The Unlikely Redemption of John Alexander MacNeil Read online

  THE

  UNLIKELY

  REDEMPTION OF

  JOHN ALEXANDER MACNEIL

  THE

  UNLIKELY

  REDEMPTION OF

  JOHN ALEXANDER MACNEIL

  a novel

  LESLEY CHOYCE

  ROSEWAY PUBLISHING

  AN IMPRINT OF FERNWOOD PUBLISHING

  HALIFAX & WINNIPEG

  Copyright © 2017 Lesley Choyce

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  This is a work of fiction.

  Any resemblance to actual persons or events is coincidental.

  Editing: Julia Swan

  Cover Design: Tania Craan

  Printed and bound in Canada

  eBook: tikaebooks.com

  Published by Roseway Publishing

  an imprint of Fernwood Publishing

  32 Oceanvista Lane, Black Point, Nova Scotia, B0J 1B0

  and 748 Broadway Avenue, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3G 0X3

  www.fernwoodpublishing.ca/roseway

  Fernwood Publishing Company Limited gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Province of Nova Scotia and the Province of Manitoba for our publishing program.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Choyce, Lesley, 1951-, author

  The unlikely redemption of John Alexander MacNeil : a novel / Lesley Choyce.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-55266-920-4 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-55266-921-1 (EPUB).--ISBN 978-1-55266-922-8 (Kindle)

  I. Title.

  PS8555.H668U55 2017 C813’.54 C2016-908077-3

  C2016-908078-1

  In Memory of Millie

  June 9, 1927 – December 1, 2016

  ONE

  I GUESS THE FIRST time it occurred to me that I was really losing my mind was the day I stopped to pick up a hitchhiker and it turned out to be somebody’s mailbox.

  In my own defence I’d have to say I wasn’t wearing my glasses and it was late in the day with the sun slanting into my eyes, but I was pretty damn sure it was a person standing there by the side of the road with his thumb hanging out, looking for a ride back to Inverary. I usually pick up any hitchhiker that doesn’t look like an axe murderer or Brian Mulroney. The mailbox looked like neither. But, as it turned out, it was mute and didn’t seem to have any interest in riding to Inverary with me. I had even reached across and opened the car door. When I discovered my mistake, I cursed the damn thing. So there you have it. An old man driving himself down the road stopping to pick up a mailbox that he believes is hitchhiking to Inverary. It brought me up short, so to speak, but I would get over it.

  ALL MY LIFE, IT would seem, I’ve been waging some kind of warfare against something or somebody. I took on the Catholic Church when I was nine. I told the priest outright that his interpretation of the Bible was all wrong. My mother and father both agreed I was ten times more trouble than my brother Lauchie. “Ten times more trouble than raising a hundred pigs and cows,” my father added. I just had my own way of doing things, was all. My own attitudes, God-given, they were. And so the battles, small and grand, continued into my seventies.

  Fen Gillis’s boy, Dickle, had me up on charges with the municipality for having an “unsightly premises.” This was as unfounded an accusation as any could be. Dickle’s father was a grumpy, small-minded man with a limited imagination and he trained his son right from the get-go to be a supreme arsehole. Sent him to study law at St F. X. and then fixed him up with political connections so he became some kind of prosecuting attorney for the municipality and occasionally the province. There was so little real crime in Inverary County that he started cracking down on bootleggers but that caused a bit too much heat for the councillors. Too many phone calls. Too many complaints. Most of the councillors believed that the bootleggers were operating on behalf of the community, providing necessary social clubs for people and if they closed down, they’d have to take some of the tax money and build more community centres with swimming pools and gymnasiums maybe. In the end, they decided to call off the whole campaign against the bootleggers.

  By that point the Mounties were involved. But, hell, the Mounties didn’t want to have anything to do with busting the likes of Billy Sheehan and Angus McWhirtle. Besides, Billy’s son, Reginald, was a Mountie himself. Imagine him walking in on his own poor father some Sunday night when the liquor commission was closed. Imagine him showing up in his uniform with a warrant for the man whose sperm had impregnated his lovely mother, Teasy, and brought the lad into the world. Imagine Reginald arresting his father and bringing him to jail.

  No bootlegger ever did end up in court and eventually they were quietly given assurance that they could stay in business. All the media attention, however, (like those front-page stories in the Pibroch and such) made all the bootleggers from Port Hastings to Cheticamp realize they better get organized to protect their industry. So Frenchie Leblanc up in Cheticamp got it all rolling and they hired a woman from Margaree as a kind of PR person. She sent flyers around to every civic address detailing bigger social and economic problems like vandalism in the schools and overpriced gasoline. The organization was known as the Inverary County Social Equity Society, the ICSES (pronounced Ick-siss). No one really understood the “social equity” part and everyone knew these were the bootleggers and were somewhat startled that this group of rascals could organize anything. But they were nearly as sharp as the dart players from Mabou. You probably remember that.

  The Mabou dart players formed an association and asked the province for financial support. Just like the hockey teams. They drew up a charter and had meetings. What they wanted to do was drink beer and throw darts and be subsidized to do just that. Without too much heavy lifting they convinced Bimp Knowles, the local member of the provincial legislature, that theirs was a good cause. His best friend was Kenneth Dingwall, premier of this bloody province. Kenneth didn’t see any problems with some of the sports budget going to dart players. He thought dart playing was right up with other major sports vying for Olympic status.

  Today, the Mabou Precision Players Association is amply funded and they’ve been able to build their own hall not far from the river in Mabou. The Pibroch devotes a couple of columns each week to who is winning what down there and who is travelling to Alberta to compete in the national championships and what have you. Darts put Mabou back on the map, everyone knows that.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. An old man rambles. I have my license for it, well earned. I’ll take any side road that presents itself, as God intended. And I’m not going to apologize. So if you’re not interested in the scenery, you can get out right here, ’cause that’s just the way I am. The way I was meant to be. It’s my story for fuck’s sakes and it’ll all come out one way or the other. It’s like that corned beef sandwich you had for lunch. It’s just on loan. You can burn some of it as fuel to keep your heart pumping and maybe feed your brain cells until they finish the Herald’s crossword puzzle. But the rest of it has to come out of you one way or the other and you better hope you have enough water left in the well to flush it.

  We’ll get back to darts later if you’re interested. I was just trying to make a point. About organizations and such. Me, I’m an independent. Always was, always will be. Never voted Tory,
nor Grit nor NDP. No Green Party or Red Party. You could come up with a Yellow Party or even a Paisley one for all I could care, and I wouldn’t vote for it. I always write in my own name on any ballot. And it’s always reported in the Pibroch. “John Alexander MacNeil Receives One Vote In Bid for Parliament.” That was my headline. Devon MacQuarrie, the Pibroch editor, thought he had a story and it was a good one. I told him that I always voted for myself in every election. He asked me what I stood for and I told him. “I stand for the right of an individual to believe anything he wants to believe in,” I reported to the press. “If I want to believe in a steaming pile of horse shit sitting there on the green grass of my neighbour’s pasture, that is my right and privilege and I would defend that to my death.” I also told Devon, “If my neighbour wants to believe that the moon is made from green cheese, that’s his right. We’re all different. We are not the same. We should not follow leaders or religion or respect any law that we believe is unjust.”

  You can see how popular I was with the churches and the politicians. But that’s who I am. Whatever way the wind is blowing, I’ll face into it and go that way. If I have to piss, I don’t turn and shoot downwind. I stand my ground and endure a little blowback if need be.

  Some would call this stubborn, but it’s one up on devoting your life to darts or bootlegging or midget wrestling. Not that there is anything wrong with those pastimes. It’s just that some of us think outside the chocolate box, like I heard someone once say.

  And I admire feisty determination in whatever form it takes as long as it doesn’t harm children, screw up the environment or infringe on your neighbour’s property rights. This takes me back to one final addendum to my report about ICSES. The PR woman from Margaree, Liddy MacKnight (herself a schoolteacher on extended stress leave), had aspirations to be a professional lobbyist in the United States. Her dream was to work for a tobacco company and try to redignify cigarette smoking. But she knew this was probably only a pipe dream so she took the part-time public relations work with the bootleggers. I’ve shared a pint or two with Liddy, a thirtyish slim woman who still knows how to fill out a blouse and skirt in the right places. She has that kind of ambition that is rare for these parts. Ambitious about just about everything. And horny to boot. She had a look in her eyes that was like a billboard sign on the highway with three big letters on it. One of those letters was an S and one was an X and the other letter was a vowel but the billboard was not advertising men’s hosiery or the number that comes after five, I assure you.

  Let’s just say that Liddy was not a shy person and she knew how to get the job done. She was not really under any great stress at her school job. She was on stress leave because the principal at the school — the new one outside Whycocomagh — knew that he needed to get her out of there for a year at least so he could restore some semblance of decorum among several competitive male teachers who were supposedly giving the kids a heads-up on subjects like mathematics, the history of the Second World War and what used to be called social studies.

  In her new capacity with ICSES, Liddy knew that there was some mounting legal concern with the bootleggers having access to moonshine. Making illegal high-potency beverages was an old and honoured tradition in Cape Breton but there was good evidence that people today — young people that is, anyone under fifty — just couldn’t handle it. I blame this on the popularity of so-called lite beers and the preponderance of wine beverages that taste like pop. At any rate, even I agree that one hundred proof moon juice would chew away at a person’s ability to make good judgements. So the bootleggers got together in the hall in Upper Southwest Mabou and, over several hours of drinking dark rum and water, all agreed that they would cease and desist the selling of illegal alcohol if the Nova Scotia Liquor Commission was willing to give them a true discount for what they were buying at the provincial-run liquor stores.

  It seemed only fair to them by the end of the evening and Liddy was there to egg them on. Just for the record, I should note that six of the bootleggers were women. This was part of the social equity notion. And they were sitting there just a stone’s throw from the big building that the Mabou Precision Players had created. The idea, floating around the room like a big euphoric nimbus cloud, was that if dart players could get funding, well maybe ICSES deserved a government grant or something too.

  Liddy said that might be going a tad too far, so she said they should just be “up front” with the province and ask for a thirty percent discount on “bulk purchases.”

  Bimp Knowles agreed after Liddy and he had a posh lunch and an afternoon strategy session booked at the Mariner’s Inn in Port Hastings. She herself jovially described it to me as a “hastily arranged discussion of mutual interest in a hospitality suite.” But the look in her eyes told the whole tale as often it does with Liddy, a woman who I have the highest respect for. As a trained English teacher, and a graduate with honours from Mount Allison University if I remember correctly, she also had that flair for creative language that was most impressive.

  Dickle Gillis, however, heard about the discount deal, and screwed up his face to imitate a prune. He thought the municipality should litigate against the province and ICSES but the news was already finding its way up and down this “Sunset Side” of Cape Breton that the bootleggers planned to pass on at least some of that discount to their customers. So Gillis realized things were hopeless and sucked hard on his lemons and his wounds.

  It was at that point he started going after old farts like me who he claimed had “unsightly properties.” I used his first summons for toilet paper and then mailed it back to him Priority Post. He didn’t seem to understand or appreciate such a basic, truly honest form of communication and he sent another summons. Due to a short bout of constipation, it took a few days before I could compose the proper communiqué but when I did, it required more postage than the first return epistle.

  Suffice it to say, he didn’t see the humour or the finesse in my creative dispatch and so, in due course, I found myself in the Port Isaac courthouse defending my right to keep my premises any way I darn well wanted to. And I had never once realized, up until the moment I opened my mouth before Judge Charles Stipples, that living in and on an alleged “unsightly premises” was of such paramount importance to the very essence of my being.

  TWO

  JUDGE STIPPLES AND I weren’t exactly old friends, but years ago we’d worked together for a brief while on the heavy water plant that was doomed even before it had blossomed like a burst blood vessel in the brain of the politician who had thought it up. Charles had failed at real estate and been married to a quick pair of women — sequentially of course — and he was regrouping his attack plan on life. “Either I’ll go up north to Fort McMurray and drive one of those big earth-moving Caterpillars or I’ll set my sights on the law.”

  He opted for the Caterpillar work, raping and pillaging the earth with great enthusiasm. He chose that option because Herbert LeJeune said that the cocktail waitresses in Fort McMurray were the sexiest and easiest women he’d ever met in his entire life. The only reason Herbert had torn himself away from the Tar Sands to come home was because his father in Cape Breton was getting too old to open and shut the back door when Les Suêtes winds came thundering down from the mountain in the wintertime.

  Chuck Stipples had visions of wild sex in his head after Herbert held his hands out in front of himself to show how large were the famous breasts of the women working the bars up in Alberta’s north country. The law could just be damned as far as Chuck was concerned and he’d had enough of marriage to last him three or four lifetimes so his mind was made up.

  Chuck only lasted three months in Fort McMurray and returned to the dismal work that continued at the heavy water plant near Glace Bay. “More cock than tail up there, I’ll tell ya,” he said. And that summed up the ratio in a general sort of way between the women who tended bar and the men who drooled into their rum and Cokes.

  C
huck and myself, like many of the other men working the heavy water plant, helped ourselves to tools that were needed at home. Sometimes building supplies found their way into our trucks too. We were caught once by our supervisor, Big Jim Dan McClellan, but Jim Dan just asked that we keep what we had taken and not take anything more. I quit stealing soon after that, but Chuck thought Jim Dan would not follow through with any retribution, so he spirited away a small electric generator and some power tools, got caught and then lost his job.

  That was what sent him to law school down in Halifax, where he had some family connections.

  I WAS REMINDED OF those somewhat cheerful days back when we were building plywood forms and watching men pour concrete into them at the doomed heavy water plant. No water, heavy or light, ever flowed from that industrial boondoggle, but much water had flowed under every bridge in Cape Breton since Chuck, now Charles, had shaken hands or shared a Moosehead beer with me. So I didn’t know for sure if our past association, our mutual tool theft brotherhood, was a plus or a minus for me that morning as I stood before His Honour in the Port Isaac courthouse.

  I was shaved for once and wearing the suit I had worn to Eva’s funeral many years ago. Dickle Gillis, now calling himself Dick, seemed to have lost more hair than the last time I’d seen him up close. His face was almost glossy, as if he’d smeared it with some kind of oil, and he had a stack of manila folders in front of him. You could tell he was a man who felt his own self-importance and that he’d not had any kind of sex, either with a willing partner or by his own hand, in many months if not years. I was wondering if he still remembered the time he’d thrown a rock through my window as a boy. He had been twelve, I’d reckon, and going through a bad streak as boys do, vandalizing church property and putting roadkill in the desk drawers of teachers. Dickle and his cronies had thrown rocks through a window of every home in Deepvale — well, every window but mine, and I knew I was next on the list.