Novelists

by C. P. Boyko

  She took care to indulge his every whim, certain that it was the Muse stirring in him. When he asked for candy, it was because art must be sweet. When he was bored, she arranged play dates with other boys and girls, because art is a social act. When he threw a tantrum over horseshoes, she sent the boys and girls home, because art is nothing if not the product of solitude and reflection. And when his uncompromising individuality discomfited his teachers, she permitted him to stay home from school, because art must find its own path to the truth.

  But as he grew older, his whims dwindled. The things he did not want to do multiplied while the things he did want to do decreased, until as a young man all he wanted to do, it seemed, was sit around in soft chairs in dark rooms and read books. Even this he did listlessly, as if he simply couldn’t think of anything better to do. She waited in vain for all this solitude and reflection to bear fruit in the form of a novel or even a poem, but the most she ever caught him writing was a note in the margin of an anthology. When she investigated later, she found that he had jotted one single word, faintly and clumsily, beside one of the greatest stanzas in English poetry. The word was “stupid.” The poet was Longfellow.

  In desperation she began inviting to dinner journalists, poets, novelists, and other writers. But, when Lance could be persuaded to join them at table, he seemed immune to the charms of the writing life. The rewards of imagination, the pride of craft, the challenge of constantly reinventing oneself, the vagaries of fame, the peccadilloes of publishers, the esoteric mystery of royalties—none of this captured his interest. He sat with his chin sunk upon his chest, staring into his soup with glazed eyes, occasionally letting a deep, sawing sigh cut right through one of the guests’ anecdotes.

  But one night his head snapped up at the sound of his mother laughing—laughing at him. Reconstructing the conversation from subliminal fragments, he determined that they had been talking about the war in South Africa. A large bearded man whom Lance vaguely recognized had recounted comprehensively his participation in that event. Then one of the literary ladies had asked Lance’s mother if he had been in it. This was the idea she found so humorous.

  “Why not?” he demanded. “I was old enough. I might have gone.”

  “Undoubtedly, dearest. Mummy didn’t mean anything by it. It was just the thought of you, in big heavy boots, and carrying a gun, with a great big pack on your back, climbing a hill—” She was overcome again by mirth.

  Lance poured his coffee into his soup, pushed back his chair, got to his feet, and sashayed with dignity from the room and out of the house. He decided to run away from home.

  He ran away from home often—once or twice a week, lately. The first time, at age twelve, he’d run away to protest a stomach flu which had prevented him from eating as much chocolate as he would have liked. He’d gone around the side of the house and crouched behind a rhododendron bush for fifteen minutes, till he could be sure that the universe and his mother had noted his disapproval. Since that time his escapes had taken him farther and farther from home. He found them both soothing and stimulating, so that by the time he returned—sometimes as much as three-quarters of an hour later—he could scarcely recall the injustice he had fled. Indeed, these runnings away were the closest he came to adventure outside the pages of a novel. He took care never to retrace his steps, but each time struck out in a different direction, trying his utmost to get lost. Most of the time we see the world as a schematic representation of itself, a sort of life-sized three-dimensional map. It is only in unfamiliar surroundings that we see the world as it really is, not cartographically, but pictorially, as a painter or photographer sees it. When Lance ran away from home, he instinctively ran away from the familiar and towards the unknown. When he entered a new park or walked down a strange lane for the first time, he felt that it could be a park or lane anywhere in the world—or in another world altogether.

  Tonight he had to walk for twenty minutes before he found a turning he had never taken before. For those twenty minutes he brooded upon his mother’s slanderous laughter. She thought he was weak! Unmanly! A sissy! He kicked at a stone in the road, but the stone resisted; and he continued on his way, now with a slight hobble and more outraged than ever. When the throbbing in his foot had subsided, he kicked at a leaf, with more satisfactory results.

  “There! That’s your laughter, Mummy! That’s your laughing face!” He imagined himself sitting atop her, and imagined her bucking and thrashing beneath him, but to no avail. “Now who’s a weakling, hey, Mummy? Now who’s laughing?”

  Then he realized that he had no idea where he was, and his daydreams went out like a flame deprived of oxygen. He looked around him. A rickety fence separated a row of houses from the road, which sloped downhill past a copse of silver beeches to an open field. A lopsided moon outlined every cloud in the sky. The air was warm and moist and smelled faintly of the ocean. He drank in the night—and strode forward, into the unknown.

  When he returned home, twenty-two minutes later, he found the large bearded man in the garden, moistening his lips with a brandy and moistening a cigar with his lips.

  “Welcome back.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Nice walk?”

  “Spiffing.”

  “Your mother.” He held the cigar out to investigate his handiwork. “Says you write.”

  (Mrs. Chitdin had exaggerated.)

  Giggling, Lance arranged himself on a nearby bench like a butler putting away the best china. When he was settled, he said nonchalantly, “I’ve composed ten novels.”

  (Mrs. Chitdin would have been surprised to hear it.)

  “Guess I could see one?” said the man.

  “Hardly! I don’t write them down.”

  The man rotated the cigar in his mouth. “You just—make them up. In your head.”

  Writhing with suppressed giggles, Lance said, “I wouldn’t know where else to make them up.”

  A woman came out of the house and joined them. She slipped her hand inside the large bearded man’s elbow and said, “Maury, we promised Beepsie we’d be back at the hotel by nine.”

  “Lonnie,” said the man with devastating patience, “it’s not your turn right now. When I’m with someone, I’m with them. And right now, as you can see, I’m with the young man. So go back into the house—and don’t act all put out. This is basic kindergarten stuff, doll.”

  A blush appeared on the woman’s face, as if she had been slapped on both cheeks. Without another word, but proclaiming her recalcitrance with every step, she returned to the house.

  Lance was impressed. “Is that your wife?”

  “One of my little sisters, let’s call her.”

  “Gee.” He looked at the large bearded man more carefully. “You were in the war, huh?”

  “Parts of it.”

  “Kill anybody?”

  “Oh sure,” he grimaced. “But one thing you learn. It’s a lot easier to shoot a man than it is to pick up his corpse.”

  Lance lost interest in this sentence about halfway through. He was on his feet, holding an imaginary rifle at the level of his knees, and spraying the garden with imaginary bullets and real spittle. “P-kow! P-kosh! Take that, Mother! Ch-chow! Bakaw bakaw! And that!”

  “Nowadays,” said Maury thoughtfully, “I mostly just shoot deer.”

  His mother had been a great beauty. She grew accustomed at a young age to marriage proposals and declarations of love; so that when she met Grant Masterson, who did not express his emotions, she was mystified and intrigued. She soon hectored him into admitting that she was beautiful, but it was several months before he betrayed the depth of his true feelings.

  One night he asked almost petulantly, “Don’t you ever feel lonely?”

  “I don’t know. Not really. Maybe sometimes.” She laughed, “I get by.”

  “I’d like to make you feel lonely,” he said.

/>   “Hey! That’s not nice.”

  “No. But fair’s fair.”

  She peered at him. “I make you feel lonely?”

  His sullen silence confirmed it.

  “Then you love me!” she cried, clapping her hands. She was so delighted to have caught him, to have finally pinned him down, that she agreed when, a moment later, he asked her to marry him.

  She died giving birth to their first child. Though marriage had not cured his loneliness, it also hadn’t lasted long enough to cure him of his illusions. He still believed she was perfect—and, by dying, she guaranteed that his disappointment would be postponed perpetually. He beatified her memory, and blamed the child for her martyrdom.

  He hated Maurice even as a baby. But he was good at hiding his feelings, even from himself, and believed that he merely took a cool-headed, pragmatic approach to parenting. In practice, this meant preventing the boy from doing things he wanted to do, and forcing him to do things he didn’t. He believed this was the only way to give his son backbone—and it was evident from an early age that the boy was lacking in backbone. Thus, when the baby cried, his father ignored him till the crying ceased. When the boy complained, his father thrashed him till he cried. If he looked sleepy, his father made him stand in the corner and read aloud (but not loud enough to disturb his father’s work) a page of Shakespeare: Dr. Masterson could imagine nothing more tiresome than poetry. If he seemed restless, his father sent him to bed. Since he often seemed lonely, his father prohibited playmates. (Besides, he could not stand children, with their hysterical histrionics, like a troupe of clowns desperately faking merriment under threat of the guillotine.

  Dr. Masterson prohibited merriment.) If the boy betrayed hunger, his father devised some reason for supper to be delayed, and when the boy looked sated, his father made him clear his plate. First desserts then fruit were outlawed, for Maurice consumed them with too overt pleasure; eventually the boy’s diet was restricted to liver, rye bread, and garbanzo beans—the three foods he had shown the most distaste for, before he learned to hide his distastes.

  As a man of science and his son’s only tutor, Dr. Masterson could not quite bring himself to forbid the boy to read, though Maurice showed hardly any disinclination for this activity. Instead, he waited till the boy appeared most engrossed in a book, then ordered him out of doors to gulp down some fresh air. Occasionally Maurice returned from his exile looking inadequately dispirited, and his father accused him of meeting with other children or of eating an apple. But Maurice assured him that he had done nothing but trudge through the woods—he showed him the mud on his boots—and this satisfied his father, who could imagine no less congenial spot than a tangle of sappy trees beneath a grey, cloud-scoured sky.

  His son felt differently, but was wise enough to keep this a secret.

  One day, however, he brought home a bird with a broken wing, and his father inferred the truth. The boy’s imagination had made the wood a refuge, and peopled it with animal friends. This had to be stopped.

  “You mustn’t interfere with Nature,” he admonished. “The fit survive, and the unfit—die.”

  “But couldn’t we mend his wing? Then he would be fit again.”

  Dr. Masterson shook his head ponderously. “If he didn’t die of shame, he’d be eaten alive by the other birds. He’s got the human smell on him now. They’d take him for an outsider.”

  The boy looked aghast at his own arms, as if expecting to see the human stench rising from them.

  “No,” continued his father, “the only legitimate reason to kidnap a wild animal from its natural environment is the scientific one: vivisection. If you like, we could pin this fellow down in my laboratory and cut him open to see how his insides work.”

  The boy went pale.

  “Otherwise, there remains only the humane approach,” said the doctor with a sneer in his voice. “If you will not use a broken, suffering animal for the advancement of knowledge, then you must put it out of its misery. Wasteful, I call it—but it’s the least you can do.”

  So, in the end, Maury carried the bird out to the road and dropped a rock on it.

  “Hunting?” Mrs. Chitdin did not like the idea at all. Wasn’t it dangerous? Mr. Masterson assured her the only critters that would bite a man holding a .490 Winchester Express were wood ticks and frost. The trip would be good for Lance, would toughen him up, would put some sap in his branches. Mrs. Chitdin wasn’t so sure: Could one harden butter? But Lance was so insistent that she felt it could only be the Muse urging him on. Perhaps there would be a novel in it, after all. So, the following week, she packed his trunks, fed him breakfast, dressed him warmly, and drove him to the train station.

  The men reached the end of the line mid-afternoon. Maury went in search of a couple of gillies to take down their luggage, first warning Lance not to attempt this himself: “An Indian’ll only do what he thinks you can’t.” This warning was somewhat superfluous, since Lance had seventeen trunks, none of which he could lift even the handles of. And he was deliriously fatigued from the train ride, which had already lasted longer than the entire hunting trip had lasted in his imagination.

  By the time Maury returned, Lance had sprawled out on the platform and fallen into a light doze; the rail crew had piled his and Maury’s luggage around his body, and the train had pulled out again, back to the coast and the comforts of civilization.

  “I think I’ve got a stiff shoulder,” said Lance ominously.

  But the expedition faced even greater problems. The two Indians whom Maury had brought back with him—visibly against their will—claimed to be unable to carry seventeen trunks and eight heavy canvas packs by themselves without horses. They also claimed to be unable to speak English.

  “Hay-lo wa-wa King George.”

  “They bloody do so wa-wa King George,” said Maury affably. “They’re just too lazy to bother. And this way, when they don’t want to do something, they can pretend not to understand and just sit around growing hair. Isn’t that right, Rocky?”

  The one called Rocky shrugged, as if to say he could see Maury’s point but wanted to hear other opinions on the matter.

  It was decided, through a largely one-sided exchange of gestures and wa-wa, that Old Moose would go with Maury to buy pack ponies from one of the ranches, and Rocky would stay behind with Lance to watch the gear. Old Moose looked back wistfully at the younger men, who were already pushing the bags together into a makeshift cot.

  In the end, however, even five ornery-looking ponies, one Rocky, and one Old Moose were unequal to Lance’s trunks. For the first time, Maury paused to wonder what all Lance had brought with him. Lance didn’t know, and was just as curious. “Let’s take a boo!” he suggested, but did not stir from his couch. So Maury rifled through his belongings, holding up items for him to see, identify, and justify or discard.

  “Those are my sleeping gowns. I need those. I sleep.”

  “Lend you a pair of my pyjamas. And these things?”

  “Oh good—my butter paddles. Did she pack my butter too? I can’t endure the salted.”

  “Got all the food we’ll need, and you can use a knife and a billy like the rest of us. This gizmo?”

  “My police rattle.”

  “No police where we’re going, son. And this?”

  “Oo, I should have that on. That’s my cholera belt.”

  “Cripes! There’s no cholera in the Cariboo!… Now what on God’s green earth do you need a dull old knife for?”

  “That’s a book knife, you silly. It has to be dull, or you’re liable to cut your fingers on the pages.”

  “Use the back of my filleting knife. —What the hell am I talking about? You brought books?”

  “Just Meredith.”

  Maury rummaged around in the trunks. “The Life and Works of Lord Macaulay, Complete in Ten Volumes!?”

  “Oh, Lord. I disti
nctly told her Meredith. I can’t read history on a hunting trip.”

  The Indians, however, seemed to admire Lance’s sleeping gowns and the lifework of the British essayist in ten volumes, so Maury struck a deal with them: They would be paid in advance for their services as guides with the extra chattels, which in the meantime would remain with the stationmaster for safekeeping. Lance, who was at that moment daydreaming about wrestling a panther, offered no objection.

  By this time it was dusk, and too late even to inquire about a hotel. In any case, the town of Quesnel Arm seemed to consist altogether of the train station, a dry goods store, and eleven clapboard cabins facing eleven directions, like misanthropes huddling together for warmth. Rocky made a suggestion.

  “Ni-ka house moo-sum po-lak-le.”

  Maury grunted; looked left; spat; looked right; and grunted again. “Well, let’s see it.”

  Rocky’s house was on the river, which they were able to find in the dark by its stench. It was late in the spawning season, Maury explained, and the salmon, having struggled heroically upstream to lay their eggs as high in the mountains as possible—leaping boulders, hurling themselves from puddle to puddle, swimming against rapids and even up waterfalls—had now given up the fight, and let the river carry them where it would, to be smashed on rocks, grated like cheese on riverbeds, washed ashore, and scooped up by bears, ranchers with pitchforks, and Indians. “It’s shooting ducks in Central Park. It’s not hunting; it’s not even fishing; it’s harvesting.” He’d seen spots where the riverbanks consisted entirely of a crunchy white sand: the powdered, sun-bleached bones of salmon. The stench coming from the river was dead salmon rotting in the shallows faster than the Indians could eat or smoke them.