“They seem to be wired different, gay people, as they call them now. You know what I mean? Sexually.”
“How do you know he’s gay?”
“Everybody knows,” he said.
“Eggs over?”
“It isn’t the … orientation that matters. God knows, I’ve got nothin’ against gay people. It’s the repression that isn’t natural. When you’ve got it all bottled up inside, you never know how or when it’s going to break out. It always does, eventually.”
“You’re talking nonsense.”
“Nonsense? You really think so? Take a look at yourself, for example.”
I faced him then, spatula in hand.
“You better watch that egg.”
I turned back to the stove. There was a long silence between us.
“I think you and my sister have been spending too much time philosophizing,” I said finally. When I turned back to him, his face was a mask.
I remembered my drink, half finished on the table. I strengthened it with a shot from the bottle. He just watched me.
“Maybe I should clear something up here,” he said.
“Listen,” I interrupted. “Your personal life is none of my business.”
The phone rang loudly. I briefly considered ignoring it, continuing the moment, which somehow felt important. But I picked it up and it was Stella.
“Thank God you’re there,” she said, on the verge of hysteria.
“It’s okay. I’m here. With Sextus.”
“We have to go to Hawthorne. To Danny’s.”
“To Danny’s?”
“Danny’s dead,” she said.
Then she was sobbing. She’d just heard. She had to dress. She said it would take her fifteen minutes. I put the phone down and stared at it for a while.
Sextus was at the stove, scooping the eggs and bacon onto a plate. “What was that about?”
“That was Stella. It’s Danny MacKay. He’s dead.”
“Jesus Christ,” said Sextus. Suddenly he was trembling. He put the plate down. “Danny. Dead?”
“She’s coming over.”
He slumped onto a chair. We just sat there. Elongated minutes passing. The storm seemed to increase its velocity. The old house creaked. My electric clock made soft sounds like stocking feet as the large second hand twitched.
“I’ve read that’s the way it happens,” Sextus said.
I didn’t speak.
“The MS weakens everything. The whole system. You had to know Danny, when I first knew him. Up in Toronto. He was … the last thing you’d ever imagine was Danny … He was like a frigging … Viking.”
I was barely hearing him.
“Where did you put that bottle?” he asked.
I rose, retrieved it from the counter. Found an empty glass. Put it in front of him. Poured into his and mine. Sat.
“I remember once, in this queer little tavern on Roncesvalles. A couple of Italian bricklayers took it in their heads to—”
“I’ve got a bad feeling,” I said. “I don’t think she was talking about Danny Ban.”
A car door slammed outside.
Somebody noticed that his boat was adrift just outside the harbour, edging into the deeper water. Obviously tied up carelessly, the boat came loose because of all the wind. Young Danny had been on a bender for weeks now, anyway. Wouldn’t have been too fussy about the ropes. Then somebody pointed out that the wind doesn’t normally get into Little Harbour, it’s so sheltered. And even if it did happen to batter its way through the trees and down over the hill, the wind and the tide would probably have pushed the boat further inshore, toward the highway bridge. Not out into the storm.
That’s when Cameron, who was a coast guard auxiliary, figured they’d better go out and get it themselves rather than go looking for Danny. So Cameron and his boy untied their boat on the Sunday morning, just after Mass, and they went out still wearing their church clothes, grumbling a little bit about people losing control of themselves and turning into nuisances. After they got a gaff on and pulled the drifting boat alongside, the boy, Angus, went on board.
Angus was about the same age as Danny, and they were worried afterwards that he might not get over what he found.
The body was in the cab, jammed into the corner of a tiny galley. The place was a mess. The rifle was on the floor in an astonishing pool of blood, which by then was black.
A full-length .303, and his arms were barely long enough to reach the trigger. But still he managed to shoot himself through the heart. It was mercifully quick, they said.
There was a note. Just four words. “There Is No Future.”
There would be theories, memory ransacked for the flimsiest of clues. It had to be related to the incident in the hall. He hit the priest. He was finished after that. And there was talk about his girlfriend, Sally. How, after that, she dropped him like a hot potato and he was never the same afterwards. Then they’d speak about a public meeting. Government bureaucrats came down to talk about the fishery and the future of Little Harbour. Danny lost it. Called the DFO guy an awful word in front of everybody. One lousy word, someone told me at the wake, is all it takes with that crowd of bastards. That was when Sally pulled the plug. Gave him the ultimatum. It was after that he hit the poor priest.
He went too far that time.
But others were saying it was the other way around, that he hadn’t been himself for years. They said: Looking back, you could see it coming. And everyone would nod, because grief makes us tolerant of absurdity, at least temporarily.
Danny Ban was solid through it all. I saw him stiffen when Sextus tried to hug him, holding a protective forearm between them.
Aunt Peggy and her son Willie made a brief appearance at the wake. I watched as they lingered near where Danny Ban was standing. Danny walked away, leaving them to their privacy. The old lady was holding Willie’s elbow tightly. Before they turned to leave, he reached down and gently brushed the dead boy’s face. And when he turned, I could see what looked like fury in his eyes.
Peggy nodded briefly and tried to smile. Willie stared straight ahead, spoke to no one.
Danny Ban resumed his place beside the casket. He was tall and broad, no evidence of his illness. And his boy was once again a child. I saw him as if for the first time. The face of a movie star, dusty with cosmetics that he didn’t need. Hair coiffed by strangers. The tension in his mother stilled the room, and her face was a mask of bitterness. I stood before her, forcing out the pieties, struggling through the violence of her stare.
“I know you mean well, Father,” she said eventually.
Mullins tried to put a stop to all the speculation. During the funeral Mass he preached a homily of surprising insight about suicide. Firm and direct. That it was an act of despair so profound as to cripple the faculties of reason. And that, where there was no reason, there could be no culpability. Speculation about causes was nothing more than gossip, he said firmly.
I’d heard it all before, of course, but coming from Mullins it sounded new because it revealed something new about him.
Mullins said, “The dead cannot be blamed for death. We cannot judge.” And then he judged. “I’m told he wrote ‘There Is No Future.’ Think of that,” he exclaimed. “Think of where we have arrived as a society when those who shape the circumstances of our lives and our communities can leave our young, the very embodiment of our collective fate, in such a state. There is no future?”
The homily became political. Mullins denounced the businessmen and bureaucrats who had mismanaged and abused God’s bounty, and the fishery in particular. He denounced the politicians who let them get away with it. And gradually, words and ideas merged and became a palatable theory. You could feel the comfort spread throughout the church. A kind of absolution for us all. This tragic death was a cry of protest, a solitary cry for help … for all of us.
The words were welcome, almost sufficient to block the angry whisper still ringing in my ears. The quiet, rasping words I had liste
ned to the night before, on the other side of the cloth panel of the confessional.
“Can you spell me off?” Mullins had asked. “It’s like Easter all over again. The lineup for confession is halfway down the church.”
I would not have wanted Mullins to ever hear the voice that haunts me to this day, and always will.
“I’m not the one that needs the confession.”
The silences were filled by heavy breathing.
“Maybe you better do some hard thinking about who needs the confession.”
I felt a numbness in my throat.
“You find that priest, that Brenton Bell they sent down here. And you find out who sent him here, and why.”
Brenton Bell?
“Get out,” I said, the numbness gone at last. “Get to hell out of my confessional.”
Mullins stopped his homily as if halfway through a thought and walked abruptly back toward the altar as we all rose to recite our Credo. Stella was in the second row of faces, just behind her sister. Our eyes met and locked for what seemed to be eternity. Finally, I had to look away.
For the grim recessional, Stella had requested an organ version of the Chopin funeral dirge, but Mullins vetoed it. Too dreary, he said. The requiem is about our belief in salvation. There is pain, naturally. But we celebrate the hope that was God’s gift, the assurance that we’ll all share in His Resurrection. Eventually.
Danny was to be cremated, so we were spared the morbid graveside rituals. The pallbearers delivered his casket to the waiting hearse. As it drove away, people stood in small groups in the parking lot, not sure where to go. The sky was dark, the wind rising. There was a sudden squall of rain, and it was cold and feathery with sleet. From inside the church I could hear a violinist playing the last phrases of Niel Gow’s “Lament for the Death of His Second Wife,” a tune so sad, I thought, that even nature weeps.
BOOK THREE
† † †
Ye have heard how I said unto you,
I go away, and come again unto you.
If ye loved me, ye would rejoice,
because I said, I go unto the Father:
for my Father is greater than I.
JOHN 14
{15}
Viewing everything in hindsight, the next five months acquire their meaning through a series of banal events. March 25, 1996, was the day my life began assuming what I expect will be its final shape.
I recall mostly a pageant of weirdness, but the police cruiser that tailed me all the way from town should have been the tipoff that I was in a state of moral peril. It didn’t, not right away, for I was, for lack of more profound analysis, somewhat drunk. It was my way of trying to evade a lot of complex issues, a lot of nagging challenges, deep ethical questions for which I should long ago have found some viable accommodation. Like: where is the defining line between sin and stupidity? By Troy, I was groping for any distraction from the reality of the car behind me, not to mention certain things that happened back in town.
Who on earth, I wondered, might have named this place Troy? And why? Some classical scholar? Somebody who came from another place called Troy? Isn’t there a Troy in New York State? Or Michigan? Obviously there must be one in Turkey. Or maybe it’s because there was a beach here once, before the causeway. And the Gaelic word for “beach” is traigh, which sounds a bit like Troy.
As I passed the little convenience store in Troy, the Mountie was well back, near the beginning of the straight stretch. Lost interest, obviously.
Lost innocence.
I remember years ago, on hot Sundays in July or August, how the dry trees would crackle, filling the Sabbath afternoon with the aroma of burned sap. John and his father would rescue us if Sandy happened to be in a decent mood, load Effie and me into the car with them and drive us to the beach in Troy. Traigh actually works better, the more I think of it. Effie would argue that everything sounds better in Gaelic. Mo run geal dileas, for example. “My faithful fair sweetheart.” Try it: Morune-gall jeelus. It leaves a sweetness on the tongue.
The Mountie’s car was gone and so the sweet face of the woman back in town returned, restored the tension of the moment. She seemed sad, standing there, arms folded over her chest, head atilt. But there was a faint smile. No hard feelings obvious. She has lost none of the sweetness of her younger years. It has, in fact, been much enriched by sadness. Sorrow and warmth equal sweetness. Innocence. Lost. What was I feeling then? Guilt? Contrition? What’s the difference? Alfonso would say that true contrition needs an action of some kind; otherwise it’s only guilt, a shallow sentiment.
Traigh. Why not? Try.
On Troy Beach, doomed Sandy Gillis would sit grinning in the broiling sun, a beer bottle balanced on a stone, scratching the snow-white skin above his elbows, or as far back on his shoulders as he could reach, revealing the damp hair matted in his armpits, as we floundered around in the water. The missing part of his head would be more conspicuous in the summer. The white, hollowed patch of skin looked like a burn scar after flesh melts and stretches and heals all puckered, but I know it was from a bullet in the war. Whack. Tore off a section of the skull. Altered the brain chemistry to darken the memory of what went just before. Nothing but shadows where the war had been until just before the end of his life. They say that what you don’t know won’t hurt you. What he didn’t know probably saved him until the night my father decided to enlighten him, to throw the switch, expose the darkened part of memory, reveal their crime. Or was it only sin? Or just stupidity?
“What they do in wars isn’t really murder,” I suggested many years ago, the first time John and I could talk about our fathers’ homicidal history.
“Doesn’t it depend on circumstances?” John replied. “What about civilians? What about killing civilians?”
“You’re right. It would depend on circumstances.”
More recently, John informed me that, in his personal experience, suicides grow calm, even ecstatic once the dread diminishes. It’s all about control, he said. And he described how, just before the end, his father’s anger disappeared, replaced by an odd stillness that John later saw as resignation. It was the closest Sandy ever came to grace, the way John sees it now.
“It has an upside, suicide,” John said, smiling faintly. “You shouldn’t be surprised that the young guy from Hawthorne called about the boat just before he did away with himself. The boat would be his way of touching base, without raising an alarm. He was already gone by then … in his own head, at least. Time doesn’t matter anymore by then. A blessing, in a way.”
Perhaps. It’s like morality. Depends on whom you ask.
What did Father Roddie say? Violent death is sometimes justifiable. Some situations … situational. He had a dark sense of humour.
Someone told me long ago that Troy Beach had been completely stripped of sand and gravel. They used it all for the causeway and the foundations of the industry the causeway brought. For every benefit there is a cost. There is a causeway. The causeway created a harbour. There are jobs and wages because of it. And leisure time, for sitting scratching in the sun. But there’s hardly anywhere to sit anymore. That’s the way it goes. Last summer local people were complaining about a powerful stink around here, like raw sewage, coming from somewhere nearby. Coming from the shore. Everybody suspicious of the industry that came after the causeway, that brought their prosperity, liberated them from anxiety. Wanting me to make a fuss. Get involved. Make a stink about the stink.
Maybe, I said.
Driving by the place we used to call Sleepy Hollow, I noted the water pipe sticking out of an embankment at the roadside, water pouring. I felt a sudden thirst, checked the rear-view mirror for the Mountie, still couldn’t see him. For as long as I can remember, water has gushed out of that pipe without fail. People would drive miles during a dry summer with barrels and buckets. Late, after a wild night, you’d stop there. Drink, splash the face, breathe the moist, clean air, refreshed. It’s still there, sparkling pure. At least for now. S
and and gravel gone, but we still have the water.
I inhale deeply, searching for the phantom sewage smell, indignation gnawing on the memory.
Driving up the hill by where an elderly couple once lived, a brother and sister called Jack and Annie Troy, I take another furtive glance behind. Their name was really MacDonald. Around here they name people after the places rather than vice versa. There’s a whole family called the Miramachis, but they’re actually MacDonalds too. Unrelated. Maybe the policeman stopped at the convenience store. Or the water pipe.
John Gillis, I’ve decided, looks exactly like his father, and I told him so the day he visited, shortly after Danny’s death.
“It’s possible,” he said. “I can’t remember exactly what the old man looked like then. But I’m about the age he was, the day he did it.”
November 22, 1963.
“It was an anniversary we can never forget, eh? Thanks to Kennedy.”
“Do you think you can ever forget something like that, no matter what the date?” I asked.
John was standing by the bookcase, studying the journals. “They look like diaries.”
“We’ve hardly ever talked about it, have we?”
“Maybe once or twice. So, what have you got in here?” He was turning one of the journals, front to back.
“Basically just notes about meetings, decisions. Did you ever keep a journal?”
He laughed. “No. I guess not.”
“Too bad. There are lessons worth remembering in our past.”
“I imagine. I imagine there’s some interesting lessons here.”
“Help yourself,” I said.
He put the journal down, turned away. “Got enough of my own past to keep me going, even if it isn’t written down. Got no room for yours, unless it’s mine as well. But it’s been a while since that, eh? Quite a while since we were family.”
I waited.
“A conscience is an awful curse,” said John. “Guilt can turn into a disease if you’re not careful. That’s the trouble with diaries, at least if you’re honest in them.”
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