“Something made them both crazy,” she said. “Our fathers.”
It was at Christmas ‘64 she introduced me to the worst of the demons. It came up casually. A weird joke. Her father’s nerves were going, she said. A combination of the war and the drink. He’d wander around at night. Sometimes straight into her room.
“When he sleeps,” she said, “which isn’t very often, he has these nightmares. And he shouts out people’s names. Often your father’s. He’ll scream ‘Sandy’ at the top of his lungs. He seems to be terrified of the dark,” she said. “Just wanders around. Only sleeps when he flakes out. Then he wakes up angry.”
It was the night before Jack and I went back to Tilt Cove. Just after New Year’s. There was a party somewhere. She was invited. Had talked for days about going, taking me. Our first public appearance. A formal coupling of sorts. But when the time came, she just wanted to talk.
“Maybe if somebody talked to him,” I said. Grabbing my wrist tightly, she said: “Never. You’ve got to promise.”
“Maybe it has something to do with the old man’s problem. What drove him to—”
“No,” she said quickly. “I can tell you for a fact. He hasn’t a clue. I asked him a hundred times. About what he knew.”
“Okay, okay,” I said. “It’s just that he’s the only one left.”
“It doesn’t really matter,” she said. “What’s done is done.”
“You can’t help wondering, though,” I said.
In January I found Jack’s company disturbing. He seemed restless. Talking about heading out somewhere else. Had a bellyful of Tilt Cove. Never wanted to spend another winter in Newfoundland.
“Maybe we’ll head for Bermouda,” he said.
I laughed.
“Sure they could use a coupla good raisemen in Bermouda,” he said. “Good raisemen are hard to find. And shaftmen.”
Jack was famous in the shaft.
“But I don’t suppose there’s a lot going on in Bermuda,” I said, smiling. Knowing more about Bermuda than he did, thanks to the TV.
“We could always ask the Bermouda expert,” he said.
He didn’t even call at Christmas.
Christmas was a drag, he said. Didn’t even have a car. Sextus had demolished the Chev a month earlier. Home for a weekend visit. Somewhere down north, beyond Judique. Passing someone at a hundred miles an hour, the cars just nudged and he lost control. Ran a hundred yards in the ditch, then flipped. Lucky the snow was early. Two brothers from Port Hood killed in exactly the same kind of accident the summer before. Sextus and Duncan and a bunch from Hawkesbury, just touring around. Not a scratch on anybody.
It was easy to believe that Sextus was the cause of his anxiety. But that, of course, was not the whole story. Jack could see the future taking shape. Didn’t like it.
Train rattling over the long railway bridge at Grand Narrows, getting near North Sydney and the boat to Newfoundland.
Uncle Jack lost in the scenery. Mountains of snow. The air in the coach hot and sleepy, stinging from cigarette smoke.
“You’re dreaming about some place warm,” I said, keeping it going, hoping to engage him. Badly had to talk to someone. About bigger things than Bermuda.
No answer. Train sounds a noise trench between us.
“What about Arizona,” I said. “How about if we went there?” Knowing he’d worked there once, sinking a shaft with Paddy Harrison.
“What would you think of that? Going back.”
No reply.
“I’d be game,” I say.
The hair on the back of his neck is curly. He didn’t even get a haircut while he was home.
“Pat Bellefleur was saying the Congo,” I said. “They’re screaming for people.”
A shrug of the shoulders, meaningless from behind.
“It’s in Africa,” I said. “Hot.”
“Big place, Africa,” he said.
“I’m up for anything,” I said. Settling back in the seat, giving up on him. “Just let me know.” Feeling a queer restlessness.
I was equally reluctant to be going back to Tilt Cove. But for a different reason. I was planning ahead, to when I’d be back home again. I was overwhelmed by the complexity of what we had between us, Effie and me. My future paralyzed by the last night home. Out with Effie. Hearing her talk about her father. Who had been invisible to me so much of the time when he wasn’t being troublesome.
The Bermuda shaftman speaks.
“I hear MacIsaac is sinking a shaft in Sudbury,” he said as the train slowed down for Boisdale. “A fellow could always go there.”
“Sudbury has a nice climate,” I said.
4
You’d never have known she was terrified of her father. Loyalty. That’s what she and Duncan always had in spades. To old Angus and to each other. She’d be holding Angus by the hand like he was survival itself. She’d be at his knee for the whole visit. His hand would go to her head as he spoke. Smoky fingers vanishing into her burnt curls. M’eudail, he called her. Darling. And it just seemed natural. When she was little. A lot of old people called kids m’eudail.
Then at about twelve, you could see a change. Whenever he was around she’d stay close to me, watching everything with that expression of indifference that she never lost. Not even after she grew up. I’d notice his face, cold and miserable. But then he’d wink and smile. Insinuating: Sandy’s boy and his little m’eudail. Proper thing. She’d look nervously at me. But never betray any ambiguity of feeling toward him.
But after that Christmas, sitting in Pa’s truck down near the old coal pier where the three of them had once worked, she talked about her terror of night. Waking to cigarette smoke, seeing the glow of his cigarette in the corner of her bedroom, then the outline of himself. In her room, her most private place. Then, discovered, he’d disappear for days. And she didn’t know which was worse. The fear when he was there or the guilt when he wasn’t.
“Jesus Christ,” I said. “I could never have guessed it.”
“I was probably fourteen,” she said, “when it started to get serious. I never noticed anything funny before. Just that he always seemed more concerned about me than about Duncan. I thought that was natural. Then he started treating me different, like I was a stranger. That was tough.
“And then one night we were in the kitchen, after supper. I got up from the table to clean up. I dropped a knife on the floor. A big one. He jumped up and stared at it and then at me. And he cringed up against the wall. I’ll never forget the look on his face. Like panic. And hate. I tried to talk to him. He couldn’t hear very well anyway, but this was different. He was somewhere else and didn’t have a clue who I was. And I just had the feeling that he was going to make a grab for the knife. He just kept looking at it on the floor, his eyes wild. But I got it first, put it in the cupboard. Then he started to cry.”
“Was he drinking?”
“Less than usual.”
“What did you do?”
“I put my coat on and left. After that he was always watching.”
I waited, left her to say it in her own time.
“Then I’d catch him…he’d sneak into my room, just stand and watch me. It would wake me up. But after that, I was really scared. He’d just be standing there, in the dark. Sometimes you’d only know by the glow of his cigarette.
“Then after Sandy,” she said. “After the day…last year. I had this queer feeling. That everything was connected. All the strangeness, in the both of them.” Squeezed my hand again. “And if that was true, he might be a bigger menace to himself…than to me.”
I studied my hands. They were trembling slightly.
“I was sure, after. Your dad. He’d be next.”
She clasped her two hands on mine then, hard as she could, emphasizing her words with the pressure, imprinting them: “I’ll tell you everything. But you mustn’t get the wrong idea.” Her face was full of entreaty. “He wasn’t what you think. I know now.”
“I know,”
I said.
“But maybe worse,” she said.
I repeated it: I know. To reassure her. But I knew something different. Something that stirred anger and nausea, mingling in the gut, put a burning in my throat. I know. What he was up to. Bunkhouse education covered that. Sick stories, jokes you’d laugh at nervously, about perversions. And here we had our own. On the Long Stretch.
“You’ve got to get out of there,” I said.
“Sure,” she said. “And where to?”
“Let me think.”
“That’s okay,” she said, moving back, wiping her face.
“I could speak to Ma…maybe our place.”
“No,” she said. “Your ma has enough, taking care of your grandma, getting her own life together.”
“I suppose so.”
“I’ll be all right,” she said. “Worse comes to worse, there’s a gun there. A big rifle. Duncan showed me how it works.” Then giggled and sniffed. Asked if I have a Kleenex.
“Does Duncan know about this?”
“No,” she said. “I couldn’t tell Duncan.”
“I just want to face him,” I said. “Put it right to him. What’s wrong with him. What the hell was it with those two.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “You can never do that. He can never know I told you.”
The sorrow in her voice. It never left me. Nor sharp imagined images. One dominant: A cigarette glowing in the dark. Cauterizing something in me, that ember, leaving a little black hole of intolerance.
Jack would say: A fella can’t judge. Jack’s way of condemning him by reverse judgment. “Poor Angus.” Codewords, full of denunciation by understatement, which is common around here. Before that I might have been defensive about him. There seemed to be this tendency to blame everything on Angus. But the same people were protective of Sandy Gillis. Maybe out of fear of him. Afterwards I had a stronger feeling about Angus than Jack did. I felt disgust.
5
I close my eyes, slide down into the motion of the train, drift back to my favourite place. Running with the wind to wherever it took us. The little dog dashing close among our flying legs. Heading into the woods and becoming soldiers among the trees. Playing war, I’d be North Novies like Pa was. That was his outfit eventually, after they joined the army. North Nova Scotia Highlanders. Angus stayed in the Cape Breton Highlanders. She’d be the CBH.
And sometimes when we were sheltering from the wet or cold, within the rustly, quiet warmth of the barn, we’d talk. Mostly of the fabulous future. Some day, far off. Snuggle in the warm hay.
She’d say: “When we’ve finished school, we’ll go to Boston. Or Toronto. Or Detroit.” I’d laugh and say: “We won’t have to go to those places. This place will be just as big. Or bigger.” And she’d shake her head, curls blurry, and say: “It doesn’t matter. I want to go somewhere else. And you have to come too.”
Jack’s head is rolling with the train’s motion. It is just as well to leave him there. He’d be no help.
Growing up, the chemistry was different when Sextus was around. He and Duncan dominant. Older. Visitors from their own place, adolescence, making reconnaissance forays into the grown-up world. When it was just the two of us, Effie and me, that world didn’t exist. We’d wander miles through the dark woods, pushing through dense thickets of spruce, with starved lower branches tearing at us. Effie right behind me. When she was in front, she had a habit of letting branches whip back where she went through.
In the open spaces, where the trees were tall and the trunks bare to halfway up, and the ground softened by a spongy moss, we’d run silently, crouched low, rifles loose in the ready hands, parallel and close to the ground. Swift and alert. Like the Indians in the show. Looking for Germans. And sometimes we’d see a real animal. A bounding rabbit, tic-tacking through the bush. And we’d start shooting. Pa-khew. Pa-khew. And argue over who saw it first. And sometimes a deer, staring with silent wary interest. We’d stare back. Usually it would be me, raising the rifle, taking steady aim. Pa-khew. It was a spy, she’d say. Or, I’d correct her, a sniper.
And then I am dreaming.
We are all standing in front of the barn at home. Angus and Duncan, Squint, who lived alone over the Crandall Road, Pa and Grandpa, and me. It is a cold morning. Snow not far off. There to kill a pig.
Effie isn’t supposed to be here at all. Butchering the pig is men’s work. Women boiled the water for cleaning up. But there she is, down by the corner of the barn, hanging over the pole fence. There is a little pen down there where we’d keep the cow sometimes, when she was freshening. Effie has her elbows over the top rail and she’s watching intently. Duncan has his back to her and can’t see her. Otherwise he’d have chased her away. Duncan is controlling one of the two big sliding doors. Angus has the other one. There is the hilt of a hunting knife sticking out of the top of his boot. You can hear the pig inside, thumping around on the threshing floor. I feel this great bubble of resentment toward the pig: He is stupid; he will be surprised by what will happen. Stupidity invites betrayal. Invites pity. I should have remembered.
Pa stands, legs spread, in front of the big doors hefting a sledgehammer. Duncan pulls his door open a crack. Suddenly you see the pig’s snout, hear him snuffling. Duncan pulls the door a little more and the pig shoves his head and shoulders through. Grunting. Then Duncan and Angus jam him squealing there in that position. Pa swings the sledge hammer. Nails him in the forehead, almost between the ears. Whump. The pig roars and his legs go from under him. Then Angus moves quick with the knife, catches the snout, and in an effortless motion, slices his throat open.
Now the pig is struggling to get up. Wheezing. Blood gushing. Grandpa is there with a wash pan, trying to catch the blood, holding the pig by the ear. Squint helping. The pig is flopping on the ground, kicking. Squint grabs his hind legs so Grandpa can get the blood. For maragan. Grandpa loved maragan. The rest are standing watching. Angus holding the knife grimly, face red. Effie’s face powder white, fascinated. Then I notice, below where she’s leaning against the top rail, the tightness of her shirt under her open jacket. The start of breasts. Flesh replacing everything I knew of her.
The pig’s struggle has subsided to quivering and twitching, the movements growing lazier. The eyes, however, full of accusation.
“What do you figure he’s thinking?” I say to Duncan.
“Pigs can’t think,” he says.
Then he sees Effie and shouts: “Hey!”
And she says: “What.” Defiantly.
Then they haul the pig into the barn and put a stake through the tendons on his hind legs and hoist him up off the floor. Hung upside down from a beam.
“Just like Mussolini,” Angus says, laughing. Smear of blood on his pant leg where he wiped the knife. Everybody chuckles with him, knowing he’d been there. Squint had been in the CBH too. He was a sniper. A sharpshooter, they called it. That’s how he got his name.
Beside her, leaning on the rail, “I saw them doing it last year.”
“Once is enough for me,” she says, sort of turning toward me. It is getting colder. Her jacket is zipped up now. She shoves her hands into the side pockets.
“What are you doing tonight?” I say.
“I don’t know.”
Her eyes scanning, looking for someone.
Then, motioning toward the barn door, she says, “I think they’re going to town. Papa said. Did your father say anything?”
“No,” I say. Then: “Who cares?”
“Well,” she says, “it isn’t very nice when they come home. Is it?”
I look away. Not knowing.
“Maybe it’s all right for you,” she says.
“No, it isn’t,” I say quickly. Seizing on something but not knowing what.
She looks like the least thing would make her cry.
And he says they call you Faye. How could you?
And later when everyone is gone, with the truck doors slamming and the engine starting, I am looking out the kitchen win
dow and the two of them are in the cab as the truck lurches down the lane. The old man and Angus. Heading into town.
And Squint is staying around for a while, helping Grandpa clean up around the barn.
“Wicked with a knife, Angus is,” says Grandpa.
“Aah haha,” Squint says, putting another half-hitch in the rope suspending the pig.
Then the two of them coming in for tea.
The sun rouses me early the next morning, revealing through my window that his truck is neither home nor over at MacAskill’s; downstairs, Ma sitting at the table, a mug of tea in front of her, just sitting there with her hand under her chin, like she’s been there all night. Her face all red welts, as if slapped, but surely not. He isn’t like that.
6
Sextus retrieves the photograph of Uncle Jack and the sawmill from the tabletop. Studying it, sadness in his face.
“Like day and night, they were,” he says.
Tell me about it.
“Two fellows, cut from the same piece of cloth, set out in life down the same road. Come to a crossroads, go different directions.”
Some crossroads.
Christmas Day 1964, Squint was at the house for dinner.
“You were in the war,” I said.
“Uh-huh,” he said, with a questioning look.
“With Angus and the old man?”
“Well,” he said, “it’s a complicated story.”
“How complicated?”
Leaning forward, elbows on knees. “We were all in the CBH together…but your father…he transferred out. To the North Novies. You knew that?”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t know anything.”
He shook his head slowly, studying the floor.
“So why did he transfer out?”
“Och…it’s a long story.”
The Long Stretch Page 8