Ma came into the room then and he changed the subject.
“The old man never really forgave me. For Christmas ’64,” he is saying.
“Not true,” I say.
“He comes home. I’m off to Bermuda,” he says, not listening to me. “He never forgave me, did he? You and him home from…where was it? Quebec? No. Newfoundland. Tilt Cove. Home from the salt mines. The two of you home. Special.”
“Copper,” I say.
“Wha’?”
“Copper mine. Tilt Cove.”
“Whatever. The first normal Christmas after Uncle Sandy. And me in Bermuda. Imagine what was going through the old man’s head.” Swallows a mouthful. Sighs long. “What a prick I was.”
Was?
“Nobody ever missed Christmas. Not if you didn’t have to. A war or something. But I missed Christmas.” He grinds out the cigarette, exhaling thin smoke. “Went to Bermuda with a broad from Halifax. You never met her?”
No!
“Boss’s daughter. Slick like you never saw. Out of the blue she says, ‘Let’s go south for Christmas.’ ‘South where?’ I say. ‘Bermuda,’ she says. ‘Daddy’s got a place there.’ She was kind of the first, how shall I put it…mature relationship.” He winks at me. “She couldn’t get enough of it. So…how could I say no? Ma wasn’t too pleased. But I half expected the old fellow would understand. I mean, he’d seen a few Christmases from away. Himself and Uncle Sandy. The mines and the war and all.”
“Didn’t seem to bother Jack one way or the other,” I say, looking him in the eye.
He holds me there. Then: “When you get right down to it, by Christmas ’64 there wasn’t all that much between him and me. Not really.” He laughs. “There was no dramatic breakdown. Just something gradual, over the years.”
He’s dabbing the cigarette in the pile of butts in the ashtray.
“Back when I was feeling sorry for myself, I’d tell anybody who cared to listen that it was because he got physical. Punched me out once. But thinking about it, honestly. It was just once. And, fuck, I sure asked for it. So. It was something else.”
Going back to Tilt Cove after Christmas, it was clear I had to find out how much Uncle Jack knew. About Angus. About what Pa’s problem had been. About their whole history. Maybe understand November 22, ’63. I kept watching for an opportunity to ask him about them overseas. To intercept the proper mood, get access to their common memory. All night crossing Cabot Strait. All next day on the train. Struggling back to Tilt Cove. Looking for a chance, as the slow miles of snow and mournful spruce and silent rock crept by. But Jack was pretty sick all the way back. Wouldn’t talk.
Ignorance cultivates nightmares.
Grandpa used to talk about the cailleach oidhche, the old woman of the night. She’ll creep into your dreams, he’d say. Climb on top of you and try to crush the breath out of your lungs. Never let you see her face. Only way to get rid of her is call for the help of the Lord. Scream Iosa Chriosd for all you’re worth. That’ll get rid of her, he’d say. Faith.
“The cailleach oidhche?” Effie just laughed the first time I mentioned her. The cailleach oidhche is an owl,” she said. “Grandpa was just pulling your leg.”
But I know it’s real.
Back in the bunkhouse, sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night and imagine a cigarette glowing in the dark. The sensation that I knew she felt. The steam whispering and clicking in the heat pipes.
Eventually it would be morning, the bunkhouse door slamming. Guys clumping down the front steps, heading through the frosts to the cookhouse. Or the headframe. Me still fagged out from lack of sleep.
It was then I started hanging around Itchy’s on my own. Drinking with the hardcore. Sheltering in their rough company and their stories about worse.
One night I realized I was smelling real cigarette smoke. Sat up quickly. Snapped on the overhead light. He was by the door. Standing there in his underwear with his trousers in his hand.
“What are you doing?” I asked, too sharply.
He looked at me curiously for a moment, the cigarette between his lips.
“Hitting the sack,” he said. “Stayed at Itchy’s a little longer than I should…”
The end of the sentence lost in coughing.
I collapsed back on the bed.
“Something wrong with that?”
I didn’t answer. Got up and went for a leak.
He was sitting on the side of his bed winding his watch when I got back. I sat facing him.
“Bunch heading for Grande Cache next week,” he said. “Want me to go with them. I said I’d rather dig shit with a spoon than mine coal. But I’m going somewhere, that’s for sure.” Yawned. “So what’s your problem?”
“Nothing worth talking about,” I said.
“Maybe you’re having a bit of feeemale trouble.”
I pretended to laugh.
“I’ll be noticing the mail coming in,” he said.
“Nothing to worry about there,” I said. The urge to seek his confidence suddenly diminished.
He looked at me, eyes a bit narrower than I was accustomed to.
“Anything you want to know, just ask me,” I said. “You’re the one told me never mind listening to the bullshit around home.”
He flipped over on his back, finishing his smoke. Then said: “You should be careful before that one gets her hooks in you.”
Her letters after that were cautious.
Things are pretty well the same, she’d say. But it’s under control.
Then something like: Had my visitor again the other night. But now that you know I don’t feel so spooked. Actually, I’m getting sick of it. I don’t think it’s sick or perverted. But you never know. Duncan doesn’t know everything but I’ll tell him if I have to.
She was handling it.
The next night over beer, Jack told me he was quitting at Easter. Take a week off. Go see MacIsaac in Sudbury. Am I interested? Better money in Sudbury. Big bonus money in the shaft if you’re any good.
Guys got rich in Elliot Lake. Kirkland Lake. Timmins before that. Now it’s Sudbury. I could maybe work there a few months, save everything. Go home, start something there. Maybe get serious with Effie. Start a life. You could work forever in a place like Tilt Cove and still have nothing. A scab mine, no union, no bonus, minimal pay, no benefits.
And, of course, at twenty-one, I’d have insurance coming. From the old man. Legion life insurance.
“They’ve got a union in Sudbury,” I said.
“They have that,” Jack said. “But that don’t bother me.”
Jack was against unions.
“Anyway, it’s just time to move on.”
I agreed.
Halfway down the third beer, my label peeled and piled in little balls, I said without looking: “About last night.”
He looked uneasy.
“I’ve been going out with Effie some,” I said.
“I noticed,” he said.
“She’s…not like Angus.”
“The war did a lot of damage to people,” he said. “Brought out the best in some. The worst in some others.”
I just nodded.
“Maybe it will come up between you.”
“Why would it?” I asked.
“There’s tihngs you don’t know,” he said.
Tihngs.
Finally he asked: “Do you think you’ll be coming with me? Or going home?”
Then his face contorted in a grimace.
My answer was lost as he folded up in a seizure of deep coughing.
Part 5
1
Effie and I are fooling around like we always did. Carrying on, Ma used to call it. I’m twelve. She must have turned thirteen. We each have pieces of wood and we’re swordfighting. She dodges my thrust but loses balance, and spins away from me. Suddenly, this perfect round ass is filling the back of her jeans in a way I’ve never seen before. All slack and boniness, gone. And, buoyed on an adrenalin surge, I swing my
wooden sword and whack the fleshy curve of her buttock more firmly than I’d have wanted to.
She freezes, then wheels to face me, “Grow up, for God’s sake.”
And the words sting.
I guess that’s what happened when I was away with Uncle Jack. I started growing up. Effie grew up a long time before I did.
There was a fellow who’d bring oil to the school. Driving a big tanker truck. The girls thought he was the spit of Elvis Presley. She’d be glued to the windows with the rest of them. His name was Bobby Campbell. And there was another one named Jimmie who would park his car near the schoolgrounds and just sit there. Driving them crazy. He had shiny black hair with a few twists on front. Duck’s arse on the back. They said he looked exactly like James Dean who died a few years before but whose movies were just getting here. He had the same half-closed semi-gawky mouth. And he knew who they thought he looked like. So when he sat there in the car, he slouched and smoked. And when he talked he tried to sound like an American. Kind of nasal. He’d been out of school a couple of years. Was waiting to go away to the uranium mines in Elliot Lake where all the young fellows were heading then. Anybody who wasn’t away already was waiting to go away. That was what growing up looked like.
Duck’s arse on the back of your head and waiting to go away.
Then the Swedes and the government announced the pulp mill. It was about 1960. And people started coming back again. Like when the causeway started. But not Jack this time. Stayed absent.
2
“So how’s your ma?” I ask.
“A whole lot better than anticipated,” he says, watching me warily. “I guess you haven’t seen her lately.”
“Drop down for a game of cards from time to time.”
Realizing it’s been months.
“She was pretty apprehensive about me bringing things up that might be a little upsetting.”
“Like what?” I ask.
“Something about your ma and Squint?”
I got a letter from Ma. Around the same time Uncle Jack was talking about us moving on somewhere else. Sometime in February ’65. Ma says she and Squint are going to get married at Easter. Don’t take it wrong, says she. It’s for the companionship. And he’s a good man. Grandma is all for it.
I was floored. Not a year and a half passed since the day the old man…and her getting married again. And to Squint.
“Grandma says she can manage alone if I move over to Squint’s. I don’t know. Grandma’s probably better off alone than with Squint here (ha, ha).”
First time she ever wrote to me in her life.
“Ah well,” Jack said. “Sandy’d want that. I know that much about him.”
Grandma used to call Squint the gloichd. In plain English, a creep.
“I suppose Squint will be moving in,” Jack said with a sly look.
“No,” I said. “I think she’s moving to his place.”
“Jaysus,” Jack said. “They’ll have to do a fumigation first.”
“Grandma wants to live alone,” I said.
Grandpa was gone by then just about a year. Since just before I went to Tilt Cove with Jack.
“Can’t have that,” Jack said, rubbing his chin. “Grandma is after getting a little gliogach herself.”
“Grandma gliogach,” I say, laughing. “Hard to imagine that.”
“Dropping things,” he said. “Forgetful. Wife was telling me in the last letter. Some day she’d fall down. Break a hip. Screwed then,” he said. “Maybe we can get her to move out, stay with the wife.”
“There isn’t room at your place.”
“Wife can move into the young fellow’s room. Give the old lady ours.” Reaching then for his smokes. “For all I’m home,” he said. “Wife doesn’t need all that room by herself.”
I knew Jack would take a couple of weeks to communicate his plan to Jessie, so I wrote to Effie write away: “Right after Ma and Squint, I’m going to want you to move in with Grandma. It’ll be doing us a big favour. And of course, I’ll be going home for it.”
“You mind if I make some fresh tea?” he asks.
“Go ahead.”
Over the sound of the water gushing he’s saying, “Ma told me there’d been a bit of a…falling out. You and your mom. And Squint.”
“Just a little something with Squint,” I say.
He makes a face. “More than ‘a little something,’ I’d guess, to come between yourself and your mother.”
“Nothing worth talking about,” I say. “Anyway, how did that come up?”
He shrugs. “I mentioned to Ma that I might drop in on Squint while I’m here. Since he was overseas with Angus.”
I hear myself saying: “So what if he was overseas with Angus. I’ve spent a long time forgetting it and I’m fucking sick of it.”
“Hey hey hey,” he says, holding a hand up like a traffic cop. “Take it easy. It’s me. Sextus. Family. Calm down. Skip it. I’m just making conversation.”
Family. That’s what Squint said. As if it excused falsehood. Effie wrote: “It’s great, your ma and Squint getting married. She needs somebody. I feel terrible, even thinking about what you suggest. Moving in there, for your grandma’s sake. But whatever happens, I’m going to have to get out of here. It just gets worse. The other night he went out and locked me in the house. He padlocked the storm door. I had to leave by the window.”
“Ma said there was a falling out. You and Squint. I was only wondering,” he said.
I say: “Sorry about that. Booze throws off my sugar. Makes me edgy.”
Squint’s insinuating know-all face in front of me; half smiling as he communicates gossip with the bogus authority of an eyewitness who saw nothing and knows nothing.
“What was it, then?” His voice is soothing.
“Nothing I want to go into,” I say.
“Nothing to do with the Swede’s wife,” he says.
Then I lie: “No, no, no. Just something to do with herself. What did you say it was? Faye. Angus and Faye.”
He persists. “But to alienate you from Mary. Your poor ma…”
“That’s not true,” I say. Another lie. “Ma and I stay in touch.”
“I actually thought,” he says, “driving up here this morning, the two of us would drop in on him. Bring a jug. Maybe get him talking.”
“I don’t think so,” I say. “Squint’s changed.”
“Like. Who knows? It’s nearly forty years now. If we got him talking we’d get to the crux of whatever it was with Uncle Sandy and Angus. Whaddaya say?”
I say: “Even if Squint had something to say—and I doubt it—what’s the point? Like, what else is there to know?”
His face. Like Squint’s was. Like everyone who has ever spoken to me with the attitude of superiority based on knowing what I don’t know, assuming, as they must, that I know nothing.
“The kettle is boiling,” I say.
He stands, walks to the stove. Then he heads for the door.
“Where are you off to?” I ask.
“I feel like taking a piss,” he says, then stops, and looks back over his shoulder. “If that’s all right with you.”
Just before Easter ’65, she wrote again to say she’d move in with Grandma as soon as we wanted her to. She knew there would be talk but didn’t care. Didn’t know how she’d keep the old fellow from hanging around there. But figured Grandma would control that. Grandma didn’t put up with much. Would move in right after Ma and Squint, if we still wanted. They were getting married at Easter.
I broke the news to Jack, carefully. He looked at me for a long time, saying nothing. Making me want to wave a hand in front of his face, say, Hello there! Speak up! But he said nothing. Just pulled a matchstick out of his pocket, stuck it in his ear, and wiggled it around. When he extracted it there was a big brown gob on the end of it, which he examined. Then said: “Whatever you think yourself.”
“I know what you’re thinking,” I said, feeling a trace of desperation.
&nbs
p; “Well, that makes one of us,” he said. Laughed. And walked off.
Heading for Itchy’s. He was there, most every night those last few weeks in Tilt Cove.
Ma wrote once more. She thought Effie and Grandma was a great idea. You couldn’t tell what Angus thought. He was on a bender at the time.
Leaving Tilt Cove felt like the last day of school used to. Cleaning my stuff out of the dry. Putting up with a lot of static from the guys. Tilt Cove was a place you stayed in because you had to. You lived to leave. And Jack and I were leaving. Our two kitbags packed and leaning side by side in a corner of my room, hardhats giving the top a rounded shape. Smelling like underground.
Then Jack’s old buddy Black Angus MacDonald came by with a bottle of rum. Captain Morgan. I had a couple with them but he and Jack were speaking Gaelic. Stuff I couldn’t follow.
Spent a few minutes in the card room, watching. There was a game going on pretty well nonstop. The usual crowd. A half-breed shift boss. The doctor. Itchy. Hubert the hoistman. A few others. Pretty intense about the cards so I didn’t stay there long. Walked around outside for a while. Climbed the steep embankment behind the bunkhouse and prolonged sundown a few minutes that way. But it became instantly cold when the sun dropped.
We drove out. New road to Springdale pretty solid considering it was springtime. No talk in the car for hours. Jack seemed permanently down those days. Shaking hands with Black Angus as we left, you could see faint ripples along his jawline.
Jack bought a flask in Corner Brook. Saved it for the boat. Sipping it as we crossed the Cabot Strait, heading toward North Sydney. Halfway through the flask, he made a few jokes about Angus. Me being almost related to him, going out with Effie. And Squint going to be my stepfather. Me retaliating: “He’ll be almost like your brother-in-law.” “No fucking way,” Jack saying, half laughing.
He’d only recently started using “fuck” in front of me.
Aunt Jessie met the ferry. Hugged me, kissed Jack lightly on his cheek.
Ma and Squint got married quietly. A few people sitting around at our place the night before. Effie came over. Didn’t stay long. Angus was there, pretty well elected.
He sobered up for the church part. It was only for family, but he was invited. He and Squint had spent a hard year together in Italy, and later in Holland. There was a little reception. And that set him off again. Got maudlin trying to propose a toast. Last seen leaning in a corner, singing “Molly Bond.” For sheee was taaall and sleeender, and gentle as a faaawn. Then was gone for days. That’s when we moved Effie into the old place. Her first night there we sat up late talking mostly about childhood. How things change.
The Long Stretch Page 9