Island (10 page)

At five-forty-five he went home after stopping at an all-night service station to convert thirty-one dollar bills into a twenty and a ten. Everybody was up; his mother was getting breakfast although it was too early; the table was set and his father’s lunch pail lay open on its side. No one said a word, and he had a strange feeling that he had gone deaf. He had never thought the house could be so quiet. He looked at his mother, but she kept her eyes on the stove, and then he looked at Donny who seemed about to burst into tears.

And then it was like the beginning of a play in which his father had the first lines, “And where the hell have you been?” Lines that came out clear and well rehearsed, as if he had been practising and practising, and they were not loud nor hard as he had expected. And he – he had not rehearsed, he had not studied his lines well enough, but he stumbled out into the middle of the stage and began to take his part, and a voice within him said, “Tell him the truth,” and the peculiar unrehearsed voice said, “I was playing pool.”

“We have been waiting for you all night,” said his mother evenly, sounding the endings to all her words, “we thought something had happened to you, that you’d been beaten or that you’d been robbed.”

He was very happy suddenly and filled with love because of their concern. His voice said excitedly: “No, no, nothing happened. I didn’t lose anything. I won. Look!” And he began to withdraw the thirty-one dollars from his pocket. Someone said,
“How much?” and he almost laughed and said, “Thirty-one dollars,” drawing the gift completely from his pocket and laying it on the table.

His mother said, “Before you have a bite of breakfast in this house, go and give it back.”

He was stopped then in full tilt and almost crushed, as if he were bolting for the hole in the football line and suddenly found that the daylight had vanished and the hole had closed and the opposition’s weight was squeezing out his life.

And then he was angry and shouted, “Give it back? Who to?”

And his mother said, still evenly, “To the people you took it from. The Lord has been good to us and it seems He wouldn’t want none of this.”

He burst into tears of anger and sorrow and hopelessness, and tried to explain: “But you don’t understand. The Lord has nothing to do with it. I didn’t steal it. It’s mine. I won it. I can’t give it back. I don’t even know their names.”

His father said, “You heard your mother,” so he stormed out of the house and stood at the gate, crying, until Donny came out and he was forced to stop. In his pocket his hand clutched the little ball that was now the thirty-one dollars, three bills that were soaked from the sweat of his perspiring palms. He looked at the sleeping soon-to-be-awakened city and did not know what to do.

He started to walk then but soon he was running. Down several streets and across several others in the almost-light of early morning. He slowed down just as he entered the Caudells’ yard, trying to walk slowly as if just out for a stroll, though breathing heavily.

He found Everett Caudell in the kitchen, sitting by himself with a cup of coffee and listening to his little radio as it valiantly tried to pull in the fast-fading signal from Wheeling, West Virginia. The others were still in bed and he himself was not completely dressed, being still in his stockinged feet, and with his heavy shirt yet unbuttoned and his trousers not yet firmly fastened by the broadness of his heavy belt.

“How do, Jesse?” he said as casually as if he had been whittling a stick on his doorstep in the middle of a Sunday afternoon. “How ya bin? Coffee?”

He was surprised first because he hadn’t been asked why he was about at such an hour but the surprise was short-lived and soon buried beneath the avalanche of his reason for coming. “Here,” he said, pulling the three criminal, sweat-stained bills from his pocket and thrusting them at the man, “here, take them. They’re for you – you lost last night.”

The big man said kindly: “Take it easy, lad. Sit down now. What’s all this? What’s all this?” and he began to fill his pipe as if there were all the time in the world and the world were never to end. And the words tumbled out then, one after the other, on top of one another, passed and thundered and banged one against the other, like the coal when it comes bounding down the chutes, which was one of the few images he remembered from Kentucky, crashing and rolling and pounding, in big lumps and little ones, and the big being broken into the small, and he ended saying: “I’ve got to give it to someone, and it’s for you because you lost and I won – and I shouldn’t have.”

The man took them then, the three dirty bills, the twenty, the ten and the one, and put them in the pocket of his still
unbuttoned shirt. “Aye lad,” he said, “your father is a good man and your mother a good woman; now go on back and tell them what you’ve done, and if they come to me, why I’ll tell them, ‘Sure, he give it to me, a twenty, a ten, and a one,’ just like you did.”

When he was at the door he heard his name immediately behind him and turned to find that Caudell had followed him on silent stockinged feet and was now standing directly in front of him. And then before he could move he saw the older man quickly and quietly tuck the three bills into the shirt pocket of his guest. “Now there,” he said, “there ain’t nothen wrong. There’s no lie. You give it to me and I took it. We’ll leave it be like that. Now go on home as I hear the army starten to move upstairs.”

And he went out then into the new day and after a while he even whistled a bit, and he thought of how he’d knock the geometry exam dead next week and of how the football pads would settle with familiar friendliness upon his waiting shoulders that very afternoon. Already he could sense the shouts and hand-claps from the sun-drenched field and as he began to jog, he could hear the golden leaves as they turned beneath his feet.

I
t is an evening during the summer that I am ten years old and I am on a train with my parents as it rushes toward the end of eastern Nova Scotia. “You’ll be able to see it any minute now, Alex,” says my father excitedly, “look out the window, any minute now.”

He is standing in the aisle by this time with his left hand against the overhead baggage rack while leaning over me and over my mother who is in the seat by the window. He has grasped my right hand in his right and when I look up it is first into the whiteness of his shirt front arching over me and then into the fine features of his face, the blueness of his eyes and his wavy reddish hair. He is very tall and athletic-looking. He is forty-five.

“Oh, Angus, sit down,” says my mother with mingled patience and exasperation, “he’ll see it soon enough. We’re almost there. Please sit down; people are looking at you.”

My left hand lies beside my mother’s right on the green upholstered cushion. My mother has brown eyes and brown hair and is three years younger than my father. She is very beautiful and her picture is often in the society pages of the papers in Montreal, which is where we live.

“There it is,” shouts my father triumphantly. “Look, Alex, there’s Cape Breton!” He takes his left hand down from the baggage rack and points across us to the blueness that is the Strait of Canso, with the gulls hanging almost stationary above the tiny fishing boats and the dark green of the spruce and fir mountains rising out of the water and trailing white wisps of mist about them like discarded ribbons hanging about a newly opened package.

The train lurches and he almost loses his balance and quickly has to replace his hand on the baggage rack. He is squeezing my right hand so hard he is hurting me and I can feel my fingers going numb within his grip. I would like to mention it but I do not know how to do so politely and I know he does not mean to cause me pain.

“Yes, there it is,” says my mother without much enthusiasm. “Now you can sit down like everybody else.”

He does so but continues to hold my hand very fiercely. “Here,” says my mother not unkindly, and passes him a Kleenex over my head. He takes it quietly and I am reminded of the violin records which he has at home in Montreal. My mother does not like them and says they all sound the same so he only plays them when she is out and we are alone. Then it is a time like church, very solemn and serious and sad and I am not
supposed to talk but I do not know what else I am supposed to do; especially when my father cries.

Now the train is getting ready to go across the water on a boat. My father releases my hand and starts gathering our luggage because we are to change trains on the other side. After this is done we all go out on the deck of the ferry and watch the Strait as we groan over its placid surface and churn its tranquillity into the roiling turmoil of our own white-watered wake.

My father goes back into the train and reappears with the cheese sandwich which I did not eat and then we go to the stern of the ferry where the other people are tossing food to the convoy of screaming gulls which follows us on our way. The gulls are the whitest things that I have ever seen; whiter than the sheets on my bed at home, or the pink-eyed rabbit that died, or the winter’s first snow. I think that since they are so beautiful they should somehow have more manners and in some way be more refined. There is one mottled brown, who feels very ill at ease and flies low and to the left of the noisy main flock. When he ventures into the thick of the fray his fellows scream and peck at him and drive him away. All three of us try to toss our pieces of cheese sandwich to him or into the water directly before him. He is so lonesome and all alone.

When we get to the other side we change trains. A blond young man is hanging from a slowly chugging train with one hand and drinking from a bottle which he holds in the other. I think it is a very fine idea and ask my father to buy me some pop. He says he will later but is strangely embarrassed. As we cross the tracks to our train, the blond young man begins to sing: “There
once was an Indian maid.” It is not the nice version but the dirty one which I and my friends have learned from the bigger boys in the sixth grade. I have somehow never before thought of grown-ups singing it. My parents are now walking very fast, practically dragging me by the hand over the troublesome tracks. They are both very red-faced and we all pretend we do not hear the voice that is receding in the distance.

When we are seated on the new train I see that my mother is very angry. “Ten years,” she snaps at my father, “ten years I’ve raised this child in the city of Montreal and he has never seen an adult drink liquor out of a bottle, nor heard that kind of language. We have not been here five minutes and that is the first thing he sees and hears.” She is on the verge of tears.

“Take it easy, Mary,” says my father soothingly. “He doesn’t understand. It’s all right.”

“It’s not all right,” says my mother passionately. “It’s not all right at all. It’s dirty and filthy and I must have been out of my mind to agree to this trip. I wish we were going back tomorrow.”

The train starts to move and before long we are rattling along the shore. There are fishermen in little boats who wave good-naturedly at the train and I wave back. Later there are the black gashes of coal mines which look like scabs upon the greenness of the hills and the blueness of the ocean and I wonder if these are the mines in which my relatives work.

This train goes much slower than the last one and seems to stop every five minutes. Some of the people around us are talking in a language that I know is Gaelic although I do not understand it, others are sprawled out in their seats, some of
them drowsing with their feet stuck out in the aisle. At the far end of the aisle two empty bottles roll endlessly back and forth, clinking against themselves and the steel-bottomed seats. The coach creaks and sways.

The station is small and brown. There is a wooden platform in front of it illuminated by lights which shine down from two tall poles and are bombarded by squads of suicidal moths and June bugs. Beneath the lights there are little clusters of darkly clad men who talk and chew tobacco, and some ragged boys about my own age who lean against battered bicycles waiting for the bundles of newspapers that thud on the platform before their feet.

Two tall men detach themselves from one of the groups and approach us. I know they are both my uncles although I have seen only the younger one before. He lived at our house during part of the year that was the first grade, and used to wrestle with me on the floor and play the violin records when no one was in. Then one day he was gone forever, to survive only in my mother’s neutral “It was the year your brother was here,” or the more pointed “It was the year your drunken brother was here.”

Now both men are very polite. They shake hands with my father and say “Hello, Angie” and then, taking off their caps, “How do you do” to my mother. Then each of them lifts me up in the air. The younger one asks me if I remember him and I say “Yes” and he laughs and puts me down. They carry our suitcases to a taxi and then we all bounce along a very rough street and up a hill, bump, bump, and stop before a large dark house which we enter.