Maclean (3 page)

“I wouldn't want Aunt Hilda not to get something,” Jim was saying, his head cocked a little to one side, watching Maclean, silently telling him, “I don't want you to go off and drink this all up.”

“She'll get something nice,” Maclean said. “Don't you worry about that. And I'll tell her you and Nancy were asking after her. And about the work and the money and all.”

At the stable door, he looked towards Main Street. He didn't see any of the boys there now, but they could have been just around the corner, so he cut into a little alley and came out further up Main Street beside the post office. He took a quick look around. There was no one down Main Street, no one at the corner, no one in front of the liquor store. Someone had come up with a bottle, and they had gone off. Or the cops had run them off.

The street was lined on both sides with cars and trucks, and the Saturday crowds on the sidewalks were thickening up. Across the street in front of the town hall, people were lined up to get the new ration books, but the police station and the lockup were also in the town hall, and Maclean had decided to get his ration book at the high school. He hadn't done anything to get himself in trouble, but the less the cops saw of you the better.

He made his way across Main Street through the crawling traffic, half-expecting someone to shout after him. Someone who had seen him around the stable. Someone who would know he was in the money.

Up the street, walking fast, getting a little winded, he passed the Court House and looked as he always did at the cenotaph and the old German field gun which stood on either side of the lawn out front. It was the only German gun he had ever seen. They were always going to get the bastards who were shelling them, but they never did.

The cenotaph was a thick, square column of black granite with a soldier on top standing at attention with his rifle at his side. The sides of the column were covered with tablets listing the dead, and as Maclean passed, names leapt out at him. Robert Cronk. Charles Simpson. Frank Gallagher. Old pals whose faces he sometimes had a hard time remembering now, especially when he was sober, although sometimes when he was drinking, one or the other of them would suddenly without warning take shape so clear he could imagine him speaking.

Hello, Johnnie, I hardly knew ya.

Where had it been? France somewhere. A summer day well away from the trenches on their way to an inspection by General somebody or other. A long column of them, a mile or more, with a band somewhere in the middle. It was playing The Soldiers of the King, and they were expected to sing along to show they were in good spirits. Most of them had been taught the words in school except that then it had been The Soldiers of the Queen. All the little boys marching around the room and the girls sitting at their desks waving as if they were saying goodbye to them as they set off to the war. The Boer War that would have been. And Miss Thatcher, a tight-limbed, fierce little woman standing up in front of the blackboard beating out the time with a ruler.

“We're the soldiers of the Queen, my lads.”

He remembered the day the old Queen died. A bitter, cold, winter day. From across the river, they heard all the bells on the hills of the town tolling, and people came out and stood along the banks of snow by the road looking across the ice, thinking there must be a fire. Then someone coming from town told them that the Queen had died, and his mother and Alice started crying and wiping their eyes, standing there on the road in the cold, and some of the men took off their hats. Crazy. And he remembered, it must have been the next Saturday, all the buildings on Main Street draped in black and the snow falling and the dung from the horses steaming in the streets.

3

THE NEW HIGH
school was a great brick building with ten-foot-high, arched windows on the second floor, a gift to the town by its only millionaire, a monument to the dignity of learning. When Maclean had gone to high school, the building had been wooden with a big steeple up the centre like a church and two wings running off to the sides with little roofed walkways along the front behind a line of arches, like the ones he had seen the time he and two of the boys had gone to Westminster Abbey. A little square of grass and around it, the walkway with the arches and a square of blue sky overhead, all just as it must have been five hundred years before so that you could imagine that you really had stepped back into that quiet time.

But as they were walking around, three big, awkward farmboys, gawking and marveling in their farmboy way, an English captain had shouted at them, “You men. You men there. What business have you here? Get out where you belong. This isn't Piccadilly Circus. This isn't a public house.”

And they had all saluted and snuck out like children.

Maclean entered the school past a sign about the ration books, which he didn't bother to read, and climbed the stairs into the central hall. A couple of trestle tables had been set up at one end, and a line of fifty people or more, mostly women, were trailing back from them. He tacked onto the end of the line behind a fat woman in a silk dress, who looked at him as if she might be getting ready to throw up and stepped up beside the woman in front of her.

Maclean left her three feet of breathing room and stood gazing around, detaching himself. The walls of the hall were lined with pictures of graduating classes. His mother would be there somewhere. And Miss Audrey Sweet, who had graduated before her calamity plunged her back into the great slough from which she had managed briefly to clamber. He himself was in none of them, though somewhere there would be one that a ghost of him might be in, waiting to step out, as the group dissolved, into the ghost of the life he had never had.

Latin and Mathematics are a training for the mind.

He hadn't known that day when he left school for home that it would be his last day.

“What does he need a high school diploma for?” his father shouted at his mother. “The horses can't read. Neither can the pigs. Maybe he can recite Latin to them. Or Shakespeare.”

Amo, amas, amat. This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England. Neco, necas, necat. Necavi, necavisti, necavit. Necaverunt. For -erunt, -ere is also found, especially in poetry.

The worst thing was going back to get the stuff from his desk. It was early in March. Overnight the temperature had gone up into the forties. There was water melting and running everywhere, and the light falling now from a different place in the sky seemed all of a sudden in that warm air no longer the hard light of winter.

He went over around four o'clock when the others would have been gone. But they weren't all gone, and three of the boys in his grade were standing in the hall. And Cynthia. That was the worst of all. They watched him and didn't speak. He could tell they had some sense of what was going on. Maybe the word had trickled back somehow from across the river. Maybe they had merely guessed at it because of the days he had already missed, he who was never sick and who never missed days. They were waiting maybe for him to speak, but he was ashamed as if somehow all along he had been in a place where he didn't belong and had now been exposed for the imposter he was.

Standing, shunned, behind the fat lady in her silk dress, looking at the long rows of graduation photographs, he could feel it all again. One of the boys once told him a story about a vacant house that had been hit by lightning. The people had moved out, too hurried or too lazy to take the bulbs out of the sockets, but the power had been cut off, so the wires inside were all dead. Then one night, the chimney had been hit by lightning, and for a few seconds all the lights in the house had come on. It was like that. There were all these hidden people there inside him, all those slumbering ghosts, like dark houses with dead wires, and every once in a while something would come like the lightning bolt, and all the dead circuitry of their grief would come to life.

The principal of the school was Mr. Raymond from one of the old Anglican families in the town. Tall with long, wild hair and wide, dark eyes. The girls adored him. He taught English composition, English literature, and Latin, and he was fond of declaiming poetry. Catullus, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson. And Yeats and Carman, both of whom he had met. Carman was a distant relative, and Mr. Raymond promised that when next he saw Carman, he would try to persuade him to come and read to them.

Past the lighthouse, past the nunbuoy,
Past the crimson, rising sun,
There are dreams go down the harbour
With the tall ships of Saint John.

Mr. Raymond was sitting behind the desk in his classroom. He too had probably guessed what had happened.

“They need me at home,” Maclean said, offhand, swaggering, trying to make as if he were saying, “I'm a man now, and I haven't time for all this.”

“That's too bad,” Mr. Raymond said. “You were doing well. Perhaps you'll be able to come back next year. You could work at some of the books.”

“I'll see,” Maclean said.

He got his things out of the desk, not looking up, and stuffed them roughly into the bookbag. He was determined never to look at them again.

“I'm sorry to see you go,” Mr. Raymond said. “And I want to wish you good luck whatever you do.”

As it turned out, he was the one who was going to need the luck, more of it than he had anyway. Three years later he was dead. Like almost all the young men from those old families with their worship of England, he joined up and became an officer, and one day a great German shell came down on the arm of their trench and blew him and everyone else to pieces so small that one of the boys told him later there was hardly anything left to bury. After the war, somebody published a little book of poems he had written, all about birds and flowers. Crazy.

Atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale

The town clock on the top of the post office was striking twelve as he hustled back, straight down Main Street and to hell with it. God damn them. The miserable, little fuckers. Is this your ration book? Yes, it's my book, it's got my name in it. Yes, but that doesn't mean you're the person that's got the name that's in the book. We have orders to be sure. Jesus Christ, you've seen me a thousand times. You know god-damned well who I am. What the hell are you talking about?

Now he was going to be late for his god-damned dinner.

“Pinky,” someone shouted from behind him.

He looked back over his shoulder without stopping. It was Junior Tedley, one of the boys he had seen hanging around the end of Diamond Street. A bum. A leech. A useless, splay-footed, chicken-brained, sponging son of a whore.

“Fuck off,” Maclean said.

Drusilla was a little behind with dinner, and she was still dishing up the Saturday beef stew when Maclean slipped into his place. The boarders sat down the sides of the table, and there was an empty space at the end where Mr. Elmer Ellsworthy sometimes ate his dinner when something interesting was being talked about.

What was interesting today was that the MacDonald boys had stopped at the post office on the way home, and Alex, the older one, had found his call-up notice waiting.

“You gonna volunteer for overseas?” Walter Haynes asked.

“I dunno,” Alex said. “I ain't thought about it yet.”

“You know all about that, Mr. Maclean,” Miss Audrey said.

“About what would that be?” Maclean asked.

“Yes, sir,” Henry said. “You been through it all. Vimy Ridge and all.”

“I wasn't at Vimy Ridge,” Maclean said.

“A lot of them guys,” Walter said, “talk about the war that never got near no trenches. They just set around England not doin' nothin'.”

“Well, you never seen no trenches anyway,” Maclean said and immediately regretted it. Walter was a mean, under-handed son of a bitch, and it made no sense to get on the bad side of him over nothing.

He looked across at Maclean as if wondering which part of him he was going to hit first. Walter was bald with a fat, pink face and very small eyes set too close together. Altogether he looked like a pig except that the expression on a pig's face was generally more intelligent.

“I had a bad heart,” Walter said. “I kept goin' down there to the Armoury, and they kept tellin' me, ‘Walter you got a bad heart. With a heart like that, Walter, it would kill you in a week. With a heart like that, it's just a wonder you're alive.'”

“It's a great honour to serve one's King and Coontry,” Elmer pronounced from the end of the table. “The greatest honour there is.”

“Ours not to reason why,” he intoned with upturned eyes. “Ours but to do and die. That's what Mr. Churchill says.”

“Bullshit,” Maclean said into his plate.

“Now, Mr. Maclean,” Miss Audrey said, “I didn't hear that.”

Maclean sat beside Henry on the front porch smoking a cigarette. The temperature had climbed all morning, and it was now nearly eighty, one of the last of the real summer days. Across the river, on the road that slanted up the face of the hill, a wagon loaded with bales of hay was being hauled up by a two-horse team so slowly that it seemed hardly to be moving.

“Did you know,” Henry said, “that them stars we look at ain't really there like that any more? What we're looking at is the light they gave off thousands of years ago, so when we look at them, we're looking back all that time.”

“Well, well,” Maclean said.

“I read somewhere in a book,” Henry said, “that there's some philosopher who says that all the time that ever was is still right here, only in a different place. Now ain't that something interesting to think about?”

“It is so,” Maclean said.

With a hearty dinner in it, his stomach was feeling good now, and with all his worries cleared away, and the wherewithal in his pocket, he was feeling the need for a drink, a need all its own, like hunger or thirst or the need for a cigarette, but with its own peculiar quality of need the way each of those things had its own peculiar quality. It was a kind of void located at first somewhere at the back of the throat, then radiating out, spreading further and further as time went on, the way the good first drink radiated out, chasing that void and transforming it into lightness and a joy that passeth understanding.

If it hadn't been for all the time he had wasted at the high school, he would have had time to stop at the liquor store and get something before dinner.

But it would have been crazy to stop when he had all that money on him. And if he'd got drinking, he could have ended up getting himself rolled somewhere. Better to do what he had done.

He would leave some of the money here and then go up town. But first he would have a nap. The work, the brisk walk to the school, the standing around, the half-run back here had tired him out. He could hang on for another hour, then everything would be set up fine, and he would be feeling rested and ready.

The dresser in his room had two small drawers at the top with a space under them big enough that something not too thick could be put there and the drawer run back in. This was where he hid money and ration coupons when he had more than he wanted to carry. His door had a lock, but Drusilla kept a key so that she and her two fat daughters could come in to clean up, and anyway the lock was so crude that anybody who took the trouble could open it with a piece of baling wire.

Maclean put the ration book with his new liquor coupons and a fifty-cent piece and a quarter into an envelope and slipped them into his hiding place. Then he drew down the blind against the sunlight, took off his boots, and lay down. He looked at the stain on the ceiling and felt the memory of something he didn't want to remember beginning to stir. He put it away and thought instead of the good afternoon that awaited him on the far side of his sleep.