8.

"What really happened to Pa's head?" I asked Ma.

"What did he tell you?" she asked back.

"Snakes," I said, smiling. "Two-legged snakes."

"I suppose you're old enough to know," she said.

I don't remember how old I was.

"It was in the war. There were people called snipers. They sat up in trees. Or high up in church steeples. Or in the upper windows of houses. And they shot people who were just going about their business."

"But they couldn't kill Pa," I said.

"That they couldn't," she said.

"And did Pa get the guy?"

"I'm afraid not," she said.

Part 3.

1.

A stranger driving the Long Stretch wouldn't see much. Dense dumb trees jostling in spaces that were once fields. A sodden marsh. Cords of pulpwood stacked, awaiting a trucker's whim. A few unwelcoming houses.

The sun in winter struggles just above the woods, weakly tinting the grey with a rosy glow and, sometimes, in the evenings, igniting small fires of light in frozen puddles. Summer shines, but only briefly. The Long Stretch is mostly a winter memory.

Belonging to the place you see more.

My father, Jack, and Angus grew up here, closer than brothers. Jack would never say something like "closer than brothers." He'd say t'ihck as t'ieves. "We were ahll t'ihck as t'ieves around there." He'd say it with a little smile. Exaggerating his accent. Because of speaking Gaelic when he was young. Talking Gaelic left them handicapped, Jack used to say. Every time you opened your mouth. Mouht.

They lasted in Newfoundland about a year after their first flight from home, on the coal boat. Hellish work, Jack said. A bunch of Newfoundlanders digging a hardrock mine with their bare hands practically. Working for nothing, or next to nothing. Soaked and cold all the time. Wet rag over your face to keep the dust out. Working for hope-that this would turn into something. And it did, later, "after the three stooges left," Jack said. Turned into a real mine.

They left for Quebec in '38. First to Senneterre, then to Bourlamaque, which was great. Close to Val-d'Or. Good times then. Bought an old rattletrap of a car in Amos. Then the war started and they went home to celebrate for a while. Then drove to Sydney to join up. The Cape Breton Highlanders took two of them. Turned Jack down. "Bad wind," he said, tapping his chest with his big middle finger. "Something they didn't like in there."

Romantic fever.

So my father and Angus went to war, and Jack went back to Newfoundland. It was the same as service, they told him. Mining fluorospar in St. Lawrence. Strategic material, for making aluminum. And he joined the militia. Got some kind of uniform at least. But he wasn't a soldier, he was a miner.

The old man called Jack a zombie once. Drinking at the kitchen table long ago. During the causeway construction, when everybody was around. I barely remember it but I have this image of Jack going over the table after him. Pa, scrambling back, laughing. Grandpa caught Jack halfway and held him. I remember the sound of the table cracking.

The old man could get away with a lot since he was a vet. Wounded in action. People wondering, of course: What kind of action?

Jack worked in St. Lawrence right through the war, his destiny taking root.

Coming back from the war, my father didn't even have the accent. Talked like from away, at least in my memory. Except when he said "hard." The r would stick in your ear. Lost everything else, it seems.

A car drives by the end of the lane. I instinctively look to the place on the wall where light would reflect when my father would be coming home. There is nothing.

Then the phone rings, like an alarm. We both jump.

"Hello."

"Hello. Which one of you is this?"

I put my hand over the receiver. "It's your mother," I whisper.

No reaction.

To the phone I say: "It's John. Is this you, Jessie?"

"Let me speak to the other fellow," she says.

I hear him say "Hello, Mom" like he does it every day. Not like somebody who's had hardly any contact in thirteen years.

Then a long silence, letting her talk.

There was a huge celebration the day they opened the World's Deepest Causeway, and the Deepest Ice-Free Harbour on the Atlantic Seaboard. Thousands of people swarmed over Port Hastings. Birth of a new metropolis on the shores of the Canso Strait. HMCS Quebec, lolling like a great grey sea serpent, relaxed after its wars, fired lazy shots in salute to the future. Booom-ooom-oom-ooom rolling down the flat black fjord, vanishing behind the point of land where the Swedes would build their big new pulp mill. Bless them. Air full of the fragrance of broiled wieners, and car exhaust. And fiddle music. Always fiddle music. Somebody at school drew a mural, pinned it to the big door between the two schoolrooms, showing skyscrapers. Then all the dignitaries from God-knows-where led a march across the new link, and at the head of the crowd a hundred men in kilts playing bagpipes. You knew you'd never forget it.

Jack was at our place in the evening that day, with Pa and Angus. At the kitchen table. Having a few. Pa behaving now, a special day. Jack had been working at home for nearly two years then. Like hundreds of others, home building the causeway. Driving truck.

"You'll be away again soon, I expect," Pa said.

"No," said Jack. "Going to hang around for a while. See what's next."

"The place is going to take off," Angus said. Angus always sounded sinusy and head-stuffed when he was on the bottle, which was almost always.

Pa scoffed. "We should all go," he said. "I hear there's big money to be made in Elliot Lake."

Jack kind of laughed. "You got her made right here, boy," he said. "Made in the shade."

"I'd go quick," said Pa.

Angus was silent, after making his point. Pulling at the little moustache.

Jack thinking deeply. Making plans.

"Is there another phone?" he asks.

"Up in my bedroom."

"You mind if I use it," he says, standing a little unsteadily.

"Go ahead," I say.

And he heads for the stairs. I take the rum bottle and pour a good shot into the teacup. What the hell. Drinking from the teacup doesn't seem as dangerous. Not like the old days when I'd be sucking it out of the neck of the bottle.

2.

I'm thinking: They were the days of wrath. Dies irae. A song you hear at all the funerals around here. I heard it first at the old man's. Then after Jack's I asked Father Duncan, What's that about?

Days of wrath, he said. And I said, Perfect.

Jack tried to get established here, after the causeway. But there were no jobs for a fellow who'd never gone to school, never served overseas, didn't know anybody important. Somebody incapable of sucking up. Jack knew he'd have to make his own job.

My father was on the power commission, since shortly after he returned from the war. The Masons and the war vets had all the power commission jobs and the railway jobs. Anything to do with the government. Jack wasn't a Mason either.

This defines the difference between me and people like Sextus.

People treated me like I was lucky having a father with steady work, home.

People here used to say: Maybe if Jack had been more like his brother. Sandy, my old man. Hard. He'd have been home more. Would have been more of a father to poor Sextus. Only saying this, of course, after Sextus had become a stranger and a bit of a scandal to the place. They'd say: Poor Jack lost control of him early on. Now, you look at Johnny and see the difference. Having a man around.

Here's the memory. I come home from school with a bruised cheekbone, blood on my sleeve where I wiped my nose.

"What happened?" he wanted to know.

"Nothing," I said.

He had his hand on the top of my head, turning my face to the light.

"Never mind the snivelling. Just tell me what happened."

But I can't.

"Donald Campbell did it," Effie said.

He didn't even look in her direction. "Go home," he said.

She left.

He always wanted me to be somebody other than who I was. Hard, like him.

There's Donald Campbell jabbing me, goading me on about Effie. Half the school standing around close. Me doing nothing. Standing there, head down, eyes on fire. "Johnny sissy, Johnny sissy," he shouts, a nickname with the awful potential of sticking to you. Like the one stuck to Hughie the Slut. And Ebenezer Lemonsqueezer. Johnny Sissy. I could be an old man, them calling me that.

Donald is jolting my shoulder with the heel of his hand, not satisfied with the effect of his verbal taunt, but it bounces off, slams into my ear, deafening me for a moment. My hand comes up suddenly, an automatic spasm, more fear than aggression. Grazes his arm, high, close to his face. Provocation. Then the nauseating smack of his fists against my face. Quick thumps. And then the smells in your nostrils. Then the taste, sweet salted blood, snot, and tears.

"I'm telling Sextus and Duncan," Effie was saying, scrambling along beside me coming home, walking fast to keep up. "They'll fix him."

"Don't tell anybody," I'm saying, thinking of Pa.

"What happened!"

But how do you explain that to the father who survived a thousand thumps? Delivered thousands more. Shook off a sniper's bullet, and a whole war. Who could never understand.

The hand went swiftly to my chin, thumb and forefinger rough on the jawbone.

"Come on," he said, voice quieter. "I don't care who did it. I just want to know what you did back."

Eyes locked on mine.

"See," he said, "you let somebody walk over you once, they never stop. You hear what I say?"

Me nodding against his hand.

"You can get a black eye or a bloody nose. That's nothing. But you let them get away with it...you never get over that."

He let go of my face, which tilted instantly to the ground.

Then: "It's my own fault...I never toughened you up soon enough. What are you now?"

"Nine," I think I said.

"Here, give me one, hard as you can. Right in the guts. Let me see what you've got."

I couldn't even lift my gaze from the ground.

3.