AT CERTAIN MOMENTS WITH HIS EYES LOOKING piercingly at you, Albert Raskin believed he could take on the world and you were just another person in the way. Whether that came from his mother or the Raskins themselves one wouldn’t know. And so a few months passed by.
Then one night when his stepfather was sitting up in the hospital bed and lifting a glass of water to his sad, tough but remarkably kind face, and his stepson was asking about shares and his percentage of the “hole on Good Friday,” Byron just smiled most tenderly and reached over to grab Albert’s hand with his large, coarse one.
“I am sorry to have ever hurt you,” he said. “Be good, be kind.”
He dropped stone dead. He was fifty-five—the last two years of his life had taken its toll.
He a Canadian military expert, who had known Stephenson, the man called Intrepid, had become expendable to everyone without knowing why. His wife was a bit shattered over it. That is, even at the end she did not believe he would actually die.
Byron was buried in the little cemetery in Saint Peter and Paul, at the back, near the fence. He never wanted a marker. Chester and Dexter were there, deeply moved. Both had tears running down their faces.
Right at the graveyard Carmel went at them, calling them cheapskates, asking them for assurances, and tried to grab Dexter’s arm.
Then she strode away, still speaking loudly, her arms folded as she walked into the sun with young Albert walking behind her.
It was a cold day. They went back to the house with the library his stepfather had built over the years, with the hothouse, the gazebo, the den with the fireplace, the huge downstairs apartment where Albert himself lived.
When he went to the room above the tavern that Byron had kept, he saw an enormous amount of books, old suits and workboots, a pocket chess set, three bottles of beer and a bottle of gin—and a rosary. He held the rosary for a moment, looking at it. It felt very strange in his hand. It was years since he had held one. There was a small statuette of the Madonna on the desk by the bed. It was years since he had seen one. He picked it up, and looked at it.
“He was a good Catholic,” the man said.
“ I think he was a hypocrite.”
“Yes, but aren’t we all.” The man said, quietly busying himself, “Aren’t those who see us pray, and call us hypocrites, worse hypocrites themselves?” Then he asked, “But do you know why he rarely went to church?”
“Why, he didn’t go—No. Why?”
“Because the priests have become affected by the age, pretentious social workers, and no longer follow the faith—and he derided what they had become. They were frightened to stand for Christ but using what Christ taught to anoint themselves. They had all become critics of the world instead of defenders of the faith. And they will go on being that way, and become more and more like the society they preach to.”
“I can’t believe that”
“Your father said most of the priests—and it would surprise you—are far closer philosophically to your professors. You see, I too was once a priest; your mother, though, disapproved of me. She is my younger sister. The priests have lost their way. So I left what has become lost, and I drink too much.”
Albert was upset for two reasons—first, that anyone would consider him to be close to a priest philosophically (he had discovered he was not supposed to be); secondly, this man said he was his mother’s brother, his uncle.
Now he was alone, and he had to try and protect his mother. He would protect her to the end—for in his life was her, and in her was his life.
“He treated my mother shabbily.”
“Yes. He knew he did. That is why he left her with well over a million dollars or more and moved here. And do you know, she is telling everyone she was his wife, and holds his memory and his papers, and is now his great champion.”
“My mother doesn’t have a brother.”
“Oh yes she does. The boy who carried her on his shoulders to school—the little girl who was frightened of bears.”
But then Albert took the expensive watch that was sitting on a chair, handed it to the man. “You can have this,” he said quietly. “I don’t want it.”
Albert left and thought: My mother’s brother—what is he doing there?
He went home with the other remnants of his stepfather’s life.
It became apparent that his stepfather was not at all forgotten, but something of a renowned person. It was amazing what they had not known about him.
His mother then felt she must do some interviews about him. Albert assisted her in this, and they were both interviewed for the paper.
She spoke of their life together very differently now, and as if she understood him perfectly. It startled Albert, and yet he followed her lead.
Her husband had left the mine at her insistence. Her husband had worked hard to convince his uncles of the effects their mine had on generations of people.
That night sitting in the greenhouse, near the white orchids his stepfather had grown, Albert remembered what his stepfather said, but he himself had never thought of sin. Still, he went to talk to Dykes about it, and the young woman Dykes had at the party.
To them, just as it was to him and most of the people he knew, it was relative and there was no real sin at all. In fact as far as Dykes was concerned there was only class struggle. Rid the world of a class struggle and the world would correct itself.
The girl laughed at Albert, in the whimsical way young women have who know so much more than you.
“Ha,” she said, looking around the room, as if the question was, like marriage and family, outdated. So Albert became embarrassed and flustered.
Dykes asked him if he was serious. And lectured him about his uncles once again.
“Yes,” Albert said, “I know too much about my uncles.”
Dykes himself had come from a well-to-do family in Indiana who made auto parts; he often wore a diamond ring, and gold cufflinks. But Dykes told him there was only class struggle and religion held its part in the oppression. Then Dykes asked him again if he was serious:
“In this day and age?”
So he left, embarrassed by his even broaching the question.
The thing to hate, at least for Dykes, was the Catholic church. So many Americans who taught here hated it, in a sustained, very middle-class Protestant way. After two years with Dykes, Albert mocked and hated it as well.
The best way to hate it was to imagine nothing sacred about it, and laugh at its inanity. So Albert learned it was very beneficial to go along with this, and no harm would come by being irreverent and throwing up one’s hands as if to slough it all off.
Albert knew one of the Raskins had been a priest and had lived with the Natives, worked healing and bandaging wounds, poled doctors though the water to places so women could be aided in giving birth. He was an elder cousin of the two elderly uncles. His mother once told him that one of the Goyas had been as well—some said a martyr for the faith who had died during the Great Fire of 1825 trying to rescue children. He was also known as a healer.
But when they talked of changing the world in Dykes’s little circle, Albert was silent about these brave men, and was too intimidated by Dykes’s genius to mention them. And so no one would ever be told of these things.
He told Dykes one night that he was his intellectual father, and he promised him he would faithfully work for revolution. Some kind of revolution that would befit the place they lived in.
“Whatever it takes,” Dykes said, wearing his khaki jacket and his khaki pants, and his Hush Puppies with the black heels, and wearing a tie and a black armband in protest.
“Of course,” Albert answered, wearing the almost identical clothes of his master, that never quite fit his rotund frame. That is why he had once tried to hire a prostitute when he was young.
But then with his mother’s interviews it became noticeable that Byron was looked upon much differently now he was gone. For some reason over the next months he heard stories of Byron and articles were written on him in the Globe and Mail and Washington Post. People who had dismissed him when he was alive said they had known him—he had spoken to them—he had confided in them.
So suddenly almost as if by osmosis he and his mother both assumed the traits of bereavement and family ties. It was not false, for they had not known the man they lived with, or didn’t live with, until others began to tell them who he was.
Yes, he was suffering from shell shock and was a real hero. That he had held off a German advance in the hills of Italy, and rushed a tank single-handed.
Albert and his mom had never been aware of this, and were stunned by this sudden historical shift. So they shifted toward it, for they could not help it, and therefore became the spokespersons for his legacy. They held a benefit in his honour and with the help of Chester and Dexter created the Byron Raskin Memorial Scholarship at the university with a two-hundred-thousand-dollar largesse. Albert himself received commendations on his stepfather’s behalf that came from the Minister of Defense and the Office of the Governor General.
They also spent money on Albert’s elocution lessons to overcome his slight stutter. Because of this, he rarely stuttered anymore.
His voice was far more polished, and after a year and a half, he seemed cured of his youthful affliction. He was also quite surprised that Dykes, who wore a black armband in protest against the system, wanted some money from him, and asked for what he couldn’t give and would appear at Carmel’s house, walking now with a cane, and smiling benignly with new false teeth, as he complimented her on her universal mind, and speaking of all his years as a radical professor of physics.
But it wasn’t his obvious and fidgeting way that upset the woman. She could fend him off easily.
It was a man Albert had forgotten about—a man named Shane Stroud.
Then a few years passed, where Albert’s name was hardly mentioned on our river. The town council named Byron person of the decade. And Carmel was given a certificate in September. There is a picture of her, holding the citation and smiling with the mayor and members of the town council.
But then there was a notice in the paper that while in the States Albert had sided with the radical Weather Underground, and had spoken to them about the best way to create a new society, and had read a statement by Dykes to a group in Chicago.
There was another picture of him, more self possessed—a man certain that revolution had to have at least some kind of trust fund. Besides, there was a rumour that he had met people like Jesse Jackson at a rally, and spoke of the evolution of the working man. All of this while he took polo lessons in Virginia.
This seemed so esoteric for us, here at home in this backwater, that he had created something of a romanticized myth among some students. Many did not know who the Weather Underground was, or really care, but seemed very proud of him nonetheless.
“He is a new hero,” one of the students wrote in the university paper.
Still, Mr. Bell among others read this with anticipation and alarm.
Albert came back on a cold night in November when it was snowing. The ground was hushed, the last of the feeble leaves had fallen down, and wind blew against him as he walked along the road. Hardly anyone knew who he was. He had changed—he looked older. But he was thin and his appeal had sharpened. His hair still was long and much straighter now. He still presented you with an aristocratic glance, as if to say you didn’t really matter. Or that you mattered only in relation to himself. Dykes had instilled this in him as much as anyone, and he still carried all the remnants of those tired lessons of late-sixties revolution in his heart. To change the world, but more so to be noticed doing it.
He was hurrying toward the great cottage on the bay, with the old key to the side door in his pocket. His boots were high, almost to his knees, and tied at the top.
It was a very last-moment decision to come back. He had been offered a job elsewhere, and he would have been well off. It was a job as a mental health counsellor, dealing with wayward kids, the kind of a job he had once coveted.
But like so many of us who believe we are our own masters, something compelled him to come home, and at a moment of indecision he turned eastward in the night. He prided himself on his looks now. After two years away he was thinner, and stronger. Gone were the pudgy hands and the supposed indecision. Gone was his worry about Annie Howl running naked away from him. All that must be in the past.
He should have taken that other job. For there is probably so much that would never have happened if he had.
Oscar Peterson had read his son Torrent’s tarot that same day. He had quickly panicked and put the cards away. That man who he had read to when he was fourteen had come back, in the dark and sleet on a cold night. He was much different, in that he was now an adult—a Raskin—and somehow he was dangerous to everyone.
“What is it,” Torrent said.
“It is the night of the wedding,” Oscar said. “It has come back, all of it along the road.”
His readings were most often taken as a joke. But what he divined in the cards was that everything in his son Torrent’s world would be terribly altered by a wealthy man walking along a road seeking shelter in the night.
Torrent’s mother had helped serve the night of Ben Mott’s wedding. She was a young unmarried woman named Mary Lou Toomey, pregnant with Torrent at the time. Ben Mott’s bride was that night pregnant as well, with a girl who would be known as Eva Mott.
That was long ago, and an entire age had passed, so everyone could believe things were much different now. Those young wild boys, Shane and Mel Stroud, were grown men, and besides no one thought much about them anymore.