The Long Stretch Read Online Free PDF

jumping off in the summer, if you knew how to swim, or wanted to learn quickly. Once in, it was hard to get out. You had to climb up the splintery creosote. Hard to believe today but you could swim in the strait back then. That was before the Swedes came with the pulp mill. Before we pumped the strait full of old fibre and chemical crap. Making a living at it.
    Uncle Jack said he and my old man worked at that coal pier in the busy days. Practically boys, they were. First paying job. Them and Angus. Shovelling coal onto boats. Coal from down north when there were mines in Port Hood and Inverness. Middle of the thirties. Jack building his strength after being sickly for years.
    One day they were loading coal on a boat bound for a placecalled St. Lawrence on the south coast of Newfoundland. Wicked hard times there but some American fellow was trying to start an underground mine. The place was going to take off, they were told. They knew nothing about Newfoundland or mining but this was a chance. Get out. Earn some real money. When the coal boat sailed, they went with it. That was the start of their mining.
    That’s how he remembered it, Uncle Jack. The beginning of liberation. By my time, the coal pier was a tumbledown relic of when the village had a purpose. A place to go swimming. Even though the old man forbade it.
    “Somebody’s going to get drowned there,” he’d say, anger and anxiety in his face.
    There was a public wharf right next to the old pier. Some of the old fellows kept little rowboats there. They’d pull a few lobster traps in the season, maybe a herring net in the summer. Some groundfish in autumn. Jack Reynolds got a nasty-looking shark in his net once. It was in the papers. We’d steal his boat when there wasn’t anybody around and row out into the strait, Sextus and me, Effie, her brother, Duncan, hunting shark or whatever. One day it was just Sextus and me. Down along the shore. It was early November, I think. I was arsing around, and fell in.
    I remember my hand kind of grabbing the air, and then the water closing over my head. And the jolt of terror. Afterwards you wonder: Where does the terror come from? Certainly not from reason. And something stronger than reason makes you struggle.
    I bobbed briefly to the surface but could feel my feet dragging me down. My new rubber boots. Instinct said kick them off. But Pa would kill me if I lost them. So I struggled against thedownward drag. Then thinking: Pa is going to kill me anyway. The sky broke over me again for just a moment, disappeared again. That’s when I became aware of the underwater silence.
    “She wasn’t the only one,” he says.
    “The reporter,” I say.
    “There were a few reporters,” he says. “Plus a TV personality and a social worker. And a politician. An elected member, actually.”
    “I guess you got around quite a bit.”
    “The seventies were pretty wild,” he says. “They talk about the sixties, but that was just…experimentation. The seventies were life.”
    “I can’t remember much about the seventies,” I say. But he just motors on.
    “Took a lot of chances before I left her. Fooling around on the side. Quickies on the road. One-night stands. Punishing her, I guess.”
    “What for?”
    “Don’t go looking for logic.”
    She’d know, had it been me. She could always read me. And I’d want her to read my anger. You’d want her to know your mind and soul so she’d know they were full of her.
    “Then one night, out of the blue she says, ‘We have to have a talk.’ And I knew what was coming.”
    “So she knew.”
    “No. That was the killer. She was all defensive. Uptight. Said there was a friend and the friendship was getting out of control…handy the threshold. So I go into indignation gear. ‘Where’sthe threshold?’ I ask. ‘Before or after the pants come down?’ That’s when I blew it.”
    All right, I say to myself. This is okay.
    “She had me then,” he says. “Didn’t have to say