Free The Long Stretch by Linden McIntyre

want to go?”
    “When?” I asked, blood pounding.
    “Tomorrow,” he said. “Going to take a load of lumber down to the Co-op.”
    Heart sunk. “There’s school.”
    “School shmool,” he said. “Look at me. I never went to school a day in my life.”
    “They won’t let me.”
    “Leave that to me.”
    And the next day we went. And it was exactly as the TV showed it, except louder. Cars streaming along King’s Road and red plumes of ore dust staining the sky over the crash and rumble of machinery. White steam billowing high above stinking coke batteries. People hurrying by. Confusion, but everybody knowing exactly where they’re heading. Saying nothing. Small boys shouting “Post Rrrrrecord!” skinny shoulders hauled down by heavy bagfuls of newspaper.
    Our first stop was at a Co-op lumber yard. Jack parked close to the door of a building with offices. Beyond it you could see huge piles of lumber, stacked precisely, saturating the air with a sour freshness. A man wearing a white shirt and necktie came out and walked around the truck. Then he and Jack talked, Jack looking at the ground, hands in his pockets. The guy went back inside. Jack jumped in behind the wheel and started the engine.
    We went to two more lumber yards before they started unloading. Then we went to a restaurant. I’d never before been in one. Everything looking and smelling delicious, even the name. Diana Sweets. Everybody looking important, except Jack and me. Was too nervous to take my coat off because I had egg yolk on my shirt from the morning. From hurrying to leave before dawn. Jack smiled, told me to leave the coat on.
    I devoured a massive plate of spaghetti. Jack ordered a sandwich but only ate half.
    “It’s a hard grind, boy,” he said, smoking, watching me eat the other half of his sandwich. “They don’t get you coming, they get you going.”
    “Everything was against him,” Sextus says, pouring unsteadily into the glass, drinking straight liquor now. “Nobody in the village gave him one little bit of encouragement. An eyesore. That was the exact word. Mainly because of the sawdust pile. With all the other crap that was around here.”
    “Today he’d need an environmental impact study,” I say, sympathetic.
    “Fucking assholes.”
    Dreams die hard, people say. You read about “the death of a dream” as if a dream ever really ceases to exist. Life would be so much simpler if dreams did die. But they don’t. No way. They sit somewhere in the darkness, ready to resurface in some simple recollection. And ruin everything. That was Jack’s problem. And I think part of my father’s problem too.

5
    The kitbag always told you when Uncle Jack was coming or going. He’d never take it into the house. You’d see it on the doorstep or in the porch. A filthy canvas laundry bag, jammed full of the boots and belts, woollens and waterproof clothes he wore working in the mine. Stuff too dirty to wash. The hardhat would be on top, a bit of scratched brown crown showing where the drawstring didn’t quite close. You could see the outline of the lamp bracket. He usually kept the kitbag in the barn when he was home. If you saw it on the porch, you knew he’d either just arrived home or was just going away. Sometime in May ‘58 I saw the kitbag in the porch.
    Sextus says, “So he packs in the sawmill venture in…what was it?”
    “Around ‘58.”
    “Machinery was always breaking down. Then you couldn’t get a price for the lumber. Was losing money on it. Figured all along he’d have to get work somewhere, get a bit more money to put into it. Of course, he was hardly gone when the government showed up. When you think about it now, it was a blessing. The best thing that could have happened. The Trans-Canada.”
    It was inevitable. Part of the Future. The new causeway was attached to a road that ran clear to the other end of Canada. Naturally they’d want to build a proper highway on our side too, cross Cape Breton, then