He turned up the drive. The house stood back from the street in the centre of a sloping lawn bordered by a line of old oak and maple trees. The house was old too, as old almost as the trees, and large and grand with stone front steps and bay windows upstairs and down. It had been built by a family that once had lots of money, but they had lost it all somehow sometime after Confederation, and then they had all died or got killed in the war or moved away, and the house was sold to someone, who sold it to someone else, who sold it at last to a woman who made it over into a “Home”—which is to say, one of Dr. Death’s waiting-rooms.
Maclean climbed the stone steps, pushed open the heavy door, and stepped inside into the sour smell of sickness and age. There was no one around, and only two lights with low-watt bulbs were burning in little brass brackets on the wall. To the right, a staircase with ornamental oak banisters ran up to a higher zone of twilight, where those still able to climb stairs did their waiting. To the left, a corridor ran off towards the back of the house, lined with doors like the corridor of a hotel, where the dining room and parlours of the old house had been cut up to make rooms for the ‘guests.’
Half way along the corridor, a shrunken, little old man was pushing a four-legged, wooden walker ahead of him. Maclean recognized him behind this hideous disguise as a man, once very brisk and dapper, who had worked in a bank. Brisk and dapper no more, he would push the walker an inch or two ahead, then with immense effort push first one foot, then the other, after it, his eyes fixed fiercely ahead of him, like the eyes of a soldier, dying and demented, crawling back through the mud to the trench he had just climbed out of.
Unnoticed, Maclean sidled past him and found the door of his mother’s room open. She was sitting in her rocking chair in a padded dressing gown, her back half-turned to him, her eyes closed. Her hair was so thinned he could see the shape of her skull through it. Her face was white, her cheek bony, her hand on the arm of the chair skeletal.
He walked around the chair, and she started and opened her eyes. Behind her glasses, they had a strange, transparent look. Dark brown once and large, the brown now looked as if it had faded, like old cloth in the sun.
“John, I didn’t hear you come in. Have you been here long?”
“No, Mamma. Just now. Just this minute. I came up to bring you your birthday present.”
He held out the box.
“Oh, John, you shouldn’t spend your money on presents.”
“It isn’t anything expensive.”
She hefted it in her hand, then passed it back to him.
“Not heavy. Must be something nice. Why don’t you put it over on the table by the window. I’ll open it in the morning. My grandfather used to say that it meant bad luck for the whole year if you opened your birthday present before your birthday.”
He put the parcel down on the table in front of a cluster of old photographs like the ones he had seen at Alice’s and drew a chair over beside his mother and sat down.
“It’s been a long time since you were here,” she said. “How have you been keeping?”
“Good. Fine.”
“You still haven’t found another job?”
“No, Mamma. Not yet. But I still have my pension.”
“You’re not going hungry?”
“No, no. Nothing like that.”
“And you got a good place to live?”
“Yes, yes.”
“And you still got your health, that’s a great thing.”
“Yes. Perfect. No problems.”
“Well, that’s good. I worry about you. You should have found someone and got married after the war. It would have been better. You used to go with that girl in town for a while when you were in school. I don’t remember her name.”
“Cynthia.”
“That’s right. She got married.”
“Yes, she got married.”
“I saw her going by on the street one day when I was sitting out front.”
“She moved away, Mamma. She moved away over twenty years ago. You must have seen someone else.”
“No, I always notice the way she walks.”
“Mamma, she’s nearly fifty years old now.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter.”
“Anyway,” she added, “I’m glad you stopped seeing that Swann woman. I’m glad she went away. She wasn’t the right sort of person.”
She began to rock, as if all of a sudden, she had lost interest in the conversation or forgotten he was there.
He remembered only now that he was here that it was always like this. He sat for a few minutes, then got up and walked over to the window.
Outside, he could see the shadowy forms of the trees, the ruins of a picket fence, a gazebo with mouldering shingles, all silvery in the moonlight. And a reflection of himself looking back at him so faint, so indistinct, that it might have been the ghost of a younger self come through the desolation of the garden to stare at what he had become. Beyond the reflection of himself, he became aware of two points of light like glowing embers, and around them a raccoon took shape among the trees. It paused, then half-stood, heaved itself around, and vanished back into the shadows.
“I remember this house when I was a little girl,” his mother said suddenly. “A family named Burnside lived here, and they had two girls who were just a little bit older than I was, and I came here once for a birthday party out there in the yard, and there was a terrible thunder storm, and we all had to run inside. Isn’t it funny that I’m living here after all these years. What would they think if they could see it now? I wonder what ever happened to them. You never heard?”
“No, Mamma, I never knew them.”
A fat girl in a ratty, flowered dress, hanging crooked at the hem, appeared at the door. She was smiling. The smile faltered as she caught sight of him, then, between one footstep and the next, recovered itself, and she came bustling in.
“I just come in to make sures there ain’t nothin’ you wanted before you went to bed, Mrs. Maclean,” she said.
Mrs. Maclean turned in her chair.
“This is my son John,” she said.
“Hi,” the girl said. “Ain’t that nice you come to see your mother. She’s been pretty good lately, ain’t you, Mrs. Maclean. Yes, we have, ain’t we?”
“Not too bad,” Mrs. Maclean said.
The girl went bustling about the room, straightening up the towels on the rack, moving the pictures on the table half an inch this way, half an inch that, peeking into the wastebasket, and prattling all the time in an itty-bitty voice like someone talking to a small child or an imbecile.
“This is Katey,” Mrs. Maclean said.
The girl went over to the bed, and Maclean moved out of her way back against the window. She unfolded a wool blanket from the foot of the bed and spread it out and turned down the sheets, the tops of her big breasts bulging out over the V-neck of her dress. One of those sloppy, well-upholstered girls who seem to have a hard time staying inside their clothes. Like Elsie Skadgett.
Elsie was dead now almost twenty-five years. Nothing left of her in the ruins of her cheap coffin but a few bones. It didn’t take long. A shell would send the bones from last year’s battle flying. Except that sometimes the dead got buried deeper, down in the mud where there wasn’t any air, and what came up then was something else. Like green bread dough. A stink like nothing else in the world. Terrifying. Worse than shells. Worse than mortars.
Maclean turned away and looked out the window again. The moon had come up over the roof of the house and was shining on the tops of the trees. Below them, the shadows moved, and Maclean saw that the big raccoon had been joined by three kits, who were snuffling busily around in the grass and dead leaves. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked, and they all lifted their sharp faces and listened.
“And tom
orrow’s your birthday,” the girl was saying. “Ain’t that nice.”
“John brought me a present,” Mrs. Maclean said. “There on the table. But I don’t open it until tomorrow because it would be bad luck.”
“You can open it when you get to your daughter’s maybe,” the girl said. “And we’ll get some nice presents there, I’ll bet, now won’t we?”
So that’s what all the cooking had been about at Alice’s, Maclean realized. She would have them all in—her daughters and their husbands and kids. And it would all be in the local paper.
He looked at the reflection of his mother sitting in her chair, fainter even than his own reflection, but he could see that she was watching him furtively, guiltily, unaware that he was watching her back.
“I expect you’ll be at the party too, Mr. Maclean,” the girl was saying to him.
“No,” Maclean said, not turning away from the window. “No.”
“Oh,” the girl said.
“Quite a crowd with all the kids,” Maclean said. “A little too much noise for me.”
“I suppose,” the girl said.
No wonder Alice had been so jumpy when he arrived. He had stumbled in on her preparations, and she was worried he would guess. He wondered if they had thought of asking him. Probably not. He had passed out of their world a long time ago, and they didn’t want to think about him. And he couldn’t blame them too much for that. Still. All that fuss about the present. Working. Getting robbed. Nearly getting killed on the god-damned railroad bridge. Why? For what? Perhaps the same insane notion that had taken him to Alice’s that afternoon, the notion that took shape somewhere out of the reach of reason, the notion that somehow at Alice’s or here some miraculous act of transportation would take him back into the past so that everything that had gone bad could be made to happen in a different way. Crazy. Or perhaps it was just that he was one of those fools who couldn’t leave their wounds alone but had to keep worrying them until they started to bleed again.
(It isn’t the soul that goes on making you the same person, Henry, it’s memory, the cells passing it down from one generation to the next like an hereditary disease.)
Outside, the raccoons had come out of the trees onto the lawn and were making their way towards the back of the house, towards the garbage cans maybe or a stand of corn. They moved cautiously, the mother in front, the three kits trotting behind her in a row.
His father used to have a dog—a nasty, little, black mongrel that no one could go near but himself. He used it to hunt down rats and anything else than strayed onto his property. Once they cornered a female raccoon and two kits in a corner of the back field. The mother could have gotten away through the fence if she had abandoned the kits because the mongrel would have been no match for her if he had caught up with her in the woods. But she stayed, backed up against the fence with the kits behind her. His father shot her first, then the two kits, and left the bodies there as a warning to anything else that dared invade the sacred territory of Angus Maclean.
The girl was still chattering away to his mother about the birthday party, and his mother was still watching him as she half-listened.
She could have stood up for him, but she never did. She abandoned him. And Alice. They could have gone on through school. They could have had another life. She was too weak, too scared of that wretched excuse for a human being whom she must once have mistaken for a figure of manly strength. She never saw that he was a coward as well as a bully—not a fearsome instrument of God, just a squalid, mean little devil. Why didn’t she leave him? Why didn’t she take Alice and him and go back across the river to her own people? They would have looked after us. They would have seen to it that we all had a good life. As it was, all she had done was to allow him enough education to make him feel too good for the likes of Elsie or Claudine and not good enough for the likes of Cynthia. Well, to hell with it.
He turned towards her. For a moment she studied him with the same furtive look he had seen reflected in the window, but he had made his face a blank. All he wanted now was to be out of here.
The girl had left off her chatter and was counting out pills from some little bottles on the dresser.
“I guess it must be getting to be your bedtime,” he said. “I better be on my way.”
“Yes,” she said. “I’m beginning to feel a little tired.”
“That’s right,” the girl said. “We need our rest, don’t we? And we got a big day tomorrow.”
She brought the pills and a glass of water, and his mother swallowed them one by one with a sip of water between, dutifully, pathetically, like a child. What did she think about here in her long nights alone? Did she too sometimes think about those forks in the road she hadn’t taken? Did she ever dream about those days in her father’s house among the sinners bound for eternal damnation that Mr. Angus Maclean had rescued her from and taken such care that his children should not be corrupted by? Perhaps out of reach of everybody and everything, that was where she now lived, quietly, unobtrusively, not letting anyone know that she had moved, this room, this dreadful place, a mere shadow, and he himself a mere shadow too.
“You’ve got a long walk home,” she said when she had swallowed the last of the pills. “Clear to Chapel Street.”
“No, Mamma,” he said. “I moved from Chapel Street a long time ago. I live down on the flat now.”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “I remember.”
“Good night then,” she said.
“And thank you for the present,” the girl prompted.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “And thank you for the present. It was good of you to remember.”
12
AS HE WALKED on towards the edge of town, Maclean looked up at the sky, high and hard, with an almost full moon and thousands of stars, and upriver, faint, shimmering waves of northern lights, like the flickering of a distant barrage, too far away to be heard, off towards the Chemin des Dames, where the French would be dying. Adieu la vie. Adieu l’amour. Le jour du gloire est arrivé.
Miss Mazerolle pounds the old high school piano and sings. Allons, enfants de la Patrie. She can’t play worth a shit, and she has a voice like wind in the stovepipes, but she loves France. She had been there once, thirty years before, for a month and had spent the rest of her life talking about it, showing people her yellowing photographs, giving little lectures in the basement of the library. When he got back, she met him one day on the street. Getting old, graying, frail, her shoulders humped, her body twisted with arthritis.
“Did you see Paris?” she asked him. “Did you see Paris?”
“No, I never got the chance.”
“What a pity! All my life I remembered Paris. It was spring. Such a beautiful city.”
The little packed-mud and gravel road Maclean’s feet at last carried him to angled off across the face of the hill, its uphill side bordered by a forest of black fir trees, the downhill side cleared, falling away towards the moonlit river far below. There were houses scattered along both sides of the road. The biggest were plain, square, two-storey frames, the smallest, hardly more than shacks. The electric light came only to the first houses on the road, where wires had been hauled across from a more prosperous street nearby. The rest were lighted with kerosene lamps, their windows mellow-orange and soft in the darkness the way windows used to be everywhere when he was a child.
Ellie Deboys’ house was one of the last on the uphill side of the road, standing back in a little, square clearing in the fir trees, a story-and-a-half cottage with a string of additions trailing off the back—a kitchen, some sheds, an outhouse.
The lamps were lit in the kitchen and the curtains drawn.
As Maclean approached the kitchen door, he heard a murmur of voices. Except for Ellie’s, he couldn’t make out whose, and he paused to listen. A big, shambling dog, like a fat sheep, came out of the shed
and said “gwuff,” then put its front paws out along the ground and stretched itself. This was Dreadnought, whose job was to raise the alarm at the approach of strangers, but Maclean was no stranger, and Dreadnought’s sagacious senses never mistook. Inside, however, his greeting had been heard, and the voices faltered their way into silence.
On the window sill beside the kitchen door, four tin cans of geraniums stood in a row, two small cans, a larger can, another small can. Maclean studied them, then knocked carefully. Knock. Knock. Knock, knock. Knock. The door in front of Maclean was divided two thirds of the way up like the door of a stable. The top part opened cautiously half way, and Ellie’s head and shoulders appeared. The bottom part remained closed and bolted. This was another of Ellie’s careful protections of herself, like the tin cans with stones in them hung on strings wound through the trees at the edge of the yard to alert Dreadnought to the approach of snoopers or thieves or rapists or the police.
Ellie was a big woman, her shoulders and neck softly massive. Her hair was thick and gray, her skin the colour of milk chocolate. She peered out at Maclean.
“Well, now, Mr. John Maclean,” she said. “I ain’t seen you for a long time. I’m surprised Dreadnought ain’t gone and forgot you.”
“Dogs never forget,” Maclean said.
“I guess not,” she said. “Dogs and Irishmen.”
She unbolted the bottom of the door, and Maclean stepped inside, into the warmth and lamplight and the smell of baking bread. Along with her other wares, Ellie sold bread and rolls.
On the end wall of the kitchen, where the chimney of the original house still stood, indoors now instead of out, a black woodstove was blazing away cooking the bread. At the other end of the kitchen, two men were sitting at a big drop-leaf table, their hands clasped in front of them as if they were engaged in an act of religious meditation. From behind some pickle jars on a cupboard shelf, Ellie took two half-filled glasses and put them down in front of them. The only other thing on the table was a single ashtray with a single cigarette burning in it and looking somehow disowned as if the person smoking it had just disappeared out the window.
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