As the old folks would say Page 19

  “I just spilled the bottle of beer I was holding, but Bill was just then taking a mouthful, and he smacked the bottle into his teeth. Martin wasn’t paying attention to any of that. He was gripping the back of the seat with both hands, looking straight through the windshield, his face utterly distraught.”

  “He’d seen his father,” muttered the company executive drily.

  The rest of the group passed no notice of the remark, attuned as they now were to his manner of interrupting. They were still attentive, their faces expectant and alert.

  “Exactly,” replied the narrator. “That’s why he screamed. When Jamie came to himself, he switched on the light in the inside of the car and whipped around to Martin. I thought he was going to tear Martin apart right there in the back seat, he was that mad. I’ve never seen Jamie that mad.

  “But Martin just looked at him with the most tearful expression and said, ‘You were going to run over my father. You were going to hit him. He was standing in the middle of the road.’

  “Bill Lawton got really mad and started to curse. He grumbled something to Martin under his breath about ‘being off his head,’ and got out of the car, feeling his broken tooth.

  “Then Bill must have felt remorseful, because he came back and poked his head in again to tell us he was going to look at the river for a while. We all knew he just wanted to cool down. Even Marina was pretty upset, pointing out to Martin in no uncertain terms how he could have put us all off the road.

  “Martin didn’t hear any of it. He just kept looking at us one by one—the biggest kind of tears in his eyes—and saying over and over, ‘You were going to kill my father.’

  “I can still see Marina shaking Martin by the shoulder over the seat. I have never seen her so mad, either.

  “‘But your father is dead, Martin . . . dead, for heaven’s sake. He’s been dead for nearly twenty years. Get a grip on yourself. He was dead before you were even born. For God’s sake, aren’t you taking this stuff a little too far?’”

  “You should have chucked him out in the snow,” commented the public health nurse. “Causing a scene like that in those circumstances.”

  James looked nonplussed.

  “I admit that the thought crossed our minds. But Martin just continued in his pleading voice. He hadn’t been in the storm, he said. It was summer, he said, and we were driving down some big wide road on the prairies, tearing along, he said, and his father was standing there right in the middle of the road holding up both hands for us to stop. And we were going to kill him.”

  “He was dreaming,” commented the priest. “It’s so simple, it’s almost obvious. Given the mental anguish occasioned by the loss of his father, his constant preoccupation with wanting to visibly see his father—all fostered by his mother. . . . The pressures of the moment came together to induce hallucination . . . a simple dream.”

  “Exactly as I said at the beginning,” called the man from the bar.

  The listeners seemed to be on his side, their looks and gestures giving him more encouragement.

  “I agree entirely,” stated Dr. Reilly, totally disinterested.

  “I must confess,” Dr. O’Dea began very slowly, her tone somewhat crestfallen, “that I had hoped for something more illuminating . . . but I have to agree with Fr. Cowan. A type of wish-fulfillment under very arduous mental and emotional circumstances.”

  The government biologist said nothing.

  The speaker was unaffected by this discourse.

  “And that’s what we would have thought, too, the rest of us in the car . . . until we saw Bill Lawton.”

  “How does Bill come into it,” asked the company executive, suddenly interested.

  “Well, like I said, Bill had gotten out to go stand on the bridge, to cool himself down after Martin’s performance—which was unnerving, to say the least. Jamie had started the car again, to try to back her out, and, with the car lights shining directly ahead, the wind not as strong in the shelter, we could detect Bill’s form on the rise over the river a short distance ahead.

  “What caught our attention was the strange way Bill was walking, staggering like he was weak. I mean, Bill Lawton went through the snowdrifts in the woods like a bull moose in a panic. Then, while we watched, he grabbed the limb of a spruce for support and got as sick as a dog, retching right there in front of us.

  “Bill Lawton would never do that.”

  “The exertion, the alcohol, the emotional upset, the close confines of the heated car. He was simply nauseous.”

  Dr. Reilly was making a clinical diagnosis.

  “That ran through our minds—Jamie and I—as we jumped out of the car and ran to where he was, shouting to him over the storm, asking him what was wrong. He looked like he was going to pass out right there in the snow, and he practically fell into our arms when we got to him through the drifts.

  “When he came to himself, he just pointed his arm in the direction of the bridge—he couldn’t speak—and kept on vomiting. The way he was getting on really frightened us, and it took us a while to come up with the courage to look toward the bridge, not knowing what to expect. You know, where people hang themselves from bridges . . . there could have been a car ahead of us smashed into the railing, a body decapitated through the windshield . . .”

  “What was it?” queried the public health nurse, unable to restrain her curiosity. “What did you see when you looked toward the bridge?”

  An air of tension hung over the group as they collectively leaned forward in the speaker’s direction, hanging on the speaker’s next words.

  The speaker’s eyes rested on the group, his face seeming to reflect his own disbelief in memory.

  “Well, that’s it. We didn’t see anything. When we looked where Bill was pointing, there was nothing. . . . Absolutely nothing.”

  Bewildered, puzzled looks greeted the announcement. The priest first broke the silence.

  “Then, what made him so sick? What was he pointing at? What was on the bridge?”

  The speaker paused and looked toward the window, a faraway look in his eyes, pondering the priest’s questions.

  “What was he pointing at? What had upset him? What did he see? . . . Nothing. At least nothing on the bridge. There could be nothing on the bridge . . .”

  Here the speaker paused again as he struggled to relive the memory, trying to find a way to say the words that he knew would fall like a thunderclap in the eerie silence.

  “There was no bridge. . . . Where the bridge was supposed to be—and I don’t know if I can describe this for you—was a mad, surging, howling, cascading torrent of foaming water tearing along massive chunks of ice, beating them to pieces on the exposed boulders. . . . The bridge was gone . . .”

  “What!”

  A collective gasp emanated from the group, a sudden, resounding gasp that extended outward beyond the table, until it was lost in the relentless drumming of the sleet on the windowpane. From the stunned silence emerged the shocked voice of the public health nurse.

  “But how . . . ?”

  She did not finish. Like the rest, the unexpectedness of the statement had left her without words. The speaker continued in his matter-of-fact tone, twirling his half-empty beer bottle, absorbed in its motion as he spoke.

  “Well, we had had all that rain which flooded the river. The mild weather and the current had broken up the ice in the backwaters, and it had all got dammed up somewhere back in the river. When the river burst through under all that pressure of ice and water, it just carried the bridge before it, like chips in a flood.

  “Those old bridges weren’t built as high as the new ones, and it was just swept away. Under the force of all that ice and water, it just didn’t stand a chance. I heard later that they found pieces of it in Shoal Arm, ten miles downriver.”

  “In anoth
er minute . . . in another second . . .”

  A look of horror had appeared on the nurse’s face.

  “You would have all been killed . . . the car and everybody in it would have simply disappeared into the river . . .”

  Dr. O’Dea had finished the thought for her. Anybody else could have done it.

  “Definitely,” assured the speaker. “If Jamie had followed through, gunning the car over that rise into the last few feet of grade, the car would have been impossible to stop. . . . We would have had absolutely no chance.”

  “Except for Martin,” observed the government biologist.

  “Or his father,” adjoined the priest.

  “That’s the way I see it,” the speaker confirmed. “Martin prayed for his father to come back. And he did come back. But not just for any old reason. He came back to save our lives; whether as a dream, or a vision . . . or as a real person. If it weren’t for Martin ‘seeing,’ I wouldn’t be here today. So it is proof enough for me. Has anybody ever come back? I firmly believe Martin’s father did.”

  The speaker stood and grasped his beer bottle as he headed in the direction of the bar. The group remained seated as they followed his movements, wrestling with the horror of what could have happened, and what to them was the mystery of the outcome. Only Dr. Reilly spoke, repeating the same words over and over.

  “Great literature and great imagination. Great literature and great imagination . . .”

  The bus driver appeared in the doorway, announcing that the bus was on the point of leaving. The group responded in a disorganized manner, shuffling about and donning topcoats and scarves.

  The road past Maccles must be open,” observed the government biologist. “Let’s see if we can get the same seats.”

  Dr. O’Dea had turned in the direction of the speaker, who was now standing at the bar in conversation with the waitress.

  “What about Martin?” she called out over the din of movement. “You must have been very grateful to him.”

  “Very much so,” replied the speaker, turning in her direction. “As we sat in the car overnight, we thought about what had happened a dozen times over. We never really apologized to Martin, but then it was like we didn’t have to. Martin was a different man from that day on. He didn’t crow or throw it up to us or anything like that. Martin wasn’t that kind of person.

  “He became a man, as they say, at peace. He seemed happy at the way things had gone, that he had truly and finally seen his father, that his father had come back to save our lives . . . that all he had ever believed and prayed for had been proven, so to speak, before our very eyes.”

  “What ever happened to him?” queried the public health nurse, adjusting her scarf as she spoke.

  “I don’t know,” the narrator responded, frowning as he pursed his lips in thought. “I haven’t seen him now since we graduated. The last I heard of him he was in one of those monasteries in western Canada.”

  Dr. Reilly was making his way around a chair, a very thoughtful look on his face.

  “So, Dr. Reilly,” asked Dr. O’Dea, smiling quietly as she nudged him. “Are you preparing a great rebuttal for James during the ride back?”

  “No, no,” he answered soberly, his tone quietly academic. “I will not attempt a rebuttal. I enjoyed the discussion . . . the story; but it is still, for me at least, in the realm of literature and imagination. I still don’t believe. . . . I can’t. To believe now would . . .”

  He didn’t finish. But then, he didn’t have to, since they all understood. He stood quietly and adjusted his topcoat, then proceeded to join the crowd moving haphazardly toward the exit. He walked past James, pausing just long enough to rest his hand upon the younger man’s shoulder. Their eyes met as he passed, and it seemed as if they understood each other.

  A “NOBLE” SPRUCE

  You talk about cutting Christmas trees.

  You should have been around the year my only teenage daughter wanted to cut her own Christmas tree. She wanted a “cut” tree instead of a “bought” one, which, in outport parlance, is something like the taste of “homemade” bread as opposed to “baker’s.”

  Since my paternal ego couldn’t take another beating in these recurrent father-daughter confrontations, I didn’t get into the distinctions between “cut” and “bought” trees, or the fact that “bought” trees are only “cut” trees once removed—if you don’t mind the pun.

  She wanted, she said, to preserve “the ageless family tradition,” which was her way of describing the three times I took her to cut the Christmas tree when she was a child. She was sixteen now and had inherited her mother’s romantic approach to things, and she vividly remembered every detail of that first time I took her up to Barry’s Grove on her first tree-cutting expedition.

  She was a pudgy little thing swaddled in umpteen layers of winter clothes, and since she was too small to walk alongside, she sat astride my shoulders as I plowed through the almost impenetrable snowdrifts of the winding wood-path, sometimes up to my waist in the deepest snow we had since John Guy got frostbite.

  We had had a ferocious early winter storm two days before, so the trees were laden with a fine, powdery snow, the kind that goes down in your neck and back very easily.

  Whether or not she was aware of that in her childlike mind I will never know, but she took a particularly perverse delight in leaning forward and swatting the overhead branches under which we passed, squealing with delight at the clouds of dry, powdery stuff that engulfed her, and found its way with uncanny accuracy straight down the back of my neck.

  As I struggled with me, her, and a sharp axe through some of the deepest snowdrifts since the second ice age, you can imagine that I wasn’t having nearly as much fun as she or that, for me, the memories of the day would be as romantically captivating.

  Now here we were, thirteen years later, with very different approaches to Christmas and Christmas trees, since there’s nothing like cold snow down a warm spine in December to put the romantic past in a reality perspective. I was understandably more interested in instituting a more modern family tradition—like buying a Christmas tree on the side of the road from Bud Squires, a suggestion which was greeted on her part by profound adolescent shock.

  In her view, I was definitely not a romantic person, and certainly not a Sagittarius, to even contemplate such a idea. Besides, even I knew Bud was hardly old enough, the way he did his hair was, well, “gross,” and I suspected that spending ten minutes buying a perfectly good tree from Bud Squires paled in comparison to roaming the ridge on a beautiful sunny afternoon with the seventh, and most newly acquired boyfriend, who was “a definite hunk,” and “so-o-o-o her.”

  Now being tough with my only teenage daughter rarely resulted in the kind of positive bonding you see on the television shows these days, so I gave in and let her have her way.

  It was just as well since her mother, who up to now had not intervened, decided that I had had enough role-playing experience as father for one day and paused in the middle of her cup of tea to quietly say “Now dear.”

  Which to anybody else was simply “Now dear” but was really mother to father talk for “She’ll only be with us for a short time more and don’t you think you should give in to her this once just for peace in the family and then it is Christmas and she is your only daughter and she loves you very much and you know you love her . . .”

  Totally vanquished, I got my good axe and motioned over my shoulder to my only daughter in the direction of Barry’s Grove. She stood rigid, totally appalled. Assuming that she mistook my action for something of more murderous intent, given our recent disagreement over the tree cutting, I assured her that it was necessary to take the axe in order to cut the tree, and that I never took these family spats that seriously.

  “It’s not that, Dad,” she blurted in astonishment. “You’re . . . you’
re coming with us!”

  I think she would have preferred to have been sold into slavery.

  Following the pattern established from similar engagements in the past, complete dismay followed astonishment as she declared, her voice shaking with disbelief:

  “I am sixteen, you know.”

  The now-familiar pattern continued, dismay now being transformed into positive terror.

  “If any of my friends saw me with you . . . I would . . . die,” this last being uttered in a tone similar to that when the heroine collapses on the stage in a seriously dramatic play and the curtain closes to end the act.

  Well, I didn’t want her to die as the result of any silly old Christmas tree, so I handed her the axe, sighed in resignation, and tried to salvage what fatherly pride I could from the situation by preparing them for the expedition.

  You talk about your ageless family traditions.

  I led her outdoors, where the seventh definite hunk was leaning against the corner of the house waiting out our confrontation, none the worse for the half-acre of snow that had settled momentarily on his two-hundred-pound-plus frame, and proceeded to give them both careful instructions on how to choose a proper Christmas tree, just as my mother had done for me, when I was sixteen.

  “It is imperative,” I said, in the authoritative tone I had acquired as a director of education, “that it be a ‘small’ tree . . . and definitely ‘fir,’” reverting to a more grammatically correct mode of conversation for more communicative effect.

  I felt that by using “definitely” I could ease the generation gap, and I deliberately avoided pronouncing “varr” in the old Newfoundland way, because she was already in the middle of the new grade twelve program, which came from Alberta, and she wouldn’t understand the word, anyway. While she shuffled impatiently, I emphasized my point by directing her to a small “varr” at the edge of the marsh.

  With the help of a tape measure and a large triangular piece of plywood laid out on the lawn, I outlined the required dimensions, insisting on symmetrical proportions, all delivered in minute detail, in that exact same tone of voice I used as a teacher in Barker’s Cove, when the grade ten class used to go to sleep.