The Second Son (8 page)

Looking back I wonder if that wasn’t a big problem of mine, listening in on things I wasn’t old enough to fully understand. But I was a kid, and the secret pleasure of hearing myself discussed always outweighed my dismay at some of the things I heard. I was taking in the world with the eyes and ears of a child and had no name for the unrest in my heart. Only later would I impose adult order and logic on the world I grew up in.

Yet I knew some things instinctively. I knew my mother was the centre of our family, just as surely as she made our meals and ran our home. And just as my father brought the cynical arguments and upsets of the outside world to our table, my mother was the one who smoothed away his rough edges and restored peace and harmony. I knew her tender beauty graced our family, that she was that sweetest rose the Mills Brothers warned us not to crush. I was also convinced I was losing the battle for her affection. Exactly when I realized this, and began to hope that something would happen to change her mind, I’m not sure.

I know that’s what I was hoping for as far back as that time Andrew knocked me into the ditch. It was one of the first things I could remember about me and my brother. We were having a race on the wooden sidewalk beside our house. Those three-plank sidewalks were just wide enough for a tricycle, only Andrew didn’t think about that when he told me I could have a head start. He figured he could pass me easily with his new two-wheeler. We were almost home and he still hadn’t gotten by, so he leaned over and pushed me into the ditch, where the rock was.

The next thing I remember I was lying on the kitchen table while the doctor sewed up my head, listening to my father yelling at Andrew for almost killing me. I was smiling past the pain, thinking my mother would soon be yelling at him, too. Maybe even spanking him. It didn’t happen. She sprang to Andrew’s defence, protesting that it was simply an accident, that Andrew would never have done something like that on purpose. I was only five or six, but I remember this clearly.

I didn’t mind so much that she was protecting him from my father’s temper — she had to do the same for me over the years. But why couldn’t she accept that Andrew had done something wrong? Why couldn’t she have chosen me, over him, just that once? Just once, choose me. That was my silent prayer through all those years, that she would choose me over him. Of course, I know now what I was really longing for. I didn’t want to be Michel, the second son. I wanted to be first. I wanted to be Andrew.

Andrew was special. I looked up to him for the longest time. He was the smart one, the boy with all the gifts. Bigger and stronger, he could beat me at all of the games we played. And he was always thinking up new games, more adventures we could go on, another project we could build. And I’d go along with him every time, happy to be included, whether I was the prince to his king, the squire to his knight, or Frank James to his Jesse.

Even the dog followed Andrew around. I could never figure out how he did it. The dog always went to him. I would ply the little mongrel with the same treats Andrew did, pet him and play with him the same way Andrew did, and watch him go to Andrew every damn time. When we first got the dog we used to fight over whose bed he would sleep on — my mother would kill us if she caught him under the covers. I would sneak a treat upstairs before bed and get the dog to start off the night with me. Andrew would wait until he figured the treats were all gone, then call the dog’s name.

“Buster,” softly and gently, just his name, “Buster.” And sure enough Buster would take off, every time, leaping off my bed and onto Andrew’s. When I would get fed up and try to hold him back he would only start barking. Then it was my mother’s turn to get fed up, finally banning the dog from the bedroom. Andrew blamed me, claiming I did it on purpose — that if I couldn’t have the dog, he wouldn’t either. He was wrong. I just wanted to be first with someone.

Andrew didn’t have to worry about that. It wasn’t just the dog that came easily to him. He was altar-boy good, Andrew was. If he wasn’t doing his schoolwork, he was performing his church duties, or helping our dad down at the store. It’s not that he was perfect — he just wanted to be. And when he couldn’t be, he took it hard. Part of the trouble was that big imagination of his. He’d get a picture in his head of how everything would go and he’d expect it all to work out, just like he had planned.

I remember one Christmas, when he was eight and I was seven, he got a pair of skis for his big present. Since there wasn’t enough snow yet to use them, he did pretend-skiing on the carpet in the living room — until Mom got mad and chased us out to the front lawn. Then a good six inches of snow fell on a Friday night. The next morning he dragged me out of bed and made me hurry up my breakfast. There was a decent hill in the farmer’s field down the road from our house, and I was supposed to accompany him with my sled. We were out on the front porch and he was strapping those skis to his galoshes when I asked, “How’re you gonna get down the steps with those things?”

He was beaming with energy and confidence. I can still see that big smile and those bright blue eyes, with that lock of blond hair escaping the edge of his toque. “Don’t worry, I’ve got it all figured out.”

“But — ”

“Just wait and see,” he said. “It was in that book Mom got me about skiing.” He had me there. I wasn’t even reading yet and he was soaking up everything in print that came into the house. Well, there must have been something in that book about how to go sideways, one step at a time. He even made it over the snowbanks on either side of the road, and across to the pasture. I was impressed. Then we hit the wire fence.

I looked up at that fence, and down at those long boards tied to his feet. “You can’t climb a fence with those things on. You’ll have to take ’em off.”

“I’ll never get these crazy straps back on. My hands’ll be frozen.”

He had a point about those straps. Still, I couldn’t see how he’d do it. “You think you can climb in those skis?”

“I figured it out, you’ll see.”

I’m sure he had. He had likely been lying awake for a week, planning this all out, picturing himself getting from the porch and over the fence to the pasture, then flying down the hill with the greatest of ease. That’s why I was along, to witness his triumph. Of course he couldn’t get over that fence. He tried for half an hour, damning the skis and damning the fence. Every time he got one foot partway up, he would slip back down again as he tried to swing the second leg up and got hooked in the wire. And each time goddamn this and goddamn that would start all over again. That’s the only time you ever heard Andrew swear, when he really lost his temper.

“C’mon,” I coaxed him, “just take ’em off. It’s not that cold. I’ll help you.”

“No,” he fumed, “I can do this myself!”

Well, he couldn’t. And he yelled and he swore until the skis fell off his feet. Then he cursed them all to hell and threw them halfway across the road back toward our place. That was Andrew. If it didn’t work out the way he had planned, he wouldn’t do it. And that temper. He got so mad at those skis I thought he was going to break them in half. He finally threw them under the porch and wouldn’t look at them for weeks. Me, I snuck them out of there a few times, put them on after I got over the fence, and had a ball skiing by myself. He caught me one time when he came over with the toboggan. He made me take them off and carry them back home. I begged my mother to let me use them, but she said they were his Christmas present and she couldn’t make him lend them if he didn’t want to.

I asked for skis the next Christmas but didn’t get them. I guess my parents figured Andrew would let me use his, eventually. Or maybe the money was short that year. After he broke his leg I didn’t have the heart to ask for them anymore. I remember feeling pretty bad, that day they hauled him off to the hospital. Things were never the same in our family after that. They may have cut down the stump after a while but they couldn’t change how they felt inside, any more than I could. Andrew’s damaged leg became part of the family myth, just as real for them as the memory of that stump was for me. My dad had high hopes for Andrew before that accident. He figured he might have the hockey career he had missed. Dad had played semipro hockey in Montreal before a high stick left him partially blind in one eye. Sometimes when he’d had a few beers he would talk about almost making it to the NHL, and how some of his teammates who weren’t even as good as him had gone all the way.

Andrew really hadn’t played much hockey before the accident and now the bad leg became the reason he avoided some sports. There were other reasons I knew about, such as he could never stand anyone hitting him. My mother never let go of that excuse, though, anytime my dad would start questioning his toughness. I know she wanted to treat us equally. And she often tried to. The trouble was, she could never change the sound of her voice or the look in her eyes when she mentioned Andrew and that damned apple tree. I don’t know why she was like that. Maybe it was like Uncle Andy said. Some things that happen to you in childhood never leave you.

MY MOTHER
’
S PEOPLE CAME
from the west of Scotland in 1846 to settle in Glengarry. According to my mother, her great-grandfather and his wife emigrated with their family of six children. They got off the ship in Quebec City and came by boat and barge down the St. Lawrence to the village of Lancaster. Then they travelled by horse and wagon to the home of relatives on the Sixth Concession, where they spent their first year, two large families in a small log house with a loft. They must have felt right at home, though, in a place where whole communities had moved from the Scottish Highlands to start afresh. By the turn of the century they were prospering, having cleared the land and built their homes, churches, and schools. With the older generations still speaking Gaelic, it must have seemed like a piece of Scotland had been transported overseas and dropped down in the middle of the bush.

Within a year or two, the MacRae family had bought their own farm and over the years saw their children take up several holdings in the county. Eventually one of them went into the coal business in Alexandria and served two terms as mayor. But there was never a close connection between my mother’s father and his relatives. I guess Duncan MacRae was pretty well disowned by his Presbyterian family when he converted to Roman Catholic to marry my grandmother, Helen McPhail, from Lancaster. He must have loved her very much to cut himself off from his family and any share of his father’s farm. He and his new bride had to start from scratch on a rented farm on the Eigg side road.

More than once my mother told us the story of her parents and their grand plans for the future, plans that would never be realized. The first time I heard that story was right after Grandpa MacRae died. I was six, I guess, because he died in 1950. It was in the fall. I don’t remember the whole day, just wisps of images from the wake. We were up on the farm, at Grandma and Grandpa’s house. I was dressed up, in a blue blazer that had brass buttons with anchors on them and light blue stitching around the lapel, and a white shirt with a bow tie stuck on with metal clips. And short pants, grey, I think, with braces. How I hated those short pants and the long itchy socks that went with them. I remember wandering through the downstairs rooms, bumping into legs and knees, looking for my brother. I remember noisy hubbub buzzing above, dried-up old faces bending over me, and waves of old ladies’ perfume — lilac and lily of the valley — filling my nose. And my mother asking me if I wanted to see my grandfather. And me asking, “Where is he?”

She took my hand and led me to the parlour and the prayer bench in front of the first coffin I had ever seen. She asked me if I wanted to kneel and say a prayer. They had started taking me to church by that time so I suppose I had a vague idea of what was meant by a prayer. At least I knew enough to put my two hands together and make a steeple. When I knelt down I couldn’t see anything but this big box of shiny wood, so I stepped up onto the prayer bench to look inside. I was startled to find my white-haired grandpa, lying there in his good suit with his eyes closed and his big rough hands clasped around a rosary of sparkling black beads. “Why is Grandpa sleeping?” I asked. “When is he getting up?”

“He isn’t, dear. He’s having his last sleep.”

“Why?”

“He’s getting ready to go up to heaven.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s going to see God.”

“No he isn’t. He’s gotta get up.” I reached down to shake him but she pulled my arm away.

“Wake up, Grandpa,” I insisted.

“He can’t hear you, dear. He’s on his way to heaven.”

I was not convinced. I started yelling at him, “Get up, Grandpa. Get up! There’s people here.”

I guess at some point I realized he wasn’t about to get up and this was not the same as sleeping, because I remember starting to bawl and being led past all those legs and knees out to the front porch where I sat with my mother on a bench while we both cried.

That’s all I remember about the event until after the funeral was over and we were back at Grandpa’s house. We were upstairs with Mom and Grandma — I didn’t know then that Grandma Bessie wasn’t my real grandmother. Anyway, they were looking at some of Grandpa’s things. I guess Mom was going to get some keepsakes to remember him by. It was Andrew who asked Mom which room had been hers, when she was a little girl. She told us this wasn’t her home when she was a girl. She said that someday she would take us to see the place where she had grown up.

Soon after, she got Dad to drive us up the Eigg road and down a long laneway to the haunted house. That’s what Andrew and I called it after that, because she took us back there other times, when we’d be taking a drive through the country or looking for a place to pick berries. And a couple of times Andrew and I rode all the way out there on our bicycles. But the first time I remember was after my grandfather died.

Nobody lived there. The original owner had sold it years before to a neighbour who worked the land and used the barn, but never bothered to rent the house. You couldn’t see the house at all until you came out from under the brush that was crowding in on both sides of the laneway. I remember my dad cursing the potholes and calling it the road to nowhere. My mother gasped when she first saw the old house. The back porch had fallen in and the west side was almost invisible under the crush of lilacs gone wild. The house had been painted yellow once but there wasn’t much left of the paint. Or the windows. Most of them were broken or missing. My father forced the front door open, wide enough for us to squeeze through — the floor was warped and kind of slanted one way. I guess the roof had leaked, because the ceilings were stained with dirty brown patches, and strips of washed-out wallpaper hung from the walls.