For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down (15 page)

“I knew there was going to be no benefit, but I knew he was trying to have one – and it could have been arranged. Everything would have turned out – if there had been time.

“Ralphie Pillar was good for him. He brought Jerry
out of himself. But change – no. Jerry would never change – that’s why I left him.”

There was a series of questions about this. About her leaving with the boy, about Jerry – about the court order – which at first she thought was necessary.

“Oh, Vera Pillar suggested it. She suggested I get the court order long before she ever met him. Jerry never knew this about her. And I did not dare tell him. But then when Jerry knew how sick the boy was, our feelings softened towards each other. At least, I think mine did. Of course, I always loved him – loved him? Yes, of course I did.”

There was a question about Jerry’s first wife – was this who Rils was trying to get in touch with in Calgary?

“I don’t know anything about the woman – Trenda. You’d have to go back to his early life, which was not my time with him.”

Loretta spoke of why Jerry did not go to the hospital. They found he had been bleeding slowly into his lung and that his left arm had been damaged. Loretta said it was because of Rils – he could not afford to leave Rils unattended.

(Her statement continued)

“Mr. Rils never touched the shotgun. This is what he was looking out for. Each time Jerry glanced into the kitchen he saw the shotgun where it was. He also believed that there was a .308 in the corner room – he did not know that I had given it away a year ago.”
Loretta made very much of the music on the radio. Everything in the house was darkening, and the wind blew. The chairs took on a heaviness, the slanted doors became heavier. But the music had changed, and softened. It was Pachelbel’s Canon, she later learned; she did not know this at the time. Why this music had suddenly come on the radio was because Mr. Rils had fiddled with the dial, and then gave it a twist and walked away from it. And faintly the sound of music entered the room, filling all the shades of darkness and light, the pink curtains turning in the twilight, and snow seeping and sifting along the outside of the windows and through the hard spruces at the property’s edge. Everything was so still.

The air was still, and darkness coming, and music played, complementing the way classical music does complement the idea of parkas and toques and hands that have been battered most of their lives by work. Does complement the mills and the frost into the earth rather than the sophisticates who would snigger at a failed colleague in a room.

“Bines could not do otherwise with Mr. Rils. If he didn’t bring him to the house Mr. Rils would have disappeared into town, to see to Mr. White or the Pillar family. In this way – if he had him at the house – he could keep an eye on him. To keep him from the Pillars – Ralphie and Vera. This is what I know now. He had to keep him in his sight.

“No, I did not know everything about the murder in Sudbury or the jewellery he had stolen, but I knew the police were looking for him because it had been in the paper and on television. So I knew who was with Jerry before he even got out of the truck.”

(Her statement continued)

“Mr. Rils came back in. He sat down in the chair near the door. One moment he would look your way, and the next he would shift his eyes. Jerry was not paying attention to him at all. He had to run the extension cord to the socket, and he had asked me to go get an extra piece of cord. He was saying he might have to move the whole tree over but I wanted it near the window, and it was the same thing every year.

“No, Mr. Rils went and got the cord. He seemed fine. Jerry took the cord and thanked him. William kept saying, ‘The lights, Mom – the lights,’ so I said, ‘Okay, open the icicles if you want.’ William looks younger than he is, and he speaks slowly. He started to hand me the box of icicles to open it for him, and Jerry said, ‘Oh, the Amoxil.’ He had it in his pocket and it has to be refrigerated. He had forgotten all about it probably. He turned to William and started to reach in his pocket.

‘“Take this to the fridge – out to the fridge,’ I heard him say distinctly, and then he cast a glance to his left. Everything seems to be in slow motion now. He cast a glance as if he were curious why Mr. Rils had jumped up. And I could tell he was about to turn and smile.

“And Mr. Rils stabbed him, under the parka and into
his left side. Willie didn’t see it – he had his hands on the box of icicles – and he looked over at his father because Jerry had uttered a sound. It was as if his breath was cut off.

“Jerry swung his right arm around in back of him and broke Mr. Rils’ jaw. But then he stumbled. Mr. Rils fell back against the wall, and Jerry tried to pull out the knife. ‘Pull it out,’ he said to me. ‘Pull it out.’”

(Her statement continued)

“Yes, I did. I went over and pulled the knife out. Mr. Rils was in the kitchen, trying to put the shotgun together. Jerry fell over against the tree. It seemed like a long time. He tried to get up and fell again. Willie tried to help him up, and I had my hands under his arms.

“‘Take Willie out the back porch – back porch, take him over to Donovan’s,’ he said. ‘Take him over to Donovan’s, Loretta –’ he said.

“I took Willie and ran into the back porch, but I didn’t go out, I opened the hatch and went into the cellar. I told Willie to hide.”

(Here there was a series of questions about the shotgun. Loretta’s statement continued)

“He hid behind a box with a few icicles still in his hand, and you could see his feet sticking out. When I started upstairs he looked up over the box at me. ‘Get down,’ I said.

“Oh yes, yes, yes. Jerry knew Mr. Rils would kill the boy – and me, too. What else would he do? We all know now about Mr. Rils. But I didn’t think of that then.
When I came upstairs the music was playing, and I remembered that the lights had come on out in the road.

“I didn’t see Jerry when I went into the room. But I could see Gary Percy making his way into the snow. He was just on the far side of the truck.”

(There was a question from Constable Petrie about what Jerry was doing, where he was, and what, if anything, he said)

“He was slumped down by the fridge. He had wrestled the shotgun out of Rils’ hand and was trying to put it together. There were shotgun shells all over the place. What did he say? He told me to put the Amoxil in the fridge and get the .308. I told him I had given it away.

“There was blood all down the side of the fridge and against the wall.

“I put the Amoxil in the fridge. He was no longer strong enough to open the shotgun and put a shell in it. I asked him if he wanted a priest, because he was baptized a Catholic. I went to telephone the hospital – I know the number off by heart – but Jerry had torn the phone from the wall.”

(There was a question from Constable Petrie if Jerry wanted a priest)

“No.”

(There was a question from Constable Petrie about Rils coming back to the house)

“No. The next thing I knew the police had picked him up in Jerry’s truck at the train station in Moncton.”

(There was a question from Constable Petrie asking if Jerry was alive when Mr. Donovan got across the road)

“No.”

“He was not alive when Mr. Donovan came in?”

“No – he was not alive – Jerry was not alive at that time.”

A month after Jerry’s death, the two ministers of Loretta Bines’ church, a father and son who looked identical (each weighed over two hundred pounds, and wore identical suits, and the boy had his hair dyed to look like his father’s), came one day to the house to visit, and ate pies and cakes sitting in the living room in mid-afternoon.

Each looked very canoned, ministerial, as the cold snow froze in the puddles, and their cars, both Buick Regals, were pulled up bumper to bumper in the little drive outside her house. Each wore leather shoes that were pointed to make them look like they only had a
couple of toes on each foot, each wore the same gold jewellery – watches and rings. Each was constantly offended. Each spoke about the French, and taxes, and Catholics, and Bible school, and their summer camp.

“Brother Bob and his boy Teddy,” people called them.

They had a trailer park, and a mobile home for sale, and they expected Loretta to clean it. In fact, they never came over until they needed her to scrub or clean the church, or help in their trailer park.

This afternoon they were here to drive her to the church because the cross was going to be put up. It was far away, across two broken roads in a community which had been cut out of the earth just two years before.

In the sky the clouds were grey and light, and the day seemed to stand still. The snow about the churchyard had frozen to ice and the ice had the same tone as the sky, flat and off-white with strands of yellow.

The deer had come out to the frozen stream below the church, into the small pasture, and young pastor Teddy tried to shoot one, following it around the pasture in his suit and holding the .308 rifle that he had borrowed from Loretta last year. The small group of men and women watched him do this – the men exclaiming that if he fired now the deer would be history.

But then the deer bounded over a few falls and crossed the river, and, like deer do, jumped in splendid retreat against the old spruce woods, so that one moment it was gone and the next they saw it palavering in the crooked shadows of the lonesome tangles.

Teddy walked back, hiding the gun under his suit, for hunting season was long over, his pointed shoes soaking, and saying that deer could run like the devil when they saw a pastor, and everyone laughed.

“I had my hopes pinned on you, Young Teddy,” one of the men said.

He smiled at this and handed the rifle to someone, as if not being so good with the rifle meant nothing to him personally, and then he looked up at the works above the church – the high scaffolding and the cross leaning against the door.

They all stood about wondering who would put the cross up and one of the children, a sixteen-year-old boy with a ready smile, started to climb the ladder.

He stood on the scaffolding and looked down and waved.

Loretta was standing with the small group of women.

Pastor Bob stood back against the door, not speaking. It was a certain kind of apoplexy came over him when things had to be done. He’d simply wait and others would look at him and shout: “Get it done for Bob.”

This became the expression of their humanity now in the grave little yard in the middle of the afternoon.

“Get it done for BOB!”

Two men lifted the cross, and tied a rope to it, and the boy began to haul. It banged its way up, and was caught in the scaffolding rods.

The deer came again to the field below and walked unconcerned against the scrapes left two months before.

One of the men who lifted the cross was Nevin White.

He had met the ministers two weeks before, and now, leaning on the scaffolding, his hair cut short, his old suit on, faded almost to nothing, he looked like most of the others.

They had promised him a new life. And it was in this new life that he put his hope.

“Can you help a man who attempted suicide and beat a child – and tormented his first wife?” he had asked them (for he’d always believed he’d beaten a child when he had only teased one).

“Of course,” they had said.

And he was startled, like Nevin always was, when confronted with simplicity or action.

It was in this new life where he hoped to find his self-respect, and to forgive himself the memory of his first wife.

He had told Vera where he was. “I’m going back to church,” he had told her.

“Yes,” Vera said. “Of course you are – well, good for you.”

“I haven’t had a drink in four weeks,” he had told her. “And I’m going to get a job – it won’t be much of a job – but it will do.”

“Well – good for you,” she said.

It was very strange that this would happen to him. It was very strange that in a way he was doing what he felt he must do, even though the whole world – almost all of his friends, and certainly all of those down to a man or woman he wanted to impress – would now turn away.

He shivered in the cold, and wisps of grey snow began to fall out of the sky, and then run to water as they hit his cheeks.

The little group, all dishevelled men and women, outcasts in every way, looked at each other. Not one was a carpenter, not one a mechanic, not one was a professional. All of them had dismal records of failure and loss. But they had taken to building this church by themselves.

And Nevin looking around at them suddenly smiled. His skin was so white it looked like ivory, and his hair cut was in the fashion of a Roundhead from the seventeenth-century civil war. He climbed the scaffolding with two others.

“Hand it to me,” he said. “Hand it to me.”

He did not know why he said this. Certainly in his former life he had done nothing like this.

“Hand it to me,” he said again.

The pastor opened his hymn book and walked back and forth, for no other reason than he thought that this was what he should be seen to be doing, the pages spattered with snow, which somehow impressed him, the old gouged earth red with rigid muck under his feet.

Nevin looked down.

No one knew him, and he knew none of them.

When he had brought his books to the rented trailer – a most quixotic collection of books – sex manuals sat atop the environmental study of 1987, atop works by Schopenhauer and Kant near cookbooks and Andy Capp comic books – the young minister had smiled at him ruefully and had said: “You won’t need none of those here.”

“Oh,” Nevin said.

“You’ll find there is only one work here – the work of the Lord.”

At the second tier of the scaffolding Nevin was the first to touch the cross and it was ice-cold on his hands. He lifted it, with the help of a grey-haired man, who, still bending over, began to teeter as if he might fall headlong into the muck below.

But Nevin balanced him and lifted the cross from him.

“I got it,” he said.

The sixteen-year-old with a heavy accent from upriver shouted: “We got her right there now.”

The scaffolding went up another two tiers and then
only one person could place the cross into the wooden support and bolt it.

“Put it on me back and I can climb right up there,” the grey-haired man said.

“I’ll help,” Nevin said.

“Mr. White,” someone shouted from below, “your pants are unhooked.”

And Nevin saw that his pants were unhooked from the cross scraping against them, and he smiled.

“Yes,” he said, and he hooked his pants again and tightened his belt.

The wind suddenly blew against him, and held him back against the steeple.

“Tie the rope – tie a rope on,” the same man shouted to the grey-haired man, looking not at him but at one of the pastors.

“It’s all right,” Nevin shouted. “We’ll jimmy it up.”

And he went up to the next tier – battered by wind and cold snow, the little group of people huddled below watching him as he dragged their cross behind him.

But he was not all right at all. He was scared to death and he did not know why he was doing such a foolish thing.

The boy stood beneath him on a small platform with his hand on the bottom of the cross, and when he let go the cross swayed in the wind and Nevin grabbed it with both hands, and almost fell between the scaffolding and the steeple.

Some people shouted out to him to be careful.

But Nevin and the boy and the older man managed to get the cross to the last tier. The older man sat down on the scaffolding to catch his breath.

“Come up to the walkway,” Nevin said to the boy, “and we’ll put it in together.”

The walkway was only a foot and a half wide, and the scaffold had ended. They could reach down and brace themselves at the top, but only if they let go of the cross.

“It’s heavy,” the boy said, but still he had the same kind grin on his face, and he reminded Nevin of the child he had teased so many years before. Already he seemed to be much stronger than Nevin and he realized this.

“Give it to me,” he said. “I’ll place her there.”

Nevin’s face was cut and his hands were torn. He bled from every knuckle. “I’ll do it,” he said, “if you support my back.”

“I’ll come up,” the old man said.

“No,” the boy said. “There isn’t room – you support our feet.”

Far away they could see the river turn bleak into the sunless sky, and the trees distant and dark.

Nevin thought about Hadley – but she seemed far away from him. He had been angry with her, for hiding behind a chair in the living room when he went to pick her up on certain Saturdays, while Vera said: “Well, you have to go – it’s your father.”

But at this moment it didn’t seem important.

The boy held on to him. The old man tried to support their ankles, and Nevin took the cross and lifted it into the socket. When it dropped into place he felt his hand jam and he winced.

“Hurray,” two people called up. “You got it, Mr. White.”

He climbed down from the scaffolding. People had drifted inside where there was to be a church service, and Nevin felt uncomfortable with this, so he stood outside the door. As he stood there his left hand bled, red blood dropping into the snow.

He was alone in the little churchyard. Suddenly he was depressed as he was at times when he thought of ending his life.

He thought of reading Kant in his studies at university and felt he had made a great mistake being here.

“Come inside,” a woman said to him. He blinked and put on his glasses and looked at her. She was standing with her little boy near the door.

“Come on – you’ll freeze yer arse off out there,” she said. She smiled and he smiled also.

She was Loretta Bines.

He looked up at the cross. Now that it was done it didn’t seem at all an important thing to do.

“You were brave to do that,” she said. The little boy nodded and smiled at him.

He looked at her, and he felt he could easily mistake her for his first wife.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” he said. “I’ve been a coward all my life. I’m sorry.”

“Well, we’re all as brave as we have to be,” Loretta said, “and none of us are any braver.”

“Forgive me,” he said, his lips trembling, “forgive me.”

But she only smiled kindly at him, and he could think of nothing more to say.