Each Man's Son (14 page)

“Your ancestors might just as well have stayed home,” Ainslie said, “for all the good they've done themselves here.”

The carriage creaked over the uneven road and Ainslie saw Doucette's house come into sight around the slope of a hill.

“If you don't mind, Fern,” he said suddenly, “you can leave me here. I'm going to take a walk over to the old town and get some of the knots inside me untied.”

Doucette reined in the horse and turned to look at Ainslie. “You're not serious?”

“Yes, of course I am. I've ordered a carriage to pick me up in time for the afternoon train.”

“But Monique's expecting you for lunch! She's even made the children put on their Sunday clothes.”

Ainslie shifted uncomfortably. “I can't eat so soon after an operation like that.”

“Well, then, come in and have a drink.”

“You know I don't drink.”

Doucette looked at his stubborn profile. “You're fifty miles from home, Dan, and nobody around here is going to stick out his nose to smell your breath.” He put his hand on Ainslie's knee and grinned like a brown monkey. “Have you ever been drunk in your life?”

“Yes, of course.”

“I don't believe it.”

Ainslie laughed shortly and stared down the empty land towards the sea. “I'd better be on my way.”

“You mean you're really going down there?”

“I've always wanted time to study the place.”

“Good God, what for? Graves of dead nuns are down there. Sometimes a mad dog howls around them. He's probably after their bones.”

“Probably.” With a quick movement Ainslie picked up his bag and put one foot on the step of the carriage. “I'm sorry I don't feel up to going home with you this time, Fern. You know how much I always count on seeing you whenever I come down here. But another time…”

Doucette's eyebrows rose. “What have you been doing that makes you so ashamed of yourself?”

“Och!” Ainslie said in reply, cursing his friend inwardly for his lack of reserve.

“I know. You Scotchmen are all crazy and the whole lot of you have corrupt consciences. A crazy Highlander nearly broke down my door the other night hammering to get in. It was a long way past midnight and when I let him in do you know what he said?”

“Whatever it was, it wasn't what you're going to tell me.”

“He was a big fellow about six feet four with black hair like yours. He began to shout at me, ‘Doctor for the luff of God the whole sky iss full of them.' ‘Full of what?' I said. ‘Full of women and effery one of them iss my wife and they are after me.'” Doucette gave Ainslie a winning smile. “You see what I mean?”

Ainslie jumped out of the carriage. “Give my regrets to Monique,” he said. “Yes, I see what you mean.” The tone of his voice was noncommittal. “The fact is, I'm very tired.”

“So tired you want to take a two-mile walk.” Doucette shrugged. “What you're lying about I don't know, but for God's sake, Dan, don't feel guilty about it afterwards. I hope you enjoy yourself in the old town. There's nothing there but grass.”

Ainslie turned without answering and set off down the side road, his medical bag swinging in his left hand. He heard Doucette call to the horse and then the squeak of springs as the carriage went on.

 

Sixteen

H
E FOUND THEM
on the old battlefield on the edge of the sea. As he walked down the rutted, grass-grown track towards the gray stone museum, he saw their tiny figures silhouetted against the sky as they watched the sea from the top of the only ruin which protruded above the grass. It was the bomb shelter which appeared in all the pictures of the fortress and which he believed, though he was not sure, had been part of the great Dauphin Bastion. It was shaped like three beehives laid side by side, and like everything else here it was covered with grass. Grass grew over what had been streets and foundations, it almost obscured the rusted cannon and carronades which had been fished up from the harbor bottom by the coal company and deposited on the ground outside the museum. Nothing but grass, as Doucette had said, but it had conquered everything.

Ainslie stopped and watched them. The operation sank below the surface of his mind as he began to think about these two as human beings and see clearly what was involved in their lives. The boy was all she had. That boy had a world to win, but he was all she had and she knew nothing about the world and the winning of it.

They turned as though his thoughts had called and saw him standing there. Mollie smiled shyly and Alan waved
boldly. When Ainslie saw the welcome on Alan's face, something turned over inside him and he waved back. He felt an ache of longing in his chest which confirmed the flaring thought that it had not been an accident which had caused Doucette to call him to Louisburg that day.

“Oh Doctor,” Mollie said, when he reached the bastion and stood below them. “Thank you for making us come here. It is a wonderful place!”

He looked up and Alan was smiling down at him. Then the boy went to his knees on the edge of the gray stone wall and spoke confidentially from his height. “We saved one sandwich for you.”

“Have you been through the museum?”

“No, Doctor, not yet,” Mollie answered. “We thought you might explain it when you came.”

“All right. If you can get down from there, let's go inside.”

He reached up and caught Alan as he clambered down. Mollie found it harder to get down gracefully, but he was too reserved to help her as he had helped the boy, so he turned his back while her skirts were pulled awry and then he heard her land on the grass. Alan laughed, so he knew she had fallen, but she was laughing too as he turned to help her up. He accepted without a word the sandwich they offered. When he had finished it he said it had tasted very good, and they left the picnic basket where it was.

There was no one else inside the museum and not even the curator was in sight. It was a nearly empty building in this empty place where a battle had been fought which was almost as important as Marathon, but Ainslie filled it with word pictures for them. He explained the old maps and the history of the period they represented, and for a long time they studied the drawings of the original city and the old paintings of British ships fighting close against the forts. Alan learned what Louis XV looked like, and the difference in the faces of Admiral Boscawen and General Wolfe and General
Townsend. By the time they came out it was already after four.

“That's enough history for one day,” Ainslie said to Alan. “Why don't you go down to the shore to play for a while?”

As they made their way back to the picnic basket Alan darted off. Ainslie watched him with an appraising eye. The boy was frail, his skeleton was light and he would never be strong compared to the rugged youngsters who would be his companions as he grew up. He probably had a sound enough constitution, but he was the type whose strength would come from will and nerves. He would succeed by his brain and his imagination or he would fail utterly.

Ainslie sat down on the turf and stared across the humpy, grass-covered ground towards the harbor. Mollie, still shy, still conscious that he was the doctor while she was merely a miner's daughter, not understanding why the doctor was showing such special interest in Alan and herself, sat down shyly some distance away, her calves tucked under her thighs.

For nearly five minutes neither of them spoke. They understood each other insofar as two Highlanders always understand each other. Each, within limits, could trust the other, but the limits were absolute.

When Ainslie finally turned to her, he said, “How old is Alan now?”

“He is eight and a half, Doctor.”

“A boy of fourteen wouldn't have asked questions as intelligent as his this afternoon.”

She flushed with pride. “I am very glad you think so, Doctor.”

“It would be a crime for a boy like that to go into the pits.”

The flush turned to a sudden pallor, but she did not reply.

“I understand his father is fighting some American boxer in an important match tonight. Is that so?”

“Yes, he is. I came down here today because I hoped I would not be able to think about it. Indeed, I had almost forgotten.”

“Forgetting a thing doesn't rule it out of existence.”

He looked away to the harbor again. He knew it was unethical for him to talk to her as he was doing. He was a doctor, not a priest, and the private lives of the people in his care were none of his business, except as their bodies were affected. Yet he could not leave the thing alone. The realization began to grow within him that if he had a son like Alan MacNeil he would be content to live and work anywhere, even in Broughton. But as soon as the idea was fully formed and he began to inspect its implications, he discarded it. Again something seemed to turn over within his chest and he was afraid of the feeling. Habit came to his rescue and he forced himself to think as a doctor. He told himself that it was a crime for a boy such as Alan to be raised with no future but the mines. Any man with a simple sense of humanity would do what he could to prevent such a boy from being sent into the pits. It was only his plain duty to do what he could.

He turned to Mollie again. “If Archie wins tonight, will he come home?”

“I don't know. I have never known what he would do. There has always been the wildness in Archie.”

“Have you heard from him lately?”

He could see that his question troubled her, so he began to study her as he would study a patient. He saw a face with small features and a short Celtic nose so straight it was almost Grecian. He saw her frail body with a certain wistful grace and he saw that her eyes had the eager loving-kindness of a deer's eyes. He knew, as one Highlander always knows when he sees it in another, that she had quality. She was incomparably superior to her husband; therefore her marriage proved that she was excessively malleable. When he came to this final conclusion he felt ashamed and knew why, for he realized that if he wished to influence her, he could do so.

“Doctor, I got a letter from Archie only a few days ago. He wants me to take Alan and go to the States.”

There was a silence before he answered. “Do you tell me this because you want my opinion in the matter?”

She hesitated. “You know so much more than I do, Doctor. What do you think I ought to do?”

“Absolutely don't go. You'd be taking Alan into a kind of life down there with Archie that would be ten times worse than what's in front of him here.”

She looked away and Ainslie's eyes sought the boy.

“I'm afraid if I do not go he will never come home.”

“For Alan–as I've said before–it will be better if he never does.”

“It is bad for a boy not to have a father.”

“Yes,” Ainslie said, “it is. But it's better not to have a father than to have one who…”

The expression in her eyes unmanned him, and he refrained from finishing the sentence. A woman like that, he thought, can make any man feel helpless. Again he turned his mind sharply away from the ideas which were forming in it. As he got up from the grass he felt more strongly than ever that he had been unethical and incorrect, that he should never have forced such a conversation. Then he saw Alan clamber down from the bastion and start running towards him and he thought, let the devil take the rules. The future of a first-class human being is worth more than all the rules in the world.

“The fog is coming!” Alan was crying. “The fog is coming!”

As he ran up to them Ainslie bent over and caught him.

“Where does the fog come from? Mummy says it comes from the sea, but why does it come from the sea? What makes it?”

“That's an easy one,” Ainslie said. “Let's go down to the shore and take a look at this fog.”

Less than a mile away was an incoming gray wall, dark below and fluffy with light where it reached into the sky.

“Why does it always come towards us like that?”

Ainslie looked down at the eager face. “Let's find a bit of sand and I'll draw you a map.”

They went down to the shore together and Ainslie picked up a stick. He sketched in the continental coast and added circles for Greenland, Newfoundland and Iceland.

“Here is where we are now,” he said, pointing with his stick at the easterly corner of what he called Cape Breton. “Out there in the sea, a little way up to the nor'east, is a great meeting place.” His stick pointed north of Newfoundland and came down in a sweeping curve. “There are rivers in the ocean and this is one of them. It's called the Labrador Current and it comes down icy from the polar sea. If it weren't for that, it would be warm enough in Cape Breton to grow grapes.”

The stick dropped down to the Gulf of Mexico. “Here is the greatest of all the ocean rivers–the Gulf Stream. It comes warm out of the tropics and just off here–” again the stick moved–“it collides with the Labrador Current over the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. The warm water meets the cold water and that produces moisture in the air that's about the same as the hot steam from your kettle in the kitchen. That's what we call fog. The fog blows into the land on an easterly wind and it gets so thick and heavy it makes rain. The rain makes the grass grow, cattle and sheep eat the grass and we eat the cattle and sheep, and that's how we stay alive.”

Alan was listening to him intently, watching his face; and Mollie was watching both of them with her mouth slightly open and her eyes eager. Ainslie felt his spirit rise like a bird in the sky. Suddenly he felt young and joyous.

“Oh, but it's a fine thing to grow up on an island! Here we are at the beginning of so many different things. You can learn about the land and the sea at the same time. How many inland people even stop to think what it means–all life originally comes out of the sea! If all life died–all of it–the sea in its own good time would fill the world with life once more.”

Even as he said this, Alan's attention wandered, and Ainslie realized that he did not yet know how to talk to a small boy. Alan was far more interested in the sea itself than in words about it. The boy was staring across the harbor mouth to the little flatiron island which once had been fortified. A moment ago it had been flecked white with roosting gulls, and more gulls circled and cried above it in the sky. Now the whole flock rose and began diving, and Ainslie watched them, too.

“A school of herring has just come into the harbor,” he explained. “That's what the gulls are after.”

Alan turned back to him. “Will the gulls eat the herring?”

“If they can catch them.”

“Does every alive thing eat other alive things?”

“Most of them do.”

The atmosphere had become somberly dramatic. Already the first wisps of fog were blowing over the gulls' island like gray smoke, yet as the three watched it come in, the backs of their necks were warm from the sun. Ainslie turned around. Westward the sky was cobalt over the dark green of spruce and the shining green of sun-swept grass, but under the overhang of the fog the water looked as coldly dark as the back of a haddock. Then the fog, as soundless as it was swift, began to enclose them. The sun became a pallid disk and disappeared and the whole landscape was as gray and cold as a wet dawn.

“It's time to be going,” Ainslie said. He looked at his watch. “Did you tell the carriage to come back for you at five o'clock?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“Well, it's five now. We'd better start for the road.” He turned to Alan. “How would you like to ride on my shoulder?”

“The way Ronnie rides on his father's shoulder?” He looked skeptical. “But I'm lots bigger than he is.”

“Let's see how heavy you are.”

As Ainslie bent and caught Alan by the waist and lifted him up with both hands he thought the boy winced. “Did I hurt you?” he said.

“I never get hurt,” Alan replied, as he shifted himself on the doctor's shoulders and prodded his heels against Ainslie's chest.

The boy was even lighter than the doctor had expected. “Here,” he said. “Suppose you carry my bag for me.”

So they returned to the museum, where Mollie retrieved the picnic basket, and then they set off on the grass-covered road, Alan jogging up and down on the doctor's shoulders and Mollie walking silently beside them.

“We'd better not go too far,” the doctor said. “The fog's getting thicker and they might not find us.”

He bent his knees and let Alan slip off, the medical bag still clutched proudly in one hand. As they returned to the museum in the mist Ainslie suddenly felt that everything was all right. Nothing was visible in the fog. And his happiness grew. The fog thickened and circled over the stone monuments to the dead nuns and the mounds of the ruined bastions. Moisture dissolving on the slate roof made a whispering sound as it fell from the eaves, gulls screamed far away over the water and there was a rattle of wings and a scrape of claws as one of the birds came to rest on the stone.

“Listening to them,” Ainslie said, “you'd think they were the ghosts of drowned Newfoundlanders.”

“Mummy sees ghosts sometimes.”