The Unlikely Redemption of John Alexander MacNeil Read online

  And then she moved. Eva gasped and then shook, coughed and drew a long hard breath of sea air. Her eyes did not open for another ten minutes and it was nearly a half-hour before she spoke.

  “I wasn’t allowed to stay,” she said. “I had to come back. It was decided. I would have been okay, you know. But you would not have been all right. I had to come back for you.”

  It was a long, slow, and, for her, painful trip back, me carrying her part of the way, her hobbling the rest. Her hip had been cracked, her thigh bone fractured. There were bruises and scrapes but all would heal.

  She became quieter for a while, more pensive, and then her feisty, youthful spirit returned. When I asked again about what it felt like when she had stopped breathing and her heart had stopped, she seemed to be unsure about what I was talking about. “I was unconscious, that’s all. I had hit my head, I guess.”

  “But you told me things. Don’t you remember what it felt like?”

  Then she smiled and looked deep in my eyes. “It felt like that first time you kissed me. It was like a warm flood of light filling me.”

  FIVE

  WHEN RCMP CONSTABLE SEALY Hines came to speak with me about the egg truck incident, I could tell he was having a hard time broaching the subject of my driver’s license. “John Alex, you wouldn’t have a cup of tea for me, would you?” He shuffled his feet and tugged at his uniform trousers. I thought that if I didn’t let him in, he might just forget about the whole incident but it was hard to be impolite when you needed company.

  “S’pose,” I said. “Come in.”

  We chewed on a handful of sentences for a while until he finally brought up the business about Hughie MacIntyre’s egg truck. “Hughie says you were on the wrong side of the road. Any truth at all to that? I’m just curious is all.”

  I suppose it was silly of me not to wear my eyeglasses when driving. I like to think of my long-distance eyesight as a hundred percent. It’s just things close up I don’t usually have good focus on.

  “I feel bad about all those eggs ending up in Fennick Gillis’s pasture. A lot of hens put a lot of hard work into that. You ever pick up an egg from under a chicken right after it’s been laid?”

  Sealy looked up at me as I poured the tea with an unsteady hand. He reckoned that he had not stuck his hand under a chicken laying an egg in his entire life.

  “You pick up this thing that is both warm and perfect. Eva and I, we used to collect the eggs, and she’d hold one right up to her cheek to feel the warmth. Mother Nature knew what she was doing when she figured out for chickens to have eggs.”

  Sealy reckoned that was true too. “Thanks for the tea.” He was looking at the other place setting with the plate and teacup. Eva was not there this morning. She was not in the habit of showing up if I had company. I poured some tea in her cup anyway as an invitation and decided not to try to explain anything to Sealy.

  “Hughie figures he lost nearly a thousand dollars in inventory when his truck went off the road.”

  “Don’t people have insurance for these things?”

  “Hughie didn’t have any insurance. In fact, his truck’s registration had run out. We didn’t press charges. Figured he’d had his fair share of bad luck.”

  “That was kind of you.” I was still picturing Hughie’s truck off the road nose first in the ditch and the contents of that flatbed distributed all over the green pasture grass. “How many dozen eggs you figure he was carrying?”

  “Hughie says there were several hundred. He was driving them to Port Hawkesbury. Some kind of bulk contract he has.”

  “That’s a lot of eggs. A flatbed truck seems like the wrong kind of vehicle for bulk egg transport.”

  “Probably is, but it’s all he had.”

  “True.”

  I could still see all those fresh eggs flying through the air. I could see individual eggs lying in the grass. I saw the cows running. Hughie himself crying over the damage. Other drivers stopping to help pick up the unbroken eggs. It reminded me of an Easter egg hunt from when I was a little boy. A person would have been surprised at how many unbroken eggs there actually were and how far they had launched themselves from Hughie’s truck. When things started to quiet down, a couple of cows returned with eggs still perched between their shoulder blades. Devon MacQuarrie from the Pibroch showed up to take a picture of Hughie’s truck and the eggs on the ground and even a couple of those cows giving a ride to hen’s eggs.

  Sealy cleared his throat. “Now some people — and I’m not saying who — are suggesting that maybe you are getting a little too old to be driving on public roads.”

  Well, there it was. Finally said out loud. I looked over to where Eva was now sitting quietly staring at the steam in her teacup. She looked up and gave me that look that reminded me to take a deep breath before speaking and think it through before saying a word.

  Now some people go through life thinking there are two kinds of things a person can do: the right thing and the wrong thing. Me, on the other hand, I’ve gone through life assuming that there are infinite shades of possibility in between.

  “Hughie’s truck is a rather wide one, don’t you think?”

  “It’s a legal width,” Sealy said.

  It was then that Bob Marley spoke up. Funny that he had been quiet all morning.

  “What the hell was that?” Sealy asked. He was apparently unfamiliar with bird noises.

  I went into the living room and brought Bob Marley’s cage in.

  “What kind of bird is it?”

  “It’s a grackle, smallest member of the crow family. One of the draft dodgers from Lake Ainslie finally decided to move back to the States and he asked me if I’d take care of him. Bob’s not all that social but he likes his music. I was told that he only listened to reggae but turns out he’s eclectic in his taste. Not all fiddle music is to his liking, though.”

  “Fascinating.” Sealy stared at the bird for a minute. “I’ve always admired you, John Alex. Everyone knows you as a kind man and a smart man.” Sealy was trying to get back to the issue at hand, I could tell. Bob Marley had calmed down in his cage and was dipping himself in his water bowl, taking a morning bath and spraying the water as he shook himself off.

  “I thank you for saying so. How old are you now, Sealy?”

  “Thirty-seven.”

  “I remember you when you were a boy.”

  “I know you do, John Alex. That’s part of what makes this kinda hard.” He nervously sipped some tea. I looked over at Eva. Steady, her eyes said. Steady. “Now about your driving abilities, John Alex,” he continued and then stalled.

  I suppose a person never feels more self-righteous than in his own defence when he knows he is wrong. I had been hogging the road a bit when Hughie’s egg truck came around the corner. I had been remembering something — fishing on the Margaree one summer day. The images of the past now sometimes seemed as real as the ones of the present.

  “You know, I’m not the only bad driver in this town.”

  “I know that.”

  “Of course, you’ve already taken away Dr. Fedder’s license, haven’t you?”

  “Well, we had to.”

  I looked across at Eva and she smiled a soft sad smile and I realized that I still loved her so much. Sealy noticed I was drifting, I suppose, and this wasn’t going to help matters. But I couldn’t help but continue to look into my beautiful dead wife’s eyes. She pitied me just then, I think. Pity mixed with pure love is not a bad thing. In fact, I think it is one of the most wonderful things in the world. I took a deep breath and turned back to Sealy. “Would you consider giving a man one more chance?” I asked.

  Sealy picked up his teacup and took a swallow. He looked sideways to where Eva was and for an instant I saw a curious look in his eye. It was as if he’d caught a glimpse of her somehow. “I’d be willing to do that for you, John Alex
,” he said. “But you’re going to have to work something out with Hughie.”

  I smiled at Sealy and felt the tears forming in the corners of my eyes. “I’ll figure a way to pay him back for the trouble, I promise.”

  With that, Sealy was on his feet. “Well, gotta get going. Can’t sit here and talk all day.”

  And as he walked out the door, Eva faded from the room as she does from time to time without explanation. Bob Marley squawked loudly at the instant she disappeared and then busied himself preening his feathers just like he was a free and healthy bird sitting on a branch near the top of a big old maple tree on the first good day of spring.

  Sadly, it was only a week later that I found Bob dead in his cage for no apparent reason. I buried him near the barn and missed his squawking and his company for several weeks thereafter.

  SIX

  SUPPOSE FOR A MOMENT that you are an old man like me, knowledgeable of your dwindling intellect but prepared to meet each day, whatever it brings, life or death or some in-between disguise thereof. Suppose you await miracles and they are not forthcoming. Several times you have tried to resurrect the love of your life with varying success, but each time she leaves you again. You end up alone and you must face up to the fact that you will eventually die alone and there is nothing to save you. You wish you were a conventional religious man, able to attend Communion in any church and join congregations of believers who believe fully in God and Saviour.

  But, instead, you have private communion with God (if He exists) and God admits He is whimsical. He suggests that the tingling, the loss of feeling in your right foot is nothing more or less than poor circulation. This God, who in a dwindling evening curtain of sun and pollen above a Deepvale field, reminds you of pictures you’ve seen of Angus McAskill, the giant from the Isle of Skye, former resident of Englishtown, Cape Breton. You have long walks (but you are no longer a swift hiker) in the high hills and the two of you speak of many diverse things, like coal and gold and the Depression years and the ancient customs of the Celts and the history of the Isle of Skye where once the MacLeods and MacDonalds fought, where one clan burned another clan in their churches as they prayed.

  Oh, there are many things discussed with such a God, but in the end, the large man of the evening solar manifestation disappears behind a veil of pine needles all of a sudden and you are left there in the warm, resin-scented woods high above your home on Cape Breton. And you suddenly realize that you have been given a gift. Your gift is one of total freedom, a freedom that empowers you do whatever you wish in the sweet tenure of your remaining days. You are free to decimate your savings in attendance of the video lottery machines down at the pub if you so choose. (Oddly enough, God said this was as reasonable as many other foolish human endeavours.) You are free to write up your memoirs (but alas, the words would not come easily). You are free to go about the world giving away what wealth and property you own and do as many good deeds as your imagination would allow. You are free to formulate a hypothesis about the deplorable nature of human kind and publish it on the wind or even in the Pibroch if it would please Devon MacQuarrie. You are free to lie down here on the carpet of pine needles and die and allow your eighty-seven cents’ worth of chemicals to seep back into the soil. You are free to open a massage parlour or a wrestling camp, to take up archery or penmanship, philosophy or philandering.

  God, in His large bulk and sunset cloak, has insisted that what you have is a kind of total sovereignty that has not been presented to any man or woman before.

  And now you should do something with that freedom. Squander it or advance it in some way to others. Doing nothing with it is even an option, but since there are so many options, it seems a dullard’s selection.

  And you, John Alexander MacNeil, are anything but a man who has embraced entropy. You do not live in a morass but on a rapidly spinning globe set at a fair distance from a burning star. You have grown to accept the daily obscurity of the line between what is real and what is not real and discovered that the geography of inner mind and outer world overlap in so many clever and creative ways that not even a passport is needed to move from one to the next.

  Aside from all this, you discover that you have wandered far into the wooded hills and it is getting dark. You are either lost or totally confused as to the way back home. Such is the gift of a God-given freedom. Such is the price of being truly free and alone.

  SEVEN

  SHE ARRIVED THAT FRIDAY night when I was asleep in my chair in the living room. The radio was on and I had been listening to a show that played old Cape Breton music until I fell asleep. I could fall asleep in any number of locations around my house without causing much harm to myself or anyone. The big chair in the living room was probably my favourite venue, but the kitchen table served equally well.

  One of the problems with being an old man who falls asleep easily is that if someone walks in, their first reaction is that you’re dead. Billy Sheehan found me that way a while back and he nearly had a heart attack of his own. I was face down at the kitchen table. Luckily there had been no food in front of me, just a tablespoon that cradled my forehead as I tilted forward into my slumber.

  Although Billy was still bootlegging, he himself had given up drinking and it was doing funny things to him. He began travelling around the county to visit old chums like me who he had lost contact with. He had first yelled out a salutary greeting but, receiving no response, decided to walk in and see if he could find me. And find me he did. Face down in the kitchen. It was three o’clock in the afternoon.

  Billy did not scream or anything. Mind you, I was sound asleep and appearing to be dead, so I don’t truly know what the old bootlegger did. I’m hoping he said a small prayer. Even though I am not sure God exists, I like the idea of people praying for each other in times of crisis.

  I must be a very convincing role model of a dead man, so Billy sat down in the chair in front of me and began to tell me how sorry he was for not coming to see me sooner. He didn’t seem to think of checking for a pulse or a breath. I must have been that good at looking dead. Finally, he must have decided to touch my shoulder and that did the trick. I returned to consciousness as if I was someone rowing a small, heavy dory very slowly back to shore through a thick salty fog. When the boat finally kissed the sandy shore, I sat bolt upright with the cupped part of the spoon still sticking to my forehead and the shaft positioned straight down over my nose. The spoon remained like that as I stared at Billy, now wide-eyed with shock.

  “John Alex, I thought you had passed on,” he croaked.

  “Not yet, Billy,” I said. “Not yet. Would you like a beer?”

  And thus was the terminus of Billy Sheehan’s month-long sobriety.

  I’VE FALLEN ASLEEP IN many locations and queried Doc Fedder about this. He said it was not a problem and that age will do that to any man. He himself claims to have inadvertently fallen asleep while listening to some of his women patients discussing problems they were having with their sex lives. “Marital problems,” he called them. “Marlene Kennedy was telling me that her husband Ernest just wasn’t as earnest anymore and that she herself was feeling more randy than when she was in her twenties. ‘He don’t seem to be able to find the right angle, anymore, doctor,’ were her exact words. I was about to give my little speech about foreplay, when apparently I grew weary of hearing her woes and fell asleep.”

  After hearing a long list of instances when Shaky had fallen asleep at work and at play, I decided not to feel so bad about falling asleep at peculiar times and locations.

  NOW, THE SHE I was referring to earlier was a girl, sixteen years of age, to be precise, who walked in on me sound asleep in my chair that evening as the Sydney radio station was playing a medley of piano and fiddle tunes. She had undoubtedly, like others before her, banged on the door and yoo-hooed and, hearing the radio, felt it fair to just walk in and announce her presence. But I could be wrong. Maybe she had com
e to steal something. She was, after all, in a somewhat desperate situation.

  Like Billy, she too thought I had expired and shed my mortal remains for the journey to the higher (or lower) realm. But I was, of course, still attached to my mortality and not at all ready to give it up before this world provided a few more lessons on how to be a human being.

  She was kneeling in front of me crying when I opened my eyes. There was a commercial on the radio, I remember that, as I awoke. Someone was announcing a sale on paints and lawn furniture at Canadian Tire and here was a girl kneeling before me with her tears falling like gentle rain upon the old carpet. I reached out and touched the top of her head and she froze.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m sorry I gave you a scare.”

  When she looked up, I realized I had seen her before around town — how could I not notice — but I didn’t know her name and couldn’t for the life of me figure out why she was here. “I was just sleeping,” I said.

  She wiped the tears from her eyes and I studied her. She had a pretty, slightly round face. Dark eye makeup had run and it gave her a bruised look. Long black hair. And those things in her face that young people do. Piercings. One above her left eye, a small ring in her nose and one in her lower lip.

  “You got a name?” I asked.

  “M” is what I heard her say.

  “Just M?” I asked.

  “It’s Em, E-M, as in Eminem.”

  “Oh.”

  “Em, short for Emily.”

  “Ah.” I wanted to immediately ask her about the piercings on her face but knew better. It wasn’t any of my business.

  She began to stand. “I’m sorry that I just walked in like that.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” I said. “You were a lovely vision to wake up to. At first I thought you were an angel.” That wasn’t true, but I liked very much the way the words sounded when they came out.