Each Man's Son

by Hugh Maclennan

  MacKenzie coughed. Then Ainslie heard the comfortable sound of the old man’s pipe knocking against the heel of his shoe and the crunch as he pressed home a new charge of tobacco into the empty bowl.

  “I’d never meant to tell you this, Dan,” he said when the tobacco was glowing. “But I think now maybe I should. I knew your father and mother in the days of my smallpox crusade around the island. I knew you, too. You were about the same age as Alan MacNeil, or maybe a little older. You didn’t recognize me when we met again because I’d grown a big mustache by then and my hair had turned gray, and besides I doubt if your father ever mentioned my name in your hearing. He never forgave me.” A match flared as the old man relit his pipe, his profile leaped out of the darkness and disappeared again. “I attended your mother–very briefly–at the beginning of her last illness. She was dying of pernicious anemia. The direct result of the eighteen months when your father’s ambition forced his whole family to go hungry. Being your mother, she ate much less than you boys did, and in those days there was little one could do for pernicious anemia, once it got under way. You may not owe your life to her, except as one always owes it to one’s mother, but you certainly owe your health to her. I wouldn’t talk about her lack of will power if I were you. When I gave your father my prognosis he dismissed me, and I never saw either of them again.” MacKenzie coughed again. “I remember that she had very gentle eyes. You would do well to honor your father less and your mother more. She was a very loving woman.”

  When it was plain that MacKenzie had said all he meant to say Ainslie roused himself from his stiff posture. He got to his feet, moved forward and grasped the railing with both hands and stared out to a blink of light in the east, no more than a faint presence in the darkness. He thought of the expression in Mollie’s eyes as she comforted Alan, lost sight of it in a welter of images, then recovered it again. Then it was not Mollie’s eyes he was looking into; they were the eyes of his own mother. Mollie and his mother became confused and he was confused with Alan.

  Behind him the old man was saying, “You aren’t looking for a son, Dan. You’re looking for a God.”

  It took a while for the import of the words to reach him. He felt alone as he had never been alone in his life as he stood with his hands on the railing and heard the rumble of the sea at his feet. It surged against the cliff, broke, fell back and surged again, and still Ainslie stood motionless, staring into the night. As his father had denied his mother, so was he trying to deny Alan’s mother, to disregard her, to dismiss her as of no importance. And yet the little boy he once had been still longed to be loved by some human being as Alan was loved by her. It was all too confused. If he couldn’t stop trying to understand it, to come to grips with it, he would lose his reason. What did MacKenzie mean by saying he was looking for a God? Once again his mind blurred.

  When he turned around his face was dark with anger. “You don’t understand,” he said. “All I want to do is help the boy. Mollie MacNeil is a good woman, but she’ll never be more than what she is now, and Alan deserves far better than that. I’m the only one who can help him and nothing is going to stop me. Nothing!”

  Twenty-Two

  AFTER HIS FIRST NIGHT in the hospital Alan began to enjoy himself. Everybody seemed to know that Dr. Ainslie had a special interest in him, and this made him a privileged patient.

  After three days he was transferred to the children’s ward, an appendage of the men’s ward, and his mother went home. There were only two other boys in the children’s ward, both younger than himself. They had had their tonsils removed and the day after Alan joined them, they went home. So it was the convalescing men who kept him entertained. Whenever the nurses would let them, they came to sit on the side of his bed and talk about their children. Bill Blackett took a fancy to Alan, at first because it was Dr. Ainslie who had helped them both, but later because Alan was an insatiable listener to Bill’s stories about whaling and cod-fishing off Newfoundland, Negro women in the West Indies with baskets on their heads, his brother Garge, and sharks, sailfish and second mates.

  To Alan, the hospital became the most exciting place he had ever dreamed of. To begin with, there were the smells. Had he been blindfolded he could have told the time of day from the odors. The carbolic smell was there at every hour, but the odors that told the time came and went, were different throughout the day. In the early morning it was the smell of hot toast. About ten o’clock the first whiffs of smoke came into the windows from the nearest colliery when the offshore breeze sprang up. At noon it was the dinner smell from trays that came into the wards on carts, and about four in the afternoon, especially on hot days, feet began to smell in the men’s ward as the patients grew restless and threw down their covers and all the doors were left open to allow air to circulate. There were also the smells peculiar to special people: sharp soap from the nurses’ hands and sometimes the odor left on their linen by a too hot iron. Whenever a doctor entered from the operating room there was the terrifying smell of ether which still made Alan’s stomach turn.

  Even more exciting were the sounds of the hospital. The nurses rustled and the housemen padded about on rubber soles; the tires of the wheeled stretcher whirred on the linoleum whenever a patient was taken to the operating room or brought back again. There was the happy sound of rattling dishes at mealtimes, Gaelic voices of the nurses joking with patients as they bathed them or brought them food; and after dark, while occasional sounds entered the open windows from the town, the ward quivered with heavy breathing, with the irregular breath of one man predominant, the man who was going to die.

  When Alan first heard that terrible, snoring sound he was frightened, for he thought an animal was loose in the ward. The next day he was sure it was an animal, for in the far corner of the men’s ward was a bed with an iron guard around it. Inside the guard was a huge, squat figure that moaned and flopped, covered with hair and naked except for a pair of diapers. It was only when he saw a nurse come in and change the diapers that Alan realized the figure was human. A little later Bill Blackett told him the flopping man was a sailor who was eighty-one years of age. Even after Dr. Ainslie explained that the old man was too far gone to know where he was, the sounds he made haunted Alan. Finally Dr. Ainslie decided to eradicate his fear. He took a pencil and paper and sketched a human figure, drawing in the heart and brain and the main arteries. Then he explained that a blood vessel had broken in the old sailor’s brain so that his brain no longer functioned and the nerves controlling his muscles were not good any more. “It won’t hurt you,” the doctor said, “to see a man like that. He’s very old and he’s had a good life. Now he’s just fading away.” Dr. Ainslie smiled at him. “I don’t want you to grow up afraid of things. Most of what we’re frightened of are things we don’t understand.” He smiled again. “What’s happened to the old man couldn’t possibly happen to you for another fifty or sixty years, and probably won’t happen at all. And even if it did, by that time you’d be old and tired and you wouldn’t mind going to sleep. When you hear the old man moan, don’t feel unhappy about it. It’s only breath coming out of his mouth. Just think of him as if he were asleep and snoring.”

  Alan lay in bed and watched the doctor go away with his brisk step to see one of the patients in the outer ward. It seemed that every time Dr. Ainslie came to see him he made everything feel better. Now Alan could look at the old man with interest and think how nice it was of his wife to come into the ward every day with a bottle of alcohol to rub his body, even if the old man didn’t know who she was.

  But Bill Blackett took a different view of the matter. Alan repeated what the doctor had said, but it made no difference to the Newfoundlander.

  “Thet ’airy old man,” he said, “’ow do the doctor know ’e can’t feel? Floppin’ and gruntin’ like a seal on a clamper of ice. Seals feel, even if they can’t talk. You ought to ’ear ’em moan when you swats ’em. Thet old woman ought to give ’im the alcohol to drink, ’stead of rubbin’ ’im down wi
th it.”

  Bill turned and saw something new on the small table beside Alan’s bed. It was a colored globe of the world which the doctor had brought the night before.

  “Wot’s thet you got theer?”

  Alan told him what it was, and how Dr. Ainslie had explained the movements of the earth.

  “The doctor do give me the creeps sometimes, like thet moanin’ old man. It ain’t ’uman for a man to want to larn everything.” He reached across the bed and gave the globe a spin with one of his four surviving fingers. When it stopped, he leaned across Alan and peered at it, looking for familiar names, but he still found reading difficult and Alan had to point out Newfoundland. Even then Bill didn’t believe it. “Thet chart ain’t right,” he said. “I bin all around Newfoundland, and it don’t look like any pork chop.”

  Blackett began to spin the globe again, and he was still spinning it when Dr. Ainslie came in. Alan saw the pleased smile on the doctor’s face when he thought Bill might be interested in geography, too.

  “It be immense, zurr,” Blackett said, jumping smartly to his feet, “to think of us goin’ round and round and not even feelin’ it.”

  Ainslie laughed, and then Blackett’s face fell when he heard the doctor say he had a free half hour. That meant a spelling lesson for Bill. So Alan watched him follow the doctor out through the main ward to the reception room at the end where they could be alone. When the half hour was up, both men came back.

  “Bill tells me he’s been down in the West Indies,” the doctor said, “so I’ve asked him to tell you what the islands are like. I was there myself once, but Bill saw more of them than I did.”

  Again the doctor left, but when Blackett was alone with Alan he became interested in the plate of fruit that Mollie had brought the day before. He ate an apple, seeds and all, and when there was nothing left but the stem he turned back to the globe. When they discovered the dot named Dominica he got to his feet and pushed back his cowlick and grinned broadly.

  “I knowed a girl in Dominica oncet told me I ’ad the longest ’un she ever did see.” Then he went off down the ward, rolling in his walk as he always did, and Alan knew he would lie in the sun behind the hospital until suppertime.

  The days passed and they were into the second week of July. Every afternoon Mollie came to see Alan, and though she tried to laugh with him, the boy sensed that she was uneasy. He wished he knew why. She never mentioned his father any more, and the afternoon before his operation seemed a long way back, so he made no reference to his father either.

  One day a huge doctor with white hair and a drooping white mustache came through the ward. Alan sensed that he was someone special because the nurses were especially polite to him. He stopped at the door of the room where Alan was, smiled at him and said that his name was Dr. MacKenzie. Then he joked with him for twenty minutes. But all the time he stood there, Alan had the peculiar feeling that the doctor was giving him some kind of test.

  A day or so later Mrs. Ainslie came especially to see him. She brought some flowers and some more fruit and before she went away she kissed his forehead. In her, too, the boy detected an unspoken question.

  It was still another day when Louis Camire appeared with a paper bag in his hand. He looked at Alan sharply, drew up a chair beside the bed, told him that his mother was not feeling well but sent her love, then opened the bag with a flourish and dangled a large bunch of grapes in front of Alan’s eyes.

  “Better than ice cream,” he said. Drops of water glistened in the cluster and the grapes smelled cool and sweet. “I made that Greek, that Petropolis, give me the best ’e ’ad. With Greeks, you ’ave to know what to do.” He laid the grapes on the counterpane. “The docteur, ’e will be ’ere this afternoon, no?”

  Alan shook his head. The doctor never came into the wards in the afternoon, he said. Sometimes he came back in the evening if he happened to be in the hospital anyway. Camire looked relieved and Alan wondered why he didn’t like the doctor. They began to eat the grapes in silence, and then Bill Blackett came rolling down the aisle in the men’s ward. When he saw the grapes he grinned and came on towards them and sat on the side of Alan’s bed opposite Camire. The Frenchman looked at him sharply, but Bill merely stretched out the surviving fingers of his right hand and broke off a small cluster of the grapes.

  “This docteur,” Camire said, his forehead wrinkling. “’E cut off your ’ands, no?”

  Blackett stuffed his mouth with grapes and held out his stump. “’E be the smartest one of the lot,” he mumbled through his chewing.

  Camire grunted. “What for do you thank ’im? Maybe it was not necessary to cut off your ’ands at all, eh?”

  Blackett swallowed his grapes half-chewed and answered amiably. “You should of seed ’em before ’e got his knives in ’em. They was so bad squatten it makes me creep to think about it. Thet accident was a lucky thing. Now I got no proper ’ands left, I got to use me brains.”

  Camire shrugged, dismissing Blackett as a person of no importance, and turned to the globe by Alan’s bed. “The docteur, ’e give you this, too?”

  “Yes,” Alan said.

  “Why? What does ’e want from you?”

  “Nothing. He just likes to teach me things.”

  “Nobody does something for anybody without they want something back.” He reached out and turned the globe until the blue shape of France was uppermost. He peered at it and then pointed with his finger to the spot he took to be the city of Avignon. “That is for me,” he said. “It is a place so much better than all this I make a blasphemy to make comparisons at all. One day I will take you there. You and your mother.”

  He looked at Alan obliquely as though to catch his response on his face, but Alan kept his attention on the grapes. Blackett was chewing placidly and seemed not to be hearing a word.

  “You and your mother,” Camire went on. “You are too good for ’ere. Nothing counts ’ere but the size of the muscles. When you grow up you will be small, like me. This place will drive you crazy. But in France there was Napoleon and ’e was smaller than me. In France there is everything. In Avignon everything is veree old and beautiful.” A wistful note entered the little man’s voice. “When a man fights in Avignon, it is for something that makes sense–for a woman, or for money. But ’ere they fight for nothing because there is nothing else to do.”

  Blackett was chewing Alan’s grapes vigorously and crunching the seeds in his teeth. He said amiably to Camire, “I never seed any Frenchman knowed the first thing about ’ow to fight.”

  In a flash Camire turned on him. His dark eyes grew larger. And then he began to chuckle ominously as he pressed a forefinger into the middle of Bill’s chest.

  “You never? You try me and you will see something.”

  Camire’s expression frightened Alan, but the New foundlander went on chewing the grapes stolidly.

  “The great MacIsaac,” Camire said, still excitedly, “the big Red Willie–I showed ’im once the end of a broken bottle in the face. After that ’e made me no more trouble.” He turned to Alan. “You want go to France with me, sometime?”

  Alan was still frightened by Camire. France was a place he had no thoughts about, but he remembered the night he had heard Camire shouting at his mother, and his mother saying how beautiful France must be. He felt a quick chill of fear.

  “My father is coming home soon,” Alan said, “and when he comes home everything will be different for Mummy and me.”

  Camire got to his feet. A look of bitterness crossed his face. “Your father!” he said scornfully. “Me, I told your mother ’e would never come back here again and she did not believe me. Then the docteur, l’enfant de chienne, ’e tell ’er the same thing and she believed ’im.”

  Camire turned and left without saying good-by, and Alan lay back in bed and wished he could keep from feeling frightened.

  “Some of them Frenchmen,” Blackett said, “is sons of bitches with broken bottles. I seed one oncet. ’E gouged a man’s ey
e out before ’e ’ad ’is neck broke on ’im. Up in St. John’s, thet were.”

  But the next day all the fear Camire had produced in Alan dissolved when Dr. Ainslie arrived. This time the doctor had a large book under his arm which he laid on the bed and said it belonged to Alan from now on. It was a book filled with pictures of famous sailing ships, with a colored print of the Flying Cloud on the cover. There was a text inside describing some of the ships and sectional drawings showing how they had been built.

  Dr. Ainslie laid the book on Alan’s knee and pointed to the picture of the Flying Cloud. “The sea, Alan, is the mightiest thing we know. The sky is the most changeable and mysterious.” He pointed to the royal yard. “Think of it–having to stand up there and set sail between sea and sky! Think of an instrument like that ship–she probably had as many as three thousand separate ropes and every one of those ropes had its purpose! Think of handling a ship like that–it was like turning yourself into a force of nature!” A note of pride entered the doctor’s voice. “The man who built that ship, Alan, was a Nova Scotian like ourselves, even though he had to go to Boston to show what he could do. Donald McKay was his name, and he was the greatest shipbuilder who ever lived. I want you to remember the names of great men. I want you to realize–and to realize when you’re a boy–that nothing of the slightest value has ever been accomplished by a crowd of people. Individual men, following ideas of their own, have given the world everything we value.” He pointed to the picture again. “When experts saw that vessel under construction they said she’d never sail. But look at her!”

  The doctor left to make his rounds and Alan forgot Camire and the feeling of apprehension about his father and mother. For the rest of the day he was lost in the book of ships, and when the nurse came in that afternoon to take his temperature he was singing some words from the book to a tune of his own. O Susanna, darling take your ease, for we have beat the clipper fleet, the Sovereign of the Seas!