“Your favourite girl—?” Annette blushed.
“Well, who else would it be? Who is the prettiest, most—well, has the best … well, looks like a princess all the time, but you? Knows how to dress but you? Wearing white gloves to church and never without a necklace. But I want to tell you—this is between you and me—you got a nice body, so use it. What about the man down in Nova Scotia I was telling you about? Now, he owns his own gravel pit and everything. I could introduce you, if you want.”
Annette blushed.
Lonnie bit the tip off his cigar and spit it away. He looked at her as he lit it, from under his eyebrows, and smiled as he blew out the match.
But then he said this: “Oh, oh, oh—how you made fun of Ian Preston!”
“I never did!”
“You laughed in his face, didn’t you! You said he was a little nit.”
“I never in my life did. I always thought he was sweet—it’s Harold what tricked me!”
Annette suddenly realized how awful everything looked for her at this moment. “What will I do?” she asked.
“Well, you come to me again—you come to old Uncle Lonnie when things go bad. But when things are good, I’m not good enough for you. I knew what Harold was—many times I didn’t want him around here, but I allowed him here because of you. That’s a fact. But now I see—I see. Old Uncle Lonnie is nothing when you think you have no more use for him. Well, well, well. I don’t like your conniving, Annette—that’s a Brideau streak, I feel. No one else on this here river has it. I was honest, and expect others to be too. Anyways, I’m pretty much done with Charlottetown, and you should be too. Thieves and bastards and whatnot over there. Someday I’ll take you to Truro and introduce you to a real good lad. Now, he’s about my age—but he saw you last year over there, and really liked what he saw, I tell you that!”
“What does he do?” Annette asked, without any feeling.
“Owns a mortuary—has a horse or two—bides his time, likes to make pronouncements. Well, you know—big feeling, thinks he is something special, not like you or me.”
I want to be a good person, Annette said hopefully but to herself. For where had that little girl gone?
Lonnie was very upset himself by this turn of events with Ian. He had now lost the money he’d thought he could get if Joyce Fitzroy died without settling on a benefactor. He knew ways in which to move into an estate and take over—settling old back taxes was one. He was always prepared for a fight, and had assumed he’d take over Fitzroy’s house when he died. He was annoyed that Fitzroy was clever enough to keep his property taxes paid, and that too seemed like an insult.
But now it was beyond him. The money had gone to Ian Preston.
From that moment on, whenever he looked at Evan and Harold he thought of them as grown men. That is, the fact that they had allowed themselves to be betrayed made him disrespect them intensely. So there were many days when he would not call them to do jobs for him—or when they did come over, he would force an argument between them. He treated Harold worse than Evan because Harold felt the worse.
“Oh,” Lonnie would chuckle, “how is Annette ever going to get along in Clare’s Longing swamp having ten little Dews? That’s paying her dues for wanting the money, isn’t it.”
And Harold, who up until that moment had thought nothing could ever come between him and Annette, began to realize that Annette wanted in some desperate way to rescind their love and escape. Harold begged—literally begged—Lonnie for money, any money, to prove himself to her.
“To prove to her what?” Lonnie said.
“To prove to her—just to prove to her,” Harold pleaded.
“I have no money for you, Harold. You shouldn’t have bragged so much about what was coming to you. Bragging is a terrible thing—it allows for terrible things in a person’s life, and causes enormous difficulty, don’t you think? Let her go off and get screwed a couple of times by someone else. She’ll see what it’s like—one cock is good as another and she’ll be back!”
This caused Harold to go into a rage, stand up and look with blearily hateful eyes at his tormenter—but he was no match for Lonnie Sullivan then.
Lonnie chomped his White Owl cigar, and after taking out a crumpled bunch of bills put them in Harold’s hand.
“That’s the best I can do for you, boy—and I do it ’cause I liked your mom.”
“Yes, the Ridge,” I would say to my sociology class when I came back here to teach in 2001. “The Ridge is hopeless. The girls get pregnant by seventeen on the Ridge, and their lives are set. The boys become drunks and hit their women. On the Ridge this is almost uniform policy.”
You see, I never said that the people on the Ridge were less than we were; I just indicated that they did not have the same chance, that they were disenfranchised. Those youngsters I taught always wished to compel those who were not like us to become like us. This attitude, in fact, is what people used against Ian and the others. Of course, it was some years after the events I am relating when I taught my course, but those three boyhood friends figured in the course I taught. And I want to tell you one more thing: I did not believe what I said to my students about the Ridge. I said it to see if I would get an argument. If I did—and at times I did—I would show them a picture of my house, and tell them of the years of my youth I’d spent there.
But often I found there was no argument, even from those who had lived close to the Ridge. Why was this? Because talking about Ian and Evan and Harold gave many of my students an incredible feeling of being concerned without suffering themselves, which is what our society, especially a university-educated one, is after. Concern without suffering allows us to think we are fine men and women, although none of us is required to prove it. We live in a country full of fine men and women who wouldn’t hurt a fly—who wouldn’t say “Indian” but “First Nations,” and who wouldn’t know one First Nations person if they met him on the street; who would ban Huckleberry Finn but never be able to create one. This is the country of transgressionalists who deplore religion yet have created their own, more sanctimonious than any other you could imagine. The university bred this kind of sanctimony; it was a place where moral positions were so often paid for by inherited money or student loans.
In the world of my students, Ian and Harold and Evan—and Molly, Sara and Annette—did not have a chance. There were actually better off with Lonnie. And when I began to realize this, what I knew of Ian and Harold and Evan—and Molly and Sara, and Annette with all her small hopes and dreams—changed me. I began to argue with my own students, and with other professors like Jonathan Mittens, my one-time high-school friend, in defence of something that I no longer was. And so I became a pariah, just as those three boys were. The university sooner than later wanted rid of me. Professors spoke against me at certain faculty meetings I did not attend. The most vocal was Jonathan Mittens himself.
Once, I took my students up to the Ridge and showed them what was left of the houses there and the great tract of lumbering land Ian had once wanted to save, which was now plowed into the earth and thrust up against a grey-black sky, a sky turbulent in its very silence. And in that silence, as sometimes happens, it began to rain.
“My God, who could ever live here?” one of the girls said, accentuating here, the sound with its own sense of middle-class condemnation.
At the turn just before Ian Preston’s lifeless, bulldozed homestead, there was an old Pepsi sign tacked against the side of a barn, and in the distance the desperate tower where small mentally disabled Glen Dew had lost his life. Some of the students looked at it all as if excavating a site for bones. I had tears running down my cheeks.
“Is this where it all happened?” one of the brighter students said, looking over at me pensively. “Then it is true. Human drama, and human greatness, unfolds wherever humans are—and that’s a fact.” He did not know we were standing beside what was left of my parents’ house.
So let us become ghosts and return to those days j
ust after the hunting trip.
Evan Young had hoped Ian would help him ask Joyce Fitzroy for the money, and then he would pay the loan back. But Ian believed Evan wanted his help in asking for his girlfriend’s hand in marriage. The hand of Molly Thorn. That quiet child whom Evan loved.
Ian knew he had done nothing wrong. He reacted to the silent accusations of others by being silent, and this was to his own credit, in hindsight—but in hindsight only. Now he was certain both of his blood brothers hated him; and he was even more certain it was not his fault.
Fitzroy had wanted to be a partner in the store until he died. That was all. Sitting by the stove and chewing snuff, his false teeth in his pocket, he still smelled of the woodchips and ice he had worked with for almost sixty years.
He had $125,000 to show for those sixty long years and he had given this over to his youngest sister’s grandchild, Ian Preston, a boy he had spoken to only a dozen times before.
And so Ian’s great store became, to some, “the stolen store,” and remained so until it closed in disgrace some years on. Did it matter if this was untrue? Not one of my students thought it was untrue—yet none of them wanted to investigate it to find out. The stolen store had variant meanings—that is, it was stolen from Harold Dew; or, as most thought, from Joyce Fitzroy; or, as was hinted at times, it was stolen from Lonnie Sullivan, who always sounded hurt when he spoke of it. But the one point that never varied was this: it had been stolen.
So how did this happen? How did a man who was above reproach in his dealings and scrupulously honest, who refused drink and did not condemn others, come to be blamed for something like this?
Ian, who was not only primarily moral but primarily loyal—even if the tendency among those who knew him was to dismiss him—had gone on the Sunday before he was to visit Evan Young to Joyce Fitzroy’s house, hoping to buy a small travelling trunk in the old fellow’s possession, one that had come over to the river on a ship out of Liverpool in 1840. He had seen it as a boy, and once again when his grandmother died. He had thought to himself, late the night before, while eating supper alone and listening to the transistor radio in his small room, that he would buy it as a wedding present for Evan and Molly.
He had the funds from saving for three years toward the store he would not be able to buy, since he could not secure a loan, and so he decided he would buy the trunk if the old man would part with it, which he believed he might. If he wouldn’t, Ian decided he would give Evan and Molly the three or four hundred dollars he was willing to spend on it, to do with what they wished.
He remembered from years gone by that the trunk was in remarkable condition, made of teakwood, with leather straps, spotlessly polished and never damaged in any way. He had been thinking this before he went to see the banks, and thinking more about it after he was refused his loan. How foolish he had been to think that the banks would give him a loan. Now he wanted to part with all ridiculous notions about himself. He was, he thought romantically, tough and brave enough to labour as a common working man.
He said to himself: Since I will never get the store, why be so scrupulous about saving for it? I haven’t spent a dime in three years. So I’ll buy the chest for Evan and Molly.
This decent thought was to cause his calamity, and the calamity of many around him, even some as yet unborn.
Ian was prepared to offer three hundred dollars for this trunk, and had the money in his pocket. He could not have known that the trunk was worth more than that—in fact much, much more. (At an auction in New York City, I could have easily sold it for twenty-five hundred dollars.)
However, the trunk was long gone. The old man did not remember where it had gone, but knew he had lost or given it away some time before.
“I don’t know. It’s gone away, boy, wherever,” Joyce said. “I might have given it away. I don’t much remember—I was probably drunk at the time!”
Joyce sat by the stove chewing snuff, and every few moments he would lift the lid, and spit into it, and after hearing the scald of his spit, he would put the lid back on and then wipe his chin with his hand. They talked of Lonnie Sullivan—always putting boys to work, and how it was a shame at that, for now Rueben Sores was working in the woods for him. And that Lonnie went to Sara Robb’s mother to get his tea leaves read.
“Does he still?” Ian asked, proud to be away from all of these things. Proud that he had escaped when his two good friends, his blood brothers, had not. Proud that he would have nothing to do with Sullivan again.
“More now than ever,” Joyce said, almost gleefully. “He still thinks he should be rich—that is all he ever wanted! He believes he is the smartest one on the river. You know that! All his conniving and cigar smoking, and looking up land deeds, and trying to find riverfront that is back-taxed. And that young one of Harold’s is here half the week—asking to help me out.” Here he laughed. “Annette is pretty, though—and don’t mind showing herself off!”
Ian said nothing. He felt hot and horrible. Even the mention of Annette caused him to feel a pang. Would he still kill for her? Gladly, he thought, and then cringed at the idea. He was well away from all of it. And now he was so temperate and so stingy that no one would want him, he decided. His whole life had been to scrimp and to save and to be alone. And right now that suited him just fine.
Then Fitzroy sat up straight, with his hands on the knees of his Humphrey pants. He had the peculiar gaze that men in the woods have: determined, far-reaching and silent.
“And what Preston, then, are you?” old Joyce Fitzroy said.
“I’m Ian Preston.”
“Well, all them Prestons are brown-skinned.”
“Just a bit.”
“Black Irish and French.”
“As they say.”
“Where do that come from?” the old fellow asked.
“What?”
“Black Irish.”
“From the Spanish taken in by Ireland—after the sinking of the armada.”
“Oh—is that a fact?”
“It’s what I heard.”
“Then my, oh my—what are you doing, working the wood like me?”
And so Ian Preston, who was actually fairer-skinned than the relatives they spoke about—ginger-coloured, in fact—mentioned that he was an electrician at the large second-hand store in town, and that he was secretly trying to buy it, and that only a few people knew it was up for sale and he did not want to advertise the news himself. But here was the problem: he had been turned down by the banks. Now these bank managers, as much as they had clay feet, had various friends who did not. So he was worried now he would lose the enterprise, for he was looked upon as both an outsider and a loner. There would be someone these bank managers would want to tell or go to. He began to use a profusion of big words because he was angry.
“Can you get the loan someplace else, then, and make yer deal?” the old man asked.
“No—I’ve been everywhere.”
Old Joyce Fitzroy stared at Ian Preston for a moment, as if accusing him. Then he lifted the lid and spit. “I never keep my money in the bank,” the old fellow admitted perfunctorily. He didn’t trust the banks. He didn’t like them. He admitted that since before starting to work for Leo McVicer in 1947—before that, he had been working for Jameson, cutting wood—he had kept his money safe in the house.
“ ’Cause of the Depression! Banks would steal from anyone.” Fitzroy sniffed again in proud unawareness. “They stole from Janie McCleary, who owned the theatre back then—the Dime, as we used to call it. People will sell their soul for money, and it’s best to just work the woods.”
Ian Preston was silent. He wanted to leave. It was as if he was being kicked in the guts. He had spent half his life in these silent, cramped rooms, with winter outside. And he was the only one of his family left, the last of the Prestons. And no one who knew him had been sure about him. That is, they had not known if he could stand on his own two feet as a man. And a couple of days before, at one of the shops downtown, A
nnette Brideau had tossed her head as she walked by, as if to mock him. As he thought of this now, it infuriated him (although in fact, she hadn’t even seen him).
I will still become rich—and have nothing to do with her, he thought again. But his anger remained.
The old man kept looking at him in sardonic silence, a kind of impetuousness on his old, hard face. He straightened his back, as if to stretch, and then opened his Copenhagen tin and took a bit more snuff. The wind blasted against the house. “Get up boy, now, and make us a cup a tea,” he said quickly.
Ian Preston put the kettle on.
It was nothing to the old man to drink tea with a mouthful of snuff. He laid the snuff full in his puffed-out bottom lip. “Yup, them banks—they know nothing, and never did. How big is this here store?”
The old man kept up bursts of subtle but self-important comments as the tea was made, and telling stories about banks.
Finally Preston said, with a laugh, “I’ll never get the store, Joyce, so it is best to forget it! I’ll bet everything you have in this house that I won’t.”
“Oh, is that so?” old Fitzroy muttered. “You just made quite a bet! I will show you why young Harold Dew shovelled my driveway and his little vixen charmer Annette brought me a boiled dinner.”
Then he went into the back part of the house. The clock ticked and almost fifteen minutes went by before the old man, his heavy pants sagging and his top shirt buttons undone to show his hardened red chest bones, came back in with a heavy tin box with a small lock. He put it on the table beside his great-nephew. He opened it with a small key—jiggling it to get it to open.
In the tin were four faded and yellowed newspaper articles—the first about the moon landing, the second about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the third about Germany surrendering, the fourth about Canada declaring war on Germany … and under this was money, a lot of it, very old money.
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