The Long Stretch (3 page)

I live alone in the old Gillis place on the Long Stretch. The family’s been there nearly 150 years. I’m the last. Some would say I have the worst of two worlds: there’s the loneliness, but the place is still occupied by the ghosts. Grandmother. Grandfather. Mother. Father. Uncle Jack. Effie. Sometimes you catch yourself waiting for people to come home.

The Long Stretch used to be just a backroad off a backroad going nowhere in particular. Now it’s almost part of the village, Port Hastings, which grew a lot after the causeway changed everything.

It’s nearly thirty years since they built the causeway across
the Canso Strait, which separated us from Nova Scotia and everything else. Then they built the Trans-Canada right through here. Port Hastings was a dead little village before. Now it’s motels and restaurants. All-night gas stations where shift workers from the pulp mill can buy milk and bread and skin magazines and smokes any hour of the day or night. There’s even a little airport. Port Hawkesbury has a radio station now, blasting out American-sounding music twenty-four hours a day. One shopping mall and talk of another. And a couple of weekly papers. Everybody has TV. I’ve got one of those new VCR gadgets and can watch any movie I can get my hands on. Yet still, it’s the old things and the ghosts that define the space I live in no matter how the place changes.

I used to go on real benders when I was alone at first, like after Uncle Jack died and Effie left. Almost sold the place during one twister. I eventually got over the binges with a bit of help and a thirty-day rest at the Monastery. The Monastery is a detox. Of course I’d never get away with it now, in this job.

Once I asked Millie if she wanted to move out here with me.

“You gotta be kidding,” she said. But then she laughed and gave me a big hug. She was right.

Running was my salvation. I do about four miles a day along the dirt roads that go forever out and back. Once a week I’ll do a twelve-mile loop, through Sugar Camp and the Crandall Road, through Pleasant Hill to the main drag between Hastings and Hawkesbury, back through Hastings and out the Trans-Canada and up the Long Stretch to home. People would tease me at first. Now there are a lot running, races and marathons. But I like to run alone.

It’s hard to tell now that the place was ever a farm. The barn is a jumble of hand-hewn beams and grass tangled in a wind
weave. It was once quite a structure. There wasn’t a nail in the frame, just wooden pegs. I feel guilty for letting it go. It was one of those projects that slipped away from me. Weathered barnboards were stylish for a while. People noticed and asked for some, and before long one side was open to the elements. One night during a high wind the roof went. That was the end of it.

I’ve taken better care of the house. It’s a fine old place. My great-grandfather built it. Millie’s tried to talk me into tearing down an ugly porch at the back. It’s out of character, she says. My father and Uncle Jack put it there, just after the war, before they drifted apart. It’s where I keep work clothes and the clothes I run in. It helps keep the place warm in the winter. It breaks the wind.

Millie’s especially fond of the enormous stone fireplace in the kitchen. That was one of my biggest projects, restoring it. My grandfather sealed it off during the war. After a lot of wallpapering and rearranging, the old fireplace was eventually forgotten except, occasionally, during a burst of reminiscence about one thing or another. That’s how I came to know about it.

Then a couple of years after Effie left I’m sitting in the kitchen. I’m working on the bottom half of a bottle of Scotch and I start thinking of Jack. How he got sick here as a small boy. No doctors then. How the sickness kept him from school until he was too old or embarrassed to start. But this place didn’t kill Jack. It was his leaving and not being allowed back.

Screw it, I said. And I went straight to the cellar, got a hammer and a drawbar, and went at the wall that hid the fireplace.

Then Millie came along.

About Millie. You don’t have to know much. Her folks were immigrants after the war. The whole family came over
from Holland, including the grandfather. I don’t remember her, growing up. She was from near Dundee, on the Lakes, well out of our circuit. She went away to Toronto young, worked in a bank, drank a bit too much. Around the mid-seventies said piss on it, pitched everything, and moved back. Got a job in the bank here. That’s about it.

So I’m tearing up my kitchen when I notice a large envelope held together by a string, full of letters and newspaper clippings, crumbling at the folds. Glorified accounts of what was going on overseas, mostly in ‘44 and ‘45. The letters, in a faded, laboured scrawl, were mostly from Angus to my father, soldier to soldier. One of them stood out. Something about the tone. It was more formal. Then I realized it was written by Angus to my grandfather,
about
my father, about how he was wounded. Shot. But was doing well. Dated May 1945.

Near Dokkum, the letter said, Sandy was hit by a sniper’s bullet. The two biggest dangers, Angus said, were snipers and shrapnel from the shelling.

Millie told me years later where Dokkum is. Showed me on a map. Not all that far from where she was born. But then nothing in Holland is.

It was the early seventies when I found the stuff. Not long after Angus went, drunk and frozen on the roadside. Things Effie had told me about him were suddenly swirling and I was tempted to shove the letters into the garbage bags with the other junk. But I poured myself another drink. Packed the letters and clippings neatly and went back to work. I eventually gave it all to Duncan. Figured it might have some value to him. Not having a clue what he’d do with it.

“Jesus,” says Sextus, gaping around the kitchen. “You’ve made a few changes.”

He goes to the fireplace and bends over.

“Where the hell did this come from?” he asks, pushing at one of the iron cooking rods. It moves, squealing.

“It was here all along,” I say. “You didn’t know?”

“No,” he says, crouched and practically inside the firebox.

“Uncle Jack must have known about it,” I say.

“The old man and I never talked much about the old place.” He squeals the rod again. “Never talked much, period.”

He looks younger with his hair slicked back and his face flushed from the hot shower. He still has a good hairline. He is tall, and the designer cords and expensive sweater hide the lard.

“So what’s the plan?” he asks, straightening up, rubbing his hands together.

“I’m thawing a couple of steaks,” I say. “We’ll have a dram or two. And who knows.”

“I heard you were on the wagon.”

“I am,” I say.

He laughs. “My kind of wagon.”

My real problem with Sextus is simple. I had a wife named Effie. She ditched me for him. Simple as that. And at a time when we were all stupefied by a book he wrote, the old wounds it opened.
The Day They Killed Kennedy.
It came out shortly before his own father died. A lot of people were saying it was the book that killed Jack. Then afterwards they were saying if the book hadn’t killed him, the next shock would have: those two running off together. Leaving poor Johnny in the lurch.

I used to have lots of questions, like why Effie and I got together in the first place, what she saw in me, and why it changed; why he would have had any interest in her, considering his success away, her just ordinary, from here; why they did it like thieves, and right after Uncle Jack. I’d come up with answers, but Millie told me, years afterwards, Your answers are all bullshit.

“I hear you and herself had a kid,” I say. “A girl?”

“Hardly a secret,” he says. “What else did you hear?”

“That you broke up, Aunt Jessie was saying.”

“Divorced, annulled, prorogued, cancelled. Kaput,” he says.

“So,” I say, “she’d be what now?”

“Twelvish,” he says warily.

“What did you call her?” I ask, knowing already.

“You don’t know?” he says, disbelief barely hidden.

“No.”

“Cassandra.” He looks at me hard. “Mostly we called her Sandy.”

“Hey,” I say. “The old man’d be proud.”

“Her mother wanted to call her Jacqueline. After my old man. I declined.”

“I think I’d’ve liked that better,” I say, quickly adding: “If I was her. The kid, I mean.”

“She likes her name. She’s more of a Sandy than a Jackie.”

“So do you see much of her?”

“No.”

“And herself?”

“No more than I have to.”

“So you drove down just for a long weekend.”

“Well,” he says, shifting his weight on the chair, “I have a little longer than that.”

“Oh.”

“Got in a little scrape,” he says. “School thought I should take a week off.”

“A scrape.”

“Young fellow, a student. Told me to go fuck myself over something. I guess I didn’t react with the kind of restraint you’re supposed to have these days. Gave him a little…push.”

I bet.

“He’s out for the rest of the term, of course.” He reaches for a cigarette. “Anyway, I’m figuring on packing in the teaching after this year. Not my cuppa anymore.”

“So what’ll you do?”

He shrugs.

“Funny,” I say. “Never thought I’d see you on the shitty end of the stick for a change.”

“You want to talk about it?” he asks.

“No.”

He says: “Really. I want to straighten things out with all the people who matter to me around here.”

“There’s nothing to straighten out.”

“Well,” he says. “Maybe the fact she and I went…you know…aren’t…anymore. That clears one thing out of the way maybe.”

“It’s been out of the way a long time now. If you’d checked before,” I say.

“Well, that’s good,” he says. Smiling, waiting.

I’m setting the table. The storm is building a wall around the house. Trees raising an uproar, like waves breaking on shore.

“I know there’s a lot more,” he says.

“I read the book.”

“There is the book.” He nods. “And there’s also the day itself.”

“A school day like all the others,” I say. “It was Aggie MacNeil told me. Aggie, who taught you everything you know about writing. She was the one that told me. ‘Poor President Kennedy.’”

“I don’t mean that,” he says quietly. “I mean what happened at Ceiteag’s place that afternoon. What happened to—”

“Leave it alone,” I bark.

“I know you’ve thought a lot about it,” he persists. “Where it originated. Something between himself and Angus. And the war. And a woman.”

“But I don’t have to talk about it,” I say. “I don’t
want
to talk about it. Nobody wants to talk about it since you wrote about it. It’s all behind us.”

“Some of us have a responsibility to the future.”

“Well, good luck to you and your future.”

Bringing him here was a mistake. Bringing him and her and all the rest of them with him. People I thought to be safely away or secure in cemeteries. Future, my arse.

“Let’s just let sleeping dogs lie,” I say.

Then he smiles, the one that got him all the things he has, all the places he has been, and is.

“Pour me something and then let’s get those steaks under way.”

You have to laugh.

He ate supper like a starved person, face close to his food. Finally shoved his plate away, straightened up, sighed, burped, then tilted his chair back.

“A regular five-star chef,” he says. “You must do something with the calories, to look that fit.”

“I run a bit,” I say.

“You gotta like…isolation,” he says.

“Maybe.”

The wine goes down like water. You forget how much you enjoy a good glass of wine.

“
Loneliness and the Long-Distance Runner.
You must have read that?”

I never heard of it.

“Believe it or not, I slept with a woman who slept with the guy who wrote that.”

I should care.

“About five years ago.”

“Effie slept with him?”

He laughs. “No, no, no. Somebody else. Just after I left Effie. In ‘78.”

“It’s been that long.” I am surprised.

“Five years,” he says. “You must have laughed your hole out.”

“Didn’t mean much by then.”

He stares at me for a moment.

“Alex something,” he says.

“Who?”

“That writer. I had a whole bunch of short relationships after I…moved on.”

“Yes,” I say. Cutting it off.

“It’s good that we can talk about it.”

“It was a long time ago,” I say. I avoid his eyes.

“Alan…something. Stivel or…Stiletto. No.”

I look back at him blankly.

“That writer’s name. It’ll come to me.”

Out in Hastings, down below his place, there was the remains of an old coal pier. Near where the railway station used to be. It’s all gone now. In my time it was a high black rickety structure of old timbers, great for jumping off in the summer, if you knew how to swim, or wanted to learn quickly. Once in, it was hard to get out. You had to climb up the splintery creosote. Hard to believe today but you could swim in the strait back then. That was before the Swedes came with the pulp mill. Before we pumped the strait full of old fibre and chemical crap. Making a living at it.

Uncle Jack said he and my old man worked at that coal pier in the busy days. Practically boys, they were. First paying job. Them and Angus. Shovelling coal onto boats. Coal from down north when there were mines in Port Hood and Inverness. Middle of the thirties. Jack building his strength after being sickly for years.

One day they were loading coal on a boat bound for a place
called St. Lawrence on the south coast of Newfoundland. Wicked hard times there but some American fellow was trying to start an underground mine. The place was going to take off, they were told. They knew nothing about Newfoundland or mining but this was a chance. Get out. Earn some real money. When the coal boat sailed, they went with it. That was the start of their mining.

That’s how he remembered it, Uncle Jack. The beginning of liberation. By my time, the coal pier was a tumbledown relic of when the village had a purpose. A place to go swimming. Even though the old man forbade it.

“Somebody’s going to get drowned there,” he’d say, anger and anxiety in his face.

There was a public wharf right next to the old pier. Some of the old fellows kept little rowboats there. They’d pull a few lobster traps in the season, maybe a herring net in the summer. Some groundfish in autumn. Jack Reynolds got a nasty-looking shark in his net once. It was in the papers. We’d steal his boat when there wasn’t anybody around and row out into the strait, Sextus and me, Effie, her brother, Duncan, hunting shark or whatever. One day it was just Sextus and me. Down along the shore. It was early November, I think. I was arsing around, and fell in.

I remember my hand kind of grabbing the air, and then the water closing over my head. And the jolt of terror. Afterwards you wonder: Where does the terror come from? Certainly not from reason. And something stronger than reason makes you struggle.

I bobbed briefly to the surface but could feel my feet dragging me down. My new rubber boots. Instinct said kick them off. But Pa would kill me if I lost them. So I struggled against the
downward drag. Then thinking: Pa is going to kill me anyway. The sky broke over me again for just a moment, disappeared again. That’s when I became aware of the underwater silence.

“She wasn’t the only one,” he says.

“The reporter,” I say.

“There were a few reporters,” he says. “Plus a TV personality and a social worker. And a politician. An elected member, actually.”

“I guess you got around quite a bit.”

“The seventies were pretty wild,” he says. “They talk about the sixties, but that was just…experimentation. The seventies were life.”

“I can’t remember much about the seventies,” I say. But he just motors on.

“Took a lot of chances before I left her. Fooling around on the side. Quickies on the road. One-night stands. Punishing her, I guess.”

“What for?”

“Don’t go looking for logic.”

She’d know, had it been me. She could always read me. And I’d want her to read my anger. You’d want her to know your mind and soul so she’d know they were full of her.

“Then one night, out of the blue she says, ‘We have to have a talk.’ And I knew what was coming.”

“So she knew.”

“No. That was the killer. She was all defensive. Uptight. Said there was a friend and the friendship was getting out of control…handy the threshold. So I go into indignation gear. ‘Where’s
the threshold?’ I ask. ‘Before or after the pants come down?’ That’s when I blew it.”

All right, I say to myself. This is okay.

“She had me then,” he says. “Didn’t have to say another word. Just stared at me. I grab my coat and a pack of smokes and out the door. Expecting her to shout something. Stop me.”

“She must have known something.”

“No way,” he says. “She’d have used it if she did. You know her.”

With me it was a brief note. Life sentence.

He says, “You must have been saying ‘Serves the bastard right’ when you heard.”

“To tell the truth, I can’t even remember how I found out.”

He stares into the cigarette smoke, the way his father used to. Then says brightly, “I think it’s great. You and me here. Grownups. Scars and all. But no hard feelings.”

“But that’s not why you’re here.”

“I suppose not,” he says, smiling.

I’m not sure what I should say next. Don’t provoke.

Eventually, he says: “Bottom line, I guess. I don’t know why the fuck I’m here.” He spreads his hands, preacher-like.

“I think we’ve grown up a bit,” he says, with that smile again.

Some more than others, I’m thinking, absorbed into the sounds of the storm outside, and the vastness of the history around us. All grown up and not even looking at each other. Speaking in parables.

The loneliness of the long-distance runner, he said. Good line.

“Some grim out there,” he says, tilting his head toward the outside.

The wind is rattling furiously at the latch on the porch door. Trying to get in.

“So you should have come in summer,” I say.

He drains the glass. “It was hard this afternoon. The three of them there…planted in different, random spots. You’d never know any one of them ever had anything to do with the others.”

Next time I surfaced, I stayed. I heard myself shouting, and the water splashing and the bump of the boat, where my arm must have been hitting. Then he had me by the hair. “Hang on!” he was shouting, but it was himself that was hanging on. Then he must have lifted me up or something, because I got my hand over the side. That’s how he became special. The first time. Gave me life, a piece of his own, if only to take it away again when it was finally worth something.