Maclean

by Allan Donaldson

  “There’s a man somewhere,” Maclean said, “who says that all the time that ever was, and all the things that ever happened, are still here now, only in a different place.”

  “I don’t understand that, John,” Ralph said. “You say some funny things sometimes.”

  “You gonna sing that song for us again, Ellie?” Legs asked.

  “No, I ain’t.”

  “You used to play the banjo,” Ralph said to Legs. “You don’t no more?”

  “No, I don’t, not no more,” Legs said. “I sold that banjo a long time ago. My fingers got too stiff to play it right, and I didn’t like playin’ it wrong, and it just hung on the wall there lookin’ at me, so one day I up and sold it to a man had been wantin’ to buy it for a long time. I was sorry afterwards. But I wasn’t gonna play it again. Not in this lifetime. Nor dance no more neither.”

  Outside the window, Dreadnought gwuffed once, then again a little louder, and they all stopped to listen. But they couldn’t hear anything and Dreadnought settled down again. Somewhere beyond the reach of their human senses, somewhere out in the woods in the darkness, something had been making its way, looking for something to eat, or trying to keep from being eaten.

  The talk drifted on aimlessly, circling for a while around the coming of winter, then drifting away again into hunting and the potato crop and the low water in the river, all these things touched on only, turned this way and that as if all of them sitting there around the table were somehow beyond the consequences attaching to any of these matters, looking down on them from some Olympian height, remote and invulnerable.

  Maclean sat, half-listening, letting his eyes roam about the familiar room. The cookstove. The pine cupboards with their neat rows of glasses and dishes. The scrubbed floor. The white and blue check curtains. The kerosene lamps. The smell of bread, the rambling talk, the warmth. It was good. It was the way the rest of the world should be but, of course, never would.

  He thought again of building himself a little house. Somewhere along this road maybe, so that he could drop up here of an evening and sip a little of Ellie’s rum and sit in the warmth and have quiet talks with Ralph and Johnnie and Legs. A quarter of an acre of land would do him—space for the house and a garden where he could grow some of his own food. He could lease the land and not have to get together the money to buy it outright. People would lease land without too much fuss because they could always get it back if need be. He wasn’t going to eat it up or burn it down or drive it over the bank into the river. And he could do most of the building himself with a little help maybe from Bill Kayton, who always knew where there was lumber lying around that nobody wanted.

  A settled man with his own house, small maybe but his own.

  The face of Claudine Swann once again began to take shape in his mind.

  (Why not? Why in Christ’s name not? Go away. Go away, god damn it, and leave me alone. I know why not, and I already know that it shouldn’t have happened the way it happened. So go away.)

  He looked at his glass and saw that it was empty. He took the bottle out of his pocket and considered the couple of fingers that were left and decided that for the moment he would leave them. It might be nice to have a little tot somewhere on the long walk home.

  He settled back in his chair, adding a comment now and then to the conversation, but mostly just listening. Once he reached for his watch and found it gone and took a second to remember, then turned and looked at Ellie’s clock on a shelf behind him.

  After a while Waldo got up to go. He went out and closed the door behind him and Dreadnought went “gwuff.” Then Ralph and Johnny left, and there was only himself and Legs and Ellie. He didn’t feel like going, but it was late, and he could see that Ellie was wanting to go to bed. He got up at last, and Legs got up with him.

  “I ain’t forgot you owe to split me some wood come Monday,” Ellie said to Legs.

  She let them out and watched over the top half of the door as they walked down the yard.

  Except for the lights behind them at Ellie’s place, there were no lights now anywhere along the road. Legs lived nearly at the end of the road with his mother. She was almost a hundred years old, though nobody knew for sure, including herself probably, and there were stories that she had been a runaway slave who made it to Canada after all sorts of adventures. Nobody knew anything about that for sure either, and nobody Maclean knew had ever thought it proper to ask Legs.

  “Ellie surely keeps a nice place,” Legs said when they were stopped in front of his house. “I surely would miss that place if anything ever happened to her. Ain’t many pleasures left in the world come our age, now is there?”

  “No, there ain’t,” Maclean said.

  “You all right, then?” Legs asked.

  “Sure,” Maclean said. “I’m just fine. Never better.”

  “You get home all right? Long way down there.”

  “I’m fine,” Maclean said. “Don’t you worry.”

  “Good night, then,” Legs said. “And you look after yourself.”

  “Good night, Legs,” Maclean said. “And you look after yourself too.”

  Maclean watched him walk off into the shadows, his gait as angular and delicate as the final steps of a soft shoe dancer disappearing into the wings.

  Then he turned and set off back down the hill.

  Most of the houses he passed were dark, though here and there an upstairs light was still on where someone maybe was lying in bed reading or listening to the far-away stations that came in sometimes late in the evening, even on the dull-eared, asthmatic, old radio at Drusilla’s. Once he heard, from far off on another street, the sound of someone playing something complicated and sad on a piano. Once from a darkened house close by, the sound of a woman laughing.

  After a quarter of an hour’s walk, slow and steady, he came to the Court House with its twin memorials of the Great War on the lawn out front—the gray German field gun on its square concrete platform and on the other side of the lawn, the cenotaph with its gray-granite soldier standing at attention on his pedestal, gun and soldier both spectral in the moonlight.

  He stopped on the sidewalk in front of the gun and looked up at it. In front of the shield on either side of the barrel were narrow metal seats with foot rests where two of the gunners could sit when the gun was being towed, although the seats must, he thought, have been damned hard on the ass.

  He looked around. The street was deserted, the houses all dark. He walked up the slope of the lawn, mounted the concrete platform, and heaved himself up onto one of the seats on the gun. It was damned hard on the ass, but maybe they folded up their greatcoats and used them as cushions.

  He wondered where the gun had been captured and imagined the gunners lying dead around it, along some road maybe where the shells had caught them, or in a field scythed clean by a machine gun, or in the bottom of a gun pit where the gas had collected.

  It was too bad about the McIntyre boy who wouldn’t be coming home, as some people so delicately put it, stepping with averted gaze around the reality of what would have happened. But maybe none of them had ever come home. Maybe only their ghosts had come home, as some poet had said. Maybe one way or another, quick or slow, they had all died of their wounds. And maybe that wasn’t so different, after all, from the way life happened for everybody. Maybe the whole thing was a war, leaving behind its trail of dead and wounded, its trail of sad ghosts haunting the ruins of their lives. In his kind of war, it had happened a lot quicker than in what they call peace, condensing into a few months what otherwise took decades, but peace or war, it happened all the same.

  He thought of Mrs. Fraser who had no doubt once loved and begotten in joy, now lying in her bed, looking up at the ceiling, waiting for death, of Miss Audrey Sweet who had once loved, as the saying went, not wisely but too well, of Alice who had once recited Wordsworth to
Harry Noles, of Miss Mazerole who had once seen Paris, of Legs who had once danced and played the banjo, of Ellie who had once sung “Rock of Ages,” of Henry, having fled his unprofitable farm, sitting out at night on the rock with his telescope studying the stars and wondering what the hell it was all about.

  And, of course, always and everywhere, high up and low down, there were the bastards, the ones you could only get away from by sneaking off for an hour or two to some hidden, little corner like Ellie’s place. That’s the way it always had been and that’s the way it always would be. So fuck it.

  He took out the pony with the last of the rum, unscrewed the cap, and took a sip, rolling the rum around in his mouth, savouring the warm sweetness those far-away, tropical islands had imbued it with. Past the lighthouse, past the nunbuoy, past the crimson, rising sun.

  He placed the bottle carefully in the corner of the seat behind him and sat on, letting the warmth spread. He could have gone to sleep sitting there, and every couple of minutes, he told himself he had better get up and go before he did fall asleep. And before someone saw him and called the police and had him thrown in the jug because it wasn’t considered good for the well-being of society that a man with a bottle should be sitting on an old field gun thinking about life in the middle of the night.

  After another quarter of an hour, he roused himself. He unscrewed the cap of his bottle and drank the last of the rum. He let it find its way and when it had, climbed sleepily down off the gun, the bottle still in one hand, the cap in the other. He studied them carefully, then screwed the cap back on the bottle and popped it into the barrel of the gun.

  He picked his way across the lawn to the cenotaph and walked around it twice, very slowly, looking at the long columns of names on the black tablets. He knew where every name was of the boys who had been his pals. Robert Cronk. Charles Simpson. Henry Noles. William Sperry. Frank Gallagher. Daniel McGrath. Ebenezer Watson. Edward McDade. Here. Here. Here. All present and accounted for.

  He ran his fingers over the engraved names of Bob and Harry like a man reading braile.

  They shall not grow old, the dignitaries at Remembrance Day were fond of intoning, as we that are left grow old. Age shall not weary them nor the years condemn. And so forth.

  At the foot of the steps up to the cenotaph, he turned and waved a sloppy, limp-wristed good night to the soldier on top, then set off on the last leg of his walk home.

  Main Street was deserted, not a car, not a soul anywhere. A streetlight hung on a metal cable over the intersection where the Salvation Army band had played and the policeman had stood directing traffic. Two more lights on poles stood on either side of the square at the bottom of the street making pools of light in which floated the litter cast away by the Saturday night crowds.

  Just below the post office, he stepped off the curb onto the street, stumbled a little, righted himself, and began to march, first close to the sidewalk, then out and straight down the middle, his arms swinging wider and wider arcs as he passed the store windows and the darkened displays. Cascades of apples and new potatoes flowing out of artfully tipped baskets. A smooth slope of green where the jewels of Marathon MacClewan had been spread. A poster with a picture of Wilf Carter in a white ten-gallon hat smiling toothily above a pile of records. Whole roomfuls of furniture. Gatherings of immaculately dressed dummies, important gents in double-breasted suits, elegant ladies in their autumn dresses, staring glassily at each other, sightless and serene.

  He glanced at them indifferently as he passed. He was elsewhere now. Slowly out of the great gulf of the past, the boys took shape around him. Bob, Frank, and Harry. Dan. Bill. Charlie. All just the way they had been before the bad things started to happen, swinging along in the close-packed, khaki lines of the old battalion, marching at ease, their rifles slung on their shoulders, the peaked caps tipped back, the sun streaming down, the band playing.

  As he approached the square, he began to hum to himself in strict march time and then to sing.

  Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag

  And smile, smile, smile,

  While you’ve a lucifer to light your fag,

  Smile, boys, that’s the style.

  In an upstairs window above a store, a large man in his undershirt with his braces hanging loose stared down at him, then slowly drew down the blind.

  ALLAN DONALDSON WAS born in Taber, Alberta, but grew up in Woodstock, New Brunswick, shiretown of a county that was settled overwhelmingly by Irish and Scots, among whom were ancestors going back to the early nineteenth century. As a child, he became well acquainted with the street life of the town. In his teens, he had summer jobs wheeling cement, tamping ties and laying steel on the railway, working on a rock crusher and an asphalt plant, and operating a jack-hammer. On scholarships, he studied English literature at the University of New Brunswick and the University of London, and he spent a teaching career in the English Department at the University of New Brunswick. He is the author of a novel, The Case Against Owen Williams, and a book of short stories, Paradise Siding.