The Unlikely Redemption of John Alexander MacNeil

by Lesley Choyce

  “You mean he never gave up on the idea of coffee.”

  “Right. He had a pretty short list of things he needed to get through the day. And that was one of them. He’d think Tim Hortons was a miracle, I guess. He’d think he’d died and gone to heaven.”

  “Fair trade.”

  “Hmm?”

  “That’s what Brian called the coffee where the farmers were paid fairly for their crop.”

  “I’m beginning to like your Brian.”

  SAMSON’S OLD ONE-ROOM CABIN was right where I remembered it. It was a rugged looking thing with faded slab-board siding and a roof covered in hand-split shakes. A stream gurgled alongside, and the trees in the neighbourhood were bigger than anywhere else on the mountain.

  Brian must have heard us coming. The door opened and out walked a young bearded man in an old flannel shirt and jeans. He looked first at me. Then at Emily. “What the fuck do you want?” he barked at her.

  Emily froze. Maybe I had made a big mistake.

  “She wants to talk,” I said, pretending I had not heard the anger in his voice.

  “And who the fuck are you?”

  I didn’t have a good answer for him. That word always hit me like a fist no matter how many times I heard it. It’s a word that I doubt my father or mother had ever even heard in their lifetime. Funny how we lived in a time and place when everything was so raw, so hard. And yet, no one, it seemed, used the vocabulary of cruelty.

  “Brian,” Emily began, “you have every right to be mad at me. To hate me. But I want to talk to you.”

  I saw the rage in this young man and it frightened me. I wondered how all that caring Emily had spoken about had transformed itself into the anger that now possessed him.

  “I knew the guy who built this place,” I said.

  Brian looked me in the eye now. “I know all about him,” he said as if the story of Samson Langley was his possession. And his only.

  “You don’t know everything.”

  “I know that he was smart enough to turn his back on war, on killing, on the whole fucking mess and try to live here on his own without harming anyone or anything.”

  “You know the myth. Not the man.”

  He was breathing heavy, still on the verge of lashing out. I looked at the tightening muscles in his neck.

  “Brian, I’m so sorry,” Emily said and began to cry.

  He seemed not to have heard her. Instead, his eyes were fixed on me. “Did you know that Samson had killed a man in Halifax?” I asked. “Did you know that that was the real reason he deserted and came here?”

  “Why the hell should I care?”

  “Because Emily tells me you are a person who wants to know the truth about many things.”

  “All I want is to be left alone.”

  “For how long?”

  “A long time. A real long time.” He turned then and went back inside. The door slammed hard.

  I don’t know why I had told him what I knew about Samson, what Samson himself had shared with me just a month before he walked off into the woods and died. I don’t even know if what he told me was true. But he had said he needed to tell someone. I just happened to be there that day, hiking high up in these hills and, like others, I dropped in and gave him some food. But I had never told another soul. I preferred the world have their own beliefs about the old philosopher of the woods.

  I touched Emily on the shoulder. “Sorry, Emily. I guess this didn’t go as planned. Let’s go.”

  But she shook her head. “No,” she said. Then she kneeled down on the ground. I thought she was about to pray and that came as quite a shock to me. Instead, she breathed deeply for a minute and then began to sing in a soft whisper of a voice. I recognized the song instantly — the words were Gaelic, the voice was that of an angel. She sang for several verses as the trees around us formed a sacred cathedral and bright rays of sunlight created ribbons of light in the air.

  When she stopped, the door opened and the young man came out again. There was hurt in his face and pain. But the anger had fled. He fell on his knees too in front of her and took her face in his hands. He touched his lips to her forehead and I turned away as I saw the tears roll down his cheeks.

  And in that moment, I felt again my own loss of Eva, gone these many years. I almost cried out her name but instead walked to the tiny stream, bent down with cupped hands and tasted the cold water on my tongue. I felt as if I had been living too long and could no longer bear the overwhelming combination of beauty and sadness that a human being was expected to endure.

  ELEVEN

  THEY HUGGED. THEN BRIAN pulled away and dried the tears off his cheeks.

  “It’s called betrayal, what you did,” he said to her.

  “I know,” Em said. “I can’t even explain it. I don’t even know why I did it. I’m a terrible person.”

  “You’re like everyone else,” he said with a harshness in his voice that only someone very young and very hurt could have. “And I thought you were different.”

  Then Brian turned to me. “How did you find me?”

  “I had a hunch,” I said.

  “How did you get here?”

  “We walked up the mountain. Like you.”

  “But how did you get to Gillis Mountain?”

  “We drove my old car. Emily drove actually. She’s quite good.”

  “Automobiles are evil,” Brian snapped.

  I shrugged. “A necessary evil perhaps.”

  “No,” he said. “Not necessary. Just evil.”

  “Samson Langley thought so too,” I said. “Sam thought a lot of things were evil. I gave up on that line of thinking a long time ago. Sam never gave up on it. It tormented him. He kept a list of people and things he didn’t trust. Not a good thing to do if you’re living alone on a mountain with a lot of time on your hands.”

  Brian didn’t like the sound of that.

  “Hey, Samson once told me that he thought laundry detergent was evil.” I was trying to lighten things up.

  Brian was deadpan. “He wasn’t so far off if you look at the environmental impact.”

  I looked at Emily. She was looking down at the ground. I took a deep breath and held it.

  Brian turned back to Emily. “Look, I need more time to myself. I wish I didn’t but I do. I’m working on something.”

  Emily looked so sad. “I don’t understand. What are you working on?”

  “Forgiveness.”

  “I don’t think I deserve it.”

  “Maybe not. I’ll see. You gonna have the baby?”

  “Yeah. I don’t know why. I thought about the alternative. I always thought it was okay. But not for me. Do you think I’m doing the right thing?”

  “I don’t know. It’s your body.” From the way he said it, I could see he was a long way from forgiveness. Then Brian nodded at me and asked Em, “What’s with the old man?”

  “He said I could stay with him.”

  “You trust him?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I trust him.”

  Brian turned back towards me. “It’s John Alex, right?”

  “That’s what my mother named me.”

  “I know about you,” he said, which was odd because up to that point he had treated me like a total stranger. “Some people think you lost it. They say it started after your wife died.”

  Maybe he didn’t mean this as a cruel thing to say, but it felt like a stab to my heart. Remembering again the death of Eva. Remembering the pain and sorrow. And the fact he was right. I started to lose it then. The shocker was I survived. Somehow I got on with my life. I felt light-headed now and saw odd patterns in the sunlight filtering down through the forest canopy. “Brian, if you live in a crazy world, sometimes you have to be a little bit crazy.”

  “Funny. I bet Samson said that too. Maybe you
guys were a lot alike.”

  “Not really,” I said. “Even after Eva died, I decided I had to live in the world, not hide from it.”

  “Whatever,” Brian said and then turning to the girl, “You sure you want to stay with this old geezer?”

  “He’s not an old geezer,” she said defiantly. “And, to answer your question, yeah, I’m sure. I need him, Brian. I really do.”

  The boy’s hurt and anger radiated like an aura I could see now. But I didn’t trust my eyesight just then. In fact, what I saw in him frightened me even more terribly than before. I saw a red fire burning in his body. He was a perilous flame that could set this entire forest on fire. Emily and I would have to walk away from there now. The fire would have to cool. The boy would have to learn to become a man. The devil within him would have to die and he was the one who would have to slay it. I’d seen it in Samson as well. Not the devil, but a version of the devil we all hold within us. I’d slain my devil a long time ago.

  “Let’s go, Emily. We have a long walk. Gonna be slow with an old man.”

  Emily tried to hug Brian again but he pulled away. I could tell it hurt her deeply in the very way that Brian’s devil wanted to hurt her. The boy’s road to forgiveness was going to be a long lonely one, I could tell, and that’s the way he wanted it.

  As we walked away, I thought of Samson again — his last days. Some hunters had found his cabin empty and a search party was formed to find him. I joined in and spent long November days combing the forests. I was paired up with Reginald Sheehan and he realized that I understood the forests better than himself. The Mounties had prepared him well for highway work, not tromping around in the Cape Breton wilderness. Reginald was good company, though.

  When we found Samson, he was miles from his home. The nights had gone cold and his body was stiff, his arms wrapped around a large stone in the midst of the forest. There was no peace on his face, only pain and sorrow. Whatever had possessed him in his lonely tenure as the Hermit of Margaree, he carried it with him to his grave. Reginald and I hauled him down the mountain on a kind of drag stretcher like something we’d seen Hollywood Indians use in a movie. It was a long, hard hike back to the valley floor.

  News spread quickly around the county about the hermit’s death and it seemed that everyone wanted to be there for the funeral. Dale Kinder, the undertaker from Cheticamp, took me aside at the wake. He said, “John Alex, Samson had the cancer throughout his body. It looked like he’d had it for years. It’s unbelievable he had lived so long. It seems impossible. Doesn’t make any medical sense.”

  “What do you think kept him alive?” I asked.

  “God knows, man. He must have been in serious pain most of the time.”

  “All the times I’d visited him,” I said, “he never spoke of any pain or ailment. He just kept telling me how lucky and privileged he was to live alone in a great forest with only himself as company.”

  “Do you think he believed in God, John Alex?”

  “No, I don’t think so. He claimed he only believed in himself, that he was totally responsible for his own fate. Totally in control.”

  “Which in some ways is easier to do if you’re a hermit,” Dale noted. “But there was this other thing too that puzzled me.”

  “What was that?”

  “We did an X-ray and saw that there was something in his stomach. That too had cancer by the way. Not a pretty picture. Jeez, I couldn’t eat for days just thinking about the way his insides were rotted. But there was this. When I opened up his gut, out spilled fifteen pennies onto the floor. They were all shiny as if they were brand new, but the dates were old — twenty or thirty years old. What do you think that was about?”

  “I don’t know, Dale. Odd too, ’cause Samson never had any money whatsoever. Relied on his own abilities or the goodwill of strangers. But never cash.”

  HIKING DOWN THE MOUNTAIN with Emily, I couldn’t help but reminisce about some of the things — the wild stuff — that Samson had shared with me. I didn’t tell her about his death or about the pennies. “Samson once told me that all the problems in the world were caused by tall, thin men. Never the short, never the fat. Tall thin men were the real masterminds of disaster. He also thought the ravens were his dead relatives. My personal favourite, though, was the fact that he believed if you soaked your feet in beer you’d become drunk.”

  “Did you try it?

  “No, but I brought up some beer and watched him.”

  “And?”

  “Drunk as a sailor on shore leave.”

  She laughed but soon shifted back to that sullen way she had about her. “Is Brian going to be okay?”

  “If Brian can live with Brian, he’ll be okay. He may come around.”

  “I miss him,” she said. “He wasn’t just my boyfriend. He was my friend. My only friend.”

  “I know what it’s like to lose your best friend,” I said. “Especially if it’s also someone you love. Eva was like that. Eva had saved me from myself.”

  “You still love her?”

  “Yes. Part of her never went away.”

  When we got to the road, Emily said she felt weak so I drove — cautiously, not trusting my mind or my eyesight, but I drove. As we neared Inverary, I took the back road, a roundabout way to get to my house. “Where are we going?” Em asked.

  “To get some chickens,” I said. “I want to see a man about some chickens.”

  TWELVE

  I DROVE VERY SLOWLY. The mailboxes were hitchhiking again. So were the trees. I didn’t let on how uncertain I was about things around me. Keep the damn car on the road, I silently counselled myself and discovered I was doing reasonably well at following the advice, even though every once in a while, a wheel would slide off onto the shoulder and we’d spray a little dry gravel before I corrected my error. I held my breath as we crossed the famous Margaree bridge where the stud bull had met his doom.

  As I exhaled on the other side, Emily looked over at me. “I’m only sixteen and already I’ve fucked up my life. I’ve also probably fucked up my baby’s life and Brian’s as well.”

  The word still shocked me. Especially coming from her. Although Em looked tough and talked tough, I knew she was just a child. A kid in trouble. And I tried to imagine what it must have been like to be in her shoes.

  “Someone told me something once. It was old Ralph Goodale, who had worked his whole adult life in the coal mine at Chimney Corner. He was ninety at the time. I was just a lad of sixty. Ralph was on his deathbed and he said, ‘John Alex, I had it too good. Too easy. I was lucky every day of my life. And I have only one regret. I wish I had made more mistakes.’”

  “Get out.”

  “That’s what he said. Honest. A man who worked in an open pit coal mine for thirty years or more. He felt he had it too good. When they buried him, they included a big chunk of coal in his casket. And a picture of his dog, Arthur. Ralph’s wife was still alive and Ralph thought it’d be bad luck to include a picture of her. Now when Eva died, I put a picture of the two of us in the coffin with her. I wanted to be with her, you see?” The damn tears didn’t help the driving.

  “You don’t have to talk about it if it makes you feel sad.”

  “Well, I don’t mind feeling sad. When you get old, sometimes sad is beautiful. When you are young, you think sad is all wrong. Then you discover it’s all part of being human. If you aren’t planning on feeling hurt or sad or beat on by the world, you might as well just decide to give up.”

  “That’s just what I feel like doing. Giving up.”

  “No, you don’t,” I said. “You just feel sad. And confused.”

  “Fucked up,” she said. “That’s how I feel. And I can’t blame anyone but me.” Then she grew sullen again. She had a way of retreating into that dark forest every once in a while and I hoped she had a good sense of finding her way back out.

 
; “Ralph’s wife, Katherine, had loved him deeply but when he died — she was younger than him, eighty-seven, I think — she grieved for a month but then invited a man to come live with her. It was my cousin, Clayton MacNeil. Clayton was my age — both of us maybe sixty-two at the time. Never did an honest day’s work. Drank any money he could muster. Lived on welfare but borrowed from us all and never paid back a red cent. And here, this decent woman, Katherine Goodale, takes him in, gives him a home and starts spending Ralph’s hard-earned money on moonshine and store-bought liquor.”

  “Old Ralph would have been spinning in his grave, I guess.”

  “No. That’s the funny thing. It should have been all wrong — how do you say it?”

  “It should have been totally fucked up.”

  “Should’ve been. But wasn’t. They got on famously. It wasn’t that she hadn’t loved her husband. It was just that she had given him nearly seventy good years of her life and they had lived happily and now she was nearing her ninth decade of breathing oxygen and she wanted to know what it was like to live with — well, a bad man. A reckless man. Katherine became a drinker herself. Rye and ginger. Then into the vermouth. My cousin finally introduced her to martinis, which was unheard of in these parts as you can imagine.”

  “Bet he spent all her money?”

  “No. That’s the part none of us could understand. He took a job at the hardware store. Stayed sober in the days. Drank his evenings away, though — martinis with Katherine up in that old coal miner’s house. They listened to country music and the neighbours saw them dancing around the house. As far as anyone could tell, he was good to her. And they lived …”

  “Don’t tell me. Happily ever after?”

  “You betcha.”

  “There’s no such thing.”

  I shrugged. That’s what I had always thought myself.

  We were near Vinegar McCallum’s farm now. I was counting on Vin to sell me some hens. I pulled up in his rutted driveway and smelled the sweet smell of old cow manure and fresh chicken shit.