The Second Son (6 page)

“No, I’m okay.” After a moment’s reflection I added, “I guess I should have known they’d want something like this. They must think he can win.”

She knew what I meant. “Look, I know how you feel about Andrew and your mother. And I know you’ve had a hard time of it. It’s just that Andrew really loves this town. He’s devoted himself to it for a lot of years now. He gives a hundred and ten per cent. I think sometimes that Brian and Joanne resent it, actually.”

I could tell it wasn’t just her kids who resented it. I wondered if she knew why she’d probably been short-changed when it came to Andrew’s attentions. My heart warmed to that notion, enjoying the fact that she was sharing her feelings with me. I finally said, “So, how come he’s knocking back so much gin, if he still loves good old Alexandria? Is something bothering him?”

She gave me a long look, probably wondering if she had said too much. There was no reason why she should trust me. I don’t think she knew how I felt about her. Finally she ventured, “I know he drinks too much, has for years. That’s one of the reasons he’s thirty pounds overweight. He’s trying to cut back, though. He promised me. Says he’ll stop altogether when he declares for mayor.”

“He won’t.”

“You don’t know that.”

I smiled. “Don’t know what?”

I was making her nervous. Probably she could smell the hate. “Mike, please. He wants this so badly. He’s worked so hard.”

And I’ve waited so long, I thought. I stood up and patted her on the shoulder. “Andrew’s tougher than you think, Jean. And very good at looking after himself.”

I guess she took some kind of solace in that because she smiled at me and said, “I hope so, although he might need your help this time, if you know what I mean.”

“Then let him ask for it,” I said as I took my leave, maybe a little abruptly. I wanted to see my mother.

I found her alone by the coffin, the last of the visitors heading for the door. I slid into the seat beside her. “Mom, how are you doing?”

She turned and smiled, like she was glad to see me. “I’m okay, I guess. Everyone has been so nice. Your father was so loved, wasn’t he?”

I smiled back at her. “Think all those people will vote for Andrew?”

No surprise, no denial, no excuse, just a question right back at me, “Who told you?”

“When were you going to tell me?”

“Oh, we were. We just thought we’d wait till after the funeral. Who told you?”

“Somebody should tell Danny McEwan to do that, wait till after the funeral. I’m not sure the old man would appreciate all this electioneering on his ticket.”

“Your father knows all about it,” she huffed, not noticing her tense. “It’s been planned for months. And he would be the proudest man in Glengarry if his son were elected mayor of Alexandria. He loves this town.”

“If you say so. But tomorrow is Ed Landry’s last kick at the can, so make sure Andrew and Danny don’t sneak in any election announcements. From the pulpit or otherwise.”

“I’m sure they have no such intention,” she sniffed. “We have such a beautiful ceremony planned. Your Aunt Sissy is going to sing ‘A Small Town Country Guy,’ and Hector Gervais is doing ‘
Un canadien errant
.’ Father Grant has agreed. It’s exactly what your father asked for.”

I knew that had to be true. “Sounds great,” I murmured, letting her off the hook, perhaps because my father was just a few feet away. Or maybe because I spotted my cousin Johnny talking to my brother and Danny McEwan.

I was still smiling when I reached them across the room. “Johnny,” I said loudly, “I’m glad I caught you. I’m not interrupting anything, am I?” The look I got from Andrew made what I did easier. “I just wanted to ask you, Johnny. Could you put together a list for me, of houses for sale in Alexandria?” I watched with glee the alarm in Andrew’s eyes as I added, “I’m thinking of coming home, eh?”

Johnny looked up at me with a big grin. The other two froze, then started backing away from me like I had the plague. I guess I did, as far as they were concerned. I eased Johnny away from them with a hand on his back and asked, “How about we go down to the Hub and have a late supper?”

“You mean the Mill?”

“We could pretend it’s still the Hub, couldn’t we? Maybe we’ll run into somebody we know. Catch up on the gossip. Spread some around.” I smiled at the instant caucus I knew was taking place behind me. I figured more than a little sleep would be lost that night. And Andrew and I would be the only ones who knew the real reason.

We buried my father the next morning. I got no comfort from the service. St. Finnan’s Cathedral is a beautiful building but I had spent too many years on its hard oak kneeling boards listening to too many lessons about sin. Venial, mortal, cardinal — take your pick. And the inch of foam they’d added to those boards did nothing to soften my memories. I had hated and coveted, dishonoured and disrespected too long and too hard to believe my milk bottle would ever be white again. So I sat by myself at the back of the church. Even if I had felt welcome at the front, I didn’t want the eyes of Alexandria upon my back while I wondered if the whispers behind me were about the second son, and what he had done.

There was a moment during the funeral mass, when Hector Gervais sang “
Un canadien errant,
” that I almost cried. I’m not even sure why. The hospital, the wake, none of that had done it. Yet when my dad’s cousin started singing that song, this nameless lump started growing in my chest, trying to force its way out, making my mouth twist and my eyes tear up. All the while I was arguing with myself, telling myself it was all right, reminding myself I was running out of chances to let it out. Yet something made me keep swallowing it back down, just as I had done the day they left me alone in that place, just as I had done the day I got out. And just as I would an hour later when they lowered my father into the ground.

The rain had stopped and the sun was trying to come out when they carried the casket down the steps to the hearse. I followed the mourners to the plot behind the cathedral, watching the water fill in the footsteps they left behind in the soggy ground. So quickly, I thought, as I watched the hearse join us with the casket. I stayed on the outside as they said their prayers and the priest splashed his holy water and made the sign of the cross over Ed Landry for the last time. I thought of his last wishes and wondered if he would mind if I left my monster with him, in this muddy hole in the ground behind St. Finnan’s Cathedral. Maybe he was right. Maybe it was time.

The last words were said and the crowd began to disperse. Andrew and Jean led my mother away, weeping. I stayed. I needed to be there when the coffin was lowered. After a few minutes the gravediggers appeared. One gestured in my direction, the other shrugged and climbed onto the front-end loader parked nearby. He stared at me for a moment or so before he started it up and rolled our way. It wasn’t long before he had the coffin in straps and began lowering it into the ground, with a guiding hand from his helper. I knew then why they had hesitated, as the muddy water gushed up around the wooden coffin. Jesus, Dad, I thought, did you know it would be like this?

The coffin down, they dragged the phony grass off the mound beside the grave and started to backfill. I watched them drop three and a half buckets of dirt on my old man, and a couple dozen shovelfuls after that. It took about fifteen minutes to relegate everything Ed Landry had been to a muddy patch of ground in a field behind a church. While I watched the tears tried again to escape. And it came to me, the name of that nameless lump in my chest. Regret was its name, regret for all the chances that were missed, regret for all that was lost. Yet each time it moved up my chest I swallowed it back down, again and again until it got easier and easier. Then it was gone that last time and I knew they would never make me cry again.

August 1953

THERE WAS AN APPLE TREE
in our front yard on Elm Street. It was an old tree, gone wild, my mother said, with gnarled branches that bore small and wormy fruit. She wanted my father to cut it down. He convinced her they should give it a chance. He pruned it and sprayed it and nursed it along, and by the time Andrew and I were old enough to climb, the tree was giving us a respectable crop of apples every year. If you picked them at just the right time, they were hard and crispy, snapping back at you with every bite. We loved those apples. Or maybe we loved the idea of those apples, right there in our own front yard in a tree that we could climb.

Late in the summer of ’53, Andrew and I got into a contest over who could find Mom the biggest apple on the tree. Higher and higher we dared each other, looking for that perfect prize. I had the largest yet when Andrew spotted a beauty near the top. “I’m gonna win,” he decreed; “it’s the best.”

“Hah,” I sneered, “you can’t even climb that high.”

“Can so,” he declared as he started up the branch. I scrambled after him, and just as he reached for his prize with one hand he lost his grip with the other, and dropped like a stone to the ground. They said he broke his leg in three places, so I can understand why Mom and Dad were so mad. I tried to tell them it wasn’t my fault, but my father yelled at me to get out of his sight before he hit me. My mother told him to calm down, that maybe it was an accident. But the truth was in her eyes. At that moment, when Andrew lay under the tree with his leg all twisted, screaming that I had pushed him, my mother turned and looked at me like she wished she’d never had a second son.

I was born in September of 1944, a year after Andrew. He was their first child, born in June of 1943, two years after they were married. My father was Ed Landry and he had a grocery store in Alexandria, a small farming community in the county of Glengarry in eastern Ontario. My mother was a MacRae, born on a farm on the Eigg side road, north of town. Her people were among the Scots who had founded the county in the 1800s. His people were the French Canadians who had gradually moved in from neighbouring Quebec. By the time we were kids, the population of Alexandria was about half-and-half, or as my father used to say about Andrew and me, moitié-moitié. Mixed marriages were on the increase in those days, as society opened up during the war. There were even some Protestants and Catholics getting married, though usually against their parents’ wishes. That’s when you’d see some little three-line announcement in the
Glengarry News
. And unless one of them converted, you wouldn’t see any big church weddings. Probably that’s one of the reasons you were more likely to see French and English couples getting married, when they were both Catholic. Girls just hated giving up those big church weddings, even when they were on a tight schedule. I guess there were more than a few of those fixes, too. When my mother asked her parish priest to preside over her wedding to a French Canadian, his first reaction was to ask her if she was pregnant. She wasn’t, though. She was a good Catholic girl.

Both my parents were Catholic and they were serious about respecting their two cultures. That’s why they named their first child Andrew, after my mother’s brother, and named me Michel, after my dad’s father. I suppose it made Grandpa Landry happy. And maybe they had plans to send me to the French school. I sure paid the price, when I ended up going to the English school. I don’t know what they planned to name the next one, and it never came up. They didn’t have any more after me. I’m not sure why. I just remember my mother saying God hadn’t blessed them, in response to the sideways questions she would get from time to time in a town like Alexandria, where everyone thought they were entitled to know your business.

As far as I can tell, my parents had everything else going their way. The grocery business prospered, and they moved into the big house on Elm Street, the only one us kids could remember. Then they bought a cottage on the St. Lawrence, down near Summerstown, at the south end of Glengarry. In the old days they used to call that the Front, where the land along the river was more fertile and the people who settled there thought themselves better off than those who were stuck with the less prosperous “rock farms” in the north of the county. This was an important distinction when most people still made their living off the land.

Alexandria is located just about the middle of Glengarry. The town grew up around a pond fed by the Garry River, which wanders its way down from Loch Garry, the only decent-size lake in the county. At the northeast end of “the Pond,” where the Garry makes its exit, a pioneering Scottish priest organized the building of a grain mill. The square that developed around it became the centre of the town. It was approaching two thousand strong, the town was, by the time my father set up business in the early forties.

My father always came alive when he talked about those years, when the store filled up with people every Friday night and all day Saturday. Back then people came in for their groceries with a list in hand and stood at the counter while the clerks ran around grabbing items off the shelves and packing them in cardboard boxes. I remember they even had a couple of those grabbers that the clerks could use to get boxes off the top shelves. My father had as many as six clerks working for him, when business was booming.

He used to say there was nothing you couldn’t sell during the war. If an item wasn’t moving, all he had to do was hide it under the counter. Sooner or later someone would spot it there and figure he was holding it back for favoured customers, on account of the shortages. He said he had gotten rid of two cases of french onion soup that way, stuff that had sat out on the shelf for two years. He must have been making good money, too, because it sure sounded like he spent a lot.

He always owned a car, and a truck for the business. After the war he bought one of those Jeeps they started making, with the real wood trim and the fake wood panelling on the bottom half. When the kingpins kept breaking, he got rid of the Jeep and bought a brandnew ’49 Chrysler with a “Fluid Drive” transmission. In those days, half the people in Alexandria didn’t have one vehicle, let alone two. That was one of the reasons stores like my dad’s did so well. If you lived in town, my dad would deliver your groceries right to your door.