What It Takes to Be Human

by Marilyn Bowering

  Inferences like these, the text informs me, are often wrong, and that the ability to see what a man looks like without making a lot of wild speculations as to what he really is within, is a gift worth developing. I agree. So I am making an effort. I look at Winchell impersonally, just as I would look at an apple.

  Winchell crashes onto his bed, stuffs a pillow behind his head and says, “Still at it, Sandy?”—which, for him, is a friendly opening.

  I say, “Winchell, you were in Spain. You’ve had military training and seen active service. You’ve a great deal of experience of life that I haven’t.”

  Winchell’s black eyes stare at me. “What do you want, Grey? You know I think you’re an idiot.”

  “It’s like this. I’ve written a letter about Attendant Cooper and I plan to send it to Dr. Frank.”

  “Jesus, Sandy, I don’t want to hear this.” He throws himself round so his feet land thud on the floor, his back to me.

  “What he did to Karl was terrible,” I continue, praying that I’m doing the right thing by speaking to him, “and what happened to Tom was cruel. I’m afraid worse things will occur if Pete Cooper isn’t stopped.”

  “You’re a fucking idiot,” Winchell says. He stands and slides his feet into the bohemian sandals he affects. The trousers of his suit are worn shiny blue. I notice his shoulders twitch, and I recall that Karl told me that a weapon made from a spoon had been taken from Winchell not long before my arrival.

  “The thing is, Winchell, there are matters here that are occluded to me. Bob’s role, in particular. I’d like to understand why Attendant Cooper is kind to Bob.”

  He faces me, eyebrows jerking. “Occluded! That’s the stupid kind of thing you’d say.” He bends over, eyes fixed on me, adjusts a strap on his sandal, then removes an object from his pant cuff. “See this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Know what it is?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a chair bolt, know what I did with it?”

  I shake my head.

  “Sharpened it on a stone. Know why?”

  “No.” Perhaps I’ve miscalculated, but it doesn’t appear to be quite the time to backtrack. No retreat, Sandy Grey.

  “So that I wouldn’t end up like Bob. Understand now?”

  Another headshake.

  “Jesus H. Christ, you’re a case,” he says. He looks thoughtful. “You raised in a nunnery?”

  “I’m not Catholic, I’m not anything, really, although my parents…”

  “Oh, fuck!” Winchell rests his behind on the bottom end of the bedstead. “You poor sap.”

  “I don’t want to be a sap, Winchell, I want to know, I believe I need to know, the characters and situations in which I find myself if I’m to have any chance of…”

  “Chance! You think you’ve got a chance!” He blows out his cheeks, then pops one of them with the slap of a hand. “You know why I’m here, Grey?”

  “No.”

  “Brought up in a Catholic orphanage, spent two years in the Spanish Civil War and when I came back there was fuck-all. Nothing, nobody cared. Know why I went to jail?”

  “No.”

  “Begging. No money, no family, no work except a few weeks harvesting now and then. We thought it would change, you know.”

  “Change?”

  “I went to jail in Winnipeg in connection with the strikes.”

  “But why did they send you here, Winchell?”

  “I told the truth, Sandy.” He leans forward to wag a finger at me. “You must never ever tell the truth, or they’ll get you.”

  “Dr. Frank says I should always tell the truth.”

  “Dr. Frank? That bulbous ox-moron! He wouldn’t know the truth about this place if it sat up and slapped him in the kisser.”

  “The truth?”

  “This is a shit-hole, Sandy. If we get out of this alive, I’ll eat my shirt. Dr. Frank’s got his head tucked so far inside his ass he can’t see for whistling.”

  I want to tell Winchell that he’s used a mixed metaphor, but I stop myself.

  “What are you grinning at?” he says. “What’s there to laugh at here?”

  “Help me out, Winchell, tell me what you know.”

  “The police were chasing me all over the country, trying to get me to kill Communists, because I knew them all. I tried to get friends to help me, but the cops watched all the mail.”

  “Everyone’s mail?”

  “No, you fool, just those of us who fought in Spain together.” Winchell pauses. “You see everything in Spain. They go at it like dogs,” he says. He explains to me about Bob and his unnatural impulses and how that’s provoked Cooper’s unnatural impulses which he hates himself for, and then why Pete Cooper hates me. It’s complicated. Attendant Cooper had a wife and she left him, and Cooper’s looking for compensation every which way, whether he knows it or not, and I don’t bite. I’m not that way inclined, and I’m not sophisticated like Winchell so I didn’t know I needed a weapon to put an end to the whole question in an uncomplicated fashion. So for Pete Cooper it’s personal. “It’s the Catholic Church,” Winchell says, and I note that he’s talking to me like a human being for the first time. “They begin as small boys wearing skirts in church, then there’s no stopping them. I tell you, I’ve seen it all.”

  I have my doubts, but I don’t voice them. An attendant I don’t know wheels Tom in and props him in a chair. Tom’s been given veronal, which will hold him for at least a few hours. He’s happiest in a chair turned to the corner, so Winchell and I, as one, get up to shift him round.

  Then Pete Cooper turns up with a stack of new magazines for Bob, and a bar of chocolate, which he puts back in his pocket when he sees that Bob’s not here.

  When Bob comes in, he’s licking chocolate from his fingers, so I decide not to show him the letter after all.

  —

  Bob’s gone back to being annoying. He knows I like hot water for a shave, so he creeps out of bed early and turns on the hot tap in the bathroom. By the time I get in the barber’s lineup, the hot water’s gone—not that it bothers anyone else. They’ve hides of leather for skin and beards that chop off easily, even with cold water and no strop, but I have sensitive skin and it’s inflamed with razor burn. I can’t bear to look in the mirror, and almost hope that Georgina won’t come to visit. However much I long to see her.

  Kosho, on the other hand, hardly grows a beard at all! Lucky.

  But this evening, as I rub my hand over my sore and roughened face as I sit at the window, Alan Macaulay’s back.

  Part II: Leaving Home

  Men like to make new beginnings, even when they say they’ve given up. Ask the dying—one day they’d like you to smother them with a pillow, the next day they’re planning holidays.

  It doesn’t mean they’ve changed their minds. They just want both things. I heard of an old woman moved out of her house by her family, who went through her belongings and rubbished them—except for the one or two “good pieces”—a gold locket from her husband, a sideboard handed down. They took the boards from her house and used them to start a new one for themselves. She pled for the mercy of a quick end, then she sent her daughter-in-law out to buy new curtains.

  If it’s consistency you want you’ve come to the wrong place for it. It’s not our strong point.

  I was not sorry that I attempted to take my own life.

  I was ashamed that my friends knew of it and I hadn’t succeeded.

  I went back to the seashore with the dog, Dandy, but I did no work.

  We all come to places in our lives where we have to take stock, and this was mine. What were my assets? One good arm, a pair of strong legs and shoulders, a handsome face (so I’d been told), a fifth share in my grandfather’s house when he passed on (the others were to go to my mother, her sister and my two cousins). My physical capital, unless I found a means of employment, would rapidly diminish: Poor food and cold would lead to sickness in winter and without money there would be nothing to
give the doctor. I was a burden on my mother and when my grandfather looked at me he saw only failure.

  Dandy and I followed the beach to the tower where we both poked through the nettles at the base in search of anything useful. I retrieved a sharp piece of glass from under Dandy’s paw and put it in my pocket. I thought of the young woman I had seen sketching there and her response to me on Cramond Island and I spat on the step where she had sat. Dandy dropped a snail’s shell at my foot and I took the glass shard and probed inside at its softness until I saw what I was doing, and wept.

  While I was still recovering from the effects of the laudanum, the minister, Reverend Duncan, came down from the manse to sit with me. I had often been to his house because he had known our family for many years. He’d invited me in the first time, when he’d caught me, a boy of six, climbing the kirkyard wall after the manse apples. He hadn’t punished me. His wife gave me a meat pie. So I knew him to be a good man, and interested in my education. Several times, when I was older, he allowed me to touch the old pulpit Bible preserved in the church, and spoke to me about the former abuses of the cutty stool where offences against the Sabbath and sexual impropriety were punished before the Kirk Session. “It’s a wicked thing, Alan, to humiliate souls, the Church’s job is to rebuke and forgive,” he’d said.

  But when I opened my eyes to find my own room in daylight, instead of the Lord Jesus Christ sitting in judgment, Reverend Duncan leaned forward in his chair and he said, “If you’d succeeded in what you’d tried, young Alan, I’d have had to bury you outside the churchyard. Think of your mother!”

  I thought of her, but all I could think was that once her cares were over, her hands, busy at the weaving, enslaved to the weaving, could finally rest. I said as much.

  “Come unto me all ye that are heavy laden and I will give ye rest,” he said. I closed my eyes.

  “You’ll be feeling ashamed of yourself now,” he said. “Your mind is hurt, it’s a long walk back from death.” I began to pay attention, for what he said rang true. “I want you to remember one thing, Alan, as you come to terms with yourself, for make no mistake about it, this is a turning point in your life. You’ll take the high road to heaven from now on, or the low road to hell. You’ve been given a second chance so make the best of it.”

  At the words heaven and hell my ears closed. His voice was the rumble of cart wheels or the spill of foaming water over the weir. Then I heard him say, clear as a bell, “Don’t mistake one for the other.”

  “What’s that?”

  “What I’ve been telling you, lad. Shame can only come from God. No man or woman has the right to inflict it. Remorse is different. That’s where you take steps to correct your habits, put them in line with God’s will for your life.”

  “What can I do?” I asked him, fearing that all he would say was “repent”—which I’d already determined I’d never do—but what he said astonished me. He said, “Have you thought about immigrating to the Colonies?”

  Dandy and I left the tower of unfortunate memories and returned to the beach. A pony cart with a man driving a young child in it—holidaymakers—lurched towards us over the stones, so Dandy and I retreated all the way to the river mouth. Several women and men waited there for the ferry boat, the women wearing caps with buttons sewn along the brims, the men in the dress of the Territorial Army. I darted up a lane between the cottages to the main road and continued on past the inn, scattered a flock of turkeys in the street, and passed through the gate into the kirkyard. There, I steered away from the kirk itself to lie amongst the headstones in a far corner. Here it was that I’d been with Peggy Moffat. I wasn’t ashamed then, and I wasn’t now, of what I’d done with her. Nor did I feel any remorse. Peggy was a good girl, and I’d have married her if things hadn’t changed. But what use is a man with an ugly worthless arm to a healthy young woman? The young woman on the island had done me a favour by showing me the true case. Peggy’s brothers were my friends. I understood the situation. One door closes and another opens.

  That’s how it was that I decided I would go.

  Many of the tombstones showed symbols of death, as you’d expect—skulls, crossbones and hourglasses. But they also showed the Green Man. I spent a few more minutes examining these images of catlike faces or humans with protruding tongues and greenery burgeoning from cheeks, forehead, nose or mouth. I touched my own face, seeming to find there my own germinating sprouts of green as I considered my new direction.

  No life without death. No death without hope. No hope without a belief in the resurrection.

  After I had swallowed the laudanum and as I’d lain on the rocks at Eagle’s Crag, my body cooling, I had found myself in a new land. Not hell as I’d feared or heaven as I’d never believed, but at the gangway of a great ship. I knew that once I boarded, I’d not get back to land. Not that I minded: I had already said my goodbyes. Then George Falconer hauled me back.

  No one would stop me this time.

  I went home and parcelled up my belongings. The tools of my trade I gave to William Watson, who had often talked of leaving the mines. I left two gold buttons with Gordon Moffat to give to Peggy as a keepsake. Both William and Gordon walked with me a way. They promised to tell my mother what I had done and that I would write her when I had a situation. At Cramond Brig we said farewell and I continued to the ships at Queensferry.

  Men were wanted for the farms and lumber camps in Canada. I signed up. I drank the last of my money in the pub. I slept rough that night and woke early on the shore with burns on my chest that I could not account for.

  “Ye were the Devil hisself last night,” a stranger, also sleeping rough, said to me as I splashed seawater over myself. He joined me at the water’s edge. “Ye said live coals wouldnae singe ye.” He shook his head. “But there’s none can dae that, ye daftie. It’s no human.”

  TEN

  July 25 and following, 1941

  All day, as I go about my work in the rabbitry, I consider what I know of Alan Macaulay. He should make an excellent immigrant. Those who have little to lose make the best of what they find. Our country was built by such men and women. Hardship, where it does not destroy, teaches endurance and stubbornness. Alan Macaulay may be a rough diamond, but given the right opportunity, he could make a success of it. I don’t see failure ahead for him as he readies himself to cross the ocean, although, of course, I know that things do go wrong. Sometimes that happens. An accident intervenes. Fate has already touched him in the matter of his arm—which, incidentally, begins to heal once he reaches the better food and living conditions of the New World.

  How do I know?

  From the file folders Dr. Frank keeps for me in the library. In them are the kernels of fact around which I construct Alan’s story. The rest comes to me, as Karl told me it would, when I wait, in the evenings, pen in hand at the writing table in my room.

  You’d think, at first glance, that the statements and letters in the files would make dry reading, but not at all. There’s inherent drama in the addressees: the arresting constable, the barrister, the sheriff, the undersecretary of state, the Governor General and Council. All the underpinning apparatus of the state. This chain-of-being is reflected, on Alan Macaulay’s side, by his mother and brother and his friends, people of high standing in the village including the minister, and the local barrister who disputes the fairness of Alan’s trial in detail. These are the warp and weft of that system. The barrister makes a mistake, I believe, with the patronizing tone in which he impugns the legal expertise of colonial officials: It did Alan no good. There is also Alan himself, with his explanations and pleas, his innocence before God.

  His restored arm.

  Alan’s story illustrates no tragedy in a wider sense—there’s no epic fall: He’s just a man who set out to alter his economic circumstances and ended up hanged. I told Dr. Frank this when he checked one day on my progress in the library. He’s still concerned I might be wasting my time.

  “Is there a lesson for you i
n this, Sandy Grey?” he asked.

  “Man is clay, he is plant, he is animal, he is intelligence, he is machine, he is an angel.” I read the words from Georgina’s son’s writing text, open at my elbow. I do not read, but I am thinking about, what the text has to say about change points: how Alan came to one, how I may be at one.

  “You’ll have to translate.” He was impatient with me. His foot—encased in an unpolished shoe—went tap.

  “It depends which of these aspects we’re talking about. As clay, Alan and I are as we were made by God and our parents. As plants we respond to our native environment. Treated well, we grow healthy and tall. Treated poorly, we wither. As animals, we learn to satisfy our basic needs and to cooperate with others. As intelligent beings we develop higher aspirations; we look to education and to our potential to change ourselves and the world we live in. We have idealistic aspirations. As machines, on the other hand, we are at the mercy of the physical, social and political systems in which we find ourselves. You remember that both Alan and I experience incarceration.” He was listening to me, but his mouth was tight. Nevertheless, I went on. “As angels we receive direct guidance from above. We may also be of assistance to others or the means of enacting God’s will. God, that is, however you conceive of him.”

  “You know I don’t like display, Sandy, even if it is of education.”

  “My education was the library, sir. Andrew Carnegie saved my life when I was a boy.”

  “He’s got a lot to answer for; I’ll say that for him.”

  “Are you against philanthropy and the supply of a public library system?”

  “I’m against prevarication, Grey, that’s what I’m against!”

  “Let me be as plain as I can,” I said to him. “Alan Macaulay’s problem is that he’s unable to prove his innocence. I’m doing that for him.”

  “Better late than never, Sandy?”