River of the Brokenhearted

David Adams Richards

• Publisher: Arcade
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781628723953
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

From David Adams Richards, winner of the Giller Prize and the Governor General's Award, comes a magnificent and haunting novel about the entwinement of remembered love and unforgotten hate.Spanning generations, River of the Brokenhearted tells the life and legacy of Janie McCleary, a strong-willed Irish Catholic girl who dares to marry a man from the Church of England. Their union is quickly deemed scandalous, and when her husband dies young, just before the Great Depression, Janie is left alone to raise a family and run a business—the first movie theater in town. Through the strength of her character, she succeeds in a world of men. For that she is ostracized and becomes a victim of double-dealing and overt violence. Based on the author's own grandmother, Janie is a pioneer before the age of feminism, but her salty individualism burdens the lives of her children and grandchildren.Writing with compassion and mastery, Richards muses on the tyranny of memory and history, and peers into the hearts of extraordinary characters. There he finds an alchemy of venality and goodwill, deceit and brotherliness, marked cruelty and true love. Once again, David Adams Richards has brought us a work of astonishing grace, rooted in his special territory on the great river Miramichi of New Brunswick, but firmly universal in scope.Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction—novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

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 shipbuilding 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.

Then, 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 stormboggled 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.

They carried such hatred for each other that in Ireland they never wiped their blades of blood. Blood over someone snitching because both their families, and ten other families as well, lost boys to a British hangman in 1791, crowded in an Irish dungeon, chained together with one slop pail. Brought out, blinded and blindfolded, and dragged to the gallows, without pomp and ceremony. The other families had been killed off. Only these two remained.

The feud started on the day a Druken man was to marry a McLeary woman. Someone from their party threw a stone at a passing British horse, which threw a cavalry officer, reported to have been related to Lord Churchill himself. One of the wedding party snitched on the rest to save his life, and the British marched into the church to find them hiding. And from this report vague and unsubstantiated over many years, because the matter was incidental on the larger scale, no trial of any sort was held.

So who was the snitch, McLeary or Druken?

Both families, never forgetting their children on the gallows, carried this holy war against each other, a war of attrition, war of words and staffs and peevies, all the way from Ireland into each other’s little houses and sheds in Newcastle, New Brunswick, a full century later. In 1875, a swaggering Protestant constable weary of their squabble told them their fight was over lives long dead and history past:

“History never passes, it forms,” one of the Drukens said, putting his arm about one of the McLearys—whom he would protect to the death his right to kill. “So, my man, we’re just getting started. And do not think we come from a nation without poets and gifts.”

But the McLearys produced few men, and the Drukens’ were more favoured by ruthlessness. The little solitary family who lived between them, by the name of Winch, sided with first one and then the other, seeing fine advantage in doing so.

By the turn of the century only Jimmy McLeary, the grandson of the first McLeary to step off the boat, was left to wage war. The remnant of a proud family gone, Jimmy was alone; his brother had disappeared, under mysterious circumstances. His oldest daughter, Agatha, had died. Only his daughter Hanna Jane was with him.

Alone Jimmy could not fight back, though he had his young daughter play tunes on the fiddle to gather courage, and would go out to meet the Drukens on the street. Paddy Druken was known to have cuffed him good as he called them forward to meet their doom; little Hanna Jane herself was taken to court once for setting booby traps near the well.

There was a squabble over the well because each family was sure the other had stolen gold from Ireland and hidden it there. A ludicrous assumption, but enough brainless among them to search. Paddy Druken, half mad with rotted teeth, guarded the well on pain of McLeary death—and the McLearys, in the hottest month of the year, squeaking for drink, had to sneak to the well to get their water. So little Hanna Jane beguiled them all by jawing a bear trap and placing it near where Paddy was known to sit. It did not catch his arse but a pad he was wont to sit upon.

“A booby trap that might cause a leg to break in half,” the magistrate said. “How does a girl of six make such a booby trap?”

“With much patience, sir,” Hanna Jane was reported to have answered.

“Whose well do you think it is, little Hanna Jane?” The magistrate asked.

“Whoever family is bold enough to lose a life there—it will be theirs by the grace of God.” Hanna Jane scratched her nose. She wore her big straw hat and long dress, and carried a purse like a little lady.

She left school, this Hanna Jane McLeary, and went to work. At twelve years of age, she went to Fredericton, that city of stately elms and small minds, so she could find work at the houses of the genteel descendants of our good Loyalist stock. But she came home when her father took ill with gout and drink.

By 1915, Jimmy could not go without drink, and all fight was gone from him.

This was Hanna Jane’s worst period, so bad that in 1918 she became briefly engaged to the young luckless Bobby Doyle, a cousin of the Drukens’ from time gone by. Yet Jimmy’s daughter had strength to care for him and found work playing her fiddle at local dances, travelling in winter by horse and cart, her fiddle in an old bait box she carried under her arm, and Bobby Doyle waiting in the snow for her money so he could drink.

“In those days,” an old man once told me, “playing for our boys from the woods, or fishermen in from the bay with their sunburned necks, she was a wild thing with her hair down—and there was no one made fresh with her if she didn’t want. But she could not continue with poor Bobby Doyle and be her own, so she left him that April, and gave back the friendship ring he had given her.”

I am the happier. For this Hanna Jane McLeary, this daring rebel girl, this sweet lost light of Bobby Doyle’s eye, became my grandmother, became in all her dancing tragic scope one of our great Maritime women, though she never wanted greatness—no, thrust upon her.

TWO

I was never to see my grandfather. There is a picture of him next to my grandmother, taken, I think, in 1922, where he looks a little like Fitzgerald, and she, a more beautiful Zelda. Someone once told me—wisely or not I do not know, or care, for the art of such wisdom as his changes—that my granddad never succeeded at anything very much.

“Yer grandaddyoo (he said granddaddyoo) was a howling failure—just like yer dad. It must be the English side of you.”

I assumed this to be correct. Why not? A small theatre in a callow town is not the great world’s idea of success. We had all failed, and he needn’t tell me. We were failed poets, dancers, and musicians that had little enough moments of brilliance on a stage, in church basements, at weddings, or forgotten moments of sorrowful laughter long gone—say with a slight ballet movement in a stage adaptation of some composer in the lost summer of 1946.

George King, our patriarch, often failed too. Failed in youth by having both parents die, failed in the first war—the illness that he wished to end with a sudden crawl over the top prevented him from going to the front. His fiancee in England left him for someone else, assuring him, as fiancees often do, that she loved him still. So, broken-hearted, he came to Canada. His wife, my grandmother, was Irish Catholic with a broad Miramichi accent, and he Church of England. This caused a rift in the family for years, and pitted the town against us in a strange way. Like a curse not ended yet. Failed at family life for a son he did not know.

So many rifts, and so few years, my sister once commented as we drove to Burnt Church for a summer vacation that we never had.

My grandfather had come to Canada from foul London as a last respite against his sickness, and fought it here, on a playing ground unlevel at the best of times. He fought it with medicine from Dr. Giovanetti and what he called stingers—that is, gin and beer mixed; he fought it with walks and exercise, and camphor and morphine, and swimming in cold climates.

“I am Janie McLeary—from Chatham Street,” my grandmother said to him when they first met—their meeting quixotic as it was assuring my birth, through the birth of my father.

“I am George King—and I’m just about done for.” He smiled as he took her hand. “You don’t have any home remedies, do you—some syrup or elixir you’re hoarding for yourself? Give it up if you do.”

He was a collector of small prints and silver coins and out-of-date things like tin meat cans from the Boer War and took his meeting with my grandmother to be destiny, for as he said: “Once on the ship—the Lucy Corker out of Liverpool—I had decided on Canada. Before that moment I had decided on nothing, not even whether I might climb the rail and jump, saying, ‘so long now, my chippy mates.’ Once in Canada, I took my travelling music show northwest. It could as easily have been southwest. At this moment, why, I might be in Boston with another lady altogether! And then to need someone to accompany me—in you walk, Janie McLeary—a nineteen-year-old girl carrying her fiddle. There you go—that’s destiny. We play well together too. You don’t call that fate—it is most remarkable.”

They were married, much to the chagrin of her father, who said he had witnessed the English when he was a boy in Ireland (though he never was a boy in Ireland) and said he would hang himself if she went through with it. So he went off to do it, wearing a white shirt and tam-o’-shanter, and then because he couldn’t bring himself to tie a rope to the Morrissey Bridge, asked his friends to hang him instead.

“Hang me, for I’m not fit company with myself.”

After being drunk with him for a day, they said they would, so he backed off and went home.

The town took the marriage to be doomed, and since he was sickly, in bad taste, and her friends all decided she was insane. They would stand outside her door talking about her as she sat inside listening. One of the things against her was that she had been engaged to Bobby Boy Doyle, a man with passable fists who boxed in the golden gloves. It was just another family of enemies for my grandmother to have.

“She’s just a damn cow, that Janie McLeary—”

“I am not,” she would say. But they in their hats and skirts from Eaton’s summer catalogue would continue speaking as if she was absent, paying no mind to her protest, and then all walk off together singular in their state of agony and in their affirmation of the mortal sin she was committing. All of them would ask her for money later on.

My grandparents lived in a rooming house run by the Dobblesteins, who owned a little mill on the back square. Janie was seen pushing her husband in a wheelchair the day after their wedding—he thirty-three, she twenty. George King failed at his first try and then his second in business, attempting to open shops in the listless, insipid summer of the flu, which, incidentally, he assumed would dispatch him with a quick cough and sudden heart failure. That it did not sent him back to reading Conrad, but saying that he found in life “not the joyous exuberance and overwhelming optimism Mr. Conrad himself finds.” (I take this not as irony in the least, for my grandfather was little fit for irony at the time.)

And then on the back of a cold winter, Grandfather coming home from playing piano in Moncton for a penny or two, decided on the theatre. It was one thing the river did not have. He decided on a theatre when the train got stuck at a pass and he saw a white drift outside in the night, the snow wisping about, he said, like “frantic actors on the silver screen who have all suddenly forgotten their lines.” All of a sudden the idea of a theatre, or a playhouse, was there, was born in morphine-induced love.

It came, spontaneously, in another man’s mind as well: Joey Elias, who himself had escaped through England to Canada and who was strangely drawn to my grandmother’s enemies the Drukens. So in one instant, two centuries of divisions were firmly entrenched, trenches fashioned for a century more.

Elias was after the same projecto...