Running through the smashed streets I see a man holding a newspaper. The headline screams: HALIFAX WRECKED.
Everywhere it’s knocked to pieces, and now eighteen inches of clean snow has buried it. Most of the fires are out, at least. There’s corpses everywhere, stacked like cordwood. Most of them are frozen, their busted faces covered in white frost.
St. Joseph’s Church, where Evelyn and I were married, looks like it’s been a ruin for centuries. The roof’s gone, and the walls gape at the sky like a smashed jaw. People are already dressed for mourning. Women head to toe in black wander sobbing through the destruction. A few demented men pull beams out of holes where houses used to be, praying for miracles.
There aren’t many today.
It’s warmer in the hospital, but there’s no heat, no electricity. The windows are gone, replaced by blankets. I wander into a waiting room and stand there a while, not sure where to go. Everyone is quiet.
“Can you help me?”
I turn to find the voice. An old woman sitting against the wall.
I kneel next to her.
“I need a doctor,” she says.
“So does everyone,” I say, pointing to the others.
She’s silent. Then she whispers, “They’re all dead.”
It’s true. Sitting in chairs, lying on gurneys, stretched on the floor: this is a waiting room for the dead. I help the old woman to her feet and we walk deeper into the hospital.
It’s calm, nurses and doctors checking on everyone. The least injured are packed in the entry area. I leave the old woman there.
The further in I go, the worse it gets. No one stops me, no one talks to me. There’s bodies in the hallway, on beds, in the bathrooms. The dead have taken over the Earth.
Then I see her. She’s standing by a burned man’s bed, holding a clipboard while an exhausted doctor calms the dying man. She’s wearing the same grey dress as yesterday, now all torn and burnt, but I don’t know the sweater. I walk over to her. She sees me.
I start to breathe, my heart pushes fresh blood into my veins. I’m born again. She’s alive; I can live.
“Evie,” I say, pulling her close to me, feeling her arms, her waist, her life.
I say her name again and again. Hot tears stream down my face. I know men don’t cry but I can’t stop, I don’t want to stop. She holds me, lifts the disaster off my shoulders.
The doctor smiles shyly and adjusts the patient’s bandages. I hear a nurse crying.
“You can take a break, Miss,” the doctor says, and my beautiful wife smiles. I love her more than my soul, and now feel I can rebuild the city myself.
I hug her tight to me. She leads me to a quiet corner and tells me her story.
“I was sitting home, sewing that button on your shirt when I heard a crash. I almost had the button done when the door came bursting in. It’s so strange,” she says, closing her eyes. “It was slowed down, so I could see the door fly into the sewing machine. It knocked it over on to me. I lay there while the city was blown away.”
She shakes her head, cries.
“One of the neighbours came digging through after a while, heard me, and dug me out. The door was full of glass daggers and dents. But I hardly had a scratch. He brought me here, and when they saw I wasn’t hurt, they put me to work. I told them I had to find you, but they said you’d find me. And you did.”
She wipes a tear from my cheek.
“What’ll we do now? Everything is gone,” she says.
I shake my head, run my hands through her hair.
“Everything’s right here.”
Lauchie and Liza and Rory
Sheldon Currie
The course of love does not always run smooth and in this fictional Cape Breton love story, Sheldon Currie explores a simple yet complex non-traditional relationship in a most traditional setting.
I knew he’d take her in. I couldn’t predict it, mind you, a minute before it happened, but when it did I said as a person often does: I knew it. Once it got to the point, he had to.
She wasn’t even good-looking. I can say that because she looked an awful lot like me. Red hair. Not the kind that glistens and goes good with green sweaters, but the other kind that looks like violin strings made of carrots. It had a part in the middle looked like an axe-cut, and it was pulled back hard and flat and tied in a little ball you’d swear was nailed to the back of her neck. The same way I did it myself. She didn’t exactly have buck teeth, but when her lips were closed her mouth was a little mound like she was keeping an orange peeling over her teeth. When she opened her mouth to talk you could see her teeth were round, and big, and almost the same color as her hair.
My brothers were identical twins, but as people they were day and night. Liza married Lauchie, the one everybody said was the good one. I could of told her, but I didn’t. Even Mother, a smart woman, thought Rory would be a gangster even after he went to work in the pit like everybody else. “He won’t last,” she said. “He’ll get fired, if he don’t get killed first, doing something foolish.”
One Friday in the winter he left with a quart of rum and a dozen beer and a smile and never showed up ’til a week from Monday, out of a taxi, a cast on one leg from toe to hip, a smile on his face, two crutches, and two poles, and one ski.
“You fool,” I said when I got him in the house and sat him down on the sofa. “You can’t ski.”
“Whyn’t you tell me that ’fore I left?” he said, and, of course, the big smile.
The beginning of the end,” my mother said, with her eyebrows.
Lauchie went steady with Liza six months. Then he took her home to meet me and Mother and Rory. Soon as she laid eyes on Rory she knew right then she made a mistake. How she knew I don’t know. There wasn’t a hair of difference between them. Rory knew it, too. He shook hands with her. He never shook another person’s hand in his life. He put out his big paw and she put her little red one in it, and he put his other hand on her shoulder; you could see her sink under it a fraction. You could almost see her eyes lock into his. “You’ll like living here, Liza,” he said. “It’s a lot of fun if you look at it the right way.”
“We’ll not be living here,” Lauchie said.
“Oh,” said Rory. “I thought you were, next door, when the MacDonnells move out.”
“Well, we are,” Lauchie said, “but there is not here. This is a duplex. Two different houses: one building.”
“Some say it’s a duplex,” Rory said. “I say it’s a company house.”
“Well, what’s the difference?”
“Difference is simple,” Rory said. “In a duplex you can’t hear people drink water on the other side.”
Lauchie wouldn’t marry her ’til the MacDonnells moved out, so we had six months to watch her trying to make up her mind. Of course, she couldn’t be sure Rory loved her. He might’ve been laughing at her. With him you couldn’t tell for sure. I could, but I’d been watching him for years. Every time she came to the house he shook her hand, and he curled his middle finger so it stuck in her palm, but he did it so it looked like he was making fun of Lauchie, how formal he was when he introduced them. “Rory,” he had said, “may I present to you my fiancée, Liza.” And Rory shook her hand, like he did every time after, even after the marriage, and said, like an Englishman in the movies, “Awfully good of you to come,” and everybody about doubled over laughing, except, of course, Lauchie, and, of course, our mother; she stood there and waited for things to get back to “normal.”
So Liza and Lauchie got married; Mother died – “mission accomplished, I suppose,” Rory said. And they lived across the wall from us and honest to God we never heard a peep out of them ’til their kid was born. Then we heard the kid. They called him Rory. He cried for two years.
When he stopped, Liza started. Both our stairs went up the wall that separated us and I first heard her through that wall, sitting on her stairs, sobbing. After that I took to going over every day to console her, but she never admitted t
o anything, though she knew I knew. She caught on pretty quick how much alike we were. She talked about it one night we were playing cards, which we did every Friday. “If me and her,” she said, meaning me, “if they got our x-rays mixed up, they wouldn’t be able to tell which one had T.B.” We all looked at her but Lauchie; he looked at his cards.
“What’s it mean, anyway, T.B.?” he said.
“Tough biscuit,” Rory said.
“You wouldn’t need an x-ray to figure that out,” I said, thinking to make a joke, but when I looked to Liza for her little smile, she was crying, and I knew there was no secret between us.
When little Rory was five and about to go to school, they left him with us on the miner’s vacation and went to Halifax to visit Liza’s sister and get Lauchie’s lungs looked at. “The little bugger needs a little fun before he goes to school,” Rory said, and gave him every minute of his time, took him everywhere, showed him everything he could think of, even took him down the pit and showed him where him and his father worked.
When Lauchie and Liza came back, the boy wouldn’t go back with them. They had to drag him back. Then he started school and every day he came home he came to the wrong gate and landed in our place. Lauchie would have to come over and drag him back.
“I thought I told you to come straight home.”
“I forgot,” he’d say.
He kept it up ’til we locked him out. We had to, to keep Lauchie from getting desperate. But he’d start again every time he went through a new phase of growing, until he got to be nine, and after that he wouldn’t do his homework except at our place. He hated school, but he was first in his class because he did so much homework. Of course, Rory helped him – he couldn’t resist. And when he got to grade nine and Rory couldn’t help him anymore, he started to teach big Rory. He taught him Algebra, French, Latin, Geometry, Chemistry, English, and God knows what all. He used to bring home the exams and Rory would do them and make high marks. “If I’d a known I was that smart I’d a stayed in school,” he’d say. “Probably coulda been a teacher.”
Of course, he’d show off in the washhouse and turn it into a big joke. “What did you learn today, Rory?” somebody’d say.
“Today I learned that the sailor loves the girl,” he’d say.
“And what have you got for homework?”
“For homework we have the girl loves the sailor, but I know it already, puellarn nauta amat.”
“What would that be in Gaelic?”
“In Gaelic, I couldn’t say. I’m a Latin scholar. You’d have to ask me grandmother.”
But he wouldn’t carry it too far. He knew Lauchie felt bad and Rory wasn’t a mean man, no matter how much he liked to make fun.
Once young Rory got to high school, his home was nothing to him but bed and board. He had his tea first thing in the morning and last thing at night with us. He went into his side of the house for meals and bed. Nothing to do about it; he was too big then to make him. Lauchie had to put up with it. Liza sat on the stairs and sobbed. Rory felt bad but nothin’ he could do, and he couldn’t help it that he enjoyed the boy so much. I just watched. I knew something had to happen.
When it happened, it happened very quietly. Of course, that was Liza’s way, but I was surprised. I expected a big fight; after all, seventeen years is a long time.
When young Rory graduated he got a big Knights of Columbus Scholarship and off he went to college. Liza picked the worst day she could find. It was coming down in buckets. She took her big suitcase and a kitchen chair and sat in the road between the two gates in her Burberry and big-rimmed felt hat. It was the first time she ever looked beautiful. It was a Sunday. Both men were home. She went out after Mass and Rory and Lauchie, each in his own side of the house, opened the front doors and watched through their screen doors as she sat there in the mud. In those days there was no pavement, or even a ditch; the road came right up to the picket fence and she sat at the edge of it between the two gates. Talk about a sight. I can still see Rory standing there, peering through the screen, cup and saucer in his hand, sipping tea. And Lauchie on the other side, the same. I knew he would be. I just went over to check.
“What do you think, Lauchie?” I asked him.
“I think it has to be up to him.”
And so it was. About six o’clock, Rory said to me, “You better go and tell her to come in. She’ll stay there all night.”
So in she came. Put on dry clothes and sat and had tea. She cried. They were tears of joy. She was ashamed of them, but couldn’t help it. “I realize,” she said, “that I’m probably not making anybody happy but myself. I can’t help it.”
After a few days when we all got the feeling it was settled for good, I moved over with Lauchie.
“Are you mad, Lauchie?” I asked him.
“Nobody to be mad at,” he said. “I’d like to be mad. But, you know, it’s not Rory’s fault. He didn’t encourage her; you know that. Just the opposite. Same for Liza. She tried for seventeen years. It’s not my fault. It’s nobody’s fault. Unless it’s all our faults. It should of been fixed up seventeen years ago when it started wrong. We all knew.”
I certainly didn’t know he knew.
“Well,” I said, “young Rory will be surprised when he comes home for Christmas.”
“I wonder,” Lauchie said. “He’s supposed to be smart too. I don’t imagine college’ll take it out of him that quick.”
A Following Sea
Michael Ungar
This contribution is a fictionalized account of Michael Ungar’s experience as a father. Like all dads, he never fully adjusted to the gently weakening bonds that connected him to his children as they grew older. It’s rumoured that he cried every time he edited a draft of this story.
Aimee’s mother, Diane, was there for only as long as was necessary. Though I can’t say she was ever handy around the house, or much good at cooking or looking after me, I still think of her like a master carpenter. She nailed down the first few rows of Aimee’s life in a straight line, just like good flooring, then left the rest of the work to her apprentice. That was me. I was handy, but not with kids. Mind you, get that first row or two straight and most everything afterwards lines up okay.
Diane and I never married. Our lives drifted together more like a truck and trailer. Suddenly, after backing towards each other we were hitched and then something much bigger was there. After Aimee surprised us (Diane was very sure she’d taken her pills), I never thought about leaving, at least not until Aimee was turning six and her mother got hit in the head by a falling branch while I was taking down a diseased birch in the backyard. Diane wandered too close. Not long after she woke up she decided that her life was missing purpose. She muttered something about Buddha and love and began going much more often to the Shambhala Centre where she sat on a cushion and watched her clever mind try to trick her into missing us. It was a few days before Aimee sang in the Christmas choir at LeMarchant Elementary that Diane pushed us both aside and took up with a lesbian lover who’d been a high school friend.
I was still feeling light-headed from the abandonment when I told Aimee that her mom had changed course, as dramatic as a Fundy tide. It all happened so fast that it was like a sharp chisel slitting your finger open. First you feel nothing, then it hurts like hell and the scar never goes away. I was left to help Aimee build herself a life.
I loved her like I remember loving the Montreal Canadiens, or my childhood dog who slept with me instead of my brothers most nights, and everything else that I’d ever really wanted. Only, I just had Aimee and she was enough to make me feel like I almost had everything. Except Diane, of course. Still, I was never really sure if I was enough for Aimee, being only one parent rather than two. There were many Saturday mornings when she’d crawl into bed with me as the sun was coming up, dragging a stuffed animal or two or three with her, that I’d feel cut in two, wanting to make her a good breakfast of waffles and real maple syrup, but thinking maybe I should just lie there and l
et her sleep snug and warm next to me. She didn’t seem to mind either way. If I got up, she traipsed after me, dragging one of her favourite stuffies by the ear. If I stayed in bed she let herself sleep, one heavy breath after another the way kids do when you know they’re not worried about anything.
Those first few years I felt more like a rough carpenter than someone who’s had his Red Seal papers for years. There was nothing pretty about Aimee’s lunches or the way she learned to swear so young. But I knew I’d done all right when Aimee began at age seven to tell me what to buy at the grocery store and the difference between organic and the crap I usually tossed in my cart. I guess she started to lay her own boards pretty early.
When Aimee was eight, her world was mostly a menagerie of ninety-three stuffed animals that inhabited her bedroom. Cougars, bears, frogs, dogs and other furry creatures that she denied were stuffed at all. To her, they were alive with rolling lazy eyes and demanded caresses before they could sleep at night. When we took them to the movies a dozen at a time, they needed their own seat. Aimee fussed with them until she was sure each and every one could see the screen. Likewise, when we travelled someplace warm, Aimee refused to leave them behind. Thankfully, airline ground crews placed stricter limits than fathers on what she could take with her when we left home. “Five, only five,” I told Aimee, who pouted and negotiated until there were five animals in her carry-on Disney princess backpack, and one animal squashed under each arm. “That’s seven,” I said, then broke into a smile to let her know we’d leave it there, a truce of sorts.
Even now, I feel lighter thinking of the love I felt for her then and how much I admired her determination to not be told what to do. Even by me who should have been able to boss around one little girl, given all the experience I had bossing around my crew at work.
The truth be known, I envied Aimee’s certainty that she would get what she wanted. Except for losing her mom, all the other wondrous worries and disappointments that awaited her were still far off being conceived. She knew nothing of the earthy pull I felt when my feet swung tiredly onto the bedroom floor, a stiff laboured breath to begin the day, perhaps earlier than I would like if my bladder demanded it.
Nova Scotia Love Stories Page 9