Dollybird

by Anne Lazurko

  “Hey. You. With the kid.”

  I turned back terrified. “Me?”

  “You’re the only one carrying a kid.”

  “Yeah.”

  “They’re looking for workers on a crew in Ibsen, couple hours’ ride south.” He looked away over the barricade again.

  Under my shirt I could feel my sweat go cold. “Uh, thanks.” He didn’t look at me again.

  It was hell, hitching rides with a little one. You’d have thought I was carrying a live skunk the way people wrinkled their noses and drove their horses a little faster as they went by. Finally I had to leave Casey out of sight in the tall grass at the side of the trail until a wagon slowed. Then I’d quick grab him and hoist us both up onto the back until they kicked us off. Some let us ride. Some didn’t, cursing all bums and delinquents, as though I was some kind of representative.

  Finally a driver stopped of his own accord and a woman’s hands reached down to take Casey. They were a husband and wife, maybe fifty years old, a flash of smile between them when they made room on the seat for me. She reached behind to a basket and pulled out a cheese sandwich and jar of milk.

  “Thanks.” The bread melted in my mouth.

  “Looks like you’ve had some hard luck,” she said.

  I nodded, looking down at the holes in my boots and the bundle of dirty grey clothes that was Casey.

  “Going to the crew?” her husband asked, sizing me up with his one good eye. The other wandered to the left a little, so I wasn’t sure where he was looking. I took my chances on the straight eye and spoke to it.

  “I was told they were looking for men in Ibsen.”

  “Yeah, so they say.” He thought for a minute. “But watch yourself. There’s some of those outfits don’t give a damn how they treat ya. Look for a big guy named Henry. He’ll steer you right.”

  “What will you do with this little guy?” The woman shifted Casey on her knee and smiled down at him. “You’re a sweet thing, aren’t you?”

  Casey mumbled through the sandwich he chewed.

  “Well, ma’am, I don’t know.” I was thinking quick so she wouldn’t think me an idiot. “I was hoping the farm women would watch him while I worked.”

  She laughed and shook her head. “Oh Lord, those women won’t have time for another little one underfoot. They’ll be too busy cooking for the crew and tending to their own.” Her husband looked at her, she raised her eyebrows at him and he nodded. “It’s none of my business, but where’s his mother?”

  A lump rose in my throat. No one except Doctor Gibson and Mrs. Brody knew how bad Taffy’s death had been. The memory was like a sore that had mossed over, ugly with festering, but hidden from everyone, so saying it out loud was like ripping off a scab. “She died of the typhoid the day he was born.”

  The woman’s eyes went soft, concern creasing at her forehead. “Oh Lord.” She held Casey too close and he squirmed to get away.

  “I tried to make it in Halifax, but there was no work. We was practically starving and Taffy pregnant and then...” My voice broke and I hated myself, because part of me enjoyed the telling and the sympathy it brought. Part of me wanted there to be a clean white scar where the wound was. See it the way these people saw it. But when I ducked my head to fake tears, all I could think of was the part I wasn’t telling where it was my fault.

  “Don’t you worry...?”

  “Dillan.”

  “Dillan. This little fellow can stay with us while you work the harvest.”

  “I’ll make out okay.” My hands unclenched and shoulders relaxed even as I protested. Someone else to worry over Casey, to figure out what he needed, to be responsible.

  “Nonsense. Look, we’re Mr. and Mrs. George Miller. You come have supper with us, ask about us in town if you like, see if we’re trustworthy enough.” She glanced at her husband and laughed out loud. “The boy will be fine.”

  I liked her. She was straight-on, looked at you when she spoke, and her eyes were kind. “Yes, I believe he will be. I’ll make it up to you, Mrs. Miller. I promise.”

  When we got to their farm, I washed up and helped Casey do the same. Mrs. Miller’s fried potatoes and salt pork were like honey on my tongue. She bounced around her small kitchen, talking of her garden, her husband’s crops, laughing with Casey as she tickled his naked belly and washed him clean of the livery and the train and the past. The boy and I slept like we were dead, wrapped in a feather tick on a bed of straw in the barn. And in the morning, Mr. Miller squeezed my shoulder and pointed me toward town.

  “The crews are assembling at the end of Main Street,” he said.

  I reached for Casey, struggling in Mrs. Miller’s arms. “Gotta say goodbye.”

  Strange feelings tugged at my belly when I hugged him – relief he’d be cared for, scared witless for him at the same time. Relief too, at being alone in the world again, the strange combination of freedom and fear you get on entering a pub where no one knows you or anything about you, the sense you will have to make it on your own legs. I’d used Taffy’s story to my advantage. Casey too. But now I’d have no excuses.

  “Go now.” Mrs. Miller looked at me sorrowfully, took my hands and squeezed them. Her hands were like my mother’s hands, hard with life, gentle with love. “Go and work out your grief. Then you’ll be ready to raise this young thing properly.”

  I couldn’t tell her it wasn’t grief keeping me poor and hopeless. The grief was easy compared to the guilt. I handed Casey to her and walked away slow, looked back and waved. Casey wouldn’t understand this leaving. How could he? I turned back at least twice, and finally started to run, faster and faster until the wind drowned out Casey’s cries, until my lungs were bursting with the great gulps of blue sky burning them.

  CHAPTER 7

  i i i

  I reached Main Street, Ibsen, and slowed up. Main Street, it turned out, was the only street and made up the whole of the business district. A few shops, a livery, hardware. Small spurs of homes sprang from this hub. That was it. Back home people lived in town, close to town, on embankments, hills, rocks and valleys. But this flat little place spread across two streets and then just stopped to make way for prairie. In Arichat a person had to make an effort to spy on his neighbour. There’d be no need of spying here. Just look down the street and you’d know everybody’s business. The whole place was cracked dry and hard.

  At the end of Main Street, a ragtag bunch of men had assembled. Men like me. Most owned nothing but the shirts on their backs and the boots on their feet. Some wore strange hats that must have come from places I’d never even heard of. It was a guilty kind of joy pumped up my chest as I got closer. I was a man again, with no child to make me weak or single me out.

  A great beast of a machine was set on a flat wagon, draft horses harnessed and ready. A line of wagons and bunkhouses were hitched to mules, donkeys and oxen. Climbing on the machine and hollering at everyone to “look at this big fogger” was a squat-looking man with a thick neck, and forearms looking like they could crush anything. He glared at me and my stomach somersaulted.

  “What are you looking at?” he shouted over the commotion around him. His voice was slurred with a heavy accent I didn’t recognize.

  My tongue was thick. “I’m just...uh...”

  “Listen to the fuckin’ mental. Just stay out of my way, you little...”

  A large hand gripped my elbow and steered me toward the line of wagons.

  “Never mind him then. He’s a horse’s ass.” The voice was heavy with an Irish brogue. The hand belonged to a huge man with flaming red hair and beard. “Name’s Henry. First time with the crew then?”

  It was more a statement than a question. I nodded.

  “Just stay away from Gabe.” Henry nodded slightly toward the man who was swinging like a monkey from one wagon to the next, hollering
at everyone he saw. “He’s an idiot, but you gotta feel sorry for him, poor bugger.” He shook his head. “Waiting for his chance two years now, but he hasn’t got a hope in hell of getting any land. He’s Polish, or Ukrainian, maybe Russian for all I know.”

  I must have looked stunned.

  “No one’s gonna give him the time of day, especially the land office. Government wants to keep folks like him out as long as they can.” Henry looked at me like I understood, so I just nodded. “But he’s a stupid bugger too. Doesn’t help his chances, acting like he does. Don’t know his arse from a knot in a pine board. But he can work. I’ll give him that.” Henry pulled himself up so he towered over me. “Now what might you be good for?”

  “I don’t know, but...” I decided I’d better sound like I knew something from a pine board. “I’d sure like to get on the threshing crew.”

  “Ha!” Henry boomed. “Wouldn’t you though? You’ll start pitching like everybody else. Work hard and learn fast and you’ll move on to the machine soon enough, ‘specially since the harvest is so late. Maybe get to drive a wagon.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “Yeah. One more thing.” Henry gave me a sidelong look. “Where’re you from?”

  “Arichat.”

  “Good. I got a second cousin from there. Good.” He walked away.

  I trailed behind feeling foolish until a wagon rumbled by and I jumped in. I grunted to the men already in the back and pretended to doze with my hat pulled down over my face. From under the brim I recognized some of the men from Halifax. Thank Christ Gabe wasn’t with ’em.

  The weeks of harvest were a blur. A new farm every few days. Men dropped off and others took their places. The sweet smells of harvest made my eyes itch and my nose drip like a leaky bucket. Even my ears itched. On the inside. Henry told me it was the dust, said a good rain would dampen things down and take care of it. Sometimes I slept in a bunkhouse on a thin mattress, sometimes in a hayloft, the loose straw giving comfort to my aching back. Exhausted and sore, I’d have slept hanging from a tree, grateful finally to sleep without dreams or regret.

  I was one of two pitchers, forking the heavy stooks onto a wagon that took them to the threshing machine. After three weeks of the endless rhythm of stab, lift, heave, pitch, Henry finally told me I’d be getting a better job. But I didn’t want one. Sure I suffered with itching and snot and aching joints, but I liked the predictability of the work, the smells, the feeling I was doing something that mattered. And the urgency of it; the whole crew checked the sky as though it might fall down around us, racing billowing black clouds that grew and threatened for miles, running to get the field done because the next storm might be bringing winter with it. The work kept Taffy locked away somewhere.

  We ate four times a day: breakfast, lunch, another meal in late afternoon and yet another at the end of the day. And the Scotsmen brought crowdy to the field, a mix of oatmeal and water they claimed would give me energy. A refreshment they called it. It tasted like wet sawdust. Otherwise, the women of the farms cooked for the entire crew as well as their own large families.

  It was a cool evening and we were camped in a circle in a field not far from the farmyard. The farmer looked exhausted, his wife worn out. Still, she beckoned us to join her family and enjoy harvest ice cream. She poured salt over packed ice surrounding the bucket of cream, then turned the crank until the little ones crowded around her hollering, “It’s thick, Momma. Momma, it’s ready.” Momma insisted on a few more minutes of cranking before declaring the ice cream fit to eat. It was cold, creamy perfection. I held it on my tongue to save the taste there as long as I could before it dissolved, and I swallowed it along with the dusty rawness in my throat. I smiled at the woman whose name I couldn’t remember. Mary or Kate or Frieda. There’d been so many farm wives.

  Gabe sat a little apart from the rest of us. He’d been staring across the fire toward the house. All through the harvest, I’d said nothing to him, staying away from him as Henry advised. I only watched as he convinced a big French guy to join a poker game and then cheated him out of a day’s earnings with an ace up his sleeve. And I minded my own business when I saw him pocket a gold watch at the general store in Benson. I watched my back and slept with my moneybelt under my head. I’d no plans to get involved.

  From beside the fire I could see the farmer’s daughter, a silhouette standing in the open doorway of the house. I’d seen her earlier, guessed her to be thirteen or so, dark hair pulled into two long braids. She’d stared right back at me, innocent, like she didn’t know her skin was clear and her breasts made a small rise under her shirt – temptation to a lesser man. She was fresh and beautiful. Like Taffy...before... Gabe was looking at her with hard eyes. There was a sudden chill on my skin.

  Behind me someone tuned a guitar, and the farmer started singing cowboy songs about love and losing love and horses and dogs. We all sat quiet, listening, embarrassed by it, the western tunes strange to our eastern ears.

  And then Henry gave us a Celtic dance on his harp, and two or three from home stood up, stepping kind of awkward-like, until everyone was clapping and hollering “faster, faster.” The moonshine appeared, and soon the strangeness was gone, and we were all flushed and homesick and happy, the evening mild, a light wind keeping the mosquitoes away, the dust of the harvest hanging in the air and the taste of ice cream faint on our lips.

  Without really looking, I saw that Gabe was gone. The door of the house was empty, too, and I searched round the fire for the girl’s face. I worked hard to keep down the bad feeling rising in my throat. Standing and slowly stretching, I started toward the yard. It was stupid, giving in to the bad feeling, but my legs just took me. I needed some time alone anyway. The moonshine made my head fuzzy and the dark of the night made it worse, like I was walking sideways and uphill.

  “Hey there.” I patted one of the horses in a pen near the barn and crooned to her like she was a woman. “Nice night. Aren’t you a beauty then?” Fear was growing to dread, my breath coming quick and shallow. There was no one in the barn. Where were they? I stopped and looked around at the black night, and shook my head. This was crazy. Gabe probably went back to camp, the girl to bed. Maybe they were both back at the fire. And I was a fool.

  And then I saw them at the back door of the house. He pushed her and she stumbled into the porch, the door closing behind them. I crept closer until I was just outside, my whole body rigid with listening, fists clenched, head pounding like my heart had leapt up there into my brain.

  “Where’s the key?” Gabe’s voice was loud through the door.

  “Please don’t,” she whispered, and then sucked in her breath, crying out a little like she was hurt. “Pa won’t be able to pay the crew. Please.”

  Son of a bitch. He was stealing our wages?

  “Another fucking word and I’ll hurt you worse. Where is it?” Gabe was breathing hard.

  “Ow, don’t.” The girl yelped. “On a hook under the coats, right there by the door.”

  There was shuffling near the door.

  “You tell anyone,” Gabe said, the words slow and hard, “an’ I’ll come back and burn your house down with your ma and those other brats inside.”

  “Leave her alone.” The words growled up from my throat. I hadn’t known they were there. I’d been so afraid, I’d forgotten to plan. “Leave her alone,” I said again, louder, and kicked open the door. Gabe had the girl’s arm pushed up behind her back. Her face was filled with pain and fear and tears. He was rooting in a strongbox on the floor with his free hand. He flashed surprised and ugly eyes at me, let go the girl and lunged, but I was already running out into the dark.

  He tackled me at the edge of the wheat field, landing on top of me, his arm across my throat. He fought like an animal, scratching my face, hammering my stomach, my kidneys, my head. I landed only a weak punch or two. I hadn’t fought muc
h, didn’t know how to protect myself, how to hurt him back. He was standing over me, kicking at my groin and back. The pain exploded in my chest and I heard a cracking sound, my ribs under his boots. There was shouting in the distance and suddenly it was over, Gabe running away, Henry’s huge arms lifting me and carrying me all the way back to the farmhouse, the girl mute beside her mother and sisters, who suddenly switched their attention to me. I saw her through one swollen eye as she turned away, flushed and suffering.

  She helped her mother nurse me, coming only at night when the lights were low, never looking me in the eye. She kept her head down, her face frowning while she changed the dressing on my eye and rewrapped the bandage round my ribs. I was useless to help her, the pain too great. Useless in other ways too. Gabe hadn’t got all the farmer’s money. We were all paid. But the family would do without ’cause of Gabe’s thieving. And I didn’t tell anyone who done it, told them it was too dark to see. Didn’t tell them how Gabe threatened the daughter so she kept quiet too. Both of us had seen what was in Gabe’s eyes. Both of us were too afraid to speak.

  Finally, one night, I tried. “He’s an evil man.”

  Her frown deepened, pulling the corners of her eyes with it. I started to tell her it wasn’t her fault. She shouldn’t be afraid to walk in the daylight. But I couldn’t find the words. Who was I to counsel anyone? I left her home as soon as I could walk a few paces without pain. My harvest was over.

  CHAPTER 8

  i i i

  MOIRA

  “You’re an embarrassment. You lied to me and now I can’t trust you.” Mr. Penny’s voice was loud, rumbling about the small room he fancied as a business office, the volume of his accusations threatening to make them true. “You will no longer work in this house.”