The Long Stretch (22 page)

Even when you’re ready, it takes the wind out of you. Cancer isn’t just a word but a proclamation that everything you know is about to change. And death will only be the final, and in some ways gentlest, change. It’s the certain prospect of intense suffering, and the terrifying anticipation of all the unpredictable changes it will bring. And loss.

Jack squeezed a large gob of tobacco spit through his lips and into his can.

“The lungs,” he said. “Told me in Halifax there’s a ninety per cent chance that I’ve had the biscuit. Said they could fight it but. It was up to me. I figure it would be a losing battle. Just prolongin’ the agony. Wastin’ the time a fella has left.
‘Bheil thu tuigsinn?
‘”

“Did they say how long?”

“Could be a year. Maybe more. Maybe less.” Then he grinned. “But it’ll be a good year, hey? Livin’ home. Pesterin’ the wife. Gettin’ waited on.”

Then we just sat.

I decided to make Effie pregnant. Call the kid Jack. No matter what.

But she had her own ideas.

Ma once butted in. Just once. “You should see the priest,” she said.

It was getting that obvious. Her spending more and more time with the other people who were taking courses. Talking about going back to work. Showing up here and there in public when I’d be working nights. Or in at Jack’s place.

“The priest,” I said, almost laughing in Ma’s face.

“Yes,” she said. “Don’t act like such a know-it-all.”

“Well,” I said, scuffing a foot impatiently, not wanting to hurt her.

“You could do worse than talking to Father.”

“I’m sure.”

“I can tell you from first-hand experience, talking to the priest can help straighten things out even when you think nothing will. It’s me knows.”

Me looking at her in disbelief. Saying: “A lot of fucking good it did you.”

Things pretty strained between myself and Ma by then. Having nothing to do with Squint at all.

Sextus says, “You spend your life becoming something, only to learn that you’ve lost what you were.”

“I don’t follow.”

“That’s because you are what you are. That’s your secret. Who you are. And have always been.”

“You’re talking in circles,” I say.

“You’re absolutely right. I’ve just given you a class-A demonstration of wanking.”

Once fertility becomes an issue it isn’t long before it becomes an obsession. I asked Effie to stop taking those pills and I think she did. You could never be sure. But nothing seemed to be happening. I even inquired about getting special drugs. The doctor laughed at me. Told me the best drug was a bottle of good French wine. So I tried that. And in January and February, when it was her time, I’d be snooping in the bathroom trash basket. Even the kitchen garbage. To see if maybe she missed. But she was regular as clockwork.

And he thinks she made him pathetic. I could tell him about pathetic.

Every day on the way home from work I’d stop in to visit Jack.

“It’s a friendly cancer,” he said. “I feel better than ever.”

“When do you think you got it?”

Laughing. “It’s one of those things you always have. Near died when I was little,” he said. “So I’ve done okay. Getting this far. Considering everything.” Then: “It was the bron’ical trouble that kept me out of the army. In ‘40. Who knows what kind a mess I’d have got into if it wasn’t for that?”

Mostly we’d just sit and reminisce about Tilt Cove and Bachelor Lake.

Or just sit.

Sextus can’t keep his hands off that gun. Keeps turning the cylinder. Clicking the hammer on the empty chambers.

“You wonder about the Americans. With so many of these things around, I’m surprised there aren’t more people blowing themselves away down there. Or each other. It seems like such an easy solution sometimes.”

“What stopped you?” I say.

He looks up, surprised. “The kid,” he says. “I swear, if it wasn’t for her…”

I actually went to the doctor myself once. Arranged a checkup. But the real motive was to ask him about Effie. Find out if she was secretly on the pill. Or whatever.

He looked at me sharply and basically told me it was none of my business. But when I was leaving he said, “If you’re worried about getting pregnant you’d better have Effie come and see me again.”

“What do you mean?”

“You never know with that old Vatican roulette you two have been playing.”

“So if we don’t want babies we should be doing something,” I said.

“Damn right,” he said.

Then winked.

So I figured she was on the level.

But nothing happened.

One night I suggested she was taking some prevention secretly.

“Oh fuck off,” she said.

All I could think to say was: “Nice talk!”

Near the beginning of February 1970, there was a terrible storm. Blew hurricane gales for a couple of days. Lots of rain. Hardly a flake of snow left by the time it was over. But one night in the middle of it a rusty old Greek oil tanker called the
Arrow
wandered off course coming up the bay and ran onto a reef near Arichat. Smack into a well-known hazard called Cerberus Rock. The papers said afterwards the reef was named after some Greek dog that guards the entrance to Hell. The tanker was carrying nearly four million gallons of bunker C, crude oil bound for the pulp mill.

Two nights after that I had a phone call from Sextus. He was in Hastings. The paper had sent him down from Toronto to cover the story. He was staying at the Skye. Had to stay there because of the story, he explained. I thought it queer, anyway, him not staying home. Effie was working at the Skye again and she actually spoke to him before I did. Told him to call me. The motel was full of reporters and government people, down to watch the tanker break up and spill its cargo into Chedabucto Bay.

He wanted to know how the old man was doing.

“Not great,” I said. “Good time for a visit.”

“Gonna be pretty busy,” he said. “But I’ll try.”

I didn’t see much of him during the first few days of his stay. The
Arrow
story seemed to get bigger and bigger every hour. It was on the national news. Oil spills were becoming big news other places. This was a first for Canada.

Effie was night manager at the motel and she was seeing a lot of Sextus.

I was still up waiting when she came in from work at about three on the Thursday morning of the following week. I’d had some rum. A few big ones.

“Where you been?” I asked.

“Working,” she said. “You know that.”

“I expected you a lot earlier.”

“I finished at midnight. But I had a drink with your cousin and some of the other reporters. I wasn’t in a hurry because I figured you were at Jack’s.”

“At Jack’s?”

“Well, you’re practically living there now anyway.”

“Jack’s sick,” I said.

“I know Jack’s sick,” she said. And as she started walking away said: “Jack’s probably going to die. Another ghost from your tragic past to come and live with us, as if there weren’t enough of them here already.”

God and the ghosts only know what happened in the next two seconds but somehow I was suddenly staring into her face from up close and my head was bursting. She made no sound. Then I realized she was actually trying to say something. And I felt her hands, on my wrists, tugging, and then I looked at my own hands, which were locked on her throat.

When I released her the only thing she said was: “Oh my God.”

And ran upstairs howling.

Coming home from work on Friday evening, I stopped at Jack’s. He was saying he expected Sextus for a visit later.

I wanted to talk to him about home. About what had
happened with Effie. I knew Jack would make it seem okay. Normal. Would help me get past it.

He was kind of nervous. Said Sextus had been staying at the motel pretty well full time to be available for the briefings, which were happening all hours of the day and night. But he was going to take a break that night. Come by for a
ceilidh.

“Wonder what we’ll talk about,” he said.

Me thinking: The damned book.

Jack had never mentioned it to me, nor had I to him.

It was Friday the thirteenth. Uncle Jack died the next day. Or night. We’re not sure.

I remember Effie coming in from work some time in the early hours of Sunday. She woke me up.

“Uncle Jack’s car is over home,” she said, sounding confused. She smelled of liquor. Over home is what she called Angus’s place.

“Can’t be Jack’s,” I said.

“It is. Maybe coming here.”

I rolled over and went back to sleep.

Next morning it was still there, so I went over. Knowing something was wrong even before I went in. And Jack was dead there, sprawled on the floor of the kitchen, half under the table. There was no doubt. I knew what dead looked like. And Angus, not dead, was flaked out on the couch, snoring. Rum bottle on the table, half full, cap off.

The doctor said he died of a massive heart attack.

Aunt Jessie said Uncle Jack had rheumatic fever as a child.

Romantic fever.

The doctor said that could have done it.

He keeps sipping his drink, then adding little splashes. Like he’s trying to finish the bottle.

“Over there at MacAskill’s, I was thinking I’ll never be able to look at that place without thinking about the old man.

“When Effie and I were married we’d often fantasize…putting a few dollars together and fixing it up as a summer place. Give the kid some contact with her roots. But just thinking about it would always give me the willies. I knew I’d never be able to darken the door.”

“Nobody could figure out what he was doing there,” I say.

“Oh, I knew,” he says sorrowfully. “I knew. It was because of me he was there.”

“You?”

“Sure. That night…I went to see him. Just a casual visit. The subject of the book came up. Things got kind of tense. For some reason I blurted the whole story, about Angus and Sandy and what happened in Holland. I don’t know what got into me. But I was pissed off at him. He was making slurs about the book and I guess I just lost my cool. Said: ‘You think the book was bad? The book is fiction. The truth is a whole lot worse.’”

Sips from his glass.

“You should have seen his face. It’d scare you. He got that upset.”

“I thought that little run-in happened at a different time. Earlier. In the fall. Or.”

“No,” he says. “I tried to fudge it. So it wouldn’t look so bad. But we had our set-to the day before he died.”

“Well, even so,” I say. “I’m not sure why he’d be so shocked. He already knew the story because he’d told it to me more than two years before.”

And then something frightening occurred to me. “Unless you included the silly speculation about the Swede’s wife.”

He looked at me head-on with a perplexed frown: “The Swede’s wife?”

There were no Legion men or flags for Jack’s funeral. The church was only about half full. Duncan celebrated the Requiem with Father Hughie, who preached a brief little homily. About working men and St. Peter and how Jesus always wanted to hang out with the working class. Even working girls, which was a sly reference to Mary Magdalene. The congregation murmured its amusement. I was angry. Where were the representatives of Jack’s end of the working class? In mining camps in the bush. In graveyards in places like St. Lawrence, Newfoundland, that’s where.

Some of the reporters covering the
Arrow
Disaster, which was what they were calling it by then, came along out of respect for Sextus. Pencil-pushers, I thought. Can’t believe Jesus would have much time for that crowd. Jesus, or Jack, when you get right down to it.

Wild and rain and everybody thinking of the big blobs of jellified crude oil sliming the shores of the bay and the rim of the Inhabitants Basin, moving right up the strait toward us. At the graveyard Duncan’s prayerbook almost blew out of his hands.
Ma on one side of me and Squint on the other side of her. Effie was standing close, clinging to my other arm, but I could tell that her mind was somewhere else.

The two nights of the wake, at the funeral home in Port Hawkesbury, Effie was stuck to him like a burdock. They sat knee to knee, whispering until everybody was gone. Then she and I would stop at Aunt Jessie’s on the way home for tea and a drink. The drink would be for me. Maybe a few drinks. Not that they’d notice because I had my own flask out in the car, under the seat. Sextus, the poor fellow, was being pretty moderate for some reason. Have a quick one with me, then back to philosophizing with herself. Talking about his awful book, I figured.

“The Swede’s wife,” he repeated, shifting in his chair and looking away from me. “What did she have to do with what happened in Holland?”

“Some people think she was there. In that barn.”

“The old man told you that?”

“No.”

Confusion in his eyes now.

“Who told you that bullshit?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I say.

Then he says with a sarcastic little laugh: “The Swede’s wife! That says it all. Wife! The poor little girl in the barn never got to be anybody’s wife.” Then kind of sneers.

Outside the wind is grieving, gently.

I can only ask: “Little girl? What little girl?”

“I thought you said you knew.”

“Nothing about a little girl,” I say weakly.

He picks up the rum bottle, then puts it down.

“It came from Duncan,” he says. “During a night of booze and confession in Toronto.”

Angus went a little crazy after Effie and I left our wedding reception. Sextus came back after driving Jack home and found Angus ranting at people. Raving about Sandy Gillis. He knew things that nobody knew. About Sandy. Sextus was about to confront him when Duncan removed his father firmly. Took him to the glebe house.

Didn’t come back.

Duncan had a hard time with the story, relating it to Sextus during their piss-up in Toronto. Afraid he was committing a grave sin, breaking confessional secrecy. But he couldn’t contain it any longer.

In the glebe house, Angus demanded that Duncan grant him absolution for a terrible sin. On the night of April 22-23, 1945, near Dokkum, he’d discovered his oldest friend, Sandy Gillis, in a barn. In the dark Angus wasn’t sure who it was at first. Had his knife at Sandy’s throat before he realized. Nearly died himself when he saw who it was.

Sandy had a bottle. Borrowed it from a farmer, he said. They were celebrating when they made a startling discovery. They weren’t alone. There was a girl. Hiding there. You couldn’t tell how old at first. By the look of her she’d been through hard times, probably from her own people. Hair mostly chopped
off. A collaborator. Bad bruises on her face and body. Which they saw while she was naked. She seemed to be really young. Maybe fifteen or sixteen.

She was afraid they’d turn her over to the resistance.

Duncan pleaded with his father to stop. Declared he couldn’t hear this as a confession. This was not about a sin. This was about something that a son cannot hear about his father.

But Angus was in the time warp then. Back there. Desperate to confess.

They reassured her. She was safe. No matter what she’d done, they promised not to hand her over to her people. They knew what was happening to collaborators. She told them in her broken English she’d done nothing wrong. Of course they didn’t believe her. Resistance people didn’t make mistakes. Not about collaborators.

It’s okay, they told her.

They gave her food, shared their booze. It was no more than that. Two boys from home, meeting up by some bizarre coincidence. Everybody relaxed. Her most of all, since there was just one of her and two of them.

Everybody happy when they went to sleep.

Duncan wept. Face in hands. Sobbing.

Then told how she got her hands on Sandy’s rifle and shot him while he slept.

“It could as easily have been my father,” says he. “It just happened to have been Sandy.”

Then she went looking for Angus, not knowing that he was like a raccoon in the dark. And before she found him, he got her, with his knife. The way he learned from the Sikhs.

Cut her throat. Took the head half off her.

Buried her deep in the hay. Then went for help, soaked in a
mix of her blood and Sandy’s. Stained right through to his skin. Tore his shirt open there and then, showing Duncan where the blood still marked him. Duncan, of course, could see nothing but sagging pasty hairless skin.

Angus told them that a sniper got Sandy while he was opening a barn window. The sun was just rising. His last words, Angus reported, were that the sun felt good. So he stood there one second too long.

The night has become still.

“I’m asking Duncan if he thought his father had ever told this story to anybody before.

“‘Yes,’ he said.

“‘Who to?’

“‘Sandy Gillis,’ says Duncan. Then says Angus figured Uncle Sandy never knew what happened. Just what everybody else thought they knew. That Angus did it. All recollection of the Dutch girl seemed to have disappeared. Last thing he remembered was Angus holding a knife at his throat. Angus decided to clear it up once and for all.

“So I ask Duncan, ‘When did he spill the beans to Uncle Sandy?’

“‘At the Legion,’ he says. ‘November 11, 1963. The last time he saw poor Sandy alive.’”

He studies me for a while without speaking. Lights a cigarette.

“You didn’t know this?”

I shake my head.

“What were you starting to say about the Swede’s wife?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“No wonder the old man had a heart attack,” he says.

I just nod.

“Not that it excuses anything but maybe…adds perspective.”

“It doesn’t matter.”