The Unlikely Redemption of John Alexander MacNeil

by Lesley Choyce

  Maybe Edgar thought he was breaking down a barrier between us, confiding like this. But it struck me the wrong way altogether. I don’t know which pissed me off more, that he would lay the blame on his wife or that he thought I wouldn’t see through his fake man-to-man approach.

  “And what about you, Edgar? What do you want to see happen?” Maybe there was a bit too much of an edge to my voice. Maybe I shouldn’t have said it so loudly that some of the other drinkers’ heads turned our way.

  Edgar hated the fact that people were looking at us, hated the fact that everyone there knew what we must have been talking about. And so now that our little truce was over he had gone back to hating me.

  “Fuck you, John Alex. You’re just an old man who’s getting in the way. I was just trying to get you to see that we could resolve this before steps have to be taken. I was hoping to save you a lot of grief.”

  That’s when I felt my father’s rage swelling up inside me. I could feel the blood pumping faster from my heart. I could hear its tempo of anger in my ears. I stood up and felt a wave of nausea and waited for the room to come into focus. “I’ve experienced grief before. We’re old friends.”

  It was snowing a bit harder when I went outside and, as I started the car, I tried to erase the conversation I had just had from my mind. I stayed focussed on three things: keeping the car on the now-slippery road as I drove ever so slowly; the fact that I was not going home to an empty, cold house but that I would have the companionship I needed to stay sane; and I kept picturing that big pyramid of maple firewood that would appear in my yard two days later, certainly enough wood to keep Emily and me warm and comfortable well past winter until the warm breezes of summer came back to the island.

  TWENTY

  TWO DAYS LATER, I heard Vin’s truck coming up the lane. He backed his dump truck up onto my frozen front yard and, as I was opening the door, he had already engaged the hydraulic lift and the wood was spilling into a pile on the ground. I threw on an old coat and went out to pay him with the cash I had on hand for this.

  “Christmas is coming, John Alex. This is my gift for you and the girl.”

  “I can’t let you do that, Vin.”

  “Please. Doreen and I have enough. I’m letting her handle the money from now on. I can’t be trusted.”

  “Then give this to her.” I held out the money again.

  “No, we’re doing okay. I sold a few cows to Hughie MacIntyre. Besides, if you put that money in my hands now, I might just hightail it to the tavern and feed it to that monster again.”

  Vin took off his glove and shook my hand instead. “God bless us all, John Alex.” And he hopped in his truck and drove off. I studied the pile of wood in front of me. Some if it had already been split, but not all of it. Vin knew me that well. He knew I would want to take the axe to some of it for my own personal satisfaction. But not the whole load. That would have been sheer hard work. I bent over and picked up an armful of some of the logs that were already split. I breathed in the sweet, clean scent of the wood, studied the grain and began the first of many trips into the house to pile it neatly along the walls of the old dining room.

  SOON, WE WERE WELL prepared for a hard winter storm and I knew we could last for weeks if need be. Even if we lost electricity should the cagey Suêtes winds decide to abandon Cheticamp and lay siege to us, I’d experienced those hurricane-force winds many times before on this coast. In Belle Cote, a woman could carelessly open her front door at the wrong moment and a gust would wrench the door from her arm, rip it from the hinges and send it sailing off at a hundred miles an hour. Pity the soul who held onto the door.

  If you lived along the exposed part of this coast, you thought twice about which side of the house you put your “front” door on. Hence you’d see many a house with an unusable front door and no porch. Perhaps the porch itself had been ripped off in a stiff winter wind and the homeowner took the clue and nailed the front door shut forever.

  I’m sorry, but a man like me thinks a lot about wind in the winter. And about heat. There had been more rain than snow so far, but it was always a “dirty” rain as we’d say. Not polluted, but nasty and insidious. Dribbling in through leaky windows and driving horizontally at times into walls.

  THROUGH THE LATE FALL, Brian had visited on several occasions and I had always found an excuse to leave — hiking high up into the forest above my house if the weather allowed, often to study the pair of eagles that lived there. I could spot them from the ground and would speak to them in the Gaelic or what I had left of the Gaelic, which was much garbled and imperfect, I am sure. But the eagles did not mind.

  They perched on an old white pine, taller than the rest. The tree had damaged branches and a missing crown, for those devil winds would come and twist a good tree like the white pine — the same way one might twist the top stalk from a beet after pulling it from the ground — until the crown had snapped. That was the eagles’ nesting tree, and it held command of a view of the hillside and valley beneath. At night, I envisioned the eagles watching over us, helping to protect us like our other allies. We had and needed our allies in the battlefield of spiritual warfare. But the enemy was all around. And the dangers were great.

  Brian claimed he was fully established into his hermitage and glad the world had left him alone. According to Emily, he still loved her but could not be with her right now.

  “He feels guilty,” she told me during one of our many evening conversations. Through November and December, a deep trust had been kindled between us. “But he says he needs to be alone. He says that what happened with me has made him want to dedicate himself to something meaningful. He says he loves me but doesn’t think he can ever put his full trust in me again. What does that mean?”

  “It means that he is still hurt. He hasn’t found forgiveness yet in his heart.”

  “Like you and your brother, Lauchie.”

  “No,” I said. “Not like that at all.”

  “I miss him. We were good friends — I mean as well as being in love.”

  “I’m sorry. Maybe things will turn out fine.”

  Sometimes Em sat for long hours with a philosophy textbook on her lap. Her favourite subject was free will. “I’ve created this reality for myself, haven’t I?”

  “I’m not sure I understand what you mean.”

  “I am responsible for my own actions. I believe that.”

  “I don’t know if I can accept all that. But I’ve never studied it like you.”

  “Brian says we are all responsible for what we do. And if we stand by and let an injustice occur — even if we are not the ones doing it — then we are responsible.”

  “A boy living alone in the woods in an old hermit’s cabin has a lot of time to think. Maybe too much.”

  “He’s a very serious person. He takes everything personally. He says he’s still trying to figure out something about me. About the baby.”

  “It’s quite unusual for a young man to be so serious.”

  “Brian is unusual. That’s what attracted me to him. He wasn’t like any of the other boys I knew.”

  “Then maybe things will work out.” But even as I said it, I felt a pang of loss. If things did “work out,” I wondered, where would I be? The port in the storm was good for the storm but when the storm was over, what role would I play in Emily’s life? Her with her ideas about free will. Free to do whatever she decided to do next.

  I know I am going backwards and forwards here. I am trying to move you ahead to later in December. But I must get us all through the fall first. The damp and drizzly fall, the glazed wood shingles of the barn in the morning. The fact that Eva had ceased to visit me anymore for breakfast — even when Em slept in. Eva only came to me in dreams during those days. And she was filled with sadness. She was mad at me, it seemed. Jealous, I fear to say, but possibly that.

  I spoke of her rarely to Emi
ly and when I did, Emily said nothing at all. Father Welenga seemed to understand better. “She lives with you in your heart,” he said. “She is still alive there and so she is still alive in many dimensions.”

  “Heaven?”

  “Heaven is probably one of the places she is. But once you have left your body, I believe, you can exist on many planes. Your soul need not remain in one place at any given time.”

  “Then she is still here with me?”

  “Yes. If she is real to you, she is here.”

  “But now she is only in my dreams.”

  “It is because you are not as lonely as you once were. She should understand this.”

  I had told Father Welenga, who I trusted most deeply, about how real Eva seemed to me at times — how she was truly there with me — and he said he understood. Even when she had been present in the room with us, I had asked Father Welenga if he could see her and he’d replied, “Just because I cannot see her, it doesn’t mean she is not here. For example, right now Jesus is with me and I bet you cannot see him.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “He is warming his hands by your stove,” Father Welenga said, smiling. But it was no joke.

  “Is he happy to be here?”

  “He says this is a very cold country and he finds it chills him but that he knows I enjoy his company and need his help.”

  “And he is that real to you?”

  “Oh, very much so. I had asked him to help me with many things. And he presented himself. He said I should tell you to be very steady. Continue to be kind and all will be well. He can help me and you with whatever challenges present themselves.”

  “Challenges. Does he know what will happen to Emily?”

  Father Welenga looked towards the wood stove and seemed to be listening. Then he turned back to me. “He says that the challenges will be great but that there will be a time for you to rise to meet them.”

  “Jesus said that to you?”

  “Yes. His advice is usually quite good. I invited him to come here to Cape Breton to help me and he came. So I must listen to what he has to say and have faith.”

  “What kind of help did you need?”

  “Remember, I am trying to save the trees. Jesus has a plan for me.”

  Father Welenga had become interested in Brian once the connection had been made through Emily. She and I both agreed that it was good for Brian to have Father Welenga for a friend. They shared a true passion for the sacred nature of forests. They both wanted to find a way to stop the clear-cutting and save the trees. Maybe in these times, it was necessary for a young man to have a crusade. I thought of the mated pair of eagles in the tall, partially shattered white pine. Where would the great birds go when the forests were cut down? Where would any of us go for refuge, once our familiar and sustaining and nurturing world was cut down?

  EMILY HAD GROWN CERTAIN that there was some complication with the fetus. “Something is not right,” is the way she would put it. On several more occasions we went to see Dr. Fedder and he had insisted she get an ultrasound to see if anything was wrong. The results were inconclusive — possibly the baby was positioned oddly in the womb, possibly there was a nutrition problem and some supplements for the mother would help. Possibly, Dr. Fedder thought, one of the baby’s organs was not developing as it should. But even Shaky’s consulting obstetrician agreed that there was nothing concrete and that, for this young mother, the baby was most likely going to be perfectly normal.

  At those times, I would not share the thoughts that went through my head. I would not speak to Emily of what had happened to Eva those many years ago, when our only child was born at home. I could not speak of those things even though Eva, in my dreams, urged me to caution Emily of the dangers ahead.

  TWENTY-ONE

  I’M NOT SURE WHY I have left out telling you about the letters that arrived or the phone calls. I had put them out of my head, I suppose, as if they did not occur at all. I had convinced myself that if I ignored the letters and the phone calls, everything would be fine.

  Emily’s mother called shortly after her father had threatened me in the tavern. I had walked out of the room and when I later asked Em what they spoke about, all she said was that her mother had given her a “final ultimatum.”

  “And?”

  “I told her to shove it up her ass.”

  Em’s mother, I believed, was strong and arrogant. Her father was weak and angry. I would not say this about her parents to anyone, but they had tried to force Em to leave her home for Halifax, to be out of sight and avoid family embarrassment. Instead, Emily boldly made her periodic visits to town for a public display of her pregnancy and everyone knew she was living here in Deepvale with an old man who may or not be of his right mind.

  The letters from Social Services were never opened as Em would collect the mail when it arrived and, if anything looked suspicious, she’d toss the offending epistle into the fire before I would have a chance to open it. I lost at least one pension cheque that way.

  Soon Emily began to answer the phone when it rang and she would hang up sometimes, claiming it was a wrong number or a crank call or someone trying to sell us frozen meat for our freezer.

  Once she shocked me when she handed me the phone. “It’s for you.”

  It was my brother Lauchie, asking me if we’d come down and join him for dinner. “I’ve learned to cook Chinese, John Alex. I’d like to make some noodles and rice and some steamed vegetables for you and Emily.”

  “I thought you said you were dying,” I said rudely to my own brother.

  “I am, but I am not dead yet. And I am learning to cook Chinese dishes and to play the mandolin while I am taking my time about dying. You would not want to hear me play the mandolin yet. But I wanted to offer you a meal.”

  “Where are you living?”

  “I am still in the rooming house on Wager Street with the other old ones like me. And we are allowed to use the kitchen and have guests if we plan ahead.”

  I knew of the rooming house he spoke of. It was a sad, lonely place in my mind, one of the old company houses that was still standing. Painted grey. And filled with the sorrow of old age — those who had no relatives, no other place to go and little savings. It meant that Lauchie was most certainly living on provincial assistance.

  My pity for him could not surmount my grudge, but Em did not let me speak. I did not know she could hear so well a man’s voice on the phone from across the room. But Lauchie must have been shouting so his brother could hear. For Emily got up quickly and walked across the room, wrenched the phone from my hand and said, “We can’t come this week, but John Alex and I will think about a good time. Why don’t you come here tomorrow instead? For lunch.”

  There was a hesitation and then Lauchie, sounding sadder and defeated said, “No thank you, miss. I’ll wait for a time I can be your host first.” And he hung up.

  GENERALLY, I PREFERRED NOT to answer the phone at all. And Em was wary enough of her predators that she too feared answering it. And the unwanted phone ringing through the darkening days was part of the jangled music of our December.

  It is an odd thing the way that technology finds its way grudgingly into our lives and I felt nervous and uncertain as Emily led me into the hardware store to buy an answering machine with what she referred to as “call minder.” Upon its purchase, the thin-lipped woman behind the counter — a McClellan, I reckoned — looked at me strangely as if I were purchasing a sex toy or something.

  Emily connected it to our phone and informed the phone company that we needed the call minding service, and soon we knew who was calling us before we answered the phone. My own preference would have been to have the phone company discontinue the service entirely. A ringing phone from an unwanted caller is much worse than an angry dog ravaging your ankle in your neighbour’s yard. But I knew that we needed a phone in case of som
e critical thing that might happen with Em’s pregnancy and we’d both been studying the library books on pregnancy and birth so much that we had a great catalogue of complications we were all too aware of.

  The call minder let us know if it was safe to answer the phone and if it was not. Sometimes callers left detailed messages that we would automatically erase without listening to. That and the official letters relegated to the flames kept us in the protective bubble that we had convinced ourselves would keep us safe in our winter home.

  It was a Monday when the call minder suggested we had a caller from the Inverary Regional Library. “Must be the books overdue,” I said. “We should answer it.”

  “Hello,” Emily said. She listened and then held out the phone. “It’s Sheila from the bookmobile, John Alex. She wants to talk to you.”

  I looked at the phone with some confusion, but I cradled it by my ear and greeted Sheila warmly.

  “John Alex, you know how much of a snoop I am and can’t keep myself out of other people’s business,” she began “but I need to pass on some information.”

  I envisioned her — lovely and concerned, always, in her bookmobile posting. “I know you wouldn’t have called unless you thought you could help.”

  “Tomorrow, Dewey Newton and Sealy Hines will be coming to see you — or to see Em, actually. Em’s parents filed a complaint a while back and it’s taken some time but Social Services can’t ignore their grievance.”

  I felt my fingers go numb and I almost dropped the phone. “I don’t understand.”