Maclean

by Allan Donaldson

  Seated in one of the wicker chairs on the front porch, Maclean rolled and lit his first cigarette of the day and began to cough.

  “Everyone one of them cigarettes is another nail in your coffin,” Henry MacDade said from the wicker chair next to him.

  “There ain’t room for any more nails in my coffin,” Maclean said.

  Every morning when Maclean lit his cigarette, Henry made this same remark about the nail. Every morning Maclean made the same reply, and every morning Henry laughed and slapped his thigh as if it were all being said for the first time.

  Henry was a plump little man, always smiling, always talkative. He was interested in history, geography, and science. He had a card to the library and a small brass telescope that he used to take out to the riverbank sometimes at night, where he would sit for hours on a big rock with a book and a flashlight keeping tabs on the goings-on in the heavens.

  “Did you know that Napoleon Buonaparte was an Eyetalian?” he said to Maclean.

  “No,” Maclean lied. “No, I didn’t.”

  “That’s right,” Henry said. “Not a Frenchman at all. An Eyetalian.”

  “Well, well,” Maclean said.

  He was trying to think through his day, and right now he didn’t have time for Napoleon no matter where he came from, but he didn’t want to hurt Henry’s feelings. Henry was a simple, good-hearted soul who often gave him liquor coupons at the first of the month. He didn’t drink and had no need of them himself, but he could have sold them for a quarter or two at the first of the month and for just about anything to some people at the end.

  “Eyetalian,” Henry said. “Born in Corsica, which is an Eyetalian island in the Mediterranean Sea.”

  “Well, well,” Maclean said.

  He was going to need a dollar at least, maybe a dollar and a half. A bottle of wine for himself and a birthday present for his mother. He might pick up some beer bottles, but they wouldn’t amount to much. He was going to have to get a couple of hours’ work somewhere, maybe at Jim Gartley’s stable. Then before dinner go to the high school and get the god-damned ration book.

  From the door beside them, Miss Audrey came out with her big handbag full of cleaning stuff. She lowered herself sideways down the steps and set off up the road towards town, her big bottom rolling, her fat little legs pumping away but making such slow headway that you could imagine that the road beneath her feet was a conveyer belt carrying her backward half as fast as she walked.

  Maclean watched her out of sight, and before Henry could get back to Napoleon, said he had to be on his way too and got up and followed.

  2

  THE RAILROAD BRIDGE at the mouth of the creek that ran through the middle of town was three spans across—a centre span with low steel trusses at the sides and two, shorter spans at either end with nothing at their sides but the forty-foot drop down to the rocky creek bed. A couple of hundred yards upstream there was a street bridge, but Maclean didn’t have time this morning to walk an extra quarter-mile for nothing.

  He knew the times of the passenger trains well enough. It was the freights that were dangerous. He stood at the end of the bridge and listened, then got down and put his ear to the rail. Nothing. Stepping carefully on every other tie, trying not to look down between them at the the water foaming and eddying among the rocks, he made his way to the centre span. He leaned against one of the trusses, listened again, heard nothing, and, footing it as fast as he dared, went on across the last span.

  “I seen you, Mr. Maclean, walking on that railroad bridge again,” Miss Audrey said. “I was on the town bridge, where you should’a been, and I seen you. That railroad bridge ain’t no place for a man your age.”

  Off the end of the bridge, a line of decaying coal sheds ran beside an abandoned siding. He slowed down to scout for beer bottles, but there was nothing, only a skinny cat that started and fled away into the weeds. Another minute brought him into town beside the General Store, a great, three-storey barn of a building with another trail of sheds along the railway.

  A cluster of men in from the country had already gathered in front of the store. Even at a distance he could hear the nasal, know-it-all voices whining about the things they always whined about: the weather, the high price of feed, the low price of potatoes, school taxes, road taxes, the government.

  As he passed, he sensed their eyes following him out of sight, and he was so taken up with his black hatred of them that he almost walked right past. Three quart Moosehead bottles, standing neatly in a row against the shed wall, as if left there for him. Some soldiers had stood them there the night before maybe because they couldn’t be bothered with them. Or maybe somebody in the feed shed was drinking on the sly. Or maybe the Almighty and Most Merciful Father, who sees the little sparrow fall, had decided this morning in his whimsical and unfathomable way to dish him up a little mercy for a change.

  He cashed the bottles in at a place that bought empty bottles—and under the counter sold a few full ones as well—and came out with twelve cents. With the fourteen he had brought with him, he was already up to twenty-six. He began to think it was going to be a good day.

  Jim Gartley’s stable was on Diamond Street, which was more an alley than a street and was certainly no jewel—a kind of wooden canyon whose walls were made up mostly of the sides and backs of buildings that faced on other streets.

  Before the Great War, before Henry Ford and the god-damned motor car, Gartley’s stable had been a good business. Now it housed in any regular way only a few delivery horses and a few horses belonging to old men who hated the motor car and still drove around town in buggies. Seeing the way the wind was blowing, Jim had set up a gas pump out front and had started garaging cars for people who put them up in the winter.

  The big double doors were wide open, and Maclean walked in, not hurrying, ambling, wanting to feel things out before he tried to see about a little work. There were half a dozen horses in the stalls, but no sign of anyone around. He didn’t want to knock on the office door for fear of interrupting something important, so he walked down along the line of stalls past the great rumps of the horses. Work horses snuffling and moving their feet around, staring at the wooden wall above the bins in front of them. (What did they think about there, each one alone, all day and all night?)

  At the back of the stable was a little workshop. Maclean peeked around the corner of the door. Sam Kelly was sitting astradle a saw horse working on a piece of harness with a leather punch. He didn’t hear Maclean. He was sixty and a little deaf. He was also a little simple, but he was a good man with horses, and he had worked in the stable almost all his life. Jim’s father, old Nate, had hired him. Old Nate had been killed, kicked by a horse one day for no reason at all, straight into the guts so that he died right there on the stable floor just as if he’d been shot.

  The shells came out of nowhere all together. No one heard them because of all the noise on the road—wagons rattling, truck motors roaring, people shouting, cursing. A whole battery must have loaded up and fired all at once, and they must have had the road zeroed in beforehand. The shells landed on both sides so fast that they seemed like one, long, continuous explosion. If the ground had been mud, it would have been bad enough, but it was stone and hard clay, and there was metal flying everywhere. A dozen or more killed on the spot, a lot more wounded. One shell landed beside a wagon and blew it to pieces and killed all the men on it and one of the horses. The other went careening, staggering, half-sideways off the road, screaming like a banshee, trailing harness and half of a broken whiffle-tree and a stream of guts and blood that poured out of its belly. It went fifty yards or more before it finally fell over and died. Afterwards, further up the road, they came to another place where a dozen horses, some still harnessed together, were lying beside the road, bloated, their legs sticking straight out like poles, teeming with flies, blue with them.

  Macle
an tapped on the door, and Sam looked up. He was short, fat, and bow-legged.

  “Hello, Pinky,” he said. “How ya been doin’?”

  “Good,” Maclean said. “The very best.”

  Sam looked at him over his shoulder, a look that Maclean knew very well, a look that was asking itself how much he might have had to drink already this morning.

  “Business good?” Maclean asked. “See you got a few horses in there.”

  “Not bad,” Sam said.

  Maclean waited for Sam to perhaps give him a lead in, but Sam just went on tapping at the harness.

  “Don’t suppose Jim has any little chores he might want done?” Maclean asked finally.

  “Couldn’t say,” Sam said. “He ain’t said nothin’ to me. You don’t know nothin’ about fixin’ harness, I don’t suppose?”

  Sam could be a son of a whore when he set his mind to it.

  “Well, perhaps I better ask him,” Maclean said.

  “He ain’t in,” Sam said. “He went downtown to fetch sumpin’.”

  “He going to be long, you think?”

  “I don’t know,” Sam said. “He might git talkin’. You never know.”

  “No,” Maclean said. “That’s it.”

  He left Sam and walked back down through the twilight of the stable past the great rumps of the work horses and the idly switching tails. He stood in the doorway and looked up and down the street. There was no sign of Jim, but at the corner of Main Street, four of the boys were hanging around talking. If they saw him, they would guess that he might be into the money, and if they came down and Jim found them there, they would screw up everything.

  He sat down on a wooden bench just inside the door where he could get the sun that was beginning to angle in above the roofs down the street. Left alone, suspended, he began to think he would like a drink.

  He didn’t notice Jim until he was already at the door.

  “Hello, John,” Jim said. “Ain’t seen you in a while. How’ve you been?”

  He looked at Maclean the way Sam Kelly had earlier, his eyes posing the same question.

  Jim Gartley was six foot with dark hair and a neat, dark moustache. Even when he was at the stable, he was something of a dude, in a flashy, light tweed suit and a shirt and tie and polished, black, pointed shoes. He was a second cousin to Maclean, and he used to be around their house sometimes when he was a boy before the Great War.

  “Fine,” Maclean said. “Just fine.”

  “And your mother? How is she?”

  “Fine. Not any worse anyways,” he said and began edging out onto the ice. “The thing is, tomorrow’s her birthday, and it’s getting near the end of the month, so I’m a little short. I wanted to get her a little something for a present, you know. And I was wondering if maybe you might have some chores around I could give you a hand with.”

  Maclean and Jim both knew, and knew that the other knew, that this business of chores was just a pretense. If there had been chores to do, Sam Kelly wouldn’t have been sitting around pounding holes in a piece of leather.

  Jim looked down the stable. Maclean never worked this oftener than once every three or four months, and Jim had never refused him.

  “Well,” he said, “it might not hurt to give some of them horses a bit of a rub. And a couple of handfuls of oats. And maybe clean up a little. I can give you a couple of hours, but I don’t really need no more than that.”

  “That’ll be great,” Maclean said. “That’ll suit me perfect.”

  “You know where the stuff is.”

  “Yes,” Maclean said. “I know where everything is. Don’t you bother about that.”

  Maclean began with a mare with a white blaze on her forehead that he had groomed before, working down her neck and shoulder with the currycomb while she stood lifting her head a little like a cat that is being petted, now and then snuffling and shivering her hide under the brush. When he had finished one shoulder, he got some oats and let her eat them out of his hand while he began working down the other shoulder.

  Maclean didn’t hear him until a board creaked under his foot as he crept the last step and his hand fastened on the back of Maclean’s shirt and pulled it tight against his throat, hauling him up until only his toes touched the floor. Then the harsh voice that always sounded as if he had something stuck in his throat.

  “You little sneak. I’ll teach you to do as you’re told, or I’ll strip the hide off your back.”

  A blow to the side of his head with the free hand, then pushed, stumbling, half-falling and being hauled back onto his feet again, out into the hot sunlight of the yard and the heavy alder switch across his back and crouching there afterwards on his hands and knees crying as the heavy boots strode back into the barn. Then the sound of the switch against Nellie’s haunches and the neighing and the hoofs pawing uselessly around in the stall.

  He was sitting wedged into a little corner between the chicken house and a cedar rail fence. That was where Alice, always the protective elder sister, found him.

  “What did you do?” she asked, kneeling in front of him.

  “I gave Nellie some of the oats in the barn, and he’d told me not to.”

  “You should have asked first,” Alice said.

  “I didn’t think a few like that were going to matter.”

  “Well,” she said, “don’t cry any more. It’s over now. I brought you a cookie.”

  “I want to go far away and never come back.”

  “If I let him do things when I’ve told him not to, he’ll grow up to be no good.”

  He was eating bread and milk while the others ate pancakes.

  “Well, yes,” his mother said. “I suppose that’s true.”

  “Spare the rod and spoil the child.”

  He sat at the head of the table, a short man with a square head, close-cropped hair, heavy brows, and lips so thin he seemed hardly to have any lips at all.

  He never smiled. Before every meal, he thanked God for giving them something to eat and prayed that the people in his care would walk in God’s ways.

  “Did ya hear the McIntyre boy got killed. Him that used to box, remember?”

  Sam Kelly stood leaning, bow-legged, against the corner of the stall.

  “No,” Maclean said. “No, I didn’t hear that. That’s too bad.”

  “Somewhere’s in Italy or someplace like that. He was in the Carleton-Yorks. They got a letter about it. It said he didn’t suffer no pain.”

  “That’s good anyways,” Maclean said. “That’s good for his mother to know. Even if it ain’t true.”

  The letters always said that. He had seen one of them after he came back. Old Mrs. Simpson got him to come and see her, and she had the letter, all ragged from having been read so many times. She started crying again as soon as she looked at it. And yes, he had said, that was right, all right. He hadn’t suffered any pain at all. He hadn’t seen it happen himself, but he had heard all about it from some of the other boys.

  And what he had heard was that Charlie had got shot in the belly and lay out between the lines all morning, working off in a few hours whatever years in hell might have been his due. Then he got carried in and lay outside a dressing station for another two hours before he died because there was nothing they could do for him anyway.

  “His picture’s gonna be in the paper next week,” Sam said.

  “That’s good,” Maclean said.

  He finished the horse and stood back to look at her. He had worked hard on her, too hard, and he was out of breath. The dust and stuff in the stable always did that anyway. He put the currycomb on the edge of the stall and walked out to the door of the stable, leaned against the jamb, rolled a cigarette, lit it, and began to cough.

  “I pay Sam forty cents,” Jim said, “so I got to pay you a
little less, so he don’t feel bad.”

  This was the way they always did it.

  “Sure, absolutely,” Maclean said. “That’s only fair.”

  “So,” Jim said, “you were a couple of hours and little over, so let’s say seventy-five cents.”

  He gave Maclean a fifty-cent piece and a quarter.

  “But I’d like to see that Aunt Hilda got something nice for her birthday, so here’s another fifty cents for that. That ain’t pay, you understand.”

  “No, no,” Maclean said. “I understand. And I won’t say a word to Sam or anyone else. Except mother. I’ll tell her you helped me out.”

  “You tell her happy birthday from Nancy and me,” Jim said.

  Maclean looked at the three coins lying in his palm. This was far more than he had ever hoped to come by.

  “I wouldn’t want Aunt Hilda not to get something,” Jim was saying, his head cocked a little to one side, watching Maclean, silently telling him, “I don’t want you to go off and drink this all up.”

  “She’ll get something nice,” Maclean said. “Don’t you worry about that. And I’ll tell her you and Nancy were asking after her. And about the work and the money and all.”

  At the stable door, he looked towards Main Street. He didn’t see any of the boys there now, but they could have been just around the corner, so he cut into a little alley and came out further up Main Street beside the post office. He took a quick look around. There was no one down Main Street, no one at the corner, no one in front of the liquor store. Someone had come up with a bottle, and they had gone off. Or the cops had run them off.

  The street was lined on both sides with cars and trucks, and the Saturday crowds on the sidewalks were thickening up. Across the street in front of the town hall, people were lined up to get the new ration books, but the police station and the lockup were also in the town hall, and Maclean had decided to get his ration book at the high school. He hadn’t done anything to get himself in trouble, but the less the cops saw of you the better.