The Pumpkin Murders Read online

  CHAPTER 7

  I continued to jump around inside Nora’s journal; I’m still not sure why. Maybe I had to intersperse the parts that were written before I was born to give myself some breathing room, in case she said something about me I couldn’t bear.

  Often, though, it was no easier to read about the distant past.

  Luce lied down for the men tonight. She made me go up to my room before it happened. But when I got up to use the pot I heard animal sounds. I tiptoed to the top of the stairs. Grunts came from the downstairs bedroom. I crept to the landing and snuk a look at the table where they play cards. Jack Logan was missing. I didn’t hear Luce make any sound at all but they were doing it to her one by one.

  The only thing that made the reading of this bearable was Nora’s tone, the matter-of-factness that she used to cover what surely must have been trembling beneath the surface. Unwittingly, she protected both herself and her future daughter with her abrupt way of putting things. Or, maybe she didn’t yet own the words to describe her true feelings; maybe she never would. At this point she still called herself I. The references to herself as she didn’t creep in till a little later. That passage was written in 1939, in the summer, when Nora was just turning eleven.

  I was a good five years away from sex when I was eleven. At fifteen I was still a virgin; Henry had been so polite.

  A boy named Duane started hanging around me. He was so handsome that I was suspicious of his interest in me. Maybe he sensed my vulnerability after Henry left, saw me as an easy target.

  He was a little shorter than Henry, who was over six feet tall. Duane’s hair was dark brown and combed back, like a greaser. He wore jeans that were way too tight, but a lot of boys did. My stomach did crazy things when I thought about him or saw him in the flesh.

  Duane’s family lived just one street over, on Claremont Avenue, but he seemed exotic to me, partly because his last name was different from his sister’s. He was a Simkin and his sister, Greta, was a Bower. I liked to think of his mum having had sex with at least two men, probably hordes more. This gave me something in common with him. I had no proof that Nora had slept with anyone other than my dad and Mr. Jones but I had my suspicions.

  Greta was my age, but she was one year behind me in school so we didn’t know each other well. I couldn’t ask her about her brother and trust her not to tell him.

  Duane started walking me home from places, like school, the Red Top Drive-In Restaurant, where we hung out at night, or friends’ houses, where we went when the parents weren’t home.

  But I always knew that I wasn’t what he really wanted. He never asked me out, never took me to a movie or anywhere at all. Not that Henry had taken me to movies. But at least we’d talked when we walked and he’d taken me to people’s houses—not just home from them.

  I knew that Duane had done it to lots of girls by then. And for some reason he wanted to do it me.

  “Plee-ease, Cherry,” he would say when we were necking in various rec rooms around the neighbourhood. “Come on, Cherry. This is killing me,” he said. “You’re driving me crazy.”

  I liked that. I liked that I was driving him crazy—if indeed I was—but I wasn’t going to let him fuck me. I had learned from somewhere that once you did it, boys lost respect for you and there was no turning back.

  The whole winter I turned sixteen, Duane kept at me. He touched my breasts.

  “Nice tits,” he said and I buried my red face in a pillow so he wouldn’t see how he embarrassed me. He touched me over my jeans, gave me my first non-self-induced orgasm that way. He drove me wild, Duane did.

  “Nobody kisses me the way you do.” He said that to me. Never I love you, he didn’t say that; I’ll hand that to him.

  He had plenty of others. I was never his girlfriend. He went steady with girls and kept after me. He took them to parties and movies and school dances; he even gave a girl his ring once. But he kept after me.

  I couldn’t figure out what exactly I meant to him. He liked me, I guess. We laughed now and then. But why did he invest so much time? Maybe that was it. After a certain point he couldn’t give up because too much time and effort had been put in. He couldn’t stand that it was for nothing, or for almost nothing.

  Henry’s letters had fallen off. He still wrote, but not as often and not at length. And he no longer talked about how it would be when he came back. He played guitar and sang in a band and that seemed to be all that was on his mind. They hadn’t had any gigs yet, but they had a manager and something was in the works. They called themselves Beaver Tree. It couldn’t have been Henry who came up with the name; it didn’t sound like him at all.

  I talked to Joanne about Duane.

  “What am I gonna do?” I said.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think he treats you very well. Maybe it would be best to try and forget about him?”

  They weren’t the words I wanted to hear. Why couldn’t she say that Duane secretly loved me, that she’d heard it from a good source?

  “I can’t forget about him,” I said.

  Joanne was in a steady relationship by now with a boy named Quint Castle, who was president of the school. He was a star. Everyone approved and I was jealous till Joanne told me that she didn’t love him.

  “What?”

  “Sometimes I don’t even like him,” she said. “He’s such a know-it-all.”

  “So what are you doing with him?” I asked.

  Quint and I had played together as kids and I did recall him being a bit bossy.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve got to get out of it. He kisses like a dead man.”

  But she didn’t get out of it, not for another year. She was in no better position than I was.

  My desire for Duane was useless and I knew it. He couldn’t give me what I wanted from him, so I began to find it easier to wish for something that was impossible: I wished that I could be him. I tried to see things through his deep brown eyes. This shift in desire undid me.

  On a Saturday night in the summer of 1966 Duane got me.

  We were at a party at Joe Turner’s house. I had gone with Joanne and Quint, had listened to them fight all the way there.

  “I don’t think we should go to this party,” Quint said.

  “Why not?” said Joanne.

  “There’ll be beer and greasers and probably fights later.”

  “So! It’ll be fun!” Joanne skipped ahead and walked backwards for a few steps. “Maybe a beer or two might loosen you up,” she muttered as she turned around.

  I wished for her words to get swallowed by the windy night, but they didn’t. We were between gusts.

  “It’s not me who needs loosening up, thank you very much,” Quint said. “I’m fine just the way I am.”

  “I’m fine just the way I am,” said Joanne.

  “Uh-oh,” I said.

  “Joanne, are you mimicking me?” Quint asked.

  “No.”

  They saw me to the breezeway of Joe’s house, made sure I knew some people, and then left. They were too riled up at each other to stay. I heard the snippet, “…kiss like a dead man,” shouted in from the boulevard. It was Joanne doing the shouting and I figured that would end it, but it wasn’t enough to break them up.

  Joe Turner’s parents were away. He was one of those guys who was old but still in high school. He hung around with delinquents and it was always a thrill to be at his house. It looked like lots of other parents’ houses. There was even plastic on the living room furniture.

  But the basement was Joe’s world and that’s where the party was. It had a bar with a fridge. I helped myself to a beer and sat down at one end of a worn-out couch. I watched Duane come in and notice me while I half-listened to what an older girl named Myrna had to say. It wasn’t uninteresting—she was going on about stiffs, as in dead people. Her dad was an undertaker. She seemed to think it was some kind of claim to fame. Maybe it was to some of those people. There was so much I didn’t know. But I had trouble con
centrating on anything but Duane that night.

  There was a room off the rec room that housed the furnace and Joe’s weight lifting equipment and a bed. I’d been there before. There were sheets on the bed that smelled like the boys’ locker room at school. I knew that because I had been there too.

  Joanne and I had snuck in once when our boys had gym. We had gym too, but we told our dim-bulb teacher that our chemistry teacher, Mr. Froese, needed our help with some tricky experiments. It was revolting in the locker room, mostly because of the unholy stink. And we got caught, so it was hardly worth it. We had to apologize to Miss Mott, the gym teacher, and run laps every day after school for one week. Miss Mott got to pick the punishment.

  Anyway, that’s where Duane led me, away from Myrna and her talk of cadavers, to that stinky grey bed. That’s where we did it. It wasn’t that I wanted to; there were other times I wanted him more, like the night when I came through my clothes. But he wore me down; I wore myself down with thoughts of being him.

  It hurt at first and then it didn’t.

  “Does that feel better now?” he asked.

  “I guess so,” I said.

  “How’s that?”

  “Okay.”

  It didn’t hurt anymore, but it didn’t feel good either. It felt like nothing. And I wondered why I had given in. I knew we would never go back to necking now and that was what I loved. That was what I wanted to do for my whole long life. And with him. No one would ever be better than him.

  “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” was on the record player over and over that night. I never hear that song without the ache that goes along with it.

  “I’ll go get us a couple of smokes,” he said after he had come all over me.

  No, don’t go. I didn’t say it out loud.

  I wiped myself off as best I could with a corner of the sheet and pulled my underwear and shorts up over my sticky body. I longed to go for a swim in cool clean water. After five minutes I knew he wasn’t coming back. I knew it even before that, but I waited a little longer because I didn’t know what to do.

  Something—fire maybe—electric fire, licked at the inside of me, pushed its way out through my face, through my eyes. It came close to blinding me as I looked for another way out of the room. There wasn’t even a window.

  When I opened the door to the rec room no one was looking my way except for a boy alone in a corner by the records: Pete. He had a beer in his hand, one of those stubby bottles that beer came in in those days. He was thirteen years old; what the hell was he doing there? I was almost certain he looked at me that night, through heavy-lidded eyes, although I couldn’t prove it. He had a half-smile on his face.

  The air in the basement was saturated with smoke and stale beer and sweat.

  I ran up the stairs and out the door to the breezeway. It was packed tight with bodies. I closed my eyes and pushed through them to get away. My bed was too good for me that night. I ran to the river.

  It was windy but it was a warm wind and I welcomed it against my face. I listened to the laughter coming from the boats moored at the marina across the way. Sleep didn’t come but I wasn’t expecting it.

  When the sky paled in the east I walked home and slipped in the back door, up the stairs to my room. I took off my filthy clothes and lay down on the hard wood floor next to my bed. I covered myself with a sheet and longed for Henry Ferris to come home and save me.

  The next afternoon I started my period, so at least I wasn’t pregnant. I set out for the Norbridge Pharmacy to get some Tampax. I’d never been able to insert it properly with its stiff cardboard applicator, but I figured for sure I’d be able to get it in now. Maybe I could salvage something from the night before. Usually Joanne came with me to buy my supplies of that sort because it embarrassed me so much, but today I couldn’t face Joanne.

  As I passed the flood bowl by the community club I saw two boys playing catch in the distance on one of the baseball diamonds. Pete and Duane. I had never seen them together before and thought it must be a mistake. But it wasn’t. Against my will I walked closer.

  “Go long!” yelled Pete and Duane ran long.

  Duane shouted, “Go short!” and they laughed together.

  They threw grounders and hit pop flies. They had a bat—Murray’s old bat, I guess. They didn’t see me. I hid from them before they had a chance.

  The idea of braving the drugstore to buy Tampax was suddenly too much for me. My head swam. Seventeen-year-olds don’t play with thirteen-year-olds, I thought. I sat by the wading pool and stared at the toddlers till I trusted my legs to get me home.

  I didn’t tell Joanne what had happened to me the night before. I did mention that I had seen Duane playing with my brother and she agreed that it was odd.

  “You should tell your mother,” she said. “Duane will be a bad influence on Pete.”

  “Or the other way around,” I said.

  Joanne looked at me funny.

  I had to tell someone what I had done the previous night so I told a girl named Darlene whom I didn’t like very much. I left out the bad parts. She was shocked and made no secret of it. I wished immediately that I hadn’t told her.

  As the days passed I tried to look on the bright side. I was no longer a virgin and in a way that was a good thing: I had gotten it over with. And it hadn’t hurt very much at all. But the overriding feeling was bad. I felt disposable, like garbage, and that stayed with me for a long time. I’m not sure it ever left me completely.

  CHAPTER 8

  When I tell you about my job and the reason I do it, you’ll probably agree with Joanne and Myrna that I’m asking for it, that I deserve whatever I get. Hermione isn’t quite so hard on me. She likes what I do, thinks of it as stirring things up which, as far as she’s concerned, can never be a bad thing.

  It began when I became obsessed with thinking that large parts of the history I read are either lies or mistakes, that the way people want to be remembered and the prejudices of those keeping the records skewer the facts. We get the odd pocket of truth, but generally it comes out wrong.

  And then there are the silences in the history books—the childhoods, the friendships, the family fights. Where were the home lives—the parts that shaped those who were written about? Elusive long-dead truths raise my curiosity but leave me edgy because I can’t know them.

  I decided to try to add something genuine to the history being written today. I did this by interviewing people and asking them questions they couldn’t answer with clichés or platitudes:

  When was the last time you cried? I asked.

  Describe to me a time you recall in your life when you really hated someone.

  I don’t believe you, I often said.

  When did you last feel afraid, sad, hopeless, happy, proud, lustful? Describe those occasions.

  Have you ever hit someone? No, but really.

  Have you ever taunted someone?

  Were you made fun of as a kid? What for? What did you do about it?

  Have you ever planned your own death? your own escape? someone else’s death?

  Those were the types of questions I asked.

  The Winnipeg Free Press published several of these interviews and after a few years I was lucky enough to get a regular gig with the paper.

  Public figures were my favourite subjects. And writers and teachers and business people and religious leaders and advocates for the downtrodden. If their answers didn’t ring true I threw the interview away. I spoke to them face to face—never on the phone. I wanted to see their eyes.

  Pissing people off was part of it. I’d had more than one death threat.

  Myrna thought I was wasting all my years of education. We bickered about this but I had no argument for her other than it was what I wanted to be doing. I wanted to tell the truth. Besides, she didn’t need a science degree for what she was doing, running the family funeral business, so what was she doing criticizing me?

  The work wasn’t always satisfying. Sometimes
weeks would go by without my getting anything real. The paper was very good about my column appearing sporadically. I was paid by the interview. But I tried to keep it regular, as best I could.

  My column was called No, But Really.

  I have a small income as a result of Murray’s life insurance policy. If I live frugally, which I do, I can get by.

  Joanne never bothers encouraging me to move up in the world; she’s known me for too long. But other people sometimes say things like, “Dr. Ring, is it? My goodness, you could be…”

  Yeah. So what.

  When I got something good for a column—like when a woman who makes her living being poor and droning on about it suddenly blurts out that she would like to slap some of the poor people she knows, hard across the face, it feels good.

  I guess I am asking for it: to be exposed, embarrassed, killed. But other than the odd letter of attack on me to the editor of the paper and those death threats I mentioned, I haven’t been tested. I’m almost certain I feel ready to take what anyone is going to give me, but I could be mistaken.

  Joanne thinks it’s just a matter of time till someone shoots me. She’s probably right. She has a theory that I crave punishment. Maybe she’s right about that too.

  CHAPTER 9

  I’ve mentioned Myrna now, more than once, so I should explain her presence in my life.

  When I was sixteen I got my first job. I worked at The Bay in the men’s shoe department. In those days men’s shoes were serious business and I had to take a course, on two Saturday mornings.

  There were several of us starting at once and we learned terms like last, which we had never associated with shoes before. I forget now what it means but I do recall that it was the most important thing to remember about shoes, according to our instructor. His name was Ken McLeod and he was the manager of the men’s shoe department.

  In order to work, I needed a social insurance number, and to get one of those I needed my birth certificate. So I enlisted Nora’s help. She dug it out from somewhere after my asking her for it on four consecutive days.