“Nice people?”
“Oh, yeah.” Then, looking back out toward the bay: “But this here’s the place, hey?”
White clouds are turning pink, like smoke over a fire.
“Over to the right,” Pa said. “You can’t see it from here. Used to be a fellow they called Wild Archie. Fished out of Gloucester, Mass.” He takes a swallow. “One night he’s in a barroom, Wild Archie. In Gloucester, Mass. Gets into a tangle with another fellow. The guy shoots him.”
“Shoots him?”
“Shoots him. Bullet passes an inch from his heart. Last thing Wild Archie did was kill the guy who shot him. Bare hands. Before he died. They brought him home, Wild Archie. Buried him down there somewhere.”
He’s looking out, toward the rest of the world. Face tight from booze.
Not thinking it through, I said: “You got shot once, Pa.”
His hand went to the side of his forehead.
“Made quite a mess, eh?” he said.
“How did it happen?”
It’d been years since I asked.
“A long story.” Then he said: “You really want to know?”
Shocked. “Sure,” I said.
“Well,” he said, real slow. “You’re going to have to ask somebody else.”
Oh.
“I don’t know a thing about it,” he said.
Then looked straight at me.
“That’s okay, Pa.”
“Right,” he said, looking back toward the bay. “Some man, that Wild Archie.”
2
You can tell Sextus is drunk, finally, by the way he almost knocks over his chair standing up. Pushes it back with the backs of his legs, hands pressing on the tabletop.
“There was a reason for…Angus and Uncle Sandy. You know?”
He sits down again and seizes the rum bottle resolutely. Pours a shaky dollop into his glass, then looks at me, his face set with purpose.
“You’re going to listen to this,” he says. “Away back, a few years after Uncle Sandy…Duncan came to Toronto. Must have been between ’68 and ’69. He was ordained. My old man was still alive. Duncan stayed with me. We got into it, pretty serious, a couple of times. And one night, pretty far into his cups, he told me the whole story. Oh, he beat around the bush quite a bit. Asking things like, ‘How is a person supposed to react when he discovers somebody close is guilty of something really, really bad?’ Him the priest, asking me? I mean, spare me.”
I say: “Hey, guess what. I already know the whole story. Okay?”
He takes a long drag on his cigarette, not sure whether to believe me.
“You know? What happened in the barn? In Holland?”
“Yes.”
“No sniper?”
“No sniper.”
“How Angus…?”
“Yes.”
“Who? Where did you find out?”
“Uncle Jack told me.”
“Fuck off.”
“It’s true.”
“The old man knew?”
“Uncle Jack knew.”
“Holy Jesus.”
Pa just kept staring out over St. Georges Bay, shaking his head. Occasionally sipping from his flask.
“I hear the Swedes put the mill here because it reminds them of home,” he said finally.
“I never heard,” I said. The mayor of Hawkesbury said it was because of the harbour.
“Interesting people, the Swedes,” he said. “Different ways of looking at things.”
“How long do you think they’ll be here?” I asked cautiously.
He looked at me full on for a moment. “However long the trees last.”
After a while he said, “I suppose you have a girlfriend.” Seemed to be killing time. Waiting for something. The sun was hanging just above the horizon. Lights were sparkling on the distant blot of shore. The mainland.
“Not me,” I said, laughing nervously.
“Sure you have,” he said quietly.
Me thinking: this is weird, for your father.
“It’s different now than when I was a young fellow.”
“How?”
Then he was watching the sun for a while.
“Nowadays,” he said, slouching farther down, “you can afford to be young.”
Then, after a long silence in which I thought he’d dozed off: “You need the rig any time, after you get your licence, you just ask.”
I stared at him, wondering if he realized it was me he was talking to. He drifted off sometimes. The plate in his head. Often forgot what he just finished saying.
“You hear what I’m saying,” he said, looking at me directly.
“Wow, thanks.”
Probably the liquor talking, I thought.
“You won’t be young for long.”
“I can’t believe the old man knew,” Sextus said. “When did he tell you?”
“I don’t remember exactly,” I said. “We were in Quebec.”
“So you knew all along too?”
“Yes,” I said.
“And did you ever discuss it with her?”
“There was nothing to discuss.”
“Well…fuck,” he said. “What about the Dutch woman? Or girl, I guess she’d have been.”
I raise my hand, cautioning, shaking my head. This is where everything went off the rails with Squint. Bringing the Dutch woman into it. Giving gossip some kind of authenticity.
“That’s where I draw the line,” I say.
He studies me, face full of sympathy.
“Can’t say that I blame you.”
Summer of ’63 was when the talk started about my father and the Swede’s wife. The Swede was one of the managers at the new mill. She was German. Or so everybody wrongly thought. She was really Dutch. But overheard speaking German at the Auto Parts. And looked like one. The blonde hair and blue eyes. Some kind of an academic. Unusually interested in things around here. Always trying to talk to people. A lot avoiding her, thinking she was a German.
You discover gossip, when it’s about yourself, in the sudden silences that seem to go before you, pushing aside whatever was going on before you got there. A strange feeling, that your presence is suddenly alarming to people you think you know well. Conversations quickly started, out of nothing. You don’t discover the substance until later.
I shouldn’t have been surprised at the gossip. Once I saw them, near the post office, standing talking. The old man was smiling like a boy, hands in his pockets. She was standing with her weight on one leg, the other angled out, casually. Toe poking at bits of gravel. She was wearing a skirt this time. But there was no mistaking her. The hair, tied back, showing her ears. The skirt draped over the extended leg, showed it off nicely. Arms folded under her chest showed that off pretty good too. Talking a blue streak. Like old friends. Then they shook hands and she headed for the big Chrysler. I felt relief. Something about the handshake. But it still seemed queer, him that friendly with a German.
The sun was almost touching the horizon.
“There’s the one over the road,” he said. “The little red one at Angus’s place.”
“Effie,” I said.
“Yeah, Effie,” he said. “You wouldn’t be interested in that, would you?”
“Nah. She’s like my sister.”
“Yes,” he said, nodding. “So. You want the rig for going to dances down north. You just say the word. Nice people down there.”
“Duncan’s going to be a priest,” I said.
“Hah.” Then: “You used to be around with that little Effie a lot. All the time.”
The sun was putting a warm glow on his face, leaving a dark absence where his skull was missing.
“Just playing,” I said.
“That’s all right. But you get older, there’s no more playing.” Took another swallow from his flask. “There’s a streak in those people.”
“Yes.”
“A streak o’ misery.”
“But there’s good in them too,” I said.
By then, of course, there was no reason for him to caution me about Effie. I had other fantasies. The blonde lady, the Swede’s wife. The image of her standing close, at Mrs. Lew’s, asking who I was, wouldn’t leave me. All the impressions created by movies and magazines and songs on the radio, real. Right in front of you, jangling all the senses. Sight, sound, smell, even touch and taste, if you dared. I seemed to be seeing her everywhere.
I was swimming off the old coal pier one hot afternoon when I noticed her standing watching me. Wearing the same outfit I first saw her in. Real short shorts. There was a kid with her. A boy, maybe nine or so. I was alone in the water so it had to be me they were looking at. I didn’t know how to acknowledge them so I didn’t try.
She put her hand to the side of her mouth and called out: “You make me want to jump in. Just like I am.”
And I suddenly had the completely crazy notion that she was there for me. You laugh now but when you’re sixteen and curious such things are possible. Why should it only be between men and girls? Why not women and boys? And I wasn’t such a boy. Going on seventeen and almost as tall as the old man. The spit of him, people were saying.
Of course, it’s pathetic now, but at the time it gave me power. Effie was the only other, but she had nowhere near the force I felt coming out of the Swede’s wife. And Effie had outgrown me. You’d think she lived in that ’58 Merc with the continental kit. You’d see it gliding over the Long Stretch from up in the field where I’d be turning the hay with Grandpa, or from a ladder on the side of the barn where I’d be fixing shingles or painting. Cruising through like a jungle animal on the hunt, except you could see the prey already inside, sitting up close to the driver. Going somewhere or returning.
Who cared. I had my own imagery. Day and night. And I’d come to, breathless and wet and relieved and lonely. Not knowing that this was as close as I’d get to normal for a long, long time.
On Creignish Mountain I asked Pa, “Did you ever go to Sweden?”
He laughed. “Was no war in Sweden.”
“You know some of the new Swedes,” I said.
He looked at me a moment. Then said, “Don’t know a soul among them.”
3
Sextus says: “The old man knew? I’d never have guessed.”
“Why not?” I say.
“I just wonder why he never told me. That he already knew.”
“You talked to him about it?”
“The last time I saw him, I told him the whole thing. He acted like he didn’t know.”
“He was pretty sick at the time,” I say. “Probably forgot things.”
“I blamed myself for a long time. Thinking it was too much for him. Mentioning it to him. Trying to get him talking. The stress.”
“All I know is it was him told me,” I say.
“If I was guessing who told you I wouldn’t be half as surprised if it was Squint,” he says, testing. “If you ask me, old Squint’s the man with the missing pieces of the puzzle.”
But the first time I asked Squint how my old man managed to get shot, all Squint said was, “Oh, a lot of good guys got shot. Lots didn’t live to talk about it.”
“How come he never talked about it?”
“Well, that’s the thing,” Squint said. “Them who lived to talk about it usually wouldn’t. Haw haw. Anyway, what’s to talk about? You ever been shot?”
“No.”
“It’s not actually something you ‘know’ about. Usually just happened. You might know afterwards. But really, you know nothing. Except you’re alive, if you are. Then it hurts like hell. Sometimes. The squealing and squirming around can be pretty wicked.”
“You been shot, Squint?”
“No, but I seen lots who were,” he said.
“You saw Pa when he was shot?” Squint studied me for a long time, then said: “Maybe.”
“What was it like?”
“Oh well, now,” he said, “you’re a little young.”
By this time the sun was a big red-orange ball deflating on the horizon. The bay was turning a kind of lavender. The water had little slivers of light dancing on the ripples. It was getting cooler fast.
He said, after another swig: “I just want to sit here for a few more minutes. You’ll see something.”
He held up his flask, measuring what was left.
“Now watch what happens when the sun hits the water.”
I watched as the great ball of fire settled slowly, spreading flat out over the skyline.
“Now look,” he said.
“What?”
“The fire ditch,” he said, pointing. “Look. There’s a big trench, full of fire, running from the land right out to the sun. Look at it.”
I see the reflection of the setting sun in a great streak running up to the shore.
“Now,” he said. “That’s the sewer that carries away all the shit and misery of the day, straight into the big incinerator on the horizon. Sucks the crap out nice as you please.”
It looked just like a molten metal stream.
“Of course the world starts filling up with shit and corruption all over again. But for the next minute or so, everything is clean as a whistle.”
I looked.
“Am I right or am I wrong,” he said aggressively.
“You’re right.”
“You hear any foolish talk about…anything. You just let it go. All right?”
“Right,” I said.
“No telling what you might be hearing around. But you just let it slide right into the ditch there. Out to the big furnace.”
I was comforted, somehow.
“Okay. Let’s go back,” he ordered, and he took another swallow. I started the half-ton and turned it around carefully.
The talk was, of course, already going strong. Just not where I could hear it.
Sextus is looking relieved. Suddenly refreshed. Says: “I’m trying to think of the old man coping with knowing that all those years.”
“He always held it against Angus,” I say. “Not that he’d say much one way or the other.”
“Never heard him say a hard word against anybody. They can be pretty wicked around here. With the talk.”
“Jack never let things eat at him,” I say.
“When did you first know there was something wrong with him?”
I shrug. “Just the coughing.”
He fumbles a cigarette out of the package on the table between us.
You could tell there was something bad wrong with Uncle Jack long before I left Bachelor Lake. I lived with his cough for years there and in Tilt Cove. But then forgot about it for a while when he moved to the staff house. But during the winter of ’67-’68, he’d scare you sometimes. In the cookhouse. Or having a beer at Ikey’s. The coughing fits.
They’d make jokes: “If it has hair on it, swallow. It’ll be your arsehole.” That’s the way he coughed.
Then you’d think: That’s just Jack. And there were a lot of people coughing in the bunkhouses those days. Especially the ones who had worked in Newfoundland during the war. Especially St. Lawrence. The radiation. They were only finding out about the radiation there in the sixties. When we were in Bachelor Lake.
“Ma said it was what saved him from the war. Said the three of them came home in the spring of ’40. Going to join up. Went down to Sydney. But the old man got rejected. Something about the lungs. That’s what saved him.”
“From what and for what?” I ask.
“I guess from whatever it was got into the other two. And for what?”
He thinks about that for a few seconds, then smiles. “I guess for what’s sitting in front of you right now.”
Sextus was born in ’42.
One evening a few years ago, after I dried out, I took Millie up to the top of Creignish Mountain to show her the fire ditch. Would never have felt comfortable showing Effie. Millie is different.
After everything went black and you could see the beads of light over the mainland, she said, �
��Did you make that up?”
I couldn’t lie. I told her about the old man taking me up here.
“He had a good soul,” she said.
“So where do you think it is?”
She looked out over the bay for a while, then said, “How do you remember him?”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“If people remember you well, that’s heaven.”
“What if they don’t remember you at all?”
“Extinction,” she said.
“Like Limbo,” I said.
“Like Limbo,” she said. “Hell but without the pain. Sorrow instead.”
“Better than the real thing.”
“For some people,” she said.
“So where does that leave the old man?”
“Depends on you,” she said.
“In one way, the war was the best thing that could have happened to them,” says Sextus.
“Didn’t do much for Uncle Jack.”
“Makes my point, doesn’t it? Jack was what they’d all have been if there’d been no war.”
4
The final months were full of surprises.
Near mid-August the old man called home from the power commission and asked me to drive in and get him. Me with no licence. Ma didn’t object, but said, “Be careful,” as I left.
Pulling in to the parking area in front of the power commission, I almost ran into a big fancy black car. The Chrysler. The two of them sitting in it. Himself and the Swede’s wife. He didn’t even try to conceal anything when I stopped alongside.
Late August, Ma asked me to go upstairs with her. Something ominous. Grandpa and Grandma looking at us, curious. Ma wasn’t one for private conversations.
She took me to their bedroom and opened his closet door.
“Look at that,” she said.
There was a brand-new suit hanging there.
“Where did he get that?” I asked.
“Who knows?” she said.
It was your basic charcoal wool suit, the kind men wore on special occasions. Or to church. Or their own funerals.
“The man never darkens the door of a church,” she said.
“Maybe he’s got a girlfriend,” I said. Joking.
She looked at me hard. “Aren’t you after getting the mouth on you,” she said and shut the door.
Labour Day weekend, the Friday. Sitting alone in the dark under the big pine tree halfway between our lane and MacAskill’s, puffing on a Kool. Home was getting too tense. I heard somebody coming. I cupped the cigarette in my hands and held my breath. It was somebody walking slowly along the shoulder of the road. Crunch. Crunch. Jesus. A woman.
The Long Stretch Page 12