“I am your friend, blast you. And Lauchie is your brother.”
“I’m sorry, Derek,” I said, using his formal name, “I can’t.” And I hung up the phone. I realized that I was being selfish — the grudge still sat heavy with me. But I had to choose, didn’t I? Between Emily and her baby or him. It was no choice at all really.
But that was when Eva appeared. Eva in her twenties.
“I don’t know if I can bear this now,” I said.
“John Alex, you must.”
I studied her. There were no wrinkles on her face. It was young and sweet. Her hair was radiant. “You know how hard it is for me to see you like this but not hold you.”
“Then hold me,” she said.
I shook my head and looked down at the floor. I reminded myself that I had a good grasp on this. I had lived with her presence for quite a while now. I could admit to myself that she was both real and not real, dead but somehow living. It was the work of an old man’s imagination. And I refused to give it up. But I would not reach out and grasp the empty air.
Then suddenly her arms were encircling me. I did not look up. Her hand was touching my hair. My heart beat wildly. “Why here? Why now?”
“When you tasted the snow outside, I felt your tongue on my cheek.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Certain things bring me back to you. Do you remember when I fell?”
“Yes.”
“And you saved me?”
“I did what I had to do.”
“And now I’m doing what I have to do.”
“What do you mean?” My head was now cradled into her shoulder, into what I must have imagined to be her. One part of me fought it. If I allowed myself to go down this road, it would get worse. Emily would notice. She might get frightened. If anyone else knew, they’d know I was crazy.
“I’m here because of Lauchie.”
“I gave up blaming you, Eva. I know all about how Lauchie seduced even the most reluctant women.”
Eva let go of me and stood back from me, tried to look me in the eyes. “It wasn’t Lauchie who seduced me. I seduced him.”
“No. It won’t work. I understand what’s happening here, what’s going on in my mind, and I won’t let that destroy my memory of you.”
“But I am not just from your memory, John Alex. There’s more to it than that. You have to believe me. Please. But I think this is the last time you will see me.”
“Why?”
But she didn’t answer. She smiled a brave, sad smile and I reached out again.
And then she was gone. I was shaking. She had never before appeared to me quite like this. I thought of those spiritual forces in the world that Father Welenga had told me about and wondered if my old age and faltering mind had made me vulnerable to demons.
When I turned around, I saw Em standing in the doorway to her room.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know this isn’t helping.”
“It was Eva, right?”
“Yes. Eva, but not Eva.”
“No,” Em said. “It was Eva. I saw her. And I heard what she said to you.”
TWENTY-FIVE
I TOOK MY FIRST part-time job in an Inverary coal mine when I was sixteen. I can still taste the coal dust in my mouth. I can still feel the fear that I felt that first day. My own father had begun working in the mine that year. Through my entire childhood up until then he had told his family over and over what fools the men were who mined the coal, sucked in the dust and “licked the boot heels” of the men who ran the mines. And then suddenly, one spring, the jeezless bastards in charge of the mines increased the pay for miners.
My father suddenly said he was through with “wasting” his life trying feed a family by raising chickens, growing crops and hauling firewood with a horse. The farming, the bare essentials of it, could be handled by his sons and wife. And my father became a coal miner.
Although Inverary was first settled in 1803 by a pair of MacIsaacs from the Isle of Skye, it wasn’t until 1863 that Red John Beaton discovered a workable seam of coal. Had he ignored it and walked away, he could have spared this town much hardship and bad health, but coal was a means to acquire wealth for any man willing to exploit his fellow destitute men who would rip it from the earth for wages. Beaton didn’t know quite how to wrestle wealth from the sooty rock, but William Penn Hussey did. Hussey was a greedy Massachusetts mining speculator and soon claimed that his Broad Cove mine was one of the “richest in the world” in his hustle to get wealthy men to invest in his business. When word reached Hussey that a rich investor from Switzerland was headed towards Inverary by ship, he ordered some of his men to paint the cliffs along the shoreline “black as night” and the gullible Swiss gentleman apparently was convinced that the coal find around Inverary must be enormous.
The bloody mines were eventually sold to the Inverary Railway and Coal Company who built a rail line to Port Hastings at the Canso Strait. They also put up company stores and houses. The housing came to be known as the Red Rows. Over the years, many of these buildings had been torn down. But now my brother Lauchie was down in Inverary dying in one of those old bleak structures.
There were Belgians and Russians, Irish and French who came to work the mines in the old days but mostly it was men of Scottish descent. The mine and its promise of a steady income failed to lure my father for most of his life. But then that small increase in pay was enough for him to abandon his identity and his “beliefs” (as he called them) in his own independence. My mother did not know what to make of his change of heart, but I think I understood. My father’s hypocrisy was paramount. He spoke to one and all about how important his family was to him, how much he loved us and then, at home, he beat his own sons and verbally abused his wife. He treated his esteemed livestock much the same way.
And once he had turned against farming, he expected his sons to follow him into the dark depths of his menial ambition — deep into the mines.
I can barely put words to the way I felt on my first shift headed below ground. It was something I could not have conjured in my imagination. The darkness, the fear, the sense of weight above and, for me, a kind of hopelessness and defeat. It had never occurred to me that someone had articulated that feeling until blessed Sheila Leblanc from the library gave me a present, an old book salvaged from the throw-away bin: The History of Inverary County by John L. MacDougall. The book was published in 1922 but MacDougall’s account gave me shivers with its accuracy. Speaking of my brother miners, the author wrote this: “He is lowered in a rake through a yawning artificial passage into the deep, dark, and rumbling bowels of the earth. He has to work with pick and shovel and with dangerous explosives. For him, there is no liberty, no air, no room, no moon, no sun, no day: all is one weird, long and lingering night … When he returns again to the light, the reaction is so severe and sudden that it is dangerous for him to expose himself to the ordinary influence of the streets. He must avoid all incentives to violent excitement … These are the men who carry the world on their shoulders.”
While the mines made some ordinary men violent, it made my father into something just short of a monster. The dirty work and the bullying he received from his bosses gave him some internal license to be even more cruel. Where once there were intervals and unpredictability, now there was regular and certain violence. I was sixteen and he had been working the mines for a year. It was killing him by degrees and he was passing on the favour to his family. There was not a satisfactory thing his wife could do. His sons were imbeciles. Lauchie and I were supposed to keep the farm running, but Lauchie was lazy and full of excuses. My mother told me it was not his fault. And it was my job to see that his work was completed — by me. I resented that, of course, but given her own burden, I guess she was doing the best she could to hold things together. And when the responsibility was to be levelled for our communal failures, my father
’s record was without blemish. The rest of us never ever got a thing right. And it was also often my job as well to accept the blame and take the punishment.
Even in my old age, I would discover a scar somewhere on my body that I was not familiar with and, if I thought about it long enough, I could pinpoint the punishment. Strip off my clothes and anyone could see my childhood history, the testimonial of what a man can do to his son to punish him for all the shortcomings of the world.
If that was not enough, one day after coming home exhausted and sooty from work, my father insisted Lauchie and I work part-time in the mines, twelve hours a week, because we needed the money. Lauchie burst into tears and took something like an epileptic fit. It got him off the hook. At least for a while. But not me. I did what my father commanded. And so began my career in the mines.
ALL THIS WAS SPINNING through my head as I drove into town as slow as anyone would ever consider driving, much to the chagrin of younger drivers on the road. I parked in front of the Red Rows — grey they were now with lichen sprouting from the boards and roof — and slowly I walked into the rooming house where I would find Lauchie.
His door was open. The room smelled of stale piss. Death was almost palpable.
Lauchie, my brother, was lying on his back, his clothes on, staring at the ceiling. I stood silently in the doorway. Up to this very moment, I was not certain what my intentions were. I did not tell Emily why I was driving to town, but I knew what she expected of me.
“Do you remember the men who once lived here?”
He did not seem surprised to hear my voice. “That I do.”
“Do you remember coming here on a Friday night to watch them fight?”
“It was like they took great pleasure in it.”
“And we had our own fun in watching them. Why do you think that was?”
“Because it was someone else getting beat on and not us,” Lauchie said.
“Lauchie, our dear father’s fists rarely found their way to you.”
“John Alex, I did take a few of his ‘gifts’ when you weren’t at home.”
“Yes, when I wasn’t there. But all those other times …”
“You took the brunt of it, for sure, John Alex.”
“How did we ever survive?” I wondered out loud and then listened to the ragged effort of my brother’s breath.
“Luck,” he said. “And a faulty seam.”
“Tell me how you felt, quite honestly now that we are old. Tell me how you truly felt when you learned of our father’s death.”
“I felt relieved,” Lauchie said. “I silently thanked the coal mine and my own blessed luck.”
“Even I felt like I was lucky that time.” What I meant was that my father’s death meant I could cease working the mines. That I would not have to quit school altogether and become a slave to coal.
“It’s a terrible thing to feel happiness at the death of your own father. But it felt justified. John Alex, will you feel much the same when I die? Look at me. All out of luck now. Do you see any raving beauties here in the Red Rows attending to me now?”
I sat down on his bed and my eyes did that funny thing again. I had a hard time focussing. I had the sudden urge to lie down beside my brother and sleep. I felt the weight of age and the sadness of my life all around me. “Lauchie, you may think you are out of luck, but you have what I might call guardian angels working on your behalf.”
“You came because of Emily?”
“Yes. And Eva.”
“Am I to be forgiven after all these years?”
“Not exactly.” I looked away from his gaunt face and surveyed the decrepit room. There was a faded painting on the wall of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. There was a mirror that was misted with age. Other men had died in this room. Miners and other wretches who had been relegated to these back streets of Inverary because they had nowhere else to go. “What’s this that I hear, that you won’t go to the hospital?”
“Do you think I want to trust myself to Dr. Fedder?”
“They have young nurses there, though.”
He turned painfully onto his side now and attempted a smile. “Do you think I want to surround myself with young women in the shape I’m in, John Alex? It would be a cruel joke.”
“It’s a cruel world. But I knew there would be no convincing you. I’m here to take you home.”
“You have your own complications. Perhaps I’d just be in the way.”
“You will be in the way. But it doesn’t matter. I’m all the luck you have left. What would our poor mother say, if she were alive and if she knew I’d turn my back on you even now?”
“She had a hard life, that woman.”
“She had no life,” I said. “She suffered so much after he died. It made no sense.”
“She loved him. She loved the mean old bastard.”
And then there was that awkward moment of silence when something should have been said, some truth, but there were no words to shape it, no final conclusion to sum up the events.
I leaned over and began to help Lauchie to sit up but he stopped me. He lurched a bit forward and then coughed, cleared his throat and leaned towards me. He was a frail, depleted replica of the brother I had despised for many years. “Just hang onto me, John Alex, and keep me from falling down. I want to be able to walk out of here. I know I can’t do it on my own but I just want to be upright.” Lauchie did find his way to his feet and I steadied him. He laughed. I’m not sure why. “The old miners, the ones who fought, they used to say every father gives his son one special gift that he should never forget. That was true even of our father, wouldn’t you say?”
We were in the dark stairway now and headed down, one faltering step at a time. I had an arm around Lauchie and I could feel the sharpness of his bones. “What was his gift to you, Lauchie — aside from the fact that he died and freed us both from having to work in the mine as kids?”
“His gift was a brother, an older brother who looked out for me. Have you ever considered what his gift to you was?”
“Yes. His gift was scars, Lauchie. He gave me the ones you can see in a mirror and he gave me the other kind too. He gave me the gift of scars.”
TWENTY-SIX
DEVON MACQUARRIE SAW ME helping my brother into the car. I knew what that meant. Not that he’d actually go so far as to publish it in the Pibroch. It’s just that when two brothers who had been silent to each other for several decades suddenly find themselves reunited on a back street in Inverary, it’s information that neighbours want to know about. Of course, Devon knew the value of such information and he couldn’t help but pass it on to his crew at the paper and soon it would find its way to the tavern and the IGA. But a lot would be missing in that story. If the gossipers did not know the why or the what or the how or the when, they would make something up.
And I really didn’t give a rat’s ass what people said about me or Lauchie. I nodded to Devon and Devon nodded back as I helped Lauchie into the front seat and snapped his seat belt in place.
EMILY HAD CLEANED THE house and brought some order to my chaos by the time we returned. She had also dressed up for the occasion. She had on a beautiful dark blue loose dress. I noticed for the first time how much longer her hair had grown. Her eyes were soft and dark in the afternoon light.
“Lauchie will have my room and I’ll sleep on the sofa,” I said.
“Apologies for the intrusion,” Lauchie said.
“No apologies necessary,” she said. “We’re glad you’re here.”
I noticed the way she used “we” — like we were an old married couple. As I settled my brother into the big stuffed chair, I felt my heart breaking several ways at once. There was the possible truth about Eva, there was the fact I had been unkind to my brother lo these many years. There was the fact he was dying. And there was the bond I felt with Emily that reminded me
of just how lonely I’d been for much of the time these past years.
“Cup of tea?” I asked, trying to be civil.
“Wouldn’t have any rum?”
“Lauchie, I never thought you to be much for the swill.”
“I’m not, John Alex, and it’s okay if you don’t. But I’ve got a bit of pain and I don’t expect it will go away.”
Emily noticed that Lauchie was trying to put his legs up on the footrest and having trouble doing so. She kneeled down by him and helped him lift his legs until he was more comfortable.
“Thank you, child,” he said.
“Lauchie, there’s not a drop in the house. What with the girl and the baby on its way and such.”
“Understood.”
I began to dial Doc Fedder’s number, which I knew by heart. Some numbers had run away from my memory, but the good doctor’s was still fresh. It was Mandy who answered the phone. I explained about my brother. “I was wondering if Dr. Fedder could maybe phone in a prescription for some kind of painkiller that I can pick up at the drugstore.” But even before she could answer I realized something was wrong. The poor girl was crying. “What is it, Mandy?”
“Dr. Fedder died this afternoon.”
“Shaky’s dead?”
“He was with Liddy MacKnight. You know how he was.”
“Liddy killed him?”
“No. Not like that. It was the Viagra.”
“The what? Oh.”
“He had taken one of those pills. Then, while they were together, he had a heart attack. Kenny Beaton was filling in driving the ambulance. He was teamed up with a new guy who didn’t know what was what. They figured he had a heart attack but he was still breathing so they gave him a shot of nitroglycerine — for the heart. With the Viagra in him, it made his blood thicken. And he died in Liddy’s arms.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry, Mandy. The town will never be the same.”
I hung up.
The Unlikely Redemption of John Alexander MacNeil Page 16