The Girl in Saskatoon Read online

  The Girl in Saskatoon

  Sharon Butala

  A Meditation on Friendship, Memory, and Murder

  This book is for Alex and for the Wiwcharuk family

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Imminence

  Preface

  Chapter One By the River

  Chapter Two Endeavour

  Chapter Three Being Ukrainian

  Chapter Four Love Me Tender

  Chapter Five Wisdom

  Chapter Six Beauty

  Chapter Seven Spring

  Chapter Eight Evidence

  Chapter Nine Sorrow

  Chapter Ten Fern Creek

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Praise for Sharon Butala

  Also By Sharon Butala

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Imminence

  Agirl sits at the river. She sits alone, her knees pulled up to her chin, her arms wrapped around them, in the centre of the concrete apron that spreads itself between the high, black-iron railway bridge some distance to her left, and the weir closer to her on her right over which the river pours unceasingly, dropping to boil and foam, and making a steady, not unpleasant, whispering roar as backdrop to the stillness of the warm spring evening.

  Off to the girl’s right, a boy casts his line into the water below the weir at the fish ladder, where an abundance of fish tumble and jump. On the girl’s left, on the apron but nearer to the bridge, there is a shadowy figure. The girl—or more properly, a young woman—dark, small, and exquisitely pretty, appears lost in her thoughts, oblivious to both the fisherman and the person in the shadows, and also to the two boys who stand at the low, ineffectual rope-and-post fence above and behind, staring longingly down at her.

  She sits, looking out over the river as the moon slowly rises to skim the dark water with its silver light. She might be waiting for someone, positioned as she is in a prominent spot, the more easily to be seen. A lover, a friend. Or perhaps like the rest of the city she’s been made a bit dreamy by spring’s arrival, and wants only to feel the soft warmth of the air a little longer before night sets in. Perhaps she is dreaming of the spring of her forest childhood, how she ran through the wet, greening pastures, the ragged, noisy Vs of geese passing overhead, how she gathered purple crocuses to take back to the cramped farmhouse for her mother. Or maybe her memories are slowly dissolved by her current dissatisfactions, the disappointing certainty, the dull rhythm of her days at the hospital where she nurses, the irritating sameness of desire among the abundance of young men in her life. Maybe she has begun to dream of a more fulfilling future: travel to exotic countries—impenetrable green jungles or vast gleaming deserts, or many-spired cities—glittering parties, brilliant, handsome men, her own place among the powerful of the world. Maybe she is thinking how she will leave this little city, go somewhere else, how she is ready to take that first, daring step from her old, tight little life into a limitless new one.

  Danger is present as she sits there; surely guardian angels also hover around her; the air is fraught with imminence, and the girl sits, clasping her knees with her arms, gazing out over the river, unaware that she is about to die.

  Preface

  One soft spring evening in 1962 a young nurse named Alexandra Wiwcharuk was murdered and an entire city came to a stop: Alexandra’s murder was all anyone could talk about. It has been forty-four years as I write this, and her killer has never been identified. I remember this, in part, because I knew her. Although Alex’s home was a farm a few miles from Endeavour, Saskatchewan, on the far east side of the province, instead of attending high school in the small city of Yorkton an hour south of her home, she was sent 125 miles west to Saskatoon to enrol in the same school I would attend. There we would meet, and from that time on, our lives would be linked.

  Forty-four years later, at a social gathering in the same city, a well-known writer who had moved to Saskatoon only two years after Alex’s death said to me, “Do you know that Saskatoon people have never forgotten that murder. They all remember it, and they still talk about it.” I did know that, but the way he said it struck a chord deep inside me, plangent, heart-stopping, and catching me by surprise, as if this were news that I was hearing for the first time. His remark had been unprompted, and it was made with such conviction, expressing, at the same time, his surprise; his voice was even tinged with something that might have been awe. I knew that sound well, that mix of surprise, dismay, chagrin, bafflement, and wonder, but in the long years—a good ten by then—of my quest to understand Alex’s murder and the city’s continuing memory of it, and in my dogged gathering of myriad details, I had nearly forgotten. But he is right: it is extraordinary that her death is still remembered.

  Without giving it much thought, over the years I had told people that I’d never forgotten what happened to Alex because we spent four years together in the same high school, and perhaps that is the main reason. But I am only one of hundreds of people, most of whom had never even heard of her before the night of her death, who still recall, sometimes with tears in their eyes or a touch of huskiness in their voices, exactly what they were doing when the news of her murder reached them, or how they went down to the riverbank that same night, or the next, in a kind of shocked suspension of belief, as if being at the actual site where her body was found could make her death real. As if a crowd of strangers standing together, silently staring at the place where she was said to have died, could make clear that she was indeed dead, and in the appalling manner the newspaper had reported.

  We haven’t forgotten, people would say, because she was young and beautiful, she was just beginning her life, and so her death was tragic. Others would say, though, that the real reason we can’t forget is that her killer was never caught, never even guessed at with any certainty. It is because there has been no closure, people would say, plaintively, that we can’t forget. Or, they would say, after all, hers was the first murder of its kind in this city, an historic marker of sorts. Or, they would insist, the reason we can’t forget is that her murder was so savage, so brutal; we remember it in proportion to its horror. How could we forget?

  But the more I study this inability to forget, the lack of the desire to forget—or, to put it positively, the extraordinary constancy with which Alex is remembered—the more I think there must be deeper reasons than those I have mentioned. I think those deeper reasons are to be found in an examination of who we were as a society then—Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, in 1962—and where we had all come from, and why. They are also to be found in an investigation of who Alexandra—sometimes spelled Alexandria—Wiwcharuk was, as well as any of us can tell, since she was barely twenty-three years old at her death—of what had formed her, and where she might have been going or been expected to go, had she not died. They are influenced by the way in which she, a smart, very pretty, but apparently otherwise unexceptional young woman could stand, at some level, for each of us. To try to answer these questions—who she was, where she came from—I had to study not just her life but the manner of her death, and the response to it of those in power—the police, the justice system—and not just of her grieving family and friends, but also of the ordinary people of the city who still remember and feel a never-diminishing pity for her.

  I also have had to inquire into my own life. I was her contemporary, a girl formed in much the same way that she had been formed, and by social factors we then took as authentic, inalterable facts about the world. I am speaking of the fifties ambience, the fifties ethic, and the fifties world of pop culture: movies, music, books, television, the new world of advertising. We had been acquaintances, never close friends, and if at the
time we knew each other we felt ourselves to be very different—she was a Ukrainian farm girl (her surname, Wiwcharuk, is pronounced something like Vee-chair-ook), while my background is a mixture of French, Scottish, and Irish, and although both my parents came from farms, I had never lived on one—we felt ourselves different only because of the cultural climate of the time and place. To this, add the fact that she grew up to be beautiful, while I did not. In fact, it would be a long time—years—before I would be able to recognize how alike we were in the ways that matter. Yet, pairing us in whatever way I might, the fact remains that I lived and have had a life, even managing to fulfill some of my high school dreams, while for Alex, everything ended that night on the riverbank in Saskatoon.

  When I began to wonder, as a writer, what her true story was, I meant by that only what exactly had happened the night she was killed, who the suspects were, and why no one was ever caught. I thought, if I thought at all, that if I knew those things, it would be enough. But as the years passed and I began to find answers to those questions, the more answers I found, the more inadequate they seemed; the more I discovered, the less I felt I knew. At last I began to see that, interesting as those answers might sometimes be, they failed to satisfy me because they were the answers to the wrong questions.

  After some ten years of thinking, talking to people, asking questions, and reading old newspaper reports and whatever documents I could lay my hands on, I had finally come to see that the question that had to be the trenchant one, the real one, almost the only one, encompassing as it does all the other questions from Who did it? to What really happened that night? and Which of the many rumours about that night, about her killer or killers, are true? to How could such evil happen in our decent, small city? was this: Why this constancy of memory? And further: What purpose is served by it? In a world where horrific deaths on a vast scale—three thousand in a moment in New York City, thousands in Afghanistan and Iraq—in a world of suicide bombers, whose purpose, whose need, is it that we should never forget one pretty young woman’s death in Saskatoon? In the end, I began to see that the real question was less about the specifics of her murder and of the investigation, and more about why I needed so badly to know, why no factual answers satisfied me, why I, too, could not forget.

  In that moment, at the social gathering when the writer inadvertently reminded me of how we all—strangers and friends alike—remembered, I saw where I had gone wrong, how my half-written book about Alex’s life and death had failed to address the resonant world of deeper meaning, had answered the wrong questions. This is the new book, the one that tries to make her alive and real again so that—in some small way—her suffering might be redeemed.

  Chapter One

  By the River

  I was sitting in my car at the city’s far south end, on the high east side of the South Saskatchewan River, and gazing down and across the half-mile-or-better expanse to the west bank. It was late spring and everything was green on that sunny day, the sky blue and cloudless, the opposite bank covered in greenery and looking, in the clear but delicate spring light, as if it might be capable of simply floating away, widening the river, or drifting toward me to make it vanish entirely. And the river, silver and blue that morning, although close up, I knew it would be a brownish green and mostly opaque, and beyond that green forest on the opposite bank, far beyond, more trees, a few rooftops, and then on the other side of the long, low hill which prevented me from seeing it, there would be the prairie. In my mind’s eye I saw the prairie billowing out like a shook feather quilt, in squares of green or brown or the palest cream, and dotted, here and there, with the chance embroidery of trees and shrubs.

  I got out of my car and walked to the edge of the high, grassy bank, at a place where no bushes rose to block my view. Far below, the sun glistened on the deceptively placid water, especially where it lapped shallowly at the edge of a long, tan sandbar, and to the right of that bar, on another which was submerged just enough that the long-legged birds that gathered there stood in water. They were brown and grey, fat and sassy, with long curved beaks, though from that distance I couldn’t actually see this, and they spread their wings easily or quarrelsomely, then settled back with self-important shakes. To their left, on the sandbar that rose a few inches above the gentle rippling of the shallow amber water, I could see a flock of birds so white that in the sunlight they appeared incandescent. I could not make out what kind they were, except that they were not the snow geese or the wild swans that might be seen at that time of year in Saskatchewan on large, isolated bodies of water. I didn’t want to call them seagulls—seagulls squawk and flap and are annoying scavengers—although I suspected that they were, but for some reason the field glasses usually kept in the car were not there so I couldn’t identify them.

  I returned reluctantly to my car and got back into the driver’s seat, still looking out across the river. Back of the green-clad banks on the other side I could pick out a few cars making their antlike ways north or west down the narrow roads, appearing and disappearing through trees, the occasional building obscuring them for a moment before they emerged again, and, watching them, and the birds far below on the water, and the way the sun made the river gleam and sparkle, made it dance, I was stricken with love. How I love this city, I thought, and was surprised enough by this that my thoughts seemed to stop, and I said again, out loud, tentatively this time, maybe closer to a question than a statement: “I love this city?”

  I was as baffled as astonished at this revelation, because it had been the scene of some rough times in my life, the roughest times: my harsh introduction to city life had been here, I had married and divorced here, I had once had a career here and in sheer disgust and something close to despair, and against the helpless protests of others, I had turned my back on it. Not that I thought specifically of all those things at that moment, but I did think that I had as much reason to hate this city as to love it, and now I wondered why I hadn’t thought, just as spontaneously, I hate this place.

  I thought, but of course I love it right now, because this morning in this wonderful spring light, and at this point high above it, this city is so beautiful, as beautiful as a landscape in a dream or a children’s book of stories. But, I argued with myself, you weren’t born here; you didn’t even live here for more than—what?—about seventeen years all told. Isn’t home the place where you were born, where you were an infant and a child? For me, that would be the east central part of the province on the very edge of the boreal forest. And, thirty years earlier, I had married a rancher and for years have lived in the far southwest of the province. Surely I had relinquished any right to call anywhere else but the southwest home; surely I should have no need; surely I could not really desire to do so. And yet, carried away for a moment by the city’s beauty, and also by my strong sense of familiarity, so intense that it did not involve reason, I had called this city home; I had admitted it is home in my soul. But instead of satisfying me, this insight made me uneasy, as if I were missing something, something important about my own life.

  The river below me, the South Saskatchewan, bisects the city at about an eighty-degree angle from southwest to northeast as it flows from the western Rockies on to join the North Saskatchewan west of the small city of Prince Albert, called for as long as I can remember “The Gateway to the North.” The river flows past the village where I started school, then where we lived for a couple of (in my memory) desolate years before I was school age, runs a few miles south of the homestead where I spent the earliest years of my life, and then on northeast past the place where I was born, also north of the area where Alex was born and lived the first fifteen years of her life, before it loses itself in the busy, complicated, and magnificently wild network of rivers and lakes in northern Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Eventually it empties into Hudson Bay, where, as every schoolchild learns, Henry Hudson tried to find the famed North-West Passage in 1611 and was set adrift on the open sea by his mutinous crew.

  The ri
ver has always defined the city, been the highway for the First Nations peoples and a rich source of food, and one of great hope—unfulfilled—for the earliest settlers. Eventually, today, dammed and no longer so wild, it makes beautiful what otherwise might have been a neatly boring plains city. Only a few parts of its riverbank, all downtown, were parks when Alex and I were in high school, but today all of its banks within the city limits are protected and managed, and most of it is parkland, and in good weather these parks are full of people strolling, picnicking, playing Frisbee, romping with dogs, and toddlers. That river is Saskatoon, as it was when we were young, and despite the new suburbs with their own busy lives, swimming pools, strip malls, tennis courts, churches, that have sprung up far from its banks.

  I started the car and drove on slowly farther south, down the road to Diefenbaker Park, where the road ended and where I would have to turn around. But first I drove into the park and stopped on one of the small asphalt-covered areas designed as lookout points, so that I could stare out, once more, across the river. I was flooded by memories then. For instance, I remembered (or thought I did) when in January of every year the city used to collect all the discarded Christmas trees and have a huge bonfire here. That would have been in the late sixties or early seventies. What had once been a huge, empty area without a tree when the city had finally gone seriously to work on making this piece of land into Diefenbaker Park (after originally obtaining it around 1930 by default of unpaid taxes, and then doing virtually nothing with it into the sixties) was now beautifully landscaped and carefully tended. Times had changed. The idea of having a twenty- or fifty-foot blaze in the park’s centre now was clearly absurd, if not downright offensive.

  The memory or pseudo-memory of the fiery pyre surrounded by city-dwellers and their children, all bundled in heavy parkas and ski pants, standing in the darkness of a frigid winter evening, the firelight flickering on their upturned faces and their clothing, casting gold and red light, faded slowly. I turned back to the wide, clear view. I missed seeing through the buoyant, blue-green surface of the trees across the river, the bright accents of the red tile roofs of the old tuberculosis sanatarium and doctor’s residence that had once been there. My mother had worked nights for a brief time around 1953 as the guardian—my tiny, sweet, dauntingly intelligent mother—in the nurses’ residence. And she had once caught a couple of young nurses, well after midnight, sneaking in through an open window. I remember overhearing her as she told my father about it, but to my surprise, as she would have killed any one of us, her daughters, for such a crime, she didn’t seem upset over it.