Peter Kirby - The Dead of Winter

“I’m sure that’s not true,” said Vanier.

“Oh, she loves me, in her own way, but she thinks that I’ve wasted my life.”

“And what do you think?”

The priest looked up at Vanier, but didn’t answer.

“So how long did you stay?”

“They had guests, and I saw I was holding them back. My presence seemed to remind them of what Christmas was supposed to be. I was making everyone uncomfortable. So I stayed for an hour, perhaps an hour and a half, and then I left. I drove back to town and parked at the Cathedral.”

“So what time did you get back to the Cathedral?”

“Around 5.30, maybe six o’clock, I suppose. But I didn’t want to go in. I decided to go for a walk. Around Old Montreal mostly, it was beautiful, very quiet and peaceful. There was hardly any traffic. Walking through the old streets I felt that I was back in a Quebec of the past. In a Quebec that still believed in Christ. It was comforting.” The priest drifted off, remembering his walk, Vanier waited for him to come back.

“So what did you want to see me about, Inspector?”

“I am investigating the deaths of five homeless people on Christmas Eve. Your name came up as someone who might know the victims.”

“I’ve seen the newspapers. You think they were killed, Inspector?”

“I didn’t say that. Right now, I don’t think anything. I just want to find out who these people were. We’ve got their names, but we don’t know anything about them. I thought you could give us some information about who they were.”

Vanier sat back into the chair like someone with nowhere to go, but desperately in need of a rest. He stared at the wall, giving Drouin room to talk.

Drouin waited.

Vanier barely stirred. “I’m tired. Maybe it’s the season,” he said, almost to himself. “This time of the year is difficult for many people, isn’t it, Father?”

Drouin was lost in thought and didn’t respond immediately. Finally he said, “It should be a time of rejoicing.”

“I haven’t been rejoicing. You know what I have been doing? I’ve been pulling corpses out of holes. At this time of year, who wants to do that? But you know what keeps me going? These people were daughters and sons, maybe sisters or brothers. Maybe they even had children, grown children. Grown children celebrating Christmas in their own families while their mother or father slept on the street. Did anyone spend a few seconds this Christmas wondering where any of these people were? Christmas is a time for families isn’t it, Father Drouin? No matter how dysfunctional. And yet they all died alone. I suppose that’s what hit me the most. Five deaths in one night, and they all died alone. That shouldn’t happen at Christmas.”

Vanier sat up and pulled the pack of photographs out of the envelope. He laid each of them out on the table in front of Drouin.

“Do you recognize any of these people?”

Drouin leaned over and examined each photo carefully. “Yes, Inspector. I know all of them.” He began pointing to each photograph. “Celine, Joe Yeoman, Madame Latendresse, Pierre Brun, and George Morissette. They were all what we call clients. I ministered to them. It’s hard to believe they are all dead in one night.”

“You don’t seem shocked.”

“I am beyond shock, Inspector. When I saw the reports in the newspapers I knew that I would probably know some of them. I don’t know what’s happening. I have to believe that God is at work. But He knows so many ways to test us poor humans.”

Vanier pulled a pen out of his pocket and began writing as Drouin talked, scribbling bits and pieces of information of the lives of the unknown. Even though the interview was being taped, he felt compelled to take notes, to write things down. Scribbling scraps of information in an effort to create individuals where before there had been only empty space, to make people out of corpses.

Laurent watched through the two-way mirror as Drouin released every scrap of information he had on the five. Vanier slouched in his chair but he was listening intently, for similarities and for differences, to hear what connected them, other than their common status at the bottom of the pile. Drouin talked of people who used drugs and alcohol to feel nothing, and of the more effective disconnection of mental illness. He talked of diets of hostel meals and rotten food scavenged from dumpsters at the back of restaurants, clothes picked from piles of cast-offs with nothing ever fitting or doing the job of keeping you warm or your feet dry. And he talked of the terror of street life in the winter, when the choice was between a quiet, dark corner where you might never wake up or a single bed in a warehouse of coughing, ranting, fighting, and crying outcasts like yourself. Each of the victims was a walking encyclopedia of medical disorders: scabs and sores that never healed on the outside, and fevers, diseases, and delusions that ate away the inside.

Drouin’s streets were full of thieves, con men, liars, murderers, and bullies, people who were by turn predators and victims, depending on circumstances and opportunity. Alcoholics who craved nothing but a deadening slumber. Young girls taking their first hit in a desperate search for happiness. And end-of-the-road junkies secretly hoping the next trip would be their last. Men, women and children selling their bodies because that was all they had left to sell. Children running from abuse. The depressed, the schizophrenics, the paranoid, the delusional who don’t know what planet they’re on, and the just plain unlucky souls life has decided to torture. A population of modern-day Jobs, invisible to all, including Vanier.

He learned about the individuals.

Pierre Brun, who appeared every winter and disappeared again in the late spring, nobody knew where. Some said to a farm in the country, others that he walked to the Maritimes and back. He never said. He just disappeared every June to reappear in October. Nobody remembers seeing Brun in Montreal in the summer.

The completely and irredeemably mad Madame Latendresse, who had more interaction with the voices in her head in one hour than she had in a week with any human. If you got her to speak, she was disappointed to have been dragged away from her imaginary friends and impatient to return to them.

Celine Plante, an alcoholic prostitute who knew nothing but life on the street from the time she was 12 years old. When Vanier suggested that, given her state, she might have been a former prostitute, Drouin disagreed; there was always a market, no matter how rotten the fruit. From time to time she would show up at the various missions and shelters, and most times she would be refused because she was drunk. She worried about her diminishing client base but couldn’t imagine any way out.

George Morissette, a notary whose wife and only child died 30 years ago in a fire in their cottage up north. That was at the end of the summer he had skipped cleaning the chimney to save $50. He had spent thirty years dying with them. It took him twenty years to descend from notary to bum, but he had managed it with the help of the bottle and a broken spirit. It took ten years to descend from bum to corpse.

Finally, there was Joe Yeoman, a Mohawk whose life was a progression in and out of prison; who used anything, drugs, alcohol, sex, or violence, to numb whatever pain he felt.

“Father Drouin, can you think of a link between these five people? A person, maybe, or even a place? Did they know one another?”

“Inspector, the homeless live in a small world. They know everyone in their brutal village. Their world is so small that what connects them is trivial compared to what keeps them separate. All paths cross. From what I read in the papers, these people were found where they were sleeping for the night. It may be hard for you to imagine, Inspector, but if you have a place to sleep for the night, you have a sanctuary. These people were found dead in their sanctuaries. For people like this, a place where you can be alone and safe is a prize, and there are only a limited number of such places in any city. What the human spirit needs, even the homeless, is privacy. When you go home at night and close your door, I assume you can be alone, even when you live with someone you love. Imagine never being able to do that. Imagine never having a private moment. That’s why for some lucky ones, there is a secret place where they can stay warm and unmolested for a whole night, perhaps longer. When a street person finds such a place, it must be protected. It must be approached with caution, for fear that others will discover it. Imagine, Inspector, if you haven’t slept warmly or with any privacy for months, what it would mean to find one space where you could lie down and sleep undisturbed for an entire night. It would be a dream. These people seemed to have found their private space. Where they were found may have been their sanctuary.