Each Man's Son

by Hugh Maclennan

  “Where did you hear about MacAskill?”

  “Mr. MacNeil told me.”

  “Did he tell you about how he picked up the ship’s anchor that weighed a ton and threw it?”

  “No, but he told me how he blew the American over the rainbow. Was he stronger than Orion?”

  “I wouldn’t think so. Orion used to break the tops off mountains and throw them at people. Or perhaps that was the Cyclops.” The mare had turned into the hospital yard now. “When you’re better I’ll tell you about both of them, but now we’re going up to the operating room to see Dr. Grant.”

  When the carriage stopped, two orderlies came down the steps with a stretcher. They lifted Alan out and placed him on it. Mollie, still silent, walked beside the stretcher holding his hand while the men carried him in. Ainslie tethered the mare and went in by another door. He was washing his hands in the alcove off the common room when he heard Grant come in and ask what the case was.

  “Appendix,” Ainslie said without turning around. “An eight-year-old I’m rather fond of. His father’s Archie MacNeil.”

  “If the kid’s half as tough as his father,” Grant said, “a little thing like an appendix won’t hurt him.”

  “He’s not like his father in any respect whatever,” Ainslie said, and left the room.

  When he was in the hall the strange feeling of being about to perform his first operation settled upon him again. He looked at his hands and saw they were trembling. He stood still and breathed deeply several times, leaned his head back and closed his eyes. Slowly he brought his nerves under control, but when he looked at his hands again he saw they were still tighter than they ought to be. He walked on down the corridor and stopped at Miss MacKay’s desk.

  “That case I just brought in–is the boy’s mother still with him?”

  “She went upstairs with the orderlies, but I don’t know where she is now.”

  Ainslie looked down at his hands as he massaged the fingers of his right hand with those of his left. Then he separated his hands and articulated them.

  “I want one of the private rooms prepared for them,” he said. “His mother will spend the night with the boy when the operation is over.”

  Miss MacKay’s voice showed her surprise. “Isn’t that unusual, Doctor? I mean, isn’t it unusual for a patient from the collieries to have a private room?”

  “The bill for the room will be sent to me,” Ainslie said shortly.

  “But, Doctor…” Miss MacKay smiled. “That’s quite out of the question. I was just thinking that if she didn’t know…”

  Ainslie flushed in sudden irritation. “Miss MacKay, it’s unusual for me to have my orders questioned. If hospitals were run by intelligent people no child would ever be left without its mother after an operation. A child alone in such circumstances is a frightened child, and so long as we do things like that to children the world is going to continue to be the sort of place it is now.”

  The nurse flushed under her gray hair and Ainslie hurried off, annoyed with himself for having betrayed his emotions. But after he had climbed the stairs and reached the operating room, he was cool and aloof. As he articulated his fingers once more he knew they were as strong and delicately sensitive as those of a concert pianist. Grant, his head flaming over the white sheet covering the patient, was bending down to give Alan the benefit of the routine jokes he always reserved for the moment before he held the mask over a patient’s face. Ainslie nodded to him to begin and turned his back. As he inspected the instruments he heard a whimper from Alan, followed by Grant’s soothing voice telling him it would not be long, and finally he heard the heavy breathing that meant Alan had gone over the frontier and no longer cared. When Ainslie approached the table he had forgotten what Alan’s face looked like. All he saw was the exposed abdomen and flank of a slightly built child with delicate skin. He picked up the scalpel and made his incision.

  “A good long one,” he muttered to Grant. “I’ve no patience with this nonsense about leaving a neat scar. I want room to work, and when I close up, I want to be sure there’s nothing left inside.”

  Grant smiled, knowing the implicit criticism was of Ronnie Sutherland. One of the nurses also smiled, but Ainslie saw nothing except the work of his rapid fingers. When he stood back from the table Grant was dangling his watch in his hand, nodding appreciatively as if at a private joke. Ainslie knew Grant was complimenting him on the rapidity of his work, but he disregarded it. After checking the pulse and the pressure he passed his hand over his face. His cheeks were as wet as if he had been swimming. Then he caught sight of the houseman, whose presence he had forgotten completely.

  “Everything seems to be all right, Weir,” he said. “There’s no likelihood of peritonitis, but I’d appreciate it if you’d look in on the patient several times tonight.”

  “Certainly, Doctor.”

  Ainslie thanked Grant and left the room. On his way to the common room he stopped at Miss MacKay’s desk to apologize for his rudeness before the operation, left before she could answer, and ran upstairs two at a time, took off his gown and gloves, washed his hands and face, ran downstairs again and left the hospital. He climbed into his carriage and drove the mare hard down the hill, but when he reached MacDonald’s Corner he charged right through it instead of turning in the direction of home. The mare was galloping as she dashed down the narrow street towards the sea, and late leavers from Jimmie MacGillivray’s saloon stopped to stare and wonder who was sick in that part of the town.

  The mare kept on going, past the last houses and on down a little used road. This area was no part of Broughton harbor. The smell of salt water and drying fish finally struck Ainslie’s nostrils as he approached a wharf reputedly used by smugglers. He pulled back on the reins and drove out onto the deck of the wharf. Then he jumped out of the carriage, drew the reins in a clove hitch around a bollard and walked to the end. There he dropped down on the coaming and let his legs dangle over the side. The tide was going out and the noise of waves ebbing back and forth around the pilings filled all space.

  For a while Ainslie thought the shaking of his body was caused by the quivering of the wharf over the pounding surf, but he knew his mind was pounding with its own rhythms and his body was out of control. There were no sea birds, no other human beings, no sign of habitation, only the docile mare waiting, yet Ainslie kept muttering “No!” over and over again, without knowing what he was saying no against. He was still shaking as if with a malaria chill, then he stopped muttering and shouted “NO!” as loudly as he could at the empty, noisy space, and suddenly he felt the tears burst down his face.

  After that he stopped shaking and he began to see the white breakers and feel the rhythm of the surf, and finally he took out his pipe and his trembling hands broke several matches before he got it lit. Puffing on it, he stared into the soft darkness over the water while a confusion of scenes and voices tumbled through his mind like barrels bursting loose in the hold of a ship.

  “She’ll never let me!” he heard himself cry out once, and recognized that “she” was Margaret, cool, detached, sensible, devoid of all trace of wild Highland imagination. Again he saw Mollie leaning over the sick Alan in the miner’s cottage, and the three figures began to blur and come apart again. He tried to hold on and keep them separated long enough to understand what had happened to him this night, but it had happened first in Louisburg and he had been afraid of it then and ever since, terrified to think about it, terrified even now to shout it at the empty sea.

  How long before he was able to say it quietly to himself he could not tell. But after he had said it again and again, it was his and he was no longer afraid of it. His life was a barrenness because he had no son. And now a son had been found.

  There it was. All of it. It made no difference that Alan was the child of two people as dissimilar from himself and Margaret as were Archie and Mollie MacNeil. A man’s son is the boy he himself might have been, the future he can no longer attain. For him, Alan was t
hat boy.

  For quite a while Daniel Ainslie sat with his face buried in his hands. He knew he was sobbing, but it made no difference now. He might as well stop trying to bolster his fierce inner pride. He let his mind go where it would, freed of the restraints he had put upon it for so long. He saw Alan growing up, year by year moving to manhood in dignity, himself being a companion to him, helping him, teaching him to be the kind of man he himself was not, thereby giving himself a continuance out of the ancient life of the Celts into the new world. He saw Alan as a young man crossing the grass of an Oxford quadrangle with young Englishmen as his friends, sitting in the college hall under the portraits of great men who had sat there before him, and he saw himself an old man with Alan in middle life understanding him, the two of them counseling together, watching Alan’s children grow up in a world unknown to the pits.

  There was no ending to such dreams. He raised his head as a last shudder passed through his body. The admittance of the one fact had brought him face to face with the other he had known all the time would be waiting there to trap him. He loved Alan, but he also loved Margaret and the two facts could not be held at once. If he clove to Margaret he would lose the boy because Margaret would never forget that he was another woman’s son. Why was he trying to forget it himself? Why was something within him saying that Mollie MacNeil was unimportant, that her feelings did not matter? Why did something within him say that she could be disregarded, so that it was Margaret’s censure, not Mollie’s loneliness, that he feared?

  How much longer he sat on the coaming of the wharf he did not know, but finally a kind of panic began to grip him. Now that the problem had a form he must find a solution for it, but there could be no solution. He began to shake again and he asked himself of what he was afraid. Alan might be in trouble in the hospital and the nurses might be trying to find him. That’s what he was afraid of. He pulled himself to his feet, relieved to have an immediate objective, and began to run up the wharf to his carriage. How would anyone find him if he were needed badly? He must hurry.

  Before he realized that his feet had caught in something soft he plunged forward, an explosion of light burst in his head and his right temple hit the boards. For a moment he lay half stunned, trying to understand what had happened. He rolled to get up, and as he did so, the hair on the nape of his neck prickled. He had stumbled over something alive, and now this living thing was rising beside him. He could smell, feel and hear it, and as he jerked his head around he saw the outline of a broken-peaked cap appear against the residual light from the sea. It rose on a pair of huge shoulders and stood over Ainslie like a tower.

  “Who’s there?” he said.

  The tower moved. “There wass dirty tricks in the States last Friday night, and by Chesus, I am going to kick them back up your ass.”

  Ainslie recognized the voice. “You drunken swine, MacIsaac–don’t you know who I am?”

  The huge figure swayed as Ainslie came to his feet. Then the truculent voice became plaintive. “Doctor, how whould I be knowing it wass yourself?”

  “Get out of here!”

  Red Willie swayed on his heels. Then he belched in the doctor’s face, put his hand over his mouth and excused himself. “I whould invite you to a drink, Doctor, but all the rum I ha? is inside of myself.”

  “Och!” said Ainslie, and turned from him. He walked to the mare and felt his hands trembling as he untied the reins. By the time the mare had pulled the carriage off the wharf, he knew he was unfit to enter the hospital. “Oh, God damn that drunken blackguard!” he said to himself.

  The mare pulled him up the hill. Overhead the post-office clock banged a single note and Ainslie knew he was in MacDonald’s Corner and it was one o’clock in the morning. The mare hesitated, waiting for the pull of the reins that would tell her whether the destination was home or whether she was to continue up the hill to the hospital. With a sudden jerk of the reins, Ainslie sent the mare around the corner and down the main street. He took out the whip and cracked it savagely, the mare broke into a gallop as though she were pulling a chariot, and the sound of her crashing hoofs and the rattle and bang of the carriage clattered so loudly through the empty street that windows went up as wakened sleepers tried to see what was happening. She charged over the bridge and was continuing home, when Ainslie again bore hard on the left-hand rein and sent the carriage lurching on two wheels into a dirt track. Tossing her head with fright, the mare galloped over level ground and through a brake of pines to the end of the track. She stopped panting in front of a high, gaunt house with a widow’s walk on its roof. Beyond the house, guarded by a low stone wall, a cliff dropped sheer to the open Atlantic.

  Ainslie jumped from the carriage, slapped the mare’s neck and saw foam on the bridle. He tethered her and went around to the front of the house, ran up the steps and pounded on the door. He waited nearly a minute and pounded again. Then he heard heavy steps inside, the door opened, and Dr. MacKenzie stood there, huge and gray and apparently undisturbed.

  “Dan,” he said quietly, “what’s the matter?”

  Ainslie lurched inside and dropped into a chair in the high-ceilinged, gloomy hall.

  “Dan, are you all right?”

  Ainslie looked up. He spoke in a voice unnaturally quiet. “Dr. Dougald, would you mind doing me a favor? Call the hospital and ask if the MacNeil boy is all right?”

  “Surely, Dan. That’s easily done.”

  Ainslie sat motionless while MacKenzie rang the operator. He did not move when the doctor asked for Weir or when he put his question a moment later. MacKenzie hung up and turned around.

  “Weir says it was a perfect operation. He added that it was the swiftest appendectomy he’s ever seen.”

  “But the boy–is Alan all right?”

  “He came out of the anesthetic without even vomiting. He’s asleep now.”

  MacKenzie left the room and Ainslie seemed to sink further into the chair. The last time he had been in this house–how long ago?–he and the old man had argued about religion and MacKenzie had insisted that it was entirely possible for a scientific medical man of experience to believe in the efficacy of prayer. Was that three months ago or three minutes ago? It was hard to know. He could hear his own voice saying over and over, But how can you?, then MacKenzie asking him what he thought of when he imagined God. Was that then, or now? There jumped into his mind the image of a tight-skinned dog with green eyes, standing before him with muscles rippling under its tawny hide. Then it disappeared.

  “Dan, whether you like the stu? or not, you’re going to drink a glass of brandy with me.”

  Ainslie looked up and saw MacKenzie holding out a glass. He took it, tossed half its contents down his throat, gasped at its sharpness and continued to sit there, holding the glass tightly.

  “It’s smuggled brandy,” MacKenzie remarked. “It goes against my principles to drink any other kind. The rule of the majority may be all right, but injustice from a majority is just as bad as injustice from anybody else. Since Confederation, the central provinces in this country have treated us very badly. So–speaking philosophically, mind you–it is no sin for Nova Scotians to drink smuggled liquor.” MacKenzie took a long pull from his glass. “Now, what have you been up to?”

  Ainslie swallowed the rest of his brandy and coughed. “I’m not sure. I’m not sure of anything any more. Can we go outside? It’s a warm night. Let’s go up to the widow’s walk–if you can put up with me for a little while.”

  “Excellent idea.” MacKenzie downed the remainder of his brandy and set the glass on the table beside a tray of old calling cards. “As a matter of fact, that’s where I was when you came along. I never go to sleep any more until three or four in the morning. That’s all I seem to need.”

  An hour and a half later they were still on the roof and Ainslie was still trying to understand his problem by hearing it put into his own words. He had tried to tell MacKenzie how he felt about Alan and how impossible he found it even to discuss the subjec
t with Margaret, but when he was finished he knew he had failed to make himself clear, had failed to relieve even a fraction of the pressure inside himself. So he stopped talking abruptly and listened to the surge of the sea. Ground swells snored somberly in the darkness at the foot of the cliff, retreated and snored in again with primeval rhythm.

  “It’s the weakness in myself I can’t forgive,” he heard himself saying. “Tonight I cracked up and I’m ashamed to have lost control. I suppose it’s a tendency I inherited from my mother. She died when I was ten, but–” Ainslie stopped and passed a hand over his forehead, brushing back the dark hair that had fallen forward over it. “My father was always afraid I’d be like her. He warned me often enough, heaven knows. I’m afraid she was a weak character.”

  MacKenzie shifted his position and Ainslie went on with his explanation. “Did you ever know my father? No, I don’t suppose you could have. He was a remarkable man even though he had no education besides what he learned from the Bible and Bacon’s Essays. I remember the year the barn on our farm burned down. I was eight or nine, I think. For a year and a half after that we didn’t have enough to eat, but my father never complained. And what’s more, he never borrowed. To borrow seemed to him like theft, for it would have meant mortgaging what he meant to save for our education. So we all went hungry and he made us keep on studying. I have two brothers, you know. They’re both ministers. One’s in Philadelphia now and the other’s in Toronto. All of us well educated, thanks to my father. Mother thought it was more important for us to eat than to learn. She had none of his will power. She died shortly after the barn was rebuilt and we were more or less on our feet again.”

  Down below the sea smote the cliff a heavy blow. The tide had turned and now it was rising. The long diminuendo of the wave traveled away down the coast like a freight train rumbling through a valley.

  “Some people can go on living with no purpose ahead,” he jerked out. “Living in a kind of vacuum. But I can’t. Even if work for its own sake were important, which it isn’t, I couldn’t go on indefinitely the way I have been. It’s no better than being a miner in a pit, boring into the black till the seam runs out.”