My father. Towering, white as a birch, turbaned with cloud. A storybook figure.

3.

"Christ, you should see her highness now," he says. "You'd never know where she came from."

"She did all right, then."

"Better than all right."

"Good for her."

"Oh, yes," he says. "Way better than all right."

"And when did the Faye start?"

"A few years back. I'm surprised you never heard."

"Faye what?"

He laughs. "Get this. Faye MacAskill fucking hyphen Gillis."

"So she stayed on her own," I say. "After you."

"She was mixed up with this oldish lawyer for a while.

Irishman, full of Old Country charm and bullshit. I think he christened her Faye. Anyway, he had a shitload of money. Owned a couple of health clubs. Keels over one day, leaves her the bundle and a nice house on the Kingsway, mind you."

"Health clubs?"

"See," he says, pointing at me. "There's no guarantee, no matter how fit you think you are." He lights another cigarette. "Some posh house she wound up with."

Long pause. Wind. Rain rattling.

"Anyway," he says finally. "Enough of that." And takes a longer drink. But he can't leave it alone. "I remember the old lady mentioning about you two. Early '65. I just couldn't see it. I guess it really started, for you...Christmas '64?" Draws deeply on the cigarette. Waiting for me. Finally says: "Of course, when I saw her, the next summer I think it was, I said to myself: Hoo-wee, that Johnny."

I don't think he expects me to answer.

"Only later, you understand. Later, when you could say the same about myself. But by the time she had her hooks in me...you say the only thing we have in common is where we're from but...that's more than enough. It's only later. You start to notice what's missing." He tests the drink.

"That's how it was, was it?" I don't look at him. "Her hooks in you?"

"Well," he says. "You know what I mean."

I pour water into the teapot.

I remember once asking Millie, coming right out with it: "What was wrong with me?"

"Who knows," she said.

"You know me better than she did," I said.

She took a long time lighting a cigarette. Millie still smokes.

"What's wrong with you is the same thing that was wrong with what's-his-face, your cousin with the name. Probably wrong with a lot of people."

"What would that be?"

"The same thing that's probably wrong with me and Effie and most everybody else." Dragged another big lungful through the fag and said: "Nothin'. When you get right down to it, absolutely nothin'."

And people wonder what I see in Millie.

I often wonder: If Angus had stayed in Sydney. Or gone to California. Or if my father had only had the sense to avoid him after he resurfaced. But the awful thing between them kept bringing them together. As if they thought that being in the same place, blending their common memories, they could somehow defeat that thing that was eating them. Find some understanding. Of course they only made it worse. And we all spent years dealing with the fallout.

Millie thinks we still are.

4.

"Your father is a hero," Ma said.

I can still see her face. White as flour. Blue crescents beneath her eyes. Eyes a little crazy. The way they were before everything happened.

"How do you know?"

"He just is. An article of faith. Like the Blessed Trinity. I'll never forget when he came home. From the war. There was a party. The biggest bash the village ever had. For him. And they had a fiddler. The Germans shot him in the head and still couldn't kill him. People came from miles around. Filled the hall."

"What hall?"

"The community hall. The one you kids burned down."

"Oh. That one."

If he'd only had the brains to stay away from Angus.

Looking at Angus you'd never guess what lay within. He was dapper. That's the word you'd hear most. Always wore a necktie. "No harm in Angus," they'd always say. And he looked like a general or a field marshal. Maybe five nine or ten. Wiry. You could believe he actually talked to Montgomery once. Shortly before the end of the war, when Montgomery visited the Cape Breton Highlanders. Right after they went from Italy to Holland. I believe it. My father was hard on the outside. But you got the impression Angus was hard on the inside.

The army had a big impact on Angus. Hair always trimmed. Swore he'd never go a day without shaving. Had a tidy little moustache along the edge of his lip. Until the later days, he'd walk poker straight, shoulders back. All this, of course, eclipsed in the memory by the image from the last time I saw him. Pleading. Out near the end of the Long Stretch.

5.

I remember the community hall as a big old shell, all weathered and full of ghosts. Grandpa told a story about people playing cards there one night. A stranger off the Boston boat was winning all the money. And somebody dropped a card. And when they bent to pick it up saw cloven hooves. You'd shiver, the way he told it.

There was an old piano on the second floor but you couldn't get a sound out of it. Not that you would anyway. We'd always be quiet. We weren't supposed to be in there. The place was condemned, they said. Because of the devil, I thought. Other than that piano there was nothing. Just empty bottles, and old dried-up stools of shit with bits of newspaper where people would go. I guess the older guys drank in there. And that's where I saw my first French safe. Mostly we'd go in there to sneak a smoke.

I know the fire happened in May. Sometime near the long weekend. After school. I was staying in, hanging around the village. Donald Campbell had a pack of cigarettes. Sweet Caps. I remember Donald had a new bike then. His father was the railway station agent. Duncan, Effie, Donald, and I and Sextus were there. Donald was handing out the smokes and I took one.

"I didn't know you smoked," Effie said to me.

"Sure," I said impatiently.

"Oh." Superior. By then she was developing a certain tone.

Then we lit up.

She was nine months older than I was, and beginning to enjoy it.

"The definitive moment of change," Sextus says, "when you think back was...what? What was it for you?"

"I don't know," I say. "Opening of the causeway. The mill. Lots of big moments." I concentrate on my tea.

"How about the old dancehall? The day she burned," he says. "Something poetic happened there."

"Compared to?" I ask.

"Symbolically," he says. "It was the official end of the old. Everything after that is new. People now don't have the same...connection with the place."

"How would you know?" I say patiently.

He laughs, flushes a little. "I suppose. I have been gone quite a while. But you do have to admit, the place has lost something."

A dancehall?

I pour another cup of tea.

The wind is making a rocking sound around the house. The rain fills our silences, slashing against the window. A cardboard box scratches as it moves along the side again. I'm tempted to bring it in but it's just too miserable out there.

"And I guess the Gaelic is gone," he says.

"A few old people," I say.

He laughs. "Wasn't it always 'a few old people'?"

Duncan finally took a cigarette too, lit it. He'd hesitated. Duncan was becoming holier every day. Effie was inhaling.

"You'll make yourself sick," I said.

"You're not my boss," she said.

"Well I am," said Duncan, and he plucked the cigarette from her fingers and threw it aside.

"Hey," she said, trying to see where the cigarette went.

Then Donald noticed the condom.

"Hey, look." He touched it carefully with the toe of his rubber boot.

"I wonder who that was," said Sextus.

"What is it?" I said.

They almost threw up laughing at me. Except Effie.

She was staring at it, figuring it out for herself.

"The causeway I suppose is the true symbol of change," Sextus says. "From island to peninsula."

"Whatever."

"God made us insular," he says. "The politicians made us peninsular." He chuckles.

"That's an improvement," I say.

"You sound like the old man."

I take my cup to the stove, top it up. Whose old man?

Donald was squatting, poking at the condom with a stick.

"I'm pretty sure who it was," he said. "I saw Alex Joe at the garage and he had a whole bagful of these things."

"And who do you think the girl was? It wouldn't be..."

"Theresa," said Donald.

Theresa was in grade ten. The smart one.