I HAD BEEN HIRED TO PAINT THE RASKINS’ PORTRAIT, to paint their brother’s (Albert’s grandfather’s) portrait, from a photograph, to paint their dog Snub, and their trucks, to do a mural along the wall of a backhoe and grader. It seemed to be a retardant against the insults now occurring against them.
So I was busy doing so in the heat of one summer, through the long evenings of sweet July and into August, when in that summer it rarely rained, and the asbestos was ripped and blown from the pit beyond me.
There was also a bust of both of them, and a statue that the board of commerce commissioned me to do. So I overheard them speak, in the office and when they stood for me. They stood bickering as I painted them, and often I did not know who was who. I would say Dexter when I meant Chester or Chester when I meant Dexter. Then they had an old gardener and handyman named Lester, who looked like they did. I was more puzzled than anything else at those voices as they stood in their ancient and heavy military uniforms from World War I. I could hear them whispering back and forth; they were talking about their nephew in unpleasant ways, not meaning to perhaps but like old men at times unable to stop.
“Gentlemen,” I’d say, “I just want you to keep your faces straight for a second—look this way—thanks.”
Their faces would turn toward me as I dabbed a touch of brown, a darker shade for the collar of the uniform, a moulted white for the chins and diminishing hairline, all expressing in their physiognomy a fury against the world that age and science had betrayed them. They would look almost chagrined that I had heard something of the unpleasant family squabble as they turned back toward me. As if thinking:
“You were talking!”
“No, you was.”
“No, you!”
It was strange that I, hardly religious, thought this, but the church would never have betrayed them as the science they relied upon had. Now clad in uniforms of battle that existed on a pitch of earth well over a half-century before, they called out to me sheepishly:
“Would you like a drink of tea or sumpin?”
“Maybe some Kool-Aid—we made grape Kool-Aid—would you like that?”
They asked me if I knew Albert. I told them I had seen him now and again. They asked me what I thought of him. I said I didn’t know him that well.
They asked me if I thought he was cracked. “You think he’s cracked?”
“Pardon?”
“Our Albert—is he cracked?”
“I’m not sure,” I said.
They looked at each other and nodded. “We both think he’s cracked.” They said he was for something called “bortions.” They wrote him a letter: “We are not completely sure what abortions are, but we are both against them.”
After this, as I mentioned, Albert within a few years became a professor.
“Albert Raskin—newly appointed. ‘I will help put an end to the mayhem’ says new professor of sociology. The Raskin name is familiar—his devotion to equality is not.”
So then everything had been prepared for him, and he didn’t even know why.
This was about the time Shane was put in jail, for an incident that will be explained later.
I met Albert a few times in the summer after he became associated with the university. He played bridge with a group, and belonged to a shuffleboard club.
At this time he was very interested in the pistol his stepfather had owned, the one his stepfather had put to his head that night, and wondered if anyone here had ever heard of it. His father had traded it for the salmon pool, and Albert wanted, if he could, to buy it back. It was an heirloom, and he wanted it in his family.
Over that particular summer Mel Stroud had become aware of how much money that pistol was worth and had gone to him one night, saying he could find it for him, for a price.
Dykes and his other soldiers (as he called them now) were very interested in Albert’s inheritance too, for it was their one chance to take some of this money for their campaign against money.
They all swam around him, this handsome, articulate young man, who no longer stuttered.
One night Albert was sitting in the dark of the hospital, with his hat in his hand, because his mother had been taken there. He wore a pair of soft white shoes, and white slacks, with a white sweater.
People said his mom was acting bizarre, threatening suicide or to go on vacation—he didn’t know which, and he had taken her there as a precaution.
That was the first night I ever met him. He looked up at me extremely worried, and his expression was peculiar. He had seemed to mistake me for having an answer to his problems as he watched me come into the main entrance. Later I realized he thought I was the Nova Scotian poet because we looked similar. He blinked and nodded, as if I had something to tell him, coming toward him from the late twilight. Then recognizing me he asked me if I might paint his picture.
So I did so.
His ancient ancestors had made it to the shores of Bouctouche and lived there in the woods. They became a family no longer set apart, the wife and mistress, the three sons, and a daughter all together. After the Reign of Terror two of the family members went back to France, served in Napoleon’s army. The mistress died in childbirth in Bay du Vin, the wife remained alive, and the son, the youngest boy, married a Hache woman here in 1812 and moved with her to the land of lumber and fish, the Miramichi.
There was a painting of him, this child, in a house in Eastern Quebec, that Albert had never seen, but which showed the same chin and almost offended eyes. It was a painting situated at the end of a hallway when one turned a corner to go along the west side of the old stone house—one looked straight ahead and it was there above an end table that was covered in a white cloth. The long hair, the jaunty blue tasselled cap, made one think of a young girl, but the masculine eyes looked out at you from a white, boyish face that was not facing the viewer but looking toward some imaginary incident that may have never taken place.
How the picture that I did not know of until recently ended up in Quebec I can only surmise. They had dealings in Montreal and in Quebec City, so perhaps that was why.
“Did you know of a girl named Annie Howl?” he asked me.
At that time, though it seems strange now, I hadn’t. “I don’t think so,” I said. “Is she a girl you want to help?”
“In a way,” he said, and his voice drifted off as he spoke. Then he said, “Do you know anything about fuses?”
“A bit.”
“I know nothing about fuses at all,” he confessed. “They went out the other night and I think my mom thought we were being attacked. I have no idea about fuses.” Then he added, “I don’t know—but I think my mom has gone crazy.”
Why I don’t know, but I felt sorry for him.
I think at that moment, with his warm smile, he could have gone back and started over. He might have gone to Darren Howl and spoken the truth that he had hidden so many years. He might even have told the many parasites now surrounding him, like Dykes and his revolutionary friends, to go fuck themselves.