The Unlikely Redemption of John Alexander MacNeil

by Lesley Choyce

  Dickle’s thugs preferred their juvenile crimes to occur in the early evening since they had to be home by nine o’clock to assist their mothers in putting their drunken fathers to bed. I had been tipped off that my house was next and I had nothing better to do than to lie in wait for them in my well-stocked tool shed. Sure enough, 7:30 rolled around and there they were, mere boys with rocks and not enough imagination to come up with more creative mischief than shattering glass. Dickle seemed to be the rock thrower and the other louts were merely along for the thrill of the crime and the sound of breakage, the cascade of glass in the evening sunlight.

  Dickle threw his first stone and missed, hitting the wall of my house with a dull thud. I emerged from the tool shed with a pickaxe for effect and, as the other boys ran for it, I grabbed Dickle with my free arm and spun him around. Dickle was caught off guard and saw the pickaxe half raised — again, only for effect — and his bowels proceeded to let go.

  I was disgusted and he was humiliated and then tearful, so I let him come inside and clean himself up. I even gave him some clean shorts and pants a few sizes too big to go home in. I asked him to bury the soiled garments in the backyard, which he was polite enough to do, even though the neighbour’s dog, Ceilidh, dug them up promptly the next morning and delivered them to the front parlour of his master, Dalton “Fig” Newton.

  Dalton’s own twelve-year-old boy, Dewey Newton, figured out whose pants they were and somehow pieced together what had happened with Dickle’s rock-throwing career and the ruin of the pants. Dewey was not the model citizen of discretion as I was trying to be and everyone at school knew before too long. Dickle blamed me for telling the world and so he harboured this grudge, as one could expect, lo these many years.

  So both men of the law present were criminals of sorts in their own right and, while I never boasted that I was a law-abiding citizen, I never committed a crime myself worse than aggravated assault. But I was in a courtroom and had decided to rise to the occasion with the funeral suit and the shaved chin and had brought along a fair-to-middling sense of dignity and self-righteousness to see me through the misty Port Isaac morning.

  Judge Stipples himself read the charges and there was a great deal of phlegm clearing and sucking back of snot involved, but it was well understood by the nine or so of the assembled accused and their families in attendance that I had been charged with what sounded like “owning an unsightly premises.” Chuck Stipples never looked up at me or anyone else after he read. Instead, he blew his nose loudly and studied with great concentration whatever had delivered itself into his handkerchief.

  “How does the defendant plead?” were his actual words, familiar as they were to anyone who had ever watched TV courtroom drama.

  “I plead not guilty, Your Honour,” I said.

  Judge Stipples took a deep, laboured breath, now looking to be tired and bored, as if this whole proceeding were too much for him today and he’d rather be home watching the Golf Channel.

  Dickle Gillis rose from his seat and described my house and front yard, slowly and dramatically, accounting for the peeling paint, the state of my much-loved but dilapidated porch, the swayback, hurricane-ravaged barn, the several “abandoned” vehicles, the rusty appliances and the sorry state of my “lawn.”

  “Your Honour,” he said, “the defendant has not only failed to clean up his premises after several official and unofficial warnings but he has continued to add to this state of chaos since the warnings were issued.”

  What he was referring to was the fact that I had allowed young Kenny Beaton to park two of his smashed-up Mustangs in my yard while he waited out his license suspension for drunk and reckless driving. But they were only temporary guests. Kenny had assured me he wanted his vehicles back as soon as he had paid his debt to society.

  As I stood to deliver my defence, I noticed Devon MacQuarrie, editor of the Inverary Pibroch, sitting in the back, his fingers poised over his laptop as if he were about to play a strathspey on a child’s miniature piano. I trusted Devon to report my case with accuracy and dignity as was his style. The Pibroch had a distinct liking for underdogs and a mistrust of big government, the legal system, American baseball and anyone who had ever lived in or had family in Halifax, Toronto or Ottawa. Devon knew me well and, when trying to get at the local truth of many a story, he’d come to my house, walk in without knocking and search around the inside of my house until he found me doing whatever I was doing. I also noticed Sheila Leblanc there. Sheila was one of my favourite human beings alive. She ran the bookmobile and I would visit her whenever she drove it to Inverary. A much, much younger woman, she flirted shamelessly with me when I came to borrow books and made me feel at least a foot taller than I really was. Now she smiled and waved and I felt even more courageous than five minutes before.

  I cleared my own throat as I stood, studied the crease in my trousers and then looked up at the boards in the ceiling. “This accusation, Your Honour, is a full frontal assault on one man’s dignity and his right to live his life in a free and open society,” I began, feeling my heart begin to pick up speed, and my blood pressure rising to the cause of defending human liberty.

  “I stand before you as a tax-paying citizen of Inverary who has lived a long and respectable life among the other citizens of my community. I believe this case to be not just about me but about any man, or woman for that matter, who may be accused of having an unacceptable appearance to his property or his person. ‘Unsightly’ is a term of insult and can be applied liberally to diminish the very freedom that is at the basis of our society. Suppose, for example, some small-minded prosecutor in days past decided that the giant, Angus McAskill of Englishtown, was ‘unsightly’ because he was too big of a man — too muscular, too large, overly massive in height and weight. Would that give the law the right to tear his massive arms from his chest or to cut him down to the measure of an ordinary man? I think not.”

  Charles Stipples coughed with great enthusiasm and his cheeks flapped slightly, their loose flesh like that of the udder of a dairy cow that had just been milked. He waved his hand in the air in front of him as if were on a fishing trip shooing away a deerfly. I’m not sure he was even listening to what I had to say or, if he was, understood what I was getting at.

  I continued on like a man who saw a shining light at the end of a tunnel or a mountain climber ascending slowly but surely up the summit of a great mountain. “I stand before you, the descendent of great men, great Scotsmen, who have defended their lands against the onslaught of invaders, often fighting to the bitter end against insurmountable odds, falling bloody and even dead upon the hallowed ground that was their home. My ancestors suffered such indignity as foreigners usurped their land, their homes, and then drove them away, casting them adrift on the stormy seas of history. In their new land of exile, these men took up the cause of defending liberty, even returning to the battlefields of Europe when necessary to combat the tyrants whose thirst for violence knew no bounds. Again more blood was spilled and men fell — good men, honourable men.” I looked over at Devon and felt certain that he was tapping my speech word by word into his laptop so that people all over The Municipality of Inverary would hear my oration and perhaps even rise up to support me in this great cause.

  I allowed my mouth and vocal cords to continue to investigate many of the great chambers of the vocabulary of the English language and to ride the tides of rhetoric, rising and falling like great oceans. This went on for some time before I feared I may have ventured too far from the primary focus of my defence. So I began to reel in the great fish that was at the end of my speech. “And so you see, this is not about the way one man’s property appears to another man. It is about freedom and the right to choose the way a man or a woman lives his or her life. It is about freedom itself.”

  I folded my hands together in front of me as if I were about to pray, but I said nothing more. A great silence fell over the courtroom until Jud
ge Stipples loudly hawked up more renegade phlegm and turned his head sideways as if looking for some safe place to spit, and finding none, swallowed with some dismay. No one clapped in appreciation of my words, but I could see that Devon and at least one other person, a young woman, perhaps forty years of age, nodded her head, fully understanding what I had said.

  “Your Honour,” Dickle said, “these are some photographs of the defendant’s property.” He walked forward with the gait of a man who had spent years if not decades walking back and forth from a desk to a filing cabinet.

  The judge accepted the photographs and opened a pair of rimless glasses and peered at the photos, turning down his mouth as if he had just been presented with something most unsavoury. His expression reminded me of that of a pious man looking at the most offensive image he could imagine

  At that moment I was prepared to defend with my life those wrecked cars of Kenny’s parked in my yard. I would not ask his father to have them removed. I was prepared to guard all the other accumulated objects on my property — my personal archives and the legacy of my own life. Stipples looked up over his glasses briefly at me and saw that I was about to speak. He put an index finger to his lips and flipped through two more photos, tapping the final one with the self-same finger, tapping it and then saying to Dickle Gillis, “It appears from these photos that Mr. MacNeil’s home and yard are set well back from the road in Deepvale. I would say that his premises is not even visible from the road. Is that the case, Mr. Gillis?”

  Gillis looked like a man who had just received a severe blow to his testicles with a ball peen hammer. He gathered his wits back together, his several uncompromising, low-yield brain cells, and replied, “The premises is both unsightly, unsafe and a hazard to public health and safety.”

  “But a person would have to go out of their way and drive up a long arduous driveway through heavily wooded land before he could see any of this? Is that so?”

  It was the truth, of course. Such an element of my own defence had not even occurred to me, an old man who had only recently offered to pick up a hitchhiking mailbox. I had instead opted to take the high road to Scotland, not the low. Even an old power tool thief could see this.

  Dickle Gillis was closing up his file and the judge said nothing more. There was no dramatic final conclusion, no hammer of a gavel, no cheering from the small audience. Justice arrived in the courtroom in the form of a small euphoric cloud drifting across my mind, a high white puffy cloud, cumulus, on a sunny, windy day high on a hill overlooking the Margaree Valley. I looked over at Dickle Gillis as he retrieved the photographs and returned them to his manila file and I felt truly sorry for him, understood that this was just another moment of humiliation, a link in a long chain of failures that had dogged him since he’d soiled his shorts in my backyard so many years ago. He’d gone through life like that, trying to bury his dirtied laundry in one backyard or another, only to have some stray dog dig up the truth and parade it through the town.

  I decided to smile at the boy and throw my hands up into the air as if they were two robins that had just been set free from a cage. Then I walked out into the Port Isaac morning, sniffed at the revitalizing sharp odour of salt air, mackerel and rotting kelp and felt a sudden pang of regret that Eva, dead these thirty years, was not here to share in my small moment of victory.

  THREE

  IN THOSE SOMETIMES DIFFICULT and confusing days before the girl came into my life, I admit that I was a lonely man as well as a crazy man. If you were to show up at eight a.m., you would have noticed I had two places set at the kitchen table. One was for my dead wife and one for me. Eva had been there with me in the courtroom too, sitting not far from Devon MacQuarrie. She’d given me a pep talk before the proceedings. “John Alex,” she said, “best not to get too carried away. Just say your piece and say it well and then let things fall as they may.”

  Eva was with me sometimes so vivid and close that I had conversations with her. And then other times, I sensed that she was far off. At those times I still ached for her. I felt a tremendous sadness well up inside me and there were tears. Sunset would do it to me. Sitting on my porch overlooking the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the tears would roll. Sunset and bagpipes would do it the worst. Dale MacNeil down below me in Deepvale got it in his head once or twice a week to play his pipes outside as the sun slipped into the Gulf. If I was outside and I heard him playing “Flowers of Scotland,” I would fold up and fall to my knees in my garden. And then Eva would be there, walking down the row between the Swiss chard and the beets. “John Alex, John Alex,” she’d repeat just like she used to. When she loved me the hardest, she’d say my name twice.

  NOW ON THOSE MORNINGS when both teacups were filled with tea, I put a piece of brown bread toast with peach marmalade on her plate as well. I ate my breakfast and I listened to the CBC. There would be a story about a fight in Sydney where someone lost an eye from a broken beer bottle. Or they would carry on yet again about the Tar Ponds and about the economy. Or the premier maybe was in Glace Bay opening up a hockey rink. Or someone down near Louisbourg was caught with a boatload of dope. Most of it meant very little to me. At eighty, you find these sorts of things rather trivial.

  So I finished my tea and toast and then I ate what was on Eva’s plate. I never once poured her tea down the sink. And every time I washed that cup, I thought of my one great regret in life and I wished I had been smarter. I wished I had not been lured by money and my prideful need to work.

  Picture me, John Alexander MacNeil, in his forties and out of work. Not smart enough to hunker down here in Deepvale, out behind Inverary in his grand old farm. All we had to do was cut back. Grow our own food, barter for fish and maybe some coal from the St. Rose mine, cut my own firewood, sell some to the Americans moving in. We could have eked out a living. Eva wanted to stay. But the other men got me going — I couldn’t believe what they were paying a man to dig for asbestos rock in Quebec. As a boy I’d worked in a mine or two. Didn’t hate it but it was some hard. I was used to the black cough, the dirty handkerchiefs, the taste of the dust. And as a young man, I felt the thrill of the camaraderie of the men who went under. The toughness right down to your bones, your very soul, the pride in working hard to earn a living for you and yours. But at forty, I’d been away from it for years.

  And I could have been a farmer if I had wanted. I could have grown things from the good Cape Breton soil. I could have had a few cattle. Chickens even. All that I could have done, but I got it in my bloody head that I wanted more for Eva. I don’t know why I did this. She loved our life as it was. She wanted nothing more. But not me.

  So I decided to move us to St. Simone, Quebec, so I could work in the asbestos mines. We lived in a terrible two-storey box of a house on a street with no trees and we ached for Deepvale and for friends back in Inverary. We’d come home in the summers in a new car and I’d see the envy in the eyes of our old neighbours.

  In Quebec, Eva washed my work clothes each and every night. She washed them by hand in a tub and hung them to dry in our heated basement. And, as she did this over and over, she inhaled the asbestos imbedded in my work clothes. And it was the asbestos that got into her lungs and eventually killed her.

  AFTER THE MAILBOX INCIDENT, I decided I should confide in someone and see if I could get an honest opinion about my sanity. I made a list of things that could possibly indicate that I was crazy:

  1. The mailbox incident.

  2. The shortness of a day. It seemed you woke up, you had your tea and it was nearly afternoon. If you took a nap, you’d wake and it would be supper. If you sat down for the TV news for ten minutes, it would be time for bed.

  3. Forgetting people’s names or knowing the faces but not the connection even of where you know a person from.

  4. Driving the car in reverse all the way down the long driveway so you didn’t have to turn it around in the yard.

  5. Putting paper and kindling i
n the wood stove, building a fire but forgetting to light it.

  6. Standing in the supermarket and forgetting what you came to the store to buy or trying to read the list you brought but not being able to make out the handwriting.

  I stopped there, although I figured I could have kept going for a couple of pages.

  I tried my list on Sheila Leblanc first, the bookmobile librarian. “What do you think, Sheila?”

  “John Alex, I wouldn’t worry about a thing. You are the smartest and fittest man in this town, possibly the county. You need to get out of the house more often is all and have a social life. Why, if I wasn’t trapped in my own dead-end relationship with what’s his name, I’d jump you.”

  She was brazen and she made me blush. But I knew it was all talk. Nonetheless, I felt better for it and thanked her for the kind words.

  On a darker day, I began to worry again and decided to make a visit to Dr. Derek Fedder. I hardly ever went to see him. I kept my aches and pains to myself. But like I said, the time came when I thought I needed some reference point and, despite what the others in town would say about Dr. Fedder, I had faith in him as a doctor and faith in his judgements.

  Derek Fedder was a young man by my standards, seventy-six years old, but the RCMP had taken away his driver’s license. They said he was incompetent, although in the Pibroch he was quoted as saying, “I’m as competent as any man in this town.” Which might be true but that’s not saying much. The good doctor had been involved in several incidents, bumping his car into other people’s cars, mostly at very low speeds. And he had always been bad at parking, even when he was young. He’d dented so many cars at the IGA parking lot that they finally set aside a double wide spot not far from the door marked simply, “Reserved.”

  When Dr. Fedder stove in the side of Enid Whalen’s new station wagon, she filed a complaint and the Mounties decided to retest him. He passed the written part of the test but failed the driving part, putting the car off the Sight Point Road into a rather deep and muddy ditch.