Each Man's Son (5 page)

“Dan,” she said. “It's doing you no good staying here year after year. Sometimes I think the only reason why you stay is because you're afraid to leave.”

Ainslie's jaw hardened, but he made no reply until he had reined in the mare before the white house where Margaret's mother lived with her three daughters who were still un-married. “They are probably all waiting for you,” he said. His voice was cool, distant and courteous, and it frightened her, for she knew that the words she had said would continue to corrode deeply into his mind.

She put her hand on his knee again. “It's stupid for us to quarrel.”

“Were we quarreling? I hadn't thought so.”

“We can't go on forever like this. When there are only the two of us together it's dreadful if we can't understand each other.”

He sat silently, holding the reins in his long fingers. Margaret knew she had hurt him and he was locking himself away in his pride.

“Please don't work too hard tonight,” she said.

“That's not a matter of choice.” He gave a slight shrug. “What is there to do but work?”

“Dan, do you know how cruel it is for you to say that to me?” But there was no expression of hurt on her face; experience had taught her to transform the frustration she felt to a look of cool serenity. She stepped from the carriage and was
about to go up the path to the house when she turned and spoke again. “I won't see you until church tomorrow?”

“Probably not.”

She went on up the path. She heard music and the stir of many feet on the polished floor of the big front parlor, and suddenly she was happy again. The door of her mother's house opened and her youngest sister was there to welcome her with a smile. Margaret forced herself not to look back at her husband, though she knew the carriage had not moved.

 

Four

W
HEN THE DOOR CLOSED
, Ainslie felt a smart of tears behind his eyes and the loneliness came down on him. He looked at the rambling house and he let himself feel angry about it because it was a thing he could consider objectively. Margaret's father, Noah Eldridge, had built the house and while he lived Ainslie had liked him, though he had never greatly respected the man. But Mrs. Eldridge, Margaret's mother, Ainslie disliked frankly and openly. She lived there like a queen bee, surrounded by a large and adoring family who worshiped her. To him, she had always seemed semialien, a selfish, superficial woman with no standards of education whatever. In his mind he always called her a Yankee, without any thought for the political significance of the word, because she stood for a state of mind opposed to everything his own emotions honored. Things came easily to people like the Eldridges and they were always ready to take the easy way out of a situation. Ainslie clucked at the mare and turned her about in the narrow street, then he leaned back and let the animal find her own way to the hospital.

The sadness, the sense of irreparable loss, persisted in him. As he sniffed the air he remembered an evening like this when he had been a boy of nineteen, earning money before the
mast during his summer vacation from college. He had put out from North Sydney on the last of old Eldridge's barks and the wind had been so right they had been able to set stuns'ls before clearing Cranberry Head. The memory of that night had lasted with him all these years. The westerly wind had flattened the sea so that the keel was as firm as a dock, but the wind had been strong and held the sails as hard as iron. All that night at sea he had smelled forests, for the wind that blew them to Newfoundland had previously traversed the length of Nova Scotia and come to them laden with the pungent scent of balsam. Those had been good days. The past had still been honorable, unblighted by the mines. The whole world had seemed too small to hold his future.

Now that future was the present, and what had it brought? Only an end to seeing ahead. Not even posterity. Just the moment of hard work. The memory of work endlessly hard. The memory of striving, straining, heaving the huge rock up the hill with the feeling that if he relaxed for a moment it would become the rock of Sisyphus and roar down to the valley bottom again. Was defiance all that remained?

The mare turned into Wellington Street and Ainslie's body shifted position. His loneliness became a hungry desire. If only Margaret had smiled at him he would have felt differently, but she smiled at others so much more easily than she did for him. He still thought she was the most beautiful woman he had ever met, except for her eyes. There was no smoke in her eyes, no mystery, nor any sense of it; instead there was a fearless clarity that could look steadily at anything short of a Gaelic ghost. Her white body was like a hill of snow under the moon. It was tantalizingly lovely, it was unbelievably beautiful, yet he had never seemed able to reach its inner warmth or to feel that he had come home to her. Her body lived in its own right, unconscious, never seeming a part of that mind of hers which always appeared to be observing him coolly, thoughtfully, with
common sense always trying to improve him, never selfish, never demanding. And yet he knew she was lonely, too, and that he had made her so.

Into his thoughts came the face of Mollie MacNeil, the face of his own people. They were all lost here in the mines. They were inextricably lost in their own sea-deep feelings and crazy dreams. And Margaret had said he was unkind to the girl!

As the mare took her time pulling the carriage along the main street closer to MacDonald's Corner, the crowds thickened on the sidewalk, but Ainslie looked straight ahead and saw no one. The first fights had not yet begun, but they took part farther up the street in the vicinity of the saloons. The shops were now closed, the coal carts and slovens were off the streets, the tram had already traversed the length of the town and gone on its way, and for the moment Ainslie's was the only carriage in sight.

The Presbyterian minister stood under a lamppost with one hand scratching the small of his back and the other hooked by a thumb to his waistcoat pocket. He was brooding on the sermon he was going to preach tomorrow morning. He wondered if he should stop the doctor and ask him, as one scholar to another, if he thought it was going too far to warn the congregation against taking the promises of the New Testament too literally. For if God was love, what was to be done about Jehovah? But Ainslie passed the Reverend MacAlistair without turning his head.

Under the light of the next post was another man who wanted to speak to the doctor. He looked like a chubby walrus dressed in a bowler hat and a high white collar. Jimmie MacGillivray, the saloonkeeper, had a stomach-ache. He wanted to ask the doctor about an idea which had been scaring the wits out of him. Could a stomach-ache be sent as a punishment for sin? If it could be–and the Reverend MacAlistair said that was so–then there was no hope for the
relief of Jimmie MacGillivray. For what more could a man do to keep the Sabbath holy than he was doing now? He made his daughters keep it, too. They cooked all the food for Sunday on the day before, put it on plates and the plates on the tables, and he even saw to it that they filled all the glasses in the house with water on Saturday night, so that not a tap was turned in the MacGillivray house on the Sabbath. But the stomach-ache was growing worse week by week, and the Reverend MacAlistair said that his sins would find him out. What more could he do? If only the doctor would look his way…but the doctor passed, still staring at the rump of his mare, and Jimmie turned away with a small moan.

At the next corner a crowd was gathering and as the fringes of it spilled over the curb Ainslie had to guide the mare to the far side of the street to avoid running down some of the men. This maneuver interrupted his thoughts and he looked for the cause of the disturbance. He could hear the broad voice of Mr. Magistrate MacKeegan…“‘And by Chesus,' I said to her, Big Annie McPhee, six foot two with the beam of a potato schooner moreoffer, ‘you whould come into my court and swear that a man the size of the prissoner wass able to rape the likes of you! By Chesus,' I said to her, ‘you whill get down on the floor and show me, or you whill get the hell owt of here and I whill ha? you for perjury moreoffer.' And that…” MacKeegan's voice tailed off as Ainslie passed…“iss a hell of a lot more serious charge in my court than rapes iss, because perjury iss perssonal.”

“Dear God,” Ainslie muttered to himself. Now the crowds were so thick they spilled out into the street and he had to urge the mare on. Most of the men were miners who spent their days underground in the dark. He could tell at a glance how many years any one of these proud clansmen had spent in the pits. The young ones were defiant, cocky in the way they walked, and they pulled their rough caps down over their
right ears like tam-o'-shanters. They were the ones who could be heard issuing a general challenge to a fight. The middle-aged ones were quieter, they moved slowly and talked little, seeming older than their age, and most of them were beginning to be plagued with sciatica and what they called the rheumatics. If a man had been in the pits beyond his fifty-fifth year, particularly in those mines with narrow seams, Ainslie's eye could measure fairly accurately how many more working years that man had before him. The young ones swaggered and the middle-aged ones could feel the break coming in their leg pains and their unspoken fears, but ultimately the mines would break them all. Those who survived accidents would become like the two white-haired men Ainslie passed near the corner, sitting side by side on the curb with sticks for support between their knees, their faces ennobled by the tremendous fact of survival, grave and white under the flickering arc light.

As the mare threaded her way through MacDonald's Corner, the T-shaped area of macadam which was the only social center most of the miners had ever known, the place where Archie MacNeil had got his start, several of the men touched their caps to the doctor as he passed, and he answered them with nods or an occasional word. The mare turned right and began to pull up the hill that led to the hospital, pushing with her hind legs so that her rump muscles bulged and glistened with sleek high lights whenever a lamppost was passed. Halfway up the hill they met the Salvation Army band marching down, instruments glinting brassily in the lights, only the bass drum booming to keep the men in step, and twelve women in black bonnets with red ribbons clapping their hands as they followed. Ainslie scarcely noticed them, for the Army always established itself in the middle of MacDonald's Corner on Saturday nights, timing its first hymns to coincide with the moment the first drunks staggered up from the rum shops in the lower part of the street.

The mare reached the top of the hill where the hospital stood like a lighthouse over the whole town. Ainslie tethered the horse in the yard behind the building, picked up his bag and walked briskly through the yard and around the front to the steps. When he opened the door and smelled the familiar odors of the building he felt a sensation of pleasure that began to relax the tense muscles of his back. Here was his own world where his skill had made him a master. He saw Miss MacKay rustling starchily down the corridor to meet him. His feeling of certainty grew and he began to smile.

 

Five

N
IGHT FELL
over the island and the moonlight picked out its shape like the claws of a lobster from the surrounding dark of the sea. The claws were ringed around by a faint line of white as groundswells crumbled against the shores, washed luminously and faded out. Inland the shadows turned with slow gravity in the hills as the moon went up the sky. The rivers and the windows of lonely farmhouses gleamed as the rays of light struck them. A soft breeze carried balsam-laden air into the packed area of Broughton, where the miners' rows looked desolate and the bankheads of the collieries loomed like monuments in a gigantic cemetery.

The moonlight came into the window of Alan MacNeil's bedroom, crept across the floor and reached his face. He woke to sounds on the other side of the common wall and knew that the father of the noisy family had come home. He heard Red Willie MacIsaac shouting and his wife telling him to be quiet, but Red Willie went on shouting and Alan could hear his words. He was saying he could whip any man in the collieries, he could whip any man in the world for all of that, and Alan smiled as he thought how small Red Willie would talk if he ever came face to face with his father.

He wondered where his father was and when he would come home. Some day his father would arrive and the people
would see how strong he was. Perhaps he would even pick up an iron bar as Red Willie had once done and bend it so everybody could see. Alan heard the tearing noise of a tramcar wheel and wondered if it was the one bringing his mother home, but as the car passed he knew it was moving in the opposite direction. Then he heard a creak on the stairs and a moment later his door opened and he could see Mrs. MacDonald with the moonlight on her face.

“So here you are, all snug in bed! Ha? you not been asleep yet at all?”

“Oh, yes, Mrs. MacDonald, I just woke up for a minute.”

“That iss fine. Now then, go back to sleep and tomorrow I whill tell your mother what a good boy you ha? been.”

Her hand touched his forehead and he lay thinking how nice Mrs. MacDonald was. He knew it was because of Mrs. MacDonald that his mother could go out on Saturday nights and have a little pleasure and then tell him about it on Sunday mornings. The stairs creaked again as Mrs. MacDonald went away.

He lay awake listening, wondering what was happening on the other side of the wall where the bumps and shuffles of the MacIsaacs were still audible. After a time he reached under his pillow for the sea shell and held it against his ear. The noise was still there, singing in his ear as the shell remembered it, the oldest noise in the world. He wondered how long it would be before he grew up and had great muscles like the men said his father had, and he wondered what it would be like when he was a man. His mother wanted him to be the same as Dr. Ainslie, who worked sometimes all night. Alan had seen him coming home in his carriage in midmorning, asleep with the reins around his neck, tired out from curing people in the hospital. As Alan thought about him, the doctor seemed to be hardly a man at all. He was The Doctor, far above everyone else he knew.