What Is Left the Daughter (17 page)

"I don't much care," Magistrate Junkins said.

My uncle turned toward his neighbors. "Wyatt's better at toboggans than sleds," he said, "but he'll manage all right."

"Mr. Hillyer!"

Magistrate Junkins checked his notes and said, "Now, then, you had asked your nephew to—what again?—invite Hans Mohring for supper?"

"No, no, because who was going to
cook
supper?"

With this, Magistrate Junkins had no possible recourse but to allow people to laugh until they stopped laughing, because those who knew our household knew that my aunt Constance would let Tilda (who was a bang-up cook herself) cook only on Saturdays, and they knew that Donald could scarcely manage to scorch a butter biscuit with a bonfire, as they say. In turn, Magistrate Junkins allowed himself a slight smile. I think he realized that people weren't mocking justice, just letting a breath of fresh air into the proceedings, since the proceedings were mostly about a life being taken.

"Magistrate Junkins," my uncle said, "I don't know where you were born and raised, nor how people there think. But I believe if you sully the sea, it comes back at you tenfold. Now, I've written out a list here. Let me read you the times I know for certain when I've sullied the sea." He reached into his suit jacket pocket and produced a piece of paper, then read from it. "First time was when I was ten years old. I was out in a dinghy with Paul Amundson, same age as me. His family was of Norwegian ancestry. We went fishing. Of course, we'd been fishing a lot, but this day he'd caught all the fish and me none. He had a bucketful. When we rowed back and tied up and got out of the boat, I pretended to stumble, and spilled his bucket into the sea. Doesn't sound more than a jealous prank, eh? But Paul knew I'd done it on purpose, even though not a word was said of it. I'd done it on purpose. Spilled betrayal and deception out of the bucket, and therefore sullied the sea."

"Enough!" Junkins said. "You may submit your list to Miss Teachout here."

Lenore Teachout got up from the stenographer's table, took the list from my uncle, sat down and immediately began copying it into her transcript. But my uncle didn't wait for her to finish: "Skipping to number
ten,
I sullied the sea by dumping Hans Mohring's body into it."

And I believe he didn't mean to say what he said next, but he did say it: "Out in the Bay of Fundy, my nephew assisted. On my instruction."

The weather had by now mostly cleared, but you could still see, through the library windows, a departing curtain of rain and dark clouds over the Minas Basin. I turned around in my chair, and it appeared that more people had crammed into the library for the afternoon session than were at the morning session. I looked over at Tilda. I noticed that, during the time the hearing had been recessed, she'd gone home and changed clothes. She now wore one of my aunt's dresses. It was pale white, slightly frayed at the hem, with outsized white buttons and a black scallop stitch along two wide pockets, and it fit Tilda loosely. I think wearing it must've been a comfort to her.

My uncle continued on his own volition: "That evening, the German student got to the house. Like I said, Wyatt had fetched him as requested. Then, I recall the heft of the runner. Oh, yes, also the rain, I remember the rain, and I brought the runner down. I don't know what he might've felt, but it wasn't the hand of God caressing the lamb, like Constance Bates-Hillyer used to call it when a breeze ruffled a child's hair at a church social, say."

"I'd imagine it wasn't like that at all," Magistrate Junkins said flatly.

"No, it wasn't. No, it wasn't."

"And once Mr. Mohring was deceased, you took him out to sea."

"We wrapped him in a tarp. We tied him to a toboggan. We put him in the flatbed. We drove to the Parrsboro dock. We took my old friend Leonard Marquette's boat—"

"For any other reason under the sun, you could have borrowed my boat without asking, Donald," Leonard Marquette said from three rows back. "But now I can't ever wash down that deck well enough, can I? I might as well sell the damn thing."

"Leonard, I can't take back what I did," my uncle said.

"This testimony is over," Magistrate Junkins said. "It's finished. I have your complete statement written out by hand here in front of me. Everyone rest assured I will study it at great length."

"—out on your boat, Leonard, the strangest thing," my uncle said. And Magistrate Junkins could see it was necessary to the crowd and even proper in some way to let my uncle finish. "I had a terrible vision, out in the dark like we were, my nephew and me. This German U-boat rises to the surface and somehow it catches the toboggan right on its deck, and the hatch opens, and out climb a bunch of German sailors. To catch a breath of good Canadian air. So they come up and 'Lo and behold, will you look at that!' Of course that couldn't happen. Of course it couldn't. But it goes to show, I was in the throes of a desperate imagination—God strike me dead, eh?—desperate as my imagination was that night."

S
OME OF THE OLDEST
people living in Middle Economy may still use the phrase, Marlais, but it was once quite common, that a child lost before birth was referred to as a ghost child. Said child being gone but still present. For instance, when a friend of Constance's, a woman named Lillian Swinaver, miscarried, my aunt said, "Poor little ghost child." Then there was a woman named Anna How, who lived in Glenholme and had miscarried four times. Story goes that one summer afternoon at a church social, she sat with her husband at a table set with plates, forks, knives and napkins for six. "We're simply a quiet family," she'd said.

Then there was Tilda Hillyer, who lost a child on January 2, 1943. Cornelia had informed me of this in her one letter to me at Rockhead Prison, which was on a bluff behind Afric-ville, in the northern part of Halifax. The letter, dated January 5, took, through channels, ten days to reach me.

Wyatt,

Our Tilda lost her child and I am looking after her for a while since no nurse's training, just good common sense, is necessary according to Dr. Bryce Stady of Montrose, who did the examination and kept Tilda overnight in his guest room. Mrs. Stady has a steady hand in such matters and she was fully present as well. I have enclosed a flowery Get Well card and postage stamp as I imagine you don't presently have such homey items available for purchase. You should send it.

From Reverend Witt's pulpit Sunday prayers are offered, less on Hans Mohring's behalf, I must say, than for forgiveness for Donald, and that doesn't sit well with some of my customers, whereas with others it seems just fine. I'd say it's cut opinions in our village pretty much in half. At any rate, Tilda has sent a long letter to Hans's parents in Denmark. She obtained their address from the president of Dalhousie University himself, so I was told. Tilda of course has a way with words but I could scarcely imagine that task. She hopes that the war allows her letter to arrive. Well then, Wyatt, see you—I'm afraid later than sooner. That's presuming your decision is to return home, though maybe you no longer see Middle Economy in that light. Which to my mind would be understandable but a mistake.

Cornelia Tell

Immediately after the hearing, Donald had been escorted by two RCMP officers back to the lockup in Truro and, after sentencing, to Dorchester Prison, where he'd spend the remainder of his life. Then, on December 10, Cornelia drove me to Halifax. Since I was officially in the RNC, I was assigned to the military prison near the Citadel, in the middle of Halifax, but within a week I received my Navy discharge papers.

Therefore, Marlais, your father had served Canada in the war for exactly not one single day.

Since there were a lot of cases backed up on the docket, I didn't have my own magistrate's hearing in Halifax until December 15, 1942. A Magistrate Quill presided, and Lenore Teachout was the stenographer. It was nice to see a familiar face. My hearing took less than an hour. I didn't have to go through the murder again myself. More, I agreed with a detailed indictment read by Magistrate Quill, who got it right. The truth is the truth, and in the end it can't be lost to excuses, cowardice or lies. There wasn't any doubt that I'd conspired in the whole sordid incident. "You aren't to be exonerated" is the one sentence I perfectly recall from my hearing. Despite everything—separate from everything—I loved Tilda to the point where her grief, sadness and anger became my conscience, so how could I not own up? Convicted of "aiding and abetting a homicide," I was remanded the next day to Rockhead Prison. My release was to be in early June 1945.

Hans had been murdered. I thought it was a fair sentence. Especially as Cornelia had told me to expect worse.

In prison, the days and nights were empty but for the radio. The prison library saved me. I read all of Charles Dickens in there. All of Victor Hugo. Three works by another Frenchman, named Stendhal, my favorite being
The Red and the Black.
As for my spirits, well, on any given day—and especially at night—standard-vintage melancholy would've been a reprieve. For my whole sentence, I was assigned to the wood shop, where I made bird feeders that were sold all over Canada, the proceeds going to the War Orphans' Fund in Ottawa.

The library had a fairly large window overlooking Halifax. In fact, close enough so that I saw the fire that ripped through Barrington and Sackville streets, which caused $130,000 worth of damage. Saw the
Queen Mary
tie up at Pier 20, and the thousands of people who awaited the arrival of Winston Churchill. "This is not the first time I've visited Halifax," I heard him say on the radio, "but it is the first time I have been accorded such a welcome." The
Mail
had a front-page photograph of Churchill holding up a London
Times
whose headline read:
ALLIES HAMMERING AWAY TOWARD SIEGFRIED LINE.
I hadn't had any contact, none at all, with Uncle Donald, except for an envelope he sent me from Dorchester Prison that contained only newspaper articles about how, on December 24, 1944, a U-boat had sunk the minesweeper HMCS
Clay-oquot
five miles off the Sambro lighthouse at the entrance to Halifax Harbor. I imagined the walls of his cell were covered with headlines.

And, Marlais, though I kept up with all the now-it-can-be-told stories in the
Mail,
the fact was, I sat out much of V-E Day itself—Tuesday, May 8, 1945—bedridden with a hacking cough and grippe. But that night, and for a few nights after, through the library window, I saw and heard some V-E Day celebrations run amok, police flares above buildings, sirens and rioting and what the
Mail
called "sailor-led lootings."

I forgot to mention that, late in my sentence, a new policy was instated, and we prisoners were allowed a movie. On April 30, 1945, eleven of us — accompanied by three RCMP officers—went to see
Mr. Winkle Goes to War,
with Edward G. Robinson in the starring role.

There were some bureaucratic glitches, so to speak, but I was finally released on June 15, 1945. I took a room at the Baptist Spa—since I had last stayed there, the room rate had gone up fifteen cents per night—and right off posted a letter to Cornelia Tell, saying which bus I'd be taking home. She must've told Tilda, and so it was the world's biggest surprise that it was Tilda who met me at the Esso station in Great Village, at about seven
P.M.
on June 19. Why she would decide, against all logic, to do that, I hadn't the slightest idea.

What with dusk tinged rose and magenta on the horizon, it was a lovely evening, clear all the way across the Minas Basin. Tilda was driving her father's pickup. "You look a bit of a scarecrow," she said, referring to the fact that I'd lost so much weight in prison.

"I'm happy to see you."

"What other family do I have left?"

Tilda herself showed some changes. For one thing, her hair was cut quite short, or let's just say its thick wildness took up less room. Also, she wore horn-rimmed glasses, and I noticed, when she pushed them back on her nose, that her fingernails were chewed to the quick. Tilda noticed me notice the eyeglasses and said, "I'd been getting headaches. Dr. Stady up in Montrose thought I should make an appointment to have my eyes checked, so I went to Halifax for that. Turns out, I'm a touch farsighted. I use these specs mainly to read books."

"Have you been reading many books?"

"Almost nightly. In the library."

Then the bus driver, Mr. Standhope, walked up and said, "You'll want to take the wardrobe trunk home. Let me help you with it."

He turned the luggage bin's latch handle, opened the door, set the hinge, slid the trunk to the edge. I held one leather handle and he held the opposite one and we loaded the trunk onto the bed of the truck. When Tilda climbed up next to the trunk and ran her hand along the seam, her eyes teared up. "I didn't know it was on the bus," I said. "Really, I had no idea."

Mr. Standhope got back on the bus and drove off. For some reason, Tilda wanted to look inside the trunk then and there. Lifting the cover, she inspected each drawer. A dress, a pair of slacks and two blouses on their wooden hangers. All the clothes seemed present and accounted for. I wondered if Constance ever got the chance to read her
National Geographic,
her
Reader's Digest.

"It took them long enough to return this trunk," I said. "They must've had hundreds."

"I'm pleased to see it again," Tilda said. "I never expected to."

Tilda discovered an envelope tucked inside the collar of the topmost folded sweater. She tore open the envelope, took out a piece of paper and read aloud: "
Clothes laundered and returned with condolences from the Christian Ladies' Auxiliary of Sydney, Nova Scotia.
"

"All neat and clean, isn't it?" she said. "They've made it seem like Mom hasn't left for Newfoundland yet. Those Christian Auxiliary ladies sure know a thing or two about wishful thinking in hindsight, don't they?" She slid the note back into its envelope, set it on the sweater and closed the trunk. She hopped down and got in behind the wheel. I put my suitcase next to the trunk and then sat on the passenger side.