Each Man's Son

by Hugh Maclennan

  “Probably not.”

  She went on up the path. She heard music and the stir of many feet on the polished floor of the big front parlor, and suddenly she was happy again. The door of her mother’s house opened and her youngest sister was there to welcome her with a smile. Margaret forced herself not to look back at her husband, though she knew the carriage had not moved.

  Four

  WHEN THE DOOR CLOSED, Ainslie felt a smart of tears behind his eyes and the loneliness came down on him. He looked at the rambling house and he let himself feel angry about it because it was a thing he could consider objectively. Margaret’s father, Noah Eldridge, had built the house and while he lived Ainslie had liked him, though he had never greatly respected the man. But Mrs. Eldridge, Margaret’s mother, Ainslie disliked frankly and openly. She lived there like a queen bee, surrounded by a large and adoring family who worshiped her. To him, she had always seemed semialien, a selfish, superficial woman with no standards of education whatever. In his mind he always called her a Yankee, without any thought for the political significance of the word, because she stood for a state of mind opposed to everything his own emotions honored. Things came easily to people like the Eldridges and they were always ready to take the easy way out of a situation. Ainslie clucked at the mare and turned her about in the narrow street, then he leaned back and let the animal find her own way to the hospital.

  The sadness, the sense of irreparable loss, persisted in him. As he sniffed the air he remembered an evening like this when he had been a boy of nineteen, earning money before the mast during his summer vacation from college. He had put out from North Sydney on the last of old Eldridge’s barks and the wind had been so right they had been able to set stuns’ls before clearing Cranberry Head. The memory of that night had lasted with him all these years. The westerly wind had flattened the sea so that the keel was as firm as a dock, but the wind had been strong and held the sails as hard as iron. All that night at sea he had smelled forests, for the wind that blew them to Newfoundland had previously traversed the length of Nova Scotia and come to them laden with the pungent scent of balsam. Those had been good days. The past had still been honorable, unblighted by the mines. The whole world had seemed too small to hold his future.

  Now that future was the present, and what had it brought? Only an end to seeing ahead. Not even posterity. Just the moment of hard work. The memory of work endlessly hard. The memory of striving, straining, heaving the huge rock up the hill with the feeling that if he relaxed for a moment it would become the rock of Sisyphus and roar down to the valley bottom again. Was defiance all that remained?

  The mare turned into Wellington Street and Ainslie’s body shifted position. His loneliness became a hungry desire. If only Margaret had smiled at him he would have felt differently, but she smiled at others so much more easily than she did for him. He still thought she was the most beautiful woman he had ever met, except for her eyes. There was no smoke in her eyes, no mystery, nor any sense of it; instead there was a fearless clarity that could look steadily at anything short of a Gaelic ghost. Her white body was like a hill of snow under the moon. It was tantalizingly lovely, it was unbelievably beautiful, yet he had never seemed able to reach its inner warmth or to feel that he had come home to her. Her body lived in its own right, unconscious, never seeming a part of that mind of hers which always appeared to be observing him coolly, thoughtfully, with common sense always trying to improve him, never selfish, never demanding. And yet he knew she was lonely, too, and that he had made her so.

  Into his thoughts came the face of Mollie MacNeil, the face of his own people. They were all lost here in the mines. They were inextricably lost in their own sea-deep feelings and crazy dreams. And Margaret had said he was unkind to the girl!

  As the mare took her time pulling the carriage along the main street closer to MacDonald’s Corner, the crowds thickened on the sidewalk, but Ainslie looked straight ahead and saw no one. The first fights had not yet begun, but they took part farther up the street in the vicinity of the saloons. The shops were now closed, the coal carts and slovens were off the streets, the tram had already traversed the length of the town and gone on its way, and for the moment Ainslie’s was the only carriage in sight.

  The Presbyterian minister stood under a lamppost with one hand scratching the small of his back and the other hooked by a thumb to his waistcoat pocket. He was brooding on the sermon he was going to preach tomorrow morning. He wondered if he should stop the doctor and ask him, as one scholar to another, if he thought it was going too far to warn the congregation against taking the promises of the New Testament too literally. For if God was love, what was to be done about Jehovah? But Ainslie passed the Reverend MacAlistair without turning his head.

  Under the light of the next post was another man who wanted to speak to the doctor. He looked like a chubby walrus dressed in a bowler hat and a high white collar. Jimmie MacGillivray, the saloonkeeper, had a stomach-ache. He wanted to ask the doctor about an idea which had been scaring the wits out of him. Could a stomach-ache be sent as a punishment for sin? If it could be–and the Reverend MacAlistair said that was so–then there was no hope for the relief of Jimmie MacGillivray. For what more could a man do to keep the Sabbath holy than he was doing now? He made his daughters keep it, too. They cooked all the food for Sunday on the day before, put it on plates and the plates on the tables, and he even saw to it that they filled all the glasses in the house with water on Saturday night, so that not a tap was turned in the MacGillivray house on the Sabbath. But the stomach-ache was growing worse week by week, and the Reverend MacAlistair said that his sins would find him out. What more could he do? If only the doctor would look his way…but the doctor passed, still staring at the rump of his mare, and Jimmie turned away with a small moan.

  At the next corner a crowd was gathering and as the fringes of it spilled over the curb Ainslie had to guide the mare to the far side of the street to avoid running down some of the men. This maneuver interrupted his thoughts and he looked for the cause of the disturbance. He could hear the broad voice of Mr. Magistrate MacKeegan…“‘And by Chesus,’ I said to her, Big Annie McPhee, six foot two with the beam of a potato schooner moreoffer, ‘you whould come into my court and swear that a man the size of the prissoner wass able to rape the likes of you! By Chesus,’ I said to her, ‘you whill get down on the floor and show me, or you whill get the hell owt of here and I whill ha? you for perjury moreoffer.’ And that…” MacKeegan’s voice tailed off as Ainslie passed…“iss a hell of a lot more serious charge in my court than rapes iss, because perjury iss perssonal.”

  “Dear God,” Ainslie muttered to himself. Now the crowds were so thick they spilled out into the street and he had to urge the mare on. Most of the men were miners who spent their days underground in the dark. He could tell at a glance how many years any one of these proud clansmen had spent in the pits. The young ones were defiant, cocky in the way they walked, and they pulled their rough caps down over their right ears like tam-o’-shanters. They were the ones who could be heard issuing a general challenge to a fight. The middle-aged ones were quieter, they moved slowly and talked little, seeming older than their age, and most of them were beginning to be plagued with sciatica and what they called the rheumatics. If a man had been in the pits beyond his fifty-fifth year, particularly in those mines with narrow seams, Ainslie’s eye could measure fairly accurately how many more working years that man had before him. The young ones swaggered and the middle-aged ones could feel the break coming in their leg pains and their unspoken fears, but ultimately the mines would break them all. Those who survived accidents would become like the two white-haired men Ainslie passed near the corner, sitting side by side on the curb with sticks for support between their knees, their faces ennobled by the tremendous fact of survival, grave and white under the flickering arc light.

  As the mare threaded her way through MacDonald’s Corner, the T-shaped area of macadam which was the only social center most
of the miners had ever known, the place where Archie MacNeil had got his start, several of the men touched their caps to the doctor as he passed, and he answered them with nods or an occasional word. The mare turned right and began to pull up the hill that led to the hospital, pushing with her hind legs so that her rump muscles bulged and glistened with sleek high lights whenever a lamppost was passed. Halfway up the hill they met the Salvation Army band marching down, instruments glinting brassily in the lights, only the bass drum booming to keep the men in step, and twelve women in black bonnets with red ribbons clapping their hands as they followed. Ainslie scarcely noticed them, for the Army always established itself in the middle of MacDonald’s Corner on Saturday nights, timing its first hymns to coincide with the moment the first drunks staggered up from the rum shops in the lower part of the street.

  The mare reached the top of the hill where the hospital stood like a lighthouse over the whole town. Ainslie tethered the horse in the yard behind the building, picked up his bag and walked briskly through the yard and around the front to the steps. When he opened the door and smelled the familiar odors of the building he felt a sensation of pleasure that began to relax the tense muscles of his back. Here was his own world where his skill had made him a master. He saw Miss MacKay rustling starchily down the corridor to meet him. His feeling of certainty grew and he began to smile.

  Five

  NIGHT FELL over the island and the moonlight picked out its shape like the claws of a lobster from the surrounding dark of the sea. The claws were ringed around by a faint line of white as groundswells crumbled against the shores, washed luminously and faded out. Inland the shadows turned with slow gravity in the hills as the moon went up the sky. The rivers and the windows of lonely farmhouses gleamed as the rays of light struck them. A soft breeze carried balsam-laden air into the packed area of Broughton, where the miners’ rows looked desolate and the bankheads of the collieries loomed like monuments in a gigantic cemetery.

  The moonlight came into the window of Alan MacNeil’s bedroom, crept across the floor and reached his face. He woke to sounds on the other side of the common wall and knew that the father of the noisy family had come home. He heard Red Willie MacIsaac shouting and his wife telling him to be quiet, but Red Willie went on shouting and Alan could hear his words. He was saying he could whip any man in the collieries, he could whip any man in the world for all of that, and Alan smiled as he thought how small Red Willie would talk if he ever came face to face with his father.

  He wondered where his father was and when he would come home. Some day his father would arrive and the people would see how strong he was. Perhaps he would even pick up an iron bar as Red Willie had once done and bend it so everybody could see. Alan heard the tearing noise of a tramcar wheel and wondered if it was the one bringing his mother home, but as the car passed he knew it was moving in the opposite direction. Then he heard a creak on the stairs and a moment later his door opened and he could see Mrs. MacDonald with the moonlight on her face.

  “So here you are, all snug in bed! Ha? you not been asleep yet at all?”

  “Oh, yes, Mrs. MacDonald, I just woke up for a minute.”

  “That iss fine. Now then, go back to sleep and tomorrow I whill tell your mother what a good boy you ha? been.”

  Her hand touched his forehead and he lay thinking how nice Mrs. MacDonald was. He knew it was because of Mrs. MacDonald that his mother could go out on Saturday nights and have a little pleasure and then tell him about it on Sunday mornings. The stairs creaked again as Mrs. MacDonald went away.

  He lay awake listening, wondering what was happening on the other side of the wall where the bumps and shuffles of the MacIsaacs were still audible. After a time he reached under his pillow for the sea shell and held it against his ear. The noise was still there, singing in his ear as the shell remembered it, the oldest noise in the world. He wondered how long it would be before he grew up and had great muscles like the men said his father had, and he wondered what it would be like when he was a man. His mother wanted him to be the same as Dr. Ainslie, who worked sometimes all night. Alan had seen him coming home in his carriage in midmorning, asleep with the reins around his neck, tired out from curing people in the hospital. As Alan thought about him, the doctor seemed to be hardly a man at all. He was The Doctor, far above everyone else he knew.

  Six

  NO SUCH THOUGHT was in Ainslie’s mind when the night superintendent turned and went back along the corridor with him, giving a meticulous report along the way. “I’m afraid your OB case will have to wait,” she said. “A horrid accident has just been brought in and there’s no other surgeon in the hospital. I telephoned Dr. Grant and Mrs. Grant said he’d come over at once.”

  Ainslie nodded. Angus Grant was his usual anesthetist. He kept on walking through the corridor with the nurse rustling beside him.

  “It may not need operating.”

  “I’m afraid it will, Doctor.”

  “What’s the damage?”

  “It’s a young Newfoundlander with his hands horribly crushed. I’ve ordered the OR prepared. I put him in that empty room next to the ward.”

  “Has he lost much blood?”

  “A good deal, I’m afraid. They had tied some filthy rags around his wrists. Dr. Weir took them off and applied tourniquets. He hasn’t lost consciousness.”

  “What about Mrs. Morton? Who’s looking after her?”

  “Dr. Weir’s with her now. He says it may be a very long labor.”

  “Yes, I know. Is Weir the only houseman on duty tonight?”

  “Yes, he is at the moment.”

  “All right. Let’s take a look at this case. You may have to rouse out another houseman later.”

  When they reached the room next to the ward Ainslie saw a young, pain-drawn face staring up at him from white sheets. The boy’s body was rigid from fright and dark stains were visible on the fresh bandages covering his wrists and hands. While the nurse stood at the foot of the bed, Ainslie drew up a chair, sat down and put his hand on the boy’s forehead. It was covered with sweat and too cold for his liking.

  Suddenly the doctor smiled and the pug-nosed face watched him. “Tell me something–how old are you?” Ainslie said.

  “Twenty, zurr.”

  “And not long out of Newfoundland, eh?”

  “No, zurr.”

  As Ainslie held the frightened eyes, all the strain faded from his own face. By an effort beyond the reach of words he tried to tell the boy that his fear was being absorbed and conquered. He said nothing for some minutes. Then, in a tone of voice that betrayed none of the considerations coursing through his mind, he said, “You’ve had a bit of bad luck, haven’t you?”

  “It’s warse than bad luck, zurr.”

  “How do you know? You’re not the doctor.” He was still smiling and the boy made an effort to smile back. “Have you ever been in a hospital before?”

  “No, zurr.”

  “Well, this is a place where people are made right again. We’re going to take good care of you. You’re in the best and safest place in the world.”

  The boy searched his face and Ainslie smiled back at him calmly. Then he rose and set quietly to work, checking the pulse, listening to the heart, looking at the chart of the blood pressure. He motioned to the nurse and she laid her hand on the boy’s forehead, turning his head away while Ainslie removed the bandages from one of the hands. Weir had done a good job of packing them. The doctor pressed several places gently while he watched the boy’s face for signs of pain, but the expression on the pug-nosed face did not alter and Ainslie replaced the outer bandages. When he examined the other hand the boy winced sharply.

  “Good!” Ainslie said, and replaced this bandage, too.

  After he had examined the boy’s entire body and found only a livid, spreading bruise on the left side, with no internal injuries which could be detected, he replaced the blankets and smiled again.

  “I don’t know what happened to you, but it s
eems as hard as ever to kill a Newfoundlander.”

  The boy gave a twisted grin.

  “I’m going to put you to sleep for a little while and you’re not to be afraid. The stu? you have to breath will smell bad for a minute or two, but it won’t smell half as bad as a beach after the catch is in and the fish have been gutted.”

  “There be beaches in Labrador,” the boy said, speaking slowly through the narcotics that had been given him, “thet do stink ’orrible when the sun gits to ’em.”

  “Indeed they do. I’ve smelled some of them myself. Now you’re going to sleep and when you wake up safe and sound you won’t be feeling a thing.”

  The boy’s eyes blurred with sudden tears and his Adam’s apple moved up and down as he swallowed. Ainslie stood calmly smiling at him, a lock of dark hair loose over his forehead, and so he stayed until he sensed that he had reached through the boy’s fear and found his courage.

  Outside in the corridor he gave the nurse instructions in a quick, precise undertone and then hurried away to mount the stairs two at a time. He found Angus Grant waiting for him in the changing room, and as he made himself ready he answered the big, red-haired anesthetist’s questions about the case.

  “What I don’t understand,” Ainslie added after explaining the condition of the two hands, “is how such an accident could have happened. The pits and machine shops closed hours ago. It’s damned odd.”

  “Well,” said Grant, “I hope it won’t take long. The Strand came today and I was halfway through the new Sherlock Holmes.”

  He laughed as Ainslie grunted his disapproval of such reading habits. The two men went to the operating room side by side, and by the time they reached it Ainslie’s concentration was so intense he did not look at the patient on the table or bother to nod to the nurse and junior houseman in attendance. He stayed out of the Newfoundlander’s sight until Grant set to work, and then he checked his instruments, articulated his fingers several times, and stood as though frozen until Grant gave him the signal. If he hesitated more than a fractured second in making his decisions while he worked, no one who watched was aware of it.