Like This: Stories

The A List

Launched to mark our forty-fifth anniversary, the A List is a series of handsome new editions of classic Anansi titles. Encompassing fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, this collection includes some of the finest books we’ve published. We feel that these are great reads, and the series is an excellent introduction to the world of Canadian literature. The redesigned A List books will feature new cover art by noted Canadian illustrators, and each edition begins with a new introduction by a notable writer. We can think of no better way to celebrate forty-­five years of great publishing than by bringing these books back into the spotlight. We hope you’ll agree.

Like This

Stories

Leo McKay Jr.

Copyright © 1995 Leo McKay Jr.

Introduction copyright © 2014 Lynn Coady

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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First published in 1995 by House of Anansi Press Ltd.

This edition published in 2014 by

House of Anansi Press Inc.

110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801

Toronto, ON, M5V 2K4

Tel. 416-363-4343

Fax 416-363-1017

www.houseofanansi.com

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

McKay, Leo, Jr., 1964–, author

          Like this : stories / Leo McKay Jr.

First published: Concord, Ont. : Anansi, 1995.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-77089-833-2 (pbk.)—ISBN 978-1-77089-849-3 (html)

          I. Title.

PS8575.K28747L54 2014            C813’.54   C2014-902692-7

                                                                                  C2014-902693-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014938678

Cover design: Brian Morgan Cover illustration: Michael Cho

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

Introduction by Lynn Coady

Like This begins, appropriately enough, with a story about how adulthood begins. Meaning it’s also a story about when childhood stops. On the surface, it’s about three children who go off and play, but underneath, the story it tells is utterly primal, universal: the story of us all. There is the heat of high summer, a swollen river, a distracted and irritated mother shooing the youngsters out from her protective skirts and into the patiently waiting wilderness. Then there is the second wilderness, the one that exists within the prepubescent Angus, just as menacing, . . . the other shade: black, damp and growing. The story, Angus Fell, captures everything there is about the incalculable before-and-after of innocence lost — the terror but also the beauty, pushed unbearably close to one another.

The thread of the primal, the fundamental, runs through these eleven stories and cinches them together like a tightening fist. They are all as rough and as lovely as the rural and small-town Nova Scotia landscape in which they take place. Sometimes the roughness takes the upper hand, as in the gruff, heartbreaking title story, but Leo McKay is not the kind of writer who revels in human ugliness for its own sake — no matter how good he might be at rendering it. Young Cliff, raw from two weeks in detox, returns to his parents’ home only to find himself fending off his blind-drunk father with a knife. The next morning is a brief, terrible set piece of despair and regret, in which McKay might have left his characters (and readers) wallowing if not for a sudden breakfast-table declaration on the father’s part that gives the story a gut-wrenching twist of, yes, sadness but, unexpectedly — and gorgeously — hope.

In other instances, McKay’s way with a simple, beautiful moment asserts itself, although the darkness is always there to temper the light. As Linda-Rose reflects in "The Ball, having been given a small flower by her suitor, a rose only gets as big as it gets." That is to say that even though the story depicts a glorious instance in Linda-Rose’s life, where her lover utterly proves himself worthy of her, the backdrop remains one of poverty, alcoholism, and her coal-miner father’s blasted lungs. Yet it is the giddy buoyancy of the moment that infects the reader here — the darkness is briefly banished in favour of the joyful, incongruous image of a colourful beach ball being inflated before an enchanted child’s eyes.

McKay’s simple use of language is deceptive, can lull you into thinking these will be simple stories. But when the young teenage narrator of Gold Wings declares, I was in America as he walks away from his crumbling row-house neighbourhood into the moneyed subdivision on the other side of town, the layers of alienation and disenfranchisement buried in that straightforward subject, verb, preposition, and object — the fact that Valley View seems like a whole other world, a separate nation — lands like a punch in the gut. Furthermore, this is how McKay’s characters both talk and think: in simple sentences that bob along on currents of unfathomable depth.

Leo McKay’s Giller Prize-nominated work of stories showcases a young writer whose considerable gifts of nuance, tenderness, and fearlessness would eventually bring him such acclaim with his subsequent bestselling novel, Twenty-Six. McKay’s seemingly effortless ability to depict the difficult and the ugly of life alongside all that is lovely and enduring, his eschewal of easy sentiment or easy answers, makes him an essential chronicler of contemporary Atlantic Canadian life — or, more simply put (in keeping with McKay’s own style), a great Canadian writer.

This book is for Mum and Pop and Kathy and Joel

CONTENTS

Angus Fell

Like This

The Ball

Gold Wings

Fidelity

A New Start

Oil

The Name Everybody Calls Me

A Thing Like Snow

The Transformed Sky

In My Heart

Acknowledgements

ANGUS FELL

Angus woke at eight o’clock and noticed that for the first time since grade five had ended in the spring, there was no square of sunlight on the west wall of his bedroom. At the end of the hottest, driest summer anyone in Nova Scotia could remember, the clouds had closed in.

He rolled out of bed and stood before the open window. The sky was drained of colour. Out over the pointed roofs of the Red Row, the clouds were fat, dark, and dangerous. In the backyard, his mother’s laundry flapped in the wind.

Let’s not go today, he called out the bedroom door to his brother, Tommy.

Shut up, Tommy said. He ran across the hall in his underwear, an index finger over his lips.

Go where? Their mother called from downstairs. Where do you two think you’re going?

Tommy glared at Angus and whispered, Nice move, dummy.

Nowhere, Mum, Tommy called down the stairs. You know she’s got ears like a hawk, he said to Angus. C’mon and get dressed. Mary’ll be here soon.

Downstairs, the wringer-washer foamed and churned. Their mother had the kitchen floor covered with dirty clothes, piled according to colour. She charged around the kitchen in a flowery sleeveless blouse. Her yellow nylon shorts barely circled her large belly, but hung baggy at her knees. Orange flip-flops snapped at her heels as she walked from piles of clothes to the washer beside the sink.

You kids can get your own breakfast today, she said without looking up at them. I’ve been up since six trying to get this laundry done before it rains.

Angus shook cornflakes into bowls for himself and his brother. As they sat at the table munching their cereal, their mother darted about the kitchen, filled a basket with wet clothes, then rushed out the door to the clothesline.

Let’s go bike riding instead, Angus said when she had gone. He didn’t really want to go biking; it meant frustration and humiliation. Tommy was two years younger and considerably shorter than Angus, but he was trim and lithe and strong. Angus was thick around the middle. His shoulders were thin and narrow. Going biking with Tommy and Mary would mean trailing along behind them, exhausted and out of breath. But biking seemed the only alternative to going to the river.

You a sissy or what? Tommy said.

It’s gonna rain today, Angus said.

So what? Tommy said.

The river gets big in the rain, it’s dangerous.

So if it rains we’ll leave. Now quit whining, Mum’ll hear and then she’ll make us stay home.

Good morning, Miss MacKenzie, their mother’s voice came through the open window. What are you selling this morning?

Oh, Mrs. Macintosh, you know I ain’t selling nothing, came the reply.

The spring on the screen door creaked, then the door banged shut and Mary walked into the kitchen. Angus looked up from the table and smiled at her. She wore a white T-shirt and blue jeans. Her tanned skin was tight and smooth over the big bones of her face. A few large red freckles spotted her nose. When she smiled back at Angus, the contrast with her skin made her big, slightly crooked teeth look even bigger.

Want some cornflakes? Tommy said.

Nope. Just had toast and tea, Mary said. She pulled out a chair and sat at the table between the two brothers.

Angus doesn’t want to go today, Tommy said. Mary looked at Angus. Angus lowered his eyes to his cereal.

"It is gonna rain," Mary said.

So? Tommy said.

So maybe we could do something else, Mary said.

We could go bike riding, Angus said. He looked at Mary.

Forget it, Tommy said. He looked at the two of them defiantly. I’m going. I don’t care about you two. He stomped out the back door.

Oh, I don’t care. I don’t care where we go, Mary said. She looked at Angus.

Angus shrugged. He got up from the table and followed Mary out the door.

Where are you going? their mother asked. She stood in a patchwork of flapping colours, her apron slung low around her waist. They didn’t answer her.

Every morning she warned them not to go to the river. She didn’t want them swimming without adult supervision. I have no desire, she’d say, to have to identify your dead bodies at the morgue, please and thank you. She also warned them about the men who lived on the riverbanks in summer. Angus, Tommy, and Mary had seen some of these men. The drunkers, they called them. The drunkers wandered the riverbanks, alone or in groups, quietly drinking until they found a shady place to pass out. Angus always got a sick feeling in his stomach when he saw the drunkers. They were dirty, hairy, old, and foul-mouthed. God only knows what those men do besides wasting their lives away drunk, their mother said. You two just stay clear of there. You hear me? Angus and Tommy always lowered their heads or stared at the cereal box as she spoke.

They walked the same route today that they had walked every day of the summer: south through the Red Row and then east to the river. The lawns they walked across were brown and dead.

For Angus, the summer had had two starkly contrasting shades. On the outside it was sunny, hot, and dry. Dust coated the green reeds on the flood plain at the river. The dark silt in which the reeds grew was baked grey and rock hard. The sun had been unrelenting; it had beamed down on his head, bleaching his hair and making him dizzy by day’s end.

Inside him was the other shade: black, damp, and growing. In the fall he would enter grade six, and things would change forever. Still, though he knew the changes were coming — could feel them at the heart of something deep within him — he didn’t know what they would be. A new school, yes. New teachers. New things to learn, new things expected of him. In grade five at elementary