The Long Stretch (11 page)

“You’ve changed things a lot since she was here,” Sextus says.

“Yes.”

“So how long did she live here before you guys, you know…”

“Got married?”

“Yeah,” he says.

“I don’t know. Couple of years.”

Ma went out to Squint’s spring ’65. Then herself moved in here. Early summer.

“Seems to me Christmas ’66 you spent at our place. Or some of it,” he says, winking.

“She was here,” I say. “I couldn’t very well.”

“Absolutely,” he says. “No shacking up in those days.”

Grandma was gone by then.

According to the letters, Effie and Grandma were getting along great. “She wants to talk Gaelic all the time,” she wrote. “It’s nice. Makes me think of Mom though I hardly remember her now.” She can call her mother Mom because she never knew her. If she’d known her longer it would be more natural. Like Ma or Mama. She was free of Angus but, according to the letters, he was dropping in unexpectedly from time to time. Always sober, she assured me. “Seems to have cleaned up his act a little bit. Grandma has a good effect on him. He’s afraid of her. Like everybody else. But she has a heart like you wouldn’t believe. She always insists he eat with us when he’s here. Duncan doing well in the Sem.”

Things become a blur after the summer of ’65. Jack and I in Bachelor Lake. The drinking became habitual there. Not a problem, at least not compared to most of the other fellows there. Not like later. But looking back from now, Jack and I, pretty well every day, after work. And on weekends, a lot.

Millie has this theory: In some people, the life spirit dominates; in others, it’s the death spirit. Or they alternate. Then one day the death spirit says, “Enough.” “Then she pulls the plug,” says Millie.

Looking back on those days in Bachelor Lake, I can see the death spirit already taking hold of Uncle Jack. The way she claimed my old man. Only Angus seemed exempted from her attentions.

Effie wrote: “I think something happened during the war. Something that involved them, together. There are different stories. I talk to your grandma about how different they were after. She said they were just ‘dear boys’ going away. Friends
with everybody. Then they came back, friends with nobody, except, eventually, when we moved over here, each other. I think Duncan knows more than he lets on.”

That letter was one of the things I got rid of after she left. I’ve never told her what I know.

Another letter. Late ’65, I think: “He landed here again the other night, drunk. Grandma put the run on him. Living with Grandma is so great. I think it’s the first time I can remember feeling safe.”

She had that right. Grandma made you feel safe. I think now Grandma was the only reason I survived with my head in one piece for as long as I did. She was tough and direct. Except for the clothes, she even had a mannish look. The way people get when they age naturally, men and women blending into one neutral gender. Like weathered hardwood. You didn’t mess with Grandma. Hard, she was. Yet you’d never be afraid of her.

Grandma once talked to me about when Ma and Pa got together, when he came home from the war. They were going out a bit before the war.

“They’d come home from the mines. You’d think they were from Boston, the clothes on them. On the go all the time. Hardly see a hair of them one end of the visit to the other. Except for the meals. It was like feeding the army.”

Ma said: “Before the war, they’d be at the dances. And we’d see them around. They were pretty conspicuous. The latest styles. Had an old car. We’d get a ride home. It was nothing serious.

“Then when he came home for good, after the war, I came up from Judique for the party in the hall. Everybody had heard Sandy’d been shot. Coming home. We were all curious. We expected everything to be like before. The old Sandy, full of fun and teasing. Then when I saw him, I just got this feeling.
He was pretty frail for a while. Then he’d come to the house, all the way down to Judique. And, well, I don’t know. We just eventually decided.”

I figured it out once that Ma and the old man had to get married because of me. She felt sorry for him. One thing leads to another. Before you know it there’s a bun in the oven. Those things don’t matter anymore but I suppose it was a bit tricky back then. You’d never ask her about something like that. Hard to imagine them the way they were. Especially my father. God forgive me, but it’s easier to picture her and Squint.

“Do you think you’d ever do it again?” he asks.

“Do what?”

“Tie the knot.”

“Ho-ho-ho,” I say.

Had this conversation with Millie once and she told me we’d be damned fools and I agreed.

“Sometimes I envy those who can,” he says. “I’m like yourself. Shouldn’t even have done it the first time. But there you are.”

He can think that if he wants to.

“Women are funny,” he says. “You first meet them, the sun rises on you. Can do no wrong. A fellow gets high on it. I swear…Then after you live with them for a while you realize you’re like anybody else. Familiarity and contempt. The two faces of matrimony.”

He lights another smoke.

“The trick is to get out before they get needy. That’s when everything gets sticky. Start looking for a relationship. That’s the big word now. Relationship.”

Then Grandma died.

Uncle Jack was coming along the drift. You could tell it was him by the light. Low. Hand-carried. And he always moved slowly and deliberately. No mistaking Uncle Jack. Accustomed to walking around in the dark. Spoke briefly to my partner, Proulx, a Frenchman who didn’t have much English. Signalled me to follow him for a bit. I did.

“Grandma’s gone,” he said.

“I shouldn’t have been surprised, that time I came home for Grandma’s funeral. I knew for sure Effie had something in mind for you.”

“Right,” I say. Uncomfortable.

“Struck me funny at first,” he says. “Off-putting. Like if you heard about a guy having a fling with your sister. Then I got a good look at her. Dolled up at the wake. She was really fond of you…You should never doubt that.”

“Hardly worth talking about now,” I say.

“In all the talking we’ve done, herself and me, she’s never said a negative thing about you. You’ve gotta believe that.”

I badly wanted to go to Grandma’s funeral.

“So I suppose I should go along too,” I said to Uncle Jack. “Poor Grandma.” Thinking of Effie.

“I don’t think so,” Jack said. “We’re way behind here. Counting on you and Prunes there to drive another couple of hundred feet in the next two weeks. You two manage that and you can get a good break at Christmas.”

“It surprised me, the way she’d become one of the family already. If there had been any doubt in my mind…But you came at Christmas. That would have been ’66.”

He’s waiting for me to respond.

“You stayed at our place a lot,” he says. “For appearances.”

I feel the heat in my face.

“Didn’t fool anybody, of course,” he says, smiling softly. “Creeping in at daylight. You kept forgetting that creaky stair. Fifth from the top. I had that one cased for years. Ma knew when you were getting in. You rascal.” He’s smiling broadly.

“Ma figured it looked queer for Effie to stay on in the house after Grandma. But they decided it should be up to you. And of course your ma, Aunt Mary, thought she should stay. Keep the pipes from freezing. Don’t remember you raising any objection.”

“There were other factors,” I say.

“I betcha,” he says. “She kept
your
pipes from freezing that Christmas.”

That’s all he can think about.

I told myself I was protecting her from Angus.

“He sneaks around over here too,” she said to me.

“I’d like to catch him at it.”

You wouldn’t think we were talking about her father.

“If it isn’t too much trouble for you,” I said, “I think we’d all
appreciate it—me and Ma anyway—if you’d stay on here. At least until the summer.”

Of course come summer ’67 we were talking about getting married.

“Women are fundamentally needy,” Sextus says. “Of course you can’t say that anymore in mixed company. Even a lot of guys will get all huffy if you talk like that. Sensitive types. Make me want to barf. Women aren’t happy unless things are changing.”

“There are lots of good women,” I say. Thinking of Grandma. Ma. Jessie. Millie. Lots more good ones than the other kind, in my experience.

“Only woman you can live with is a woman who likes things the way they are. Or who’s got enough clout to change things.”

“You’re over my head,” I say.

“Not when you think about it.” He splashes more rum in his glass. “It only takes one frustrated woman to make a cock-up of everything.”

The first person I told we were thinking about getting married was Jack. Still in Bachelor Lake. Past the two-year mark by 1967.

“Thinking of tying the knot,” I said.

He got that look on his face. Same one that came over him every time her name came up.

“Well, that’s great,” he said, fishing for his pack of smokes. “When?”

“Next summer,” I said.

“Fellow’ll have to start getting ready for that.”

Not asking when I’d be leaving.

Weeks later he asked: “You got a date yet?”

I said, “Duncan is getting ordained in the spring. We’re figuring on having him do it maybe in June. Around the middle.”

“Let me know,” he said. “I’ll be going. If I’m invited.”

Laughed at that.

That fall they made Jack underground captain, so he moved into the staff house. He could have lived in the staff house all along because he was a shift boss. But he chose to live with me in the bunkhouse. But things were changing. Distance opening up. And would continue to open up, even after he moved home, fall of ’69. Something to do with me marrying Effie MacAskill. Making a Gillis of her.

It took a long time for him to get around to telling me. And when he did nothing would ever be the same again.

“The
tihng
is,” Jack says, “a fellow never knows what you have to know or want to know. You know?”

Studying a spot on the table between us. In Ikey’s place at Bachelor Lake. It’s late. Everybody else gone and Mrs. Ikey giving us the eye. He’s been rambling on about the early days in northern Quebec. Bourlamaque. Cadillac. East Malartic. Amos. Noranda. Good times, hungry times.

Ikey sitting with us for part of the evening, telling stories about prospecting. How he staked the Royal York Hotel in Toronto during a prospectors’ convention once. Laughing his
head off. Me and Jack wondering what the Royal York Hotel was all about. Ikey leaves us alone then.

Jack crushes his cigarette as if he’s finished for the night.

“Poor Sandy. And Angus.”

Shakes his head, thinking hard about something.

“But it doesn’t seem to be a problem between you and his young one,” he says.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say. Feeling something in my gut.

Picks up his bottle, lifts it to his mouth, and empties it. Burps loudly. Making up his mind.

“One thing I always gave your dad credit for. Putting a lot behind him like he did. Except maybe when he’d have too much to drink.”

“Putting what behind him?”

He shrugs, avoiding my eyes.

“Wait now,” I hear myself say. “Are we talking about…”

He sighs. “I imagine we are,” he says.

He pulls a package of tobacco and papers from his shirt pocket and begins to roll a cigarette. When it’s packed, he runs the fine pink point of his tongue along the glued edge of the paper and with his large, rough yellowed fingers smooths the cigarette carefully. Then points it at me.

“I’d just say this, then. If your dad was man enough to put something like that behind him, then there’s not much that any of us have to complain about.”

I wait.

“It was just something that happened. Nobody will ever know why. Probably just an accident.”

I say, “Just tell me straight. How did my father get hurt in the war?”

He lights the cigarette and when the flare dies from the end says: “Angus shot him.”

Early seventies, a year or so after Angus died, Duncan came to see me. I was living alone. Here, on the Long Stretch. It was on an Easter Sunday. I remember that. You could smell the booze on his breath. He’d been working hard through Holy Week in Hawkesbury.

He asked if it was okay to come in. I figured it was about Effie. He had a bottle of Glenfiddich. I declined.

Of course he wasn’t here to talk about Effie at all. He was here to talk about my old man. And about his, really. Beating around the bush. Me with the upper hand, knowing just about the whole story of our fathers by then, but him not knowing what I knew. He was writing something about the war and his father, and seemed to want to clear things with me.

Nothing to clear up, far as I was concerned.

“Actually there could be,” he said.

“Not really,” I said.

“The day Sandy got shot,” he said. “Overseas. Do you believe they actually were together?”

“What’s the difference?” I said, testing him.

“Your father wasn’t shot in Germany. He was shot in Holland.”

“Germany, Holland,” I said. “Hardly made much difference to his skull.”

He poured half a water glass full of the Glenfiddich.

“You heard about the sniper,” I said.

He looked at me with that look priests learn.

“People don’t realize,” he said finally, “how unlikely it was that they could have been together. At any time during the war.” He studied his glass for what seemed like a long time. “But, somehow, it happened. Them together. By some fluke. No doubt about that part.”

I nodded, waiting.

“And the sniper? The letters you gave me back…when. One is quite explicit. A sniper. He states it unequivocally. And I’ve confirmed what he said, what Dad said, about shrapnel and snipers being the greatest dangers. In Holland. In April of ’45.

“But I guess the real point is, nobody knows anything for sure. And in a few years there won’t be anybody left to speculate from any first-hand knowledge.”

“I guess that’s one thing we know for certain,” I said.

“And in the long run, what does any of this really mean?”

He stood then, studied me for a moment, his face weary. “Effie’s well,” he said. “And always asks about you. I hear from them, of course.” Studying me with a hint of apology. “He’s still my friend. She’s my sister.”

I was just watching.

“I don’t approve,” he said. “But I believe the situation calls for…compassion.”

I nodded again.

“Compassion,” he said, “is a…quality…that defines true…holiness. For the living. And for the dead.”

He wanted eye contact. But I couldn’t.

“God bless you,” he said finally, raising a limp hand. Gesturing, the way they do.

Shortly after that visit he disappeared for a couple of years. Went to Honduras to do mission work. And maybe to dry out. Finished his little memorial about the war down there.

We lost track of each other after that. Until recently.

In the book
The Day They Killed Kennedy,
the character who is me says to a priest, “Maturity begins at the moment you know that everything you’ve learned up to then is probably a lie. Including this.”

The priest, who is a nice post-Vatican II guy, probably Duncan, says: “There is much to be hopeful about in the word ‘probably.’”

The main character in the story is a schoolteacher, the father of the troubled character who everybody thinks is me. This teacher is an unhappy fellow who, because of teaching about the Second World War, becomes obsessed with it. Gets the kids interviewing local guys who were in it. One of the kids gets all screwed up over a story some local guy tells him. The guy is full of anger and bitterness about the Germans. Turns out this kid’s mother is a German lady, married to one of the Swedish newcomers working at the new pulp mill. The kid has a crisis. The teacher gets involved. Then gets mixed up with the German wife. Et cetera, et cetera. Old story. Big affair. Inner conflicts. Then people find out. He kills himself. November 22, 1963. Exactly at the moment Kennedy is being killed in Dallas. The place is still old-fashioned, in spite of the new mill. Superstitious about suicide. All the time the story is going on, nobody can say the word
suicide
or speak directly about what the teacher character did. They refer to everything heavy as
“the day they killed Kennedy.” The end. Got pretty steamy in places. Everybody wondering where he got all that stuff. Looking at me funny. Coming out only five or six years after the old man did what he did, the day they killed Kennedy. It hit Uncle Jack really hard. The book itself was neither here nor there. But what happened to Jack—that, I couldn’t forgive.