When she was about to leave suspicion became certainty. “I would be glad to come again, Mr. Naddin, if you still have things to sell.” He felt his face start to pucker into a smile, felt his hands move instinctively forward as if to ask her to stay — but he resisted and answered feebly that he had nothing more. She left and for a while he was almost in a frenzy. His face became fixed in a permanent smile, the skin stretching and becoming almost painful in its unusual wrinkles. He faced upward towards the ceiling as though he were about to shout and sing but no sounds came. He walked quickly around the room, his back straight, his limp gone. He bumped into chairs and tables and was hardly aware. Then he sat down and hugged himself with delight, rocking back and forth in an agony of pleasure. He felt as though his wife had risen from the grave and was held in his arms.
After a while he was still. Then he ground his face into its mask of woe. He forced his feelings to conform until he felt safe again. He rose to his feet and began to pace around the room with a steady rhythm. At first his stride was normal, but he persevered until his limp had returned with its habitual control. He continued to circle the room until the influence of Mrs. Lamont was exorcised. Only then would he sit down in peace.
A few days later Henry Jones knocked and entered. Naddin was sitting alone in the dark watching a small TV screen. The screen gave the only light in the room. Jones put on the lights and saw Naddin sitting like a spider in a web of his own making. The chairs, the tables, the drapes, the lamps, the pictures, the ornaments, all spoke of their new owner. The colors were all muted. Everything was sharp angles and twisted shapes, like a burnt forest. There was no light, no bright spirit, no elevation of heart anywhere.
“It’s all new!” said Jones.
“Yes, all new.”
“It’s different. Hard to say what it is. But it’s you.”
“It’s me?’’
“Yes, I don’t know how, but it’s you.”
When he returned to his wife, Jones said, “Poor Jim Naddin, he’s a case. He almost made me cry in the basement. He’s tough, he keeps going, but he’s like a bug down there.”
The next day was Sunday. Naddin went for a walk as usual. The sun was bright and the trees were waving in a warm breeze. It was good to be alive. Naddin almost wished that he could forget his crippled back and run up and down the grass. But he continued to hobble along. After a half hour of loitering, he saw Mrs. Lamont walking down the street alone. She wore a bright blue dress and had nothing on her head. Her hair was a dull gold and was flying around her face. She was about his age and would probably be glad to see him again. He watched her come nearer and nearer. Then he retreated across a lawn to another street which took him out of her way. He wanted very much to talk to her but he did not want to go through that again.
Mike Finigan
Passion Sunday
Elic didn’t much like Colin, but he sat with him at Mass because Colin was the only one he could let on he knew. Besides, if he wanted to become good, Colin was a good role model. Too good maybe, but . . . .
“G’day,” he said. They were kneeling.
Colin didn’t much like Elic either, coming to Mass with the jeans on, and the black leather jacket, and black eyes, or split lips, and smelling of last night’s liquor. And always with the heart on the sleeve; repentant from one end of Mass to the other, depending on the length of the homily.
Anyway, you had to let him sit by you, or else face being killed as you took a shot of rum from your glass in a Legion six months to ten years from now.
“How’re you t’day?”
Elic crossed himself with a thickly bandaged right hand. He loved crossing himself. He caught Colin looking.
“Sliced a tendon on a beer glass,” Elic said. “I was goin’ for Aubrey Boland’s nose up at the Legion for the second time, but somebody held me arm back for a split second and the bastard got the glass up in front of him.”
“We’re at Mass,” Colin whispered.
“Eh . . . yeah,” Elic said, apologizing.
A cloud crossed his face and he looked soberly at Colin.
“Do yeh think there’s any hope for me?”
Colin shrugged. “Go to confession. Ask Father. He’s better equipped to tell you.”
Elic contemplated. “I ain’t Catholic, though. I don’t know the rules in there.”
“And you’ve been receiving Holy Communion!” Colin whispered sharply.
“Yeah. Well,” Elic said.
“You’d better hope Father doesn’t find out,” Colin said.
“How’s he going to find out?”
They prayed.
The pews were filling up. Elic said, “There’s that Melvin Pastuck.”
Melvin Pastuck was down in front, genuflecting extravagantly. On his knees, face to the ceiling, arms out in supplication. He was short and husky with a ponytail and a wiry beard. He wore a combat jacket, jogging pants, and a pair of orangey-coloured work boots.
“Coming in here, looking like that,” Colin said.
“He’s from Boston. Been here a couple a months,” Elic said. “Did yeh ever hear tell of him?”
Colin shook his head curtly.
“Who comes to live in Glace Bay from Boston?” Elic pondered.
Colin shrugged and let on he was still trying to pray.
“He musta had people here once,” Elic surmised. “Everybody used t’go teh Boston before they started goin’ teh Tronno. Maybe he’s lookin’ for he’s roots.”
He thought out loud, “Pastuck. Pastuck . . . .”
Colin stiffened in his prayer.
“They say he thinks he’s Jesus,” Elic said.
Colin raised an eyebrow and studied Melvin Pastuck. “First or second coming?”
Elic didn’t know.
“You have to watch the second comings,” Colin said suspiciously. “The terrorists.”
Elic thought and said, “You kinda gotta like ’im, though.”
Colin didn’t say anything.
“Those’re hundred-and-thirty-five-dollar boots,” Elic said.
Colin moved away an inch or two, almost imperceptibly.
Elic wondered if it was his breath. God! he was hungover. And the hand! Throb? It was like it had a heart of its own. The freezing was coming out.
What a life.
He watched Melvin Pastuck. Melvin was all caught up. There could have been no one else in the church for all Melvin knew. Elic wished he could pray like that. He wished he could be connected to God like that. But there wasn’t much chance of it today. Not with a hangover like this. And it was no sense in saying it was the last one. No sense at all. One small comfort Elic took from getting older was that he became wise enough to know he was going to be stupid no matter how smart he was. The first thousand hangovers came with a vow to never drink again. Now they came alone, the good devil that hangs over the guy’s right shoulder in the cartoons and TV shows finally killed off by relentless attacks of fun. And they stayed longer.
Before the priest got going, he got everyone to say hello to the people near to them. When he first started coming to Mass, Elic felt uncomfortable with this practice. He forgot about it going in and always wound up shaking hands with people he felt uncomfortable with, people who he knew didn’t like him or approve of him and who smiled meanly at him. And he felt conscious of the fact that he was there by himself. But after a few times in he remembered to find somebody to sit with who he knew a little at least, a peer of some degree. And the best he could do was Colin. He would have sat with Melvin Pastuck, but Melvin was too involved with God all the time. So he sat with Colin and didn’t feel like he was sticking out like a sore thumb. He shook hands with everyone around like he was a regular part of things. He enjoyed shaking hands. “G’day,” “How’s she goin’?” In time he learned to just say, “Good morning.” This morning he felt
lucky, for when he turned around there were two fine-looking young ones sitting behind him, all wide-eyed and scrubbed clean and smelling like a spring morning. They were eager to say hello too. “Good morning,” he said with a charming smile full of strong white teeth. He couldn’t fool himself. He knew his smile was a charmer. And his leather jacket. “Hi!” they said, giggling to each other. They were a little younger than he expected.
They were standing and standing. There was a crew doing The Passion. Colin was upset that Jimmy Ratchford was still Jesus after four years. “They should give someone else a chance up there,” he said. “They’re nothing but a clique.”
Jimmy Ratchford was bored, it was plain. He missed his cue after Simon Peter cut off the guard’s ear. He was in another world. Everyone waited and waited.
“And Jesus slept,” Colin said, fanning himself with a bulletin. “Clique.”
“Those three old ones,” Elic whispered during the collection. He was nodding toward the MacInnises, old Angus and his two sisters, Mary and Alice. “They’re always here,” he said.
Angus sat to the right of them. They were all big and granite-looking in their grey outfits. They all had white hair. They lived up on Swallow’s Hill in the same house. They’d been there forever. They came from Scotland, some people said, and cleared the Hill when it was just woods. They never married. Any of them. But nobody seemed to take it as odd. “They’re all wrapped up in their prayer beads,” Elic said. “It’s like they washed up on the beach, tangled up in somebody’s lines.”
“They never miss a single Mass,” Colin said. “They come every day, Father says. They’re old church.”
“They’re like three big rocks,” Elic said. They seemed mysterious, biblical somehow, not that Elic had ever read The Holy Bible thoroughly enough to know what he meant when he said that. Not that he’d ever read it at all. Most of what he knew about Christianity came from his Uncle John, whose religion consisted of a pocketful of mixed scriptural quotations that he used indiscriminately and usually in self-defence; a love of God, a contempt for holy rollers — especially Roman Catholic Holy Rollers — and a condescending tolerance for anybody who wasn’t Roman Catholic. The old ones conveyed the essence of the Roman Catholic Church for Elic though.
“I’m thinkin’ about becomin’ a Catholic,” he said. “Mainly because a them. I can feel their faith. They’re solid. I’d like to be solid like that.” Elic looked around at the statuary and the relics, at the pews and the stained glass windows. He inhaled and exhaled deeply through his nose. “I like the whole thing,” he said, rhetorically. “The beads, the crucifixes, the holy water. The saints. I love the saints. Even the plastic Jesuses and the Virgin Mary lamps.” At my church, Elic thought, they’re always putting that stuff down. But it seemed a way to keep God on your mind all the time. Doing the beads and reading about somebody thanking St. Jude for the favours in the classifieds. And Mass every day. It kept a person in touch. At my church, he thought, you get God for an hour on Sunday morning and then everyone goes for tea in the basement and talks about how nice the service was. It’s not even Mass! It’s a service! Wasn’t that a nice service, dear? It was. It was so nice. All the old ones with the blue hair comin’ up and askin’ yeh if yeh want more tea. He hated nice. If there was one thing he couldn’t stand, it was nice. I’d rather have the shit beat outta me, he thought. And after the social, everyone goes home. They turn out the lights and leave God in the basement with a half a package of Peak Freans and a cup of cold tea. See yeh.
“What I like about the Catholics,” Elic whispered as best he could to Colin, though he was not good at whispering as his deep voice would cut in and out conspicuously, “is that they aren’t nice. No offence.”
“They’ve sunk a lot into this place, I’m told,” Colin said, still on the subject of the old ones. “They’ve got a few bucks. They’re holding the place up, they say.” Then Colin wished he hadn’t said that. He pictured Elic drunk, trying to break in. “Shhh now. We shouldn’t be talking. We’re getting the eyes.”
“Did you ever talk to them?” Elic said.
“No,” Colin said shortly.
The ushers were coming. Elic fished through his pockets with his good hand. He withdrew a five and a twenty. He put the twenty in. He looked at Colin. “I’m not showin’ off,” he said. “I have to stop spending so much on the booze, so I’m doing this for spite. It’s terrible when you think about it. I’ll look at a forty-dollar pair of pants for a week. I’ll go to the store and look at them and I’ll go back and look at them again a few days later and finally, a week later, I won’t buy them because they’re forty dollars. But then I’ll spend seventy-five on the way home in the Legion without a moment’s notice. Funny, ain’t it? I really have to get me priorities straight.”
People were turning around and looking.
“Shhh, will yeh?” Colin said.
Mildred MacIntyre, a white-haired, little old ex-nun, turned around from the pew in front with her eyes hot and gave a stifled “Sh!” Elic flushed and Colin caught another whiff of liquor and leather coming from him. Mildred MacIntyre gave him the hot look too. Does she think it’s me? he thought.
Elic leaned forward and said to her in his broken whisper, “I was just tellin’ him, ‘In My house there are many mansions.’” It was the only quote he could think of. His Uncle John used it all the time.
“You were not,” Mildred whispered, and she almost withered in the fire of Elic’s breath. “You were talking about the liquor! At Mass!” she added. “My God!” she whispered. “Is there no place sacred any more?” She stuck an elbow into her husband Tom’s ribs — Tom, whom Elic recognized from the Legion and who was trying desperately to mind his own business. Tom didn’t frequent the Legion much, but when he was there he made good use of it. And, according to Stan Graves the taxi driver, Tom called most of his liquor in at home and received it through the missing board in the back of his coal barn facing the back road away from his house. Elic watched Tom’s red/blue profile, but Tom didn’t turn around or even acknowledge the elbow. He knew he couldn’t cast any stones.
“You’re right, Sis . . . eh . . . .” Elic flushed again. Everyone still called her “Sister” even though she’d left the nuns before he’d been born. “Eh . . . Mrs. MacIntyre. I was. I’m . . . I’m a wicked alchy,” he said, surprised at the sound of his own words. “I was hopin’ to straighten up and fly right. Coming here would help me start, I figured.” And he smiled cheerfully.
“You talk as though you’re proud of it,” Mildred said. “Now, I can hear every word you’re saying!”
Elic reddened at the rebuke. And then, having said what he just said, he suddenly felt ill with a commitment he hoped he hadn’t really made. Had he just said he was an alcoholic? Did he imply that he was going to quit drinking? No booze? Ever again? He felt weak. He started to feel what he thought might be a panic attack. Or claustrophobia. Saying the words made them much more real. I’m an alchy, he thought. Am I really? He began to take stock of his life then and there.
Who are you to be looking down the side of your nose at me, yeh witch, Colin thought. You who gave it all up for the flesh. Though why — he looked quickly at Tom, who seemed to know that he was being looked at — I can’t imagine. I wouldn’t be turning around at all if I was her. Does she really think I smell of that? I’ll have to talk to her alone after Mass. This guy. Jesus! Surely she knows I wouldn’t be hanging around the likes of him.
“On the night he was betrayed . . . ,” Father began, consecrating the host.
Elic hunched up his shoulders, feeling a chill. You come lookin’ to straighten out . . . , he thought. And then the swimming sensation washed over him again and carried his thoughts away on its tide. His concentration was down to ten-second spurts. Christ on the cross. The candles. The altar servers. One of them looked a bit old for an altar server. Aubrey Boland on the floor beside the pool table looking up i
n terror and madness, a broken nose, blood everywhere. The sweet Keri Swan, Elic’s potential woman, somewhere in the background, screaming. Hitting the beer glass; the funny feeling of being sliced open. The hot feeling. Throwing up. The lovely Keri Swan throwing up too somewhere in the background. The effects of the severed tendon; he could bend his finger but couldn’t straighten it back up; going to the Glace Bay General Emergency Room, meeting up again with Aubrey Boland there. The nurses threatening to call the cops. Having a smoke with Aubrey. Laughing like hell. And then getting into it again over who won the fight until the nurses dragged them off into separate rooms. The doctor all pissed off and disgusted. C’mon now, Elic. You’re at Mass. Christ on the cross. The choir singing. They were great. Bobby Lowe hitting the odd bad chord, though, on the guitar. He looked pretty bad. The hair all over the place. No whites to the eyes. The tie crooked. He could sing though. And better when he was rumsick. God! Rumsick! The liquor everywhere! It did something to his vocal chords, though, the day after. Lowered his voice. Bobby’d been in the band last night. He was in about three bands, Bobby. It was killin’ him. He played, he drank. The choir director was givin’ him murderous looks. No wonder. Bobby was after him to join. Maybe he’d see. But he might have to become a Catholic first, probably. He’d see. It’d be a good way to meet that Sandy Aucoin too. She had that voluptuous smile. She weighed a few pounds, but that smile. And when he made it to Mass, he was always catching her looking. He should really be settling down too. He was getting too old for this kind of goin’s on. She was attractive, by God. What a smile. He should see Bobby about the two of them joining AA too. A twinge in the stitched tendon. It was going to put him off work in the pit. He’d probably get the insurance, though. Nah. Light duty most likely. Sweepin’ floors on the surface or something. The boys’ll be sayin’ he did it on purpose. Maybe he should have put the five in the collection instead of the twenty, just in case. What do these priests make a year anyway? Never mind money. All the money in the world was no good if you couldn’t get laid. C’mon now, Elic. It’s Mass you’re in now. C’mon! That slow dance with the sexy Keri Swan last night. Keri Swan . . . ohhh my God . . . Keri Swan — Married though. If you call that married. The husband home four months a year maybe. Terrible thoughts now to be thinking in church! Keri Swan. She was lonely, you could tell. All tender and soft. It was like falling. Man! You don’t want to be thinkin’ . . . . And us feelin’ no pain. “On the Dark Side of the Street” playing too. The perfect waltz. God knows what would’ve happened if not for Aubrey Boland cutting in. God. There’d a been bigger fish to fry than a sliced tendon. Maybe he was a drunk, but he wasn’t yet an adulterer. Fish. That’d be nice now. A good feed a Phil’s Fish and Chips. What time does Phil’s open on Sundays? Maybe he could get a nice seafood platter and a beer after Mass. No. No beer. That’s it for the beer.
Great Cape Breton Storytelling Page 14
