The Road Back

The Allison twins, Davey and Donny, were six years old when they shot and killed their mother.

They had discovered their daddy's hunting rifle in the closet under the dark stairway and been playing a noisy game of cowboys and Indians when their mother came in to quiet them. Startled, they turned at the sharp sound of her voice and the gun went off. She was, as people came to say, dead before she hit the floor. Wakened by the blast, John Allison raced out of his bedroom to find his wife sprawled and bloody on the kitchen linoleum and his sons screaming over her body. Both boys were covered in blood and hysterical and John, a good and decent man, gathered them to him and carried them outside to the front steps where he began to sob. He was twenty four and Jenny had been two years younger.

No one was prosecuted. The mounties came and an inquest was held in the church and as everyone expected, Jenny's death was ruled an accident shooting. The boys were sent to live with relatives in Yarmouth while John tried to come to terms with his shattered life. Accidental or not, the fact was that his sons had killed their mother, a reality that would never go away, and John had no clear idea how to accept it or get past it. He loved his boys but he had loved Jenny too and reconciliation seemed far beyond his grasp. How am I to look at their faces and not blame them? he asked my grandmother, how am I to forgive them for what they did? Nana sighed but she had no answers so she simply forced him to drink tea with brandy and repeated the same words over and over to him, Time, John, give it time. But time brought no change and no healing and by the summer following the shooting when the boys were still away, Miss Hilda stepped in and swept away all sentimentality like so much debris under her feet. First, she took stock of the island girls and commandeered those she found fit for a cleaning crew and set them to work on the Allison house. Under her watchful eyes, it was put right, inside and out, in just under three days. She then enlisted my grandmother to call her the next time John appeared, and as he sat drinking tea and brandy on the sunporch, in strode Miss Hilda. Come now, John, she told him sharply, we're going for a walk. He reached for the brandy and she struck his wrist smartly with her stick. I disapprove of spirts, sir, she said in her no-nonsense tone, especially when used to excess. He met her gaze with a haunted look in his eyes and his shoulders sagged. For a fraction of a second Miss Hilda wavered then in a voice as cold as steel she made what amounted to a speech. Do not think, sir, for one moment, that I or anyone within three hundred miles is unaware of your situation, however, this maudlin self pity has run its course. You have two sons and it's high time you saw to their needs. Now get up! And she punctuated this last with a another strike of her stick. John got up.

Miss Hilda and John walked - 'round the Old Road, all the way to the other side of the cove and back, then past the point and over the coastline, coming out at the softball field. They walked that day, and for several days that followed and Miss Hilda showed no mercy, no diplomacy, no weariness and no inclination to give up. She walked John Allison into submission and back to life. When the boys finally came home, Miss Hilda went every day to cook and clean and put the family back together until she felt that they could manage on their own. She nagged,
lectured, manipulated, threatened, dominated, reasoned, counseled and arbitrated until they were whole again.
It was her finest hour.