The Western Light Read online

  “Are you all right, Mary?” My aunt gently touched my face and against my will stupid tears rolled down my cheeks.

  “Do you understand me, Sal?” my grandmother said. “Mary is not to ride that bike again.”

  “If that’s the way you want it.”

  “That is the way I want it.” My grandmother handed me one of her perfumed hankies to dry my eyes. Then she and my aunt took my hands and together they helped me into the house for our Easter lunch of baked ham with pineapple rings and sweet potatoes.

  11

  THE FOLLOWING SUNDAY, THE DOORBELL RANG WHILE WE SAT at the table reading. My aunt had her nose in The Face of War by Martha Gellhorn while Big Louie was deep into the latest James Bond novel, From Russia with Love. I was only a quarter of the way through The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. I was taking my time because I didn’t want my book to end. Morley was hiding behind the sports section of The New York Times. Morley and I always read at the dinner table and sometimes we didn’t put down our books when Sal brought in our food.

  The doorbell rang again. Morley didn’t look up from his paper. Big Louie swaggered off to the front hall. We heard the front door open and my grandmother say in a false polite tone, after a minute of mumbling, “It’s kind of you to have done this, Mr. Pilkie.” Little Louie and I stared wide-eyed at each other.

  “I made it in the workshop. Mary needs it, eh?” John Pilkie’s husky voice said. “Will you give my regards to Doc Bradford?”

  “Yes, of course,” Big Louie answered. “By the way, I didn’t know that you’d been released from the hospital.”

  “Oh, I’m still there. Jordie here is taking me to the Catholic mass tonight. The drunkard’s mass, eh? I guess I ruined my chances with the Anglicans.”

  My grandmother didn’t laugh. “Fine, then.” She shut the door loudly. I rushed to the living room window and watched him sashay down our sidewalk in his striped brown suit and fedora. Jordie Coverdale walked beside him, his hips bumping John’s. The two men were shackled together by a leash hanging from Jordie’s belt. What must that be like, I wondered, to be guarded so closely? Out by the sidewalk, Jordie untied his prisoner and the two men climbed into the hospital van. This time he didn’t wave. I didn’t, either, because I heard Little Louie behind me. “He scares the daylights out of me,” she whispered. “Does he scare you?” I nodded before Little Louie could suspect I thought otherwise.

  In the front hall, my grandmother bellowed for Morley. My father dragged himself out of his chair, and Little Louie and I followed him into the front hall, where my grandmother stood next to a small pine desk. When she saw us, she threw up her hands. “John Pilkie left this for Mouse. My granddaughter can’t accept a gift from a convict. He’ll have to take it back.”

  “If you say so, Louisa.” Morley glanced at the desk, a flicker of interest in his eyes.

  Then from the kitchen Sal called Morley. “They want you at the hospital, Doc Bradford.”

  “Go ahead and eat. Don’t wait for me, girls,” Morley called as he walked out the door.

  While my aunt and Big Louie watched apprehensively, I read the note from John that had been scotch-taped to a box placed on the top of the desk. The words were written in curly, spiralling letters on blue-grey hospital notepaper. Happy Easter, Mary, from your friend, John. Inside the box, a large chocolate Easter egg sat on a nest of shredded purple fibers. I bit into the egg, smacking my lips over its creamy yellow filling. The faces of my aunt and grandmother softened.

  “Why don’t you let her keep the desk, Mom?” my aunt asked. “What’s the harm in it?”

  “My father accepts presents from his patients. So why can’t I? Mr. Pilkie was one of his patients.”

  “Was he, Mary?” My grandmother acted surprised. “Well, you aren’t a doctor. You’re a doctor’s child.”

  LATER THAT EVENING, JORDIE COVERDALE drove up alone in his truck. When my grandmother opened the front door, Jordie was standing there, a cigarette stuck behind each ear.

  “I don’t want my father to feel badly,” I said stepping in front of Big Louie. “You see Morley was too busy to notice I needed a desk.”

  “Mary, what do you mean?” Big Louie asked.

  “The sick need my father more than me. And he works every waking minute to cure them.”

  Jordie and my grandmother regarded me silently. They didn’t understand that I was proud to be neglected by Morley. Other fathers were sissies who pushed their children on park swings or barbecued for their family. It was enough for me that Morley and I watched Hockey Night in Canada every Saturday evening. I liked to sit in the chair opposite his and stop Sal from disturbing him if he fell asleep before the game, the newspaper in his lap.

  Looking up from the sidewalk, Jordie reassured my grandmother. “Never mind about the desk. I’ll tell John that Mary liked it and he won’t feel so bad.”

  My grandmother held my hand and together we watched Jordie carry the furniture out to the truck like a circus strongman. The next day my grandmother took the train back to Petrolia. Three weeks later a new study desk from Eaton’s was delivered. My grandmother had ordered it. Nobody mentioned John’s present again.

  12

  ONE FRIDAY AFTERNOON, AS WE SAT DRINKING NEILSON’S COCOA in the kitchen, Sal confided that John’s mother had asked her to tea. It had something to do with a letter Mrs. Pilkie was writing my father; Sal didn’t know the details. “The old bat must have her reasons,” Sal said, her round eyes glowing like headlamps. “Want to come? It’ll make it easier for me if you tag along.”

  She didn’t have to ask twice. I was ready in five minutes, my hair combed, my face washed. Hand in hand, we walked down Whitefish Road. Mrs. Pilkie had been born French-Canadian, but she didn’t live in French Town. According to Sal, Mrs. Pilkie’s father had been a successful dentist who looked after Englishspeaking patients so Mrs. Pilkie felt speaking the French language was beneath her. I didn’t get these complicated distinctions, although they mattered to Sal whose Irish mother had married Tubby Dault, a French-Canadian cab driver who worked for Thompson’s Taxi, our town’s most notorious bootlegger. Once I recited the poem, “The Wreck of the Julie Plante” to Sal: “On wan dark night of Lac St. Pierre, De win she blow, blow, blow, An’ de crew de wood scow Julie Plante, got scart and run’ run below —” Sal threw me out of the kitchen for making fun of her father’s accent.

  On our way to Mrs. Pilkie’s home, we passed the hockey arena, and turned up a path behind the post office. We were on the outskirts of town now. At the top of an empty lot stood a two-storey clapboard house. The front windows were halfhidden behind over-grown spiraea bushes. The bouncy branches covered in white lacy flowers made me think of Big Louie, whose standards of taste ruled my mother’s family. Spiraea bushes were vulgar, or “plebeian,” my grandmother said. As Sal knocked on the front door, I noticed all the window shades had been drawn. Maybe Mrs. Pilkie didn’t want to look out on the world or maybe she felt uneasy about the world looking in on her.

  “Was John’s bedroom up there?” I pointed at a secondstorey window imagining John’s boyish face staring down at us through the glass.

  “John slept at the back of the house.”

  “Did you know him then?” I persisted.

  “Yes. Now quit pestering me,” Sal said as the front door opened. The mother of Mad Killer Pilkie stood before us wearing her funny-looking dark glasses. “Sal, dear, you’ve brought a child with you.” Mrs. Pilkie bent over to shake my hand. Up close, she wasn’t stylish like her son John. She wore a baggy floral blouse and a long skirt that reminded me of my dead mother’s clothes in her old photographs.

  “Georgie, I am babysitting the doctor’s daughter.”

  “The doctor’s daughter? Sal, you should have told me so I could wash my floors.”

  I blushed at the idea of anybody going to trouble on my account.

  “Mary doesn’t care about your floors,” Sal said, pushing me forward.

  “Well,
come in, both of you.” Mrs. Pilkie ushered us into a room crowded with sofas and armchairs in plastic slipcovers, and I thought of Big Louie again who would consider the see-through plastic covers in poor taste, along with the shiny white Woolworth Department store blinds. But my grandmother’s la-de-dah views wouldn’t help me with the mother of the hockey killer.

  She noticed where I was looking. “I can open them if you like. I’m afraid the light hurts my eyes.”

  “No, this is fine.” Sal nodded at me. “Georgie has cataracts. She can’t see well anymore.”

  “Sal, dear, I will be able to see perfectly well after my operation. But that’s not for a while yet.”

  I took off my Lone Ranger hat, and we settled ourselves on a hard-looking sofa. The plastic cover stuck to my thighs. I looked around for signs that John had lived here, but the parlour was disappointingly average. The clean white walls were covered with framed photographs like the ones published in The Chronicle under captions such as, “First Snow on the Wye River” and “The Approaching Storm.” On the mantel, a cut-glass vase of purple pansies sat next to a porcelain figure of a shepherd and his sheep. The vase of pansies was the only thing my grandmother would admire. “You wanted to see me, Georgie?” Sal smiled.

  “Yes, Sal, dear. I’m asking Mary’s father to get us a review of John’s case.”

  Mrs. Pilkie didn’t drop her “ing” endings or talk in a nasal twang like Sal and Sib, and I remembered what Sal had told me about John’s paternal grandfather. So that was the reason John could talk slangy Madoc’s Landing talk, or sound as educated as a man like my father. John’s mother must have told him not to drop his “ings” the way Big Louie told me, and that meant he could adjust his speaking style to suit any situation.

  “You think there’s a chance of John getting out of the Bug House?” Sal asked.

  “Of course I do. That fire was a terrible accident. You know John idolized his wife and child.”

  “Well, that’s his story.” Sal wiggled her eyebrows so I would know not to believe Mrs. Pilkie.

  “I don’t know why you’re making that face, Sal. You used to be sweet on John once.”

  I had no idea that Sal had been sweet on John. Shocked, I turned towards Sal, who dropped her eyes. “Oh, go on with you. What do you want, Georgie?”

  “Will you look at my letter to Dr. Bradford?”

  “Guess I don’t have a choice.” Sal frowned.

  “Good. And now if you will excuse me, I’ll get our tea.”

  “No questions, Mouse!” Sal hissed as soon as Mrs. Pilkie left the room. So I sat meekly until Mrs. Pilkie came back, carrying a silver tray stacked with teacups. She set the tray down on a piano stool and began to pour, placing a lacy paper napkin under each cup in case the tea slopped over into the saucer. Sal watched, sucking her teeth. After Mrs. Pilkie handed Sal a cup, she asked me if I would like to go outside and play.

  “Let Mary stay here, Georgie. She can help you with the spelling.”

  “If you say so, Sal.” Mrs. Pilkie fetched the letter from a side table. “Dear Dr. Bradford,” she began, lifting the letter up under a standing lamp so she could see it better. “I am taking pen in hand because a review of John’s case is long overdue …” Mrs. Pilkie put the letter down. “It is no use. My eyes aren’t good today. Can you read it, Sal?”

  “Let Mary do that, Georgie. I’ll think better if I hear it read out loud.”

  Reluctantly, Mrs. Pilkie handed me the letter, and I started in:

  As you know, my son is real soft-hearted. He is clever with his hands and he never could stand to see a living thing suffer. When we lived in town, John built houses for the kittens the tourists left behind. He filled their houses with straw so the cats sat warm and pretty all winter. John kept some rats as pets. But I digrress.

  I paused at the misspelled word, “digress.” Sal waved her cigarette irritably, and I read on:

  When John scored the winning goal against the Rangers in the Stanley Cup playoffs, the sports columnist Mr. Miltie Burke said that my boy played with ‘the mad glare of Rocket Richard.’ But John was a real gentleman off the ice. Not like those crooks he worked for. I well remember you telling that manager of the Detroit Red Wings to pay for John’s medical care and I am counting on you to speak up again for my boy when the time comes. John has never been the same after his hockey injury. If he was in his right mind that fire would not have happened.

  Yours sincerely, Mrs. Roy Pilkie

  I gave the letter back to Mrs. Pilkie, amazed by how involved my father had been in their lives.

  “John is a good boy. He doesn’t have a mean bone in his body, does he, Sal?”

  “Oh, John has a good side, Georgie.” Sal scowled at the ceiling, her lips compressed in a firm, hard line, and I couldn’t help thinking of Morley’s mother who shamed Morley for being big and full of energy. Did Mrs. Pilkie know what being a good boy meant? Maybe she didn’t read the news reports about her son rough-housing the other players.

  While I sat wondering what to say, Mrs. Pilkie retrieved a photo album from the coffee table. “John put this book together himself,” Mrs. Pilkie said. “See? He’s written his name here. Isn’t that cute?” I leaned over for a better look. The words Self with Smokey and Blue had been written in white ink beneath a photo of a skinny, dark-haired boy petting a pair of kittens.

  On the opposite page, the same skinny dark-haired boy stood with a tall, heavy-set man wearing a fedora. The boy was holding a hockey trophy. I took a breath.

  “Your daddy always liked John.” A long sigh escaped Mrs. Pilkie and she turned quickly to a photo of the same skinny boy holding a hockey stick and a man with a pockmarked face. A dusting of snow coated their jackets. “Some days at the Light, Jim took a hammer to my coat to get off the ice.”

  “Was it like that the November Mr. Pilkie took John’s appendix out?” I asked.

  “Well, yes, it was. Poor Jim. His hands were shaking in fear that night.”

  “Shaking from too much whisky, you mean,” Sal said.

  Mrs. Pilkie gave Sal a dirty look and flipped to a snap of a skinny teenage boy whose ribs showed above his plaid bathing trunks. A round-eyed girl sat beside him wearing a one-piece suit with a flowered skirt. “Why, Sal. Here you are at the Light.” Tapping the girl’s head, Mrs. Pilkie said, “My husband was in Davy Jones’s locker when Sal came to visit. Sal had a real crush on John. Wouldn’t do anything unless John did it first. Isn’t that right, Sal? You were so hurt when he broke your engagement.”

  “No thanks to you, Georgie,” Sal snapped.

  “Sal was engaged to John?” I asked wonderingly.

  “You bet she was, but Sal didn’t want to leave Madoc’s Landing, and John wanted her to move to Detroit.”

  Sighing noisily, Sal lit up a fresh cigarette, and it came back to me how Sal had flirted with John the day she brought him into our kitchen, and how angry Sib had been over it. Now it all made sense, and I prayed Sal wouldn’t pick a fight so I could hear more. As if she read my mind, Mrs. Pilkie flipped to a newspaper photo of a younger Sal and John sitting at a nightclub table. He held up a scrap of burning paper and Sal was laughing in a half-frightened, half-admiring way. The caption read: “Gentleman Jack Pilkie Burns a $100 Bill to Impress Girl Friend.”

  “You had some good times with John, didn’t you, Sal? Too bad he picked somebody else.”

  “Too bad for her, you mean,” Sal replied.

  “Now Sal, you know I don’t like that kind of talk.” Mrs. Pilkie came to a page with empty photograph tabs. Before I could ask about the missing photographs, she closed her album with a purposeful snap. “Do you think Doc Bradford will like my letter, Sal?”

  Sal shrugged as she butted out her cigarette.

  “May I make a suggestion?” I said. “You have used ‘was’ when the verb should be ‘were.’ And you shouldn’t say ‘real softhearted.’ Modifiers are the leeches that infect the pond of prose.”

  “Pardon, Mary?”


  “That’s what William Strunk says in The Elements of Style. And John didn’t score the winning goal for the Red Wings. He made an assist in the third period and his assist helped them score the winning goal.” When I looked over, Sal was grinning broadly.

  “Yes, of course,” Mrs. Pilkie said in a small voice.

  “You should send your letter to Dr. Shulman too,” I added, sorry I had picked on Mrs. Pilkie’s grammar. “He has new ideas about the treatment of mental patients. My father says so.”

  “Does he really? Now bless you. That’s the best news I’ve heard all day.”

  Sal sprang out of her chair. “Georgie, thanks for the tea. ’Course, you don’t have a hope of helping a bad apple like John.” Sal pulled me out of the sofa and pushed me towards the door. We said goodbye to Mrs. Pilkie, Sal steering me purposefully out into the spring night.

  “The old fool.” Sal glanced back at Mrs. Pilkie’s house. “Once those nutcases are locked up, they should stay put.”

  “Mrs. Pilkie said you were sweet on John. Don’t you care about his feelings?”

  “As if he cares about mine.” Sal stopped me under a streetlight. “I don’t want any more questions, Lady Jane. Some things are better left dead-and-buried. Do you understand?”

  I said “yes” and we walked the rest of the way in silence. All the way home I wracked my brains wondering how I could get Sal to talk. As we walked into our front hall, I burst out, “If John was a bad apple why did you like him?”

  “Didn’t I tell you: No more questions?” Sal said and rushed upstairs. There was no hope of getting a cup of cocoa now.

  13

  IN WARM WEATHER, WHEN WE DIDN’T TAKE THE BUS HOME from school, Ben and I used a shortcut through the grounds of the Bug House. We didn’t tell anyone about it because the shortcut took us past Maple Ridge, where the criminally insane patients were locked up, and we’d been warned not to go near it. But, now that John was there, I wondered how he liked his life behind its stone walls. Did he spend his days thinking about his dead wife and baby girl? Or maybe he was hatching plans for another escape so he could draw attention to his case.