“Thanks,” I said. “Where are you going?”
He stood up stiffly then, like an old man. And Jessie was suddenly there.
“We’re just going out for a few minutes, dear,” she said. “I’m driving Jack to the train. You can wait here till I get back.”
Like she wanted me to.
As soon as their car was out of sight, I streaked for home.
Around that time it became clear, at least to me, that one day I’d be going with him. Predictions of prosperity weren’t for the likes of me and Uncle Jack. Something false in all the promises.
Ma once asked: “What do you think you’ll be when you grow up?”
My response was quick: “A miner like Uncle Jack.”
I heard the old man laugh.
Uncle Jack was gone for the best part of three years after he went away in 1958. Flin Flon, Manitoba. I’m sure it was ‘58. It was after the causeway but before the pulp mill. He went to Tilt Cove late in ‘60. Maybe it was ‘61. That’s where I hooked up with him in ‘64.
“We got the ‘58 Chev,” Sextus says, “just before he left the last time. For, where was it? Flin Flon? Yeah. I remember by the car. Almost new.”
Remembering by association with large events. Like buying cars.
Sextus learned to drive the ‘53 Ford before they got the Chev. For my money, the Ford was the nicest car ever made. Sextus just couldn’t wait to get behind the wheel. “Car crazy,” Uncle Jack said he was. And he seemed to have the car whenever he wanted it. Aunt Jessie was like that.
“Young people need to get around,” she’d say.
And there was a lot of territory to get around in unless you wanted to be doing the same thing night after night. The fun could be just about anywhere in a radius of fifty miles. That’s how lots of us got killed. Gas was cheap then, about fifty cents a gallon. If you could scrape together three or four dollars you were good for the evening. And Uncle Jack was sending money home, once he got work in Flin Flon.
He called Aunt Jessie from somewhere one evening a week after he left. He was still on his way. I could tell by the way she was talking to him that he was drunk. When she got off she said, “That was poor Jack, in Winnipeg.”
“Wow,” I said. “That’s halfway across the country.”
“Just about,” she said.
“What’s he doing there?”
“Having a few, I think,” she said wryly. “I don’t mind. I know when he’s in there, where he’s going…he’ll have nothing to do but work. He never drinks when he’s working away.”
I guess they all told the wives that.
Jack used to joke about it: I was so far in the hole in ‘58 I had to go down another hole to get out of it. Meaning Flin Flon. Laughing and gagging over his own irony. Whenever he laughed it usually ended in a spasm of coughing violent enough to blow his head off.
The Trans-Canada went through where his mill was. I watched them bulldoze the sawdust pile and a lot of trash wood left behind. There had been a lot of firewood there, slabs cut into stove lengths. He’d been selling them there for ten dollars a truckload, but after he was gone people just took the wood. Filling the trunks of cars, or the backs of their half-tons. Sometimes in armloads. The last of the slabs went the night before the bulldozers came. Aunt Jessie took a picture.
The new road ate through the place and you’d think the country would never heal. It was all charred tree stumps and mud banks and big boulders with the dust and the sour smell of the blasting still on them. Today it looks like it was always there, a natural thing bright with lupins and wild roses in summer, the new spruce crowding close again.
“We just never clicked. Don’t ask me. There are people like that. Warm, kind-hearted, good people. Draw you in, all right. But you never really know the real person. You know what I mean? I mean, your gut tells you nobody is as great as those folks seem to be. So you always wonder, what’s up with them?”
“But your gut can be wrong,” I say.
He looks at me, measuring.
“He wrote to me in the spring of ‘61, said if I needed work he’d get me something in…where was it? Tilt Cove. I was calling it Tit Cove. Underground labour, he said. Jesus Christ, I thought. Said no, thank ya. Got on at the pulp mill. Electrician’s helper. Good money, great summer. Couldn’t picture the two of use…bumping around in a place like that.”
I say: “He never mentioned.”
“Then, a few years later, you went. Hung in for what? Years.” Shakes his head slowly. “Christ, that must have been an experience.”
He fishes out another cigarette, waiting for me to move the subject forward. Open up some space for exploring all the unanswered questions about my father.
6
Here’s truth. Duncan and Effie, white-faced in their barely managed panic, tumbling through that door, gasping: “I think Uncle Sandy is going to kill Pa.”
They called him uncle too, though he wasn’t.
Ma, as always, calm. Drying her hands at the sink, barely turning, saying, “John, you and Duncan go over and take the truck home so they won’t go anywhere else.”
Duncan looking hopeless, not having a clue how to drive. Me knowing the theory, taking the keys like I knew more, the two of us sprinting over. Duncan speaking quickly: “They came home late. We had supper in the oven. We all sat down to eat. And Uncle Sandy shouted ‘Jeeeeesus!’ Flipped the table up on end and everything slid down and onto Papa.”
That was how it often started.
Duncan and I climb into a truck neither of us knows how to drive. I am too afraid to enjoy the look of helplessness in Duncan’s face as he watches me turn the key and start the engine, then put the truck in gear; then stall it, popping the clutch and giving too much acceleration. And the instant terror when we see a giant figure looming through a sudden splash of light, carrying a rifle.
Duncan and I dashing home and telling Ma and hearing her say, “That’s okay. I called the Mounties.”
Jesus Christ. The Mounties!
But the truth is that Ma looks half ready to murder me for telling her: “They’re saying Pa smashed the window out of the school porch.” Saying it like I heard it, with cautious levity, people looking at me askance in the schoolyard that day. Me looking askance at her.
“At the dance? Grabbed Paddy Fox by the throat and drove him through the window? Nearly took the eye out of him? You should see it. Looks like a big blood clot?”
Her face pink with shame. “Don’t you be listening to that. They just love to start stories.”
“But did he?”
“Just never mind!”
“But Paddy’s eye?”
“He could have got that anywhere…and good enough for him. The things he’ll be…Get away with you now. With that foolish talk about your own father.”
“We had a dog once. Effie, Duncan, and I. You must remember.”
“Called Sandy,” he says, smiling, “after Little Orphan Annie’s dog.”
“Do you remember what happened to it?”
He frowns for a moment, then says, “Killed by a car, I think he was.”
“No,” I say. “He was shot.”
“That’s right,” he says. “Now I remember. Some hunter.”
That’s what everybody thought. But the war hero killed him. I knew right away, when I found the corpse in the ditch, looking like a discarded cardboard box at first, the colour of winter-flattened hay after the snow goes. Thinking he was killed by a passing car but seeing, as Duncan picked him up, the large ragged black hole a bullet made. Then noticing my father, leaning against a fence post near the barn, the .303 resting on the top of the fence, half-covered by his arm. Remembrance Day ‘58. After Jack was gone.
Should I tell him this? Perhaps, for his own good.
“Everything goes to ratshit, sooner or later,” he says wearily.
To agree is to comply.
“Three guys, like brothers. Come the war, they become strangers…two of them like enemies, actually.
” Turning then, and to the side of my face: “Four of us like family. Then…herself and Duncan, you and I. But no mysteries there, eh? No war.”
“That’s true,” I say.
“What, then?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “Even ratshit goes away, in time.”
He laughs softly. “When was the last time you saw Duncan?”
“Must have been around Christmas,” I say. “Yes. He was over helping out the priest in Hawkesbury. I talked to him after midnight Mass.”
“So what do you talk about?” he asks.
“Not much. Work. A bit of politics. Getting older.”
“Did he ever give you his take on me and herself? The split?”
“He asks,” I say. “Now and then. Do I ever hear?” I look at him, questioning.
He grabs the bottle then and sloshes a splash of rum into my teacup.
“Easy,” I say.
“So Duncan still calls her Effie. No Faye there, eh!”
“Actually he never mentions her by name.”
He laughs and says, “No wonder.” Pours another splash before I can stop him. “I’m trying to get you pissed now,” he says. “Trying to corrupt you.”
“That’s not so difficult,” I say, moving my cup out of his reach.
“Because,” he says, “I’m working up to a confession here.”
I just stare into his face.
“My being here,” he says, “wasn’t the big coincidence I made it out to be.” Watching me carefully. “Actually docked late yesterday. Stayed with the old woman in her little apartment in Judique last night. Sorry I lied,” he says. “Just. I wasn’t ready for it. When you popped up like that. Kind of panicked.” Smiles. “Quite an evening we had, Ma and me,” he says. “Spent half the night talking about things.”
“What things?” I say.
“We talked through a lot of stuff, Ma and me,” he says. “A lot of stuff we haven’t got into yet…you and I.”
Part 4
1
I can’t avoid the ripple of annoyance. Not about the silly lie. Compared to all the others he’s invented, this one’s pitiful. My annoyance is based on this: he has caused another shift in my scaled-down, manageable world with its tiny population. What will he do next? Sleep with Millie? I wouldn’t put it past him. At least to try. But then, he’ll never know about Millie. Not many do. Not even Jessie.
For a while in the early seventies, Jessie knew everything about me. In a few days, both our lives were reinvented by the same disasters: Jack going to his grave and Effie and Sextus running off together. That bonded us for a couple of years. Then, in early 1972 she swallowed a lot of pride and reservations and visited Toronto, presumably to see her grandchild.
“What do you think?” she asked me.
“Looks like a baby,” I said, handing the pictures back.
“In the flesh,” she said, “she’s the spit of yourself.”
Then seemed to be staring at me, waiting.
I just laughed.
It took me longer to move on. Which is why I became progressively more crazy over the course of about five years. Until I discovered AA and Millie. Haven’t seen much of Jessie since.
“Everything changes,” she told me once. “From the minute we’re born.”
Uncle Jack’s life changed the way a soft stone changes under the corrosive stroking of the wind. Mine changed in a single afternoon, in November 1963, the way a bottle changes dropped upon a stone floor. Then, in 1964, I went away with Jack. Looking for another change, hoping to become him.
It never happened. I got distracted. Aunt Jessie always said she saw it starting. Claimed it made her apprehensive, right from day one.
2
Christmas 1964. Jack and I came home from Newfoundland, from the mine in Tilt Cove where we’d been working. He’d been there for years by then. I’d been there for eight months. Jack was frightened flying, so we had to get drunk first. “A couple of rivets to hold the courage together,” he’d say. It took about a dozen. Nine o’clock in the morning. We flew from La Scie to Springdale in a seaplane. Car to Badger. Train to Port aux Basques. I can’t remember the boat over Cabot Strait. Or getting home.
By that Christmas, home was changing radically. Just Ma and Grandma at home by then. Pa gone more than a year. And Aunt Jessie out from Hastings at least once every day, checking. I had been away only a short time and I could see the differences. Grandpa was gone by then too, practically lost in the darker longer shadow left by my father. They were fading fast. Nothing but women left on the Long Stretch. If you didn’t count Angus.
Christmas ‘64 was on a Friday. We got home sometime in the afternoon of the Sunday before. Had a nap. Effie came over in the evening. I couldn’t believe how she’d grown up over the summer.
And she threw her arms around me. Right there. In front of Ma. Grandma too. Right around my neck. Standing on her toes. Didn’t kiss me or anything. But her cool face against mine. I half jumped. And the smell. Some kind of cologne that went right to the core.
That was the beginning of it.
It still feels weird, just remembering. Her clinging to you. The tone of voice, the energy, the fullness in your arms, against your body, all strike edgy sparks at the base of all sensations. But in your head she is innocence and vulnerability. Little Effie. Orphan Annie. Nine months older than you are, but still the little sister, looking for the safety of a sibling. How could I have known, when she folded those long arms around my neck, pressed her cheek to mine? This was no embrace. This was a collision. Needs crashing up against each other.
My first trip away was in ‘64. And my first trip back, Christmas. The old man was gone, and you could feel his absence. And Squint MacDougall was hanging around. Another war vet. Served overseas with Angus MacAskill. Made you uneasy, the way he’d look at you. But there was Effie.
I can’t believe she’s changed her name to Faye.
Uncle Jack was in a funk, just sitting around the house. Sextus was in Bermuda. Bermuda? Where was it, anyway?
“Down south.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes. Way south. All black people, they say.”
“And what’s he doing there?”
“Him and a friend.”
“Friend?”
“Somebody from away.”
Duncan had decided to become a priest and spent the whole time in church, or staying at the glebe house. But there was Effie.
I laughed a lot. A new sensation. Everything she said was funny. And every time I’d laugh, she’d laugh at the sound of it. Everything around us was fresh. New building everywhere, new roads. From Port Hastings, looking down the strait, you could see tall stacks with smoke and steam billowing. The future taking hold. Full of promise.
Christmas Eve, Effie and I went to town to buy each other gifts. Coming home afterwards, sitting over on my side of the truck, she said: “You don’t have to go back there. To that Tilt Cove place.”
I didn’t answer. But she was right.
“It sounds so boring there. You could stay home. There’s work here now.”
“You never know,” I said. Wondering what Jack would think.
She’d finished school while I was away. Had a job. Working at a new motel that was almost on the site of the old community hall. The place she worked was called the Skye Motel. I laughed when I realized it was almost on the ashes of the place we burned.
On our third night out, coming home from a movie, she said to me: “Take me parking.” She slid across the seat, close to me, and slipped an arm behind my neck. “Come on,” she said. Her voice was strange. Low.
“Where do they usually go?” I asked, feeling hot.
“What,” she said, “you don’t know?”
I said, quickly, “I never had anybody out from here.”
“Well, it’s about time,” she said. And told me to drive down by the railway station and over to the old coal pier.
The station is gone now too.
> I remember there would be half a dozen people on the platform when the train arrived each afternoon around five. People going nowhere, meeting nobody. Just there to feel the heat and power of the machine. Potential for change.
There was soft music murmuring from the radio. Bobby Darrin, voice like dark syrup.
I knoooow, beyond a doubt, youch, my heart…will lead me there.
“Used to play around here all the time, didn’t we,” I said.
Then she leaned into me, face very close.
My lover stands on golden saaaaands and watches the ships that go saaaailing…
“So let’s play around again,” she said, smiling gravely. Nose almost touching mine.
Before I could reply, her mouth was spread wetly upon mine.
Her kissing was enough to consume everything. Hauling the tongue out of me. Eyeballs. The breath from my lungs. Like nothing I’d ever imagined. All through my guts and groin. Almost abandonment. Could feel my arms responding as if automatically, my hands cupping her shoulderblades.
By the station platform, near the old coal pier, we were all over each other, gasping between the whispers. Car radio urging us on with slow suggestive music. Raw ecstasy mixed with the terrified knowledge that it will take an act of my own will to stop this magical flight.
I said: “I think we should go.”
She started to extract herself, lightly giggling. A white flash of bra and firm bulging flesh. Her fingers fumbled slowly with the buttons. Her face resumed its weary smile.
“That’s probably wise,” she said.
And we went home in silence, wondering what was happening.
Suddenly glad Sextus was away somewhere. And Duncan wrapped in his own anxieties. And our parents lost to us.
New Year’s Eve, the last day of 1964, Jack said: “Seen your half-ton on the road today but it couldn’t have been you at the wheel.”
“No? How come?”
“The driver had two heads.”
Trying to be funny, but the disapproval like a bruise.
3
She was almost as tall as I was, shoulders boyishly broad, giving her a deceptively flat-chested appearance. She wasn’t glamorous, but there was energy in her expression, starting with the eyes. It could make you nervous. What else? The down on her upper lip, soft as a breath. I think we found an excuse to be together every day and night that holiday. I remember there was a lot of snow and it was cold. But we’d find places to park the old man’s truck and we’d talk about things. Inevitably some emotion would blow up out of nowhere and one or the other of us would reach out and we’d fuse. Naturally as anything.
The Long Stretch Page 7