"We could put both of them on the one stone," I say, finally.

"Assuming they're close enough. Their graves."

Closer in their graves than they ever were out of them.

"They're close enough," I say.

"You must think of him a lot. Uncle Sandy. These days. Being nearly twenty years, exactly."

"I find myself thinking more about Uncle Jack," I say. "I don't know why. I guess maybe there's more to think about there." I roll down my window a crack to let some smoke out.

"And how about yourself?" he asks.

"Doing okay," I say. "And yourself?"

He shrugs and spreads his hands, making a face. Then I take a deep breath and say: "So what about herself?" I watch closely. Then say the name. "Effie."

He looks at me carefully. Then he says, casually: "We're split. You know that."

There is no shock, no relief. No payoff.

"Say something," he says. "Or hit me. Just don't look stupid."

"No skin off my arse," I say. I look him in the eye to confirm.

"Can we shake on it, then?" he says, lifting his hand.

I can't. Shake. Or let the moment pass. I keep my hands on the wheel. "How long are you here for?"

"It depends."

"I suppose."

"Wouldn't be right if I didn't put in an appearance in Judique," he says. "Face the old woman. It's been quite a while."

"She'll be glad to see you," I say, carelessly.

"You think?"

"Well, I would think so. It's been what since you left here?"

"Thirteen years," he says. "Give or take. Queer how you let the days slide and they become years like that." He snaps his fingers. "Then you figure it doesn't matter any more. But of course that's wrong. It never goes away. The nagging, missing. But the longer it goes on, the harder it gets to face. So you push it further away. You know what I mean?"

I look out the side window.

"Not that I haven't seen Ma now and than during that time. But seeing her on a few short visits to Toronto, you don't really get much of an impression."

"I can imagine." Then I say: "You should come out to the old place, have something to eat."

He looks at me hard, showing surprise. "I'd better check into the motel. Take a shower. Get to bed early. I'm pretty bushed from the drive down. Anyway, I wouldn't expect you'd want to talk a whole lot to me."

But maybe listen.

"Suit yourself," I say. "I've got no plans. Was just going to watch the hockey game. You're welcome to come out. The place has a shower. You could stay the night."

"Can't stand hockey," he says, laughing.

"Not that interested myself," I say. "Just something to occupy a Saturday night."

He is thinking about it, staring at me, searching my face, I suppose, for motives. I look straight at his eyes. The sockets have grown deeper and darker. The liquor taking hold.

"I have a bag in the car," he says quietly.

6.

I live alone in the old Gillis place on the Long Stretch. The family's been there nearly 150 years. I'm the last. Some would say I have the worst of two worlds: there's the loneliness, but the place is still occupied by the ghosts. Grandmother. Grandfather. Mother. Father. Uncle Jack. Effie. Sometimes you catch yourself waiting for people to come home.

The Long Stretch used to be just a backroad off a backroad going nowhere in particular. Now it's almost part of the village, Port Hastings, which grew a lot after the causeway changed everything.

It's nearly thirty years since they built the causeway across the Canso Strait, which separated us from Nova Scotia and everything else. Then they built the Trans-Canada right through here. Port Hastings was a dead little village before. Now it's motels and restaurants. All-night gas stations where shift workers from the pulp mill can buy milk and bread and skin magazines and smokes any hour of the day or night. There's even a little airport. Port Hawkesbury has a radio station now, blasting out American-sounding music twenty-four hours a day. One shopping mall and talk of another. And a couple of weekly papers. Everybody has TV. I've got one of those new VCR gadgets and can watch any movie I can get my hands on. Yet still, it's the old things and the ghosts that define the space I live in no matter how the place changes.

I used to go on real benders when I was alone at first, like after Uncle Jack died and Effie left. Almost sold the place during one twister. I eventually got over the binges with a bit of help and a thirty-day rest at the Monastery. The Monastery is a detox. Of course I'd never get away with it now, in this job.

Once I asked Millie if she wanted to move out here with me.

"You gotta be kidding," she said. But then she laughed and gave me a big hug. She was right.

Running was my salvation. I do about four miles a day along the dirt roads that go forever out and back. Once a week I'll do a twelve-mile loop, through Sugar Camp and the Crandall Road, through Pleasant Hill to the main drag between Hastings and Hawkesbury, back through Hastings and out the Trans-Canada and up the Long Stretch to home. People would tease me at first. Now there are a lot running, races and marathons. But I like to run alone.

It's hard to tell now that the place was ever a farm. The barn is a jumble of hand-hewn beams and grass tangled in a wind weave. It was once quite a structure. There wasn't a nail in the frame, just wooden pegs. I feel guilty for letting it go. It was one of those projects that slipped away from me. Weathered barnboards were stylish for a while. People noticed and asked for some, and before long one side was open to the elements. One night during a high wind the roof went. That was the end of it.

I've taken better care of the house. It's a fine old place. My great-grandfather built it. Millie's tried to talk me into tearing down an ugly porch at the back. It's out of character, she says. My father and Uncle Jack put it there, just after the war, before they drifted apart. It's where I keep work clothes and the clothes I run in. It helps keep the place warm in the winter. It breaks the wind.

Millie's especially fond of the enormous stone fireplace in the kitchen. That was one of my biggest projects, restoring it. My grandfather sealed it off during the war. After a lot of wallpapering and rearranging, the old fireplace was eventually forgotten except, occasionally, during a burst of reminiscence about one thing or another. That's how I came to know about it.

Then a couple of years after Effie left I'm sitting in the kitchen. I'm working on the bottom half of a bottle of Scotch and I start thinking of Jack. How he got sick here as a small boy. No doctors then. How the sickness kept him from school until he was too old or embarrassed to start. But this place didn't kill Jack. It was his leaving and not being allowed back.

Screw it, I said. And I went straight to the cellar, got a hammer and a drawbar, and went at the wall that hid the fireplace.

Then Millie came along.

About Millie. You don't have to know much. Her folks were immigrants after the war. The whole family came over from Holland, including the grandfather. I don't remember her, growing up. She was from near Dundee, on the Lakes, well out of our circuit. She went away to Toronto young, worked in a bank, drank a bit too much. Around the mid-seventies said piss on it, pitched everything, and moved back. Got a job in the bank here. That's about it.

So I'm tearing up my kitchen when I notice a large envelope held together by a string, full of letters and newspaper clippings, crumbling at the folds. Glorified accounts of what was going on overseas, mostly in '44 and '45. The letters, in a faded, laboured scrawl, were mostly from Angus to my father, soldier to soldier. One of them stood out. Something about the tone. It was more formal. Then I realized it was written by Angus to my grandfather, about my father, about how he was wounded. Shot. But was doing well. Dated May 1945.

Near Dokkum, the letter said, Sandy was hit by a sniper's bullet. The two biggest dangers, Angus said, were snipers and shrapnel from the shelling.

Millie told me years later where Dokkum is. Showed me on a map. Not all that far from where she was born. But then nothing in Holland is.

It was the early seventies when I found the stuff. Not long after Angus went, drunk and frozen on the roadside. Things Effie had told me about him were suddenly swirling and I was tempted to shove the letters into the garbage bags with the other junk. But I poured myself another drink. Packed the letters and clippings neatly and went back to work. I eventually gave it all to Duncan. Figured it might have some value to him. Not having a clue what he'd do with it.

7.

"Jesus," says Sextus, gaping around the kitchen. "You've made a few changes."

He goes to the fireplace and bends over.

"Where the hell did this come from?" he asks, pushing at one of the iron cooking rods. It moves, squealing.

"It was here all along," I say. "You didn't know?"

"No," he says, crouched and practically inside the firebox.

"Uncle Jack must have known about it," I say.

"The old man and I never talked much about the old place." He squeals the rod again. "Never talked much, period."

He looks younger with his hair slicked back and his face flushed from the hot shower. He still has a good hairline. He is tall, and the designer cords and expensive sweater hide the lard.

"So what's the plan?" he asks, straightening up, rubbing his hands together.

"I'm thawing a couple of steaks," I say. "We'll have a dram or two. And who knows."

"I heard you were on the wagon."

"I am," I say.

He laughs. "My kind of wagon."

My real problem with Sextus is simple. I had a wife named Effie. She ditched me for him. Simple as that. And at a time when we were all stupefied by a book he wrote, the old wounds it opened. The Day They Killed Kennedy. It came out shortly before his own father died. A lot of people were saying it was the book that killed Jack. Then afterwards they were saying if the book hadn't killed him, the next shock would have: those two running off together. Leaving poor Johnny in the lurch.

I used to have lots of questions, like why Effie and I got together in the first place, what she saw in me, and why it changed; why he would have had any interest in her, considering his success away, her just ordinary, from here; why they did it like thieves, and right after Uncle Jack. I'd come up with answers, but Millie told me, years afterwards, Your answers are all bullshit.

"I hear you and herself had a kid," I say. "A girl?"

"Hardly a secret," he says. "What else did you hear?"

"That you broke up, Aunt Jessie was saying."

"Divorced, annulled, prorogued, cancelled. Kaput," he says.

"So," I say, "she'd be what now?"

"Twelvish," he says warily.

"What did you call her?" I ask, knowing already.

"You don't know?" he says, disbelief barely hidden.

"No."

"Cassandra." He looks at me hard. "Mostly we called her Sandy."

"Hey," I say. "The old man'd be proud."

"Her mother wanted to call her Jacqueline. After my old man. I declined."

"I think I'd've liked that better," I say, quickly adding: "If I was her. The kid, I mean."

"She likes her name. She's more of a Sandy than a Jackie."

"So do you see much of her?"

"No."

"And herself?"

"No more than I have to."

"So you drove down just for a long weekend."

"Well," he says, shifting his weight on the chair, "I have a little longer than that."

"Oh."

"Got in a little scrape," he says. "School thought I should take a week off."

"A scrape."

"Young fellow, a student. Told me to go fuck myself over something. I guess I didn't react with the kind of restraint you're supposed to have these days. Gave him a little...push."

I bet.