Punishment (2 page)

When I rounded the corner I noticed a small group waiting near the back entrance to what once had been the county jail but now was just holding cells for people awaiting court appearances for more serious offences. The new regional facility for longer-term incarceration is hours away.

There were four burly men, a grand-uncle and three older cousins of the victim. They were of a more recent generation than mine but I knew them all, their names and genealogy and status. They were all solid, decent citizens. I could feel the tension, the potentially explosive mix of grief and anger. But there was also the awkwardness of normal people in the presence of the law.

They were silent as the vehicles pulled up. Three were tradesmen who mostly worked in distant places. The grand-uncle was a seasonal fisherman. There were two women, one of them the dead girl’s grandmother. I knew her well from long ago and felt a sudden rush of recollection. She looked startled and distracted when she noticed me.

Five officers assembled near the back door of the van. One unlocked and opened it to reveal young Strickland, shackled, pale and blinking in the sudden flood of daylight, hunched over, staring out. A reporter started the disturbance by shouting at him as he walked, handcuffed, amidst the little scrum of lawmen toward the entrance to the cells.
“Do you have anything to say to Mary’s family?”

Strickland lifted his face and stared at the reporter with an
expression that was both defiant and contemptuous. He smiled briefly and seemed to wink at her.

That was when one of the cousins, a tall man about forty years of age, stepped forward, face furious, and reached into the moving knot around the accused only to be quickly seized and wrestled down by the two RCMP. Two other men then raised their voices in protest and moved toward what was now a squirming struggle on the ground. A sheriff’s deputy blocked them, a cautionary hand raised.

“Come on now, boys,” he said.

The younger of the two women then shouted
“Bastard!”
and spit at Strickland. He saw it coming and ducked as the sheriff hurried him toward the door. The Mounties were by then on their feet, still restraining the angry cousin. It was while the sheriff fumbled with a clump of keys that Strickland noticed me and raised his eyebrows in surprise just before the sheriff grabbed his elbow and half-shoved him through the doorway. He stumbled on the threshold, and was gone.

I knew a little bit about the victim from the papers and the talk. She was seventeen years old, an athlete (distance runner, soccer player), a dancer and a prodigious student. She’d been missing for five days before they found her body at Dwayne Strickland’s place. The early speculation was about hard drugs and rape, so it was probably for the best that he had been nowhere to be found at first.

There were conflicting reports about what happened but the one consistent factor was Strickland. I had avoided the community formalities, the wake especially, which would have been abuzz with speculation and inflamed emotion. Three
days before the courthouse incident I’d almost blundered into the funeral, which I’d been determined to avoid, too, given what I knew about the man everyone was blaming for the tragedy. I was probably the only person in the village who didn’t go—the other absentee was Collie Rankin who ran the local store. He saved a daily paper for me and I was on my way to get it when I saw the cars and trucks lining both sides of the road that runs past the ancient sandstone church. The large back door of the hearse was open wide, the undertaker and his helper hovering.

Collie looked up from a newspaper as I entered. Just inside, on a corkboard festooned with notices of sales and schedules of social functions, there was a photo of the dead girl, Mary Alice Stewart, and a request for contributions to a memorial scholarship fund. She had a smile that revealed both shyness and a sense of mischief.

“I hear they got young Strickland,” Collie said. “He was at the airport. Making a run for it by the look of things.”

“I see.”

“You must remember Strickland.”

“I was gone from here by his time.”

“You knew he was adopted …” It must have been the expression on my face—he stopped, then added quickly, “Not that that means anything, Strickland is in a class all by himself.”

“The papers are in?” I asked.

“Yes.” He carefully folded the newspaper he’d been reading before handing it to me. “Awful about young Mary Alice.”

I nodded, paid and left. I could see people trickling out of the church and as I turned my car onto the highway, six men of
varying ages, faces all deformed by sorrow and exertion, were carrying the coffin to the hearse.

The Mounties, back in their cars, sat for a few moments eyeing the group still standing just outside the lockup door. The men seemed angrier now with the crisis passed. I could hear their voices raised, loudly venting afterthoughts, regrets about what seemed now to have been a moment lost—words unsaid, deeds undone. I turned to leave. Then the grandmother was at my side. Years ago we called her Caddy. She still retained the basics of her youthful prettiness, clear blue eyes, strong cheekbones, but she seemed haggard now, face grim. “I saw the look he gave you,” she said. “How do you know that piece of garbage?”

“It’s a very long story,” I said.

I wanted to say more but felt the weight of strangeness. She said: “You haven’t changed much, Tony.”

“I was devastated when I heard …” I said, embarrassed by the banality but at a loss for anything more meaningful. She didn’t seem to notice. She was looking toward her relatives who were now walking away slowly, still muttering. Then she met my eyes, searching. “We’ll never get over it, you know, something like that. People like that Strickland are ruining the place.”

“What’s happening here today?”

“The arraignment,” she said. “I had to get a look at him. Don’t ask me why.”

“I’ll come and visit,” I said. “When things settle down.”

“Please do,” she said, touched my hand briefly. She walked away, then stopped as if remembering, turned and smiled.
She waved again and disappeared around the corner of the courthouse.

In those early days of my retirement I found a disproportionate sense of satisfaction in completing little obligations, even paying taxes. Former colleagues who had retired were always telling me how much they had to do.
Never been so busy. Not enough hours in the day
. A load of crap, as I had learned in the first five months I’d been back here. Days spread out in front of me as vast uncultivated plains. So my expedition to the courthouse had been something to look forward to. The unexpected drama was a bonus.

I thought of Caddy all the way home and about how strange it was that in spite of nearly forty years and all the living in between I’d still feel this nagging adolescent mix of sadness, anger and embarrassment just from seeing her. I had thought about calling on her since I’d moved back but, each time, had been restrained by memory and a cautious nature. Considering my confused reaction on seeing her at the courthouse, I realized that my caution had been prudent.

After I filed away the tax receipts in a drawer I sat back to contemplate the ancient desk I’d brought with me from Kingston. It’s an old roll-top from an age when ideas turned more slowly into words, when words were written by hand. I’d also taken books, although there had been some tension over texts that Anna said she needed for her legal practice, dense volumes that mostly dealt with deviance and criminology, which were, I pointed out, my specialty as well as hers. I’d also
somehow ended up with the conjugal bed. All sentiment aside, it was a good bed and when she indicated her intent to send it to the dump I said I’d take it. She kept almost everything else.

We’d sold the Kingston house and split the equity. I kept the place in St. Ninian, the coastal village I’d grown up in, and where Anna always seemed to be vaguely miserable. Now I was here alone, for good. It was a disturbing thought—being at a dead end, in a way—but I was vaguely comforted by the desk’s connection with a time when I was relevant and busy. And I admired its obvious antiquity and quality as I sat in front of it with my fingers laced across my stomach the way an old man sits. The stomach, I noted with some chagrin, had become substantial.

I’d been told the upside of divorce is often weight loss but, if anything, I’d gained. The Kingston doctor had cautioned me that two life changes close together—retirement and divorce—might constitute a psychic overload and to be careful with the comfort food and booze. He offered pills. I’d never needed pills before, even in the most stressful periods of my working life. I didn’t trust pills. He said I needn’t worry. The pill he had in mind would be innocuous—it might cause some dryness in the mouth, a fuzzy brain at first and perhaps, occasionally, an inappropriate erection which, at my age, might not be entirely a bad thing.

“At my age,” I asked rather sourly, “what would you consider ‘inappropriate’?”

He laughed. “You’ll have to be the judge.”

I’ve been on the pills ever since, with no apparent side effects.

——

I remembered that I had a photograph of Dwayne Strickland buried somewhere in a desk drawer, a coloured eight-by-ten that I found easily. A friendly inmate snapped it for us on the day I introduced young Strickland to my wife, back in 1998. It was August, I believe. The backdrop was a whitewashed prison wall and they were crouched while I was standing. I was frowning slightly, which was appropriate for my status as an institutional parole officer. Anna was still building up her practice at the time. They, being much younger than I, were more flexible and so looked quite relaxed, squatting in what I would have found to be an awkward pose. Anna was smiling like a girl and afterwards she gushed about the con—Strickland was so engaging; “a waste,” was how she put it. What was he like once one got to know him?

I had pointed out to her that one rarely ever gets to “know” an inmate but as far as I could tell he had no discernable personality disorders. He had a fairly high opinion of himself. He wasn’t especially violent, just a garden-variety drug dealer who had strayed beyond his expertise by robbing banks for which he was serving eight years. He was in Kingston Pen, far more custody than he required, but only for a psychological assessment before a likely reclassification to medium security. His case managers were also trying to assess the fallout from an incident that might have got him labelled as a rat—a fatal designation in the world we occupied. All that aside, he had a lot of life ahead of him if he had the character to rise above the consequences of his past behaviour.

She had shrugged. “He’s awfully good-looking anyway.”

Four years had passed since that sunny day in 1998 but I remembered quite clearly how young and carefree Anna seemed
back then. It’s amazing how anger strips away a woman’s youthful qualities. She
was
beautiful, even squinting in the sunshine that was bouncing off the glaring walls, her fine auburn hair ruffled by the August breeze.

I’d had to visit Strickland there that day and Anna had asked to come along. She’d acquired her interest in criminals quite naturally. Anna grew up in or near a lot of prisons. Her father was an officer who had worked his way up the corrections food chain to warden in another institution. She’d heard me speak of Strickland, and the fact that he and I were from the same small place in Nova Scotia seemed to excite her curiosity. Maybe I was mildly flattered by this rare and unexpected show of interest in where I’d come from.

“If we had a son,” she’d once said, after she’d become better acquainted with Strickland, “I’d have been happy with someone just like him. In any case, the way he turned out has everything to do with his family background. Discipline without love. Being adopted.”

“Take him and everything he tells you with a grain of salt,” I’d warned her.

I put the photo back in the drawer. The telephone saved me from another slide into the wasteland of remorse.

The caller asked if I was Mr. Breau. I told him that I was. “
Tony
Breau?” he stressed, sounding friendly. I confirmed it by staying on the line.

He told me that his name was Sullivan, Stanley Sullivan, and that he was a lawyer representing Dwayne Strickland.

I said I was acquainted with his client. Sullivan then proceeded to assure me that he was calling me at Dwayne’s request. Strickland wanted to reconnect, given all our history.

“It’s all behind me now and I’d like to leave it there,” I said.

“I understand,” he said. “But I think you were friends.”

Naïveté annoys me. “I know him,” I said at last. “We both grew up around here and we had some other things in common. We talked occasionally when he was inside but the relationship was hardly personal. Given my line of work, ‘friend’ would be a bit of an overstatement.”

“Whatever the relationship was,” Sullivan said, “even if you weren’t friends, you were friendly. Let’s say he respects you. And for people with his background it’s rare to see respect for someone in the so-called system. He’d like to talk to you. That’s why I’m calling.”

“Did he tell you what he wants to talk about?”

“You’ve heard about the allegation, the death of the young woman. I think he’d like to present his version of events. He said he wants to tell you exactly what happened.”

“And why would I believe him?”

There was a pause, then he said, “It would be as much for my benefit as his. Given your history with him and your background I think it might be helpful to hear him tell it again. There might be small details, even inconsistencies.”

“From my point of view,” I said, “I’m not sure what I could contribute.”

“Mr. Breau, you and I have been around long enough to understand these kinds of situations.”

“He got himself in a jam. He wants to get out of it. There’s really nothing I can do.”

“Look. It’s my job to help him deal with his predicament. How to do that isn’t clear yet. Do we go for broke or cut our losses …”

“Around here he’s already guilty …”

“I don’t give a shit about ‘around here.’ He’s innocent until the system says otherwise. So will you help or not?”