by Jack Hodgins
As for someone like Gerry Mack, her nephew, who was the only member of The Immediate Family ever to move off Vancouver Island, these events were more than he could bear.
When Gerry was twenty years old he very nearly married Karen O’Brien, a pretty blonde he’d gone all the way through school with. They went to movies together on Saturday nights and sometimes to dances, and afterwards they parked up the gravel road to the city dump to kiss each other until their mouths were raw. But Karen was already a member of The Immediate Family and had half a dozen brothers eager to increase the population. Gerry balked at marriage. He was the son of one of Nora’s older brothers and had wished since the time he was six years old that he’d been an orphan.
Soon after dumping Karen O’Brien he met a stoop-shouldered secretary named April Klamp, who was plain-looking and very dull and wore clothes that looked as if they were bought for someone else, perhaps her mother. But she was an only child and had no relatives at all, only a pair of doddering parents who didn’t care very much what happened to her. Gerry asked her to marry him a week after their first meeting and of course she accepted. No one before had even given her so much as a second look.
Some members of The Immediate Family had a few words to say about it. It seemed odd, they said, that a young man as vibrant as Gerry couldn’t find himself a wife who was more of a match. Aunt Nora, too, thought it was unusual, but she’d given Gerry up long ago as not a real Macken at heart. And besides, she said, it could have been worse. He could have married a churchgoer (something no Macken had ever done) or worse still, remained a bachelor (something three of her brothers had done and become cranky old grouches as a result). “Just watch him,” she said. “He’ll cut off his nose to spite his face.”
Gerry didn’t particularly care what any of them thought. Before his wedding he took two letters off his name and became Gerry Mack. He got no argument from April, of course. She was quick to agree that having too much family was worse than having none at all. She didn’t even mind that he insisted on getting married seventy miles down-island by a minister she’d never met so that it would be impossible to have a reception afterwards. And when he told her they would live on the mainland she merely nodded and said it was about time one of the Mackens showed a little spunk. Personally, she said, she’d always hated living on an island. She agreed with everything that Gerry Mack said and never took her eyes off his face while he spoke. It was clear to everyone that when Gerry married her what he got was not a separate person to live with but an extension of himself. Aunt Nora said he could have gone out and bought a wooden leg if that was all he wanted.
Though she added, “At least they won’t ever get into a fight. An extra limb doesn’t talk back.”
Their intention was to move far inland, but Gerry hadn’t driven a hundred miles up the Fraser Valley before he realized he couldn’t stand to be away from the coast. They turned back and settled in a little town on the edge of the strait, facing across to the Island, directly across to the valley where he had grown up. They bought a house fifty feet from the beach, with huge plate-glass windows facing west, and began saving their money to buy a small boat of their own so they could fish in the evenings.
Because he was a young man with a good rich voice and many opinions, Gerry had no trouble getting a job as an open-line moderator for the new radio station. He spent the first week voicing as many outlandish ideas as he could think of and being as rude as he dared to people who phoned in, so it didn’t take long for him to draw most listeners away from the competing station. Within a month he had a large and faithful following on both sides of the strait. People didn’t say they listened to CLCB, they said they listened to Gerry Mack’s station.
What pleased him most was knowing that whether they liked it or not, most of The Immediate Family would be listening to him every day. He could imagine them in their houses, cringing whenever he was rude to callers, and hoping no one else realized where he’d come from, and saying Thank goodness he’d had the sense to change his name. He made a habit of saying “So long, Nora” every day as a sign-off but didn’t tell anyone what it meant. People in the mainland town guessed that Nora must be his wife’s middle name or else the name of a grandmother who’d died when he was a little boy. None of them ever guessed, of course, that Aunt Nora Macken over on the Island sat by her radio every morning for the whole time he was on and went red in the face when he signed off, and told herself maybe he was the only real Macken in the lot after all, though she could spank him for his cheek.
And that, he thought, will show you that here’s one Macken who has no need for family.
Though he did not know then, of course, that even the most weak-minded and agreeable wife could suddenly find a backbone and will in herself when she became pregnant. He was sitting in the living room with his feet up on the walnut coffee table looking for good controversial topics in the newspaper when she handed him the wedding invitation that had arrived in the mail that morning. “I think we should go,” she said.
“The hell you say,” he said, and read through the silver script. “We hardly know them. Who’s this Peter O’Brien to us?”
“A cousin,” she said. “But that doesn’t matter. I think we should be there for the reunion the next day.”
Gerry put down the newspaper and looked at his wife. She was rubbing a hand over her round swollen belly. “What for?” he said. “I’ve been to a million of them. They’re all the same. I thought we moved over here to get away from all that.”
She sat down beside him on the sofa and put her head against his shoulder. “It’s been a year since we’ve even put a foot on the Island. Let’s go just for the fun.”
He looked down into her plain mousey hair, her white scalp. She had never asked for a thing before. “We’ll go,” he said, “but only on the condition that we leave the minute I can’t stand any more.”
They took the two-hour ferry ride across the strait, and though he sat with a book in his lap and tried to read, he found it hard to concentrate and spent a lot of time watching the Island get closer and bigger and more distinct. He hated sitting idle, he was a man who liked to be doing things, and right now he would have preferred to be at work in the radio station or digging in his garden.
Aunt Nora outdid herself. “Lord,” she said. “This must be the best reunion ever. There are three hundred and fifty people here, at least, and listen to that racket! When the Mackens get together there’s no such thing as a lull in the conversation, there’s never a moment when tongues have ceased.”
“They do seem to have the gift of the gab,” April said.
“A Macken,” Aunt Nora said, smiling, “is a sociable person. A Macken enjoys company and conversation.”
Macken this Macken that, Gerry thought.
His cousin George Smith put a bottle of beer in his hand and steered him across the yard to lean up against someone’s car. He said he couldn’t understand why Gerry put up with all the bullshit he had to listen to on his show. He wanted to know why Gerry didn’t just threaten to quit his job if people wouldn’t smarten up.
Gerry noticed that the whole back yard and orchard were filled with parked cars, and that against nearly every car there was at least one pair leaning and drinking beer and talking. Only the old ones were inside. April was standing straighter than he’d ever seen her, laughing with a bunch of women gathered beside a new Buick. “It doesn’t matter a damn to me what they say,” he told George Smith. “It’s just part of my job to listen. Sometimes I tell them to go take a flying leap, but what the hell? Who cares?”
George told him he’d cleared over fifteen hundred dollars last month, working in the pulp and paper mill, most of it from overtime. He said he couldn’t understand why most of the rest of them worked in the logging camp or in stores in town where there was hardly any overtime at all. It was overtime, he said, that made it possible for him to buy this here little baby they were leaning on. He pushed down on the front fender of the sports car a
nd rocked it gently and with great fondness. Then he asked Gerry if a person working for a radio station got paid a salary or a wage, and what kind of car was he driving anyways? Gerry pointed vaguely across the yard and said as far as he was concerned it was just a way of getting places. But George told him if he got enough overtime within the next few months he intended to buy himself a truck and camper so he could take more weekends off to go fishing up in the lakes. “Everybody’s got one,” he said. “One time I went up to Gooseneck Lake with Jim and Harriet and there were sixteen truck-and-campers there already. Nine of them were Mackens. Even old Uncle Morris was there, driving a brand-new Chev, and he only makes the minimum wage at his job. I told him, I said How could you afford a thing like that? and he said It pays to have a son in the car-selling business. I said I bet you’ll be paying for that thing for the rest of your life.”
“And he said?” Gerry said.
“Nothing,” George said. “He just told me I was jealous. Ha!”
April came across the yard and led Gerry away towards a large group of people sitting in lawn chairs in a circle and doing a lot of laughing. But Aunt Nora, tall Aunt Nora with all her dyed-black hair piled up on top of her head, intercepted them and took them inside so that Uncle Morgan, who had been sick in the hospital the whole time they’d been engaged, could meet April. “It won’t do,” she said, “to have strangers in the same family.” She pushed them right into her cluttered little living room and made someone get up so April could have a comfortable chair. Gerry leaned against the door frame and wondered if old Black Alex realized when he was alive that the dozen kids he’d hauled onto the Island in his touring car would eventually become these aging wrinkled people.
And of course it was Black Alex they were talking about. Uncle Morris said, “I mind the time he said to me Get off that roof boy or I’ll stuff you down the chimney!” He laughed so hard at that he had to haul out a handkerchief to wipe the tears off his big red face.
Aunt Nora, too, shrieked. “Oh, that was his favourite! He was always threatening to stuff one of us down the chimney.” Though she was careful to explain to April that never in his life did he do any such thing to any of them, that in fact the worst he ever did was apply the toe of his boot to their backsides. “He was a noisy man,” she said, “but some of us learned how to handle him.”
Then she drew everybody’s attention to April and said, “As you can easily see, there’s one more little Macken waiting to be born. Boy or girl, we wish it luck.”
“D’you know?” Uncle Morgan said. “Not one person in the family has ever named a child after Dad.”
“No wonder!” Aunt Nora cried. “There could only be one Alex Macken. No one else would dare try to match him.”
“Or want to,” Aunt Katherine said. “Suppose they got his temper too, along with his name.”
“One thing for sure,” Aunt Nora said. “He’ll have plenty of cousins to play with. He’ll never run out of playmates or friends.” Then, remembering, she added, “Of course, as long as they keep him isolated over there on the mainland I suppose he’ll miss out on everything.”
“It’s terrible having no one to play with,” April said. “Especially if you’re too shy to go out making friends on your own. Just ask me, I know. At least with cousins you don’t have to start from scratch. Nobody needs to be scared of a relative.”
“Right!” Aunt Nora said, and looked right at Gerry. “Though there are some people who think loneliness is a prize to be sought after.”
Gerry Mack knew, of course, that something had happened to the wife he thought was a sure bet to remain constant. It came as something of a surprise. After all, who expected an adult’s foot to suddenly turn into a hand or start growing off in a new direction? He brooded about it all the way home on the ferry and wouldn’t speak to her even while she got ready for bed. He sat in his living room until he was sure she’d gone to sleep, then he tiptoed in to the bedroom and undressed without turning on the light.
The next day he held off the phone calls that came into the station and kept the air waves to himself. From his little sound-booth he could look out across the strait. “From over here,” he told his listeners, “from here on the mainland, Vancouver Island is just a pale blue chain of mountains stretched right across your whole range of vision. A jagged-backed wall between us and the open sea. Go have a look. Stop what you’re doing for a minute and go to your window.” He waited for a while, and thought, not of the housewives who were moving to the ocean side of their houses, but of the islanders who were over there listening and wondering what he was up to.
“There it is,” he said. “Twenty miles away. I bet you hardly ever notice it there, like a fence that borders the back yard.” He drank a mouthful of the coffee he kept with him throughout the show. “Now those of you who’ve been across on the ferry know that as you get closer those mountains begin to take on shapes and change from blue to green and show big chunks of logged-off sections and zig-zag logging roads like knife-scars up their sides. And closer still, of course, you see that along the edge of the Island, stretched out along the shelf of flatter land, is a chain of farms and fishing villages and towns and tourist resorts and bays full of log booms and peninsulas dotted with summer cabins. All of it, ladies and gentlemen, facing over to us as if those people too think these mountains are nothing but a wall at their backs, holding off the Pacific.”
He gulped coffee again and glanced at his watch. He thought of the mainlanders looking across. He thought of the islanders wondering what the hell he was talking about. Then he said, “But the funny thing is this: to those people over there on that island, this mainland they spend most of their lives facing is nothing but a blue chain of jagged mountains stretched across their vision like a wall separating them from the rest of North America. That continent behind us doesn’t even exist to some of them. To them we look just the same as they do to us.”
Then, just before opening the telephone lines to callers, he said, “What we live in is a trench. Do you suppose trench-dwellers think any different from the rest of the world?”
His line was busy for the rest of the morning. Most wanted to talk about why they liked living in a place like this, some asked him couldn’t he think of a more pleasant comparison to make, and a few tried to change the subject to the recent tax increase. One long-distance call came in from the Island, an old man who told him he was jabbering nonsense and ought to be locked up, some place where all he could see would be bars and padded walls. “If you want to live in a trench,” he said, “I’ll dig you one. Six feet long by six feet deep.” Gerry Mack hung up on his cackling laughter and vowed he would never cross that strait again.
But April told him that didn’t mean she couldn’t go across just whenever she felt like it.
So that when the next wedding invitation arrived he was ready for her announcement. Even if he didn’t want to go, she said, she was heading across and taking Jimmy with her. He couldn’t deprive her for ever of the pleasure of showing off her son to his family. And Jimmy, too, had a right to meet his cousins. She was pregnant again, and there was a new hard glint in her eye. Gerry Mack, when she talked like that to him, felt very old and wondered what life would have been like if he’d married Karen O’Brien. If that’s what happened to women, he thought, you might as well marry your own sister.
When she came back she told him the reunion of course was a huge success and everybody asked where he was. She’d stayed right at Aunt Nora’s, she said, and it was amazing how much room there was in that old farmhouse when everyone else had gone home. She’d felt right at home there. Jimmy had had a wonderful time, had made friends with dozens of cousins, and could hardly wait for the next time they went over. And oh yes, Aunt Nora sent him a message.
“What is it?” he said, weary.
“She says there’s a wonderful new man on their radio station. She says she doesn’t know of a single Macken who still listens to you. This new fellow plays softer music and isn�
�t nearly so rude to his callers. She says people do appreciate good manners after all and she can’t think of one good reason for you not to be at the next wedding.”
“At the rate they’re marrying,” he said, “The Immediate Family will soon swallow up the whole Island.”
“The Mackens believe in marriage,” she said. “And in sticking together.”
Mackens this Mackens that, Gerry Mack thought.
“Nora told me her father used to say being a Macken was like being part of a club. Or a religion.”
“Do you know why they call him Black Alex?”
“Why?”
“When he was alive people used to call him Nigger Alex because his hair was so black and you never saw him without dirt on his hands and face. People over there never saw a real black man in those days. But the ‘children’ decided after his death that Black Alex was politer and what people would’ve called him if they’d only stopped to think.”
“Well at least they called him something,” she said. “It shows he was liked. It shows people noticed him. I never heard anyone call you anything but Gerry, an insipid name if I ever heard one. Pretty soon those people over there will forget you even exist.”
“That’s fine with me,” Gerry Mack said, and went outside to sprinkle powder on his rose leaves.
But she followed him. “Sometimes I don’t think it’s family you’re trying to get away from at all. I think it’s humanity itself.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “If that was what I wanted I’d have become a hermit.”
“What else are we?” She was on the verge of tears. “You don’t let Jimmy play with anyone else’s kids, none of them are good enough for you. And we’ve hardly any friends ourselves.”
“Don’t harp,” he said. “Don’t nag at me.”