The Unlikely Redemption of John Alexander MacNeil

by Lesley Choyce

  Emily was washing dishes at the sink afterward and the sun was slanting in, painting everything a golden coppery colour as I was drifting away, sitting in my old stuffed chair, and I thought it might have just been I was falling asleep but it wasn’t that. At first, I felt that my mind was not attached to my body. Em came into the room, sat across from me and turned on a light as the evening sun slipped down out of the Cape Breton sky. The world was becoming dark except for the light of that lamp and my mind latched onto the notion that this was all that was left of the world. Everything else had vanished. Emily sat silent for a few minutes, then got up and started to walk to her room but I called to her. I was afraid for her, of course. Out there beyond this pool of light was nothing at all. The world, the universe had been whittled down to this space. It was an island of light there in my living room and I understood perfectly that this was how the world was about to end. No reason. No cause. No explanation from science or God.

  Emily must have somehow understood the crazy look on my face so she stayed with me in the room. She sat down on the floor near my feet. And she began to cry.

  I assumed she was crying because it was the end of the world and everything else was gone except for us and I wondered if we would die too if the light were turned off.

  “I’ve got to go out there,” is what I apparently said. Out there meant into the void, the nothingness. Emily was crying because the world had gone away and it was my job to somehow retrieve it. “I’ll be right back,” I said, uncertain of what that exactly meant and not sure of what would come next. And I heaved myself up out of my chair with a monumental effort. Emily touched my ankle as I began to walk and I remember walking through some invisible wall and being swallowed by absolute blackness. I did not fall or stumble and I must have been outside at that point because I could hear the sounds of night and I knew that this was the first step involved in bringing back the world.

  I asked myself who I was recovering the world for. Certainly not for me. I was one of those old men who, in the back of his brain, kept thinking, “I’ve had a good run of things. Mostly. I’ve had enough to fill a lifetime. Whatever comes next is okay by me.”

  Of course, at that point, I called out her name. “Eva!” I shouted to the night sky. “Now, Eva.” I must have believed (and you have to forgive me, because I’ve tried to piece this back together) that I could at that moment make some kind of self-sacrifice and give Emily back a world for herself and her baby. And I could move on to be with Eva wherever she was.

  I was looking up into the inky blackness of the sky. There were no stars. There was no trace of moon. I could see nothing around me. Only the night sounds, the lingering sounds, I supposed, of the spirits of insects and night birds and wind in the tops of spruce trees. But then the pitch black above gave way to a few points of light and suddenly the heavens became filled with stars. I waited to be pulled up into them. I believed it would be a good thing. Girl and baby would be safe in a resurrected world and an old man could be swallowed in exchange by the night and follow the faded smile of his dead wife.

  But Emily had followed me outdoors and was on the back porch. Singing again. A verse of the haunting “The Dark Island.”

  An mo thùras don iar ’s leam bu mhiannach a bhi

  Far bheil àilleachd nan eathar dol fo sgéith sa chuan sios,

  Creag Dhearg ’s e fo bhlàth faileadh cùbhraidh cho saor

  Air a’ bheinn ud as àird ’san Eilean Dorcha.

  I ALMOST SHOUTED TO her to stop. But I didn’t. And then the singing broke the spell. I was back.

  An old man standing outside staring up into the heavens. What I recognized within me was that, no matter how much I was losing my mind, no matter how crazy I was acting, here was this young girl who cared enough about me that she did not want me to leave her alone.

  My feet remembered the path back to the house. I did not stumble, but my mouth was dry and my thoughts were scattered over decades and over geography. It was all there, a life, but there was no straight line of time to thread it together, no semblance of relationship of one event to the next. It would take another full lifetime to create a framework, a meaning for such a disconnected mass of intimate and intense recollection.

  Emily must have put me into my bed and as my thoughts settled without unscrambling themselves, I heard her sobbing from down the hall in the room where she slept. My great fear now was that I was about to fail her and that she would have, as she had said, no place else to go. And then maybe she’d feel forced to leave Inverary forever.

  I AWOKE IN THE morning to find a man sitting on my bed. He was staring at me from a pale and hollow face. He had prepared a death mask for the visit. His countenance was so familiar that I must have known him well, but I could not attach a name. Dr. Fedder had explained that this was the nature or what was happening to my brain. He had not wanted to attach the label “Alzheimer’s” but had said, “It’s that or one of the other things. For you, John Alex, we don’t want to attach a name to it.”

  So I had settled for my own twin label — “old and crazy.”

  “Morning,” the living cadaver said.

  “You?” I asked, accusingly.

  “Yes, John Alex. Me.”

  It was my brother sitting on my bed. We had not spoken a word to each other for many years. How many times had I seen him on the street approaching and angled off in a different direction? “Lauchie. You aren’t real, are you?”

  “Yes, John Alex. Real as you. Real as any of this. The girl called me.”

  “The girl?”

  “The pregnant one. I’d say she’s a little young for you.” He was smiling a half-smile, a boyhood smile. My blood boiled with the hatred that had filled up in my veins for so many years. My brother who had seduced my wife. Tried to ruin my life.

  “Do they still call you Lucky?” I asked him with a hostile knife-edge to my quavering voice.

  “Not since the cancer, John Alex. It sucked whatever luck I had right out of me.”

  “I swore I’d get through this life without ever talking to you again.”

  “I tricked you, I guess.”

  Emily was in the room now. I realized I was in bed in my underwear. She would have had to take off my clothes and put me here. “Father Welenga was in Sydney and Dr. Fedder told me just to put you to bed. He said there was nothing to do but keep you safe. So I called your brother.”

  “I took advantage of you in a weak moment, John Alex. I truly did.”

  “Did you think I was dying?”

  “No. I thought, here was my chance to talk to my older brother when he wouldn’t be able to kill me.”

  “I’d never kill you, Lauchie. I wanted to, but I didn’t have it in me.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong. We are both sons of our father. He put it in us. Not necessarily murder. But the seed of violence, the hatred that can lead to murder.”

  “But I am not my father,” I said. “And he never had the power to turn me into something like him.”

  “I’m sorry, John Alex,” Emily interrupted. “Did I do the wrong thing? I was only trying to help. You scared me. I thought I might lose you.”

  I gazed at her sorrowful face and wondered how one so young and childlike could also be so mature and so burdened already by all the responsibility of caring for an old man and a baby on the way.

  “Lauchie, do you have much money? You want to make amends, maybe you can help us out.” I would take his money if he had it, but my mind was locked on something here — taking advantage now of him in any way I could. I would use the money for Emily, of course, not for me.

  “Hardly a cent. You remember what I was like. Money liked me well enough but as soon as I had it, it wanted to be somewhere else. What I have goes to staying at McPherson’s Rooming House and for my meds.”

  “And all your women?”

  “All gone.
I proved to each and every one of them what a shallow, selfish bastard I was. Now I’m on my own.”

  “And not nearly as handsome as you used to be.”

  “I lost all me good looks after they took out my spleen and one kidney.”

  “Possibly what you deserved.”

  “Do you think it works that way? Do you really? I’ve known men twice the bastard that I was who ended up with lovely wives, money and happiness. Seen it many times over.”

  “So if you don’t have any money, what good are you to me? To us?”

  “I’m here, aren’t I?” He seemed so sincere. He had changed. But I couldn’t trust him. Lucky had always been the most supreme of con artists and smooth talkers.

  Emily was touched by his words, though. She was holding her hand on her belly now. This was the first time I noticed that.

  “John Alex, this is your brother. He came to help you.”

  I sat bolt upright. “How can he help me? Look at him. Nothing but a bag of bones. Eaten away by cancer. A life in ruins.” Oh, I had the venom in me that morning. The confusion of the night before had given way to a highly focussed animosity for my brother, my enemy.

  “So much flattery for one morning,” Lauchie said.

  “Where’s my clothes?”

  Emily walked to my closet and brought me a clean shirt and pants. She didn’t leave the room as I dressed.

  “Kinda thin yourself there, John Alex. Remember in school, when you were about twelve, old Mrs. Redfern would say you were so thin that if you were sitting in your seat sideways, she might accidentally mark you absent.”

  “Mrs. Redfern never said that about me. I was thin but I had muscle.”

  “And it was your muscle that saved me from Pa more than once. I’ll never forget that.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t want to talk about that.”

  “If you hadn’t have learned to fight back, we both might have been dead.”

  “You’re exaggerating. Everyone beat their kids back then.”

  “Not like Pa did. He hated us.”

  “How can a man hate his own sons?”

  “I don’t know. How can a man hate his own brother?”

  “You know the answer to that, Lauchie.”

  “But you still can’t forgive me?”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because I’m here. And because I’m not going to be around for all that much longer. Right now, I feel fine.” He didn’t look fine. He looked like death warmed over. A corpse taking a short holiday with the living. “But any time it could be back. And you, who knows how much more time you have left?”

  Emily was helping me on with my shirt. I wouldn’t let her help me with my pants. “Please don’t talk like that around him,” she said to Lauchie.

  Lauchie raised his eyebrows and smiled again, making his cheeks suck in a bit. “When do you two plan on tying the knot?”

  Emily just pawed at the air with her hand and looked at my brother. He winked at her and, much to my surprise, she blushed before she left the room.

  I sat there on the edge of the bed, my brain still fitting the pieces of my life back into order. Whatever was wrong with me — this is how it worked. Things made sense for a while, and then everything fell apart. There was no schedule to it and I never knew when it would happen, but it was happening more frequently.

  “John Alex, you have to forgive me. I have no defence for who I was. Had I been a violent person, I could have blamed Pa but this was different. I always wanted what I thought was best for me and only me. Everyone else came second or third. Or never. I didn’t care who I hurt. Maybe that was a kind of violence in itself.”

  “Lauchie, you can’t get off the hook that easy. You used people. You used women. You used other men’s women.” I was whispering now. I didn’t want the girl to hear. “Was it only about sex? Was it just that?”

  He ran a hand through his thinning hair. He had it combed back and some kind of lotion on it like in the old days. “Yeah. I think, for a while, it was. And I loved every second of it.”

  He’d said the wrong thing. I knew there had been many women. And many of them married. Some young and vulnerable like Emily but others as well. I don’t think age, old or young, mattered much to him. It was about conquest and physical pleasure. But I couldn’t bear to think about him and Eva even though so many years had passed. “So what does it all add up to, Lauchie? Looking back now, what does it add up to?”

  Lauchie knew the answer, but he didn’t want to say it. “You remember when I was eight, John Alex? Do you remember being out on the ice on Lake Ainslie? Pa was ice fishing.”

  “And you were complaining about the cold.”

  “I had no gloves and my shoes were in pitiful shape.”

  “I was as bad off.”

  “But you,” Lauchie said, “you were older and you weren’t complaining.”

  “He had brought an axe and chopped a hole in the ice and was fishing. There were others nearby doing the same and some open water not far away where a channel ran.”

  “You’d tried to get me to be quiet. You gave me your scarf to wrap around my hands.”

  “I remember.”

  “But I kept whining until he picked me up by my feet and held me over the hole he had chopped through the ice. He threatened to drop me in head first if I didn’t shut up. I honestly believed he would do it. The other men nearby, they just watched. They didn’t want to get involved with a man as violent as he was. I thought he was really going to do it. I tried to stop wailing, but I only wailed louder.”

  I swallowed hard and felt my mouth go dry again. I had put this memory far out of my mind and not thought about it for a long time. It was almost as if it had never happened. “For a long while, I thought that this was just some kind of nightmare that we both had shared.”

  “Oh, it was real, John Alex. It was as real as it gets. And do you remember what happened next?”

  “I tried to help you.”

  “You picked up the axe and came towards him. You swung it at his ankles and missed.”

  I could see it now. The cold mist over the frozen lake. The other fishermen staring at us, none of them coming to our assistance. My brother suspended upside down, wailing. My hot breath panting panicked clouds in front of my face.

  “He kicked the axe out of your hands and dropped me onto the ice, then he hit you across the face, hard enough to knock you down.”

  “And dragged both of us to the edge of the channel and shoved us out onto the weak ice that shattered and we plunged into the freezing water. I can still feel the current tugging at my legs. It wanted to pull us under the ice. The other men were shouting now, running towards us but afraid the ice would not hold them. It’s a miracle we didn’t drown.”

  “No, not a miracle. I was going under but you held onto me, John Alex. We clawed at the ice but it kept breaking. I couldn’t feel my toes or my fingers. But you kept at it. And you never let go of me. Why didn’t you just save yourself?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “He never helped us out. He stood there and watched. As if fascinated by the horror on our faces. Finally, one of the other fisherman, it was someone from Cheticamp, I think, because I remember him speaking to us in French. He reached with his fishnet out to us and you grabbed on. But you didn’t let go of me. The ice buckled and cracked as we slid across it, two men now tugging us to safety. None of the men said a word to my father except for the French guy who spit one word, “merde,” at him and then hustled us to his truck parked on the shoreline. He drove us to the Mounties, but they didn’t take any of it seriously. So he drove us home.”

  “We never knew the man’s name,” I said. “But why are you reminding me of all this now? I’m not sure I wanted to ever relive that day.”

  “I’m telling you because I wanted you to know
that you saved me more than once. I knew this the whole time I was growing up and while I was an adult.”

  “But you tried to take Eva away from me anyway.”

  “I didn’t try to take her away. I just wanted her and I wanted to see if I could make her want me. That’s the kind of person I was.”

  “It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “No, it doesn’t really. But now I want you to forgive me, John Alex. Now you need to save me from Pa one more time.”

  FIFTEEN

  THE WELL-HEELED GRUDGE IS a famous part of Cape Breton history, our legacy. They say that to err is human and to forgive divine. If that is true then many of us are all too human without a trace of such divinity. Perhaps it is the very nature of our people here on this island. The holding of a grudge is a sweet, almost spiritual thing in its own right. Of those who I could not forgive in life, there were but two. My father for one. And my brother. And now, in my dotage (as some might say) should I have forgiven the one and ultimately the other and relieved myself of the weight of this enmity?

  Or not.

  Despite my brother’s willingness to come to my assistance, despite his frailness, I could not find it in me to do so. And I made this decision with clarity. Maybe I feared that if I forgave him, I would put the blame on Eva. And I could not bear to do such a thing.

  “Lauchie, perhaps it is best that we leave things as they were. An old man is hard to change in his ways. I’m like an old dog sleeping beneath the same chair each night. You don’t want to move him to another room.”

  Lauchie’s skin turned a shade more ashen, his lower lip protruded slightly, like that of a little boy’s about to tremble.

  Em returned to the room, something cupped in each of her hands.

  “Look,” she said, holding out two eggs. She was smiling.

  “Where did you find them?” I asked.

  “In the rafters of the barn. I had to climb up there on a ladder. One fell. We’ll have to train our chickens to lay their eggs closer to ground level.”