Free Maclean by Allan Donaldson Page A

people wouldn’t give you a job because you drank, and so it would go around.
    So what should he say to Bill? Get yourself together. Stop drinking. Work steady. Get a good wife. Have children. Stay at home nights and listen to the radio. Or take your wife to a movie. Or work in your garden or your carpentry shop in the back shed. Go to church. Join a lodge. Be an upstanding member of the community. Live so that when you die, everybody will say nice things about you and give you a big funeral.
    â€œYou do have to wonder sometimes,” Henry said, “what life is supposed to be all about, now don’t you.?”
    â€œIt ain’t about anything,” Maclean said. “It ain’t about a god-damned thing.”
    â€œNo,” Henry said. “There has to be a purpose to it. It just stands to reason.”
    â€œLike God,” Maclean said.
    â€œThat’s right,” Henry said. “Like God.”
    Maclean dug at the moss-covered earth in front of him with the heel of his boot and uncovered a colony of tiny black insects, which went chasing around in the ruins of their world looking for somewhere to get back underground out of danger.
    He looked out across the river at the climbing flame of red maple leaves behind the old school and remembered the first day he had gone there, setting out on a bright, summery September morning with Alice, who was already in Grade Four, a smart girl in school, pretty as pretty could be, with great, brown eyes and long, brown hair. (Once when he was little he said that he was going to marry her when he grew up, and his mother had laughed.) He had a bookbag and a slate that his mother had bought him early that summer so she could teach him his letters before he started school. Life was beginning for him, and he felt important and afraid, marching along the road beside Alice.
    Other children strung out along the road ahead of them and behind, and a big old wagon passing them with a load of hay, and a man leading a little herd of cows across the road to a pasture on the riverbank, and the river flowing away beside them, and the town on the far side climbing its hill with the steeples and the town clock at the top, and this rock there too jutting out black from the bank of green, waiting for them to come and be sitting here today and waiting too for the time when they would all be swept away and forgotten.

7
    MACLEAN TRUDGED, HEAD down, eyes front, uphill past big old houses with oak front doors and bay windows, wide lawns and carefully weeded flower beds. It was the kind of street he didn’t like walking on and only did when there was no other, even half-easy way to get where he was going, the kind of street that gave him the feeling of being watched by indignant ladies peeking out at him from behind curtains or through the wickering of trellises or gazebos, a shabby trespasser in their manicured world, a breath of undeodorized humanity from the alleys, a reminder even, in his skeletal lineaments and the evident fragility and brevity of his expectations, of the dust and mud and rot that all this tidiness was designed to allow them to forget.
    At the crest of the hill, the big houses and the sidewalk abruptly ended, and the pavement gave way to a rough gravel road with ditches on either side, half-filled with brown, peaty water where beetles skimmed and tiny frogs kerflopped and vanished into the roots of the bordering weeds as he passed. Beyond a little buffer zone of uncut black firs, houses began again, but smaller and poorer now, some of them hardly more than shacks, on little lots cut out of the woods with unpulled stumps sometimes at the back and a general rawness of ground which gave the whole place the feel of being somewhere much further from the centre of town than it was.
    Alice’s house was on the right, half a dozen houses on and set back a little from the road so that it was hidden by the house before it. Maclean approached cautiously, close