The Boy

THE BOY

THE BOY

by

Betty Jane Hegerat

OOLICHAN BOOKS
FERNIE, BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA
2011

Copyright © 2011 by Betty Jane Hegerat ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a newspaper or magazine or broadcast on radio or television; or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from ACCESS COPYRIGHT, 6 Adelaide Street East, Suite 900, Toronto, Ontario M5C 1H6.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Hegerat, Betty Jane, 1948-

The boy / Betty Jane Hegerat.

ISBN 978-0-88982-275-7

1. Cook, Robert Raymond, 1937-1960--Fiction. 2. Hegerat, Betty Jane, 1948-.

I. Title.

PS8615.E325B69 2011------C813'.6------ C2011-901006-2

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council through the BC Ministry of Tourism, Culture, and the Arts, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, for our publishing activities.

Published by
Oolichan Books
P.O. Box 2278
Fernie, British Columbia
Canada V0B 1M0

www.oolichan.com

Cover design by David Drummond -
daviddrummond.blogspot.com
.
Cover photo by David P. MacNaughton, courtesy of the Legal Archives Society of Alberta.
eBook development by
WildElement.ca

Printed in Canada on 100% post consumer recycled FSC-certified paper.

this book is dedicated to the memory of the Cook family
Ray, Daisy, Gerry, Patty, Chrissy, Kathy, and Linda
and Bobby, the boy who was lost along the way

It begins with fiction. An image of a boy with scabby knees, a thatch of dull blonde hair, eyes like hummingbirds. A boy circling a house. Window to window, dirt-rimed fingers on the sills. A boy on tiptoes, peeking, ducking, smirking before he slinks away. It begins with a woman inside the house, dizzy with this window, that window, and
where is the little bugger now?

The Boy

June, 1994

Louise hates these end-of-school celebrations. What she really wants, is to go home and have a glass of wine in solitude, but always there is the round of drinks with her fellow teachers, the very people she's looked forward to escaping for two months.

As the evening wears on and the pub gets noisier, she waits impatiently for the woman who's giving her a ride to tire of the forced hilarity. There is a man at the next table who seems as much an outlier to his party as she is to hers. He looks familiar, but she can't imagine where she could have met him. Chronic tan, crew-cut hair, that way of looping his arm over the back of the chair, so that he looks mildly amused but not really part of the company. He reminds her of the farmers in her extended family. The waiter, she's noticed, has refilled the man's glass of Coke as many times as he's filled hers. A teetotaller? Or the driver for tonight? He looks up and catches her staring. Winks, then tilts his head and seems to puzzle a minute. Finally, he nods, puts his finger to his lips and stands up. Without a moment's thought, Louise stands too, and follows him to the end of the bar. No one at either table seems to have noticed their leaving.

“Louise, right?” The green eyes are so familiar. “Ninety-two Corolla, four door deluxe, sun roof, Desert Sand. How's the car running?”

“Amazing,” she says. Now she remembers that he'd seemed out of place at the car dealership as well. Too polite and soft-spoken to be a salesman. He sold her the car two years ago, and he remembers her name? The colour of the paint? “You have some memory.” Trying hard to recall his name.

“Jake Peters.” He sticks out his hand, and when she extends hers, instead of shaking it, he holds it in his warm grip. “The memory is the secret to my success as a salesman.” A grimace. “I've been trying for ten years to find a better way to use this gift, but I guess I'm stuck in the rut.”

Ah, the career rut. Even with summer stretching ahead of her, Louise is anticipating the blue funk that will wash over the whole month of August as she thinks about going back to the classroom. “I know all about it,” she says. “I never thought I'd spend a lifetime teaching, but I seem headed in that direction.”

“What did you imagine yourself doing instead?” he asks, and steers her by the elbow to a place at the bar.

She imagines herself married, raising a family. Now there's a good line for picking up a guy in a bar. “Anything but,” Louise says. She looks back at the teachers. Surely someone will have noticed. Is there anyone less likely in the room to be hit on by this totally presentable man than Louise Kernan? She glances at his hands where he's conveniently rested them on the bar. Gold band on his ring finger, right hand. She felt it there when he held her hand. Nothing on the left.

“Not married,” he says. She has no finesse at this game. “I lost my wife two years ago.”

A widower? The word sounds archaic, but so does “lost” in reference to a spouse. Unless he means he's lost her in some other way. “I'm sorry,” Louise says. “That must have been terribly hard.”

The bartender is waiting for them to order. “I don't think I can handle any more Coke,” Jake says. “How about you?”

Louise shakes her head. “I was ready to leave before the ice cubes in the first glassful melted.”

Jake slaps his palms down on the counter. “I'll take you home, but how about we find a good cup of coffee somewhere first?” The bartender shrugs and moves on.

Coffee? No more caffeine. Louise wants to sleep away the first day of summer holidays. She wonders how Jake feels about herbal tea. “Your friends aren't counting on you to drive?”

“Heck no. I almost never come out with them. We're celebrating a promotion and I think everyone came because they're glad to be getting rid of the guy. How they get home is their problem.”

Louise stops at the teachers' table to collect her jacket, says she's run into an old friend, and the party doesn't seem to miss a beat as she walks away.

At Tim Horton's, over Jake's chicken sandwich and three refills of coffee, he talks and Louise sips weak tea and listens. Married fourteen years ago, one son, who'll be twelve years old in another month. His wife diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and dead six months later. Jake lifts the bread on the sandwich and gives the chicken a liberal salting. The last two years have been tough, but he's beginning to feel the ground under his feet again. No, Louise decides, Jake Peters is not like the men in her family—except for the salting. Not one of them would have opened up to a stranger in this way. Jake is treating her like someone he's known for years. Like a cousin, or an old school friend. The way, Louise thinks with resignation, men always treat her.

“I guess,” she says, “your wife was still alive then, when I bought my car.” God, that sounded so cold. And irrelevant. What did the buying of a car have to do with the dying of a wife?

“I think,” Jake says, “the day you came in was my first day back at work. Maybe that's why I remember you so well. I went home that afternoon right after we closed the deal. I decided one gentle customer, you, was all I could handle in one day.” She feels heat in her cheeks, the blotchy embarrassment that she can never control and which is not even remotely as charming as a schoolgirl's pink blush of modesty. “Your son?” she asks, to shift the attention. “Tell me about him.”

“Danny's a good kid at heart, and smart too, just not real motivated when it comes to school work, and maybe a bit rambunctious, you know what boys are like?”

The child, Daniel, is a problem at school. This Louise knows from that one sentence. The kind of child teachers roll their eyes over in the staffroom at the beginning of the year.
Who's the poor schmuck who's ended up with the Peters kid?
Still, she reminds herself, he's lost his mother, and shouldn't she give him compassionate benefit of the doubt? His teachers must have cut him some slack for at least the year after.

“We're a lot closer since his mom died,” Jake says. “I guess that's about the only good thing that's happened. Brenda always dealt with the school and the neighbours when Danny got into mischief, and I have to admit I was glad to work long hours and hope for the best. Now, I spend all my spare time with him.” He glances at his watch. “I'd better get home. My next door neighbour said she'd look in on Dan tonight, but he won't go to bed until I get back.”

When Louise looks into the tired smile of the man across the table, she sees a petulant boy superimposed. A kid daring her to make more of this encounter than a lonely man confiding to a familiar face. A one-off occasion, as most of Louise's encounters with decent men tend to be.

They pull into the parking lot at Louise's townhouse. “Aw man, I've been talking your ear off. I don't know what uncorked me tonight. Can I make it up to you by being a good listener next time?”

Next time? For once Louise is grateful for the poorly-lit parking lot. He can't see that her face has burst into flame. “I'd put you to sleep with my life story,” she says. “There's not much to tell.”

“Okay,” he says, “then we'll go dancing instead of just drinking coffee.” He brushes a wisp of hair off her cheek and tucks it behind her ear. Louise wonders if he can feel the heat from her skin. “You have the most beautiful hair,” he says. “That's how I recognized you tonight.”

Schoolteacher hair, her friends all tease her. Cut it! Go short and perky. Instead, she clings to the French braid that takes fifteen minutes every morning, the end result a plait as thick as her forearm, and still a rich brown, although she will soon have to cease plucking the white strands. Louise is not perky and a short hairdo on top of her chunky body would look ridiculous.

“I'm a terrible dancer,” she says, wishing the hand was still there, but it has dropped again as gracefully as it rose to her hair. “But I love movies.” She's astonished by her eagerness, and embarrassed too.

“Perfect,” he says, “so long as it's not
Dumb and Dumber
, or
Ace Ventura
, or
Mighty Ducks
, or anything else in that vein.”

So they make a date to see
Four Weddings and a Funeral
, Louise's suggestion, and it isn't until she closes her front door and takes a long deep breath that she realizes the very title is another gaff on her part.

Roads Back

July, 2004

I re-read the first scenes of the story, then powered-off the computer, hoping to silence Louise. My husband and I were going out for dinner with friends, and I welcomed the escape. I'd been dogged by the voices of characters before in the early stages of writing stories and had always loved the process because I'd learned that if I listened the story would find its own way onto the page. Louise was a challenge; demanding but elusive, compelling but disquieting. Instead of telling me the story herself, she seemed to expect me to tell her what was going to happen next. How could I know that? And yet, behind the image of Louise in my mind, there was sometimes a dark shadow, something she couldn't see, and I didn't want to illuminate. Power off.

So far, I knew Louise had married late and had inherited a stepson—a half-grown unruly boy named Danny. I knew that I would uproot Louise from Edmonton and transplant her to a small Alberta town. Churning underneath that small cache of information, though, was darkness I felt too cowardly to explore. So I'd been trying to confine this new story to a short piece of fiction, find an ending and let it go. I was excited about a first novel which was set to be published in the fall, 2006, and had just finished final edits. I was trying to find a home for a collection of short stories, and I did not want to get mired down in another book length project. But Louise was not going away, nor was she giving me the help I needed. I'd begun to wonder if there was another voice I was ignoring. Someone else in the story? The child?

As long as I'd been writing fiction, I'd been trying to dump the baggage I carried from my social work career. As well as the obvious professional commitment to confidentiality, I have a deep sense of privacy, and while I've been a necessary intruder in many lives, I do not feel I have the right to steal specific story material from them. The universality of the human condition is one thing, but individual stories are another. After I had children of my own, a question that haunted me in child welfare work, and especially in adoptions, was “How does someone learn to love someone else's child?” With babies it was easy, but I'd known many older children who weren't especially loveable, nor even likeable. Was that where I was going with Louise?

Ask your characters what they want, I tell my creative writing classes.

Do I want to love Danny? Of course. Is it going to happen? You like fairy tale endings?

That was all Louise would give me. So far all I had was tension between stepmother and stepson, old news.

On this particular day in July, the story had run into a brick wall. Or so it seemed to me, but when I saved the meager writing of that day, I could almost hear Louise sniff. If I hadn't muted her, I'm sure she would have told me that I was laying the bricks myself.

My husband, Robert, and I had a dinner date with long-time friends, Dave and Dorna Young. We'd already cancelled the trip to the Longview Steakhouse twice that spring because of snow. Longview is only an hour away from Calgary, but when a blizzard swoops across the Rockies, Highway 22X is as bleak as tundra. That afternoon, when thunderclouds had begun to pile up in the north, underbellies white with hail, I'd felt sure the dinner was off again. By five o'clock the only souvenirs of the storm were the shredded hostas in my garden and a few drifts of slush on the shady side of the house. The sky had been washed clean; azure silk stretched cloudless over the foothills.

For the first half of the drive from Calgary to Longview we talked about children. The Young's two children, our three; we'd been friends for more than thirty years, there was a lot to talk about. Long ago we'd fretted over toilet training, tantrums, kindergarten crises, bad teachers, bullying. Then we'd run the gauntlet of junior high and high school and the lure of drugs and booze, and will they survive? Our youngest was sixteen, Dave and Dorna's son nineteen. The older three—their daughter twenty-two, our middle son twenty-three, our daughter twenty-six—were just finishing university, still in need of propping up.

When? Robert asked. When will we get to relax? I recalled a ninety-year-old woman I'd met when I worked in a geriatric program shortly after I finished my social work degree. I'd asked about her family, and she in turn asked if I had children. Not yet, I said, but hoped to have a baby soon. Oh, the joys and the sorrows of it all, she said. My youngest of the five is sixty-five and not a day goes by that I don't worry about each one of them.

But that, I said, in reply to the groans in the car, doesn't mean we can't relax tonight.

When we stopped for gas in Turner Valley, the other three got out to stretch their legs. While I waited, Louise nudged her way into my thoughts.

Is this where I'm going? This town?

I stared across the street at a clapboard house. The windows were boarded from the inside, pieces of two-by-four nailed across the front door to keep out anyone not daunted by the sagging front porch whose first two steps had cratered. In spite of neglect, perhaps because of it, an old rugosa rose, probably a Hansa, was lush with new growth beside the step. In another two weeks, a mass of mauve-pink blooms would cover the window of what I guessed must be the master bedroom, if such a humble house had a master.

I indulged in a fantasy of buying an old house in this town, restoring it with floral wallpaper, fifty's arborite and lino in the kitchen—a weekend retreat. A fine place for writers, because if I squinted I saw ghosts—a woman on the porch, children tumbling across the patch of packed dirt at the side of a house. A man, hands on his hips, watching from a shadowy garage set diagonally on the end of the property. The overhead garage door hanging askew, probably permanently rusted into the open position. The leaves of many autumns past having drifted in to settle against layers of cardboard and rags.

Is it my house you're imagining? Don't move me into that sad place.

I rolled down my window. The air was tinged with the scent of petunias spilling out of a barrel in front of the gas pumps. A nice touch, but after the first whiff, the smell of gas prevailed.

And in the garage across the street? I mentally scuffled through the debris on the floor, imagined the smell of decay, of rotting leaves. And grease.

I closed my eyes and I was eleven years old, reading a copy of the
Edmonton Journal
my mother had hidden under a stack of
Star Weekly Weekend
magazines because she did not want me to know the gruesome details of a nearby crime. Reading about bodies hidden under layers of greasy rags and cardboard. Heart-thumpingly vivid.

When the other three came back to the car, I pointed down the street. Would a garage in a small town have a grease pit? But even as I asked the question, the empty house became just another old building, benign in the gold light of a spring evening. Why my interest in grease pits? Surely an old rose bush was more in my realm.

Did any of them remember the Cook murders, back when we were all just kids? Stettler, Alberta. Robert Raymond Cook. The whole family bludgeoned to death, bodies hidden in a grease pit in the garage.

Bludgeoned. A word that was new to my vocabulary when I was eleven years old. I remembered sitting on the back step, my mouth full of that blunt, ugly, word. But it was pictures more than words that began roiling up out of my memory now. I conjured a small clapboard bungalow, a flashy convertible, a madman rampaging through the central Alberta countryside. The eldest son of the murdered family.

The son? The son murdered the family?

I couldn't remember how the story ended. There was an escape, a recapture, and then? All this had happened more than forty years ago. Surely sometime in my adulthood there'd been a mention of Robert Raymond Cook, but if so, it had passed me by without this tweak—no, this clutching of the throat—of my memory.

Dave remembered the murder story, he said, but only vaguely. Dorna and Robert shook their heads.

For the last ten minutes of the drive I concentrated on the scenery, miles of mint green ranchland rolling toward bruise-coloured mountains. When we parked on Main Street, Longview, I vowed to douse the morbid memories and enjoy the evening. This quiet little town with its one long commercial street and scattering of possibly two dozen houses was postcard serene, and from our table next to the window we looked out at the hills, the tall grass bending always to the east.

The sons of the Moroccan family who owned the busy restaurant with its French bistro menu, country kitchen ambiance, were working that night. One in the kitchen, one waiting on tables. Before Longview, they'd owned a successful restaurant in Calgary, but had moved to this small town, this space just up the street from Ian Tyson's Navajo Mug coffee house, for the quieter life.

Could I see my children working alongside us in a family business? Working alongside each other for more than an hour without bickering and plotting their escape? Different cultures, different sense of family obligation, we agreed quietly over our dinner but not without a slightly wistful note in all our voices. And as for the safety and serenity of the small town? The members of the Cook family were bludgeoned to death in small town Alberta. Stettler.

I do remember that murder, Dave said. Hard to imagine what could provoke a son to murder his family. Hard to imagine.

Before I had children, I'd never imagined sons at all. My fantasies were of a gaggle of auburn-haired daughters, cheerful
cherubs who became tall, quick-witted girls who grew into headstrong capable women. Our daughter was born ten weeks early and grew into a petite, blonde, sweet-natured girl, then hit the crucible of junior high. I'd forgotten, repressed probably, the nastiness of grade eight girls. None of this is the stuff of fantasy. These are things from which we cannot shield our children, but our daughter survived. I made a mental note to ask her sometime, what she remembered of junior high. When our second child was born, I'd looked at the robust boy in my arms and wondered what I needed to know to raise a son. He and our third, another son, plunged me into the world of boys. My two sons and their many friends grew from puppy-dog toddlers to noisy exuberant boys and were now on the cusp of becoming men. There were times when the sheer force of their energy overwhelmed my house. There were times when I saw flashes of anger that seemed to come from a place I did not want my child to inhabit.

Ha. When you haven't had the pleasure of the first twelve years with the boy, there's a real reason to feel overwhelmed. And more.

I filed away the garage, the grease pit, bludgeoned bodies, until we were home again and I sat down, compulsively as ever, to check my email before bed. Then I “googled” the murderer, Robert Raymond Cook.

Good. Let's get down to it.

Exactly. I'm going to find out what happened and be done with it.

I don't think so.

Seven members of the Cook family were murdered in June, 1959. Robert Raymond Cook was tried twice,
convicted, lost an appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, lost a last ditch bid for a commuted sentence and was hanged at Fort Saskatchewan Provincial Gaol on November 14, 1960. He claimed the infamy, I discovered, of being the last man hanged in Alberta. Little wonder, I thought, that I'd filed the Cook case away so quickly in my young mind. Justice had been swift, the case probably old news within a year.

Aside from this thumbnail sketch on the “Great Alberta Law Cases” page of the
Alberta Online Encyclopedia
, there were few links. Three books on the subject. I jotted down the titles. Maybe the next time I was at the library…Maybe.

Leave it, I told myself. This was a gruesome story. Better to spend my time on Louise's story. The Cooks—all eight of them—had been dead for almost fifty years. There were enough new murder stories to trouble anyone's dreams.

In the morning, I blamed the several cups of coffee at the Steakhouse for my insomnia, but it was the memory of the Cook murders that had kept me awake. How much of it real, how much imagined? How much did it matter?

Oh, it matters. I have a feeling this is going to be important. To me.

Louise was right. When I sat at the computer that morning, I finally acknowledged that her story wasn't just about family dynamics, a rebellious teenaged stepson, a crisis, a resolution. There was a reason for my recall of the Cook story. Write boldly! Hadn't I given that advice to other writers? If the writing frightens you, you're finally getting somewhere?

I found myself contemplating a trip to Stettler, although that was surely not where Louise's story was set. Nor should it be necessary for me to travel around rural Alberta to get the feel of small town life. I'd lived it.