Maclean (7 page)

“But them other kids of Ruthie's, they ain't fat nor nothin', but they're just as healthy as can be,” Alice said. “It's funny, ain't it. Just no reason.”

“No,” Maclean said. “I guess most of the time there isn't.”

They were sitting on the ramp by the woodworking shop, Elsie in a bathing suit she had made out of an old dress, which when wet, clung to the shape of her nakedness beneath.

“Why don't you come up to our place after supper,” Elsie whispered to him, “and we'll go for a walk.”

The summer sun still high and hot. They walked up along the edge of a field full of yellow stubble where the last hay had been cut. Two of her younger brothers trailed along behind them further down the hill. One of them ran out into the field waving his arms, and a flock of blackbirds—grackles, starlings, red wings—rose and swirled in a great corkscrew of motion above the hillside and came down again further away. The boy ran after them, and the other boy followed.

They climbed a cedar rail fence, he first, Elsie after, bending over, her breasts hanging loose inside her dress, laughing her hoarse laugh, knowing very well what he was looking at.

“Now her sister Mildred's kids is all just little butterballs,” Alice said. “It must have somethin' to do with heredity.”

A corner of the next field. Wild grass, buttercups, daisies, devil's paint brushes. The black birds swirling again overhead. The voices of the boys fading away, further off down the hill. Lying close together, finding her naked under her dress, watching her violent fit, unknowing and terrified at first that something awful, something fatal, was happening to her. Later on the way home, overwhelmed with guilt and the fear that his father would find out and horsewhip him or drive him from the house. Sin will always be found out. The righteous can always see it in the faces of the unrighteous as plain as if they were branded.

“Mildred's husband Frank, now he ain't big, but his mother was a big woman if ever there was. Mitch says people take after their grandparents more than their parents”

“Maybe so,” Maclean said.

A few days later, they met again at their spot on the hillside, and two or three more times after that. Then in the fall, he went across the river to the high school, feeling clumsy and awkward, the only one in his class there who wasn't a town kid. He was only there a year and a half, but it was enough to make him feel ashamed of what his classmates might say if they knew he had a girlfriend like Elsie Skadget.

Then the war came and later the influenza.

It arrived in George County a few months after he came home from England, first one or two people coming down with it, nobody yet hardly knowing what it was, then more and more, and the atmosphere of terror gathering like that of the Black Death as people started dying when the winter came. People not going out any more than they had to, wearing a whole witch's cupboard of crazy charms.

The Skadgets got it in the middle of the winter, and lying around in that ramshackle house with the wind blowing through it, every one of them died except the mother and one boy. Elsie was one of the first. Too many people were dying for graves to be dug in the frozen ground, so the undertakers collected the bodies in a barn on the edge of town after the funeral ceremonies, and in the spring there were dozens of buryings. The Skadgets were all lowered into the same grave in plain, wooden coffins on a rainy day with the water running down the piles of raw earth onto the coffins in the bottom, where a field mouse had fallen in the night before and drowned.

His father had watched all the dying with fierce satisfaction. It was God's judgement on the wicked and the lazy. Then he got the influenza himself, the only one in the house to get it, and nearly died. But the judgement of God, who is a just God, visits his wrath not only on individuals but on their houses. Many were the children whose sins God has punished through the father.

That awful house of self-righteousness and rage as the winter of 1918 dragged toward spring. Sleet, then snow again, then rain that froze on everything. The roads so covered with ice that you could hardly stand up on them, then so deep in mud that a horse would sink to its fetlocks with every step and give up and just stand. Sometimes with all that mud and death, it seemed to him as if he was back in Flanders. Then the ice breaking up at last at the end of April and the first flowers of spring coming up in the woods. And all the while, more and more of the boys dragging home with their wounds, outer and inner, from the trenches.

At the table Alice was rolling little doughnut balls around on a plate of sugar.

Maclean eyed the cooked doughnuts.

Alice caught the look.

“Them doughnuts is cool now if you want one,” she said curtly as if giving an order.

“Thanks,” he said. “I wouldn't mind.”

He picked out one that had exploded a little in the hot fat and had a thicker, rougher crust on one side.

If he had never gone to high school, he might have married Elsie Skadget and had kids and never gone to the war. And if she had married him, or even if they were just going together when the influenza came, fate might have taken a different road so that she didn't die.

Once he and Henry had one of their long talks on the porch at Drusilla's, and they decided that if even one little thing happened differently, then all sorts of other things would happen differently too. For example, on his way into town, a young man might stop along the road to admire a butterfly and six hours later get killed by a car whereas if he hadn't stopped to look at the butterfly he wouldn't have been stepping onto the street just at the moment when the car was arriving and might have gone on living for another fifty years. He might have gone on to be married. Children might have been born. Other lives lived. All because of a butterfly.

It makes you think, as Henry said.

“Do you remember,” Maclean said, “the time the bunch of us walked out to Lake Kintyre to have a picnic? Us two and the Nickerson girls, and Elsie Skadget and one of her brothers.”

Alice eyed him over her shoulder, and didn't answer at first, searching maybe for the memory, or maybe not wanting it.

“Yes,” she said, finally. “And Sadie and Billy Sprague.”

“And Harry Noles,” Maclean said and wondered if maybe he shouldn't have mentioned Harry.

“Yes,” she said. “And Harry too.”

Late July. The road along the little wooded valley dusty and shimmering. The brook that ran beside it so shallow it seemed hardly to be moving at all, as if it were nothing but a network of standing pools among the rocks. The chokecherry bushes along the road heavy with fruit and swarming with robins and blackbirds. The smell of the evergreens on the sides of the valley drifting down through the heat. And the crowd of them tramping along, the boys in caps, the girls in wide-brimmed straw hats with ribbons—except for Elsie Skadget, who had an old straw hat of her father's all raveling away along the brim.

Alice was still taller than he was, slim and straight. She walked with a long, swinging stride beside Harry Noles, and he remembered her laughing. Once she ran away, and Harry chased her up the road until she ran out of breath, and they both stood at the top of a little rise waiting for the rest to catch up.

Where the road skirted the shore of Lake Kintyre before vanishing away into the deep forest, there was a stretch of green and a narrow beach of rounded stones. They sat there in a line on the edge of the green and ate their sandwiches of jam and cheese on homemade bread and looked across the lake at the forest rising up over the hill on the other side. Alice had taken an interest in poetry and once read aloud at the school closing, and she had brought along a book, hoping maybe that Harry Noles would see her as a sensitive and intelligent soul.

“I wandered lonely as a cloud,” she read, “that floats on high o'er vales and hills.”

Funny that so small a thing could be so great an adventure that he had remembered it all his life when there were now whole years that he couldn't remember one thing about.

What year was it? 1906 maybe. It must have been just about then that Alice finished Grade 8 and father made her leave school. Perhaps that was what reading the poetry that day was about.

“I wandered lonely as a cloud,” Maclean said.

“What?” Alice asked, looking up from the stove.

“Nothing,” he said.

“Ain't you gonna eat that doughnut?”

“Yes. Yes, I am.”

As she went on stirring furiously at something in a double boiler, he slowly ate his doughnut and looked around at the great clutter of cooking gear and fended off as best he could the sense of exile that threatened to assail him.

He became aware that more of the port he had drunk at the Black Rock had begun to work its way through. He wondered if he would be able to make it back to the boarding house without being caught short and decided not.

“I wonder,” he asked, “if I could use your bathroom.”

8

MACLEAN PEEKED OVER
the top of the bathroom curtain at the back yard. A chicken coop, a little vegetable garden, at the back, a dense stand of fir trees unmoving in the afternoon heat, reminding him again of that long-ago morning when Alice at one of life's awful crossroads had read Wordsworth to Harry Noles. Inside, on a set of shelves beside the washbasin, an arrangement of domestic clutter. Surprise soap. Toothbrushes. Hair brushes. Hair curlers. A pile of neatly folded towels. A shaving mug. A shaving brush. A safety razor. The furnishings of a settled life where a man might lie of an evening in a tub of hot water and read and float away from the troubles outside.

He looked at his face in the mirror. The bruise on his forehead was getting bigger and turning an even uglier shade of black and blue.

When he first moved to town, he boarded at a nice house on a nice residential street. It belonged to a couple, Bob and Clara, who took in only one boarder for the sake of a little extra money and maybe also for a little extra company now that their children had all moved away. Big elms and maples all around. A lawn out front that he mowed for them sometimes. A big garden that he used to help Bob weed in the evening, talking away about this and that, Bob asking him sometimes about the war and him telling the usual, well-sanitized lies.

In the morning, he washed and shaved in an upstairs bathroom that faced east and in the morning was always filled with light. Then dressed up in a suit and tie the way he used to be the year he went to high school, he walked up through town to the woodworking factory and an office of his own, where he worked at accounts at a desk with a little sign with his name on it. Mr. John Maclean. A window looked out over the back lumber yard towards the hills across the river, where he never went now and intended never to go again ever, far away here from the farm and the dirt.

“You miserable, old bastard, what do you know about anything?”

“You speak to me like that? You speak to me like that! God will smite you!”

“God doesn't give a shit.”

“God will smite.”

A scrawny fist shaking with rage. Mother cowering in a chair at the kitchen table. Then upstairs, throwing his things into an old knapsack, down the stairs and out, down the road and away, the river whispering among the bushes on the bank, the town on the far side fixed on its hills in the summer heat. And the sense gathering, as he crossed the bridge, of freedom at last and life after all in spite of everything.

But even then there were times when all of a sudden that good world with its nice room and its garden and his good job seemed unreal—a kind of curtain on which all these things were just a painted show, like a curtain he once saw in a theatre in London with a country scene on it which disappeared when a light was turned on, so that you saw behind it a different scene with real people. Once, walking back from work on a rainy afternoon that was already getting dark in the damp cold of November, he saw a man coming up the hill towards him. For a few seconds, terrified, he took him to be Sergeant Death, but when he got close, he turned out to be a harmless little man who worked in a clothing store on Main Street.

I'm sorry, John, but there just ain't the work. I got to let half the boys in the shop and the yard go too. Mary's going to keep the books, and her mother's going to come in to look after the kids. If things pick up again, you'll have your job back the very first day I can afford it. I'm sorry, John. There just ain't the work any more. It's a bad time.

Old vets, like himself, on street corners coming to see that in the years they had been away the ones who had stayed home, the smart ones, light-footed, had been making money and getting ahead, and they, the heroes, the stupid ones, were never going to catch up.

Well, it's over now, the fat little man at the employment bureau said, and the world has to go on, don't it? What did you say your name was? Yes. Yes. Angus Maclean's son. A little gas. Yes. We'll see. Yes. Yes.

He peed as quietly as he could against the side of the bowl so as not to be heard and buttoned up and stood looking out the window again at the yard. Surrounded by these reminders of long-vanished possibility, he found the face of Claudine Swann taking shape in his imagination. It had been a long time since she had last risen to haunt him, of all his memories the most carefully buried in the spacious graveyard of the past.

Mrs. Claudine Swann, as she was generally called, was the widow of Private Eldon Swann. Because of his fascination with pipes and kilts and all things Scottish, Eldon Swann had left George County and enlisted in the North Nova Scotia Highlanders, and one weekend in 1916, when he was on leave in Halifax, he went to a dance and met Claudine MacCrae. A month later they were married, and a month after that he was on a ship to France.

For some reason, Claudine moved to Wakefield to await his return. But Private Eldon Swann did not return. He was killed a few days before the Armistice. With the prospect of peace so close, he got careless maybe, or maybe some general back in his chateau decided to use his last chance to improve his record by capturing another few acres of mud.

When she first came to Wakefield, Claudine lived for a while with her in-laws, but they didn't get on, and she moved to a small apartment over a store off Main Street. She was still living there when, like Private Eldon Swann, Maclean met her at a dance.

They were both a little tight. She had come with another couple, an ex-soldier and his girlfriend. Maclean knew the ex-soldier a little, and they fell into talk. After a while, he had a dance with Claudine, then another, and soon found himself part of a foursome.

In spite of the gas, he was still a good-looking man in those days, he still had his job at the woodworking factory, and he was well aware of the popular view that a man such as himself should be in search of a wife. Except at a respectful distance, he had never had anything to do with a woman since he went to the war. The whores of England had not attracted him, the whores of France still less, and no other possible relationship had ever come his way. There were now plenty of unattached women around, thanks to the war, but he didn't feel the impulse to pursue them. When asked, as he sometimes was, about his single state, he served up the stock reply that he had not yet met the right girl.

After the dance, he walked Claudine to the building where her apartment was. It was after midnight, and the streets were deserted. Standing in the door way, she kissed him goodnight and pressed his hand.

Claudine Swann was small with thick, reddish-brown hair, brown eyes, and a sharp foxlike face. She wasn't particularly pretty, but she had a good deal of whatever it is that can make a woman attractive regardless of her looks. Working away at his desk, Maclean found himself thinking about her, and half way through the following week, he went around to the store where she worked and asked her to the next Saturday's dance. After that, they began going out to dances, movies, the races, band concerts. One night she took him by the hand and led him upstairs.

Although he always went back to his own room to sleep (How would he have explained an all-night absence to Bob and Clara? How long would it have been before the talk started? How long before his boss at the woodworking factory decided to have a “word” with him?), over the next couple of months, her apartment took on some of the qualities of home.

She didn't have much, and much of what she had was second-hand or third- or fourth-hand. Well-worn furniture, well-chipped dishes, well-dented pots and pans, an unmatching assortment of cheap “silverware.” The oilcloth on the floor had been worn down in places almost to the boards underneath. The wallpaper was overlain by a layer of dirt the colour of weak tea and in places had begun to peel. One of the windows was cracked. (Even after a quarter of a century, he could still remember the precise location and shape of every one of these disfigurations.)

Within this context of neglect and decay, Claudine had made things as cheerful as she could with colourful curtains and calendars and pictures from rummage sales of far, imaginary places.

She never spoke of Eldon Swann, and once he realized she didn't want to, he never spoke of him either. Now and then she let drop remarks that suggested other dark memories, but she volunteered nothing more about them, and he didn't pry. Since she knew that he had parents on the other side of the river whom he never visited, he told her about them one night in a monologue that lasted almost the whole evening. Then that too was consigned to silence. Sometimes she asked him about the war, and he told her whatever she wanted to know, wondering whether what she was asking about might not be Private Eldon Swann and what his dying might have been like. She never said what had happened to him. Perhaps she didn't know.

For a while, what they did talk about were mostly things of no deep importance—her job, his job, the things they had done (or not done), the people they met, the goings-on of the town—sometimes, though not often, the goings-on in the great world that neither of them wanted anything more to do with.

She didn't have a lot of schooling. Grade Eight, she said, in a country school in Cape Breton. Coming across unexpected abysses of ignorance, he sometimes wondered if she had even less schooling than that and was lying to him because she was intimidated by his year and a half of high school with its Shakespeare and French and Latin. But although she might not have been well-educated, she was clever and alert and knew far more about life—meaning the lives of men and women—than he had ever had a chance to know.

Among the many things they didn't talk about was the future, which was to say, their future. She didn't talk about it, he suspected, because she was afraid. He didn't talk about it, he told himself, because for the moment the present was enough.

Sometime in the next few weeks, the right moment would come when they would talk. But before that moment came, there came the morning when he went to the factory and found out that he had lost his job.

He could still have afforded his room on his pension and the money he had saved, but the very next week, he moved out and into a one-room apartment in an old, wooden tenement building beside the creek, a great rabbit-warren of a place full of poor people, mostly Catholic Irish, with broods of sad, dirty children.

“Why?” Claudine shouted at him. “Why for Christ's sake? Tell me why?”

“It's all I can afford.”

“Bullshit. And anyway you can live here.”

“No.”

“Why not? Why in Christ's name not?”

Why not?

As the money he had saved began to run out, he found a job helping to dig a basement, another chopping the winter's firewood for a store.

He began to drink more, and she drank along with him although never so much. Some nights now, he did stay all night, waking in the morning in the stale heat of the apartment with an aching head and a dead weight in his stomach.

This went on for weeks. Sometimes they fought, usually over nothing of any importance. Mostly they merely wallowed in a kind of dank despair which gathered at first in him but soon generated a counterpart in her. They hardly went anywhere any more, and there were times when they sat all evening at her kitchen table and hardly said a word. He brooded about his lost job, his lost education, the war. He didn't know what she brooded about, apart perhaps from her lost husband. As was her way, she never said.

One day in early fall, she told him she was going to visit her sister in Halifax. A week after she left, he got a letter saying she wasn't coming back. It said hardly more than that she saw no future for them and that it seemed to her they would do better without each other.

The letter was postmarked Halifax. It had no return address, but the little she had told him about her people was still enough that he knew he could get in touch with her if he wanted to. Maybe she knew that too. Maybe it was all a kind of test.

For months, he carried the letter around in his billfold. One of the boys from the army lived in Halifax, and he could easily have written him and given him the information he would need to locate Claudine. Twice he sat down and began to write, but before he had finished, something, he hardly knew what, came between him and his intent.

Then one night, very drunk, going through his billfold in a futile search for money, he came across Claudine's letter and tore it up and threw the pieces away.

Why? In Christ's name, why? Was there lurking somewhere some kind of insane pride, without sense or purpose, that would not let him consent to be the husband of this simple, good woman? Had the wounds he had suffered finally rendered him unfit for active service in the world?

He gave his battered face a final look in Alice's mirror, then turned away and went out into the hall. A doorway led to the living room in the old part of the house, a room with everything needed for a comfortable evening at home. Off in one corner, a collection of photographs was arranged on a big oak table.

He slid through the doorway and crept like a thief across the room. Some of the photographs were recent, some from long ago. A photograph of Alice and Mitch in front of the house all dressed up for some occasion. A photograph of Alice's daughters and their husbands and children. The wedding photograph of Mother and Father. Mother, small and elegant, looking wistful, as if foreseeing the future, the way people in photographs sometimes do. Father drawn up stern, scowling into the camera so that God would not think that he really cared for such vanity as this. A studio photograph of Alice aged eighteen or so, looking very pretty in a white dress with a white ribbon in her hair. A photograph of the children and their teachers in front of the old school across the river. Himself, Alice, Harry. Elsie Skadget, big and awkward, smiling her big smile over the heads of shyer, smaller kids.

Apart from the school picture, there were no photographs of him. His father would have destroyed them all. Just as years before he had destroyed all the photographs of his mother's people, the Somervilles. Once when he had asked his mother why his father had said that her father was some kind of a bad man, she had said that her father wasn't a bad man but that Father didn't like him, that was all. And the reason Father didn't like him, it turned out a long time later when Maclean was old enough to understand such things, was that her father had been a man who could play the piano and had taken part in plays and operettas and, more sinful even than that, had been far better off than Angus Maclean. He hated all the Somervilles, and once when his mother had sneaked off to see one of her sisters who was ill, he had locked her in the pantry and wouldn't let her out. Later, when the sister died, he wouldn't let her go to the funeral, and she sat outside on the bench beside the kitchen door, listening to the bell of the Anglican Church tolling on the far side of the river.