The Long Stretch (5 page)

“Your father is a hero,” Ma said.

I can still see her face. White as flour. Blue crescents beneath her eyes. Eyes a little crazy. The way they were before everything happened.

“How do you know?”

“He just is. An article of faith. Like the Blessed Trinity. I’ll never forget when he came home. From the war. There was a party. The biggest bash the village ever had. For him. And
they had a fiddler. The Germans shot him in the head and still couldn’t kill him. People came from miles around. Filled the hall.”

“What hall?”

“The community hall. The one you kids burned down.”

“Oh. That one.”

If he’d only had the brains to stay away from Angus.

Looking at Angus you’d never guess what lay within. He was dapper. That’s the word you’d hear most. Always wore a necktie. “No harm in Angus,” they’d always say. And he looked like a general or a field marshal. Maybe five nine or ten. Wiry. You could believe he actually talked to Montgomery once. Shortly before the end of the war, when Montgomery visited the Cape Breton Highlanders. Right after they went from Italy to Holland. I believe it. My father was hard on the outside. But you got the impression Angus was hard on the inside.

The army had a big impact on Angus. Hair always trimmed. Swore he’d never go a day without shaving. Had a tidy little moustache along the edge of his lip. Until the later days, he’d walk poker straight, shoulders back. All this, of course, eclipsed in the memory by the image from the last time I saw him. Pleading. Out near the end of the Long Stretch.

I remember the community hall as a big old shell, all weathered and full of ghosts. Grandpa told a story about people playing cards there one night. A stranger off the Boston boat was winning all the money. And somebody dropped a card. And when
they bent to pick it up saw cloven hooves. You’d shiver, the way he told it.

There was an old piano on the second floor but you couldn’t get a sound out of it. Not that you would anyway. We’d always be quiet. We weren’t supposed to be in there. The place was condemned, they said. Because of the devil, I thought. Other than that piano there was nothing. Just empty bottles, and old dried-up stools of shit with bits of newspaper where people would go. I guess the older guys drank in there. And that’s where I saw my first French safe. Mostly we’d go in there to sneak a smoke.

I know the fire happened in May. Sometime near the long weekend. After school. I was staying in, hanging around the village. Donald Campbell had a pack of cigarettes. Sweet Caps. I remember Donald had a new bike then. His father was the railway station agent. Duncan, Effie, Donald, and I and Sextus were there. Donald was handing out the smokes and I took one.

“I didn’t know you smoked,” Effie said to me.

“Sure,” I said impatiently.

“Oh.” Superior. By then she was developing a certain tone.

Then we lit up.

She was nine months older than I was, and beginning to enjoy it.

“The definitive moment of change,” Sextus says, “when you think back was…what? What was it for you?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Opening of the causeway. The mill. Lots of big moments.” I concentrate on my tea.

“How about the old dancehall? The day she burned,” he says. “Something poetic happened there.”

“Compared to?” I ask.

“Symbolically,” he says. “It was the official end of the old. Everything after that is new. People now don’t have the same…connection with the place.”

“How would you know?” I say patiently.

He laughs, flushes a little. “I suppose. I have been gone quite a while. But you do have to admit, the place has lost something.”

A dancehall?

I pour another cup of tea.

The wind is making a rocking sound around the house. The rain fills our silences, slashing against the window. A cardboard box scratches as it moves along the side again. I’m tempted to bring it in but it’s just too miserable out there.

“And I guess the Gaelic is gone,” he says.

“A few old people,” I say.

He laughs. “Wasn’t it always ‘a few old people’?”

Duncan finally took a cigarette too, lit it. He’d hesitated. Duncan was becoming holier every day. Effie was inhaling.

“You’ll make yourself sick,” I said.

“You’re not my boss,” she said.

“Well I am,” said Duncan, and he plucked the cigarette from her fingers and threw it aside.

“Hey,” she said, trying to see where the cigarette went.

Then Donald noticed the condom.

“Hey, look.” He touched it carefully with the toe of his rubber boot.

“I wonder who that was,” said Sextus.

“What is it?” I said.

They almost threw up laughing at me. Except Effie.

She was staring at it, figuring it out for herself.

“The causeway I suppose is the true symbol of change,” Sextus says. “From island to peninsula.”

“Whatever.”

“God made us insular,” he says. “The politicians made us peninsular.” He chuckles.

“That’s an improvement,” I say.

“You sound like the old man.”

I take my cup to the stove, top it up. Whose old man?

Donald was squatting, poking at the condom with a stick.

“I’m pretty sure who it was,” he said. “I saw Alex Joe at the garage and he had a whole bagful of these things.”

“And who do you think the girl was? It wouldn’t be…”

“Theresa,” said Donald.

Theresa was in grade ten. The smart one.

Then I finally figured it out.

Effie was giggling.

“What are you laughing at, for Christ’s sake?” said Duncan.

“I know what it is,” she said.

“We’re getting out of here.” Duncan ground out his cigarette, grabbed her by the arm.

“Wait,” she said.

He gave the arm a yank.

“You said Christ,” she accused.

“Remember building the causeway? It was wild,” he says. “You’d be sitting in school. The ground would shake. Real slow. You’d look out the big windows and the side would be heaving off the cape, like in slow motion. There’d be dust and smoke for an hour after, it seemed.”

“What are you driving at, anyway?” So what if aggravation shows.

“Don’t take it the wrong way,” he says. “But thinking back to all that, the causeway and the hall and all, led me to thinking about Uncle Sandy, and all the talk. After the Swedes moved in with the mill.” His face is a study in managed sincerity. He should have my job.

“We all know what that kind of talk is worth,” I say.

“It’s wicked the way people get speculating,” he agrees.

“A lot of the speculation came from the story you told in your book.”

He avoids my eyes. “Well, if you want to get into all that, we both know the speculation was rife long, long before the book.” He is studying me closely now, eye to eye. And I realize I have been lured into a place he intends to revisit. No matter what I want.

Donald was the first to see the flames.

“Holy Jesus,” he said.

I looked and the fire was curling around some old newspaper, licking at the dry wall. Sextus jumped at it, kicking it away from the wall. But it was too late. Crackling happily.

Donald beat it with a board. It roared angry then.

I look out the window. “If it wasn’t so stormy, I’d take you in to Billy Joe’s tavern, have a couple of beers…” Making sure my tone is light. Then I turn and smile at him. But he’s looking away.

“When I was little there wasn’t even pavement. Then, overnight, we’re on the main drag. A truck stop on the road from St. John’s to Vancouver. Whoopee shit.”

“A little bit more than that,” I say, sitting down again.

“True.” He splashes a bit more rum into his glass. “We’re also…what did the sign say? ‘The Largest Ice-Free Deepwater Harbour on the Atlantic Seaboard’ or something. What the fuck does that mean?” Though he smiles.

“We’ve had some pretty big supertankers.”

“Oh, yes,” he says. “There was a refinery. For a while. Whatever happened to that?”

“Who knows,” I say. “The Americans pulled the plug.”

“Wasn’t there a heavy water plant as well?”

“That’s gone too.”

He laughs.

The fire truck from Hawkesbury poured water on the wreckage all night. When they first arrived the fire was leaping high
into the late-afternoon sky, smoke billowing almost all the way to town on a gale that carried embers in all directions. They ran a fat hose up from the strait and kept pumping water on the roof of the Reynolds’ house and Clough’s store. If the store went, they said, the village was gone. Not realizing then that the old village was already gone anyway, fire or no fire. Soon to be replaced by the new roads and the world passing through.

I knew my father knew. Word got around. He didn’t say anything at first. You just knew by the way he looked at you. Half a smile on his gaunt face.

“Too bad about young Campbell’s bike,” my father said.

“Yes,” I said. “It got burned.”

“I know it got burned,” he said. “Gaddam lucky thing he didn’t get burned with it.”

He was looking at me too closely. Waiting for something to betray me.

My father was tough. You’re a hard man, Uncle Jack would tell him. Gotta be hard to be good, the old man would snap back.

He had a lot of sayings like that. Takes a hard man for the hard road. Harder y’are, easier things go.

He was staring at me.

Sextus had that wise look, enjoying my fear.

Donald was there, standing sort of behind him, smirking.

Then my father laughed, made a fist, pressed his knuckles to the side of my head and pushed gently. I shut my eyes tightly.

“You’re a bad bunch,” he said.

After he drove away I said: “I wouldn’t tell.”

“Yeah, you better not,” said Donald. “He don’t kill you, we will.” He looked to Sextus, who was bigger: “Right?”

“Right,” said Sextus.

“I’m still struggling with the Faye,” I say.

“You should have seen her, when she went after me. During the breakup. Fwoof.”

“Hard to imagine.”

“Like I was a piece of shit!”

“Take it easy,” I say.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “If I ever got started…talking about her.”

“Never mind.” I slide the forty-ouncer toward him.

He fumbles with the cap, hand shaking, pours into his glass. “I made a shitty husband,” he says. “But I was going to be a good parent. Father. Going to be everything mine wasn’t.”

“Hard to blame somebody for something he isn’t or wasn’t,” I say.

“I didn’t say I was blaming,” he says.

We just stare at each other. Then he smiles.

“This is her worst nightmare happening,” he says. “The two of us talking. She’d shit herself.”

“She knows you came down?”

“She knows everything.”

I take a mouthful of tea, waiting for a real answer.

“Fucking Faye,” he says. Laughing. An ugly sound, as if he’s talking to himself. “Connecting up with her was the worst thing that ever fucking happened to either one of us.”

“Speak for yourself,” I say.

He studies my face. Then: “Things were nearly perfect in my life, you know. Free and easy. Then I got mixed up with her.” Sighs, takes a drink. “Remember when we torched the old dancehall?”

“I was just thinking about it.”

“It was her cigarette that did it,” he says. “Her and Duncan bickering about something. I got the shit for it.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“You probably didn’t know. The old man found out. Then I ran away. You remember? I come in late one night, shortly after the fire. He says he’s putting me on a curfew. Says he knows how the fire started, et cetera. Says, ‘When the eight-o’clock siren goes off in Mulgrave’—remember how it used to every evening in the summer? You could hear it at home—he says, ‘I want you in your room.’

“I just ignored him. I remember going to the fridge. He says, ‘I’m talking to you.’ I just pretend I’m not hearing. Then he says, ‘Take that cap off your head when you’re in the house.’ He had a thing about caps. Would always be telling me, ‘Tip your cap to a lady’ or to an old person or ‘Tip your cap going by the church.’ Me just shaking my head. Cap on.

“Then he says it again. Something like, ‘Get that gaddamned cap off your head while you’re in the house.’

“I say something like, ‘You can bite my arse, you’re only a visitor here anyway.’”

The wind blows up outside again.

“People talk about the lights going out when you get hit. I never saw him move but it was like every light in the universe suddenly came on. And me on my arse in the corner.”

“He hit you?”

“Something did. Anyway, I scramble out of there like a four-legged spider. Never stopped running till…Well, you know.”

He was gone for three days. Nobody knew why. Everybody out looking for him, even the Mounties. Day two I found him hiding in our barn. But didn’t tell. I owed him. He saved my life once. From drowning. He persuaded me that Jack was trying to kill him. So I helped him hide until Grandpa accidentally discovered him. I remember Jack hugging him closely afterwards, saying nothing.

“You look back now,” he says, “it was a big turning point. We never got close after that.” He slowly blows out smoke. “There was something about him. All of them. They really didn’t seem to…fit. Nothing prepared them for families,” he says. “It wasn’t just my own old man. They were all like that. That generation. Always seemed kind of out of place around the wife and kids. Uncomfortable, like. Then it was kind of natural to assume, when he was always gone, that it was because there was something about us.”

“It’s beyond me,” I say. “I just know Jack cared. About you.”

“Maybe, but I never knew it. So what the hell?”

I know it wouldn’t kill me to share with him the things that I know. But, God forgive me, it feels good sitting here with something that he craves. After all he took away from me.

He joins me at the sink.

“Enough heavy stuff,” he says. Opens a cupboard door looking for a dishtowel, spies a fresh forty-ouncer of rum. Brightens
conspicuously. “For a guy on the wagon you’ve got a pretty good supply.”

“That’s the secret,” I say. “You’ll always have it if you don’t use it.”

“What do you say, huh?”

I look at the bottle.

“What the hell,” he says, plucking two clean glasses from a shelf. Uncaps the bottle, pouring free-hand, singing: “Oh mein papa, to me you ver so vunderful.” He hands me my glass, raises his own, taps mine with a clink. “Down the hatch,” he says. Tosses it off in one gulp.

Then: “You can’t imagine how weird it is, being here. I’m talking to little Johnny. But I can’t get it out of my head how much you’ve become…both of them. You’re the image of Uncle Sandy, but you’re so much like the old man. Must have been all the time you two spent together. In the bush. When was it you two went away? Nineteen…?”

“Sixty-four.”

“Of course,” he says. “Just after Uncle Sandy…”