"Duncan's gone back?"

"Yes. Just Papa there." Something in the way she said it.

"You can always stay here."

"Just you and me," she said. I could feel her fingers on my neck. Teasing.

"And Grandma," I said. "And Ma."

"That's too bad," she said.

And the problem is, you never know whether they mean it. Even today, familiar as I am with the little games they play, you feel the same old responses. I crossed my legs, pretending not to notice what she was saying or doing.

"So you don't like Jack Benny," I said.

She took a handful of the hair on the back of my head and gave it a little yank.

She slept on the couch that night.

I put the blankets on her carefully. Hung Duncan's old coat on the back of a dining room chair. And when I came down the next morning she was gone.

School, of course.

Friday evening I decided to take the truck into town. Near their lane I could see there was a car up at their house. Arseend low from the continental kit. Whip aerial swaying in the wind. Ontario plates almost obscured from salt and roadshit.

By March, you could see a difference in Grandma. Starting to go down. Seemed to lose all her opinions. Which was a good thing because Ma suddenly had plenty. Politics. Religion. Housework. Grandma just seemed to be pushed aside by them. Which I didn't mind. Ma was always too easygoing. Easy to a fault, Jack would say. Poor Mary, people had habitually called her.

She opened up. Little glimpses of her long-buried self. Startling stuff, like the fact that she was brought up. That's how people described being adopted. Brought up. She knew who her real mom was. Some single girl from Judique who went away to the States after she was born. Never came back. Her mom's parents gave her to an older couple who had no children of their own. Lived down the shore road in Judique.

Suddenly she was sharing all sorts of little bits.

"Everybody thought Sandy Gillis could have done better," she said, laughing. "They didn't remember what a wreck he was coming home from the war."

"Couldn'ta done better than you, Ma," I said.

"Darn right," she said. "Who'd've put up with him?"

Us laughing. Her eyes wet and sparkly.

Easter weekend Duncan was home. I got in the half-ton and drove over to their place. Their gate was open so I just pulled in like the old days. Evening of Good Friday. Days getting longer. The ground was wet and muddy, so I stopped near the gate and started walking a kind of crescent path, around the mud. Frost coming out of the ground. Spring always smells like catshit.

Then loud voices. And Effie's high above them. Then a crash. I froze. Then the old man's voice, harsh. "You miserable old bastard, if I ever hear the like of that again, you'll be on the road. You hear?"

My father? Then, of course, it registers: Duncan. All anger always sounded like my old man.

Then another crash and the door suddenly opened and it was her rushing out.

Saw me. Stopped dead. Paralyzed. Just staring.

What I did? I waved, a fluttering little gesture with the hand.

She turned quickly and went inside. She didn't look back.

"Duncan was the big surprise when the book came out," he says.

Probably liked it," I say.

He raises his eyebrows. "Why do you say that?"

"Duncan was always unpredictable."

He laughs.

"For sure I knew one person around here liked it," I say.

He's smiling in anticipation.

"Guess."

He looks away. "Yes," he says. "She told me."

Her letters.

"I remember it almost by heart," he's saying. "She said, 'I don't know how much of the story is true. It's very touching.' That was her word. 'It's very touching. But the details, in the end, don't matter. The story is really'-get this-'about how we hide from the truth, or let other things get in the way of the truth.' Can you believe that?"

Effie talking about truth. Him writing about the lives of people who called it thruth. Makes you want to haul off and...

"Wow," I say.

He's back there. And I'm back there. But There is two different places.

"I'm saying, high-priced reviewers didn't figure that out. But there she was, our Effie. Writing to me from the Long Stretch. And getting it absolutely dead on."

Our Effie?

Big arguments about it. Right here, where we're sitting.

"A little strange," I said to her, "a fellow cooking up a big pack of lies to make some kind of a bullshit point about the truth."

"You have to read beyond the details," she said.

"Go ahead and take his side," I said, wishing I could think of something clever.

"Let's just not talk about it."

"Why don't I just go to town and talk to people of my own mental calibre."

"Grow up," she said.

I headed for the door.

The worst thing was that she wouldn't tell you to stop and come back. So you'd head to Billy Joe's and get yourself lost in a lot of mindless crap about the mill and the usual pile of discontent from people who were never really better off than right now.

Then you'd try to make up for it with her over a thirty-dollar dinner at the Skye Motel dining room. Of course it was 1970, near the end of everything up until then. Thirty dollars down the drain.

6.

On his last Saturday night home, Uncle Jack came over unexpectedly. We were all sitting around the kitchen table drinking tea. Jack was catching the Sunday-evening train to North Sydney. Heading back on an overnight boat.

Out of the blue I said: "I should go with you."

They all looked at me.

"Back to school is where you should go," Ma said.

Aunt Jessie said: "My God. Why would anybody want to go into that?"

"What do you think?" I asked Uncle Jack.

"I don't think you know what you're talking about."

I said, making it up on the spot, "I could make some good money this summer, get myself a car, and go back to school in the fall."

I think it was the reference to school that slowed them down. Ma probably thinking, Well, maybe it would get him out of the house for a while. Aunt Jessie thinking it might be good to have somebody keeping an eye on the old fellow. Jack saying no way I'd last more than a few weeks in that place but not sure if that was good or bad.

Eventually he said, "Where did you get the notion you'd be making good money?"

"Well, in Ontario I hear they can make fifty or sixty dollars a day bonus."

"Ho-ho," he said. "We're not talking about Ontario, where they've got unions and modern technology. We're talking about the ass-end of the industry. You'd be on pick and shovel all summer. Think about it. Pick and shovel. The tools of ignorance."

"So how much do they pay?"

"You'd be looking at a buck forty an hour, probably."

Jesus. They were making twice that at the mill. But it wasn't the money anyway.

"Sounds pretty good to me," I said.

"Right off the top, they'll be taking room and board. Plus you'll have to buy thirty or forty dollars' worth of gear at the store. Before you get started."

"The pulp Grandpa and I cut is worth about a couple of hundred bucks," I said, looking at Ma. "You could loan me that, couldn't you? Squint's already promised to haul it out to the road for nothing. Says he'll take it in to the mill if I want." Ma laughed. "You really want to go, don't you?"

And at that moment, I did. Really.

"What do you think, Jack?" she said.

"Well...I dunno," he said. Which was what he always said when he knew.

Squint seemed to be around a lot those days. Dropping in out of the blue. You'd be in the middle of eating at noon. The door would open. Squint would walk in. Hello everybody. Just passing by and wondering. More likely smelling the grub. Squint lived alone. Never married. Nobody would have him, they used to say. Big joke: When Uncle Jack would have been away for an unusually long time they'd be saying to Jessie, We'll have to line you up with Squint. Her howling and pretending to gag. Everybody getting a big kick out of it, including Ma. The old man smiling, saying, Don't be so hard on poor Squint. Of course Squint had been overseas. You couldn't say anything around the old man about anybody who'd been overseas. Not even Squint.

"Those letters probably more than anything else opened up the possibility of something between us."

It's me who knows about her letters.

"I know there are plenty thinking it's a lot of crap. But there are enough others saying great things. But there's one thing. It's down home that really matters. And she was the one voice of encouragement from here. Her and, eventually, Duncan, of all people."

"So what did you fucking expect?"

"I don't know. I didn't think it was so outrageous."

"The old man stood out like a sore thumb. And the Swede's wife."

"I heard that," he says. "The lawyers were a little worried about the Swede."

"I wish they'd have been as worried about some of the others. Like your father," I say.

I pronounce the words carefully and aggressively. In his face.

"That's pretty unfair," he says gently.

"Unfair?"

"I didn't think he'd be so...sensitive."

"He was a dying man."

"I didn't know that." His face now haunted.

Well, everybody else knew.

"I expected he'd give me at least...that much credit for it." He holds thumb and forefinger about a millimetre apart. "You know? You realize...Jesus Christ, here I've been doing pretty well. Good jobs. People away acting like I'm a celebrity. But him? Fuck-all recognition from him."

Tugging at me to say something.

Then looks away and says: "That's when I told him about what happened to Uncle Sandy. As much out of spite as anything else."

Early in '64, the Swede moved away. We heard New York City. The mill had a sales office there and he was supposed to run it. She and the boy went with him. Then later, there was a story that she and the boy moved back to Sweden. Some local men, sent by the mill to Sweden for special training, saw her at a company reception. Looking good as ever, they were saying. I never saw her again after the wake. He eventually came back for a while and I saw him several years later, when I went to work at the mill myself.

Here's what Millie thinks. The closer people were to the war, the more inflexible they became. You'd think it would be the other way around, but they weren't. And that's why people like the old man and Angus and Squint and the Swede's wife and the whole sorry lot of them were so vulnerable. Your life is battered by circumstances the way a tree is battered by the wind. If you can't bend, you break. And the first sign of danger, like the rot that weakens the tree, is self-loathing. Something she heard about when she was in Toronto. Apparently she went to a therapist there for a while. Then it got too expensive and she quit. Ironically, after she quit, she really started drinking hard. Spent more on booze than on the therapist. But that's a whole other story. So, she says: The secret of survival is flexibility.