Maclean

by Allan Donaldson

  In the morning, he washed and shaved in an upstairs bathroom that faced east and in the morning was always filled with light. Then dressed up in a suit and tie the way he used to be the year he went to high school, he walked up through town to the woodworking factory and an office of his own, where he worked at accounts at a desk with a little sign with his name on it. Mr. John Maclean. A window looked out over the back lumber yard towards the hills across the river, where he never went now and intended never to go again ever, far away here from the farm and the dirt.

  “You miserable, old bastard, what do you know about anything?”

  “You speak to me like that? You speak to me like that! God will smite you!”

  “God doesn’t give a shit.”

  “God will smite.”

  A scrawny fist shaking with rage. Mother cowering in a chair at the kitchen table. Then upstairs, throwing his things into an old knapsack, down the stairs and out, down the road and away, the river whispering among the bushes on the bank, the town on the far side fixed on its hills in the summer heat. And the sense gathering, as he crossed the bridge, of freedom at last and life after all in spite of everything.

  But even then there were times when all of a sudden that good world with its nice room and its garden and his good job seemed unreal—a kind of curtain on which all these things were just a painted show, like a curtain he once saw in a theatre in London with a country scene on it which disappeared when a light was turned on, so that you saw behind it a different scene with real people. Once, walking back from work on a rainy afternoon that was already getting dark in the damp cold of November, he saw a man coming up the hill towards him. For a few seconds, terrified, he took him to be Sergeant Death, but when he got close, he turned out to be a harmless little man who worked in a clothing store on Main Street.

  I’m sorry, John, but there just ain’t the work. I got to let half the boys in the shop and the yard go too. Mary’s going to keep the books, and her mother’s going to come in to look after the kids. If things pick up again, you’ll have your job back the very first day I can afford it. I’m sorry, John. There just ain’t the work any more. It’s a bad time.

  Old vets, like himself, on street corners coming to see that in the years they had been away the ones who had stayed home, the smart ones, light-footed, had been making money and getting ahead, and they, the heroes, the stupid ones, were never going to catch up.

  Well, it’s over now, the fat little man at the employment bureau said, and the world has to go on, don’t it? What did you say your name was? Yes. Yes. Angus Maclean’s son. A little gas. Yes. We’ll see. Yes. Yes.

  He peed as quietly as he could against the side of the bowl so as not to be heard and buttoned up and stood looking out the window again at the yard. Surrounded by these reminders of long-vanished possibility, he found the face of Claudine Swann taking shape in his imagination. It had been a long time since she had last risen to haunt him, of all his memories the most carefully buried in the spacious graveyard of the past.

  Mrs. Claudine Swann, as she was generally called, was the widow of Private Eldon Swann. Because of his fascination with pipes and kilts and all things Scottish, Eldon Swann had left George County and enlisted in the North Nova Scotia Highlanders, and one weekend in 1916, when he was on leave in Halifax, he went to a dance and met Claudine MacCrae. A month later they were married, and a month after that he was on a ship to France.

  For some reason, Claudine moved to Wakefield to await his return. But Private Eldon Swann did not return. He was killed a few days before the Armistice. With the prospect of peace so close, he got careless maybe, or maybe some general back in his chateau decided to use his last chance to improve his record by capturing another few acres of mud.

  When she first came to Wakefield, Claudine lived for a while with her in-laws, but they didn’t get on, and she moved to a small apartment over a store off Main Street. She was still living there when, like Private Eldon Swann, Maclean met her at a dance.

  They were both a little tight. She had come with another couple, an ex-soldier and his girlfriend. Maclean knew the ex-soldier a little, and they fell into talk. After a while, he had a dance with Claudine, then another, and soon found himself part of a foursome.

  In spite of the gas, he was still a good-looking man in those days, he still had his job at the woodworking factory, and he was well aware of the popular view that a man such as himself should be in search of a wife. Except at a respectful distance, he had never had anything to do with a woman since he went to the war. The whores of England had not attracted him, the whores of France still less, and no other possible relationship had ever come his way. There were now plenty of unattached women around, thanks to the war, but he didn’t feel the impulse to pursue them. When asked, as he sometimes was, about his single state, he served up the stock reply that he had not yet met the right girl.

  After the dance, he walked Claudine to the building where her apartment was. It was after midnight, and the streets were deserted. Standing in the door way, she kissed him goodnight and pressed his hand.

  Claudine Swann was small with thick, reddish-brown hair, brown eyes, and a sharp foxlike face. She wasn’t particularly pretty, but she had a good deal of whatever it is that can make a woman attractive regardless of her looks. Working away at his desk, Maclean found himself thinking about her, and half way through the following week, he went around to the store where she worked and asked her to the next Saturday’s dance. After that, they began going out to dances, movies, the races, band concerts. One night she took him by the hand and led him upstairs.

  Although he always went back to his own room to sleep (How would he have explained an all-night absence to Bob and Clara? How long would it have been before the talk started? How long before his boss at the woodworking factory decided to have a “word” with him?), over the next couple of months, her apartment took on some of the qualities of home.

  She didn’t have much, and much of what she had was second-hand or third- or fourth-hand. Well-worn furniture, well-chipped dishes, well-dented pots and pans, an unmatching assortment of cheap “silverware.” The oilcloth on the floor had been worn down in places almost to the boards underneath. The wallpaper was overlain by a layer of dirt the colour of weak tea and in places had begun to peel. One of the windows was cracked. (Even after a quarter of a century, he could still remember the precise location and shape of every one of these disfigurations.)

  Within this context of neglect and decay, Claudine had made things as cheerful as she could with colourful curtains and calendars and pictures from rummage sales of far, imaginary places.

  She never spoke of Eldon Swann, and once he realized she didn’t want to, he never spoke of him either. Now and then she let drop remarks that suggested other dark memories, but she volunteered nothing more about them, and he didn’t pry. Since she knew that he had parents on the other side of the river whom he never visited, he told her about them one night in a monologue that lasted almost the whole evening. Then that too was consigned to silence. Sometimes she asked him about the war, and he told her whatever she wanted to know, wondering whether what she was asking about might not be Private Eldon Swann and what his dying might have been like. She never said what had happened to him. Perhaps she didn’t know.

  For a while, what they did talk about were mostly things of no deep importance—her job, his job, the things they had done (or not done), the people they met, the goings-on of the town—sometimes, though not often, the goings-on in the great world that neither of them wanted anything more to do with.

  She didn’t have a lot of schooling. Grade Eight, she said, in a country school in Cape Breton. Coming across unexpected abysses of ignorance, he sometimes wondered if she had even less schooling than that and was lying to him because she was intimidated by his year and a half of high school with its Shakespeare and French and Latin. But althoug
h she might not have been well-educated, she was clever and alert and knew far more about life—meaning the lives of men and women—than he had ever had a chance to know.

  Among the many things they didn’t talk about was the future, which was to say, their future. She didn’t talk about it, he suspected, because she was afraid. He didn’t talk about it, he told himself, because for the moment the present was enough.

  Sometime in the next few weeks, the right moment would come when they would talk. But before that moment came, there came the morning when he went to the factory and found out that he had lost his job.

  He could still have afforded his room on his pension and the money he had saved, but the very next week, he moved out and into a one-room apartment in an old, wooden tenement building beside the creek, a great rabbit-warren of a place full of poor people, mostly Catholic Irish, with broods of sad, dirty children.

  “Why?” Claudine shouted at him. “Why for Christ’s sake? Tell me why?”

  “It’s all I can afford.”

  “Bullshit. And anyway you can live here.”

  “No.”

  “Why not? Why in Christ’s name not?”

  Why not?

  As the money he had saved began to run out, he found a job helping to dig a basement, another chopping the winter’s firewood for a store.

  He began to drink more, and she drank along with him although never so much. Some nights now, he did stay all night, waking in the morning in the stale heat of the apartment with an aching head and a dead weight in his stomach.

  This went on for weeks. Sometimes they fought, usually over nothing of any importance. Mostly they merely wallowed in a kind of dank despair which gathered at first in him but soon generated a counterpart in her. They hardly went anywhere any more, and there were times when they sat all evening at her kitchen table and hardly said a word. He brooded about his lost job, his lost education, the war. He didn’t know what she brooded about, apart perhaps from her lost husband. As was her way, she never said.

  One day in early fall, she told him she was going to visit her sister in Halifax. A week after she left, he got a letter saying she wasn’t coming back. It said hardly more than that she saw no future for them and that it seemed to her they would do better without each other.

  The letter was postmarked Halifax. It had no return address, but the little she had told him about her people was still enough that he knew he could get in touch with her if he wanted to. Maybe she knew that too. Maybe it was all a kind of test.

  For months, he carried the letter around in his billfold. One of the boys from the army lived in Halifax, and he could easily have written him and given him the information he would need to locate Claudine. Twice he sat down and began to write, but before he had finished, something, he hardly knew what, came between him and his intent.

  Then one night, very drunk, going through his billfold in a futile search for money, he came across Claudine’s letter and tore it up and threw the pieces away.

  Why? In Christ’s name, why? Was there lurking somewhere some kind of insane pride, without sense or purpose, that would not let him consent to be the husband of this simple, good woman? Had the wounds he had suffered finally rendered him unfit for active service in the world?

  He gave his battered face a final look in Alice’s mirror, then turned away and went out into the hall. A doorway led to the living room in the old part of the house, a room with everything needed for a comfortable evening at home. Off in one corner, a collection of photographs was arranged on a big oak table.

  He slid through the doorway and crept like a thief across the room. Some of the photographs were recent, some from long ago. A photograph of Alice and Mitch in front of the house all dressed up for some occasion. A photograph of Alice’s daughters and their husbands and children. The wedding photograph of Mother and Father. Mother, small and elegant, looking wistful, as if foreseeing the future, the way people in photographs sometimes do. Father drawn up stern, scowling into the camera so that God would not think that he really cared for such vanity as this. A studio photograph of Alice aged eighteen or so, looking very pretty in a white dress with a white ribbon in her hair. A photograph of the children and their teachers in front of the old school across the river. Himself, Alice, Harry. Elsie Skadget, big and awkward, smiling her big smile over the heads of shyer, smaller kids.

  Apart from the school picture, there were no photographs of him. His father would have destroyed them all. Just as years before he had destroyed all the photographs of his mother’s people, the Somervilles. Once when he had asked his mother why his father had said that her father was some kind of a bad man, she had said that her father wasn’t a bad man but that Father didn’t like him, that was all. And the reason Father didn’t like him, it turned out a long time later when Maclean was old enough to understand such things, was that her father had been a man who could play the piano and had taken part in plays and operettas and, more sinful even than that, had been far better off than Angus Maclean. He hated all the Somervilles, and once when his mother had sneaked off to see one of her sisters who was ill, he had locked her in the pantry and wouldn’t let her out. Later, when the sister died, he wouldn’t let her go to the funeral, and she sat outside on the bench beside the kitchen door, listening to the bell of the Anglican Church tolling on the far side of the river.

  He looked back at the studio photograph of Alice. How pretty she was! If somehow he had never seen her after that photograph was taken—if, for example, she had moved away while he was at the war and then, now, moved back, looking the way she now looked, and he had met her on the street, he wouldn’t have known her. It was as if there was another person altogether still living somewhere there in the past who had nothing to do with the fat, sweating old woman with her straggly hair who was in the kitchen making cookies. Or as if maybe, somewhere along some other branch of the road of time, there was an Alice this age, but not this Alice—an Alice who had been let go to high school and had married Harry Noles, who had not gone to the war, not been blown to pieces at Festubert. And another John Maclean too who had not gone to the war either because he had finished high school and had better things to do with his life than join the army and fight for the god-damned English.

  He became aware that Alice was standing in the doorway behind him, wondering no doubt what had been taking him so long, not knowing what journeys, backward and sideways, he had been making through the tangle of life.

  “I’ve been looking at the old pictures here,” he said.

  She came and stood beside him, silently, then picked up the wedding photograph.

  “Tomorrow’s the day father died,” she said. “Mother’s birthday. It was so hot that day.”

  She stared out the window, looking beyond the pots of geraniums on the window sill and the fir trees on the other side of the road, down the years into the upstairs room where their father lay.

  His office job at the woodworking factory was long gone by then, along with all the fine speeches about a country fit for heroes, and he had been through a succession of menial, short-term jobs, interspersed by a good many times when he had no job at all. That morning, when the boy from across the river came to tell him that his father was dead, he was piling lumber as a day labourer at the woodworking factory whose books he had once kept.

  He got his pay from the office and walked across the bridge against the flow of wagons and trucks on their way to town. Alice was right. It was hot, the sun beating down out of a cloudless sky, even the asphalt on the bridge getting soft underfoot.

  It was the first time he had been in the house in years, the first time he had been in his father’s bedroom ever. His father lay on his back, his face skeletal and white, his mouth half open, his hand lying on the quilts, the fingers curled up like claws.

  He had seen too many dead to be bothered by one more, and he could think
of nothing to make him sorrowful for this one. From all those years, he could not remember one act of kindness or generosity, no matter how small, that this man had ever performed for anybody.

  But his mother and Alice were weeping.

  “You never made it up,” Alice said.

  “No. And neither would he unless I wanted to go back there and work for him for nothing.”

  “Well,” Alice said.

  She turned away from the table, abruptly, and he sensed her irritation.

  “My cookies are gonna be burnin’ up,” she said.

  She went out, and he followed her, and sat down again at the table, wondering whether he should not now get away, but held there by some need or other—perhaps some such craziness as a notion that just by talking to Alice, he could take them back to that fork in the road of time where they could make the turn towards the lives they ought to have had.

  He watched her pull the cookie sheet with the peanut butter cookies out of the oven and replace it with another.

  “There wasn’t any need for him to take you out of school,” he said, abruptly, without having made any decision that he was going to say it, the craziness taking him over as if he were a ventriloquist’s dummy. “You could have gone to high school and done just fine.”

  “Mamma needed the help. You know that.”

  “No, she didn’t. It was him. He wanted everyone to be as ignorant as he was, sitting around with his god-damned Bible laying down the law as if he were God himself.”

  “That’s no way to talk about him. Anyway it was a long time ago.”

  She unloaded the cookie sheet and went back to the frosting in the double boiler.

  “There wasn’t any need for him to take me out of school either,” Maclean said.

  “They needed you too. On the farm.”