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The Defilers
Copyright © 2006 Deborah H. Gyapong
All rights reserved
Printed in Canada
International Standard Book Number: 1-897186-02-9 (paperback edition)
International Standard Book Number: 978-1-894860-60-4 (electronic edition)
Published by:
Castle Quay Books
1307 Wharf Street, Pickering, Ontario, L1W 1A5
Tel: (416) 573-3249
E-mail: [email protected]
Copy editing by Janet Dimond
Cover Design by John Cowie, eyetoeye design
Printed at Essence Publishing, Belleville, Ontario, Canada
This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form without prior written permission of the publishers.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Gyapong, Deborah, 1949-
The defilers / Deborah Gyapong.
ISBN 1-897186-02-9
I. Title.
PS8613.Y36D43 2006 C813'.6 C2006-900736-5
Prologue
I used to believe it was easy to tell who was good and who was evil – until the year I turned thirteen. Then someone who was supposed to be good shattered my innocence.
I grew up in Boston’s Jamaica Plain district. Brick apartment buildings, ark-like wooden houses, and tall maple trees crowded the streets in my blue-collar neighbourhood. I remember the clatter of the streetcar, the smell of dusty green leaves after a thunderstorm, and the screaming wheels of the Orange Line rattling the elevated tracks that darkened Washington Street.
A low chain-link fence enclosed our tiny front lawn and a little gate opened to the walk leading to our yellow triple-decker – a flat-roofed building with three identical apartments stacked like pancakes. On hot days when the sun scorched the grass the sprinkler would go tsk tsk tsk back and forth, wetting Gran’s two-foot-high statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Our Lady faced a quiet tree-lined street and a root-heaved sidewalk. She stretched her arms over the crabgrass in the one spot where there was no shade.
Gran used to tell me the Blessed Virgin was my mother. For a long time I thought that made me special. I used to brag about it to my cousins until Aunt Gladys spoiled it by telling me Our Lady was the mother of all the faithful. I don’t remember my real mother, who died of brain cancer when I was three, but Gran said she was up in heaven along with Jesus and the Holy Mother, praying for me.
I never felt like a motherless child. I had Gran and Gramp who lived on the first floor. I had Aunt Gladys and Uncle Fred and my cousins who lived on the third floor. And I had Dad. He and I shared the second floor, though he was hardly ever home. He was a detective with the Boston Police Department, always busy catching the bad guys.
Gran and Aunt Gladys looked after me when I wasn’t at school. Between the two of them I always had plenty to eat and, frankly, more attention than I wanted most of the time. They made sure I respected my elders, did my chores, and said my prayers. I tried to be a good girl, but they told me “mischief” was my middle name.
I must have been a handful for Gran, who sewed me dresses and did everything she could to wrestle the tomboy out of me. But I still did cartwheels and hung upside down from the jungle gym. So she finally gave up, except for insisting I wear the dresses to Mass.
Gran often kept an eye on me from a sagging outdoor couch on her front porch. When the weather was warm enough she’d bring her budgies outside. She’d set their white wire cage on a card table nearby and talk baby talk to them. She’d even bring the ironing board outside. That’s where she taught me how to iron my Holy Child Parochial School uniform.
Other girls at Holy Child took ballet or Irish dancing, but Dad put me in karate lessons along with my boy cousins. They called me a showoff, but Dad called me his “little ninja girl.” Sometimes I tagged along when he and the other detectives taught karate in Roxbury and Mattapan as an outreach to keep kids from joining gangs.
When I was eleven Dad was trying to solve a rash of drive-by shootings in the Grove Hall section on the other side of Franklin Park. We were so proud he was trying to make Boston a safer city. But a year went by and the bodies kept piling up. Kids shooting other kids caused too much stress, so Dad took time off work and made a pilgrimage to Rome – his first vacation without me. On the bus tour he fell in love with a Canadian woman named Veronica.
Shortly after that trip Dad decided to take early retirement. I remember sitting on the edge of a folding metal chair at his retirement party, listening to his friends swap stories about crimes they’d solved and the stupid things criminals did. They treated me like one of their own daughters, but I longed to be one of them. By then my breasts had grown big enough to prompt Gran to buy me a bra. I hunched over to hide the little mounds that pushed out despite my baggy T-shirt, and wished I were flat-chested like a man.
At that age I was taller than most other seventh graders, especially the boys. My honey-coloured hair was fairer than it is now and I had a habit of blowing my bangs out of my light green eyes. Everyone said my eyes came from Gramp. I didn’t like the comparison because he wore Coke-bottle glasses that made his eyes look huge. Aunt Gladys said my olive skin and heart-shaped face came from Nana, my Puerto Rican grandmother on my mother’s side. I felt Irish, but I didn’t look anything like Gran who was short and round. By the time I was in seventh grade people started telling me I was beautiful and to act like a young lady.
Around then I stopped being Dad’s special girl. He had his eyes on Veronica. They got married and their wedding felt like my funeral. I might as well have been a ghost because no one noticed how upset I was. It got worse. Rather than persuade my new stepmother to live in Boston, Dad decided to move to Nova Scotia where she owned an art gallery.
Dad and Veronica gave me a choice. I could come with them right away or stay behind with Gran, do eighth grade at Holy Child, then move to Canada the following summer. Deep down I hoped Dad would argue with me and convince me to go with them, even if he had to force me. But he didn’t. I hated Veronica for taking him away from me. If he no longer cared about me, I would pretend I didn’t care about him either.
Only one person saw through my mask. My priest.
The previous year Father Ron had appeared like a godsend at Church of the Holy Child, a crumbling red brick building occupying a whole block across the street from my school. Ron filled that dark musty space with his presence, radiating something magnetic that the gentle old priests didn’t have. He brought change and life – or so it seemed. With his shoulder-length hair and beard he reminded me of the holy card of Jesus with His Sacred Heart showing, except Ron had ice blue eyes and a receding hairline. He even seemed to have a glow around his head, like the halo around Jesus’ head in the picture.
We already had folk songs at Mass at Holy Child, but Ron allowed the Moriarty twins to bring in a drum set and an electric bass. Ron himself could do a wicked Jimi Hendrix imitation on his Fender guitar, though he had to explain to us first who Jimi Hendrix was. Aunt Gladys and her charismatic friends loved his special healing sessions. Others loved how inclusive he was. Everyone loved how much he cared about the poor.
When Gran, who still said the rosary in Latin, got upset about Ron not wearing a Roman collar, he started dressing occasionally in a cassock instead of worn Levis and tie-dyed shirts. He’d always wear a black clerical shirt and collar when he brought the Blessed Sacrament to Gramp, who rarely left the living room because of his oxygen tank. After Latin prayers with him and Gran, Ron would head upstairs to tutor me in math.
At first we really did math, but somewhere