Road Ends

by Mary Lawson

  Unsurprisingly, her parents weren’t as happy with the turn things had taken. My mother wrote to them regularly (she mentions receiving their responses) and I imagine her tone was much the same as in her diaries. They must have been appalled. The letters would have taken months to go back and forth but eventually, having learned amongst other things that my mother was pregnant, they decided enough was enough, and my grandfather set off to track them down. The result was a furious confrontation between him and his son-in-law. My mother’s distress was so great that when she recorded it later the nib of the pen scored through the paper.

  … shouting at each other right there in front of our tent and I could see that Stanley was beside himself with the shame of it, his wife’s father shouting at him like that for everyone to hear … never seen him so angry, I feared that he would strike my father.

  … when Stanley had still not returned I went down to the lake and walked along the shore, sobbing with anger and grief. At first I did not know what, exactly, I was grieving for, but then I realized it was for my parents, my closeness to them, which today has come to an end. My loyalty is to Stanley. Just days ago he said to me that I was the first person in his life ever to have faith in him, which is both terrible and wonderful. I will never let him down. What my father said to him was unforgivable. I have told Stanley that I will never speak to him, or indeed to any of my family, again.

  In the end she broke that promise for our sakes and I will be forever grateful to her for that. But she stuck to it for eight long years, refusing to see her family or to accept help of any kind from them, and those years must have been punishing even by the standards of the day. Her pregnancy turned out to be twins, my elder brothers, Alan and Harry. They were born in a tent. Less than a year later, so was I, though by that stage the tent was pitched in a different mining camp.

  We moved many times in those early years, in pursuit of one rumour after another, and later, when the money ran out altogether, in pursuit of jobs, and each time we moved there were more of us. Mostly we lived in shacks thrown together out of whatever timber was lying around. There was never running water, far less electric light. My mother’s days would have been spent in a constant struggle to feed and clothe us. She was the most resourceful person I have ever known, but it must have called for every ounce of her strength and ingenuity.

  I don’t know how long it took for her optimism and her faith in my father to be worn down. Quite some time, I imagine; a commitment as strong as hers would have been hard to break. Pride probably came into it too—she wouldn’t have wanted to admit, even to herself, that her father’s assessment of her husband had been right. Nonetheless, the time did come. I found proof of that on a long thin strip of newsprint torn from the margin of the Temiskaming Speaker.

  When Stanley came in he was so excited, he seized me and began dancing around, laughing and saying that this was all we had dreamed of and more, a deep, rich seam, and this time there was no doubt, any fool could see it was the real thing. I rejoiced with him, of course, I genuinely rejoiced, but …

  The “but” says it all.

  I remember him doing that—picking her up and whirling her about the room, whooping with joy. God knows how many times she had to endure that over the years, each time trying so hard to believe in him, hoping and praying, for all our sakes, that this time he would be proved right. I remember watching her as she laughed and danced, seeing the tension at the corners of her mouth.

  The next day he’d take a sample of the ore to the assay office and it would turn out to be worthless. He’d be dumbfounded. Absolutely dumbfounded. And then incredulity would give way to rage. The assayers were out to swindle him, to get him to abandon his claim so that they could take it over themselves. Or they were in cahoots with some mining consortium from the USA. Anything but accept that he’d been wrong again. In fact, the more often it happened the less he could accept that possibility, because as time went on the only conclusion you could draw about someone who was so consistently and repeatedly wrong was that he was a fool.

  Then the drinking would start, fuelling his fury.

  “I fear that Stanley does not take disappointment well,” my mother wrote.

  That was for sure.

  The carefree loops and swirls of the early days have gone from her writing but it is still fairly firm, fairly confident. I’m guessing that means he hadn’t yet started to take out his “disappointment” on her physically. She wasn’t frightened of him yet, in other words. Knowing her, knowing her inner strength, I imagine she didn’t become truly frightened until he started taking it out on the rest of us. Specifically, on me.

  If I start thinking about all that I will never get to sleep. I will stop this now.

  A very strange thing has happened. I had just put the papers back in the file and was closing this ledger when there was a knock at the front door. I waited for someone to answer it but of course no one did, so eventually I went to answer it myself, glancing at my watch as I did so. It was one o’clock in the morning. In this town everyone’s in bed by nine, so I wondered what catastrophe had taken place. When I opened the door there was no one there.

  I stuck my head out, letting in an icy blast of air, and saw Reverend Thomas climbing over the snowbank at the end of our drive. There is a streetlight beside the road and it was unmistakably him. As I watched he clambered down the other side and began walking down the road towards his own house.

  I considered calling to him but he couldn’t have heard me. I’d have had to put on my coat and boots and go chasing after him, which, given that I have nothing to say to him and no wish to hear anything he has to say to me, seemed unwarranted. In any case, I hadn’t taken all that long to answer the door, so he must have decided against saying whatever he had come to say.

  I had just closed the door when Tom appeared, bleary-eyed, evidently wakened by the knock.

  “Who was it?” he said.

  “Reverend Thomas.”

  He looked startled. “What did he want?”

  “I don’t know. He’d gone before I got to the door.”

  Tom pushed past me and opened the door, letting in another flood of air. I said sharply, “Close the door—we’ll freeze to death. He’ll be practically home by now.”

  He closed the door and turned around and leaned against it. He looked very strained. Very anxious. He closed his eyes for a minute and then opened them again and looked at me and said, “Dad, do you think he’s all right?”

  He hasn’t called me “Dad” in years. It surprised me and also, I confess, gave me an unexpected surge of pleasure, suggesting as it did that he was appealing specifically to me rather than merely to whoever happened to be standing there.

  The answer to his question was clearly “no,” but instead I said, “Tom, nothing of what happened in that family was your fault. You know that, don’t you?”

  He closed his eyes again. I said, “Let’s go into the kitchen. It’s warm in there.”

  For a moment I thought he would, but then he shook his head. “I have to get back to bed. I’m up at five.”

  And he turned and went upstairs.

  I should have called him back. I should have insisted that we talk about whatever it is that is worrying him so much. I think he would have, if I’d insisted, and it might have helped.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Tom

  Struan, February 1969

  A mouse drowned in the honey. Someone had left the lid off overnight. It had gone in head first and its tail was sticking out like the wick of a candle.

  “He went to the bathroom in it,” Adam said. He was kneeling on a chair, peering into the jar.

  “You’re right,” Tom said. There were ant-sized pellets in the vicinity of the tail.

  “Was he hungry?” Adam said.

  “Probably to start with,” Tom said, “but probably not by the end.”

  “What will happen to him now?”

  Tom thought about it. Would the honey preserve it?
Candied mouse? Unlikely. There’d be enough air trapped in its fur for decomposition to take place.

  “He’ll rot.” Death again. It followed him around like a dog.

  Adam looked troubled; two short vertical lines appeared between his eyebrows. Tom wondered suddenly if this was his first acquaintance with the concept—the fact—of mortality. He didn’t want to traumatize him.

  “It won’t hurt him,” he said. “He can’t feel anything anymore.”

  The vertical lines were still in situ. “But can we still eat the honey?” Adam said. “From around the edges?”

  Another blizzard. Out by the Dunns’ farm the snowplough slid into the ditch—the ultimate humiliation. Tom was rescued by Arthur Dunn, a case of the present being rescued by the past because Arthur Dunn still worked his land with horses. Huge animals, big as buses, they’d looked like something from a Greek myth when they loomed up out of the snow. Arthur tied a rope around the rear axle of the snowplough and the horses hauled it out as if it were one of Adam’s Matchbox toys.

  “Thanks very much,” Tom said.

  Arthur nodded. “Wanna come in an’ get warm?” He was a shy man and looked at his feet when he spoke.

  “I’d better get on with it,” Tom said, “but thanks again.”

  Arthur and his team dematerialized and there was nothing left but the snow.

  By morning the storm had passed and the sky was a clear and innocent blue. Tom and Marcel worked overtime and managed to get the roads clear just as the first flakes from the next storm started drifting down.

  “Dis is one stupid job,” Marcel said disgustedly. “Ever’ year I say to myself, Marcel, nex’ year you jus’ pack up de wife an’ go to Florida till Easter, an’ ever’ year I forget.”

  The roads were now mere corridors between snowbanks four feet high. In the centre of town the sidewalks had been abandoned weeks ago; everyone walked on the road. There were gaps in the snowbanks outside the entrances to the stores and businesses, shovelled out afresh each morning, filled in again each time the snowplough passed. People who needed their cars to get to work had to shovel out their driveways both morning and night. Leave a car parked at the side of the road and you wouldn’t see it again till spring.

  At six fifteen in the morning, rumbling down Cleveland Road on the snowplough, Tom saw Reverend Thomas standing outside on the porch of his house in his bare feet. The porch light was on, otherwise Tom wouldn’t have noticed him. He appeared to be looking at his car—or rather at the three feet of snow that covered his car—down in the driveway. He was wearing pyjamas and no shoes or socks. Tom saw it clearly: there were three or four inches of new snow on the steps but there was less than an inch on the porch itself, and Reverend Thomas’s bare feet were unmistakably planted in it.

  Tom’s heart began beating painfully hard. He kept on ploughing, unsure what to do. He should go back. But how could he go back? The last thing Reverend Thomas would want would be for the snowplough to stop at his front door and Tom, of all people, to get out and ask him why he was standing there in his bare feet.

  But what if he’d had some sort of breakdown, had suddenly lost his mind? In the circumstances that had to be a possibility. And if you’d stand in the snow on your porch in your bare feet, what was to stop you from walking down the steps and keeping on walking until you froze to death in the street? At this temperature it wouldn’t take long.

  At the end of the road he turned left, then left, then left again and rumbled slowly back down Cleveland, past the house. The porch light was off and a light was now on inside the house, which he was pretty sure it hadn’t been before. Which was good news. But though he couldn’t see the porch clearly, there now being no light, Tom saw something that had not been there five minutes ago, namely footprints in the snow leading down the steps and across to the car. Two sets of footprints, one going there and one going back. The Reverend had waded barefoot through the snowdrifts to look at his car. There was no way he could have actually seen it without digging it out from under the snow, but he’d gone out and stood beside it nevertheless.

  He couldn’t sell the car; Tom understood that perfectly. There was nothing wrong with it apart from the small dent in the front fender on the passenger side. It was in good running order, a solid, reliable Ford, black and sedate as befitted a clergyman, but Reverend Thomas wouldn’t be able to bring himself to sell it because the idea of somebody driving around with that dent in it would be unthinkable. Likewise he couldn’t get it repaired—get the dent hammered out—because it was impossible even to contemplate repairing a dent of that sort. A dent of the sort that would be made if a car going at considerable speed hit a small, light object such as a child on a bike.

  Depending on your point of view it had happened either very fast or very slowly. From the point of view of the rider of the bike and her mother, who was running along beside her cheering her on (because as it turned out it was the first time the small rider had managed to ride her bike unsupported and, although she was a bit wobbly, she was quickly getting the hang of it)—from their point of view, because the car was coming up behind them around a bend in the road and they would have neither seen nor heard it, it must have seemed to happen in an instant. From the driver’s point of view it had probably seemed like an instant too. He was going very fast and, due to the large amount of alcohol in his bloodstream, his reaction time was slower than normal. When he rounded the bend and saw the child on her bike he would have been on top of her before his brain had fully registered that she was there.

  Whereas from Tom’s point of view, watching from the beach, with a clear view of the section of Lower Beach Road the little girl was on, it had seemed to happen very slowly, because he was able to see not only the child on her bike with her mother running beside her but also the cloud of dust churned up by the car as it approached the bend. Tall reeds obscured his view of the car itself, but from the dust he could see how fast it was going, and he also knew, though he wasn’t consciously thinking about it at the time, that although it was nine o’clock in the morning Rob was still drunk from the night before—all of them were still drunk because they’d been partying on the beach all night. So he’d been watching the car’s approach with a faint, almost subconscious shimmer of anxiety, and when the moment came, it seemed to him that he’d known it was coming for quite a long time.

  The plan had been that the twelve of them would get together for a class reunion down on the beach at Low Down Bay, just as they’d done in previous summers. They’d make a gigantic bonfire and watch the sun go down, eat a bit, drink a bit, swim a bit, then watch the sun come up again. The guys would bring stuff for supper (hot dogs, hot dog buns, potato chips, booze); the girls would look after breakfast (powdered orange juice, instant coffee, French toast). They’d cook everything over the fire—the girls brought three big frying pans for the French toast—and generally make it a night to remember. And everything worked out perfectly: the night was warm for June and the bonfire kept the bugs away and, though the lake was still ridiculously cold, quite a few of them did go in. There was a stupendous amount of hooch, thanks mostly to Rob, who had contact with a couple of guys from the sawmill who’d set up a highly illegal distillery in a shack off in the woods. They mixed it with Coke to hide the vile taste and sat around the fire and passed it around and talked and sang silly campfire songs that somehow didn’t seem silly at the time but kind of nice and nostalgic, reminiscent of their youth, which with hindsight had been special. Some of them rolled themselves in picnic blankets and got a little sleep and some of them rolled themselves in picnic blankets and got a little sex, though probably less than they let on. By morning they were all ravenous, so the girls brought out the ingredients for French toast, which was when they realized they’d forgotten to bring margarine or butter to cook it in.

  If only. The two most pointless words in the English language. If only it hadn’t been Rob, who’d had more to drink than any of them, who volunteered to go home and get some marg
arine. If only he hadn’t then decided to drive back in his father’s car to speed things up. If only Tom had gone with him. He might not have been able to persuade Rob to walk back, because when he was drunk Rob wasn’t good at listening to reason, but at least he’d have been able to say, Hey man, slow down. We’re coming to the bend. Slow down.

  The worst thing had not been the child’s body, which was almost unmarked, or Rob’s face, which was so shocked, so white, that he’d looked as if at any moment he would pass out. It had been the way the child’s mother, sitting in the dust at the side of the road, cradling the little girl in her arms, kept rocking her, kissing her, telling her everything was all right, it had just been a little bump—“Don’t cry, sweetheart, don’t cry”—when the child was not crying and it was absolutely, unmistakably clear from the way her head lolled whenever her mother moved her that she was dead.

  Because of the blizzard no newspapers had made it as far north as Struan for the past three days but Tom kept a copy of The Grapes of Wrath in the cab of the snowplough in case of just such an eventuality and he took it with him into Harper’s to read over lunch. It wasn’t that he particularly wanted to read it again—when they’d studied it in high school Rob had summed it up as the longest sermon ever written and Tom had pretty much agreed—but he needed something dark to match his mood and the only alternatives in his bookcase apart from books about airplanes were Moby-Dick, which just plain had too many words in it, and Jude the Obscure, which was so depressing it had made him feel suicidal even when he was sixteen.

  There were half a dozen people in Harper’s, including a big blond guy sitting at the back in the half-booth across from the one Tom considered his own, but he was reading last week’s copy of the Temiskaming Speaker and didn’t look the gabby type, so that was okay. Tom had read the Speaker twice already. It was full of the upcoming winter carnival: dog-sled races on the lake, speed skating competitions, hockey games, ice sculptures—fun and games for all. The whole idea made Tom so tired he could hardly hold his head up. Photos of the seven girls competing for the title of Carnival Queen adorned the front page (“Seven Pretty Young Ladies Competing,” the headline said) and they made him tired too—his interest in girls seemed to have vanished along with everything else. So now I’m a eunuch, he thought. The idea didn’t bother him much.