The Long Stretch

by Linden McIntyre

  She was staring at it, figuring it out for herself.

  “The causeway I suppose is the true symbol of change,” Sextus says. “From island to peninsula.”

  “Whatever.”

  “God made us insular,” he says. “The politicians made us peninsular.” He chuckles.

  “That’s an improvement,” I say.

  “You sound like the old man.”

  I take my cup to the stove, top it up. Whose old man?

  Donald was squatting, poking at the condom with a stick.

  “I’m pretty sure who it was,” he said. “I saw Alex Joe at the garage and he had a whole bagful of these things.”

  “And who do you think the girl was? It wouldn’t be…”

  “Theresa,” said Donald.

  Theresa was in grade ten. The smart one.

  Then I finally figured it out.

  Effie was giggling.

  “What are you laughing at, for Christ’s sake?” said Duncan.

  “I know what it is,” she said.

  “We’re getting out of here.” Duncan ground out his cigarette, grabbed her by the arm.

  “Wait,” she said.

  He gave the arm a yank.

  “You said Christ,” she accused.

  “Remember building the causeway? It was wild,” he says. “You’d be sitting in school. The ground would shake. Real slow. You’d look out the big windows and the side would be heaving off the cape, like in slow motion. There’d be dust and smoke for an hour after, it seemed.”

  “What are you driving at, anyway?” So what if aggravation shows.

  “Don’t take it the wrong way,” he says. “But thinking back to all that, the causeway and the hall and all, led me to thinking about Uncle Sandy, and all the talk. After the Swedes moved in with the mill.” His face is a study in managed sincerity. He should have my job.

  “We all know what that kind of talk is worth,” I say.

  “It’s wicked the way people get speculating,” he agrees.

  “A lot of the speculation came from the story you told in your book.”

  He avoids my eyes. “Well, if you want to get into all that, we both know the speculation was rife long, long before the book.” He is studying me closely now, eye to eye. And I realize I have been lured into a place he intends to revisit. No matter what I want.

  Donald was the first to see the flames.

  “Holy Jesus,” he said.

  I looked and the fire was curling around some old newspaper, licking at the dry wall. Sextus jumped at it, kicking it away from the wall. But it was too late. Crackling happily.

  Donald beat it with a board. It roared angry then.

  I look out the window. “If it wasn’t so stormy, I’d take you in to Billy Joe’s tavern, have a couple of beers…” Making sure my tone is light. Then I turn and smile at him. But he’s looking away.

  “When I was little there wasn’t even pavement. Then, overnight, we’re on the main drag. A truck stop on the road from St. John’s to Vancouver. Whoopee shit.”

  “A little bit more than that,” I say, sitting down again.

  “True.” He splashes a bit more rum into his glass. “We’re also…what did the sign say? ‘The Largest Ice-Free Deepwater Harbour on the Atlantic Seaboard’ or something. What the fuck does that mean?” Though he smiles.

  “We’ve had some pretty big supertankers.”

  “Oh, yes,” he says. “There was a refinery. For a while. Whatever happened to that?”

  “Who knows,” I say. “The Americans pulled the plug.”

  “Wasn’t there a heavy water plant as well?”

  “That’s gone too.”

  He laughs.

  The fire truck from Hawkesbury poured water on the wreckage all night. When they first arrived the fire was leaping high into the late-afternoon sky, smoke billowing almost all the way to town on a gale that carried embers in all directions. They ran a fat hose up from the strait and kept pumping water on the roof of the Reynolds’ house and Clough’s store. If the store went, they said, the village was gone. Not realizing then that the old village was already gone anyway, fire or no fire. Soon to be replaced by the new roads and the world passing through.

  6

  I knew my father knew. Word got around. He didn’t say anything at first. You just knew by the way he looked at you. Half a smile on his gaunt face.

  “Too bad about young Campbell’s bike,” my father said.

  “Yes,” I said. “It got burned.”

  “I know it got burned,” he said. “Gaddam lucky thing he didn’t get burned with it.”

  He was looking at me too closely. Waiting for something to betray me.

  My father was tough. You’re a hard man, Uncle Jack would tell him. Gotta be hard to be good, the old man would snap back.

  He had a lot of sayings like that. Takes a hard man for the hard road. Harder y’are, easier things go.

  He was staring at me.

  Sextus had that wise look, enjoying my fear.

  Donald was there, standing sort of behind him, smirking.

  Then my father laughed, made a fist, pressed his knuckles to the side of my head and pushed gently. I shut my eyes tightly.

  “You’re a bad bunch,” he said.

  After he drove away I said: “I wouldn’t tell.”

  “Yeah, you better not,” said Donald. “He don’t kill you, we will.” He looked to Sextus, who was bigger: “Right?”

  “Right,” said Sextus.

  “I’m still struggling with the Faye,” I say.

  “You should have seen her, when she went after me. During the breakup. Fwoof.”

  “Hard to imagine.”

  “Like I was a piece of shit!”

  “Take it easy,” I say.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “If I ever got started…talking about her.”

  “Never mind.” I slide the forty-ouncer toward him.

  He fumbles with the cap, hand shaking, pours into his glass. “I made a shitty husband,” he says. “But I was going to be a good parent. Father. Going to be everything mine wasn’t.”

  “Hard to blame somebody for something he isn’t or wasn’t,” I say.

  “I didn’t say I was blaming,” he says.

  We just stare at each other. Then he smiles.

  “This is her worst nightmare happening,” he says. “The two of us talking. She’d shit herself.”

  “She knows you came down?”

  “She knows everything.”

  I take a mouthful of tea, waiting for a real answer.

  “Fucking Faye,” he says. Laughing. An ugly sound, as if he’s talking to himself. “Connecting up with her was the worst thing that ever fucking happened to either one of us.”

  “Speak for yourself,” I say.

  He studies my face. Then: “Things were nearly perfect in my life, you know. Free and easy. Then I got mixed up with her.” Sighs, takes a drink. “Remember when we torched the old dancehall?”

  “I was just thinking about it.”

  “It was her cigarette that did it,” he says. “Her and Duncan bickering about something. I got the shit for it.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “You probably didn’t know. The old man found out. Then I ran away. You remember? I come in late one night, shortly after the fire. He says he’s putting me on a curfew. Says he knows how the fire started, et cetera. Says, ‘When the eight-o’clock siren goes off in Mulgrave’—remember how it used to every evening in the summer? You could hear it at home—he says, ‘I want you in your room.’

  “I just ignored him. I remember going to the fridge. He says, ‘I’m talking to you.’ I just pretend I’m not hearing. Then he says, ‘Take that cap off your head when you’re in the house.’ He had a thing about caps. Would always be telling me, ‘Tip your cap to a lady’ or to an old person or ‘Tip your cap going by the church.’ Me just shaking my head. Cap on.

  “Then he says it again. Something like, ‘Get that gaddamned cap
off your head while you’re in the house.’

  “I say something like, ‘You can bite my arse, you’re only a visitor here anyway.’”

  The wind blows up outside again.

  “People talk about the lights going out when you get hit. I never saw him move but it was like every light in the universe suddenly came on. And me on my arse in the corner.”

  “He hit you?”

  “Something did. Anyway, I scramble out of there like a four-legged spider. Never stopped running till…Well, you know.”

  He was gone for three days. Nobody knew why. Everybody out looking for him, even the Mounties. Day two I found him hiding in our barn. But didn’t tell. I owed him. He saved my life once. From drowning. He persuaded me that Jack was trying to kill him. So I helped him hide until Grandpa accidentally discovered him. I remember Jack hugging him closely afterwards, saying nothing.

  “You look back now,” he says, “it was a big turning point. We never got close after that.” He slowly blows out smoke. “There was something about him. All of them. They really didn’t seem to…fit. Nothing prepared them for families,” he says. “It wasn’t just my own old man. They were all like that. That generation. Always seemed kind of out of place around the wife and kids. Uncomfortable, like. Then it was kind of natural to assume, when he was always gone, that it was because there was something about us.”

  “It’s beyond me,” I say. “I just know Jack cared. About you.”

  “Maybe, but I never knew it. So what the hell?”

  7

  I know it wouldn’t kill me to share with him the things that I know. But, God forgive me, it feels good sitting here with something that he craves. After all he took away from me.

  He joins me at the sink.

  “Enough heavy stuff,” he says. Opens a cupboard door looking for a dishtowel, spies a fresh forty-ouncer of rum. Brightens conspicuously. “For a guy on the wagon you’ve got a pretty good supply.”

  “That’s the secret,” I say. “You’ll always have it if you don’t use it.”

  “What do you say, huh?”

  I look at the bottle.

  “What the hell,” he says, plucking two clean glasses from a shelf. Uncaps the bottle, pouring free-hand, singing: “Oh mein papa, to me you ver so vunderful.” He hands me my glass, raises his own, taps mine with a clink. “Down the hatch,” he says. Tosses it off in one gulp.

  Then: “You can’t imagine how weird it is, being here. I’m talking to little Johnny. But I can’t get it out of my head how much you’ve become…both of them. You’re the image of Uncle Sandy, but you’re so much like the old man. Must have been all the time you two spent together. In the bush. When was it you two went away? Nineteen…?”

  “Sixty-four.”

  “Of course,” he says. “Just after Uncle Sandy…”

  8

  “What really happened to Pa’s head?” I asked Ma.

  “What did he tell you?” she asked back.

  “Snakes,” I said, smiling. “Two-legged snakes.”

  “I suppose you’re old enough to know,” she said.

  I don’t remember how old I was.

  “It was in the war. There were people called snipers. They sat up in trees. Or high up in church steeples. Or in the upper windows of houses. And they shot people who were just going about their business.”

  “But they couldn’t kill Pa,” I said.

  “That they couldn’t,” she said.

  “And did Pa get the guy?”

  “I’m afraid not,” she said.

  Part 3

  1

  A stranger driving the Long Stretch wouldn’t see much. Dense dumb trees jostling in spaces that were once fields. A sodden marsh. Cords of pulpwood stacked, awaiting a trucker’s whim. A few unwelcoming houses.

  The sun in winter struggles just above the woods, weakly tinting the grey with a rosy glow and, sometimes, in the evenings, igniting small fires of light in frozen puddles. Summer shines, but only briefly. The Long Stretch is mostly a winter memory.

  Belonging to the place you see more.

  My father, Jack, and Angus grew up here, closer than brothers. Jack would never say something like “closer than brothers.” He’d say t’ihck as t’ieves. “We were ahll t’ihck as t’ieves around there.” He’d say it with a little smile. Exaggerating his accent. Because of speaking Gaelic when he was young. Talking Gaelic left them handicapped, Jack used to say. Every time you opened your mouth. Mouht.

  They lasted in Newfoundland about a year after their first flight from home, on the coal boat. Hellish work, Jack said. A bunch of Newfoundlanders digging a hardrock mine with their bare hands practically. Working for nothing, or next to nothing. Soaked and cold all the time. Wet rag over your face to keep the dust out. Working for hope—that this would turn into something. And it did, later, “after the three stooges left,” Jack said. Turned into a real mine.

  They left for Quebec in ‘38. First to Senneterre, then to Bourlamaque, which was great. Close to Val-d’Or. Good times then. Bought an old rattletrap of a car in Amos. Then the war started and they went home to celebrate for a while. Then drove to Sydney to join up. The Cape Breton Highlanders took two of them. Turned Jack down. “Bad wind,” he said, tapping his chest with his big middle finger. “Something they didn’t like in there.”

  Romantic fever.

  So my father and Angus went to war, and Jack went back to Newfoundland. It was the same as service, they told him. Mining fluorospar in St. Lawrence. Strategic material, for making aluminum. And he joined the militia. Got some kind of uniform at least. But he wasn’t a soldier, he was a miner.

  The old man called Jack a zombie once. Drinking at the kitchen table long ago. During the causeway construction, when everybody was around. I barely remember it but I have this image of Jack going over the table after him. Pa, scrambling back, laughing. Grandpa caught Jack halfway and held him. I remember the sound of the table cracking.

  The old man could get away with a lot since he was a vet. Wounded in action. People wondering, of course: What kind of action?

  Jack worked in St. Lawrence right through the war, his destiny taking root.

  Coming back from the war, my father didn’t even have the accent. Talked like from away, at least in my memory. Except when he said “hard.” The r would stick in your ear. Lost everything else, it seems.

  A car drives by the end of the lane. I instinctively look to the place on the wall where light would reflect when my father would be coming home. There is nothing.

  Then the phone rings, like an alarm. We both jump.

  “Hello.”

  “Hello. Which one of you is this?”

  I put my hand over the receiver. “It’s your mother,” I whisper.

  No reaction.

  To the phone I say: “It’s John. Is this you, Jessie?”

  “Let me speak to the other fellow,” she says.

  I hear him say “Hello, Mom” like he does it every day. Not like somebody who’s had hardly any contact in thirteen years.

  Then a long silence, letting her talk.

  There was a huge celebration the day they opened the World’s Deepest Causeway, and the Deepest Ice-Free Harbour on the Atlantic Seaboard. Thousands of people swarmed over Port Hastings. Birth of a new metropolis on the shores of the Canso Strait. HMCS Quebec, lolling like a great grey sea serpent, relaxed after its wars, fired lazy shots in salute to the future. Booom-ooom-oom-ooom rolling down the flat black fjord, vanishing behind the point of land where the Swedes would build their big new pulp mill. Bless them. Air full of the fragrance of broiled wieners, and car exhaust. And fiddle music. Always fiddle music. Somebody at school drew a mural, pinned it to the big door between the two schoolrooms, showing skyscrapers. Then all the dignitaries from God-knows-where led a march across the new link, and at the head of the crowd a hundred men in kilts playing bagpipes. You knew you’d never forget it.

  Jack was at our place in the evening that day, with Pa and A
ngus. At the kitchen table. Having a few. Pa behaving now, a special day. Jack had been working at home for nearly two years then. Like hundreds of others, home building the causeway. Driving truck.

  “You’ll be away again soon, I expect,” Pa said.

  “No,” said Jack. “Going to hang around for a while. See what’s next.”

  “The place is going to take off,” Angus said. Angus always sounded sinusy and head-stuffed when he was on the bottle, which was almost always.

  Pa scoffed. “We should all go,” he said. “I hear there’s big money to be made in Elliot Lake.”

  Jack kind of laughed. “You got her made right here, boy,” he said. “Made in the shade.”

  “I’d go quick,” said Pa.

  Angus was silent, after making his point. Pulling at the little moustache.

  Jack thinking deeply. Making plans.

  “Is there another phone?” he asks.

  “Up in my bedroom.”

  “You mind if I use it,” he says, standing a little unsteadily.

  “Go ahead,” I say.

  And he heads for the stairs. I take the rum bottle and pour a good shot into the teacup. What the hell. Drinking from the teacup doesn’t seem as dangerous. Not like the old days when I’d be sucking it out of the neck of the bottle.

  2

  I’m thinking: They were the days of wrath. Dies irae. A song you hear at all the funerals around here. I heard it first at the old man’s. Then after Jack’s I asked Father Duncan, What’s that about?

  Days of wrath, he said. And I said, Perfect.

  Jack tried to get established here, after the causeway. But there were no jobs for a fellow who’d never gone to school, never served overseas, didn’t know anybody important. Somebody incapable of sucking up. Jack knew he’d have to make his own job.

  My father was on the power commission, since shortly after he returned from the war. The Masons and the war vets had all the power commission jobs and the railway jobs. Anything to do with the government. Jack wasn’t a Mason either.

  This defines the difference between me and people like Sextus.

  People treated me like I was lucky having a father with steady work, home.

  People here used to say: Maybe if Jack had been more like his brother. Sandy, my old man. Hard. He’d have been home more. Would have been more of a father to poor Sextus. Only saying this, of course, after Sextus had become a stranger and a bit of a scandal to the place. They’d say: Poor Jack lost control of him early on. Now, you look at Johnny and see the difference. Having a man around.