William Murphy, Jr. was 21 years old the day the Marco Polo was run aground by its captain at Cavendish. She was a three-masted three-deck clipper ship built at Marsh Creek in Saint John, New Brunswick 32 years earlier. During its construction the frame got loose in a storm and was blown all over the shipyard. The skeleton had to be reassembled. After the shipbuilding was done the launch didn’t go well. The boat grazed the bank of the creek while sliding down the slipway, got stuck in a mudflat, and went over on her side. A week later a high tide lifted her up, but she got stuck in the mud again. Two weeks later she finally floated free and was fitted with rigging.

   The big boat carried emigrant men and women from England to Australia for many years. She set the world’s record for the fastest voyage from Liverpool to Melbourne, doing it in 76 days. More than fifty children died of measles on her maiden voyage and were buried at sea. Coming back, she carried a king’s ransom in gold dust and a 340-ounce gold nugget. The nugget was a gift to Queen Victoria from the colonial government, although she wasn’t able  to pull rank and keep it under her mattress. Pulling into its home port, the ship unfurled a banner claiming it was the “Fastest Ship in the World.” Men with swords and guns were waiting.

   The gold dust and the big nugget were delivered to London by a fast coach guarded by a company of the King’s Men. There wasn’t going to be any Great Coach Robbery. They unloaded it at the Bank of England. One man after another carried the loot inside and stashed it in the vault. When they were done they locked it up tight and posted a sign saying, “Keep Out.”

   During the gold rush the ship carried loads of standing room only men to Australia. Nobody died of measles, although some of them died of bad moonshine and fights. Fire is the test of gold. Many of the men died of typhus, what they called ship fever, burning up in their hammocks in the South Atlantic Ocean, Indian Ocean, and Tasman Sea. Many of the original settlers laying claim to aboriginal land, the oldest, flattest, and driest inhabited continent with the least fertile soil anywhere, got there on the Marco Polo. 

   When she was retired from the passenger trade, she was refitted for the coal, timber, and bat shit trade. The hull was rotting and wasting away. Chains were wrapped around it and drawn tight trying to keep it together. A windmill-driven pump was installed to send leaks back where they were coming from.

   It was a late July morning, clear sunny warm after the storm that had driven the ship to Cavendish. Bill Murphy was in the dunes watching the crew wade ashore. They had been on the way from Montreal to England loaded with pine planks when they got caught in a gale. They plowed ahead but started to take on water. Two days later wind and waves were still pommeling them, and they were still taking on water. The ship was flooding from stem to stern and the hands couldn’t plug the leaks fast enough. The windmill blew away and the pumps gave a last gasp. Captain P. A. Bull decided to save the crew and cargo. He put the clipper into full sail and wheeled it straight at Cavendish’s sandy beaches.

   The closer they got the better their chances looked until, three hundred feet from shore, he ordered the rigging cut. The masts groaned wanting to snap and the bottom of the boat scraped the bottom. Everybody stayed where they were, staying awake all night, until dawn when the storm finally wore itself out and they rowed ashore. T

   Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote, “The crew, consisting of 25 men, found boarding places among the settlement and contrived to keep the neighborhood in perpetual uproar They were lively times for Cavendish The crew consisted of Norwegians, Swedes, Spaniards, Germans, and a Tahitian.” They were rollicking tough men. It was the beginning of the Tahitian’s second sea voyage. He was barely half-tough but looked tougher than he was. He was speckled with tattoos and wore his hair in long braids tied up at their ends with small fishhooks.

   Lucy was a pale slim 8-year-old girl, her long crimson hair in braids with choppy bangs, when she and everybody else in Cavendish watched the crew abandon the boat. She wore a white flower hairpiece on one side of her head and took notes on scraps of paper. Nine years later her short story “The Wreck of the Marco Polo” was published. Sixteen years after that her book “Anne of Green Gables” was published.

   Bill Murphy was hired by the salvage company stripping the boat. It was welcome work before harvest time. As soon as they started on the grounded vessel, another storm rolled in. Bill was on the boat and had to stay where he was. Trying for the shore was too dangerous. They battened whatever hatches were still left and spent the night being battered. Captain Macleod from French River showed up the next morning. The wind beat him back the first time he tried to reach the Marco Polo, but he made it the second time, saving all the men except one. He and his shipmates got gold watches for their courage. Bill went home wet as a wet dog.

   He didn’t go home empty-handed, though. There were twin figureheads of Marco Polo, depicting the boat’s namesake, spearheading the boat. A man from Long River hauled one of them away and hung it in his barn. Bill hauled the other one away and hung it in his barn. It was the end of the road for the far-ranging ship.

   Bill was back on the boat two days later as the salvage work went apace. He was taking a break on the poop deck leaning against a gunwale above the captain’s cabin when a young dark-skinned man joined him.

   “I am Teva the Tahitian,” he said. “We are dead in the water.”

   “I am Bill the Murphy,” Bill said. “You are copper-bottomed now.”

   Teva was the only one of the crew who signed on to help salvage the ship. The rest of them stayed in Cavendish drinking and chasing farmgirls. The Tahitian and the Irishman worked together for the rest of the week and into August. Teva told Bill he was putting his purse together to get to Maine and sign on as a whaler.

   “My grandfather Queequeg was a harpooner,” he said. “He was the best in the world. You could spit on the water, and he could split your floating spit from the deck with one throw. He shaved with his harpoon and smoked from a tomahawk. He was a cannibal, but his favorite food was clam chowder.”

   “He was a cannibal?” Bill asked, taken aback. 

   “Him, not me,” Teva said. “I don’t eat my own kind. I never met him, but my father told me about him before he went whaling. He never came back, either.”

   “They both went to sea and never came back?”

   “Both, never. A friend of my grandfather’s stopped on our island when I was a boy and told us about what happened to him. He was a white man. His name was Ishmael. He and grandfather sailed and slept together.”

   “Slept together?”

   “In the morning his arm was thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner,” Ishmael said. “You had almost thought I had been his wife. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian, I always say.”

   Teva asked the white man sailor what his grandfather had been like, what he was about.

   “There was no hair on his head, nothing but a small scalp-knot twisted up on his forehead, large, deep eyes, fiery black and bold. He looked like a man who had never cringed and never had a creditor. His bald purplish head looked for all the world like a mildewed skull. His body was checkered with tattoo squares. He seemed to have been in a war, and just escaped from it with a sticking-plaster shirt. Still more, his legs were marked, as if dark green frogs were running up the trunks of young palms.”

   Teva lapped up water from a barrel with his hands, gulped, and spat on the deck.

   “Grandfather saved Ishmael’s life when their ship was head-butted by a white whale they were hunting. The coffin they had built for him when he was dying during the hunt was thrown overboard and Ishmael hung on to it like a buoy. He was the only sailor who survived when Captain Ahab the crew my grandfather and the Pequod all sank to the bottom.”

   “Since your father and grandfather both went whaling and never came back, why are you going southways to take up whaling?” Bill asked

   “It’s in my blood,” Teva said. “There will be blood, our kind says.”

   Every day when the day was fair and the sun shining families picnicked on the beach at Cavendish, watching launches with two-masted ketch rigs go back and forth, taking what they could to Alexander MacNeill’s for auction. It was a Sunday when Sinbad the Sailor walked up to Bill Murphy, looked him up and down, and meowed. “They say our boat had no rats the whole last year,” Teva said. “This cat drove them off and those who thought they could stand up to him, they disappeared.” Teva tossed a piece of salt pork at Sinbad, who snagged it midair and gulped it down.

   Sinbad was a two-tone Norwegian Forest cat. “One of the Vikings brought him aboard,” Teva said.

   Sinbad was a twenty-pound bruiser with long legs and a bushy tail. His coat was a thick, glossy, water-repellent top layer with a woolly undercoat. It was thickest at the legs, chest, and head. His ears were large, tufted, wide at the base, and high set.

   “He’s a good climber, very strong,” Teva said. “He can climb rocks and cliffs.” When he leaned on Bill and reached up stretching flexing his front legs, his claws extended themselves slightly. They were sharp as razors. Bill rubbed Sinbad’s head. 

   “He’s big enough to be a man-eater,” Bill said. “What’s going to happen to him when our work is finished?”

   “I don’t know,” Teva said. “The Viking left him behind.”

   That evening, when Bill was walking back to the rude shelter he had thrown up for himself behind the dunes, Sinbad followed him. Bill put a bowl of fresh water out for the cat but left breakfast lunch dinner up to him. He was sure Sinbad was not going to starve. He was a vole shrew deer mouse snowshoe hare red-bellied snake widow maker. Even racoons, coyotes, and foxes gave him a wide berth.

   Sinbad went back and forth to the boat with Bill the rest of the month and the next month while the vessel fell apart piece by piece until a thunderstorm barreled up from the United States. The ship broke up along the coast, going down to the bottom of the sea. It was the end of the Marco Polo. 

   When Bill packed up his bedroll and shelter and walked home, Sinbad walked beside him the five miles back to Murphy’s Cove and North Rustico. Biddy and Kate were shucking oysters on the porch, a pot at their feet. The oysters were from Malpeque Bay. Hundreds of boats were in the fishery there and at St. Peter’s Bay. Until the 1830s oysters were plentiful but few people ate them. They were spread over land as fertilizer. The shells were burned, too, for the lime they produced.

   After the Intercolonial Railway got rolling in 1876 new markets for Prince Edward Island oysters opened in Quebec and Ontario. But oyster stocks started to fall and kept falling as more boats joined the harvesting. Oysters fled for their lives. They didn’t like being eaten alive. Biddy and Kate didn’t give much thought to overfishing or the deep-seated fears of shellfish, so long as they got their fair share.

   “Oh my gosh, what a beauty!” Kate exclaimed when Bill walked up to the porch with Sinbad beside him. 

   “He landed here on the Marco Polo,” Bill explained. “The ship broke up yesterday in the storm and he needed a new home, so here he is.”

   Sinbad walked straight past the girls to the pot and started pulling oysters out, gulping them down without a single word of hello.

   “Hey, stop that,” Biddy scolded, covering the pot. “You’ll ruin your appetite, silly goose.”

   Sinbad’s ears pricked up. He had taken goose for dinner last Christmas, and it was delicious. He shot a look in all directions. He didn’t see any birds, but had no doubt there had to be one or two somewhere nearby. He was by nature a nomad, but as there was a pot full of oysters and silly slow geese to eat, he thought, I’ll stay for the time being.

   He was a back door man, but when the front door was wide open, that was the door he went through. God might or might not still believe in destiny, but he was only a cat and didn’t know anything about the divine. He didn’t believe in the garden path, but when there was an easy way of doing things, that was always the way he took.

   Aksel was a Norwegian rat, although it would have been a matter of contention if anybody told him that. He thought he was a Norman rat since his forebears had come to the New World aboard a French ship that sailed from Bayeaux long ago. It had been more than a hundred generations of his family saga ago. He had no idea about Norwegians. He didn’t even know where Norway was.

   He knew where Rolling’s Pond was. He  didn’t know he was on Prince Edward Island. He had no idea he was on the North American continent, although if he had known it wouldn’t have mattered. Home is where the heart is. The pond was where he spent most of his time. During the day he slept in the basement of the Stella Maris church. He didn’t own anything, not even a fork, knife, or bedroll, but it was cozy. He stored food there and had a nest of straw and a small pillow.

   He wasn’t a farmer, instead foraging for food. He went gleaning far and wide. He ate anything and everything. He thought he had probably eaten thousands of different foods in his lifetime.. He ate any discarded human food he came across as well as all crops from all fields. He ate all the time, snacking on whatever came his way. Some people said he was a glutton. He preyed on lizards, chicks, and other rodents. He caught fish on Fridays. The pond had all the fresh water he wanted.

   His mother had let it slip one day that their kind lived about two or three years. His eyesight wasn’t going bad. It had always been bad. He needed glasses. He was colorblind, too. His other senses, smell taste touch and hearing, were outstanding. He wasn’t especially agile, but he could run jump climb and swim enough to keep life and limb together. He used his face whiskers to feel the world around him. He could wiggle each one of them individually, unlike cats like Snaps from Murphy’s Cove who were always messing with him. He and Snaps were going to have it out one day. The beast was forever laying low for him. He had to find a way to neutralize the cat’s claws, which were razor sharp and deadly. He had the scars to prove it. 

   Except for Snaps, cats rarely bothered Aksel. He was too big and nasty for most of them, feral or otherwise. Snaps was on a different order of things. He was a dangerous son-of-a-gun. They were a stop-and-go dance in the dark  When Aksel stopped the cat stopped. When he started up again the cat was on his heels again, intent stealthy menacing.

   Nobody ever called Aksel by his name. Instead, they called him sewer rat, wharf rat, and street rat. Some called him Hanover rat and Parisian rat. He didn’t like it whenever he was called a dirty rat. He was fastidiously clean. He washed and groomed himself ten times a day. He was a brown rat with a white underside. He was big boy, his body length almost a foot long with a tail slightly shorter than a foot. All he had to do was smile and wiggle his tail at passersby to make them jump.

   One day he met one of his kind in the dumpster behind the Co-op next to Amanda’s. After giving each other the secret handshake, after which both rats were sure the other one was legit, they gossiped while they ate. His new-found friend, it turns out, had come off a cruise ship in Charlottetown, gone on a self-guided tour, been late getting back, and was now stranded until the next boat rolled in.

   “I can hi-jack myself on to any boat,” he said. “You know those big round things they attach to mooring lines, what they call rat guards, and they coat them with grease? I suck up the grease. I spit it out over my shoulder when I go over the rat guard.”

   Cruise ships had been coming to Charlottetown since just after the turn of the century, pulling into port to hearty welcomes. They let loose hundreds sometimes thousands of tourists all at once to eat drink lick ice cream stretch their legs see the sights and buy “Anne of Green Gables” dolls and effigies.

   It was after midnight when Aksel and Your Yeoman Purser, what his  friend called himself, went their separate ways. “I know I’m just a rat and a mug, to boot, but I have got to say this place here is something else, just beautiful, and everywhere I look there is food.”

   Aksel was more nocturnal than not, so when Bernie Doiron found the woman dead in the ground on the other side of the hill from Rolling’s Pond and every cop car, ambulance, and fire truck in the land descended on his landscape, the noise that morning woke him up. He had just fallen asleep. He coughed and cleared his throat, blinking. He was curious and made his way the back way to the top edge of the field where it was all happening to see what was going on.

   Aksel had a love hate relationship with human beings. On the one hand, he preferred living near them since they were a rat’s number one fast food outlet. On the other hand, they were always trying to kill him. They were always checking his droppings and tracking him by them. They were always putting out traps and bait stations. Whenever they found his nest they gassed it. He was cautious. He knew full well what glue boards and snap traps were about. It didn’t matter if they were baited with his favorite fish and cereals. He gave them a wide berth.

   “My mama didn’t raise no fool,” he grumbled to himself.

   He saw what Bernie had seen and what the cops were seeing. It was an arm that had been chopped off. He guessed the rest was still in the ground. It looked like they were digging her up, although why was beyond him. He knew they weren’t going to eat her, so what was the point? What human beings did baffled him more often than not. 

   Aksel quickly lost interest. There wasn’t going to be a free meal in it for him anytime soon unless somebody dropped some food. That was something else that puzzled him. They seemed to not want to pick up food they had dropped. In his world no rat did that. They ate everything in sight, no matter what. 

   He sprinted  across the open ground behind him. He could run faster than any man alive. He could run six times his body length in a single second, but he couldn’t keep it up for long. When he got to the tree line and was out of sight, he slowed down and caught his breath. When he got to Church Hill Rd., he looked both ways before crossing. There was no sense in being run over on his own doorstep by some potato truck.

   The first day of summer wasn’t any different than the day before the first day of summer. When JT Markunas checked the weather report, it looked like it wasn’t going to be any different the next day, either. He sat outside his rented house in Milton and thought it was like the murder he was investigating. It wasn’t any different today than it had been yesterday and looked like it wasn’t going to be different anytime soon.

   The difference was nobody could do anything about the weather. The RCMP could do something about the murder in North Rustico. They knew where and how the woman with the empty briefcase was killed but didn’t know why. They still didn’t know who she was, nor did they have a clue about who might have done it. The more days and weeks went by the more it got pushed back in everybody’s minds. It was starting to become a cold case. Nobody had seen or heard anything in the fall and by the time anybody knew something had happened, winter was over, and it was springtime. Now it was summer.

   It was a hell of a shame, he thought. Nobody should get away with murder. Murders are often a spur of the minute mistake, but what happened in Conor Murphy’s field wasn’t a mistake. It was deliberate. It rankled him to think whoever did it thought they could get away with it. It was usually poor slobs who didn’t get away with murder. They got locked up. The rich hired somebody to talk their way out of it. They walked away free. JT thought what happened had to involve money, and lots of it. But the rich didn’t swing hand axes to get what they wanted. They had fountain pens for that.

   An execution is justice, but the deep-six is murder. There was no justice in taking the law into your own hands. There was money in farming and fishing, which Prince Edward Island did a lot of. Farmers and fishermen rarely shot each other, or anybody else. At one time lenders got rough when it came to collecting debts, but that time was gone. Criminal gangs shot first and didn’t ask questions whenever they were crossed, but there were no criminal gangs like that on the island. There were some folks with criminal minds. That’s why the force existed. He thought it was likely that whoever did the killing was a lone wolf. That meant whoever it was, was likely to keep to themselves. Whoever it was, he was going to be hard to find. JT wasn’t holding his breath. He was a patient man, though. He took the long view. He would get his man.

   It was going to be a tough nut to crack but it was a nut that would have to keep. It was his day off. He tossed his bicycle into the back of his pick-up. The bike was a Specialized Rockhopper, nothing special, but virtually indestructible. It went up and down farm roads and tracks just fine and rode smooth enough on pavement. He lived about 10 kilometers from Charlottetown and the RCMP station. Brackley Beach was about 20 kilometers away. He drove to Brackley Beach.

   JT parked at the west end of the beach. It was 15 kilometers to Dalvay. He was going to keep going another 5 kilometers farther on to Grand Tracadie, stop and stretch his legs, and ride back. Forty kilometers in the saddle would be enough for him. When he started the wind was at his back and the living was easy, until he realized it would be in his face on the way back. He thought he would find somewhere in Grand Tracadie to have a scone and a cup of coffee.

   He rode past the Harbor Lighthouse, some cottages, Ross Beach, some more cottages, Stanhope Beach, Long Pond, and stopped at Dalvay. He rode to the front steps, parked his bike, and walked down the sloping lawn to a set of red Adirondack chairs. He was sitting there looking out at the ocean when somebody walked up and asked if he would like tea and biscuits.

   “Black tea and plenty of butter,” he said.

   He need not have asked for butter. If there was anything plentiful on the island, it was homegrown butter. There were enough cows in all directions that everybody on the island could go on an all-butter diet if they wanted to and there still wouldn’t be a shortage.

   Dalvay By the Sea was a big house and seasonal rooms. Before becoming lodgings, it was only a big house. The Gilded Age American industrialist Alexander Macdonald built it just before the end of the 19^th century on grounds of 120 acres. The lower half of the house and all the fireplaces were island sandstone. Windmills supplied power and water. He kept horses and carriages and a cohort of grooms to look after them. He and his wife entertained all summer when they weren’t riding and at the end of every summer hosted a lavish dance for the locals. They were like patroons from another age.

   By 1909 Alexander Macdonald was dying. At the beginning of that fall, he stood on Long Pond for the last time staring at his house. He died the next year. After his children squandered the family fortune, Dalvay was sold to the man who had been tending it. William Hughes had contacted the family to ask what should be done with the 26-room place. They said, “You can have it for the back taxes.” He bought it and all the furnishings for less than $500.00. Fifteen years earlier it had cost more than $50,000.00 to build. The furnishings were gotten during family travels to Italy, France, England, and Egypt. They were transported to Prince Edward Island by ocean steamer. Nobody knew what all of it had cost.

   William Hughes turned around and sold the house for a handsome profit. The last owner went broke and sold it to the government in 1938, which turned it over to Parks Canada, which under a concession had been operating it for the past fifty years as a summer hotel.

   JT finished his biscuits and tea, saddled back up, and buckled his helmet. Before he got started, he saw two young women on bicycles going his way. They were noodling it. He rode past them giving them a friendly wave. They waved back. He thought they were both good-looking, one more than the other. He had a job, a house, and a bed, but he didn’t have a girlfriend. His job was the problem. It was a Catch-22. Most of the women he met who liked policemen, he didn’t like them. Most of the women he liked didn’t like policemen.

   There were no coffee shops in Grand Tracadie. There wasn’t much other than houses and fields. He rode as far as MacDougalls Cove and turned around. At first, riding back to Brackley, the breeze was at him from the side. Once he got back on the parkway, though, it was in his face. It wasn’t a hurricane, but it wasn’t a powder puff, either. He dropped his bike into a lower gear and plodded on. He rode the bike for fun and fitness. The ride back to his pick-up was going to be about fitness.

   He had just passed Cape Stanhope when he saw the two young women on their bicycles ahead of him. It almost looked like they were riding in place, although he could see they were peddling. He was fifty-some yards behind them when a red motorcycle went past him fast. JT hadn’t heard the motorcycle and was taken aback when it hummed zipped by him. It was going 140 KPH for sure, maybe faster on a road where the speed limit was a third of that. When the Tasmanian Devil passed the women ahead, the rider wiggle waggled his motorcycle at them and was gone. 

   The women were riding on the shoulder. The one closest to the road got shaky unnerved see-sawed lost control and fell over. She bounced on the shoulder and bounced sideways into the sand. Her friend stopped and ran back to the fallen woman.

   “Son of a bitch,” JT cursed under his breath. If he had been working, he could have caught the motorcycle, maybe. It had to be a Jap bike. They made the quietest motorcycles. He hadn’t gotten the plate, but he knew high-tech when he saw it. It looked new and might have been faster than his Ford Mustang pursuit car. He stopped where the fallen woman was rolling over and sitting up. Her hands and forearms were scraped and bleeding. There was sand in the blood. She had broken her fall with them. Both of her knees were scraped and bleeding, one of them worse than the other.

   He put his hand on her shoulder and pressed her back down when she tried to stand up.

   “No, don’t do that,” he said. “I’m with the RCMP. Stay where you are.” 

   He turned to the friend.

   “Don’t let her get up until I come back. It should just be a few minutes.”

   Some gulls came up from the beach to see what was happening. They made a choking ha-ha-ha sound. After they saw there was no food to be had, they flew away.

   He rode back across the bridge the way he had come, raced down Wharf Rd., and stopped at the first deep-sea fishing shack on Covehead Bay that he saw somebody at. He telephoned for an ambulance and rode back to the two women. They were where he had left them, except a man and wife had stopped to help. Their Ford Taurus with Massachusetts plates was half on the road and half on the shoulder behind the women, its flashers blinking. 

   “I run a tow truck operation back in Boston,” the man said.

   When the ambulance had come and gone, the man said, “She’s got road rash all over. What happened?”

   “Some jackass on a motorcycle went past like a scorcher and made a veer at them before cutting away, and she lost it, went down.”

   “That’s too bad,” the man said.

   JT stopped at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital the next morning. It was almost new, the biggest hospital in the province, having replaced both the Charlottetown and Prince Edward Island hospitals in 1982. He was told the woman had been treated and released.

   “Is she an islander?” he asked.

   The woman at the desk checked. “I don’t know, but she lives here in town,” she said.

   An islander was anybody who had been born on Prince Edward Island. The designation was closely watched. When a woman who was brought to the province as a baby died 90 years later her obituary in the newspaper read, “Woman from away died peacefully in her home.”

   Some said you had to be conceived on the island to make the grade. A boy living in Souris was flummoxed when he found out he might not be an islander, even though both his parents were, and he was born on the island. It turned out he was brought into existence on an impulse in a dark corner of the ferry crossing the Northumberland Strait. “He was not conceived on the island so he’s not an islander,” his uncles and aunts pointed out, their noses out of joint. His parents took the argument to his father’s father. 

   “It all depends on whether the ferry was going away or coming back,” his grandfather said.

   The woman’s name was Kayleigh Jurgelaitis. JT got her address and went to work. After he was done wasting his time arresting a teenaged dishwasher smoking pot behind a dumpster, he clocked out at the end of the day, changed his clothes, and went looking for the address. He didn’t have far to go. She lived near Holland College. It was a two-year trade school, home to the Culinary Institute of Canada and the Atlantic Police Academy.

   He recognized the friend when she opened the door and she recognized him. When Kayleigh limped out of a hallway into the living room, she was limping up a storm.

   “How’s the leg?”

   “Better than yesterday, believe it or not. I couldn’t even walk. You’re the cop, right?”

   “Peace officer.”

   “Right.”

   “So, what happened to your leg?”

   “They said I have a slight meniscus tear in the knee,” she said sitting down and elevating her bad leg. “I’m supposed to keep it up and put ice on it every couple of hours. They think I should be back on my feet in a week or two.”

   “I’m glad to hear it. So long as I have it on my mind, did either of you get the license plate of that biker?”

   They both said no.

   “Neither did I,” JT said. “He was too far ahead, and it happened too fast. We might be able to find him, but probably not, except by accident.”

   “If I never see him again it will be soon enough,” Kayleigh said.

   “I couldn’t help noticing your name,” JT said. “Are you Lithuanian?”

   “Yes and no,” she said. “My mother was Irish, from here, and my father was Lithuanian, from there. I’m half of the one and half of the other. Why do you ask?”

   “Because my name is Justinas Markunas,” JT said.

   “I was wondering if I was the only Lithuanian on this island among all the Irish, Scots, and the French,” Kayleigh laughed. “Now I know there are two of us.”

   “Spud Island is immigrants through and through,” JT said. “Everybody here came from somewhere else. I’ve run into a few Jews, Swedes, and Hungarians, not to mention the Indians. There aren’t many of them even though they were here first. I’ve even heard some Asians are thinking of setting up a Buddhist community in Kings County, which will probably make everybody’s heads spin when they do their meditating.”

   Before leaving, pausing at the door, he asked, “Since it’s just the two of us, we should have lunch or dinner sometime and toast our native selves.”

   “I think I will take you up on that,” she said. “In the meantime, I’ll try to remember whatever I can about the rat who ran me off the road.”

   It wasn’t two weeks or even a week later that JT Markunas and Kayleigh Jurgelaitis got together for dinner in Charlottetown. Kayleigh healed fast when dinner on the town was on the table. It was half-a-week later when they sat down to eat at the Canton Café on Queen St. It was early evening. The sky was clear, but the stars weren’t out, yet. The town was lit up.

   “Homegrown is the best,” Kayleigh said, “but it’s fun to globetrot now and then.”

   “I’ve had nothing but next-door eggs and bread for breakfast and white fish mussels potatoes and rhubarb pie for dinner the past two weeks,” JT said. “I’m ready and willing for something off-shore.”

   The Canton Cafe had opened 19 years earlier. George Lee and Ken Wong both came from Nowheresville in China to Prince Edward Island in the 1950s. Whenever they heard the words “Chairman Mao” and “Land Reform” they spit out the back door. They had their reasons. When they got tired of working at other people’s restaurants, they put their heads together and scrimped and saved and bought the Lotus Café. They renovated it and renamed it and opened it with themselves in the kitchen and at the cash register. Ken Wong retired in 1980, a new cook getting acquainted with the tongs whisks utility knives, spatulas and skimmers, sushi kits and bamboo steamers, dumpling makers, and the dozens of woks. George Lee stayed behind the cash register, a fixture at the front. 

   “They have got great egg rolls,” JT said.

   The Canton Café had a Canadian menu, too, a short list of hamburgers, hot sandwiches, and French fries. Nobody ever ordered the Canadian menu, except for tourists who stumbled in by mistake. When they were done, they usually knew they had made a mistake.

   “Why would you have French fries when you could have this?” Kayleigh asked, biting into an egg roll.

   “Policemen usually say everything happens for a reason. What I say about ordering fries here is that sometimes things happen for no good reason,” JT said.

   “I want to thank you again for stopping and helping me in the park.”

   “Uphold the right,” JT said.

   “What’s that?”

   “That’s the official RCMP motto. The unofficial motto is ‘They always get their man.’ We might get that guy on the bike but I’m not holding my breath until I see his motorcycle again. Anyway, I thought you were a tourist, and part of our mission is making sure tourists want to come back.”

   “Were those the only reasons?”

   “No.”

   “Are you from here?”

   “No, I’m from Sudbury, which is a mining town in Ontario.”

   Kayleigh didn’t say anything for a minute until she said, “Are you messing with me? Did you check up on me?”

   “No, of course not. Why would I do that?”

   “Because I’m from Sudbury, too.”

   JT sat back pursed his lips and whistled. “I don’t believe in coincidences, but that is a hell of a coincidence.” His chopsticks lay on the table untouched. He wasn’t going to touch them and risk going hungry. He ate with a knife and fork. They ordered dumplings and roasted duck and shared their plates. He snared his dumplings deftly and easily with tines. They talked about chance and taking chances. 

   A wiry young man walked it and waited at the counter. George went to the kitchen and brought back a take-out order in a brown bag. The man paid with a one-hundred-dollar bill and walked out nibbling on an egg roll.

   They were sipping their green tea and unraveling fortune cookies when Kayleigh sprang up from her seat facing the front window, “Hey, there’s the motorcycle!” The red Kawasaki wheeled away from the curb. By the time Kayleigh and JT, followed by George, were out the door, the bike was out of sight. They looked up and down the street. George shrugged his shoulders. They heard its whine somewhere in the distance. It was impossible to tell where it was or where it was going.

   “Goddamn it, that is the second time that has happened,” JT cursed.

   “Can you put an APB out for him?” Kayleigh asked.

   “What’s that?”

   “An all-points bulletin like in the movies.”

   “It doesn’t exactly work that way, but it will be on a report tomorrow and a bulletin board after that.”

   After they determined the motorcycle was long gone not to be found, George went back to his cash register, JT paid the bill, and suggested they stop at a bar on the waterfront. “Talk about coincidences,” Kayleigh said walking up to the bar and looking at the sign that said JR’s Bar. “JT and JR. Are you two the abbreviation brothers?”

   “Now that is a turn of the cards,” JT said. “I never gave it a thought. This place has probably been here before I ever saw the light of day. They’ve got some good draft beers and a dance floor in the back. The tunes are always terrific, whether they’re local or otherwise. Junior has had his share of music makers come through here, Anne Murray, John Allen Cameron, and Stompin’ Tom Connors. Stompin’ Tom even wrote a song about the place.”

   When they walked in Johnny Reid behind the bar gave JT a wave, waving him to the bar. “Long time no see, been a month, eh?” He was a short man wearing big glasses and a ratty short-sleeved shirt. He had a bar towel stuck in his pants pocket. JT ordered two pints of Alexander Keith’s India Pale Ale. 

   “He doesn’t look that good, like he’s sick,” Kayleigh said while their beers were being poured.

   “Junior’s got cancer.”

   “Oh, that’s terrible.”

   “Don’t say anything to him about it. He’s afraid he might have to close.”

   “Of course, I won’t, poor man.”

   “He’ll pull through. Junior’s no snowflake. He’s in it for the duration, whatever that might be.”

   They sat in silence for a few minutes until Kayleigh said, “Tell me about yourself and how a Sudbury boy ended up here.”

   “It’s a long story.”

   “I’ve got all night,” Kayleigh smiled, touching the tips of her fingers under her chin.

   “Me, too,” JT said, “so long as you don’t do the handgun steeple.”

   The night Siobhan Murphy died in 1901 was the same night Queen Victoria died more than five thousand kilometers away. Siobhan’s head got smashed in when Father Georges Belcourt’s one-seater fell on her. The horseless carriage killed her just as fast as the horse who kicked her husband in the head many years before killed him. 

   Her last thought was of the first day she met William Murphy in Cavendish, of her first look at him. She knew in a flash what he was about when he looked her up and down and knew what her answer would be. After her last thought in this life before meeting her maker she went down into the darkness. She saw a bright light ahead of her.

   Siobhan lay dead under the steam-powered car in her barn all day before anybody noticed. She didn’t feel sorry for herself. She knew she wouldn’t be forgotten. Flies buzzed around her. Her cat wandered in and lay down beside her. There was nothing he could do except keep her company. The sun went from one end of the sky to the other. Queen Victoria died in Osborne House of a stroke in her sleep, in a palatial bed surrounded by her family. The moon rose when she died.

   Father Belcourt bought the car that killed Siobhan from a man in New Jersey in 1866. It was unloaded at Charlottetown and pulled to the Farmer’s Bank in Rustico by a team of horses. Nobody except the priest knew how to work the self-propelled wagon. He had a letter explaining its operation. He was keeping it close to the vest in the meantime.

   “Be careful,” one of his parishioners said pulling him aside. “The devil could be in that tank.”

   If he was, he was hunched over and hot as hell. The steam chamber was four feet high, and the motor was connected to the wheels by a chain. The car had no suspension, no windshield, and no roof. Father Belcourt kept it in a shed beside the bank. The Farmer’s Bank was organized by him soon after he arrived there in 1859. One of the first things that jumped out at him was the economic hardship of his flock. What he did was establish a Catholic Institute to bring parishioners together. Everybody had to agree to be teetotalers. The second thing he did was create the credit union to provide loans to farmers at Christian rates of interest. The third thing he did was buy the car to be able to get out to see the sick and homebound.

   The priest was from Quebec and had been in the business of saving souls for more than thirty years before arriving in Rustico. He led missions in Manitoba and North Dakota and fought it out with the Hudson’s Bay Company over their compensation to the natives who delivered furs to the trading company. But when he demanded the savages swear off liquor as a condition of conversion, they were unwilling to give up their company-supplied booze.

   He didn’t give up working for them, working up a petition for redress of wrongs. He persuaded a thousand of the savages to sign the petition about the company’s selfishness and discrimination, a petition he meant to send to Queen Victoria. Earl Gray, the Colonial Secretary, tore it up and threw it away and had Father Belcourt arrested for inciting discontent. The Archbishop of Quebec had to step into the fray. He got the charges retracted but sent the priest far away to the east to Prince Edward Island. 

   Father Belcourt retired as the pastor of Rustico in 1869 and moved to Shediac, New Brunswick, but couldn’t get islands off his mind. He pled to be allowed to pastor a parish on the Magdelen Islands. It wasn’t long before he was on a boat out on the Gulf of St. Lawrence with the Archbishop of Quebec’s blessing. Before he sailed, he asked Siobhan Murphy if he could store his steam-powered car on her farm. 

   “Of course,” she said.

   The horseless carriage had forgotten how to get up and go and had to be towed there by a team of horses. It went into the barn. It was pushed into a corner. Everybody forgot about it.

   Siobhan had gotten into the habit of burying her money in a hole at the backside of the barn. When the bank got going, she dug up her savings and put it in the bank. She didn’t know it, but she was one of the biggest holders at the credit union. In 1893, a year before the bank closed, after her son Bill told her the bank would be closing soon, she withdrew all her money and buried it in the ground again. 

   She had raised six children on her farm outside North Rustico. She raised them by herself. Siobhan knew the value of a dollar better than most. She wasn’t a miser, but she was frugal. When the shipbuilding business in Atlantic Canada collapsed in the 1880s and her son Sean was thrown out of work, she paid for his passage to the United States, where he joined Michael, her youngest. 

   Half of the island’s economy disappeared when shipbuilding disappeared. Thousands of islanders migrated to the Boston States looking for work in factories and domestic service. By the time Siobhan died more than a third of everybody on the island was gone. She never saw Sean and Michael again. Her three daughters all married, one of them going to Summerside, one to Acadian land, while Biddy stayed nearby in Stanley Bridge. She married a fisherman who was good at getting eels. They had seven children by the turn of the century.

   In the mid-1880s, unhappy that their winter mail and passenger service was still relying on iceboats, islanders started demanding a fixed link to the mainland by way of a railway tunnel.

Siobhan rarely got mail and never left the island and didn’t care if there were iceboats, tunnels, or bridges. The tunnel never got built, no matter how many folks demanded it.

   In 1895 Robert Oulton and Charles Dalton become the first men on Prince Edward Island to successfully breed silver foxes in captivity. They brought a litter of foxes with a vein of silver in their fur to maturity near Tignish, on the west end of the island. They did it by mating red and black foxes. After that the gold rush was on. They shared the secret of their success and their breeding stock with a small circle and before long the small circle was getting rich. When word started to get out, the fox boom was on. When Bill Murphy heard about it, his ears pricked up. It was early fall 1900. When he told his mother about it, she dug up the family money buried behind the barn and laid it out on the kitchen table.

   She knew there was a livelihood and even a fortune to be made from fur. The explorer Samuel de Champlain was in the fur trade three hundred years ago. Alexander Mackenzie, the first European to go cross-country and reach the Pacific Ocean, was in the fur trade. John McLaughlin, who built forts in Vancouver and established the Oregon territory, was in the fur trade.

   The Hudson’s Bay Company and North-West Company were in the business of hunting and killing bears, beaver, fox, deer, buffalo, mink, otter, and seal for their skins. Every Victorian woman in the Americas and Europe coveted a fur coat, but as the century raced to a close there weren’t enough wild animals left to answer the demand. Fur farms became the answer.

   “Charlie Dalton and another man have got a fur farm out on Cherry Island,” Bill said. “They’ve been raising foxes in pens and have somehow got it so that the females stay quiet. They sold two breeding pairs to Silas Rayner up in Kildare and he’s making it work, too. Bob Tuplin bought a breeding pair for $340.00 and has gone into a partnership with Jimmy Gordon at Black Banks.”

   “That is a bushel full of money,” Siohhan said.

   Farm hands on Prince Edward Island made about $25.00 a month. After a year they might have been able to buy one breeding fox, but it takes two to tango. Bill leaned across the table. “Charlie sold one of his pelts in London for almost two thousand dollars.”

   Siobhan was amazed and said so.

   “Charlie and the Raynor’s and some others are setting up what they call the Big Six Combine. They plan on keeping their secret a secret, not produce too many pelts, and keep the price sky high.”

   “What’s their secret?” Siobhan asked.

   “One of their secrets is the wire they use, which they import from England. The foxes don’t seem to mind it. Charlie builds his pens with it. The wire stays free of rust and stays shiny. It seems to make a difference. They keep one breeding pair in one wire pen with a wooden kennel.”

   “How do they keep the foxes from climbing or digging their way out?”

  “They build sidewalls slanting in and add overhangs. To keep them from burrowing, they dig trenches and bury wire in the ground. They put catch boxes in corners and along the guard fences to trap any of them trying to escape.”

   “I would build a watchtower, valuable as the animals seem to be.”

   “Charlie’s got watchtowers.”

   “It must be hard on him if a fox does escape.” 

   “He pays schoolboys to hunt them down on weekends. There might be a boy or two who ends up going to Saint Dunstan’s with that money.”

   “What does he feed the foxes?”

   “He mixes fowl livers, junk fish, raw horsemeat, tripe, and offal with water. They eat about the same as a cat does, about a half pound a day. If a vixen can’t make milk for her pups, he brings in a nursing cat. He keeps the pups in good health, making sure they don’t have mites or worms.”

   “How do they go about taking the pelts without damaging them?”

   “Charlie pokes poison into their chest cavities when the time comes. I hear he might be getting a stunner from Norway, which kills the foxes on the spot. He’s got a fleshing machine that cuts the flesh from the pelt and sucks the fat into a tank. He cleans the pelt by putting it into a spinning drum filled with corn grit. Then he dries it on a wood board cut through with ventilation holes.”

   “Do you think you can make it work like Charlie’s done?”

   “Yes.”

   “How do you know all this about farming fox furs?” Siobhan asked.

   “It’s a secret,” Bill said to his mother, from whom he had never been able to keep a secret. He spilled the beans.

   “How does it happen that you’re from Sudbury,” Kayleigh Jurgelaitis asked.

   “World War Two,” JT Markunas said.

   “Me, too”

   “My dad is from Siauliai up in the north of Lithuania,” JT said, giving the pint in front of him a break. “My grandmother Antonina was Russian, a schoolteacher in Saransk. My grandfather Jonas met her during the first war.” The town and an army garrison were there, four hundred miles southeast of Moscow. “He was an officer in the Russian Imperial Army.”

   “You’re part Russian, like Ivan the Terrible?”

   “A part of me is, so watch your step.”

   Saransk was founded as a fortress, at the crossroads of Moscow and the Crimea. Before the war its commercial life revolved around meat, leather, and honey. After the war its factories were closed for more than ten years when there weren’t any available fuels or raw materials.

   “He was conscripted and trained as an officer and sent to serve with an infantry regiment. Back then they said drinkers go to the navy and dimwits to the infantry.” The Imperial Russian Army counted more than a million men in uniform, most of them conscripted, most of them peasants. There were a quarter million Cossacks, too. Only the Cossacks knew what they were doing.

   “He swept my grandmother off her feet, and they got married. They had my aunt, Genute, in 1917. My other aunt Gaile was born the next year.” JT’s father was born six years later, in 1924. He was named after King Vytautas the Great. His mother called him Vytas. His sisters called him many things, including the Little Prince. They didn’t mean it as a compliment.

   Siauliai is home to the Hill of Crosses. It is covered with tens of thousands of crosses, crucifixes, and statues. It was after Czarist forces crushed the November Uprising of 1831 when the first crosses appeared. By 1918 Lithuania had been missing from the map for more than a hundred years, having disappeared after the Partition of Poland. Since that time, it had been under the thumb of the Russian Empire.

   In late 1919, while Russia was being torn apart by the Bolshevik revolution, Jonas and his family went home to a newly independent Lithuania. “The country didn’t have many officers when they formed their own army,” JT said. “Most of them were men who had been conscripted into the Imperial Army before the war. My grandfather fought in the post-war battles around Klaipeda and after that served in the secret service in Kaunas, which was the capital.”

   “Was he a spy?”

   “He was more like somebody who kept spies on their toes.”

   Lithuania declared independence and for almost three years fought Soviets, West Russians, and Poles. Finally, in 1920 they formed their own government, although they later lost their capital Vilnius to the Poles, with whom they remained officially at war with no official warfare. “After the fighting my grandfather got some land for serving his country. They had a house in town but lived on a farm most of the time.” During World War One most of the town’s buildings were destroyed and the city center was obliterated. Since its founding in the 13^th century Siauliai had been struck by plague seven times, went up in flames seven times, and World War Two was the seventh conflict that wrecked the town.

   “My grandfather was the governor of Panevezys for more than fifteen years.” The royal town, founded in the early 16^th century, is about fifty miles east of Siauliai. During the interwar years Lithuania was divided into 24 districts and each district had its own governor. Farming was what mattered the most. Prince Edward Island is ten times smaller than Lithuania, but they are both on the shores of a sea and are both farming lands. Agriculture is nearly half of what goes on. The livestock is pork and beef. Potatoes were number one in both country places.

   “When my grandfather became the governor of the Zerasai district, my grandmother didn’t want to move, since it was more than seventy-five miles away from where they lived, so my father stayed with his mother. But he didn’t get along with the students at the high school there.” It was a strict Catholic school, and everybody had to dress appropriately, like they were tending to saints.

   “On my first day of classes I was dressed up too nice, like I was going to a party, with a bright tie and everything, and everybody laughed at me,” JT’s father said. “Where are you from, they asked, mocking me. I didn’t make any friends there.” He finally told them, “I’m leaving.” He moved to Zerasai in 1939 and lived with his father. “We always studied a second language in school, and since my mother was Russian, studying it was easy for me. But when I got to Zerasai I found out they only had English as a second language. There was no Russian. My father had to hire a tutor for me.”

   During the 1930s the world was changing fast. The Lithuanian world was changing even faster, although it didn’t change so much as fall apart. “The Commies showed up,” JT said. “All of the country’s officials were let go and the Russians put in new people they wanted to run the show. They always said they didn’t order anything themselves, but it was the Lithuanian turncoats who were in charge, so it was really the Russians.”

   The father and son moved back to Siauliai. By then Vytas spoke Lithuanian, Russian, and English. The Markunas family spent more and more time at their farm. “It was only a few miles from our farmhouse to town,” Vytas said. “I used to walk or bicycle. The mood was bad. Everybody thought something terrible was going to happen.”

   The Russian annexation of Lithuania was completed by the late summer of 1940. Businesses were nationalized and collectivization of land began. As the Russian presence expanded the family talked about leaving the Baltics. “Why don’t we go to Germany?” Antonina asked. “We had a chance to leave the country and go somewhere else,” Vytas said. “My mother wanted to go. We talked about it often.” But Jonas didn’t want to leave his home. “I have never done anything wrong that they would arrest me,” he told his family. “I have always been good to people. They aren’t going to put me in jail.”

   The family stayed on their farm through the winter. Then, as mass arrests and deportations of policemen, politicians, and dissidents began Jonas was picked up by NKVD plainclothesmen. “My grandfather was gardening, wearing a shirt, old pants, and slippers when they drove up, a carload of Russians, and stopped, saying there was something wrong with their engine,” JT said. “He walked over to the car with them. They shoved him into the back and drove off.”

   Vytas was in school taking his final exams that morning. “My mother called the school and told me my father had been taken. I went home right away.” Antonina packed clothes, socks and shoes, and soap for her husband. She went to see him the next day. “The man who was running the jail was a Jewish fellow. He had grown up with us and was a friend of our family, but when my mother asked him to help us, he said times have changed.” 

   It was a new day. There was a new boss. “He was a Communist and had been in and out of jail because of his political activities. He was always in trouble. My father always let him go after a few days. Just be a nice boy, he would tell him, but then the next thing he would be in jail again. He wouldn’t help my father when he was arrested. He said everything is different now.”

   The man who had once ruled the local police stayed under lock and key in the local lock-up. “They didn’t let my mother talk to my father. We went there many times, but they never let us see him. We never saw him again.” Jonas was loaded onto a boxcar. Four days later, the 4^th Panzer Group, part of the first phase of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of Russia, finished the destruction of Red Army armored forces in Lithuania. Within a week Nazi Germany seized the whole of the country.

   JT’s grandfather was transported to a labor camp near Krasnojarsk in Siberia. He was ordered to log in the dense forests and starved to death in the winter of 1942. Anton Chekhov, the Russian short story writer, once wrote that Krasnojarsk was the most beautiful city in Siberia.

   “My father logged when he first came to Canada, north of Sudbury,” Kayleigh said. “He always said it was hard work, working in all kinds of weather, much harder than the mines.”

   When the NKVD began mass arrests of Lithuanians, Soviet officials seized their property, and there was widespread looting by the natives. It was every man for himself, unless you were a Red. After the deportation the family left the farm. “It was too dangerous to stay. We went into the forest. But then my mother told me to go to Vilnius and tell Gaile our father had been arrested. She wanted her to know to be careful. I took a train, but as soon as I got there, I got a phone call saying my mother had been arrested.”

   “They were still living in the forest?” Kayleigh asked.

   “They built a lean-to near a stream and camouflaged it,” JT said. “His sister stole food from nearby farms. They had a rifle. The gun didn’t do them any good.”

   “All the French Acadians were deported from here during the French and Indian Wars,” Kayleigh said. “They didn’t have many guns, not that it would have mattered. I’ve heard people call it the Great Expulsion.”

   “I’ve heard about that,” JT said. “The way I heard it was that if you were Acadian, you were removed from your home and your land. Your house was burned, and the land given to settlers loyal to Britain, mostly immigrants from Scotland and New England.”

   “Somebody complained and informed on her,” Vytas said. “We had land, 160 acres, so we were considered capitalists. We weren’t rich, but we weren’t poor, either. I went to the train station but didn’t see her anywhere. She was sent to a prison camp.” His mother was transported to the Gulag. She was released in 1956, after Stalin’s death, but not allowed to return home to Siauliai. She was sent to a decrepit cinder block one-room apartment near the Baltic Sea.

   “After his mother’s arrest my father moved to Vilnius, staying with my aunt Gaile and her husband,” JT said. “At the time almost everyone living there was either Russian or Polish.” Lithuanians in the former capital city were strangers in their own land.

   “The day the Commies retreated and before the Germans came, everybody raced to the food warehouses and broke into them. There was almost no food anywhere in a fertile land of small farms. When the Germans arrived, they put a stop to it. My father stayed there for a month but went home when summer ended. The farm had to be cared for, but, first, he had to get a travel permit. He couldn’t get in to see a single German to apply for a permit, but finally he talked to somebody who had known my grandfather. The officer told him they weren’t issuing any more permits, but then he said all right, and wrote one out for him.”

   He took a train back to Siauliai and walked home, but when he got there, he discovered a company of Wehrmacht infantry had taken over the farm. “They were there about three weeks, more than seventy of them. I couldn’t stay in our house since the officers had taken it over. They didn’t do our farm any harm. They had their own quarters and their own mess. I made friends with some of them. We drank beer together at night.”

   Jonas’s practice had been to have a foreman run the farm. The foreman hired three men and three women every spring. Although the farm had chickens and pigs, and draft horses to do the heavy work, it was a dairy farm with more than twenty cows. “I started taking care of things, even though I didn’t know anything,” Vytas said. “I knew the cows had to be milked and the milk had to go to the dairy. But about growing crops, and the fields, I didn’t know anything. But I worked as though I knew what I was doing.” That fall he sent farmhands to till the ground in a nearby field. When his nearest neighbor saw them working, he ran across the road shouting and waving his arms.

   “What the hell are you doing?” he yelled.

   “I told him we were preparing the ground for next year. He said, ‘You’re ruining this year’s seed and you won’t have any grass next year.’ We stopped right away. I learned what to do.” A year later he was on a horse-drawn mower cutting hay when he saw storm clouds gathering. He decided he would walk the horses, lightening the load so they could pull the mower faster, and jumped down from his seat. “As I hopped down, I stumbled and fell on the blades of the mower. The horses stopped. My hand was almost cut off. The boy who was helping me ran over. When he saw what happened, and saw my hand, he passed out.”

   As the war dragged on, he had problems keeping the farm going. He had only partial use of his injured hand and farmhands were deserting the countryside. “I went to the prisoner-of-war camp where I knew they gave Russians out. They gave me some of them. One morning they were all gone. I had to go back to the Germans and ask for more. My God, how they were mad about it. One officer shouted that I hadn’t looked after them, that I needed to lock them up at night, and that they weren’t going to give me anymore. In the end I said, I need more, so they gave me more. I kept them locked up after that and they were still there when I ran away.”

   In 1944 the Red Army stormed back into Lithuania. Vytas fled with a mechanized company of Wehrmacht, whisked up by them as they passed. They had been stationed near the prisoner-of-war camp. They told him he had five minutes to decide whether he was coming with them or not as they retreated. “They were in a big hurry. They said the Russians were on the other side of the Hill of Crosses. The hill was on fire. I only had time to fill a bag with a few clothes, a little money, and photographs of my parents.”

   His oldest sister fled to East Prussia. His other sister didn’t get away. “She had a problem at the border and didn’t make it. The Soviets had taken that area, so she was forced to stop in a town there. She had her daughter and her husband’s mother with her. Her husband had been shot and pushed into a pit. In the end the three of them were forced to stay there. She finished school, became a nurse, and never told anybody where she was from. The Russians never found out anything about her.”

   In July the Red Army captured Panevezys. Later that month they took Siauliai, inflicting heavy damage on the city. Two months after that the counterattacking German 3rd Panzer Army was destroyed, and Lithuania became part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. “My father ended up in Sudbury in the late 1940s with a duffel bag and enough loose change to buy a snack,” JT said. “He got a job with Inco and that’s where he stayed. At first, he worked as a blaster, one of the more dangerous jobs, but over the years the daily grind got easier.”

   “My dad worked in the mines for seven or eight years after he quit logging, and then went to Toronto and from there we moved to Buffalo,” Kayleigh said. “No matter, I still think of myself as a Sudbury girl.”

   “Where did you live?”

   “We lived on Pine Street, where the Eastern Europeans lived.”

   JT grew up on Stanley Street where it dead-ended, only a few blocks from Pine Street.

   “When were you born?”

   “1961.”

    JT had been born the same year. Kayleigh was the same age, from the same town, and had grown up within shouting distance of him. He wasn’t sure if the coincidences were a good thing or a bad thing.

   “How does it happen that you’re from Sudbury,” Kayleigh Jurgelaitis asked.

   “World War Two,” JT Markunas said.

   “Me, too”

   “My dad is from Siauliai up in the north of Lithuania,” JT said, giving the pint in front of him a break. “My grandmother Antonina was Russian, a schoolteacher in Saransk. My grandfather Jonas met her during the first war.” The town and an army garrison were there, four hundred miles southeast of Moscow. “He was an officer in the Russian Imperial Army.”

   “You’re part Russian, like Ivan the Terrible?”

   “A part of me is, so watch your step.”

   Saransk was founded as a fortress, at the crossroads of Moscow and the Crimea. Before the war its commercial life revolved around meat, leather, and honey. After the war its factories were closed for more than ten years when there weren’t any available fuels or raw materials.

   “He was conscripted and trained as an officer and sent to serve with an infantry regiment. Back then they said drinkers go to the navy and dimwits to the infantry.” The Imperial Russian Army counted more than a million men in uniform, most of them conscripted, most of them peasants. There were a quarter million Cossacks, too. Only the Cossacks knew what they were doing.

   “He swept my grandmother off her feet, and they got married. They had my aunt, Genute, in 1917. My other aunt Gaile was born the next year.” JT’s father was born six years later, in 1924. He was named after King Vytautas the Great. His mother called him Vytas. His sisters called him many things, including the Little Prince. They didn’t mean it as a compliment.

   Siauliai is home to the Hill of Crosses. It is covered with tens of thousands of crosses, crucifixes, and statues. It was after Czarist forces crushed the November Uprising of 1831 when the first crosses appeared. By 1918 Lithuania had been missing from the map for more than a hundred years, having disappeared after the Partition of Poland. Since that time, it had been under the thumb of the Russian Empire.

   In late 1919, while Russia was being torn apart by the Bolshevik revolution, Jonas and his family went home to a newly independent Lithuania. “The country didn’t have many officers when they formed their own army,” JT said. “Most of them were men who had been conscripted into the Imperial Army before the war. My grandfather fought in the post-war battles around Klaipeda and after that served in the secret service in Kaunas, which was the capital.”

   “Was he a spy?”

   “He was more like somebody who kept spies on their toes.”

   Lithuania declared independence and for almost three years fought Soviets, West Russians, and Poles. Finally, in 1920 they formed their own government, although they later lost their capital Vilnius to the Poles, with whom they remained officially at war with no official warfare. “After the fighting my grandfather got some land for serving his country. They had a house in town but lived on a farm most of the time.” During World War One most of the town’s buildings were destroyed and the city center was obliterated. Since its founding in the 13^th century Siauliai had been struck by plague seven times, went up in flames seven times, and World War Two was the seventh conflict that wrecked the town.

   “My grandfather was the governor of Panevezys for more than fifteen years.” The royal town, founded in the early 16^th century, is about fifty miles east of Siauliai. During the interwar years Lithuania was divided into 24 districts and each district had its own governor. Farming was what mattered the most. Prince Edward Island is ten times smaller than Lithuania, but they are both on the shores of a sea and are both farming lands. Agriculture is nearly half of what goes on. The livestock is pork and beef. Potatoes were number one in both country places.

   “When my grandfather became the governor of the Zerasai district, my grandmother didn’t want to move, since it was more than seventy-five miles away from where they lived, so my father stayed with his mother. But he didn’t get along with the students at the high school there.” It was a strict Catholic school, and everybody had to dress appropriately, like they were tending to saints.

   “On my first day of classes I was dressed up too nice, like I was going to a party, with a bright tie and everything, and everybody laughed at me,” JT’s father said. “Where are you from, they asked, mocking me. I didn’t make any friends there.” He finally told them, “I’m leaving.” He moved to Zerasai in 1939 and lived with his father. “We always studied a second language in school, and since my mother was Russian, studying it was easy for me. But when I got to Zerasai I found out they only had English as a second language. There was no Russian. My father had to hire a tutor for me.”

   During the 1930s the world was changing fast. The Lithuanian world was changing even faster, although it didn’t change so much as fall apart. “The Commies showed up,” JT said. “All of the country’s officials were let go and the Russians put in new people they wanted to run the show. They always said they didn’t order anything themselves, but it was the Lithuanian turncoats who were in charge, so it was really the Russians.”

   The father and son moved back to Siauliai. By then Vytas spoke Lithuanian, Russian, and English. The Markunas family spent more and more time at their farm. “It was only a few miles from our farmhouse to town,” Vytas said. “I used to walk or bicycle. The mood was bad. Everybody thought something terrible was going to happen.”

   The Russian annexation of Lithuania was completed by the late summer of 1940. Businesses were nationalized and collectivization of land began. As the Russian presence expanded the family talked about leaving the Baltics. “Why don’t we go to Germany?” Antonina asked. “We had a chance to leave the country and go somewhere else,” Vytas said. “My mother wanted to go. We talked about it often.” But Jonas didn’t want to leave his home. “I have never done anything wrong that they would arrest me,” he told his family. “I have always been good to people. They aren’t going to put me in jail.”

   The family stayed on their farm through the winter. Then, as mass arrests and deportations of policemen, politicians, and dissidents began Jonas was picked up by NKVD plainclothesmen. “My grandfather was gardening, wearing a shirt, old pants, and slippers when they drove up, a carload of Russians, and stopped, saying there was something wrong with their engine,” JT said. “He walked over to the car with them. They shoved him into the back and drove off.”

   Vytas was in school taking his final exams that morning. “My mother called the school and told me my father had been taken. I went home right away.” Antonina packed clothes, socks and shoes, and soap for her husband. She went to see him the next day. “The man who was running the jail was a Jewish fellow. He had grown up with us and was a friend of our family, but when my mother asked him to help us, he said times have changed.” 

   It was a new day. There was a new boss. “He was a Communist and had been in and out of jail because of his political activities. He was always in trouble. My father always let him go after a few days. Just be a nice boy, he would tell him, but then the next thing he would be in jail again. He wouldn’t help my father when he was arrested. He said everything is different now.”

   The man who had once ruled the local police stayed under lock and key in the local lock-up. “They didn’t let my mother talk to my father. We went there many times, but they never let us see him. We never saw him again.” Jonas was loaded onto a boxcar. Four days later, the 4^th Panzer Group, part of the first phase of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of Russia, finished the destruction of Red Army armored forces in Lithuania. Within a week Nazi Germany seized the whole of the country.

   JT’s grandfather was transported to a labor camp near Krasnojarsk in Siberia. He was ordered to log in the dense forests and starved to death in the winter of 1942. Anton Chekhov, the Russian short story writer, once wrote that Krasnojarsk was the most beautiful city in Siberia.

   “My father logged when he first came to Canada, north of Sudbury,” Kayleigh said. “He always said it was hard work, working in all kinds of weather, much harder than the mines.”

   When the NKVD began mass arrests of Lithuanians, Soviet officials seized their property, and there was widespread looting by the natives. It was every man for himself, unless you were a Red. After the deportation the family left the farm. “It was too dangerous to stay. We went into the forest. But then my mother told me to go to Vilnius and tell Gaile our father had been arrested. She wanted her to know to be careful. I took a train, but as soon as I got there, I got a phone call saying my mother had been arrested.”

   “They were still living in the forest?” Kayleigh asked.

   “They built a lean-to near a stream and camouflaged it,” JT said. “His sister stole food from nearby farms. They had a rifle. The gun didn’t do them any good.”

   “All the French Acadians were deported from here during the French and Indian Wars,” Kayleigh said. “They didn’t have many guns, not that it would have mattered. I’ve heard people call it the Great Expulsion.”

   “I’ve heard about that,” JT said. “The way I heard it was that if you were Acadian, you were removed from your home and your land. Your house was burned, and the land given to settlers loyal to Britain, mostly immigrants from Scotland and New England.”

   “Somebody complained and informed on her,” Vytas said. “We had land, 160 acres, so we were considered capitalists. We weren’t rich, but we weren’t poor, either. I went to the train station but didn’t see her anywhere. She was sent to a prison camp.” His mother was transported to the Gulag. She was released in 1956, after Stalin’s death, but not allowed to return home to Siauliai. She was sent to a decrepit cinder block one-room apartment near the Baltic Sea.

   “After his mother’s arrest my father moved to Vilnius, staying with my aunt Gaile and her husband,” JT said. “At the time almost everyone living there was either Russian or Polish.” Lithuanians in the former capital city were strangers in their own land.

   “The day the Commies retreated and before the Germans came, everybody raced to the food warehouses and broke into them. There was almost no food anywhere in a fertile land of small farms. When the Germans arrived, they put a stop to it. My father stayed there for a month but went home when summer ended. The farm had to be cared for, but, first, he had to get a travel permit. He couldn’t get in to see a single German to apply for a permit, but finally he talked to somebody who had known my grandfather. The officer told him they weren’t issuing any more permits, but then he said all right, and wrote one out for him.”

   He took a train back to Siauliai and walked home, but when he got there, he discovered a company of Wehrmacht infantry had taken over the farm. “They were there about three weeks, more than seventy of them. I couldn’t stay in our house since the officers had taken it over. They didn’t do our farm any harm. They had their own quarters and their own mess. I made friends with some of them. We drank beer together at night.”

   Jonas’s practice had been to have a foreman run the farm. The foreman hired three men and three women every spring. Although the farm had chickens and pigs, and draft horses to do the heavy work, it was a dairy farm with more than twenty cows. “I started taking care of things, even though I didn’t know anything,” Vytas said. “I knew the cows had to be milked and the milk had to go to the dairy. But about growing crops, and the fields, I didn’t know anything. But I worked as though I knew what I was doing.” That fall he sent farmhands to till the ground in a nearby field. When his nearest neighbor saw them working, he ran across the road shouting and waving his arms.

   “What the hell are you doing?” he yelled.

   “I told him we were preparing the ground for next year. He said, ‘You’re ruining this year’s seed and you won’t have any grass next year.’ We stopped right away. I learned what to do.” A year later he was on a horse-drawn mower cutting hay when he saw storm clouds gathering. He decided he would walk the horses, lightening the load so they could pull the mower faster, and jumped down from his seat. “As I hopped down, I stumbled and fell on the blades of the mower. The horses stopped. My hand was almost cut off. The boy who was helping me ran over. When he saw what happened, and saw my hand, he passed out.”

   As the war dragged on, he had problems keeping the farm going. He had only partial use of his injured hand and farmhands were deserting the countryside. “I went to the prisoner-of-war camp where I knew they gave Russians out. They gave me some of them. One morning they were all gone. I had to go back to the Germans and ask for more. My God, how they were mad about it. One officer shouted that I hadn’t looked after them, that I needed to lock them up at night, and that they weren’t going to give me anymore. In the end I said, I need more, so they gave me more. I kept them locked up after that and they were still there when I ran away.”

   In 1944 the Red Army stormed back into Lithuania. Vytas fled with a mechanized company of Wehrmacht, whisked up by them as they passed. They had been stationed near the prisoner-of-war camp. They told him he had five minutes to decide whether he was coming with them or not as they retreated. “They were in a big hurry. They said the Russians were on the other side of the Hill of Crosses. The hill was on fire. I only had time to fill a bag with a few clothes, a little money, and photographs of my parents.”

   His oldest sister fled to East Prussia. His other sister didn’t get away. “She had a problem at the border and didn’t make it. The Soviets had taken that area, so she was forced to stop in a town there. She had her daughter and her husband’s mother with her. Her husband had been shot and pushed into a pit. In the end the three of them were forced to stay there. She finished school, became a nurse, and never told anybody where she was from. The Russians never found out anything about her.”

   In July the Red Army captured Panevezys. Later that month they took Siauliai, inflicting heavy damage on the city. Two months after that the counterattacking German 3rd Panzer Army was destroyed, and Lithuania became part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. “My father ended up in Sudbury in the late 1940s with a duffel bag and enough loose change to buy a snack,” JT said. “He got a job with Inco and that’s where he stayed. At first, he worked as a blaster, one of the more dangerous jobs, but over the years the daily grind got easier.”

   “My dad worked in the mines for seven or eight years after he quit logging, and then went to Toronto and from there we moved to Buffalo,” Kayleigh said. “No matter, I still think of myself as a Sudbury girl.”

   “Where did you live?”

   “We lived on Pine Street, where the Eastern Europeans lived.”

   JT grew up on Stanley Street where it dead-ended, only a few blocks from Pine Street.

   “When were you born?”

   “1961.”

    JT had been born the same year. Kayleigh was the same age, from the same town, and had grown up within shouting distance of him. He wasn’t sure if the coincidences were a good thing or a bad thing.

   “Do you remember the Canadian Pacific trains blowing their air horns when they curled around the cliff at the back of Stanley Street?”

  “I sure do,” Kayleigh said. “Whenever they wailed, I wailed right back.”   

   “Me, too,” JT said, smiling at the memory.

   Malcolm “Monk” Kennedy was half rattlesnake and half Scottish. He was from Prince Edward Island but had spent only a part of his life on the island. He was born on Point Prim near the lighthouse, off Route 209 in a fishing shack that had nothing to do with fishing and everything to do with smuggling, especially drugs, most of it weed. 

   When the midwife left the house the middle of the night that he was born the first thing she did when stepping outside the door was make the sign of the cross. She hurried away under a full moon. Monk was born under a bad sign, staying a bad boy as soon as he began to crawl.

   His father was superstitious to a T. He kept an American Indian head penny made in a leap year and a double six domino made long ago in a drawer. There was a rooster claw nailed to the front door and blood red prayer candles on the sills of the two front windows. Mason jars full of moonshine were buried at the four corners of the house.

   By the time he was ready to go to school Monk decided he wasn’t going to school. 

   “Thomas Edison only went to school for three months his whole life,” he said.

   “Who’s Thomas Edison?”

   “He’s the man who invented electricity.”

   “Maybe he did, and maybe he didn’t, but you ain’t no Edison, whoever he is,” his father said.

   “I know, that’s why I’m not going to go at all.”

   “You got more nerve than a bum tooth.”

   Monk’s mother left the minute she was done nursing him, not leaving a note or forwarding address. She left with some clothes and all the loose money in the house. She moved to Vancouver Island, as far away from Prince Edward Island as possible. None of the Kennedy clan ever heard about her or from her again.

   His father took Monk’s declaration to heart and sent him to live with an uncle in McMasterville near Montreal. He turned 18 in 1982 without a diploma, not even a first grade one. It made no difference to him. He wasn’t planning on working in an office or supermarket. “I ain’t punching no clock,” he said. He knew his way around the world he lived in. He tied his star to Maurice Boucher, a friend of his uncle’s. He was the leader of a white supremacist outlaw motorcycle gang who called themselves the SS.  His best friend Salvatore Cazzetta was the other leader of the gang.

  The Schutzstaffel, who were the Nazis known as the SS, would have shot them dead on the spot if they had spotted them. They hated the French and Italians. They would have taken the gang’s motorcycles for their own use. The SS didn’t believe in the law or self-styled outlaws. They lived by their own dark rules of due process. They shot first and never asked questions.

    Maurice went to prison for sexually assaulting an underage girl. In the meantime, Salvatore ran things. Four years later Maurice was a free man and was hooking up with the Hells Angels. It didn’t take long before he was president of the Quebec branch. Salvatore didn’t like it and said so. He had sworn to never have anything to do with the Angels after the Lennoxville Massacre the year before. Hard words and pushing and shoving led to more hard words and more pushing and shoving and finally fists. Salvatore stomped off and formed his own gang with his brother Giovanni. They called themselves the Rock Machine.

   Before long Quebec was known as the Red Zone among bikers far and wide. The RCMP didn’t call it that, but they knew all about the blood being spilled. So long as it was biker blood, they didn’t worry overmuch about it. If they could have, they would have encouraged the fighting. Both the Angels and the Rock Machine distributed cocaine for the Mafia. They wanted to buy and sell the drugs themselves except the kingpins of the trade didn’t trust any of the biker gangs.

   “The Mafia are in charge of importation and the Hells Angels are the distributors. The Mafia has a better reputation than the bikers because the Colombians don’t trust the Hells Angels, but they do trust the Mafia,”one journalist explained, looking over his shoulder.

   The men who were the Mafia were all Sicilians or of Sicilian descent. They kept their made-man business to themselves. They didn’t drive around in limousines with noisy mufflers. The bikers were mostly French-Canadian, with a sprinkling of assorted misfits. Their Harleys were loud. They either replaced the stock exhaust pipes with rowdy variants or simply removed the mufflers. Inside and outside their clubhouse doors the Hells Angels were jacked up.

   During a Hells Angel picnic in the homeland, which was strictly RSVP, watched over by the San Mateo, California Sheriff’s Office, Terry the Tramp hooked up a microphone to speakers and addressed the lawmen parked on the other side of the road.

   “Remember this, you jackasses,” he bellowed, “just remember that while you’re standin’ out there on that cold road, doin’ your righteous duty and watchin’ all of us sex fiends and dope addicts in here having a good time, just think about that little old wife of yours back home with some dirty old Hells Angel crawlin’ up between her thighs! What do you think about that, you worthless fuzz? You gettin’ hungry? We’ll bring you some chili if we have any left over, but don’t hurry home, let your wife enjoy herself.”

   One of the policemen spit in the dirt. “That dog is doing a lot of chopping, but no chips are flying,” he said to the others standing beside him. He fingered his handgun. “That smart boy has got a mind like a steel trap, except it’s full of mice.”

   “The Hells Angels try not to do anything halfway, and anyone who deals in extremes is bound to cause trouble, whether he means to or not. This, along with a belief in total retaliation for any offense or insult, is what makes the Hells Angels unmanageable for the police,” is what Hunter Thompson said about Terry the Tramp and the rest of the Red & White.

   Chico Jones was a Mexican who cut his own finger off during a statewide Angel run. One of the other Hells Angels, Butchie the Gringo who was from Cleveland, Ohio said to Chico, pointing to the man’s hand on the handlebar, “What would you do if I cut that finger of yours off?” 

   Chico said, “You don’t have to cut it off, I will.” After he cut his little finger off and threw it in the ditch alongside the road, while doing a wheelie, Butchie said, “That’s what I call showing real class.”

   The Hells Angels came to Quebec in 1977, prospered in their own way, but shot themselves in the foot eight years later. During a pow-wow gone wrong five Angels in the Laval chapter were shot and killed by other Angels.  One of the dead men wasn’t dead, yet. He got his face kicked in for his trouble. After that he was dead. None of the gunmen made any apologies about what they had done. It came to be known as the Lennoxville Massacre. 

   Michel “Sky” Langois, the national president of the Canadian Angels, fled to Morocco after a warrant for his arrest on charges of first-degree murder was issued by the RCMP. Maurice Boucher was fully patched two years later and became president of the Montreal South chapter. He decided the Angels would turn a new page on his watch. He was looking ahead to expand their thuggish empire of crime.

   “We’re going to expand into the Atlantic provinces the next couple of years,” Maurice told Monk. “We’re going to start with New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. You go to PEI, scout out Summerside and Charlottetown. Keep it on the quiet side, don’t ride a Harley, and don’t wear colors. Don’t tell anybody what you’re about. We’ll talk every few months.”

   He gave Monk a thick envelope full of fifty-dollar bills.

   “Don’t live it up and don’t come back to me for more,” he said.

   As the end of the year approached, Monk had gone through almost all the cash living it up. He knew he couldn’t go back to Maurice for more. There would be hell to pay. He hadn’t recruited anybody to the Red & White, not that he tried, although he had found a girlfriend. When he found out she was going to Montreal for a few days, he asked her what it was about.

   “I have to make a delivery.”

   “What kind of delivery?”

   She showed him a briefcase stuffed to the gills with cash. 

   “Two million, but it’s not real.”

   “It looks real,” Monk said after inspecting a handful of bills. “It looks damned real.”

   “It’s the best in the world,” she said.

   The money was going to Montreal. It was going to Vito Rizzuto, who imported and distributed most of the hashish, heroin, and cocaine in the eastern half of Canada. He ran gambling and laundered hundreds of millions of dollars, dollars that included payments for contract killings. Everybody called his gang the Sixth Family.

   Vito’s father and grandfather were both murdered in turf wars. His mother was the daughter of a Mafia chieftain. His wife Giovanna was the daughter of a mobster. The only time he served time was in 1972 for arson but he was on the hook for a boat seized by the RCMP off the coast of Newfoundland the year before. The boat was loaded with 16 tons of hashish. He was out on bail. The prison time he spent 17 years earlier was a mistake. He knew for sure that he wouldn’t be serving any more time this time. As soon as it was wrapped up, he would load up another boat.

   “You done good, babe, you done good,” Monk said, giving his girlfriend a kiss and rifling the wad in his hand.

   “What do you mean?” she asked

   “Nuthin’, babe, nuthin’,” Monk slithered and whispered.

    She didn’t know he signed and sealed her death warrant that night. He would deliver it in his own good time. Her time was just about up.

   JT Marcunas started in Kensington with gas stations, went on to diners and convenience stores, and ended at the Parkview Drive-in in Brackley Beach. From Kensington he went to New London and Stanley Bridge. He stopped at farm stands and fish shacks. He stopped at liquor stores. He described the motorcycle and what little he knew about the rider. In between he stopped at every ice cream stand he saw. They all had gravel parking lots, although not all of them had gravel. They served some of the best ice cream in the world, most of it from ADL Dairies. The milk and cream came from Prince Edward Island cows. The sugar came from Florida.

   A new ice cream store had opened in Charlottetown six years earlier and was soon expanding. Inside a few years Cows was voted “Canada’s Best Ice Cream” store in a Reader’s Digest opinion poll. Twenty years later it was listed as No. 1 in the “World’s Top Ten Places for Ice Cream.” Walking up to the counter of his third ice cream stand JT broke down and had a scoop of Wowie Cowie.

   Everywhere he went, he went in the door, described the red motorcycle, left his name and phone number, and asked to be called if anybody spotted his man. One woman in Stanley Bridge remembered the motorcycle because the rider had paid with a one-hundred-dollar bill for a fish sandwich.

   “Do you have anything smaller?” she asked.

   “Take it or leave it, lady” the rider said, snarky. She made change for him and watched him ride away. “That one was a rude piece of work.”

   When he walked into Captain Scott’s on the Cavendish Boardwalk, JT heard the same story about a young man on a red motorcycle stopping in for a bite.

   “He come in, ordered fish and chips, and when I brought him his food, he paid with a one-hundred-dollar bill. But then he threw it down on the floor and said it was no good, it was old fish, and he wanted a new piece. When I said no, I thought at first he was going to come over the counter at me. I even put my hand on this knife that he couldn’t see.” He showed JT the knife. It was a knife that could gut man or beast. “What he did though was throw the fries down on the floor next to the fish and stomp out. I went to the door to make sure he was leaving. There was something crooked as a corkscrew about that young man.”

   When JT got to North Rustico he stopped at the Lion’s Club and the co-op store. He went to the Fisherman’s Wharf restaurant. He stepped into Lorne’s Snack Shop. Two women were at the counter. One of them said something.

   “What was that?” he asked. She said it again. He caught a word or two. Judging by their unfamiliarity with English, he suspected they were Newfies. When he asked one of them if they were from Newfoundland, the bigger of the two said, “I just dies at you!” JT reckoned it meant something pertinent. He thanked them for their time.

   He walked across the street to the harbor. He talked to the Doiron’s in their fish shop, a couple of teenagers scraping danglies and goop from the bottom of a boat, and two men at the entrance to a yellow building. The two of them were outside the entrance. One man in suspenders, his pants pulled up to his belly button, was sitting on an old stove next to the door. The other man in a red t-shirt and ZZ Top beard was standing in the doorway. They were the Court brothers. There were white board signs on all sides of the door advertising deep sea fishing. One sign said, “This place has been advertised in Modern Maturity Magazine July – August 1985.”

   “Yeah, we seen him,” ZZ Top said. “We take tourists out mornings, afternoons, and evenings, but never on Sundays.” They were born again Christians. “We was here one Sunday, not working, since it’s a day of rest, when this young fella on a red motorcycle pulls up. He wanted us to take him out, not for no fishing, but to see the lay of the shoreline. We told him we don’t do that, and besides we don’t go out on Sundays. He flashed some hundreds, but we said no again. He didn’t like that. He got mad as a hornet, took a couple of steps at us, but he was kind of scrawny and us two being grown men, he backed off, but not before swearing up a storm.”

   It was nearly dark by the time JT made his last stop at Brackley Beach’s Parkview Drive-in. He talked to the teenager in the ticket booth. The teen was downing a can of Big 8.

   “We don’t get many motorcycles here,” he said. “Practically none, no sir. I can’t remember the last one.”

   “OK, thanks for your time.”

   “You know, we’re showing a cop movie tonight, if you want to stay.” 

   “Is that right?”

   “Yeah. It’s got Jim Belushi in it.”

   JT parked in the last row, turned off his car, and hooked the sound box onto his partially lowered front door window. He adjusted the back rest. The movie started.

   The big screen cops and robbers movie “K-9” was about a disheveled San Diego detective who orders pizza delivered to his car during stakeouts. He heats up the leftovers with his cigarette lighter. He’s after a drug dealer who sooner than later spots him and blows up his car with a helicopter. After he gets a new car his commanding officer says he has to ride with a partner for safety’s sake. He would rather work alone but settles on a compromise. His new partner will be a dog. The dog later bites some of the criminals and sniffs out the dope. To top it off he saves the policeman’s life. He later plays dead, and the detective thinks he really is dead. While he is delivering a eulogy the dog slyly opens his eyes, takes a peek, but quickly closes them again when the detective looks his way.

   JT laughed so much he had to wipe his eyes a couple of times. When the movie was over he flashed his red and blue lights to show his appreciation. On the way home he thought, if I don’t get myself a steady girlfriend soon, I’m going to have to get a dog for a friend.

   “When Britain is at war, Canada is at war,” Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier proclaimed in 1910. “There is no distinction.” When Britain entered World War One, Canada signed on, too. The Governor-General of Canada vowed that “the Canadian people will be united in a common resolve to put forth every effort and to make every sacrifice necessary to ensure the integrity and maintain the honor of our Empire”

   Blood and guts bravado was easy enough talk. He might have had the guts, but it was going to be somebody else’s blood. He wasn’t going to be doing the sacrificing. Empires are made by plundering and slaughtering. They never go down without a fight. They are always sure of the rightness of their cause. It doesn’t matter if there’s any honor in the slaughter, or not. They plow straight ahead. Stay out of the way or get plowed six feet under.

   Canada had no air force, a navy fit only for a bathtub, and an army of 3,000-some men. 

By the end of the war more than 600,000 Canadians had enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force to fight for King and Country and more than 400,000 of them served in Europe, out of a population of less than 8 million.

   “THE EMPIRE NEEDS MEN” is what the posters blared. “All answer the call! Helped by the YOUNG LIONS the OLD LION defies his foes. Enlist NOW!”

   Everybody wanted in on the fight because everybody thought it would be over by Christmas. Canadians lined up to support the British Empire and collect pay of $1.10 a day. The harvest that year was bad, and unemployment was soaring. The army was a steady paymaster. But machine guns fired ten times as many bullets a minute as they were paid pennies a day. Hundreds of thousands on all sides were slaughtered day by week by month by the new rapid-firing weapons on the Western Front.

   At the beginning of the war, it was better to be killed than wounded. The wounded were taken off battlefields in horse-drawn wagons or on mules in baskets draped over their sides, the baskets soaked with men bleeding to death. There wasn’t much in the line of on-the-spot lifesaving. If they made it to a train station, they were transported to hospitals. “One of those trains dumped about 500 badly wounded men and left them lying between the tracks in the rain, with no cover whatsoever,” complained Harvey Cushing, the head of volunteer doctors at the American Ambulance Hospital of Paris.

   Nearly 60,000 Canadians were killed, the result of enemy action and disease, and more than 170,000 of them were wounded. Almost 3.500 men and one woman had at least one arm or leg amputated. Private Curley Christian lost all four limbs but survived.

   During the Battle of Vimy Ridge he was unloading cargo from a truck when an artillery shell hit next to where he was, trapping him under debris for several days. When stretcher bearers tried to reach him, they were killed by more artillery. When he was finally rescued, he was transported to a military hospital and from there to London. His arms and legs had gone gangrenous and all four were sawed off. When he got back home, he was fitted with prosthetic limbs and married Cleopatra McPherson. He designed his own new hand for writing letters. Cleo and he had a son who twenty years later served in World War Two. He managed to walk away from it at the end on his own two feet.

   More than 7,000 Prince Edward Islander’s enlisted. Five hundred of them were killed and more than a 1,000 wounded. Tommy Murphy went overseas with a siege battery in 1915. Before he went, he got married to Freya O’Sullivan and got her pregnant. He got word of his son Danny’s birth by telegram while taking a break in ankle-deep sludge sheltering in a trench during the Third Battle of Artois. 

   He spent eight days at the front at Artois and was due for four days in a reserve trench and then four more days at a rest camp. When the bloodletting went on and on and the ranks thinned out, he never made it to the reserve trench much less the rest camp. It was that kind of war. The Allied and Central Powers fought the same battles over and over again. It was every man for himself and God against all.

   The British, French, and Canadians assembled seventeen infantry and two cavalry divisions for the offensive at Artois, backed by 630 field guns and 420 heavy artillery guns. During the fighting the field artillery fired 1.5 million rounds and the heavy artillery 250,000 rounds. Tommy Murphy barely slept for days. Whenever he took a break, he felt like his arms were going to fall off after loading shells until there weren’t any more to load. He knew he had sent his fair share of Huns to Valhalla even though he never saw one of them die.

   When the Allies tried to advance, they suffered horrific losses. The battle went on from late September to mid-October when it ground to a halt in the middle of a never-ending autumn rainstorm and mutual exhaustion. By that time both sides were conserving ammunition because they were running out of it. They spent the rest of the month burying their dead, tending to the wounded, and withdrawing.

   Tommy was a cannon man because he was taller than five feet seven inches and burly enough to do the heavy work of feeding cannons. He didn’t have flat feet or bad eyesight, He didn’t have the greatest teeth, but explained he was enlisting to fight Germans, not bite them. He could have begged off because he was married, but he was patriotic and wanted to do his fair share. Cash money from the Canadian Patriotic Fund helped his wife keep the home fires burning in North Rustico.

   His battery had a sniper attached to it. Francis “Peggy” Pegahmagabow was an Aboriginal who could split a bullseye nobody else could even see. He had more than 300 kills to his name. He roamed No Man’s Land for them, seeking out enemy snipers and forward spotters. He worked at night. He always came back in the morning. The other side didn’t always make it back to their side.

   Peggy wore moccasins instead of army boots, chewed on twigs whenever he sensed danger, and always carried a medicine bag. “When I was at training camp on Lake Superior in 1914, some of us landed from our vessel to gather blueberries near an Ojibwa settlement,” he said. “An old Indian recognized me and gave me a medicine bag to protect me, saying I would shortly be in great danger. The bag was deer skin tightly bound with a leather throng. Sometimes it seemed to be hard as a rock, at other times it appeared to contain nothing. What was inside of the bag I do not know.”

   Tommy had signed up for short service and when 1915 was over and done and it was April 1916, he was done with his one year. His commanding officer tried to convince him to re-enlist, but he had a wife, a child, and a farm that needed him. He didn’t need to kill anymore Germans. He was sick of the butchery.  He had heard three men from North Rustico were already dead. He didn’t want to be next one. He knew if he re-enlisted it was only a matter of time before he went home in a pine box to be buried on Church Hill Rd.

   He got out when the going was good. The next year enlistments dried up as men near and far began to realize the toll the new style fighting on the Western Front was taking. Machine gun and shell fire were murderous. On top of that there was poison gas. The dead were left where they fell. They were left for the rats. In May 1917 the government announced conscription through the Military Service Act. The rats stood up and cheered for more grub in their feedbag.

   It was easier getting into the army than it was getting out. However, he finally found a ride on a troop transport from Calais to Dover, took a train to London, and spent the night at a whore house with a razzle dazzle girl. He took a steam bath the next morning and had lunch at a corner fish and chip shop, cod with a splash of vinegar and a pint at his elbow. He followed the first pint with a second one and was happy for it. He had a ticket for passage to Halifax, but the voyage was a week away. His grandfather had come from Ireland, or so the family legend went, and done something big for the Crown, who rewarded him with 400 acres of Prince Edward Island shoreline. He unfolded a map and located Dublin. It was directly across the Irish Sea from Liverpool.

   He bought a train ticket to Liverpool and the next morning landed in Dublin. It was Easter Monday. The Easter Rising had started yesterday. The Easter Rising was happening today. Tommy was unaware of the hubbub until he walked face first into it.

   After landing at Dublin Port, he followed the River Liffey, making for Dublin Castle and St. Patrick’s Cathedral. His plan was to find a cheap hotel and have dinner. He would explore the rest of the city after a good night’s sleep. He was wearing his Canadian Army uniform over a pair of Spring Needle underwear and carrying a rucksack. He had his toiletries, four pairs of clean socks, his rolled up military wool overcoat, and a paper bag full of Huntley & Palmer biscuits in it. The biscuits were so hard they would crack a man’s teeth at the first bite if not soaked in tea beforehand. He always soaked them beforehand.

   His papers and money were in a travel wallet attached to his belt. He had his Colt New Service revolver on his belt, too, for what it was worth now that his war was over. An hour later he was glad he had it, after he got it back from the rebels, although he wasn’t sure if he was going to need it to protect himself from the Irish or the British.

   Dublin Castle was in the middle of the old part of the city. The city got its name from the Black Pool, the ‘Dubh Linn,’ where the rivers Liffey and Poddle met. It was where the castle was. It had been a Gaelic ring fort in the beginning, a long time ago. Later, after the Vikings showed up, it was a Viking fort. For the past 700 years it had been a British fort, the seat of their rule in Ireland. 

   Tommy didn’t have anything against the British, but after a year of serving in their army, he thought the Irish might be better served ruling themselves. They couldn’t do worse. During the year he served on the Western Front hundreds of thousands of John Bulls were killed. It made him sick to think of the men he had seen obeying orders to attack barbed wire and machine guns on foot across open fields. Many men were wounded or went missing. The wounded might survive, but he didn’t think the missing were coming back anytime soon.

   He was glad to be out of it. It hadn’t ended by Christmas of 1914. It still wasn’t over by Christmas of 1915. The next Christmas was in eight months and the talk was it would take many more holidays to either win or lose the war. He wasn’t a religious man, but he meant to say a prayer in St. Patrick’s Cathedral before dinner. 

   He didn’t get a chance to say a prayer, find a room, or have dinner. He lost his chance when he came across the bridge leading to Trinity College, turned the corner towards Dublin Castle, and found himself face to face with a Mauser semi-automatic pistol. He knew exactly what it was. He stood stock still where he was. The hand on the firearm was a woman’s hand. She was wearing an old military hat and a yellow armband.

   “Hand’s up and on the wall, boyo,” she said, a second woman coming up behind him. The second woman was wearing a bandolier laden with half dozen hand grenades. She had a rusty handgun. It looked like it came from the Middle Ages. He did what she said. She patted him down and took his Colt.

   “This is a right nice gun,” she said. “Now, who are you and what are you doing here?”

   “Tommy Murphy, Canadian Army, from Prince Edward Island by way of a year in France,” he said. “I’m here to take in the sights before going home. I thought Ireland was sitting this war out.”

   “We ask the questions,” the woman wearing the bandolier barked.

   “Come on,” the woman with the Mauser said, jabbing him in the small of the back with the barrel of her gun.

   The streets leading to the city center were barricaded. When they got to the General Post Office, he saw there were two green flags flying in place of the Union Jack. They said “Irish Republic” in gold letters. He was surprised. He knew there was no such thing as an Irish Republic. 

   “What’s going on?”  

   “We’re rocking the casbah,” the grenade girl said.

   There was a man outside the post office reading from a broadsheet. It was the “Proclamation of the Irish Republic.” There were copies of it pasted on walls. Newsboys were handing them out to anybody who wanted one. Not everybody wanted one. Most of the onlookers didn’t understand what was happening. They went about their business, shopping, stopping for lunch, gossiping. The grenade girl handed him a copy. “Read this,” she said. There were men with rifles and shotguns on the roofs of buildings overlooking bridges.

   “Who’s this?” said a man wearing a scrap of paper pinned to his breast. It said “Citizen Army.”

   “We found him down the street, Sean.”

   Sean was Sean Mac Duiarmada, one of Commander-in-Chief Patrick Pearce’s right-hand men.

   “He’s Canadian,” Sean said pointing to Tommy’s regimental badge and the “CANADA” title at the end of his shoulder straps.

   “We thought he was a Brit.”

   “They’ll be here soon enough,” Sean said. There were 1,200 rebels waiting for 20,000 British troops to show up. A shot rang out in the distance and Margaret Keogh fell down dead. She was a 19-year-old nurse tending to a wounded Citizen Army man. She was the first person to die during the Rising of Easter Week.

   A team of Volunteers trotted past on their way to the Magazine Fort in Phoenix Park. They took all the weapons and ammunition they could carry and blew up the rest. When the son of the fort’s commander tried to raise the alarm, he was shot dead. He was the second person to die.

   “You’re free to go,” Sean said to Tommy. “Best you leave Dublin all together.”

   “What about my sidearm?”

   Sean nodded to the grenade girl, and she handed Tommy’s Colt back to him. She wasn’t happy about giving up the up-to-date firearm. She wasn’t sure hers even fired.

   When a contingent of the Citizen’s Army approached Dublin Castle, police sentry James O’Brien ordered them to halt. He was shot dead even though he was unarmed. He was the third person to die. When British troops showed up the rebels retreated to City Hall, ran up to the roof, and fired down on the troops in the street. The man commanding the rebel contingent, Sean Connolly, was shot dead by a sniper, the first rebel and fourth person killed.

   Tommy made his way back to the docklands. He boarded the same boat he had come on. An hour later the boat was steaming out of Dublin Bay on its way back to Liverpool. Eight hours later he was asleep in a room of a boarding house on the waterfront, not far from the Three Graces. The next morning was cold and damp. Women were out in the streets with their long-handled push brooms. They were called Sweepers. Others were in homes cleaning and scrubbing. They were called Dailies. Many more were at work in munitions factories. They were called Munitionettes. Liverpool’s men were on the Royal Navy’s battleships and in the King’s Liverpool Regiment. They were called Cannon Fodder.

   Tommy found a fry-up near the port and ordered breakfast, which was eggs back bacon sausage baked beans a fried tomato fried mushrooms fried bread and black pudding. The Liverpool Daily Post headline screamed “REBELLION!” There was no need for him to read about it. He thought he might have this same breakfast again at midday and tonight. Somebody once said, “To eat well in England you must have breakfast three times a day.”

   He put the newspaper aside. Pushing himself away from the table, he checked his ticket for Canada. He tucked it securely away with his service revolver. Tommy Murphy was going to keep himself safe and sound until his boat sailed for home. Once he was out of the frying pan on somebody else’s stove, he was going to make sure he stayed where the frying pan was of his own making. The old lions could tear themselves apart as much as they wanted, for all he cared, empire or no empire.