The Case Against Owen Williams (45 page)

Back at the armoury, Dorkin had packed up his papers and his kit in preparation for his immediate and final departure from Wakefield. He had not been thanked, nor had he expected or wanted to be, and when he looked back on all that had happened, he felt more depressed than elated. He had, by mere luck, rescued an innocent boy, who was also a mean-minded, self-righteous little shit. Not that these were capital offences. But still. He had avenged Sarah Coile, but vengeance does not raise the dead. Louie Rosen, unavenged, was also dead. An end had been put to the Reverend Clemens, but his two wives in God had been taken down with him. Daniel Coile and his cronies were all alive and well. The irrepressible H. P. Whidden would no doubt go on to compensatory triumphs, the cool-blooded McKiel to still more.

The dark tower forever awaits, the knight errant forever rides out, and in the end the only thing he ever really changes is himself.

He finished his coffee, put on his great coat, and walked out into the cold. On the other side of the square, the movie theatres were advertising
Going My Way
with Bing Crosby and
Hollywood Canteen
with Barbara Stanwyck. He had no interest in either, but he noted the titles in case he might want to affect an interest in order to escape from the house for a couple of hours some evening.

He turned down King Street into the raw cold rising up from the harbour. At the corner of Dock Street, two merchant seamen, one very drunk, were arguing in a Germanic-sounding language, perhaps Swedish. A Canadian sailor and his girlfriend gave them a wide berth, and a policeman on the other side of the street had stopped to keep an eye on them.

Dorkin made his way past and walked out to the end of the slip and leaned on the rail to look across the harbour. The commercial docks on the other side were lined solid with merchant ships, squat, ugly, their paint peeling, leaving patches of rusted metal.

Down the harbour beyond the commercial docks, small clouds of mist shifted, dissipating, reforming above the ice-cold water. Once long ago, when he was in grade three or four, his class had been brought down here as part of an outing, and the teacher had pointed down the harbour to the place where nearly three and a half centuries before, Champlain's little ship had anchored. Now in the place, or near it, Dorkin could make out through the mist the shape of a destroyer, grey, low, clean-lined, and deadly, riding at anchor, awaiting its charges.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to thank Patrick Murphy for his support and to acknowledge the meticulous and perceptive editing of the text by Kate Kennedy.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Allan Donaldson was born in Taber, Alberta, and grew up in Woodstock, New Brunswick. He is the author of the short-story collection
Paradise Sliding
and the novel
Maclean
, which was shortlisted for the 2005 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Award. He lives in Fredericton.