The golden boy, p.23
The Golden Boy, page 23
“You’re going to get married?”
“Yeah,” Bobby answered.
“To Carrie Ann Schwenke,” Stafford said.
“Yeah,” Bobby said again. “Why not?”
And what about us? Stafford wanted to say. What about our plans? What about going to Arabia and France and Queen’s University? What about everything we always talked about? What about you being the prime minister and saving the world and everyone in it, goddamnit? And what about Steven Truscott, Bobby? Who’s going to get him out of jail now if you don’t? Who’s going to set things right there? Jesus Christ, Bobby, he wanted to say, what’s happening to you? What is so fucking great, Bobby, he wanted to say, about an insecure girl who lets a guy do it with her just because he wants to? But mostly Stafford wanted to say, What about me, Bobby, what about me?
“I got drunk on Wolfe Island.”
Bobby Shepherd died seven months after Stafford’s father, and three months after Emmett went to jail for shooting the horse. Stafford’s mother had left by then, but she came back to Napanee when Bobby died, and it was she who moved Stafford into a Kingston boardinghouse when he refused to live any longer with his uncle Christy or go back with her to Guelph and live with the Brennans.
“The Brennans will take you in, Stafford, and you can finish high school there. Maybe you could go to university like your father wanted. They’ve got a school for veterinarians in Guelph. Why couldn’t you be a vet, Stafford? Wouldn’t that be nice? Stafford, please, please, listen to me. There’s nothing left for you here. You need to come away.”
“I got drunk and I had sex with my best friend’s girl.”
But Stafford refused to go to Guelph with his mother, so she stopped asking him and found a place for him to live in Kingston, an old house on Sydenham Street owned by a middle-aged woman who took in boarders if they were quiet. And there Stafford remained for the next three years, living alone in an upstairs room. He finished high school there by correspondence, securing marks so spectacular he was admitted to Queen’s University the following year, where he changed directions again, switching from science to philosophy midway through his second year. “Spirituality is not disincarnate,” he was warned by the professor who introduced him to Aristotle. “It is rooted in what is human.” But Stafford dismissed this, commencing instead his rise up the academic ladder, clinging to Aristotle and the rubrics of philosophy like a dying man.
And Emmett? Well, Emmett was out of the picture by then, wasn’t he? Emmett was doing two years at Collins Bay for shooting Brenda Bee Hoover. He had driven her to a win at the Belleville racetrack in front of a cheering crowd. People clapped him on the back that day. But a horse needed a farm, and the Hopkinses didn’t have one anymore. Christy would take Stafford, and he would take the horse, but he would not be taking an alcoholic nephew in his thirties who showed up with a halter and a gun one night to take the horse back.
“She’s my horse,” he said. “And I want her.”
Christy was at the door, Emmett weaving on the porch.
“Stay inside,” he said, looking at Stafford. And to Angela, “Call the police.”
Christian Hopkins was a quieter man than his older brothers. But he was yelling now, dragging Emmett by the arm away from the house, across the yard, and into the barn where a few minutes later, they heard a gunshot. Stafford was out the door then, running across the yard in bare feet, Angela screaming from the porch.
The stall door was open, and Brenda Bee was lying on her side, flailing wildly, bleeding from a wound in her shoulder. Stafford pushed past Emmett who stood like a man in a trance, the gun on the floor next to the stall.
“It was an accident,” he said when he saw his brother.
“Give me the gun, Stafford,” Christy said, his voice so quiet it seemed he hadn’t spoken at all. And easing himself into the stall, he knelt down next to the little mare. “Hurry now. She’s in pain. You’ll have to hold her down. Put your knee on her neck.”
But Stafford didn’t have the physical strength to pin down a dying horse, so Christy held the horse steady, and it was Stafford who fired the bullet that euthanized Brenda Bee Hoover.
There were sirens in the distance when Stafford and Christy left Emmett in the barn, and Stafford often wondered if Christy knew they had left the gun behind. But even then, Emmett failed—shooting himself in the head but missing the mark necessary to finish the job.
“I got drunk at a dance on Wolfe Island and had sex with my best friend’s girl.”
“Mister, maybe you should be telling the Father this story.”
“We were all drinking. It wasn’t just me.”
“Mister.”
“I didn’t want to lose him. I wanted to break them up.”
“Okay, maybe we should stop here.”
“And I did. I was successful. I broke them up. I took his girl for a walk outside when he wasn’t looking. I told her how pretty she was. She was cold so I took off my jacket.”
“Mister, I’m just the caretaker here.”
“And when he couldn’t find us, he came looking for us. And he found us.”
“Oh boy.”
“He didn’t say anything. He just looked at me and—”
“What?”
“He started to cry. And then he left.”
“Well, no wonder.”
“We thought he’d gone back to the dance, but when we went to find him, he wasn’t there, so everybody started looking for him and that’s when we saw he’d gone back down to the lake and started across the ice back to Kingston.”
“Mister, this is no good.”
“I went after him, and I went through the ice. Everyone was yelling. I heard them yelling.”
“Oh boy.”
“And that’s when the ice broke. There was a current there and it was pulling me sideways under the ice. I put my hands up, trying to push through, to break the ice, but I couldn’t, and I started—”
“What? You started what?”
“Sinking.”
“Well, don’t stop now, mister—what the hell, excuse me, what happened next?”
“What?”
“Who saved you? Who got you out?”
“Christy. My uncle. He came for me just like he said he would. He broke the ice all around me and he pulled me out—”
“You were real lucky, mister. Some aren’t so lucky. I knew a boy went through off Howe Island, only he—”
“—and then he went after Bobby. The ice was okay farther out. You just had to get past the point. But it was cold, and then it was snowing and there were no tracks.”
“Mister, please—you don’t want to break down like this. It isn’t right.”
“They found him the next morning. He wasn’t in the harbor. He was on the lake. He was on the ice. His father found him.”
CHAPTER 20
Pursuit
It is well said, then, that it is by doing just acts that the just man is produced.
—Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
ROGER NULAND HAD NOT been a very successful lawyer, but he was content with the opportunities that had come his way and content that he had done his best.
He was sixty-four years old for starters, and that alone was significant. Many in his condition had not lasted nearly as long. Hell, most of the guys he went to law school with—the so-called normal guys—hadn’t lasted that long either. They were pretty much retired now. Wealthy if they stayed married to the first wife. Broke if they didn’t. It was, however, getting harder to function physically, and Roger had very nearly turned down the Shepherds when they came to him seeking legal counsel. The truth was, he didn’t want any new clients. He had just enough work to keep him going one last year and it came at a pace he could still handle. New clients meant new responsibilities, and he wasn’t sure he had the strength to meet them. The problem was, Roger liked the family.
Donny and Marilyn Shepherd were two good people in their early forties. They were happy with each other and their big family—proud of their three boys and thrilled with that little girl. Struggling a bit financially? Sure. Worried about money? Of course they were. But they were managing all right. They were getting by like most people get by. They were worried, though, worried because there weren’t any relatives on either side to take their kids in if something happened to them.
Donny Shepherd, well, he was an orphan, plain and simple. Raised by his grandparents the first part of his life, fostered out after they died. Nobody seemed to know anything much about his mother. The birth mother, that is. It was the usual story, though. A teenager, pregnant and alone. She gave Donny up for adoption to his grandparents, Andrew and Susan Shepherd, and moved away. No contact there. No contact wanted. Apparently, there’d been some tragedy involving Donny’s father before Donny was born. Roger’s wife knew a bit about it, but no more than anyone else. It was probably the right decision on the young mother’s part, although a little boy raised by a couple of old-timers on some backwoods farm didn’t sound like the best kind of childhood to Roger. Still, Donny spoke very fondly of his grandparents and that said something. Said a lot, in fact.
And Marilyn’s family? Well, that was a different kind of trouble, wasn’t it? They were just plain hopeless. Small-town misery on a small-town scale. Her dad dead from lung cancer. The mother screaming it out in a nursing home. A cousin in Tamworth. He was a charmer. Welfare fraud and grow-ops. But there was no point in dwelling on any of that. There are always people willing to waste their lives. That would never change. The main problem facing Donny and Marilyn Shepherd ergo Roger Nuland, Barrister & Solicitor, was how best to legally address concerns that there weren’t an awful lot of people lining up to take on four children in the unlikely event and so forth. If Donald Junior were just a little older, they could put him in charge, but fourteen was too young for legal emancipation and they would need an interim guardian for a few years in the meantime.
So Donny Shepherd came up with an idea about some friend of his late father’s. This Stafford Hopkins fellow. Donny seemed to know a lot about him—his childhood, a big career in the TV business, the family background, and so forth. Donny had all kinds of pictures, newspaper articles, scrapbooks, and stories—oh, he had the stories all right. Stories his grandparents told him about his dad and this Hopkins fellow when they were boys. Best friends, apparently. Closer than brothers and so forth. Well, it sounded like a possibility, but there had to be some discussion with the man himself. I mean, you couldn’t just write down the Queen of England in your will and expect her to pop over and pick up your kids in between foxhunts. There had to be some tacit agreement that the guardian named would, in fact, accept. And that’s where it all got a bit messy, because it was impossible to get hold of Stafford bloody Hopkins. The man didn’t take phone calls. He didn’t have an email address. He didn’t respond to messages delivered secondhand, thirdhand, any hand at all really, and there was nobody at any of the studios the man had been so famously associated with who could—or would—provide even so much as a post office box number. It seemed the man lived in three or four different places, traveled extensively, and didn’t, well—he just didn’t take phone calls. He may have made a few from time to time but he certainly didn’t take them.
Check, Mr. Nuland.
But Roger was a determined man, no less determined than Donny Shepherd who suggested they name Stafford Hopkins as interim guardian in the interim document that would serve as the Shepherds’ will in the unlikely event and so forth. They would at least have a preliminary document in place, and that would serve in some legal capacity, wouldn’t it? Stafford Hopkins was, Donny insisted, his late father’s closest friend. Donny’s grandparents had talked about the friendship between Donny’s dad and Stafford Hopkins until the day they died. They were closer than brothers, his grandmother said. Two peas in a pod, his grandfather said. Surely Stafford Hopkins would care about the fate of his best friend’s grandchildren in the unlikely event and so forth. Just put Stafford Hopkins down for now, Donny said, and we’ll track him down later.
Except there wasn’t any later. Only the sudden, awful news that two nice people had gone grocery shopping on New Year’s Eve and been hit broadside by a truck pushing its luck against a yellow light.
Things got busy then for Roger Nuland, Barrister & Solicitor. Neighbors and friends stepped in immediately, of course, with food and funeral arrangements. Marilyn’s useless cousin arrived and did everyone a favor by leaving again soon after, when he heard he wasn’t in the will. The documents were all rounded up—the birth certificates, a marriage license, baptismal documents, school records, bank accounts, and a couple of modest life insurance policies.
And the kids? Well, they were assigned a public guardian and trustee, no choice about that, while Roger Nuland did what he’d promised Donny Shepherd he’d do—track down Stafford bloody Hopkins, come hell or high water, and force the man to accept or decline the legal interim guardianship of Donny and Marilyn Shepherd’s four children.
It had been the letter that did it. An old-fashioned letter sent to the Canadian consulate in Honolulu. It seemed Mr. Hopkins had retained his Canadian citizenship despite his great fame as an American television executive, and with the new protective security measures in place after 9/11, he—like everyone else who didn’t hold a US passport—had been required to register his place of residence with the Canadian consulate in Honolulu. Roger’s letter, thus received by the Canadian consulate, was duly sent on to Stafford’s Maui address, where it slid through the secured mail slot on the wall of an outside courtyard in an elegant, gated community, along with the usual bills and bank statements, the industry magazines, and the junk mail.
Check, Mr. Hopkins.
But no, the man said, when he finally called Roger back. No, he would not accept guardianship, interim or otherwise, of the Shepherd children. He neither knew them nor wished to meet them. The relationship with their grandfather was “ancient history” and no longer “relevant,” he said. Still, he was prepared to provide the children with some degree of financial security by way of honoring what had once been “an association” with the Shepherd family. He would therefore come to Napanee himself, the man said, and address the legal issues involved in establishing trust funds for the four Shepherd children.
Check, Mr. Nuland.
“The man’s an ice cube,” Roger said to his wife after that first and only telephone call. “He’s all set to organize bank accounts so long as he doesn’t have to meet the kids. I don’t get that.”
“Well, it’s kind of out of the blue, don’t you think?” his wife said. “I mean, he’s sitting there sunning his toes on Maui and gets a letter from you asking him to raise four kids.”
“Maybe,” Roger said. “But that doesn’t explain the coldness. Was he always like that?”
“More like shy, I’d say. He talked to Donny’s father, though. He never said much to the rest of us. They were real tight, those two.”
“That’s what Donny said.”
“So maybe you won’t remember what he said?”
“Donny?”
“No, dear. Stafford.”
“About?”
“About meeting the children. You said he said he didn’t want to meet them.”
“What are you getting at, Tam?”
“Well, if a picture’s worth a thousand words, dearest, what’s the going rate for the face of an Ontario orphan?”
“Oh, you are a clever girl, aren’t you?”
“Come over here, Roger. Come closer to me. Let me rub your feet while you think.”
Roger adored his wife. She was a big, smart girl who talked too much. She bossed him around and told him off when he watched sports on TV. She complained when he snored, and she didn’t like the way he let the newspapers pile up on his side of the bed. In short, she treated him like a normal guy. A regular husband with plenty of room for improvement.
He had come to Napanee looking for someone like her more than thirty years earlier, but the fact that he’d found her remained a source of astonishment to him. He was still a young lawyer then, a young lawyer with cerebral palsy who looked a whole lot better on paper than he did in person. There had been a lot of talk about the rights of people with disabilities in Roger’s day, but not enough to alter the fact that every third-rate legal hack in Toronto who could eat soup properly in a restaurant would always have the jump on a guy like Roger. Roger and soup—well, that was another matter. His right side was pretty good—more cooperative than his left—but it was still no joy to watch him struggle through a meal in public. He knew he was a better lawyer than most. Certainly smarter. But the big guns at the Bay Street firm who hired him as their token loser? They didn’t want the office joke at their breakfast meetings or any of the endless quasi-social events that substituted for legal insight, and any of Roger’s efforts to participate had been social disasters. The truth was, Roger Nuland was too clumsy and too odd looking for Bay Street. And his speech, while pretty good for a guy with CP—well, it deteriorated quickly when he was nervous or tired, at which point he sounded like a duck with a stroke. And there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.
So he’d gotten out early, answering an ad for a second lawyer at a one-man firm in Napanee. It was an advertisement posted by an elderly lawyer who had, Roger discovered, the rudest legal secretary he had ever met in his life. Well, poor old Tam. She got her comeuppance later, he said, when she fell in love with the little frog.
“Don’t you question my taste in men, Roger Nuland,” she snapped. “I didn’t settle for a frog!”
At sixty-four, however, Roger was feeling increasingly froglike. He’d managed on braces for most of his life, but the wear and tear on his joints and the increase in pressure sores and skin breakdown along his forearms and at his elbows had put him into a wheelchair at last. He knew he was losing bone and muscle mass more rapidly now, and he was beginning to suffer a marked increase in bowel and bladder problems—all perfectly normal for an old guy with CP but no less embarrassing. But somehow he knew he had to see the Shepherds’ wishes carried out, and if he could do that without causing the children any further distress, he would have the satisfaction of believing, finally, that he really was the prince dear old Tam always said he was.
