Each Man's Son (25 page)

 

Twenty-Eight

T
HE FREIGHT TRAIN
that Archie MacNeil had boarded in Moncton was slamming and banging on the curves that outlined the Bras d'Or as it rattled on its way towards Sydney. Far ahead of the car where Archie sat the whistle kept wailing at the crossings, and there were many crossings to wail at on this section of the line. He leaned against the side of the open door and watched the dark green spruce go by. The heavy odor of balsam told him that he was coming home at last. The fights were over and he was going to a place where people would like him. When he got home the nightmares would stop and the pains in his head would go away. He would go down into the mine again and show those men who had never left Broughton how a trained fighter could work. And the coal dust covering his face would hide the scars and lumps so that when he came home from work with the dust on him he would no longer have a face that frightened children and made men laugh.

The train passed Iona and pulled out into the open, and as he sat in the doorway of the rattling car Archie could see the waters of the Bras d'Or sparkling in the sunshine. There was no kind of country he had seen anywhere in the United States which he thought could equal what he had seen today in Nova Scotia, and the farther north he had come the better
it had been. There was no lake in the world as pretty as the Bras d'Or and if anyone wanted to deny it he would make them prove it. There were no people anywhere in the world like the people here. When he got home they would all be good to him because he had come back and once he had made them proud.

The train swerved away from the lake and ran through more spruce, then it came out of the woods into a blueberry barren. He could see the low dark blueberry bushes and wished the train would stop long enough so he could pick some berries. It made him hungry to think about them. They passed into the spruce again and the land darkened as though a curtain had been drawn. Behind the train the sun had set, so he left the open door and went back to the bales of cloth where he had slept all the way from Moncton. It was cloth on its way from Montreal to Sydney and Broughton. It was clean and dry and better to sleep on than the bags of feed he had traveled with to Moncton from Montreal.

He crawled into a nest between the bales and unwrapped the newspaper in which he had kept the last of his food. He ate the last scraps of bologna and dry bread and washed it down with cold tea in a whiskey bottle which a waitress had given him at an all-night stand in Moncton. When he finished, he took aim at the square opening of the door and hurled the bottle out, but the fine sound of its smashing was lost in the clatter of the train. Then he lay back and closed his eyes and thought about the old days when Mollie had been able to make him laugh. He would sleep awhile and be fresh for her tonight, for after all these years this night would be even better than the night after they were married. She did not really mean that she never wanted to see him again! He would show her how that was a mistake.

Archie slept only a short while on the bales, for he had scarcely closed his eyes before the pain started in his head again and he sat up, terrified by a nightmare. Fierce men were
coming at him as his muscles tightened to protect himself and he struck out instinctively. So he propped his back against the bales and stared at the open door and let the darkening rush of the landscape make him feel numb. The train kept on bucketing around the curves while he lurched with it, but he did not mind the motion so long as the nightmares stayed out of his head. The sky through the open square swayed to the motion of the train, it swung and tilted on the banked curves, but even when it grew quite dark and the stars came out, it still seemed like a friendly sky because he knew it was over Cape Breton.

 

Twenty-Nine

E
XCEPT
in the vicinity of the slowly moving train, the September night was so still that in the forested hills of Cape Breton a snapped twig could startle a deer at a distance of half a mile. The deer were out that night with polished horns, but they moved so stealthily no one saw them come or go. The autumn salmon were furtive in the deep pools of the Margaree and the Baddeck, and halibut lay flat, black and icy-cold on the bottom of St. Ann's Bay. All around Cape Breton, in the coves and at the foot of dark promontories, the sea ringed the island with a thin line of astringent foam as the ground swells broke in the darkness, retreated with long throaty sighs and broke again.

In the bedroom where Alan slept the lamp was out, but moonlight entered the window and made a bright crossbarred rhomboid on the floor. He woke up and opened his eyes to the light and then he saw a mouse crouching delicately on its hind legs in the bright center of the rhomboid as it nibbled on a crumb of bread. Its whiskers moved nervously up and down as it held the bread in its forepaws, and Alan was glad because the mouse had found something to eat. The house seemed very warm because his mother had built a big fire in the kitchen stove. Alan thought about the way the embers had glowed red through the draft under the stove
box as he closed it the way he was told to do before he came upstairs to bed.

His eyes took in everything he could see in the room, the wooden chair on which his clothes always hung, the table where the globe of the world now stood, the lighter square on the wall which was the calendar the butcher had given him, and the book of ships lying beside the globe. He lay still, watching the mouse.

The metal alarm clock ticking in the kitchen could be heard through the floor. Its sound made Alan wonder why the mouse wasn't frightened by it. He guessed it must be very late, maybe almost twelve. But there was still a murmur of voices in the parlor. Mr. Camire and his mother thought he was asleep and he knew they hoped he was. Mr. Camire had been in the house every night now for more than a month. It made a difference which Alan felt but could not put into words, not even to himself. His mother was as kind to him as ever. She did for him the same things she had always done. It was the way she did them that was different, as though she were no longer thinking about him at all. Alan knew that was on account of Mr. Camire. Tonight Mr. Camire had brought a bottle of red wine when he came and he made Alan understand that he wanted the wine and his mother to himself.

So Alan lay in bed and wondered, trying to understand what had happened in the past weeks since he had gone back to school. The biggest difference was not seeing Mrs. Ainslie and the doctor any more, even bigger than the change in his mother. It seemed to Alan as if he had begun to grow backward instead of forward, as though it were last year instead of this year. At first, when he was told he must not go to the Ainslies' any more, he had thought the doctor was angry with him or disappointed because he was not clever enough, but his mother had said it was only because the doctor was too busy to see anybody except his patients.

And then there was Louis Camire. Alan's ponderings stopped because he couldn't find a satisfactory pattern for thinking about Mr. Camire. He remembered the little Frenchman talking to him in the hospital, saying that one day he would take them away to France. Maybe that was the trouble. Alan sat up in bed. Was it on account of Mr. Camire that the doctor no longer wanted to see him?

Wide awake, Alan stared at the windowpane and listened intently for sounds from below. There was an occasional movement in the parlor but the sound was very faint and he could hardly hear it. Mr. Camire and his mother were not even talking together. He lay back on the pillow but his eyes remained open. It was certainly on account of Mr. Camire that the doctor did not like them any more, just as it was because of Mr. Camire that Mrs. MacCuish said hateful things whenever his mother walked past her house. How could his mother really like Mr. Camire? Sometimes she refused to talk about him, and when Alan asked more questions she averted her eyes. What did Mr. Camire want of them, to make him return every night? Alan had no words for his feelings, but he knew that Dr. Ainslie had come to give, as Mr. Camire had come to take.

So the boy lay with round eyes staring at the dark ceiling where the moonlight showed a crack in the plaster that twisted and turned like a river in a geography book.

Perhaps it was the thought of the geography book that made Alan suddenly remember his father. His mother never talked about him any more, but Alan was sure his father would come home one day because that was what he had learned and repeated for years. His father was away in the States and things had gone hard for him there, but someday he would come home, and when he did that would be the end of Mr. Camire. His father was a fighting man, a man so wonderful at fighting that people wrote about him in newspapers, a man so mighty that when Alan had asked if Red Willie MacIsaac could beat him, Angus the Barraman had
roared with laughter. Why was his mother ashamed because Archie MacNeil was a prize fighter? What was the matter with that, when his father was so brave and strong that even strange Americans paid money to see him fight and every man in Broughton was proud to have known him? Archie MacNeil would come home someday and show Alan what he could do, and then his mother would be the way she used to be and he would have a father like other boys in the school, and Mr. Camire would go away and the doctor would be friends with them all again. He wondered if the doctor knew his father. He wished he had remembered to ask someone.

Downstairs a door opened and closed. Alan jumped out of bed, for it was the outside door and its closing could mean only one thing–Mr. Camire was leaving.

In his bare feet he went to the bedroom door, opened it and stood at the top of the stairs to wait for his mother. He wanted to ask her right now if the doctor knew his father. It was dark, for there was no light burning in the hall below, but the foot of the stairs caught the light that shone from the open parlor door.

Suddenly Alan's heart began to beat faster, even before his mind took in the fact that strange sounds were coming from the parlor. He stood stiff and silent, listening intently. There were heavy steps, and sounds of metal hitting wood, and then all at once grunts and scuffles and above it all his mother's piercing scream. Before the scream died away there were more strange sounds of furniture being knocked about, and Alan was running down the stairs as fast as his bare feet would take him. When he reached the lighted square of the parlor door he stopped like a fawn caught in the headlight of a train.

Everything that was happening in the room he saw quickly and completely, understanding none of it, yet feeling all of it, so that for the rest of his life all the violence of the world would be the violence of this night.

An ugly man with a great body in a soiled city suit, his face battered and lumpy and his nose mashed square, was standing sideways to the door. His arms were bent at the elbows and thrust forward, his huge hands half clenched, his shoulders poised and on guard, and in the split second while the boy watched, not taking a breath, the big man's clenched fist shot out and smashed into Mr. Camire's head.

As the Frenchman's white body fell backward, Alan heard his mother scream again. This time the sound of her voice in terror not only made his heart beat faster still, but it froze him where he stood in the doorway, unseen by the three struggling people within the room. In the next few seconds a table was knocked over, Camire got to his feet, and Alan saw that he was holding a wine bottle by its neck. The big man was looking at something on the floor that Alan couldn't see, in the direction of his mother's scream, and it was in this fraction of time that Alan knew he was watching his father. He felt the fact, rather than knew it, perhaps because he had so often dreamed of the day when his father would come home and rid them of Mr. Camire.

Like a fox, Camire made a sudden darting movement, smashed the wine bottle on the leg of the fallen chair and shot forward with the fangs of the broken glass jabbing at Archie's face as the remainder of the wine dribbled out. It was then that Alan saw what his father could do. So that was what it meant to be the strongest man in the world! Archie shifted backwards and aside, smoothly and easily, and the broken bottle jabbed viciously towards his left ear. His hand shot out and closed on the poker beside the grate, the pack of muscles under the cloth of his jacket shifted, the poker shot up and Camire seemed to stand quite still, staring at the upraised arm.

It was then that Alan saw his mother. As the poker came down she was suddenly there between the two men, thin and frail as she tried to stop them. When the poker hit her head her large soft eyes rolled into her head and she seemed to sink
down into the melting white wax of her own thighs and calves. The two men stared down at her. Alan stared at her. Then the house shook with the thunder of Archie MacNeil's voice. He roared as the poker swung up again and Camire darted back and forth across the room, trying to find a place to hide as he gave mouselike squeaks of terror.

Seven blows landed on him, but Alan was no longer there when the Frenchman was silenced at last. The boy had fled.

 

Thirty

J
UST FOR AN INSTANT
Archie knew what had happened, but the knowledge got mixed up with the pain in his head. Then he heard the rain of blows on the outside door and heard men calling in Gaelic voices to open up for the love of God. It was like the roar of the crowd yelling at him to come on when he was already blind with blood, pain and exhaustion. Now, as always, he answered it. He staggered into the hall and reached for the knob of the front door. He tried to open it, but it was locked. He had locked it himself, a long time ago. The shouting outside kept on, so he unlocked the door and pulled it open and stood there facing the street with the light from the parlor at his back and himself in the frame of it.

“What the hell do you whant?” he said.

He took them in all at once, the forgotten familiar faces he had come home to see. Angus the Barraman was in front of the crowd. He reached out to touch Archie's arm.

“We hear you are haffing trouble, maybe. We ha? come as your friends only.”

The figure in the door stood motionless, back to the light.

“Och, Archie, there iss trouble everywhere, and four years wass a long time for her to be alone. She whould neffer ha? done it but she thought you whould neffer come home at all.”

The figure in the doorway swayed, then stood still.

“The doctor hiss ownself thought you whould neffer come home, moreoffer. And the Frenchman hass been seeing her only lately.”

When Archie still gave no sign that he had heard, Angus reached out again. Then Archie hit him. To the men behind Angus, the punch seemed powered by a superhuman force, it came so fast. Before they could catch him, Angus fell to the ground. Archie closed the door and they heard him lock it behind him again.

“Now we must get Big Alec McCoubrie,” one of them said.

“But we must also get the doctor, fast.”

Two men started off on bicycles towards Broughton and another was already running towards the doctor's house. So, long before the policemen arrived, they could see the doctor coming up the hill on his bicycle. He had dressed so hastily a scarf was around his neck in place of a collar and tie. One of them ran to take his bicycle and the crowd stood back when he took his bag from the handlebars and ran to the door and tried to open it.

When he turned around to face them they felt his authority as he looked them over by the light of the moon. “Tell me again what you saw through the window,” he said quietly.

After they told him once more, he said, “What about the boy?”

“We ha? not seen him, but we are sure he iss somewhere inside. Archie would not touch the boy, surely.”

He studied them for a moment longer, then he said, “Matheson and MacDonald–you're big men. Smash in that door.”

The two men named stepped forward, braced themselves and lurched against the door. On the third try there was a crack of splitting wood and they heard Archie's voice inside.

“The first man who comes in, I whill kill him.”

The two men turned to look at the doctor.

“This is Dr. Ainslie speaking, MacNeil,” his voice called out. “I want you to understand that the first man to enter will be me.”

He motioned MacDonald and Matheson against the door again and this time they smashed it. The door jumped from its hinges with a crash and the two men went down with it. The crowd saw Ainslie step forward, his bag in his left hand, and then Archie loomed under the overhead light. The doctor and the fighter stopped as they recognized each other. Matheson and MacDonald picked themselves up and stood back, but Ainslie and Archie MacNeil stood a yard apart with their eyes on each other's faces.

At that moment Archie seemed of more than human size. Standing in the doorway with the light over his head, he was a good foot higher than the doctor. In the imaginations of the crowd he was higher still because of what they knew he had done. They saw him draw back his right fist, but only Ainslie was close enough to see and understand the expression in Archie's eyes. They were as full of pleading as the eyes of an overwhipped child. At the same time the doctor's trained glance told him something else. One of the eyes was blind and the other was glazing. The battered face was loosening as a process of profound disintegration was occurring in the fighter's whole organism.

The men said afterwards they had never heard the doctor speak so gently. “It's all over now, MacNeil. Nothing you or I can do can change what's happened.”

They saw Archie's fist loosen and his cocked arm fall loose at his side. They saw his face contort in a spasm of pain and his one good eye suddenly stare and they saw the doctor drop his bag and put both hands on the boxer's shoulders and catch him as he lurched and fell forward.

Matheson and MacDonald helped Ainslie carry the unconscious man out. They lowered him to the ground and
propped his back against the wall of the house while behind them Angus the Barraman began to groan and move. Ainslie entered the house and the crowd at the steps saw the window of the parlor brighten as he turned on another light, but no one made a move to enter. They heard him leave the parlor and then the sound of his feet running upstairs and they heard his voice calling out to Alan asking where he was. Still they remained standing outside.

There was a sound of horse's hoofs and a carriage drove up and stopped on the fringe of the crowd. They recognized Mrs. Ainslie in the carriage and one of the men crossed the ditch to hold the head of the mare, but none of them said anything to her and she asked no questions. A moment later the doctor came out of the house with Alan in his arms.

They watched him as he crossed the ditch and they saw the boy in his nightclothes stiff with fright, his eyes averted from the doctor, his ears apparently deaf to the comforting words the doctor was saying. When Mrs. Ainslie stretched out her arms to take him from her husband, Alan gave a little cry; and with a convulsive movement both his arms went about her neck as he buried his face in her shoulder.

They saw Ainslie stand stiffly beside the carriage and heard him clear his throat. “He was hiding upstairs in a cupboard, but he's not hurt,” the doctor said to his wife. “Whether or not he saw what happened I don't know. Give him a bromide and stay with him until he goes to sleep. It may be morning before I get home.”

One of the men jumped into the carriage to drive the mare so that Mrs. Doctor could hold the boy and keep him warm. The doctor himself re-entered the house and the crowd broke up a little, men muttering together in small groups as they waited. Archie sat motionless with his back to the wall and his head hanging forward on his chest, and Matheson crouched beside him, holding him upright with his arm so he would not sprawl sideways with his head on the ground.

Later there was the sound of a clanging bell, then the surge of hoofs as a team of horses drove the ambulance fast around the corner. The horses pulled up panting with foam on their bridles and two men in white jumped out and ran around to the back of the ambulance to open the doors. They rolled out a stretcher, the crowd parted for it to go through and parted again when the stretcher came out the door with a small covered body on it.

The doctor followed and touched one of the orderlies on the arm. “There's still another one,” he said, and pointed to Archie.

The second stretcher was rolled out of the ambulance, Archie was placed on it and the men panted under his weight as they rolled it in.

Ainslie turned to the crowd. “When the police come, tell them I've left the Frenchman inside. There's nothing to be done for him. But none of you are to touch his body until the police come.”

Then the doctor stepped into the ambulance and crouched on the floor between the two stretchers. As the driver closed the doors, they could see his fingers search for the pulse at Mollie's wrist.