The Long Stretch (16 page)

“You don’t know ‘euphemism’?” Sextus says. “Think Euphemia or Faye. Synonym for deception.” Euphemia. Effie’s real name.

“The day they killed Kennedy really meant the day Sandy…you see. It’s hard to say. Even for me. Killed himself.”

“That’s bullshit,” I say quickly. We’re not going to get into that again.

“You’re right,” he says. “Killed himself? Somebody killed him? Circumstances killed him? What difference? The thing was…why?”

“Sometimes life ends when you don’t expect it to,” I say.

“If you believe that,” he says quietly. “Something that simple, how come it’s been so hard for you to think about, never mind talk about?”

“I’ve never had any trouble thinking about it.”

“Ha!”

Ha yourself.

Ma spent a good week writing notes on the little cards she sent to everybody whose name appeared in the visitors’ book and on the Mass cards. There must have been hundreds. Duncan took a bunch of the cards back to Antigonish for distribution among the priests at the university. They’d have time to say all the Masses people were offering up for poor Sandy the Lineman’s soul.

“Your dad would be awfully proud knowing they’ll be saying Masses for him over at the university,” Ma said.

Dad?

Even Ma was changing.

Sextus says, “Sandy just disappeared. Nobody talked about him. So it was like he never existed. You look around for a trace of Uncle Sandy and…nothing. Like you pulled your hand out of a bucket of water. Sandy deserved better than that. To be written out of the memory…for something like…”

“Like what?”

“Small-town shit.”

“If you’re talking about the goddamned Swede’s wife, then that’s it!” I shout, jumping to my feet.

His face is very calm.

“Where does it leave any of us,” he says, “if one…lapse…erases everything else?”

Nowhere to look but at my calloused hands.

“That’s all I was trying to say,” he says.

Before, the schoolbus had rocked and bounced with the noise and carrying on. Guys grabbing at girls. Legs. Tits. Hair. Them screaming. People up and down the aisle. Throwing things. Guys messing up each other’s hair. Even mine. People getting pissed off. Hair was a lot of work then. Getting longer.

After the funeral the bus was quiet. You’d catch people watching you. Then they’d look away. A lot of low talking. First I thought it was just them being respectful. Then I realized it was them talking behind my back. Exchanging what they were picking up at home.

We don’t know the half of it. Smirking. Words that rhymed with
Swede
and
wife
and
Sandy
made me jump.

Effie would sit with me, which I appreciated. Then I realized she probably knew what was going on and didn’t want me thinking she was part of it. The safest place for her was beside me. A kind of loyalty. We were both from the Long Stretch. Screw them.

The teachers. Every single one would say hello no matter how many times I bumped into them during the day. Cheerful as hell. But I couldn’t concentrate on classwork. People watching. Teachers talking. I broke out in a swath of pimples. Then I got a big cold sore.

“Johnny’s got a dose,” somebody said. The way they laughed I knew I wasn’t included in the joke, even though it was about me. At recess or noon hour I’d just sit in the classroom. Whenever somebody barged in they’d stop quickly and say “Oh, hi” and retreat. That went on through the end of November and into December.

Then he ceased to be. And I did too.

Over Christmas I decided to quit. Piss on it. Ma wasn’t happy when she heard. She got Aunt Jessie to put pressure on me. And Sextus came down from Halifax early in the New Year to ask how come. I had no answer for him.

“Maybe a few months out will do a fellow good,” he said.

“Won’t do any harm,” I said.

“A fellow can always go back,” he said.

“That’s what I figure.”

He retreated then, back to his life in Halifax. Going to the university. Building his road to the Future.

After that the rest backed off.

Plus the pulp mill was going full blast by then. There would always be something. Cutting pulpwood or working there. Even driving a truck. And there was bold talk about refineries. Petrochemical plants. You name it. The place was going to turn into a frigging metropolis. Who needed school?

“There’s just the two of us left,” he says.

“Plus your kid,” I say.

“She’s a girl. The name will go.”

“Hardly,” I say. “There’s more Gillises around here than you can count.”

“I’m talking about our Gillises,” he says. “Our line.”

“You’re looking,” I say, “at the human starter pistol.”

“Which means?”

“I just shoot blanks.”

He puts his head back and laughs. Then stares at me.

“Maybe,” he says.

“No doubt about it,” I say.

“What if Sandy wasn’t premature?”

Now it’s me staring.

“Just something to think about,” he says. He takes a swig from his glass, then goes to get his overnight bag. Brings it to the table. “I want to show you something,” he says. Rummages inside and pulls out a pistol. I figure at first it’s a toy. Something for the kid.

“Not a starter pistol,” he says, holding it up.

“That’s not real,” I say.

“It is.” He spins the cylinder.

It’s small enough so you could carry it in an overcoat pocket.

“Where’d you get that?”

“It’s yours,” he says.

“Mine?”

“I meant to give it to you years ago. But I guess I thought it would look odd.” He’s turning it in his hand. “You might have been tempted to use it. On me.”

He laughs and pulls the trigger. Click.

“You never saw this before?”

I shake my head, keeping a close eye on it.

“It was Grandpa’s,” he says.

“You’re kidding.”

I no longer felt like going to town, even for a hamburger. Every time I looked at his truck, I didn’t want to go near it. And
dances were out of the question. Even if I wanted to go, people observed mourning periods then. Quaint when you think about it today. Of course when Lent started, in February, social life came to a halt for everybody. Effie started coming over again, to watch TV. They had their own by then. Angus won it in a Legion raffle. But she said she didn’t get any joy out of watching TV at home.

Duncan would visit when he was home but he’d be talking mostly to Ma and the old people. Seemed he was studying Gaelic at the university. Wanted to talk it with Grandma and Grandpa. Them obliging, but saying, after he left, his accent was queer. Pronounces his
l
s. Like they do back in the Old Country. Well, his ma was from there, they’d say. And that would explain it.

Ma liked Duncan’s visits but I could see he was after getting very distant. Piety setting in. Everybody knew he was heading for the seminary next year.

I spent almost all my time in the house. Watching TV day and night. At least until it went off, after the news. The news was at midnight then. Was following the Kennedy stuff pretty closely. They’d set up a special commission right away to look into it, though I couldn’t imagine what there was to look into. Oswald, the Communist, killed him. Jack Ruby killed Oswald. Ruby was in jail, but it seemed that he was nuts. Telling people nothing.

Effie would tell me I should be getting out more. I told her I had to stay home to keep an eye on things, especially Ma. Ma, of course, seemed to be doing fine. Even Grandma. You read that after the shock of something like that there’s fatigue. Then sorrow. But I never realized there was also relief.

Grandpa, on the other hand, felt neither relief nor guilt nor
much of anything. He’d begun to slip. He hardly ever talked English anymore. Except when Sextus would come around.

“Grandpa was probably the first casualty,” he says. “He was the most vulnerable. You could see him starting to slide back. I guess when he arrived, mentally, back around where he was travelling in the States, he dug out the gun. Always kept it in an old trunk. Don’t suppose that’s around anymore.”

“Went many a housecleaning ago.”

“Told me he brought this from a fellow in a lumber camp in New Hampshire. He was leaving for Boston and the fellow told him he’d need a gun. So he bought it.”

He hands the thing across to me. I take it gingerly. I’ve never held a handgun.

It’s heavy for its size. Cold.

“I don’t particularly want it,” I say, handing it back.

He says, “I think when Grandpa gave it to me he was under the impression that I was Sandy. The way he talked.”

A reasonable mistake.

“Said it was a shame how I lost the Gaelic when I got shot in the war. So I just took it. But it was meant for Sandy, so it would have been yours,” he says, handing it back.

When I don’t take it he sets it down on the table between us.

Grandpa became preoccupied with money. Figuring it had become his job to provide again. Like the old days. All winter he was talking about going to the woods, cutting pulpwood. I
didn’t understand much Gaelic so I was missing a lot of it. It became kind of a joke.

One day in March I watched him from my bedroom window trudging off across the field toward the woods, carrying a pulpsaw and an axe. The old-fashioned way. Ma wanted me to go after him, but Grandma said he’d be okay. As long as it wasn’t a chainsaw.

It was the same the next day. And the next. After about a week I decided to check on him. I followed his tracks through the snow and after about a twenty-minute walk I could hear chopping. He’d been busy. He actually had about three cords neatly piled.

I stood there until he saw me.

I could tell by his puzzled look that he wasn’t quite sure who I was. I realized then that I really had no choice but to start going with him. I found Pa’s power saw in the barn, hardly ever used.

The sad thing was that there was no money problem to worry about. Pa’s veteran’s pension would continue. The old people had their pensions. And, Ma said, there was the insurance. “What insurance?” I asked her.

“Oh,” she said, “Pa left us well looked after, God bless him.”

Then I remembered the lawyer after Pa’s funeral. “Like how well?”

There were two policies, she said. One from work, naming her. The other through the Legion, naming me. Two substantial amounts, she said. I’d get mine when I was twenty-one.

“They’ve decided somehow it was accidental,” she said.

“What do you mean, ‘somehow’?”

She just gave me a look.

To me the work was just a reason for going outside, but gradually we had a substantial pile. Maybe a few hundred
dollars’ worth. I started thinking about how we were going to get it out of the woods. I’d heard that Squint MacDougall had bought a new tree-farmer, planning to get into the contracting business, starting with his own woods in Sugar Camp. A lot of people were doing that now that there was a mill.

The morning I went out to talk to Squint, it was my understanding that Grandpa was going to take it easy. Stay home until I got back. He said something to me, and I assumed he was agreeing with me. But he went off to the woods as usual, and that was the end of him. Curled up on a bunch of boughs and died. And that’s how I found him early in the afternoon on a crisp sunny day in April.

“Grandpa hurt almost as much as Uncle Sandy,” Sextus says. A fresh drink in front of him. “The old boy had a life and a fellow never really got a chance to know it.”

“He was eighty years old,” I say.

“Christ. It must have been a shock for you. You found him.”

Actually, he seemed to be sleeping. Curled up like a child. And when I realized, I can’t say that I felt much of anything. I gathered up his axe and his saw and I headed for home. Of course I checked first to make sure. But it was pretty obvious. He was already stiff as a stick.

At Grandpa’s wake Effie draped her arms around my neck and hugged me tightly.

She was wearing a strong cologne that stuck to me for the whole evening.

I remember asking her how things were in school. Her rolling her eyes. “You aren’t missing anything,” she told me.

Ma saying: “Death always comes in threes.” And everybody looking uncomfortable, not wanting to stare at Grandma.

“What were you figuring on doing with yourself now?” Uncle Jack asked after we’d buried Grandpa. He’d come home right away. Planned to stay until after Easter. A couple of weeks. Things to clear up. Grandpa, of course, didn’t have a will.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Probably look for something around here.”

“I suppose,” he said. Like there was something on his mind.

We were sitting in Billy Joe’s tavern. I was only seventeen. Four years under the legal age. But tall as the old man and the image of him. So nobody bothered me. Beer suddenly didn’t taste so bad. Chilled, at least. I had four. Was feeling better than I had for months. Coming back from a leak, passing a table of guys from the pulp mill, I heard the words “power-pole Gillis.”

Swing my face to the table and they’re all studying their beer, except the fellow who said it. A bigmouth from Princeville. And without thinking I backhanded him right off his chair.

He must have been off balance or something because I’ve never been any good at hitting. Don’t know why. Maybe because I saw the old man hit Angus once. The old man was a good hitter. He had a knack. Jack was like me. Told me once he’d never hit a person. But Jack never had to. In one flashing, fluid moment, he’d have a guy off balance and his face would be rubbing off on whatever it was pushed against.

The bigmouth is scrambling off the floor and I’m kind of paralyzed. I’m in for it. But suddenly he’s a statue. Jack has him by the back of the neck, saying, “Hey hey hey, what’s
going on here?” The guy tries to swing around, but the shirt twists into a kind of knot, choking him. Jack is just talking to him quietly. And by now there’s a couple of waiters over and it’s finished. Jack and I leave. Me mouthing off over my shoulder. Jack steering me to the door.

“What got that started?”

I can’t. How could I repeat those words?

But if he was a stickman, wouldn’t that argue against the theory that he was in a state of torment because of the business with the Swede’s wife? And would he do himself in for that? Impossible. Like they say: Being a stickman is never having to say you’re sorry.

I asked Millie once if she’d ever heard my father was like that. She just asked, “What if he was?” I didn’t have an answer and she said: “If he was, good on him. We only live once.” My Millie.