Haunting hanging

The Boys in the Trees tells a quiet but eerie
tale of domestic violence and its aftermath

by JULIET WATERS

I finished The Boys in the Trees, Mary Swan’s Giller-nominated novel, the day before Halloween. It got me thinking about the Old Montreal Ghost Tour I took a few years back. It’s rare to find someone doing this who isn’t a tourist, which is too bad. There are some fine actors in this city right now moonlighting as torture victims, murderers and other haunted characters from our city’s past.

Still stuck in my head is a visit to a square where all public hangings used to take place. According to our guide, these events were always packed, mostly with kids. In Québécois families that usually averaged at least a dozen children, it was common practice to bring them along, a way to let them know what was in store should they grow up to be murderers. If the ratio of murders involving family members was anything like it is today, this might not have been as bizarre a strategy as we assume.

Montreal was undoubtedly not the only place where kids witnessed hangings. The boys of this book’s title are in the trees to watch a 19th century execution in a small Ontario town. It is the execution of William Heath, a Sunday school teacher who, one day, without warning, poisons and shoots his wife and two daughters.

For readers raised on the quick paced, urban true crime rhythm of Law & Order, Swan’s book may often feel like a slow, dry read. It is told from a multitude of voices that populate this fictional town. This includes family members before the murder takes place, neighbours of the Heath family, a local doctor and his son. The stories they tell take place before, shortly and even long after the murder. Swan takes care to mimic the quiet, carefully controlled inner voices of the time, voices that sometimes sound a little dull to contemporary ears. It’s kind of like an Errol Morris documentary told through the memories of upstanding Christian pioneers, without the reliable bits of colour provided by good old-fashioned white trash.

Still, this is a short, subtle and ultimately searing book. Because the life described here is almost punishingly mundane, horrific events stand out in ways that become especially eerie. Here are the last sentences of the chapter narrated by Lillian, one of Heath’s daughters.

The package was gone from the outside chair and when I opened the door the house was silent, no sound of my mother’s humming, not even the ticking clock. She had been mixing her cake when I left and there was a smell in the air, as if it had burned in the stove…. The third stair cracked, like it always did, as I climbed toward my father. He stood very still, his hands behind his back, and I thought of the game he used to play with Rachel, wondered if it was finally my turn to guess which hand held the surprise.

In our day and age, it’s easy to jump to conclusions about what that surprise normally was. But in the end Swan’s take on family violence, a subject that is too often exploited for purposes of lurid drama, is remarkably sensitive as it patiently investigates the stifling family and community politics that imprison women and men long before any actual murder takes place.

When the execution of William Heath is over, two jailers will remain “beside the hanging man, his hooded head dropping forward, the black body stark as a carefully drawn comma.” The boys who watch this scene from the branches above will become men in the increasingly tangled family trees of Canada’s first European settlers. They are the ghosts that haunt the massive, underexplored forest that is Canada’s history of domestic violence. In their way, they are also the commas between the people that future generations will always consider more important.

THE BOYS IN THE TREES BY
MARY SWAN, HENRY HOLT, PB,
207 PP, $15.50