“‘ . . . take this, all of you and . . . .’”
“What time does Phil’s open on Sundays?” Elic asked Colin.
“Sh!”
On the way up for Holy Communion, Elic watched nervously. He could never remember how it was done exactly, or if he’d done it right the last time. He was trying to see around people. Was there a proper hand you took it in? Wasn’t there this religious disgust of the left hand? Wasn’t it the sign of The Devil or something if you were left-handed? Some people just had it put on their tongue. No. He wouldn’t do that. God knows what the priest might see in there, let alone smell. Then he remembered that he only had the one good hand today anyway. The left hand. They’d have to understand. He turned his attention to the wine and watched how that was done. Should he go for the wine? Maybe not. It was optional. Lots of alcoholics didn’t go. But it’s Christ, he thought.
Somehow, Colin had gotten ahead and was talking to a young, attractive woman in front of him. His face was scarlet over her shoulder. There was no mistaking the anger that flashed in his eyes. They all kept proceeding down the aisle, one person at a time, and then the woman turned around and parted from the line before she got to the priest. Her head was bowed and she was crying but trying not to be noticed. Colin didn’t follow her, or even watch her go. He stepped up and received the host.
Elic thought he saw a suspicious look on Father’s face when it was his turn.
“Body of Christ.”
“Thanks.”
“Pardon?”
Elic went red instantly. “Thanks,” he said.
“That’s Amen.”
“That’s right, too.”
The bread and the wine filled him. It worked every time. Even though he wasn’t Catholic.
Elic knelt in his pew. Colin was deep in prayer already. He wanted to pray, too. He tried. He hoped the Communion would help him. But he still couldn’t concentrate. He was too hung over. Bloody hangovers! Would he ever learn? Was there no hope? He prayed for hope but his mind kept flipping through thoughts like it was flipping through the Canadian Tire catalogue. The Communion would have to do.
Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, he thought. One of these days I’m going to come in here clean, and I’ll pray up a storm. Help me come in clean, will yeh, piece a trash that I am?
Elic didn’t know if he should mention the woman to Colin or not. But it was driving him crazy. He posed the question five or six different ways before he found a way comfortable enough to voice. “Was that woman all right?” he asked.
“That depends,” Colin said, directly. “She is. But she probably doesn’t feel all right. She’s a divorcée and married again outside the church. She’s not to go for Holy Communion. She’s home from Toronto and figured nobody knew.”
Colin saw the indignation rise up in Elic’s eyes and he sensed it wasn’t at the woman. “You can’t fool around with Holy Communion,” he said and Elic felt the universal accusation. “I saved her from hypocrisy, and from committing a terrible sin whether you like to believe that or not. Being a Catholic is not all roses and saints, you know. It’s not, as you say, about being nice.”
At the end of Mass, everyone was going up to the altar to get a palm frond. There was a smaller chapel inside the church, Elic knew, where people went to light vigil candles and to pray. He went in to light a candle and hoped that that would make up for his inability to pray. Melvin Pastuck had been there and was coming out. He had a breadbag with him that held a sponge soaked in what Elic learned was holy water. Melvin came toward him smiling, stopped and knelt down in front of Elic and began to rub Elic’s shoes with it. Elic was embarrassed but he didn’t have the nerve to walk away from him.
Melvin looked up from the floor with crazy, intense green eyes, smiling. He patted the sponge on Elic’s trouser legs lightly. “The Lord says do this,” he said. “It’s anointment for you.”
“The Lord does?” Elic asked in a slightly patronizing tone, chuckling nervously.
“You have a long way to go,” Melvin Pastuck said. He smiled like he was looking down knowingly on everyone and everything.
Colin came in and saw. He’d been out talking to Mildred MacIntyre. “Is that holy water? Where did you take that from? Don’t you put . . . .”
“I know where you live,” Melvin Pastuck said, the smile still crazy but now subtly malicious.
Outside, Aubrey Boland was going by with the broken nose. He spotted Elic on the church steps. He held up his right hand and wrung it, pretending to cry, mocking Elic’s pain of last night.
Elic screwed up a fist. Thought. And let it go. “Ah, the hell with him,” he said to Colin, but Colin was up on the top step with Father.
Alistair MacLeod
The Boat
There are times even now, when I awake at four o’clock in the morning with the terrible fear that I have overslept; when I imagine that my father is waiting for me in the room below the darkened stairs or that the shorebound men are tossing pebbles against my window while blowing their hands and stomping their feet impatiently on the frozen steadfast earth. There are times when I am half out of bed and fumbling for socks and mumbling for words before I realize that I am foolishly alone, that no one waits at the base of the stairs and no boat rides restlessly in the waters by the pier.
At such times only the grey corpses on the overflowing ashtray beside my bed bear witness to the extinction of the latest spark and silently await the crushing out of the most recent of their fellows. And then because I am afraid to be alone with death, I dress rapidly, make a great to-do about clearing my throat, turn on both faucets in the sink and proceed to make loud splashing ineffectual noises. Later I go out and walk the mile to the all-night restaurant.
In the winter it is a very cold walk, and there are often tears in my eyes when I arrive. The waitress usually gives a sympathetic little shiver and says, “Boy, it must be really cold out there; you got tears in your eyes.”
“Yes,” I say, “it sure is; it really is.”
And then the three or four of us who are always in such places at such times make uninteresting little protective chit-chat until the dawn reluctantly arrives. Then I swallow the coffee, which is always bitter, and leave with a great busy rush because by that time I have to worry about being late and whether I have a clean shirt and whether my car will start and about all the other countless things one must worry about when one teaches at a great Midwestern university. And I know then that that day will go by as have all the days of the past ten years, for the call and the voices and the shapes and the boat were not really there in the early morning’s darkness and I have all kinds of comforting reality to prove it. They are only shadows and echoes, the animals a child’s hands make on the wall by lamplight, and the voices from the rain barrel; the cuttings from an old movie made in the black and white of long ago.
I first became conscious of the boat in the same way and at almost the same time that I became aware of the people it supported. My earliest recollection of my father is a view from the floor of gigantic rubber boots and then of being suddenly elevated and having my face pressed against the stubble of his cheek, and of how it tasted of salt and of how he smelled of salt from his red-soled rubber boots to the shaggy whiteness of his hair.
When I was very small, he took me for my first ride in the boat. I rode the half-mile from our house to the wharf on his shoulders and I remember the sound of his rubber boots galumphing along the gravel beach, the tune of the indecent little song he used to sing, and the odour of the salt.
The floor of the boat was permeated with the same odour and in its constancy I was not aware of change. In the harbour we made our little circle and returned. He tied the boat by its painter, fastened the stern to its permanent anchor and lifted me high over his head to the solidity of the wharf. Then he climbed up the little iron ladder that led to the wharf’s cap, plac
ed me once more upon his shoulders and galumphed off again.
When we returned to the house everyone made a great fuss over my precocious excursion and asked, “How did you like the boat?” “Were you afraid in the boat?” “Did you cry in the boat?” They repeated “the boat” at the end of all their questions and I knew it must be very important to everyone.
My earliest recollection of my mother is of being alone with her in the mornings while my father was away in the boat. She seemed to be always repairing clothes that were “torn in the boat,” preparing food “to be eaten in the boat” or looking for “the boat” through our kitchen window which faced upon the sea. When my father returned about noon, she would ask, “Well, how did things go in the boat today?” It was the first question I remember asking: “Well, how did things go in the boat today?” “Well, how did things go in the boat today?”
The boat in our lives was registered at Port Hawkesbury. She was what Nova Scotians called a Cape Island boat and was designed for the small inshore fishermen who sought the lobsters of the spring and the mackerel of summer and later the cod and haddock and hake. She was thirty-two feet long and nine wide, and was powered by an engine from a Chevrolet truck. She had a marine clutch and a high-speed reverse gear and was painted light green with the name Jenny Lynn stencilled in black letters on her bow and painted on an oblong plate across her stern. Jenny Lynn had been my mother’s maiden name and the boat was called after her as another link in the chain of tradition. Most of the boats that berthed at the wharf bore the names of some female member of their owner’s household.
I say this now as if I knew it all then. All at once, all about boat dimensions and engines, and as if on the day of my first childish voyage I noticed the difference between a stencilled name and a painted name. But of course it was not that way at all, for I learned it all very slowly and there was not time enough.
I learned first about our house, which was one of about fifty that marched around the horseshoe of our harbour and the wharf that was its heart. Some of them were so close to the water that during a storm the sea spray splashed against their windows while others were built farther along the beach, as was the case with ours. The houses and their people, like those of the neighbouring towns and villages, were the result of Ireland’s discontent and Scotland’s Highland Clearances and America’s War of Independence. Impulsive, emotional Catholic Celts who could not bear to live with England and shrewd, determined Protestant Puritans who, in the years after 1776, could not bear to live without.
The most important room in our house was one of those oblong old-fashioned kitchens heated by a wood- and coal-burning stove. Behind the stove was a box of kindlings and beside it a coal scuttle. A heavy wooden table with leaves that expanded or reduced its dimensions stood in the middle of the floor. There were five wooden homemade chairs which had been chipped and hacked by a variety of knives. Against the east wall, opposite the stove, there was a couch which sagged in the middle and had a cushion for a pillow, and above it a shelf which contained matches, tobacco, pencils, odd fish-hooks, bits of twine, and a tin can filled with bills and receipts. The south wall was dominated by a window which faced the sea and on the north there was a five-foot board which bore a variety of clothes hooks and the burdens of each. Beneath the board there was a jumble of odd footwear, mostly of rubber. There was also, on this wall, a barometer, a map of the marine area and a shelf which held a tiny radio. The kitchen was shared by all of us and was a buffer zone between the immaculate order of ten other rooms and the disruptive chaos of the single room that was my father’s.
My mother ran her house as her brothers ran their boats. Everything was clean and spotless and in order. She was tall and dark and powerfully energetic. In later years she reminded me of the women of Thomas Hardy, particularly Eustacia Vye, in a physical way. She fed and clothed a family of seven children, making all of the meals and most of the clothes. She grew miraculous gardens and magnificent flowers and raised broods of hens and ducks. She would walk miles on berry-picking expeditions and hoist her skirts to dig for clams when the tide was low. She was fourteen years younger than my father, whom she had married when she was twenty-six and had been a local beauty for a period of ten years. My mother was of the sea, as were all of her people, and her horizons were the very literal ones she scanned with her dark and fearless eyes.
Between the kitchen clothes rack and barometer, a door opened into my father’s bedroom. It was a room of disorder and disarray. It was as if the wind which so often clamoured about the house succeeded in entering this single room and after whipping it into turmoil stole quietly away to renew its knowing laughter from without.
My father’s bed was against the south wall. It always looked rumpled and unmade because he lay on top of it more than he slept within any folds it might have had. Beside it, there was a little brown table. An archaic goose-necked reading light, a battered table radio, a mound of wooden matches, one or two packages of tobacco, a deck of cigarette papers and an overflowing ashtray cluttered its surface. The brown larvae of tobacco shreds and the grey flecks of ash covered both the table and the floor beneath it. The once-varnished surface of the table was disfigured by numerous black scars and gashes inflicted by the neglected burning cigarettes of many years. They had tumbled from the ashtray unnoticed and branded their statements permanently and quietly into the wood until the odour of their burning caused the snuffing out of their lives. At the bed’s foot there was a single window which looked upon the sea.
Against the adjacent wall there was a battered bureau and beside it there was a closet which held his single ill-fitting serge suit, the two or three white shirts that strangled him and the square black shoes that pinched. When he took off his more friendly clothes, the heavy woollen sweaters, mitts and socks which my mother knitted for him and the woollen and doeskin shirts, he dumped them unceremoniously on a single chair. If a visitor entered the room while he was lying on the bed, he would be told to throw the clothes on the floor and take their place upon the chair.
Magazines and books covered the bureau and competed with the clothes for domination of the chair. They further overburdened the heroic little table and lay on top of the radio. They filled a baffling and unknowable cave beneath the bed, and in the corner by the bureau they spilled from the walls and grew up from the floor.
The magazines were the most conventional: Time, Newsweek, Life, Maclean’s, The Family Herald, The Reader’s Digest. They were the result of various cut-rate subscriptions or of the gift subscriptions associated with Christmas, “the two whole years for only $3.50.”
The books were more varied. There were a few hardcover magnificents and bygone Book-of-the-Month wonders and some were Christmas or birthday gifts. The majority of them, however, were used paperbacks which came from those second-hand bookstores that advertise in the backs of magazines: “Miscellaneous Used Paperbacks 10¢ Each.” At first he sent for them himself, although my mother resented the expense, but in later years they came more and more often from my sisters who had moved to the cities. Especially at first they were very weird and varied. Mickey Spillane and Ernest Haycox vied with Dostoyevsky and Faulkner, and the Penguin Poets edition of Gerard Manley Hopkins arrived in the same box as a little book on sex technique called Getting the Most Out of Love. The former had been assiduously annotated by a very fine hand using a very blue-inked fountain pen while the latter had been studied by someone with very large thumbs, the prints of which were still visible in the margins. At the slightest provocation it would open almost automatically to particularly graphic and well-smudged pages.
When he was not in the boat, my father spent most of his time lying on the bed in his socks, the top two buttons of his trousers undone, his discarded shirt on the ever-ready chair and the sleeves of the woollen Stanfield underwear, which he wore both summer and winter, drawn half way up to his elbows. The pillows propped up the whiteness of his head and the goose-necked l
amp illuminated the pages in his hands. The cigarettes smoked and smouldered on the ashtray and on the table and the radio played constantly, sometimes low and sometimes loud. At midnight and at one, two, three and four, one could sometimes hear the radio, his occasional cough, the rustling thud of a completed book being tossed to the corner heap, or the movement necessitated by his sitting on the edge of the bed to roll the thousandth cigarette. He seemed never to sleep, only to doze, and the light shone constantly from his window to the sea.
Great Cape Breton Storytelling Page 15
