Robert McGill - Once We Had a Country

“I don’t remember saying that.”

“Father Jean says there are plenty of missionaries in Laos who go as families.”

“Dad, I can’t—”

“We used to be so close, you and I …”

“We’re still close.” Her throat closed around the words.

“Don’t tell lies. It makes it worse.”

“Maybe I’ll be able to visit—”

“It’s not a place for tourists, little girl.”

“That isn’t what I meant.”

“You’re sick of me,” he said. “You ran off to Boston.”

“I went to college.”

“As far away as you could.”

“You don’t think there are farther places?”

“As far as you could go and still satisfy your conscience.”

She had been expecting him to say these things for months, years, ever since she’d left Syracuse, but now she had no strategies to deal with them. Although she had thought of him as the one suppressing everything, suddenly it was her anger that came seething out.

“Am I a bad daughter, then? You think just anybody would keep coming back to sit here and be preached at?” She stared at him until he flinched. “You don’t even need me, anyhow. You have the Church.”

It sat between them for a time.

“You say it like a dirty word.” He gave a wounded sigh. “Perhaps for you it is.”

A dare, but she refused to accept it. Instead, she fled to her room. Whatever she’d hoped to preserve was gone. They both knew she was the one who’d always looked after him. Who would take care of him now? On top of her dresser sat the box for the Super 8 camera he’d given her at Christmas. It was a selfish present.

When he knocked, her shame wouldn’t let her answer. The knocking grew louder. He called to her, his voice irate, then beseeching, while she lay paralyzed on her stomach with a pillow pulled around her head so tightly it was hard to breathe. She waited for him to barge into the room, but he stayed in the hall, begging her to reconsider, imploring her to let him in. She couldn’t, because if she saw his face with its desperation and its brokenness, she’d give in to him, she’d go to Laos, and then she’d never be able to forgive him for making her. Better to tell him in the morning that she didn’t want any part of the life he’d chosen. No phone calls, no letters. She needed to find her own way in the world. But she would wait until the airport, until she didn’t have to spend too long dealing with the look in his eyes.

From the hall, his voice became almost unrecognizable. He was berating her, cursing her, hurling words she’d never heard him use.

She didn’t answer, didn’t move.

In the morning, he was lying on the carpet when she opened her door, the comforter from his bed wrapped around him, a corner of it scrunched to support his head. He slept there like a careless guard or a faithful dog. She went to the bathroom, washed her face, and tried to pull herself together. Then she woke him and said they’d have to hurry if he was going to make his flight.

The sun swells above the horizon like a blister about to burst. Along the orchard lanes, the water in the ruts has gained a skin of ice, bubble-ridden and darkly translucent. A metal pipe atop the barracks roof issues a thin stream of smoke. Inside, George Ray paces between the table and a set of plywood shelves near his bunk bed as he packs. He’s wearing the same buttoned shirt he wore to dinner at the rectory, and his suitcase sits open on the table, straps dangling, half filled with folded clothes. The mattress on his bed has been stripped and turned on its side. A crack from the fire in the wood stove makes him start. Then he stuffs a few pairs of socks into his workboots before setting them in the case. A pair of leather shoes waits for him by the door, hairline creases veining the newly polished surfaces.

From above the bed he removes the photograph of his family and examines it for a few seconds before slipping it into his pocket. Turning to the mirror at the back of the room, he stands straight to inspect himself, combs his hair, adjusts his collar. After a time his eyes catch movement, and he turns to see Maggie standing on the mat near the door with her purse in hand.

“Finished?” she asks.

There’s a bob of his Adam’s apple as he swallows. He goes to the wood stove and with a fire iron bends low to prod a few chunks of charred wood. At last he stands upright again.

“Finished.”

Late that night, Maggie is smoking and watching TV. It’s a religious programme hosted by a silver-haired man in a sweater whose accent sounds Canadian. The time and channel are the ones the documentarian named, and Maggie has been watching with trepidation. She didn’t tell Brid, just said good night before sneaking back down to the living room, because whatever she’s about to see, she wants it to be a private thing.

The man onscreen begins to talk of martyrdom. Martyrs are models for all of us, he says. In their devotion they’re contact points between the earthly and the divine. He says he’d like to share a short documentary about one of them, a man from upstate New York doing God’s work in a foreign land. It’s what Maggie expected, yet somehow she still can’t believe it.

The next shot reveals a line of tents in the middle of a jungle. Then there’s a low-angle view of canoes on a brown river, followed by close-ups of brightly coloured birds in cages and a fly crawling on an old man’s leathery ear. This is Laos, says a woman’s voice, the home of ancient peoples and a modern, secret war. Maggie recognizes the voice as the filmmaker’s, but the woman remains unseen as the camera reveals the inside of a little hut and a line of items laid out on a table: a fountain pen, a pair of reading glasses, a canteen in a canvas holster. The woman calls them the last relics of Gordon Dunne.

Maggie calls it thievery. They should have sent those things back to the States. She thinks of the box upstairs containing the few items from his house she chose to keep. There’s the white shirt he wore to work every Monday. There’s his shaving brush, still pungent with a sweet, rich scent that was his scent as far back as she can remember. There’s an album of photographs she gave him one by one after taking them with her Brownie Starflash. He never told her he kept them. Two weeks ago, when she came upon the album among his belongings in Syracuse, she wept for a long time.

Now the television is showing two men by a campfire. One of them is Lao, one a white man with a beard. The Lao man extends a boot and nudges a little figure near the edge of the flames. It takes Maggie a second to realize that the white man is supposed to be her father. Around his neck he wears a red bandana, even though her father hated red, and his beard is shot through with grey, although her father never had a grey hair in his life.

She watches as the two men in the re-creation evade a group of thugs with rifles, then encounter a priest and an old woman who bleeds a fluid far too garishly coloured to be actual blood. Was the scene filmed in Laos? Could that be Father Jean? There’s no way to know, because Maggie has never seen an image of him. She watches as the man playing her father steals a baby from under the noses of armed teenagers on a riverbank, only to be apprehended along with Yia Pao as he hides behind a waterfall. Maggie doesn’t know if it’s the real Yia Pao or if any of it is true. No one has said anything about such heroics. There was nothing about a waterfall.

The camera shows Yia Pao with the baby in his arms, marching ahead of the man who is not her father as they are led through mountains that could be Asian or the Adirondacks. Once they reach a campsite high up among stunted trees, her father is interrogated by their captors’ leader, a cruel-looking man with a brush cut. When one of the other thugs calls the man Sal, Maggie blanches. Wale wasn’t lying, then. Or perhaps the documentarian just heard the same lies that Wale told Maggie. She thinks the interrogation scene is supposed to seem tense and full of danger, but she feels nothing, not even when her father is punched in the stomach, because it isn’t him. When he admits to having debts, when he refers to his widowed mother, she doesn’t buy it. These are details anyone could find out; they don’t say the first thing about him. She watches him write a letter, knowing there wasn’t one, then wonders if there was and she just didn’t receive it. She watches him huddle with Yia Pao in a deep, narrow pit that must have been lit carefully by the film’s crew, because the men’s faces are still visible at the bottom. Nobody told Maggie about a pit.