The Second Son (17 page)

“Well . . . boys,” he finally got out, “I’ve got some bad news. You know, business hasn’t been so good lately.” We knew that. He had been complaining all winter about Allied Food Stores, the big grocery chain that had moved into Alexandria the November before. We figured that’s what he meant. We nodded and he continued, “Well, it means we have to find a way to cut back on our spending. And now I’m having problems with the truck. We’ll probably have to replace it. Anyways, what it all comes down to is . . . well, I had to sell the cottage.”

“Sell the cottage?” I cried, then took note of the tense he had used. “You mean you already sold it.” I was holding back the tears. “Somebody else owns our cottage?”

“I had to, son. April is the time of year to sell a cottage, when people get the itch. I got a good offer and I had to let it go.”

“But where will we go fishing?” I looked to my mother and Andrew for support. They didn’t seem as upset as I was. “I mean, we’ll still go fishing, won’t we?”

He fudged an answer, and if I had been older I would have understood we were in real trouble. “Well,” he said, “the boat is showing its age. Those oak ribs are rotting out around the keel . . . I’m not sure I can fix it.” A week later the boat disappeared from the shed while we were at school. I didn’t even ask what happened to it. We were already in the making sacrifices mode, with me giving up my expectations of a new bicycle to match my longer legs and Andrew working after school at the store.

I didn’t think that was such a great deal. I would have given my eye teeth to be a big shot like Andrew, working for my dad in the store. But he was still the mature one, the one who could be trusted to paint the back porch, or help Dad change the plugs on the truck. I was still all thumbs, maybe too much like my namesake, Grandpa Landry, to suit my father. Whatever I did, I could never graduate from the apprentice stage. Washing the car or mowing the grass, I always seemed to leave something out, like scrubbing the whitewalls or raking the grass cuttings. My father had this rule he kept harping on. “If a job is worth doing,” he’d say, “it’s worth doing right.” I hated the very sound of that sentence. Still do.

I was after him for weeks before school finished to let me join Andrew for the summer, working at the store. He finally relented and let me go in with them that first Monday after Dominion Day. He warned me, though. The big job, delivering groceries on the bike, that was Andrew’s. I wasn’t strong enough yet to carry those heavy boxes. I would have to be satisfied with odd jobs, like helping Dory out.

Dory McNabb was his head clerk, a little sparkplug of a woman with a voice as loud as his and a temper to match. She had been with him for years and ran the store when he was away. She was my favourite of all the people who worked for my father, mainly because she was one of the few people who would force their way past my shyness, always cornering me for a big hug and a sloppy kiss. “Yuck,” I would say, but I never ran away from her. Many’s the time she covered up for me when I knocked something over, or made a mess of a window display, looking for the best piece of fruit. She even slipped me a chocolate bar now and then, making me promise not to tell my father I was “eating up the profits.”

After working for Dory a while, doing what was probably a mediocre job of sweeping the floors and dusting the shelves, I began complaining to my dad that I wanted a real job.

“All right,” he sighed, “I’ll see how you do at trimming the vegetables.” He took me into the back room and pointed to a case of iceberg lettuce. “This lettuce has to be trimmed,” he said, “before we put it on display.” He picked one up and pulled off the outside leaves. “See, you take off the first few leaves until it’s nice and round and fresh-looking.”

“Okay, I get it,” I answered quickly, anxious to get started on this important job. I had a hard time keeping the big grin off my face. He left me alone and I went to work removing the outside leaves and tossing them into the garbage can beside the worktable. Maybe he should have spent more time with me, or at least finished a couple of samples. I kept pulling off one leaf after another, until I had that firm round shape I thought the customers would go for. Unfortunately, to satisfy my image of a perfect head of lettuce, I had to reduce them to the size of a softball. But I worked fast. I had the case almost finished when he came back to check on my progress.

“Jesus, dying Jesus!” he yelled after taking one look at the pile of lettuce leaves overflowing the garbage can. Then he fixed on the pile of softball-size lettuce heads that wouldn’t fill half the case, and exploded, “Goddammit . . . of all the stupid damn . . . I told you to trim them.”

“Huh?” was all I could muster.

He picked one up and looked at me with disgust. “You’ve ruined a whole case of lettuce. What the hell were you thinking?”

Well, I had been thinking he would come back and compliment me on these fine round heads of lettuce I had sculpted. Only I wasn’t about to tell him that. “I dunno,” I muttered, unable to look at him, “I was trying to make them look nice.”

“Nice,” he spit out. “They look like shit. I’ll have to throw them all out.” He muttered and cursed under his breath as he threw all my good work into a garbage pail. “Don’t touch the rest of these,” he warned. “I’ll be lucky if I have enough to last the weekend.” Then he started patting his shirt pocket for his cigarettes. After he lit one up and took a couple of deep drags, he turned back to me. “Dory’s out there stocking shelves. Go help her for a while. And make sure you don’t break anything.”

After I had gotten in Dory’s way for about ten minutes, the old man came out front and called me over to the cash. “Look, Mike, you’re not old enough to work in the store.” That’s the way he was. No need for discussion — he was the boss and he’d made up his mind. He punched the cash drawer open and pulled out a two-dollar bill, sliding it across the counter. “Here, take this, and don’t tell your mother — it’s way too much for a half-day’s work. I want you to go home now and enjoy your summer vacation. There will be time enough for work when you’re older. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

I couldn’t answer him. I knew I’d cry if I tried to talk. I just nodded and hung my head, not wanting to go, not wanting to stay. He saw my hesitation and his voice grew softer, “Here, take this,” he pushed the bill closer to me, “and take yourself a chocolate bar if you want.”

I didn’t want his chocolate bar or his money, but I was beginning to worry that Andrew might be back any minute to witness my humiliation. Even today I wish I had found the courage to tell him what to do with his money and his goddamn chocolate bar. I finally slid my hand up to take the bill. I jammed it into my pocket, then turned and headed for the door. On the way by the candy display I reached out and grabbed three chocolate bars, Malted Milks. I hated Malted Milk. Halfway home I threw them in the field across from the Supertest Station. I never told my mother why I came home early that day. And she never asked. What my father told her when he got home, I never found out.

I have often asked myself how he could have been so thoughtless, to send me home like that. Why couldn’t he have pretended to let me work a little longer, then let me down more gently? I suppose he thought he was doing me a big favour, giving me another summer to do what I pleased. I’m sure he didn’t think he was casting me adrift to spend the summer alone, while Andrew went in with him every day to do a “man’s work,” taking the place of the extra clerk he usually hired in the summer. I guess I was just a kid in my father’s mind, who would figure out soon enough that working all day in a grocery store was not a privilege. If that was the case, he should have stopped Andrew from bragging about his big job at the store, as he flashed his pay in front of me every week. And he should have told my mother to stop telling everybody who came to the house that Saint Andrew had given up his summer to save the family. Then I might not have been so ripe for the allure of Gail MacDonald.

NOT LONG AFTER MY FATHER FIRED ME
, the MacDonald family moved into the old Willard house across the street from us. Gail MacDonald was in the same class as me all through school, and I always had a bit of a crush on her. We were pretty friendly up till Grade 6, when she started getting her growth and I started thinking about her as a girl, instead of just another kid. She matured early, a lot sooner than I did, and for a while that summer her friends were calling her B.B., on account of she looked a lot like that French movie actress, Brigitte Bardot. I could never see it. She was kind of pretty, with that blonde hair she wore in a ponytail, and a nice smile, but I just kept on calling her Gail.

Andrew always said she looked like our mom. He was nuts. Sure, she had blonde hair and blue eyes, but her hair was long and straight, while my mother’s was short and wavy. And most of the people in Glengarry had blue eyes, so that didn’t mean anything. I’m not sure why I got so stuck on her — there were lots of other girls around. I don’t suppose she would have had much to do with me if she hadn’t moved in across the street. Even in a small town, geography can have a lot to do with who your friends are.

Don MacDonald was already the mayor of Alexandria by that time, and a big success in business. He owned the feed mill, a car dealership, and two or three hotels. They had a pretty nice house down at the other end of Bishop Street, and a farm just north of town. But I guess his wife, Marjorie, had admired the Willard house when she was a kid. It was a big, square, brick house with a covered porch around three sides so you could always find shade on a summer day. When old Mrs. Willard had her stroke in the winter of ’56 and had to move to the home in Cornwall, Mr. MacDonald bought the house for his wife. All spring there were trucks and men working to fix the place up. It was on a double lot, and the MacDonalds fixed it up pretty fancy, putting a new garage and a big addition on the back, even installing a swimming pool. It was the first swimming pool ever built in Alexandria.

We never saw much of Mr. MacDonald. My dad used to say he was too busy making money. He was a big guy, kind of roundish, with a red face. He always looked like he was half-running, rushing around the way he did. He’d show up at their new house every few days, walk around the place with his wife and the builder, give him a bunch of instructions, then take off again in his big blue Buick. People said there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do for his wife and daughter. Gail had her own horse up on that farm they owned, a palomino like Trigger — Emmanuel would have loved that horse. And Mrs. MacDonald had her own convertible car, a green Chevy Bel Air.

Gail was a little stuck-up. My mom said that was because she was an only child. Her mother sure wasn’t. Stuck-up, I mean. She was a Brodie, and her own mother lived around the corner from us, in a little house on Dominion Street. Mrs. MacDonald was at the new house a lot while they were making the changes, and I started going over there for something to do. She was pretty young to be Gail’s mother and sometimes when she was out there in the yard with her shorts on and her hair tied up in a ponytail, she looked more like she could have been Gail’s sister, even though her hair was a lot darker. She was real nice to me, giving me fifty cents now and then for picking up scraps of wood and other junk from the construction. Even after I told her I was using it to improve our tree house, back in the cedar grove by MacMillan’s farm, she still paid me for hauling it away. I asked Gail once if she wanted to come and see the tree house but she didn’t seem too interested.

After they moved in, though, she started talking to me more, mainly when we started walking downtown for swimming lessons at the park. Her mother told her there was no water going in that new pool until she had her intermediate swimmer’s badge from the lifeguards at the park. I thought maybe she was getting to like me, those afternoons we went down to the beach. The beach was really just a couple hundred yards of sand the Kinsmen had dumped along one side of the Pond.

Those were good days. I even started to forgive my father, knowing I couldn’t have been spending this time with Gail if I had still been working at the store every day. I made sure Andrew knew how I was spending my time. He said it was no big deal, that he was meeting lots of girls, what with serving people in the store and delivering groceries. When I concentrate, I can bring back those afternoons on the beach — stretched out on the sand, stealing glances at a real girl who was mocking me sometimes, teasing me others, spending most of the time talking to her girlfriends, yet at least acknowledging my existence. She would talk to me, too, if I bugged her enough. I remember one conversation we had that always stayed with me. Her girlfriends weren’t around that afternoon, and she was reading one of her movie magazines. Then she stuck this picture in front of my face and asked, “Do you think he’s cute?”

“Who is it?”

“Elvis Presley, dummy.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Sorry, but everybody knows who Elvis is. Don’t you think he’s cute?”

“Naw, he’s ugly.” I was hoping that would get me a punch in the arm.

It did, and she said, “C’mon. Be serious.”

“Aw, I dunno. I never thought about it.”

“Well, think about it. Is he cute or what?”

“Jeez, Gail. I’m a guy.”

“No guff, I never woulda guessed.” She said that a lot, no guff. I hated it but I never let on. “Well,” she persisted, “what do you think? Is he cute?”

I guess I was just young enough and stupid enough to think she really wanted my opinion, so I reached up and pulled the picture closer. “He’s kind of girly, don’t you think?”

She jerked the magazine back. “What do you mean, girly?”

“Well, he looks like he’s got lipstick on. And he dyes his hair, don’t he?”

“He does not. And so what if he dyes his hair? Most movie stars do. It’s for the camera.”

“Okay, okay, I give. He’s cute, for a guy.”

“He’s a dreamboat, and you know it. You’re just jealous. All the boys are.”

“How come you asked me, then?”

She just grunted at me and went back to her magazine for a few minutes, while I silently cursed myself for getting her mad again. Would I ever learn to talk to her? A few minutes later, she gifted me with another of her private thoughts. “You know, if I ever got married I’d want it to be with someone who’s a cross between my father and Elvis.”