Maclean (8 page)

He looked back at the studio photograph of Alice. How pretty she was! If somehow he had never seen her after that photograph was taken—if, for example, she had moved away while he was at the war and then, now, moved back, looking the way she now looked, and he had met her on the street, he wouldn't have known her. It was as if there was another person altogether still living somewhere there in the past who had nothing to do with the fat, sweating old woman with her straggly hair who was in the kitchen making cookies. Or as if maybe, somewhere along some other branch of the road of time, there was an Alice this age, but not this Alice—an Alice who had been let go to high school and had married Harry Noles, who had not gone to the war, not been blown to pieces at Festubert. And another John Maclean too who had not gone to the war either because he had finished high school and had better things to do with his life than join the army and fight for the god-damned English.

He became aware that Alice was standing in the doorway behind him, wondering no doubt what had been taking him so long, not knowing what journeys, backward and sideways, he had been making through the tangle of life.

“I've been looking at the old pictures here,” he said.

She came and stood beside him, silently, then picked up the wedding photograph.

“Tomorrow's the day father died,” she said. “Mother's birthday. It was so hot that day.”

She stared out the window, looking beyond the pots of geraniums on the window sill and the fir trees on the other side of the road, down the years into the upstairs room where their father lay.

His office job at the woodworking factory was long gone by then, along with all the fine speeches about a country fit for heroes, and he had been through a succession of menial, short-term jobs, interspersed by a good many times when he had no job at all. That morning, when the boy from across the river came to tell him that his father was dead, he was piling lumber as a day labourer at the woodworking factory whose books he had once kept.

He got his pay from the office and walked across the bridge against the flow of wagons and trucks on their way to town. Alice was right. It was hot, the sun beating down out of a cloudless sky, even the asphalt on the bridge getting soft underfoot.

It was the first time he had been in the house in years, the first time he had been in his father's bedroom ever. His father lay on his back, his face skeletal and white, his mouth half open, his hand lying on the quilts, the fingers curled up like claws.

He had seen too many dead to be bothered by one more, and he could think of nothing to make him sorrowful for this one. From all those years, he could not remember one act of kindness or generosity, no matter how small, that this man had ever performed for anybody.

But his mother and Alice were weeping.

“You never made it up,” Alice said.

“No. And neither would he unless I wanted to go back there and work for him for nothing.”

“Well,” Alice said.

She turned away from the table, abruptly, and he sensed her irritation.

“My cookies are gonna be burnin' up,” she said.

She went out, and he followed her, and sat down again at the table, wondering whether he should not now get away, but held there by some need or other—perhaps some such craziness as a notion that just by talking to Alice, he could take them back to that fork in the road of time where they could make the turn towards the lives they ought to have had.

He watched her pull the cookie sheet with the peanut butter cookies out of the oven and replace it with another.

“There wasn't any need for him to take you out of school,” he said, abruptly, without having made any decision that he was going to say it, the craziness taking him over as if he were a ventriloquist's dummy. “You could have gone to high school and done just fine.”

“Mamma needed the help. You know that.”

“No, she didn't. It was him. He wanted everyone to be as ignorant as he was, sitting around with his god-damned Bible laying down the law as if he were God himself.”

“That's no way to talk about him. Anyway it was a long time ago.”

She unloaded the cookie sheet and went back to the frosting in the double boiler.

“There wasn't any need for him to take me out of school either,” Maclean said.

“They needed you too. On the farm.”

“For six months, there wasn't anything I couldn't do in two hours after school. The rest of the year he could have hired somebody.”

“I don't suppose he had the money.”

“He had all of Mamma's money that she got from her father. And that wasn't all. Uncle Andrew told Mamma that he would pay to hire a man so I could stay in school.”

Alice stopped stirring.

“Who told you that?”

“Aunt Elizabeth. After the war. After Andrew died. She told me herself. She said that Andrew got Mamma to tell him, and he wouldn't hear of it. Andrew even went over himself, and Father ordered him out of the house. It didn't have anything to do with money.”

“I never heard that. Anyway, you still got a good job when you left the farm.”

“It didn't last long.”

Alice carried the top of a double boiler over to the table and began frosting a cake that had been sitting there under a glass cover.

“You could have got another job if you'd tried,” she said. “The trouble with you is that you always thought you were too good for an ordinary job.”

She looked at him over her shoulder, closely again, at the bruise on his forehead, and all over him, clothes, hands, everything. He could see that she was beginning to simmer, and he could feel the conversation sliding relentlessly towards familiar ground. He knew for sure that the time had come when he should get up and leave, but he didn't.

“I worked at lots of ordinary jobs. Try peeling pulp sometime.”

“You worked at ordinary jobs just long enough to get yourself some money to get drunk on. You'd have been better off if they hadn't given you no pension at all. Then maybe you'd have had to get yourself some kind of steady job and stick to it or starve. You could still get some kind of light work like carpenter work and get some kind of decent wage and live a decent life.”

“There isn't any decent life,” he said.

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing.”

“You can't even talk sense,” she said, and she went back to frosting her cake, scraping the frosting out of the bowl, spreading it on the cake with jerky, furious little movements, her lips pursed tight.

He sat with his elbows on the table and looked at her. Her fat, corpse-white legs with their great blotches and wriggling varicose veins. Her fat, corpse-white arms. Her fat neck with a fold and a ring where it met the fat of her back. The straggly hair like a mop someone had stood up in a corner. The sweat spreading down the back of her dress. The whole, great shapeless hulk of her hunched over the table. If anything, she looked worse than he did.

I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high o'er vales and hills.

“You should have married Harry Noles,” he said.

“What?” she said. “What? I didn't hear.”

“I said you should have married Harry Noles. You should just have walked out.”

”Harry was killed in the war, you know that. What are you talkin' about?”

“I mean before the war. You let Father drive him out. You just gave in. You should have walked out and lived your own life.”

“I told you. They needed the help, him and Mamma.”

“Bullshit.”

“Don't you talk like that in my house. And what's the sense of bringin' all this stuff up after all these years?”

“You could have walked out and gone to Uncle Andrew's place and gone to high school and married Harry and had a good life.”

“I do have a good life. Mitch is a good man. I have nice children. And grandchildren. You ain't got no right to talk against Mitch. We ain't never wanted for anything we needed. Not never. Why do you come here and bring all this up again. There ain't no sense to it. It just makes me upset, and then my heart goes funny. The doctor said I shouldn't get myself upset over things. What's the sense of all this? What's the sense?”

“There isn't any sense.”

“Look at you. With your face all bruised up, scroungin' around the streets and alleys and fightin' and gettin' yourself put in jail and livin' like some kind of wild animal. Mitch is worth ten of you.”

It always ended up like this. What had he come here for? The Black Rock. The fighting. The old school. The dying maple with its banner of flame. But earlier too. Even that morning. Someone, something, sneaking past the sentries he had posted, had thrown wide the gates of memory.

Alice started to cry.

“Why do you come here?” she wailed.

He walked as fast as he could down the gravel road. A quarter of a mile from Alice's place, it passed through another little patch of woods, then emerged onto a more civilized road that ran above the creek and back to the centre of town. The little valley the creek ran through broadened out here into a wide stretch of interval land, hot now in the sun, with yellow hayfields and fringes of trees along the creek and the little purdues that cut into the flat land. Off towards the far side of the valley, a hay wagon drawn by two horses was moving slowly away, and just below him two boys were fishing in a little square-nosed punt.

Once when he was in hospital in England before they decided he was no longer healthy enough to be killed, some English ladies, one of the groups that turned up to do something for the boys, took a dozen of them to a great house in the country. It was summer and fine for a change, and they all went bouncing along in a pair of funny, tall little buses with wooden sides.

In one of the rooms of the house, there was an enormous painting of a countryside with a little stream and great oak trees and cattle wading and drinking and a wagon just making its way down to a ford in the stream and flat distances with fences and trees disappearing in a haze of sunlight. While the others were touring the house, he sat on a fancy sofa and looked and looked, imagining himself stepping into the picture and wandering off across those fields.

After a while one of the ladies who had brought them, a little gray-haired lady dressed all in black, came up to him and asked, “Feeling a little tired, Private Maclean?”

“Yes,” he said. “A little.”

She stood looking at the picture, and then as if reading his thought she said, “It's beautiful, isn't it. It makes you want to walk away from all this and never come back.”

9

“DID YOU KNOW,”
Henry said, “that in fifteen years every cell in your body dies and a new cell gets put in its place?”

“No,” Maclean said. “No, I didn't know that.”

“That's right,” Henry said. “There ain't one cell in your body that was there fifteen years ago.”

“Is that so?” Maclean said. “Well, well.”

“It makes you wonder what goes on makin' you the same person, don't it?” Henry said. “I guess it must be the soul.”

“And what if you don't have any soul?” Maclean asked.

“You have to have a soul,” Henry said. “It just stands to reason.”

“Like God.”

“That's right. Like God.”

Not five o'clock yet and the shadows from the elm trees behind the house were already across the road and into the grass on the other side. The summer was dying. After many a summer dies the swan. Man comes and tills the fields and where is he? Alfred Lloyd Tennyson, one of the class dumbbells said. Everybody laughed. Not Lloyd, Mr. Dingley, Mr. Raymond said. Lord. Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Queen Victoria made him a Lord because he was a great poet.

“The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,” Maclean said.

“Poetry?” Henry asked.

“Yes,” Maclean said.

“You still read poetry,” Henry said. “That's wonderful.”

“It was in an old school reader.”

“I was never any good at poetry,” Henry said. “Most of the time I just couldn't make any sense out of it.”

“It don't matter,” Maclean said. “It'll put the right words in your head sometimes, but it don't change anything much.”

He had a pain in his shoulder and a general sense of aches all over. The fight at the Black Rock had hurt him worse than he thought. But there was always a pain somewhere, and he got so used to it that if he didn't have one somewhere he would wonder what was wrong with him.

After supper, he would go up town and get the present and take it up to his mother and come back and go to bed and have a good sleep and tomorrow, he would take it easy all day just sitting out here watching the clouds and the river go by and listening to Henry telling him about mankind and the history of the world. The fishhawk was back, circling high up above the river, slowly without effort, tipping a wing, sliding away, riding up again. Soon, he would be going south to wherever they went for the winter. The woods decay, the woods decay and fall.

Miss Audrey Sweet came out, and Henry got up and gave her his wicker chair and moved over and sat on the wooden bench along the end of the verandah. She had changed out of her work clothes into a bright print dress, and she had got her wiry hair combed into some kind of order and pinned a little, flat felt hat to the top of it and put on some rouge and perfume. On Saturday night, she always went to the service at the Salvation Army chapel.

She looked at the river and the hills and the sky with its white clouds and the fishhawk. Her pale blue eyes behind her glasses were bright the way a child's are bright, and she smiled as she took in one by one these wonders of the afternoon.

“Now isn't this all just beautiful,” she said.

She was always cheerful. But she wasn't cheerful the way Henry was cheerful. Henry was cheerful because it was his nature. Miss Audrey was cheerful because she couldn't afford to let herself not be. Once in the middle of the night, Maclean had gone downstairs to the bathroom because someone was in the one upstairs. As he went by her room, he noticed that the door was ajar and in the light from the outside he could just make out the shape of her kneeling there in the darkness beside her bed. He wondered about her getting up to pray that time of night, but as he broke step just for a second passing the door, he could hear that she wasn't praying but sobbing.

“God's in his heaven,” Maclean said. “All's right with the world.”

“That's just the truth, Mr. Maclean,” Miss Audrey said.

In her room, Mrs. Fraser was lying looking up at the ceiling. Maclean slipped past and unlocked his door and stepped quietly inside and closed the door behind him. He sat down on his bed, tired and still conscious of the pain in his shoulder. He took out his change purse and poured the five remaining coins out into his palm. A dime with the new king on it, a nickel and three pennies with old King George V, whom he had seen once a long way off when he came to Salisbury to review the old First Division. Enough for a pack of tailor-made Turrets and a package of tobacco. And he could keep back twenty-five of the seventy-five he had hidden.

He got up and quietly pulled out the drawer of his dresser and fished out the brown envelope. He took out the ration book with his liquor coupons and looked into the bottom of the envelope.

There was nothing there.

He tried to think. Sometimes he forgot things. Sometimes he thought he had done things that he hadn't done. Or found that he had done things that he didn't remember doing. But he remembered the beer bottles and working for Jim and getting the extra fifty cents and coming back with it all, not being anywhere that anybody could have picked it off him. He had put it there and no doubt, and someone had got into his room and stolen it. He felt his rage building and told himself that he had to keep calm and think.

Who? Who could have got in? The door was locked. But Drusilla's fat daughters came in to clean. They would have all the time in the world to search the room. Or Walter. Any old skeleton key would open that lock. Walter didn't work on Saturday afternoons. He could have slipped in and searched. There weren't many places in a room like this where you could hide things, and now he saw that it had been stupid to put money in a place like that. Anyone searching the room would think almost first thing of looking under the drawers. He should have known that. Stupid. He should have given the money to Henry to keep for him.

As he thought about it, he realized the girls wouldn't have dared. They would be too afraid of Drusilla. The boys down the hall wouldn't do it. And not Henry, not ever, not if he were starving to death. It had to be Walter Haynes. God damn him, the pig-faced son of a whore.

He found himself walking up and down the room, back and forth between the window and the door like a crazy man. Like the crazy men in the hospital back of Ypres. He was even talking out loud to himself. Shovels, one man kept saying as he stormed back and forth, ten paces one way, ten paces the other, but staring ahead all the time with a far look in his eyes, as if he was walking down a long, straight road towards some distant goal. Shovels. Shovels. Shovels.

“You not feelin' good,” Henry asked.

“No,” Maclean said. “Fine. Fine.”

He looked at the baked beans on his plate. Beans with thick slices of fresh porkside. And brown bread. Maclean liked beans and brown bread, especially the bread. But his appetite was gone.

The MacDonald boys weren't eating much either. They'd had all afternoon to think about Alex getting his call, and they weren't saying anything, and nobody liked to ask them anything. Nobody, that is, except Walter.

“So when d'ya go off to Fredericton,” he asked Alex.

“Wednesday,” Alex said. “Next Wednesday.”

“You goin' too then?” Walter asked Doug.

“I don't know,” Doug said. “I ain't really decided.”

Anyone who wasn't as chicken-brained as Walter could see that Alex didn't want to go off by himself and that Doug didn't want to go, not yet anyway, and that to haul it up at the supper table in front of everybody was putting Doug on the spot.

Maclean had been watching Walter, and whenever his eyes met Walter's, Walter looked away, not too fast, but he always looked away. It was him who took the money. No doubt about it. If he knew he could get away with it, Maclean could have killed him.

Some of the boys did that once in France. His name was Blanstock. A replacement. By that time, most of them were replacements. From somewere in northern Ontario. He stole. Stuff people had got from home, anything. And he didn't even pretend not to because he felt sure he could beat the hell out of anybody in the company who tried to take him on. He even stole a boy's boots because his had got a cut in one of them. Prove it, Blanstock said. Prove it. And he was all ready to beat the boy up. Harper. That was the boy's name. He'd only just got there, and he was killed a couple of weeks later by a sniper, still wearing the old boot with the cut in it that Blanstock had left him.

Blanstock never got it into his head that this wasn't any northern Ontario lumber camp. So one night when the shells were coming down in one's and two's just to make life miserable, he was in a party going back through a communication trench, and the boys let him get around a corner into the next leg of the trench by himself and took the pin out and rolled a grenade after him. And what with the shelling, nobody knew the difference. Or pretended they didn't anyway.

It was funny, Maclean thought, how the same people keep re-appearing over and over again. Blanstock. Willie. This son of a whore Haynes. As if God, or nature, or whoever, didn't have much imagination when it came to making people instead of birds and animals.

He looked at the MacDonald boys and wondered what he should say to Doug, if he were going to say anything—which he wasn't. Stay out of it? Or stick with your pal? He would go. He was that sort. And they would both get themselves killed because they were that sort. And that's why wars go on getting fought. Because the world is full of people like the MacDonald boys, who go because they're dumb and stick it out because they don't want to let down their pals. Somewhere up there, well out of danger in their offices and clubs, well above the mud, the blood, and the shit, there were people who understood that.

Maclean hiked once more down the road towards town. There was still sunlight on the tops of the hills, but the valley bottom was in shadow, and in eastward facing windows a few lights were coming on. A radio was playing cowboy music somewhere and somewhere someone was playing “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny” on a piano.

Half way to the railroad bridge, he swung off the road up a steep little street to the tracks and then along between the main line and a siding, his boots grinding and slithering in the loose clinkers. His mind was still racing, and his heart too. Someday it would get him. The gas has weakened your heart, the doctor said to him from on high, and it has to work harder because your lungs are bad. Light work would be best. A store maybe. Perhaps you know somebody.

As he walked, keeping a lookout for bottles, his eyes took in the familiar scene. Weathered, gray loading sheds with rusting metal signs for chicken feed and flour. Weeds. Clinkers. Broken glass. An old newspaper. Lying curled up between the rails of the siding, a freshly dead rat that must have got poisoned in one of the feed sheds and made it that far in its search for water before the poison got to it. Sparrows hopping around in the clinkers looking for bits of dropped grain. Along the roof trees of the sheds, lines of well-fed pigeons fluttering and fussing. Wurble. Wurble. Wurble. No bottles. And none of the boys either. Too early. Too light. The whole place deserted except for himself and the pigeons and the sparrows and the dead rat.

Carefully, down the middle between the rails, placing one foot deliberately after the other, skipping one tie each time, he made his way out onto the railway bridge, looking down now and then in spite of himself between the ties to where the water swirled and eddied among the rocks, spreading out, finding its way again after pouring through the sluice gates of the little dam the town had built to keep the water level up in the hot summer months. Above the dam, the water was as smooth as a mirror, reflecting the red light of the declining sun, and on the bridge by the square, men were leaning on the rails talking while the steady flow of Saturday night traffic moved back and forth behind them.

He glanced ahead. He had a couple of dozen more ties to go before he reached the centre span of the bridge with its waist-high steel trusses. The unprotected sheer drop off the sides of the two end spans always made him nervous, as if somehow it had the power to call to some hidden assassin inside himself who would draw him over to the edge and down. As he approached the centre span, he began counting down what he guessed to be the remaining ties. Sixteen. Fourteen. Twelve.

Suddenly, without so much as a preliminary flutter, a flock of pigeons burst upwards from their perches underneath the bridge and wheeled around him, their wings almost brushing his face. He threw up one arm, and his heel came down in the space between the ties. He fought to keep his balance, found it, and at the same instant heard the ticking of the rails that signaled an approaching train. He looked up and saw the smoke billowing up above the coal sheds along the curve off the end of the bridge. The train whistled, sounding almost on top of him already. It would have whistled twice already for crossings further up, and he hadn't heard either one, still lost in his furious calculations about how to replace his stolen money.

That's how it always happened, one day when they were thinking about something else and their head stayed up at a gap between the sandbags and the sniper was waiting with the gap in his sights, supernaturally alert and infinitely patient.

He stood frozen. He didn't have time to get back off the bridge before the train got to him. All he could do was try to make the centre span. Fighting his panic, still keeping to the middle between the rails away from the drop over the side, trying to put his feet down solidly on the ties, taking just one at a time now, short and quick, he made his way. Eight. Seven. Six. Jesus. The engine appeared around the end of the coal shed, coming fast. It blew again, and the sound nearly took him off his feet. He reached the centre span and got out from between the rails, imagining himself at the last second catching his foot sideways between the ties and being held there. He wouldn't have been the first person to have been killed on that bridge, taking a short cut to town and eternity or oblivion or wherever.