Remembrance Read Free Page A

that surrounded them. Things did not go well under such circumstances.
    For a year and a half he worked with his father cutting pit timbers for the nearby mine. Sometimes he slept at his in-laws’ house and sometimes at his father’s. His daughters enjoyed the attention lavished upon them by their young aunts, who were constantly arranging their hair, experimenting with lipstick and nail polish, or admiring the dress styles of the models in the Eaton’s catalogue. They showed no interest in their other, glum grandfather and relatively little in him.
    The young David MacDonald, however, was different. He burst into smiles whenever he saw him and tried to follow him everywhere. Sometimes when he visited his in-laws, he could see the child waiting at the window as if he had been anticipating him for a long time.
    One winter evening he left the house of his in-laws to take his father’s horses back to their home barn. It was cold and the horses snorted and tossed their heads impatiently as they cantered along the snow-covered road. After they reached the barn, he took his time unharnessing the horses and putting hay in their mangers. As he was leaving the stable, he became aware of movement beneath the horse robes in the back of the sleigh. He discovered the child, who extended his arms so he could be lifted from the sleigh. He wore only a light shirt and trousers and was blue with the cold. There was frost on his eyelashes and his cheeks were chilled by frozen tears. He threw his icy arms around his discoverer’s neck and pressed his cold cheek against neglected whiskers.
    That night when they were preparing for bed, he noticed that the child wore no underwear and was still shivering. He draped one of his flannel shirts upon the child’s small frame and inserted the slender arms into the shirt’s sleeves. The shirt hung down beneath the boy’s knees like the smock of an ancient monk. Later he wakened to the embrace of small arms around his neck and the pulsing body heat that emanated through the flannel and seemed to fuse their bodies closer together.
    It went on for another year. The mine was in trouble and the market for pit timbers declined. Sometimes he and his father cut fence posts for the bigger farm owners, but there was little predictable income in that. He did not wish to stay with his wife’s family, nor she under the scrutiny of his father. At one time they had planned to start a house oftheir own, but their limited enthusiasm for such a venture had now completely dissipated.
    Many of the younger veterans with whom he marched in the Legion parades began to drift off to southern Ontario, to the car plants in Windsor, to Polymer in Sarnia, to Massey Ferguson in Brantford, to Continental Can in Toronto. One day his wife announced that she was going to Montreal to work for a while in a garment factory. Her aunts had found her a job. She would send some money to help support the children.
    The children seemed mainly unaffected by her absence. The girls continued to dress up and explore new hairstyles with their young aunts while David MacDonald spent more and more time with the older men he seemed to have chosen. He began to imitate the manner of their walking and their speech patterns, including their comments on the weather. As his sisters seemed destined to be forever young, so he seemed to be headed in the opposite direction and to willingly embrace an advanced maturity far beyond the years of his chronological age.
    It was a late November evening that he came breathlessly to their door. He had taken a shortcut through the woods and across the swamp, which was now frozen because of the season. He wore no jacket but only a thin, faded plaid shirt.
    “They’ve come to get me,” he said as if he were announcing the arrival of abducting aliens.
    “Who?” said David MacDonald.
    “My mom,” he said, “and a man who is with her. They want to take us all to Montreal.”
    “Well, we’ll have to talk about