The Long Stretch (9 page)

You’d never have known she was terrified of her father. Loyalty. That’s what she and Duncan always had in spades. To old Angus and to each other. She’d be holding Angus by the hand like
he was survival itself. She’d be at his knee for the whole visit. His hand would go to her head as he spoke. Smoky fingers vanishing into her burnt curls.
M’eudail,
he called her. Darling. And it just seemed natural. When she was little. A lot of old people called kids
m’eudail.

Then at about twelve, you could see a change. Whenever he was around she’d stay close to me, watching everything with that expression of indifference that she never lost. Not even after she grew up. I’d notice his face, cold and miserable. But then he’d wink and smile. Insinuating: Sandy’s boy and his little
m’eudail.
Proper thing. She’d look nervously at me. But never betray any ambiguity of feeling toward him.

But after that Christmas, sitting in Pa’s truck down near the old coal pier where the three of them had once worked, she talked about her terror of night. Waking to cigarette smoke, seeing the glow of his cigarette in the corner of her bedroom, then the outline of himself. In her room, her most private place. Then, discovered, he’d disappear for days. And she didn’t know which was worse. The fear when he was there or the guilt when he wasn’t.

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “I could never have guessed it.”

“I was probably fourteen,” she said, “when it started to get serious. I never noticed anything funny before. Just that he always seemed more concerned about me than about Duncan. I thought that was natural. Then he started treating me different, like I was a stranger. That was tough.

“And then one night we were in the kitchen, after supper. I got up from the table to clean up. I dropped a knife on the floor. A big one. He jumped up and stared at it and then at me. And he cringed up against the wall. I’ll never forget the look on his face. Like panic. And hate. I tried to talk to him. He couldn’t hear very well anyway, but this was different. He was somewhere
else and didn’t have a clue who I was. And I just had the feeling that he was going to make a grab for the knife. He just kept looking at it on the floor, his eyes wild. But I got it first, put it in the cupboard. Then he started to cry.”

“Was he drinking?”

“Less than usual.”

“What did you do?”

“I put my coat on and left. After that he was always watching.”

I waited, left her to say it in her own time.

“Then I’d catch him…he’d sneak into my room, just stand and watch me. It would wake me up. But after that, I was really scared. He’d just be standing there, in the dark. Sometimes you’d only know by the glow of his cigarette.

“Then after Sandy,” she said. “After the day…last year. I had this queer feeling. That everything was connected. All the strangeness, in the both of them.” Squeezed my hand again. “And if that was true, he might be a bigger menace to himself…than to me.”

I studied my hands. They were trembling slightly.

“I was sure, after. Your dad. He’d be next.”

She clasped her two hands on mine then, hard as she could, emphasizing her words with the pressure, imprinting them: “I’ll tell you everything. But you mustn’t get the wrong idea.” Her face was full of entreaty. “He wasn’t what you think. I know now.”

“I know,” I said.

“But maybe worse,” she said.

I repeated it: I know. To reassure her. But I knew something different. Something that stirred anger and nausea, mingling in the gut, put a burning in my throat. I know. What he was up to. Bunkhouse education covered that. Sick stories, jokes
you’d laugh at nervously, about perversions. And here we had our own. On the Long Stretch.

“You’ve got to get out of there,” I said.

“Sure,” she said. “And where to?”

“Let me think.”

“That’s okay,” she said, moving back, wiping her face.

“I could speak to Ma…maybe our place.”

“No,” she said. “Your ma has enough, taking care of your grandma, getting her own life together.”

“I suppose so.”

“I’ll be all right,” she said. “Worse comes to worse, there’s a gun there. A big rifle. Duncan showed me how it works.” Then giggled and sniffed. Asked if I have a Kleenex.

“Does Duncan know about this?”

“No,” she said. “I couldn’t tell Duncan.”

“I just want to face him,” I said. “Put it right to him. What’s wrong with him. What the hell was it with those two.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “You can never do that. He can never know I told you.”

The sorrow in her voice. It never left me. Nor sharp imagined images. One dominant: A cigarette glowing in the dark. Cauterizing something in me, that ember, leaving a little black hole of intolerance.

Jack would say: A fella can’t judge. Jack’s way of condemning him by reverse judgment. “Poor Angus.” Codewords, full of denunciation by understatement, which is common around here. Before that I might have been defensive about him. There seemed to be this tendency to blame everything on Angus. But the same people were protective of Sandy Gillis. Maybe out of fear of him. Afterwards I had a stronger feeling about Angus than Jack did. I felt disgust.

I close my eyes, slide down into the motion of the train, drift back to my favourite place. Running with the wind to wherever it took us. The little dog dashing close among our flying legs. Heading into the woods and becoming soldiers among the trees. Playing war, I’d be North Novies like Pa was. That was his outfit eventually, after they joined the army. North Nova Scotia Highlanders. Angus stayed in the Cape Breton Highlanders. She’d be the CBH.

And sometimes when we were sheltering from the wet or cold, within the rustly, quiet warmth of the barn, we’d talk. Mostly of the fabulous future. Some day, far off. Snuggle in the warm hay.

She’d say: “When we’ve finished school, we’ll go to Boston. Or Toronto. Or Detroit.” I’d laugh and say: “We won’t have to go to those places. This place will be just as big. Or bigger.” And she’d shake her head, curls blurry, and say: “It doesn’t matter. I want to go somewhere else. And you have to come too.”

Jack’s head is rolling with the train’s motion. It is just as well to leave him there. He’d be no help.

Growing up, the chemistry was different when Sextus was around. He and Duncan dominant. Older. Visitors from their own place, adolescence, making reconnaissance forays into the grown-up world. When it was just the two of us, Effie and me, that world didn’t exist. We’d wander miles through the dark woods, pushing through dense thickets of spruce, with starved lower branches tearing at us. Effie right behind me. When she was in front, she had a habit of letting branches whip back where she went through.

In the open spaces, where the trees were tall and the trunks bare to halfway up, and the ground softened by a spongy moss, we’d run silently, crouched low, rifles loose in the ready hands, parallel and close to the ground. Swift and alert. Like the Indians in the show. Looking for Germans. And sometimes we’d see a real animal. A bounding rabbit, tic-tacking through the bush. And we’d start shooting. Pa-khew. Pa-khew. And argue over who saw it first. And sometimes a deer, staring with silent wary interest. We’d stare back. Usually it would be me, raising the rifle, taking steady aim. Pa-khew. It was a spy, she’d say. Or, I’d correct her, a sniper.

And then I am dreaming.

We are all standing in front of the barn at home. Angus and Duncan, Squint, who lived alone over the Crandall Road, Pa and Grandpa, and me. It is a cold morning. Snow not far off. There to kill a pig.

Effie isn’t supposed to be here at all. Butchering the pig is men’s work. Women boiled the water for cleaning up. But there she is, down by the corner of the barn, hanging over the pole fence. There is a little pen down there where we’d keep the cow sometimes, when she was freshening. Effie has her elbows over the top rail and she’s watching intently. Duncan has his back to her and can’t see her. Otherwise he’d have chased her away. Duncan is controlling one of the two big sliding doors. Angus has the other one. There is the hilt of a hunting knife sticking out of the top of his boot. You can hear the pig inside, thumping around on the threshing floor. I feel this great bubble of resentment toward the pig: He is stupid; he will be surprised
by what will happen. Stupidity invites betrayal. Invites pity. I should have remembered.

Pa stands, legs spread, in front of the big doors hefting a sledgehammer. Duncan pulls his door open a crack. Suddenly you see the pig’s snout, hear him snuffling. Duncan pulls the door a little more and the pig shoves his head and shoulders through. Grunting. Then Duncan and Angus jam him squealing there in that position. Pa swings the sledge hammer. Nails him in the forehead, almost between the ears. Whump. The pig roars and his legs go from under him. Then Angus moves quick with the knife, catches the snout, and in an effortless motion, slices his throat open.

Now the pig is struggling to get up. Wheezing. Blood gushing. Grandpa is there with a wash pan, trying to catch the blood, holding the pig by the ear. Squint helping. The pig is flopping on the ground, kicking. Squint grabs his hind legs so Grandpa can get the blood. For
maragan.
Grandpa loved
maragan.
The rest are standing watching. Angus holding the knife grimly, face red. Effie’s face powder white, fascinated. Then I notice, below where she’s leaning against the top rail, the tightness of her shirt under her open jacket. The start of breasts. Flesh replacing everything I knew of her.

The pig’s struggle has subsided to quivering and twitching, the movements growing lazier. The eyes, however, full of accusation.

“What do you figure he’s thinking?” I say to Duncan.

“Pigs can’t think,” he says.

Then he sees Effie and shouts: “Hey!”

And she says: “What.” Defiantly.

Then they haul the pig into the barn and put a stake through the tendons on his hind legs and hoist him up off the floor. Hung upside down from a beam.

“Just like Mussolini,” Angus says, laughing. Smear of blood on his pant leg where he wiped the knife. Everybody chuckles with him, knowing he’d been there. Squint had been in the CBH too. He was a sniper. A sharpshooter, they called it. That’s how he got his name.

Beside her, leaning on the rail, “I saw them doing it last year.”

“Once is enough for me,” she says, sort of turning toward me. It is getting colder. Her jacket is zipped up now. She shoves her hands into the side pockets.

“What are you doing tonight?” I say.

“I don’t know.”

Her eyes scanning, looking for someone.

Then, motioning toward the barn door, she says, “I think they’re going to town. Papa said. Did your father say anything?”

“No,” I say. Then: “Who cares?”

“Well,” she says, “it isn’t very nice when they come home. Is it?”

I look away. Not knowing.

“Maybe it’s all right for you,” she says.

“No, it isn’t,” I say quickly. Seizing on something but not knowing what.

She looks like the least thing would make her cry.

And he says they call you Faye. How could you?

And later when everyone is gone, with the truck doors slamming and the engine starting, I am looking out the kitchen window and the two of them are in the cab as the truck lurches down the lane. The old man and Angus. Heading into town.

And Squint is staying around for a while, helping Grandpa clean up around the barn.

“Wicked with a knife, Angus is,” says Grandpa.

“Aah haha,” Squint says, putting another half-hitch in the rope suspending the pig.

Then the two of them coming in for tea.

The sun rouses me early the next morning, revealing through my window that his truck is neither home nor over at MacAskill’s; downstairs, Ma sitting at the table, a mug of tea in front of her, just sitting there with her hand under her chin, like she’s been there all night. Her face all red welts, as if slapped, but surely not. He isn’t like that.

Sextus retrieves the photograph of Uncle Jack and the sawmill from the tabletop. Studying it, sadness in his face.

“Like day and night, they were,” he says.

Tell me about it.

“Two fellows, cut from the same piece of cloth, set out in life down the same road. Come to a crossroads, go different directions.”

Some crossroads.

Christmas Day 1964, Squint was at the house for dinner.

“You were in the war,” I said.

“Uh-huh,” he said, with a questioning look.

“With Angus and the old man?”

“Well,” he said, “it’s a complicated story.”

“How complicated?”

Leaning forward, elbows on knees. “We were all in the CBH together…but your father…he transferred out. To the North Novies. You knew that?”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t know anything.”

He shook his head slowly, studying the floor.

“So why did he transfer out?”

“Och…it’s a long story.”

Ma came into the room then and he changed the subject.

“The old man never really forgave me. For Christmas ’64,” he is saying.

“Not true,” I say.

“He comes home. I’m off to Bermuda,” he says, not listening to me. “He never forgave me, did he? You and him home from…where was it? Quebec? No. Newfoundland. Tilt Cove. Home from the salt mines. The two of you home. Special.”

“Copper,” I say.

“Wha’?”

“Copper mine. Tilt Cove.”

“Whatever. The first normal Christmas after Uncle Sandy. And me in Bermuda. Imagine what was going through the old man’s head.” Swallows a mouthful. Sighs long. “What a prick I was.”

Was?

“Nobody ever missed Christmas. Not if you didn’t have to. A war or something. But I missed Christmas.” He grinds out
the cigarette, exhaling thin smoke. “Went to Bermuda with a broad from Halifax. You never met her?”

No!

“Boss’s daughter. Slick like you never saw. Out of the blue she says, ‘Let’s go south for Christmas.’ ‘South where?’ I say. ‘Bermuda,’ she says. ‘Daddy’s got a place there.’ She was kind of the first, how shall I put it…mature relationship.” He winks at me. “She couldn’t get enough of it. So…how could I say no? Ma wasn’t too pleased. But I half expected the old fellow would understand. I mean, he’d seen a few Christmases from away. Himself and Uncle Sandy. The mines and the war and all.”

“Didn’t seem to bother Jack one way or the other,” I say, looking him in the eye.

He holds me there. Then: “When you get right down to it, by Christmas ’64 there wasn’t all that much between him and me. Not really.” He laughs. “There was no dramatic breakdown. Just something gradual, over the years.”

He’s dabbing the cigarette in the pile of butts in the ashtray.

“Back when I was feeling sorry for myself, I’d tell anybody who cared to listen that it was because he got physical. Punched me out once. But thinking about it, honestly. It was just once. And, fuck, I sure asked for it. So. It was something else.”

Going back to Tilt Cove after Christmas, it was clear I had to find out how much Uncle Jack knew. About Angus. About what Pa’s problem had been. About their whole history. Maybe understand November 22, ’63. I kept watching for an opportunity to ask him about them overseas. To intercept the proper
mood, get access to their common memory. All night crossing Cabot Strait. All next day on the train. Struggling back to Tilt Cove. Looking for a chance, as the slow miles of snow and mournful spruce and silent rock crept by. But Jack was pretty sick all the way back. Wouldn’t talk.

Ignorance cultivates nightmares.

Grandpa used to talk about the
cailleach oidhche,
the old woman of the night. She’ll creep into your dreams, he’d say. Climb on top of you and try to crush the breath out of your lungs. Never let you see her face. Only way to get rid of her is call for the help of the Lord. Scream
Iosa Chriosd
for all you’re worth. That’ll get rid of her, he’d say. Faith.

“The
cailleach oidhche?
” Effie just laughed the first time I mentioned her. The
cailleach oidhche
is an owl,” she said. “Grandpa was just pulling your leg.”

But I know it’s real.

Back in the bunkhouse, sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night and imagine a cigarette glowing in the dark. The sensation that I knew she felt. The steam whispering and clicking in the heat pipes.

Eventually it would be morning, the bunkhouse door slamming. Guys clumping down the front steps, heading through the frosts to the cookhouse. Or the headframe. Me still fagged out from lack of sleep.

It was then I started hanging around Itchy’s on my own. Drinking with the hardcore. Sheltering in their rough company and their stories about worse.

One night I realized I was smelling real cigarette smoke. Sat up quickly. Snapped on the overhead light. He was by the door. Standing there in his underwear with his trousers in his hand.

“What are you doing?” I asked, too sharply.

He looked at me curiously for a moment, the cigarette between his lips.

“Hitting the sack,” he said. “Stayed at Itchy’s a little longer than I should…”

The end of the sentence lost in coughing.

I collapsed back on the bed.

“Something wrong with that?”

I didn’t answer. Got up and went for a leak.

He was sitting on the side of his bed winding his watch when I got back. I sat facing him.

“Bunch heading for Grande Cache next week,” he said. “Want me to go with them. I said I’d rather dig shit with a spoon than mine coal. But I’m going somewhere, that’s for sure.” Yawned. “So what’s your problem?”

“Nothing worth talking about,” I said.

“Maybe you’re having a bit of feeemale trouble.”

I pretended to laugh.

“I’ll be noticing the mail coming in,” he said.

“Nothing to worry about there,” I said. The urge to seek his confidence suddenly diminished.

He looked at me, eyes a bit narrower than I was accustomed to.

“Anything you want to know, just ask me,” I said. “You’re the one told me never mind listening to the bullshit around home.”

He flipped over on his back, finishing his smoke. Then said: “You should be careful before that one gets her hooks in you.”

Her letters after that were cautious.

Things are pretty well the same, she’d say. But it’s under control.

Then something like: Had my visitor again the other night. But now that you know I don’t feel so spooked. Actually, I’m getting sick of it. I don’t think it’s sick or perverted. But you never know. Duncan doesn’t know everything but I’ll tell him if I have to.

She was handling it.

The next night over beer, Jack told me he was quitting at Easter. Take a week off. Go see MacIsaac in Sudbury. Am I interested? Better money in Sudbury. Big bonus money in the shaft if you’re any good.

Guys got rich in Elliot Lake. Kirkland Lake. Timmins before that. Now it’s Sudbury. I could maybe work there a few months, save everything. Go home, start something there. Maybe get serious with Effie. Start a life. You could work forever in a place like Tilt Cove and still have nothing. A scab mine, no union, no bonus, minimal pay, no benefits.

And, of course, at twenty-one, I’d have insurance coming. From the old man. Legion life insurance.

“They’ve got a union in Sudbury,” I said.

“They have that,” Jack said. “But that don’t bother me.”

Jack was against unions.

“Anyway, it’s just time to move on.”

I agreed.

Halfway down the third beer, my label peeled and piled in little balls, I said without looking: “About last night.”

He looked uneasy.

“I’ve been going out with Effie some,” I said.

“I noticed,” he said.

“She’s…not like Angus.”

“The war did a lot of damage to people,” he said. “Brought out the best in some. The worst in some others.”

I just nodded.

“Maybe it will come up between you.”

“Why would it?” I asked.

“There’s
tihngs
you don’t know,” he said.

Tihngs.

Finally he asked: “Do you think you’ll be coming with me? Or going home?”

Then his face contorted in a grimace.

My answer was lost as he folded up in a seizure of deep coughing.