The Unlikely Redemption of John Alexander MacNeil Read online

  After that, Dr. Fedder hired Fig Newton’s youngest son, Buddy, to drive him where he needed to go — to the store or into Sydney so he could play the slot machines at the casino or even into Halifax where, Fig claimed, Dr. Fedder took a suite in the Lord Nelson Hotel and hired not one but two prostitutes to keep him company for a weekend, leaving Buddy on his own to find other young men with cars who he could race against on the city streets. Buddy was a reckless driver but dependable, always showing up on time whenever the doctor needed a ride. Buddy’s incarceration for his road crimes put an end to his chauffeur career and Dr. Fedder was currently between drivers, depriving the casino at Centre 2000 of a good patron and downsizing the paycheque of some of the working girls in Halifax.

  Dr. Fedder also was afflicted with early stages of Parkinson’s disease so he’d earned the nickname Dr. Shaky. “It’s not so bad, really,” he confided to me once over a beer at the tavern. “When you make love to a woman, you can fall asleep and just keep going.”

  Despite his infirmities, the medical profession seemed to think Dr. Fedder was still competent as did most of his patients who had been with him, like me, for over twenty years. Young people needing to be stitched up after bar fights would still go to him and they didn’t seem to mind he was a little erratic with the needle work. Like Buddy said, “You wouldn’t want to go to Dr. Fedder, say, if you had a bad slice over your eye. But he’d do okay on your chin or arm.” Besides, the Doc was a big believer in anaesthetics. Teenage boys would sometimes roll their four-wheelers and get banged up just so they could go see Dr. Shaky Fedder for repair. He’d sit them down in the side room by his office and give them a half pint of Smirnoff’s vodka so they wouldn’t mind a thing when he began his shaky stitching. The good doctor kept a generous supply of several brand name vodkas for himself and his clientele.

  Dr. Fedder had once been president of the Nova Scotia Medical Society, and on one of his weekend junkets to the Lord Nelson, there had been an awards dinner in his honour where he’d been recognized with a “lifetime achievement award,” which hangs on his wall here in Inverary.

  It would be to this highly respected man of the medical profession that I decided to turn for an objective assessment of my mental state. Dr. Fedder’s assistant was a slender voluptuous woman named Mandy MacKnight, who happened to be the sister of Liddy. I was never a gawker when it comes to women and was never considered to be lascivious in nature but that day I found myself sitting in the waiting room with nothing better to do than study Mandy as she read her Cosmopolitan magazine. I had noted when I checked in at her desk, she was reading an article titled: “Oral Sex — What Men Really Want And 10 Things You Can Do To Give It To Them.”

  Mandy had that curious aura of both professionalism and sexuality that well suited the physician’s office. I tried to read a Reader’s Digest article called “How to Improve Your Digestion,” but found myself looking up at Mandy, who kept tracing her forefinger in a V up and down along the exposed part of her chest between her two uplifted breasts. A delicate cross hung on a silver chain between the cleavage and, again asserting that I am not a man who usually gawks at women, I found the whole scene thrilling enough to make my mouth go dry.

  Shaky Fedder opened the door to his office and said goodbye to sixteen-year-old Ven Hiffle, whose broken leg from a dirt bike accident was said to be “healing nicely.” As I began to stand, I realized I had an erection, my first in quite a while, so I had to kind of limp into the doctor’s office.

  Dr. Fedder’s glasses seemed thicker this time than when I’d been in several months ago, his eyesight no doubt diminishing, and he looked at me as if from a far distant place and not here in his office at all. “Is it a leg problem, John Alex? Certainly not arthritis, not for a man as young as you.”

  The smile was familiar and, recognizing that his new specs were making another old client uncomfortable, he removed them and blinked. I still thought of Derek Fedder as a youth, but I could see that he looked older now, as if time had stepped up the regimen on him, at work on his eyesight and his skin (pale now with a few odd blotches on his cheeks), stealing away sections of his hair, follicle by follicle. I allowed my erection to subside and hobbled forward but not before it had stirred something in my head, some memory, some horde of memories of love and sex, of Eva and of other women who had tried to comfort me in the years after her departure. I declined to admit that leering at his receptionist had given me a hard-on, although if I had actually stated it out loud I know he would have been impressed and given his familiar promotional speech urging me to accept a prescription of Viagra.

  I noticed that he didn’t seem to be shaking so much so I said, “No, no arthritis, nothing like that. Just a kink. You,” I said, “you are looking quite well,” even though it occurred to me that he looked like a walking corpse, pale and gaunt, thin to the point of emaciation, loose skin on his neck.

  “Everyone says so. They drill holes now in the back of your head — for the Parkinson’s. It really helps. They sit you down in Halifax and they have this rig that looks not much different from a Black and Decker I have at home. I think it’s a sixteenth-inch bit they use. Seems to work. I’m like a new man. Between that and the Viagra … well, you can just imagine.”

  “Well, good for you,” I said, meaning it.

  “Now we’re not here to discuss my health. What concerns you, John Alex? You’re not one to just waltz in here for a minor concern. Let me guess. Is it a hernia?”

  “No.”

  “Something gastrointestinal?”

  “Not that at all. It’s my mind that concerns me. I don’t have the clarity I used to have.”

  “Hmm. Yes. That.” Shaky put his glasses back on, which gave him the long-distance effect again. He nodded up and down. “The mind is always tricky. Some days I’m sharp as a tack while other days I feel like pulling up the zipper on my pants requires tremendous intellectual effort.” He was trying to put me at ease. I recognized his bedside manner.

  I handed him my list of things. “Do you suppose it’s the Alzheimer’s catching up with me?”

  He ran a finger over his jaw and then tapped his chin as if checking to see if his chin bone was still there under the flabby skin. “Memory is a complicated business, John Alex. There are neuro-circuits in the brain. Like trails in the wilderness. The more you travel a path, the wider it becomes, the more familiar. But if you don’t travel a certain path, it becomes overgrown and the trail gets lost.”

  “Some of my trails seem quite overgrown,” I told him. “Some don’t even seem to be there anymore.”

  “Do you think of Eva?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Even though she is gone, your memory of her is strong. She’s your pathfinder.”

  “She’s still with me,” I said and I told him about breakfast.

  “Perfectly normal,” he said.

  So I told him about the mailbox.

  He laughed. “These things happen.”

  “But I want to be confident that I’m not losing my mind. Don’t you have some kind of medical test or something?”

  “John Alex, I’m glad you asked. I was recently at a symposium in Halifax. It turned out to be a grand weekend and I stayed at the Queen’s Suite in the Lord Nelson with the most charming companions. At the symposium, a young doctor from the Veterans Hospital lectured on dementia. I feel like I’m truly up to speed on that one. So, yes, there is a clinical test we could do.”

  “Should I make an appointment to come back?”

  “Not at all. Here. We’ll do it forthwith.”

  Dr. Fedder pulled out a clipboard and with a slight tremor to his hand drew a rectangle on it. He handed it to me along with a pencil. “This is a house,” he said. “Now you put the roof on the house.”

  I frowned, took the pencil and drew a large triangle on top of the rectangle.

  Dr. Fedder looked pleased. “
There. Good. If you can still put the roof on the house, you’re okay. Can you draw a door?”

  I drew a door.

  “A window?”

  I put in a window.

  “Give me a sun.”

  I drew a sun in the sky.

  “One bird?”

  I put in a squiggly seagull.

  “A flower in the front yard.”

  I drew a flower.

  He threw up his hands. “Well done. There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re perfectly normal.”

  FOUR

  I WAS BORN NOT far from here in Dunvegan. My father had a farm, a real farm, in those days. I remember a huge pile of firewood out the back door of our old house. I remember summer days that lasted forever. Summer is a great sadness, I’m sorry to say, to an old man. The smell of summer hay, the sight of dew on vetch vines, the song of goldfinches and sparrows. All of that and more collects inside my bones and makes me ache from a sorry sweetness that is in me and in my past.

  That summer when I thought I was going crazy, I would walk the old logging road behind my house, the one that went uphill to the now-vanished community that once was called MacNeil, after my father’s ancestors who had lived there a long time ago. I saw eagles in the sky and I again returned to the boy I once was, young and restless walking the hills in June, alone, forever alone, but happy.

  My younger brother Lauchie, known to all as Lucky, was living in Inverary then. We had not talked to each other for many years even though he lived so close by. We would pass on the street sometimes and I would not even look at him. I had tried to forgive my brother but had not yet found the necessary tools in my heart to do so. He had apologized on more than one occasion, but the apologies had not been accepted.

  When he was a young man, Lucky could have any woman he wanted. He had an air about him that women could not resist. I would say Eva and I were thirty-five at the time and I knew he fancied her, knew he was attracted to Eva and that she could not help but feel the power of Lucky — his eyes falling on her, his casual handsomeness that was both his blessing and his curse.

  I had been away in Port Morien for nearly two weeks, not going home, but staying on through weekends to work extra shifts at the mines so we’d have more money for a bit. I saw that the demand for coal would ease up soon and we’d all be out of work. I would save my money for the thin times. Lucky was an opportunist. I would not say he was overly greedy or hateful or anything like that. He just could not resist opportunity. He was working the mine with me but went home to Inverary on weekends, knowing I was staying behind to work. He went to Eva one time and told her a story he had concocted about me and the Baptist minister’s wife from Glace Bay.

  In the story, I was having an affair with the minister’s wife. We were steaming up the windows of her old Chevrolet in the back roads down by the Mira. Lucky had embellished the story with many colourful turns of phrases and had practised it and delivered it with an air of sadness and woe. It was not at all like Eva to mistrust me or to be attracted to another man, but this was Lauchie MacNeil, my own brother, who had been the object of desire of every young woman in Inverary and beyond.

  Everyone had become aware of Lauchie’s nature even by the time he was six. If there was a penny to be found lying in the street, Lauchie was drawn to it. When he was thrown from a bareback horse he had stolen for a ride at twelve, he landed in a bush that broke his fall. When his rowboat sank on his forbidden adventure to Wolf Island out in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, a beer keg was drifting by and the currents and wind were favourable. Lauchie had lost his virginity by thirteen. He graduated from high school, it seemed, without ever cracking a book outside of the school. When the roof of the mine he had been working in collapsed, Lauchie had just surfaced with complaints of an upset stomach. A bad piece of cold haddock in his lunch pail had given him a mild case of food poisoning and it saved his life while a dozen other good men were crushed to death by a million tons of coal and rock.

  And the women could not get enough of him. And he of them. My own jealousy of him had cooled with time. It became a form of amusement to see beautiful young women brawling in the street over him. Yet it was the luck on so many levels that seemed to set him up for a kind of unhappiness that was unlike any I would know in my life.

  Everything could be had with ease. Nothing was ever enough. The only thing that attracted him, that challenged him, was something he could not have. And that something was my wife Eva. Eva, who was the love of my life, my true companion, who had, I thought, total loyalty to me as I had to her.

  My brother had conspired a plan, short and simple. Tell her that I was having this sordid affair with a Protestant preacher’s wife and be present to provide comfort to her like a good brother-in-law. When I finally returned, I had not been home for more than ten minutes before Eva realized that Lauchie had been lying. It’s like he had hypnotized her and could have made her believe anything.

  It took me seven days to forgive Eva. I wasn’t sure I could do it at first, but I’ve always had this skill, this ability to see past the terrible present when things go wrong, to peer off into the future and convince myself that this too will pass. There is a bridge at such times, a narrow mental footbridge, not much more than a fallen log really, half rotted but worth testing. You can cross over that log, possibly fall and drown in the raging current beneath, or if you are lucky make it to the further shore. Or you can stay on your side of the river and never cross over. Allow the disaster to keep you in the rutted path that will be there for the rest of your journey in this life.

  For Eva, I heard her confession, I pondered the way to respond, I saw the rutted path of anger and remorse, an end to the happiness we had known and I saw the fallen tree, only one, across the river and I crossed over. I let it go. I forgave her.

  But I did not forgive my brother.

  IF THERE IS SUCH a thing as luck, it is fickle and wild. It has no rules to play by. If it is something that can be measured in quantity, some possessing great wealth and others a meagre pittance, then it can diminish or increase with or without reason or it can simply run out.

  Lucky had married a woman he did not love. I wondered sometimes if he was even capable of love. Viola had inherited money enough so neither one of them had to work. And then she died young. He did not marry again after that but travelled and returned home to Inverary many times to make other men jealous of his charmed life, to seduce a married woman occasionally and even destroy a marriage but no harm ever seemed to come to him.

  His health was good until he hit seventy and then it was as if someone had thrown a switch. As they say, it was as if his pipeline of luck had gone dry. His luck ran out. His health diminished and he grew pale and gaunt. Shaky Fedder told me that he couldn’t pin it down to any specific disease. “Although I hate to admit it, I’d have to say it was just too much of a good thing. Your brother Lauchie had a gift that he used without respect and that gift has been taken away. I’ve seen it before. Medicine has no term for it. Psychiatry none. Now, some of us, myself included, would have been happy and satisfied to have had one-tenth of Lauchie’s supply of whatever elixir was working for him. But for Lauchie, he assumed he could glide through life. The doors opened of their own accord, the women dropped their drawers without request. The money fell from trees. I’ve told him to take a heavy vitamin B supplement and try some St. John’s wort.”

  St. John’s wort and the vitamins didn’t seem to help much. Lucky grew paler and more despondent. His cheeks were concave as if they’d been dipped into with ice cream scoopers. He would wave at me, his own brother, as I walked by his house but I would not give in to him despite his ill health. Perhaps I was waiting for him to die.

  THE FIRST TIME EVA died, I held her to me and prayed to a God I did not believe in, a God who listened to a nonbeliever and took pity on him, a generous God who saw a chance to convert a heathen.

  We were twenty
-five and climbing limestone cliffs near Pleasant Bay. I loved hiking in the Highlands and taking risks, testing myself on steeper and steeper rock faces. Eva was with me on this occasion and said she would let me decide what was safe and what wasn’t. I had been pushing her, not fully realizing how dangerous our adventures were becoming — swimming into the sea caves near Sight Point, walking along the rim of headlands with our eyes closed using only the feel of the wind in our face as a guide to direction, rowing to sea on windy days and testing the waves, teasing them.

  On this day, when she fell to the stony beach below, I felt a cold, bright terror come over me. She did not scream as she fell and she did not let out a sound when she landed hard on a flat sheaf of stone below us. I scrambled down, fuelled by panic and foreboding. There was not a breath and not a heartbeat. And we were more than two miles to the nearest road. My instinct was to pick her up and carry her. In those days, I knew nothing of artificial respiration or how to encourage a heart to beat again. I could not see any injury but realized that such a fall could be fatal. She lay on her back, her arms outstretched as if she had fallen asleep on top of the bed on a midsummer day. Her face was peaceful and she was beautiful.

  I breathed heavily and tried to come up with a plan. I waved frantically at what I thought to be a fishing boat, a Cape Islander, off in the Gulf but quickly realized it was too far away. The horror of the moment froze my mind and I became physically paralyzed. My life was a great ruin of a thing that had once been a magnificent edifice.

  I knelt over her and wept. I cursed myself, I cursed the world and then I cursed the God I did not believe in until something melted within me. I put one hand on either side of her face and my cursing stopped. To the same God I now prayed one long silent prayer of pleading. And I wailed out loud until my lungs ached.