The O'Briens

by Peter Behrens

  “Didn’t catch the name. Says he was in my company in the 199th. Probably was. So many went through I don’t remember all the faces.”

  “What was wrong with him, Uncle?”

  “I guess he’s got a little bit of trench fever.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I’ve had it myself.”

  ~

  The servants were asleep and the rest of the house was empty when he sat down at the typewriter in his father’s study. He didn’t want his parents worrying any more than they had to. He didn’t want any fuss.

  May 27th, 1929

  Dear Mother,

  I’m not running away only taking a trip by myself. Shall let you know when I get there. Shall be all right. Don’t worry about me.

  your son,

  Michael J. O’Brien

  P.S. I’ll be o.k.

  Leaving his note beside the telephone, he quit the house and, with Grattan’s RFC haversack slung across his shoulder, walked down Murray Hill and across Murray Park.

  The park was their natural home. He and his sisters knew every flowerbed and piece of shrubbery, had climbed every tree worth climbing. They knew how water in the different drinking fountains tasted: metallic in some, salty in others. When he was ten, his father had given him a wristwatch and said a man with a good watch had no excuse for being late ever. What he’d meant was that Mike was responsible for bringing his sisters and himself home from the park in time for their evening curfew. June, just before they left for Santa Barbara, was the luminous month, and he always hated leaving friends and games then while the sky was still bright. The girls never wanted to leave either, but the three of them would cross Westmount Avenue together and trudge up Murray Hill under the canopy of elms and maples, on sidewalks strewn with bright green maple seeds. Their mother might be in her darkroom or off at a committee meeting or washing babies at Sainte-Cunégonde, but their father was always waiting outside under the portico, clutching the evening newspaper and wearing a silk smoking jacket, with his reading glasses pushed back on his head. Maybe he figured that if he didn’t watch for them something bad would happen. And something could have happened. Frankie could have been hit by a truck losing its brakes on Murray Hill. Margo could have been electrocuted by a power line brought down by a sudden thunderstorm. Mike could have fallen out of his favourite apple tree and broken his neck instead of just scraping his elbow. A thousand things could have happened. Only they never did.

  Leaving the park, he continued down into Westmount Glen and through the dank tunnel under the Canadian Pacific main line, which debouched into Sainte-Cunégonde, where poor people lived, where children died of tuberculosis caused by bad milk. He caught a streetcar along Notre-Dame Street, then walked through another seeping tunnel under the Lachine Canal. On the other side of the canal St. Patrick Street was hectic with motor trucks. The weeds growing in pavement cracks had a certain sour smell. A stone wall topped with coils of barbed wire ran along Wellington Street, flanking the Grand Trunk train yards. The air smelled of rust and train brakes and he heard yard engines at work on the other side of the wall, shunting cars, making up trains.

  Coming to a gate manned by a railway policeman, Mike crossed the street and waited on the opposite side until a truck pulled up and sounded its horn. As soon as the gate swung open, he crossed the street and slipped through without the cop noticing him.

  Cuts of boxcars lined dozens of sidings. Crouching beside a track bed, gravel cutting into his palms, he watched brakemen and a yard engine put a train together. Skirting them, he headed for a switching shack and found the destinations board, but the train and track numbers were in a code he wasn’t able to decipher.

  The sun was warm. Tar oozed from sleepers. Dodging between boxcars, scrambling over couplers, he was wary of being spotted. When he saw a couple of hoboes climbing into a boxcar, he thought about asking them where the train was headed, then decided not to. He didn’t want to expose himself to people who knew everything while he knew nothing. He’d be better off figuring out stuff on his own.

  He was hiding behind the embankment, peering over the grade and watching brakemen checking automatic couplers and linking up brake hoses, when a man in a blue suit darted out from behind a cut of tanker cars, ran across the tracks in a crouch, and dropped down beside him on the tarry gravel embankment. Putting a hand on Mike’s arm, he gasped, “Train? Yes? Where?”

  The words were scraps, harshly pronounced. He wasn’t a brakeman or a guard. He didn’t look like a hobo, wasn’t carrying a bedroll or knapsack. There was a blue shadow of beard on his cheeks and chin. His blue suit was too big for him.

  “Where?” he repeated, gesturing at the train.

  A foreigner.

  “Out west,” Mike answered. “Alberta.”

  “Chicago? Toronto, Chicago? My brother, Chicago.”

  Cha-cago.

  Signal bells started banging and a big 4-4-2 locomotive and tender coupled up to the train. A brakeman came along the track waving a green flag, and they both ducked heads below the grade.

  “I’m going to jump that train.” Mike was suddenly determined.

  “Nikos.” The man thumped his chest. “Greek!”

  “Mike.”

  “My brother is restaurant. Cha-cago.”

  With a series of massive clanks and squeals, the couplers pulled snug and the train started moving.

  “Cha-cago,” the Greek repeated.

  Most trains out of the Montreal yards, Mike knew, were westbound, headed for southern Ontario or up around the Lakehead. He hadn’t been able to read the board but there was a better than even chance this train was going in the right direction.

  The rank smell of weeds along the embankment made him feel sad for some reason. Scrambling to his feet, he started walking alongside the moving train, keeping up with a wooden boxcar. The doors were open and the car smelled of rotten oranges. The wooden floor was higher than he’d expected. He realized he wouldn’t be able to hoist himself aboard while the train was moving.

  Falling back a little, he noticed an iron footplate and ladder at the end of the car. If he could get a hold on the ladder he could climb up to the roof and ride there. He’d seen men riding on boxcar roofs in California, so there was probably something to hold on to up there.

  The train was moving faster. He started running to keep up. It was amazing how such a giant thing could pick up speed so quickly. He heard someone running behind him and without looking around knew it was the Greek.

  Mike knew he wouldn’t be able to keep up with the train much longer. Reaching out, he grasped the iron bars on either side of the iron ladder, and as soon as he touched the bars he could feel the train’s muscle, its momentum. The iron bars seemed to want to surge right out of his hands, but he held on. The trick was to get his feet up onto the footplate. Once he did that it would just be a matter of holding on and climbing to the roof.

  The train was starting to pull him off his feet, and he made himself run faster. If he let go he’d be pulled under the steel wheels by his own momentum and the suck of speed. He swung his legs up, scrabbling for the footplate, and felt a dose of panic as his body swung in the gush of air. Then his feet touched and he was able to stand on the footplate, pull himself inboard, and start climbing.

  Looking back down, he saw the Greek loping alongside like a wolf. He looked up at Mike and his lips parted in a smile, exposing teeth that were brilliant and white. As he reached for the ladder the Greek made the mistake of seizing it with only one hand instead of grasping it with both. How could he have guessed the sheer power, the rolling pull of that train, until he’d actually touched it? And as soon as he did, it twisted him sideways. He lost his footing, spun around backwards, and was sucked underneath the wheels.

  He didn’t scream. Or if he did, Mike didn’t hear it; the sound was submerged under the enormous bearing of the train.

  Mike scrambled to the roof and crouched, holding on to some iron ribs and shivering, while
the train ground along, skirting the factories of southwest Montreal. He had never seen anyone killed. He hadn’t imagined it could happen so quickly and be over so suddenly and that everything would just go on afterwards.

  The string of boxcars squeaked and crackled. His boxcar was so far back in the train that he could barely hear the engine. He clung on and shivered. It was as if his brain had been rubbed by some giant eraser, and it wasn’t until the train started across the Victoria Bridge over the St. Lawrence that he understood they were heading east, not west: to the Eastern Townships and the Maritimes, not Toronto or the Lakehead.

  The train picked up even more speed coming off the bridge. It was too late to jump off. His face stung in the wind. He had forgotten to bring water and suddenly he was very thirsty.

  Starting off in the wrong direction was a stupid, basic, humiliating mistake. Huddled against the wind, he wondered how long he could keep holding on. He didn’t trust that the peeling wind wouldn’t blow him right off the top of the car. He tried to shut down his thoughts and just watch the country slipping by: meadows, bean fields, orchards. After a while he started feeling a little more normal. He didn’t need to hold on so tightly; the constant breeze wasn’t going to blow him off after all.

  People were always being killed by trains. If he’d read about an accident like that in the newspaper he probably wouldn’t have thought much about it, would have forgotten all about it after turning the page.

  Three hours after crossing the St. Lawrence, the train halted on a siding at a pulp mill. By then he’d had enough of going the wrong way. The Greek’s bluish jaw and bright smile were coming back to him. He knew the trip was over and he’d have to go home.

  What would they find on the tracks? A lump of blood and meat and whatever was left of the blue suit? How did they bury a person after something like that?

  The stench of wood pulp was sour. He climbed down from the boxcar and asked a startled yardman if there was a telephone somewhere. The man collared him and dragged him into a shack where a foreman was smoking a cigar. Mike asked in French if he could telephone Montreal and have someone come and fetch him.

  The foreman said there was no phone in the shack but there was one in the mill’s main office, which was, unfortunately, closed because it was Saturday afternoon. Mike could use that phone, but it would cost money to pay for the call.

  “Combien?”

  “Puis, un piastre.”

  The foreman tucked the dollar into his pocket, then led Mike through the noisy, steamy mill and up to the office. The room was deserted but there was a phone. He gave the operator Grattan and Elise’s number; his aunt answered the phone.

  “Are you all right, Mike? What’s going on? Where are you?”

  “I’m okay. I just need to talk to Uncle Grattan, please.”

  Grattan agreed to come and fetch him. “I’ll be there in a couple of hours. Sit tight.”

  After he hung up there was little to do but watch the workers tending the giant newsprint machines. In a while the men started shutting everything down. The shift was over.

  He went back out to the railway siding, found the boxcar, and inspected the wheels and undercarriage. There was no trace of blood or gore — just grease, flecks of sand and gravel, and the acrid smell of brakes. Across fifty or sixty miles everything else had dissolved or been blown away. He didn’t know if he was going to tell someone or not. It would start feeling very different once he began talking about it, he knew. He would keep it to himself a while longer, think it over some more.

  He followed a group of workers leaving the mill and crossing the highway. The evening damp smelled of hay from meadows that sprawled towards a river. A few men got into ancient cars but most set off walking down the highway towards the lights of the town.

  He went back inside the mill and played barbotte with a night watchman who was missing his right arm. They rolled dice at a nickel a game. The watchman said his wound had been un petit bleu, vraiment non plus qu’une éraflure, but instead of healing it had grown very tender, and the next thing he knew he was at a dressing station, then a field hospital, where a surgeon told him he had septicémie and was going to lose the arm. “Je lui ai dis, okay, je vais vous donner mon bras si vous me permettriez de revenir au Canada.”

  After giving Mike a cigarette, which made him dizzy, the watchmen stretched out on a cot and fell asleep. Mike wandered across the highway to a brightly lit lunch wagon with a tin Kik Cola sign and a half-dozen trucks parked out front. Behind the lunch wagon the fields were planted in corn and beans.

  He sat down at the counter and asked the waitress for a glass of milk. Un verre du lait, s’il vous plaît.

  Did the Greek’s brother really work in a Chicago restaurant? Would he ever learn what had happened?

  He felt as though he wasn’t really in the café, wasn’t really anywhere. He’d started for the West and this was as far as he had gotten. He knew he hadn’t the strength to go farther, not just then, anyway.

  He’d finished the milk and was about to ask for a slice of apple pie when Uncle Grattan suddenly sat down on the stool beside him. Grattan wore a tweed jacket and old grey flannels and a gold ring on his left hand that Elise had given him on their fifteenth wedding anniversary.

  “Thanks for coming, Uncle.”

  “I’m glad you called. Your mother was getting worried.”

  “I left her a note.”

  “Yes. That’s what had her worried.”

  The waitress came over and Grattan asked for a cup of coffee.

  “Tell me what the plan was,” he said to Mike after the waitress left. “Did you have a plan? Or were you just hightailing it?”

  He needed to hold on to what had happened a little longer. Keep it in his hands a while and just think it over. “I was going out to Alberta,” he said, “but I got on the wrong train.”

  “Ever hopped a train before?”

  “No.”

  “Not that easy, is it. I used to bum into L.A. on the lemon cars out of Santa Paula. I’m not going to ask why you left. Maybe I have a general idea, and I guess the details don’t matter. But I want you to promise me something.”

  “I was born out west, Uncle. I’m not from here. I don’t belong here.”

  “Nonsense. A person belongs wherever he’s willing to stop and dig in. I’ve experienced a vivid sense of belonging in certain shell holes. I want your word of honour you won’t try it again. Too hard on your mother. Train yards aren’t the place for a boy. Easy to get hurt. People get killed.”

  For a moment he considered telling Grattan, but something made him hold back. “I’m not a boy, Uncle.”

  “No? What are you, then?”

  “Well, I guess I am.”

  “Before you try something like this again, talk it over with your parents. Come to some sort of understanding. Tu comprends? Donne-moi ta parole.”

  “I swear.”

  “Don’t go boasting about this escapade to your pals: you’ll start a train-jumping craze. And don’t tell your sisters, or you’ll just scare the pants off them. Do you want anything else? Another glass of milk? Mademoiselle, s’il vous plaît, apportez un verre du lait pour ce gars.”

  They walked out into the fresh-smelling dark. Grattan’s car was a brand-new Chevy Capitol, maroon, with a black cabriolet roof. The previous autumn Grattan had taught Mike to drive on a range road up north. He didn’t have his licence yet but he knew how to handle a machine.

  Grattan had set the choke and was about to push the starter when Mike resolved that he wasn’t going to tell anyone, certainly not his father and maybe not even Grattan. Not for a while anyway, maybe never. If he told it would become just a story. Right now it felt like a part of him, a limb, an eye, a pint of his own blood.

  “Uncle?”

  “Yes?”

  “I want to be like you, not like him.”

  Grattan sat back in his seat. Taking a pack of cigarettes from his coat pocket, he stuck one in his mouth and struck a mat
ch.

  “I’d like to save you some grief, pass along my manly wisdom. But I don’t have any. I’ve always looked up to Joe. You can learn a lot from successful men like your father. A father’s protection and love are rare, rare things. We lost our old man, and things got pretty rough after that, believe me.”

  “I don’t know what I’d learn from him except sneaking off and getting drunk.”

  “Now you’re sounding like a kid again.”

  Grattan pressed the starter with his foot and the engine caught. As his uncle steered the nimble little Chevrolet out onto the highway, Mike let the acceleration push him back against the seat. Sweet engine noise filled the silence. His uncle spoke from the other side of experience, and that counted for a lot, but the only way he would ever get to that other side was to go there himself someday, and on his own. Maybe he’d already started.

  MONTREAL, 1931

  Disorder

  Mother superior stalked into geography class, interrupting the lesson. She looked angry, and the little nun teaching the class looked scared. Boarders, day girls, teachers — everyone at the convent was scared of Mother Superior. Born a Protestant, she had all the rage and zeal of a convert.

  “Margo O’Brien! Gather up your books and come with me.”

  Margo glanced at her best friend, Lulu Taschereau, who gave a little shrug. Tasch had been teaching Margo, Mary Cohen, and Lulu’s cousin Mathilde to play bridge, and they had been playing rubbers in the dormitory by candlelight and flashlight. Had Mother Superior found them out?