by Anne Emery
†
“All right, gentlemen,” Father Burke announced after the usual opening prayer, “the group favourite, ‘All We Like Sheep.’ Yes, it’s great crack to sing it. Until the end, when it is very solemn, and you have to make that transition seamlessly. It is one of the most moving passages in all of the Messiah. ‘And the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.’ What does iniquity mean, Richard?”
“Sin, Father?”
“Right. Sin. Wickedness. That’s what the Lord took upon Himself when He came down to earth. The wickedness of us all.”
“All except you because you’re a priest. Right, Father?”
“Sadly, I cannot claim exemption. But I’m sure you little fellows can. When we grown-ups sing it, though, we do so in full recognition of our iniquity. Handel underscores that for us in his final, sombre chord. Basses, bring out that F and lean on it. Let’s hear you beginning at bar seventy-six. And needless to say we want to hear every q and every t. Consonants like the crack of a rifle.”
The choirmaster was pleased with the sound, and we sang several other Handel choruses. Even Ed Johnson got into the baroque spirit, doing a great job on the long vocal runs so typical of Handel.
Burke and I headed over to the Midtown afterwards, as usual. Ed said he had a quick errand to run, but would be joining us shortly.
Our beer arrived, and Brennan asked: “So, what’s the word from the MacNeil?” He lit a cigarette and sent the smoke up to the ceiling.
“I haven’t been talking to her.”
“What, she hasn’t called?”
“She’s spoken to Tom and Normie. She always seems to call before I get home from work.”
“Time difference.”
“I’ve tried to reach her a couple of times but missed her. Things are going well, according to the kids. A lot of work, but she’s seeing the country too. She hopes to get down to Italy for a couple of days.”
“Mmm. That fellow Giacomo must be out of the picture now, do you think?”
I shrugged. Giacomo was my wife’s sometime paramour. He had been in Halifax on some sort of visa; had he returned to Italy? I didn’t know and, these days, I wasn’t going to brood about it.
“So she gets back when?” Brennan asked.
“Two and a half weeks from now, the Friday we go to Cape Breton. You still on for that?”
“When does who get back?” Ed asked, arriving with a waiter in tow. “Leave the tray,” he instructed.
“Speak for yourself. I’m not drinking a tray of draft.”
“Nobody said you were, Collins. I am. Padre, you can help me out. So, who’s away?”
“Maura.”
He groaned. “She’s been away for years. What else is new? How did you ever let that out of your grasp, Collins? You loser. The lush, the creamy, the soft flesh of Maura MacNeil writhing beneath you. The sassy mouth silenced at last, except for little murmurs of delight. God, just to think of it gives me a — sorry, Father. I don’t want to put sinful thoughts in your mind.”
“You’re not an occasion of sin for me, Ed. But thanks for your concern.”
“I tried to jump her bones in law school. She treated me to a vituperative — one would almost say emasculating — diatribe from which it took me eons to recover.”
“You seem to have recovered quite well.”
“Yeah, I moved on to less challenging targets. Then Maura met Babyface here, and her icy heart melted at the sight of him. But somehow he fucked up and she fucked off. Maybe she’s lonely. Maybe I should try to hit on her again. Nah, somebody must be keeping her happy.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
“Such language in front of your priest and choirmaster.”
“He took the words right out of my mouth, Johnson,” Burke remonstrated. “How would you like it if Collins was talking about your wife that way?”
“I’d love to think other guys lust after my wife, but nobody ever does.”
“Not that you’d ever know, pinhead. Donna is a very attractive woman, Brennan, and, as you must have inferred, very, very tolerant.”
Ed got up to say hello to someone on the other side of the tavern, and Brennan looked at me, his left eyebrow raised. “Tolerant doesn’t begin to describe what his wife must be, putting up with him. Is he like that with her?”
“He’s like that with her when they’re with us. With her alone, I suspect he isn’t. He’s harmless. In fact, he lives in fear that his wife will leave him, that Donna will wake up some day and realize he’s not good enough for her, and that will be it. Get him really loaded, and he’ll work himself up to the point where he has to rush home to assuage his fears.”
“Ah,” Brennan said.
“So, powerful stuff from Mr. Handel tonight,” Ed remarked when he got back to the table. “The arrival of Jesus in the world doesn’t seem to have had much effect on the iniquity quotient, Padre.”
“Certainly seems that way,” Burke agreed. “It’s one of the standard arguments against belief.”
“I bet you’d lose your religion pretty quick if you saw what we see every day of the week in court.”
“Are you telling me all defence lawyers are non-believers? Should I be starting a new ministry?”
“Well, no. But they should be. How anyone can believe in a God who is all good, after hearing what these depraved psychos and bottom-feeding lowlifes do to each other, day in and day out, is beyond me. Sometimes I feel like throwing the cases, sitting on my ass, and not doing any work for them; let them rot in jail. Who gives a fuck?”
“Now, don’t be sending any more of them out to the Correctional Centre. That only makes more work for me.”
“That’s right. You’ve got some kind of chapel going out there. So you do see them. Come on, Brennan, ‘fess up. Aren’t you ready to pack it in? Give up the collar and find yourself a nice little hausfrau?”
“Sounds to me as if you’re more ready to pack it in than I am.”
“Nah. It’s just that some of them . . . well, let’s just say the world would be a better place if they suddenly ceased breathing.”
“So? What’s stopping you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why shouldn’t you go and choke the breath out of them?”
“Huh?”
“There’s no reason not to, is there? From your point of view, the materialist view. There is nothing transcendent in the universe, nothing exalted about the individual. The human person does not belong to God because there is no God. We’re just animals like, say, the hissing cockroach. And it simply doesn’t matter if we kill each other off. ‘Without God, everything is lawful,’ to paraphrase the Brothers K.”
“Who?”
“The Brothers Karamazov. Don’t you read anything but case law, Ed?”
“Don’t you read the papers, Brennan? I see a lot more people being killed by religious zealots than by, say, Atheists for a Caffeine-Free Café Society.”
“I see it too. Let’s not forget the Stalinist purges but, that being said, I agree with you. I’m a great admirer of the non-believers of my acquaintance, who are some of the least murderous people I know, and I admire them precisely because as far as they’re concerned they have no reason to be so forbearing. Why aren’t they out there blowing away the miscreants who have breached the social contract or otherwise pissed them off? I don’t know. I guess they just act the way they do out of the goodness of their hearts. And of course they don’t agree with me as to where that goodness comes from!”
“Whatever happened to talking about chicks and cars?” Ed wondered. “How did we get into a deep discussion of moral theology, or whatever this is?”
“We haven’t even grazed the surface of the topic,” Brennan declared. “Anybody else having another draft?”
“Don’t mind if I do. Collins?”
“Why not?”
†
The next couple of weeks were taken up with an armed robbery trial and a series of discovery examinations in the cr
umbling condominium case. I made no progress at all in the Leaman investigation. My free hours were spent with Tom and Normie, and we had a grand old time together playing music, going to movies, and having picnics in Point Pleasant Park. We were all in a lather of anticipation for the return of wife and mother Maura, and the long-planned weekend in Cape Breton.
Chapter 8
Do you prefer to drink alone?
— Alcoholics Anonymous Questionnaire
June 7 finally arrived. Maura’s plane was delayed by fog, and we said quick hellos at the airport before heading out on the Trans Canada Highway for Cape Breton Island. Brennan was driving his own car, so I travelled with him. Maura and the kids were in my car behind us. The fog lay over the highway, and we needed our headlights at four o’clock in the afternoon. Brennan kept checking his rearview mirror, as if he thought MacNeil couldn’t keep the car on the road without divine intervention.
It was eight-thirty by the time we arrived in Glace Bay. The MacNeils had departed for the ceilidh, but had left the doors of the two-storey family home unlocked. Perhaps they were never locked. We unloaded the car, cleaned ourselves up a bit, and left for the Legion Hall on Union Street downtown. We entered to a set of jigs and reels played by an assortment of fiddlers crowded together at one end of the room. They ranged in age from eight to eighty, and many of them did a step-dance as they played. The applause was uproarious when they wound up and announced a short break for a little gillach. People flocked to the bar. A group of card players immediately coalesced around a table and began, or resumed, a game of tarabish.
“I told him his arse was suckin’ wind! He was no match for District 26 of the United Mine Workers of America!” At the sound of her father’s voice, expounding in the strongly Celtic accent of Glace Bay, Maura led us to the table where he was holding forth. He turned and saw us approaching.
“Ach, here they are now! And high time, too.” He rose to greet the latecomers. Alec the Trot MacNeil got his nickname from his devotion to Leon Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. Back in his working days, when he wasn’t miles under the sea hacking at the coal seams, Alec was above ground organizing the miners to take on Big Coal, Big Capital and their Big Lackeys in Government. He was six feet in height, big boned and strong, but stooped with arthritis from a lifetime of bending under the low ceilings of the mines. His thinning white hair was brushed wildly back from his forehead.
“What time did you leave Halifax?”
“Dad, you’ve asked me that same question every time I’ve come home since I was eighteen years old!” She let herself be enveloped in the big man’s embrace. Her mother, Catherine, came over and joined in. She was a stout, pretty woman with short grey hair and laugh lines etched deeply into the skin around her eyes. She and Alec made a big fuss over the two grandchildren and allowed as how it was good to see old Monty as well. I introduced them to Brennan.
“So! A man of the gospel,” Alec said, eyeing him with suspicion. “Social gospel, I hope.”
“Mr. and Mrs. MacNeil,” he said, shaking her hand and then his.
“Have you got your dancing shoes on, Father?”
“Always, Mrs. MacNeil.”
“Call me Catherine.”
“Call me Brennan.”
“An Irishman, are you?”
“Yes, with a long layover in New York.”
“Lenin thought the revolution might take place first in Ireland. Why do you suppose it didn’t?”
“I don’t know. But Stalin was later of the opinion that we were too ‘Mexican’ to be good revolutionaries.”
Alec barked out a laugh at that and clapped Brennan on the shoulder.
The musicians returned, fortified for another set, and Normie, after a few minutes of bashfulness, joined some cousins in a step-dancing group at the front of the room. Tom, whose bashfulness was more prolonged, eventually approached a young girl with fiery red hair and dark eyes, and asked her on to dance. I was captured by an old friend of Maura’s, leaving Brennan to make conversation with Maura and the in-laws. It wasn’t long before his head was thrown back with laughter, so the stories must have been as entertaining as I remembered. As soon as I got free of the friend, I tugged on my wife’s hand and brought her to the dance floor, just in time for a slow number, which allowed me to whisper in her ear.
“I’ve missed you.”
“Mmm-hmm,” she replied, seemingly distracted by the sight of old friends and foes in the Legion Hall.
“You were kept occupied during your stay in Geneva? I didn’t hear much from you.”
“Quite occupied, yes.”
“But now that you’re home, we’ll be able to take up where we left off. Tonight, with any luck.”
Was that a blush I saw on her face? Now there was a rare sight. I pulled her closer to me, but she managed to wriggle away. “There’s Meg! Let’s go over and say hello.” She manoeuvred herself out of my arms and headed for her old school friend. I had my work cut out for me. But it was early yet. The room suddenly erupted in cheers and whistles, and I looked around. A lovely girl with long blonde curls had joined the band.
“Natalie!” the crowd called out. Had Natalie MacMaster been retained as a surprise guest performer, or had she just dropped in on her way through town? She began to play, and not a toe was still. Maura was teaching Brennan the rudiments of step-dancing and she seemed to have lightened up. After a few lively reels, Natalie slowed it down, and I looked on as Father Burke took my wife in his arms for a slow air called “If Ever You Were Mine.” He smiled down at her and whispered something in her ear; she responded by cupping his face in her hands and saying no and something else I couldn’t lipread. What’s that about, I wondered. Then they danced. For the first time, I became aware of a woman sitting with her back straight against the wall. Catherine’s ancient mother, Morag, was dressed head to heel in black, the only way I had ever seen her. She held Maura and Brennan in the beams of her intense black eyes. The old woman gave me the willies; she always had. I looked around for distraction and caught my daughter’s eye. Natalie had introduced what she called a strathspey.
“Let’s show them a thing or two about dancing, eh, Normie?”
“All right!” she squealed. “Let’s go, Daddy!”
I did not get to enjoy my wife’s company that night; she was tired from her trip, and took to her bed in the room she was sharing with Normie. The next day, Brennan and I and the kids went on tour with Alec. We saw various landmarks in the workers’ struggle in Cape Breton and went down into the Ocean Deeps Colliery, a mine that was open for tours, beneath the Miners’ Museum. Maura spent the day visiting old friends. A night’s sleep seemed to have done her good; when we got home for dinner she was a little more talkative than she had been the night before. The house was filled with people, and we drank and told tales until we sat down for a big scoff in the dining room.
The table was virtually sagging in the middle, there were so many platters of food. A roast of lamb, a turkey, countless plates of vegetables and loaves of bread, bottles of red and white wine. Rum and whiskey were within easy reach on the sideboard. There was a cooler of beer just inside the kitchen door. Crowding around the dinner table were Brennan, Maura and I, our two kids, Alec and Catherine, the grandmother, Morag, Maura’s sister, Lucy, her husband, Donald, and their three children, Allan, Laurie, and Grace. Four people I didn’t know were at a card table off to the side. The liquor flowed freely, and the conversations overlapped.
Lucy was filling Maura in on an old acquaintance. “So they pulled little Gaetan-Philippe out of school.”
“Gaetan-Philippe? They grew up in Sydney Mines, for Christ’s sake. They don’t speak two words of French between them!”
“Ah, but zey have been to Paree!”
“Well, zut-freaking-alors! I’ve been to Moscow, but I didn’t name my kid Igor.”
“Anyway they pulled him out so they could home-school him, because he’s gifted.”
“Gifted, my arse. Everybody�
��s kid is gifted now, have you noticed that? That little peckerhead is no more —”
“So she signed up for this home program and bought all the books, and the little turd behaved so badly, and threw so many tantrums, that she desperately wanted to dump him back in the school system but she was too mortified to admit it.”
“Mortify this, Gaetan!” Maura’s brother-in-law had tuned in just in time to tune out again. “Crack me open a beer, dear! What was that you were saying about the army, Alec?”
I switched channels to catch a rum-fueled dissertation by Maura’s father.
“In aid of the civil power,” he exclaimed, “that’s how they put it when they sent the army in. Bullshit. In aid of corporate capitalism, is what they meant. In aid of corporate greed. And when I came over in 1925, as a lad of five short years, I saw for myself what they were up to, the British Empire Steel Corporation and its company thugs. Well, the miners showed them! But not before William Davis was shot down in the prime of his life by company police. Murderers!”
“Don’t get yourself in a lather over it now, Alec,” Catherine MacNeil said gently. “I suppose you’ll want to attend Mass with us tomorrow morning, Brennan.”
“I used to go to church when Andy Hogan was doin’ the Mass,” Alec said. “A fine priest and a good socialist. The early Christians were socialists; you can’t disagree with that, Father Burke!” The old man turned his ferocious glare on Burke. “It’s right there in the Bible.”
“I’m sure Brennan has read the Bible, Alec,” Catherine said.
“I have,” Burke assured them.
“Well?” Alec challenged him. “Am I right?”
“You’re not far wrong, I’m thinking, Alec. The early —”
“How can there be such a thing as a right-wing Christian? That’s what I’d like to know.” Maura had interrupted herself in mid-sentence to turn from her sister and join the politico-religious discussion. “Piling up a personal fortune at the expense of the poor; where’s the authority in the gospel for that?”
