The Second Son (24 page)

I suddenly realized he was talking about the butt he had seen in the ashtray. “It was,” I lied. “I put it out. Besides, it was in the ashtray. How could — ”

He grabbed my arm and squeezed. “Look, mister, I don’t know what happened for sure . . . if it was your cigarette started that fire, or not. But whatever happened, your smoking has to stay between you and me. You understand?”

“Yes, but how could they tell — ”

“It doesn’t matter if they can tell. It’s their suspicions I’m afraid of.” He stopped then, probably wondering how much information to trust me with. “Look, so far my luck is holding. There was an old electrical outlet behind the desk and they found some burnt wires, so maybe they’ll decide it was the old wiring that started it. Who knows, maybe that’s what it was. I just don’t want the whole town thinking I started that fire myself. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

“But . . . you said you wanted to burn — ”

“Jesus Christ! Are you stupid? That’s the goddamn problem.” He grabbed my arm again and shook me. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you, for Chrissakes. I talked about it in the hotel, probably a dozen times over the last year, which is why I’m so screwed. Don’t you see why you have to keep your mouth shut? I know you were smoking back there last night, and if anyone comes up with the idea a cigarette started that fire . . . well . . .” He paused again and I thought he might be wondering how much I could really understand, so I tried my best to keep a stupid look on my face. Maybe it worked, because he finally said, “
Ecoute, mon fils, la seule chose
. . . the only thing saving my ass right now is the fact that I didn’t have any insurance. I made damn sure Bill Sunstrem and Chief Kennedy knew that right away. I’ll be lucky to escape an arson charge, after talking about burning down the goddamn place for months. You understand? Why we can’t talk about any accidents with any fucking cigarette butts?”

The implication of what he was saying finally dawned on me. I felt a great weight begin to lift off my shoulders, as I worked very hard at not smiling. Not only was he telling himself it was an accident, he was also telling me we had to keep my cigarette butt a secret — and that having insurance would have meant even more trouble for him. So I wasn’t going to jail after all. And I wasn’t going to be condemned from the parish pulpit next Sunday for putting my parents in the poorhouse. He must have seen the hint of a smile.

“Don’t think you’re off the hook, you little thief. It’ll be a cold day in hell before I trust you again.” He reached out and grabbed my hand, yanking it in front of my face. “You see these yellow fingers?” he cried. “Don’t think I don’t know how long you’ve been smoking. And where you’ve been getting them. Of course, we won’t have to worry about that anymore, will we? You burned the fucking place down.” I had this image in my head of my father’s store as it was, and now burnt to the ground by his lying, stealing son with the yellow fingers. For the first time tears came to my eyes. He let my hand go and started yelling at me again, “You just cost this family a fortune, mister. Your mother can’t know about this, ever. It would break her heart.” He shook his fist at me. “Do you understand?”

The tears were dripping down my cheeks at the same time as I felt my anger rising against them. I clenched my fists and tried to stem the flow. “Yes,” I managed to get out.

“There will be no more smoking? Is that understood?”

“Yes.” I hated that thing he had of forcing me to acknowledge his power over me, again and again.

“Yes, what?”

“Yes, I understand.”

“And no more sneaking around.” He was relentless. “Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, what? Say it.” He grabbed me by the arm again.

“Yes, I understand,” I muttered through clenched teeth.

He finally finished with the “stay out of my sight until I cool down” routine.

I believed him. And I did avoid him for the next few weeks, especially when he was talking to my mother about the fix we were in. And the things he was doing to make ends meet. I was glad he was the one who knew my secret, and not her. She wouldn’t have yelled and screamed at me, or hit me. She wouldn’t have touched me — just told me how disappointed she was. And then she would have worn that disappointment like a wound until it was a permanent part of both of us. I count myself lucky that it was only my father who knew about the cigarette. Because if I’d gone into that next year any more damaged than I was, I don’t know if I would have survived it. Of course, I’ve always taken for granted that she didn’t know, that he kept his word and didn’t tell her. I guess you have to take some things on faith, to survive.

My father’s bid to survive played out at our kitchen table over the next few months. He turned down an offer from George McPhee to work for Allied. I can still hear him cursing, “Jesus H. Christ, I’d be working for Dory McNabb. Can you believe that?”

Once more, my mother forgave him his blasphemy. She probably gave him a lot of points for quitting drinking. I think he even went to AA for a few months. At least we didn’t have to look for his truck in front of the Atlantic anymore. He sold it three weeks after the fire and counted out the money on the kitchen table. Five hundred and twenty-five dollars he got. Enough to live on for two months.

We lived another few months on what he got for the lot on Main Street. Grandma Landry cried when he told her. It wasn’t a lot of money, not after he paid for the clean-up and the back taxes. It was Don MacDonald who bought it — to keep the competition out, my father said. There must have been some truth to that because it sat empty for a long time, like some ancient ruin we had to pass every time we walked down Main Street, reminding us of our defeat. For a while there it seemed like we just kept losing things. He even had the Model A up for sale by that time. There were more than a few curses over the offers he got. “Sons-a-bitches,” he would say, “think they’re going to get it for nothing. I’ll set fire to the goddamn thing before I’ll give it away.”

I would wince when I heard that one. No one else seemed to notice. I think they had to take out a bigger mortgage on the house to pay off the creditors, like the wholesalers he still owed for the stock that had gone in the fire. As for those who owed him money, that box of bills was his biggest hope for too long a time. At first he sat down with my mother for a week of evenings and wrote out letters to everybody that owed him. I don’t think more than ten or twelve people in town gave him any money at all. Only a few paid the whole bill. I think Grandma Bessie paid him eventually, and some of their good friends.

Of course their good friends turned out to be a lot fewer than they thought. Many’s the night I heard him working his way through the names on those bills, talking about seeing them with a new car, or hearing them brag about some new purchase or other, at the same time as he was sitting at home with an unpaid bill of seventy-five dollars for groceries. He took it hard. I don’t think he ever mentioned that box of bills to Grandpa Landry.

By Christmas he still didn’t have a job and my mother was busy looking for something. She got three weeks in December, at the post office, for the Christmas rush. The old man had finally caved in and sold the Model A to Gail’s father, after turning down his first two offers. He just hated the idea of him getting one more belonging of ours, but Mr. MacDonald was a smart guy. I think he got my dad to finally part with the truck by promising to sell it back to him at the same price, anytime he wanted. Andrew whined a lot about that deal. He even complained to Gail that the old man had promised him he could drive it next summer, in the Dominion Day parade. Both Andrew and my dad must have suffered at the thought of their beloved truck sitting across the street in the MacDonalds’ big garage. Like my dad said, though, we needed to eat.

I knew we were in deep shit when we went to Montreal for Christmas. It was embarrassing, the number of presents under the tree for us, compared to that little box of gifts we brought to Grandma’s. Not only were there no parties at our house during the holidays, the only booze I saw him buy that year was a case of beer. Then I heard him tell my mother he wanted to go to Montreal for New Year’s, too. In those days there was still a tradition of people dropping in all day long to wish you a Happy New Year and have a drink. I guess he was ashamed of not having anything to offer people. Or maybe he was worried no one would show up.

Sometimes I wished he had kept on drinking. He was around the house all the time now, in a bad mood. It got so I didn’t want to come home, afraid he’d find some stupid chore for me, or chew me out for breaking some tool of his I couldn’t even recognize the name of. Even without any money in my pocket, I was better off hanging around downtown — in front of the Hub chewing the rag with the guys and bumming cigarettes, or in the poolroom downstairs getting a free game from somebody stuck for a partner. Andrew thought he was even worse off.

After earning money for the last few years, he was now flat broke, except for the dollar or two my mother would slip us from the babybonus cheque. I guess Gail was giving him a hard time, too. Back then the boy paid for everything when you went out, so there was no way Andrew was letting her pay their way into the show, or buy him some chips and a coke after. That meant they didn’t go out very often, even though he was in high school now. He never said much about it, only complaining to me a couple of times that she was bugging him to take a job with her uncle at Allied, especially during the Christmas rush. It sounded to me like he wanted to, except he was afraid of my father’s reaction. I don’t think he ever asked him. Andrew wouldn’t do that. He’d just be the good son and make sacrifices for his parents, like work harder at school and try to come first again.

That’s the only thing I can remember him doing that fall, up in our room every night with his books. He never complained about school, or talked about what it was like being a nobody, instead of the big hero. He must have been some embarrassed at having to scrounge all over town trying to find a set of used books that fall. But if he was miserable, he kept it all inside. And it worked, I guess. Anytime I heard my mother talking to relatives about how we were getting along, like at Christmas, she would always end up talking about him.

“And then there’s Andrew,” she would say. “He’s our little trooper, never complaining. He got straight A’s again this Christmas. His teachers tell me he’s their star pupil, already.” Of course she didn’t talk about her other son, the one she couldn’t brag about, the one who smoked and played pool. And I was beginning to like it that way.

For the past year I’d been having an ongoing battle with her over my hair. I wanted to start combing it straight back, like my father. Only every time I came out of the bathroom with it combed like that she’d make me go back and comb it sideways, with a part, like she’d been doing since we were little kids. She said my way made me look older — and tougher. She just didn’t get it. Anyway, a couple of weeks after New Year’s, I took some of my grandmother’s Christmas money and sneaked down to Mr. Lalonde’s barbershop, where I asked for a special cut. “You know what I mean, Mr. Lalonde, a ducktail.”

“Like Elvis Presley?” He pointed at the photo of the singer tacked beside the other hairstyle photos on the wall above the mirror. “
Comme ça
?”

“Yeah, just like that.”

“You sure that’s okay for your parents, Michel?” Mr. Lalonde asked me.

“Oh, yeah,” I assured him. “They said I could keep it long like this, just so’s it’s neat.”

“
Je n’ sais pas
. . . I don’t know, son. Maybe I better give your father a call.” He reached for the phone on the counter.

“Oh, he’s out looking for a job, sir. But he’s okay with it. We figured I wouldn’t have to get it cut so often. If I kept it longer.” I was hoping he’d catch on to what I was saying, that the Landrys were too broke to pay for regular haircuts. I must have embarrassed him a bit because he put the phone down and moved back to drape the sheet around me.

“Okay,
d’abord
. Just be sure to tell your father, if he don’t like it this way I’ll trim them back — no charge.”

Damned if I was going to tell the old man that. I figured the only way I would keep the ducktail was if my father thought it would cost him another fifty cents to fix it. I went home with my toque in my pocket, freezing my ears but happy with my new look, hoping against hope my old man wouldn’t take a notion to get out the bowl and cut it himself.

I caught a break. When I came in he was already at the kitchen table telling my mother about the job he’d just gotten. “I told you, didn’t I,” he was half shouting, “that Barry would come through. I knew he’d give me the job.” Barry Watson was an old drinking buddy of my dad’s who was in the coal business. Since the end of the war he’d been getting into the oil furnace business, selling and installing them. He even had a storefront now, with one of those modern new oil burners on display in the window. I guess it was a pretty big deal in the fifties, when most people were replacing their coal or wood furnaces with oil.

“That’s wonderful,” my mother said, “that he thought of you like that. He didn’t seem to mind that you didn’t have any experience?”

“Well, he knows I can do anything I put my mind to. He just needs somebody he can trust. You know, to get on with the job when he isn’t there to supervise. Said he knew damn well I was a self-starter.” He had a big smile on his face, like he couldn’t stop from grinning. I guess by this time any job would have sounded the same to him, even sweeping the streets. “Hell, anybody could tell you that. You don’t run your own business for fifteen years without being a self-starter. That’s for damn sure.” He looked at Andrew and me and smiled some more. “Isn’t that right, boys?”

We must have been smiling, too, thinking our troubles were over. “Gee, Dad,” Andrew gushed, “does that mean you can buy back the Model A?”

“What about the cottage?” I chimed in. “Can we buy the cottage back, too?”

My father finally stopped smiling. “Whoa, hold your horses, now, boys. Mr. Watson can only pay me about forty dollars a week, to start. He promised me steady work, though. Especially after next month, when he gets the new fuel tanker. I didn’t tell you about that, did I? He’s going into the furnace oil business, so I’ll be driving a big truck. How about that?”