The Second Son (14 page)

Andrew took care with people, and with things. If we had money for candy after school, or found some bottles we could trade, we’d stop in at Mrs. Laprade’s — all she sold was cigarettes, candy, and soft drinks in this ten-by-twenty shop built like a lean-to on the side of Mr. Dickey’s barbershop. Andrew would take forever picking out the most variety he could get for his three or four pennies, like three blackballs, one jawbreaker, and two pieces of licorice, one red and one black. He’d lay his pennies on the counter and this tiny, hunched-over old lady, her reddish-grey hair in a fine black net, with those bent old fingers looking like they could break at any moment, would patiently pick out each item from behind the glass and drop it into a little brown bag on the counter, then wait silently for his next decision. When he was finally finished choosing, she would fold the top of the bag over twice, creasing it slowly and carefully each time, and hand it down to him like it was some great treasure.

Maybe she did it up special for Andrew, knowing he was the kind of kid who would treat it like it was a treasure, savouring it over two or three days. Me, I’d just take three cents’ worth of my favourite that week, like black licorice twists, and eat them all on the way home — before my mother could make me put them away until after I’d had my supper. Needless to say, Andrew was never moved to share his hoard with me. If I even bothered to ask for one measly blackball he’d start that stupid talk about ants and grasshoppers. Like I said, Andrew knew how to treasure things, just like he knew how to love Alexandria. I only learned to appreciate it later, when I had lots of time to think about it.

I would lie there after the lights went out and let my mind take me back to those days, before they sent me away. At first, Andrew was still with me. In my mind’s eye we’d leave from our house on Elm Street, passing Mrs. McDougall’s big yellow house, the first on the right. If she was sitting out on the porch, Andrew would wave to her and Rusty, her yappy cocker spaniel, who would always run up the front walk to be petted. Andrew would stop and make a fuss over him, before rising to continue down Elm. There must have been five or six houses on that stretch of Elm, white clapboard with coloured trim, plain yellow or blue, and brick, dark, blackened brick before anyone started coming to town with those sandblasting machines. Most had porches, everything from wraparound porches that made the house look twice as big to makeshift storm porches stuck on the front with a different-angled roof.

It was the same thing on Dominion. If there was anyone out and around, you could be sure Andrew would wave to them, maybe stop and talk for a minute, answering questions about our folks and those visitors we’d had on the weekend. My brother could describe all the houses on those streets, including who lived in them, all the way over to Main Street. He knew them all. That was one of the reasons I started going my own way on Halloween — to avoid getting dragged into those twenty-minute conversations he’d have with the old ladies trying to guess who we were. Now that I think of it, they probably knew all along. Pretty soon I started leaving Andrew out of my imaginary walks as well. Stretched out on my bunk in the dark, I would reach back for that same knowledge, trying to recall each house we had passed, imagining what it looked like and conjuring up the faces of those who lived there — the Brodies and the Austins, the Laportes and the McDougalls, the Sampsons and the Deprattos. Along Elm and Dominion, and down Main Street I’d go in my mind, passing the storefronts that filled both sides of the street, five blocks down, all the way to the entrance to the park and the Pond, where I had special memories to find.

I would call to mind the ice cream parlour where people lined up on a summer evening, the clothing store that kept changing owners, the lawyer’s office that always stayed the same, the two banks that marked the corner where my dad would turn west to take Highway 43 to Maxville and the Highland Games, the hardware store where I would stop to look at the camping knife with all those tools and add up all the allowances it would take to buy one, the little jewellery store where you would see fat Mr. Boulet working on his watches with that thing in his eye all the time, the butcher shop with skinny Mr. Lavoie in the bloody apron, where my mother would send me for meat.

Taking that walk in my mind would bring the town alive, and oftentimes I’d find myself lined up outside the Garry Theatre on Main Street, waiting with every kid in town for the Saturday matinee — a Randolph Scott Western, the Three Stooges, and a Woody Woodpecker cartoon. If I tried really hard, I could bring back those hyper kids with happy faces shining bright in the darkened theatre. And I could dream of Eatmore Bars and Cracker Jacks, Orange Crush and Royal Crown. Or kids darting from row to row, jockeying for the best seat, looking for friends, pandemonium everywhere until the newsreel starts, then wild cheering for everything from the woodpecker’s crazy cry, hah-ha-ha-ha-ha, to the bad guys getting shot and the hero riding off. And finally, rushing up the aisle while the credits ran, emerging into the blinding summer sunlight back out onto Main Street.

And then I would blink a few times and realize the summer sun was really the harsh bulb in the hallway, left on so the guard could spot anyone trying to leave the dorm. I wouldn’t give up my dreaming, though, even as I wiped my tears and swallowed the lump back down. I’d just close my eyes and conjure it up all over again. I would go over it all in my head, again and again, until it became as real for me as it had been for Andrew. And I came to see why he loved it, and then began to love it myself, to love what was lost. I could tell you now what each house looked like, wood or brick, porches and sidewalks, who lived in it, if they had kids, all that stuff. I worked it out over the years, digging deep through my memories. It was all buried in there, right where you’d expect to find it. Of course it’s not real, not anymore. Nothing stays the same, I know that. The question is, was it ever real? Or was there another layer of reality in that small town of ours, buried even deeper?

FAMILIES ARE LIKE ICEBERGS
. You’re looking right at them but all you’re seeing is that small part on the surface. There’s always a lot more, hidden away. You know a family’s history. You know the individuals that make up a family, their likes and dislikes, their interests, how they make their living. And you have some idea of each person’s character. But do you ever really know what’s going on inside a family, how each individual gets treated, behind closed doors?

There’s one thing for sure: Families collect a lifetime of hurts, slights, and disappointments, often burying them deep inside. And sometimes those buried feelings build up to a sharp, pointed thing, hiding just below the surface. Then, exactly when you least expect it, that pointed thing sinks your little red boat, pretty damn fast. And you didn’t even know it was there, that pointed thing. I should have understood that sooner.

I started piling up those hurts and slights in my second year of school. You’d think a person would have a pretty good idea of what life has in store for him when a bride of Christ dangles his copybook in front of his face like some dead rat and says, “If this dog-eared mess is your best work, Michel Landry, you’re never going to be the student your brother is.” The funny thing is, it was me who had begged my mother to send me to school, even though I only turned six that September. I was desperate to join my big brother on his great adventure, watching forlornly from the front window every morning when he left for school and anxiously awaiting his return each long afternoon.

My enthusiasm survived the first year or so, until the gap between our report cards became obvious, even to my seven-year-old mind. Probably that’s why they used to call it the age of reason. Andrew’s marks were a millstone around my neck all through school, especially during those long years we were in a double grade together. The more he got along with the nuns, the more I disappointed them, drawing their wrath for everything from dirty fingernails to missing benediction in the Month of Mary. The fighting started early on. For starters, every time someone told me I had a girl’s name.

There was this kid in our school that everybody hated. Gary Gillespie had no mother and his father drank. He was held back every second year and was sixteen before he got out of grade eight. I don’t think he ever went to high school. I caught up to him in grade three, where he took the heat off me with worse work habits and deportment than I had. I was grateful to him for more than that, though. That fall I fought Gary Gillespie every week for a month. He beat me every time, until I got enough licks in to force a truce. After that last time, when we both went home with bloody noses, he started calling me Mike. Pretty soon everyone else followed suit. I would have been Gary Gillespie’s friend for life if he had let me.

Unfortunately fighting had gotten to be a habit by that time. At least the nuns seemed to think so. After the first few years they started taking for granted I was the instigator. I admit I was impulsive, and quick to take offence, but I still think it was all about Andrew. It was as though making an effort to follow the rules like he did, or putting an effort into homework or church, or even admitting that I knew the meaning of the word deportment, would be an admission that I wanted to be like him. Or maybe I was just being realistic, accepting the odds against me. Because it always seemed to me that Andrew got there first when it came to brains and talent, in school and at home.

It’s not as though I gave up altogether. I tried in my own way to woo my mother. There was that one spring when Andrew started coming home through the fields along the highway, gathering violets to decorate the dinner table. I tried to copy the gesture a couple of times, only to lose my concentration somewhere in the execution. My mother had a hard time faking any enthusiasm for the handful of crushed stems and petals I would pull from my pocket in the middle of dinner. One weekend, when I was wandering by myself in the bush back of Grandma Bessie’s house, I was elated to find a patch of purple and white flowers, bigger than any Andrew had brought home.

I landed in Grandma’s kitchen to present my mother with a handful of beautiful blossoms, only to be scolded for picking trilliums. How was I to know it was illegal, I protested. It sounded pretty dumb to me, a law against picking flowers. Of course my brother was only too ready to inform them that our teacher had told us exactly that, just a few weeks earlier when we had our lesson on Ontario’s wildflowers. It was bad enough having the nuns reporting on your “lack of concentration,” without having an embedded spy in the same classroom.

And if my actions didn’t get me on the wrong side of my mother, my big mouth did. I remember one particular Sunday after mass when she spent a good half hour yakking on the church steps with this woman I knew she didn’t really like. When she finally got to the car and said she was sorry to keep us, I grumbled, “How come you were talking to her so long? Last week you said she was the worst gossip in town.”

“Michel Landry,” she practically yelled, “don’t you dare talk to me like that. I’m your mother and I’ll talk to whomever I please, without any advice from you.”

“But you said — ” I got out before she interrupted.

“And you won’t be allowed to listen to any adult conversations if you don’t learn to mind your own business, young man.” I don’t know which was worse in situations like that, her yelling at me for just being honest, or Andrew’s triumphant smirk at my discomfort.

I didn’t do much better with my father. I remember the year he hauled home this old truck, a 1928 Model A Ford, and parked it in the horse-shed back of the house. He had gotten it for half-nothing from some old bachelor on one of those rock farms in Kenyon Township. From the first day my father set out to restore that truck, it was clear who the mechanic in the family would be. That was in 1952, when Andrew was nine and I was eight, and he was already being called the mature one, who could be counted on to listen closely and follow instructions carefully.

Not me. I had no patience for standing around for hours, holding a trouble light, or handing my father tools. If he asked for a wrench he’d be just as likely to get a pair of pliers. And if he sent me off for more clean rags, or a fresh beer, I’d be just as likely to wander off somewhere. I can still hear him yelling from under the truck, “Michel! Where’s my goddamn rags?”

I wasn’t interested in fetching stuff and holding tools. I wanted to get right in there and do the important work, whatever that was. And why would I want to learn the names of all those tools when I wasn’t even allowed to use them? I wanted hands-on experience, right away. I can still see the look on Andrew’s face that day I was examining the oil can. “How does this work?” I asked my dad, as I pressed the lever and squirted Andrew right in the eye. I had them all pissed off at me for that. It took my mother half an hour to rinse the oil out of Andrew’s eye.

Anyway, my dad managed to restore that old truck to all its glory without my help. I was banned from the shed long before he finished. I guess the last straw was when I tried to figure out how the jack worked, while he was still under the truck. I could never understand why he got so mad. Didn’t he have those cement blocks under there as a backup? And didn’t they work?

At the same time as this stuff was going on the nuns were teaching us about Jesus, with stories about vineyards and talents, and rules about loving your neighbour as yourself — which, they assured me, included my brother. That made me feel guilty for not always loving my brother the way I should. Just as they planned, I suppose. For a while there, I figured I was the only one in the family who harboured evil thoughts. Then I started to realize it wasn’t just me who had problems. The summer after Andrew broke his leg I got my first inkling that my father’s life wasn’t perfect, either.

Grandpa and Grandma Landry were down from Montreal, spending a week of summer holidays with us. I had a flat tire on my bicycle and had been bugging my father to fix it for days. I finally got tired of waiting and cornered my grandpa out on the front porch, where he was relaxing after lunch.