The Unlikely Redemption of John Alexander MacNeil

by Lesley Choyce

  Vinegar was in the barn staring at a flat tire on his truck when I found him.

  “Don’t worry. It’s only flat on the bottom,” I said.

  “Yeah, but that’s the part I have to drive on. Jeezus, John Alex, you still alive? I thought you died last year.”

  Funny. He wasn’t the first person to say that to me. It was John Alexander MacLean who had died and the typesetter at the Pibroch at the time had thought it was me who was dead. She thought MacLean should be MacNeil, so she fixed what she thought was a typo. My death came as a considerable surprise to me when I read about it in the papers. I had not been in town much at all for a while. Keeping to myself was all it was, avoiding town, avoiding people and such. The open casket funeral confirmed to everyone they were burying the wrong man. MacLean himself had moved away when he was a kid. No one really knew him. He just came home to fit into a casket and go to bed in some Inverary soil.

  When I appeared in good health down on Main Street, I discovered I had more friends than I thought. Everyone said they were glad it was MacLean dead and not me. The Pibroch printed a retraction and Devon MacQuarrie apologized to me in person. I got a free year’s subscription to the paper out of it.

  But Vin wasn’t serious. He knew I’d been resurrected by the Pibroch and now here I was wanting to buy some of his Rhode Island Reds. “You should take one of the roosters with you. The hens lay better. I’ll toss one in free.”

  So I took the rooster even though he looked like he was a bit too proud for my liking. And I paid cash for twelve good hens. “They say they’re going to pave the road out here this year, John Alex. Wouldn’t that be something?”

  “Election coming, what?”

  Vin smiled. “Yeah, ’tis so.”

  “But have they ever followed through and actually paved ’er?”

  “Not yet. But a man can always dream.”

  To some of my neighbours, a paved road would truly have been a dream come true. “You better watch it, though, Vin. Civilization creeps out this way and first thing you know, you have people building those suburban bungalows. Next thing, they start complaining about the smell of your cow patties. Soon they start trying to get you to clean the place up.”

  “Yeah, I read in the Pibroch about your trouble with the unsightly property bullshit. Unsightly property, me arse. You always had a lovely home.”

  “Thank you, Vin.”

  As we were loading the crates of cackling chickens into the trunk of my car, Vin eyed the girl with suspicion. “Who would that be?” he asked.

  “That would be a niece of mine,” I lied. “She’s visiting.”

  He raised an eyebrow but said nothing. I began to wonder what the neighbours would say when Emily started to show her pregnancy. I shook Vin’s hand and thanked him. “Beannachd leibh,” I said.

  “Beannachd leibh, John Alex.”

  “SO NOW WE HAVE chickens,” Emily said as we drove out the driveway. We, she had said. We had chickens.

  I picked up the thread of the conversation we had been working on before the chickens. “When Eva died, I could not be consoled. I wished it were me dead, not her. She had saved me from becoming my father.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “My father had been beaten by his own father. In more ways than a person can understand. He believed it was his privilege and his right to do the same to me. I think I may have gone on in my life becoming my father had it not been for Eva. A woman can change a man. She did that.”

  “I don’t think things work like that anymore. I don’t think people fall in love like you’re talking about. Now, everyone is too selfish. Me included. That’s why I’m not sure I can be a good mother.”

  I nodded back towards the trunk and the chickens. “Those hens back there would do a great job of raising chicks if the likes of you and me let them keep their eggs. They’d know what to do and they’d defend them and care for them. And they’re only chickens.”

  “Yeah, but we’re different. We’re human and we’ve fucked up everything we ever got involved in. Brian could tell you the details of how we’re ruining the planet. And I know he’s right. And me, I got selfish too. I didn’t just let Mark have sex with me. I wanted it. Does that shock you?”

  It did. But I didn’t let on. “When Eva died,” I said, “I wanted to die too. I thought about it. I feared the anger and rage I’d grown up with would surface. I thought I might someday even kill someone. But worse than that, I missed her so much that I did not want to live. Being alone in my house was like torture. I went so far as buying a hose I could fit over the exhaust pipe of my truck — one that would carry the carbon monoxide into the cab. I bought it at the hardware store from my cousin.” But then I suddenly realized I shouldn’t be talking about suicide to a distraught girl, a girl now pregnant by the wrong guy.

  “Why didn’t you do it?”

  I swallowed hard and tried to focus beyond the windshield. “I thought it was too selfish. I’ve thought about dying more than once. More than just then. Plenty of times. But I finally took that goddamn hose and buried it. I didn’t really have much of a choice.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Eva came back. She came back and told me I had to pull myself together. She told me I owed it to her to live the rest of my life. So I had no choice. It was Eva who saved me the first time. So I guess she did it again. Changed me, that is.”

  I thought I might have frightened her. But it seemed to have the opposite effect. She had an odd little smile now and an almost playful look in her eye. “A woman can change a man, right, John Alex?”

  “If you say so.”

  THIRTEEN

  WELL, THE CHICKENS DIDN’T complain much about the barn. There were twelve hens and the one rooster and they scurried about the place, clawed at the dirt floor and made quite a fuss before I realized I needed to go into town to buy some chicken feed for them. “After a few days, we can let them out and they can run around the property. Makes for better eggs.”

  “Free range,” Emily said. “We’ll have free-range chickens.”

  “Trouble is they don’t always lay eggs where they’re supposed to.”

  “So we have to go searching for them? Like an Easter egg hunt?”

  “I suppose so. I haven’t thought about that for years. Used to do that as a boy but since Eva and I never had kids, we never did it ourselves.” But as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I felt a moment of panic accompanied by nausea. Never had kids. Not exactly one hundred percent true. But I didn’t want to go there just then. Maybe I didn’t want to go there ever.

  “Hunting for Easter eggs never made much sense to me,” Em said. “Easter was all about Jesus, rabbits and hiding painted chicken eggs. Suppose you came down here as an extraterrestrial and tried to figure out what that was all about?”

  Thinking about those extraterrestrials brought me back from the dark place I had been headed for. And that amazed me. As we stood there in the dim light inside the barn, I studied this strange girl with her long dark hair and her pierced, childlike face. She was watching the chickens scratching about and she was … she was smiling.

  “My guess is that those ET folks you’re talking about are watching us right now and trying to figure out why an old man and a girl are standing inside a barn in the middle of the day watching chickens running around.”

  “Maybe they’ll decide that this is what the meaning of life is.”

  “What?”

  “The meaning of life. The purpose. Brian and I used to talk about why we are here. What we’re supposed to do.”

  “Thundering Jesus, I haven’t even figured any of that out yet. I don’t expect I ever will.”

  She smiled. “Well, you can stop trying. This is it. The purpose of life is chickens — watching them run around in a barn and scratch in the dirt. This is why we are here. We are supposed
to be doing this.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” she said with fake certainty.

  “Great,” I said. “Well, we solved that riddle for the day. Now we have to get back in the car and drive to town to buy the chickens some cracked corn. Are you feeling better?”

  “Much. I’ll drive.”

  “Good.”

  AS WE DROVE, I had another story I wanted to tell her but I kept it in, fearing it could ruin the good mood. It was about my father. My father killing chickens.

  If a hen wasn’t laying enough eggs or if it was getting a bit old, my father would catch it and chop off its head with his hatchet. Usually he’d kill three or four at a time. He’d catch them, put them in a pen near the chopping block and, one at time, stretch out the hen’s neck, then swing down hard with the hatchet blade. He always said he wanted me to watch — even from the time I was four years old. Back then I don’t think I really understood what was going on. It wasn’t until I was six that I began to realize that my father was taking great pleasure in the killing.

  He’d chop off the heads of all of the doomed chickens quickly and then I’d watch as they’d run around in circles together, blood spurting out of their necks where their heads used to be. And all the while my father standing there with a bloody hand axe, grinning, his thumb pressed against the sharp edge of the blade.

  When the chickens were spent, he’d dip them in a big bucket of scalding hot water and then hang their bodies from nails hammered into a couple of maple trees. Then he’d pick the feathers from their carcasses. We’d eat the chickens, of course. My mother would cook one and preserve the rest in bottles.

  I was haunted down through the decades about many things concerning my father. I never understood him. I loved him, but I wished that it had been someone else who had raised me. It wasn’t until I was nearly a teenager that I realized how cruel he was, how he liked to hurt things. There was that grin on his face when the axe blade connected with the chicken’s neck. And then there was this.

  I was still very young — four, maybe five — and he had brought the bucket of nearly boiling water out from the house where it had been heated on the kitchen wood stove. I was watching the steam rise and was staring into it. I reached out and tried to put my finger in it, to touch the surface of the water. My father yelled at me to get away. But I didn’t listen. So I reached toward it again and he told me a second time to get back. I took a step back, but when he saw that I was still fascinated by the steam rising from it and that I wanted to get closer, his anger changed to something else. “Why don’t you just put your whole hand in there, John Alex,” he said, “and see what that feels like.”

  And I did.

  I let out a howl of pain and looked in terror at my father’s face. That look still haunts me. He wasn’t smiling. No, it wasn’t that. It was a look of smug satisfaction. Howling and crying, I ran for the house and for my mother. It took weeks for the burns to heal. At home, “the accident” was never discussed. It was more than my father’s way of teaching me a lesson. It ran much deeper than that.

  WE WERE PULLING INTO downtown Inverary. I pointed to the hardware store and Em had a little trouble parking. She bumped the tire up and over the curb and then backed up slightly. As I looked around at the surroundings, I had one of those moments of confusion that were becoming all too common. Inverary looked different somehow, as if the town had changed overnight. I didn’t recognize it at all, even though I’d lived here all my adult life.

  “You get quiet sometimes,” Emily said. “Like you go someplace else. Are you all right?”

  I blinked and turned to look at her. While my surroundings seemed unaccountably foreign to me, her face looked so familiar. “I feel like I’ve known you for a very long time. Is that possible?” The words sounded crazy coming out of my mouth, but she was taking me very seriously.

  “I don’t know. We’re still just getting to know each other. But maybe anything is possible.”

  “When did all this change?” I made a sweeping arc with my hand. “What happened to Inverary?”

  She wiped a hand across her nose and shrugged. “Nothing much has changed here in my life. A couple of new stores maybe. Every ten years or so someone changes the colour of their house. That’s about it.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I trust you.” And I found it odd that I was the one saying I trusted her. But I needed to trust her, I realized, because my sense of reality was not always dependable. I hadn’t confessed that to her yet, but I wondered if she was beginning to understand how true it was. My mind would sometimes leap through time. Yesterday, Inverary looked like it did in the 1950s. Today, well, it looked like today. I lost the years in between. That’s what happened to me sometimes. Some invisible thief could steal my memory and then, just as suddenly, trick me by giving it back — parts of it or all of it. I wondered if I would wake up one day and not know who Emily was. Not know who I was.

  “Why are we here?” I asked.

  “On earth?” I guess she thought that I was picking up on the thread of life’s meaning from back in the barn.

  I laughed. “No. Why are we in Inverary?”

  “For chicken feed, remember?”

  “Right.”

  “You sure you’re all right?” She looked truly concerned.

  “Do I scare you?”

  “A little,” she admitted. “I mean, just then when you didn’t recognize the town. What’s that all about?”

  “I don’t know. Getting old. Memory. Trying to sort out what is real and what isn’t.” “Can I help?”

  “Yes, I think you can.”

  “Does it happen often?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, if I am alone, I don’t have a reference point.”

  “I think I get it. You’ve been to a doctor?”

  “Been to Dr. Fedder.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said, ‘John Alex, you’re getting old. But then so am I.’ ”

  “So we both have the same doctor. Fedder was very kind to me. He said I could go to Sydney and have an abortion if I wanted or I could go into one of those homes or just stay at home and have the baby when the time came. I told him that I couldn’t live at home, though.”

  “And then what?”

  “He told me I should go visit you.”

  “And, just like that, you did.”

  “I didn’t feel like I had any other choice.”

  I smiled. “Any port in a storm.”

  We got out of the car and were walking to the store when she saw him coming out.

  “Em,” he said. “I’d been looking for you.”

  “Fuck off, Mark,” she said with venom in her voice.

  “C’mon, be nice. Let’s be friends.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “We need to talk,” he said.

  “I don’t think so,” Emily said. “Now stay out of my life.”

  Mark was clean-cut and had classic good looks. He’s what people around here would probably have called “a nice young man.” People who judged young people by their appearances.

  “C’mon. I’m going to be going back to university soon. I kinda feel like we have some unfinished business.”

  “No. It’s finished.”

  He looked at me for the first time, only now realizing I was with Em.

  “Who’s this?” he asked.

  “A friend,” she said.

  “Oh. Sorry. Hi.”

  “Hi,” I said. Nothing more.

  “We gotta go,” Emily said.

  “I really think we should talk,” Mark said, sounding very sincere.

  We were blocking the sidewalk and some people had to step onto the street to get around us. Others nearby were looking our way. We were some rich fodder for
gossip.

  “We did that, remember? You said you wanted to talk. And then you said you wanted to fuck. Remember?” Her voice was rising. She was hurt and she was angry and here was Mark. “And when I wasn’t so sure at first, you gave me your little lecture, remember? There are no rules, you said.”

  People were just standing and watching now. I wasn’t sure what my role was here. I decided I was there for moral support. I thought about giving my own lecture to the boy, but I kept my mouth shut. I felt that Emily was strong just then. She was saying what she needed to say and she didn’t care who heard.

  “You’re mixing things up. And I thought you were on the pill. I assumed …”

  “Well, you assumed wrong, asshole. But what’s done is done. Now I want you out of my life. For good.” She was shouting now. “Go back to university. Go back to philosophy class and learn more about anarchy or whatever the fuck it is you believe in. But just leave me out of it.”

  He stood there stunned. A small crowd had gathered around us.

  “And by the way, there are rules,” she said. “Important rules.”

  I’d never seen such fire in a girl or a woman. I was both frightened and impressed. Emily took a deep breath and took my arm. She opened the door to the hardware store and we walked in.

  “Chicken feed, right?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Chicken feed.”

  FOURTEEN

  WELL, THE NEXT PART is a bit confusing as you’ll see but I can’t do much about that. I remember coming back home and checking on the chickens in the barn. The rooster was strutting around all proud and self-important and I liked him for that and told Emily he reminded me of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who was a very good man, certainly a bit of a rooster and one who had a fairly high regard for his own company. So that’s what we named the rooster.

  Now, why that part is so clear, I can’t tell you. But things became stranger after that. I remember we must have missed eating lunch so I made Emily dinner. All she wanted was Kraft dinner and I started thinking about her health and the baby and all but didn’t want to start lecturing the child about food.