Each Man's Son (18 page)

Angus stopped again, and for nearly a minute Alan waited for the story to continue. Angus shifted his cud. Then he took
out his plug and bit off another chew and settled himself.

“You see, Alan, it wass like this. MacAskill wass so gentle he whould neffer be the one to start anything. It wass the sea captain that started it, for when he saw the size of MacAskill he began to laugh.”

Again Angus paused, and worked hard on the dry tobacco until he could feel the slime beginning to grease his gums.

“What did MacAskill do?” Alan said.

“There iss men here that saw him do it,” said Angus the Barraman, “and if you do not believe me, you can ask Big Alec McCoubrie.”

“But what did he
do
, Mr. MacNeil? What did MacAskill do?”

“Whell now, it wass yourself that asked me.” Angus let go another squirt. “When that sea captain laughed, the giant did not think it wass funny at all. So he stood up and he looked across the bay and measured the distance, and the bay wass so wide not even a rainbow could cover it. Then MacAskill put owt his hands, and he picked that sea captain up, and he bent over and he pointed hiss ass across the bay like a big gun, and nobody effer saw the like again of what happened then. For MacAskill fired such a blow owt of hiss ass that the sea captain sailed most of the way across the bay, and he landed with a big splash in the water right in front of Englishtown. He whould ha? gone all the way across moreoffer and busted hisself on the beach, but MacAskill wass such a nice man he did not want to hurt him.”

Angus the Barraman began to laugh and slap his legs, but the moment he hit himself he winced and groaned.

“Keep owt of the pit when you grow up, Alan. It iss fine work when you are young and your own boss, but it puts hell into your legs when you get old. By Chesus, if there iss not a strike soon I do not know what I whill do whateffer.” He got slowly to his feet and began to rub his back and his eyes showed white in his coal-black face as he stared down the road. “Whell now, and here iss your mother!”

Alan jumped up to look and saw his mother coming down the road with Mr. Camire. He could see that his mother was happy again and it made him want to laugh and do something to show Angus the Barraman that he had never really been worried at all. His mother was smiling as she talked to Mr. Camire and the Frenchman was carrying his guitar in its case. That meant he would stop for supper and there would be songs.

“Don't you think it would be fun, Mr. MacNeil, to be a Frenchman and play the guitar?” Alan said.

“Some of them foreigners iss clever little buggers,” said Angus the Barraman. “But the trouble with them iss, you can't always believe what they say.”

Alan's mother and Camire came up and asked Alan what he had been doing all day and then they began to talk to Angus, but Alan wanted his mother to himself. He pulled her skirt until she followed him into the house, leaving the two men outside.

“Mummy, Mr. MacNeil said that Father might be coming home.”

She turned her back while she took off her hat and laid it on the parlor table. Then she turned back and looked down into his face. With an impulsive movement she put her hands on his shoulders and held him.

“Alan dear, maybe he comes and maybe he does not. Now we do not know any more.”

In a small voice, muffled by her dress, he said, “Is Father dead like Mr. O'Connor?”

“Of course not.” She thrust him away and he looked up at her and saw that her eyes were smiling. “Your father is alive and well. Now then, go out and talk to Mr. Camire while I fix the supper. It will be a fine night after all. You will tell me all about what you have been doing today and after supper Mr. Camire has promised to sing for us.”

 

Nineteen

L
ONG AFTER
it had grown dark that night Alan lay in bed with his eyes open listening to Louis Camire downstairs singing French songs to his mother. He had been at it for hours and Alan wondered when he would stop. He was less sure than ever if he liked Mr. Camire or not. Part of the evening had been fun. Mr. Camire had brought a bottle of red wine and he had talked about strange countries. There was a city in Italy, he said, where the streets were made of water and people went from house to house in boats and every night there was music and singing from the balconies. There was no coal anywhere in Italy and nothing was black in the whole country except the hearts of the rulers. There were mountains in Italy with snow on their tops in the summertime, and below the mountains were green hills covered with olive orchards which turned gray whenever the wind blew the leaves backward. On the plain between the hills and the sea there were trees with walnuts and oranges on them. If a man was hungry he could pick the walnuts and crack them in his palms and eat them, and if he was thirsty all he had to do was to reach over a stone wall and pluck an orange from a tree. At least, that was all a man need do, Mr. Camire said, if it were not for the police, but soon there would be no police, for
there was going to be a revolution in Italy and the rulers were going to be hanged because they had kept the people hungry. Mr. Camire said that the wealth of the world was like a pie. There was plenty of pie but only a few people were cutting it and of course they cut all the big pieces for themselves, but when the rulers were hanging from the lampposts there would be plenty of pie for everyone. Alan wondered if this was true, and he was not sure who a ruler was and had no idea what a revolution was, but he hoped that nobody would be hanged in Broughton. He fell asleep remembering Angus the Barraman's warning that it was not safe to believe everything a foreigner said.

He woke up later, how much later he did not know, and heard Mr. Camire's voice talking very loud downstairs and his mother speaking much more quietly. Alan sat up in bed, listening.

“No, Louis, Alan is upstairs and he must not be ashamed of me.”

“Name of God–ashamed! It is natural and it is necessary.”

“It would not be right now.”

“There is always something. First it was your 'usband. Now you think he will not come home, so now it is the boy!”

“I am all he has, Louis.”

“So! Then you do not like me!”

“But you know I do.”

“The first time I saw you I said to myself, That is my girl.” Alan could hear the sound of muffled movements. “Now I want my girl.”

“Please be quiet, Louis.”

“Why? Why not? We both want it.”

“Who can have what he wants? Isn't that always the way?”

“
Nom de Dieu
, who told you that?”

“Please, Louis–not so loud!”

Camire's voice dropped, but only slightly. “Why do you drive me crazy? You look at me and it means only one thing
when a woman looks that way. And then you say no! What is the matter with you that you are not honest?”

“Louis!”

Camire's voice dropped low, Alan heard his mother speak again, and then he heard the sound of the front door closing. He hunched himself up in bed wondering if he could hear his mother crying. A few minutes later he heard her in the parlor, then she shot the bolt in the front door and then the stairs creaked. As her steps mounted slowly he snuggled down under the covers and pretended to be asleep. When the bed tilted and he knew she was sitting on the side of it he opened his eyes.

“Have you been awake, Alan?”

“No, Mummy. I just woke up now.” He felt very bad about telling her a lie, but he knew she would feel worse in a different way if he didn't.

“Have you been asleep all this time?”

“Yes.”

She sighed and he knew she was glad to believe him.

“Is anything the matter, Mummy?”

He felt her small breasts strain against him as she held him and he wanted to struggle free, but he was afraid she would be disappointed if he did.

“It is hard when you are older, Alan. Sometimes everything gets mixed up.”

“Does Mr. Camire get mixed up?”

She let him go. “Sometimes. But he is more sure than most. And he likes us very much. More than some people do.”

“Everybody likes you, Mummy.”

He could see that his answer had disturbed her, so he tried to change the subject. “Do you like Mr. Camire?” he said.

“Of course.”

“Dr. Ainslie doesn't.”

“I know.” She was troubled again. “But the doctor does not know everything. Poor Louis has had a hard life. In France he
had a fine education and when his father dies he will have a business in France all his own, and then he will show everybody what he is.” He saw the smile return to her lips. “It must be beautiful in France. People don't fight with each other like they do here. I should think maybe we can go there someday.”

Long after she had left him to sleep Alan thought about what she had said. It was the first time he had ever heard her talk about going to some other place. At school the teacher had told them about boys from Cape Breton who had gone away from home to the States and become famous. But Alan did not want to go away from home. He wanted his father to come home instead so he could see him fight and watch people pay money for a prize and then read about how famous his father was in the papers.

 

Twenty

T
HE WEEK END PASSED
, Monday and Tuesday followed, and Margaret discovered that a sudden lull had fallen in Daniel's practice. There were no night calls, no operations and fewer people than usual came to the surgery. Sometimes it happened that way.

There was also another thing Margaret noticed. Daniel seemed almost frightened by this rare opportunity to rest and enjoy himself a little. With less work at the hospital, he made more work for himself at home. The moment dinner was over he went into his study and plunged into Homer. When she asked how the translation was coming along, he accused himself of stupidity and said he would never be able to finish his self-appointed assignment before Christmas. It was then that Margaret understood how deeply worried he was about something he was keeping to himself. His eyes told her that he longed to talk to her, but she knew him well enough to be aware that his Highland nature was probably deceiving him about the nature of whatever might be troubling him. She even sensed a measure of hostility to herself, though she was sure Daniel was unconscious of it, for in little things he was more solicitous than usual. He asked if she wouldn't like to take a holiday with her sisters. He tried to persuade her to go to Halifax for a few days to buy herself some
new summer clothes. He even talked of getting a girl to help her in the house, though she had assured him long ago that without children she preferred to manage both the house and the calls alone. Meanwhile the lonely, longing look in his eyes remained, and Margaret wondered how she was going to find a way to help him.

When they were drinking their coffee after dinner on Wednesday night she said, “Dan, why don't
you
take a holiday? You could easily manage a week in the Margaree. You haven't had a rod in your hands in years.”

He looked annoyed. “Of course not.”

“Why not, Dan? This is a wonderful chance. Collie McCuen could take over your work for a week and in the fall you could take his for a week and let him go hunting.”

“No,” he said, “I can't go off like that now.”

She knew there was no point in pressing further at the moment, so she got up from the table and went out to water her roses. As she stood with the hose in her hand watching the geometric pattern of shadows lengthening over the gravel drive, she wondered why the place where they lived no longer meant anything to her husband. It was entirely his creation. He had selected this site on the verge of the intervale above the brook. He had planned and helped to build the house himself and had lived alone in it the year they were engaged. He had cut the undergrowth out of the wood, torn up the saplings and burned out their roots and now the grove of birches and pines was like a small park. When they were married he had given her the whole place as a gift.

Margaret shut off the hose and bent over the rose bushes one by one, examining the newest shoots for aphids. Then she strolled to the edge of the bank and looked down the slope of the intervale to the brook. She loved the brook's curve as it came out of the grove for the run through the intervale and she loved the sound it made.

Still puzzling over Dan's present state of mind, she remembered with something like surprise that he had not always been like this. He had always been intense, but when she had first known him he had laughed a great deal. She asked herself if the change was her own fault. Self-analysis was not easy for Margaret and it generally made her uncomfortable. Her mother had taught her that sensible people get rid of their troubles by laughing at them. Now her common sense told her that the situation between Dan and herself needed more than a joke and a smile. She told herself that she was thirty-five years old, not unintelligent, and married to one of the ablest men in Nova Scotia. Why had her marriage turned out like this? Was Daniel now resenting her as a person in the way he had always resented her family? Once his acid comments about her mother had made her smile. Later on they had annoyed her, and her refusal to accept them had finally forced him to keep his thoughts on her family to himself. But in the last month Margaret had begun to wonder how much she herself resembled her mother in Daniel's eyes. She thought of the murderous weight of overwork and responsibility he endured as a matter of course and she realized that no member of her own family could have tolerated a quarter of it without feeling abused.

Tonight she felt painfully useless. Her own world was too neat, too small and secure. His was the world of the sick and frightened. She had grown up comfortably without worry or struggle. Daniel had struggled from the day he was born. Her mother had reared her with the notion that there was a smooth-edged solution for everything. But how many times had she lain in bed hearing Daniel's feet pacing the floor and known there was no solution for him at all? How many times had she lain beside him, hearing him think aloud in the medical terms she could not understand, helpless to aid him as he tried to grope through darkness to the unknown, sure
of nothing except that time was running out on his patient? Not once had he reminded her that a human life depended on his ability to think clearly. To say that a life was at stake would have seemed to him both sentimental and unprofessional. She was proud of him because she knew he saved people who would have died under other doctors, but had she ever understood, had she ever felt even a fraction of the price he paid?

She turned to the house, saw that the light had come on in his study, and supposed he was back at his Homer again. Why did he do it? What was Homer to him? Why didn't he take a holiday and go home to the Margaree, instead of trying desperately to overcome this academic giant of his own contriving?

Then the thought came to her that perhaps he didn't want to go because the Margaree was a home no longer. She remembered the look on his face when he had taken her, only six years ago, to see the old farm. There was no one left within a mile of the place. A fence he had once built himself now ran into a grove of young spruce. The house was a ghost house, unoccupied, with rattling shingles and broken panes. His father's gravestone was overgrown with young spruce and it had astonished Margaret to find it there alone on the top of the mountain instead of in the churchyard in the valley. She remembered a large, granite boulder at the head of the property, also surrounded by spruce. “I used to be able to sit here,” he had said, “and look down on the whole valley. Now you can't see anything except trees.” And she had imagined how that valley must have seemed to a boy of sixteen who had never been any place else. She recalled now the sweep of the noble stream between the hills with the islets of white stones in the channel and how the moon had looked climbing the sky over the opposite mountain. She heard again, with a shudder at the beauty of it, the evening in the Margaree when they had heard wild distant music in the sky and Daniel had
pointed up the hill to a cottage so small it was only a white dot and said it was old Angus Fraser piping as he walked back and forth before his door. No wonder, she thought now, growing up with those wild, solemn, Bible-reading Highlanders all around him, looking out at the glory of an innocent world, Daniel had been unable to prevent a need growing in him until now that need was higher than a mountain.

When Margaret went into the house it was already deep twilight and the cirrus clouds had lost their color. Quietly she entered his study. His back was towards the door, but she knew he heard her, for his head lifted slightly. She slipped her arms about his neck and pressed her cheek against his hair.

“Let's harness the mare and go for a drive,” she said.

She felt tenderness and even some of his deeply controlled passion in the impulsive movement with which he seized her hand and pressed it to his cheek.

“I'm not much to live with, am I?”

“If you only thought a tenth as much of yourself as others do, you'd never say things like that. Let's drive to the cliffs by Dr. Dougald's? It's still early.”

To her surprise he pushed back his chair. “All right, but I don't want to see Dr. Dougald tonight. Let's go to your mother's instead. I haven't seen any of them for two months.”

Margaret, too surprised by this suggestion to know what to say, went upstairs to put on her hat and a light coat while Daniel went outside to harness the mare. She came downstairs, passed through the surgery and had already closed the door behind her before she saw that a small, wiry little man was standing on the gravel of the drive talking to her husband. It was too dark to see his face, but his posture and manner of gesturing told her it must be Louis Camire. She waited by the door. When Daniel started towards her, then brushed past and went into the surgery, she knew it was another emergency. She sighed as she watched him bend over the leather bag he always left packed, snap it open and hastily check its
contents. He was wholly the doctor again and almost unaware of her existence, and in this kind of situation Margaret knew her role.

“I've got to go out on a case.” His back was turned. “Will you call Miss MacKay right away and tell her to have the OR prepared for me? It's probably an appendectomy.”

From the undertones in his voice she thought the case must be more serious than a simple appendix, but she never asked questions at moments like these. She stood aside as he rushed past her with the bag in his hand. Camire had lighted the carriage lamps, and as Margaret stood in the surgery door she saw the two pools of light move away into the darkness. Then she closed the door and telephoned the hospital.