Until I Find You Read Free Page A

first they put her up in the St. Paul’s Parish House, at the corner of Argyle and Prince streets, to await her delivery day. By this time, she was not only pregnant; she was “showing.”
    Jack Burns was alleged to have been a difficult birth. “A C-section,” his mom told him around the time of their arrival in the first of those North Sea ports. At four, the boy took this to mean that he was born in the C-section of a hospital in Halifax—a part of the hospital designated for difficult births. It was a little later—probably during, not after, their European travels—that Jack learned what a birth by Cesarean section meant. Only then was it explained to the boy that this was why it was not proper for him to take a bath with his mother, or to see her naked. Alice told Jack that she didn’t want him to see the scar from her C-section.
    Thus Jack Burns was born in Halifax, under the care of churchgoers at the other St. Paul’s. As his mother remembered them—for the most part, fondly—they demonstrated considerable sympathy for a wayward choirgirl from the Church of Scotland, and they expressed the utmost contempt for the licentious organist who was one of their own. Scottish Episcopalians and Canadian Anglicans were cut from the same religious cloth. Apparently, it was because of those Anglicans at St. Paul’s in Halifax that William did not long remain in hiding in Toronto.
    “The church was onto him,” as Alice put it.
    In the meantime, after Jack was born in Nova Scotia, his mother went to work for Charlie Snow. Charlie was an Englishman who’d been a sailor in the British Merchant Navy in World War One; he was reputed to have jumped ship in Montreal, where Freddie Baldwin, who was also from England and had fought in the Boer War, taught him how to tattoo.
    Both Freddie Baldwin and Charlie Snow had known the Great Omi. People paid to see the Great Omi’s tattooed face; he used to come to Halifax with a circus. When he walked around town, he wore a ski mask. “No one got a free look,” Jack’s mom told him. (This amounted to more nightmare material for the boy; Jack couldn’t stop himself from imagining the terrible tattoos on the Great Omi’s face.)
    From Charlie Snow, Alice learned to rinse the tattoo machines with ethyl alcohol; she cleaned the tubes with pipe cleaners, which she’d soaked in the alcohol, and every night she boiled the tubes and needles in a steamer. “The kind meant for cooking clams and lobsters,” Alice said.
    Charlie Snow made his own bandages out of linen. “There wasn’t much hepatitis then,” Alice explained.
    She told Jack that Freddie Baldwin had given Charlie Snow his most impressive tattoo. Over Charlie’s heart, Sitting Bull sat facing General Custer, who stared straight ahead, unseeing, on the far right of Charlie’s chest. Dead-center on Charlie Snow’s breastbone was a full-sailed ship; a banner, unfurled from Charlie’s clavicle, said HOMEWARD BOUND.
    Charlie Snow wouldn’t get home to his final resting place until 1969, when he was eighty. (He died of a bleeding ulcer.) Alice learned a lot from Charlie Snow, but she learned how to do a Japanese carp from Jerry Swallow, whose tattoo name was Sailor Jerry; he’d become Charlie Snow’s apprentice in 1962. Alice liked to say that she and Jerry Swallow “apprenticed together” with Charlie Snow, but of course she’d already been apprenticed to her father at Persevere in the Port of Leith.
    Long before she’d docked in Halifax, Jack’s mother knew how to tattoo.
    Jack Burns had no memory of his birthplace; until he was four, Toronto was the only town he knew. He was still an infant when his mom caught wind of his father and what he was up to in Toronto, and they followed him there from Halifax. But Jack’s dad had left town ahead of them, which was getting to be a familiar story. By the time the boy could comprehend his father’s absence, William was rumored to be back in Europe, having crossed the