“Of course not. Sorry, Benoit. Who else knows about this? Who all knows?”
“Jackson, me, Tag, you folks. That is all as far as I know,” said Benoit. “But I only speak for myself.”
And Isabelle in a way and probably the Willis twins and Dirk Botham and maybe Gert Walker, I thought, but kept that information to myself.
“Tag. Why does Tag know?” my dad asked.
“I am sorry, sir. Because I told him. We spent much time together on the road and on the trains. We talked about many things. There were not many topics did not arise.”
My dad stood up abruptly. I’ve got to go to Montreal,” he said. “I’ve got to go now. I’m going down to the train station to get a ticket.”
No one slept much. When Helen nagged at Dad to go to bed he said he’d sleep on the train. He drank more whiskey. That scared me a little; it was unlike him and I didn’t want him changed in any way.
I dreamed of a man in a tan suit. When I awoke and went back to sleep the man in my dream multiplied and fell apart and turned into a pile of tattered clothes, sticky with blood. Tippy’s sweet dead snout poked out from beneath them.
My dad was on a train to Montreal the next day. I swear if there hadn’t been a passenger train going he would have hopped a freight along with the hoboes. He had decided to do it on his own, without any help from the police, in the hope that he could. If he couldn’t, well, he would cross that bridge when he got to it, he said.
Helen and I wanted him to take Mr. Foote with him, but he balked at the suggestion. I think he was afraid of the hoopla that might occur if word got out, harkening back to that terrible summer of 1925.
“You two keep this under your hats, now,” he said when we kissed him goodbye at the station.
As soon as we got home I went over to see Fraser and put him in the picture. He talked me into telling his dad. They promised it would go no further. Mr. Foote wanted to follow my dad to Montreal but he finally agreed to take a wait-and-see approach.
Meanwhile, there was no sign of Jackson.
There was no reason why his vanishing should be associated with the disappearance of our Sunny eleven years ago, and our discovery of his ties to her, but it was connected in all our brains and in my head at least, it stirred up an unholy turmoil.
Chapter 27
It was two days later that we read the first report in the paper about the man who had been killed by the railroad tracks. “Vagrant Found Murdered” was the small headline.
Jackson still hadn’t turned up. None of us spoke his name but I was certain it was him. So was Helen. Benoit wouldn’t believe it.
Any talk about the killing hinted at the involvement of the railroad bulls. From all across the country stories rode in on the rails along with the men about the savage violence of some of those police. They were said to think nothing of bludgeoning vagrants to within inches of their lives. And sometimes the line was crossed. I’d heard it from Isabelle and I’d heard it from Hedley Larkin, both good sources.
The man’s name was not released at first because his next of kin had to be notified. A couple of days later he was identified as Jackson Shirde, seventeen, from Montreal. Shirde?
At first all that went on in my brain was
no
. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t have happened without my seeing him again. I had to go back in time to before he died so I could at least say goodbye. I put on my sneakers and ran, only as far as the river.
Then I couldn’t think at all. It was just pictures: Sunny’s carriage, a tall man in a tan suit whom I’d never seen before, Margie Willis’s grandfather’s dirty toes, the boxcar the community club had hauled over to our skating rink last winter as a shelter from the cold (l liked that one), Warren’s glowing little face (I liked that one too, but nothing stayed long enough for me to hold onto it). I shivered like my dad did when he found out about Beatrice/Sunny. I noticed that, as if I were observing my own reactions for scientific reasons. It wasn’t totally unpleasant.
Jackson had been dead for at least three days. I had laughed on some of those days. Not a lot, though. There hadn’t been much to laugh about lately. There had been brief moments of nervous excitement over the idea of Sunny coming home but mostly it was a peaky sort of anticipation. I couldn’t picture it at all. I had stolen the photograph of “Bertram” from Jackson’s knapsack but couldn’t bring myself to look at it again. It rested at the bottom of my underwear drawer, waiting, like I was, for her to come home.
Shirde was Jackson’s real last name. Or maybe it wasn’t him that the paper had identified; I thought that again and again. But I knew it was. I thought about my dad in Montreal. He was looking for a family of Shirts. I remembered him on the phone with Mrs. Dunning, saying, “Mrs. Shirt.” She would have been saying, “Mrs. Shirde.” But over the phone lines I supposed they sounded very much alike.
When I went back to the house Helen was on the phone to my dad at his hotel in Montreal saying, “Shirde,” spelling it out for him: “
s h i r d e
.” She didn’t tell him how she knew; she didn’t mention Jackson’s death. I suppose she didn’t want him to feel worse about taking Mrs. Shirde’s remaining child. Helen’s face was a crumpled mess. She pulled herself together for the duration of the telephone conversation.
I walked over to see Benny. He was sitting alone in a corner of the yard. It was obvious to me that he had heard. When I came near him his eyes were flat at first but he seemed to quickly click into my presence from wherever he had been.
“How does that help?” I asked.
“What?” Benny said.
“Your stupid trances. How do they help?”
“Help what?” Benny asked.
“Anything,” I said. “What’s the point?” Then I burst into tears and Benny leapt up and wound his skinny arms around me. I sobbed noisily into his sleeve while several builders looked on.
“Did you know his name wasn’t even Shirt?” I asked.
“No,” said Benny and smoothed the hair away from my face. “No, I did not know that. Perhaps he changed his name for the trip west.”
Benny needed to get back to work, so I left him and roamed the streets. I tried to convince myself that there were two rambling seventeen-year-old Jacksons from Montreal with similar last names, neither of which I’d heard before. And my Jackson was still alive.
I went home to Helen. She didn’t talk to me much in those first days after Jackson’s death. She didn’t talk a whole lot to anyone. Mrs. Foote came over, but she wanted to pray with us and neither Helen nor I would have it.
Helen’s only words could have been spoken by anyone: “supper’s ready,” “don’t forget your satchel,” “how were classes today?” She wasn’t unpleasant, but I knew she didn’t care about answers. I grew uncomfortable around her, more so than when Jackson was a living being between us. Her sorrow, her mourning, seemed to take on a certain aggression — like a renunciation of sorts — of hope? of visions of rapture? — I couldn’t know. Whatever it was, it shut me out. I wanted what now seemed impossible — to rest my head against her shoulder with both her arms around me for a long, long time. I felt like I needed more comfort than I was getting and that caused me to want to bonk her on the head with the cast-iron frying pan.
Dusty gauze cloaked the first couple of days and whetted blades lurked beneath it, never buried deep enough for safety or comfort. I couldn’t wash myself and I had trouble swallowing anything, even my own spit. It seemed like the last time I was able to take a deep breath was the night I got drunk. My whole body ached from trying. Also, I had to get away from Helen, but I didn’t want to be alone.
I went with Gwen to visit Warren.
“Tag’s dead, isn’t he?” Warren said.
“What?” I said.
“Tag’s dead.”
“Well, no, not that we know of,” I said. “Why do you say that?”
“We heard Nurse Parnell talking to Nurse Miles about a dead Negro, killed by the railroad tracks. Tag’s the only Negro around. I don’t like Nurse Parnell. She’s the only one here that isn’t nice. She said ‘nigger’ like mum does.”
“This is news to us, Warren, but we’ll find out,” Gwen said and she marched out of the ward to the nurse’s station.
“The way we heard it was that Jackson died,” I said to Warren.
I knew it didn’t work to keep secrets that big. He would find out in the wind or from Nurse Parnell and then he would blame us for not coming clean.
“Jackson?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Is this to do with your sister, Violet?” Warren asked.
My temples squeezed inwards till I had to close my eyes and hold my head.
“What are you talking about, Warren?” I asked.
“Tag told me about your baby sister,” he said.
Robert walked slowly over from his bed to join us and Gwen came back at the same time.
“Hi, Robert,” Gwen said.
“Hi, Gwen,” he said. “Hi, Violet.”
“What gives?” said Warren. “Who’s dead and who isn’t?”
“Nurse Parnell’s not on duty but Nurse Miles said that Nurse Parnell’s brother is a cop and that he said that the man who was found by the tracks was a Negro.”
I sat down in a metal chair and put my head between my knees, something Helen had taught me. My dizziness passed and after a few moments I sat up.
“Are you okay, Violet?” asked Warren.
“Yes, I think so,” I said.
Gwen went into Warren’s tiny washroom and came back with a cold cloth that she pressed against my forehead.
“So, are Jackson and Tag both dead?” I asked, still reeling from what Warren had said about Sunny. Did everyone in the world know way more than I did about me and my very own family? “Or is Jackson still alive or what? Jesus!”
“I don’t know,” said Gwen, “but I told Nurse Miles to tell Nurse Parnell to watch her tongue around young boys.”
“We’re not young boys,” said Warren. He included Robert in his statement.
“What are you?” I asked, trying to act normal.
“I don’t know, middle-age boys, I guess. We’re not young.”
We promised him we would find out what was what.
“Please find out it wasn’t Tag,” said Warren. “Or Jackson, either. I like him, too. Why does it have to be either of them?”
“Maybe it isn’t,” said Gwen. “Maybe it’s neither and it’s all a big mistake.”
I think we all doubted that.
We were both quiet on the way home. I hadn’t told Gwen anything about finding Sunny. I didn’t want her mum knowing any more of our business than she already did, shadowing it as she had with her dark thoughts. But Warren knew about my long-lost sister!
“Has your mum been to see Warren?” I asked, now dreading any contact between the two in case Warren spilled the beans. I needed to speak to him again.
“No,” said Gwen.
“What does your brother know about Sunny?’ I asked.
“Who?”
“My sister,” I said.
“Nothing,” said Gwen. “Not that I know of. Why?”
So Gwen wasn’t in the picture. I believed that.
“I don’t want Tag to be dead,” I said. Maybe even more than I didn’t want Jackson to be dead, I realized, and then understood there had been a small amount of relief attached to Jackson’s death.
“No,” Gwen said. “We’ve got to find out what’s going on. Maybe you could ask Frank’s dad?”
“Yeah.”
We walked along Bartlet Avenue in silence for a while. The street was empty except for an Eaton’s delivery wagon and a ’33 Plymouth parked on the road. And the tail end of a young boy on his bicycle turning the corner onto Osborne Street. A dog trotted along at his side.
“Any sign of Tippy?” I asked.
“No,” said Gwen.
I remembered Isabelle then and her possible sighting of the dog, but I didn’t mention it. I didn’t want to get Gwen’s hopes up. Maybe I could see Isabelle today sometime.
We leaned into the thin fall air; it was an effort for me to move forward. And in this pale new world of death and loss and middle-age boys, even the chrysanthemums and asters looked dull. I could barely see them.
“Did your mum ever hear back from Mr. Roosevelt about going to that polio place?” I asked.
“No, but Eleanor Roosevelt wrote Warren a letter wishing him well.”
It became, not easy, but not difficult, either, to keep certain feelings at bay. Whenever they began to creep in, I recognized them as something to be put aside, dealt with later.
I didn’t feel like talking to Mr. Foote. I went to see Isabelle instead. She was babysitting, but we went outside and sat on the steps of her apartment building.
She was matter-of-fact about Jackson’s death. She had heard about it, although not from the newspaper.
“I heard people talking about it at Jimmie’s,” she said.
“Who’s Jimmie?”
“It’s not a who. It’s a what,” she said. “A coffee shop downtown. But I heard that the dead man was a Negro,” she went on.
“No, I don’t think that’s right,” I said. “It was Jackson. Wasn’t it? Could you please find out if two men died?”
I realized I might have to go and see Fraser’s dad after all. He would know what was going on.
“The Willis twins and creepy Dirk were at Jimmie’s,” Isabelle said. “They seemed really interested in the man named Jackson’s death.”
“Interested like how?” A crawly feeling snaked up and down my sides beneath the sweat.
I could see their ears perking up,” Isabelle said.
“What did that look like?”
“They were almost but not quite twitching.” Isabelle laughed. She could. This had no real connection to her other than through me. And who the heck was I? A rich girl from The Flats that she probably didn’t even like all that much.
“But since then I heard that the man was coloured so I don’t even know if it was the same Jackson.”
“This is crazy,” I said. “Tag’s a coloured man, but his name isn’t Jackson and we’re all hoping he’s gone home to Detroit.”
I told her the news about Sunny. She took it in stride as she did pretty well everything, but she found it interesting.
“You’re going through a hell of a lot right now, aren’t you, Vi?” She put her arm around my shoulders.
My eyes burned. “It sure feels like it.”
“I’ll keep my ear to the ground,” she said.
When I stood up to leave she said, “That dog you’re looking for? The one I met at Happyland that night?”
“Tippy.” I had completely forgotten about her. For a little while, anyway.
“I’m pretty sure I saw her under the bridge,” Isabelle said, “and then again behind the hospital at the river. I think she’s living semi-wild, with some tramps.”
“Thanks, Is.”
Briggs Hardware was across the street on Taché. I stopped there and bought a dog collar and a leash. Then I followed the path by the river from north of St. Boniface Hospital, under the bridge, past the rowing club and the motorboat garage all the way to St. Mary’s Road.
Some of the scruffy characters I spoke to seemed familiar with Tippy when I described her to them. One young boy tramp who I was sure was a girl knew her quite well, she said, and was glad to find out her name. I gave her my address and the collar and leash and a dollar and asked her to bring Tippy to me if she should see her again. The hobo’s name was Bill.
Back home, I told Aunt Helen to expect a young girl hobo pretending to be a boy named Bill to turn up at any time with Tippy Walker. I didn’t have the strength to tell her anything else, especially about the possibility of Tag being dead. There had to be more than one Negro in Winnipeg. I just hoped it wasn’t Tag’s brother.