Deep River Night

by Patrick Lane

  From the moment Joseph pulled him from the river Emerson hadn’t spoken. Art had told him his father was coming to get him, but Emerson gave no sign he’d heard what Art said. Art didn’t mind the boy’s silence. In his rare meetings with him Emerson Turfoot had never been much for talking and Art knew better than to try and change his ways.

  The Turfoots weren’t a forward family. Emerson’s mother was the one exception, though when she talked it was never idle chatter. Most people in the village who exchanged words with her thought Isabel spoke in riddles. Whenever anyone asked Art to try and explain what she might have said to them, the best he could do was tell them Isabel Turfoot was what he’d call spiritual. People nodded when they heard that about her. It confirmed her strangeness. She was spiritual, the word explaining everything they’d ever thought of her. She wasn’t exactly Christian and she wasn’t exactly not. What she was was someone else entirely.

  Art respected Isabel. She was known up and down the river as a healer, though there were some who were a little nervous about seeking her help. She worked with old-time remedies and there were people who didn’t quite trust her ways. Her healing wasn’t Art’s but more than once he’d gone to Isabel when he found there was nothing else he could do for someone. Isabel had helped a lot of people in her years.

  One day she’d found him passed out beside the mountain trail that led to the high springs in the alpine. Why he was there he didn’t know then and didn’t know now. All he remembered was waking up to find Isabel beside him working threads and stems of grass into long woven chains. When he opened his eyes she said a prayer over him. He looked at her long and then not knowing what else to say he asked her what she was doing weaving grass. She told him the work gave her pleasure. She told him she was weaving chains to hold Art in this world and then she laughed. The next day he’d gone up to the farm and asked her to tell him the prayer so he could remember it. She did but he forgot it almost as soon as she told him, the whisky he’d drunk before he went up leaving him a little adrift. When he asked her whose prayer it was, she smiled and said it was given to her by an Indian from the desert country down south. “A good man,” she’d said. “A lot like you”—this last leaving him bewildered.

  While Emerson had been out Art told him what he remembered of the prayer. It was just a line or two, but Art repeated it anyway. Hold on to what you are, Art told him. Be what you believe. Each tree in the forest stands by itself. Art knew the boy was in a morphine dream, but he thought maybe the words might take root in some nook or cranny in Emerson’s mind and be there to find if the boy needed them.

  A half-hour later Arnold Turfoot had come with the horse and buckboard. Joseph hopped down from the wagon and helped Emerson off the porch and up onto the seat, Arnold lending a hand as his son settled beside him. “I’m thanking you both,” Arnold said and Art nodded as if what had happened was just another occurrence in an ordinary morning. When they pulled away Art fell in behind them on the path to the village. As he walked he looked at Joseph sitting on the heel of the buckboard, his guitar in his arms. He was singing a song with wild horses in it, a song Art didn’t know.

  When Art got to the end of the path through the meadow he squatted in the gravel where the road ended and watched the horse haul the buckboard up the hill past the abandoned church. Joseph dropped off there, turning to wave at Art as he disappeared into the trees. Emerson sat close to his father and Art was sure it was because Arnold held him tight so his son couldn’t jump off too and disappear, the trees and brush swallowing him.

  The last whisky at the cabin had left him shaky and he closed a fist and leaned into the gravel with it, propping himself there as he willed the trembling to pass. He waited and watched the buckboard pass the store and the Hall until it disappeared behind the old church. Art stood up and moved into the shade of a cedar, leaning back against its trunk as he followed their journey in his head, the wheels grinding as it climbed to the high road, crossing it and climbing farther, passing the shacks where the Sikhs lived. Beyond that was the village dump and then the road veered away as it dwindled into the two-gutter track that wound its way another half mile through the forest, coming out into the meadows, fields, house, and barn that were Arnold’s pride and Isabel’s joy, their farm.

  A strange wild creature was young Emerson Turfoot, part bird and animal, part fish, part boy. Each stitch he’d knotted in the boy’s face had brought Art’s war back, fragmented images of broken children standing in the mauled dirt as his tank rolled by, old women searching in the rubble for something to replace the nothing in their hands, the Calgary Highlander outside Falaise he’d tried to help breathe before a medic had taken over only to tell him the soldier was dead, Art dropping his hands, half afraid to lift them again for fear of what they might try to do next. And the old woman weeping in that doorway in Caen and, no, he didn’t want to put a face to her and not to the little children piled in the ditch either, no.

  But the thing with Emerson, that had been good. He had at least that, didn’t he?

  It had been fourteen years since he came home from France in 1946 and the war was still with him. He stayed under the cedar at the end of the path and looked up through its branches at the fire and smoke rising from the sawmill’s burner into the sky above the North Thompson River. Far back in a cloud he could see the flame-throwers arching a molten fire over the Leopold Canal in Moerbrugge, the German bodies they found later when they crossed over, the smell of charred wet ashes behind the berm.

  His hand shook as he picked up some loose gravel, letting the shards drift through his fingers. The cracked rocks glittered as they fell and as he heard them click against each other they became the stones in the path that led away from St. Dionysius church, its ruined tower broken against the sky.

  He closed his eyes. They had fought for weeks in the battle for Caen. Then without rest they had moved on into Belgium. The struggle for Moerbrugge had left them exhausted. After three days they were pulled back to rest for a few hours, the crew sprawled in the mauled ground under what was left of an oak tree a half mile southwest of the canal. Art had stayed with the men for a while but the smell of diesel and grease, fire and smoke, and the smell of the men too, their cigarettes, their sweat, even their breathing drove him away. A rubble wall and a ruined house and store made him think there might be wine or maybe brandy in the ruins.

  He’d found the German officer lying on the side of the road a few yards from the store. The body of the man lay partly buried under a skirt of gravel. The man’s legs were covered in loose stones thrown up by the treads of a passing tank, perhaps their own. Part of the man’s head was gone. Art could see what was left of the face so clearly, the blond hair strangely clean and flung to the side, the rest a cup of skull hanging over an emptiness that had once held a mind. The man was another ruined body and not one of theirs. Something glinted on the officer’s hand and he knelt down and saw a signet ring emblazoned with an Iron Cross. He took it from the man’s bruised finger.

  He’d thought he would show it to the men, but when he took the ring from his pocket that night and gazed at the Iron Cross he was ashamed. At dawn he returned and found the body. He put the ring back on the soldier’s finger, got down on his knees and dragged muddy rocks over the corpse with his hands, the early flies lifting around him in their croon, benisons of a false glory.

  Done, he’d stood beside a breach in the rubble wall, nothing much left of the store and the house beyond but wreckage. No chance of an intact bottle of anything. Anyway, what might have been there would have been scavenged by the Germans. The garden behind what had once been a house had somehow survived the fighting, carrot and beet tops wavering. He would never forget the trembling green skirts of the lettuce bright in the sun.

  He was going to pull some carrots for the men back at the tank, but as he stepped over the low wall and leaned down everything around him vanished in a fire that lifted him up from the orderly rows of vegetables, turning him into a bright star
made of earth and stones, dust and silence.

  The next thing he knew was Paris. He was sitting at a table outside the Café Olympique, Claude introducing him to Marie. Between the explosion in the garden and the moment in Paris everything that had happened to him was gone. He had lost ten days, no memory of the tank crew finding him, no memory of what happened next, the medics, the field hospital, Paris, all of it remembered for him by Claude.

  Art looked up and saw Bill Samuels step out of the store and get into his pickup. As the foreman turned up the hill he waved at someone from the truck’s window, his hand vanishing in the dust. Art wiped at his forehead with his sleeve, the last bits of gravel slipping through his fingers. He wasn’t in France. This wasn’t Paris and it wasn’t Moerbrugge. There was no dead officer, no Marie. Not anymore.

  He took a last look down the path and got up, his hand touching the small flat bottle of whisky in his jacket pocket. He gripped it for a second and then let go of it. Down the tracks was the sawmill, the saws, the refuse chains and drive belts, and the whistles. Claude, the boss, said the great noise was the sound of money crying. To Art it was the sound of war, machines and chains, smoke and fire, the sweat and blood of men at their labour. It was Claude’s mill and it was Claude’s village. He hired and fired as he wished. Solitary worker or family man, most everyone’s life depended on the monthly cheque from the mill. No one argued with Claude except Art and that was because he didn’t care if he was fired and also because he had known Claude back in the war.

  Major Claude Harper.

  Art had history with him.

  The sawmill whistles cut into the day, each whistle a command that cut through the noise, one whistle to start the mill and one whistle to stop it. If the whistles went to four it drew Claude from his office down to the mill and no one wanted Claude coming down so the count rarely stopped at four. The whistles almost never went to five. If the count went to five it meant someone had been injured so badly he couldn’t walk off the mill floor and Art would have to go to him.

  Art let go his breath when the whistle stopped at three, the foreman. Art forced his shoulders to relax. The whistles sounded all day and most of the night and each time they did he counted them down, one, two, three, and then the relief when they stopped, no fourth whistle for Claude, no fifth for a first-aid man, for Art to come running—no man so broken in the sawmill that he couldn’t make it to the first-aid room.

  And again, one, two, three, his body one still, terrible thing until the whistles ceased.

  Wang Po would be waiting for the men to come for dinner, the day shift nearly done and the night shift crew already sitting on the benches waiting for the cook to lay out the food at ten past five. In another few minutes the single whistle would sound. Dinner tonight would be pork stew, tomorrow night steaks. The men would be looking forward to T-bones piled high on platters, cream corn, mashed potatoes, and a gravy they could drown in. Fresh bread too from the morning and apple pie for dessert.

  Late tonight he’d go to the basement room under the cookhouse and spend the last hours of the week with Wang Po, the last shift’s whistles as he drank, the opium he smoked with the cook adding to his vanishing. They would smoke and drink whisky as they talked or didn’t talk about their lives, their wars.

  Art had never fit in to the village or the mill. He was the first-aid man and he looked after the mill workers, single guys, but men with families too. Art had seen and done things in some of the rooms in the village, men and women, kids too like Emerson. Bad things happened and people could do terrible things to each other and to themselves.

  The nearest hospital was in Kamloops, four hours away by truck on the one-lane dirt and gravel road that crawled along the canyons of the North Thompson River until it got past Little Fort, and even then the road could be rough. Most people didn’t have the money to take the train out, let alone stay in a hotel or motel and then pay for a doctor and a hospital on top of that. The farmers and mountain people came to Art sometimes to ask for his help with an injury, an illness. He had access to penicillin and morphine, drugs Isabel Turfoot didn’t have and couldn’t get. Art entered people’s homes in the wrong hours, saw to husbands, wives and daughters, men and boys and girls. He couldn’t be a friend to any of them. He knew too much about their lives, saw their blood and tears, their frailties and vulnerabilities, their joys and sorrows.

  But there was Wang Po. He was an outsider too, a Chinaman as they called him here, an alien to everyone. Men might sometimes thank him for a meal the cook made, but no one talked to him. Wang Po stayed close to the cookhouse and his room in the basement. If he did go out it was after the night shift ended at three in the morning. There was a big gravel bar by a river eddy a quarter mile below the mill. Art had seen Wang Po sitting on the pale skeleton of an old fir tree caught on shore rocks high above the river’s big eddy. Art never bothered him those nights. Still, he often wondered what Wang Po thought about out there under the stars. Art often walked the night, his rambles taking him along the river, the bottle of whisky back in his cabin sitting on the table awaiting his return, the mickey in his jacket empty by the time he returned. He knew what loneliness was and knew Wang Po did too. They both had their wars, his in Europe and Wang Po’s in China.

  Art passed the cookhouse and the station, crossed the main line and siding tracks, and glanced for a moment at the men hurrying to load the last boxcars of the week. The morning freight would pick up the cars tomorrow and take them to Baton Rouge down in Louisiana. The freight came in an hour after the Express pulled out on its way to Edmonton. His package from Li Wei would be on the Saturday Express out of Vancouver. He had missed the Friday Express, but his liquor shipment would be in the station waiting for him, the box with its twelve bottles too heavy for Joel or him to pack back to the cabin. Bill Samuels would bring the box in his pickup. He’d carry it down to the cabin later in the day and leave it on the porch by the door. Bill said he owed Art that much ever since Art splinted the arm of Eddy, Bill’s youngest. The kid had a green-stick fracture and there was no need to send him to the hospital. He’d straightened the arm and the bones healed quickly.

  Art sat down in the shadow of the CNR station porch and watched the men on the train siding spear eighteen- and twenty-foot two-by-twelves into a boxcar, the long boards heavy white spears floating through the air, entering the maw of the box where other men inside directed them into piles at either end of the car. He couldn’t see them but he knew how dangerous the work was. The lumber came hard and fast and the men in the boxcars had to be careful. He’d had to put a man in a freight train caboose and send him out to the hospital last winter. The man had been struck in the back of the head by a two-by-ten. The man never returned to the mill. Billy something, Foster, Forester, his name the same as all the men who passed through the mill, someone forgotten the day they headed south or north. No one ever came back once they were gone.

  The boxcar was close to being full. The men on the platform moved together in the synchronized repetitions of hard labour. The dance at the Hall was tomorrow night. Everyone who could walk or crawl would be there.

  Saturday night.

  He didn’t always go to the dance, but if there was trouble later on, a fight, a woman hurt, someone injured, they’d come to his cabin and get him to come and help. There were a lot of men working at the mill. Some had wives and families in cabins or shacks, but most were single and lived in the bunkhouses. And there were the people from the mountain, women and children, sons and daughters too who were looking for a way off the farm or ranch so they could leave and go somewhere where they could pretend they were in a place where real life happened, Edmonton, maybe, or even Vancouver.

  The hill people kept mostly to themselves, but come a Saturday night dance they’d be all dressed up, shiny shoes, polished boots, worn high heels, a pair almost new, a homemade dress or one they’d worn ten times or more, a starched shirt ironed on a kitchen table, a pretty necklace, whatever it took to make the nig
ht special. The girls who went there danced for their lives, men standing outside the Hall drinking on the deck, behind the Hall in the trees, or standing along the wall inside as they waited for a chance to cut in on someone, anyone, just to hold a woman in their arms. Their wildest dream was to take a woman back to their truck or into the darkness of the trees while “Dream Lover” or “Stagger Lee” played back in the Hall, any song so long as they weren’t alone on their bunk at three in the morning holding themselves in their hands as they stared at a shadow on the wall.

  And there was the new girl, Alice, at the store. The Rotmensens had brought her in to work for them, nearly a month ago now. They’d paid fifty dollars for her at the residential school in Kamloops. She was theirs till she was sixteen. Piet and Imma kept her locked up at night in the shanty hanging off the back of the store for fear she’d run off with someone. People shook their heads when they saw her pulling that wooden wagon down to the station to pick up the food shipment from Woodward’s. Sometimes she’d have to make four or five trips. When she was working at the lunch counter men would come by and get a coffee or sandwich just to look at her.

  A lot of the women in the village were upset by her being locked up at night, but what had really got them talking was the Rotmensens buying a girl and an Indian girl as well, no matter them saying they were giving her a chance to work. Molly Samuels was especially upset and Art had heard her say so more than once to Imma. Molly hated that anyone could just buy a girl and she told her so, but Imma said she and Piet were giving her a chance to have a life and how was it Molly’s business anyway. Who did she think she was? Just because her husband was the foreman at the sawmill didn’t make her any more special than anyone else. Bill had told her she should let it go, but Molly wasn’t the kind of woman to do that. Art heard she’d asked Bill to talk to Claude and he did, but Claude wanted nothing to do with it. He said the girl was lucky they’d rescued her from the residential school given the kind of stuff that went on there with the Brothers itching to get their hands on a pretty girl.