage with my mother was monosyllabic grunts at the questions she asked. How are they treating you? How is the food? Are you being a good boy? I don’t know what the hell she thought was going to happen. I couldn’t accept her appreciation or her love, any more than I could forgive her, not when we were living this grotesque lie. She didn’t help matters when she started dropping those hints about all the suffering the three of them were doing, back there in Alexandria. As for Andrew, I couldn’t stand the sight of him. I wouldn’t talk to him at all — just stared at him until he looked away.

A couple months of that routine and my father showed up alone one weekend. He explained how my mother was finding it too distressing to see me in this place, and wouldn’t be coming as often. “There’s days I’m afraid for her sanity, Mike,” he finally confided. “People can be so cruel.” He didn’t mention Andrew’s state of mind. I often wondered how much my mother had told him, and if he had ever questioned how Andrew got that scratch on his face? Around that time I told my father I didn’t want to see Andrew again. I wouldn’t say why, just let him guess. I wanted my bastard brother wondering how fed up I was with being locked up, and how close I was to telling everybody the truth. As for my mother, I said I understood how she was feeling and she didn’t need to come either, if she didn’t want to. I told myself I didn’t need to see her to know I was in control.

It got to be a ritual. Every time my father would come alone he would say, “Your mother sends her love. She said to tell you she’s thinking of you.”

And each time I would smile and say, “I know she is.”

He never mentioned Andrew. I guess there was enough of that cold clean hate left in my eyes that he got the message. He would blush every time and change the subject. I always figured his embarrassment must have built up after each visit, until he would finally put his foot down and insist she come along. She managed four or five visits a year, and I made each one as painful as the last. They never forced Andrew to come, except for Christmas and my birthday. And I made sure I never showed any interest in the shit he was supposed to have bought for me.

I also made sure he never saw me suffering. Okay, some bad things happened in there. I’ve got no reason to lie about it. I had some good days and some bad years. There was the year devoted to anger, and the year of bitterness. And the year of despair. Let’s face it, I wasn’t always the well-adjusted person I am today. Lock a person up and that’s what you get — a person getting pushed around, crapped on, and humiliated every day of his life. In short, you turn a human being into a piece of shit that nobody wants.

But I deserved it, right? That’s why I was in there in the first place, to be punished for my sins. Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time, right? And any idiot who thinks that stupid rhyme squares things deserves a visitor in the night. In fact, that’s one of the main reasons you survive, the need to make the world pay for what you’ve lost, for the crap and corruption you’ve endured. It’s always there, tucked away in some part of your brain, the need to get even. And if you want to get even, you have to survive.

Maybe that’s why I never had any real permanent problems, in reform school. It was strictly a juvenile facility — that helped. We didn’t have any of those peachy little boys that draw the perverts. There was one teacher I remember who had the liver lips and roaming hands we used to joke about. He tried something one night in a dark corner of the cafeteria and I stuck a fork in his hand. The real problem you have with sex in those places is trying to keep your mind off it. The constant talk about girls and their anatomy, most of it lies, the pornography that gets passed around by a bunch of horny teenagers, it can swallow you whole. Like anything else in life, the less you have of something, the more you think about it. That’s why they try to keep you busy all the time with studies and sports.

The only trouble is, if you’re not pissed off about anything else when you go in there, being separated from girls is at the top of your list by the time you get out. Then you wake up one day after you’ve been out for a while and realize it’s even worse than you thought. You realize you have no skills whatsoever when it comes to talking to any woman that’s halfway decent. That’s what really hurts. I did one smart thing, though. I avoided that garbage talk about girls, the kind that turns them all into sluts and bitches. It was Gail who saved me from that.

Anytime I got asked about girls I said I had a girlfriend and she was none of their fucking business. I never told them who she was. I never told them I went to sleep every night thinking about a girl standing beside a horse, dressed in a white cowgirl outfit with red and silver trim, laughing and smiling as she hands me a picnic basket. And I never told them the last thought on my mind before I went to sleep was the promise I made to her — that I would make someone pay for what happened to her, the girl they all thought I had killed.

I was never in any physical danger. Not serious, anyway. Getting into fistfights from the time you’re five can have its benefits. That and the stories going around that you’re the crazy person who set fire to a town and murdered someone who made the mistake of pissing you off. There was a boxing program at the school and I was into that from the start. A lot of kids took the pounding that was meant for Andrew. My specialty was breaking noses. I loved that popping sound they made when I really nailed them. And there was a Mr. Campbell, one of the shop teachers, who took an interest in me. He said it was because he came from Lochiel and knew my grandfather. He kept a close eye on me, straightening me out a couple of times when I was headed for trouble. He was the one who made sure I got my teeth fixed and kept them that way. He tried to talk me out of smoking, too. That never took. Smoking was just about the only thing you could do in that place that made you feel like you were an independent person.