Each Man's Son

by Hugh Maclennan

  “Ever been in Montreal before, Archie?”

  “I ha? been here two weeks already.”

  “This is quite a city.” He pointed to a square building nearby with the words OGILVIE OATS written in white letters around a black water tank on its roof. “What does that sign say, Archie?”

  Archie stared, following the pointing finger. “What sign whould you be meaning?”

  “Right in front of you where I’m pointing. Can’t you see it?”

  “That iss pretty far away,” Archie said.

  Picotte went back to his desk, and Archie, slouching around after him, slumped in his chair.

  “It iss time Masson met a man willing to fight,” Archie said. “What iss the Canadian title worth, with him holding it?”

  Picotte picked up his cigarette and leaned back in his chair, the cigarette between his fingers and a wreath of smoke drifting away from it. “Tell me something else, Archie–how long is it since you’ve seen a doctor?”

  Archie thrust out his jaw and his bronze hair bristled above his scarred face as he looked angrily at Picotte. “Why whould you be asking me that?”

  “Because your left eye is completely blind, and your right eye is losing its sight, too.”

  Archie slumped back again. “I can see good enough with one eye to look after Masson.”

  Picotte got up again and came around the desk. This time Archie did not move. Picotte put his hand on Archie’s shoulder and felt the pack of muscle, nodded admiringly, then leaned back against his desk and surveyed the fighter with crossed arms. His jaw looked lean and shrewd as he tightened his lips over the tip of his burning cigarette.

  “Archie,” he said in the voice of a man talking to a child, “you’ve done your fighting. Why not hang up the gloves for good?”

  Archie stared back without moving. His body was still trim and powerful, but after his fight with Packy Miller, the scar tissue over his eyes had become infected and it was still rough and angry-looking. The flesh over his cheekbones was battered and mashed, his nose was a sponge with hardly any unbroken bone left in it and his ears were like the handles of a jug.

  “Listen, Mr. Picotte, since my last fight I ha? improved. I ha? been thinking about things. Look–I whill show you.” He got up and sprang into a fighting stance, crouching and holding his fists close together before his chin with the elbows guarding his heart and solar plexus. He danced around the office, snapping out quick, vicious, short punches. “You see, Mr. Picotte,” he said, stopping suddenly. “With the big punch I ha?, it iss not necessary to fight so open. From now on I whill fight out of a crouch and wear them down with the short ones. I whill save my strength for the big punch when they are ready.”

  As he slumped back into his chair he realized he had made no impression. “So you whill not make the match for me with Masson?”

  Picotte took the cigarette from his lips and snubbed it out in an ash tray. Eying its ruin, he said, “I still have some conscience.”

  “Then maybe you ha? something else for me? A semifinal or a preliminary, maybe?”

  Picotte shook his head.

  Archie stared at him, trying to think. Then he got to his feet. “All right. You can go to hell.”

  “Sit down again.” Picotte’s voice was quiet and authoritative. “I want to talk to you some more.”

  Archie hesitated, but finally he did as he was told. He watched dully while Picotte put his hand into his breast pocket and took out his wallet. He watched Picotte count out five ten-dollar bills, eye the ceiling while he made a rapid calculation, replace one of the bills and leave four tens lying on the table.

  “Are you married, Archie?”

  “I ha? a wife.”

  “How long since you’ve seen her?”

  “Four years.”

  “That’s a long time.”

  “I whill go home when I am the champion.”

  Picotte smiled. “What does a championship mean? Who even remembers some of the champs? But everyone remembers Sam Langford from your own province. Everyone remembers old Peter Jackson from Australia and Peter Mahar from Ireland. What’s a championship?” He pushed the four bills across the table. “One night two years ago you earned a lot of money for me, though you don’t know it, maybe. Let me pay your way home. That’s where you ought to go now, Archie–home.”

  Murky thoughts blundered through Archie’s mind as he sat there watching the dapper French-Canadian with his money. What was the idea of offering him money? Who had ever offered him anything for nothing in all his life?

  “So you think you can get me owt of Montreal that way and keep Masson for the easy ones? Whell, I am no fool. Downey used to giff me money like that, in bills too, but I found owt what he wass up to.”

  Picotte’s shrewd eyes narrowed. “Did he? So that was how Downey worked you, eh? In New York they call him the son of the original bitch.” He pushed the four bills so far in Archie’s direction that they protruded over the edge of the table. “You need this money bad, Archie. Take it.”

  “How whould you be knowing if I need it or not? And what makes you think I take money I ha? not worked for? Do I look like a bum?”

  Picotte smiled. “Listen, boy–don’t make it too easy for me to take this back. I like money. But I told you before–I owe you something. You remember Timmy O’Leary? The night you stopped O’Leary I was there. I didn’t think you had a chance, but you were a Canadian and I backed you at one to four. From what they told me afterwards, I made more on that fight than you did yourself. That forty dollars is 10 per cent. Call it your commission on the deal, if that makes you feel any better.”

  Archie glared at him. “There iss a place where you can put that money, and you whould be knowing where it iss. All I want iss a chance to show what I can do again.”

  “The night you whipped O’Leary,” Picotte went on, ignoring him, “you were great. Any man in the world you could have taken. Jack Dillon, Philadelphia Jack O’Brien–it would have made no difference, you would have whipped them. Nobody can take that night away from you, Archie.” Picotte gave another encouraging smile. “Take that fare money and go home to your wife. She doesn’t care if you’re the champion or not. Four years is a long time to leave a woman alone.”

  Archie rubbed his forehead roughly with his right palm and wondered what it was, the queer feeling that came over him so often these days. Picotte looked blurred and he felt dizzy and slow.

  “You whill not fool me that easy,” he said, and got up and blundered out of the office.

  A few minutes later he was in St. James Street, walking back to Victoria Square with his hands in his pockets. This was a god-forsaken city in the heat. It was almost as bad as Trenton. He reached the square and found an empty bench under a tree and sat watching the carriages and motor cars and horse-drawn drays moving noisily around the oblong island of grass where he sat in the center. He glanced up at the statue of Queen Victoria, but the pigeons had made such a mess of her face that he did not know who she was. He felt in his pocket and took out his money to count it. All he had was two dollars and seventy cents left from a fortnight of stevedoring. Next week he would keep out of the taverns and save his pay, but this was a godforsaken town and he liked nobody in it. Next week if the foreman gave him any more of his lip he would have to show him what he could do, and that would be the end of his job on the docks.

  Archie sprawled on the bench with the sun in his face. The heat made him drowsy and the drowsiness sent his mind a long way back behind the arenas and gymnasiums and cigar-smoking, gravel-voiced crowds among which he had lived these past years. He remembered Mollie the way he had seen her the first time. He remembered her strange, exciting timidity, her gentleness and how she had made him laugh and how good he had felt to know that a girl like Mollie would take up with the son of a man like his father. For a moment he felt a pang of guilt for having left her alone. Then he remembered her letter saying she never wanted to see him again. By Jesus, he thought, and passed his hand over h
is scars. “By Chesus,” he muttered aloud, “I ha? taken it here in my flesh and body, and who iss she to complain?”

  Twenty-Five

  LABOR DAY marked the end of summer but not an end to the unusually warm season, and Alan went back to school. About the same time Ainslie’s practice became so crowded that he had time for nothing but work. There were many operations and more people than usual lying sick in their homes. Each morning he set out with the mare at seven-thirty and seldom returned before midnight. He ate his lunch in the hospital or went without it, and Margaret was instructed how to dispense the routine quotas of medicine to the miners who called at the surgery to receive them.

  Then finally a break came in the rush of work, and Ainslie managed to be at home one night for dinner. When the meal was over he pushed back his chair and said, “How do you think Alan is faring at school? He’s probably wasting his time. I’d better take a walk and drop in on him this evening, because I see no prospect of being here for lunch for a while yet.”

  Margaret watched him search his pockets for his tobacco and matches. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” she said.

  “It won’t hurt,” he said. “I need a different kind of exercise.” He began to hum out of tune as he went into the kitchen to get some matches.

  When he returned to the dining room, she said, “Alan hasn’t been eating his lunches here since school began.”

  He stopped humming and looked at her. “Why not?”

  “His mother wants him at home.”

  For a moment he looked relieved. “I’ll set her straight on that. School or no school I want him here every day. It’s the only way I can be sure he’s being properly fed.”

  “But his mother has forbidden him to come here for any reason.”

  Slowly his face became an angry red. He watched her for a moment, as though testing her words in his mind to be certain he had heard them correctly, then he turned and left the room. Margaret waited, heard him stop by the front door, and then she got up and followed him.

  “Please, Dan–don’t go up there,” she said as he was about to close the door behind him.

  He waited but he did not return to the hall. She opened the door wide and stood on the step above him. Still he refused to turn, but she knew his curiosity was greater than his anger, so she said, “If you’ll stop to think instead of rushing off into the night, you’ll realize that you’ve brought this on yourself. Mollie has decided to take her boy back and there isn’t a thing in the world you can do about it.”

  “That’s nonsense!” he said.

  “Perhaps. But it might have been easier for you if you had consulted her in the first place, instead of simply giving her orders as though she were a patient.”

  “She wants the boy’s good as much as I do.”

  He had turned around and was trying to read her face.

  “I’m sure she does,” Margaret said. “But you haven’t come to an agreement, have you, on what is Alan’s good?” She pretended to pluck some lint off his shoulder. “Mollie happens to think it will be best for Alan if she leaves here and marries that Frenchman, Louis Camire.”

  For half a second she wondered if her husband might be going to faint. His eyes became round and large and his face paled as slowly as it had flushed. But there was nothing she could do to help him, though she knew she was more sorry for him than she had ever been before.

  He turned his back again and looked down the dark drive.

  “Are you sure?” he said tonelessly.

  “Yes, I’m sure.”

  He brushed her restraining hand from his shoulder and went out into the darkness and she could hear the sound of his feet going down the gravel drive.

  Twenty-Six

  DAN AINSLIE walked out to the road, down the slope and over the bridge, then up the slope in front of the miners’ row. It was a cool evening with a smell of kitchen fires in the air, but there were several miners and their wives sitting on front steps. Ainslie felt that the eyes of all of them were watching him as he approached the MacNeil house, so he lifted his chin defiantly and quickened his gait to that of the visiting doctor they all knew so well.

  Mollie answered his knock on the door.

  “Where’s Alan?” he said without preliminaries.

  “He is upstairs doing his lessons, Doctor.”

  “I’d like to see him.”

  But Mollie stood there in the door without speaking and with no apparent inclination to ask him in. Immediately he felt a fool, for everyone must see that the doctor was not going inside on a professional call.

  “I want a word with Alan,” he repeated. “I’ve been too busy lately to see how he was getting along.”

  “Alan is fine.”

  “May I come in?”

  “You are the doctor and I could not say no.”

  Her face was naked. He saw its delicacy, its tenderness, its love. She was the mother Alan had known all his life. And there was something else he recognized, a last reserve of strength which she was calling upon. To oppose him–to oppose his father? He passed his hand over his eyes.

  “I’ve come as a friend,” he said. “Not as the doctor.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  He straightened his shoulders. “I trust Alan is feeling stronger all the time?”

  “You have been good to us, Doctor. We will always be grateful.”

  This girl had only to look at him and say she was grateful for what he had done; she had only to look at him and express her thanks while deliberately ignoring what she knew he had been trying to do, and he was helpless against her. There was a rock in her as there was a rock in them all, buried deep in the past of his whole race. But he knew in that moment she was stronger than he was because he was ashamed of something and she was not. Her features were dim as she stood with her back to the lighted hall, and she seemed to him incredibly poignant and beautiful.

  “Then it’s true,” he said. “You’re going away.”

  “Yes, Doctor. We are.”

  He looked beyond her to the stairs, but there was no sign of anyone else in the house. “Tell Alan I send him my love.”

  “Yes, Doctor. That I will do.”

  He turned away and heard the door close behind him. With his chin down he began to retrace his steps quickly down the board sidewalk in the direction of the bridge.

  “Good evening to you, Doctor,” a voice said in the night.

  Ainslie kept on walking. A few steps on he stopped and turned.

  “Did I hear you say somebody is sick?”

  “No, Doctor. No indeed. I wass just saying good evening to you.”

  “Good evening to you, Angus.”

  He crossed the bridge and climbed the slope on the other side and started up his own driveway. A half-moon rode overhead and its light filtered through the trees. He turned off the driveway among the birches, reached the grass of the interval and saw the brook. There were dancing pin points of light where the moonbeams struck the broken water near the bridge. The sky was a radiant dome, the firmament glowed and there was not a breath of wind. On such a night, he knew, the sea would rest in shining silence all around the island and sailing ships would be as still on its surface as protruding black rocks.

  Ainslie dropped onto a patch of grass by the brook, stared up at the sky, then lay on his back and closed his eyes. A terrible fatigue, an exhaustion of the whole spirit, engulfed him. His vision of Alan growing up twisted itself into a mockery of what it once had been. He saw the lad in a scholar’s gown crossing an Oxford quadrangle under the moon, saw the gown flutter and disappear, and there was Alan again with coal dust black on his face, a metal lunch box under his arm, a cap with the broken peak on his head. Then Louis Camire’s face came into his mind, but the Frenchman’s part in Alan’s future crushed his imagination and he could not think about it. It was he alone who had driven this girl to Camire. How then could he blame her or hate her? God forgive me, he thought.

  A shaking rage began to mount within him
. There is no God, he kept repeating to himself. God is nothing but an invention of mad theologians who have told generations of men that He is the all-seeing Ancient of Days who at the same time damns men and loves them. The theologians, not Jesus, have tried to convince us that God, out of His infinite loving-kindness and tender mercy, out of His all-wise justice, has decided that nearly all human beings are worthless and must be scourged in the hope that a few of them, through a lifetime of punishment, might become worth saving.

  Now he had something specific to be angry about, and Ainslie let his rage build upon itself. Underneath all his troubles, he told himself, lay this ancient curse. He thought desperately of Margaret and desperately of himself, and he knew that it was his fear of the curse which had hobbled his spirit. The fear of the curse had led directly to a fear of love itself. They were criminals, the men who had invented the curse and inflicted it upon him, but they were all dead. There was no one to strike down in payment for generations of cramped and ruined lives. The criminals slept well, and their names were sanctified.

  For nearly an hour more Daniel Ainslie lay on the grass and tried to come to terms with himself. If there was no God, then there was nothing. If there was no love, then existence was an emptiness enclosed within nothing. He felt as though his spirit had hurled itself against the window of his life like a wounded bat and broken the glass. It had been caught in a prison and now it was free. But its freedom was the freedom of not caring, and the things it witnessed now were different from those it had seen before. Now his spirit flickered like a bat over a dark and sinister landscape as lifeless as the mountains of the moon, its bat’s eyes contemplating a world older than the human race; a world where there were no gods, no devils, no laws, no certainties, no beginnings and no end. A world without purpose, without meaning, without intelligence; dependent upon nothing, out of nothing, within nothing; moving into an eternity which itself was nothing.