Aunt Jessie jumped up from the table where they'd been sitting. Headed into the pantry rattling dishes and stuff.

He was sitting with one forearm across his knee, an elbow on the table. And he reached into his pocket and pulled out a dollar bill and handed it to me.

"Here's an advance on your wages," he said.

"Thanks," I said. "Where are you going?"

He stood up stiffly then, like an old man. And Jessie was suddenly there.

"We're just going out for a few minutes, dear," she said. "I'm driving Jack to the train. You can wait here till I get back."

Like she wanted me to.

As soon as their car was out of sight, I streaked for home.

Around that time it became clear, at least to me, that one day I'd be going with him. Predictions of prosperity weren't for the likes of me and Uncle Jack. Something false in all the promises.

Ma once asked: "What do you think you'll be when you grow up?"

My response was quick: "A miner like Uncle Jack."

I heard the old man laugh.

Uncle Jack was gone for the best part of three years after he went away in 1958. Flin Flon, Manitoba. I'm sure it was '58. It was after the causeway but before the pulp mill. He went to Tilt Cove late in '60. Maybe it was '61. That's where I hooked up with him in '64.

"We got the '58 Chev," Sextus says, "just before he left the last time. For, where was it? Flin Flon? Yeah. I remember by the car. Almost new."

Remembering by association with large events. Like buying cars.

Sextus learned to drive the '53 Ford before they got the Chev. For my money, the Ford was the nicest car ever made. Sextus just couldn't wait to get behind the wheel. "Car crazy," Uncle Jack said he was. And he seemed to have the car whenever he wanted it. Aunt Jessie was like that.

"Young people need to get around," she'd say.

And there was a lot of territory to get around in unless you wanted to be doing the same thing night after night. The fun could be just about anywhere in a radius of fifty miles. That's how lots of us got killed. Gas was cheap then, about fifty cents a gallon. If you could scrape together three or four dollars you were good for the evening. And Uncle Jack was sending money home, once he got work in Flin Flon.

He called Aunt Jessie from somewhere one evening a week after he left. He was still on his way. I could tell by the way she was talking to him that he was drunk. When she got off she said, "That was poor Jack, in Winnipeg."

"Wow," I said. "That's halfway across the country."

"Just about," she said.

"What's he doing there?"

"Having a few, I think," she said wryly. "I don't mind. I know when he's in there, where he's going...he'll have nothing to do but work. He never drinks when he's working away."

I guess they all told the wives that.

Jack used to joke about it: I was so far in the hole in '58 I had to go down another hole to get out of it. Meaning Flin Flon. Laughing and gagging over his own irony. Whenever he laughed it usually ended in a spasm of coughing violent enough to blow his head off.

The Trans-Canada went through where his mill was. I watched them bulldoze the sawdust pile and a lot of trash wood left behind. There had been a lot of firewood there, slabs cut into stove lengths. He'd been selling them there for ten dollars a truckload, but after he was gone people just took the wood. Filling the trunks of cars, or the backs of their half-tons. Sometimes in armloads. The last of the slabs went the night before the bulldozers came. Aunt Jessie took a picture.

The new road ate through the place and you'd think the country would never heal. It was all charred tree stumps and mud banks and big boulders with the dust and the sour smell of the blasting still on them. Today it looks like it was always there, a natural thing bright with lupins and wild roses in summer, the new spruce crowding close again.

"We just never clicked. Don't ask me. There are people like that. Warm, kind-hearted, good people. Draw you in, all right. But you never really know the real person. You know what I mean? I mean, your gut tells you nobody is as great as those folks seem to be. So you always wonder, what's up with them?"

"But your gut can be wrong," I say.

He looks at me, measuring.

"He wrote to me in the spring of '61, said if I needed work he'd get me something in...where was it? Tilt Cove. I was calling it Tit Cove. Underground labour, he said. Jesus Christ, I thought. Said no, thank ya. Got on at the pulp mill. Electrician's helper. Good money, great summer. Couldn't picture the two of use...bumping around in a place like that."

I say: "He never mentioned."

"Then, a few years later, you went. Hung in for what? Years." Shakes his head slowly. "Christ, that must have been an experience."

He fishes out another cigarette, waiting for me to move the subject forward. Open up some space for exploring all the unanswered questions about my father.

6.

Here's truth. Duncan and Effie, white-faced in their barely managed panic, tumbling through that door, gasping: "I think Uncle Sandy is going to kill Pa."

They called him uncle too, though he wasn't.

Ma, as always, calm. Drying her hands at the sink, barely turning, saying, "John, you and Duncan go over and take the truck home so they won't go anywhere else."

Duncan looking hopeless, not having a clue how to drive. Me knowing the theory, taking the keys like I knew more, the two of us sprinting over. Duncan speaking quickly: "They came home late. We had supper in the oven. We all sat down to eat. And Uncle Sandy shouted 'Jeeeeesus!' Flipped the table up on end and everything slid down and onto Papa."

That was how it often started.

Duncan and I climb into a truck neither of us knows how to drive. I am too afraid to enjoy the look of helplessness in Duncan's face as he watches me turn the key and start the engine, then put the truck in gear; then stall it, popping the clutch and giving too much acceleration. And the instant terror when we see a giant figure looming through a sudden splash of light, carrying a rifle.

Duncan and I dashing home and telling Ma and hearing her say, "That's okay. I called the Mounties."

Jesus Christ. The Mounties!

But the truth is that Ma looks half ready to murder me for telling her: "They're saying Pa smashed the window out of the school porch." Saying it like I heard it, with cautious levity, people looking at me askance in the schoolyard that day. Me looking askance at her.

"At the dance? Grabbed Paddy Fox by the throat and drove him through the window? Nearly took the eye out of him? You should see it. Looks like a big blood clot?"

Her face pink with shame. "Don't you be listening to that. They just love to start stories."

"But did he?"

"Just never mind!"

"But Paddy's eye?"

"He could have got that anywhere...and good enough for him. The things he'll be...Get away with you now. With that foolish talk about your own father."

"We had a dog once. Effie, Duncan, and I. You must remember."

"Called Sandy," he says, smiling, "after Little Orphan Annie's dog."

"Do you remember what happened to it?"

He frowns for a moment, then says, "Killed by a car, I think he was."

"No," I say. "He was shot."

"That's right," he says. "Now I remember. Some hunter."

That's what everybody thought. But the war hero killed him. I knew right away, when I found the corpse in the ditch, looking like a discarded cardboard box at first, the colour of winter-flattened hay after the snow goes. Thinking he was killed by a passing car but seeing, as Duncan picked him up, the large ragged black hole a bullet made. Then noticing my father, leaning against a fence post near the barn, the .303 resting on the top of the fence, half-covered by his arm. Remembrance Day '58. After Jack was gone.

Should I tell him this? Perhaps, for his own good.

"Everything goes to ratshit, sooner or later," he says wearily.

To agree is to comply.

"Three guys, like brothers. Come the war, they become strangers...two of them like enemies, actually." Turning then, and to the side of my face: "Four of us like family. Then...herself and Duncan, you and I. But no mysteries there, eh? No war."

"That's true," I say.

"What, then?"

"It doesn't matter," I say. "Even ratshit goes away, in time."

He laughs softly. "When was the last time you saw Duncan?"

"Must have been around Christmas," I say. "Yes. He was over helping out the priest in Hawkesbury. I talked to him after midnight Mass."

"So what do you talk about?" he asks.

"Not much. Work. A bit of politics. Getting older."

"Did he ever give you his take on me and herself? The split?"

"He asks," I say. "Now and then. Do I ever hear?" I look at him, questioning.

He grabs the bottle then and sloshes a splash of rum into my teacup.

"Easy," I say.

"So Duncan still calls her Effie. No Faye there, eh!"

"Actually he never mentions her by name."

He laughs and says, "No wonder." Pours another splash before I can stop him. "I'm trying to get you pissed now," he says. "Trying to corrupt you."

"That's not so difficult," I say, moving my cup out of his reach.

"Because," he says, "I'm working up to a confession here."

I just stare into his face.

"My being here," he says, "wasn't the big coincidence I made it out to be." Watching me carefully. "Actually docked late yesterday. Stayed with the old woman in her little apartment in Judique last night. Sorry I lied," he says. "Just. I wasn't ready for it. When you popped up like that. Kind of panicked." Smiles. "Quite an evening we had, Ma and me," he says. "Spent half the night talking about things."

"What things?" I say.

"We talked through a lot of stuff, Ma and me," he says. "A lot of stuff we haven't got into yet...you and I."

Part 4.

1.

I can't avoid the ripple of annoyance. Not about the silly lie. Compared to all the others he's invented, this one's pitiful. My annoyance is based on this: he has caused another shift in my scaled-down, manageable world with its tiny population. What will he do next? Sleep with Millie? I wouldn't put it past him. At least to try. But then, he'll never know about Millie. Not many do. Not even Jessie.

For a while in the early seventies, Jessie knew everything about me. In a few days, both our lives were reinvented by the same disasters: Jack going to his grave and Effie and Sextus running off together. That bonded us for a couple of years. Then, in early 1972 she swallowed a lot of pride and reservations and visited Toronto, presumably to see her grandchild.

"What do you think?" she asked me.

"Looks like a baby," I said, handing the pictures back.

"In the flesh," she said, "she's the spit of yourself."

Then seemed to be staring at me, waiting.

I just laughed.

It took me longer to move on. Which is why I became progressively more crazy over the course of about five years. Until I discovered AA and Millie. Haven't seen much of Jessie since.

"Everything changes," she told me once. "From the minute we're born."