The Unlikely Redemption of John Alexander MacNeil

by Lesley Choyce

  “What about your village?”

  “Gone. All gone. We could not live there. So everyone moved to the cities. Even the water in the wells dried up once the forest was gone.”

  “Would you like another glass?”

  “Please. And then we must talk about the girl.”

  NINE

  THE GIRL WAS IN the doorway, listening.

  “You came here because of the trees, Father Welenga?” she asked.

  Father Welenga turned and seemed delighted to see Em, even though she looked like a tired and troubled child, a wounded angel fallen from heaven. He smiled broadly and I noticed how straight and white his teeth were. “Good morning, Emily. I’m so glad to see you.”

  “You were talking about trees,” she said. “Brian always talks about the trees. I thought he was crazy sometimes.”

  “Crazy is not so bad,” Father Welenga offered. I took this as a good omen.

  “Brian is crazy but crazy-good, not crazy-bad.”

  “Brian is your boyfriend, right?” the priest asked with a gentle tone in his voice.

  A slight breeze found us, trailing up from the beach and the water far below us. It smelled of seaweed and salt and faintly of fish.

  “Brian was not the one who did this,” Em said with an air of defeat. “Brian was my boyfriend who wanted to save trees. He said if you could save the trees, you could save the world.”

  Father Welenga nodded. “I should meet this Brian.”

  She lowered her head. “He’s not talking to me.”

  I don’t know why I thought I should be part of this discussion but I wanted to help out here, help her to get past the uncomfortable part. “There was this other boy from St. F.X. who took advantage of Em at a weak moment.”

  “It was my own fault,” Em said. “It wasn’t just a weak moment. Mark said there were no rules, that he didn’t believe in anything but himself. And therefore he was free. He asked me if I wanted to be free as well.”

  Father Welenga was full of surprises. “ ‘Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.’ One of your fine North American singers, Janis Joplin, sang that in a song. My own brother is a singer who has put his music on CD. Wes Welenga is his name. Have you heard of him, John Alex?”

  “Sorry, Father. I’m not up on contemporary music. But I do remember Janis Joplin, though.”

  “Have you ever met Janis Joplin? Does she live on Cape Breton Island?”

  I was fairly certain that Janis Joplin had long ago travelled on to wherever heartbroken blues singers travel on to but didn’t have the heart to pass on the news. “No, she was from Texas, I think. And I think I heard that she is not doing well — her health.”

  “Then I should send her a card,” Father Welenga said. “I’ll look up her address on the Internet.”

  Em looked discouraged as she leaned on the door frame, then hugged herself and looked at the pair of us, expecting one of us to do what?

  “Emily,” the priest said, “how did you end up here with John Alex?”

  “I followed my heart,” she said. “And it took me to Deepvale.”

  I felt a small tremor pass through me just then. I did not exactly know what she meant. She had said it had been Dr. Fedder who had suggested my home was a “safe haven.” I wondered why she said this.

  “Well, then. All is fine in that regard,” the priest said in a rather professional manner. “I should be going. I need to look in on Kenny Beaton. Poor Kenny had another car accident. A most unlucky lad. They found him last night — his truck had gone out of control and crashed through the front of your store that sells alcoholic beverages.”

  “The boy never had a lick of common sense.”

  “He was trying to break into the liquor store to steal booze,” Em said. “That would be like Kenny. Did he get hurt?”

  “No. But they arrested him even though he said it was a problem with his truck.”

  “Poor Kenny,” I said. I had always rather liked the boy and he had shown respect to me over the years. I even spoke up as a character witness the time he stole a tractor trailer load of cigarettes. His defence was that smoking was an addiction. Just like the liquor store incident, none of it was Kenny’s fault. Or so he argued.

  “So I must see the boy and counsel him,” Father Welenga said. “To you both, have a good day amongst yourselves.”

  Father Welenga handed me the empty water glass and smiled, looking very satisfied to be alive and well on a summer day in Cape Breton.

  Em still looked very tired. She sat down on the porch steps and looked out across the field. “I don’t know if I can do this,” she said.

  “Do what?”

  “This baby thing. I thought I could. But now I don’t know. I think I’m a little like Kenny Beaton. I just smash into things. I don’t think. I’m hopeless. My parents are right. They say I’m hopeless.”

  “Nothing and no one is without hope.”

  “John Alex, you must be smart. You’ve lived so long. You seem so calm about everything. You must understand what it all means and how it all works out. Tell me what I need to know.”

  “Em, I’m not sure I understand any more than you do. You get up in the morning like this. You get out of bed. You go out and feed the chickens and then have breakfast with your wife …” I stopped there.

  “I didn’t know you had chickens,” she said.

  “I don’t. And my wife has been dead for many years.”

  “I knew that. I’m sorry. You must have loved her dearly.”

  “I still love her. That’s how it works. That’s one thing I know. I know love.”

  “Mark convinced me that love was a fantasy. I had told him about Brian and he said it was a delusion.”

  “And you believed him?”

  “Not really.”

  “What about Brian then?”

  “He’s living somewhere in the woods up by Margaree. Once I told him about Mark and about being pregnant, he said that he needed to get away and live alone in the woods — maybe for the rest of his life.”

  “How did that make you feel?”

  “I felt like I had betrayed him. I felt like I had just ruined the best thing I ever had in my life.”

  “Then maybe we should find Brian. I’d like to hear what he has to say about the trees.”

  “But he hates me. I deserve to be hated.”

  “You, my dear, do not deserve to be hated.”

  She sulked and looked both sad and guilty. It tore at my heart until I thought it would break.

  “What did the two of you talk about when you were together?”

  “Brian did most of the talking. He told me about all the books he read. He told me about everything he believed in and said he was going to figure out how to live what he believed.”

  “So there’s the clue. Tell me one thing he believed in.”

  “He said ‘all things are possible.’ Even the law of gravity can be broken. He believed that one person, the right person, could reverse the destructive path of history.”

  “So then he will understand why we are looking for him.”

  “I think he was referring to the clear-cutting. He said he could stop them from destroying the forests.”

  “I think he meant more than that.”

  I made Em breakfast, although she barely touched it. “We’re going to have to read up on this pregnancy business,” I said.

  “We?”

  Her question stopped me dead in my tracks. What did it mean? What was it I was thinking? What had I concluded? “Well, I have a feeling that it’s good to know what to expect. I didn’t mean to imply … well, I don’t know what I meant.”

  “What you meant was ‘we.’ You implied you wanted to be involved.”

  “I guess I did. Maybe that was a mistake.”

  “No
t a mistake. I’m okay with ‘us’ doing some reading. I told you I don’t have any place else to go.”

  It wasn’t exactly flattery, but I would accept what she said. “You’re sure you should not be home with your parents?”

  “My parents would destroy me. I wasn’t an easy child. Now I’ve proven to them and everyone else what a fuck-up I am. They’re going to have to be satisfied with that.”

  “You can stay here as long as you like,” I blurted out. “But first we have to find Brian.”

  “Maybe Brian doesn’t want to be found.”

  “Once we find him, we’ll see what he says.”

  “If we can find him.”

  “He loves trees, right?”

  “Big trees.”

  “Then I think I know where to look.”

  THERE WAS A SMALL but locally famous bridge over the Margaree River that would take us in the right direction to the remaining old-growth forest. It’d been a long while since I’d been up that way.

  Somebody in the Highways Department had been wanting to close down that narrow old steel and wood structure for many years. Kyle MacDonald was in charge of road and bridge repair and he hated the MacDougalls who lived in the valley. The MacDougalls, all of them cattle farmers, had to use the little poorly maintained bridge if they wanted to get to the highway and have any contact with the outside world. They complained to their MLAs about holes in the bridge and washouts around the supports but it never did any good. Kyle MacDonald had a pretty tight grip when it came to holding an intergenerational grudge.

  So if Kyle were ever forced to send his men down to that part of the Margaree for bridge repair, he’d tell them to just patch up the holes in the rotten boards by “sealing” them with asphalt. Which they did. But of course hot asphalt trying to seal one hole or another on a wood-surface bridge just meant that the asphalt would be shovelled on, only to drop right through, steaming and black, into the cool clear waters of the Margaree. So the work got done and a report was filed, but the holes were still there.

  Kessie MacDougall grimaced every time he drove his prize bull, Zeus, over that cursed bridge and swore he’d fix the damn thing himself one day if it weren’t for the fact that he’d paid all that frigging money to the province in gas and liquor taxes and it was supposed to go to road repair — and did, to every other road except for his road and his bridge. So one day back a few months, Zeus was being hauled to Margaree Forks for some serious stud work when a wheel of the trailer broke through the rotten boards of the bridge and the trailer slammed down hard on the surface. So hard in fact that the bull’s two hind legs broke through the floorboards of the trailer. Zeus bellowed loudly and soon Kessie discovered that the bull’s two back legs were broken. There’d be no more stud work for Zeus that day or any day thereafter.

  Kessie had to shoot what he said was the best stud bull of its kind on the planet. And he was plenty mad. He took Kyle MacDonald and the province of Nova Scotia to court and Judge Stipples found favour in his arguments. With his $25,000 settlement, Kessie bought a new truck and a bull, but the province still never repaired the bridge. In fact, it appeared clear that if any of the MacDougalls kept complaining about the bridge, the province would do what they did down in Lower Northwest Mabou, namely tear out the old bridge, claiming it would be replaced but then not get around to actually replacing it for seven to ten years.

  So the MacDougalls bought some steel, some Wolmanized wood, a couple of loads of backfill for the approaches and fixed the bridge themselves, all at a price tag of close to $25,000 plus federal and provincial sales taxes, the famous Harmonized Sales Tax. And that was more or less the end of that.

  The MacDougall bridge was a fairly smooth ride these days, but nothing would bring Zeus back into this world and a large number of Inverary County cows would never again receive the good and competent services of the deceased bull. I couldn’t help but think about that bull as we headed east towards where I thought Brian might be hugging his trees.

  Em was driving. She owned up to the fact that she had no driver’s license, but I told her my story about stopping to pick up the hitchhiking mailbox. She was a quick learner.

  “I have to warn you,” she said. “Even if we find Brian, he’s gonna start talking to you about crazy stuff. I’m not sure if he’s still Buddhist or not. He’s gone through a number of religions.”

  “I don’t understand. How do you ‘go through’ religions?”

  “He reads a lot of books.”

  “Must be smart.”

  “Too smart, really. He thinks about everything. He questions everything.”

  “Must take a lot of energy.”

  “Brian is driven. He wants to understand everything. He thinks that if he can understand it all, he can change the world.”

  “I thought I could change the world once,” I said, suddenly conjuring up a mental image of myself as a heady young man.

  Em looked over at me and then back at the road as I pointed to the turnoff that would take us up Gillis Mountain. “Did you? Did you change the world?”

  “No,” I said.

  “What happened?”

  “The world changed me instead.”

  TEN

  I ALLOWED EM TO drive us as far as the road would allow up into the mountains above the Margaree Valley. There had been considerable clear-cutting and the ravaged land broke my heart but I did not speak of it. As we walked higher, however, we moved beyond the jumble of fallen trees and found ourselves walking through a mixed spruce and hardwood forest. The old forest road was not much more than a footpath now and the canopy of leafy trees filtered the sun above our heads.

  “How will we find him?” Em asked. “He could be anywhere.”

  “Well, I have a hunch. When you get old, you have a sense about some things.”

  We walked on and my heart was pounding a bit from the exertion. I felt some difficulty breathing and began to sweat, but it all felt good.

  “I don’t know if I can face him. I hurt him, you know. I hurt him deeply.”

  “We all hurt each other. Even the ones we love. And they hurt us. Sometimes it doesn’t matter what you do, you end up hurting someone. That’s why it’s so important to forgive.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  We walked silently after that. Our destination was an old cabin built by Samson Langley. Samson was dead now, but he’d lived out here on his own, a hermit in the truest sense of the word, for almost sixty years. He’d been drafted into the army during World War II and was being trained to fight the Germans in Europe. But he went AWOL. He was in Halifax, preparing with hundreds of other young men to board a troop ship, when he changed his mind. He tried to disappear so he wouldn’t have to fight. He said he couldn’t kill another man, any man, even a Nazi with a weapon trained on him.

  So he lived alone high on Gillis Mountain, carving things from wood, living off the land mostly and the kindness of the locals who helped him survive. When he died, hundreds of people came to his funeral. The Hermit of Margaree they called him. And everyone had a story about that odd, gentle, frightened man. Right up to his death, he thought he might be arrested for deserting from the army. But there had been an amnesty many years ago. I often wondered what it was like to live alone in the woods like that. Thought it might make a man go crazy. However, I had a feeling there may be many more just like Samson hiding out from one thing or another and with good reason. So maybe he wasn’t so crazy after all.

  After Samson’s death, people maintained his little cabin. Made it almost into a shrine. Kept Samson’s things there, repaired the roof and door. Sometimes hunters would sleep there or others would just hike up from the valley and move in for a day or a week, always doing a bit of improvement to keep the place in good shape.

  EMILY SUDDENLY HEAVED A deep sigh and stopped in her tracks. “I can’t do this,” she said and sat down on the ground. The
re was an air of total defeat about her. Now the great chasm of years between us seemed vast. I realized that the world I had grown up in was one completely unrelated to hers. Maybe we were doing the perfectly wrong thing.

  “Do you like coffee?” I asked her.

  “Coffee?”

  “Yes. Are you a coffee drinker?”

  “Well, yeah. Brian would make fun of me when we’d go to Tim Hortons. Two sugars, I’d ask for. He’d give one of his lectures. Sugar, he’d say. White death. Might as well eat poison.”

  “Did you mind? When he lectured you, I mean.”

  “That’s the funny part. I didn’t mind it at all. Every one of my so-called friends from school didn’t seem to care much about anything but cigarettes, partying, music maybe or money. But Brian cared about everything — what he called the important stuff. What you ate, what you believed in. I got tired of it, but now I miss it.”

  “But did he drink coffee?”

  “Sometimes. Only if he bought the beans himself from a place that assured him farmers were paid fairly. Then he’d grind them himself.”

  “Think he has any coffee with him up here?”

  Emily stood up and gave me a curious little smile. “I don’t know. What got you thinking about coffee all of a sudden?”

  We continued on our path. “Well, I was thinking about my father. He loved his coffee, and once when I was a boy, we were so poor we had no money for anything. Not a cent. People today have no idea what it could be like back then. My father would reuse his coffee grounds over and over until he wasn’t really even drinking coffee anymore but drinking the idea of coffee. He said he needed it to keep him going. It was like a little religious ceremony. He’d pour in the hot water, drink it black — or dull grey after a while — and then collect the granules and dry them in the sun or on the wood stove to use again tomorrow. He never complained. And then an old Mi’kmaq fella told him to dig up different kinds of roots and roast them. Dandelion, chicory and some others. So he started experimenting until he came up with something that he said tasted pretty close to coffee. He never gave up on coffee.”