The golden boy, p.16
The Golden Boy, page 16
“I sure feel sorry for that family.”
“Better to feel sorry for the other one.”
“Oh, I feel plenty sorry for everyone. And plenty glad I don’t have anything like that to worry about around here. How about if I stew up that old hen for supper?”
“I thought we were going over to Christy’s.”
“Apparently your brother’s wife has another headache. Supper’s off.”
“Who called?”
“Princess Angela herself. And she didn’t sound too sick to me.”
“Don’t start, Mary-Jean.”
“Three Saturdays running? Maybe your brother should stop asking us over for supper if that baby-doll wife of his is going to change her mind at the last minute.”
“It’s got nothing to do with Christy.”
“It sure doesn’t.”
“Mary-Jean.”
“Oh, don’t look at me like that. I’m not starting anything. Tell Emmett I’ll need the little ax sharpened. Stafford, where are you going with that newspaper?”
“I’m going over to Bobby’s. They don’t get the Whig.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. They just don’t. Bobby’s parents don’t like bad news, I guess.”
“They can like whatever they want, Stafford. Facts are facts.”
Stafford and Bobby fought only twice during the course of their friendship, because Stafford disliked fighting and Bobby had no reason to. But when the news broke in the summer of 1959 that an Ontario girl had been raped and murdered by an Ontario boy, Bobby and Stafford had their first real fight and it was a terrible fight, a fight that emerged quickly like the story itself. And afterward, when the fight was over and the friendship had resumed, there was a division between them that left Stafford aware that if he had been given all the blessings that came with physical beauty, Bobby had been compensated with a kind of moral beauty that left him lit from within.
It had been a dry spring in the months leading up to the murder and a warm one, but there were lots of things to do outside in a small town, and in the long evenings, local children could cool off in the river and ride their bicycles without parents pursuing them from one place to another. So on June 9, 1959, when a twelve-year-old girl asked a fourteen-year-old boy if he would give her a ride to the river on his bicycle, nobody thought much about it. But when the boy said yes, he would give her a ride to the river on the handlebars of his new bicycle, it led to the death of many childhoods in Canada—and among them was Bobby Shepherd’s.
To hear the news that a girl had been murdered was a terrible thing and it frightened people, but to learn that a Canadian boy might have done it was a different kind of horror. Haste was critical. The sooner the killer was caught, the sooner everyone could forget about it. Seizing the line of least resistance, suspicion became fixed on the tall boy with the new bicycle, and the nightmare of Steven Truscott unfolded like an evil spell. On June 13, at two thirty in the morning, he was charged with first-degree murder, and a few months later, on the last day of September, he was sentenced to death.
The case was a source of anguish to many Canadians who felt it was wrong to hang a boy, even a guilty and terrible one. Guilty or not, they said, it was wrong to hang a boy that young. But citizens made of sterner stuff accused them of being sentimental, complicit even, in the encouragement of other terrible boys to rape and kill their classmates. Did they want Canada to get a reputation for this sort of thing? The debate raged, and there were letters to newspapers about it for months. “The child should be whipped before he dies,” read one, but even the hard-liners balked at that. This was, after all, Canada.
Stafford had been upset by the case from the moment the story broke, finding no comfort in the moral trade-off between Emmett’s failures and a boy named Steven Truscott, but he had a lingering faith that the men who were on the jury, the men who decided who was innocent and who was guilty, must know what they were doing because they were important people and Canada was a good country. But as hard as Stafford tried to accept the verdict and forget about Steven Truscott, he couldn’t—because Bobby Shepherd wouldn’t let him.
Bobby was mad about Steven Truscott, all fired up in fact, and he refused to accept anything from anybody unless they felt the same way he did. He hammered away at Stafford for months until finally, pushed relentlessly to think for himself, Stafford came to blows with Bobby on a cold fall morning, standing at the edge of the highway, waiting for the school bus.
“Facts are facts,” Stafford said to Bobby, who just shook his head, baffled by his friend’s pragmatic stupidity. “And there’s nothing you can do about facts.”
“Yeah, but whose facts?” Bobby argued.
“What do you mean?”
“You just take it all on a plate, don’t you?”
“I don’t take anything on a plate. It’s not like I want him to be guilty. I just don’t think he should hang, that’s all. But I can’t make him innocent, can I? And I can’t make that girl alive again either. What about her? What about Lynne Harper?”
“You want. You don’t want. You think it’s about what you want? What anybody wants? What about Steven Truscott? And his family? What do you think they want?”
“Don’t yell at me.”
“Steven Truscott was framed, Stafford! Framed!”
“Framed by who?”
“Who? Who doesn’t matter. It’s why, you retard! Why?”
“Why what? Where are you going?”
“I’m going home.”
“You can’t go home. What about school?”
“Stuff school, Stafford. And stuff you too!”
“Go home then, Bobby! Go home and cry about your sick friend, Steven Truscott!”
They had never come to blows about anything, but the last comment was too much for Bobby, and when he and Stafford had finished with each other, they had matching wounds, though the cut on Stafford’s lip didn’t heal quite as well as Bobby’s. It was the middle of October in their grade-nine year and Stafford had never been in a fistfight, although he had seen his father and Emmett go at it a few times. He would offer no explanation to his parents that evening for the bloodied lip and the black eye, but it did not go unnoticed that Stafford was moody and withdrawn and that something had happened between him and Bobby Shepherd.
“I saved that last piece of raisin pie for you, Stafford. It’s on the counter.”
“Thanks, Mum,” Stafford said.
“You can take a glass of milk with it.”
“Sure.”
“Come eat it in here.”
“I might later.”
“Where are you going?”
“Homework.”
“Oh. Well then, I’ll just keep it in the back of the fridge for you.”
Stafford could not remember a time when he and Bobby had fought. He could not remember when they had not met in the middle of the field that lay between their two houses for the long walk to the highway where the school bus stopped for them. He could not remember sitting alone on the ride into town in the morning and home again in the afternoon. He could not remember any time, in fact, when he and Bobby had not talked about the things they saw and the things they thought about. He had a vague sense that he had conducted himself reasonably well in his first fistfight, but he did not know how to undo the damage for the things he had said, and he was ashamed. Bobby’s faith in Steven Truscott seemed a brave thing to Stafford because it challenged the authority of public opinion, and this was something Stafford was unable to do. It was public opinion that kept his family together, and Stafford was reluctant to challenge what he perceived as positive pressure to behave. But it was the teachings of his Catholic faith that really prevented Stafford from behaving differently, and since it was the kind of faith anchored by fear, Stafford was beginning to realize he was not, in fact, a very brave boy—or even a free one.
He had been brought up to accept the certainty that there was a God who was in charge of everything except, of course, mankind’s insatiable appetite for sin, for which He was blameless but upset. The story was simple, and it made sense so long as nobody tried too hard to explain it as Stafford once did to Bobby, both of them eight years old, sitting on the floor of the barn, watching a cat give birth to kittens. You were born full of sin, Stafford explained, because Eve messed up in the Garden of Eden. Those kittens were full of sin.
“That’s just stupid,” Bobby said. “It doesn’t even make sense.”
“Well, you’re not Catholic,” Stafford said.
“So what? Pretend I am.”
“That’s not allowed.”
“Come on, Stafford.”
“Adam and Eve lived in the Garden of Eden and got everything they wanted from God. You know, food and stuff.”
“He was there too?”
“Yes. Well, not all the time. But mostly.”
“Where was he when he wasn’t there?”
“I don’t know. He was just somewhere else. But He could always see what was going on.”
“How?”
“Anyway, there was a tree with apples on it and God told them no apples.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t eat any.”
“Don’t eat apples?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because they weren’t supposed to.”
“Why was the tree there?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who put it there?”
“God did.”
“Stafford, this is a stupid story.”
“That’s because you’re not Catholic.”
“I’m a little bit Protestant,” Bobby said. “That’s close, isn’t it?”
“No.” Stafford frowned. “It’s not the same.”
“Those are a lot of kittens.”
Stafford was a farm boy, and he knew about death and bad luck. People got sick and died. They fell into rivers and drowned. Men went crazy and killed other people and sometimes they set buildings on fire. Farmers turned their back on a threshing machine and lost an arm or worse. Kids fell out of haylofts and broke their necks. Brothers got drunk and roared up highways in cars that spun out of control. But the trial and conviction of Steven Truscott was a different kind of evil and Stafford was frightened by it. How was it possible that a boy his own age could go for a bicycle ride and end up caught like a bird in a snare? He wished he could talk to Bobby about it, but Bobby wouldn’t look at him when they waited at the highway for the bus, and he wouldn’t sit near him on the ride into Napanee.
There were others, though, who talked about the case in the fall of 1959, and Stafford concentrated on them, hoping he would see things their way and be done with Steven Truscott. They accepted sin and judgment without personal anguish and then they went about their business knowing they could not be accused of doing anything wrong, not even by accident, because they were good people and they behaved themselves. But if they were untroubled by the rift between God, free will, and another boy’s fate, it was only because they didn’t think there was one.
“If this is Steven Truscott’s fate,” Stafford said to Emmett, “then there’s no point to anything. It’s all a big fat joke.”
“I’d say so,” Emmett said.
“He should confess and ask for forgiveness,” Stafford’s mother said. “Somebody finish off the carrots.”
“They’ll never hang a boy that young,” Stafford’s father said. “They’ll commute the sentence to life.”
“But what if he’s innocent?”
“Oh, I don’t think so, Stafford. Not anymore,” his father said.
“Deliver us from evil,” Father Keating intoned at Sunday Mass.
“Deliver Steven Truscott from evil,” Stafford prayed then and in the months that followed. “Please, God, do something.”
But if Stafford resorted to prayer, Bobby continued to rage about what was right and what was wrong and what he, toad-face Shepherd, was going to do about it. He insisted his parents start buying the Whig-Standard “like everybody else,” and he saved newspaper articles about the case for months, the clippings piling up on the kitchen table until his father finally bought him a scrapbook to keep them in. Bobby wrote long and carefully constructed notes in the margins, analyzing the case and the trial with questions and arguments about false leads and dicey facts. And on the front cover of the scrapbook, he glued a picture of Steven Truscott, and underneath it, he wrote the word Justice.
His parents were proud of him, they said, very proud indeed, but privately they had begun to worry that their only child’s passion for justice would hurt him terribly in the long run if it came at him too hard and too soon. They worried also that Stafford’s absence in Bobby’s life had created a void that was not good for either of them, and that could not be ignored.
“Justice comes to those who wait,” Bobby’s mother said. “When you’re grown up, you can take the law and go after the cases you believe in. You’ll save people from the noose, Bobby, so long as you can prove they’re really innocent. We don’t want a bunch of murderers walking around.”
“There was a lad in my town, not so young as Truscott, mind, he got hung for murder too,” Bobby’s father said. “But they found him with the handle of the knife in one hand and the blade still stuck into the back of the poor fella dead on the floor, so it weren’t so much of an argument. Still, hanging a boy’s an awful thing, an awful thing. Can’t be many with the stomach for it.”
“If they hang Steven Truscott,” Bobby said, “I’ll move to South America.”
“And how,” his mother asked, “will that help?”
“I’m not sure,” Bobby said. “It’s just how I feel.”
“You’d better find another way, Bobby,” his father said. “Your mother and I would be lost without you.”
“You won’t find a perfect world anywhere, Bobby,” his mother said. “It doesn’t exist.”
“Not in Canada! That’s for damn sure!”
“Now, Bobby!”
“And not for Steven Truscott waiting to get hung at Christmas while we sit here peeling apples like it’s no big deal. Like it doesn’t matter!”
“Bobby, of course it matters. Nobody thinks it doesn’t matter. Say something, Cookie. I don’t know what to say to him.”
“Here, Bobby, try this. Is it good? It needs more sugar, don’t you think? Now, wipe your eyes and blow your nose. There’s my sweet boy. You mustn’t lose hope. Life is filled with second chances. Justice will prevail! I can promise you that, my darling. Now, why don’t you clean yourself up a bit before Stafford gets here? What time is it, Andrew?”
“Stafford?” Bobby said.
“Oh my goodness! There he comes now, across the field. Is it two o’clock already? And what’s that he’s got with him? What’s he carrying, Andrew?”
“Stafford’s coming over here?” Bobby said again.
“Yes, dear.”
“Why?”
“Because we asked him to, Bobby.”
“It’s a set of golf clubs, Cookie.”
“Oh, for goodness’ sakes. Golf clubs! Where’s he going to find a place for golfing this time of year?”
“You asked Stafford to come over?”
“Yes.”
“Why?” Bobby asked. “Why did you do that, Mum?”
“Because the fight’s gone on too long, dear. But we didn’t mention anything about golf, did we, Andrew?”
The night before Stafford was summoned to Bobby’s house, Emmett had come home later than usual—and very drunk. He usually stumbled past Stafford’s door and fell into his own bed, which was in the little room across the hall, but that night he was confused and came instead into Stafford’s room, where he passed out across the foot of Stafford’s bed. Michael and Mary-Jean had been sleeping peacefully downstairs, but they woke up when they heard the yelling. Michael was the first to enter the bedroom and the first to see Stafford standing over Emmett, pushed off the bed and onto the floor.
“You stupid asshole!” he yelled, and he kicked his brother once and then a second time.
“What the hell’s going on? Stop it, Stafford. What are you doing? Emmett, get up. Get up off the floor! Goddamnit, Emmett!”
“Stop it!” Mary-Jean said. “Stop!”
“Get him away from me! Get him out of here!” Stafford screamed, and he began to throw things down at Emmett, who tried to cover his head with his arms.
“I’m sorry,” Emmett said. “So sorry,” he said again, and he began to cry, but nobody took his tears seriously, because they were ashamed of him and his drunken tears.
“Stafford, no,” his father said. “Don’t.”
“I hate you, Emmett. I hate you!” Stafford said, and then he scooped up a row of little china birds from his windowsill and threw them at Emmett, but they landed on the floor and broke into pieces. They had come in boxes of tea and Stafford had collected them, bird by bird, amusing his brother and his parents with his excitement over each one.
Mary-Jean left the room and went back downstairs. She could not, she said later, be expected to choose one son over another. She would speak to them both in a few days when everything settled down and nobody was yelling.
Michael dragged Emmett out of Stafford’s room and into his own. He stripped the clothes off Emmett and made sure he was covered up for the night. Then he went back into Stafford’s room and sat down heavily on the bed. He started picking up the tea-birds, but Stafford told him not to bother.
“Just leave them. I’m too tired.”
“Well, how about I just sweep the broken ones away from the bed? You don’t want to cut your foot in the morning.”
“I won’t.”
“This one’s okay,” Michael said, and he bent over to pick one up. “See?”
“I don’t care about them anymore,” Stafford said.
“But you always got so excited when we let you open the box.”
“Well, I’m not ten anymore, am I?”
“No, I guess not.”
The next morning, while Emmett slept and Mary-Jean sat grimly in the kitchen, clutching her rosary beads, Stafford’s father took Stafford into town. It was November and there was no snow yet on the fields, but the frost lay heavy in the mornings and there was ice in the driveway and along the road leading to the highway. His father looked tired and said little, but when they got to town, he took Stafford to a sporting goods store and asked if he’d like to pick out a birthday present for himself.
