The Long Stretch (23 page)

Uncle Jack is dead. Dead and buried. This is the first thought that enters the mind with consciousness. You are waking up on a strange chesterfield. Well, not strange. Aunt Jessie’s. And reality floods back in. The reality you so successfully postponed with the bottle you had hidden in the car. Never mind the eyebrow-arching implications of hiding bottles. Uncle Jack is gone. Died hard. What the f. What else matters. Uncle Jack is gone. And so are you. Mouth cracking in the heat of Jessie’s electric-heated living room. She got that in for Uncle Jack. When he was sick. Cold all the time, he said.

The house seems empty. Creep upstairs to empty the indignant bladder. Jessie snoring.

Time to go.

Oustide the air refreshes. Close the door carefully coming out.

Do not disturb. The house seems empty.

Halfway home I’m saying to myself: I guess he drove her home, decided, wisely, to leave me where I was.

A drunken zombie.

But when I got home, she wasn’t there.

Next day they disappeared. February 19.

After they were gone, I showed Ma the little note she left.
The note wasn’t really necessary and it didn’t say much. Just that she was sorry, which I didn’t really believe.

“All I can say,” Ma said, “is thank God poor Jack didn’t live to see this.”

And I can’t help wondering what the other old fellow would have thought. Sandy the Lineman. Or the Stickman. Whatever.

“Sextus the Killer. You could read it in all the faces at the old

man’s funeral,” he says wearily now. The aggression gone.

“People thinking: ‘That book killed his poor father. Writing all

that garbage, and poor Jack already sick.’ As if I knew. When

I wrote it. How sick he was.”

“Would it have made any difference?” I ask.

“No,” he says.

“Well,” I say. “Thanks for the honesty.”

The truth, Millie is always saying, is real simple: Life is a sequence of mistakes and consequences and a process of getting smarter because of them. Most of them, anyway. The hard part is those rare, big ones. They’re the ones that either destroy you or make you wiser.

It is time for my confession. How I killed Angus.

I didn’t hit him or shoot him or scare him to death. But in a moment of choice, I accepted responsibility for ending his life. Partly because of what happened to my father. Partly because of what happened to Effie. Mostly because of what happened to me through them. By dying, Angus freed me from the anger which surely would have carried me away before him.

One night I was coming home drunk from the tavern in Port Hawkesbury. It was in February ‘72, and it must have been 25
below zero. Angus was sitting on the shoulder of the Trans-Canada. One hand raised. And I just said: Fuck him. That’s all it took.

The biggest revelation was how little it bothered me. At first, at least. The regrets came later, when I was well again. After Millie.

Angus dead?

Waking up the next day, head splitting and somebody pounding on the back door. Ma downstairs, calling me. Squint sitting out in the car. Ma all worked up.

“Did you hear about Angus?” she said.

Me looking confused. Which was a truthful look.

And Effie didn’t even come home for it.

Until the funeral was over I somehow thought she would. And that it would have made the whole situation worth something. Maybe allow a fresh start even though she had a kid by then.

I run some water into the sink, just covering the dirty mugs and glasses. He’s giving no sign of moving away from the table. Contemplating the bottle.

Well then, I’ll just leave him there.

He’s pouring two very stiff drinks and I don’t even try to prevent him. What possible harm could they cause now?

“I’ve always been amazed,” he says, “that one death in a war that claimed what, fifty million people or more, one death could matter so much. One anonymous death in a barn in Holland could cause so much havoc.”

Then he says: “Guilt is right up there with self-pity in the toxicity department.”

And I say, impulsively, “If you’re guilty…of Uncle Jack, then I stand guilty of murder too.”

“Oh yeah,” he says, half laughing. “Who did you murder?” Mocking, the way he’s good at.

And so I told him about Angus, watching the colour draining out of his face.

My unilateral gesture of reconciliation.

“You’re a good man,” he says eventually. Everything is out of him. He’s slumped on his end of the table.

“I have no guilt or anything. Not anymore. Only thing missing was…saying I’m sorry. To you. How did it used to go? Heartily sorry for having offended thee…I detest all my sins because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell, but most of all because I have offended thee.”

He reaches his hand across the table. I hesitate for a moment, then take it in mine. We sit like that for a moment, limp hands lightly clasped.

I am standing at the foot of the stairs. My foot is on the first step, my hand on the banister.

“What are you going to do with this?” he says.

I stop and look at him. He’s standing there with the pistol in his hand. Unsteady.

“What am I supposed to do with it?” I say. “It’s all yours.”

“No,” he says. “It belongs to you. Where will I put it?”

Work it up yeh, I think. Smile in spite of it all.

“I don’t want it around here,” I say, letting my weariness through. “There are no guns or rifles in this house. Do what you want.”

He walks to the door and out. I hear the storm door slam. He’s gone, I figure.

Then he’s back.

“There,” he says. “That’s done.”

“What did you do with it?”

“I got rid of it,” he says. “That’s all you need to know.”

“As long as I don’t run into it with the lawnmower.”

“Don’t worry,” he says. “You won’t find it.”

“Okay.” I resume my ascent of the stairs.

“Look,” he says, stopping me again. “I don’t think I want to sleep up there. Could you throw down a blanket?”

It is getting chillier.

I fetch the down comforter and a pillow from the spare room. I bring them to him. He is still looking lost. For a moment it’s Uncle Jack’s face I see.

He is smiling. “I guess I’m a little scared of the ghosts.”

Uncle Jack’s face is gone.

“I thought I was the only spook around here,” I say.

His face is saying something like: There is so much more.

Ideas, interviews & features

L
INDEN
M
AC
I
NTYRE
was born on May 29, 1943, in St. Lawrence, Newfoundland. His father, Dan R. MacIntyre, a hardrock miner, and his mother, Alice Donohue MacIntyre, a schoolteacher, were both natives of Cape Breton (MacIntyre’s Mountain and Bay St. Lawrence, respectively).

MacIntyre grew up in Port Hastings, Inverness County, Nova Scotia, where he attended local and county schools in the villages of Port Hastings and Judique. He earned a B.A. in 1964 from St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish after four years of studies there and at Saint Mary’s University and King’s College in Halifax.

From 1964 to 1967, he worked as a reporter for The Halifax Herald Limited, publishers of
The Chronicle Herald
and
The Mail-Star.
He spent most of that time as a parliamentary correspondent in Ottawa. Between 1967 and 1970, he was a reporter for the
The Financial Times of Canada,
also on Parliament Hill.

In 1970, he returned to Cape Breton following the sudden death of his father. He worked there as a correspondent for
The Chronicle Herald,
covering northeast Nova Scotia and provincial political affairs until he joined CBC Television in 1976. Based in Halifax, he worked for the CBC for three seasons, hosting a regional current affairs program called
The MacIntyre File.
In 1979, on behalf of his program and the CBC, MacIntyre successfully initiated a legal action to clarify public access rights to documentation regarding police search warrants. The case,
MacIntyre v. the Attorney General of Nova Scotia,
was eventually
heard by the Supreme Court of Canada and resulted in a landmark decision affirming press freedom and the principle of transparency in the courts.

Eventually, MacIntyre became an associate producer for the CBC television network. As a producer-journalist for CBC’s ground-breaking national current affairs program
The Journal,
he was assigned to documentary reporting in various parts of the world, including the Middle East, Central America and the USSR. From 1990 to the present, he has worked as a co-host on CBC’s flagship investigative program
the fifth estate.

MacIntyre has won several Gordon Sinclair Awards for his work in journalism and broad-casting, as well as eight Gemini Awards from the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television. He has written and reported for numerous other award-winning projects, winning an International Emmy, a Canadian Association of Journalists Award, the Michener Award for meritorious public service in journalism and several Anik Awards. He has also written and presented award-winning documentaries for PBS’s
Frontline.

MacIntyre holds an honorary Doctorate of Laws from University of King’s College, Halifax, and an honorary Doctorate of Letters from St. Thomas University, Fredericton.

The Long Stretch
was first published in October 1999. MacIntyre’s first non-fiction book,
Who Killed Ty Conn
(co-authored by Theresa Burke), was published in 2000. His latest work,
Causeway: A Passage from Innocence,
will be published by HarperCollins in fall 2006.

A STORY
has two beginnings: a seminal event inspires the imagination; eventually there is the beginning of a narrative structure.
The Long Stretch
elaborates the consequences of an imaginary event in the very real and tragic circumstances of a war. Someone should have told me just how dangerous this approach to fiction can become.

The narrative begins with a chance encounter on a rainy day in 1983 outside a liquor store in Nova Scotia. But the real beginning is a singular incident many years earlier, during the final days of World War II in the northwest of Holland.

I’ve always been intrigued by the extent to which lives are shaped by collateral consequences. Decisions or unconsidered actions by individuals we could not have known contribute to who we are or will become. What then, I wondered, lies in store for the descendants of the generations of people who lived through the most violent part of arguably the most violent century in the recorded history of humanity? What turmoil lies waiting in the unlived lives of the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the twentieth century?

The seminal story here is set in war-struck Europe in 1945. Two friends, separated by the evolving strategies of the war, are reunited briefly near the end of it. Something violent happens. It alters their lives. Their subsequent pathologies, in turn, create distortions in the lives of their children who will, in all
likelihood, convey the consequences of that wartime encounter to future generations. Personalities yet unformed will be marked by an event of which their generation will have no knowledge.

The two men who meet outside that liquor store after nearly three decades are cousins, the son and the nephew of one of the two men involved in a deadly encounter that took place in the spring of 1945. The son of one soldier was once married to the daughter of the other, a marriage doomed by the secrets of their fathers. The woman abandoned her husband for the cousin who has suddenly materialized as if out of nowhere.

The narrative opening in this book is a common occurrence in most lives: people resurfacing unexpectedly. Defences are down, memory is momentarily unclear. The moment is defined by a spontaneous emotion. The emotion is confused: the two men were children together; there is the intimacy of a common history. But the most recent common experience was a callous betrayal. There is an automatic impulse to abort the meeting before it starts. But a deeper primal need prevails: the need for reconciliation between two men who share a common bloodline.

I’ve seen the results of war first-hand, and I have studied and reported on violent conflicts in many places. Wars begin with large ideas that are, inevitably, articulated in simple words and virtuous sentiments. Freedom. Patriotism. Protection of a moral order. Wars begin with promises of justice. How else can we understand the readiness of people to suppress an innate fear of violence, to
authorize the destruction of life, property and, occasionally, entire civilizations? Virtuous beginnings quickly mutate into the brutality of conflict. Through propaganda, violence and suffering become normal, banal and ultimately tolerable for the participants. The deviance of what people do in war becomes appallingly clear only to the survivors. It is in the aftermath of war that the greatest disfigurement occurs in the human soul.

This is what I have learned from having grown up among the survivors of two great wars, from having listened to hushed stories in refugee communities in the Middle East, in alleyways and morgues in Central America, in the silent aftermath of slaughter in Central Africa. It is in the eyes of the orphans and the refugees that you see the spark destined to ignite the violence in our futures. Growing up, I realized that I would one day learn to tell a story. As an adult I realized that it would have to be about the legacy of war.

I’ve never been a soldier, but the limits of experience become irrelevant in storytelling. To reconstruct an important moment in a distant war, I relied on research. I read extensively about the war in Europe. The compilations of Canada’s renowned war historian, Colonel C. P. Stacey, were invaluable. My own work in journalism—reporting on the effects of war and retrospective documentaries on World War II—also helped in a general way.

I chose northwest Holland, or Friesland, as the location of the encounter between the soldiers for the simple reason that, for many of the war veterans in the area where I grew
up, this was where the war ended in May of 1945. The two soldiers were from different battalions of the same regiment, the Nova Scotia Highlanders. That they could meet up near the end of the war and engage in an impromptu celebration seemed to me to be more historical likelihood than fictional device. I was wrong.

As I began to learn more about the particulars of World War II, it became clear to me that history was in conflict with a crucial part of my fictional scenario. I discovered from my research that an encounter in 1945 between two soldiers from those particular battalions was, to say the least, improbable. I knew that one battalion, the Cape Breton Highlanders, had spent much of the war in Italy, while the North Nova Scotia Highlanders had fought mainly in France and Belgium after the D-Day landings. I was aware that both battalions saw action in Holland in the final days of the war. But everything I read in the official histories made it highly unlikely that the men I depict in my novel would ever have been close enough for the fateful encounter that I imagined in April 1945.

I decided to invoke the privilege of creative licence. It occurred to me that while a handful of old soldiers might find the discrepancy annoying, most readers wouldn’t know enough to spot it. Those who did would suspend their disbelief if my story was shaped and told with sufficient skill. I hoped. But in my heart I was afraid. Strong memories from my origins and from a long career in journalism told me that accuracy in small details makes the difference between a storyteller and a liar.

And then—one of those peculiar moments which, for people far more pious than I, confirm the reality of great and essentially benevolent forces in the universe, deities with a soft spot for storytellers. On a chilly summer evening, somewhere between a first and second draft of the manuscript, I was standing in a bookstore in a town that isn’t far from a real place in Cape Breton called “The Long Stretch.” The town is Port Hawkesbury, and in the Volume One Bookstore there, on a rack loaded down with local literary produce, there was a book with a glaring red dust jacket. The name of the book was
The Breed of Manly Men,
which I knew to be a translation from a Gaelic slogan:
Siol na fear fearail,
the motto of the Cape Breton Highlanders. The book was a history of the battalion during the period of World War II. Because this was one of the units mentioned in my story, I took a second look.

There was just one copy of the book. At first glance it confirmed what I already knew. Cape Breton Highlanders…heroic in Italy. I bought it anyway.

Days later, as I browsed, I discovered among all the military jargon and terse accounts of combat what was, I’m sure, to the authors a rather unremarkable disclosure. It was remarkable to me because it involved operations in Northwest Europe. Holland, to be precise.

On April 18, 1945, the battalion was involved in the liberation of some villages and towns near the shores of the Zuider Zee. In a letter home, a Lieutenant Roy described the reactions of the local people:

The underground laddies came out and armed with German rifles, grenades, British sten guns and such, whizzed around on their bicycles rounding up collaborators. Any women who had relations with the Jerries had their hair completely cut off and were slapped and such by other women. Dutch SS traitors, trying to sneak away in civvy clothes, were rounded up and forced to go on their hands and knees through the main streets to jail. They were shot forth-with. Huge bands of men and women marched through the streets, arms linked and ten to fourteen abreast, singing their national anthem over and over. People everywhere were laughing, singing and shouting for joy. We were mobbed with kindness.

And then, after that dramatic personal account, the text returned to a recitation of military activities, including this seemingly unimportant disclosure:

The unit moved off again at 0630 hours on the 21st (April, 1945) and moved to the area of Dokkum, northwest of Leeuwarden, where it
took over from the North Nova Scotia Highlanders of 9 CIB and 3 CID…

I read it again.
The North Nova Scotia Highlanders.
I wasn’t dreaming. The Cape Breton battalion had somehow linked up with the other half of the Nova Scotia regiment

just long enough to validate the imaginary encounter I had invented to reflect on war’s long-term consequences. Just as two imaginary soldiers stumbled on each other in the darkness of an imaginary barn, the blundering imagination had somehow stumbled upon truth.