Each Man's Son

by Hugh Maclennan

  But when they reached the corner he suddenly pulled in the mare and called out, “Are you going into town?”

  Mollie hesitated and Margaret saw her glance at the small, wiry figure of Camire. “Yes, I am going into town, Doctor.”

  “Then get in.” Ainslie’s hands were impatient on the reins. “Be quick about it. I’m on my way to the hospital.”

  Margaret moved nearer her husband, doubtful about Camire but seeing no sign from the Frenchman that he expected Mollie to remain with him.

  “Come along, my dear,” Margaret said. “We’d love to have you.”

  Still Mollie hesitated. “I would be in the way.”

  “If there wasn’t room I wouldn’t have stopped,” Ainslie said.

  If he had noticed Camire’s presence, he gave no sign, and the authority in his voice decided Mollie. She climbed into the carriage and sat as far on the outside as she could, giving only one more quick glance in Camire’s direction. The Frenchman’s back was still turned. Ainslie flicked the reins and sent the mare around the corner on her trot into town. They passed the long wire fence enclosing the company’s property, came to a short stretch of vacant land tilting eastward towards the cliffs and then passed the stark and ragged outlines of solitary wind-torn pines and thin cattle bending to the sparse grass.

  Margaret said, “How is Alan? I haven’t seen him lately.”

  Mollie glanced at the doctor’s profile before answering. “Thank you, Mrs. Ainslie, but Alan is fine. We were on the shore all this afternoon.”

  “That must have been lovely.”

  “It was indeed.”

  “Don’t you worry when you leave him alone at night?”

  “It is not often, and Mrs. MacDonald has promised to drop in to see him, moreover. Alan never gets into trouble like other boys.”

  Margaret’s manner showed the warmth of her interest. She knew all the miners’ families and the private stories of most of them, for they all loved her and often the men hung about in the woods near the house waiting for the doctor to leave; when he did they promptly presented themselves at the door of the surgery to get their quotas of medicine from the Doctor’s Missus. They liked the way she smiled when she talked to them about their families.

  Ainslie, who had seemed lost in his own thoughts, broke into the conversation. “I suppose he’ll soon be going to school?”

  “Alan has been to school for two years now,” Mollie answered. “He just finished his second grade.”

  Ainslie said, “Och! The school here is a disgrace.”

  “Indeed, Doctor, I and Archie have often worried over the school.”

  “Archie? I can imagine you worrying, but I can’t see Archie fashing himself over his son’s schooling.” Ainslie let out the short laugh which Margaret had come to loathe, for it indicated anger as well as contempt. She understood it, but she was sure nobody else did. He wanted them all to be wonderful and gallant like the Highlanders of legend, and he was angry when they were not.

  “Archie never got beyond second grade himself, I shouldn’t think,” he added.

  “Oh, no, Doctor. Archie passed the seventh grade.” She went on hastily. “I know he has been gone a long time, but he has not been lucky in the States, and he will come home when he can.”

  “Four years is pretty hard on you and the boy.”

  “Oh, but Doctor, it is harder on Archie himself. You should have seen him with Alan before he went away. He was so proud.”

  Ainslie said, “Och!” again, and then added, “So proud he became a prize fighter and hasn’t come back once since he went away. I suppose it looked easier to him than the mines.”

  The carriage swayed down the rutted road towards town, a dog came out of some scrub to snap at the hocks of the mare and Ainslie flicked it off with his whip. Margaret decided to draw Mollie’s attention from her husband’s words by small talk.

  “I noticed that our friend Angus the Barraman started in early tonight.” “Oh, Mrs. Ainslie, isn’t it a shame how Angus drinks these days?” “When Angus is sober, no man could be nicer.” “But sometimes he gets the black feelings, and then it is only a drop and he is in liquor over his eyes.” “Well, Mollie…” Margaret’s musical laugh rang out. “You know what the Reverend MacAlistair says–first it’s a thimbleful, then it’s a glassful, then it’s a bucketful and then it’s too late!” “The night Red Willie MacIsaac beat Mick Casey he drank a bucket in MacGillivray’s saloon.” “Nonsense, Mollie, no one could drink a bucket of whiskey at one time and live. Red Willie’s your neighbor, isn’t he?”

  The last color had drained out of the sky and the moon was growing bright. As they passed a cluster of miners walking together towards the town the men all tugged their caps and said good night to the Doctor and the Doctor’s Missus.

  Suddenly Ainslie’s voice snapped out a question. “Who’s that dark little fellow who was standing on the corner with you?”

  “Do you mean Mr. Camire, Doctor?”

  “Camire? What sort of a name is that?”

  “He is a Frenchman from France.”

  “What’s he do here?”

  “He is now a timekeeper at Number Four.”

  “Dan,” Margaret interrupted. “I told you about that young man. He was on the Italian ship that was wrecked and when the rest of the crew was taken back to Italy, he stayed here. Mother knows him. He was working in a store on Wellington Street for a time and she heard he could play the guitar and sing beautifully. She says he lived in Venice once.”

  “Oh, no,” Mollie said. “Mr. Camire is a Frenchman even if he was on board an Italian ship. But he sings lovely songs.”

  They were on the outskirts of the town now and suddenly the glow of many street lights in the distance drowned the soft shadows of the twilight. Throughout every colliery surrounding Broughton, as well as in the heart of the town itself, the lights came on at the same moment, night after night.

  “This Camire,” Ainslie said. “He was in jail, wasn’t he?”

  Mollie’s answer was quick. “For ten days he was in jail, Doctor, but it was a mistake.”

  “That’s what people generally go to jail for, isn’t it?”

  “But it was the mistake of the magistrate.”

  Ainslie indicated his disbelief.

  “But Doctor, it truly was not Mr. Camire’s fault this time.” Her eagerness to explain turned into a sudden bubble of laughter. “We all laughed at him when we heard. Poor Mr. Camire! But for him it was not funny at all. You see, he had no English then, and there he was in court and the rest of them were all so big and he was so small trying to stand up for himself without knowing a thing about what was going on. There was the magistrate with his red beard looking like Jehovah in the church window, and how could Mr. Camire know that behind the beard there was nothing at all but old MacKeegan?”

  Ainslie said, “MacKeegan’s a jackass, but he doesn’t send a man to jail without cause.”

  “Let Mollie tell the story,” Margaret interrupted. “You weren’t there, so how do you know what happened?”

  Mollie set out to explain and forgot her shyness in the telling. “It was one of those days, Doctor, when MacKeegan’s courtroom was full to the doors, for it was the Monday after the biggest fight of all in MacDonald’s Corner. Big Alec McCoubrie looks very fine in his brass buttons, and I know it is true he is strong enough to burst his uniform if he swells out his chest, but he can’t see anything in the dark, Doctor, and he is not too smart in the daylight, either. Imagine Big Alec arresting Mr. Camire thinking he was Holy John MacEachern–but that is what he did, and on Monday morning there was Mr. Camire in court with the rest of them.”

  Mollie began to imitate the magistrate’s accent as she continued to explain and Margaret smiled, hoping the story would not irritate her husband.

  “‘What are you up to?’” Mollie went on, her gentle voice suddenly as hoarse and broad as MacKeegan’s. “‘Wass it fightin’ or wass it just tomcattin’ around?’ And of course,”
she continued in her natural voice, “not being able to understand the English, what could Mr. Camire do but stand there and shake his head? ‘Now then, you,’ said MacKeegan, ‘you answer me–are you ghuilty or are you not ghuilty?’ And Mr. Camire just stood there, not being able to understand. ‘So the prissoner cannot speak English! Can you speak Gaelic?’ And still Mr. Camire could not understand. ‘The prissoner cannot speak Gaelic. Can you speak French?’ And how could Mr. Camire know what old MacKeegan meant when he said it just like that? After MacKeegan said ‘Can you speak Gherman,’ that was all the languages he had ever heard of, so then he got mad and he grabbed his beard with both hands the way he does and he shouted out loud, ‘I ha? talked to this little bugger in four different languages and he hass not answered me in one. I say he iss as ghuilty as hell!’”

  Margaret laughed in the hope of forestalling a comment from her husband, but the comment came.

  “This town,” Ainslie said flatly, “has far too many liars in it.”

  Mollie stiffened and her eagerness turned to a sudden dignity. “What I was telling was true, Doctor, and the language included. If you do not believe me you can ask Mr. Sutherland, the lawyer.”

  Ainslie let out a sigh of exasperation. “I wasn’t calling you a liar. I was merely trying to suggest that you shouldn’t believe everything you hear–whether you hear it from Mr. Sutherland or anybody else.”

  “I’m sorry, Doctor.” She was still aloof in her dignity.

  “There’s nothing for you to be sorry for. I’m sorry for the–the general childishness of this whole place.”

  Margaret sighed inwardly. It was too frustrating to a mind like his to be constantly irritated by people he wanted to love and admire. She turned to Mollie. “Tell me some more about Alan. He’s growing so fast. What would you like him to be when he grows up?”

  They were well into the town now and the mare was taking the left turn towards the bridge over the inner harbor of Broughton.

  “I would like for Alan to grow up to be a doctor, but it is not a thing I expect, Mrs. Ainslie. It would be bad for us to have too high ideas. Maybe Alan could be a minister. He’s different, I know he is. And if his father is successful, Alan will have a fine education.”

  Mollie’s answer seemed almost unbearably poignant to Margaret, for she knew that the boy was exceptional and she also knew that the odds were against any future for him but a life in the mines. Mollie herself came of worthy people; her father had been an elder in the church and it was said in the district that after her marriage he had never spoken to her again. When people began to talk about Archie as a fighter, she remembered Dr. Dougald saying that in spite of his family Archie wasn’t too bad a boy. He had certainly been handsome and he had moved with the sure, reckless grace of a wild animal, but he had been restless and moody, and when he began to drink his eyes had flamed out of his face with the desperate look that was only too familiar in those of the young men who came to realize they had been trapped by the mines.

  “You’re living in a fool’s paradise,” she heard Dan saying, “if you think a man like Archie MacNeil is going to be any help towards that boy’s bettering of himself.”

  Mollie stiffened as if he had struck her. “Archie is my husband, Doctor, and I am proud of him.”

  “Have you ever seen a professional boxing match?”

  “Indeed I have not.”

  “Well, it’s a brutal spectacle. Some people call it sport. If so, it’s the only sport I know in which the objective is the injury of another man.”

  Mollie was trembling and Margaret said, “Dan, I don’t think this is any of our business.” To the girl she said, “The doctor didn’t mean to be unkind.”

  “I know, Mrs. Ainslie. It is terrible, the life Archie is leading. They say he is getting too old to fight now, but he is only twenty-eight. Whenever he has a fight I feel so bad in here–” she pressed her hand against her stomach–“I can hardly eat my supper. I never thought he would fight for money, Mrs. Ainslie, but he was such a beautiful boxer they led him into it. And when he went away I thought, Well at least he will make money for Alan’s education. But he has not even made money for anything.”

  The mare clopped over a bridge spanning a tongue-shaped inlet from the harbor. Fishing boats and potato schooners were moored at jetties farther out and a cluster of dories lay nearer the bridge. Three young men were leaning on the railing of the bridge engaged in a spitting contest with the closest dory as a target. “We should be haffing Big Alec McCoubrie here,” Margaret heard one of them say in a melancholy lilt. She smelled the old familiar odor of drying fish and remembered her childhood when the harbor was more important than it was now, when Broughton was a small town with only a few colleries nosing their way into a back area, when all the land on the left-hand side of the bridge had been a field belonging to her father. In those days the bridge was on the edge of the town. Now the field had disappeared and the core of the business section had swallowed it. The mare entered a narrow main street with lighted store fronts close on either side, lampposts crooked and raw holding up incandescent lights which made the pavement look blue and naked, and narrow sidewalks between the stores and the street swarming with aimless people, as always on Saturday night. Among the many carriages on the street were a few motorcars.

  Ainslie reined up before the motion picture theater where, so Margaret had heard, an audience could watch slapstick comedies, serials about cowboys, gypsies, cops and bathing beauties, and morality plays about nice young Americans who went hellward by way of drink and cards.

  “I suppose this is what you came into town for?” he said.

  “It is a change, Doctor, and it only costs ten cents.”

  When Mollie stepped from the carriage she looked at them both, and Margaret’s eyes moved quickly from the girl’s face to her husband’s. She saw the strong, tense lines about his mouth relax and then tighten again, and she knew that he felt infinitely sorry for this girl.

  Mollie looked up at him with the helpless dignity of a gentle person who has lost her way. “Doctor,” she said, “I would like you to understand something because you have always been kind to us. I know many things here are bad for Alan, but I will not be talking to him against his father. It is not good for Archie to be away, but it would be worse for a boy not to be proud of his father.”

  Suddenly Margaret had the queer feeling that comes of having thought one was with two strangers, only to find out obliquely that they are friends. Her husband and this girl understood each other in a way she herself would never be able to understand either of them, because Daniel had been born in the same kind of poverty as Mollie had known. Margaret had not only never been poor, she was not even Scottish. Her family had been Loyalists with ancestors who had been prominent in Massachusetts before the Revolution. Her father had been born on the main peninsula of Nova Scotia, and though she had grown up in Broughton, Margaret had never been able to think of the Highlanders here as anything but strange.

  But when Ainslie answered Mollie, Margaret lost her feeling of queerness. If he understood this girl–if he understood any woman who ever lived–he certainly knew how to disguise his knowledge.

  “In my opinion there are some men who don’t deserve to have sons at all,” he said. “The fact of the matter is that Alan is your total responsibility. His future is up to you, and telling him fairy tales about what a fine man his father is won’t help him in the least.”

  Margaret saw Mollie looking across her at her husband and she realized that the girl was not hurt. She seemed to understand that his words were not hostile. These Gaelic people, Margaret thought, had lived close together in small places for so long they could somehow communicate with each other in a way no one else could fathom. To Margaret, words meant exactly what they said. To her husband, words always meant either more or much less than they did to her.

  “I have not told Alan his father fights for money,” Mollie went on, still looking at Ainslie with the sad dignity in her
large, dark eyes. “The men are always telling him how strong his father is, but that his father fights for money Alan does not know. And I hope he never will.”

  Margaret put her hand on her husband’s knee and leaned away from him. “We’ll say good night now, Mollie,” she said, and then she smiled at the girl.

  Mollie turned away and Ainslie started the mare up the street. Behind them a tram clanged its bell and Margaret glanced over her shoulder in time to see Camire join Mollie in front of the picture house. So they had been together after all! Why couldn’t she have said so, instead of pretending to be alone?

  The sound of the mare’s hoofs echoed back from the store fronts as she clopped up Wellington Street. The mare’s mouth felt Ainslie’s tension as he jerked the left-hand rein and she tossed her head in protest before obeying and taking the turn into the street where Margaret’s mother lived.

  “Dan,” she said. “It’s doing you no good staying here year after year. Sometimes I think the only reason why you stay is because you’re afraid to leave.”

  Ainslie’s jaw hardened, but he made no reply until he had reined in the mare before the white house where Margaret’s mother lived with her three daughters who were still un-married. “They are probably all waiting for you,” he said. His voice was cool, distant and courteous, and it frightened her, for she knew that the words she had said would continue to corrode deeply into his mind.

  She put her hand on his knee again. “It’s stupid for us to quarrel.”

  “Were we quarreling? I hadn’t thought so.”

  “We can’t go on forever like this. When there are only the two of us together it’s dreadful if we can’t understand each other.”

  He sat silently, holding the reins in his long fingers. Margaret knew she had hurt him and he was locking himself away in his pride.

  “Please don’t work too hard tonight,” she said.

  “That’s not a matter of choice.” He gave a slight shrug. “What is there to do but work?”

  “Dan, do you know how cruel it is for you to say that to me?” But there was no expression of hurt on her face; experience had taught her to transform the frustration she felt to a look of cool serenity. She stepped from the carriage and was about to go up the path to the house when she turned and spoke again. “I won’t see you until church tomorrow?”