The Second Son (9 page)

We took a quick tour, upstairs and down. My father got impatient pretty quickly so my mom told him to go wait in the car. “Have a smoke,” she said; “I know you’re dying for one.” She always told him that when she knew she was keeping him waiting. Then she said she wanted to tell us a story, and we looked for a place to sit. There was no furniture left in the place, except for a rusty old kitchen stove and a covered woodbox built into the wall. She brushed the dirt off the woodbox, and we sat there in the kitchen while she made the old house come alive with the story of her family and what had happened there.

Mom was the oldest, with three others coming shortly after — two brothers and a sister. That day she told us about their first home, how they all had their chores, how they did their homework by coal-oil lantern at the kitchen table, and what would happen when company came and the fire was lit in the parlour. She described each room and who had slept there, or what they were used for, and how her mother had furnished them. She could even tell us how they were decorated, recounting tales of painting and putting up wallpaper. I remember she talked about how small everything looked, and how much bigger the house was in her memory, but I don’t think that registered with us.

I wonder now, looking back, if she wasn’t pretty lucky to be able to return to that place she remembered and think through the things that happened there. I mean, how can you straighten a thing out in your head if you’re cut off from where it happened? Everybody has something that happened to them, big events in their life, people and places they keep remembering, memories that keep taking them back. The trouble is, if you can’t get back to the place where it happened and think it all through again, it’s likely a lot harder to adjust its meaning, or its importance in your life. And if you can’t go back, maybe it just stays there, like some great lump of pain you’ve swallowed and can’t digest.

Most people need to go back, I think. Look at how often they say they would like to return to the house of their childhood and visit the rooms they grew up in. And when they do, they always tell you the house seemed so small, and the rooms seemed so tiny, compared to their memories. I often thought that if I could have stayed in Alexandria, where this all happened, the struggle for my mother’s love might have been like that remembered house — smaller somehow, small enough that it wouldn’t have weighed on me still, after all those years. And maybe there would have been room in my heart for bigger dreams, among other things.

I don’t know if my mother was resolving things for herself by taking us back there, right after her father died, stirring up more sad memories. I don’t remember being struck by the sadness of her story, even though she told it many times over the years. Maybe if I had taken more notice of how she had appeared when she’d recounted what happened in that house, how her voice changed as the story passed through the different stages of her growing up, I would have had more understanding, later. But I was a child. It all sounded like ancient history to me, like something you might read about in a book.

I do recall her voice was bright and happy when she talked about the early years, when her father worked so hard and her mother managed so well that they had enough money saved to get all excited about buying their own farm, as soon as their fifth child was born. These were the good years, she would say, in the twenties, before the Depression murdered everyone’s hopes. Her voice would change, yet never break when she got to the sad part. And she never cried when she told us the story of her mother and Uncle Andy, not even a tear. Not that I can remember.

“It was in March,” she would say, “of 1928, when my mother told us we were going to have another little brother or sister. We all thought that was great, especially me. I was ten and jealous of my friend on the next farm over who had a baby sister to fuss over. So I was looking forward to it, dreaming about having a little baby to play with, like a doll. Of course I had no idea how much work was involved. The others were happy about it, too. Angus was eight, Gerry was six, and Sissy was five. We first knew something was wrong in May, when Mama got sick.”

I suppose a kid today would have lots of questions about pregnancies and how babies are made and where they come from. We didn’t, Andrew and me. Likely we thought there was stuff we weren’t supposed to know and decided it didn’t matter, since nobody else our age knew it, either. “We knew something was wrong,” my mother would continue, “when she asked my father to take her into town on a weekday. He hitched up the horse that afternoon and took her to see Doctor Wallace. They were still arguing when they came back from town and Dadda helped her down from the buggy.

“ ‘I don’t care what the doctor thinks,’ Mama said, ‘I’m not going to the hospital. Who will look after these children?’

“ ‘Lorna can, and I’ll get her some help.’

“ ‘You’ll do no such thing. Lorna has to finish her school year. She has exams next month.’

“ ‘You know what he said, the risk is too great. You need to be in bed.’

“ ‘That’s easy for him to say. These children still need their mother.’ ”

Then my mother would shake her head and say, “I can still hear my father’s voice. ‘And what will these children do if something happens to you? Tell me that, Helen MacRae.’

“She never answered him,” my mother would say, “and at first it seemed like she was right. She didn’t need to be in a hospital. Then the summer heat moved in toward the end of June and able-bodied people couldn’t catch their breath, let alone a pregnant woman with a weak heart. One day she collapsed out on the back stoop, trying to hang the laundry. She sent Angus to get my father while I tried to comfort her with a wet towel on her forehead. Dadda came running up from the fields and carried her into the little bedroom behind the kitchen. Our room, Sissy’s and mine.”

My mom would think about it for a moment before continuing, “She stayed in there for three weeks, waiting for the baby to come. There were days she could hardly catch her breath. Sometimes Dadda would carry her out to the front porch, where there was always a breeze in the evening. Her sister, Aunt Gertie, came to stay with her and help with the birth. One night near the end of July we were cleaning up after supper when we heard a commotion in the back room. Dadda rushed out and went into town to get the doctor. The birthing went on into the night. Dadda stayed out in the kitchen with us while Aunt Gertie and the doctor looked after Mama. I wanted to stay up, but Dadda made us go to bed. Sissy and I went up and slept in their bed, Dadda’s and Mama’s.

“Dadda woke us up the next morning and told us we had a new baby brother. We were thrilled and wanted to know what name we were going to give him. Andrew Allan, my father told us, and we ran downstairs to see him. The baby was in a cradle by the kitchen stove, a wee tiny thing wrapped in blankets with only his red little face peeking out. We all made a big fuss over him until one of us remembered Mama and asked if we could see her. Dadda said the doctor and Aunt Gertie were still with her and she wasn’t ready yet to see us. He made us all sit down and eat breakfast first, which we wolfed down, of course. Then we sat and waited impatiently to see our mother.”

No matter how many times she told us this story I always hoped that somehow it would change at this point and she would tell us a different ending. I don’t know how Andrew felt. He never talked about it. I used to think he liked the ending better than I did, because it sort of made him the special one. Like life I guess, the ending never changed.

“After a while,” my mother told us, “Doctor Wallace came out of the little bedroom and looked over at Dadda. He shook his head and Dadda got a funny look on his face, like he wanted to say something but he couldn’t make his lips work. The doctor finally said, ‘She wants to see the children, Duncan. You’ll have to hurry.’

“Dadda called us over to the door and told us we had to be very quiet and not make too much of a fuss because Mama was very weak and could only see us for a moment. He led us to the bedside. The only noise in the room was the rasping sound of Mama trying to catch her breath, just like when she had passed out on the stoop. She turned her head slowly on the pillow and reached out her hand to us, and smiled. She tried to say something. It wouldn’t come out. She just couldn’t breathe enough to say anything. At last she just reached out and took us each by the hand, in turn, looked at us, and sort of squeezed. Sissy started to cry a little. She knew something was wrong. Angus made a funny noise and ran from the room. Then Dadda told us that Mama needed to rest. And he led us away and out onto the front porch where he took us all in his arms and started to cry. After a while he sent me to find Angus, who was hiding in the barn. It took me a long time to coax him back to the house. When we got back, they told us she was gone.”

My mother never told us much about the next part. She was waked at the house, of course, and my mother would point out where the coffin was placed in the parlour, in front of the east window. She said she was probably so busy cleaning and getting ready for all the company that she couldn’t remember much about the funeral. She did remember getting mad when she heard the next door neighbours, the Fourniers, whispering about “
consumption
.” In those days anyone that died with difficulty breathing was said to have consumption, often considered a disease of the poor people. We never paid much attention to that part. It was the aftermath of the funeral, when Mom learned she would lose baby Andrew, that so caught our imagination that we protested each time as if we had never heard the sad news before.

“How could Grandpa do that?” we would ask. “How could he give away his own baby?”

“He wasn’t giving the baby away, not really,” she would explain each time. “The baby was just going to live with Aunt Gertie in Lancaster. It could have been worse. My mother’s brother and his wife, who couldn’t have children, wanted to bring him home to Detroit, in the States. My father said that was too far, that we’d never see him again.”

“But didn’t Grandpa want Uncle Andy? How could he be so mean?” It was only in later years that I began to wonder what her reaction must really have been, when her father made the decision. My mother always explained it in his terms, from his point of view. Never once did she lay claim to any feelings, any emotions of her own about her father’s decision.

“A farm is different from life in town,” she would tell us, “it takes a lot of work. My father couldn’t look after four kids and a little baby and still run the farm. I had to go to school in September. He promised mother we would finish our schooling, no matter what. He was able to get Mrs. Grant, a neighbour lady with no children, to come over and look after us during the day. But she wouldn’t even consider caring for an infant.”

“Why couldn’t Andrew come home on weekends,” we would always ask, “when you weren’t at school?”

The answer was always the same. “Because Lancaster was twenty miles away and none of us owned a car. Besides, we’d be snowed in for most of the winter. You couldn’t take a horse and cutter on a fortymile trip every weekend. There was just too much work on a farm.” She couldn’t criticize her father, I know that now. Even when she would tell us about the years passing and him sitting at the kitchen table, agonizing aloud about the need to “bring that little boy back home to his brothers and sisters,” she had only sympathy in her voice for her father’s dilemma.

I suspect now that she longed for her lost little brother over the five years it took to bring him home. Too many times she reminisced about the holidays she spent with Aunt Gertie, where she could help look after the baby, and told of the joy she felt when he was four and came home for the first month of summer. By this time she was looking after the family with less and less help from the neighbour lady, and must have been hard at work from dawn till dusk. Yet there were no complaints in that part of her story. And to hear her tell it, she had no reason for complaint about the next part of her life, either.

My mother lost baby Andrew twice, first to her Aunt Gertie and then to her father’s second wife, Bessie Weir. Duncan MacRae probably thought he was lucky to find a woman of property who was willing to take on a man with five growing children. Bessie Weir was an unmarried woman who had nursed her parents through old age and inherited their hundred-acre farm, with eighty acres of tillable soil, a hardwood bush, and a new barn. She had been working the farm with a little help from the neighbours since 1930, when her older brother with the drinking problem had gone west in search of a job that paid cash money. She must have seen marriage to Duncan MacRae as her last chance to catch up on the life she had missed.

They were married in June of 1933, with my mother as their bridesmaid. The happy couple travelled by train to Montreal for a honeymoon, while Aunt Gertie, with baby Andrew in tow, came to the house on the Eigg road to look after the children and get started on the packing. When the honeymooners returned, they moved the MacRae family to the new bride’s big brick home on the Fourth of Kenyon. As far as I know, the new bride never did offer to sign over any part of the farm — her parents had disinherited her older brother and she remained the sole owner. I do know the next part of my mother’s story should have been full of complaints, partly because of how little she spoke of it.

The most I ever learned about Bessie Weir and the MacRaes came as an accident, if you could call my Uncle Angus getting drunk an accident. It was at Christmas, and I must have been eight or nine by that time, because that’s when I started noticing that some people had a lot more to say when they were drinking. Normally Uncle Angus was a shy man. Like a lot of old bachelors in Glengarry, he was slow to court and slower to wed — he never did get married. He spent most of his life working in isolated areas like Goose Bay, or the D.E.W. Line. He would come back home every few years with a pile of money and try to fit back into normal life. It never took. He would spend all his money buying rounds for the good friends he discovered in the local beverage rooms, then head back up north, flat broke once again.