“Uh. No,” I say, smiling at his transparent insincerity.
“Old Sandy,” he says, oblivious. “There was a man. Larger than life. What I wouldn’t have given…” Then, through the smoke, he asks: “What happened?”
I act out my confusion, raising a hand to my temple, half closing one eye quizzically, struggling to speak. Finally uttering: “What?”
He studies my face steadily for some seconds, then says: “Shit. Who knows what? What happened to Sandy. And my father. What happened to us.”
The face I’ve been dreaming and dreading looms a final time, pale as snow, eyes dark forest green. Unmistakably different from other fathers’ faces. Or Uncle Jack’s. Even Angus MacAskill’s. Then he puts his hand on my head and it is trembling.
Even he could be gentle in the presence of death.
“Pa. What’s that?”
“What’s what?” he says.
I extend my hand carefully toward his head.
He laughs, touches his shattered and bloodied temple.
“Snake,” he says.
I stare.
“The worst kind of snake,” he says.
“Rattlesnake,” I say.
“No.”
“Asp,” I say, remembering a comic. Little Orphan Annie.
“No,” he says.
I am out of snakes.
“Two-legged snake,” he says. “Worst kind there is.”
Then the eyes go dark again but he laughs.
“The best years,” Sextus is saying, “were the few years there when we were all kids. It’s all downhill after…puberty.” He smiles.
“I had the impression you kind of enjoyed your puberty,” I say.
He laughs. “The novelty wears off.”
“Wears off what?” I say.
He rocks back, laughing louder.
Some of us didn’t even notice puberty when it happened. Just a new layer of confusion.
He’s poured another rum. Determined to be grave again.
“You know she doesn’t go by Effie anymore,” he says.
I didn’t know. “What do you call her now?”
“Me? Still Effie. But everybody else, Faye.”
Recovery happens first in the eyes of the others. Relief that they no longer have to be concerned. Not in that particular way. The old man returns into the shelter of his shell.
I see him now clear and present. Sitting in the living room, where the woodstove is now, back to the corner. Reading the newspaper. A daily ritual with him.
“Pa. How did the snake get you?” I ask, begging an extension of the pardon granted in my moment of peril.
“What snake, for Christ’s sake?” he said.
“I thought you said a snake. Bit your head.”
“Oh, that snake.” Silent for a while. “Caught me napping,” he said finally, folding the paper.
“Oh.”
“Never let a snake catch you napping.”
“Try to picture her as Faye,” Sextus says.
Hard enough to picture her as a wife—or ex—when she was, for such a long time, like a sister.
“How old were you when they came here?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Seven or something.”
It was in the early fifties, when people were talking about starting work on the causeway. We were an island, part of a North Atlantic archipelago. Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland, us. Every island proudly alienated from the others, and from the blob of uniformity called the mainland. To justify the loss of our uniqueness, this new causeway had to be unique. Was going to be the deepest causeway in the world, they said. Two hundred and forty feet deep in the middle. Road to the Isles, they were calling it. After some Scottish song. Road to the future and everything modern. Prosperity. Jobs for everybody. Tearing rock from the mountain called Cape Porcupine to make the magic link. Then erecting cities and factories and institutions. This is what they promised.
And I remember them at the kitchen table, pale and silent. With their coats on. Their mother was dead. It made them more grown-up than I was. Independent. Both had red hair, his cropped close to his skull. Angus had clippers, and a shaky hand. Her hair was bushy then. Angus trying to be jolly, smelling of wine. Pa with his arms folded, acting cautious. Because Angus smelled of wine, I thought.
“You’ve been doing all right,” Angus was saying, seeming satisfied by that.
Pa nodding.
“I’m real glad,” Angus was saying. “Real glad.”
“Yourself?” Pa said.
“Ah well,” Angus said.
You hear the details later, after they become neighbours. Disconnected bits floating free. Angus took his wife and Duncan and Effie to Sydney after the war. Got a job at the steel plant. Effie was nine months older than I was. No trouble getting work then. Angus had the credentials, had some relatives over there, in the city. He was all set, they’d say. You get the whole picture if you’re interested in any part of it. And I was. In her. From day one, now that I look back on it.
Or maybe I just think that, because of later.
Angus grew up here, on the Long Stretch. Born in the city but his mother couldn’t look after him after his father was killed. Put him in the orphanage. An old couple here needed a boy. Got Angus. That’s how he grew up here, up the road from our place. A bit older than Pa and Uncle Jack, but they became like brothers. Until the war. In the kitchen that day, when Angus moved back, he and Pa didn’t seem like brothers.
Of course it was the wintertime.
Pa looked sour when Ma offered tea. Milk and cookies for Effie and Duncan.
“Well, I don’t mind if I do,” Angus said warmly.
“Yes, please,” the kids said in unison.
Angus reached out then, ran his fingers into Effie’s hair. Looked at Pa searchingly.
“So you’re going to resurrect the old place,” Pa said.
Angus shrugged. “For the time being.”
“Must be pretty bad over there,” Pa said.
“Not so bad. They put a new roof on in ‘45.”
“I ga’e them a hand,” Grandpa said. “I and old Willie. Shingled ’er ourselves.”
Then they died, one after the other. In a matter of months, Willie and the Wife. Left everything to Angus.
But he went straight to Sydney after the war. Until he had to come back.
“We got a lot of catching up to do,” Angus said.
Pa made a funny kind of a laugh and turned away. When he turned like that, you could see the scarred depression near the temple, where the bullet tore a piece of his skull away.
“What’s that?” Effie said, pointing.
Pa looked at her with a half-smile. His dangerous look. “You ask your papa.”
Life would have been so much simpler if Angus had stayed put in Sydney. Or gone to California. Or anywhere.
There was a lot of talk in the kitchen those days. Ma and Grandma. How was Angus going to manage with two children? Then he’d come by whenever he was drinking. Usually two bottles of wine in a bag. You’d know he’d started with three. Bright’s wine. I got to know the label well. I’m sure they knew it even better. They’d be with him, quiet and frightened as he sat at the kitchen table with my father talking. About the war, you’d think, and you’d want to hear everything. Everything was about war, those days. Newspapers. Comic books. Radio. There was war all over the place. Joe Larter from Hastings just home from Korea. Ma and Grandma working to distract us kids from the loud talk. But we couldn’t stop watching and listening. They were our fathers talking about times past and people they knew then. Pa drinking too. Until they could hardly stand up. Endless stories. Boring stories, it soon became obvious, even to us. They never told a story that was familiar to us. Nothing like the war comics or battles, snipers or ambushes. More about shafts and drifts and crosscuts and raises. Bunkhouses. Cookhouses. Merits of trucks. Cars. Must have been a different kind of war they were in. A boring war with a lot of men like them sitting around drinking. No s
hooting. Except Pa got shot somehow.
Then you’d realize they weren’t talking about the war at all. Not with us around.
We’d go outdoors, Duncan, Effie, and me. Leave them to it, blabbing on. Until Angus would take them home. Eventually they’d come by themselves. Then just her.
Sometimes Pa would visit their father. I’d go with him. We three kids would be outside. Which was better because we wouldn’t have to listen to the same stories again. But often you’d hear them shouting inside the house. Crazy. You’d hear things smashing. Effie would put her hands over her ears and make faces. Duncan would run over, climb on a bucket or something, look in the window, his face angry and afraid and excited at the same time. Then we’d run to our place. Tell Ma, who’d just look away.
They started once in our barn, not realizing I was there. Loud talk first, then they jumped up from where they were sitting drinking. Angus tried to say something back to Pa, but his arm blurred and there was a solid wet splat and Angus went over clumsily backward. His face was all twisted, eyes closed. Then there was another sound, even more terrible. My father, face red, gasping, tears pouring down the lines of his face. I never forgot the sound. I never cry.
If we were near them when they were like that, in their warp madness, she’d stay close to me. Sometimes hanging on to my sleeve. Even holding my hand.
And I remember this. Or dreamed it.
It is summer. We are lying in a hayfield behind our barn, warm in sunshine, talking about unknown places above the clouds, beyond the bend in the road. Suddenly she jabs my armpit. Giggles and rolls away. Lightning swift, I dig her ribs before she is out of reach. She rolls back shrieking, pokes at me again but I am jabbing and grabbing for all her ticklish places. Touching flesh. Scrambling and laughing until we are touching everywhere. And then a sleepy kind of thing rises out of the warm earth and wraps around us.
“Hey!”
A sweeping foot catches my wrist, throws my hand away from her. She sits up quickly.
My father. Towering, white as a birch, turbaned with cloud. A storybook figure.
3
“Christ, you should see her highness now,” he says. “You’d never know where she came from.”
“She did all right, then.”
“Better than all right.”
“Good for her.”
“Oh, yes,” he says. “Way better than all right.”
“And when did the Faye start?”
“A few years back. I’m surprised you never heard.”
“Faye what?”
He laughs. “Get this. Faye MacAskill fucking hyphen Gillis.”
“So she stayed on her own,” I say. “After you.”
“She was mixed up with this oldish lawyer for a while.
Irishman, full of Old Country charm and bullshit. I think he christened her Faye. Anyway, he had a shitload of money. Owned a couple of health clubs. Keels over one day, leaves her the bundle and a nice house on the Kingsway, mind you.”
“Health clubs?”
“See,” he says, pointing at me. “There’s no guarantee, no matter how fit you think you are.” He lights another cigarette. “Some posh house she wound up with.”
Long pause. Wind. Rain rattling.
“Anyway,” he says finally. “Enough of that.” And takes a longer drink. But he can’t leave it alone. “I remember the old lady mentioning about you two. Early ‘65. I just couldn’t see it. I guess it really started, for you…Christmas ‘64?” Draws deeply on the cigarette. Waiting for me. Finally says: “Of course, when I saw her, the next summer I think it was, I said to myself: Hoo-wee, that Johnny.”
I don’t think he expects me to answer.
“Only later, you understand. Later, when you could say the same about myself. But by the time she had her hooks in me…you say the only thing we have in common is where we’re from but…that’s more than enough. It’s only later. You start to notice what’s missing.” He tests the drink.
“That’s how it was, was it?” I don’t look at him. “Her hooks in you?”
“Well,” he says. “You know what I mean.”
I pour water into the teapot.
I remember once asking Millie, coming right out with it: “What was wrong with me?”
“Who knows,” she said.
“You know me better than she did,” I said.
She took a long time lighting a cigarette. Millie still smokes.
“What’s wrong with you is the same thing that was wrong with what’s-his-face, your cousin with the name. Probably wrong with a lot of people.”
“What would that be?”
“The same thing that’s probably wrong with me and Effie and most everybody else.” Dragged another big lungful through the fag and said: “Nothin’. When you get right down to it, absolutely nothin’.”
And people wonder what I see in Millie.
I often wonder: If Angus had stayed in Sydney. Or gone to California. Or if my father had only had the sense to avoid him after he resurfaced. But the awful thing between them kept bringing them together. As if they thought that being in the same place, blending their common memories, they could somehow defeat that thing that was eating them. Find some understanding. Of course they only made it worse. And we all spent years dealing with the fallout.
Millie thinks we still are.
4
“Your father is a hero,” Ma said.
I can still see her face. White as flour. Blue crescents beneath her eyes. Eyes a little crazy. The way they were before everything happened.
“How do you know?”
“He just is. An article of faith. Like the Blessed Trinity. I’ll never forget when he came home. From the war. There was a party. The biggest bash the village ever had. For him. And they had a fiddler. The Germans shot him in the head and still couldn’t kill him. People came from miles around. Filled the hall.”
“What hall?”
“The community hall. The one you kids burned down.”
“Oh. That one.”
If he’d only had the brains to stay away from Angus.
Looking at Angus you’d never guess what lay within. He was dapper. That’s the word you’d hear most. Always wore a necktie. “No harm in Angus,” they’d always say. And he looked like a general or a field marshal. Maybe five nine or ten. Wiry. You could believe he actually talked to Montgomery once. Shortly before the end of the war, when Montgomery visited the Cape Breton Highlanders. Right after they went from Italy to Holland. I believe it. My father was hard on the outside. But you got the impression Angus was hard on the inside.
The army had a big impact on Angus. Hair always trimmed. Swore he’d never go a day without shaving. Had a tidy little moustache along the edge of his lip. Until the later days, he’d walk poker straight, shoulders back. All this, of course, eclipsed in the memory by the image from the last time I saw him. Pleading. Out near the end of the Long Stretch.
5
I remember the community hall as a big old shell, all weathered and full of ghosts. Grandpa told a story about people playing cards there one night. A stranger off the Boston boat was winning all the money. And somebody dropped a card. And when they bent to pick it up saw cloven hooves. You’d shiver, the way he told it.
There was an old piano on the second floor but you couldn’t get a sound out of it. Not that you would anyway. We’d always be quiet. We weren’t supposed to be in there. The place was condemned, they said. Because of the devil, I thought. Other than that piano there was nothing. Just empty bottles, and old dried-up stools of shit with bits of newspaper where people would go. I guess the older guys drank in there. And that’s where I saw my first French safe. Mostly we’d go in there to sneak a smoke.
I know the fire happened in May. Sometime near the long weekend. After school. I was staying in, hanging around the village. Donald Campbell had a pack of cigarettes. Sweet Caps. I remember Donald had a new bike then. His father was the railway station agent. Duncan, Effie, Donald, and I an
d Sextus were there. Donald was handing out the smokes and I took one.
“I didn’t know you smoked,” Effie said to me.
“Sure,” I said impatiently.
“Oh.” Superior. By then she was developing a certain tone.
Then we lit up.
She was nine months older than I was, and beginning to enjoy it.
“The definitive moment of change,” Sextus says, “when you think back was…what? What was it for you?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Opening of the causeway. The mill. Lots of big moments.” I concentrate on my tea.
“How about the old dancehall? The day she burned,” he says. “Something poetic happened there.”
“Compared to?” I ask.
“Symbolically,” he says. “It was the official end of the old. Everything after that is new. People now don’t have the same…connection with the place.”
“How would you know?” I say patiently.
He laughs, flushes a little. “I suppose. I have been gone quite a while. But you do have to admit, the place has lost something.”
A dancehall?
I pour another cup of tea.
The wind is making a rocking sound around the house. The rain fills our silences, slashing against the window. A cardboard box scratches as it moves along the side again. I’m tempted to bring it in but it’s just too miserable out there.
“And I guess the Gaelic is gone,” he says.
“A few old people,” I say.
He laughs. “Wasn’t it always ‘a few old people’?”
Duncan finally took a cigarette too, lit it. He’d hesitated. Duncan was becoming holier every day. Effie was inhaling.
“You’ll make yourself sick,” I said.
“You’re not my boss,” she said.
“Well I am,” said Duncan, and he plucked the cigarette from her fingers and threw it aside.
“Hey,” she said, trying to see where the cigarette went.
Then Donald noticed the condom.
“Hey, look.” He touched it carefully with the toe of his rubber boot.
“I wonder who that was,” said Sextus.
“What is it?” I said.
They almost threw up laughing at me. Except Effie.
The Long Stretch Page 4