The Long Stretch (20 page)

Getting married is way too easy. A couple of people not yet wise enough to make a sensible decision only have to go along to some church or government person and ask to be married and it’s done. So sure of themselves.

Of course it’s easy to get out of commitments now. Thanks to Mr. Trudeau! People in and out of marriages like mortgages. Actually a mortgage is a lot more binding. Ending a marriage? No fuss, no muss. But I see lots of fuss and muss at work. People and their personal problems take up half of my time.

June went by quickly. Another Kennedy murdered. Sextus had to leave the campaign for a week to deal with that. Must be the only reporter they’ve got up there, Ma said. Then Trudeau walked away with the election. I didn’t vote. Didn’t give a shit one way or the other.

Sextus and Jack both docked on the twenty-eighth, Friday
night. Met up at the airport in Halifax. Drove down together. Both a little wobbly getting here. Then we got together with Squint and Duncan. Father Duncan, at this point. Had a little stag party. Drinking and talking. Jack and me catching up. I never mentioned Scotty.

Effie wanted to get married outside. In the field below the house, near the poplar trees. I was thinking: Not far from where Pa shot our dog. Duncan, who was presiding over everything, got the goahead from the bishop on the understanding that we’d all troop off to town later and sanctify the whole performance with a proper Mass. Which is what we did. Effie invented a lot of the ceremony, with Duncan’s approval. There was a lot about loyalty and respect. She had daisies tangled in her hair. They had to be artificial because the real ones weren’t out yet. Only dandelions. I joked she should try them but she just gave me a look. Jack and Squint and Angus standing at the back of the crowd looking very edgy.

Jack saying afterwards: “Jesus, boy. That was some nice.”

Me searching his face for evidence of mockery.

What else? Dinner at the Skye. A party at the house. A couple of Duncan’s priest friends showed up. One had a fiddle and the other brought a guitar and they were good.

I was afraid to stop driving that night. After it became time to leave the party. I remember Uncle Jack was drunk. On the verge of passing out. I volunteered to drive him home. Sextus took me by the arm. Fairly drunk himself.

“Hey, man,” he said. Talking like someone from away. “I think you got something else to take care of.” Arm over my shoulder, face close to mine. Sweaty. His arm hot. “Little bit of business over there in the corner,” nodding his leering face toward Effie, who was with Ma and Squint, conspicuous in her new suit. Her travel clothes.

“I’ll take care of the old man,” he says. “You take care of that.”

Two hours after we left, near Truro, Effie asked, “When do you plan to stop?”

Fortunately I had a bottle of rum with me. I took a large drink when she went into the bathroom. Then a couple more when it became obvious that she was taking her time in there. Sitting on the side of the bed with a quart of rum fighting panic.

Scotty was supposed to be for practice but all she proved was that I needed lots of it. Should have started sooner. Practising. Christ.

The drink helped. I felt suddenly reckless. Undressed. Clambered into the bed. Switched off the bedside lamp. And thought of Angus.

She didn’t wait for me to start anything. She took control. All the things that I’d imagined were supposed to happen seemed to happen. But when it was over, I still felt that I’d missed something.

Squint and I actually became friends in the following months. No way was he going to be my stepfather. He was no Uncle Jack. But gradually I warmed to him. Occasionally we’d go in to Billy Joe’s for a beer. Played a lot of cards. Effie and me, himself and Ma. With a few drinks, Squint was one of the few who’d talk about the war. Places he’d been. Some of the things he’d seen. And I often wondered how much he really knew.

I got work at the pulp mill. Started stevedoring, loading
boats. Then the woodyard, driving a loader. Called into the office one day and Sandgren, the Swede, back from New York, asked if I wanted a permanent position. I said sure. Sandgren had become personnel manager by then. He pointed out that I really needed a grade twelve certificate but he was sure I’d get that sooner or later. And I assured him I would. Before I knew it I was in. Wondering why he smiled at me and acted friendly. But I never got a chance to ask because he was gone soon afterwards. Back to Sweden. Never heard of either one of them again.

Squint came by one afternoon on one of my days off shift. Effie was at the motel. It was early afternoon but he’d already had drinks by the look of him.

“Come on to town,” he said. Which meant to Billy Joe’s.

My choice was to go with him or have him settle in here. Probably had a bottle in his truck. I decided to go. Squint was a binge drinker. Would go on it for a week at a time. No harm in him, though, Ma said.

The tavern was practically deserted because it was mid-afternoon.

“You know what day this is?” Squint said.

Then I remembered. November 11.

“Was there no ceremony this year?” I asked.

“Didn’t go this year,” he said. “Your ma gets a little tense. For good reason, as I understand.”

I felt a tightening in my gut.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “Your father was a good man. Shame he had to live with something like that…considering how everything happened.”

I didn’t ask. Something told me I didn’t have to.

“Nobody ever told you, eh?”

“Told me what?” I said, studying my beer bottle.

“About what happened to your old man.”

I nodded.

“Funny thing,” he said. “I was there. But I don’t quite remember exactly how the two units came to be so close together. We’d never been in the same area before. But out of the blue we heard we were relieving the 9th Infantry Brigade and I remember somebody saying, ‘Jesus that’ll be the North Novies.’ And sure enough, it was. Somewhere close to the German border. Near a place called Dokkum. You ever heard of it?

“I was out all night on a contact patrol. Not a hide or a hair of a German to be found. Near daybreak I’m after coming out of some woods, from the east, into a big polder with an old stone barn in the middle of it. Sun just coming up.

“Then I sees this commotion around the front of the barn and when I pull up, they’re taking somebody out on a stretcher. Looks dead to me. Has that orange look. And a wicked smash in his head. Blood all over. I look closer and Jesus Christ, it’s Sandy Gillis.

“Talk about surprised, seeing him there.

“‘What happened?’ I ask somebody.

“‘Sniper,’ they say. ‘Over in those woods, by the sound of it,’ pointing to where I just came from.

“‘Says who?’ I say. I’d been all over that area. Seen nothing. The guy points to the door of the barn and there’s Angus MacAskill standing there. Like he was going to pass out.
Almost as far gone as the guy on the stretcher. Soaked with poor Sandy’s blood. Tried to carry him, I guess. Making himself look good.”

“Look good?”

“Well,” he says. “Think about it.”

Looking straight at me, face full of insinuation.

“I took off then, heading for those trees. Imagine how I feel. They’re saying somebody picked off Sandy Gillis right under my nose. But I never heard or saw nothing. Often when there was a sniper, you’d find signs. Empty shells. Food leftovers. Shit. Clothes. Whatnot. I spent a lot of time in those woods that day. And there was nothing. Not a trace.”

I haven’t touched the beer. Afraid to look at him. That he’ll stop. Or continue.

“The official report said a sniper,” he said. “But we all knew different.”

“No sniper,” I said.

“Oooohhhh, no. No sniper.” He started fishing in his jacket pocket for a package of cigarettes. Keeping close eye contact. “So you knew,” he said finally, eyes narrowed.

I nodded.

He lit up a cigarette. “When the rest of it started coming out, some of the boys thought we should say something. Or do something. Fella shouldn’t get away with something like that. Then the Krauts suckholed. Days later. Maybe a week or so. War was over. And we were thinking about other things.”

He was studying me quietly: “You’re okay, are you?”

I nodded.

“I often wondered,” he said, “how much you knew. Or if you knew anything at all. Especially when that one was around and all the talk was going on.”

That one?

“The Dutch one. Who landed here, the Swede’s wife. In my personal opinion she was the cause of it, you know.”

And he told me, perhaps too eagerly, his theory: that Angus shot my father in a jealous rage over a girl named Annie. Sandy’s little Dutch girlfriend.

“How would Angus know that the old man had a girlfriend if he was in a different part of the country right up until they met?”

“I wondered about that. Only thing I can figure was she was there, with Sandy, when Angus showed up.”

“In the barn?”

“I’d put money on it. Angus walked in on them. Everybody in Sandy’s company knew he was having a little fling with this Dutch one. It had been hot and heavy for weeks. Naturally after he got shot word went around that it had something to do with her. Sure enough, Angus in his cups one night after everything was over starts blubbering about some female being in the barn with Sandy when he got there. And everybody just put two and two together. Sandy and this Annie having a little time in the barn, before the North Novies move out. A little bit of a farewell. And who should walk in but Angus the
fuamhair
from home.

“Some wicked story, what? Then when she showed up here seventeen years later everybody was talking and wondering what was going to happen. Never expecting what did.

“Queer when you think…yourself and young Effie…married now. Your old man would’ve got a wicked kick out of that.”

Squint and I drank late into the night. Eventually he delivered me home. Somehow to bed.

I came half awake as Effie was dressing to go to work and I decided then that I would never tell her what Squint had told me.

Whatever happened there no longer mattered.

Millie says Squint’s story was a load of crap. Admitted that her family had known Annie Van Ryk a lot better than she’d first acknowledged. Squint was talking through his hat. Annie was from Zutphen. Millie had an uncle there.

“Annie was a doctor’s daughter and she was seventeen and the likelihood of being overnight in a barn with a soldier, no matter how nice, even a Canadian—I doubt it.

“And if she was! Can you imagine somebody like her who saw something like that happen ever wanting go set eyes on either of those guys again? Not likely. She’d have freaked out, first sign of either one. Run a mile. Wouldn’t have stayed around here a day. Never mind getting involved again.” Involved again?

“Well…it’s not unlikely that they…knew each other. Over there. Annie and your dad. Maybe even…”

“Maybe,” I said.

“And if that part was true, it’s possible that they reunited over here. In ‘63. Isn’t it?”

“Maybe.”

“Isn’t it!”

“Yes.”

She only confirmed my own instinct: the Squint story was just over-excited gossip. Long before Millie came along I’d shoved it into the background with all the other myths about
Sandy the Lineman. Some things can never be explained. Explanation requires logic. What happened to my father was as illogical and pointless as the war itself. Not worth talking about. People naturally want to find justifying causes and large purposes in misery, but that day was the beginning of the end for me and Squint. And eventually Ma. It was probably his eagerness in the telling. There was something indecent there. Something real stupid.

I’ve forgotten how hard it is to piss in a high wind, propped against a house that won’t stop moving. My feet are wet because I forgot to put shoes on before coming out. The ground is soaked and freezing. The storm is passing and there’s a cold front moving in behind it. I also forgot that rum always causes some kind of constriction in the chest. Strange. I seem to have forgotten a lot of things. Like how easy it is to fall into the grips of the booze. And how quick you can land back at square one. Wandering around outdoors in your sock feet. All the things they told me at the Monastery the last time. Things Millie and I have told each other a thousand times. But then again. Who wouldn’t slip after today.

I’m almost worrying about him. Haven’t seen the hair of him for an hour. Ever since he stomped off.

I won’t wait much longer. If I’m in bed within the next half hour I should be okay tomorrow. Go for a good long run in the morning. Living like this I’d be worn out in a matter of weeks.

It isn’t that these things he seemed so determined to get into haven’t been on my mind. It’s where they lead that makes me nervous. The old man took the easy way out. But that isn’t the hardest thing to deal with. It’s going the next step: Figuring, the easy way out of what?

He and Ma were having some problems. But he was always a difficult man, unpredictable ever since the war. But why that
particular day? Which made me wonder about the Swede’s wife. Was she the “what” he was taking the easy way out of? No way. Not somebody his age. Then you begin to learn more of the details of his life. Eventually you start approaching that age yourself and know anything is possible.

The truth, in the end, was simple. My father had a fling with an old flame from the war. What does it matter now? He never really survived the war. The bullet that killed him at Ceiteag’s was, in a way, just a ricochet from the bullet that got him in Holland. Or its ghost.

It is so easy to say. So why is it so difficult to accept? Maybe because I know that those were merely conclusive events. In themselves they mean nothing. The hard part is finding out and coming to terms with what went before. Because if there is anything worthwhile to learn, anything instructive for the lives being lived now, it’s entangled in the experiences of lives lived before November 22, 1963. Mouthing endlessly what happened on that day is nothing more than titillation.