The Long Stretch (21 page)

I knew Jack was a goner the minute I set eyes on him, Thanksgiving weekend, 1969. We didn’t expect him but there he was, walking into the kitchen with a big hello and a big smile. Home from Quebec. It was the smile. It was too big for his face. He looked like he was wearing somebody else’s teeth and eyes. And the head was too big for the body. Everything out of proportion. Jack had dropped a good forty pounds since the last time I saw him, the Christmas before.

Said he was going to stay around for a while, maybe do some hunting.

Jack? Hunting?

“Jack looks awful,” Effie said later.

Effie had quit her motel job. Was home most of the time. She was taking some university courses at night. I bought her a car for the travelling. A ‘67 Mustang. Kind of an orange colour. You wouldn’t miss it. She made quite a picture riding around in that, with her mop of red curls. With sunglasses on her, she looked like a movie star. You couldn’t help staring. Even me, and wondering: Wow.

I was enjoying working at the mill. Spending so much time in daylight was a nice change. But sometimes I actually missed the peculiar tang of the underground air, the queer freshness of it, like the smell of new rubber or the inside of a new car. The air at the mill was sour. Some days you’d get a headache.

Between work and home I wasn’t seeing much of Uncle Jack.

“Jack’s in the hospital,” Effie announced just after I got home one night around Hallowe’en.

“What hospital?”

“Antigonish.”

I called Jessie and she said he’d just gone in for tests. Nothing in particular. Just hadn’t been to a real doctor for years. Was postponing his trip back for another week or two.

Then it was Halifax for more tests.

Half of the personnel problems I deal with are family related. The other half are what they call substance abuse. We used to call it boozing, though there are other substances in the mix now. I tell the young fellows at work that routine is the source of most of the comfort in a marriage. But it can also become a hiding place and can start stirring up trouble in the best of relationships. People know I’m talking from experience. I didn’t realize I was hiding stuff. And I paid for that delusion. Paid big. And they all know it.

Effie was pretty rigorous about public routines because of Father Duncan. I’d become more like my father. Indifferent to the rituals and public expressions of faith. Religious in my own way, but private. Effie didn’t seem to care whether I went to Mass or not. Ma was scandalized when I wouldn’t be there, sitting conspicuously. Later, when everything in my life went to hell, she said it was because I lost my religion. As far as she was concerned that was all you had to know about what happened to Pa. He lost his religion. But he had an excuse, she said. The war. Me? I was just a slacker.

Nature takes care of the routines of intimacy. Eventually you get the confidence to start thinking family. Even though I never entirely lost the feeling that there was something missing.

“I think there were too many dead people in that bedroom.”

You can talk about stuff like that with Millie.

“So why is everything okay now?” I ask. “You and me? Assuming it is…not wanting to speak for you.”

“It is,” she said.

“So?”

“Different bedroom,” she said.

“I don’t think it’s that simple.”

“You should have had kids,” Millie said. “Kids drive the ghosts away.”

But Effie wanted to go to university first. Started taking that new pill in spite of what the pope was saying. The pope didn’t bother me, but I was suspicious of the pill. Made me feel weird. Impotent.

“I’m determined to prove myself,” Effie would say. “Make a contribution to the place.”

But the place didn’t need it. I had my job at the mill, making decent money. And I had over fifty thousand in the bank.

The university extension courses were one thing. Kept her occupied when I’d be working the long shifts at the mill. But I didn’t want her going off to university. People got weird in university. And eventually just put it out of my mind when they told her she’d have to improve her grade twelve marks before she’d be eligible for admission full time. Either that or just keep picking away at the evening courses. Like a hobby. Okay.

Life was good. On days off, we explored distant parts of the island, well away from the Long Stretch and the grim places that reminded us of the lives we’d abandoned. She’d drag me off to the university in Antigonish for a concert or a play. All the way to Sydney for a movie. I remember
Midnight Cowboy.

“Drove a long way just to get depressed,” I told her on the way back. “Coulda done that without leaving home.” Laughing. You could even tease about that.

And when the trees were turning, in the autumn, and the hillsides oozing lurid shades of rust and yellow, we’d hike for hours in the highlands back of Mabou or the hills that sheltered Lake Ainslie. Kinloch. Gaelic, she’d explain.
Ceann an loch.
Head of the lake. And wonder sadly: Why couldn’t we have grown up in a place like this? Usually gazing out over the flashing sea, with me silent by her side, asking myself: What difference could it possibly have made?

“My mother grew up in a place that looked like this, I think. An island called Benbecula. Always in sight of the ocean. The sea has an effect on people. For the better.”

And I’d agree, without knowing why.

Once we bumped into Charlie Angus MacLeod in the liquor store in Sydney. Asked about Tilt Cove.

“They’ve shut ‘er down,” he said.

I’d get the occasional urge to go back to the mines. Longing for something, not sure what. Maybe something I found there through Jack. Something missing in him now. Last time I’d been talking to Jack he was planning on heading back to Manitoba. Soon as he felt up to it. Or maybe New Brunswick. Up by Bathurst. New mine opening near Springdale, in Newfoundland. A lot of miners from Tilt Cove gone there. But he wouldn’t go back unless I went with him. Giving me a wink, knowing that Effie was within earshot. And she said, “Over my dead body,” and Jack and I both laughed.

Next thing we heard, Jack was staying around for Christmas.

I was a good husband. I managed that by following one basic rule. To be all the things my old man wasn’t. To talk openly. Help around the house. I was one of the original modern partners. And Effie had absolute freedom, within reason. She could come and go as she pleased. And she did. And I was faithful
to her above all. The original Stand By Your Woman kind of a man, or whatever they were saying in the song.

Then I noticed she’d get edgy anytime the subject of my father came up. She was really the only person I’d ever been able to talk to about him. What happened. Why. Effie had perspective. But after we were married about a year I noticed she’d try to duck out of certain subjects early on in a conversation. My father was one of them.

“Do we really have to dig through that again?”

Once she said it seemed like I was trying to hang the blame for everything unpleasant on her poor old father. Maybe he was just as much a victim, just by being there. In that barn. In Holland.

Sooner or later people get sick of other people’s problems. No matter how real or how serious.

“There you are,” I said. “I was starting to wonder.”

Sextus is standing half in shadow, hands jammed into his jacket pockets. Looking cold.

“Walked over to the old MacAskill place. Starting to look run down,” he says. “Can’t imagine what…Faye!…would think of it.”

“It isn’t so bad in the daytime. Duncan’s done a lot. New windows. New chimney. I think he put a fireplace in. Deliberately didn’t paint it. Copying something he saw in the States. Cape Cod or somewhere.”

“How’s the head?” he asks.

“No damage done.”

He sighs. “I must be losing it. The least I’d have expected was to knock you over backwards.”

“You were sitting down,” I say.

“That’s true,” he says. “But so were you.”

In profile, half in shadow, and with a lot of cockiness gone, he’d pass for Uncle Jack. In appearance.

He follows me inside. When I sit to peel the wet socks from my feet, he sits.

“One more,” he says. “A nightcap. And sorry I called you sanctimonious.”

“No problem,” I say.

“It’s an awful word, isn’t it? A hell of a thing to call anybody.”

“What about…prick?”

“Och,” he says, half laughing. “That’s nothing. We’re all pricks now and then.”

That’s what somebody at work called him, just before Christmas ‘69, when the book came out. It was a fellow from Inverness who didn’t know the local situation too well.

“Did you see what that prick from Hastings wrote? That Gillis fella? He’s probably related to you?”

“No. Afraid not.”

Of course I knew all about it. He’d sent a copy home before it was released in the bookstores. And Effie had been talking about it.

Jack was back and forth but never mentioned it. They were probably all talking about it among themselves. Just not in front of me. One night at Jessie’s I just picked it up and took it. She didn’t say anything. It looked like about a hundred people had read it already.

A quickly written book with that name wasn’t going to upset me by itself. Just the arrogance that it represented. That’s what
got me. Plus the feeling that everybody was looking at me and talking about me all over again. Like I had something to do with that day. Like I pulled the trigger.

I just put my head down and carried on. Still working in the woodyard where I didn’t have to talk to people if I didn’t want to. Just roaring around the yard on my loader, moving the pulpwood from here to there. Off the trucks, into the grinders, around the yard. Working harder. Truckers complained that I was bashing their flatbeds and generally surly. But nobody made an issue of it. This is a small place. Everybody knew.

Effie seemed to have become a big fan of his. And of the book. Just before Christmas the stores were full of them. Everybody seemed to be getting the goddamned thing for Christmas. By the new year I was still keeping my head down, taking a bit of vodka to work in the Thermos. And noticing a bit of new attitude in the wife. The birth of Faye, maybe. The book exposed another fault line in the marriage. She didn’t want me to know she’d read it and liked it. And admired him for it.

I figured: If you can deceive somebody close about what you’re reading, you can do it on any level. And I started to watch her more carefully.

“I was real stupid, bringing up the book like that.” He looks away. Suddenly distracted by his need for another cigarette. Patting pockets. “Where’s my fucking jacket?”

“Over there,” I say.

He goes to it. Digs into a pocket, discovers a new pack of cigarettes. Waves it at me, hand like a claw.

“Feeling sorry for yourself,” he says. “Every human failure can be explained, to some extent, by the tendency to feel sorry for yourself. You follow?”

“Maybe.”

He lights a cigarette.

“You’re right,” he says. “There I go again with my big statements. That’s what happens to you in TO. You learn to talk like a wanker. You know what a wanker is?”

I shake my head.

“Good,” he says. “You don’t want to know. The minute you know, you can assume it’s because there are too many of them around.”

“Too many of what?”

“Wankers.” Then fondles his cigarette for a few moments. Sips from his glass.

“Thing I always admired about you,” he says. “You’ve never been a wanker.”

“If you say so,” I say. Take a sip of my own.

“Same for Uncle Sandy. And my old man. Not a trace of wanker in them. Not a wanker hair on their body. Wherever they were was a wanker-free zone. You know what I’m saying?”

I nod and take another sip.

Raises a hand. “Don’t say a word. Just sit there and shut up till I finish.” Then he smiles at me and says: “Or I’ll fuckin’ slug you again and
this
time, I’ll see that you land on your arse.”

You have to smile back.

Jack finally told me. It was early January.

“I got the big one,” he said.

He was chewing tobacco then. Gave up cigarettes shortly after he came home. Always had a tin can near where he was sitting. Disgusting to some people but I was used to it. A lot of the fellows in the mines chewed. Controlled the dust, they said. Jack should have been chewing long ago.

“Cancer,” he said.

“Did I ever tell you about the time he came up to see me in Halifax,” Sextus says, clearing his throat.

“No.”

He picks up Grandpa’s old pistol, which is still on the table between us. Studies it for a moment, then holds it under his chin. And he pulls the trigger.

Click.

“You have to wonder why Uncle Sandy wouldn’t have used this thing. It’s a lot simpler.”

“Throw that fucking thing away,” I say.

Still fondling the gun he says, “The old man came to see me in Halifax. In my third year, I think. Tracked me down in the Lord Nelson Tavern. That’s where we all hung out those days. Landed in. Comes right over to the table. Everybody’s looking at him, wondering, ‘who the fuck’s that?’”

“Why?” I ask.

“He was just so…out of place.”

“In a tavern?”

He shrugs. “Sat there for a while. Couple of guys tried to make small talk with him. Then he left. I followed him out. Asked how long he was there for. He said he was just heading back. Gave me twenty bucks. Christ, I felt weird. Took a long time to admit what that feeling was.”

The mouth works silently for a moment, no words coming. Then, squeezed from somewhere deep in his chest: “I was ashamed. Of him.”

Staring at me, awaiting my judgment. Exhaling hot smoke.

“Ashamed of your own father, hey,” he says. “Pretty sick. I never even asked him to the graduation.”

“He wouldn’t have gone,” I say. Remembering. Jack and me celebrating the day at Itchy’s, in Tilt Cove. Getting drunk for the first of our Gillises to ever get a university degree.

The wind has gone silent for a moment.

“I spent a lot of time wondering what your secret was,” he says.

“What secret?”

Then he points the gun at me, holding his arm fully extended, sighting down the arm and along the short silver barrel. One eye closed in a wink.

“Pa-khew,” he says. Then: “The way you keep everything locked up. Say nothing. There’s gotta be some big secrets in there.”

His face is very serious. Then he smiles.

Grow up, for Christ’s sake.

“You wonder how anybody does that,” he says. “Blow somebody away…looking right at them.”

“Put it away.”

“You can understand a sniper. Like in a war. Or Oswald. You’re just shooting…abstractions. But up close like this,”
he says. “I couldn’t do it. Yourself I could see. Just…quick like. No thinking. Just swing it up. Pull the trigger. Bingo.”

He puts the pistol barrel to the side of his head. Pulls the trigger. Click.

“For Christ’s sake,” I say.