River of the Brokenhearted (2 page)

“Because of their enmity you will be left alone.
They will cast you out and forsake you.”

The Seven Storey Mountain
, Thomas Merton

PROLOGUE

The graves of the Drukens and the McLearys are spread across the Miramichi River valley. If you go there you might find them—“run across them” is not the exact phrase one might want to use for graves—in certain villages and towns. I don’t think we have hamlets here, but if we do, then in certain hamlets as well.

What is revealing about these graves is their scarcity. The scant way they are impressed upon the soil, dispersed here and there about the river. A river that stretches 250 miles from the heart of our province, a river of lumbering and fish and of forests running tangled to the water’s edge. Our ancestors came and founded communities, and over time abandoned them for the greater lumbering towns of Newcastle and Chatham, so that only graves are left. One might go years without stumbling upon one, and when one finally does, an immediate reaction might be to say: “Why in Christ is old Lucy Druken buried way out here?”

I suppose some of the brightest of my relatives have lain forgotten for decades in the woods, forgotten even by their own descendants, in fields that have become orchards or mushroomed into forests again, the descendants having moved on, first to the towns and then west to the cities of Montreal or Toronto, or south to the great and frantic United States. The graves’ occupants unremembered. Yet in what love and sorrow might they have been placed?

Two hundred years have passed to find what is left of us still here. Last October I came back from the train station in the debilitating gloom of a rain-soaked autumn day. He had demanded the key that morning, when I said I was leaving.

He spoke to me in his slightly limey way—being the only memory he ever retained of his father, and so the thing he held onto, come hell or high water, for a memory gone over sixty years. A limey with a Miramichi brogue.

“Yes—well, then—you can just give me the key, can you not—leave it here” His hand shook as he pointed to the table. “And we will think no more of it; I will not even call you a traitor—just remember I could not leave people in the lurch—as much as I wanted to—if they were lurching I’d stay!” he said turning away at that moment.

I found it hanging upon a string outside the winter door, waiting. I came into our small house, with the broken mirror in the foyer, to find him sitting in his straight-backed chair in the absolute middle of the small den, equidistant from the memorabilia of both British and Irish roots—the cross of Saint George and a broken Irish bagpipe, staring out at me in perplexity, his hair now thin against his fine head, his tie done up very properly, hankie in his breast pocket, dark high socks and well-polished shoes on his feet. Each shoe tied with a small bowed lace, which never really did anything but make my heart go out to him—especially when I realized it took upward of fifteen minutes to get each shoe on. He was drinking some mixture of aftershave and vermouth—a pleasant enough concoction, he said, to starve off his “dearth” of gin gimlet he might on occasion—at two in the morning, or five in the afternoon—go searching for. I told him I did not have anything on me—no Scotch or rum.

“Do you know,” he said to me, “you are absolutely right, my lad. I have been thinking of giving it all up.”

“What up?” I say, turning away so he will not see the gin I have tucked in my tweed jacket.

“This place—this house—sell it and go away! Is that a gin cap I spy—”

“Where?” I say, looking about the room. Trying to make no sudden moves, I pick up a cushion and hold it against my pocket.

“That cap?” He clears his throat.

“What cap?”

“Why, my son, the cap on the gin bottle—you have glided a cushion over it.”

“Glided a cushion?”

“Is it glided—I’m not sure—?”

His fingers tremble just slightly. He is looking around for something—a cigarette, I suppose.

I take the gin out, hold it before me like a newborn infant.

“Yes—there it is—you are a saviour—I always knew you were—and foolish me in the process of changing my will—wondering who to leave all of this to”—he waved his hand abstractly. “You just went out to get me some gin—”

I go into the kitchen, get the glasses and pour out our libation.

“Gin’s the drink,” he says, smacking his lips and looking at the two glasses to see if they are perfectly symmetrical. He takes his, shakes just a bit getting it to his lip and, confident his immediate plight is over, downs it in a draught.

“You found the key all right?” he says.

“Absolutely.”

I came back once to find 223 newborn baby chickens in the house. I believe it occurred when he upset a crate of chicks somewhere in his travels. He was imprinted on them and they followed him home. He came in the house, the front door left ajar, picked up the letter opener to open his increasingly oppressive pile of bills, and saw 223 little yellow chicks staring at him. He opened the door and told them to go. They did not. He then tried to hide them in the dresser drawers, and keep this from me when I came in.

“Do not say one damn thing about what you see in this house,” he said.

I found them walking the halls, sitting on his lap, as he pretended not to notice. In fact, he remained until I bundled them up and took them away, ruefully dismissive of us all.

“I will not go,” I say to him after our gin.

“And why not?” he asks. “Why won’t you go wherever it is you are wanting to—go?”

“Because you’re my father and someone needs to stay with you.”

“Oh—well then—I see—very noble of you—Wendell my boy. Let’s drink to nobility.”

I guess I can drink to that as much as anyone.

My father Miles King told me that some are damned by blood, by treason, by chance or circumstance, some even by the stars themselves, or as Shakespeare, denying that, said, by ourselves. This in a way is a journey back in time to see how I was damned.

My name is Wendell King, and I have looked for these forgotten places, and found them in their quietude and hope, and have gone to the archives, reading old tracts, deeds, family history, searching out what I can, to try to dislodge the secrets that have plagued my father’s life.

PART I

ONE

The McLeary family arrived in 1847. They left Ireland crammed into a ship’s steerage with those like themselves, unseafaring and sick. The ship foundered in an autumn gale off Sheldrake Island, at the mouth of the Bartibog River, which flows into our great Miramichi. Having no help, they lived quietly in a cave near the bay.

“Well, it’s a better cave than you’d ever find in Ireland,” old Isaac McLeary would say.

From dawn till dark the children saw only trees, and the snow fell without much regard for them. Most of the children went into a stupor; then the “gales did come,” as was written by Isaac, so he could no longer tell land from sky. He wondered what he might do to save his family, but there was very little he could do. He had no money for return passage, and no idea how to keep his children alive in a country where he had nothing to plant, and the very bay was frozen. He kept going out to look at it, and then sent his youngest to walk on it.

“By God—he’s walking on water. Saint or not, I do not know—I only know that there he is, Little Hemseley, wandering about on a bay.”

Five were lost. Their graves have been found by me, in an alder valley, forgotten under mouldy stone. I have read the transcript, at the back of the Bible that my father possessed: “I found them laying with their backs to trees only a few yards from each other. Three of my sons are gone. My oldest girl Colleen was dead holding her rosary. I find little Hemseley in a small shelter. He’s gone to heaven yesterday. Isaac—January 25, 1848.”

Unfortunately the old man did not know there was a church and a school and houses and stores a few miles away. And when he did find out he did not tell the others, because he was mortified by his lack of resolve in finding this out before half his family was dead.

With spring, what was left of the McLearys moved from the cave to the town of Newcastle, at the time a great lumbering and ship-building port in the north of our province. They lived in a small brick house notable for its lack of windows and its chimney leaning like the Tower of Pisa.

“It’s not much better than the cave, but at least it’s in a community where everyone helps everyone, and none are left to flounder in the cold,” Isaac was reported to have told his children. Except that was wishful thinking by a man who never had the wherewithal to support himself. Soon very few helped them, and they became wards of the church, constantly at the point of beggary for almost twenty years.

Then, one cold autumn morning in 1868, old McLeary saw the very Irish family he had run from, all walking up the muddy street of Irishtown with trunks and suitcases, swords and guns. The Drukens had arrived. A strange name and a strange family. They were a wild lot, unfettered even by what was considered colonial civilization. The four Druken children were as tough as whalebone and went off to wars as youngsters go off to play baseball.

They settled as near to the McLearys as they ever were in Ireland. It made poor old Isaac’s gamble of taking his family across the storm-boggled sea to escape the horde almost pointless. For once again, by sheer accident it seemed, they were all crowded together on the farthest back street of town.

There they were all cozy again, in two incredible small houses, in a back lane farther from the centre of the universe than they had ever been, so creating their own, a universe of blistered snow and dirt, rebellious sin, and a dozen childhood diseases that erupted each spring from the mud, an inferno where insults were drivelled toward each other and battles of hellish nature erupted on the street. Both families came with old men and children to escape the kind of poverty known to characters in Dickens—but poverty not as fanciful. Both were Catholic, both hated the British with a dying hatred, and yet hated each other even more, the hatred of subjugated people propelled by subjugation. Both believed the other had betrayed them in a former time to British intrigue, in bogs and lands where death blows were dealt to children and women as right justice by those who nosed snuff and wore wigs.

They carried such hatred for each other that in Ireland they never wiped their blades of blood. Blood over someone snitching because both their families, and ten other families as well, lost boys to a British hangman in 1791, crowded in an Irish dungeon, chained together with one slop pail. Brought out, blinded and blindfolded, and dragged to the gallows, without pomp and ceremony. The other families had been killed off. Only these two remained.

The feud started on the day a Druken man was to marry a McLeary woman. Someone from their party threw a stone at a passing British horse, which threw a cavalry officer, reported to have been related to Lord Churchill himself. One of the wedding party snitched on the rest to save his life, and the British marched into the church to find them hiding. And from this report vague and unsubstantiated over many years, because the matter was incidental on the larger scale, no trial of any sort was held.

So who was the snitch, McLeary or Druken?

Both families, never forgetting their children on the gallows, carried this holy war against each other, a war of attrition, war of words and staffs and peevies, all the way from Ireland into each other’s little houses and sheds in Newcastle, New Brunswick, a full century later. In 1875, a swaggering Protestant constable weary of their squabble told them their fight was over lives long dead and history past:

“History never passes, it forms,” one of the Drukens said, putting his arm about one of the McLearys—whom he would protect to the death his right to kill. “So, my man, we’re just getting started. And do not think we come from a nation without poets and gifts.”

But the McLearys produced few men, and the Drukens’ were more favoured by ruthlessness. The little solitary family who lived between them, by the name of Winch, sided with first one and then the other, seeing fine advantage in doing so.

By the turn of the century only Jimmy McLeary, the grandson of the first McLeary to step off the boat, was left to wage war. The remnant of a proud family gone, Jimmy was alone; his brother had disappeared, under mysterious circumstances. His oldest daughter, Agatha, had died. Only his daughter Hanna Jane was with him.

Alone Jimmy could not fight back, though he had his young daughter play tunes on the fiddle to gather courage, and would go out to meet the Drukens on the street. Paddy Druken was known to have cuffed him good as he called them forward to meet their doom; little Hanna Jane herself was taken to court once for setting booby traps near the well.

There was a squabble over the well because each family was sure the other had stolen gold from Ireland and hidden it there. A ludicrous assumption, but enough brainless among them to search. Paddy Druken, half mad with rotted teeth, guarded the well on pain of McLeary death—and the McLearys, in the hottest month of the year, squeaking for drink, had to sneak to the well to get their water. So little Hanna Jane beguiled them all by jawing a bear trap and placing it near where Paddy was known to sit. It did not catch his arse but a pad he was wont to sit upon.

“A booby trap that might cause a leg to break in half,” the magistrate said. “How does a girl of six make such a booby trap?”

“With much patience, sir,” Hanna Jane was reported to have answered.

“Whose well do you think it is, little Hanna Jane?” The magistrate asked.

“Whoever family is bold enough to lose a life there—it will be theirs by the grace of God.” Hanna Jane scratched her nose. She wore her big straw hat and long dress, and carried a purse like a little lady.

She left school, this Hanna Jane McLeary, and went to work. At twelve years of age, she went to Fredericton, that city of stately elms and small minds, so she could find work at the houses of the genteel descendants of our good Loyalist stock. But she came home when her father took ill with gout and drink.

By 1915, Jimmy could not go without drink, and all fight was gone from him.

This was Hanna Jane’s worst period, so bad that in 1918 she became briefly engaged to the young luckless Bobby Doyle, a cousin of the Drukens’ from time gone by. Yet Jimmy’s daughter had strength to care for him and found work playing her fiddle at local dances, travelling in winter by horse and cart, her fiddle in an old bait box she carried under her arm, and Bobby Doyle waiting in the snow for her money so he could drink.

“In those days,” an old man once told me, “playing for our boys from the woods, or fishermen in from the bay with their sunburned necks, she was a wild thing with her hair down—and there was no one made fresh with her if she didn’t want. But she could not continue with poor Bobby Doyle and be her own, so she left him that April, and gave back the friendship ring he had given her.”

I am the happier. For this Hanna Jane McLeary, this daring rebel girl, this sweet lost light of Bobby Doyle’s eye, became my grandmother, became in all her dancing tragic scope one of our great Maritime women, though she never wanted greatness—no, thrust upon her.