Forgiveness (2 page)

“Oh, this should go back to your grandpa MacLean,” Grandma said as she passed me a green velvet case embossed in gold with the Queen’s face. It was the Pacific Star medal.

“He must have given it to my mom before she left for Fiji,” I said.

I knew this to be one of the many medals my grandpa MacLean had received during the war. My mom had shown it to me before. It hung on coloured ribbons: red, narrow dark blue, green, narrow yellow, green, narrow light blue, and red. The colours represented the forests and beaches of Hong Kong. The medal had been awarded in recognition of service in the Honk Kong theatre of war. It was set in blood red velvet. My grandpa MacLean was, in every sense of the word, a war hero, though he’d never call himself that. He had only done what needed to be done. He tried to kill—and tried his best
to avoid being killed by—people who looked like the woman who was now carefully passing me his medal. The people trying to kill my grandpa all those years ago looked like his first-born grandson. They looked like me.

When Grandpa MacLean talks about the war, which is more often as he gets on in years, he always says he spent it trying to keep his head down and his buddies alive. Some made it, some did not. When he lost his strength to fight on, he prayed. Someone heard him. He beat astronomical odds to do it, but he survived.

My grandma Sakamoto and my grandpa MacLean shared a deep and unrelenting respect and love for each other. As impossible as it may seem, Mitsue Margaret Sakamoto and Ralph Augustus MacLean saw themselves in one another.

“Okay, I’ll make sure Grandpa gets it back,” I said.

Satisfied, my grandma nodded.

Her hands darted back into the box and emerged with a hand-drawn picture of the hut in which my parents had lived, a beautiful thatch peaked structure with rows of palm trees on either side. Instinctively, I smelled the picture, but no ocean fragrance remained. The hut was right on the beach and I could picture my mom and dad strolling hand in hand as they watched the sun dive into the ocean, leaving the day a parting gift of streaks of pink and orange. I placed the picture carefully on the futon as Grandma continued the excavation. An album of pictures, mostly of friends dining on white fish and drinking Fiji Bitter beer.

“Life looked pretty good,” I said.

My grandma giggled. “Oh, and Dar dropped this off too,” she said.

And there it was: the cassette. I knew exactly what it was as soon as I saw it. She handed it to me as I put on a brave face.

“Her voice … it’s been so long.”

My mom and Darlene, her favourite cousin and best friend, would mail cassette tapes back and forth while my mom was in Fiji. She was pregnant with me and Dar had just had her first son, Eric.
A new life was beginning for both of them, and they were sharing this newness together, across the vast Pacific Ocean.

My grandma had moved on to the second box and I realized that I hadn’t heard a word she said for the past five minutes. I sensed that heaving feeling approach like an unwelcome acquaintance.

“Grandma,” I said, “I have a few errands to run. I’ll come back and help you later this aft, okay?”

“Of course,” she said.

She was feeling my forehead all over again.

It started out innocently enough. I should not have been caught unawares. Grandpa Ralph does have a habit of travelling with one family member at a time. I can’t quite pin down when that began. Cousin Christine went with him to Hawaii. Uncle Blake accompanied him to China. He wants to show his family the world. When my turn came, I was just wrapping up my first year of law school in Halifax. He rang me up. He knew I had not spoken to my mom in months. Neither had he.

“Thinking about going home. Thought maybe I might swing by Halifax and take you with me.”

This was a trip of a lifetime. His lifetime. It would almost certainly be the last time he returned home. He made no bones about that.

“Well, I’m eighty-three now. How many times can I make the trek back there, eh?”

My grandpa never let sentiment run his show. He didn’t quite need a cane yet, but he had purchased one. It was still in the box, in the spare bedroom off the kitchen, where he did his ironing. It was waiting. He knew its time was coming.

“So, whatdya say?”

There was no hesitation on my end of the line. I was up for this road trip.

“I’m in, Grandpa! I can’t wait.”

All I really knew about the Magdalen Islands was their shape. Grandpa had an old framed map on his basement wall that I had studied several times. The islands were a tiny little sliver, sitting all alone in the vast Gulf of the St. Lawrence. They looked like an amoeba under a microscope.

Three weeks later, en route to pick up Grandpa at the Halifax International Airport, I had to pull over twice as horizontal rain, coming in sideways off the ocean, blinded my view of the highway.

I spotted him standing outside the airport terminal pickup area, suitcase at his feet. He was, of course, braving the elements. He waved when he saw my blue Volkswagen. He knew it well. I’d driven him around in it when I lived with him in Calgary while I went to university. He picked up his suitcase and walked over to the curb, his bowlegged gait seemingly as strong as ever. I was glad to see that he had left his cane in the closet. I pulled over and before I could get out to give him a hand, he hopped in.

“Some rain, eh?” he said.

“Just another day on the east coast. Scared of a little rain?” I said, teasing.

“Oh, I’m no pantywaist—I’ll manage.”

We laughed, but I didn’t mention the two stops I had made en route to the airport. We got caught up as we drove into the city. Grandpa made a point to keep in touch with family, but he has never been one to dither on the phone. He’ll call you up and talk for a few minutes: the weather, school, his bum knee; then, abruptly, he’ll say, “Well, I won’t keep you. Talk to you later,” and the line goes dead. It is a cordial hit-and-run.

So there was quite a bit to go over. We reviewed how all the family members were doing. He had hired a new cleaning lady because the previous one had moved to Regina. He had fixed a piece of carpet that had lifted on the stairs.

“Darn near tripped on it twice.”

We were just entering city limits when he let me know that, just by coincidence, his niece Marian and her husband, Hans, would be out on the island at the same time as us. This was a great little surprise to me. Just after Marian was born, her father died of lung disease and her mother, my grandpa’s sister Ada, asked him to be Marian’s godfather. He stepped into her life in a way that has left an endearing mark. It is impossible for her to speak of my grandpa without tearing up a little.

Marian was born with an underdeveloped leg and an overdeveloped heart. She has a left shoe with a thickened sole and she walks with a bit of a shuffle. She always required a little extra attention, and she got it from my grandpa. Marian lives for her family and she has never forgotten the extra time, the extra love Ralph Augustus MacLean gave to her.

Marian married a German man named Hans whom she met in Calgary in the 1940s. Hans is a no-nonsense man armed with a quick wit. My mom loved him—he could take a ribbing and dish one out. I imagine a lot of back and forth between the two of them. When my dad started coming around, Hans took Mom aside and cautioned her. He liked my dad well enough—a lot, actually—but he felt it incumbent on him to ensure my mom took a cold hard look at the situation.

“You need to think about how your children would fare out there in the real world. We know just how cruel it can be.”

I’m not sure whether my mom took Hans’s advice to heart, but I know she received it warmly. He was looking out for his niece, just as my grandpa had looked out for Hans’s wife so many years before.

When we got to my apartment, Jade had a hearty meal on the stove already. Grandpa is always ready for food. It really doesn’t matter what time, day or night. Jade knows how he loves his sweets: a cake was baking in the oven. He smiled as we came through the apartment door.

Our place was so small that we had to eat in the living room. Grandpa didn’t mind. He was happy to be back in Halifax, and he
has always had such affection for Jade. We spent the night chatting about the few months he had lived in the city, only a few blocks from our apartment on Ogilvy Street, just off tree-lined South Street with its old-world mansions. We didn’t have the money to live there—and Grandpa certainly didn’t when he lived here either.

Grandpa slept in our bed. Jade and I folded out our IKEA futon couch and slept in the living room.

The next day, Grandpa and I drove across the Confederation Bridge and boarded a ferry to Grindstone, Magdalen Islands, six hours away on the open sea. The Gulf of St. Lawrence with its vast horizon and the salty sea breeze felt thoroughly oceanic.

The captain alerted his passengers that we would dock in thirty minutes. I grabbed the ice-cold railing on the ship’s deck and squinted to see our destination.

Grandpa looked at me with a wry smile. “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore,” he said.

The landscape came into focus. The island looked like it had been bottled up into a time capsule in the 1800s. Houses speckled the hillside willy-nilly. Whoever had planned the island had clearly had no training. As we entered the harbour we passed Entry Island. A couple of miles long, it still had a one-room schoolhouse and six small farmhouses that looked like they had been built for the set of
Little House on the Prairie.

My grandpa pondered as we passed.

“You know, I’ve never set foot on that island. I really should. I came to know so many of the boys who grew up there.”

He had good reason to visit. Turns out, we all do. On a per capita basis, few places have given more blood and treasure to ensure our way of life than Entry Island; this little protruding speck of rock in the harbour of a slightly larger protruding speck of rock provided more volunteers to the Second World War than almost any other place in the Dominion. The whole island deserves a medal.

Almost every man on the island went to war. Entire families were killed. The Arsenault boys signed up. The Chanell brothers, all five of them, went. Few came back.

“They were all fine, fine men. They could shoot and they sure knew how to hang together. Guess they had been doing that all their lives on that plot of land,” Grandpa said.

I spotted a large church that seemed too big for the island. I pointed it out.

“It’s the Memorial. Entry Island folks erected it soon after the war. It’s as close to a Royal Rifles Memorial as we’re going to get,” Grandpa explained.

He was thinking of those boys, wondering what their lives would have been like had they lived to his age. It was making his eyes well up, making him bite his stiff Scottish lip.

We docked, and as I drove off the boat, I felt further away from my life than I ever had. We were headed directly to Grandpa’s old home. He didn’t even want to drop off our bags where we would be staying first.

“Let’s just get there,” he said.

It was his duty to pay his respects to his old home. I knew he had mixed emotions about it. He loved this place. He hated this place. He was drawn to it and yet he wanted to flee as soon as he could.

The house itself sat on a corner edged by a jagged cliff. Pleasant Bay was visible in the distance. The two-storey house had not changed much since Grandpa left. It clung to the land, looking angry and leaning into the wind. I felt like I was visiting a tombstone.

He walked around the outside of the house like he would a museum. He was attached to it, but he kept his distance. He was no longer of this place; it did not hold him as it once had. He was free from it, but he still carried its weight on his shoulders.

We walked out past the potato patch—now completely overgrown—to the cliffs. It was a steep dive down. As a child, Grandpa would have been scolded—or worse—had he ventured this close to the edge. Now he paused four feet from it. His brown leather oxford shoes inched forward another two feet. I wondered if this was a childhood habit, or if he was worried about his bum knee.

“I’d imagine a different life from this spot,” he said.

This view of sea and sky—emptiness—was his only window to the world. He could shape it however he wanted. A gust of sea wind blew hard against our faces. My windbreaker flapped like a naval flag. Grandpa took one step back, but quickly brought his foot right back into place. He was still a stubborn old fighter—he wouldn’t be pushed around by some damn wind.

“Exactly the same as it was sixty years ago. I can just close my eyes and be back …”

We turned to make our way back to the car. I saw Grandpa pull out one of the white linen hankies he keeps in the back pocket of his trousers and quickly wipe his eye. Maybe it was the wind. We walked down the gravel laneway without saying a word.