River of the Brokenhearted Read online

  Acclaim for David Adams Richards’

  RIVER OF THE BROKENHEARTED

  “If there’s literary justice in this world, River ought to be a notable commercial success. Richards merits the kind of plaudits that were frequently lavished on [Robertson] Davies.… As a pure storyteller, Richards has it all over … just about every male writer in this country.… His comedy is so deeply rooted in an absurdist’s delight in the illogicality of thinking processes raddled by alcohol and drugs or addled by greed and vengeance.… River of the Brokenhearted delivers a highly readable study in kinds of damnation that are as common in the towers of Bay Street as on the banks of the Miramichi.”

  —The Globe and Mail

  “River of the Brokenhearted is one of the most ambitious of Richards’ novels.… [It] evokes pity and fear—the fate of these characters is not so different from our own—to a degree rarely seen in our literature.”

  —Toronto Star

  “Richards’s gift is to make these people human in their resiliency and fragility and to transform them from the pitiable to the iconic … by the moral force of his vision, the absolute sincerity of his voice and his uncanny ability to internalize the rough majesty of the Miramichi.… His mode is tragedy, but there is humour—even if blackly satirical—sneaking out of the shadows.”

  —Times & Transcript (Moncton)

  “River of the Brokenhearted has the robust feeling of a Shakespeare play.”

  —The Vancouver Sun

  “Brilliant.… Is it worth it, diving into Richards’s river of misery …? A thousand times yes. And once you’re in, you’re in until it spits you up on to dry land, for like all great literature, it has everything about life you need or want to know and you must ride to the end, to make sure you get every drop of what this astonishing writer has to offer.… A great gift to English literature.”

  —The Daily News (Halifax)

  “There is a dark, sly current of humour in Richards’ work, the humour of the downtrodden and the unbelievably unlucky, and that washes over River of the Brokenhearted, the latest addition to the author’s distinguished Atlantic oeuvre.… It’s hard to believe that a single imagination can produce characters as large as these, but it has been done here.”

  —The Hamilton Spectator

  “River of the Brokenhearted is a wonderful, sad novel that reflects our capacity for strength, loyalty and forgiveness. With its strong sense of justice, this book is also a testament to the power of faith—in all its many forms.”

  —Edmonton Journal

  “Richards is a remarkably mature writer, whose confident, compassionate narrative voice makes fine fiction of the tragic randomness of human life.”

  —The London Free Press (ON)

  “Richards [is] a Maritime Dickens.”

  —Toronto Star

  “David Adams Richards has become Canada’s contemporary master of the novel.… Intricately plotted, River of the Brokenhearted must be read slowly so that every clue and character can be understood.… Richards’ prose is something to linger over, to enjoy in slow motion.”

  —The Sun Times (Owen Sound)

  ALSO BY DAVID ADAMS RICHARDS

  Fiction

  The Coming of Winter

  Blood Ties

  Dancers at Night: Stories

  Lives of Short Duration

  Road to the Stilt House

  Nights Below Station Street

  Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace

  For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down

  Hope in the Desperate Hour

  The Bay of Love and Sorrows

  Mercy Among the Children

  Non-Fiction

  Hockey Dreams

  Lines on the Water

  Copyright © Newmac Amusement Inc. 2003

  Anchor Canada edition 2004

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Anchor Canada and colophon are trademarks.

  National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Richards, David Adams, 1950-

  River of the brokenhearted / David Adams Richards.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-37509-4

  I. Title.

  PS8585.I17R48 2004 C813′.54 C2004-900584-7

  This is a work of fiction; the characters and settings found within are imaginary composites and do not refer to actual persons or places.

  Published in Canada by

  Anchor Canada, a division of

  Random House of Canada Limited

  Visit Random House of Canada Limited’s website:

  www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  For my cousins Mary Baldasaro

  and Cathy Richards Green

  who know that though this is based

  on incidents in the life of our grandmother

  Janie, it is a work of fiction.

  And for Bob Gibbs and Fred Cogswell.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part I

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Part II

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Part III

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Part IV

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Part V - The New Age

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Part VI

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Part VII

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  “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.

  Th
en, 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.