Old Men by Elaine McCluskey

The old man was as lean as a tough winter, and yet he never got cold. He wore a hoodie and tatty fishing gloves in January. A bleached ballcap instead of a toque. He had a face hardened by work yet lightened by mischief, resigned to life but hopeful, if not for himself, then the young ones.

           The old man—his name was Normand— retired from lobstering eight years ago. He’d lived in the village his whole life. A place of rituals and rhythms. Early-risers.

            His son Delfin sometimes drove him places in his black Ford 150. To visit relatives. To appointments. For company. Today there was a sight up ahead on the highway. A pick- up with a mounted deer in the back, an aberration drivers were slowing to see. Was it real? Upright, it could have been a rubber lawn ornament, or one of those decoys wildlife officers planted in fields. Reddish-brown with a thick neck and chest. Looking off into the distance.

“That’s a good-sized buck,” noted Delfin when they got closer. “Eight point.”

“Not bad,” said the old man, a hunter most of his life. Deer, rabbits, ducks, and geese.

“Wouldn’t have been cheap to get it done.”

“Must be the first one he ever shot,” said the old man wryly. “Some people never get over their first.”

You could tell that the old man had once been a handful. You could tell by his set jaw and blue eyes. You could imagine him with a full head of hair, his original teeth, and arms jacked from labour. Saucy. He and Delfin had an easy way between them. They could talk or not talk—it made no difference.

“I’m tired of those studies on the news,” said Delfin because he felt like talking.

Delfin could get wound up, pondering unsolvable problems.

“The ones about drinking?” asked the old man.

“No,” said Delfin. “The ones that say dying people regret the things they didn’t do. Not the things they done. Stole lobsters from buddy’s traps. Maybe. Robbed the credit union with a shotgun. If you say so. But didn’t take that trip to Disney. Guilty as charged.”

“Nobody’s regretting none of the evil they done, are they?”

“Nope.”

“And them supposed to be dying.”

  “It’s like my neighbour Lester saying: ‘I could feel bad about visiting my captain’s wife when he was in hospital, but I don’t. But I wish I’d taken calculus in school.”

“And what the hell difference would that make: calculus?”

“Some people thinks it makes them special.”

“Some people think spiked lug nuts on their truck makes them special too.”

“That’s right.”

“Lester had them too, didn’t he?”

“Yep. Still does.”

Delfin pulled into a parking lot. “You can wait in the truck,” he said, “or you can go inside”— pointing to a store that advertised Hardware and Purina Feeds. Outside were BBQ tank refills and bags of salt. A sign: FREE BIBLES INSIDE. Next door was the medical clinic where Delfin was headed.

  “Nah, I’m good.” When you spend forty years on the North Atlantic, a three day’s steam from shore, when you have days when your traps are as empty as your wallet, you can handle time.

Delfin was a new patient at the clinic. After five years without a doctor, he was assigned a Nurse Practitioner. But first, there was an intake interview. The intake nurse was wearing a medical mask and running shoes. Tall and businesslike, she had a list of questions she was rattling off like a border-crossing guard. Delfin could have been in a concrete room with undeclared liquor in his trunk. Is this your current address? Yes. Do you work? Yes, as a fisherman. Do you live alone? No with my wife and two sons. Medical insurance. No. History of heart disease. No. Do you use drugs? No.

“Do you drink alcohol?” 

It sounded like a tricky border-guard question, so Delfin gave a safe answer, not an obvious lie but not the absolute truth. “Ahh one drink a day.”

Apparently, that was not safe enough because the nurse gave him a look: “Are you aware of the new recommendations on alcohol?”

“Yes,” he lied.

“Do you drink water?”

“Yes.”

Who doesn’t?

“How much in a day?”

“The regular amount.”

“Glasses? Litres?”

How am I stuck on this?

“Any history of STDs?”

Here we go.

“Any problems with urination or clearing your bowels?”

Dear Lord.

“Mental health issues?”

Maybe after this.

She took him into the hallway where she measured his height in metric (183 cm) and his weight in imperial (186 pounds.) And then attached him to a blood-pressure machine that gave readouts every two minutes. By the time he left, Delfin was ready for pint of dark rum.

“How was that?” asked the old man.

“I had a confessional once with Father Leonce that was more fun.”

“He was a mean old thing, too. Used to twist boys’ ears.”

“Not all he twisted.”

***

Delfin and Normand drove past a boat builder with its bay doors open, exposing a red Cape Islander up on a stand. “That’s a good-looking rig,” said Normand. “It’s for Gary Doucette, I hear. He must be doing all right.”

The old man never owned his own boat—a boat like Gary’s and a license could run you a million bucks—but he’d been a good worker. When Normand man was young, he was good at many things—he was a star baseball pitcher; he could skate so fast that his nickname was le demon. He carved ducks so real you wanted to shoot them.

“Lester hit a porcupine with his Hyundai,” said Delfin. “Tore a hole in the bumper in the exact shape of the porky.”

“Now that would be something to see.”

“Drive by his place, and you’ll see it.”

The old man had a Honda Civic at home.

“I will.”

“You’re not feeding them again, are you? The porkies.”

“No.” The old man acted offended. “Those things could tear your hand right off. They’ve got claws like Freddy Kreuger.” This long—he held up his hands to show the distance. He almost looked excited.

“Okay. I heard you was giving them apples.”

“I got better sense than that.”

“If you are, you are,” Delfin shrugged.

“They can weigh over thirty pounds, you know.”

Delphin shrugged again.

He pulled into a driveway, where the Honda was parked next to a shed. “Say hi to Grand- mère. I’ll be by with the boys this week.”

***

Normand met his wife Pauline when he was fifteen, twenty when they married. He got lucky, he would tell you. She was as kind as she was pretty. When they didn’t have much, she pretended that they did. For thirty years, she worked in a nursing home, taking care of old ladies who called her ma chérie. She sang to them in French.

           Three years ago, he almost lost her. Pauline was run over in a crosswalk when she was in Halifax to see a doctor. The old man found himself telling people about the accident, trying to make sense of it in the way you never could.

“She was under two wheels,” he told a plumber installing a water heater. “She would have died if an off-duty firefighter hadn’t come along. She was bleeding inside, and he turned her over. She didn’t want him to because she was in so much pain. But he did.”

“There’s good people out there.”

“Six weeks in hospital. Two surgeries. They put metal pins in her hips and legs. She needs a walker now, and she don’t think the same. We are lucky to have her but she’s not the same.”

“I hope she got a settlement.”

“Forty thousand.”

“Down in the States, you’d get two million bucks.”

“The lawyer said it was the law. That back in the 70s, some judges in Ottawa decided what you could get and what you couldn’t. You could be in a wheelchair, and it wouldn’t matter.”

“Who was paying them off?”

“I’d be looking hard at the insurance companies, wouldn’t you?”

If you started to get angry about all the things that were wrong in this world, you might never stop, Normand once told Delfin. Crooked politicians. Insurance companies. Unrepentant sinners wishing they had gone to Disney. “There is no point in winning an argument,” he said, “when there ain’t no prize.” Despite the wickedness, some people beat the odds. There was a family down the road, and the son became a doctor and the daughter a veterinarian. The kids moved away, but Normand would see them now and then in the summer driving rental cars, and they would wave.

***

Normand’s younger son, Jamie, never liked fishing—he got seasick—so he got a job as a sheriff at the courthouse in nearby Yarmouth. He fit the bill. A 6-2 gym rat covered with tattoos and squeezed into a Kevlar vest. Jamie had the right disposition. He was punctual and unfailingly polite to individuals who found themselves in unfortunate situations. “Can I help you?” he would ask a car thief trying to read the docket or a teenager looking for a washroom to cry in.

***

Some days, the old man babysat Jamie’s kids after school. He liked kids. The front plate of his Honda was a photo of the four grandchildren—Delfin’s teenagers who played hockey and Jamie’s young ones—with the word Grand-Pere. Pauline helped out as best she could. The kids loved her, but she couldn’t get around like she used to. The six-year-old was a smart little thing with a heart as big as the sun, Normand would tell you. She was so smart that she could be anything she wanted. He would tell you that too. When they drew Valentine’s cards at their so-called art table, she told him his was “okay,” but Grand- mère’s was “the most beautiful,” and Grand-mère smiled. The boy, he was a rascal.

***        

There were old men who sat on their porch all day. Wondering where their lives went. Old men who drove to the wharf to stare at boats. There were old men who still operated ham radios. Old men who met at 6 am inside a fishing warehouse rain or shine to share a coffee and a smoke. Leaving exactly at 7.

            Normand went to a walking trail on the ocean while his wife was having her coffee. On the wind-beaten side, the side that reminded you why the village existed, waves kicked up foam, and boats made their slow progression to sea. When Normand was young, he fished halibut as well as lobster. Gone for weeks at a time. In hellish places. And sometimes, when he came home, spent but not broken, his wife would have a pot of venison stew on the stove, and he would eat it all. With biscuits.

The old man waited for the porcupines to come out. From afar, they looked like tumbleweed. Rounded brown masses. Low to the ground. He waited until they rubbed their prickly backs on the leg of his jeans. Two of them. And after that, he fed them apples. They clutched the apples in their Freddy Kreuger claws and gnawed them. Some day, when the time was right, the old man was going to bring the boy and show him the porkies. The girl could stay at home. She was a sweet little thing, but the boy, the boy, he was a rascal.

Elaine McCluskey has published four short-story collections and three novels.  Rafael Has Pretty Eyes won the 2023 Alistair MacLeod prize for short fiction. Her stories have appeared in journals such as Room, subTerrain, and The Antigonish Review.  One story was a Journey Prize finalist. Another placed second in the Fish contest in Ireland. She lives in Dartmouth, N.S.