Remembrance Page 2

  Later, on the overcrowded train to northeastern Nova Scotia, there was a great deal of raucous celebration. Men drank openly from their brown-bagged bottles and sang off-colour songs. Mothers tried to cover their young children’s ears. A soldier stood in the aisle with a baseball bat he had borrowed from one of the children while a friend pitched oranges to him. When the bat made contact, the oranges exploded, spraying the passengers with juice and seeds and mushy pulp. Through all this some people slept and dreamed, and froth bubbled from their lips.

  When he finally arrived, he went first to his in-laws’ house, where he assumed his wife was staying. The house was hot and overcrowded and filled with women. His father-in-law had died during the previous winter, but no one had informed him. He hugged both of his daughters, one of whom had not been born when he had enlisted. From an adjoining room his wife brought forth an energetic little boy. “This is another David MacDonald,” she said. “Say hello to Daddy.”

  The child, clearly under two years old, ran forward and hugged his brown-serged pantleg as if he had been rehearsing.

  The room lapsed into silence. He sat down, and the child sat on his lap and played with the buttons on his tunic.

  From the start, the child showed a fierce affection for him. He was later to think that perhaps he was a sort of novelty as a masculine presence in a house of so many women, but he could not be sure. For a brief time he thought that his in-laws were encouraging the child to win over his affections, but he soon realized that could not be true. The child was too young, and his in-laws were not given to that sort of planned deception.

  He went to visit his own father, whom he found as austere as ever. “Well, what do you think?” asked his father.

  “Not much,” he said, trying to sound as noncommittal as he could. He felt somehow that he should defend his wife against his father’s stern morality, but he was not sure of that either.

  When he first lay with his wife, he was hesitant and uncertain. He remembered that, in the barracks, soldiers had said that certain Arab or African men would not sleep with their wives if they knew their wives had experienced sexual relations with men other than themselves. He was not sure if this were true, or if it mattered. He realized that a lot of the talk in the barracks bordered on the fantastical and was little more than nonsense. Still, he wondered if such talk was having an effect upon him or if it was just his own personal situation. He wondered if he would be the same had he never heard such talk and never encountered what he had.

  Too late for that.

  “I couldn’t do without it,” his wife said. “I bet you sowed a lot of your seed in Holland and Europe and all those other places.” He was surprised at her use of the phrase sowed a lot of your seed and realized how very little he really knew her. They had been in a married relationship for just over a year and he was not sure if he had changed or she had changed, or if it were the circumstances that surrounded them. Things did not go well under such circumstances.

  For a year and a half he worked with his father cutting pit timbers for the nearby mine. Sometimes he slept at his in-laws’ house and sometimes at his father’s. His daughters enjoyed the attention lavished upon them by their young aunts, who were constantly arranging their hair, experimenting with lipstick and nail polish, or admiring the dress styles of the models in the Eaton’s catalogue. They showed no interest in their other, glum grandfather and relatively little in him.

  The young David MacDonald, however, was different. He burst into smiles whenever he saw him and tried to follow him everywhere. Sometimes when he visited his in-laws, he could see the child waiting at the window as if he had been anticipating him for a long time.

  One winter evening he left the house of his in-laws to take his father’s horses back to their home barn. It was cold and the horses snorted and tossed their heads impatiently as they cantered along the snow-covered road. After they reached the barn, he took his time unharnessing the horses and putting hay in their mangers. As he was leaving the stable, he became aware of movement beneath the horse robes in the back of the sleigh. He discovered the child, who extended his arms so he could be lifted from the sleigh. He wore only a light shirt and trousers and was blue with the cold. There was frost on his eyelashes and his cheeks were chilled by frozen tears. He threw his icy arms around his discoverer’s neck and pressed his cold cheek against neglected whiskers.

  That night when they were preparing for bed, he noticed that the child wore no underwear and was still shivering. He draped one of his flannel shirts upon the child’s small frame and inserted the slender arms into the shirt’s sleeves. The shirt hung down beneath the boy’s knees like the smock of an ancient monk. Later he wakened to the embrace of small arms around his neck and the pulsing body heat that emanated through the flannel and seemed to fuse their bodies closer together.

  It went on for another year. The mine was in trouble and the market for pit timbers declined. Sometimes he and his father cut fence posts for the bigger farm owners, but there was little predictable income in that. He did not wish to stay with his wife’s family, nor she under the scrutiny of his father. At one time they had planned to start a house of their own, but their limited enthusiasm for such a venture had now completely dissipated.

  Many of the younger veterans with whom he marched in the Legion parades began to drift off to southern Ontario, to the car plants in Windsor, to Polymer in Sarnia, to Massey Ferguson in Brantford, to Continental Can in Toronto. One day his wife announced that she was going to Montreal to work for a while in a garment factory. Her aunts had found her a job. She would send some money to help support the children.

  The children seemed mainly unaffected by her absence. The girls continued to dress up and explore new hairstyles with their young aunts while David MacDonald spent more and more time with the older men he seemed to have chosen. He began to imitate the manner of their walking and their speech patterns, including their comments on the weather. As his sisters seemed destined to be forever young, so he seemed to be headed in the opposite direction and to willingly embrace an advanced maturity far beyond the years of his chronological age.

  It was a late November evening that he came breathlessly to their door. He had taken a shortcut through the woods and across the swamp, which was now frozen because of the season. He wore no jacket but only a thin, faded plaid shirt.

  “They’ve come to get me,” he said as if he were announcing the arrival of abducting aliens.

  “Who?” said David MacDonald.

  “My mom,” he said, “and a man who is with her. They want to take us all to Montreal.”

  “Well, we’ll have to talk about it,” said David MacDonald, himself in a state of confusion.

  “There is a car coming,” said his austere father. “I see the headlights through the trees.”

  “It’s them,” said the child and bolted for the door.

  “Wait a minute,” said David MacDonald, seizing the shoulder of the faded shirt, which ripped and came apart in his grasping hand. The child fled into the descending darkness, slamming the door behind him.

  They went outside.

  The car came up the driveway, its headlights illuminating the frozen ruts over which its suspension bounced. There was a man at the wheel and David MacDonald’s wife sat in the passenger seat beside him. The two excited girls were in the back seat amid a clutter of shopping bags that spilled an assortment of clean and unclean clothing across the seat and onto the floor.

  “Where is he?” she said. “It’s getting dark and we’re in a hurry. Jacques says we’ve got to get into New Brunswick before midnight.”

  His father went inside to get the lantern, and all of them, except the man behind the wheel, called the child’s name, which seemed to vanish on the rising wind. It was beginning to snow.

  They followed the austere, lantern-carrying father into the barn, still calling the child’s name. On the threshing floor there was a ladder that led up to the hayloft, where the grey cat kept he
r kittens secreted within a hole in the sheltering hay. Because he carried the light, the austere father was able to see and reached the threshing floor first. He knocked the ladder flat and kicked some hay over it before the others followed him into the dimly lit space.

  They kept calling the child’s name.

  “David, David,” they called, but there was no sound from the muffled hay, only the impatient animals shifting in their stalls.

  “We’ve got to get going,” said David MacDonald’s wife. “Jacques says we’ve got to get into New Brunswick before it gets much later. It’s beginning to snow. I’ll let you know when we get back to Montreal and we can make arrangements.”

  They left the barn and went back into the yard. Jacques was drumming his fingers impatiently on the steering wheel.

  “Do you want to be doing this?” said David MacDonald to his flesh-and-blood daughters, who, after the search, had returned to the chaos of the back seat.

  “Yes,” they said. “It will be fun. Montreal has street lights and lots of restaurants. There is a merry-go-round not far from where Mom lives.”

  – 3 –

  NONE OF THEM ever reached Montreal, nor for that matter the New Brunswick border. All of them were killed when their car collided with a transport truck on the narrow wooden bridge outside of Tatamagouche, on the “Sunrise Trail.” It was near midnight and snowing quite heavily and the roads were slippery and the visibility poor. Perhaps Jacques was tired or unfamiliar with the narrow roads. It was said that when the occupants spilled from the car, the wife of David MacDonald and her oldest daughter were still alive, but it was snowing and dark and isolated and by the time help arrived it was too late. Jacques, it was learned, worked in the laundry room of the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Montreal. All of this information did not reach them until the following day. They had no telephone and the neighbours’ lines had been blown down by the storm.

  After the car with the Quebec plates left the yard, they stood for a while and watched the red tail lights vanish into the enveloping snow and then they went inside where it was, at least, warmer. After a while the austere father said, “You better go out to the barn and put the ladder up to the hayloft.”

  “Why?” said David MacDonald, who was still in a state of confusion.

  “You’ll see,” said his father, who rose to put a stick in the fire.

  David MacDonald took the lantern and went out to the barn. He found the ladder partly covered in hay and placed it against the loft and then went back inside.

  A short time later the child came through the door. The shoulder of his shirt was torn and wisps of hay clung to his clothes and to his hair. He had a blue plastic bowl in his hand.

  “How is the grey cat and her kittens?” said David MacDonald’s father.

  “She’s fine,” said the child. “I’m going to get her some milk. I don’t want to go back to Mom’s,” he continued. “I’m afraid they’ll come back and take me. Can I stay here?”

  “You don’t have to go back,” said David MacDonald’s father. “You can stay here. We will leave the cat’s milk until the morning. It is too dark to climb the ladder now. You should go to bed. You can sleep with your father.”

  David MacDonald was surprised to hear himself described to the child as “your father,” but now and in the weeks and months that followed there seemed no way of avoiding it. Perhaps his father had not liked his wife, but he clearly bore no animosity toward her child. The weeks and months stretched into years, and when the boy went to the Co-op to pick up feed or farm equipment, he signed the bills or receipts as “David MacDonald,” which was, after all, his given name. He was tremendously good with animals and had a calming effect upon them. Mothers giving birth allowed him to stroke their heads, and strange dogs never barked or growled in his presence but moved toward him to lick his hand.

  In the afternoon of November 11, 1952, the two David MacDonalds were filleting mackerel out in the yard. The elder one had returned from the Remembrance Day ceremonies and they were preparing the fish so that they might have them for food during the coming winter months. Later they would pack them in buckets, alternating layers of mackerel with layers of salt.

  They looked up from their work to see a magnificent buck grazing in the field beyond them. Because their thoughts were on food and because they knew the meat would not spoil in the cooler days of autumn, they decided to act. Silently the boy entered the house and returned with a knife, four bullets, and the sawed-off rifle that had seen action in Holland.

  David MacDonald lay down on his stomach and inched forward through the dying grass, propelling himself on his elbows and loading the rifle as he moved. His hands were still bloody and greasy from handling the entrails of the mackerel, and the worn grass tickled his neck and pressed against his chest and stomach in a manner that reminded him of Ortona. The boy crouched close behind him with the knife. The buck lifted his head and sniffed the wind. The wind was from the south and his stalkers were crawling from the north. He lowered his head and continued to graze.

  It all happened in a matter of seconds. David MacDonald rose up as he had been taught, firing his rifle as he came to his knees in a single, fluid military motion. The buck collapsed and then leapt to his feet. David MacDonald realized that because the barrel of the rifle had been shortened, the sights were misaligned and he hastened to reload, his fingers still slippery from the fish. He fired again. He heard the boy scream as he fell before him. In the field beyond, the buck had collapsed again and now lay still. The knife fell from the boy’s hand as he tried to staunch the blood and slivers of bone that pulsed from his shattered ankle.

  After the first shot, the boy had leapt forward with his knife to bleed the animal without realizing that a second shot was coming. David MacDonald fashioned a tourniquet out of his shirt and belt as he had been taught in the army and tightened it with the knife. Beyond them the silent body of the buck began to fill with its own gases and lay like the bloated cattle near the ruined roadways of Holland.

  They were in trouble. If they went immediately to the hospital, the authorities would have to report the gunshot wound to the police. The gun was illegal. They had no permit, and they had no hunting licence, and the body of the buck lay heavy and obvious before them. Blood spurted from the boy’s ankle whenever the tourniquet was loosened.

  David MacDonald was to wonder for the rest of his life whether the delay before they went to the hospital, without legal repercussions, resulted in the boy being permanently crippled, although the medical authorities said it was not so.

  “Maybe,” he said to the boy later, “I ruined your life.”

  “Maybe,” said the boy, “you saved it.”

  “I should never have brought that rifle home from the war,” said David MacDonald, “but then I guess a lot happened because of the war.”

  – 4 –

  AS I BEGIN to tell this, it is November 11, Remembrance Day, I am on a gravel road that leads to my grandfather’s house in rural Cape Breton. It is early in the morning and I have been driving for four hours in my rental car from the Halifax International Airport. Driving in the dark for four hours by yourself on Remembrance Day is a certain kind of experience, making you think of how the present always comes out of the past.

  There are few distractions and relatively few vehicles on the major highway. As you penetrate deeper into Cape Breton, traffic is even further reduced, but you have to be aware of animals lurking by the roadside or emerging from the ditches. Their eyes glow in the headlights’ beams. They are going about their nocturnal business: foxes, coyotes, raccoons, wildcats, bears, deer, even moose. There are no porcupines, nor skunks, on Cape Breton Island, or as one wag said in reference to skunks: “No four-legged ones!”

  I will never encounter any of these animals with their glowing eyes in the practice of my professional life. They will never be anesthetized upon my operating table.

  My name is David MacDonald, and the men to whom I travel are called David MacDona
ld as well. I am a veterinarian and, it seems, by most standards, a reasonably successful one. I specialize now in “small animals,” although it was not always so. I have three clinics located in the suburbs of Toronto, Canada’s largest city. Much of my work involves the spaying and neutering of dogs and cats. The fee for a dog’s castration is $250.00 and most owners do not seem to mind. There is also a great demand for the declawing of cats so they will not damage their owners’ expensive urban furniture. You may have seen my billboards along the major highways, or my elaborate ads in the Yellow Pages. They proclaim: “For a healthy pet, see your vet.” On the left-hand side of the advertisements is my name, “David MacDonald, D.V.M.,” and then those of my associates. In the upper-right-hand corner there is a family of five happy kittens. In the middle, there is a list of the services we offer. Besides the neutering and declawing, we specialize in Heartworm and Flea Protection, Dentistry, Grooming, Endoscopy, Surgery, Nutritional Counselling, etc. There is a growth in “nutritional counselling” because many modern pets suffer from obesity due to lack of exercise. Lack of exercise is not a concern for the animals whose eyes gleam in my headlights. Sometimes the fat female cats are simply pregnant and their owners do not know “how it happened.” “Well, it won’t happen again,” they say resolutely. “Can I make an appointment?”

  “What will I do with the kittens?” some of them ask.

  “After about three to four weeks, after their eyes are open, you might try the pet shops or the Humane Society,” I say. I realize that ads offering “free kittens to a good home” seldom work anymore.