The Pumpkin Murders Page 9

  Once, when she was more talkative than usual, I asked her why she hadn’t kept in touch with the Kennaughs. After all, they had been her family for four years.

  “They were paid to be my family,” she said. “You would have to pay me to go back to see them.”

  “Didn’t you like them?” I asked.

  “They were all right. They were an improvement over what I came from.”

  I think Nora missed Henry more than I did. She saw his leaving as a door closing. My mother didn’t like me very much. Ever. I try not to dwell on it.

  CHAPTER 16

  I was stretched out in the hammock in my backyard. It was hung between two trees, an ash and an oak. Joanne sat on a lawn chair close by, one of Dougwell’s old wooden ones. It needed a coat of paint.

  “Let’s take kick-boxing lessons,” she said.

  “Kick-boxing?”

  “Yeah. I’d like to have a sport that I’m good at.”

  “We walk our dogs,” I said.

  “Walking our dogs isn’t a sport.”

  Spike had heard the word walk twice and he was up on his feet, on full alert.

  “But kick-boxing? Why not yoga, something more leisurely?”

  Joanne and her husband Grant had moved back to Norwood when their last kid left home and their house in Southdale grew too big. We had stayed in touch over the years but it was so much better now that she lived only two streets away.

  “My hip couldn’t handle it,” I went on.

  “Oh,” Joanne said. “I forgot about your hip.”

  “I’m on the list for a new one.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. This one is a little outdated; it’s a one size fits all.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “No,” I said. “They build much better appliances these days, more personalized. That’s what they call them: appliances.”

  “Well, good then. When’s this going to happen?”

  “I don’t know. I’m on a list.”

  Joanne was eating salted peanuts in the shell and was covered in peanut dust. I was eating sunflower seeds, spitting the shells over the side of the hammock onto the lawn. Spike had sat down again and was gnawing on a piece of rawhide.

  “My new hip will be titanium,” I said.

  Joanne let out a low whistle.

  We both love salty snacks. If I were to interview myself I would say that munching on popcorn with my head on a pillow, staring through the leaves of an oak tree is one of my favourite things to do.

  Blue and green are my favourite colours. I think it’s because of the times I have spent all my life, staring through many shades of green at the deep blue Winnipeg sky.

  There are other things I like: throwing a stick for Spike, reading history books, playing Scrabble with Joanne. She always wins and I’m a poor sport, but she doesn’t mind it when I call her a slippery slapper.

  Sometimes four of us play: Joanne, Myrna, Hermione and me. We drink wine and swear a lot, call each other cunts and cocksuckers. In the summer we play outside. We shout so loud we wake the neighbours. We eat snacks and smoke.

  But that day in late July it was just Joanne and me and by the time the sun got lost behind the oak tree we decided on yoga at the Norwood Community Club. There was a class coming up in the fall. My Italian cooking class had finished at the end of June. It was amazing how little I had learned. Maybe I would do better with the yoga.

  When Joanne left, I went in the house. I remembered some focaccia that I had made at my cooking class and I took it out of the freezer. I ran a bath and immersed myself in eucalyptus-scented bubbles. Before I even soaped myself up there was a loud commotion outside so I got up to look out the bathroom window. It was a Green Guy deweeding my lawn. Green Guys is a lawn care outfit that I hired to contaminate my little patch of the universe. I got a special deal because I planned a year ahead. I closed the window to keep out the toxic fumes. My guilt was strong enough that I knew this was the last time ever for the poison. I returned to my bath, which had suddenly lost its appeal. It was just another chore.

  Afterwards I threw on a sundress and sat down at the dining room table with a glass of iced tea and a slice of the focaccia. Nora’s green book sat on the table in front of me. Several days had gone by since I read about “the littlen” being ready for plucking and I hadn’t picked it up again.

  Sometimes I was afraid that her words would bury me. Like quicksand they would suck me down, fill my lungs and close in over my head. But I was determined not to let that happen, always taking the time to digest each entry before I went on to the next. Digest and then what: blow out or assimilate? I didn’t know, still don’t. Some parts will be with me always. I do know that.

  My Italian bread wasn’t very good. Maybe I shouldn’t have frozen it. I chewed slowly for a while and then gave up and threw the rest away.

  I reopened Nora’s journal.

  1939 Fall

  Luce has quit eating. She cooks for Mr. Trent and me but she doesn’t eat anything herself. I asked her about it and she said she eats when I am at school. She’s lying.

  Uh-oh, I thought, and closed the book.

  CHAPTER 17

  It was late on a warm cloudy afternoon. Rain was in the forecast. July makes me even lazier than usual. I have never stopped thinking of July and August as the holidays. I looked out the upstairs hall window and saw that Joanne was in my hammock. I hadn’t noticed her arrival.

  “Beer?” I called out the kitchen window.

  “Yes, please,” she said.

  Her dog, Wilson, was snorfling around the edges of the yard. I let Spike out first and Wilson was in ecstasy. She is a huge mutt who thinks Spike is king. He appears to only tolerate her, but I’m quite sure she means more to him than he lets on. Wilson bounded over to me when I came outside with my arms full of beer and pistachio nuts. There were bits of twigs and old leaves attached to her coat.

  “Grant’s got that weed-eater thing going,” Joanne said, “so I had to get out of there.”

  “Tell him I can hear it all the way over here,” I said.

  “Can you?”

  “No. But tell him that.”

  “It’s the loudest noise I’ve ever heard next to his leaf blower,” Joanne said. “I can’t believe he thinks it’s a good idea.”

  “What day is it?” I said.

  “Friday.“

  “Let’s play Scrabble.”

  “Should we phone Myrna and Herm?” Joanne said.

  “Yes.”

  “We can order pizza or Chinese food.”

  “Or Vietnamese,” I said. “This’ll be great.”

  “You make truth seem evil, Cherry,” Myrna said later. “You make it seem wrong. Your column should be called Dr. Cheryl Ring is Evil.”

  I chuckled when Myrna said that, but no one else did. I cared what she thought. It wasn’t the first time she’d mentioned my column but it was the first time from that particular angle. She had a few drinks inside of her.

  We had decided on Trivial Pursuit and we were sitting around my dining room table: Myrna, Joanne, Hermione and me. Smoking is allowed, as is swearing and drinking too much.

  Three of us have the odd toke if Hermione brings something. She’s the only one of us who goes to the effort of buying it. There are no teenagers or husbands to worry about at my house, just Spike, the silken little lout. And he enjoys our company if we don’t get too raucous.

  Dope is out of the question for Myrna. She hasn’t done anything but alcohol and cigarettes since 1975, when, after dropping a tab of Windowpane acid, she received a call from her dad who tracked her down at a party to tell her that her mum was dead,. Just exactly what you don’t want to happen. It was sudden too, a blood clot in the brain. It went downhill from there. Myrna got it into her head that she was supposed to “do” her mum. She ended up in the mortuary mucking about with the equipment, poking around at a dead woman who wasn’t her mother, thinking she was “the warm-up act,” as she put it, until her y
ounger sister found her and took her in hand. Nightmare city.

  Myrna looks pretty much the same as she did twenty years ago, just a little heavier in the face and thicker through the middle. She isn’t fat, but she no longer goes in at the waist, so she looks a bit like a fire hydrant, being so short. Plus, she wears red all the time.

  “What smash 1971 tune ran eight minutes and twenty-seven seconds?” asked Hermione.

  We were playing the Baby Boomer Edition.

  “‘American Pie,’” I said.

  Joanne and I were partners.

  “Good one,” said Herm. She’s the best sport of all of us.

  Joanne rolled again.

  “Obsession with the truth can be as harmful as obsession with anything else,” said Myrna. “Your column could be called Dr. Cheryl Ring’s Dangerous Obsession.”

  Her words were scaring me, but I didn’t want her to stop.

  “Hmm,” I said.

  “Too much truth isn’t always a good thing,” she went on. She poured herself another glass of red wine, spilling a little on the game board and on her shirt.

  I went to the kitchen for a damp cloth and dabbed at our sticky and faded board. I could hear thunder rumbling in the distance. Rain began splatting against the window in huge drops.

  “Sometimes,” Myrna said, “in certain circumstances, a lie is a good thing.”

  “I don’t agree,” I said and tossed the rag toward the kitchen. It hit the doorjamb and landed on the floor. Spike went and sat beside it.

  “How was torturing your good friend Dr. Bondurant beneficial in any way?”

  “That was ages ago,” I said.

  “So!”

  “It wasn’t torture for him. He could take it.”

  “Bullshit!”

  “Plus, I think it benefitted the ratio of truth to lies floating around in the stratosphere. That needs evening out sometimes.”

  “That’s horseshit,” she said.

  I knew it was. I considered telling her she looked like a fire hydrant.

  “You don’t care about people,” Myrna said.

  “That’s not true,” I said. “I care about you guys.”

  “Do you?” she said.

  “Okay, for a pie,” Herm said. “Whose last big hit was 1963’s ‘Forget Him’?”

  “Bobby Rydell,” said Joanne. “Yay! We got a pie! Forget him, ’cause he ca-an’t see-ee you,” she sang. “Forget him ’cause he has no eye-ey-ey-ey-eyes.”

  Hermione laughed. “Those aren’t the words, you crazy old slut.” She gave Joanne a little shove.

  “God, we’re good,” I said. “No one’s better than us.”

  “I’m not old,” said Joanne. “You’re old.”

  She got up and looked out the dining room window at the rain. It was coming down in torrents.

  “Do you, Cher?” Myrna was still at me. “Do you care about us?”

  She hadn’t called me Cher in a long time. I didn’t like it. She pronounced it chair, just so you know. She was drinking fast and her words were starting to come out flabby.

  “Yes! How could you not know that?” I said. “And don’t call me Chair. I don’t like having a name that sounds like something you sit on.”

  “Would you tear me to shreds if you interviewed me for your column?” she asked.

  Myrna was a lousy drunk.

  “I wouldn’t interview you,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I wouldn’t want to hurt you.”

  “But I’m an undertaker. You could crucify me if you wanted to. You could accuse me of all kinds of weird things.”

  “I wouldn’t want to.” I knew where this was leading.

  “That in itself is dishonest then, isn’t it? Keeping certain people safe from your toxic pen because you think they are your friends? You’re a liar, Cherry, the biggest liar of them all.”

  “Okay, Myrna. That’s enough,” Herm said. “I’m going to take you home before you make me slap you.”

  “Yeah, I should call it a night too,” Joanne said from the window seat. “I want the rain to stop,” she went on, pressing her nose against the glass. “I hate the rain.”

  “How can you hate the rain?” Hermione asked, joining her at the window. “It’s one of the good things.”

  “I worry about our roof leaking and seepage in the basement, and mould forming in the closets. Our house is so old.”

  “Do you have any of those things?” I asked. My house was older than Joanne’s.

  “No.” she said. “And I’m worried that I’ll get wet and never get dry again.”

  “Maybe you should see a psychiatrist,” said Myrna.

  She rested her face on the table now. I wanted to tousle her curly hair but I was afraid to.

  “The rain’s gonna let up tonight. It’s starting to right now,” said Herm. “Look. It’s coming down lighter. And the thunder’s getting further away. Tomorrow’s going to be sunny and dry. It’s going up to twenty-six.” Hermione always knows the forecast.

  She assured Joanne and me that she would drive Myrna home. Myrna had gone quiet and I decided not to say anything more to her, but I felt terrible.

  Joanne stayed with me after the others had gone. I put Van Morrison on the CD player. Poetic Champions Compose.

  “Are you okay?” I said after Joanne was settled into my best chair with Spike in her arms. “Since when do you hate rain?”

  “I don’t, usually. I think Myrna got me down. I hate it when she gets drunk and horrible.”

  “You think she’s right about my column, don’t you?”

  “Mm-hmm,” said Joanne.

  “Do you think she’s importantly right?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you think what I do matters enough to be important in a negative sense?”

  “Yes.”

  I opened a window and lit a cigarette. The cool damp air sucked the smoke outside.

  “It hurts you to get to people’s truths if you have to harbour so much hate to do it. And I think you do.”

  “You think I harbour hate?”

  “Yes. And you feed it and nurture it. I’m surprised it hasn’t burnt you down to a little pile of ashes.”

  I shivered and closed the window.

  “To say nothing of the other people you hurt with your so-called truths, like poor old Dr. Bondurant. Jesus, I can’t get over that you did him. I think the benefit of truth to lies that you talk about floating around out there is less powerful than hateful vibes that come out in bits of cruelty. They cancel out good stuff all over the place.”

  I looked at Joanne, at her clear brown eyes and her thick mop of white hair.

  She carefully set Spike down on the floor, stood up and found her umbrella by the front door. “I gotta go,” she said.

  I followed her to the door. “I’ll think about what you said.”

  “No, you won’t.” She kissed me on the forehead.

  “Yes, I will.”

  Spike rolled over on his back at Joanne’s feet so she would give his tummy a rub before she left.

  “See you tomorrow,” she said to us both.

  She had a short walk home to their bungalow on Ferndale Avenue.

  I stretched out on the couch in the living room to listen to the rest of the disc. The couch is one I bought from The Bay soon after my family went away in 1971. Spike lay across my chest and I drifted off during “Alan Watts Blues.” I didn’t wake up till early morning, when Darius Widener’s weed-eater accompanied by his dog Mitzi’s barking frightened me into an upright position.

  CHAPTER 18

  Nora and Dougwell Jones were together for years before they finally married. Mr. Jones’ first wife, Barbara, had had a series of strokes and was in the hospital, the Princess Elizabeth, I think. She wouldn’t die. Dougwell must have hoped she would and for sure Nora would have wished for her death, but Barbara Jones hung on till December of 1970 when one last stroke finally did her in.

  Nora married Dougwe
ll five minutes later.

  It was possible that they sensed disapproval in the community or maybe they felt guilty all on their own. Whatever the reason, they decided a change of scene was a good idea and made plans to head for the west coast. Jobs were easy to come by in those days.

  The idea was to take Pete with them and leave me behind. More precisely, I refused to go. I had Joanne and Myrna and my job at the Dominion store. And there was the house on Monck Avenue and a whole lot more. Henry was back in the city, though I never saw him. Winnipeg was where I wanted to be; I thought it was the centre of the universe.

  It all felt good to me. It would be a chance to dwell less on my crippled little family. I needed distance from my mother and my brother, some good long Canadian miles stretching out between us.

  Pete was as excited as I’ve ever seen him. Vancouver, man. He had never been anywhere. He had friends who worked on the trains in the summer and they came back from the coast with tales of pure drugs and easy girls. The way he saw it, the time was right for a move to Vancouver. He had taken two years to finish grade twelve at Nelson Mac, had taken the two-year plan, as he called it. So he was between things when they left. There was talk of his going to Simon Fraser or UBC or maybe going to forest ranger school. This was all from Nora. If Pete had any ideas about his future he kept them to himself.

  My mother wanted to sell the house but I dug in my heels and promised to keep it up. At her expense, of course. Murray’s expense.

  “It’s a good investment,” I said.

  Dougwell agreed.

  She liked that. It was the right thing for me to say. And she was okay about giving me an allowance as long as I took the upkeep of the house seriously and promised to return to school in the fall. It was worth it to her to have me out of her hair.

  I worried about Murray’s ashes; I didn’t want Nora to take them. My concern was unnecessary, although I kept a vigilant eye out till the three of them were packed up and ready to go. The urn stayed in its box in the closet along with the picture of Murray that Nora had taken down from the mantel when she first brought Dougwell home.