‘The Boy’ by Betty Jane Hegerat

Reviewed by Rob Sherren

The Boy, by Betty Jane Hegerat, is a book with a problem. And because that problem demands a special approach it has the capacity to produce unique results. The problem is this: how to humanize the victims of a horrible and notorious crime fifty years after the accused perpetrator has been hanged?

Non-fiction can tackle facts easily enough but it seems to be the unique calling of fiction to bring life to the people behind the names, figures, and dates – to give them the vitality that lets us truly understand an event’s human aspects. Hegerat’s special approach is to use both fiction and non-fiction at the same time.

The book starts with a story called The Boy. Louise, a teacher, is acquiescing to an early spinsterhood when she lets herself fall in love with, and marry, a charming widower. The life she moves into has many challenges including traditions established by the perfect deceased wife, and a highly imperfect/troubled stepson named Daniel.

As the Louise-Daniel story is setting-up we are introduced to the author who is writing it. She is a woman with a happy home, who is very conscious of her writing craft and process. In fact she teaches creative writing, and encourages her students to “Write Boldly… if the writing frightens you, you’re finally getting somewhere?” Why the question mark? Because she is quoting herself to herself – it’s only page 21 but she is already doubting the direction the project is threatening to take. She hadn’t felt that there was much new to say about the stepmother-stepson relationship until she recalled a terrible crime that occurred when she was a girl in rural Alberta; in 1959 a stepson named Robert Raymond Cook was accused of the brutal murders of his father, stepmother, and five young half-brothers and sisters.

The author (whom we learn is Hegerat) sees the Cook crime as a possible model for a deeper conflict between the fictitious Louise and Daniel. She sets out to interview people who were touched by the events, but it’s not the murder, or trial, or hanging that she wants to know about; she wants to know what the dead family members were really like. As the investigation takes-on a life of its own, it becomes a work of creative non-fiction entitled Roads Back.

Literature has a tradition of appropriating historical figures. Irving Stone made a career of inhabiting famous personalities; Maria Vargas Llosa donned Trujillo’s depravity for Feast of the Goat; Michael Winter borrowed the identities of Rockwell Kent and Bob Bartlett in The Big Why, but upset surviving family members with what they thought was Bartlett’s gratuitous outing. Hegerat is determined not to tread on the Cook family grave, and flat-out refuses to become Daisy Cook, the stepmother who died so terribly saying “I’ve tried. I can’t, because I don’t know the truth. And anything less dishonours these people.”

To whom does Hegerat say this? Why to Louise of course. As The Boy and Roads Back trade chapters, Hegerat conducts an italicized dialogue with Louise on the directions the stories are taking. They question and challenge each other like old friends, or perhaps sisters, who see through one another’s bullshit. The dialogues provide readers with an interesting glimpse into Hegerat’s creative process but the self-consciousness sometimes dulls the point of the book’s more daring thrusts.

The great potential of the twinned format is to point to events that are so much more terrible because they’re true, and then use a parallel fiction to explore the relationships and settings that bring the facts to life. In prose, whose lustre must have had a hundred brushings, Hegerat conveys Louise’s fear and rural isolation through richly rendered domestic scenes that seem constantly to be on the verge of crashing to the floor, tumbled and trampled by the erratic influence of Daniel, a boy growing into manhood through the youth and adult correctional systems.

Her investigation of the Cook case goes on for years. Like many who’ve peered into its mysterious complexities she comes to believe that Bobby Cook was innocent of the crimes for which he was executed. This poses a problem for the fiction in that she’s not willing to turn Daniel into a murderer nor is she willing to go “into the white bungalow on the night of Thursday, June 25, 1959” and relive Daisy Cook’s terror by having someone else massacre Louise and her babies.

The crisis of a book with many victims but no viable perpetrator becomes largely authorial and works itself out in meta-fiction as Hegerat is left without a satisfying resolution to either The Boy or Roads Back. Her refusal to descend into barbarism or violence as she tenaciously defends the privacy of the real life victims becomes the fiction’s tragic flaw. We have the feeling that her five-year writing project is stuck between her self-exhortation to write in the realm of her fears, and her inability to move the fictional relationship much beyond Louise’s fear of Daniel.

One could call the story a-bait-and-switch, (especially given the preamble,) or a book that pulls its punch. But it is too well written, too good a read, especially for anyone who is involved in writing, so I prefer to think of The Boy as a book with a problem. And Hegerat, like a good parent, accepts The Boy, and shows us the extent to which its problem is not to be cured, but rather is what makes it unique and true. She helps The Boy mature and under her care it became a special book, completely capable of standing in the world on its own two feet.