Spit Delaney's Island (12 page)

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.”

It passed through his mind to tell her she had no business going against
his wishes when it came to bringing up the boy. But he was a strange kid
anyway, and Gerry had always been uncomfortable with children. It was
easier to let her do what she wanted with him.

When April went across to George Smith's wedding (his second) and
took Jimmy and the baby with her, he knew she would not be coming
back. He wasn't surprised when she didn't get off the Sunday evening
ferry. He didn't even bother watching the ferries coming in during the next
week. The only surprise was the sight of Aunt Nora getting out of a taxi
the following weekend and throwing herself into the leather armchair in
Gerry's living room.

“My God,” she said. “It looks as if you could walk across in fifteen minutes but that damn ferry takes for ever.”

“Where's April?” he said.

The wedding, she told him, was lovely. Because it was George's second
the girl didn't try to make it into too much of a thing, but just as many
people turned out for it as for his first. “He's got a real dandy this time,”
she said. “He's not going to want to spend so much time at his precious
pulp mill when he's got this one waiting at home. She's got outdoor teeth
of course, but still she is pretty!”

Gerry said George's first wife hadn't been much to look at, but then
George was no prize himself.

Then, suddenly, Aunt Nora said, “I think she'll be asking you for a
legal separation.”

“Who?” he said, stupidly.

“I told her she could live with me. There's too much room in that old
house for one person. I'll enjoy the company. I remember Dad saying if a
Macken couldn't count on one of his own relatives in times of trouble, who
could he count on? That little boy of yours is going to look just like him.”
She stood up and took off her coat and laid it over the back of her chair.
Then she took a cigarette out of her purse and lit it and sat down again.

“If you want to come back with me and try to patch it up, that's all
right.”

“Patch what up?” he said. “We haven't even had a fight.”

But she acted as if she hadn't heard. “I'll tell you something, Gerry,
you've got spunk. Maybe you're the only real Macken in the whole kaboodle.”

“Ha.”

“And if you and April patch it up, if you want to live on the farm, that's
all right with me too.”

“Why should I want to live there?”

“It's the family homestead,” she said, as if it was something he might
have forgotten. “It's where your grandfather started out. Where the family began.”

Gerry grunted and went to the refrigerator to get himself a bottle of beer.

“Well, somebody will have to take it over some day,” she said. “You can
see what's happened to the farm with just an old maid living on it. He
never should have left it to me in the first place. Except, of course, it's the
best place for holding family get-togethers and I know if it was left to anyone else they'd never get done.”

“Look,” he said. “You got her and my two kids. Three for one. That
sounds like a pretty good trade to me.”

“I just can't believe you don't care about those children,” Aunt Nora
said. “Those two little boys. No Macken has ever abandoned his own children. It doesn't seem natural.”

“Natural,” Gerry Mack said, and tilted up his beer.

But when she caught the morning ferry home he did not go with her.
In fact, he was to make only one more visit to the Island, and that would
not be until two years later when he attended his son's funeral. Aunt Nora
phoned him in the middle of the day to say the boy had drowned in a
swimming accident. The Immediate Family was at the funeral, four hundred or so of them, standing all over the graveyard where Mackens were
buried. He'd sat beside April in the chapel but when they got to the graveside she seemed to be surrounded by relatives and he was left alone, on the
far side of the ugly hole where they were putting his son. Aunts and cousins
were weeping openly, but April in their midst stared straight ahead with
her jaw set like stone. She appeared then to have lost all of the slump that
was once in her back. Even her mousey brown hair seemed to have taken
on more life. When their eyes met she nodded in a way that might have
been saying “Thank you” or might have been only a dismissal, or could
perhaps have been simply acknowledging that she had noticed his, a
stranger's, presence.

Aunt Nora, afterwards, cornered him in her little living room. She
seemed smaller now, slightly stooped, getting old. There were deep lines
in her face. “Now,” she said. “Now do you see where your place is? Now
do you see where you belong?”

He turned, tried to find someone to rescue him.

“This whole farm, Gerry, it's yours. Just move here, stay here where
you belong.”

And it was April who rescued him after all. She came into the room
swiftly, her eyes darting with the quick concern of a hostess making sure
everything was going well. “Oh Nora!” she said. “Uncle Morris was asking for you. I promised I'd take you to him.”

When the old woman stood up to leave, April let her gaze flicker momentarily over him. Her complexion against the black dress looked nearly
ivory. Beautiful skin. She would be a beautiful woman yet. “George Smith
was wondering where you were,” she said. “I told him I thought you'd
already gone home.”

For several years after that Aunt Nora visited the mainland every summer to report to Gerry on his wife and remaining son and to tell him all
about the weddings and reunions he'd missed. April, she told him, had
taken over the last reunion completely, did all the planning and most of
the work. And some people on the Island were listening to him again she
said, now that he was only reading the news, once a day.