And also:
How will I survive Grade Nine with all the cliques?
And then this lone guy came down the stairs from the bridge. I squinted to make sure it was who I thought it was. “Ha,” I said, and I pushed myself up and headed over.
Tom Wilkinson blinked at me as he pushed the door open and limped out onto the gravel parking lot.
“You find your sister?” he asked. I nodded and he said, “Good.” Then I extended my hand. He looked at it, shrugged, and took it in his own.
In the awful world of adults, some things are definitely harder. But some things are easier too, and this thing was one of those. So we just shook each other’s hands like a couple of grown-up gentlemen and I said, “All right then?” and he said “All right then,” and then I headed back to Nick’s car to finish the trip home.
The Mayor Will Make a Brief Statement and Then Take Questions
“Good afternoon.
“The death of a child affects all of us deeply. We are a community of parents, of brothers and of sisters, of friends and neighbours. Any child lost is a loss for us all.
“We feel the loss of little Nicholas Fletcher especially keenly. Who among us does not recoil in horror, at the echoes of the squealing tires of the car that cut short Nicholas’s brief, brilliant life? Who among us does not, in the early hours of these dark mornings, awaken clenched, bathed in sweat, eyes fixed unwillingly on Nicholas’s unforgiving, uncomprehending stare?
“I have spoken with the Chief of Police, and he has assured me that his detectives have made the hunt for Nicholas’s killer their highest priority. Make no mistake, it is a challenge, for homicide detectives are no different from any of us. They weep for Nicholas too; they feel his cool fingers on the napes of their necks, hear his soft, wordless whispering in their ears. The dreams he conjures wake them also. But with diligence and fortitude, I am confident they will apprehend the coward responsible for this travesty — and so, we pray, end this terrible chapter in our city’s history.
“At this time I would like to thank the eyewitnesses who have come forward already, and urge others with any information that might help the investigation to do the same. And I would again like to speak to that motorist among us, who has so far remained silent.
“Come forward; admit to your crime. You will, in a very meaningful way, be saving your city, your community, your family.
“Yourself.
“As for the rest of us: what can we do to quiet our grief? We can recall that we are citizens of a fine, brave city — a great city, with brightly lit boulevards and fine restaurants and theatres, museums and stadiums; a kind city, with many strong and mutually supportive faith communities. Our city.
“Nicholas speaks to us from the dark corners, the cold spaces — but they are shadows amid light, a chill draft by a glowing hearth.
“It is from this place — the warm nest of our homes and communities, the cherished receptacle of our dreams… our sanity… that we must send a clear message:
“Nicholas — we grieve for you. We offer our comfort to your mother and your baby sister in their pain. We yearn to see the driver who killed you brought to justice.
“You truly do live on in our hearts, truly… truly… as no other boy, living or dead, ever has.
“Now please. Release those hearts. They are not yours to inhabit.
“As Mayor of this city, I beg you. Rest in peace, son. Please, Nicholas. Just stop.”
The Pit-Heads
Paul Peletier and I drove up to Cobalt one last time, about seven years ago. It was my idea. Should have been Paul’s — hell, almost two decades before that it was his idea, going to Cobalt to paint the pit-heads — but lately he hadn’t been painting, hadn’t been out of his house to so much as look in so long, he was convinced he didn’t have any more ideas.
“Bullshit,” I said to him, ignition keys jangling in my fingers, coaxing him outside. “You’re more of an artist than that.”
“No,” he said. “And you’re not either.”
But Paul didn’t have much will left to fight me, so he grumbled around the house looking for his old paint kit, the little green strongbox filled with the stuff he euphemistically called his Equipment. Then he climbed into the cab of my pickup, grunted, “Well come on, Picasso, let’s do it,” and we headed north.
Just to see.
There are other things to paint in Cobalt, after alclass="underline" the black-and-umber tarpaper houses, built high on the rock with materials as likely stolen as they were bought; the roads wending dangerously through the lips of bedrock, like the untended streets of a medieval town; the grocery, built on top of an old mine shaft, a three-hundred-foot-deep root cellar where the owners dangle their overstock of meat and cheese against the improbable heat of high summer in northern Ontario.
We’d painted them all before, in every season and under every sky, and when the pit-heads were still up, they never got old.
So we turned off Highway 11, parked by the grocery and set up our easels. Paul dallied a bit in his strongbox — took out the old silver chain and put it around his neck, muttered a little prayer from his Catholic school days. And then, because there was nothing more but to get started, he reached into his kit and took out a blank pallet, squeezed out some acrylic from the little magazine of ancient paint-tubes he kept in a dark recess of the kit.
I even remember what we were painting. I’ve still got the panel at my studio — it’s not very good, a not-very-confident study of one of those houses, rambling up a slope of rock and perched on a foundation of cinderblock. In a fit of whimsy, I included the figure of a man, bending down at the septic tank, tool box at his feet, an expression of grim determination painted on his tiny face. In fact, no one came out of the house the entire time we painted.
Or should I say, the entire time that I painted. Paul just sat there, lifting his brush, swirling it on his pallet. Setting it down again.
“Nothing here anymore, Graham,” said Paul, fingering the chain at his neck, and squinting over the still rooftops of the town in the too-bright summer sun. “They’re gone.”
“They’re buried, you mean.”
Paul shook his head, and he smiled. “The mining companies’ll say it’s because of taxes. Hailiebury taxes dearly for a pit-head, next to nothing for a cement plug over a dark shaft.”
Then he looked at me, the tiny pewter Jesus at the end of the chain caught in a vise-grip between his thumb and the hard stem of his brush.
“As long as the price of silver stays low, the pit-heads stay down. Holes stay covered, to keep the weather out of the shafts. That’s the story, eh, Graham?”
“I guess those miners had the right idea, then,” I said. “I guess it’s time to go.”
“I guess so,” said Paul.
And so we packed up our brushes and pallets and paintings, and we followed the miners’ example. Paul was inordinately cheerful on the way back, and so was I, I have to admit. There was an ineffable feeling of freedom leaving that town — finally admitting it was over for us there; we were strictly on our own, from that moment on. We made jokes, shared a few carefully chosen reminiscences, were just like old friends again on that four-hour drive south.
But much later, back at my own place in the cold dark of the early morning, I woke up with the once-familiar scream in my throat — memories of the miner Tevalier’s age-yellowed flesh, his cruel and hungry grip, renewed in my blood.
Trembling alone in my bed, I vowed to myself that I would not call Paul Peletier, and I would not go to Cobalt again.