The Second Son (19 page)

He got in pretty late, slamming the door behind him. I slid out of bed and over to the grate. She must have been waiting for him in the kitchen. One thing I learned that night, she wasn’t afraid of him. “Feel better, now?” I heard her say.

“Goddamn right,” he answered, “and the next time you call the hotel I might be gone the whole night.”

“Don’t you swear at me, mister. This is my home just as much as it is yours.” She was yelling just as loud as he was.

I had never heard her yell like that before and I guess he hadn’t, either, because his voice was a lot softer when he answered. “You know what this town is like. Everybody in town will know you called the hotel looking for me.”

“And what if one of your children took sick, or I really needed you for something? I’m not supposed to look for you?”

“That’s not the case, and you know it. You were just mad I was late for supper.”

“Don’t I have a right? I’m not running a restaurant, here.”

“You know the kind of trouble I’m in, why I need to unwind a bit. I had to let another clerk go today.”

“In that case we don’t have money to be buying rounds for people in the hotel.”

“What the hell do you mean by that?”

“I know what you’re like when you’re drinking. You have to be the big shot all the time, paying for everybody. Just like your grandfather.”

His voice changed then. “Don’t you ever throw that in my face again, or you’ll hear some language you’ve never heard before. Not even from Angus MacRae.”

There was silence for a long moment before she spoke again. “You know as well as I do, you’re not going to solve our problems in the Atlantic. If we’re really that hard up, I’ll go out and find a job.”

“Here we go again. Why not put a sign on my back and be done with it? Ed Landry — Big Failure. If you really want to help you can come and clerk for me. Save a whole salary.”

“You know the answer to that. I told you when we got married that I’d never come to work for you. I saw how you talked to your clerks.”

“I don’t mean anything by it. I just blow my top for a minute, then it’s all over with, forgotten about.”

“Not by me it wouldn’t. I’d have to come home with you.”

“Dammit, Lorna, it would be different with you.”

“It doesn’t matter, anyway. I’m not about to start serving my own friends and neighbours.” I often wondered in later years how she squared that excuse with taking a job in the post office.

Probably the old man knew at the time it didn’t make sense. “Admit it,” he taunted her, “it’s just foolish Scotch pride.”

She wouldn’t back down. “Now that’s a laugh. Who’s got more pride than the French?”

I don’t know how the argument finally ended. I fell asleep about that time. When I woke up it had gone all quiet down in the kitchen. I slipped back into bed, wondering if we were really as broke as they said. It was hard to believe. My father still carried that big wad of cash all the time. I know because I often had fantasies about all the things I would buy if I could just sneak into their bedroom one night and slip that great roll of money from his pants pocket. I can still see him, digging it out with his left hand and peeling off the bills with his right. A ritual he had to reassure himself of his place in the world, I suppose. That’s how my mother got any money she had, off that roll. And he always made her ask for it. Each week she would tell him she needed some “household money” and he’d pull the roll out. “How much do you need?”

“Why do you always ask me that?” she’d say. “Why don’t you just give it to me without making me ask?”

“Well . . . I don’t know. You might need more, some weeks, for something extra. Or something special.” He’d be taken aback each time, as though this was the first time he had ever heard the question. That’s how I know the ritual was so important to him. He’d rather look foolish each week, giving the same dumb answer, than give up the ceremony of being asked and then peeling off the bills in response.

“I’d ask if there was something special, wouldn’t I?” she’d always answer.

“I suppose,” he’d say, and the discussion would end there. I wonder if she enjoyed the game as much as he did. Because they never altered it, not until the great roll of bills became a thing of the past. Of course, that wasn’t the only thing that was changing. It’s funny how things disappear on you, sneaking away in the night, long before you even notice they’re gone.

When it happened, we all had a big laugh over it, that night in September when we were wakened in the middle of a sound sleep by someone playing the piano. At first I thought it must be a radio or something, until I saw my father out in the hall in his baggy underwear, trying to peer around the top of the staircase without being seen. When I heard the violin kick in I realized the noise was coming from down in the parlour.

“Ed,” a man’s voice called out, “c’mon down here and have a drink with us. And bring your lovely wife. Danny’s too drunk to play.”

“Aw, g’way with ya,” someone else yelled.

My father shrank back into the hall and put a finger to his lips, warning Andrew and me to be quiet. The voice persisted, “Get yourself down here, dammit, and we’ll have a party.”

Then somebody, it must have been Danny, broke into song, “You take the high road, and I’ll take the low road,” accompanying himself on the piano. The violin picked up again, while the voice from the foot of the stairs serenaded my parents with, “and I’ll be in Scotland afore ye.”

My father figured it was Flappy McHugh and his two drinking pals, Dave Gormley and Danny O’Brien. Flappy had kind of a raspy voice that was easy to recognize, and Dave Gormley played the fiddle. It came out later that the three of them had been kicked out of the Atlantic when it closed for the night. Apparently they decided to move the party to our house, where they thought there was a piano, booze, and a friendly host. In fact, several months earlier my father had brought the same trio home with him for exactly that purpose, to keep the party going — only at eleven o’clock, not two in the morning. But what’s a few hours between friends?

Like I said, though, times were changing. A year or two earlier, my father would have slipped on his pants and gone down to have a drink with Flappy and the boys. And likely my mother would have gotten up to make them some coffee. That fall, though, I’m not sure my father had a drink in the house to offer them. And if he didn’t have the heart to throw them out, neither did he have the heart left to offer the hospitality they had come to expect. Still cautioning us to be quiet, he tiptoed through our room and down the back staircase to the fuse box in the back kitchen, where he threw the main power switch.

“Holy shit,” we heard someone exclaim, “what happened?”

Then we heard a chair scrape, a bang, and a muttered curse. “Goddammit, Flappy. What’d you do?”

“I din’ do nothin’,” rasped Flappy, “I jus’ turned a lamp on.”

“You musta done something, man. You knocked the power out.”

Another voice chimed in, “Lorna’s gonna be mad at youse guys. We better get the hell outta here.”

More scraping and clunking could be heard as they stumbled their way to the front door and made a noisy exit. Our window was open and we could hear them muttering at each other all the way up Elm Street. My father went back to bed laughing at the trick he had played on them. I suppose it was enough like old times that we were able to fool ourselves for another little while, at the same time as adjustments were being made.

My mother eventually quit complaining about my father’s detours to the hotel. And she quit sending us to look for him. I guess the final straw was the night we saw his truck go right by the house on the way to the Atlantic. After that she simply filled a plate for him and put it in the warming oven. Sometimes he would come home on time to eat with us, but often as not he ate his supper alone at the table. I can still see him, his head sagging, half-heartedly chasing a dried-up pork chop and some shrivelled green peas across the plate, trying to make out like everything was fine and normal. My mother must have felt some sympathy for his plight, because she left the table set. And she never asked him to wash his dishes.

Those nights he wasn’t home, I’d usually get on my bike after supper and take a ride by the hotel. For some reason I felt better when I knew his truck was there. It was harder to keep up the facade though, when he started finding other ways to deal with his restlessness. It used to be we’d spend Sunday afternoons going for a drive in the country, visiting relatives, stopping in to say hello to old friends. Often as not there were cousins to play with, horses to ride, or haylofts to climb. So Andrew and I never hesitated to scramble into the back seat and take our chances on the destination. That fall, even this ritual began to change.

The old man started stopping at any hotel he could find on the route to wherever we were supposed to be going. He especially liked wandering over to Quebec — to places like St. Justine and St. Polycarpe, Rivière Beaudette and St. Télesphore, or Dalhousie — where the hotels were plentiful and open on Sunday. He’d pull into a parking lot and my mother would ask, “Why are we stopping here?” After the first few times she added, “As if I didn’t know.” And so we all waited in the car for a half-hour or more, while the old man went to “wet his whistle,” or “see a man about a horse.” It only took a few trips like that for my mother to start finding something important to do on Sunday afternoons, like preparing for those parent-teachers’ meetings she’d started taking an interest in.

“Well then,” my father would say, “maybe I’ll take the boys for a drive.”

“Suit yourself,” she’d say, not even looking up from what she was doing.

Without my mother, it got worse. We’d end up sitting for hours in a parking lot outside some hotel, wondering why we’d fallen for the same old story. He might have taken a roundabout route, regaling us with tales of the good old days, like who lived on this farm or who came from that town, but he’d still end up at some hotel, like Bon Homme Daoust’s in Beaudette, where he’d find some old acquaintance to share a quart with. Every hour or so he’d wander out to check up on us, reach into his pocket for a handful of change and count out enough for cokes and a bag of chips from the store down the street. If we were real lucky, he’d bring us a bag of cheese curds from the bar, to share. Every time we went along, with promises of visiting an uncle or a cousin, we’d spend a longer stretch in a parking lot somewhere.

One chilly afternoon in Dalhousie, we finally gave up. After sitting out there for three hours, we took off down the railroad tracks to Uncle Gustave’s farm, which backed on to the line about two miles down. The old man figured out where we must have gone and showed up at Uncle Gustave’s an hour or so later. They had a big laugh, my dad and his uncle, at the joke us kids had played on him. I could tell it was put on, though, especially when Aunt Sophie made him have three cups of coffee before we left for home. Naturally she wanted us to stay for supper, but he kept insisting my mom was expecting us home for a big meal, which was also bullshit. As soon as he had us alone in the car he gave us holy hell. It was weird. For the first time, his temper didn’t scare me. He warned us not to tell Mom what we had done. It would upset her, he said. More bullshit. I knew damn well that he was the one in shit, not us. And that was what scared me.

“
GODDAMMIT
,
WOMAN
! What were you thinking?” My father had just come barging in the front door with a pile of newspapers in his arms. Andrew and I had come home for lunch and were sitting at the kitchen table. I was surprised when my mother didn’t yell back at him for swearing at her.

Instead she asked, “What did you do? Is that the Cornwall paper?”

“Do you know what’s in it?” he barked as he dumped the newspapers on the chair by the door.

“Yes, Gordon phoned me about it.”

“Well, thank God Jim Tobin called me when they landed in his shop. I’ve been running all over town, buying them up.”

“Did you read it yet? Is it bad?”

“Bad? It’ll be a bloody miracle if I’ve got any French customers left. I told you not to get involved in that stuff. Goddammit!”

Andrew and I were sitting there with our mouths still open, unaware of what “stuff” they were talking about. I’m not sure we ever really understood why the adults were behaving that way, over a simple thing like building a school. It was hard for us kids to comprehend the political minefield my mother had walked into. Our English school’s PTA was in a dispute with the French-speaking half of the Catholic School Board over the construction of a new school. The French people wanted a new school for their girls, but the English trustees were opposed. The Board had just finished building a new French school for boys, and the English people figured it was their turn — seeing as how their kids were jammed into the old Holy Cross convent with classes up on a third floor with no fire escape.

“Quit yelling at me,” my mother finally reacted, “and tell me what it says.”

“The reporter says he talked to Lorna Landry and confirmed the rumour that outside agitators were causing the problems. People from Quebec.”

“I never said any such thing. He asked about that and I told him I’d heard that. But I had no comment, myself.”

“It doesn’t matter, Lorna. They mentioned your name three times in the damn article. Nobody else on the English side is mentioned. He made it sound like you’re leading the fight against the French people.”

She shook her head in denial. “I never dreamt it would come to this. I never would’ve accepted being the spokesperson if I thought this would happen. You know that.”

“I warned you, didn’t I? That sneak Gordie McNaughton just wanted someone with a French name to take the heat. Never did have the guts to stand up for himself. Every time he opens his mouth his wife speaks.”

“Anyway, I didn’t do anything wrong. It’s not anti-French to fight for your children’s rights. For God’s sake, I’m married to a French Canadian. And it’s true, there are outsiders stirring people up.”

“And the French people ate shit in this town for fifty years — ask my mother. But they’ve got the votes now and they’re going to look after their kids first. And in case you’ve forgotten, I’m one of them.”