Maclean (13 page)

He stopped on the sidewalk in front of the gun and looked up at it. In front of the shield on either side of the barrel were narrow metal seats with foot rests where two of the gunners could sit when the gun was being towed, although the seats must, he thought, have been damned hard on the ass.

He looked around. The street was deserted, the houses all dark. He walked up the slope of the lawn, mounted the concrete platform, and heaved himself up onto one of the seats on the gun. It was damned hard on the ass, but maybe they folded up their greatcoats and used them as cushions.

He wondered where the gun had been captured and imagined the gunners lying dead around it, along some road maybe where the shells had caught them, or in a field scythed clean by a machine gun, or in the bottom of a gun pit where the gas had collected.

It was too bad about the McIntyre boy who wouldn't be coming home, as some people so delicately put it, stepping with averted gaze around the reality of what would have happened. But maybe none of them had ever come home. Maybe only their ghosts had come home, as some poet had said. Maybe one way or another, quick or slow, they had all died of their wounds. And maybe that wasn't so different, after all, from the way life happened for everybody. Maybe the whole thing was a war, leaving behind its trail of dead and wounded, its trail of sad ghosts haunting the ruins of their lives. In his kind of war, it had happened a lot quicker than in what they call peace, condensing into a few months what otherwise took decades, but peace or war, it happened all the same.

He thought of Mrs. Fraser who had no doubt once loved and begotten in joy, now lying in her bed, looking up at the ceiling, waiting for death, of Miss Audrey Sweet who had once loved, as the saying went, not wisely but too well, of Alice who had once recited Wordsworth to Harry Noles, of Miss Mazerole who had once seen Paris, of Legs who had once danced and played the banjo, of Ellie who had once sung “Rock of Ages,” of Henry, having fled his unprofitable farm, sitting out at night on the rock with his telescope studying the stars and wondering what the hell it was all about.

And, of course, always and everywhere, high up and low down, there were the bastards, the ones you could only get away from by sneaking off for an hour or two to some hidden, little corner like Ellie's place. That's the way it always had been and that's the way it always would be. So fuck it.

He took out the pony with the last of the rum, unscrewed the cap, and took a sip, rolling the rum around in his mouth, savouring the warm sweetness those far-away, tropical islands had imbued it with. Past the lighthouse, past the nunbuoy, past the crimson, rising sun.

He placed the bottle carefully in the corner of the seat behind him and sat on, letting the warmth spread. He could have gone to sleep sitting there, and every couple of minutes, he told himself he had better get up and go before he did fall asleep. And before someone saw him and called the police and had him thrown in the jug because it wasn't considered good for the well-being of society that a man with a bottle should be sitting on an old field gun thinking about life in the middle of the night.

After another quarter of an hour, he roused himself. He unscrewed the cap of his bottle and drank the last of the rum. He let it find its way and when it had, climbed sleepily down off the gun, the bottle still in one hand, the cap in the other. He studied them carefully, then screwed the cap back on the bottle and popped it into the barrel of the gun.

He picked his way across the lawn to the cenotaph and walked around it twice, very slowly, looking at the long columns of names on the black tablets. He knew where every name was of the boys who had been his pals. Robert Cronk. Charles Simpson. Henry Noles. William Sperry. Frank Gallagher. Daniel McGrath. Ebenezer Watson. Edward McDade. Here. Here. Here. All present and accounted for.

He ran his fingers over the engraved names of Bob and Harry like a man reading braile.

They shall not grow old, the dignitaries at Remembrance Day were fond of intoning, as we that are left grow old. Age shall not weary them nor the years condemn. And so forth.

At the foot of the steps up to the cenotaph, he turned and waved a sloppy, limp-wristed good night to the soldier on top, then set off on the last leg of his walk home.

Main Street was deserted, not a car, not a soul anywhere. A streetlight hung on a metal cable over the intersection where the Salvation Army band had played and the policeman had stood directing traffic. Two more lights on poles stood on either side of the square at the bottom of the street making pools of light in which floated the litter cast away by the Saturday night crowds.

Just below the post office, he stepped off the curb onto the street, stumbled a little, righted himself, and began to march, first close to the sidewalk, then out and straight down the middle, his arms swinging wider and wider arcs as he passed the store windows and the darkened displays. Cascades of apples and new potatoes flowing out of artfully tipped baskets. A smooth slope of green where the jewels of Marathon MacClewan had been spread. A poster with a picture of Wilf Carter in a white ten-gallon hat smiling toothily above a pile of records. Whole roomfuls of furniture. Gatherings of immaculately dressed dummies, important gents in double-breasted suits, elegant ladies in their autumn dresses, staring glassily at each other, sightless and serene.

He glanced at them indifferently as he passed. He was elsewhere now. Slowly out of the great gulf of the past, the boys took shape around him. Bob, Frank, and Harry. Dan. Bill. Charlie. All just the way they had been before the bad things started to happen, swinging along in the close-packed, khaki lines of the old battalion, marching at ease, their rifles slung on their shoulders, the peaked caps tipped back, the sun streaming down, the band playing.

As he approached the square, he began to hum to himself in strict march time and then to sing.

Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag
And smile, smile, smile,
While you've a lucifer to light your fag,
Smile, boys, that's the style.

In an upstairs window above a store, a large man in his undershirt with his braces hanging loose stared down at him, then slowly drew down the blind.

ALLAN DONALDSON WAS
born in Taber, Alberta, but grew up in Woodstock, New Brunswick, shiretown of a county that was settled overwhelmingly by Irish and Scots, among whom were ancestors going back to the early nineteenth century. As a child, he became well acquainted with the street life of the town. In his teens, he had summer jobs wheeling cement, tamping ties and laying steel on the railway, working on a rock crusher and an asphalt plant, and operating a jack-hammer. On scholarships, he studied English literature at the University of New Brunswick and the University of London, and he spent a teaching career in the English Department at the University of New Brunswick. He is the author of a novel,
The Case Against Owen Williams
,
and a book of short stories,
Paradise Siding
.