Barrington Street Blues (23 page)

“Let's show them a thing or two about dancing, eh, Normie?”

“All right!” she squealed. “Let's go, Daddy!”

I did not get to enjoy my wife's company that night; she was tired from her trip, and took to her bed in the room she was sharing with Normie. The next day, Brennan and I and the kids went on tour with Alec. We saw various landmarks in the workers' struggle in Cape Breton and went down into the Ocean Deeps Colliery, a mine that was open for tours, beneath the Miners' Museum. Maura spent the day visiting old friends. A night's sleep seemed to have done her good; when we got home for dinner she was a little more talkative than she had been the night before. The house was filled with people, and we drank and told tales until we sat down for a big scoff in the dining room.

The table was virtually sagging in the middle, there were so many platters of food. A roast of lamb, a turkey, countless plates of vegetables and loaves of bread, bottles of red and white wine. Rum and whiskey were within easy reach on the sideboard. There was a cooler of beer just inside the kitchen door. Crowding around the dinner table were Brennan, Maura and I, our two kids, Alec and Catherine, the grandmother, Morag, Maura's sister, Lucy, her husband, Donald, and their three children, Allan, Laurie, and Grace. Four people I didn't know were at a card table off to the side. The liquor flowed freely, and the conversations overlapped.

Lucy was filling Maura in on an old acquaintance. “So they pulled little Gaetan-Philippe out of school.”

“Gaetan-Philippe? They grew up in Sydney Mines, for Christ's sake. They don't speak two words of French between them!”

“Ah, but zey have been to Paree!”

“Well,
zut
-freaking-
alors
! I've been to Moscow, but I didn't name my kid Igor.”

“Anyway they pulled him out so they could home-school him, because he's gifted.”

“Gifted, my arse. Everybody's kid is gifted now, have you noticed that? That little peckerhead is no more —”

“So she signed up for this home program and bought all the books, and the little turd behaved so badly, and threw so many tantrums, that she desperately wanted to dump him back in the school system but she was too mortified to admit it.”

“Mortify
this
, Gaetan!” Maura's brother-in-law had tuned in just in time to tune out again. “Crack me open a beer, dear! What was that you were saying about the army, Alec?”

I switched channels to catch a rum-fueled dissertation by Maura's father.

“In aid of the civil power,” he exclaimed, “that's how they put it when they sent the army in. Bull
shit
. In aid of corporate capitalism, is what they meant. In aid of corporate greed. And when I came over in 1925, as a lad of five short years, I saw for myself what they were up to, the British Empire Steel Corporation and its company thugs. Well, the miners showed them! But not before William Davis was shot down in the prime of his life by company police. Murderers!”

“Don't get yourself in a lather over it now, Alec,” Catherine MacNeil said gently. “I suppose you'll want to attend Mass with us tomorrow morning, Brennan.”

“I used to go to church when Andy Hogan was doin' the Mass,” Alec said. “A fine priest and a good socialist. The early Christians were socialists; you can't disagree with that, Father Burke!” The old man turned his ferocious glare on Burke. “It's right there in the Bible.”

“I'm sure Brennan has read the Bible, Alec,” Catherine said.

“I have,” Burke assured them.

“Well?” Alec challenged him. “Am I right?”

“You're not far wrong, I'm thinking, Alec. The early —”

“How can there be such a thing as a right-wing Christian? That's what I'd like to know.” Maura had interrupted herself in mid-sentence to turn from her sister and join the politico-religious discussion. “Piling up a personal fortune at the expense of the poor; where's the authority in the gospel for that?”

I usually did my best to participate in these multi-level talks, but I was on my way to being half-corked and I had other things on my mind. Namely, how many hours would I have to wait until I could
get Maura by herself and continue our newly resumed marital relations. The MacNeils had their room, the old lady had hers, Brennan had his, Maura and Normie were in the fourth bedroom, and Tom and I had a couch and a cot in the basement. Things must have been crowded when Alec, Catherine, and their seven children shared this house in earlier times. But, then, who had more than four bedrooms? Alec had built this place himself; it was a palace compared to some of the houses in the area, particularly the company houses, owned by the coal company.

As long as Normie didn't get too wound up tonight, I could count on her falling asleep by nine. Could Maura and I both beg off whatever entertainment was planned so we could be alone? Maybe Alec would take Brennan out to a tavern, and — I realized someone had asked my opinion on something. “What?”

“Never mind, Montague,” Alec said. “He talked himself out at the courthouse this week, did he, Maura? Or do you two not talk at all now? If not, why is he here? We were hoping you two were finally going to get back under the same roof.”

I smiled. The in-laws were on my side.

I went back to my calculations. I wasn't the only quiet one at the table. Maura's spooky grandmother sat across from me. Old Morag rarely spoke and, when she did, it was usually in Scottish Gaelic. She was regarding me with her glittering black eyes, which she then trained on Maura and on Brennan. She shook her head, as if in disagreement with an utterance only she could hear.

“Alec, get your fiddle out after dinner and give us a tune, why don't you?” Catherine suggested.

“I may do that.” The old man's voice had softened. “If our little Normie will do a step dance for us. You were kicking up your heels with your dad last night, weren't you, little one?”

“That was fun!”

“Do you make music yourself, Normie?”

“I can play four songs on the piano. Tommy Douglas plays the guitar and saxophone.”

“So you just need a few more kids in the family: a fiddler, a drummer, and a singer. Then you'll have a family band. Like the Barra MacNeils.”

“Any relation?” Brennan asked.

“No,” said Donald.

“Yes,” countered Alec.

“Distant,” declared Catherine.

“And the Rankins. Whatever happened to the big families?” Alec demanded. “That's what I'd like to know!”

“Everybody's telling the church to get stuffed when it comes to birth control, Dad,” Maura answered. “And rightly so. The pope's own hand-picked commission came out in favour of relaxing the ban.”

“People can't afford them, that's what,” the old man declared. “Big families are a luxury only the rich can afford, and they don't want them. Hiring nannies to watch the children while the parents cavort on the tennis court! And all the while, working people are being squeezed and cheated to the point where the thought of another child —”

“We're having a baby!” Every tongue was stilled. Every eye locked on to my little girl. She beamed at her mother. Maura sat staring at her, speechless at last. The old grandmother was rocking and nodding her head, the terrible eyes shining at my daughter.

“Is she right, Maura?” Catherine asked.

“Ach, she is right,” the old lady intoned. “The child has the sight.”

My wife nodded dumbly.

“Mummy didn't tell me. But I know there's a baby in there. I'm so excited!”

I, thunderstruck, could no longer hear what was being said around me. We were having another child? How many weeks ago was it that we were together? The tests they had now were amazing in their ability to confirm a pregnancy so early. Well, not so amazing. I was just out of step. As the news sunk in, I was filled with a joy that almost made me delirious. I could see it all: me as the solicitous husband, my wife's belly growing, the birth of our new baby, the walks around the old neighbourhood with the baby carriage, the five of us together in the old house, everything falling into place at last. I could feel a grin spreading across my face and I didn't even try to contain it.

“And you're due when, darlin'?” my mother-in-law asked.

Silence. Then, reluctantly: “The third of October.”

What?
This was the eighth of June. The third of October was less than four months away! That meant she was already more than five
months gone, and I hadn't been with her until — I stared across the table at her, and she stared back, unable to turn away, horror written all over her face. My eyes turned to Brennan, whose normally unreadable features had been blasted into an expression of shocked disbelief.

Everyone at the table, as if in answer to an unspoken command, turned to me.

With one last look at my former wife, I got up from the table, grabbed my wallet and keys, and walked out.

†

Roaring down the Trans Canada at roughly twice the speed limit, still half-lit from the booze in Glace Bay, I cranked up the car radio and was mocked even by that. It was a song by Free Movement about a guy who gets the bad news, rises from the table, stubs out his cigarette, and walks away from his marriage. I scrabbled around the glove compartment until I found a George Thorogood
CD
and rammed it into the machine. I was the personification of the word
greaser
. But I didn't care. As long as I lived, I would never get over sitting there at the dinner table, with her family all around us, me with a big fucking grin on my face, thinking we were going to be together again, counting the hours till Normie would fall asleep so I could get in there with MacNeil, anticipating it like a sixteen-year-old kid, and all the while she knew she was carrying a child that wasn't mine and that everybody was going to know it. She didn't even care enough about me to give a thought to what this would do to me; she didn't have one shred of residual feeling for me. Warn me off from the trip to Cape Breton? Why bother? Who cares? And just who was Mr. Wonderful, that she would risk a pregnancy at forty-two or whatever age she was; wasn't it more dangerous after forty? I didn't fucking know.

So, who was it? Her Latin lover, Giacomo? I hadn't heard his name or caught sight of his dark curly locks for months; I thought he'd gone back to Italy. Or he'd fallen out of favour with Her Worship. But if it wasn't him, who was it? The look on Burke's face when she made her announcement! You usually couldn't read his expression if your life depended on it, and there he was looking as if he'd taken a
musket ball to the heart. I'd wondered about the two of them before; in fact, I'd come close to pounding Burke one night during a drunken row in which he'd told me to smarten up or I'd lose her. But I realized I was being ridiculous. Or was I? I knew he had taken a shine to her, but I always told myself he liked her as a friend.

Think about it, though. The guy had taken a vow of celibacy. No, it wasn't a vow. A vow was made to God. This, he explained, was a promise. To his bishop. I knew he took it seriously; he lived a celibate life nearly all the time. But not entirely one hundred percent of the time. This wasn't a delicate little virgin when he entered the seminary; he'd been getting more tail than any three of the rest of us put together until he went into the sem. And he'd had the occasional fling since then, as I well knew. Very rarely, to be fair to him. But still. And how many times had I seen him and her sharing a little laugh? And dancing together? Like last night. And what exactly had been going on that Saturday morning I'd popped in at the house unannounced and found Brennan there half naked? The more distance I put between myself and her, and the faster I did it, the happier I would be. But by the time I reached New Glasgow I was falling asleep.

I pulled off the highway, stopped at a convenience store for toothbrush, paste, and some other overnight supplies, and signed in at the Heather Hotel in Stellarton. No sooner had I flopped down on the bed than I was wide awake again and restless. I went down to the pub, sat at a table, and ordered a double whiskey. A party of young women was whooping it up in the corner. Businessmen and Westray miners took up most of the rest of the pub. I knocked back my drink and got another. And started brooding about Burke again. He was always trying to get MacNeil and me back together. What if he had another motive in trying to shove us together? Part of it was genuine, I had no doubt. He counted us both as friends; he wanted the best for us. But did he also want her with me because this way he could be sure of seeing her fairly often? And was there something else too? I remembered the time he had put the run to this Giacomo, saying mysterious things to him in Italian on the phone. What had that been about, really? Was he doing it for me, or for himself? Was it that he couldn't stand the thought of Giacomo or any other guy having Maura if he couldn't have her himself? Did I not count because you
don't miss a slice off a cut cake? I was her husband; he was not jealous of me. But with other guys — I was tired of myself and my deranged reasoning. I ordered a beer and surveyed the pub.

One of the young ones from the girls' night out came up to the bar and asked the bartender for a Singapore Sling. She chatted flirtatiously while she waited; she had obviously known the guy forever. As she was about to return to her table, she was greeted with shrieks of joy when two of her long-lost friends burst into the bar with elaborate excuses for the lateness of the hour. It was clear that there was no room among the party at the back; they asked if I would mind sharing my table. What could I say?

“You're not from here!” one of the new arrivals said to me.

“No, I'm a come-from-away.”

“With Sobeys, I bet.”

“Mmm.” I imagined it was a common sight, personnel from the grocery chain appearing in Stellarton for a conflab at headquarters. I wished I were there for something as routine. “Right.”