Forgiveness Read online

  Marian was born with an underdeveloped leg and an overdeveloped heart. She has a left shoe with a thickened sole and she walks with a bit of a shuffle. She always required a little extra attention, and she got it from my grandpa. Marian lives for her family and she has never forgotten the extra time, the extra love Ralph Augustus MacLean gave to her.

  Marian married a German man named Hans whom she met in Calgary in the 1940s. Hans is a no-nonsense man armed with a quick wit. My mom loved him—he could take a ribbing and dish one out. I imagine a lot of back and forth between the two of them. When my dad started coming around, Hans took Mom aside and cautioned her. He liked my dad well enough—a lot, actually—but he felt it incumbent on him to ensure my mom took a cold hard look at the situation.

  “You need to think about how your children would fare out there in the real world. We know just how cruel it can be.”

  I’m not sure whether my mom took Hans’s advice to heart, but I know she received it warmly. He was looking out for his niece, just as my grandpa had looked out for Hans’s wife so many years before.

  When we got to my apartment, Jade had a hearty meal on the stove already. Grandpa is always ready for food. It really doesn’t matter what time, day or night. Jade knows how he loves his sweets: a cake was baking in the oven. He smiled as we came through the apartment door.

  Our place was so small that we had to eat in the living room. Grandpa didn’t mind. He was happy to be back in Halifax, and he has always had such affection for Jade. We spent the night chatting about the few months he had lived in the city, only a few blocks from our apartment on Ogilvy Street, just off tree-lined South Street with its old-world mansions. We didn’t have the money to live there—and Grandpa certainly didn’t when he lived here either.

  Grandpa slept in our bed. Jade and I folded out our IKEA futon couch and slept in the living room.

  The next day, Grandpa and I drove across the Confederation Bridge and boarded a ferry to Grindstone, Magdalen Islands, six hours away on the open sea. The Gulf of St. Lawrence with its vast horizon and the salty sea breeze felt thoroughly oceanic.

  The captain alerted his passengers that we would dock in thirty minutes. I grabbed the ice-cold railing on the ship’s deck and squinted to see our destination.

  Grandpa looked at me with a wry smile. “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore,” he said.

  The landscape came into focus. The island looked like it had been bottled up into a time capsule in the 1800s. Houses speckled the hillside willy-nilly. Whoever had planned the island had clearly had no training. As we entered the harbour we passed Entry Island. A couple of miles long, it still had a one-room schoolhouse and six small farmhouses that looked like they had been built for the set of Little House on the Prairie.

  My grandpa pondered as we passed.

  “You know, I’ve never set foot on that island. I really should. I came to know so many of the boys who grew up there.”

  He had good reason to visit. Turns out, we all do. On a per capita basis, few places have given more blood and treasure to ensure our way of life than Entry Island; this little protruding speck of rock in the harbour of a slightly larger protruding speck of rock provided more volunteers to the Second World War than almost any other place in the Dominion. The whole island deserves a medal.

  Ralph MacLean (left) and Mark Sakamoto en route to the Magdalen Islands, July 14, 2001

  Almost every man on the island went to war. Entire families were killed. The Arsenault boys signed up. The Chanell brothers, all five of them, went. Few came back.

  “They were all fine, fine men. They could shoot and they sure knew how to hang together. Guess they had been doing that all their lives on that plot of land,” Grandpa said.

  I spotted a large church that seemed too big for the island. I pointed it out.

  “It’s the Memorial. Entry Island folks erected it soon after the war. It’s as close to a Royal Rifles Memorial as we’re going to get,” Grandpa explained.

  He was thinking of those boys, wondering what their lives would have been like had they lived to his age. It was making his eyes well up, making him bite his stiff Scottish lip.

  We docked, and as I drove off the boat, I felt further away from my life than I ever had. We were headed directly to Grandpa’s old home. He didn’t even want to drop off our bags where we would be staying first.

  “Let’s just get there,” he said.

  It was his duty to pay his respects to his old home. I knew he had mixed emotions about it. He loved this place. He hated this place. He was drawn to it and yet he wanted to flee as soon as he could.

  The house itself sat on a corner edged by a jagged cliff. Pleasant Bay was visible in the distance. The two-storey house had not changed much since Grandpa left. It clung to the land, looking angry and leaning into the wind. I felt like I was visiting a tombstone.

  He walked around the outside of the house like he would a museum. He was attached to it, but he kept his distance. He was no longer of this place; it did not hold him as it once had. He was free from it, but he still carried its weight on his shoulders.

  We walked out past the potato patch—now completely overgrown—to the cliffs. It was a steep dive down. As a child, Grandpa would have been scolded—or worse—had he ventured this close to the edge. Now he paused four feet from it. His brown leather oxford shoes inched forward another two feet. I wondered if this was a childhood habit, or if he was worried about his bum knee.

  “I’d imagine a different life from this spot,” he said.

  This view of sea and sky—emptiness—was his only window to the world. He could shape it however he wanted. A gust of sea wind blew hard against our faces. My windbreaker flapped like a naval flag. Grandpa took one step back, but quickly brought his foot right back into place. He was still a stubborn old fighter—he wouldn’t be pushed around by some damn wind.

  “Exactly the same as it was sixty years ago. I can just close my eyes and be back …”

  We turned to make our way back to the car. I saw Grandpa pull out one of the white linen hankies he keeps in the back pocket of his trousers and quickly wipe his eye. Maybe it was the wind. We walked down the gravel laneway without saying a word.

  I opened the passenger door and Grandpa slowly lowered himself in, holding the windshield as a brace. He let out a grunt when he was in the seat, followed, as always, by a cheerful “Okay—I’m good—thanks.” I closed the door as he did up his seat belt, then walked around the back and got in the driver’s seat.

  We were in a bit of a hurry. We were headed to Grosse Île, which was tucked away in the northeast corner of the island. Grandpa always stayed with his cousin Margaret when he came home, which was about every ten years. Margaret was sure to have dinner ready by now.

  Margaret’s house was straight out of a children’s tale. Like her, the house was tiny, old, and full of warmth. Everything was small and made out of wood. Every tabletop was fitted with a knitted doily. You never knew when a teapot might show up. There was a painted cuckoo clock above the archway that led from the living room into the dining area and kitchen. Neither Margaret nor her house quite fit in the twenty-first century.

  Margaret embraced us and poured us tea. Halfway through the first cup, a truck came barrelling up her gravel driveway. Through the window we saw the rusted-out Chevy swerve as the driver tried to light a cigarette. It looked like his eyes were closed. He was drunk. “Right pissed” were Margaret’s words. We smelled whisky before we heard the door open.

  Margaret met her brother Frederick in the foyer.

  “You can’t come in here now. You go home, make a pot of coffee, and come back when you’re presentable,” she told him.

  Grandpa explained to me that Frederick had been thrown out of Margaret’s house more times than he’d been thrown out of the local tavern. He put up no fight.

  “I’ll see ya soon, Ralph!” he yelled as the door closed. A few minutes later the engine rattled away.
r />   Margaret apologized profusely. It was unnecessary, of course, but she was mightily embarrassed. We sat down to a wonderful dinner of herring, lobster, and mashed potatoes. We drank milk. Margaret spent the dinner updating Grandpa on who had left and who had died.

  Frederick dutifully returned four-and-a-half hours later smelling of coffee and cigarettes. It seemed as though he had willed himself sober so he could see my grandpa. His mission was simple: he wanted us to come to his house so he could give us his stash of canned haddock.

  Grandpa could not say no to this gift; it would be a devastating insult. Fortunately, there was a lobster trap in the cab of Frederick’s truck, giving us an excuse to follow him to his place in our rental car. We passed the post office, the graveyard, and two rabbits. The dark and the fog conspired against me as I struggled to follow Frederick’s rear lights. There was not a street light to be seen.

  We wound our way through a wooded area as the road deteriorated into a well-worn trail. Houses appeared out of the woods like ghosts. We pulled into a muddy ditch that served as a driveway, climbed out, and carefully made our way up to a rickety veranda.

  The house was a dump. It reeked of whisky, canning brine, and sweat. It had not seen a cleaning product in a decade. The coffeepot had been left on. There was a canister of coffee whitener and an overflowing ashtray on the small kitchen table.

  Frederick invited us to sit. The three kitchen chairs look liable to buckle. We took our chances and sat as he rifled through the cabinet under the sink for his stash—our gift. Half of Frederick’s body was under his sink; it was as if he were rooting under the deck of a boat. He emerged with a sly grin, exposing broken, nicotine-stained teeth.

  “Here you be,” he said, holding out four Mason jars jammed full of haddock. Grandpa was clearly eager to leave and after some small talk about recent fish hauls and mutual friends, he used his time-tested escape hatch: “Well, we won’t keep you.”

  “Don’t want to stay for a nightcap?”

  “Oh no, we’ve had a long day of travel.”

  And with that, we were off.

  We were both glad to return to Margaret’s. Her house hugged us as we came in. Grandpa took the spare room upstairs, I took the living-room couch. There was a small TV on top of a three-drawer cabinet. I turned it on and surfed the few channels Margaret was able to receive. The TV was placed in such a manner that you could really only see it if you were lying on the couch as I was. There was dust on the “on” knob. Watching CNN in Margaret’s living room, I felt strangely out of place.

  I woke to the sound of frying eggs and the smell of coffee. I could hear the shower going. I stretched and untangled myself from the three blankets I had slept under. The top one was an old Hudson’s Bay blanket; I could almost see the paper catalogue it would have been ordered from, the one that came in the mail from the mainland.

  In the kitchen, a CorningWare coffee percolator was brewing on the stovetop. The cast-iron frying pan had clearly cooked thousands upon thousands of eggs. I sat at the small kitchen table just behind the cupboard that separated the kitchen and the dining room. Margaret spun around with an enormous smile.

  “Good morning, dear. I hope that you were comfortable enough on that old couch. Oh, how I wish I had another bed for you to have a proper sleep in.”

  I could tell she had been up half the night worrying about the sleeping arrangements.

  “I had a great sleep. I hope the TV didn’t bother you,” I reassured her.

  “Not at all, dear. I’m glad someone got some use out of it.”

  While I poured my coffee, Margaret dished me a heaping plate: four eggs, salted fish, two pieces of homemade bread, all smothered with fresh butter. Grandpa came in and sat down beside me with a smile.

  After breakfast, he and I struck out for a drive around his old stomping grounds. We were hardly out of Margaret’s front door before we stumbled into his memories. Almost everything was exactly as it had been when he was a child. We stopped the car at a valley and walked over the first hill to find his school. Behind the school was a clearing, more of a mossy bog that would ice over come winter. It was the local hockey rink.

  “Seems like I spent my whole childhood in that clearing,” he said.

  He told me there were two teams. The Uproaders lived up the road from the school and the Downroaders lived below it. Grandpa was an Uproader along with his brother Ford, his cousin Walter MacLean, Harold Patton, Deighton Aitken, brothers David and Robert Grey, and Michael Sumarah. The Downroaders donned Toronto Maple Leafs jerseys, while the Uproaders sported the jerseys of the Chicago Blackhawks. Michael Sumarah’s father, a Syrian immigrant who owned the dry goods store, had purchased the jerseys from the Hudson’s Bay catalogue—the same one from which Margaret would have selected her blanket.

  Fellow Uproader Deighton Aitken was Grandpa’s closest chum and his right-winger. Deighton loved to say the word Judas. He’d scream against the frigid air: “Judas—pass me the puck, Ralphie!” Deighton always wanted the puck. He was always on the make for the next goal.

  Ralph MacLean (far right) and the Uproaders in the Magdalen Islands

  After the first period Mrs. Grey, Robert’s mother, would usually come out with hot chocolate for all the boys. Hot chocolate under the stars with the game underway made for some of the finest nights in Grandpa MacLean’s memory. Although it was a warm breezy summer day, I could hear the blades carve into the ice and see the vapour rising from his mouth.

  We lingered around the marshy rink for a while. Grandpa wanted to imagine being on the ice for one last skate as an Uproader, but we ran the risk of our shoes sinking in the mud. As we climbed back up the hill, Grandpa took a last look. He didn’t say anything, but I know he saw twelve kids wearing Leafs and Blackhawks jerseys, some leaning on their sticks, some skating. He heard an echo of Judas off the pine trees.

  We pressed on down the winding road and came to the local coffee shop. It was a tired-looking, smoke-stained place with six tables and some old bar-room chairs. I felt like we had stepped into an ATCO trailer. But the people huddled inside were some of the warmest I had ever met. It was the kind of place where, as the door opened, everyone paused to see who was joining them. They smiled with anticipation.

  Today, they looked us over and I could tell everyone had the same question in their minds: Who are his people? I was a write-off on that front—I was clearly a “come from away.” But they got forensic with Grandpa. Eyes were squinting, searching for a telltale family feature: Big ears? A particular nose?

  I was looking through the room for a table to sit at and quickly get out of everyone’s line of sight when I noticed that Grandpa was scanning their faces too, on the hunt for familiarity. From a table near the back of the room just beside the men’s washroom came a holler. “MacLean!” It rang out with the excitement of a call of “Bingo!” Grandpa had been identified. Three old ladies at the table closest to us nodded in agreement. We had apparently been tagged and fit for release. We meandered our way to the back table and shook hands with one of Grandpa’s old acquaintances. He was a member of the Sumarah clan—a cousin, I think. The family still owned the general store, and the man told us they had dramatically increased their operations by moving into the business of smoking fish.

  These folks were tough. They stubbornly clung to this island, daring time to try to change their way of life. They lived by the ageless rhythm of the sea. We shared a cup of coffee with them and took our leave.

  Just as we rounded out the walk, we came upon the Notre-Dame de la Garde hospital, a four-storey solid brick building. It was a big rectangle with a cross on top and eight windows per side. It was well kept—newly painted and without a brick out of place. The hospital was the last stop for most people on the island.

  “If the sea doesn’t get ’em, most folks around here will meet their Maker right here,” said Grandpa.

  In a way, he had almost met his Maker here too.

  The Magdalen Islands were founded by ship
wrecked people. Close to its shores, there have been over one hundred wrecks. It is an island of castaways. Folks from the mainland washed up onto the beaches of the island, leaving their old lives beyond the Gulf of St. Lawrence behind. They had little choice but to make a go of it on that lifeboat of land. No one was coming to look for them. Time moved on, just as the families of those who washed up there.

  Ralph’s father’s name was Stanley MacLean. He was a carpenter, which on the Magdalen Islands meant a shipbuilder. He was a mean, violent man who belittled those around him, especially his children.

  Ralph remembers one day when he was eight, his father entered the living room and strutted up to the phonograph. He put on a two-step jig. He was in a foul mood. You could feel it.

  “Dance, boy,” he commanded.

  Ralph looked down; all he saw were two left feet. His mother had been too busy trying to put food on the table to take time to teach her second youngest son to dance. He just stood beside the couch with a bowed head.

  “I can’t. I got two left feet, Pa,” he whispered.

  Ralph was upset that he could not please his father. More than anything, he was afraid of what would happen next. He was right to be afraid.

  His father used his big boot to kick Ralph into the couch. His small frame hit the couch hard, bouncing him straight back onto the hardwood floor. Violence of this sort was unpredictable. Was it a brief flash of rage that would quickly retreat into its ugly old cave? That was rarely the case, but there was always hope.

  “Quit crying, boy,” Stanley threatened.

  Ralph knew more was to come if he didn’t stop. But he just couldn’t. He was eight and he was gasping. He lay on the wood floor, seeing two big boots right in front of his face, then one. The next kick propelled him to the doorway. When he landed, instinct took over. He tried to grasp the archway as he scrambled to gain his footing. That didn’t work. His father’s boot plowed into his lower back. He was licked. All he could do was close his eyes and curl up into a ball. It was his only hope. It took three more kicks for the storm to pass. The last kick sent him flailing right through the open patio door. Ralph lay in the mud of the backyard, bloodied and battered.