Watch that Ends the Night

by Hugh Maclennan

  Inside the bedroom the blind was drawn and the darkness was total. Jerome found the match box, lit the lamp and turned to look. His mother’s body lay like a sack under the blankets because the engineer had covered her and pulled the blind before going out. Jerome lifted the blanket, put his hands to her face and felt the fingers of his right hand sink into a warm stickiness. He jerked them back as though he had put them into fire and stood frozen.

  “The bad wound was on the left side of her head and her left eye was bruised by his fist. Her mouth was open and her clear eye was open and angry. She looked far angrier than frightened. My mother died in a rage.”

  Her body was not yet cold, but it had lost some of its warmth and the blood barely oozed now that the heart had ceased to pump it. Blood was dark and wet all over the pillow and wetly thick in her hair; her breasts were like chalk-white balloons when he tried to shift her body. It was only then that he knew absolutely that she was dead. He cried out to her, he beat her naked breasts with his palms to wake her and all the time he did this he understood she was dead. Knowing she was dead he called to her to come alive again and take care of him, yet all this while he was glad the Engineer had not been like the other men whom she had humiliated.

  Then he froze once more, for a step creaked outside. He blew out the lamp and turned to run into the darkness of the cookhouse where there were tables to hide under, but he was too late. The kitchen door creaked open and he crawled under the bed and crouched there against the wall with the sag of the spring just over his head.

  The man entered and when Jerome heard him sniff, he knew he was smelling the snuffed wick of the lamp. When the man lit a match it was like an explosion of sound and light simultaneously, but the man did not carry the match to the lamp. Jerome saw his boots standing by the bed as the light slowly died. Then darkness again. Then the Engineer let out a slow, choking sob and went away. Jerome heard his feet go away noisily, heard him bump into a chair in the kitchen, open the door and leave.

  He crouched shivering with cold and fright, and he might have stayed there for hours if the dog had not returned to the room. The dog came under the bed whining and nuzzling, and Jerome felt his long, wet tongue licking his feet. The feeling of the dog’s tongue horrifled him and he rolled over and pushed the animal away, pressing his hands against its muzzle. The beast whined appreciatively and Jerome’s hair bristled when he knew the dog was licking his mother’s blood off his fingers. He hit the dog and heard him whine. He hit him as hard as he could on the muzzle and the dog let out a yelp and left him alone. Then Jerome came out from under the bed and stood up.

  Years afterwards he told Catherine that this was the first of many occasions when a sudden, clear-headed coolness came to him after moments of paralyzing terror. He was only ten years old, but he knew exactly what had happened and what else would happen if his mother’s murderer caught him. He knew the murderer had left the bedroom because he was in terror of what he had done there, but he also knew he would be on the watch outside. The Engineer would almost certainly be watching by the kitchen door, for that was the natural way for Jerome to get out and it would also be the shortest route to the bunkhouse where the rest of the men were sleeping.

  Jerome had to escape from the horror of that room where his mother lay dead. He took his clothes from the hooks where they hung: his shirt, stockings, pants, sweater and cap, and the heelless larrigans of cowhide he wore all year round. He took them out to the kitchen and dressed beside the stove which still was warm, with the dog nuzzling and whining, and he had to push the dog away several times as he pulled on his stockings. After he was dressed he washed the remaining blood from his hands under the pump and dried them on a roller towel. Very clear in the head now, he opened the big ice chest where the food was and took out the first thing he found. It was a garland of blood sausage much too clumsy and big to carry, so he cut it into lengths and stuffed a length of sausage into each of the side pockets of his pants. He left the kitchen and entered the long eating barn where the benches and trestle tables were, heading for the door at the far end, a door rarely used, and when he reached it he found it unbarred. He guessed that the Engineer had used this door when he had first gone into the clearing to search for him.

  “It must have been the dog that saved me that first time. When I ran out into the clearing, the dog must have gone into the eating barn and when the Engineer heard him moving there, he must have mistaken him for me. That was the mistake that gave me time to hide.”

  The dog was with Jerome now and this time Jerome made no error; he caught him by the long hairs at the back of his neck, held him while he stepped out, then pushed him inside and closed the door on him.

  From this corner of the cookhouse the distance to the edge of the forest was no more than twenty yards and nobody was in sight as Jerome ran across it and disappeared into the trees. He worked his way silently through trees and deadfalls until a quick coolness touched his cheeks and he knew he was near the water on the edge of the northwest branch where his canoe was beached. In flood time the branch invaded the forest a distance of thirty yards or so, and now it was pouring through the trunks of the trees, gurgling and sighing as it strained through the scrub and deadfalls, and Jerome saw quick flashes of light as the moon struck here and there against the living water.

  He worked his way along, his oiled larrigans keeping the moisture off his soles, but once his foot sank into a hole and the icy wetness poured in through the laceholes and his foot felt cold and soon went numb. After a few minutes he reached the place where the canoes and rowboats were beached, his own little canoe among them. The camp motorboat was moored to a jetty about a hundred yards downstream in the main river, but the canoes and rowboats were moored where the current was weak, and now he saw their snouts projecting out of the blackness of the woods into the moonlight. He stepped out, looked up to see the sky a wide open dome with a moon in the middle of it and a vast circle of light shining around it.

  “I knew I was going to make it. Every time afterwards when I was older, every time when I’ve been in danger and everything seemed hopeless, some moment like this always came. Suddenly I’d hear myself saying, ‘You’re going to make it. You’re going to make it after all.’”

  The short birch bark canoe with the air cans under the thwarts was easy to lift, he turned it over and ran it out into the water. He found his own paddle made to fit his height, and with a single movement he pushed the canoe off and swung himself over into the stern seat, then crept forward and settled down just about mid-ships, got the paddle working and guided the canoe past a tree trunk and clear of some fallen branches. The movement of the current kept pressing him inshore, but he paddled hard on the left into a backwash that took the canoe gently out, he changed sides and gave two hard thrusts on the right, and then the canoe floated silently out into the great wash of moonlight where the branch widened into the main course of the river. The current of the branch carried him far out from the shore and when he felt himself making leeway he knew he was in the central stream at last. He gave two more thrusts and pointed the bow downstream, and at once he began to move fast on a river wide, firm, silver and alive bearing him down past the silent camp, utterly alone for the first time in his life, bearing him down under that wide open sky through the forest to the open sea which he knew was at its end.

  Jerome paddled as he had been taught to paddle in a current, slowly and evenly, making long, steady sweeps of the paddle and after each stroke taking a short rest with the blade trailing behind like a steering oar. The river at this season and place was flowing at more than five miles an hour, breaking and gurgling in the shallows and sparkling in the moon, but out in the central current the flow was so satin-smooth the eddies were like whorls of polished glass. A thin mist lay patchily over water colder than the air, and the moon was enormous in the wide greenly-shining sky.

  “When I grew older and learned how human organisms behave,” he said, “I knew I was in that queer state of eup
horia that often comes after shock. The response of the adrenal glands to danger. But that’s a mechanic’s way of looking at it. It’s just as real for a man to say, after he’s escaped a danger to his life, that he feels twice as alive as he ever felt before. All that night I never thought of my mother. I just thought about the canoe and the river and I was so alert that everything I saw and did – everything – I still remember.”

  Steadily the tiny canoe went down the river between the trees, following the curves almost by itself in the current. Now that he was secure in the canoe, Jerome eased further back against the aircan lodged under the stern seat and got the head up and sank the stern to give more purchase for the current to take him along. Often he passed floating logs and once he came up with a raft of them lodged on a hidden rock and damming the current, the water washing over and making the whole raft pitch and heave as though things were alive under it. He paddled around, touched logs once or twice and when he was clear he found himself in a flotilla of individual logs that had shredded out from the raft and were going down by themselves. He kept on paddling down, occasionally rubbing against a travelling log and sometimes afraid of holing his canoe, but as the logs were going in the same direction there was little danger of this. There were no lights on the shore, no cabins or houses, there was nothing but the forest, the sky, the moon, the river, the canoe and the logs floating down to the sea.

  “I had no sense of time that night, but I’d guess it was about one in the morning when I first heard the motorboat. I can still hear it. It was a primitive boat, nothing but an old high-bowed fishing boat with an engine installed. Its motor was always getting out of order and the Engineer was the only man in the camp who could do anything with it. When I first heard it, the boat was still around the bend I had just rounded, and its sound came to me muffled by trees.”

  Jerome was abnormally strong for his age, his shoulders powerful even then, and now fear gave him its added energy. He paddled hard toward the shore, but at this point the current was so swift that when he tried to move athwart it the canoe was swept hard alee, he knew it would take him minutes to reach the shore and that even if he did, the backwashes would sweep him into the current again. A hundred yards ahead was a small wooded island in the middle of the stream and he brought the bow about and paddled for his life making the featherweight birch bark craft jump to his strokes. The drub-drub-drub of the motorboat struck his ears solidly and looking back he saw its dark shape with the hunched outline of the Engineer sitting at the hand-wheel in the starboard forequarter. As Jerome drew in toward the island he saw that many logs had got there first. Instead of a beach there was a mat of logs bobbing in the press of the stream and he was panic-stricken, for the log mat spread in clear moonlight about twenty yards out from the shore, and he knew he could never get through it to hide in the trees. There were all kinds of logs there, long ones and pit-props mixed, some of them piled on top of others and the whole mat creaking in the current. “I had never seen this island before but in a vague way I knew about it. There were several islands like that in the river and they caught tons of logs every year. Once the drives had gone down, work gangs used to follow to clear the islands one by one. That was one reason why men were still left in the camp.”

  The canoe lifted, slid smoothly up onto some half-sunken logs, stopped dead, and there was nothing for Jerome to do but lie in the bottom and wait. He peered over the side smelling the wet logs and hearing the gurgle and lap of the stream, the canoe bobbing gently with the logs while the motorboat came straight on growing larger all the time, its drub-drub-drub filling the river and the man at the wheel looming up. Jerome was sure the man was staring straight at him, but when the boat was about twenty-five yards off the island the Engineer moved and Jerome saw the bows swing sharply off and an instant later the dark length of the boat went out of sight around the left side of the island.

  “Then I knew what he was doing. He was running away. All the men knew about the railway track that crossed the river at the town just inside the estuary. It was the railway a man made for when he got into trouble or just wanted to get away. Sometimes a man left after a fight and sometimes he just left. Looking back on it, I know the Engineer was numb with his own fear. He may have been drinking and that may have been why he didn’t see me. Or maybe he was just exhausted by what he had done and in the state of mind when a man can’t think or see anything because he can’t stand thinking or seeing anything and does one thing automatically after the other. I don’t know. But he was certainly getting away as fast as he could and in the only way he knew. There was no telegraph or telephone and it would be morning by the time any of the men would find my mother and a good time would pass before they missed the Engineer and put two and two together. He’d have lots of start. He’d reach the railway long before any of the men could reach it, and once he was at the tracks he’d have his choice of trains moving east or west. I knew nothing about east or west so far as the railway was concerned, not then. I didn’t know that east was down to Moncton and Halifax and a dead-end, and that west was up to Quebec and Montreal, and that he’d certainly go west. But I did know he’d be able to catch a train, for all the trains stopped in that town for water.”

  For a long time Jerome lay in the canoe listening to the diminishing throb of the engine. Such wind as there was came up the river and it must have been twenty minutes before the throbbing ceased. It would die away and return, die and throb up again, but at last there was no sound but the lap of the river and the slow, water-softened creak of the shifting logs.

  With the passing of the motorboat Jerome’s euphoria left him and he began to shiver and cry. He was chilled because at dawn the cold increased and his left foot, which he had soaked while moving through the trees, began to ache. He reached into his pocket and felt the stickiness of the blood sausage he had stored there, he took it out, washed it in the river, bit off a mouthful and ate it. The taste of blood made him feel sick but he went on eating until his shivering stopped and he felt new strength grow inside of him. He scooped water out of the river in his cupped hands and sucked it in through his teeth though it was so cold it made them ache. Meanwhile more logs from upstream were floating down and kept looming at him out of the dark water, hunching at him silently, pressing at him out of the dark as though they were the river’s muscles forcing him out. The log mat was loose enough for him to get his paddle into the water and he changed position and pushed and paddled until at last the canoe gave a quick slip sideways, swerved broadside on to the stream and began to list against the mat of logs as he paddled hard to get clear toward the left-hand channel. A new log loomed at him about to ram but he fended it off, struck hard with the paddle as the canoe’s bow yawed against the pressure of the stream, then the unseen hand of the current caught him, he struck with the paddle on the left, the bow shot around and again he was in the flow, passing the island so effortlessly that he was by before he knew it and now in a widening river he went on with the current pouring down through the forest to the sea.

  After a time – how long he did not know for he had lost all sense of time – he became conscious that the world was lighter and opening up. Instead of seeing the forest as a dark mass on either side of him, he saw it clear and close with individual trees standing out. Now the western sky where the moon was had become darker than the east, soon there was more light in the east than there had been in the dome of moonlight under which he had sailed since leaving the camp, and looking over his shoulder he saw the moon low over the forest, its light a pallid copper-colored lane along a river that had become steel gray. Colors appeared, a flush of pink in the east broke apart until it looked like the parallel bars of a gate across the pathway of the dawn, the bars merged, the colors grew stronger, they swelled into a cool confiagration that flushed up into the wide and real sky as the entire world opened up.

  Now Jerome became aware of life all around him as birds called in the forest on either side of the river, he saw the white trunks of a
stand of birch, and as the current at this point swerved in toward the shore, the carolling ring of bird calls was loud and near. A crow flew out from a pine top and its cawing racketed back and forth across the river echoing from shore to shore. The hammer of a hungry woodpecker whacked against a dead trunk while a larger bird, one of the blue herons called cranes in the Maritime Provinces, flew slantwise across the rising dawn and turned slowly, its long legs folded in under its body and trailing behind, its snaky head hanging down as it quested for fish with slow flaps of its wings heading upstream along the right bank. Jerome heard a snick and saw the flash of a trout’s belly. He paddled on through clear water with hardly a log in sight and within ten minutes there were snicking flashes all around him as trout broke the surface to feed on early flies, the first run of the season in from the sea, quick, slim fish with bellies as bright as silver coins, firm and fierce from a winter of cold salt water as they drove up against the current to the beds where they had been spawned. Jerome saw the lazy roll of a salmon about ten feet from the canoe, the little humping of water as the fish turned and went down; he heard a splash behind him but when he looked over his shoulder there was only a ruffle of broken water; he paddled a few minutes more, the trout still snicking, and then directly in front of the canoe the river broke open and a huge salmon slashed out shining, paused in the air with its hard muscles bending its body like a sickle and dropped with a drenching splash, the canoe crossed the broken water, and Jerome looking over the side saw the last twisting tail-thrust as the big fish went down.