Why Men Lie (3 page)

He was surprised. “I would have thought Cape Breton was an ideal place for fieldwork, research.”

“I kick myself all the time,” she said, “especially now that I realize what was there and what I was missing. But no, I let it all slide. True tradition bearers are now few and far between. Unless you count the graveyards.”

“Early seventies,” he said. “I seem to recall something. Someone died. I remember Sextus talking about it.”

“That would have been my father,” she said, nodding. “He died around then.”

“So that would have been your last trip for quite a while.”

“Actually, I didn’t even go home for that.”

“Ahhh,” he said. He was tracing circles on the tablecloth with the salt shaker. “We forget how travel was in those days. It was a big trip then.”

“Yes,” she said. “A very big trip.”

He asked about the possibility of meeting up again on Friday evening. Drinks, maybe dinner. Talk some more?

“Give me a call,” she said. “When you know your sched.”

“The sched is pretty simple these days,” he said. “I’m in editing.”

“Something interesting?”

“Not really,” he said. “A lot of hoohoraw about Y2K and the end of Western society as we know it. The millennium bug, wiping out computers everywhere at midnight, December 31, 1999. Mark the date.”

“No great loss.”

“I agree,” he said. “A hundred percent.”

They left in separate cabs. He held the door of hers for just a moment. “Our Easter dinner,” he said. “I can’t remember anything as … memorable.” He blushed.

She smiled. “Memorable?”

“I’ll try to think of a better word. How about Friday? It’ll be my homework. I’ll hand it in at dinner, poetry perhaps. I expect your standards are high. Regarding poetry.”

“Merciless,” she said.

He kissed her quickly on the forehead before she ducked into the back seat. And he stood there as the taxi drove away.

Only once had Sextus’s name come up during the time they spent together after JC’s visit on Good Friday. JC wanted to know how long she and Sextus had known each other.

“Oh my God,” she said. “Forever.” And she’d looked away, vaguely irritated. “We were children.”

She changed the subject then, but later, as she stood alone in her kitchen, listening to the whisper of her kettle, the first time she met Sextus came back to her. It was a very precise memory.

She and her father were standing in the barren yard at home. A car stopped near their gate. A man and a boy emerged. The boy was nine or ten years old, about Duncan’s age. They walked toward the closed gate then stopped there. The man was heavy-set, with thinning hair. He stood, elbows resting on top of the gate, the boy beside him. Effie’s father walked slowly toward them as she trailed behind, uncertain. He took the same position, forearms resting. Effie studied the boy, who was staring at her, his steady hazel eyes unblinking
.

“Well, Angus,” said the man. “So this is you. Back at square one, back home on the Long Stretch.” He gestured widely with both arms, returned them to the top pole of the gate
.

“Luckier than some,” said Angus
.

“There’s that,” the man replied. He extracted a package of cigarettes slowly from an inside pocket, poked it open, presented one to Angus
.

Angus shook his head
.

The stranger took one for himself, flicked a lighter, squinted at the flame and smoke
.

“Sorry for your loss,” he said, exhaling. “I heard about the missus when it happened. Last year it was, I think. I was still in East Malartic. So I couldn’t even get in touch.”

Angus nodded. “The TB got her. The place was rotten with it. There was nothing anyone could do. And where are you now?”

“Stirling, near Loch Lomond.”

“What’s there?”

“Zinc. Base metals.”

“Right.”

“They’re hiring. I was wondering … you were an able man in the raise.”

Angus laughed, placed a hand on Effie’s head. The hand was heavy, seemed to grasp her skull for steadiness
.

“I’m kind of tied down just now,” he said. “Got all the raise work I can handle right here, raisin’ kids.”

“I suppose,” the stranger said
.

“I hear there’ll soon be lots of work right here. The new causeway to the mainland.”

“So they say. I’m planning to move home for that myself,” the man said. “Should be good for a few years’ work. We can do some catching up then.”

“You saw Sandy?”

“I did. He’s doing okay, considering. You know Sandy. Doesn’t say much anymore.”

Angus laughed. “And who’s the gentleman beside you?”

The man looked down
.

“Another Sandy. The son and heir. Alexander Sextus.”

“Sextus?” Angus said. “Quite the handle.”

Effie thought the boy looked bold. “What’s your name?” he asked
.

She looked away. “Effie MacAskill,” she said at last
.

“We’ll be seeing you,” the man said to her father. He dropped his half-smoked cigarette, stepped on it and turned away. The boy looked back and waved; no longer bold, he now seemed shy
.

“Who was that?” asked Duncan, who by then was sitting on the doorstep
.

“That’s Jack Gillis,” Angus said. Then, to Effie, “What’d he say that boy’s name was?”

“I don’t know, I couldn’t hear,” she said. “Something sex.”

Her father looked at her sharply, then laughed and walked away toward the barn
.

The Friday night dinner date was at a trendy fusion place, reputed to be terrifyingly expensive. It was cold for early April, but the air
was fresh with hints of spring. She’d read about the restaurant, but it was her first time there. The menu had no prices. “If you have to ask how much, you shouldn’t be here,” JC said. He seemed to know the menu and the staff.

A waiter appeared with a tray of small plates, each with a careful arrangement of bite-size foods in sauces, garnished with sprigs of green and red. With exaggerated flourishes, the waiter placed them at the centre of the table. Poured water. She watched JC eat, noted how he picked at food, more curious than hungry.

A slim, young Asian man who, Effie gathered, was the owner, appeared near the end of dinner to inquire about JC’s health. There were none of the usual formalities, whether they enjoyed the food, the service—satisfaction was a given. He and JC seemed to have a well-established friendship.

“Great guy,” JC commented later. And, as he prepared to pay the bill, a server appeared with a half-bottle of dessert wine that they just had to try. Compliments of Mr. Lee.

Before they left, she excused herself, went to the bathroom to inspect her makeup. She looked and felt clear-headed. She had cleverly avoided cocktails, stuck to wine. Now she felt that she was ready for whatever. But at her door he declined when she offered him a nightcap. He had a heavy day on Saturday, he said apologetically. But he wanted to see her again soon, to talk more about the summer and her plans.

The prospect of a summer holiday together had arisen over dinner in the context of a general discussion about weather. In the city you could sense the end of winter, the inevitability of summer. But summer came reluctantly and invariably late to the east coast. As a rule she stayed in Toronto until July, then she would fly to Halifax and rent a car. That year she said she thought
she’d enjoy driving out on her own, all the way. Hadn’t done that for a zillion years.

And that was when he told her it felt at least that long since he’d been back to Nova Scotia, the last time a visit in the sixties that he’d rather not remember, even now. He laughed, remembering. “You probably knew about the scandal?”

“Can’t say that I did.”

“Pretty tame by the standards of today. But I got someone, as we used to delicately put it, in trouble. I was starting out in university. She was from Cape Breton. We arrived at a kind of settlement, but it pretty well wiped me out financially.”

“I see,” she said. Waited through a long pause, then gambled: “So … you have a child.”

“I suppose I do,” he said.

“Boy or girl?”

“Girl,” he said. “In her mid-thirties by now. I lost touch a long time ago.”

“That’s a shame,” Effie said.

His frown tugged down the corners of his mouth. “Depends on how you look at it.”

“So where did she end up?”

“Last I heard she was in your neck of the woods. Around the Strait somewhere. The mother was from Isle Madame. Petit-de-Grat. You ever been there?”

“She’d be French.
Acadienne
.”

“
Oui
.”

“I’m not sure what to say.”

“It all worked out,” he said. “It launched me into journalism.”

She suppressed a laugh. “Really!”

“A long story, maybe for a long car drive.”

“I suspect you have a lot of stories.”

“A thousand and one,” he said.

His handling of chopsticks, she’d noted, was masterful.

“And I could share the wheel. Those drives are killers.”

“I wouldn’t be averse to company,” she said. “To share the driving. And, of course, the gas.”

“And the accommodations.”

“That too.”

Everything about him was so easy, she told herself, settling at home that night with a small nightcap and a book she had no intention of even opening. He had no reluctance to disclose, but neither had there been the compulsive revelation she had heard so often, the self-mythologizing that can happen in the early going. His life was rich, as far as she could tell from his brief references to distant places and events. But such details always seemed subordinate to his avid curiosity about her. The overall impression he gave her was that nothing in his life, no prior time or place or individual, was as central to his consciousness as this one, here, with her.

She would, in later years, remember one event that would define JC Campbell and mercifully contradict so much that she would later struggle not to know. They were on the subway. It was shortly after that first Easter. The car was crowded. They were standing, swaying with the motion of the train. She smelled smoke. A man seated close to them had lit a cigarette. The people on the train were instantly uneasy, moving away, as if he’d lit a fuse. JC smiled, leaned down, said softly, “Put it out.” The smoker just stared, cleared his throat as if to spit and turned away.

He was in the act of raising the cigarette to his lips again when JC caught his wrist, then squeezed the ember on the cigarette
between his naked thumb and forefinger. Then he broke the cigarette in two. Sparks fell to the man’s lap and he tried instantly to stand, but JC now had him firmly by the collar. Held him down. Leaned over, whispered something.

The train was slowing for a station stop. JC released him. The man stood and moved toward the door, muttering dark threats. JC said to Effie, “Wait for me at Broadview.” She said “No!” but JC and the stranger were already gone. As the train pulled away, she could see the man through the window, wild-faced, waving his arms while JC stood rock-still, hands jammed into the side pockets of his jacket.

“What happened?” she asked later.

“Nothing,” he replied.

“You frightened me.”

“Why? How?”

“What you did.”

“Sometimes you have to do what you have to do.”

It would be May before she’d have the confidence to talk about him, to share her feelings with another. May 31, to be exact, a Sunday. She called her brother, Duncan, and invited him to dinner.

“I might have news,” she said.

“News. It’s a perfect day for news. Good news, I presume?”

“I hope so,” she said. “What’s the day?”

“Pentecost,” he said. “It’s Pentecost Sunday.”

“Sorry, Father, I’ve been missing Mass lately.”

“You’re forgiven,” he said. “For your penance, a good act of contrition and three fingers of Balvenie for your confessor.”

“You’re on,” she said.

“So is it anyone I know?” Duncan asked. He was sitting on her sofa now, studying his drink with a pastoral expression on his face.