The Long Stretch (7 page)

Remembrance Days were bad. First, they were always grim looking. The sky thick with rain or sleet, cold. It was a day off back then. The old man would be up early. Barn chores done, he’d wash up and shave. When I was really small I loved to watch him shaving. He’d stand there in his barn pants and undershirt, his arms brown to the elbow. Then creamy white up over the shoulders. When he moved his arms, muscles would thicken and swell under the skin. When you stood on his left, looking at him standing sideways, you couldn’t see the mess on the right side of his forehead. I liked the smell of the lather. Hearing the scratchy sound of him sharpening an old blade by rubbing it around the inside of a drinking glass. He’d always get a couple of extra days out of it that way.

Then he’d put on his good pants and Legion blazer, the poppy and the bar of medals. He explained what they all were but I’ve forgotten. Gave them to the museum in Hastings after Ma moved out. He’d carefully comb his hair across the top of his head, the right side combed forward to cover the blasted patch
where nothing grew. Then he’d put on the beret he wore only on that day or for Legion funerals. We’d all go in. Him, Ma, and Grandma in the cab. Myself and Grandpa, and Angus in the back, on an old car seat. Sometimes Effie and Duncan. And we’d watch the parade. He’d be in it, near the front, carrying a flag. Looking grim like the rest of them. And Angus, farther back. They’d march along the main drag in Hawkesbury, to where the war memorial used to be, at the Old Post Office. There would be quite a crowd of them back then and up into the early sixties, when I quit going. The last one I went to was November 11, 1963, only eleven days before they killed Kennedy.

After the causeway and the pulp mill, the main street pretty well died. The memorial and the Legion are up on the by-pass now. The new main street built around shopping malls. The day comes and goes now and I hardly notice. Just people pestering you to buy a poppy. Then you notice the wreaths and stuff when you’re driving by.

They had the Sea Cadets in Hawkesbury for a couple of years and I joined. I figured the old man would be pleased, seeing me in a uniform. But the first time I put it on he kind of chuckled and said, “Come here and let me look at that.”

I stood in front of him for inspection.

He said: “Well, well. Popeye the sailor man.” Kind of singing it.

I dropped out after a few months.

After the parade he and Angus and the other vets would go to the Legion Hall. Jessie would drive the rest of us home, everybody jammed into her car.

Remembrance Days were bad because you always knew something was going to happen. Him and Angus getting hammered.

Uncle Jack shut the mill down Remembrance Day in ‘57. Out of respect, he said. And I could understand just by the way he said it. By the next Remembrance Day of course the mill was a dead duck.

The sawmill was a big mistake, Jack told me years later.

“Should have listened to Sandy. And the wife,” he said. “They told me all along: ‘You got no head for business.’”

He was a little bit drunk, remembering.

“Your timing was bad, that’s all.”

“The causeway was good. Good timing,” he said. “Got me home for about three years there. Longest stretch I ever had in the place.”

“But it was just a construction project. Temporary.”

“But they were saying there would be lots of work afterwards. New industry.”

“I guess it was too…small scale. Your little mill.”

“I planned to expand. When I got on my feet.”

“Maybe you were in the wrong place.”

“You can say that again.”

Jack would stand by that terrifying saw, hand on the lever that controlled the carriage, like an admiral on the bridge of his flagship. Clothes flecked with sawdust, eyes squinting against the spray of splintered wood, wincing, cigarette clenched between his lips, as the saw screamed through the log. The carriage then raced back, ready for another run. Boards and plank falling away, perfect objects of art. More than revenue. Each turn of the saw was another bite at the future. Never mind the world’s deepest causeway and the big political plans. I’d come
after school, help him roll big frozen logs from the pile onto the carriage. Using a peavey tall as myself. Jack using bare hands. Talking to me like I was somebody.

“You ever been to Sydney?” Uncle Jack said to me one day.

“No,” I said. Thinking: Sydney, a city, huge steel mill, a massive smoking, steaming place. Pictures of it often on television.

“Ya want to go?”

“When?” I asked, blood pounding.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “Going to take a load of lumber down to the Co-op.”

Heart sunk. “There’s school.”

“School shmool,” he said. “Look at me. I never went to school a day in my life.”

“They won’t let me.”

“Leave that to me.”

And the next day we went. And it was exactly as the TV showed it, except louder. Cars streaming along King’s Road and red plumes of ore dust staining the sky over the crash and rumble of machinery. White steam billowing high above stinking coke batteries. People hurrying by. Confusion, but everybody knowing exactly where they’re heading. Saying nothing. Small boys shouting “Post Rrrrrecord!” skinny shoulders hauled down by heavy bagfuls of newspaper.

Our first stop was at a Co-op lumber yard. Jack parked close to the door of a building with offices. Beyond it you could see huge piles of lumber, stacked precisely, saturating the air with a sour freshness. A man wearing a white shirt and necktie came out and walked around the truck. Then he and Jack talked, Jack looking at the ground, hands in his pockets. The guy went back inside. Jack jumped in behind the wheel and started the engine.

We went to two more lumber yards before they started unloading. Then we went to a restaurant. I’d never before been in one. Everything looking and smelling delicious, even the name. Diana Sweets. Everybody looking important, except Jack and me. Was too nervous to take my coat off because I had egg yolk on my shirt from the morning. From hurrying to leave before dawn. Jack smiled, told me to leave the coat on.

I devoured a massive plate of spaghetti. Jack ordered a sandwich but only ate half.

“It’s a hard grind, boy,” he said, smoking, watching me eat the other half of his sandwich. “They don’t get you coming, they get you going.”

“Everything was against him,” Sextus says, pouring unsteadily into the glass, drinking straight liquor now. “Nobody in the village gave him one little bit of encouragement. An eyesore. That was the exact word. Mainly because of the sawdust pile. With all the other crap that was around here.”

“Today he’d need an environmental impact study,” I say, sympathetic.

“Fucking assholes.”

Dreams die hard, people say. You read about “the death of a dream” as if a dream ever really ceases to exist. Life would be so much simpler if dreams did die. But they don’t. No way. They sit somewhere in the darkness, ready to resurface in some simple recollection. And ruin everything. That was Jack’s problem. And I think part of my father’s problem too.

The kitbag always told you when Uncle Jack was coming or going. He’d never take it into the house. You’d see it on the doorstep or in the porch. A filthy canvas laundry bag, jammed full of the boots and belts, woollens and waterproof clothes he wore working in the mine. Stuff too dirty to wash. The hardhat would be on top, a bit of scratched brown crown showing where the drawstring didn’t quite close. You could see the outline of the lamp bracket. He usually kept the kitbag in the barn when he was home. If you saw it on the porch, you knew he’d either just arrived home or was just going away. Sometime in May ‘58 I saw the kitbag in the porch.

Sextus says, “So he packs in the sawmill venture in…what was it?”

“Around ‘58.”

“Machinery was always breaking down. Then you couldn’t get a price for the lumber. Was losing money on it. Figured all along he’d have to get work somewhere, get a bit more money to put into it. Of course, he was hardly gone when the government showed up. When you think about it now, it was a blessing. The best thing that could have happened. The Trans-Canada.”

It was inevitable. Part of the Future. The new causeway was attached to a road that ran clear to the other end of Canada. Naturally they’d want to build a proper highway on our side too, cross Cape Breton, then Newfoundland. Sea to sea. Just like John A. Macdonald did with the railway. But before long they’re bulldozing the old houses and Mrs. George’s orchard. Tearing up the fields. The new highway ran smack through
the middle of Jack’s little sawmill. He could see it coming and packed up before it got to him. Sold the machinery to somebody but managed to be gone before they came for it. “Didn’t want to give them the satisfaction,” he said.

“He was never cut out for business. Should have settled for an ordinary job like everybody else. But he had to be different.”

“Don’t see where he had a lot of choice in the matter,” I say.

“Funny thing,” he says. “One of the last times I talked to him. When was it, ‘69 or ‘70, just before the end. You’d never guess what he was talking about.”

I heard it a hundred times.

“Another sawmill. Would you believe it?”

So I’m looking at the kitbag, when he said: “Well, young fellow…I’m putting you in charge of the women. Expecting you to be dropping in here regular to make sure everything is copasthetic.”

Aunt Jessie jumped up from the table where they’d been sitting. Headed into the pantry rattling dishes and stuff.

He was sitting with one forearm across his knee, an elbow on the table. And he reached into his pocket and pulled out a dollar bill and handed it to me.

“Here’s an advance on your wages,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said. “Where are you going?”

He stood up stiffly then, like an old man. And Jessie was suddenly there.

“We’re just going out for a few minutes, dear,” she said. “I’m driving Jack to the train. You can wait here till I get back.”

Like she wanted me to.

As soon as their car was out of sight, I streaked for home.

Around that time it became clear, at least to me, that one day I’d be going with him. Predictions of prosperity weren’t for the likes of me and Uncle Jack. Something false in all the promises.

Ma once asked: “What do you think you’ll be when you grow up?”

My response was quick: “A miner like Uncle Jack.”

I heard the old man laugh.

Uncle Jack was gone for the best part of three years after he went away in 1958. Flin Flon, Manitoba. I’m sure it was ‘58. It was after the causeway but before the pulp mill. He went to Tilt Cove late in ‘60. Maybe it was ‘61. That’s where I hooked up with him in ‘64.

“We got the ‘58 Chev,” Sextus says, “just before he left the last time. For, where was it? Flin Flon? Yeah. I remember by the car. Almost new.”

Remembering by association with large events. Like buying cars.

Sextus learned to drive the ‘53 Ford before they got the Chev. For my money, the Ford was the nicest car ever made. Sextus just couldn’t wait to get behind the wheel. “Car crazy,” Uncle Jack said he was. And he seemed to have the car whenever he wanted it. Aunt Jessie was like that.

“Young people need to get around,” she’d say.

And there was a lot of territory to get around in unless you wanted to be doing the same thing night after night. The fun could be just about anywhere in a radius of fifty miles. That’s how lots of us got killed. Gas was cheap then, about fifty cents a gallon. If you could scrape together three or four dollars you were good for the evening. And Uncle Jack was sending money home, once he got work in Flin Flon.

He called Aunt Jessie from somewhere one evening a week after he left. He was still on his way. I could tell by the way she was talking to him that he was drunk. When she got off she said, “That was poor Jack, in Winnipeg.”

“Wow,” I said. “That’s halfway across the country.”

“Just about,” she said.

“What’s he doing there?”

“Having a few, I think,” she said wryly. “I don’t mind. I know when he’s in there, where he’s going…he’ll have nothing to do but work. He never drinks when he’s working away.”

I guess they all told the wives that.

Jack used to joke about it: I was so far in the hole in ‘58 I had to go down another hole to get out of it. Meaning Flin Flon. Laughing and gagging over his own irony. Whenever he laughed it usually ended in a spasm of coughing violent enough to blow his head off.

The Trans-Canada went through where his mill was. I watched them bulldoze the sawdust pile and a lot of trash wood left behind. There had been a lot of firewood there, slabs cut into stove lengths. He’d been selling them there for ten dollars a truckload, but after he was gone people just took the wood. Filling the trunks of cars, or the backs of their half-tons. Sometimes in armloads. The last of the slabs went the night before the bulldozers came. Aunt Jessie took a picture.

The new road ate through the place and you’d think the country would never heal. It was all charred tree stumps and mud banks and big boulders with the dust and the sour smell of the blasting still on them. Today it looks like it was always there, a natural thing bright with lupins and wild roses in summer, the new spruce crowding close again.

“We just never clicked. Don’t ask me. There are people like that. Warm, kind-hearted, good people. Draw you in, all right. But you never really know the real person. You know what I mean? I mean, your gut tells you nobody is as great as those folks seem to be. So you always wonder, what’s up with them?”

“But your gut can be wrong,” I say.

He looks at me, measuring.

“He wrote to me in the spring of ‘61, said if I needed work he’d get me something in…where was it? Tilt Cove. I was calling it Tit Cove. Underground labour, he said. Jesus Christ, I thought. Said no, thank ya. Got on at the pulp mill. Electrician’s helper. Good money, great summer. Couldn’t picture the two of use…bumping around in a place like that.”

I say: “He never mentioned.”

“Then, a few years later, you went. Hung in for what? Years.” Shakes his head slowly. “Christ, that must have been an experience.”

He fishes out another cigarette, waiting for me to move the subject forward. Open up some space for exploring all the unanswered questions about my father.