The Unlikely Redemption of John Alexander MacNeil

by Lesley Choyce

  “You shouldn’t be climbing,” I cautioned.

  “I love to climb. I used to live in the trees, my mother would say — when I was younger.”

  Again, I looked at her and could see that she was not much more than a child. A child bringing another child into the world.

  “Want me to cook them?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Please.”

  Lauchie looked at her, then at me, then at the door. “I better go. John Alex, I truly hoped that coming here today … well, I thought we could finally sort this out.”

  “Lauchie, this was sorted out a long time ago.”

  He was about to say something more but stopped himself. He said my name and then he left. I wondered if I would see him alive again. Both of us physically displayed our mortality. We wore it on our faces and it was not like a mask but an unmasking. It revealed to everyone all who we really were — old men who had a limited number of mornings ahead of them and beyond that a long dark night. I wondered exactly what he meant about me having to save him from our father one more time. I wondered if he too shared the night terrors I had felt in my adult life — waking and thinking I was still a boy and had done some simple thing that would anger my father and bring on his wrath.

  “You weren’t very nice to your brother,” Emily said, walking back into the room as the eggs fried.

  “There is a long story there, my dear. One you do not want to hear.”

  “Oh, I know the story. My own father never speaks to his sister even though she only lives in Mabou. And you know why? It’s because she married a Beaton, a man he never even knew. Just because of the family name. He stopped speaking to her. His own sister.”

  “That’s different,” I said. “I had my reasons for not forgiving my brother.”

  “You should forgive and forget.”

  “Can you apply that to … what’s his name? Mark?”

  “Someday I will. Just not yet. I plan on forgiving anyone who does anything wrong to me.”

  “That’s a tall order.”

  “I plan on breaking the cycle.”

  “You what?”

  “I plan on breaking the cycle. I decided this last year. I explained it all to Brian. I was reading psychology books — on my own, not the stuff in schools. A MacNaughton hates a Beaton and teaches his daughter to hate the Beatons. But she breaks the cycle and marries one. Brian agreed. He said all we have to do is recognize what he calls ‘the killer traditions’ and we can all be free. I also read about child abuse. The father does it to the son. The son does it to his son even though he hated his own father for it. It goes on for generations until someone is smart enough and strong enough to fully understand the pattern. And then finally a father raises his son with a gentle hand.”

  “Child abuse?” I said out loud, almost chiding her. “No such thing when I was growing up. We all got the belt or the fist. Or worse.” It almost sounded as if I were defending the practice. “We survived, didn’t we?” The old man talking now, not understanding the modern world where kids had no respect for parents or rules.

  “Survived, yes, but does that make it right?”

  It seemed bizarre to think of what I had lived through as “child abuse,” unbelievable to realize that if my father had done now what he did then, he would have been put in prison. And what of my mother? Why had I never once blamed her for letting him be so cruel? But I kept these thoughts to myself. I got up and followed Em into the kitchen. She took the frying pan off the burner, and slipped two plates onto the table. She looked radiant.

  “I’m going to raise my child with no physical discipline at all,” she said.

  “Spare the rod and spoil the child.”

  “Bullshit.” She put one egg on my plate and one on hers.

  “Girls didn’t speak like that to their elders when I was growing up.”

  “Bullshit,” she said again. “Now eat.”

  Despite my mood and the acid feeling in the pit of my stomach as the result of confronting my cadaverous brother, the egg was the best-tasting egg I had ever had the privilege of placing upon my tongue. “We’re going to eat like kings,” I offered up to smooth things over.

  “And princesses,” Em added.

  “Here’s to royalty,” I offered with a piece of egg dripping from the end of my fork.

  “I almost forgot about the tea,” Em said, waltzing back to the stove and bringing the pot and two cups. She poured one for me and one for herself and I found myself staring at her pierced eyebrows again and the one little odd metal ball embedded beneath her lower lip. Why on earth would a pretty young girl do that to herself? Again, I wanted to ask but did not. These body piercings represented to me a great gulf between her world and mine. We both had mysteries that maybe the other would never unravel.

  “Perfection,” she said out of the blue. “Do you believe in the idea of perfection?”

  “What an odd thing to say. Well, maybe not odd but … there was something about … just now when you got up to get the tea that made me think, ‘Everything is perfect.’ ” That was before I got distracted by the piercings.

  “Maybe that was what I was thinking too. But you know it can’t last. Everything is too … too complicated. All we get are glimpses.”

  “That we do.”

  “And then we get mad — or at least I get mad — when things that appear perfect turn out to be otherwise. I get so angry.”

  “That was my first impression of you. Angry and running away. You looked like you hated everything.”

  “Almost. I think I even didn’t like you when I first came here.”

  “Why would you stay, then?”

  “Any port in a storm.”

  “Did your father say that?”

  “No. My father said if I ever had sex with a boy, he would disown me.”

  “Fathers have said these things before and changed their mind.”

  “I am glad to be ‘disowned.’ I don’t want anyone to own me.”

  “No one will ever own you. You’re too independent for that. But maybe someone will love you and that is a kind of ownership of each other.”

  “Brian loved me.”

  “He probably still does. Maybe he can learn to forgive you.”

  “Look who’s talking about forgiveness.”

  I cleared my throat. “The Beaton your aunt married. Was he a dart player?”

  “Yes. His name was Victor Beaton.”

  “I read about him in the Pibroch. He was one of the founders of the Mabou Precision Players Association.”

  “My aunt was very proud of him. He was a champion.”

  “At darts?”

  “Yes. He taught me how to hit a bull’s eye.”

  “How?”

  “You steady yourself, aim high and imagine the arc of the dart flying and then dropping just so to hit the centre.”

  “And it works?”

  “Yes. Aim high and watch the arc.”

  “Jesus, I never knew that.” I had played darts with men before and always thought it a silly game at which I’d always lost. Now I was thinking there was just one little trick to it that no one had ever taught me. Suppose all of life’s lessons were like that? Suppose all you needed was someone like Victor Beaton to give you a little pointer?

  SIXTEEN

  IN THE FALL THE rains came. God had blinked and made summer disappear. It was mid-afternoon in early November when I awoke from a nap in the living room. I was awoken by Pierre Trudeau pecking at my toes.

  The reason Em and I brought chickens into the house sometimes was for entertainment. We had no television and early on this had been difficult for Emily. Children raised on television background noise go through withdrawal when it’s gone.

  “But I hated television. I truly did,” Emily had said. “I didn’t know it until Brian expl
ained to me how stupid television was.”

  “They say it can be educational,” I had countered — me having never owned a TV in my life. Eva had convinced me it was a waste of time. It detracts from living, she had said, and created what she called a false life.”

  “Brian said it is full of lies.”

  “Mostly, I suppose. But we all can choose the lies we want to believe.”

  “And the truths,” she added.

  So instead of TV, we let one or two chickens into the kitchen now and then. I know it was not the most hygienic thing in the world. But if you had to choose between television and its side effects or chickens and a little cleaning up of chicken shit, you should choose the chicken shit every time.

  The birds had become like pets. The rooster, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, was a favourite because he had cultivated for himself such a strong personality. You could tell he believed that the world was created for him. He was at the centre. He and the hens had become quite tame. They had their free range now and had become quite good flyers. Usually chickens don’t take to the air but ours did. They roosted in trees and on the roof and sometimes laid eggs up on the roof. You’d walk out the back door and a hen was above laying an egg. When she heard the screen door open, she’d lift herself up and an egg would roll down and smash on your head.

  This was very funny when it happened to a marauding Jehovah’s Witness who came to save us one day from eternal damnation. It was even funny when it happened to Father Welenga. “What a gift this is,” he said. “Anything that falls from the sky is a blessing.” It was obvious, I’d told him, that he’d never been shit on by a seagull flying overhead. “That too would be a blessing,” he said. “Anything that keeps us humble is a blessing.”

  BUT I’VE BEEN SIDETRACKED. Running your story off the road and into the fields suggests you have a rich life that does not follow a straight and narrow line. I like to think that is what mine was. I like to think that I was blessed by things falling out of the sky. But by November the skies were dark. And the rains came.

  And when I woke up that day I realized I had lost two months. Maybe more. I remembered summer. I remembered the arrival of Em. I remembered how angry and hurt she had been. I remembered how surprised I was that she changed, that she trusted me, helped me, turned into someone much older and wiser than her age. And then September and October vanished without a trace. I decided not to frighten her by saying this. I trusted that everything was going okay, that we were doing all right. That we would get through this.

  And I hoped the days of September and October would return to me sometime, that they would fly down out of the sky or roll down from the roof and crash upon my head and seep into my memory.

  “I felt sick again,” Emily said. “I threw up.”

  “I’m sorry. I was sleeping.” I liked to be there to comfort her when she got sick. It was not that often, but it scared her. She reverted to being a child and needed comforting. If necessary, I would clean up the vomit. I didn’t mind. She was so helpful in other ways but couldn’t seem to handle the sight of her own puke.

  “Sometimes I feel like I am going to die when that happens. I can feel myself choking.”

  “I won’t let you die,” I said. “It just frightens you.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. But you’ll be okay.”

  The chickens were resting now, just sitting on the floor with their feathers puffed up, side by side. Pierre Trudeau and the one we called Margaret. There were two Margarets: Margaret Thatcher and Margaret Trudeau. This was the latter.

  “It’s getting dark so early.”

  “And the rains don’t help.” I wasn’t thinking about rain, but about snow. Soon the snows would come. “Do you think we have enough firewood?” I asked again. It was a question I repeated too often. I was thinking about Em and keeping her warm. I was used to a cold house, but I could not live like that this winter.

  “Don’t be silly,” she said.

  A small fragment of September suddenly came back to me. I walked to the room that had once served as a dining room and looked in. The walls were lined neatly, two tiers deep with immaculately piled firewood — floor to ceiling. And I remembered the two of us stacking the wood — yes, and Father Welenga had come to help. We stacked it lovingly and with care and now here it was. We were prepared for the snow and the cold.

  “You’re looking at the firewood again,” Em said, a hint of puzzlement in her face.

  “Old and crazy, like I said.”

  “Young and foolish is a better way to put it.”

  “Never was that and never will be,” I countered.

  I NOTICED A CRUCIFIX on the wall and beside it an African mask of some sort. That came back to me too. Father Welenga, our Cameroon priest and ally, had carved for himself a role as our protector. He said that he had ensured that both the Christian God and the fertility god of his people were together watching over us. But I think it was more likely that it was the spirit of Father Welenga himself — or Kovi, his first name that he sometimes insisted we use. It was Kovi who was protecting us.

  “They’ve stopped calling, did you notice?” Emily said.

  I wasn’t sure who she meant. I felt funny about what I did next because I must have been doing this often. I went fishing. I didn’t know who they were. But it didn’t sound good. “How long has it been?”

  “Over a week. Maybe they decided to leave us alone.”

  “I hope so.” I walked into the dining room and returned with a couple of sticks of wood, opened the lid on the cook stove and put them to the flames. Inside the firebox, the fire looked bright and comforting.

  “Do you think it’s because of Father Welenga? Do you think he convinced them to leave us alone?”

  “I suppose,” I said, still completely uncertain as to what we were talking about.

  “What should we do if they show up here again?”

  “Cross that bridge when we come to it.” I’d been crossing a great number of bridges lately and a lot of them were like that fateful bridge across the Margaree — in poor repair, unreliable and likely to have large gaping holes. “What do you want for Christmas?” I asked to change the subject.

  “Christmas? What made you think of that?”

  “I was thinking there will just be the two of us here at Christmas and I’d put up a tree that I’d cut from the field and there would be presents and maybe a roasted turkey or chicken dinner.”

  Emily looked at the sleeping chickens.

  “Oops. Sorry. Maybe you can cook a special vegetarian dinner — buy some more of that tofu or whatever you call it that tastes like mush.”

  “You still don’t like tofu?”

  “Oh, I’m coming around to it. What did you say it was made from? Soybeans?”

  “Soybean curds.”

  “Oh, hell. How could a person not like the taste of that? Don’t mind me. We’ll have a grand Christmas dinner.”

  “What if I’m not here at Christmas?”

  “What do you mean?” A sharp knife was driven into my chest. I had once adapted to living old and alone. But I did not believe I could go back to it. Emily had become for me a great companion, a friend and, in the most important way, she was family. Although I could never come out and explain it to her — or anyone — we were father and daughter but also mother and son. When I was weak, she was somehow strong. And added into that mix was the fact that I think I loved her but there was nothing sexual or physical about that. How was it that language failed at coming up with some other word or category that explained what this was between us? I refused to feel any shame in this but knew that it would be the most difficult thing to discuss with her. And I never would. To explain it to anyone else would probably lead to something worse. So it was a secret within my heart — a love that was based on a dependency and trust of each other and also something much deepe
r. But secrets of the heart are the most difficult ones to bear.

  Only twice that I know of did I accidentally call her Eva.

  There was no sunset that night and the rains persisted through the darkness and into the morning. I awoke with a clear mind but heard Emily throwing up in the bathroom and got up to wipe the vomit from her lips, give her cold water and to clean up the floor.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  “There’s nothing to be sorry for.”

  It was her morning to visit the doctor and to see Father Welenga as well. And of course there was the bookmobile.

  Emily drove all the time now unless she was feeling sick. Sealy Hines had seen us plenty of times while on patrol around Inverary. He knew she did not have a licence. But he also knew that it made more sense for her to be driving than me. It was comforting to know that men like Sealy and Reginald Sheehan found their way into the Royally Mounted Constabulary. Sealy waved as we passed him on the way into town.

  The bookmobile was parked in front of the Co-op store and, inside, Sheila Leblanc greeted us warmly. As usual, Sheila gave me a great hug and pressed her breasts up against me like we were lovers. She told me great lies for compliments and said that she should ditch the bastard she was living with and take up with me so she could finally have some real fun in life. This made Emily laugh.

  “My God, dear, you’ve taken all the hardware out of your face,” she said to Emily. Funny, because I had noticed this but it hadn’t sunken in. She had removed all the pierced “hardware” and it hadn’t really registered.

  “I miss it in a way, but I got to thinking what was it I wanted my baby to see first thing when she comes out? What would she see first, her mother’s face or some shiny metal jewellery?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t worry too much. The baby will love the mother who is there to hold him. By the way, here are the books from the La Leche League I told you about.” Then she turned to me. “John Alex, how much does yourself know about breast-feeding?”

  I think I might have blushed. Sheila had no trouble in making my face change a dozen shades of colour. “How much is there to know?” I asked. “I supposed my mother must’ve performed that service for yours truly and I doubt she read any books on the subject, given the fact that both my parents were illiterate.”