“She’s a girl. The name will go.”
“Hardly,” I say. “There’s more Gillises around here than you can count.”
“I’m talking about our Gillises,” he says. “Our line.”
“You’re looking,” I say, “at the human starter pistol.”
“Which means?”
“I just shoot blanks.”
He puts his head back and laughs. Then stares at me.
“Maybe,” he says.
“No doubt about it,” I say.
“What if Sandy wasn’t premature?”
Now it’s me staring.
“Just something to think about,” he says. He takes a swig from his glass, then goes to get his overnight bag. Brings it to the table. “I want to show you something,” he says. Rummages inside and pulls out a pistol. I figure at first it’s a toy. Something for the kid.
“Not a starter pistol,” he says, holding it up.
“That’s not real,” I say.
“It is.” He spins the cylinder.
It’s small enough so you could carry it in an overcoat pocket.
“Where’d you get that?”
“It’s yours,” he says.
“Mine?”
“I meant to give it to you years ago. But I guess I thought it would look odd.” He’s turning it in his hand. “You might have been tempted to use it. On me.”
He laughs and pulls the trigger. Click.
“You never saw this before?”
I shake my head, keeping a close eye on it.
“It was Grandpa’s,” he says.
“You’re kidding.”
4
I no longer felt like going to town, even for a hamburger. Every time I looked at his truck, I didn’t want to go near it. And dances were out of the question. Even if I wanted to go, people observed mourning periods then. Quaint when you think about it today. Of course when Lent started, in February, social life came to a halt for everybody. Effie started coming over again, to watch TV. They had their own by then. Angus won it in a Legion raffle. But she said she didn’t get any joy out of watching TV at home.
Duncan would visit when he was home but he’d be talking mostly to Ma and the old people. Seemed he was studying Gaelic at the university. Wanted to talk it with Grandma and Grandpa. Them obliging, but saying, after he left, his accent was queer. Pronounces his ls. Like they do back in the Old Country. Well, his ma was from there, they’d say. And that would explain it.
Ma liked Duncan’s visits but I could see he was after getting very distant. Piety setting in. Everybody knew he was heading for the seminary next year.
I spent almost all my time in the house. Watching TV day and night. At least until it went off, after the news. The news was at midnight then. Was following the Kennedy stuff pretty closely. They’d set up a special commission right away to look into it, though I couldn’t imagine what there was to look into. Oswald, the Communist, killed him. Jack Ruby killed Oswald. Ruby was in jail, but it seemed that he was nuts. Telling people nothing.
Effie would tell me I should be getting out more. I told her I had to stay home to keep an eye on things, especially Ma. Ma, of course, seemed to be doing fine. Even Grandma. You read that after the shock of something like that there’s fatigue. Then sorrow. But I never realized there was also relief.
Grandpa, on the other hand, felt neither relief nor guilt nor much of anything. He’d begun to slip. He hardly ever talked English anymore. Except when Sextus would come around.
“Grandpa was probably the first casualty,” he says. “He was the most vulnerable. You could see him starting to slide back. I guess when he arrived, mentally, back around where he was travelling in the States, he dug out the gun. Always kept it in an old trunk. Don’t suppose that’s around anymore.”
“Went many a housecleaning ago.”
“Told me he brought this from a fellow in a lumber camp in New Hampshire. He was leaving for Boston and the fellow told him he’d need a gun. So he bought it.”
He hands the thing across to me. I take it gingerly. I’ve never held a handgun.
It’s heavy for its size. Cold.
“I don’t particularly want it,” I say, handing it back.
He says, “I think when Grandpa gave it to me he was under the impression that I was Sandy. The way he talked.”
A reasonable mistake.
“Said it was a shame how I lost the Gaelic when I got shot in the war. So I just took it. But it was meant for Sandy, so it would have been yours,” he says, handing it back.
When I don’t take it he sets it down on the table between us.
Grandpa became preoccupied with money. Figuring it had become his job to provide again. Like the old days. All winter he was talking about going to the woods, cutting pulpwood. I didn’t understand much Gaelic so I was missing a lot of it. It became kind of a joke.
One day in March I watched him from my bedroom window trudging off across the field toward the woods, carrying a pulpsaw and an axe. The old-fashioned way. Ma wanted me to go after him, but Grandma said he’d be okay. As long as it wasn’t a chainsaw.
It was the same the next day. And the next. After about a week I decided to check on him. I followed his tracks through the snow and after about a twenty-minute walk I could hear chopping. He’d been busy. He actually had about three cords neatly piled.
I stood there until he saw me.
I could tell by his puzzled look that he wasn’t quite sure who I was. I realized then that I really had no choice but to start going with him. I found Pa’s power saw in the barn, hardly ever used.
The sad thing was that there was no money problem to worry about. Pa’s veteran’s pension would continue. The old people had their pensions. And, Ma said, there was the insurance. “What insurance?” I asked her.
“Oh,” she said, “Pa left us well looked after, God bless him.”
Then I remembered the lawyer after Pa’s funeral. “Like how well?”
There were two policies, she said. One from work, naming her. The other through the Legion, naming me. Two substantial amounts, she said. I’d get mine when I was twenty-one.
“They’ve decided somehow it was accidental,” she said.
“What do you mean, ‘somehow’?”
She just gave me a look.
To me the work was just a reason for going outside, but gradually we had a substantial pile. Maybe a few hundred dollars’ worth. I started thinking about how we were going to get it out of the woods. I’d heard that Squint MacDougall had bought a new tree-farmer, planning to get into the contracting business, starting with his own woods in Sugar Camp. A lot of people were doing that now that there was a mill.
The morning I went out to talk to Squint, it was my understanding that Grandpa was going to take it easy. Stay home until I got back. He said something to me, and I assumed he was agreeing with me. But he went off to the woods as usual, and that was the end of him. Curled up on a bunch of boughs and died. And that’s how I found him early in the afternoon on a crisp sunny day in April.
“Grandpa hurt almost as much as Uncle Sandy,” Sextus says. A fresh drink in front of him. “The old boy had a life and a fellow never really got a chance to know it.”
“He was eighty years old,” I say.
“Christ. It must have been a shock for you. You found him.”
Actually, he seemed to be sleeping. Curled up like a child. And when I realized, I can’t say that I felt much of anything. I gathered up his axe and his saw and I headed for home. Of course I checked first to make sure. But it was pretty obvious. He was already stiff as a stick.
At Grandpa’s wake Effie draped her arms around my neck and hugged me tightly.
She was wearing a strong cologne that stuck to me for the whole evening.
I remember asking her how things were in school. Her rolling her eyes. “You aren’t missing anything,” she told me.
Ma saying: “Death always comes in threes.” And everybody looking uncomfortable, not wanting to
stare at Grandma.
“What were you figuring on doing with yourself now?” Uncle Jack asked after we’d buried Grandpa. He’d come home right away. Planned to stay until after Easter. A couple of weeks. Things to clear up. Grandpa, of course, didn’t have a will.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Probably look for something around here.”
“I suppose,” he said. Like there was something on his mind.
We were sitting in Billy Joe’s tavern. I was only seventeen. Four years under the legal age. But tall as the old man and the image of him. So nobody bothered me. Beer suddenly didn’t taste so bad. Chilled, at least. I had four. Was feeling better than I had for months. Coming back from a leak, passing a table of guys from the pulp mill, I heard the words “power-pole Gillis.”
Swing my face to the table and they’re all studying their beer, except the fellow who said it. A bigmouth from Princeville. And without thinking I backhanded him right off his chair.
He must have been off balance or something because I’ve never been any good at hitting. Don’t know why. Maybe because I saw the old man hit Angus once. The old man was a good hitter. He had a knack. Jack was like me. Told me once he’d never hit a person. But Jack never had to. In one flashing, fluid moment, he’d have a guy off balance and his face would be rubbing off on whatever it was pushed against.
The bigmouth is scrambling off the floor and I’m kind of paralyzed. I’m in for it. But suddenly he’s a statue. Jack has him by the back of the neck, saying, “Hey hey hey, what’s going on here?” The guy tries to swing around, but the shirt twists into a kind of knot, choking him. Jack is just talking to him quietly. And by now there’s a couple of waiters over and it’s finished. Jack and I leave. Me mouthing off over my shoulder. Jack steering me to the door.
“What got that started?”
I can’t. How could I repeat those words?
But if he was a stickman, wouldn’t that argue against the theory that he was in a state of torment because of the business with the Swede’s wife? And would he do himself in for that? Impossible. Like they say: Being a stickman is never having to say you’re sorry.
I asked Millie once if she’d ever heard my father was like that. She just asked, “What if he was?” I didn’t have an answer and she said: “If he was, good on him. We only live once.” My Millie.
5
Effie was talking about taking secretarial. You could take a course at the convent school in Mabou. Or nurses’ aide in Antigonish. Maybe getting on at the mill.
“I hear there’s even a newspaper starting up,” said Sextus. “So there might even be work for me.”
“Ha, ha,” she said. “You’ve got bigger fish to fry than around here.”
Always saying he wanted to be a writer. Duncan was going to be a priest. That was normal. A teacher, maybe. But reporting the news was a process you’d never have any contact with around here. Pretty exotic. Of course the reach of his ambition went far beyond the little paper a couple of young fellows were trying to establish in Hawkesbury. Far beyond anything we could imagine back then.
“The urge to write a novel really first came to me when Grandpa died,” he says. “Seeing all those old people around. I realized I’d kind of forgotten about their existence. Every one of them a connection with a time that had become unreachable and mysterious to us, the time when we were all immigrants around here. I’d listen to them talking Gaelic. Like a secret code. Like they were full of hidden history. Then I remembered the gun. Kind of a metaphor…the mystery of their lives. Write a story about a mysterious gun turning up after somebody’s grandfather dies. Then I thought: No, it’ll have to be something more original than that. It was only later I thought the nature of memory itself. Tricks it plays.”
“Maybe it was too deep for around here,” I say.
“No,” he says. “A good idea badly executed.”
That’s the trouble with jazzing things up. Ordinary people miss the point.
“Who thought of the name?” I say.
“The editor figured it would get American interest.”
“And I suppose it did.”
“Nothing that would make any difference.”
Good for the Americans.
I drain my cup. And I’m thinking how easy it is to slip back.
The last five years or so, ever since AA and meeting Millie and getting myself in shape, it became impossible to imagine that I would ever slip back, feel as I now feel. That strange belligerence, beneath a numb weariness. But here I am.
Wednesday night after Grandpa’s funeral Jessie and Uncle Jack came out to take Ma to a movie in Hawkesbury. Ma was worried about people talking, so soon after Sandy. To hell with it, Jack said. The place is full of strangers anyway, he said. So they went. Grandma was in bed. I was watching TV when I heard Effie in the kitchen.
She was wearing one of Duncan’s old coats, jeans, and heavy wool socks. She crashed down on the chesterfield beside me.
“What are you watching?” she asked.
“Jack Benny,” I said.
“Crikey,” she said. “Is that all there is?”
So we just watched.
“How are things over the way?” I asked.
“Not good,” she said.
“Duncan’s gone back?”
“Yes. Just Papa there.” Something in the way she said it.
“You can always stay here.”
“Just you and me,” she said. I could feel her fingers on my neck. Teasing.
“And Grandma,” I said. “And Ma.”
“That’s too bad,” she said.
And the problem is, you never know whether they mean it. Even today, familiar as I am with the little games they play, you feel the same old responses. I crossed my legs, pretending not to notice what she was saying or doing.
“So you don’t like Jack Benny,” I said.
She took a handful of the hair on the back of my head and gave it a little yank.
She slept on the couch that night.
I put the blankets on her carefully. Hung Duncan’s old coat on the back of a dining room chair. And when I came down the next morning she was gone.
School, of course.
Friday evening I decided to take the truck into town. Near their lane I could see there was a car up at their house. Arseend low from the continental kit. Whip aerial swaying in the wind. Ontario plates almost obscured from salt and roadshit.
By March, you could see a difference in Grandma. Starting to go down. Seemed to lose all her opinions. Which was a good thing because Ma suddenly had plenty. Politics. Religion. Housework. Grandma just seemed to be pushed aside by them. Which I didn’t mind. Ma was always too easygoing. Easy to a fault, Jack would say. Poor Mary, people had habitually called her.
She opened up. Little glimpses of her long-buried self. Startling stuff, like the fact that she was brought up. That’s how people described being adopted. Brought up. She knew who her real mom was. Some single girl from Judique who went away to the States after she was born. Never came back. Her mom’s parents gave her to an older couple who had no children of their own. Lived down the shore road in Judique.
Suddenly she was sharing all sorts of little bits.
“Everybody thought Sandy Gillis could have done better,” she said, laughing. “They didn’t remember what a wreck he was coming home from the war.”
“Couldn’ta done better than you, Ma,” I said.
“Darn right,” she said. “Who’d’ve put up with him?”
Us laughing. Her eyes wet and sparkly.
Easter weekend Duncan was home. I got in the half-ton and drove over to their place. Their gate was open so I just pulled in like the old days. Evening of Good Friday. Days getting longer. The ground was wet and muddy, so I stopped near the gate and started walking a kind of crescent path, around the mud. Frost coming out of the ground. Spring always smells like catshit.
Then loud voices. And Effie’s high above them. Then a crash. I froze. Then the old man�
�s voice, harsh. “You miserable old bastard, if I ever hear the like of that again, you’ll be on the road. You hear?”
My father? Then, of course, it registers: Duncan. All anger always sounded like my old man.
Then another crash and the door suddenly opened and it was her rushing out.
Saw me. Stopped dead. Paralyzed. Just staring.
What I did? I waved, a fluttering little gesture with the hand.
She turned quickly and went inside. She didn’t look back.
“Duncan was the big surprise when the book came out,” he says.
Probably liked it,” I say.
He raises his eyebrows. “Why do you say that?”
“Duncan was always unpredictable.”
He laughs.
“For sure I knew one person around here liked it,” I say.
He’s smiling in anticipation.
“Guess.”
He looks away. “Yes,” he says. “She told me.”
Her letters.
“I remember it almost by heart,” he’s saying. “She said, ‘I don’t know how much of the story is true. It’s very touching.’ That was her word. ‘It’s very touching. But the details, in the end, don’t matter. The story is really’—get this—‘about how we hide from the truth, or let other things get in the way of the truth.’ Can you believe that?”
Effie talking about truth. Him writing about the lives of people who called it thruth. Makes you want to haul off and…
“Wow,” I say.
He’s back there. And I’m back there. But There is two different places.
“I’m saying, high-priced reviewers didn’t figure that out. But there she was, our Effie. Writing to me from the Long Stretch. And getting it absolutely dead on.”
Our Effie?
Big arguments about it. Right here, where we’re sitting.
“A little strange,” I said to her, “a fellow cooking up a big pack of lies to make some kind of a bullshit point about the truth.”
“You have to read beyond the details,” she said.
“Go ahead and take his side,” I said, wishing I could think of something clever.
“Let’s just not talk about it.”
“Why don’t I just go to town and talk to people of my own mental calibre.”
The Long Stretch Page 16
