Free The Long Stretch by Linden McIntyre Page B

it: I was so far in the hole in ‘58 I had to go down another hole to get out of it. Meaning Flin Flon. Laughing and gagging over his own irony. Whenever he laughed it usually ended in a spasm of coughing violent enough to blow his head off.
    The Trans-Canada went through where his mill was. I watched them bulldoze the sawdust pile and a lot of trash wood left behind. There had been a lot of firewood there, slabs cut into stove lengths. He’d been selling them there for ten dollars a truckload, but after he was gone people just took the wood. Filling the trunks of cars, or the backs of their half-tons. Sometimes in armloads. The last of the slabs went the night before the bulldozers came. Aunt Jessie took a picture.
    The new road ate through the place and you’d think the country would never heal. It was all charred tree stumps and mud banks and big boulders with the dust and the sour smell of the blasting still on them. Today it looks like it was always there, a natural thing bright with lupins and wild roses in summer, the new spruce crowding close again.
    “We just never clicked. Don’t ask me. There are people like that. Warm, kind-hearted, good people. Draw you in, all right. But you never really know the real person. You know what I mean? I mean, your gut tells you nobody is as great as those folks seem to be. So you always wonder, what’s up with them?”
    “But your gut can be wrong,” I say.
    He looks at me, measuring.
    “He wrote to me in the spring of ‘61, said if I needed work he’d get me something in…where was it? Tilt Cove. I was calling it Tit Cove. Underground labour, he said. Jesus Christ, I thought. Said no, thank ya. Got on at the pulp mill. Electrician’s helper. Good money, great summer. Couldn’t picture the two of use…bumping around in a place like that.”
    I say: “He never mentioned.”
    “Then, a few years later, you went. Hung in for what? Years.” Shakes his head slowly. “Christ, that must have been an experience.”
    He fishes out another cigarette, waiting for me to move the subject forward. Open up some space for exploring all the unanswered questions about my father.

6
    Here’s truth. Duncan and Effie, white-faced in their barely managed panic, tumbling through that door, gasping: “I think Uncle Sandy is going to kill Pa.”
    They called him uncle too, though he wasn’t.
    Ma, as always, calm. Drying her hands at the sink, barely turning, saying, “John, you and Duncan go over and take the truck home so they won’t go anywhere else.”
    Duncan looking hopeless, not having a clue how to drive. Me knowing the theory, taking the keys like I knew more, the two of us sprinting over. Duncan speaking quickly: “They came home late. We had supper in the oven. We all sat down to eat. And Uncle Sandy shouted ‘Jeeeeesus!’ Flipped the table up on end and everything slid down and onto Papa.”
    That was how it often started.
    Duncan and I climb into a truck neither of us knows how to drive. I am too afraid to enjoy the look of helplessness in Duncan’s face as he watches me turn the key and start the engine, then put the truck in gear; then stall it, popping the clutch and giving too much acceleration. And the instant terror when we see a giant figure looming through a sudden splash of light, carrying a rifle.
    Duncan and I dashing home and telling Ma and hearing her say, “That’s okay. I called the Mounties.”
    Jesus Christ. The Mounties!
    But the truth is that Ma looks half ready to murder me for telling her: “They’re saying Pa smashed the window out of the school porch.” Saying it like I heard it, with cautious levity, people looking at me askance in the schoolyard that day. Me looking askance at her.
    “At the dance? Grabbed Paddy Fox by the throat and drove him through the window? Nearly took the eye out of him? You should see it. Looks like a big blood clot?”
    Her face pink with shame. “Don’t you be listening to that. They just love to start