The Unlikely Redemption of John Alexander MacNeil

by Lesley Choyce

  “I’m no angel,” she said. “Are you Catholic?”

  “In some respects yes.”

  “Do you believe in hell?”

  “Hell no,” I said. She smiled a little-girl smile in a shy way with her chin tucked down.

  “Do you believe in heaven?”

  “I believe in the possibility of heaven.” I stood up and turned off the radio. “Cup of tea?”

  “Do you have any beer?”

  “Sure,” I said. “McEwan’s okay?”

  “Don’t have any Wildcat, do you?”

  “Just the McEwans.”

  “’Kay.”

  I went to the fridge and opened two cans of the Scottish ale. Handed her one and offered her a seat at the kitchen table.

  “Dr. Fedder said I should come see you.”

  “Shaky Fedder? Why me?”

  She sipped her beer and paused for a minute. Then she placed her hand briefly on her stomach and looked down at the floor. “Because I had nowhere else to go.”

  I had a strong urge to touch her face and try to remove the pierced ornaments that seemed so wrong. I wanted to wash the dark makeup away and ask her to brush her hair. I wanted to remind her she was just a child, that all the grown-up problems of the world around her need not be anything she should be concerned about yet. But, instead, I sat silently, looked across the table to Eva, who already understood much more than I had mustered in these brief minutes of conversation.

  “Are you hungry?” I asked.

  She nodded yes.

  “You like haggis?”

  She squinched up her face at me.

  “Just kidding.”

  I COOKED HER A meal from what I had in the fridge — some chicken and potatoes and Swiss chard from the garden. I worked slowly and patiently and waited for her to tell me her story.

  The boy was a student at St. Francis Xavier University, who had come to Inverary on a summer grant to count small-mouth bass in Lake Ainslie. Someone had introduced small-mouth bass into those waters and that was bad news for the salmon apparently. The Margaree Salmon Association was up in arms and wanted to press charges if the culprit was found, but Mark Lancaster’s job was just to rent a boat and tour around Lake Ainslie catching fish and counting the bass to document the extent of the problem.

  “I was swimming in Lake Ainslie when we met. He said he was a philosophy major. I was going out with someone at the time. Someone who really loved me. But Mark was so different. And older. I liked him. I even told him about Brian, but he said it was okay. In his world, he said, there were no rules.”

  “No rules? Everything has some kind of rules,” I heard myself saying, strangely enough, this coming from a man, once a boy, who had said the exact same thing — to his teachers, to the priest, to himself.

  “I was stupid,” she said.

  “Join the club.”

  “There’s a club?”

  “I’m the founding president of the Stupid Association of Cape Breton.”

  “I should have taken one of those morning-after pills, but if I went to the drugstore, everyone would have known. Including Brian. I should have gone to the doctor, but I thought I would be lucky. I wasn’t. So I decided I would have an abortion.”

  “Did you tell anyone this?”

  “I told Mark.”

  “And what did Mark say?”

  “He said there are no rules so it was okay.”

  “Philosophy major, right? You like paprika?”

  “Sorry?”

  “On the chicken. Paprika?”

  “Sure. Okay. And then I told Brian.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I was trying to be honest.”

  “Honesty is good. But often painful. How did he react?”

  “He said don’t do it.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s the part I don’t get. He’s not Catholic. He’s not very religious. He says he still loves me even if I was pregnant with this other guy’s baby.”

  “Maybe it’s because he knows it’s not what you really want to do.”

  “And that’s why I’m here.”

  Hmm. I was trying to fit the pieces together and didn’t really see where I fit in. I stirred the potatoes, looked back at Em sitting across from Eva, who was as patient as ever.

  “People will talk. Everyone will know.”

  “I know that. But I don’t want to leave here and go someplace else. And I don’t want to go to one of those homes.”

  “They still have them?”

  “Yes. I talked to a priest.”

  “Did you mention you were thinking about the abortion?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Follow your heart.”

  “I kind of like Brian. Where is Brian in all this now?”

  “He’s not speaking to me. He says he’s really hurt.”

  “Boys are like that. I’ll fix you up in the spare bedroom.”

  “Will you teach me to cook?”

  “You can’t cook?”

  “Not much.”

  “Eva will teach you,” I accidentally said.

  “Who?”

  “Eva,” I said. “My wife.”

  ONCE EM HAD EATEN, she washed the dishes and went to the spare bedroom and must have gone immediately to sleep because I didn’t hear a sound. I myself tossed and turned much of the night, thought of giving up on the bed altogether and sitting back down at the kitchen table to attempt sleep face down on a table spoon. But I thought that if the girl found me like that, she might think I was old and crazy. And I didn’t want that right then. I didn’t want that at all.

  EIGHT

  I AWOKE AT DAWN to the sound of snoring. The girl in the other room snored deeply and evenly. It made me feel peaceful in a way I had not felt for many years. Like many other mornings before this, I questioned my sanity. It was an interrogation that took place inside my head. Today it went like this.

  Is any of this real? Am I asleep still or awake? Is there really a sixteen-year-old pregnant girl sleeping in the next room? What is it I am supposed to do? Today? This week? With the rest of my life? Eva, exactly who am I now?

  Such interrogation led to a stomach-churning sensation of confusion, so I got out of bed quickly and put those two boney feet on the floor yet again and stared at the floorboards, trying to make them stay put and come into focus. And then I suddenly wished that I had chickens.

  As a young man, a young husband, I had raised chickens. First thing in the morning after making love to Eva, I would go out to the barn and feed the chickens and collect the eggs. Within minutes, some of those eggs were delivered, still warm, into the hands of my wife, who cracked them and delivered their contents to the sanctuary of a heavy black cast-iron frying pan. We ate many eggs in those years before the worry of cholesterol swept the land.

  I made a mental note to consider the possibility of buying a few hens. I would ask the girl what she thought when she awoke. Em. Emily. Snoring still in her bed.

  One of the great things about being old and scattered in your thoughts is that your mind leaps from one place to another and sometimes you land in some very interesting territory. I was myself now wondering what it would be like to be a pregnant teenage girl. Such a thought had never really occurred to me in my life. But I wrestled with it. I went there. I found a great deal of confusion. And fear. There had to be fear.

  I walked outside and took a look at my garden. The deer had been eating the Swiss chard again, the rabbits chewing away all the leaves of the string beans. Everything was planted in neat rows, the way my father had taught me to garden. Why straight lines? I now wondered. Why not circles? Why not just scatter the seeds at random? Certainly the deer and the rabbits wouldn’t care one way or the other.

  I fel
t angry in a way over the plight of Emily, the snoring one. So she had been coerced into having sex with a philosophy major from the university in Antigonish. Despite sex education and all the hefty advice, something did not go according to the textbooks and she ended up becoming pregnant. By the wrong lad at that — one who did not believe in rules. Or condoms, I supposed. What next? The real boyfriend, off moping somewhere, trying to sort out the harsh jagged edges of betrayal and love.

  Parents? Not the type to take this lightly, was all I knew. And so here she is, a girl adrift with a fetus.

  As if — and perhaps each youthful and pregnant girl feels like this — as if she were the first one to be in this situation.

  What we needed to do was sit down with society as a whole and say, Look, let’s all just chip in and make them comfortable, safe and happy and tell them we will help them and take care of them. And we will not talk behind their backs and we will welcome their little ones into our world with all our hearts. It turned out that I was actually giving this little speech out loud to the Egyptian onions and to the mute zucchini. And upon that realization, I was glad there was no human around to attend my lecture.

  A lone raven bobbed his head from the top of the barn and I saluted him as I sometimes do.

  I heard the phone ringing from the house and did not run to answer it. I wondered who would be calling an old man so early in the morning.

  Inside the house, it felt decidedly different. Not cold and lonely. Someone else was there, someone who needed me. I did not know how long she would stay. But her presence made me feel like I once again had a purpose. Living life one year at a time had been replaced by one month, one week, one day, one hour, one minute.

  Now, I would return to living my life one breath at a time. Back in the house, the phone was ringing again and it came as a shock. Already I had forgotten that I even owned a phone. I had slipped back to a day many decades ago when Eva and I had returned from our garden on an August day and an amazing calm had settled over the world and our lives, a tranquillity and peace that was unsurpassed.

  And now I discovered that someone had installed the telephone in the living room. There was a television set there as well and I wondered where that had come from. And the wallpaper was different.

  “Hello,” I said into the mouthpiece, holding it at several inches from my mouth as I had once done when I first spoke on a telephone.

  “John Alex?”

  “Speaking. Who’s this?”

  “Father Welenga.”

  “Father who?”

  “Welenga, from St. Theresa’s. Do you have a moment?”

  “I suppose I do. But you’re not calling about the steeple fund again, are you? I already told them I wasn’t Catholic, that I had nothing against Catholics but I just didn’t want to give money for a steeple.”

  “I’m not calling about a steeple, sir.” His accent was unusual — Cape Breton, yes, but something else in there. Welenga? Maybe he was Polish or Czech.

  “You must be an early riser,” I said.

  “Indeed. As you yourself must be. It is not an inconvenient time to call you, is it?”

  “No,” I said. “I was just out feeding the chickens.” Or would have been if I had had the good sense to buy some.

  “I’m calling about the girl,” Father Welenga said.

  “What girl?”

  “Her parents, the MacNaughtons, spoke to me. They were most upset. I had to do some asking around, but I believe the girl is staying at your house.”

  “I’m not sure where this is leading, Father.”

  “Can I speak to the girl, to Emily?”

  “She’s asleep.”

  “Very well. May I come speak with yourself then on this fine morning?”

  “I don’t know. I was planning on doing some gardening. I have slugs eating my cucumbers. I was planning on tossing them.”

  “Tossing them?”

  “It sounds cruel, I know. But I don’t like slugs and show them little mercy. So I toss them out of my garden. As far as I can. I don’t know if they live or die when they land. Is that heartless?”

  “Not at all. Slugs deserve to be tossed if they have intruded in your garden. Would you mind if I came up there and helped you with your slug tossing?”

  “I don’t know. I never had a priest help me with that before. Are you trained?”

  “I’m a quick study.”

  I paused for a breath or two and waited for the world to sort itself out a bit better. How had the conversation drifted into this crazy talk about slugs? This busybody priest probably already thought I was crazy. I felt like I had no way out. “Suit yourself,” I finally said. “Do you know where I’m at in Deepvale?”

  “I know Deepvale like the palm of my hand. I will see you soon.”

  I had the urge to say that I would go paint the mailbox at the end of my driveway orange so it would be easier to find me but I did not. I don’t know why I had that sudden urge. Just old and crazy, I guess.

  Over a cup of instant coffee into which I had inadvertently poured salt instead of sugar, I counselled myself that any meeting with clergy concerning a pregnant girl was likely to end up with trouble. I would try to keep all conversation linear and to the point. There would be no rambling on my part. I asked the caffeine in my salty coffee to muster together a small orchestra of brain cells to keep me on track. No slug tossing, no painting of mailboxes, no chickens. I looked across the table to see if Eva had any opinions on this but was surprised to see she was not there. I shrugged it off. I knew she came and went as she pleased.

  THE FIRST THING THAT surprised me about Father Welenga was that he was driving a blue truck that had a significant exhaust problem. You could hear him coming all the way from downtown Inverary.

  The second thing that came as a surprise was that he was a Black man.

  “Greetings to you, John Alex. It is an even finer morning than I had first thought.”

  “Father?”

  He was familiar with the way people reacted to him. “I can see I am not what you expected.”

  “I expected you would be … taller. And quieter.”

  He smiled broadly. “Ah, the truck. I am meaning to have that fixed. Apologies. Now where are the slugs?”

  I waved a hand in the air. “Maybe later.”

  “As you wish. Do you have a well?”

  “Yes, why?”

  “Could you offer me some water from your well? I am tired of the chlorinated variety in town. Where I came from, we drank only water that came straight out of the ground. I would be pleased if you could offer me some of your own well water.”

  “I imagine that can be arranged. Come sit on the porch. I’d offer you some coffee, but it’s a little salty this morning.”

  “No problem.”

  The water was offered and received. “Water is such a blessing,” the smiling Black Father Welenga said. “Where I come from, we give thanks for it all the time.”

  “You’ve mentioned that phrase twice already — where I come from. My guess is that you are not from around here.”

  “Cameroon, in West Africa.”

  “Well, you could have fooled me. On the phone, you didn’t sound like an African.”

  “But as you can see from my skin, I am very much so.” He was almost laughing and it was beginning to sink in that I rather liked this priest who was not anything like the priests of my childhood. “However, my teacher and mentor was a missionary from Glace Bay. Father Harvey Steele. He taught me English. I already knew French. But Father Steele taught me good English. And he converted me to Christianity.”

  “What were you before that?”

  “I believed in several religions. In fact, I still do. Father Steele told me it was okay to keep the good parts from the traditional religions of my people. He said it would do no harm.”


  “And your church approves?”

  “I love the church. But I am my own man. My father said I must always be my own man. When I listen to orders, I listen only to God and only to my heart. No one else.”

  “How’s the water?”

  “John Alex, this is excellent water. Only once or twice in my life have I tasted water like this.”

  “I used to keep a trout in the well, but the trout died.”

  “I am so sorry to hear that.”

  “It’s okay. That was ten years ago.”

  “Still, you must have the memories.”

  “I guess you could say that.” I was still rather curious as to how a West African had found his way to become parish priest in rural Cape Breton. “Father Welenga, how did you end up here, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Not at all. I would bare my soul to any man who can give me a glass of water of such fine quality. I will give you the Coles Notes version of my story. Here goes. Like I said, Father Harvey Steele of Glace Bay came to my village and, at first, he only played soccer with us and did not discuss God. He sang to us sometimes and he sang very badly, sometimes in French, sometimes in Gaelic and sometimes in English. All very badly and we laughed at him. He loved it.

  “Of course there was preaching after a while. And he gave me a Bible and taught me to read it, so I read it very slowly, cover to cover. But while Father Steele was there, a company bought up the forest all around us and began to cut it down. Father Steele tried to stop them but they would not stop. We all thought it very funny to see two white men arguing but we didn’t realize how serious it was until all the forests were gone. You see, they hired my people to help cut down the forests. Taught them to operate chainsaws and machines and drive trucks and the men thought it was wonderful.”

  “They destroyed your forest, did they?”

  “Yes. And in so doing, they destroyed my village. There was no shade left. No medicines from the leaves of trees. No firewood to cook from. Nothing would even grow in our gardens. It was all very tragic and Father Steele told me that he felt terrible. So that’s when I told him I would myself become a priest and go try to encourage the white people — wherever I could find them — to not cut down the trees, but to leave the forests alone. So, after much study and training, I ended up here.”