Road Ends

by Mary Lawson

  “He has always wanted to set up in the hotel business. He tells me it has been his dream ever since he was a boy. Although I am no expert in such matters, it seems to me that it is a good dream, not just from his own perspective but because it would also benefit the whole community, bringing more tourists into the area.

  “However—and here’s where you, in your capacity as a bank manager, come in—he needs some financial help to get started.

  “Now then.” (The steeple of his fingers touched his lips, once, twice, a third time. If that’s what a university education does for you, I don’t regret not having one.) “A hypothetical question to go with a hypothetical case: if you were in a position to help such a man, knowing that you would also be helping his family and the wider community, wouldn’t you want to do so?”

  I pushed back my chair and stood up. I said, “Excuse me, Reverend Thomas, but this conversation is ridiculous and I have a lot to do today.”

  He stayed seated. He said, “Mr. Cartwright, this is a good man we’re speaking of. He has weaknesses, as do we all—only God is perfect—but he is at heart a good man, and I believe he deserves a second chance. Don’t forget he won’t be on his own this time—he will have the grace of God and the support of the church community behind him. And I, personally, will vouch for him.”

  By this stage I was having great difficulty controlling myself. “Will you, personally, guarantee the loan?” I said tightly.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Will you, personally, guarantee the loan?”

  To my pleasure he flushed. “If I had the resources I certainly would, but I’m afraid I don’t.” He paused, then tipped his head to one side. “Mr. Cartwright, I’m beginning to wonder if you have a personal grudge against this man. You are in a position to help him and yet you won’t even consider it. Why is that? I find it very strange.”

  “I am not in a position to help him,” I said. “The money in this bank is not mine. It is money entrusted to the bank by its customers and I have an absolute duty to safeguard it and not expose it to undue risk. On the other hand, if you would guarantee the loan by, say, taking out a second mortgage on your home, the risk to the bank would be greatly reduced and I’d be happy to arrange it. As you have such faith in him, presumably you’ll be happy to do that.”

  His face went a pleasing ripe-tomato red, apart from his lips and the end of his nose, both of which were pinched white. He stood up.

  He said, “I came here this morning because I thought, despite our differences, that you were a reasonable man, Mr. Cartwright. All I was asking was that you reconsider your decision in this case. I don’t think that’s too much to ask when a man’s future is at stake. But apparently you do.”

  I walked over to the door and opened it and he walked out. As he passed me he said, “I am disappointed in you, Edward Cartwright. Profoundly disappointed. I expected better, even from you.”

  I still can’t help wishing I had knocked him down.

  That was not the end of the affair, not by a long way. The following Sunday Reverend Thomas stood in his pulpit and preached a sermon on the evils of those who set themselves up in judgment over others. I wasn’t there, of course, but I heard about it afterwards. It was a very powerful sermon, apparently, and somehow he managed to make it clear whom he was talking about. It was all around Struan within a matter of hours. As a result a number of our customers—not many but even one would be too many—withdrew their money and took it to other banks in other towns.

  Until that day I believe the people of this town, virtually without exception, trusted and respected me. That meant a great deal to me. I’d go as far as to say I valued it above almost anything else.

  Now there are exceptions. I cannot begin to say how painful that is and how bitterly I still resent it.

  Why do I keep thinking about things like this? It’s almost as if my brain actively seeks them out. It’s absurd. I will stop.

  One more thing, though. One final thing I want to say before closing the book on the subject once and for all: in the years since that incident Joel Pickett has gone from bad to worse and taken his family with him. He has never held a job for more than a couple of weeks, he has spent many nights in the jail cell after drunken and aggressive behaviour, his boys have been constantly in trouble practically from the moment they could walk, and now, it would appear, they have become arsonists.

  Reverend Thomas no doubt maintains that this is my doing—that by not giving Joel Pickett a loan at a critical point in his life I condemned his family to a downward slide into poverty and disgrace. The truth is, if I had approved that loan, when his absurd hotel scheme failed, and it would have failed, Joel would have owed so much money that he would have lost his home along with everything else and his family would now be on the street. They would be destitute. That is the truth of the matter. I am not the cause of Joel Pickett’s ruin; Joel Pickett is.

  There. I am not going to think about it ever again.

  Saturday. I shouted at the boys again. They broke the lamp in the living room. They were fighting. It wasn’t even eight o’clock in the morning and they were fighting. I cannot understand why they don’t just keep out of each other’s way if they hate each other so much. It seems such a simple, obvious solution. Instead it’s as if they are glued together; you never see one without the other.

  I heard the crash and opened the door of my study to see what the commotion was, and there was the lamp in pieces on the floor, the boys staring down at it in wonderment as if it had fallen from the sky. I was … incandescent. The room echoed afterwards.

  But the worst thing was that as I turned to go back into my study, I saw Adam, crouching down beside the old armchair Tom has adopted as his own. (Tom was out on his snowplough.) I hadn’t realized he was there. He had curled himself into a ball with his arms covering his head as if to protect himself.

  I knew I must speak to him, reassure him somehow, but before I could say anything Emily appeared at the top of the stairs, clutching the baby. She stared at me with those huge eyes of hers and said in a whisper, “Edward? What is happening? Are you all right?”

  I crossed to the entrance hall and hauled on my coat and boots and left the house. It was murderously cold. I pulled my scarf up over my nose and mouth but still the air seared my lungs. When I reached the road I stopped; I didn’t know what to do, where to go. It was too cold to stay outside for any length of time but I didn’t want to see anyone. Not even Betty. Particularly not Betty. In any case the library doesn’t open until nine. Nowhere does except Harper’s, so in the end that was where I went. Thankfully the cold had kept everyone else at home.

  The frightening thing is that it felt as if I had no control over it—over the shouting. As if it wasn’t me.

  That is a ridiculous statement. If Joel Pickett is responsible for his own actions, then I am responsible for mine. If you don’t accept that, then your life is not your own. You are nothing more than a puppet, with your ancestors pulling your strings.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Tom

  Struan, January 1969

  His goal was to construct each day like the hull of a ship, every action a plank fitting exactly up to the next, no gaps or holes where thoughts might seep in, no changes to throw him off course, no surprises. Work, eat, read the paper, go to bed; stick to the routine and you’ll make it through the day.

  At 5:15 a.m. the alarm went off and he hit the stop button and swung his legs out of bed. Off with pyjamas, on with long johns, jeans, two pairs of thick woollen socks, down the hall to the bathroom for a wash (at least at this hour he didn’t have to stand in line with sundry sleep-sodden, bad-tempered brothers), back to his bedroom, on with undershirt, flannel shirt, sweater, grab a Hershey bar from the secret stash behind the bookcase by his bed, downstairs for cornflakes and toast, eaten standing up at the kitchen sink, fill the Thermos with coffee, out to the entrance hall to search, cursing, through the jumble of outdoor gear for his own boots, scar
f, hat, parka, gloves, grab the Thermos, tuck it under his arm, pull open the inner door, push open the outer door, slam both behind him and off into the frozen dark.

  Sometime during the night the snow had stopped and the clouds had cleared and now the piercing, brittle stars moved with him as he walked. At the end of the road he had to climb over the bank of snow thrown up by the snowplough over the previous days, hard and steep and pitted with footprints, each footprint a dark soft shadow in the starlight.

  There was only an inch or so of new snow on the main roads, so today, finally, he would be able to make a start on the smaller side roads, which had been clogged up like frozen rivers for days. Then the citizens of Struan would be able to shovel out their driveways and get their cars back on the road and the town would be back in business.

  The snowplough lived around the back of the gas station, crouched amidst the snowdrifts like the prehistoric heap of junk that it was, a Sicard, 1940s model, headache yellow, a basic truck with a plough on its nose. Tom climbed up on the step, slammed his shoulder hard against the door of the cab three times while simultaneously heaving violently on the handle—the door was always frozen shut and it took brute force to break it free—climbed into the cab and stuck the key in the ignition. After a couple of goes the engine caught and roared into life and he raised and lowered the shovel to get everything moving, then ploughed his way around to the front of the gas station. In exchange for parking, the deal was that he and Marcel Bruchon, on the late shift, would keep the garage forecourt free of snow, so he did that first and then set off down the road.

  The main roads were still empty of traffic and he rumbled down them as fast as he dared, the new snow flying off the blade of the plough in a great soft arc. The roads were cleared in order of priority: access to the fire station, the police, the doctor’s office, the school, then Main Street and the major crossroads within the town, then the main road out as far as the New Liskeard turnoff, where the Department of Highways snowploughs took over, then the major roads on the school bus route and finally the minor side roads, some of which might be snowed in for a week if there was a heavy and prolonged snowfall.

  By the time he reached the side roads it was light enough to turn off the headlights but still he moved cautiously. Marcel hurtled down even the smallest roads at terrifying speed but he’d had twenty years to learn the difference between a snow-covered road and a snow-filled ditch and could tell at a hundred yards whether a snowdrift was really a snowdrift or a car in disguise. Though even Marcel made the occasional mistake. The previous week he’d ploughed up a dead moose out along the Harper Side Road.

  “Made me feel not too good, I tell you,” he’d said to Tom afterwards. “Engine, she give a liddle grunt like she does, cab, she shake a liddle bit, den all at once d’ole damn snowdrif’ she shif’ ’bout tree feet an’ up come dese four legs, stickin’ straight up like candles on a cake. I tink, Whoa, Marcel, dem’s legs! What you doin’ ploughin’ up legs? But den I tink, well, leas’ dey don’t have boots on, dat would be worse.”

  There had been worse. A couple of years back Marcel had unearthed a car containing a family of four, all dead. They’d pulled over to the side of the road to wait out a blizzard but it lasted two days and buried the car and they ran out of air.

  The thought of it—coming across a car full of dead bodies—made Tom sweat. He’d wanted to ask Marcel what it had felt like when he cleared the snow away and saw the people inside. That moment of realization when they didn’t respond to his banging on the side window—what had that been like? He would have shouted encouragement to them and no heads would have turned. No one would have moved.

  But probably he’d known they were dead earlier than that. There would have been something about the silence inside the car. Not an empty silence; something more final.

  When he’d seen what appeared to be a heap of clothes at the foot of the cliff Tom had known instantly that it was not a heap of clothes. It had nothing to do with recognizing what Robert had been wearing, he never noticed what anyone wore. It was something else. He and Simon had reached the bottom of the ravine and come around the corner of the rock face, picking their way over the rubble of glistening boulders at the river’s edge, and he’d glanced up and seen the bundle lying there at the foot of the cliff, directly below where they’d been standing half an hour earlier, and he’d known at once.

  The unforgivable thing was that, along with the icy wave of sick, cold horror, he had felt absolute outrage. His first thought had been, What kind of friend would do that to you? Would kill himself virtually in front of you, and with a stranger present?

  The real question was, what kind of sick bastard would have that as his first thought on seeing the dead body of his closest friend. It was monstrous; he could hardly believe it of himself, but that was what he’d thought, what he’d felt. He’d felt as if the act were aimed at him, as if Robert had stepped off the cliff (and he had stepped, he hadn’t jumped or hurled himself, because if he had his body would be a few feet out from the cliff instead of right at the foot, almost touching the sheer rock face)—as if he had stepped off the cliff purely and simply to punish Tom, as if he were speaking directly to him, saying, You don’t seem to care what I’ve been going through, you and this new friend you’re having such a good time with, so I’m going to show you. Take a look at this.

  He never thought about anything but death anymore. It was with him every waking moment and stalked his dreams at night. When he read the papers death leapt up at him. One single death or mass extinction, murder or genocide, war, famine, plague, disease: it called to him, drew him in. There had been four columns of death notices in The Globe and Mail the previous morning and he’d been unable to stop himself from reading every one. It was as though his brain were scrabbling around like a rat in a cage trying to find a way to rationalize what had happened. Look at all these deaths, it was saying. Everybody dies, so what’s the big deal? Everybody dies; people are dying all the time, literally all the time, every second of the day or night. Some die old, some die young, but they all die and in the great scheme of things the fact that someone dies earlier than he otherwise might have doesn’t matter a bit. It doesn’t matter because nothing matters, in the great scheme of things.

  In any case—this was another thing his brain constantly told itself with no effect at all—there was nothing he could have done.

  The church was on the corner of Main and Cleveland Street. Turn down Cleveland and Reverend Thomas’s house was the first on the left. The car was a whale-shaped hump under three feet of snow; it hadn’t moved all winter. Kindly souls kept shovelling out the drive but some sense of delicacy seemed to prevent them from clearing the snow from the car itself. A narrow path from the road to the front door testified to the endless stream of ladies from the church bearing casseroles and pies.

  Tom looked resolutely straight ahead as he drove past the house, just in case Reverend Thomas should happen to step outside onto his porch. According to gossip Tom had overheard in Harper’s, Mrs. Thomas had left him, which meant that Reverend Thomas had now lost not only his son and his faith, but his wife as well. Lost everything, in effect.

  What do you say to someone who has lost everything? How do you meet his eye? If you were the last person to have seen his son alive, if you were with him for virtually the whole morning before he died but you were so busy having a good time you didn’t even notice the state he was in. Or worse, you did sort of notice, but it merely irritated you because it was such a great day and you didn’t want anything to spoil it.

  What do you say?

  By the time he’d finished ploughing the side streets, people were up and about, shovelling out their drives or trudging along the edge of the road, hats pulled down, hoods up, shoulders hunched against the cold. They’d raise a hand to Tom as he went by and he’d raise his in return, grateful for the isolation of the small, freezing cab. One of the advantages of the job was that no one expected him to stop for a chat. />
  He knew most of them—had known most of them all his life, though none of his friends from school was still here. There had been five of them who hung around together, Miles Cooper, Wayne Patterson, Elliot Park, Robert and himself, though Robert was the only one he’d been really close to. After high school Miles and Wayne had both gone to the mining school in Haileybury, Elliot had joined Ontario Hydro and Tom and Robert had gone to U of T, Tom to study aeronautical engineering and Robert to study history. They’d roomed together in their undergraduate years and it had been a blast, but then on their first day back at the start of their postgraduate terms—Robert was doing an MA and Tom an MSc—Robert had announced casually that he’d decided to change courses and study theology. Tom thought he was joking and laughed, and then realized he was serious and was dumbfounded. Robert? Study theology?

  It was true they’d never specifically talked about religion—in your teens there were things you didn’t talk about even with close friends (your parents, for example, whose very existence was too embarrassing for words), and religion was one of them. Maybe by the time they reached university they could have discussed it the way they discussed the various new ideas they were coming into contact with—everything from philosophy to free love—if it hadn’t been that the subject of religion was inextricably bound up with the subject of Robert’s father, who in Tom’s opinion was an arrogant jerk. Not only that, but Robert had once said something that strongly suggested he thought so too. Which must be tricky for him, Tom thought. His own father was pretty much a dead loss as far as parenting went, but at least you could respect him. At least he didn’t humiliate you in public by standing up in front of the entire town and preaching at everyone with a patronizing smile on his face. He didn’t know how Robert stood the shame.

  The thing Robert had said—the revelation of his feelings about his father—had come out when he was drunk, years back, when they were still in high school. It was a summer evening and they were down at the beach polishing off the remains of a bottle of Jack Daniel’s that Robert had swiped from the back seat of a tourist’s car.