The Unlikely Redemption of John Alexander MacNeil by Lesley Choyce

Author:Lesley Choyce
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fernwood Publishing
Published: 2017-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

EIGHTEEN

ON THE MORNING OF the first light snow, I discovered that a wild animal — a weasel or a fox perhaps — had killed and eaten one of the hens. It was a disturbing sight even though I’d certainly seen plenty of dead animals before. I felt what I always felt: the unfairness of it all. The other hens as well as Pierre Trudeau seemed unaffected by the tragedy and pecked at their corn as usual. I surveyed the barn and realized there were dozens of places an animal could get in here. Would the others die in the nights to come? I decided not to tell Emily. She was getting moody. Bad news, even something heard on the radio about a man falling from the Seal Island Bridge or a car accident in Ingonish, seemed to upset her.

I had gotten into the habit of putting Father Welenga’s wooden spider in my shirt pocket when I awoke each morning. I took it out now and perched it on an old square-headed rusty nail that protruded from the wall. Perhaps it would protect the chickens. If I felt the need for it, I would know where to find it. I gathered eight eggs into a plastic pail and returned to the house.

It was only a dusting of snow, but the air was so different and the sky was brooding. As I was walking across the yard to the barn, I returned all too vividly to a school day from my past. When I say this, I do not mean I remembered it. I mean I was there.

Something terrible had happened at home. I was maybe nine years old. My father was yelling at my brother and I kept saying, “It wasn’t his fault!” I don’t know what had triggered my father’s tantrum, but it could have been anything or nothing at all. I remember being hit hard on the side of the head with his hand. I fell to the floor and my ear was ringing. I realized I could not hear out of it. The hearing did not return until later that day. I didn’t cry. I was so used to this. It seemed so familiar and at that point in my life I think I still believed that this was the way all fathers treated their sons.

And I never considered the fact that when my father got angry — even if he got angry with Lauchie — he ended up hitting me, not him.

But then that was all part of why my brother was called Lucky.

As I walked from the barn to my back door, I had travelled back there and then to that rutted laneway of my troubled past, walking to school. I was deaf in one ear except for the continual ringing that would not go away. My clothes were ragged, although they were freshly washed by my mother, who always made sure we were clean. My shoes let in the cold and the light dusting of snow on the hard ground reminded me there were colder, harder days ahead.

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