"The Village"

[rfmcdonald]

When I was growing up, no one really cared about the old village. Now, in retrospect, that was probably stupid, but keep in mind that we were only kids, and that kids -- I know, I’ve got two myself -- are stupid by their own nature. We wouldn’t have recognized something of real value if we’d been given it gift-wrapped with a bow. Honestly, it’s frightening to think about how ignorant we all were.

Growing up, we knew all about the derelict village -- we all had grandfathers or step-uncles who had lived there, before the soil gave way and the jobs moved away and they had to leave the place, let it be peopled again by milkweed and foxes and the odd alder sprouting in what had been a parlour years back. We never really thought of it as anything that had a proud history of its own, only as something that was just there, like the old brook by St. Paul’s and Hammett’s Pond and the dusty dirt road heading arrow-straight for town.

When we were really young, our parents had to tell us not to play in the old abandoned buildings, that we could fall from the hayloft and break or necks, that we could rip our arms wide open on a few choice shards of broken glass, or we could puncture our feet on an old tin can and get tetanus. We never listened to them, of course. Why should we? We were kids. We played around in the old church, ran along the winding narrow road half-covered with alders and pine, dared each other to run up to the third story of the old Peterson house and get out before the ghost came. When we grew older, we learned from our brothers -- and our sisters, and cousins of all kinds -- that playing in the houses was kid’s stuff, and that if you wanted to go out with your girlfriend, the old church was a great place to make out. I did that, of course -- it’s odd to think just what people now would think of that. Of course, they never admitted to knowing that, even though half the people who boasted that they scored first (or second, or third) base still live down below and know the same things that I knew.

After I graduated from high school, I left the village to find work. Let us face the sad reality -- no matter how beautiful the lush green hills rolling down to the white ocean breakers and picturesque cliffs, beauty isn’t going to give you a job. That is, not unless you want to try to grow potatoes or winter wheat or tobacco or whatever will grow on the soil, that or live on the dole for most of the year in between a dozen weeks of fishing the lobster to extinction. Beauty certainly won’t give you a job suitable to your person, that is, if you are an ambitious person.

So, you leave. You room in some old lady’s upstairs room, or in an apartment, one that really should be condemned by the building inspector but you don’t want it to be since you have nowhere else to go. You go and take a stupid job, paying at minimum wage, doing some godawful task like pumping gas or flipping burgers over and over again, hour after hour, week after week, because you can’t get anything else with your credential. You try to find a car that won’t explode when you turn the key, but one that you can still afford after lodgings and booze and food are all factored in. Then, you try to get some higher education in. I tried the university, but it wasn’t practical enough, so I went to the community college. Now that was practical.

As you slog away at the psycho teacher’s assignments, or at the car joint, and freeze in the winter when the car won’t start and you have to push it to the side of the road and walk against the horizontal snow to the nearest house to call a tow truck, you suffer. Suffering builds up character, now remember, and it seems better after you’re all done with it. And during all of that time, you know that you are getting somewhere -- you aren’t going to suffer for nothing, would you? You know that you’re making slow progress towards getting a piece of paper that will mean something and that will open all kinds of doors for you. You know that without that piece of paper you went get anywhere at all, and that you’ll end up like the people you pity -- unemployed the better part of the year, or doing government make-work for ten or so weeks care of the friendly neighbourhood MLA, drinking beer and watching the television all winter (and fall, and spring) long. When you think of it that way, there really isn’t any choice, is there? Now, a two year business degree is not bad at all, and certainly more than anyone else back home had at the time. Besides, it has the merit of practicality.

Even though home was -- is, rather -- an hour’s drive away from the college, all year long I never got a chance to go home. It’s sad, but truer, that between work and school and parties and more work and more school I didn’t have an hour to spare. Anyway, I was able to catch up on the news from the b’ys from out the way of home, when the came into town and spent their time between a farmer’s errands and bar runs. That news kept me satisfied enough, but it never was quite the real thing.

After my first year at the college was over, I took a week off of work to go back home. It wasn’t a surprise to see that things had hardly changed at all. There will still the old farmhouses and barns with their chipped paint, still the neat rows of root crops and the waving green fodder in the fields, still the backcountry bootleggers with their reliable churches. There was still gossip, of course, and that was where I heard most of the news from my old high school friends who’d stayed at home. Even that was much the same as before -- most of it was about who fought who after he drank how much alcohol and over which girl. The only novelty, in fact, was that Maria Lourdes from down in the valley went off on a drunk, and tried to claw Louisa’s eyes after she went out with Maria’s boyfriend. I guess that feminism did reach home.

I’d come home because I wanted to enjoy a bit of home life. I wanted Mother to make food for me, good food, and I wanted to go out on the fields with Father. As it turned out, I’d grown in the year that I’d been in town. I found Mother suffocating, and Father seemed so, well, quite frankly limited. By the third day, I’d began to hang out at the old general store with the guys, chatting up the pretty clerk and sitting out by the table by the window and playing cards. I’d heard from Frank that the Finlay brothers from up the road by the new Anglican church had decided to apply for a grant from the Tourism department of the Province, to refurbish the village and to make it a real historical experience. Now, I knew the Finlay brothers from the time we went to school, and I had absolutely no reason to think that they would use it right without the government watching them around the clock. I had a good laugh, and we moved on to talk about the latest shotgun wedding.

I’d forgotten about the Finlays’ dream almost as soon as I’d been told about it, and in all the long summer of washing dishes at a Chinese restaurant, and in the terrible year ahead, I didn’t devote an entire second’s thought to the whole matter. It was only when I graduated that overjoyed Father, standing in the auditorium with my sister and mother by his side, mentioned in passing that perhaps I might want to go to work for the Finlays’, who had incidentally been doing a great job of fixing up the old village and incidentally making everyone quite proud.

That was the first time that I had heard of the fact that the Finlays hadn’t drunk away all of the money. I had to circle around the room a few times and chat with my fellow graduates -- making sure that I set up the proper neuronal connections in their heads so that whenever they thought of the graduation ceremony that they’d remember me, you understand? -- before I could go back to father and ask him to tell me more about just what was going on about the village.

It seemed that the over the course of the past year the Finlays really had been doing their very best to make the old tumbledown village look half-decent. The government had put some of the layabouts from around home on its payroll, setting them to work tearing a couple of generations worth of weeds out of the ground and to raze the filthy and positively dangerous old church, assembly hall, and general store. Father said that they were planning to make the old village a positive showcase for traditional culture down home, and that they were counting on drawing tourists from all over the continent.

I didn’t learn anything else until the second morning after the great night-long parties that my fellow graduates hosted -- at least, those graduates who didn’t live in rooms rented out by cranky old ladies. Too early in the morning, Father came by with the Ford pickup to haul me and my stuff home. As it turned out, an hour was more than enough time to tell me all about it.

It was a perfect day for riding in the old pickup. It was a hot day out, a beautiful early summer day with perfectly blue skies, but the side windows were down and the wind blowing through them made things quite comfortable inside. As we went along the cracked pavement leading to home, he told me straight off that he’d submitted one of my old résumés to the Finlays. From what he told me, they were quite impressed with my degree, and went so far as to tell him that they could use someone like me to manage their finances for the next few years, at least so long as they were rebuilding the village on government grants.

As Father pulled into the front yard, I had already made up my mind. It sounded like a good offer, and I did get along with the Finlays when we were all in school together. There weren’t any other locals with business degrees -- remember, this was years ago -- and they had to hire at least a few tokens. Why on Earth shouldn’t the token have been me? So, as soon as I was done dragging all of my suitcases up to my second-story room, I left to find them at the old village.

As I drove up the old dirt road in the pickup, I’d noticed that they’d stripped all of the alders that had been growing on the road. Now that was something that anyone had done for decades, and the road showed that. The village itself looked hugely different. The first thing that I’d noticed was that the old church steeple, stripped of paint by years of rain, snow, and wind, wasn’t there any more. Neither were the general store and the square rectangular community hall. The weeds were gone from the front yards of all of the old homes, too -- they looked bare, without paint or any kind of covering to protect them from the elements.

Still, I had to admit to myself that it looked a lot better, and I could imagine it one day, years from now, all new and shining, filled with tourists taking a look at what it was like to live in a turn-of-the-century agricultural village in this part of the world, buying souvenirs from the hall that had been remade a gift shop. I could imagine advertisements put in all of the papers within a day’s drive of here announcing the opening of this fascinating new attraction. I could see the cottages and motels being built around it, and the restaurants and the craft shops rising alongside the road. I could see the future, and I wanted in on it.

And as it happened, I did. I did manage the finances of the village well enough to keep it going through all of the hard years, and I did help the Finlays promote the village. I did make the tragic yet highly interesting history of the settlers known to all and sundry through neat little handbooks available in gift shops across the province for five dollars each, and we made a killing out of the crafts cooperative that had been installed in the rebuilt community hall. I met my wife at a conference to discuss the village’s success, and we came back here just in time to sell Father’s old field overlooking and build a couple of dozen cottages available to the overnight visitor at 80 dollars per night. I have seen home become a rich place, filled with summer-long visitors who build expensive chalets on top of the most spectacular cliffs, and who patronize the local theatre that we opened in the new church that we built and pour even more money into our coffers.

In short, I have made the future out of our distant past, and I’m proud of it.