I said, “Duncan is getting ordained in the spring. We’re figuring on having him do it maybe in June. Around the middle.”
“Let me know,” he said. “I’ll be going. If I’m invited.”
Laughed at that.
That fall they made Jack underground captain, so he moved into the staff house. He could have lived in the staff house all along because he was a shift boss. But he chose to live with me in the bunkhouse. But things were changing. Distance opening up. And would continue to open up, even after he moved home, fall of ’69. Something to do with me marrying Effie MacAskill. Making a Gillis of her.
It took a long time for him to get around to telling me. And when he did nothing would ever be the same again.
6
“The tihng is,” Jack says, “a fellow never knows what you have to know or want to know. You know?”
Studying a spot on the table between us. In Ikey’s place at Bachelor Lake. It’s late. Everybody else gone and Mrs. Ikey giving us the eye. He’s been rambling on about the early days in northern Quebec. Bourlamaque. Cadillac. East Malartic. Amos. Noranda. Good times, hungry times.
Ikey sitting with us for part of the evening, telling stories about prospecting. How he staked the Royal York Hotel in Toronto during a prospectors’ convention once. Laughing his head off. Me and Jack wondering what the Royal York Hotel was all about. Ikey leaves us alone then.
Jack crushes his cigarette as if he’s finished for the night.
“Poor Sandy. And Angus.”
Shakes his head, thinking hard about something.
“But it doesn’t seem to be a problem between you and his young one,” he says.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say. Feeling something in my gut.
Picks up his bottle, lifts it to his mouth, and empties it. Burps loudly. Making up his mind.
“One thing I always gave your dad credit for. Putting a lot behind him like he did. Except maybe when he’d have too much to drink.”
“Putting what behind him?”
He shrugs, avoiding my eyes.
“Wait now,” I hear myself say. “Are we talking about…”
He sighs. “I imagine we are,” he says.
He pulls a package of tobacco and papers from his shirt pocket and begins to roll a cigarette. When it’s packed, he runs the fine pink point of his tongue along the glued edge of the paper and with his large, rough yellowed fingers smooths the cigarette carefully. Then points it at me.
“I’d just say this, then. If your dad was man enough to put something like that behind him, then there’s not much that any of us have to complain about.”
I wait.
“It was just something that happened. Nobody will ever know why. Probably just an accident.”
I say, “Just tell me straight. How did my father get hurt in the war?”
He lights the cigarette and when the flare dies from the end says: “Angus shot him.”
7
Early seventies, a year or so after Angus died, Duncan came to see me. I was living alone. Here, on the Long Stretch. It was on an Easter Sunday. I remember that. You could smell the booze on his breath. He’d been working hard through Holy Week in Hawkesbury.
He asked if it was okay to come in. I figured it was about Effie. He had a bottle of Glenfiddich. I declined.
Of course he wasn’t here to talk about Effie at all. He was here to talk about my old man. And about his, really. Beating around the bush. Me with the upper hand, knowing just about the whole story of our fathers by then, but him not knowing what I knew. He was writing something about the war and his father, and seemed to want to clear things with me.
Nothing to clear up, far as I was concerned.
“Actually there could be,” he said.
“Not really,” I said.
“The day Sandy got shot,” he said. “Overseas. Do you believe they actually were together?”
“What’s the difference?” I said, testing him.
“Your father wasn’t shot in Germany. He was shot in Holland.”
“Germany, Holland,” I said. “Hardly made much difference to his skull.”
He poured half a water glass full of the Glenfiddich.
“You heard about the sniper,” I said.
He looked at me with that look priests learn.
“People don’t realize,” he said finally, “how unlikely it was that they could have been together. At any time during the war.” He studied his glass for what seemed like a long time. “But, somehow, it happened. Them together. By some fluke. No doubt about that part.”
I nodded, waiting.
“And the sniper? The letters you gave me back…when. One is quite explicit. A sniper. He states it unequivocally. And I’ve confirmed what he said, what Dad said, about shrapnel and snipers being the greatest dangers. In Holland. In April of ’45.
“But I guess the real point is, nobody knows anything for sure. And in a few years there won’t be anybody left to speculate from any first-hand knowledge.”
“I guess that’s one thing we know for certain,” I said.
“And in the long run, what does any of this really mean?”
He stood then, studied me for a moment, his face weary. “Effie’s well,” he said. “And always asks about you. I hear from them, of course.” Studying me with a hint of apology. “He’s still my friend. She’s my sister.”
I was just watching.
“I don’t approve,” he said. “But I believe the situation calls for…compassion.”
I nodded again.
“Compassion,” he said, “is a…quality…that defines true…holiness. For the living. And for the dead.”
He wanted eye contact. But I couldn’t.
“God bless you,” he said finally, raising a limp hand. Gesturing, the way they do.
Shortly after that visit he disappeared for a couple of years. Went to Honduras to do mission work. And maybe to dry out. Finished his little memorial about the war down there.
We lost track of each other after that. Until recently.
In the book The Day They Killed Kennedy, the character who is me says to a priest, “Maturity begins at the moment you know that everything you’ve learned up to then is probably a lie. Including this.”
The priest, who is a nice post-Vatican II guy, probably Duncan, says: “There is much to be hopeful about in the word ‘probably.’”
The main character in the story is a schoolteacher, the father of the troubled character who everybody thinks is me. This teacher is an unhappy fellow who, because of teaching about the Second World War, becomes obsessed with it. Gets the kids interviewing local guys who were in it. One of the kids gets all screwed up over a story some local guy tells him. The guy is full of anger and bitterness about the Germans. Turns out this kid’s mother is a German lady, married to one of the Swedish newcomers working at the new pulp mill. The kid has a crisis. The teacher gets involved. Then gets mixed up with the German wife. Et cetera, et cetera. Old story. Big affair. Inner conflicts. Then people find out. He kills himself. November 22, 1963. Exactly at the moment Kennedy is being killed in Dallas. The place is still old-fashioned, in spite of the new mill. Superstitious about suicide. All the time the story is going on, nobody can say the word suicide or speak directly about what the teacher character did. They refer to everything heavy as “the day they killed Kennedy.” The end. Got pretty steamy in places. Everybody wondering where he got all that stuff. Looking at me funny. Coming out only five or six years after the old man did what he did, the day they killed Kennedy. It hit Uncle Jack really hard. The book itself was neither here nor there. But what happened to Jack—that, I couldn’t forgive.
Part 6
1
Summer 1963. The old man started acting out of character. Gentler in his own rough way.
I was helping out. Haymaking. I was suddenly almost as tall as he was. Surprised to discover I was starting to look like him too. People would comment: especially arou
nd the eyes. Getting those Gillis eyes.
Also getting the odd day working for pay. Usually on a pulp truck. People stockpiling pulpwood then. The new mill was starting up. Hard work, hauling pulp and haymaking, before the mechanical revolution around here when everybody went crazy for gadgets. Now a lot of them just shrinkwrap the hay and leave it in the field. And haul pulpwood without ever touching a stick of it. Back then it was forking the hay and slinging wood with a pulphook. Building muscle. I’d catch the old man sizing me up.
July was always hot. Evenings you’d want to go into the village. It was cooler there, alongside the strait. Sit out in front of Mrs. Lew’s canteen, have a soft drink, watch the world come and go. Lots of cars roaring around then. Money to burn, for a change.
A Friday night, Effie and I are sitting side by side on pop cases. You can tell she’s giving the eye to a car parked in front. A ’58 Mercury with Ontario plates. A continental kit on the back end. Big whip aerial. Two guys in the front gabbing and laughing in loud bursts. Their radio blaring Out in the west Texas town of El Paso I fell in love with a Mexican giiiiiirl…Good old Marty Robbins, helping us all pass the balmy boring summer evening.
Paddy Fox is inside. He’s leaning out through the open hatch where people buy things. His eye has a permanent red blob in it, like some eggs you open up. Burst blood vessel, I guess. A reminder of my old man.
Then there’s the crunch of gravel as a big black Chrysler pulls in and slides to a stop. A ghost gets out: white skin, white-blonde hair, white blouse open down to there, and tiny tight white shorts. Three strides and she’s up the steps, standing near enough to smell, and ordering a pack of Kools and a bottle of Lime Rickey. Our eyes meet. She’s like nobody from around here. And as she turns she stops and looks at me again, almost staring. Smiles and says hello. Then asks what my name is. Has an accent.
I struggle to stand up and say, John Gillis. And she says, Is that a common name around here? Gillis? And I say, Pretty common. She smiles and says, Nice to meet you, John Gillis, and she trots down to the car. And is quickly gone. “There you go,” says Effie. “An older woman for you.”
She looked to be about mid-thirties. Little thrills ping in my midsection.
“What do you think, Paddy?” says Effie.
“That’s eatin’ stuff,” says Paddy.
Mrs. Lew is at the window, wiping her hands on a ragged dishtowel.
“That’s one of the new Swedes,” she says.
The old man took his vacation for our haymaking so Grandpa and I didn’t have to do it all ourselves. That was weird. He usually only took a vacation in hunting season. Hated haymaking, he said. From the time he was a kid. We still used a horse back then. Mostly to humour Grandpa. We could have had a tractor. But Grandpa like harnessing old Tony, cutting and raking the way he’d always done it. Used Pa’s half-ton to haul it to the barn. My father and I did the heavy stuff. Grandpa and Tony both knew they didn’t have much more haymaking left in them.
The work Pa did, the way he lived, kept him lean. When he was stripped to the waist under the baking July haymaking sun, you could see the long stringy muscles tense under the milky skin. Uncle Jack tended more to bulk. You’d never notice his physical power unless you got to see his bare back when he was moving his arms around. Like taking off a pullover. You’d see the thick muscles knotting behind the shoulder, neck bulging. Jack was stronger than the old man, but the old man was quicker.
“The old man was kind of like a big friendly dog,” Sextus said once. “Uncle Sandy was like a cat.”
Near the end Pa seemed to be trying to open up. By then, of course, people were conditioned by his isolation.
Haymaking that summer, my father would have a case of Schooner behind the seat of the truck. Would sip one between loads.
“Want one?” he asked me once, grinning.
Me wondering if he meant it, or was setting a trap.
“No thanks,” I said.
Grandpa watching cautiously.
“Here. Take a sip,” Pa said, holding the bottle toward me.
I took it, raised it carefully to my lips, watching his eyes as I did.
The beer stung the tongue, hot and sour.
I grimaced and handed the bottle back.
He roared laughing.
The evening closed in quickly behind the Chrysler. Seemed to leave everything moving gently and rustly, like a flag stirred by a sudden breeze. You felt an absence. The music coming from the car with Ontario plates had gone gentler, a mournful Acker Bilk tune, “Stranger on the Shore.” Effie kind of swaying, sitting on the pop case, looking dreamy. Then the door of the Merc swings open and one of them calls out, kind of rough, “Hey, Eff-ay. Come ‘ere.”
She stands, stretches, and says, “What.”
“We’re going to the dance in Creignish. Wanna come?”
“Sure,” she says without a moment’s hesitation and is gone, door slamming and engine starting simultaneously, tires popping gravel then hitting pavement with a little screech. The continental extension on the rearend almost touching when they accelerated. Then gone, taillights disappearing up over the graveyard hill. Me left with Paddy and his bad eye.
Got up and stretched, like nothing mattered.
Before beginning the long walk home I said to Mrs. Lew, “Give me a pack of cigarettes.”
“What do you want?” she asked.
“Gimme a pack of those Kools,” I said.
Two days later I saw the Chrysler in town. I was standing with Pa and Squint on the sidewalk near the old town hall. Noticed them staring at somebody walking along the other side of the street. Squint saying, “Tha i muineil…,” laughing strangely, gawking. Pa looking nervous, knowing I was near. Watching the Swede’s wife crossing the street wearing tight pants called pedal-pushers. Me knowing what Tha i muineil meant. Figured it out.
Me. Too young to understand that grown men remain randy adolescents.
Except Pa was looking like he was seeing a real ghost.
“They say the worst thing the father can do is make himself hard to forget,” Sextus says, puffing smoke.
“Who said that?”
“Who knows? Sometimes the less they say the more they leave behind.”
“I never had much of a problem forgetting the old man,” I say, feeling the ghostly presence of him again.
A Saturday evening, the day we finished putting the hay in, Pa said to me, “What are you now, anyway? Sixteen, is it?”
I nodded. Seventeen in October.
“I suppose you’ll be wanting your driver’s licence soon.”
“I’d like that,” I said cautiously.
“What’s stopping you?”
“Well,” I said, allowing a nervous laugh, “I’d have to learn first.”
“Bullshit,” he said. “You can drive. You’ve been practising.”
I’d been at the wheel, putting the hay in. Could see him watching closely.
“Well,” I said, “just in the yard. And around the field. Nowhere with traffic.”
“Not on the road?” He looked skeptical.
“No,” I said.
“Well. It’s about time, then. Let’s go.”
“But I don’t have a beginner’s,” I said.
“Fuck the beginner’s,” he said.
A word he rarely used around me before that. His way of opening up, I guess.
We drove out through Sugar Camp. At the turn off to West Bay Road he said keep going. When we got to Glenora Road, he said take a left. I figured I’d turn back at Dan Alex MacIntyre’s lane but he said keep going again. Alex Lamey’s then. But he said no, hang a left on the Trans-Canada.
“The Mounties will be around,” I said. “It’s the weekend. We can turn up MacIntyre’s Mountain.”
“Fuck the Mounties,” he said.
Me driving along about forty miles per hour, hands leaving imprints on the steering wheel, eyes bugging out of my head, blood pressure through the roof, and a feeling like sexual excitement righ
t in the pit of my groin. Wanting to pass somebody I knew. Toot the horn, wave casually at people. Especially Effie. Imagining the half-ton as a Monarch. One better than a Mercury. With Hollywood mufflers gurgling.
Near the General Line, Pa said, “I want you to turn up there. I want to show you something.”
By then he had a pint bottle in his hand. Must have been in his pocket. Or stashed under the seat.
A couple of miles up the dirt road he said, “Keep left at the intersection, by the old John H. place. Towards Creignish Rear.” Going by Shimon Angus’s place he nods toward the old farm: “Did you know that Shimon Angus had twenty-seven kids?”
I said I didn’t know that.
“From three wives,” he said. “The pope gave him a medal.”
I think he expects me to laugh.
“Jack’s Jessie was saying they should have gave the medal to the women.”
A mile or so past Shimon Angus’s the road breaks out of the trees and suddenly you can see you’re on the top of Creignish Mountain and St. Georges Bay is spread out in a great blue sheet in front of you. At the foot of the mountain, the houses of Creignish are strewn along Route 19, with the church among them. Stella Maris, Star of the Sea. Stuck on the top of a fold in the mountainside, the graveyard rolling off to the right, and the dancehall in front, just across the road, back to the windy gulf. This is where everybody goes on Friday nights to dance and drink and fight and pick up women.
He swigs straight from his bottle and screws the cap back on.
“This is the prettiest place in the world,” he says, staring out into the bay.
I’d pulled over to the side, on his instruction.
“I’ve seen a lot of the world, you know,” he said, looking in my direction.
I nod.
“You know that,” he said.
“Yes.”
“So you know I know what I’m talking about.”
“Yes.”
“There were places I’ve seen…would have been nice. Holland was too flat. But France. Belgium. Even Holland, though. You should see the nice farms there. Big meadows. Dikes holding the water back.”
“And windmills?”
“Big jeezly windmills. Like the books. Canals too.”
The Long Stretch Page 11
