The Second Son (2 page)

They all chuckled at that, then Andrew added, “Of course, I can only make it on weekends. Running a high school can be pretty exhausting. I’m there till six or seven, most nights.” He touched his wife’s leg. “Jean goes often, on Mother’s day off. He appreciates that.”

Jean smiled. “I bring him his ice cream. He still loves his ice cream.”

I looked at her. “You’re not teaching anymore?”

“I’m on half-days,” she answered.

I smiled. “Must be nice, having pull with the boss.”

“There’s no favouritism.” Andrew stirred in his seat. “It’s just jobsharing.”

I frowned at him. “I was only kidding, for — ”

Jean intervened, a hand on his arm, “Your father always insists I leave early. He doesn’t want me driving in the dark.”

“It’s the same with me,” my mother said. “He’s always thinking of others, wanting to make sure we’re safe and sound.”

He must be in bad shape, I thought, if she’s already elevating him to sainthood. “I guess you don’t hold out much hope?”

My mother shook her head and I thought I saw a tear starting. “Thank God he retired when he did. At least he had a few good years, enjoying himself.”

“I wish I’d known sooner. I could have spent some time with him.”

My mother sniffed, “I’m not sure it would have been good for him, dear. He gets upset very easily, from the strokes, I think.”

“Still, I owe him. He came to see me all the time I was in that hellhole.”

“Don’t say it like he was the only one. So did I, and your brother. You just sat there and stared at us.”

“I had my reasons,” I snapped.

“So you did,” she snapped back, “as though you were the only one who ever had reasons.”

Jean tried to intervene. “I don’t think it’s the time — ”

My mother sighed and waved a hand in her direction. “It’s all right, Jean. Mike isn’t happy unless he’s finding fault.”

I took a deep breath. Was I that obvious? Maybe my eyes had given me away one more time. Like the old man used to say, “It’s your eyes, kid. You stare at them like they’re naked.” Hell, we all knew what it really was. It was the Landry family monster, once again in residence.

“All right,” I finally got out, “I’m here for the old man. Just give me the directions, and I’ll get the — ”

“Don’t call him that, he’s your father,” my mother said as she got up and crossed over to the writing desk in the dining room, her sensible shoes tapping out her anger on the hardwood floor. She picked up a piece of paper and brought it back to me. “I wrote them out.”

I took the paper, looked down at the neatly printed directions, then looked up at the woman standing over me. I pushed myself to my feet and stepped sideways. “I’ll be staying at the Shady Glen, with the minks.”

Nobody was listening to my little joke. “You can stay here if you want. The bed’s made up in your room.” My mother’s ability to say that with a straight face still impressed me. I wanted very badly to tell her what I thought of her offer, but I knew I might as well leave town right away if I started down that road. I had decided to do the right thing by my father and let him die in peace, if that was what he wanted. The monster would have to go back in the closet.

“I’ve already made a deposit,” I said, cancelling out one lie with another. I started moving toward the front door, with the three of them following me — herding me, it felt like.

“I see,” she responded. “Well then, we’ll see you tomorrow, I imagine.”

We all muttered some relieved goodbyes, with Jean having the last word. “It’s good you’re here. Your father will be glad to see you.”

Yeah, sure, I thought, as in, who do you see when you haven’t got a gun? I smiled to myself as I heard the door shut firmly behind me.

I was halfway to the motel when I realized they hadn’t even offered me a drink. What was Glengarry coming to, I wondered? Truth be told, it was always the old man who gave me a real Glengarry welcome, with
aye the open han’
, while the others seemed to stand off to the side, accepting but not exactly welcoming. So here I was, still owing something to the old man, at the same time as the worst part of me was looking forward to the day he would be gone. And I would be free to settle my debt with the rest of them.

I smiled when I pulled into the Shady Glen, reminded of another dream that had come to die in a small town. When I was a boy this place was a mink farm. It belonged to Tom Sangster, a guy who thought he could escape the dog-eat-dog world of the city to raise his family in the pastoral quiet of Glengarry County. He thought he had the inside track, being married to a girl from one of the town’s established families. They moved back here with their three kids, planning to set up a little business and live the good life in a friendly community where everybody knew their neighbours. The story was, they had trouble adjusting to the gossip and the backbiting and the pressure to take sides in the longstanding quarrels that provide the entertainment of small-town life. The stuff you don’t read about in the
Glengarry News
.

I was thinking of the weekend Tom Sangster had his heart broken for good. There was a grass fire in the fields around his factory. They never found out who started it. Some people said it was kids smoking, over behind the war memorial, only it was never proven. Every time the firemen would leave, the flames would break out again in another corner of the field. Sangster spent two days out there, trying to beat back the smoke and the flames with garden hoses and steel shovels. He shut off all the intake fans in the building, but the thin yellow smoke still crept through and killed half his stock.

I could still see him, standing there in the field with a bunch of us kids who had jumped at the chance to fight the fire. We had spent hours out there with shovels, trying to slap down the eruptions of flame that kept popping up. When everybody started hopping around on the hotfoots they were getting from the fire underground, Sangster realized it was no use. “Forget it, boys,” I could remember him saying, “the goddamn roots are on fire. We’ll never stop it, not until they burn out.”

He stood up straight and arched his back to relieve the pain a tall man like him must have been feeling after two or three hours of pounding the ground with a short-handled shovel. He looked over at the smoke curling round the doors and windows of his dream and wiped the sweat from his soot-covered face. “Boys,” he said, “don’t ever let them tell you that hell is some far-off place. Hell is right here on earth, right under your goddamned feet.”

I remembered wondering what he was talking about, back then, thinking maybe he was talking about the kids who had started the fire and what was in store for them. I smiled at how right he had been. Poor Tom Sangster, I thought. Maybe the night clerk will know what happened to him.

He didn’t have a clue, that guy. He was a kid who had trouble taking his eyes off the little TV he had under the counter. “Is the Sangster family still in town?” I asked.

“Sanster?” He looked half asleep in his baggy jeans and sweatshirt, with a ball cap pulled down over his eyes. How he could see anything in that dimly lit office, I don’t know. “Don’t know any Sansters, myself,” he managed to come up with, as he watched me fill out the registration form. I didn’t want to know badly enough to repeat the name. He did manage to look up from his seat when he checked my credit card. “Landry? Any relation to Mr. Landry, the high school principal?”

I have to admit that took me a bit by surprise. “Yeah,” I said, watching him closely, “he’s my brother.”

“Cool,” the kid said. “I didn’t know he had a brother.”

“He’ll be glad to hear that.”

He wasn’t interested — wanted to get back to his program. He handed me the key and said something about having a good night.

“Yeah, right,” I muttered as I headed for the door, “like you give a fuck what kind of night I have.” If he heard me he didn’t let on. Or maybe I made him nervous.

I breathed a sigh of relief when I finally got into my room and flipped on the lights. I like motel rooms, even cheap motel rooms with built-in furniture and screwed-down appliances, and those tired old bedspreads and see-through sheets. For me they’re so much more than ten by twenty square feet of space with a bed, a toilet, and a shower. I don’t even care if the goddamn TV works. It’s the privacy I love. Just having that cocoon of my own space is so much more than I had in the dormitory of the detention centre where I spent my youth.

It’s the same with restaurants. I never get tired of them. Any greasy spoon where I can order what I want off a menu is a thousand times better than lining up for mush that all tastes the same, every goddamn day after every other goddamn day. That’s probably why I didn’t last long up North on the military bases, where you had to share a room and eat in a cafeteria. Too many rules, those places. I always preferred places you could drive to, where you could find work on a drill site or a construction project and get your own place in some Mom and Pop motel sitting on a slab of asphalt at the edge of town. And if you were lucky, you could get discount meals in the restaurant next door. Handy, with nobody to bother me, that’s how I liked things. Sometimes I think the only time I ever relaxed in those days was when I was completely alone.

It hadn’t always been that way, I was thinking before I went to sleep that night in the Shady Glen Motel. I started out thinking about my father and what I might find the next day in the hospital in Cornwall. I was picturing him lying alone in that place for three months, and that got me thinking about my first night alone in the town jail. I had my own room that night — for the first time, really, having always shared a bedroom with Andrew. Sure, I had spent time at my grandmother’s in Montreal, but that night in the jail was the first time I had ever been separated from my family.

At first it had seemed quiet in the old courthouse, and cold, the summer heat held at bay by the thick stone walls. Or maybe I was just shivering from fear. I remembered lying on that cot in the dark, listening to the sounds in the night getting louder and louder — the chirp of a cricket, the drip from a pipe, the clang of a door, rising and rising to fill all the space around me, closing in on me as I scrunched closer and closer to the wall, wishing I could crawl right through it. And I remembered that other moment, after the days and nights had all run into each other and I found myself in an institution, alone in a crowd. And it suddenly dawned on me that I had done this to myself. And worse still, I couldn’t think of a single good reason to try and undo it. And here it is, I thought, thirty years later and I’m still alone, still searching for a reason.

I TOOK MY TIME GETTING
to the hospital the next morning. I drove slowly through Alexandria, looking for familiar sights, watching for familiar feelings. The town’s expansion had killed a few of them, starting with the new subdivision that stretched across the fields and through the bush where we used to build our tree forts. The old downtown was still there, along Main Street and the Pond. And the mill square was almost intact, with the Mill Restaurant where the Hub used to be on one corner and the big brick post office opposite. But faded window displays and final sale signs told the tale. The business strip that was once the heart of the community had been replaced by big boxes and parking lots stretched out along the southend highway.

I’m sure that suited most people fine, easy parking and city prices. Still, something was missing. Old favourites were gone, like Chenier’s Hardware and Charlebois’ Dairy Bar, where we used to go for ice cream on Sunday after mass. Same with Mr. Dickey’s barbershop and the Five and Dime, where we went each year to spend our precious Christmas money. Must have broken the old man’s heart, I was thinking.

I stopped for a late breakfast at one of those new restaurants on the highway south of town. There were six or seven people in the place, and I didn’t recognize one of them. There was a waitress about my age with the name “Allison” pinned to her chest. There were no “Allisons” when I was a kid. I asked her what her last name was and she told me, “Sinden.”

“That’s a new one on me,” I said. “Did you grow up around here?”

“No,” she said, “I moved here from Montreal a few years ago. How about you?”

“Oh, I’m from here all right. Name’s Landry.” I figured I might as well find out what I was up against. “My mother worked in the post office and my brother’s the principal at the high school. My father’s retired.”

No reaction. She just shook her head. “Nope, doesn’t ring a bell. Like I said, I didn’t go to school here.” She cast an eye at the fellow by the cash register, as though there was some rule about discussing personal history with customers. “You want to order?” she asked, looking down at her scratch pad.

When the order came, I took my time eating, watching the comings and goings. Never did see anyone I knew. The guy at the cash register looked at me kind of funny when I was leaving. Probably he came from Montreal, too.

I drove south through Lancaster and took the overpass over the 401. I wanted to take the old highway along the St. Lawrence. It was clear and cool, a nice day for a drive. There wasn’t that much to see, it turned out — lots of houses on both sides of the road, blocking the view of the river, mostly. It looked like the only thing stopping Cornwall from suburbing clear out to Lancaster was all the swampland around Gray’s Creek. I couldn’t concentrate on the scenery, anyway. I kept thinking about the old man. We had driven this road all the time when we had the cottage at Summerstown. And this was the road he raced down that one day in his life he got to play the hero.

A young lad had gotten his arm caught in the drive shaft of a truck at his uncle’s garage on Main Street. My father was at the pumps filling the tank on his new Pontiac when the kid’s uncle begged him to drive them to the hospital in Cornwall. They couldn’t find the doctor, and people were starting to panic. The arm had been severed at the elbow and it looked like the kid was going into shock. No one would accept the responsibility, afraid of ruining their upholstery, I guess. “To hell with the seats,” my father said when the boy’s uncle talked about laying out a car blanket. “Use it to wrap him up.”