Free The Second Son by Bob Leroux Page A

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.

CHAPTER FIVE
    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