“Something you’re not getting,” his father replied.
The boys went quiet, too quiet. The room’s air felt warm and bloated, just waiting for a lightning bolt—which I then delivered. I said, “Did your father ever tell you that I once found a dead body?”
Their eyes bulged. “What?” They looked to William for confirmation.
“Yes, she did.”
“Where? When?”
“Lizzie, it was in, what, grade six?”
“Five. I was the same age as you two are now.”
“How?”
William said, “If you two would just shut up, maybe we’ll find out.”
I handed my brother his Baileys. “I was walking on the railway tracks.”
“Where?”
“Out by Horseshoe Bay.”
Hunter asked, “By yourself?”
Chase looked at me and said, “Aunt Lizzie, do you have friends?”
I said, “Yes, thank you, Chase. In any event, it was summer, and I was picking blackberries—by myself. I rounded a corner and I saw a shirt in the fireweed on an embankment. People huck all sorts of things from trains—mostly juice boxes and pop cans—so I didn’t pay it too much attention. But as I walked closer, I saw some more colour there—a shirt and then shoes. And then I realized it was a man.”
That much was true. It was indeed a man, but I only gave the boys my PG-13 version of the event. They were the same age I had been when it happened, but somehow Chase and Hunter seemed younger than their years. Look at me—here I am being biased against them in the same way people were against me throughout the dead body episode.
Here’s what happened: It was August and I’d been quite happy to be by myself for the entire afternoon, taking several buses out to Horseshoe Bay, having a quick cheeseburger at a concession stand near the ferry terminal, and then hiking up steep hills and piles of blasted rock to the PGE rail line. I was wearing a blue-and-white gingham dress, which I hated, but it kept me cool, and a day’s walk on the rails would kill it with oils and chemicals and dirt, so I could live with it for one more day. You might ask, what was a twelve-year-old girl doing alone in a semi-remote place near a big city? Simple answer: it was the seventies. Past a certain age, children just did their thing, with little concern shown by their parents for what, where, when or with whom. Chase and Hunter probably have chips embedded in their tailbones linked up to a Microsoft death-satellite that informs William and Nancy where they are at all times. But back then?
“Mom, is it okay if I hitchhike to the biker bar?”
“Sure, dear.”
It was a baking July day, all scents were amplified, and I smelled something quite awful. Actually, I immediately guessed that the odour was that of a partially decomposed body. Knowledge of this smell must be innate. As I approached it, I was almost happy; I liked to think a short lifetime of detective novels, TV shows and secret visions had prepared me for this moment. A crime to solve. Clues to locate.
I’d never seen a dead body before. Kids at school had seen car crashes, which made me jealous, but this? This was murder, and a grisly one at that. The man’s body had been severed at the waist, the two halves positioned at a right angle. The corpse’s lower half was wearing a floral print skirt and knee-high boots, and the top half was wearing a plaid lumberjack shirt. The face was untouched, a quite handsome man’s face, grey at this point, in spite of thick makeup: flaking foundation, mascara and one false eyelash, still attached. Flies buzzed all around. I wondered who this man had been, and why he’d been wearing a skirt.
The skirt. Here’s something shameful I’ve never told anybody before: I took a piece of alder branch, stripped it of leaves and then went over to the lower half of the body. I needed to lift up the skirt and see whether the—well, whether the bottom half went with the top—and it did—with no underwear, either.
Who could have done this to him? I looked around, and nary a weed or daisy stem nearby had been bent or bloodied. There was no evidence that the cutting and splattering had occurred on location. Even to a twelve-year-old, it was pretty obvious the body had been dumped. I stood there in the heat, suddenly thirsty. I remember that it was the corpse’s makeup that confused me more than the body, or even the skirt.
I am not a callous person, and have never been. I imagine most people might have vomited or looked away, but I simply didn’t. That’s how coroners must feel. I can only imagine that one is, or is not, born with squeamishness. Surgery scenes on TV? I’m in. To be blunt, finding the body seemed to affect me about as much as an uncooked roast.
And also—and this is something I didn’t pinpoint until years later—being that close to something so totally dead made me feel … infinite—immortal.
I was standing there immobile for maybe five minutes before I heard a train off in the distance, coming from the north, from Squamish. It was the Royal Hudson, an old-fashioned steam train refurbished and converted into a tourist attraction, chugging down the Howe Sound fjord. I stood beside the body amid the fireweed, chamomile and dandelions to await the train’s approach. I kept looking between the body and the bend in the track around which the train would come, as the steaming and chugging came closer and closer.
Finally, the Royal Hudson huffed around the bend. I stood in the middle of the tracks, the scent of creosote from the trestles burning my nostrils, and waved my arms. The conductor later said he almost popped a blood vessel seeing me there. He clamped on the brakes, and the squealing was unlike any noise I’d heard until then. It was so shrill it collapsed time and space. I think that was the moment I stopped being a child. Not the corpse, but the noise.
The engine stopped a few cars past the body and me. The conductor, whose name was Ben, and his partner jumped down, cursing me for pulling such a prank. I simply pointed at the severed body.
“What the—? Barry. Come over here.” Ben looked at me. “Kid, get away from this thing.”
“No.”
“Look, kiddo, I said—”
I just stared at him.
Barry came over, took a look and promptly vomited. Ben came closer, and he dealt with the corpse simply by not looking at it. Meanwhile, I couldn’t look at it enough. He said, “Jesus, kid—are you some sort of freak?”
“I found him. He’s mine.”
Barry radioed the authorities from the engine. Of course, the tourists were gawking from the train’s windows, snapping away. I suppose these days photos would be posted on the Internet within hours, but back then there was only the local papers, none of which were allowed to publish either news or photos of the body until the next of kin had been found and notified. And so, while the passengers tried to hop out of the cars to check out the action, Barry was able to feel useful screaming at them to get back in. By the time the authorities arrived, he had the cheese-grater voice of an aged starlet.
The police asked me questions. Had I moved anything? Had I seen anyone? I kept my peeled alder switch a secret. But other than having found the body, my role was limited. I just watched it all. The one question they didn’t ask was, Why would my parents allow me to pick blackberries so far away from home all by myself? Again, it was the 1970s.
The police complimented me on my coolness, and once the scene calmed down a bit, Ben offered me a ride in the engine back to the PGE station in North Vancouver. The police wanted to drive me home, but I pleaded my case and was able to ride the train. I have yet to equal the sense of mastery over my destiny I had during that experience. Me at the helm of this million-pound chunk of fate, pounding along an iron track—God help whoever stood in my way. It was supreme. I was alive! I was not a corpse!
Nobody