The Case Against Owen Williams Read online

  Praise for Maclean:

  A finalist for the 2005 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and one of Globe and Mail fiction reviewer Jim Bartley’s “Bartley’s Top Five” books of 2005.

  “Note to book-chat pooh-bahs: This book merits a media flurry…. Donaldson’s simple device of inserting John’s ghastly war memories directly, without preamble, into the body of the main narrative pays huge dividends. Without writerly display, he communicates not only the ambushing of John’s psyche by old traumas (his past is always present) but the unfathomable fact of life’s random doling out of horror and beauty.”

  – THE GLOBE AND MAIL

  “With sharp, incisive prose, Donaldson illuminates one ex-soldier’s search for peace that left this reader humming along to the barely remembered ‘Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag…’ ”

  – OTTAWA CITIZEN

  “Maclean may be modest in scope, but readers should be lavish in their praise of this fine novel.”

  – FREDERICTCTON DAILY GLEANER

  “Allan Donaldson’s first novel, Maclean, is a finely detailed study of a man buffeted by fate whose story stays with you long after you put the book down.…A small, hard but brilliant gem of a book.”

  – HALIFAX CHRONICLE HERALD

  the CASE AGAINST

  OWEN WILLIAMS

  ALLAN DONALDSON

  Copyright © Allan Donaldson 2010

  E-book © 2010

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission from the publisher, or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, permission from Access Copyright, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario M5E 1E5.

  Nimbus Publishing Limited

  3731 Mackintosh St, Halifax, NS B3K 5A5

  (902) 455-4286 nimbus.ca

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Author photo: Marjory Donaldson

  Interior design: Jenn Embree

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Donaldson, Allan

  The case against Owen Williams / Allan Donaldson.

  ISBN 978–1–55109–776–3

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-55109-818-0

  I. Title.

  PS8557.O51C37 2010 C813’.54 C2010–903052–4

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) and the Canada Council, and of the Province of Nova Scotia through the Department of Tourism, Culture and Heritage for our publishing activities.

  for Marjory

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  Dominion Day, 1944, fell on a Saturday. Elsewhere across Canada, the shipyards and factories worked on without ceasing, turning out the materiel of victory. But in Wakefield, New Brunswick, population 5,783, nothing that was postponed until Monday was going to lengthen the war by one second, so the town took its holiday as usual and staged the parade that in some form or other it had staged every July 1 since 1867.

  In front of the cenotaph a small reviewing stand had been set up, decorated with red, white, and blue bunting, and as noon approached a thin crowd of people—the patriotic, the bereaved, the lonely, the poor, the idle—began to gather near the courthouse. They waited on the sidewalks in such shade as they could find, and as the town clock began to strike twelve, they heard from out of sight up the street the drums and bugles of the local company of the Royal Canadian Army Cadet Corps. It was the signal for the reviewing party to descend the steps of the courthouse and take their places on the stand—the mayor of Wakefield with his chain of office, Captain Ernest Fraser of the Seaforth Highlanders of Nova Scotia, and Colonel (retired) J. MacGregor Blaikie, late of the 85th Infantry Battalion, now honourary commander of the local branch of the Royal Canadian Legion.

  There was a minute of expectancy, and then around the curve of the street, under an arch of elm trees heavy with summer, the parade appeared, led by Corporal Drost of the RCMP in his dress scarlet and a colour party of the Legion bearing the Union Jack, the Red Ensign, and the Legion banner. Behind them marched the brass band of the local militia, and as the colour party approached the reviewing stand, it took over from the bugle band and struck up “The Maple Leaf Forever.” Colonel Blaikie and Captain Fraser saluted. The mayor stood stiffly at attention. The band passed and was followed by a company of the Legion, then the bugle band and two platoons of cadets, and finally, not so much the climax of the parade as an ignominious afterthought, a platoon of Captain Fraser’s Seaforth Highlanders.

  As they passed, Colonel Blaikie pointedly dropped his salute, and there was a scattering of derisive whistles from the crowd. Captain Fraser had known that marching them would be a mistake, but Area Headquarters had ordered them to be marched, so marched they had to be.

  The difficulty about Captain Fraser’s Seaforths was that they were what had become known popularly as “Zombies” —men who had been conscripted but who had refused to volunteer to go overseas and could not under existing law be forced. Now with the casualty lists rolling in once again from France, they had become an object of furious debate in Parliament and of growing unpleasantness on the street.

  Most of the Zombies were hidden away in camps in the West, where they were supposed to be waiting to repel a Japanese invasion, but some of them were scattered around the country, guarding things the army had decided ought to be guarded. In Wakefield, they guarded a makeshift basic training camp that had been set up in the summer of 1940 on a big island in the middle of the river, used to train one battalion through one bitter winter, and then abandoned.

  The buildings that had been run up still stood there, unused and useless—jerry-built huts already rotting away under their leaky roofs—but four times a day a guard detail of half a dozen Seaforths marched down Main Street and across the bridge to the island, and the detail they had relieved marched back. It was an operation that had about it, like many things that went on in those days, an atmosphere of dreamlike absurdity, and it was possible to imagine the army forgetting about the Seaforths altogether and leaving them to march back and forth there forever.

  It had befallen Captain Fraser to command the Wakefield Armoury, the Wakefield Basic Training Camp, and this platoon of military outcasts, not because he himself was a Zombie, but because he was thirty-nine years old with eyesight too bad to allow him to be assigned to a combat unit. Nevertheless, as he watched the platoon slouch past, not so smart even as the high school cadets, and as he saw out of the corner of his eye Colonel Blaikie drop his salute, he felt that something of their disgrace inevitably rubbed off on him, and he resolved once again to set about pulling strings to get some kind of overseas posting. Or, failing that, any posting anywhere away from this dismal hole and these dismal misfi
ts.

  When they had passed, Fraser ended his salute with the snap he had been taught long ago before the war. He shook hands with the mayor, saluted the colonel, and descended the reviewing stand, revolving in his mind some act of vengeance for the day’s humiliation. A route march would be the thing. On Monday, a punitive route march for sloppiness on parade. March the little bastards in full kit until their legs fell off. He would have Sergeant MacCrae see to it.

  At seven o’clock it was still hot, and the sky was filled with gathering thunderheads—tall galleons of cloud that sailed in from the west in fleets. In the late afternoon, there had been distant rumblings to the north, but in Wakefield there had been no rain, only sudden, odd little gusts of wind that raised tornadoes of dust along the roads and then subsided as abruptly as they had come.

  With the approach of evening, there had also come clouds of blackflies and mosquitoes, nowhere more of them than around Daniel Coile’s house on the Hannigan Road a mile west of town. It stood at the top of a high bank above a creek, which here spread itself out during the spring floods over acres of interval land, then retreated in the summer, leaving behind it stagnant ponds where blackflies and mosquitoes bred by the billions.

  Unlike most of his neighbours, Daniel Coile had never built himself a summer kitchen, so the temperature in the house after supper had been cooked was in the nineties. With all the doors and windows open, the flies and mosquitoes found their way through the rotting screens and into the house, where they buzzed from room to room until they eventually blundered into one of the ribbons of sticky paper that festooned the ceilings or were squashed with a swatter by Matilda Coile.

  For himself, Daniel Coile didn’t give a shit about blackflies or mosquitoes, nor for any god-damned man who ever walked neither. What he did give a shit about was his good name and the obedience due him as a father.

  “She ain’t gonna talk to me like that,” he said, sitting up very straight in his chair by the kitchen table. “She ain’t gonna talk to me like that and go on livin’ under my roof. I’ll give her one she won’t forgit in a hurry. I’ll give her one that will make them soldiers think twice before they run around with her. By Jesus, them bastards better not cross me.”

  Upstairs in the bedroom she shared with her younger sister Unis, Sarah Coile half-listened to the rhetorical rise and fall of her father’s voice, not making out the words especially and not particularly trying to or needing to. She had brought a pailful of hot water upstairs from the tank on the side of the kitchen stove and poured it into a large wash basin, and she was standing, naked except for her pants, in front of the mirror on the dresser, washing herself. She was a well-built girl with the kind of opulent Edwardian figure that still turned up occasionally on dirty postcards or flipcard peepshows at carnivals.

  Her sister was sitting on the bed.

  “I don’t have to stay around here,” Sarah said. “There’s all kinds of jobs in places like Saint John. There are girls makin’ a dollar an hour buildin’ ships.”

  “Where are ya gonna git the money to go down there with?” Unis asked.

  “Never mind,” Sarah said. “I can git it if I really want to.”

  She washed her armpits and under her breasts, lifting one after the other, then stopping to look at herself, admiringly, in the mirror.

  “Papa said he wasn’t gonna let ya go to the dance,” Unis said.

  “Papa can go to hell,” Sarah said.

  She towelled herself dry and got dressed in clean underwear and a white dress that she had bought earlier in the week and sneaked into the house when she got back from work. From the back of one of the dresser drawers, she took out a tube of lipstick and a compact of rouge and put them in her purse. Then she went downstairs, and Unis trailed after her.

  Her father was still sitting at the kitchen table, drinking a cup of tea. He eyed her wrathfully from under his heavy brows.

  “So where are you goin’ all dressed up like the Queen of England?” he asked.

  “I’m goin’ to see Vinny,” Sarah said. “Maybe we’ll go to the movies.”

  “Or to that dance hall,” he said.

  “Maybe,” Sarah said.

  “You ain’t goin’ to no dance. No daughter of mine is gonna hang around in no dance hall.”

  He started to get up.

  Sarah stopped by the door and turned on him.

  “You better watch out. You lay a hand on me, you’re gonna be sorry.”

  “If you go to that dance hall, you needn’t bother comin’ back,” he bawled at her. “If you ain’t gonna do what I say, you ain’t gonna live under my roof.”

  “That suits me.”

  She pushed out through the screen door and slammed it behind her.

  The band that night at The Silver Dollar had three fiddles, a guitar, a banjo, and a mouth organ. The man who played the mouth organ could also play bones, and he liked to step dance, playing the bones off his elbow. They were playing a waltz now, not putting much into it, and there were only a dozen couples on the floor, dancing in the slow, bored way people dance at the start of an evening.

  Sarah sat on a chair on the right side of the dance hall where the female stag line always sat, just as the male line always sat across from it on the left. Sarah knew or half-knew all the other girls in the line, but she didn’t join them. Instead, she sat a few chairs away and watched Vinny and her boyfriend, Brick, as they shuffled around among the other dancers.

  Brick was a big boy, over six feet, over two hundred pounds, and he was nicknamed Brick because of his mat of red hair. Vinny was only the latest in his succession of girls, and it had surprised Sarah when Vinny had told her that Brick had begun taking her out. Vinny was pretty, but she was barely five feet, barely a hundred pounds, and there didn’t seem to be enough of her to be a girl for someone like Brick. Sarah knew it wouldn’t last, and she felt sure that she could take Vinny’s place when it ended, but that wouldn’t last either. With Brick, nobody was going to last.

  She turned her attention to the male stag line on the other side of the hall. It was a good deal shorter than the female stag line. It always was. Once, four years before, when the battalion had been training on the island, it had been the other way around, and she still heard stories from the older girls about how in those days any girl no matter how homely had half a dozen soldiers chasing her to go to dances, to go to movies, even towards the end to marry them. But she had been only twelve then, too young for it to do her any good. And the thousand men of the battalion had left, and so had several hundred men from the county, and the twenty or thirty Seaforths who had arrived a couple of years later didn’t begin to make up.

  There were half a dozen of them in the stag line now, sticking together as they always did, not dancing yet until things had sorted themselves out a little, waiting for the strays whom no one was going to fight over. Sarah knew them all, more or less. Some she had danced with. Some she knew about from other girls. The rest of the stag line was made up mostly of sixteen- and seventeen-year-old kids who in spite of all the stag girls would end up with nobody because they didn’t know how to dance or what to say to a girl when they did. Sarah hardly looked at them.

  The set ended. Vinny and Brick came back, and Brick went off to the canteen and got a bottle of ginger ale and three paper cups. Sarah and Vinny got up, and the three stood tight together while Brick poured rye into the bottom of the paper cups and then topped them up with ginger ale. It was against the law to drink in a dance hall, or anywhere else in public, but at The Silver Dollar this was interpreted to mean that you didn’t openly show the bottle, so that if the Mounties arrived, the owner could claim with something like the truth that he hadn’t seen anybody drinking.

  Brick hadn’t stinted on the rye, and Sarah still had a finger in her cup when the band started up again and a local singer in a white cowboy suit slid into “It Makes No Difference Now.” Vinny dropped the rest of her drink into Sarah’s and went out again with Brick.

  S
arah sipped the drink and watched the soldiers on the other side of the floor. Some of them now and then watched back, but none of them made a move, and she was still there holding her empty cup when the number finished.

  “Take your partners,” the man who played the bones shouted, “for the first reel of the night. And here’s Daddy MacDade to call.”

  An enormous fat man came down the hall at a heavy trot, like a milk cow someone had thrown a stick at, and heaved himself up onto the stage.

  The reel brought out most of the soldiers from the stag line, and even some of the kids who couldn’t dance one to one but could be hauled and pushed through a reel. There were enough for two lines almost the whole length of the hall. Daddy MacDade did a little step dance and gave a whoop. The band threw itself at “Soldier’s Joy,” and the evening began to take off.

  Sarah didn’t get one of the soldiers. She got a soft, pimple-faced boy named Herbie Booth. But with a reel it didn’t matter. What mattered was that he got her out there, so that while he clomped around, getting lost in the clockwork down the middle of the lines, she was breaking the ice with some of the others.

  “What are you doing with that jerk?” one of the soldiers asked her as they spun.

  “Tryin’ to git rid of him,” Sarah said. “What are you doin’ with that scarecrow?”

  After five minutes, “Soldier’s Joy” abruptly stopped and Daddy MacDade shouted, “Now waltz them partners,” and the band struck up “The Tennessee Waltz.”

  Herbie was somewhere in the confusion as the reel broke up, and Sarah slipped away. A lot of the dancers were getting rid of one partner in hopes of a better one, and Sarah saw close to her a soldier she had danced with the week before. His name was Owen Williams. He would do, for now anyway. She took his elbow and swung herself into his arms.

  She saw him blush. He wasn’t much taller than she was, slightly built, with rather pale skin and very thick black hair. On his chin and along his jaw line, even though he was close shaven, there was a dark shadowiness. He smelled faintly of some kind of shaving stuff and of something else, something like leather, some sort of army smell, different from the smell of farm workers or garagemen.