The Long Stretch

by Linden McIntyre

  Here’s the memory. I come home from school with a bruised cheekbone, blood on my sleeve where I wiped my nose.

  “What happened?” he wanted to know.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  He had his hand on the top of my head, turning my face to the light.

  “Never mind the snivelling. Just tell me what happened.”

  But I can’t.

  “Donald Campbell did it,” Effie said.

  He didn’t even look in her direction. “Go home,” he said.

  She left.

  He always wanted me to be somebody other than who I was. Hard, like him.

  There’s Donald Campbell jabbing me, goading me on about Effie. Half the school standing around close. Me doing nothing. Standing there, head down, eyes on fire. “Johnny sissy, Johnny sissy,” he shouts, a nickname with the awful potential of sticking to you. Like the one stuck to Hughie the Slut. And Ebenezer Lemonsqueezer. Johnny Sissy. I could be an old man, them calling me that.

  Donald is jolting my shoulder with the heel of his hand, not satisfied with the effect of his verbal taunt, but it bounces off, slams into my ear, deafening me for a moment. My hand comes up suddenly, an automatic spasm, more fear than aggression. Grazes his arm, high, close to his face. Provocation. Then the nauseating smack of his fists against my face. Quick thumps. And then the smells in your nostrils. Then the taste, sweet salted blood, snot, and tears.

  “I’m telling Sextus and Duncan,” Effie was saying, scrambling along beside me coming home, walking fast to keep up. “They’ll fix him.”

  “Don’t tell anybody,” I’m saying, thinking of Pa.

  “What happened!”

  But how do you explain that to the father who survived a thousand thumps? Delivered thousands more. Shook off a sniper’s bullet, and a whole war. Who could never understand.

  The hand went swiftly to my chin, thumb and forefinger rough on the jawbone.

  “Come on,” he said, voice quieter. “I don’t care who did it. I just want to know what you did back.”

  Eyes locked on mine.

  “See,” he said, “you let somebody walk over you once, they never stop. You hear what I say?”

  Me nodding against his hand.

  “You can get a black eye or a bloody nose. That’s nothing. But you let them get away with it…you never get over that.”

  He let go of my face, which tilted instantly to the ground.

  Then: “It’s my own fault…I never toughened you up soon enough. What are you now?”

  “Nine,” I think I said.

  “Here, give me one, hard as you can. Right in the guts. Let me see what you’ve got.”

  I couldn’t even lift my gaze from the ground.

  3

  I hear his footsteps. Stops in the bathroom. Toilet flush. Now I can hear the creak of floorboards in the living room. He’s exploring.

  He calls, “I have a photograph here. The old man’s sawmill. Him in it.”

  “I watched him build it,” I say, impatient. Where did he find that?

  He shuffles into the kitchen with a photograph in his hand.

  “So what about the phone call?” I ask.

  “What about it?” he says.

  “Like when did Aunt Jessie find out you were around?”

  “Well, what’s the difference,” he says. “It just means now I’ll have to go see her tomorrow.” Something evasive in his voice, the averted face.

  “Wasn’t that your plan?”

  “Well, yes,” he says. “But you never knew how a fellow will feel tomorrow. Anyway. Look at this.”

  He drops the photo on the table between us. Black and white. Uncle Jack standing by the big circular saw. Hand on the long lever that controlled the carriage. Him looking like he has the rest of his life under his hand.

  “He gambled everything on that old mill. Everything he saved up working on the causeway. Lost his shirt.”

  “I don’t want to harp on it,” I say. “But how many people know you’re here?”

  “Couple,” he says with a shrug.

  “Like?”

  “Well. Ma, obviously.”

  “And who else?”

  “Well,” he says. “Effie knows. That’s the point, eh? Make her sweat. Worrying what we’ll be talking about.”

  “So what did you tell Effie you were coming down here for?”

  “I told her I wanted to see Ma…maybe you.”

  See me.

  “She thought that was pretty funny. Said I’d better make sure there aren’t any firearms in the old place.”

  I snort. “So you’re on pretty good terms,” I say.

  He laughs a long chortling “Noooooho. I wanted to take the kid with me. Sandy. See the place. Let her meet people. Expecially Ma.”

  “So?”

  “She laughed.”

  I couldn’t stay away from the sawmill. I’d head there straight from school. Hang around until near dark. Jack would often drive me home. Running interference. Telling them I’d been helping. Now and then he’d give me some change or a dollar so I could prove that I was really working with him. I watched Jack digging in for the long haul. Not counting on anybody.

  I remember Uncle Jack saying that he wanted to get the mill running by winter. The best time for cutting and hauling logs. The earth was frozen. You could get the truck a long way back into the woods. People who lived out there would cut the logs for him and haul them to the woodroads with their horses.

  I take the photo from Sextus. I haven’t looked at this stuff for a long time. Not since I culled just about everything with him or Effie in it. A wonderful purge. To look at him now in the photograph, I realize Jack always knew he was living short term. Maybe he got that way working in the mines. Mining exhausts itself. Miners are always moving. Standing beside the big saw, Jack could see the causeway. Once he remarked: Funny looking at something that permanent.

  Roadway to a place called the future. A place that only exists if you do.

  The old man would stop by the mill occasionally and watch. Even when Jack was setting it up, working alone, except for me and sometimes Sextus and Duncan. Helping. Setting up cribwork, machinery, his future. The old man would just watch Jack, hands on his hips. Jack would ask him if he’d like to take a turn running the carriage, making a cut on a log. He’d shake his head, kind of laughing. His face would be saying: This project is doomed. He was negative like that.

  That didn’t bother Uncle Jack.

  Angus showed up, asked Jack if he needed a hand. Jack said sure. Put him down at the end of the carriageway, on the trimmer. He’d take the slabs of wood that were cut away when the log was being squared and chop them into stove lengths. People would pay for them. Jack told him he could have anything they made from selling slabs. But Angus showed up pissed after about a week and almost cut his own hand off. Jack told him to stay away.

  Even though Angus MacAskill was a veteran, he never had a steady job after the causeway. Because of the drinking. And he had some deafness, I think. From the big guns. In Italy. They’d be talking about Coriano Ridge. Ortona. I saw a movie about Monte Cassino once. They said Angus would eventually be stone deaf. Duncan wrote about it later.

  Ma said it was a shame Angus couldn’t wear a hearing aid. He got one from Veterans Affairs. But he wouldn’t wear it. There was a roar in his head and the hearing aid would make it worse. Eventually the noise inside his head would drown out everything else.

  “Angus is bad news,” Jack said once. The worst thing I ever heard him say about anyone.

  Jack always made me feel equal, even while wrestling with the logs at one end of the mill. He’d flip them easily, pretending not to notice my struggle. As the winter settled in, the pile of logs diminished and the piles of lumber and slab grew on the other end. Two-by-fours. Two-by-sixes. Only cutting boards when somebody would come asking for them.

  Then Jack would shut down for a day or two, heading back to the woods with the truck, replenishing the pile of logs.<
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  Always working alone, unless he had me with him. My father in the background, waiting, wearing his yellow power commission hardhat. Jack wore a ballcap.

  4

  Remembrance Days were bad. First, they were always grim looking. The sky thick with rain or sleet, cold. It was a day off back then. The old man would be up early. Barn chores done, he’d wash up and shave. When I was really small I loved to watch him shaving. He’d stand there in his barn pants and undershirt, his arms brown to the elbow. Then creamy white up over the shoulders. When he moved his arms, muscles would thicken and swell under the skin. When you stood on his left, looking at him standing sideways, you couldn’t see the mess on the right side of his forehead. I liked the smell of the lather. Hearing the scratchy sound of him sharpening an old blade by rubbing it around the inside of a drinking glass. He’d always get a couple of extra days out of it that way.

  Then he’d put on his good pants and Legion blazer, the poppy and the bar of medals. He explained what they all were but I’ve forgotten. Gave them to the museum in Hastings after Ma moved out. He’d carefully comb his hair across the top of his head, the right side combed forward to cover the blasted patch where nothing grew. Then he’d put on the beret he wore only on that day or for Legion funerals. We’d all go in. Him, Ma, and Grandma in the cab. Myself and Grandpa, and Angus in the back, on an old car seat. Sometimes Effie and Duncan. And we’d watch the parade. He’d be in it, near the front, carrying a flag. Looking grim like the rest of them. And Angus, farther back. They’d march along the main drag in Hawkesbury, to where the war memorial used to be, at the Old Post Office. There would be quite a crowd of them back then and up into the early sixties, when I quit going. The last one I went to was November 11, 1963, only eleven days before they killed Kennedy.

  After the causeway and the pulp mill, the main street pretty well died. The memorial and the Legion are up on the by-pass now. The new main street built around shopping malls. The day comes and goes now and I hardly notice. Just people pestering you to buy a poppy. Then you notice the wreaths and stuff when you’re driving by.

  They had the Sea Cadets in Hawkesbury for a couple of years and I joined. I figured the old man would be pleased, seeing me in a uniform. But the first time I put it on he kind of chuckled and said, “Come here and let me look at that.”

  I stood in front of him for inspection.

  He said: “Well, well. Popeye the sailor man.” Kind of singing it.

  I dropped out after a few months.

  After the parade he and Angus and the other vets would go to the Legion Hall. Jessie would drive the rest of us home, everybody jammed into her car.

  Remembrance Days were bad because you always knew something was going to happen. Him and Angus getting hammered.

  Uncle Jack shut the mill down Remembrance Day in ‘57. Out of respect, he said. And I could understand just by the way he said it. By the next Remembrance Day of course the mill was a dead duck.

  The sawmill was a big mistake, Jack told me years later.

  “Should have listened to Sandy. And the wife,” he said. “They told me all along: ‘You got no head for business.’”

  He was a little bit drunk, remembering.

  “Your timing was bad, that’s all.”

  “The causeway was good. Good timing,” he said. “Got me home for about three years there. Longest stretch I ever had in the place.”

  “But it was just a construction project. Temporary.”

  “But they were saying there would be lots of work afterwards. New industry.”

  “I guess it was too…small scale. Your little mill.”

  “I planned to expand. When I got on my feet.”

  “Maybe you were in the wrong place.”

  “You can say that again.”

  Jack would stand by that terrifying saw, hand on the lever that controlled the carriage, like an admiral on the bridge of his flagship. Clothes flecked with sawdust, eyes squinting against the spray of splintered wood, wincing, cigarette clenched between his lips, as the saw screamed through the log. The carriage then raced back, ready for another run. Boards and plank falling away, perfect objects of art. More than revenue. Each turn of the saw was another bite at the future. Never mind the world’s deepest causeway and the big political plans. I’d come after school, help him roll big frozen logs from the pile onto the carriage. Using a peavey tall as myself. Jack using bare hands. Talking to me like I was somebody.

  “You ever been to Sydney?” Uncle Jack said to me one day.

  “No,” I said. Thinking: Sydney, a city, huge steel mill, a massive smoking, steaming place. Pictures of it often on television.

  “Ya want to go?”

  “When?” I asked, blood pounding.

  “Tomorrow,” he said. “Going to take a load of lumber down to the Co-op.”

  Heart sunk. “There’s school.”

  “School shmool,” he said. “Look at me. I never went to school a day in my life.”

  “They won’t let me.”

  “Leave that to me.”

  And the next day we went. And it was exactly as the TV showed it, except louder. Cars streaming along King’s Road and red plumes of ore dust staining the sky over the crash and rumble of machinery. White steam billowing high above stinking coke batteries. People hurrying by. Confusion, but everybody knowing exactly where they’re heading. Saying nothing. Small boys shouting “Post Rrrrrecord!” skinny shoulders hauled down by heavy bagfuls of newspaper.

  Our first stop was at a Co-op lumber yard. Jack parked close to the door of a building with offices. Beyond it you could see huge piles of lumber, stacked precisely, saturating the air with a sour freshness. A man wearing a white shirt and necktie came out and walked around the truck. Then he and Jack talked, Jack looking at the ground, hands in his pockets. The guy went back inside. Jack jumped in behind the wheel and started the engine.

  We went to two more lumber yards before they started unloading. Then we went to a restaurant. I’d never before been in one. Everything looking and smelling delicious, even the name. Diana Sweets. Everybody looking important, except Jack and me. Was too nervous to take my coat off because I had egg yolk on my shirt from the morning. From hurrying to leave before dawn. Jack smiled, told me to leave the coat on.

  I devoured a massive plate of spaghetti. Jack ordered a sandwich but only ate half.

  “It’s a hard grind, boy,” he said, smoking, watching me eat the other half of his sandwich. “They don’t get you coming, they get you going.”

  “Everything was against him,” Sextus says, pouring unsteadily into the glass, drinking straight liquor now. “Nobody in the village gave him one little bit of encouragement. An eyesore. That was the exact word. Mainly because of the sawdust pile. With all the other crap that was around here.”

  “Today he’d need an environmental impact study,” I say, sympathetic.

  “Fucking assholes.”

  Dreams die hard, people say. You read about “the death of a dream” as if a dream ever really ceases to exist. Life would be so much simpler if dreams did die. But they don’t. No way. They sit somewhere in the darkness, ready to resurface in some simple recollection. And ruin everything. That was Jack’s problem. And I think part of my father’s problem too.

  5

  The kitbag always told you when Uncle Jack was coming or going. He’d never take it into the house. You’d see it on the doorstep or in the porch. A filthy canvas laundry bag, jammed full of the boots and belts, woollens and waterproof clothes he wore working in the mine. Stuff too dirty to wash. The hardhat would be on top, a bit of scratched brown crown showing where the drawstring didn’t quite close. You could see the outline of the lamp bracket. He usually kept the kitbag in the barn when he was home. If you saw it on the porch, you knew he’d either just arrived home or was just going away. Sometime in May ‘58 I saw the kitbag in the porch.

  Sextus says, “So he packs in the sawmill venture in…what was it?”

 
“Around ‘58.”

  “Machinery was always breaking down. Then you couldn’t get a price for the lumber. Was losing money on it. Figured all along he’d have to get work somewhere, get a bit more money to put into it. Of course, he was hardly gone when the government showed up. When you think about it now, it was a blessing. The best thing that could have happened. The Trans-Canada.”

  It was inevitable. Part of the Future. The new causeway was attached to a road that ran clear to the other end of Canada. Naturally they’d want to build a proper highway on our side too, cross Cape Breton, then Newfoundland. Sea to sea. Just like John A. Macdonald did with the railway. But before long they’re bulldozing the old houses and Mrs. George’s orchard. Tearing up the fields. The new highway ran smack through the middle of Jack’s little sawmill. He could see it coming and packed up before it got to him. Sold the machinery to somebody but managed to be gone before they came for it. “Didn’t want to give them the satisfaction,” he said.

  “He was never cut out for business. Should have settled for an ordinary job like everybody else. But he had to be different.”

  “Don’t see where he had a lot of choice in the matter,” I say.

  “Funny thing,” he says. “One of the last times I talked to him. When was it, ‘69 or ‘70, just before the end. You’d never guess what he was talking about.”

  I heard it a hundred times.

  “Another sawmill. Would you believe it?”

  So I’m looking at the kitbag, when he said: “Well, young fellow…I’m putting you in charge of the women. Expecting you to be dropping in here regular to make sure everything is copasthetic.”

  Aunt Jessie jumped up from the table where they’d been sitting. Headed into the pantry rattling dishes and stuff.

  He was sitting with one forearm across his knee, an elbow on the table. And he reached into his pocket and pulled out a dollar bill and handed it to me.

  “Here’s an advance on your wages,” he said.