SOON THE HUMBLING WIDTH of Brebeuf County stretched before us. To the north shone the navy mass of Georgian Bay and the slab of headland where Samuel Champlain performed the first Catholic mass in Ontario with his Huron guides, although I would be lying if I said it was easy to find the wooden cross that marks the spot.
Brebeuf County was named after Father Brébeuf, the seventeenth-century Jesuit priest tortured to death by the Iroquois. According to
Hansen's Handbook of the Georgian Bay
, Brebeuf County had always been dangerous and was dangerous still, especially the Great Bay, whose plainspoken names describe what you see: One Tree Island, Strawberry Inlet, Pancake Rock, Hole-in-the-Wall, Turnaway Reef, Steamboat Channel, and, more ominously, Grave Island. Its lonely stretches are one of the worst places for lightning in North America. Canoes overturn in waves at the drop of a hat, and swimmers are sucked to their deaths by undertows; in the off-season, the ice-cold water will take your life in three minutes. Back then, I knew all these dangers and a few more besides. If you went sailing without a long-sleeved shirt, the sun could give you a third-degree burn. If you fell out of a motorboat making a turn, the boat would keep making smaller and smaller circles until the blades of the propeller shredded you to bits â unless you knew how to duckdive, that is, and could hold your breath while the boat passed over you.
The landscape seemed to ask for physical giants like my father and the Jesuit martyrs; even Jesus with his long-suffering nature would fit right into Brebeuf County.
NO SOONER DID WE WALK in the front door than the phone rang. My father took it, cupping his hand over the mouthpiece. He had to go, he told us, setting the black Bell phone back in its cradle. A man had been knocked unconscious after he fell into the hull of a barge.
“Mary, ask Sal to serve the prisoners tea,” Morley called as he rushed out the door. “You'll see, girls. Everything will be fine.”
“Little Louie, you help Sal,” my grandmother said, taking charge. “Mary, you stay in the kitchen and stack teacups.”
“Do we have to, Mom?” Little Louie whined.
My grandmother stared her down. “You know the answer,” Big Louie replied stiffly and went off to find Sal.
We quickly did what Big Louie said. It was a waste of time arguing with somebody who could make grown men on her oil rigs cry real tears of shame over disobeying her. After I finished helping, I cleared off a space for myself on our kitchen table, already crowded with plants and old recipes. Satisfied, I opened Big Louie's book to a chapter titled, “The Romance of Oil in Canada West.” I was glad to see the author supported Big Louie's claim that North America's first commercial oil well was dug by friends of my great-grandfather in 1858 in Oil Springs, Ontario, one year before the Americans drilled theirs in Titus, Pennsylvania.
From outside came the noise of car doors slamming. Peeking around the kitchen door, I saw Dr. Shulman coming into our living room with the prisoners and the hospital guards, Jordie Coverdale and Sal's boyfriend, Sib Beaudry. The men took off their coats and loosened their ties. With their slicked-back hair and shaved faces, the prisoners resembled travelling salesmen. Nobody would guess they were insane killers, except for the fact that Sib Beaudry looked scared to death. His big hound dog eyes were trained on John Pilkie, and I wondered what the hockey killer would say if he knew that Sib had brought beaverboard to the train station along with hammer and nails in case John Pilkie broke the windows of the hospital van.
In the living room, Little Louie's yellow hair and heavy-lidded eyes were drawing smiles from the men. “What can I give you, gentlemen?” she asked in her high, girlish voice. “A little milk and sugar? Or do you prefer cream?” The prisoners blushed or grinned and took a teacup from her tray, while my aunt helped them to lumps of sugar.
John Pilkie took off his brown fedora and pushed his cowlick back from his high, rounded forehead. As he slipped off his raccoon coat, he started to cough. It was a low, hollow-wheezing sound like the noise of a rubber plunger going into a human chest.
“That's a nasty cold you've got,” Little Louie said.
“Sorry ma'am. I'm just getting over one.” He gave her his big, dimpled grin. “They don't heat the rooms where I live, eh?” Then he said something in a lowered voice. She smiled back a little reluctantly and hurried off with her tea tray. When he realized my aunt wasn't returning, he glanced around. I held my breath, waiting for him to knock down Sib Beaudry and make a break for it. But he stayed where he was, so I let my eyes follow his around our comfortable living room, and it was as if I, too, were seeing it for the first time: our two big bay windows along with the double parlours with the matching coloured tiles on their fireplaces; the plump chintz furniture whose print was slightly faded because my grandmother believed bright chintz was vulgar; our brand-new black-andwhite Zenith television with a mahogany console; the soft red tongue of carpet unwinding down our front stairs; and the life-size oil painting of my mother, Alice. Hanging near my mother's portrait was a glass cabinet holding my father's hockey trophies.
John (I began thinking of him as John long before I called him John to his face) stared longest at my father's cabinet. Was he thinking about his days with the Rats? Or did he miss playing hockey? He must have sensed someone looking. Turning around, he caught my eye and winked. I stepped back into the kitchen, and sat down at our kitchen table. Breathing hard, I opened Big Louie's history book again and forced myself to read about the Indians using crude oil to seal their canoes. They didn't understand oil's potential and neither did Upper Canada's first Lieutenant Governor, Colonel John Graves Simcoe. He barely mentioned the oil seepages he saw in 1793 near Bothwell, Ontario, not far from my mother's hometown of Petrolia. It was up to Mrs. Simcoe to scribble in her husband's journal: “a spring of real petroleum was discovered in the marsh by its offensive smell.” Nobody knew what to do with the oil seepages until a man named Charles Nelson Tripp used the crude oil to make asphalt. In 1857, Tripp sold seven boats of asphalt to the French government to pave Paris streets. “Seven boats of asphalt! How about that, Sal?” I asked as she swept by with a fresh pot of coffee.
“Mouse, I don't have time for your studentin'!” Sal pronounced “studentin'” the same way she said “touristin',” her word for what summer visitors did in Madoc's Landing. She didn't worry about dropping the “gs” from her “ing” verb endings, although Big Louie said it was the mark of an uneducated person. After Sal left, I scribbled “not bad for us Canucks” in my Scholastic notebook, and underlined “seven boats of asphalt” three times. I didn't hear the kitchen door swing open.
“Mouse, do you want to meet a killer?” Sal asked. When I looked up she was standing there with John and smiling as if she were introducing me to a movie star. John and I stared nervously at each other. Then he started coughing again, making that low hollow-wheezing sound. I waited, half-embarrassed for him. After he stopped, I nodded yes, and he smiled his big, dimpled smile and sat down in the chair opposite. Sal poured me a ginger ale and opened Cokes for herself and him. “A ciggy, John?” Sal offered him her package of Matinees.
“Makes me cough, Sal.” He trained his big, dark eyes on me. Did I mention his eyes? They were slightly exophthalmic, the term for bug-eyed that I had found in one of Morley's medical textbooks. I'd added it to my list of words like “execrate,” which sounded thrillingly like defecate, and “vainglorious,” an adjective even the grown-ups misused, not realizing it meant boastful.
He turned to Sal, popping his fingers against his palms. “Mary saw my sign protesting my innocence. I bet you didn't know mental patients can't get their cases reviewed, eh?”
I shook my head, taking in his clean, shapely hands. The moons at the base of his cuticles were shiny with clear polish, as if he'd painted his nails like a woman.
“You and everybody else. But I aim to change that. Well, I guess we're acquainted now, aren't we?”
“In a manner of speaking, Mr. Pilkie.”
“In a manner of speaking, Mr. Pilkie! What a fancy way to put it! You have manners, just like your old man.”
Flattered, I tried not to let it show.
“Okey-dokey, Mary. I'll behave.” He pointed at my history book. “What have you got there?”
“I'm writing a composition about my great-grandfather, who was an oilman in Petrolia.”
He examined the tintype of Mac Vidal thoughtfully. “Now isn't that something? You look just like him. Something determined about the mouth.” He popped his fingers again and added, “My great-granddaddy was in the oil business down there. So you and I have a connection to Petrolia. How do you like that?”
“Maybe your ancestor worked on my great-grandfather's rigs.”
“Maybe.” He sounded doubtful. “You aren't fooling me now, are you?”
“I'm telling the truth, Mr. Pilkie. Cross my heart and point to heaven, my great-grandfather's boat ran into an oil slick on the Great Lakes. The slick was caused by an oil gusher near Petrolia and he followed the oil to its source and struck it rich.”
“That's quite a story,” he replied.
I showed him the page from my grandmother's book that quoted the
Sarnia Observer Advertiser
from August 5, 1858. He whistled as he read it out: “âWe lately heard of the discovery of a bituminous spring in the Township of Enniskillen ⦠that will continue an almost inexhaustible supply of wealth, yielding at the lowest ⦠not less than one thousand dollars per day of clear profit â¦' Imagine, Sal! A thousand bucks a day!” he said.
“That was in the old days,” Sal replied. “They don't make a dime now.”
“Sal's right. My grandmother says the price of oil hasn't gone up in years,” I added.
He asked how my great-grandfather stored his oil, and I showed him a picture of the clay storage tanks like the ones my ancestor used. I skated over the mechanics of “puddling” the tank walls because I considered myself more like Morley, without a practical bone in my body.
“Did you know your father saved my life when I was a kid?” he asked after I finished. “I got an appendix attack at the Western Light. It was blowing up a storm so we couldn't leave the island.”
I looked at Sal. I wasn't supposed to know about Morley helping John's father take out John's appendix.
“Or do you want me to tell you another story?”
“Well, we sure don't want to hear about your wife and baby girl,” Sal said.
John's face closed up. He drummed his fingers angrily on the kitchen table, his dark angel's eyes glowing.
“Please tell me about you and my father, Mr. Pilkie.”
“Call me John,” he replied, his eyes softening.
“Okay, Mr. Pilkie.”
He snorted. “We Pilkies are dogans, eh?” He lifted a gold chain out of his shirt and wiggled its tiny gold cross. I made admiring noises and he tucked away his gold chain and said: “Well, Mary, before Doc Bradford, we only went to Catholic doctors. But when my granddaddy put his fingers too close to the sawmill blade our Catholic doctor wouldn't come. It was January, and snowing hard. So the sawmill manager phoned Doc Bradford. Your daddy didn't care about us being dogans or cat-likers, as you Protestants call us, and he didn't care about the weather, either. If you ask Doc Bradford to come, he comes lickety-split. Everybody knows that. Doc Bradford is our hero, eh? And two hours later your daddy arrived in his sleigh at my grand-daddy's sawmill. He sewed two of my granddaddy's fingers back on and closed up the hole on the little one because the saw had chewed it to bits.”
He bent back his baby finger, and I imagined I was looking at his grandfather's four-fingered hand.
“And then Doc Bradford went back out into the storm,” Sal said. “Can you imagine anything so crazy? He drove the horse and sleigh across the frozen bay.”
“He was just doing his job, Sal.”
“You hush up, John,” Sal interjected. “You don't know this part and I do. I know the nurse who was working in Doc Bradford's office back then. Doc Bradford lost his bearings.”
“I do so know this part. Her daddy put down his doggy and let it find the way home.”
“That's what Doc Bradford did,” Sal said. “He had a fox terrier by the name of Tipper, and the little dog picked its way through the ice and led your father back. 'Course, once Doc Bradford got to the mainland, he knew where he was.”
“But Mary wants to know how her daddy took out my appendix. Look girls, here's the damage.” He lifted up his shirt and Sal and I gaped at the laddered scar that vanished under his belt.
“John, for the love of money.” Sal slapped his arm and he tucked his shirt back under his belt. “I guess I need one of these to make me remember, eh?” He grinned at me and reached for Sal's cigarettes. “Well, here goes, Mary.”
“Entertaining the ladies, Pilkie?”
We all jumped. Sib Beaudry stood in the doorway.
“Sal, you keep this. Your boyfriend here says I have to go.” He threw over Sal's unlit cigarette and Sal caught it with a flirtatious yelp. For a moment, Sal looked almost pretty and it came to me that Sal was still a young woman even though she was ten years older than Little Louie, who was twenty.
“That's enough palavering, you two.” Sib gave Sal a dirty look.
“Wait a sec, Sib, will you?” John leaned close, and I smelled something tangy, like shoe leather mixed with lemon juice.
“Mary, a smart girl like you needs a desk of your own.”
“Get moving, Pilkie,” Sib snarled. “Now.”
“Oh, cool your jets, eh Frenchy?” The next thing I knew John was kissing my hand and then he kissed Sal's. Sal giggled. I blushed. Sib's face turned red. “Don't take any wooden nickels, Mary,” he called as he sauntered out of the kitchen.
“So what do you think?” Sal asked after they'd gone. “You met the mad killer, eh?”
“He doesn't look like a killer. He's not mean enough. Do you know what he said when the Bug House boys threw snowballs at him?”
“You tell me.”
“He said, âAim low and you hit something.' Why would he say that?”
“He was making a joke, Mouse Bradford. John thinks highly of himself. I should know. He's my cousin. And he's slicker than a gravy sandwich.”
“That's a fine way to talk about a cousin.”
“Well, he's my third by marriage, so it doesn't count. Besides, you have to know what people are made of. It don't matter if you like 'em.” Sal smirked as if she'd won another argument about me seeing the world through rose-coloured glasses. Big Louie said I was too trusting. Sal always saw the worst in people. I guess together we had the world covered.