The Western Light Read online

  Sleeping next door to Morley made me feel safe. But I could see the Bug House from my bedroom window. Of course, the Bug House wasn’t really a house, but a group of buildings hidden behind a large maple sugar bush. It included Maple Ridge, a high security prison where insane murderers were locked up; a six-storey office building; the staff houses, with back kitchens and sheds; the nineteenth-century cottages that housed the harmless patients; and, last of all, the working farm where patients grew turnips and potatoes.

  At night, a row of lampposts lit up the prison, which had started off as a reformatory for delinquent boys. The shadowy light falling on its large shuttered windows made Maple Ridge resemble a sleeping face. I used to complain that we were the first in line if a patient escaped until Sal pointed out that a house by the hospital was the very last place an escapee would visit because that’s where the guards would look first.

  I kept my crime scrapbook on my bedside table. Using LePage glue, my friend Ben and I pasted in news stories about bank robbers and criminally insane murderers. As far as Ben and I were concerned, reading crime stories was the best way to discover the frightening potential in your neighbours who could look as worn and ordinary as last year’s rubber tires. The goriest crime stories were in the late night editions of the Toronto Telegram, printed on pink paper. After he read the stock listings, my father gave me the front section folded down to the stories about bank robbers like the Polka Dot Gang and Edwin Alonzo Boyd who once apologized to a female teller for dirtying her blouse.

  On my bedside table, I also kept M.B.’s Book of True Facts. In my opinion then, a true fact was one you were glad to know whereas most facts lacked the sheen of that conviction. I was making a book of true facts because Sal had a low opinion of Canadians, her own people, and Little Louie wasn’t much better. For instance, neither Little Louie nor Sal believed that Tonto (the Lone Ranger’s companion) was a Canadian named Harold J. Smith who grew up on the Six Nations Reserve in Brantford, Ontario. Both Sal and my aunt laughed when I pointed out that the world’s biggest cheese had been manufactured in 1866 inside a lean-to in Ingersoll, Ontario. On the trip to England for an exhibition, it stank so badly the crew had to toss it overboard.

  In my bedroom cupboard, I stashed the books my grandmother wanted me to read — classics like The Bobbsey Twins, which bored me silly — along with some ancient Baby Wet’um dolls, whose arms were still in the slings that I used to make out of Morley’s linen handkerchiefs. When my mother was sick with the brain disease that killed her, I would tear the dolls apart and fix them the way Morley patched up his patients. I popped off their heads the way I used to pull apart the beads of my mother’s plastic necklaces. My dolls were far harder to fix than I realized. Their heads didn’t go snugly back into place and their broken limbs stayed broken. Only Morley could fix smashed up bones.

  But he couldn’t fix my mother. Nobody could. And that’s how I ended up with Little Louie as a companion eight years later.

  3

  THE MORNING JOHN PILKIE CAME TO MADOC’S LANDING I WAS in my aunt’s bed, reading her the front-page story about him in The Chronicle, our local newspaper. My aunt lay next to me eating apples and smoking one Sweet Cap after another. It was two weeks before Easter Sunday, and only thirty-one days after my all-time faves — Richie Valens, Buddy Holly, and the Big Bopper — died in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa. The Cold War was ongoing, along with the Hula-Hoop, although we didn’t see much about either in the newspaper that day. While Little Louie listened, I read out the headline: “Mad Killer Pilkie Comes to Town.” The town newspaper often referred to him as Mad Dog Pilkie, as if he was a dog with distemper. That’s how people talked in Madoc’s Landing. There was a kind of poetry to it, and John Pilkie had more nicknames than most. Sometimes the newspapers called him “The Hockey Killer” or “Gentleman Jack Pilkie” on account of his debonair clothes.

  I was still on the first paragraph of the news story when Sal yelled at us to get moving. Morley was taking us to the train station to pick up my grandmother, who was coming early for the Easter holiday — coming not only for a visit, but to inspect the job that Little Louie was doing on me.

  “Did you hear me?” Sal shrieked. “Time’s a-wasting!”

  Neither Little Louie nor I answered. We were too absorbed in Kelsey Farrow’s newspaper story. Kelsey said that John Pilkie and three other insane murderers were being transported by train to the psychiatric hospital in Madoc’s Landing. According to Kelsey, the murderers were travelling under armed guard. They were in civilian clothes to avoid attracting attention, although how they planned to do that was anybody’s guess.

  The three other killers travelling with John Pilkie were: a Latin teacher, who split open his wife’s head with an axe after she asked him to change his shirt for dinner; a potato farmer, who had stabbed his field hand for giving him a dirty look; and a seventeen-year-old boy, who shot his mother dead when she wouldn’t lend him her car one Saturday night. John Pilkie’s crime was mentioned too, although by that time he was better known for his escapes than for the murder of his family. Kelsey listed John’s escapes in the newspaper as if he were a creature with supernatural powers:

  The Escapes of Mad Killer Pilkie

  1. Disappearing from a work crew while haying a field.

  2. Scaling the twenty-foot wire fence around a Vancouver psychiatric ward.

  3. Unlocking his cell at the Whitby psychiatric hospital using a key he had carved out of a jam jar. The Chronicle claimed he held some paraffin wax in his palm when he shook the hand of a guard holding the key, and made a copy from the wax impression.

  4. Slipping out the back door of a hospital chapel before the service ended and (this was the amazing part) watching the departing churchgoers from a tree.

  “That killer is a regular Houdini!” my aunt exclaimed. She blew three smoke rings from her Sweet Cap cigarette and waited while I tried to poke my finger through her wobbly creations.

  “John Pilkie used to be Canada’s Most Wanted Man,” I confided after the rings floated away. “That’s what Kelsey said.” “Mouse, we don’t have a ‘most wanted list.’ It’s something the Americans invented.”

  “Well, I guess Kelsey wants Canada to sound as interesting as the United States.”

  My aunt laughed. “Then Kelsey has his job cut out for him,” she said, reaching over me to get another apple. “I wouldn’t believe everything Kelsey writes. Sometimes newspapers shade the facts. I’m a reporter, remember?”

  Undeterred, I showed Little Louie an old news story about John Pilkie that had been written by a Toronto journalist, and not by Kelsey Farrow. On the day she was murdered, Peggy Pilkie, John’s wife, had sprinkled kerosene on the bedroom floor to kill cockroaches. That night, in a fit of temper, John threw a lit match on the oil-soaked boards and ignited an explosion called a flare fire. His wife was heard to shout that John would pay for his crime. She couldn’t make her way through the flames to save their baby girl, and the child died in the hospital of smoke inhalation. Mrs. Pilkie herself died a few hours later of shock and severe burns to her legs and torso.

  I still shudder when I think about it. To set your wife and baby girl alight is unimaginable now, and it was even more unimaginable then. The courts said John Pilkie had been abandoned by reason and sent him away for life to a mental institution.

  Accompanying the article was a black-and-white drawing that depicted the former Pilkie home in Walkerville, a Windsor suburb named after a local liquor baron. A large X marked the second-storey bedroom where the fire began. Next to the drawing was a photograph of a young John Pilkie and a dark-haired woman leaning on a crutch. Its caption said: “As a girl, Pilkie’s young wife suffered from polio.” I had forgotten that John Pilkie’s wife had polio. It made me feel uneasy and somehow implicated. Did he kill her because she limped like me?

  “Why did he leave his wife and baby behind to die?” I asked. My aunt pointed to the last paragraph. “It says here that Pilkie suffered from
a paranoid delusion that his wife was an enemy out to hurt him. That means he thought people were out to get him even if they weren’t.”

  So he was overcome by a crazy notion. Maybe John Pilkie wasn’t a true killer, I told myself. A true killer would know it was his own wife and child he was burning up. But I kept my doubts to myself and told Little Louie about the day I read my first story about John Pilkie. The story’s headline read: “Hockey Killer Stopped in His Tracks”; it described Pilkie’s capture in Montreal. It claimed he might still be at large if he hadn’t come down with pneumonia and gone to a Montreal hospital where a doctor spotted his Ontario hospital underwear and phoned the police.

  On the same day, my grandmother, Big Louie, had walked into Sick Kids hospital carrying a vial of convalescent serum for me made from the blood of recovered polio patients. I told my grandmother about Mad Killer Pilkie making headlines, and my grandmother said John Pilkie sounded like a knock-off man who didn’t want to work for a living.

  “It’s as if Big Louie already knew that he was going to be sent to the Bug House, and she wanted to stop me from liking him,” I told Little Louie.

  “So Mom was right. You got better.” Little Louie grinned. “And now the hockey killer is coming to Madoc’s Landing. She must be tickled pink.”

  From the stairwell, Sal yelled up at us again. “Louisa, if you don’t make Mary do what I say, I’m telling Doc Bradford.”

  “Shut up, you big B-I-T-C-H!” Little Louie muttered, spelling out the letters without saying the word. When she saw my face, she shouted back, “Okay, okay, Sal, we’re coming!” Little Louie pulled on a pair of old jeans and a torn turtleneck sweater and I put on my best tartan kilt and clean white blouse with a Peter Pan collar; then she helped me on with my Boston brace. If you’ve never seen a Boston brace, it was quite a contraption. I wore an abbreviated version, custom-tailored to me. The top half fit around my pelvis and buckled up under my clothes. The second part was the long metal bar used to stretch and strengthen my left leg, which didn’t move as fast as my right leg, the one polio hadn’t touched.

  A Useless Conversation with Hindrance

  Me: I hate it when the kids at school whisper, “Here comes Peg Leg.”

  Hindrance: You’ll just have to lump it, won’t you?

  Me: Over my dead body.

  Hindrance: Say that enough, Mouse, and your wish will come true.

  NEXT, I PUT ON MY blazer and the Lone Ranger hat Morley gave me. It had a black braided chinstrap. I refused to wear my winter coat or galoshes, because Little Louie said it was spring so she wasn’t wearing hers.

  “Where’s your coat?” Sal yelled as I rushed past. “Upstairs,” I shouted over my shoulder. Our springer spaniels, Joe and Mairzy, thundered after me, barking their heads off. We clambered into the back seat of my father’s green Oldsmobile convertible. According to Sal, I had been named after the first springer spaniel, Mary, because my mother was so crazy about her. I had every reason to believe Sal was serious.

  A moment later, my father and Little Louie got in too. His dove-grey fedora was still on his head. He liked the 1953 convertible because even with the roof up, it was the only automobile big enough to let him to drive with his hat on. Halfway down Whitefish Road, he stopped unexpectedly.

  “Who lives here?” my aunt asked.

  “Cap Lefroy. Sal says he’s dying of lung cancer,” I whispered as Morley got out of the car. My aunt scoffed and lit up a Sweet Cap to show me how little she cared about the disease. Together we watched Morley plod up the drive, Joe and Mairzy bouncing at his heels. I had dreamt about Cap’s three-storey brick house the night before, and my dream depicted the same scene I was looking at from the back seat of the Oldsmobile: fat, puffed up snow clouds swarming around Cap’s place. I had no idea what kind of menacing energies the clouds in my dream suggested, and I didn’t want to guess. It was bad enough that a snowstorm was coming our way and we had gone out minus our winter coats and boots. Inside the car, the chilly March air was drifting up through the floorboards, making us shiver. There was no heater in the Oldsmobile, just the warmth from the engine.

  At last Morley came back, bringing Cap, who opened the door to the back seat and peered in. “Our town is sure lucky to have Doc Bradford,” he said, winking at Little Louie and myself. “He’s the town saint, eh Mary?”

  “I guess so,” I said shyly.

  “You guess so? Our country was built by men like your father! They don’t make ’em like him anymore.”

  “That’s enough guff, Cap. We’re off to see the hockey killer,” Morley said. Cap whistled, long and low, and we drove off, the uplifting strains of Pat Boone singing “April Love” blasting from the car radio.

  4

  THE PARKING LOT WAS ALREADY NOISY WITH CARS AND PEOPLE who had come to see the mad killer. Morley pulled up alongside a line of police cars and a van owned by the psychiatric hospital. Sprawled on the northeast hill above town, it was a secret world that refracted the town’s rational mindset.

  On the station platform, the final snow of the season had begun to fall. I could feel its icy dampness seep into my Oxford with its built-in heel. Now see here, Mouse, I told myself, Morley doesn’t have on his galoshes and he expects you to ignore discomfort the same way he does. My father’s hand was resting on my shoulder as if he knew I was getting cold and thought he should do something, but per usual he was distracted. His eyes kept turning to the wooded hill beyond the grain elevator, and the opening in the trees where the train would appear before its plunge to the station house.

  By my elbow stood Ben Shulman who, like me, had dressed up to see the killers. Ben wore his new orange cowboy chaps and a gun belt with two six-guns that fired real caps. He also had on a baggy Toronto Maple Leafs hockey sweater that hung almost to his knees. Ben imagined the sweater made him look thin, but no sweater could disguise his soft, doughy-looking hands and chipmunk cheeks. His plump cheeks and hands were exactly like the cheeks and hands of his roly-poly father, Dr. Shulman, who bore the uneasy distinction of being the only Jewish man in our town, where everyone was either French-Canadian and Catholic or English-speaking and Protestant. To the right of Dr. Shulman stood John’s mother, Mrs. Roy Pilkie, who wore an expensive-looking Persian lamb coat and matching pillbox hat, plus a pair of weird wrap-around sunglasses. Even though she was the mother of a killer, I guess she wanted to look nice for her son. As we stamped our feet to keep warm, she said, “My poor boy just has no luck. Does he, Doc Bradford?”

  My father shook his head gravely, his eyes turning back again to the hill where John’s train was expected to appear. On either side of Morley were Chief Doucette and the reporter Kelsey Farrow. Balancing on our tiptoes, Ben and I tried to read the small, spidery symbols scrawled across Kelsey’s notepad, but neither Ben nor I understood shorthand, so we turned our attention back to my father.

  “Is it cold enough for you, Joe?” Morley asked Chief Doucette.

  “’Spozed to turn to sleet tonight,” Chief Doucette replied.

  “We’re in for it then,” Kelsey said without looking up from his notepad. In The Chronicle, Kelsey had reminded us that John Pilkie was a local boy who had played with the hockey team in Madoc’s Landing as well as the Oshawa Colts before he went across the border to play defence for the Detroit Red Wings. According to Kelsey, John kept a photograph of the young Queen Elizabeth in his pocket for luck; he could rag the puck, which was another way of saying that no matter where he was on the rink, the puck stayed glued to the blade of his stick. His bodychecks, along with his hooks, trips, slashes, elbows, and punches made him a dangerous opponent, although off the ice he was known for holding the door open for his female fans. But there was no mention of my father in Kelsey’s story and I wondered if Kelsey knew what Sal had told me that morning at breakfast. John Pilkie had been my father’s patient.

  According to Sal, my father had helped John Pilkie’s father take out John’s appendix when a November storm trapped the lightkeeper’s family o
n their island in the middle of the Great Bay. Sal swore what happened at the Western Light was better than the Biblical tale of Abraham and Isaac; but she warned me not to breathe a word about it to anyone — especially not to Little Louie — because Morley disliked Sal discussing his patients with anyone.

  Sal also said my father believed that a hockey concussion had turned John Pilkie violent, although nobody, including Sal, felt the same way.

  FROM THE DIRECTION OF THE grain elevator came a low, hooting whistle. It was now snowing too hard to see the train, but all of us on the station platform could hear it coming down the hill. We heard the rasp of hissing steam as it pulled into the station. A conductor blew his whistle. Then there was the sound of a door opening, and John Pilkie stepped through a ghostly curtain of snow and stood before me. I recognized him from the newspaper photographs that Little Louie and I had seen that morning, but I was still surprised by how nice he looked. He had on a chocolate-brown fedora with an upturned brim, a striped chocolate-brown suit, and an unbuttoned raccoon coat that fell to the top of his fleece-lined galoshes. Three men along with the armed railway guard followed him as he trudged through the falling snow holding up a white Bristol board sign. In huge, block letters, it said: I AM INNOCENT. His companions were neatly dressed and clean-shaven, and they looked more concerned about getting out of the snow than escaping their jailer. I examined them in wonder. Did the boy in a toque really blast his mother to smithereens? The men were smiling and talking to the guard, as if their train ride was an ordinary Saturday outing.

  More passengers came spilling out the coach doors, carrying their bags. The guard asked the crowd to step back so the prisoners could pose for Kelsey’s camera. While they huddled together, a man in a hunting cap tried to snatch the sign out of John Pilkie’s hand. “Go back where you came from, killer!” the man cried. A police officer quickly pushed the man off the platform, and the crowd shuffled closer for a better view. John Pilkie waited for the crowd to grow quiet; then he fished a harmonica out of his pocket and played a tune that Ben and I knew from school: “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here. Never mind the weather. Here we are together. Sure we’re glad that you’re here too.”