The Murder House

Why we felt guilty for finding the murder house is difficult to say. It’s not as if we killed anyone. But there was something so sordid and inexplicable about what we found there that it would have been better never to have discovered it at all. What we saw only raised questions about life in Colinton that I believe are fundamentally impossible to answer. Knowing that such questions, such houses, exist is only to draw attention to a grown man’s habit of picking and eating his scabs. He would do it if he were alone, but the shame is multiplied because of your presence. Your shame is multiplied too.

The murder house (as we immediately started calling it) stood across the road from J’s trailer. We found it for what it was in broad northern daylight, on a walk with the three dogs, on a Thursday afternoon when D and I had driven up from the city to attend Steak Night at the Colinton bar. J had been living in Colinton (population: 410) for months already, but this was our first trip to visit her. I remember feeling guilty that we hadn’t come sooner, and now, almost a year later, I continue to feel guilty with each month that passes without us visiting again.

Steak Night, as J promised, was populated with a cast of country characters I couldn’t have invented for the page if I tried.

There was the live jukebox couple who claimed to know twenty-five hundred songs and took requests all evening. They seemed too young for their work and later D realized he’d gone to highschool with the woman. (J and I smirked and pretended to gasp. D’s old friends from highschool had become one of our minor urban legends. To our disappointment, he had not slept with this one.)

There was the table full of young men, sunburnt and beer-bellied, in John Deere t-shirts and badly fitting jeans, and the astonishingly beautiful young man in their midst—the group of them field hands, and the one a hipster’s dream of a field hand, complete with a denim shirt, sleeves rolled, unbuttoned at the chest, and a bandana around his neck. Perhaps we were most astonished that the other men allowed themselves to be seen with him.

There was the woman in the gingham sundress and running shoes which her ankles overflowed. How she had maneuvered her oxygen tank into the bar was uncertain. 

There was T, a trucker and ex-earth-mover who preached an impromptu and unwelcome sermon on the ease of getting “native girls” pregnant and the horrors attendant on on the naive man who stuck around after getting them that way. Seeing our faces, he laughed and said he was allowed to say these things, he was a quarter Indian himself. 

“Just look at the history. They were born to get slapped around.” It was far too long before he delivered his promised punch line. “They hit right back too.”

. . . . .

Months later, writing this down, it occurs to me that this speech of T’s was the second scene of violence I was a fool to bear witness to, and that, by listening, I made myself complicit in the violation of women and indeed whole peoples I was not even acquainted with. If crimes of this scope take place in Colinton, population 410, what have I failed to notice (for lack of white-trash-prairie-gothic effect?) in my cute apartment in my city of a million people?

But in fact it would be ridiculous to talk about the prairie gothic effect of the murder house. Its effect lay in its absurdity. It was no George Webber photograph. A scene from rural life, perhaps, but if you asked me, I’d still be at a loss to answer what kind of life.

. . . . .

I got very drunk that night, and made a fool of myself throwing my weight against the door to the ladies bathroom. Eventually, one of the two huge bartenders came to free me, nudging the door in with her hip and explaining with the patience of a nurse doing a bowel movement inquiry that it was a pull door, not a push. 

I believe these bartenders also owned the business. Though they suffered abuse, they controlled the flow of beer, and patrons berating them for taking so long to return to their table sprinkled handfuls of change on their wet serving trays as if these farmers believed they were making it rain. The bartenders rolled like combines between the inside dining room (where a buffet of white rolls and potato salad and caesar salad and bean salad and a pan full of red jello with a whipped topping had been set up) and the patio, about the size of a competition swimming pool, where we were sitting with T and J and N, J’s housemate and one of the her colleagues from Athabasca U. 

N was a boy of 25 who spoke as if he were 40. That evening, he spoke about how often he liked to eat meat, and the weather. He spoke about wanting to sell his Sunfire, and T spoke about wanting to buy it off him. T liked the red velour interior. J shuddered. N said it got the job done. I made a face and everyone burst out laughing. 

Now I wonder if it is possible to be young in a place like Colinton, where the whole bar was expected to drive home along dark township roads, where we city slickers felt unexpectedly naive. 

T’s and N’s cynicism (though I doubt they would have called it cyncism) was that of extreme and inglorious age, of men deprived of something. What? What does the beauty of nature fail to make up for? When does the green and gold prairie, the expanded universe, the elevating vista, become the empty page, large as a field, on which the child drops without a pen?

Though not without weapons, or tools that could become weapons. Just look at the frequency of farm accidents, limbs mangled in harvesters, carloads of teenagers flipped in the ditch on graduation night, neighbours mistaken for deer. I know that equally terrible things happen in the city. But does the city so easily take them for granted and move on? Do city people pass around the funeral photos at the next wedding? 

. . . . . 

We approached the murder house through a field of tansy, chest-high. We were going to look at it because J thought we should buy it. Large, wood-shingled, clearly (or so we thought) abandoned, built into a generous rise, it had a bank of windows across the front, which rose over the prairie like the prow of a ship. As we waded toward it, the dogs got more and more excited and we unclipped their tangle of leashes. J, having lived for a year in our building, familiar with our apartment and with our past apartments, told us exactly where our desks would sit in relation to the windows. She pictured me hemming curtains for them and suggested that we would have an excuse to expand our collection of houseplatnts. She had pothos, coleus, and wandering jew cuttings for us. 

“And you’d always be making rhubard crisp and high bush cranberry jam in the kitchen.” In the end, the reason we peered into the basement at all was that J had a hunch that the kitchen was there. 

Perhaps it was a kind of kitchen. We assumed at first that deer hunters had set up a butchering station, though why they would do this in the basement of an abandoned house was an unanswerable question. We soon had a whole collection of unanswerable questions. We still have nowhere to put them.

One question: Why was the blood still red in July, eight months after the end of the last hunting season?

To follow up: Why was there so much of it?

None of us knew much about butchering practices, J being a vegetarian, myself a lapsed vegetarian. D had participated in a turkey kill organized by an ex-girlfriend’s aunts, but that was the sum of our collective experience with killing animals and taking them apart. Nevertheless, we were all quite sure that it was a controlled, somewhat technical process that was not meant to result in sprays of blood on a white Ikea armchair, or what appeared to be a pile of blood-crusted bandages on the end of a deeply stained wooden table. True, the chains hanging from the ceiling and heaped like dropped snakes on the dirt floor suggested butchery. The fact that the armchair was a specimen of Ikea’s POÄNG model, once ubiquitous in urban lofts, currently ubiquitous in the home furnishings section on kijiji.com, suggested nothing that made sense to us. 

Though for a few seconds we had stared at the scene before us looking for the familiar 

ingredients of a mocking hilarity, there was too much blood to laught about.

An irrational fear for the dogs hit all three of us at once, as if we’d telepathically shared a brave excuse to hurry away. The fear was tailored to our desired reaction. We weren’t sure if we were afraid of the dogs lapping at the blood, stepping into the steel teeth of a trap which abruptly conjured the possibility of itself, or being hacked to pieces and splattered across the furniture, but we were sure that it was imperative to get them all back on leash and up through the tansy (which became an ominous, strangling barrier) to the road.

. . . . . 

J mentioned the murder house not that night, but a month later when drove out for Steak Night again. 

Again, though wasn’t sure how it had happened, we were sitting and drinking with T and N. Another Colinton area man who never told me his name had scooted his chair around to our table and had twice slapped at mosquitos on my thigh. It was August, the night was warm, smelling of dry grass and manure, and since it was darker than it had been at ten o’clock a month before, the strings of patio lights were on and making us feel like we’d just attended a dance at a community hall. 

Had T (J took a sip of her beer and looked at him expectantly, her pink bangs lifting with her eyebrows over her glass), heard anything about the murder house?

I felt J was asking for trouble. We called it “the murder house” mainly in our discussions about my writing a story about it. It wasn’t as if there was a sign blazoned above the bank of unseeing windows. It wasn’t as if the town of Colinton took it for an institution or a landmark. 

“Which one?” T lifted himself in his chair and dug around in his back pocket. “Oh, the big one right over by your place.” As far as T knew, it had recently been boarded up (“boarded up again, if I remember right”). 

So there had been no investigation, no police, no rumours about someone breaking into the basement?

“Well, you never know.” T suggested that if J felt unsafe, she should knock on his door. “I’m just a hop-skip-and-a-jump away from you. Any time of the day or night. Unless I’m working on my truck, I’ll hear ya. Just kick the dog if she starts making a racket. She’s loud but she don’t attack unless I say so.”

He offered to host a kind of Steak Night afterparty, starting in ten minutes. “I’ll head over there right now. Just gotta pick up my underwear off of the floor. I got beer, better than here, as long as you’re not looking for that fancy stuff.”

To my surprise, J whispered that T was one of the few neighbours who knew her dogs’ names or talked to her, and then she turned and said she would go for an hour. D and I drove back to the city and I returned to my desk by the window.