Each Man's Son

by Hugh Maclennan

  With a slow movement, as if coming out of a deep sleep, Ainslie sat up and looked at the sky. With longing for continuance brimming in his blood, he had looked ahead on his days and seen total emptiness. He had reached his core. And there he had stopped. He got to his feet and looked down at the brook. In that moment he made the discovery that he was ready to go on with life.

  For many minutes he stood there looking down at the brook in the moonlight. Now Alan and Mollie MacNeil were two people he had known and loved a long time ago. “God bless them!” he said, and turned towards the house.

  When he opened the surgery door Margaret was sitting behind his desk with the telephone in her hand. He smiled at her tentatively. Her answering smile reached him and he knew that if he had not come home, he had at least returned to the surest haven he had ever known.

  “Miss MacKay has just called,” she said. “The tonsils case you operated on this morning. She says bleeding has started again. Weir would be more comfortable if you could see it.”

  He nodded and began to check the contents of his bag.

  “I spoke to Mollie,” he said and cleared his throat. “What you told me was quite true.”

  Now he could once more think about the people around him. He knew Margaret would never understand what had wrought this change in him, as he knew it was not in his power to explain, but he was grateful for her calm silence which no longer seemed to be accusing him. Once more it was a strength against which he could lean.

  “You might call the hospital and tell them I’m on my way,” he said as he reached the door with the bag in his hand. He turned around and his eyes went to three photographs on the wall behind her head. They had hung there in the same place for years. Tonight he was seeing them as though they were new. Lister, Osler and Dougald MacKenzie. What qualities did they share which he lacked? It seemed important to take time to find the answer right now. Perhaps it lay in the fact that they were all three supremely fortunate human beings. They were all men who had lived out their careers before the world had become conscious of its own nerves. They had lived with a sense of continuance and permanency which he had never known. Within that permanency their wagons had been hitched with reason to stars. During their life spans the great and obvious evils had been attacked and conquered–fevers, plagues, the kind of death that came from dirty hands. They were men the Romans would have called beati, secure in their age and in themselves. As Ainslie looked at their photographs he realized why he could learn nothing from MacKenzie any more. He was now alone with his own skill, surer of his fingers than of his soul. Even here in Cape Breton he could guess at vistas of skill and knowledge which old Dougald lacked the imagination to contemplate. So he would go to Europe, as MacKenzie had said he must do, and there he would reach the top of his profession. Perhaps MacKenzie and Margaret had known he would come to this decision all the time, but it was his own path, not their pressures, which had led him to it.

  “One thing more,” he said to Margaret. “I may be at the hospital all night, so I’d better tell you while I think of it. You might write to Halifax tomorrow and see what kind of shipping space you can get. It doesn’t matter whether we land in Southampton or Liverpool, so long as we leave soon.”

  Twenty-Seven

  IN THE SECOND WEEK of September the weather broke at last. A storm that had begun off Cape Hatteras roared out of the sea and tore across the whole province from Yarmouth to Cape North. It made the spruce forests whistle like banshees and it turned the dirt roads to splashing brown mud. It shook the wooden houses and rattled the windows. It lifted the ocean against the shores and in the bare places along the coast it drove the flying spume half a mile inland. Under Dr. MacKenzie’s house the sandstone cliff trembled for three days as the ocean entered the caverns it had made and rumbled volcanically. Fishing schooners homeward bound from the Banks to Lunenburg and Gloucester ran battened down under bare poles while the seas crashed over their bulwarks. Cape Breton changed from an island of shining waters and sunlit green to a granite-gray outpost smoking with cold rain as it threw back the sea.

  On the third day of the storm a freighter with a flooded engine room fired distress signals in the night, and just after dawn a small group of watchers on the cliff near MacKenzie’s house saw her hit. A huge sea rolled her over, lifted and beam-ended her on a reef, and there she hung impaled. From the way she wallowed it was clear to people who knew ships that her after-bulkhead was gone. She jerked up on the incoming sea and lay level with the ocean fuming across her, then crashed down with the ebb, so that her stern was under and her bows pointed skywards like a gun aimed for the highest trajectory.

  The men on the cliff fired a line across her and watched a seaman go overboard as he came out of the shrouds to make it fast. The line was hauled in and fired again. This time it caught on the foremast shrouds and the crew belayed it. A breeches buoy was run out and one after the other the seamen were pulled in to the top of the cliff until nineteen men were accounted for, five unconscious and lashed to the buoy and four others with nothing worse than broken bones.

  Ainslie and McCuen were called to work on the survivors, who had been carried to MacKenzie’s house. When they arrived they found the old doctor at work in his shirt sleeves, so all three of them administered first aid as they could, set bones and sent the serious cases on to the hospital. MacKenzie’s housekeeper gave the doctors their breakfast and shortly afterward Ainslie and McCuen drove off in the blowing rain to begin their regular rounds of the day.

  During the next night the gale blew itself out and left a coldly shining sky over the province and a sea roaring angry green around it. The summer was over. Men began to think of the autumn run of salmon and of crystalline days when they would stalk deer and bring home partridge to be hung. Their wives counted jars of preserves and vegetables on cellar shelves and hoped for one more week of warmer sunshine before a killing frost left gardens black in the dawn.

  For Dan Ainslie there was no respite from work. Although he and Margaret were making their plans to leave Cape Breton within a month, there was little time for either of them to savor the coming change in their lives. Margaret thought she had never seen Dan work so hard before. For years he had driven himself and wasted energy through nervous frustration. Now he wasted nothing.

  When he returned each evening from the hospital he ate his dinner quietly and usually spent the length of a burning pipeful of tobacco talking to her about getting the house ready for the Doucettes from Louisburg, who would be coming up to take over the practice while they were away. Or they talked about Ruth’s engagement to the bank’s Mr. Toast. But neither of them spoke the name of Mollie or Alan MacNeil.

  Then he went into the surgery and buried himself until midnight, and sometimes long after, in journals and medical textbooks. He was determined to recapitulate what he knew of neurology and neuropathology before he reached London, and each day confirmed his belief that there was no field of medicine in which more was mysterious and less was actually known. On three nights out of four his work was likely to be interrupted by a call. He made the call and returned to his work. Those were the times when a clear evening under the new moon or some remembered smell in the air reminded him of his childhood, and he thought of Alan with renewed pain. Those were the nights when neither Margaret nor anyone else could help him, because no one knew how much he needed help, and he was powerless to tell.

  Over his books in the surgery a conviction gradually developed from an old hunch that the sciatica which plagued so many miners in the Broughton area was not caused by the dampness of the mines, as most of the textbooks said it was. His imagination grew on the problem until there were moments when he felt the answer was only just beyond his reach. He studied carefully the incipient pains in his own sciatic nerve which he knew were caused neither by dampness nor by cold. Nor was such a condition caused by too much muscular strain, or by a nerve lesion, though this last theory seemed to draw him closer to the answer than anything else he could f
ind.

  Then there were hours when he realized that he was nowhere near a solution of the problem, but he felt himself drawn forward into the mystery, and the longer he studied the more eagerly he looked forward to the advanced clinical work he would be doing in London the following year.

  Twenty-Eight

  THE FREIGHT TRAIN that Archie MacNeil had boarded in Moncton was slamming and banging on the curves that outlined the Bras d’Or as it rattled on its way towards Sydney. Far ahead of the car where Archie sat the whistle kept wailing at the crossings, and there were many crossings to wail at on this section of the line. He leaned against the side of the open door and watched the dark green spruce go by. The heavy odor of balsam told him that he was coming home at last. The fights were over and he was going to a place where people would like him. When he got home the nightmares would stop and the pains in his head would go away. He would go down into the mine again and show those men who had never left Broughton how a trained fighter could work. And the coal dust covering his face would hide the scars and lumps so that when he came home from work with the dust on him he would no longer have a face that frightened children and made men laugh.

  The train passed Iona and pulled out into the open, and as he sat in the doorway of the rattling car Archie could see the waters of the Bras d’Or sparkling in the sunshine. There was no kind of country he had seen anywhere in the United States which he thought could equal what he had seen today in Nova Scotia, and the farther north he had come the better it had been. There was no lake in the world as pretty as the Bras d’Or and if anyone wanted to deny it he would make them prove it. There were no people anywhere in the world like the people here. When he got home they would all be good to him because he had come back and once he had made them proud.

  The train swerved away from the lake and ran through more spruce, then it came out of the woods into a blueberry barren. He could see the low dark blueberry bushes and wished the train would stop long enough so he could pick some berries. It made him hungry to think about them. They passed into the spruce again and the land darkened as though a curtain had been drawn. Behind the train the sun had set, so he left the open door and went back to the bales of cloth where he had slept all the way from Moncton. It was cloth on its way from Montreal to Sydney and Broughton. It was clean and dry and better to sleep on than the bags of feed he had traveled with to Moncton from Montreal.

  He crawled into a nest between the bales and unwrapped the newspaper in which he had kept the last of his food. He ate the last scraps of bologna and dry bread and washed it down with cold tea in a whiskey bottle which a waitress had given him at an all-night stand in Moncton. When he finished, he took aim at the square opening of the door and hurled the bottle out, but the fine sound of its smashing was lost in the clatter of the train. Then he lay back and closed his eyes and thought about the old days when Mollie had been able to make him laugh. He would sleep awhile and be fresh for her tonight, for after all these years this night would be even better than the night after they were married. She did not really mean that she never wanted to see him again! He would show her how that was a mistake.

  Archie slept only a short while on the bales, for he had scarcely closed his eyes before the pain started in his head again and he sat up, terrified by a nightmare. Fierce men were coming at him as his muscles tightened to protect himself and he struck out instinctively. So he propped his back against the bales and stared at the open door and let the darkening rush of the landscape make him feel numb. The train kept on bucketing around the curves while he lurched with it, but he did not mind the motion so long as the nightmares stayed out of his head. The sky through the open square swayed to the motion of the train, it swung and tilted on the banked curves, but even when it grew quite dark and the stars came out, it still seemed like a friendly sky because he knew it was over Cape Breton.

  Twenty-Nine

  EXCEPT in the vicinity of the slowly moving train, the September night was so still that in the forested hills of Cape Breton a snapped twig could startle a deer at a distance of half a mile. The deer were out that night with polished horns, but they moved so stealthily no one saw them come or go. The autumn salmon were furtive in the deep pools of the Margaree and the Baddeck, and halibut lay flat, black and icy-cold on the bottom of St. Ann’s Bay. All around Cape Breton, in the coves and at the foot of dark promontories, the sea ringed the island with a thin line of astringent foam as the ground swells broke in the darkness, retreated with long throaty sighs and broke again.

  In the bedroom where Alan slept the lamp was out, but moonlight entered the window and made a bright crossbarred rhomboid on the floor. He woke up and opened his eyes to the light and then he saw a mouse crouching delicately on its hind legs in the bright center of the rhomboid as it nibbled on a crumb of bread. Its whiskers moved nervously up and down as it held the bread in its forepaws, and Alan was glad because the mouse had found something to eat. The house seemed very warm because his mother had built a big fire in the kitchen stove. Alan thought about the way the embers had glowed red through the draft under the stove box as he closed it the way he was told to do before he came upstairs to bed.

  His eyes took in everything he could see in the room, the wooden chair on which his clothes always hung, the table where the globe of the world now stood, the lighter square on the wall which was the calendar the butcher had given him, and the book of ships lying beside the globe. He lay still, watching the mouse.

  The metal alarm clock ticking in the kitchen could be heard through the floor. Its sound made Alan wonder why the mouse wasn’t frightened by it. He guessed it must be very late, maybe almost twelve. But there was still a murmur of voices in the parlor. Mr. Camire and his mother thought he was asleep and he knew they hoped he was. Mr. Camire had been in the house every night now for more than a month. It made a difference which Alan felt but could not put into words, not even to himself. His mother was as kind to him as ever. She did for him the same things she had always done. It was the way she did them that was different, as though she were no longer thinking about him at all. Alan knew that was on account of Mr. Camire. Tonight Mr. Camire had brought a bottle of red wine when he came and he made Alan understand that he wanted the wine and his mother to himself.

  So Alan lay in bed and wondered, trying to understand what had happened in the past weeks since he had gone back to school. The biggest difference was not seeing Mrs. Ainslie and the doctor any more, even bigger than the change in his mother. It seemed to Alan as if he had begun to grow backward instead of forward, as though it were last year instead of this year. At first, when he was told he must not go to the Ainslies’ any more, he had thought the doctor was angry with him or disappointed because he was not clever enough, but his mother had said it was only because the doctor was too busy to see anybody except his patients.

  And then there was Louis Camire. Alan’s ponderings stopped because he couldn’t find a satisfactory pattern for thinking about Mr. Camire. He remembered the little Frenchman talking to him in the hospital, saying that one day he would take them away to France. Maybe that was the trouble. Alan sat up in bed. Was it on account of Mr. Camire that the doctor no longer wanted to see him?

  Wide awake, Alan stared at the windowpane and listened intently for sounds from below. There was an occasional movement in the parlor but the sound was very faint and he could hardly hear it. Mr. Camire and his mother were not even talking together. He lay back on the pillow but his eyes remained open. It was certainly on account of Mr. Camire that the doctor did not like them any more, just as it was because of Mr. Camire that Mrs. MacCuish said hateful things whenever his mother walked past her house. How could his mother really like Mr. Camire? Sometimes she refused to talk about him, and when Alan asked more questions she averted her eyes. What did Mr. Camire want of them, to make him return every night? Alan had no words for his feelings, but he knew that Dr. Ainslie had come to give, as Mr. Camire had come to take.

  So the boy lay
with round eyes staring at the dark ceiling where the moonlight showed a crack in the plaster that twisted and turned like a river in a geography book.

  Perhaps it was the thought of the geography book that made Alan suddenly remember his father. His mother never talked about him any more, but Alan was sure his father would come home one day because that was what he had learned and repeated for years. His father was away in the States and things had gone hard for him there, but someday he would come home, and when he did that would be the end of Mr. Camire. His father was a fighting man, a man so wonderful at fighting that people wrote about him in newspapers, a man so mighty that when Alan had asked if Red Willie MacIsaac could beat him, Angus the Barraman had roared with laughter. Why was his mother ashamed because Archie MacNeil was a prize fighter? What was the matter with that, when his father was so brave and strong that even strange Americans paid money to see him fight and every man in Broughton was proud to have known him? Archie MacNeil would come home someday and show Alan what he could do, and then his mother would be the way she used to be and he would have a father like other boys in the school, and Mr. Camire would go away and the doctor would be friends with them all again. He wondered if the doctor knew his father. He wished he had remembered to ask someone.

  Downstairs a door opened and closed. Alan jumped out of bed, for it was the outside door and its closing could mean only one thing–Mr. Camire was leaving.

  In his bare feet he went to the bedroom door, opened it and stood at the top of the stairs to wait for his mother. He wanted to ask her right now if the doctor knew his father. It was dark, for there was no light burning in the hall below, but the foot of the stairs caught the light that shone from the open parlor door.