The Long Stretch (17 page)

Effie was talking about taking secretarial. You could take a course at the convent school in Mabou. Or nurses’ aide in Antigonish. Maybe getting on at the mill.

“I hear there’s even a newspaper starting up,” said Sextus. “So there might even be work for me.”

“Ha, ha,” she said. “You’ve got bigger fish to fry than around here.”

Always saying he wanted to be a writer. Duncan was going to be a priest. That was normal. A teacher, maybe. But reporting the news was a process you’d never have any contact
with around here. Pretty exotic. Of course the reach of his ambition went far beyond the little paper a couple of young fellows were trying to establish in Hawkesbury. Far beyond anything we could imagine back then.

“The urge to write a novel really first came to me when Grandpa died,” he says. “Seeing all those old people around. I realized I’d kind of forgotten about their existence. Every one of them a connection with a time that had become unreachable and mysterious to us, the time when we were all immigrants around here. I’d listen to them talking Gaelic. Like a secret code. Like they were full of hidden history. Then I remembered the gun. Kind of a metaphor…the mystery of their lives. Write a story about a mysterious gun turning up after somebody’s grandfather dies. Then I thought: No, it’ll have to be something more original than that. It was only later I thought the nature of memory itself. Tricks it plays.”

“Maybe it was too deep for around here,” I say.

“No,” he says. “A good idea badly executed.”

That’s the trouble with jazzing things up. Ordinary people miss the point.

“Who thought of the name?” I say.

“The editor figured it would get American interest.”

“And I suppose it did.”

“Nothing that would make any difference.”

Good for the Americans.

I drain my cup. And I’m thinking how easy it is to slip back.

The last five years or so, ever since AA and meeting Millie and getting myself in shape, it became impossible to imagine
that I would ever slip back, feel as I now feel. That strange belligerence, beneath a numb weariness. But here I am.

Wednesday night after Grandpa’s funeral Jessie and Uncle Jack came out to take Ma to a movie in Hawkesbury. Ma was worried about people talking, so soon after Sandy. To hell with it, Jack said. The place is full of strangers anyway, he said. So they went. Grandma was in bed. I was watching TV when I heard Effie in the kitchen.

She was wearing one of Duncan’s old coats, jeans, and heavy wool socks. She crashed down on the chesterfield beside me.

“What are you watching?” she asked.

“Jack Benny,” I said.

“Crikey,” she said. “Is that all there is?”

So we just watched.

“How are things over the way?” I asked.

“Not good,” she said.

“Duncan’s gone back?”

“Yes. Just Papa there.” Something in the way she said it.

“You can always stay here.”

“Just you and me,” she said. I could feel her fingers on my neck. Teasing.

“And Grandma,” I said. “And Ma.”

“That’s too bad,” she said.

And the problem is, you never know whether they mean it. Even today, familiar as I am with the little games they play, you feel the same old responses. I crossed my legs, pretending not to notice what she was saying or doing.

“So you don’t like Jack Benny,” I said.

She took a handful of the hair on the back of my head and gave it a little yank.

She slept on the couch that night.

I put the blankets on her carefully. Hung Duncan’s old coat on the back of a dining room chair. And when I came down the next morning she was gone.

School, of course.

Friday evening I decided to take the truck into town. Near their lane I could see there was a car up at their house. Arseend low from the continental kit. Whip aerial swaying in the wind. Ontario plates almost obscured from salt and roadshit.

By March, you could see a difference in Grandma. Starting to go down. Seemed to lose all her opinions. Which was a good thing because Ma suddenly had plenty. Politics. Religion. Housework. Grandma just seemed to be pushed aside by them. Which I didn’t mind. Ma was always too easygoing. Easy to a fault, Jack would say. Poor Mary, people had habitually called her.

She opened up. Little glimpses of her long-buried self. Startling stuff, like the fact that she was brought up. That’s how people described being adopted. Brought up. She knew who her real mom was. Some single girl from Judique who went away to the States after she was born. Never came back. Her mom’s parents gave her to an older couple who had no children of their own. Lived down the shore road in Judique.

Suddenly she was sharing all sorts of little bits.

“Everybody thought Sandy Gillis could have done better,” she said, laughing. “They didn’t remember what a wreck he was coming home from the war.”

“Couldn’ta done better than you, Ma,” I said.

“Darn right,” she said. “Who’d’ve put up with him?”

Us laughing. Her eyes wet and sparkly.

Easter weekend Duncan was home. I got in the half-ton and drove over to their place. Their gate was open so I just pulled in like the old days. Evening of Good Friday. Days getting longer. The ground was wet and muddy, so I stopped near the gate and started walking a kind of crescent path, around the mud. Frost coming out of the ground. Spring always smells like catshit.

Then loud voices. And Effie’s high above them. Then a crash. I froze. Then the old man’s voice, harsh. “You miserable old bastard, if I ever hear the like of that again, you’ll be on the road. You hear?”

My father? Then, of course, it registers: Duncan. All anger always sounded like my old man.

Then another crash and the door suddenly opened and it was her rushing out.

Saw me. Stopped dead. Paralyzed. Just staring.

What I did? I waved, a fluttering little gesture with the hand.

She turned quickly and went inside. She didn’t look back.

“Duncan was the big surprise when the book came out,” he says.

Probably liked it,” I say.

He raises his eyebrows. “Why do you say that?”

“Duncan was always unpredictable.”

He laughs.

“For sure I knew one person around here liked it,” I say.

He’s smiling in anticipation.

“Guess.”

He looks away. “Yes,” he says. “She told me.”

Her letters.

“I remember it almost by heart,” he’s saying. “She said, ‘I don’t know how much of the story is true. It’s very touching.’ That was her word. ‘It’s very touching. But the details, in the end, don’t matter. The story is really’—get this—‘about how we hide from the truth, or let other things get in the way of the truth.’ Can you believe that?”

Effie talking about truth. Him writing about the lives of people who called it
thruth.
Makes you want to haul off and…

“Wow,” I say.

He’s back there. And I’m back there. But There is two different places.

“I’m saying, high-priced reviewers didn’t figure that out. But there she was, our Effie. Writing to me from the Long Stretch. And getting it absolutely dead on.”

Our
Effie?

Big arguments about it. Right here, where we’re sitting.

“A little strange,” I said to her, “a fellow cooking up a big pack of lies to make some kind of a bullshit point about the truth.”

“You have to read beyond the details,” she said.

“Go ahead and take his side,” I said, wishing I could think of something clever.

“Let’s just not talk about it.”

“Why don’t I just go to town and talk to people of my own mental calibre.”

“Grow up,” she said.

I headed for the door.

The worst thing was that she wouldn’t tell you to stop and come back. So you’d head to Billy Joe’s and get yourself lost in a lot of mindless crap about the mill and the usual pile of discontent from people who were never really better off than right now.

Then you’d try to make up for it with her over a thirty-dollar dinner at the Skye Motel dining room. Of course it was 1970, near the end of everything up until then. Thirty dollars down the drain.

On his last Saturday night home, Uncle Jack came over unexpectedly. We were all sitting around the kitchen table drinking tea. Jack was catching the Sunday-evening train to North Sydney. Heading back on an overnight boat.

Out of the blue I said: “I should go with you.”

They all looked at me.

“Back to school is where you should go,” Ma said.

Aunt Jessie said: “My God. Why would anybody want to go into that?”

“What do you think?” I asked Uncle Jack.

“I don’t think you know what you’re talking about.”

I said, making it up on the spot, “I could make some good money this summer, get myself a car, and go back to school in the fall.”

I think it was the reference to school that slowed them down. Ma probably thinking, Well, maybe it would get him out of
the house for a while. Aunt Jessie thinking it might be good to have somebody keeping an eye on the old fellow. Jack saying no way I’d last more than a few weeks in that place but not sure if that was good or bad.

Eventually he said, “Where did you get the notion you’d be making good money?”

“Well, in Ontario I hear they can make fifty or sixty dollars a day bonus.”

“Ho-ho,” he said. “We’re not talking about Ontario, where they’ve got unions and modern technology. We’re talking about the ass-end of the industry. You’d be on pick and shovel all summer. Think about it. Pick and shovel. The tools of ignorance.”

“So how much do they pay?”

“You’d be looking at a buck forty an hour, probably.”

Jesus. They were making twice that at the mill. But it wasn’t the money anyway.

“Sounds pretty good to me,” I said.

“Right off the top, they’ll be taking room and board. Plus you’ll have to buy thirty or forty dollars’ worth of gear at the store. Before you get started.”

“The pulp Grandpa and I cut is worth about a couple of hundred bucks,” I said, looking at Ma. “You could loan me that, couldn’t you? Squint’s already promised to haul it out to the road for nothing. Says he’ll take it in to the mill if I want.” Ma laughed. “You really want to go, don’t you?”

And at that moment, I did. Really.

“What do you think, Jack?” she said.

“Well…I dunno,” he said. Which was what he always said when he knew.

Squint seemed to be around a lot those days. Dropping in out of the blue. You’d be in the middle of eating at noon. The door would open. Squint would walk in. Hello everybody. Just passing by and wondering. More likely smelling the grub. Squint lived alone. Never married. Nobody would have him, they used to say. Big joke: When Uncle Jack would have been away for an unusually long time they’d be saying to Jessie, We’ll have to line you up with Squint. Her howling and pretending to gag. Everybody getting a big kick out of it, including Ma. The old man smiling, saying, Don’t be so hard on poor Squint. Of course Squint had been overseas. You couldn’t say anything around the old man about anybody who’d been overseas. Not even Squint.

“Those letters probably more than anything else opened up the possibility of something between us.”

It’s me who knows about her letters.

“I know there are plenty thinking it’s a lot of crap. But there are enough others saying great things. But there’s one thing. It’s down home that really matters. And she was the one voice of encouragement from here. Her and, eventually, Duncan, of all people.”

“So what did you fucking expect?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t think it was so outrageous.”

“The old man stood out like a sore thumb. And the Swede’s wife.”

“I heard that,” he says. “The lawyers were a little worried about the Swede.”

“I wish they’d have been as worried about some of the others. Like your father,” I say.

I pronounce the words carefully and aggressively. In his face.

“That’s pretty unfair,” he says gently.

“Unfair?”

“I didn’t think he’d be so…sensitive.”

“He was a dying man.”

“I didn’t know that.” His face now haunted.

Well, everybody else knew.

“I expected he’d give me at least…that much credit for it.” He holds thumb and forefinger about a millimetre apart. “You know? You realize…Jesus Christ, here I’ve been doing pretty well. Good jobs. People away acting like I’m a celebrity. But him? Fuck-all recognition from him.”

Tugging at me to say something.

Then looks away and says: “That’s when I told him about what happened to Uncle Sandy. As much out of spite as anything else.”

Early in ‘64, the Swede moved away. We heard New York City. The mill had a sales office there and he was supposed to run it. She and the boy went with him. Then later, there was a story that she and the boy moved back to Sweden. Some local men, sent by the mill to Sweden for special training, saw her at a company reception. Looking good as ever, they were saying. I never saw her again after the wake. He eventually came back
for a while and I saw him several years later, when I went to work at the mill myself.

Here’s what Millie thinks. The closer people were to the war, the more inflexible they became. You’d think it would be the other way around, but they weren’t. And that’s why people like the old man and Angus and Squint and the Swede’s wife and the whole sorry lot of them were so vulnerable. Your life is battered by circumstances the way a tree is battered by the wind. If you can’t bend, you break. And the first sign of danger, like the rot that weakens the tree, is self-loathing. Something she heard about when she was in Toronto. Apparently she went to a therapist there for a while. Then it got too expensive and she quit. Ironically, after she quit, she really started drinking hard. Spent more on booze than on the therapist. But that’s a whole other story. So, she says: The secret of survival is flexibility.

April 19, 1964. A Sunday night. Jack said the train left at eight o’clock. Stupid time to be heading out on a long complicated trip, but there you are. We’d get to North Sydney just in time to connect with a coastal boat that was crossing the Cabot Strait that night. Jessie drove us to the station. I think it was the first evening of daylight saving, so it stayed bright longer. One of those chilly, crunchy evenings you get in the spring when everything goes kind of blue as the sun sets. Not like the copper colour you get in July when the sun is an incinerator at the end of the fire ditch.

Going up the long crawl of Sporting Mountain, Uncle Jack produced a flask from his coat pocket. Took a swig.

“I’d offer you one,” he said, “but you’re a bit young to start.”

I didn’t want one anyway.

“How old are you?” he asked.

“Seventeen.”

“Oops,” he said, smiling.

“What?”

“You have to be eighteen. To go underground.” Pausing for effect. “You’ll have to go back.”

I laughed.

“When’ll you be eighteen?” he asked.

“October.”

“Oh well. You look older. Say you’re eighteen. If they ask for proof I’ll back you up. Say you’re sending home for your birth certificate. They’ll forget.”

He was looking out the window, dreamily, allowing his head and body to rock in alternating rhythms as the train clattered through the night.

Sextus is sitting with his chin practically touching his chest. No wonder, the amount of booze in him. Heaped ashtray in front of him.

“That book,” he says. “If it did nothing else, it opened my eyes. Made me realize just what it’s all about.”

“What what’s all about?” I say, allowing a trace of impatience.

“You’ll be the pride and joy of a place, then you do something that’s more about something you care about. Then you realize.
Only reason anything ever mattered to the place all along was because it reflected well on them. You know what I mean?”

“Frankly, I’m sick of the subject.”

“Frankly, eh?”

I should have been watching him more carefully.

A stunning blow to the side of my head leaves me momentarily in darkness though I can hear him saying, “You big-feeling sanctimonious prick,” and can feel the chair tipping backward as in slow motion.

I still have wits enough to roll off sideways, landing like a cat, hands on the floor in front of me, and stand quickly. Even I’m impressed. He’s one arm length away. Oddly, I feel no impulse to retaliate. My head has only one thought: Pa lives! I can see him in front of me, eyes dancing.

I almost smile but instead, I say: “That was fucking clever.”

I’m sure he wants something else. Wants me to come flailing at him. Provide closure. Another shrinkwrapped notion. Screw him. Let’s leave it open.

He wheels, stomps toward the door, grabbing a jacket as he goes, then outside. Slam!

I have this queer image: him out there in the storm with the Lineman, or Stickman. Me in here with Uncle Jack.

Jack’s voice comes to me through the wind. He’s saying something like: You did good there. That was the proper thing. You’re all right.