Each Man's Son

by Hugh Maclennan

  Alan tried to remember what his father was like. It was as hard as trying to remember how he had been born. His mother had told him about when he was born. She said she had wakened up one night and found him in bed beside her. He was very small, but the first thing he did was to reach up and rub her nose with his fist. He thought he could remember rubbing her nose but he was not sure. His memory of his father was clearer than that. A red-haired man of great size with a wonderful laugh had carried Alan on his shoulder, and that was the way Alan always thought of him. But this story about the boxing and the dancing must have happened before he was born, because he could not remember his mother and his father doing anything like that.

  He went upstairs ahead of her and climbed into his cot while she rubbed his chilled feet before pulling the covers over them. Then he lay back and looked up at her with round eyes as he thought about the picnic they would have on Friday.

  “Mira is where the river is–isn’t it, Mummy?”

  “Yes, and it’s one of the prettiest rivers in the world.”

  “Is it as big as Dr. Ainslie’s river?”

  “Dr. Ainslie has only a brook. The Mira is so big it belongs to the government.”

  “How can the government have a river? The government is in Ottawa.”

  “Don’t ask any more questions and close your eyes and we’ll talk about it some more when we get there.”

  He was asleep before she left the room.

  Fifteen

  ON THURSDAY EVENING Daniel Ainslie received a telephone call from an old friend in Louisburg, an Acadian doctor called Fernand Doucette, who wanted him to perform a major operation on the following day. The patient was a longshoreman who had fallen down the hold of a vessel and fractured his skull and Doucette believed a fragment of broken bone had penetrated the brain and damaged some of the tissues so badly they would have to be removed. The patient would probably die, he said, but it should be a lovely case. If the man lived it would be the first time a Nova Scotian surgeon had ever succeeded in such an operation.

  While Dr. Doucette talked, Ainslie studied his engagement pad and decided that the work in Broughton could wait on his return from Louisburg. He promised Doucette that he would arrive on the morning train, and after telephoning the hospital to say he would not be in until after the train returned from Louisburg in the early evening, he went into his surgery and pored over his medical books for three hours.

  He went to bed at midnight excited by the challenge of the operation, feeling almost superstitiously confident of his own powers even though he had never in his life performed an operation in which there were so many unknown quantities.

  It was just before seven the next morning when Ainslie reached the railway station in Broughton. The waiting train was a composite local of three box cars, four coal cars, a dozen empty flats, two wooden passenger coaches and a caboose. The coach Ainslie entered was empty and he sat down on one of the red plush seats at the back and opened his medical bag. After taking out a school edition of the Sixth Book of the Odyssey he settled himself to study it. More passengers entered the coach and found seats, but he paid no attention to anything but the lines before him, turning to the vocabulary in the back of the book whenever he required the meaning of a word.

  The train started with a violent jerk and then it pulled out through the streets, passed a colliery and dragged off into a stretch of open country. After finishing five lines Ainslie put the book down and stroked his eyelids. His continued consciousness of the coming operation made him too tense to concentrate on Homer, but he blamed himself for laziness and flogged himself on through another five lines until he came upon three words which were unfamiliar. He stopped and counted the lines left in the book and saw that he had still a hundred and eighty to go.

  “I’ll never finish it at this rate,” he said under his breath. He marked the completed line with a pencil, closed the book and looked about. Halfway down the car he saw Mollie MacNeil and a small boy, Mollie with a picnic basket on the seat beside her and the boy on the red plush opposite with his nose pressed against the windowpane. There were several other passengers in the seats between them, but nobody he knew, so he got up and walked along to their seats.

  “Where are you two going?” he said, and wondered why Mollie flushed when she looked up and saw him.

  “Alan and I are on our way to Mira.”

  “What are you going there for?”

  “It is just a picnic, Doctor.” She brushed back a wisp of hair and smiled at Alan, who had stopped pressing his face against the window and was sitting neatly on the plush-covered seat with his knees together and his feet dangling. “This is Dr. Ainslie speaking to us,” she said.

  Ainslie saw the boy look up with his eyes large and eager.

  “Mummy said the river in Mira is lots bigger than yours,” Alan said.

  “Did she, now? Well, so it is.”

  He saw the boy smiling at him with the happy composure of a child who thinks everyone is his friend. Nobody in all of Daniel Ainslie’s memory had ever looked at him with such an unquestioning welcome in his face. Ainslie smiled back, and the tight lines about his mouth relaxed.

  “You’re the boy I’ve heard so much about.” He moved the picnic basket and sat down on the seat beside Mollie. “So you know my brook?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Well, you mustn’t drink any of the water in it. Some chemicals are seeping into it from the mine and it’s not fit to drink. What are you going to do in Mira besides eat all the food in this basket?”

  “I’m going to find more sea shells.” Alan’s voice grew confidential. He took from his pocket the white shell he had picked up in the cove and handed it to the doctor. “Mummy says the noise in this one is the oldest noise in the world. Did you know that?”

  “I certainly didn’t.” Ainslie gave Mollie a startled glance.

  He saw a look of uncertainty pass across Alan’s face, and the flush return to Mollie’s cheeks.

  “Mummy says,” Alan told him gravely, “that the oldest things in the world are on the bottom of the sea, and she says the shell remembers the sounds they make.”

  Before Ainslie could answer the boy, Mollie interjected, “It was just something I told him for fun.”

  “And you weren’t so far wrong, at that,” he said. “But what gave you the idea?”

  “It is what I read.”

  Ainslie took out his pipe and stuffed it carefully, and although there was a sign at the end of the car forbidding smoking, he lit the pipe and began to blow smoke steadily before him. When the conductor opened the forward door of the coach Mollie looked up at the sign, and then she saw him begin to punch the tickets of other passengers, so she started to search the picnic basket for her purse. By the time the conductor reached them, Ainslie’s wallet was in his hand.

  “Three return tickets to Louisburg,” he said.

  Mollie leaned across him, holding out some coins. “We are only going to Mira,” she said. “We were too late to get our tickets in the station.”

  “Louisburg,” Ainslie repeated to the conductor, who recognized him and disregarded the pipe because he was the doctor.

  Mollie was too embarrassed to say anything more until the conductor had moved beyond them up the aisle and Ainslie had handed her two tickets, after slipping one into his wallet.

  “But Doctor, we wanted to go to Mira.”

  “There’s nothing in Mira but the river, and Alan can see that when we cross the bridge. In Louisburg there’s a lot he can learn.” Ainslie smiled cheerfully at the boy. “You’d like to see Louisburg, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then that settles it. Louisburg was once the strongest fortress in the world, and the Highland regiments had a part in capturing it. I have to operate on a man in Louisburg. It won’t take too long. After I’ve had my lunch, I’ll go down to the museum and meet you there about half past two. Do you know anything about Louisburg, Alan?”

  “Mr. Boudreau
in the third house from us comes from there.”

  “Yes, so he does. I doubt if he knows much about the old town, though. The old town was built by French kings more than two hundred years ago and the British drove the Frenchmen out. That’s why Cape Breton is British country now.” He turned to Mollie. “You won’t really mind, will you? You can have your picnic there just as well as on Mira beach.” As he got up, he took a two-dollar bill from his pocket and handed it to her. “You’ll need this to take you from the station to the old town. As nearly as I remember, the old town is a couple of miles away.”

  Again her face flushed. “Doctor, we will pay our own way, and for the train tickets, too.”

  He dropped the bill on the seat. “You’ll do nothing of the kind,” he said, and walked back to his own seat at the rear of the coach, humming to himself.

  He sat down, looked out the window and marveled. Suddenly the whole world was fresh, exciting and beautiful. A sense of well-being had risen in him like a rill of fresh water in the spring, and as he picked up his Homer, he knew past any reason or logic that today he was going to perform a great operation.

  He did perform a great operation. For three and a quarter hours his fingers seemed endowed with the power of thought, while Doucette beside him assisted flawlessly, administering only a touch of anesthetic at the beginning, stopping it when the instruments entered the cerebral areas where pain does not exist, resuming again at the finish when Ainslie replaced the broken fragments of bone, fitted them together and sealed them. If total concentration on a healing task is a form of holiness, the two doctors were saints during that period. For the first time in his life, Ainslie worked successfully below the cortex of the brain. Operating from intuition as much as from exact knowledge, he performed a work of such art that Doucette’s eyes glowed with excitement. When all the slow, meticulous work was finished, Ainslie knew that the man would almost certainly live, and might in time recover the full use of his limbs.

  When the operation was over and the patient in his own bed, the two doctors, both moist with sweat, washed their hands at the kitchen sink and went out to sit on the doorstep and breathe the fresh air. It was now past one in the afternoon.

  “Well, Dan!” Doucette said, and smiled.

  In spite of himself, Ainslie smiled back at him. Doucette was a little man with liquid eyes and a dark skin which he attributed to the root-stained water he had drunk as a child. Everyone else called it Indian blood, but not to his face, for Doucette was proud of his French ancestry. He and Ainslie had known each other for years and showed their mutual affection by interminable arguments and criticisms of one another’s character.

  They lit their pipes and rested. The house stood on the crest of a low hill just outside the modern village and they could look across a scattering of houses and the flat land beyond to the glint of sunshine on the ocean. Behind them in the kitchen the patient’s Acadian wife was on her knees before a crucifix, a rosary in her hands.

  “Listen to her!” said Doucette. “Thanking God when she ought to be thanking us!”

  “A fine Catholic you’ve turned out to be!”

  Doucette grinned. “When I saw through the sham I was finished with it–which is more than you can say.”

  “And when you get your first coronary you’ll call the priest just like the rest of them.”

  Doucette grinned. He put his hand on Ainslie’s knee and squeezed it affectionately. “Tell me something–when you’ve finished a good job, do you feel you deserve a new woman?”

  “Och!” said Ainslie.

  “So you do!” He let a few seconds elapse. Then he said, “How’s Margaret?”

  “She’s the same as ever.”

  “You don’t deserve her.” As Doucette got to his feet he gave off an aroma of ether and chloroform. He looked into the kitchen and made a face. “She’s still at it. If that husband of hers was worth anything, or if we lived in Montreal or Boston, this morning’s work would bring us two thousand dollars apiece.” Doucette’s liquid eyes smiled affectionately. “You’re a stuffed shirt, Dan, but oh, you’re a lovely surgeon!”

  “Rot!” said Ainslie. “Cushing does this sort of thing every day. So does Pyke in London.”

  “On kitchen tables? I’m serious. You can go home and tell that tribal god named Dougald MacKenzie that this operation was better than anything he ever dreamed of doing. Whenever I think of the ability you have, I get angry. You hold a full house and you play it like a man with two small pairs. If I had half what you have, I’d be in New York making fifty thousand a year.”

  Ainslie sat with an impassive face, smoking his pipe and staring across the sloping land to the sea. He was filled with a sensation of peaceful excitement, for today he had fulfilled himself and justified himself, and he knew it. After a time he uncrossed his legs and took his pipe from his mouth.

  “Old Dougald’s right about you, Doucette. He always did say you’d be a rogue if you had the chance, but he’s wrong about one thing–he doesn’t appreciate what you can do in diagnosis. It’s wasted here. I mean, it’s wasted for someone like you. Why don’t you go to New York yourself?”

  “Perhaps I will, Dan, perhaps I will.” After a moment he added with a note of amused pleasure in his voice, “So old Dougald thinks I’m a rogue, does he?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  The nurse Doucette had brought over from a neighboring parish came to the door to say she had cleaned and packed Ainslie’s instruments. He rose and stretched, knocked out his pipe and returned to look at the patient once more. The man lay as though dead, but Ainslie felt sure he would not die for many years to come. Not of that particular wound, at any rate. The two doctors gave the nurse her final instructions, accepted the tearful gratitude of the man’s wife, and for the first time caught a glimpse of the rest of the family. A grandmother and eleven children of graduated sizes, beginning with a two-year-old and ending with a lank girl of seventeen, were crowding through the kitchen door to stare at them as though the two doctors were visitors sent by the saints. Ainslie gave them a reassuring smile and followed Doucette out to the carriage. Again Doucette rubbed his hands and said what a lovely case it had been.

  “What do you think, Dan–if you’d cut away more tissue, would he have lived?”

  “How would I know?”

  “You needn’t pretend to me you didn’t know what you were doing.”

  “It was mostly luck and guesswork. Medically speaking, this case has no significance.”

  “Luck and guesswork–what else is medicine anyway?” Doucette’s large eyes became speculative. “All the same, it doesn’t have to be that. The Viennese have the right idea. I’m told there are men in Vienna who experiment every day on those Balkan peasants who come to their clinics. We ought to do the same here.” He grinned, and watched Ainslie’s face as he added, “I couldn’t do it, but you could. All these Scotchmen trust you.”

  Ainslie grunted and refused to rise to the bait. The horse had descended the hill and entered the village. Ainslie looked at the cluster of mean brown houses that was modern Louisburg and then at the chutes for dumping coal from the trains into the ships that carried it around Cape Breton, through the Gulf of St. Lawrence and up the river to Quebec and Montreal. From this raw modern village a winding grass-covered track went off into an empty nowhere at the harbor mouth where the famous and historic Louisburg once had stood.

  “Your ancestors might just as well have stayed home,” Ainslie said, “for all the good they’ve done themselves here.”

  The carriage creaked over the uneven road and Ainslie saw Doucette’s house come into sight around the slope of a hill.

  “If you don’t mind, Fern,” he said suddenly, “you can leave me here. I’m going to take a walk over to the old town and get some of the knots inside me untied.”

  Doucette reined in the horse and turned to look at Ainslie. “You’re not serious?”

  “Yes, of course I am. I’ve ordered a carriage to pick
me up in time for the afternoon train.”

  “But Monique’s expecting you for lunch! She’s even made the children put on their Sunday clothes.”

  Ainslie shifted uncomfortably. “I can’t eat so soon after an operation like that.”

  “Well, then, come in and have a drink.”

  “You know I don’t drink.”

  Doucette looked at his stubborn profile. “You’re fifty miles from home, Dan, and nobody around here is going to stick out his nose to smell your breath.” He put his hand on Ainslie’s knee and grinned like a brown monkey. “Have you ever been drunk in your life?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  Ainslie laughed shortly and stared down the empty land towards the sea. “I’d better be on my way.”

  “You mean you’re really going down there?”

  “I’ve always wanted time to study the place.”

  “Good God, what for? Graves of dead nuns are down there. Sometimes a mad dog howls around them. He’s probably after their bones.”

  “Probably.” With a quick movement Ainslie picked up his bag and put one foot on the step of the carriage. “I’m sorry I don’t feel up to going home with you this time, Fern. You know how much I always count on seeing you whenever I come down here. But another time…”

  Doucette’s eyebrows rose. “What have you been doing that makes you so ashamed of yourself?”

  “Och!” Ainslie said in reply, cursing his friend inwardly for his lack of reserve.

  “I know. You Scotchmen are all crazy and the whole lot of you have corrupt consciences. A crazy Highlander nearly broke down my door the other night hammering to get in. It was a long way past midnight and when I let him in do you know what he said?”