A Good Man

by Guy Vanderhaeghe

  All afternoon, he trudged the streets trying to find some peaceful spot where it would be possible to connect two thoughts together. Only when a coal-smoke Toronto dusk began to darken the thoroughfares did he find it, the shadowy grounds of a massive red-brick Methodist church. Leaning an elbow on a tombstone in its graveyard, Dunne counted his money into his palm, a pitiful amount when weighed against the extravagant rates for accommodation he had seen posted outside fleabag hotels and dusty-windowed rooming houses. Life in a city was dearer than he had ever dreamed. As he closed his fist on his few coins and crumpled paper money, he saw that the evening service had concluded, and the congregation was filing sedately down the steps of the church.

  Catching sight of a vagabond in the churchyard, one of the congregants, Mr. Hind, indignantly marched over to demand a word with him. He was a parchment-skinned, desiccated, elderly gentleman who had all the stern self-confidence of those who have pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. At the last deacons’ meeing he had raised the issue of vagrants who hung about begging from parishioners and used the graveyard as a doss-house and lavatory. There had been some soft tut-tutting and weary head-shaking on the part of the other deacons, but no one had seemed ready to take steps, to take action. Hind was about to.

  “You,” he said to the young fellow in a harsh, ringing voice, “don’t bother coming cap in hand here, bothering honest people. And there’ll be no sleeping rough in the cemetery either. Clear off.”

  “I ain’t asking no money from nobody. And I ain’t intending to sleep here neither. I was just looking for a quiet spot to think is all.”

  The phrase “to think is all” struck home with Mr. Hind. Was it a discreet allusion to a crisis of faith, to the spiritual confusion that so often beset the young? At just such an age he himself had been prey to religious melancholia, but had managed to flail his way up from the dark depths to bathe in God’s beneficent light. Suddenly, this young man seemed a worthy object of fatherly concern. Hind saw himself sculling a lifeboat to the rescue of a sinking soul.

  The old man dramatically swept his arm to the tombstones that surrounded them. “It is not here you will find rest for your soul, my young man.” Then he pointed emphatically to the church. “What you seek lies there. In the midst of the living body of Christ eternal.”

  Michael Dunne followed the finger taking shaky aim on the double doors creaking shut on the backs of the last of the departing parishioners. “I ain’t looking for rest,” he said. “I’m looking for work.”

  This was a deflating response; it was disappointing to have to ship oars in the midst of soul-saving. But Hind had a practical side to him also, and a mere three days before, he had found it necessary to dismiss his man of all work when it had come to light that he was engaging in highly irregular relations with the neighbour’s parlour maid. Hind’s eyes narrowed in appraisal. This sturdy lad was obviously healthy and strong. And, of course, the firm guidance of a Christian master and the atmosphere of a godly household would be of great profit to the young fellow. Here was a situation of benefit to both parties.

  “Can you drive a team of horses?” Hind demanded.

  “I was raised up on a farm. I can drive anything that’s got four legs.”

  “Not afraid of work?”

  “I said I come off a farm. There it’s nothing but hard work.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Michael Dunne.”

  Hind’s eyes bored into him. There was a time he had hired Catholics, colleens fresh off the boat who came cheap. Frustratingly, however, they had all clung to their rosaries, resisted being Methodized. Their intransigence had led Hind to swear off engaging them. He was not a man who liked to be reminded that not everything could be moulded to his will. “Irish, that name, isn’t it? You’re not a Papist?on’t employ those who bend a knee to Rome.”

  Without a moment’s hesitation Dunne said, “Me? My colour’s Orange. King Billy’s my man.”

  A shadow of skepticism passed over Hind’s face. The answer had come a little too swiftly. But the width of this prospect’s chest and shoulders was promising. “Very well,” Hind said. “I pay a hundred dollars a year. You will have a room in my house and meals at my expense. I provide male servants with three shirts, two pairs of trousers, socks, and undergarments every twelfth month. A new suit of clothes every four years. I keep a teetotal house. My name is Rupert Hind. Mr. Hind to you.”

  Dunne immediately accepted the terms offered and followed his benefactor into a new life.

  Hind had made his fortune provisioning railway construction gangs and lakeboat crews with the very cheapest of weevily foodstuffs. Driving hard bargains and slicing the loaf thin had won him an imposing home, a square, ugly blockhouse built of russet brick that cowed an elm-lined street. Its architecture resembled that of the church he attended. The interior was solemnly church-like too, furnished with hard chairs constructed to wring repentance from buttocks, walls painted a Protestant eggshell white, the air an eye-watering compound of varnish and vinegar. Dunne’s attic room was as bare and cold as a cell in debtors’ prison.

  Compared to the heavy labour he had been sentenced to on the farm, his work was relatively light, but he was constantly at the beck and call of his new master and mistress. The ox was transformed into a patient dogsbody. He mucked out the stables, curried the horses, polished carriage fittings, mended harness, chopped wood, stoked the furnace, shovelled snow, cut grass, trimmed hedges; planted, manured, watered, weeded, and harvested the vegetable garden; made repairs to the house, walked the master’s two Irish setters daily, ran errands to the shops, and drove Mr. and Mrs. Hind about in their carriage wherever they wished to go, any hour of the day or night.

  Dunne performed all these tasks with consummate diligence and attention. Even when he learned his counterpart down the street got paid twenty dollars a year more for doing the same work, he never complained or betrayed resentment. The schoolmaster’s belief that he had the makings of a prodigious clerk had taken root in his brain. He was alight with ambition. He had a plan. If he beavered away, proved himself loyal and efficient, perhaps Mr. Hind would consider him for a post in his company offices. In the meantime, he was making himself fit and suitable for such employment. No one was aware Dunne was studying a primer on double-entry bookkeeping, which he pored over whenever he could steal a spare minute from his busy days. Late at night, as he did accounting exercises in his attic room, the figures he entered with such lip-licking precision in the columns took on an eerie significance for him. The black numerals he inked were the bricks with which he was building his dreams. They were the hard, solid support for his future. They were actual. They were real. It was in such things he sought salvation.

  But Dunne did not rely simply on competence with numbers to win him a place in Mr. Hind’s firm. He memorized acres of the Holy Book, which he dropped into every conversation with his employer, giving proof of both his piety and power of memory. Sometimes he got carried away spouting scripture, which brought a flicker of irritation into Mr. Hind’s eye and made him scuffle his feet impatiently on the floor. Still, Dunne doggedly persisted in making a good impression. At morning and evening prayer, obligatory for all servants, he sang hymns and entreated God with a fervour that incited giggling fits in the maids.

  From the other servants Dunne held himself imperially aloof, not because they laughed at him and pulled faces behind his back, but because in his heart of hearts, he knew he was not one of them. Michael Dunne was destined for better things. He was training himself to think like a master, to note the delinquencies and shortcomings of household staff because the time would come when he would be a master himself. Several times, he took it upon himself to inform Mr. Hind of misdeeds and trespasses committed below stairs. He reported that the butcher had given the cook an emolument to ensure she kept placing orders in his shop. With a sad, reluctant air, he informed Mr. Hind it was Alice who had been responsible for breaking one of Mrs. Hind’s prized vases
. His employer appeared to be very happy to be enlightened on these matters. Of course, tattling made Dunne no friends among his fellow servants, but that signified no more to him than a cabbage fart in a windstorm.

  Finally, after eighteen months of sterling service, Dunne respectfully buttonholed Mr. Hind and asked whether he would consider him for a clerkship. Something humble, of course, but a post that would offer opportunity for advancement if he proved capable. Mr. Hind stared at his handyman as if he had gone barking mad. “Why, Dunne, you are deficient in experience. I need practised men,” he said sharply.

  Dunne interrupted, mentioning the bookkeeping primer, the midnight oil he had burned improving himself. Mr. Hind turned slippery, muttered something evasive. When Dunne persisted in arguing his case, his master grew angry. “Not now! Can’t you see I am busy? I have visitors arriving from New York tonight. A thousand things to see to! Understand?”

  The set of Mr. Hind’s shoulders, the way the tip of his cane angrily stabbed the floor, drove home to Dunne that all his hopes had been illusory. Hind would never give him fair play, never give him a chance. The old man had imagined his faithful dogsbody’s big paw wrapped around a pen and realized what a ridiculous sight that would make, had considered what impression his man of all work’s Ottawa Valley accent and country manners would make in a commercial establishment, what a preposterous figure he would cut before customers. Hind briskly dismissed his servant and marched off to see to the preparations being made to welcome his visitors from the United States.

  Americans had been frequent callers ever since Dunne began to work in the Hind household, a great itinerant pack of anti-slavery men, so many of them that Dunne had wondered if there wasn’t a factory in New England dedicated to their manufacture. A flock of wing-collared, frock-coated, starchy-shirted old ducks, quacking the same thing through their bills. Free the slaves! Lift the poor black man up!

  Dunne wondered why, if Hind was so much in favour of giving the Negro a boost, did he want to keep his boot planted on his white neck? He had driven his employer to enough meetings and lectures, stood at the backs of enough halls to have seen how these famous pamphleteers and orators could bring crocodile tears to Hind’s eyes with the mere mention of shackles, whips, and slave auctions. Every abolitionist who came to Toronto to raise money to extirpate the Great Abomination was an honoured guest in Hind’s home, and managed to stick a hand in his pocket.

  But then in the summer of 1863, two months after he had dashed Dunne’s hopes for advancement, Mr. Hind descended into a period of profound despair. For days he sat in his study, face buried in his hands, and everyone tiptoed about the house as if there had been a death in the family. Mr. Hind subscribed to a bundle of newspapers from near and far, some of which arrived by post from distant points, including New York and Boston. Being a frugal man, when Mr. Hind was finished with them they were turned over to his handyman to light the stoves and draw the drafts in the fireplaces. But before he put them to the match, Dunne, not having given up trying to improve himself, read them assiduously. From what he read, he soon became convinced Mr. Hind’s black mood had something to do with the riots that had recently broken out in New York in opposition to President Lincoln’s new Army draft. For three days mobs had run wild, attacking and burning government buildings, until soldiers and artillery arrived to clear them from the streets. According to the newspapers, poor whites held the Negroes responsible for the draft, resented that their blood was to be sacrificed to buy the black man’s freedom. The Negroes soon paid a price for that, were assaulted and murdered by the rampaging gangs; even a Negro orphanage was laid siege to and set ablaze with the children trapped inside.

  From experience, Dunne had learned that his employer’s moods were accurate barometers of what was in the newspapers. Union successes gladdened him and Union defeats darkened his countenance. But nothing before had thrown him into despondency the way the news of the slaughter of New York’s Negroes did. The carnage there shook the old man to the core. When he finally emerged from the study, he was much changed. Hind had always been a hard man, but the newspaper accounts he had brooded over had cold-chiselled his face into the terrible, righteous mask of an Old Testament prophet.

  A few months later, Dunne’s employer began to entertain Americans of a very different stripe from the soapy old codgers who had formerly cluttered the premises, flashy young fellows who sported yellow waistcoats and loud windowpane-checked trousers. These men never orated or peddled pamphlets; they simply lolled about in an upstairs bedroom for a night or two, playing cards, smoking foul cigars, and passing round a bottle, which, to Dunne’s astonishment, his teetotalling employer turned a blind eye to.

  One of Dunne’s duties was to ferry these rakish fellows back and forth from the Union Train Station. He picked them up when they arrived and drove them back to the depot when they departed. During these trips, his passengers didn’t deign to exchange a word with him, but Dunne listened intently to the slangy, jokey code they talked and which they assumed he was too witless to decipher.

  “Well, I hope the fish are biting down Windsor way. With the border so close, I like to get them into the frying pan while they’re still wet and fresh!” And another would say, “Last time I didn’t even have to call those wild tom turkeys around Mount Forest out of the bush. They trampled each other trying to climb into my game bag.”

  It wasn’t long before Dunne saw that these shady strangers threw their ownshadows. He began to notice strange people and peculiar occurrences in the street outside the house. One morning while raking leaves, he observed a furniture van that sat in the roadway for two hours, then drove away without making a delivery. Another day a workman spent most of the morning up on a ladder checking a gas lamp – and peering into the upper windows of the Hind house. There were others, a suspicious birdwatcher with binoculars, and a man who walked a fat old dog for an eternity, toing and froing up and down the same few blocks near the Hind property until the animal sat down and refused to move, and his owner had to carry the exhausted animal off in his arms.

  Then one October afternoon, as Dunne was greasing the hubs of Hind’s carriage, he glanced up and saw a figure framed in the double doorway of the carriage house. The fellow had carefully posed himself there to create a picture of devil-may-care self-assurance. His thumbs were hooked in the armpits of his waistcoat; his bowler was cocked down over one eye; he was flicking a toothpick up and down in his jaw. “Now that’s a landau to beat all landaus – a regular beauty,” he said, and sauntered over.

  Without offering a reply, Dunne dipped into the grease and resumed lubricating the wheel. This did not discourage the stranger; on the contrary, it drew him in even closer, so close that he filled Dunne’s nostrils with the cloying smell of his pomade.

  “Getting ready to take Mr. Hind’s American friends on a sightseeing tour? Toronto displays itself to advantage this time of year, the colour of the leaves and what not. Don’t you agree?”

  “I ain’t stupid. I know why you’re here,” said Dunne.

  The man produced a gold sovereign, waggled it at him enticingly. “It’s yours, mate, you give me the Yankees’ destination.”

  “I never know where they’re going,” said Dunne. “Hind gives me their hour of departure. But if you take a gander at a railway schedule, it ain’t hard to figure where they’re likely headed.”

  “So what’s their hour of departure?”

  “Hind ain’t give me my marching orders yet. But there’s time yet. He always gives a day’s notice.”

  “Well then, you and I are the best of friends already,” said the man. “Aren’t we?” He pressed the sovereign into Dunne’s palm. Dunne stood staring down at the engraving of St. George’s horse trampling the dragon. When he looked up, he saw the man’s face was stretched in a wide, elastic grin that revealed a notable gap in his front teeth. He looked ready to swallow him whole.

  “The name’s McCorkle. And yours is –?”

  “Dunne.”r />
  McCorkle tipped his head in the direction of the door and smoothly suggested, “I think we should step outside. Just in case someone happens to come to find you to run an errand. In that case, I’ll be looking for a certain house and you’ll be giving me directions.”

  Dunne followed him out into slanting sunshine. From a neighbour’s yard, the smoky incense of burning leaves wafted over them. A blue jay cocked its head at McCorkle, its attention captured by the piece of chalk he was casually tossing from hand to hand. “So when you get the departure time from Hind, this is what you do. Note the hour here,” he said, writing down 10:45 a.m. on a plank of the carriage house. “Make the figures small. We aren’t a commercial concern – no need to advertise,” he said. “I’ll be checking it regular. When I get the hour” – he swiped the wall with his sleeve – “gone.” He handed Dunne the chalk.

  Dunne thought for a moment. “I wonder why a fellow happens to carry chalk with him everywheres,” he said.

  “In my line of business,” said McCorkle, “there are plenty of things to mark. Maybe a carriage of interest, or maybe a door that needs looking into or opening. By my associates, I mean. But those are details you don’t have to bother your head about.”

  “Well, if it’s your line of business maybe you ought to think longer and harder about the marks you leave lying about. No numbers,” Dunne said. “Do it so.” He drew four lines, ran a diagonal through them. “Five.” Marked another four and slashed them with another diagonal. “Ten. Say it’s ten forty-five, I take it to the lowest hour. Ten o’clock. It don’t hurt any of you fellows to kick your heels in the train station waiting a few minutes. I put a little dot on top of the lines if it’s a.m., a dot under them if it’s p.m.” Dunne illustrated, then wiped his marks clean. “If Hind was to catch sight of a number like 10:45 writ down on his property, it’s likely to remind him of a time he just give me. It’s likely to make him wonder. But this looks like somebody counting off something. What? Maybe the number of days until it’s time to grease the wheels on the carriage again. I might say that if I was asked.”