Each Man's Son

by Hugh Maclennan

  In the kitchen that evening, after they had finished their supper, Alan took the sea shell from his pocket and held it against his ear.

  “Mummy, listen!”

  He handed her the shell and she also held it against her ear. “All shells sound like that,” she said. “They remember the sea.”

  “How can they remember? They’re not alive.”

  Her face lightened as she thought of an answer. “It was in the book we read with the birds and snakes and fish. It said that the first things that ever lived were in the sea. Are you listening, Alan? That means the shell is so old the noise in it is the oldest sound in the world.”

  She was pleased because he seemed to be satisfied and for a moment she watched him as he listened to the shell. Then she looked at the alarm clock on the shelf over the table and told him it was late and past his bedtime. He got up and went upstairs slowly, knowing that because it was Saturday night his mother would be going out. Under the sharp slant of the roof he took off his shirt and hung it on a nail. Then he took off his pants and finally his shoes and stockings. He laid his shoes side by side on the floor by the head of his cot and carefully pressed down the creases in his pants before he laid them on a wooden chair. He turned the socks inside out and laid them on the back of the chair and finally took a flannelette nightgown from under his pillow and put it on. The shell went under the pillow where the nightgown had been, he scrambled into bed and pulled the covers up to his chin and lay on his back.

  “Mummy,” he called. “I’m here.”

  A moment later he heard the stairs creak and then she came in and looked quickly to see how well he had disposed of his clothes.

  “Now,” she said, and smiled at him as she sat on the edge of his cot. “You’re all ready for sleep.”

  “No. I’m not sleepy.”

  “But that is the time you grow, and think how strong you must grow if your father is going to be pleased when he comes home.”

  Alan’s voice was muffled. “Does Father remember me?”

  “Of course he does.”

  “Donald’s father doesn’t have to remember him. He comes home every night.”

  She slipped off the edge of the cot and sat down on the floor beside him, to make her serious face on a level with his. “Look at me, Alan.”

  He turned on his side to face her.

  “Now, don’t ever, ever forget. You have one of the most special fathers of anybody you’ve ever heard of. He is not like Donald’s father, coming home every night with the pit dust all over his face so you can’t tell who he is.”

  The boy began to smile.

  “Archie MacNeil,” she said the name proudly. “It is something to be the son of the bravest man in Cape Breton.” She stood up and looked down at him. “But you must do your part and grow strong so he will be pleased when he comes home. It is hard for a boy not to have his father with him every night. It is hard for me, too. But think how much he misses us. Your father is so special that he had to go out into the world to do his work.”

  She touched his lids with her finger tips, but he was still unsatisfied. “Don’t go yet, Mummy,” he said.

  She sat down on the side of the bed again.

  “Mr. Camire doesn’t come home with the pit on his face.”

  “Mr. Camire is different, too. He is a Frenchman from France, and he had a fine education.”

  “But he just lives in Mrs. MacPherson’s house beyond the bridge.”

  “I know. But that’s because he is a stranger here and he has to learn English better. I’ve told you all about it, Alan. Mr. Camire was a sailor and his ship was wrecked not far from here. You remember how excited everybody was when she went on the rocks.”

  The boy frowned. “I sort of do.” He began to pleat a fold in her skirt. “Do you like Mr. Camire, Mummy?”

  “He’s a very nice man. He’s kind as kind can be. Don’t you like him, too?”

  “If he’s kind, I do.” He smiled up at her. “If you like him, I like him too. I like everybody you like, Mummy.”

  She got to her feet. “Now then–it’s time for you to sleep.”

  “Mummy?”

  “Alan, I’ve got to go.” But she laughed at him.

  “Dr. Ainslie doesn’t have the pit on his face. Is Father like Dr. Ainslie? I wish I could remember him, too.”

  She hesitated before she answered. As she walked to the door she said, “No, your father would not be like Dr. Ainslie at all.”

  “Is he stronger?”

  “Oh, yes. He is much stronger.”

  “Is he better than Dr. Ainslie?”

  “The questions you’re asking me tonight!” She made a face of mock despair. “He is just different, Alan. Lots of men are different. Dr. Ainslie is a surgeon and he is a very fine, clever man. Some day perhaps you will be a doctor yourself. That would be wonderful, for he is the best doctor in town. Think of it! He studied so hard he went away to be a doctor in the United States and then he came home to help us here.”

  “Mr. Camire says Dr. Ainslie has a bad temper.”

  “Oh, he means nothing by that. Mr. Camire hardly even knows him.”

  “Mr. Camire doesn’t like anybody but you.”

  “That is just his way. He is a Frenchman from France and he is lonely here without his friends. Now then, close your eyes and drop right off to sleep. And when I’m gone Mrs. MacDonald will look in, just to make sure you are safe and sound.”

  Two

  DOWNSTAIRS the late light of evening was in the little parlor when Mollie pushed open the door. It was a room they had seldom used when Archie was home, but he had been away four years now and she had turned it into a workroom. In the center of the floor was a frame with a partially finished rug mounted on it and a debris of materials on the floor where she could put her hands on them as she worked. Against one wall stood a dresser with her best china displayed on its smooth top. In front of the window stood a solid table holding a glass lamp. Two rocking chairs, which Mollie now skirted in order to look at herself in the mirror that hung over the open coal grate, filled the room. There was one other piece of furniture in the corner, a tall whatnot reaching three quarters of the way to the ceiling.

  She was touching a piece of chamois to her nose when she heard the grinding of wheels and knew the streetcar had cleared the bridge. Quickly she put on her hat and left the house, but when she reached the sidewalk she saw the tram as it stopped at the corner seventy-five yards up the row. There was no point in hurrying now. The tram took on its passengers, turned the corner and went on its way into Broughton. It would be half an hour before the next one followed.

  Mollie went back into the house and stood quietly in the hall, wondering whether she ought not to work some more at the rug instead of going into Broughton to see the moving picture. But tomorrow was the Sabbath and this was the one night in the week she called her own; to break the routine she had made of the last four years was hard to do. It was the routine that had helped her forget how long four years could be.

  She went back into the parlor and took off her hat. She looked at the rug and even picked up the hook, then she laid it down again. She touched a match to the wick in the lamp, turned it low, and then stood for some minutes considering her reflection in the mirror. She did not think she had changed much. Archie would find little difference in her if he came home now. An idea crossed her mind and she looked about the room until her eyes found a small framed photograph on the top shelf of the whatnot. She took it down and went back to the mirror, comparing her reflection with the girl in the picture until she admitted to herself that she had changed a great deal. She looked no more than a child in that wedding photograph as she stood hanging on to Archie’s arm. They had both been so young; Archie twenty and she three years younger. She looked at Archie’s thick hair and remembered the way it felt when her fingers brushed it the wrong way. He had never been able to part his hair, it had been so stiff. Even in that poor picture his eyes looked hurt and exposed, and
no wonder, she thought, with the life his father had made for him. She had been the first person in all Broughton to understand and admire Archie–before he became a hero whom nobody understood and everyone admired.

  She put the photograph back on the whatnot and then sighed without realizing she was doing so, as she passed the palms of her hands down the neat curves of her hips and flanks. For the first time in four years a thought opened wide in her mind as she tried to examine it. Would Archie ever come home? It was more than a year since he had sent any money and eight months since she had even received a postcard from him. But she knew where he was at the moment, and that was a lot more than she usually knew about him.

  Did Archie ever intend to come home? She put the thought away again as she pulled open a drawer in the table by the window and took out a piece of newspaper which she had folded and stuffed in there the day before. Spreading it out flat on the table, she turned up the lamp and began to read it slowly, beginning with the Halifax dateline under the banner on the sports page. Archie’s name was often to be found in this column, but never before had there been so much.

  Up from New York comes word that Archie MacNeil’s next opponent is being groomed for a shot at Jack Dillon’s light-heavyweight title. They say this boy Packy Miller is quite a slugger and you can get odds at four to one that he’ll beat Archie, and two to one he’ll win by the knockout route. The fight’s to be held in Trenton, New Jersey, by the way, Miller’s home town.

  If these odds are anywhere near right, all we can say is that Archie has gone a long way over the hill. We saw Packy Miller in Boston last fall, and the boy who fought that night couldn’t have stayed in the same ring with the Archie MacNeil who flattened Tim O’Leary two years ago that great night in Providence.

  Mollie remembered the fight with O’Leary, remembered what Archie’s victory had meant to the men of Broughton and all the collieries roundabout. They had been as happy as though something beautiful had come into the lives of them all. She read on.

  Archie’s decline from the status of top-line contender to a trial horse fighting for peanuts calls for some pretty sharp questions about how well he’s been managed. A long time ago–three months after the O’Leary fight to be exact–this column noted that Archie MacNeil was battling at the rate of once every ten days. What fighter can stand a pace like that? He was sent in at catchweights against George Chip before his left eye was healed from an old cut. Chip was ten pounds lighter, but he also happened to be the middleweight champion of the world, and what he did to Archie’s eye that night wasn’t funny. To our way of thinking, that particular fight was the turning point in the career of the boy from the mines.

  Make no mistake, this boy Packy Miller is no George Chip. The odds may be heavy, but we have a hunch that Archie is going to win this one. He better had, because if he can’t beat Miller there’s no place else for him to go.

  Mollie read the last sentence over again and tried to realize that the words referred to her husband. When she and Archie were married there had been no question of his becoming a prize fighter. That he was a brave and a good boxer she had known; so were lots of other boys in Broughton. She had even known that he was fierce, unpredictable, hated his work in the mine and sometimes got roaring drunk. So did many others. But she had always been able to quiet him and control him until he was calm again. Alan was too little to remember the excitement when his father won the middle-weight champion ship of Canada in a fight in Halifax, thereby astonishing and delighting the whole of Cape Breton Island. Then the fat man with the bowler hat had come up from the Boston States to offer him big money for fighting.

  Mollie closed her eyes and clasped her hands as she remembered the man. He had been so dreadful and Archie had not been able to see it. He was fat and pasty and his voice was a thin falsetto. He had only half a nose, and when she asked Archie what had happened to it, Archie laughed and told her that somebody had bitten it off years ago. That was the first time she had felt a whisper of fear that she might lose Archie. His lovely body–wide in the shoulders, narrow in the waist with rippling muscles all over–this was to be turned into a punching machine by an ugly fat man whose name was Sam Downey.

  But to the men of Broughton, Archie was a hero. When he gave an exhibition before going away, six thousand Highlanders–men who had been driven from the outdoors into the pits where physical courage had become almost the only virtue they could see clearly and see all the time–paid to watch him fight. They loved him because he was giving significance, even a crude beauty, to the clumsy courage they all felt in themselves.

  Mollie stuffed the newspaper back in the drawer and went out to the kitchen to look at the alarm clock. The next tram was due in twelve minutes, but she wanted to get out of the house. She left the door unlocked so that Mrs. MacDonald could come in later in the evening, and began walking slowly towards the corner.

  It was a far different scene now from the one which she and Alan had passed on their way home from the beach that afternoon. The miners’ row was quiet. The sun had set and the long afterglow of a June evening was flooding scattered clouds with red and saffron and then with bronze. Below the clouds the earth was darkening fast and the whole area seemed uncannily silent with the men in town for Saturday night.

  “And where do you think you’re going?”

  Mollie started at the bitterness in the voice and brought her eyes down from the sky to see the withered face of Mrs. MacCuish staring at her from the steps of a neighboring house. The old woman’s husband had been killed in a mine accident fifteen years before, and one of her sons was married and two others had gone to the States. The old woman sat alone on her steps smoking a clay pipe and looking up and down the row. Mollie disregarded her because it was said that she was no longer right in her mind.

  “All day long you do nothing at all whateffer and in the nights you enjoy yourself. You whill pay for it when himself comes home.”

  Mollie was relieved when she had passed the old woman and was out of earshot, for the old voice was thin and high. Other women sitting on their doorsteps spoke to her in kind soft voices and she answered them. The women were always on the steps on a fine evening like this when their men were in town. They sat there in the gathering twilight whispering like spirits, some of the older ones speaking in Gaelic, the others in English with a strong Gaelic accent. As she passed the fourth house, Mollie saw that the women on the steps were turning to look farther up the row where Angus the Barraman, another MacNeil though no relation of Archie, was kneeling on the ground in front of a washtub. His wife stood over him, and everyone in the row knew this meant that Angus had escaped his wife before she had been able to get her hands on his pay and had got drunk before he had even washed the coal dust off his face. As Mollie neared them she could hear Mrs. Angus scolding and Angus grunting back at her through a foam of suds.

  Something she said which Mollie couldn’t hear must have been more than he could take, for suddenly he rose in a rage and heaved over the tub. The water splashed her skirt and her shoes as he stood there, lean, angular, wet and only half-washed.

  Out of the suds came his voice. “Hold your tongue, woman, or by Chesus, I whill be angry at you!”

  “Your own wife,” said Mrs. Angus, ignoring the water at her feet, “and efferybody looking at you, and efferybody able to hear you, moreoffer!”

  “You and the lot of them!” the Barraman shouted. “There iss a place where you can go!”

  “And what whill Father Donald be saying when I tell him where the pay hass gone this week?”

  “Father Donald hass my permission to buggerize hisself iff he would say a man cannot spend hiss pay without the old woman foreffer asking where it goes. Would I be saying no to Red Whillie when he iss happy?”

  “Red Whillie! So it wass him you wass with? I might ha? known it.”

  Angus picked up the tub in both hands and smashed it down on the ground. The wood was too well seasoned to break, but the tub bounced and hit his wife on
the foot and she began to jump up and down on one leg, holding the ankle of the other.

  “Into the house, by Chesus,” Mollie heard Angus roar, “or I whill show you what else I can do!”

  Mrs. Angus gave him a bitter look before she turned her back and limped into the house. As the door slammed behind her, Angus the Barraman sat down on his front step, the suds beginning to melt on his face and the wet coal dust like a black scum patching his naked chest and flanks. He sat there with his chin in his hands staring across the road at the field beyond, and Mollie took care not to look at him as she passed, for when the Barraman was sober he was always conscious of his dignity and she did not wish to embarrass him now by watching him when he was at a disadvantage.

  When she had passed she could hear him begin to croon a Gaelic song to himself. It was as soft and plaintive as the cry of a sea bird lost in the fog.

  The reason for the tart remarks Mrs. MacCuish had made became apparent as she neared the lamppost with the white band around it, at the corner. Louis Camire was standing under it, and from his position she knew he had probably been waiting for some time.

  “Hullo!” she said when she reached him, letting him see that she was glad to find him there.

  “I thought maybe you would be going into town tonight,” he said without emphasis. “Mon Dieu, it is a miserable place, that theater, but it is a place to go.”

  She noticed that Camire was wearing his best suit, the one he had bought in Sydney which always made him look more foreign than when he was in working clothes. Compared to the bulky Highlanders of Broughton, he seemed a very small man. Even with his padded shoulders he looked frail, but she knew he was wiry and quick, for he had already earned the reputation of being able to take care of himself.

  “You look verree nice,” he said in his strong French accent. “Some day I would like to buy you fine clothes.” He shrugged his shoulders. “But there are no fine clothes ’ere. What a place!”