The Romantic

by Barbara Gowdy

  I close my eyes and finally experience what I feel. A pounding in my head. Terrific pain in my thawing fingers and toes. Relief.

  She isn’t here.

  If she had been! I picture her sitting dead centre, sticking out like a steeple but not embarrassed by that, not like I am. She’d be straight-backed, happy with herself in her purple coat, although, now that I think of it, she might not wear purple to church. Still, whether she knows it or not she is scorned (Maureen’s mother saying that she drowns out the whole choir), and during the week people gape at her.

  The choir is on its feet once more, the organ playing. Everyone around me is getting up as well, so I do the same.

  “Pssst.” From the old woman.

  She has a little navy book opened in her hands, and when I catch her eye she nods at the pew in front of me. Another such book is there, in a pocket on the back of the seat. I take it out. “Number five hundred and forty-one,” she whispers.

  “Stand up, stand up for Jesus,” the congregation sings,“ye soldiers of the cross.”

  I find the hymn and join in: “From victory unto victory, His army He shall lead.” By the middle of the second verse I have caught the melody and sing more confidently. By the fourth verse I am in the throes of an exhilaration I think must be the Holy Spirit.

  But it is Mrs. Richter, not Jesus, I imagine marching into the mighty conflict for. Against her unnumbered foes, so that she shall reign in glory, I scream along with the highest voices in the choir.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The day in the ravine that Abel shows me the gold-eyed toad is a breakthrough. From then on I feel entitled to say hi to him at school. He murmurs hi back, occasionally allows himself a nod. In that nod, which due to some aberration of timing or incline seems foreign, I distinguish courtliness, modesty, commiseration: qualities I can’t name but sense the benevolent array of. Even so, there is no question—while we have witnesses—of going beyond our cautious greeting. A boy without friends is a leper. A boy without friends who talks to girls is a leper asking to be bullied. I wander around the schoolyard, keeping an eye on him, imagining events that would oblige him to take me to his house (I find a note with German writing on it; I overhear a plot to murder his father) while he leans against the chain-link fence and watches the boys in his class play marbles or cowboys and Indians. Now that the weather is warmer he has become absorbed in the weeds growing along the fence’s base. Sometimes he’ll pick a thing up and turn it over in his hands as if it were money.

  I feel sorrier for him than I do for myself. I’ve grown accustomed to my unpopularity; it makes sense to me. I’m not pretty, I say the wrong thing so reliably that whenever I open my mouth a deathly silence falls, I can’t dance the Highland fling, as can a perplexing number of girls at our school, although I do own the most authentic-looking kilt, the most expensive wardrobe, which, of course, is another offence, a less insufferable one than it was before my mother left, and yet still an ongoing irritant to Maureen Hellier, who, at the sight of me and as the months pass, takes longer and longer to twitch her face into a look of friendliness.

  But Abel …

  He’s handsome. He’s quiet. Everything that counts against him is the result of a circumstance beyond his control (whereas the circumstance beyond my control—my mother’s disappearance—counts very much formt). It isn’t his fault that his mother is nothing like other mothers and that a rumour is adrift about his father being a Russian spy and former Nazi. Never have I seen him with a baseball glove or hockey stick, and because I can’t imagine Mrs. Richter refusing him anything, I assume, correctly as I’ll learn, that nobody ever taught him how to hit a ball or puck. And yet to suppose he might be lonely doesn’t occur to me until one afternoon in the ravine when I spot him tossing up a stone and trying to swat it with a length of metal pole he must have found at the sludge factory.

  He is too preoccupied to notice me, and after watching for a few minutes I creep away, mulling over this hole in his self-reliance. Should I have offered to pitch the rock? No, too forward. As even “Hi” is now too forward, in the ravine anyway. From my increased surveillance I have come to appreciate how segregated his worlds are, the lurking, stationary boy of the chain-link fence contrasting so drastically with the Tarzan of the ravine as to make the latter seem like a secret identity. Maybe it is. If Mr. Richter really does spy for the Russians, then Abel might be his deputy, scouring the woods for … what? Buried maps? Buried bombs? I don’t care. I won’t give him away and I suspect that his nod at school is partly to acknowledge my complicity and discretion—qualities that, again, I have no vocabulary for, although, as an amateur spy myself, I instinctively value.

  But even if he isn’t working for the Russians, he would still appreciate my leaving him alone in a place so clearly his. Seeing him grab branches and leap over crevices reminds me of somebody racing through a house and flicking on lights without having to glance at the wall. The intruders—me, gangs of boys playing on the slopes—he tolerates out of no choice. At school when we recite the Lord’s Prayer, the part where we say “Forgive us our trespasses,” I think of him. He knows I monitor his whereabouts, he knows I’m there, and it’s true that he has kept his distance ever since the incident with the gold-eyed toad (did my fake enthusiasm offend him?), but it is also true that he never hides from me. To escape boys I’ve seen him shimmy up the trunk of a wild-cherry tree as fast as those men in pole-climbing contests. I’ve seen him outrun a dog. He’s like a signal: a flicker of him in one place, a few moments later a flicker in another, farther away than seems possible.

  I have a feeling that the ravine is where he goes to at night, and I find it odd that Mrs. Richter hasn’t figured this out. My father finds it odd that the Richters haven’t taken to locking him in his bedroom. I say, hotly,“Mrs. Richter would never do such a thing! She’s nice!” I tell myself that the morning after one of her nights of roaming the streets, when she asks him where he went, he keeps his answer vague.

  “Just out,” he says. “Wandering around.”

  In the ravine. Once school finishes for the summer, he spends every day there, no matter what the weather. Except for Saturday mornings, so do I.

  Saturday mornings Mrs. Richter does her grocery shopping, and that’s my opportunity to look at her for at least an hour.

  I wait across the street behind the Gorys’ cedar hedge. At about ten o’clock she leaves her house, pulling a bundle buggy. I follow her. At the Dominion store I stand close enough that I could reach out and touch her skirt if I had the nerve. I don’t think she’d even notice. Everybody could be naked and she wouldn’t notice, she is so caught up in trying to figure out what to buy. She taps a finger on her cheek, cocks her head. She makes me think of someone playing charades. I wish I could help her. I could push the cart, I could pull her bundle buggy, going home. As it is, I do what I can to mentally urge along her decisions. I think,“The Mcintosh apples, pick them, the Delicious are too bitter.” Nine times out of ten she does what I command.

  So then I think,“Turn around and see the girl in the pink shorts, love her, want to adopt her,” but this never works.

  In the ravine, I enter a daydream that has me as an orphaned Indian princess called Little Feather and Mrs. Richter as a captured German settler whom the chief has renamed Nightingale and taken for his bride. Because Mrs. Richter is too old to bear children and I am like a daughter to her anyway, she and the chief have adopted me. I teach Mrs. Richter Indian songs, the ones I learned last year at Camp Wanawingo—“Indians are High-minded,” “We Are the Red Men,” “Pow-Wow, the Indian Boy.” She teaches me the German language and customs. Everything is fine until Maureen Hellier waltzes by. Maureen is a sleazy half-breed named White Pig. When she starts throwing her weight around, the chief orders her to be tied to a tree and gagged. Sometimes she’s not in the daydream at all, she has been banished to the wilderness. Sometimes I imagine everyone, including Mrs. Richter, gone. I am alone in my tee-pee. I am the sole survivo
r of a massacre by white men.

  I have built myself a shelter on a wide ledge along the eastern slope, and though I call it a tee-pee, I know it’s only a lean-to: a row of branches tilted against a pile of logs, the branches secured to the uppermost log using pieces of wool, forest-green for camouflage, that I unravelled from the cable-knit sweater my mother wore the last Christmas morning she lived in our house. To break the wool I burnt it with matches, these, too, once the property of my mother, rescued from pockets curiously overlooked by Aunt Verna, who might have come up with leads by tracking down the places on the matchbook covers: Satin Doll Lounge, Bart’s Esso. Of the five full books from Bart’s, most contain duds.

  I now have a knife if I need to cut anything. My father’s penknife, which I took from his desk drawer and which he has yet to report missing. In the tee-pee, among sticks of sunlight, I sort through my stone collection and feed Jell-O powder to black ants. Sometimes, overhead, I hear a faint whine I think must be the clouds gliding by. Then there are moments of silence so absolute I am convinced I hear the ants’ footsteps; it is a tinkling sound, as if they wore bells on their ankles. When I lie with my ear to the dirt floor, the tunnelling of the worms is distant thunder. All around me pine trees cross out the view. I am at the heart of an impenetrable fortification. Safe.

  The valley and its cool slopes are also Abel’s preferred part of the ravine. The other part, where the valley ends, is open land, the trees shrinking to scrubby sumachs and crab apples, a few willows. A river is down there, and the boys who swim in it get rashes and smell like the sludge factory, and like Camp Wanawingo, too, when the wind blows from the south. It’s a spookily quiet camp, I thought that even during my brief stay there. Now, from my tee-pee, the only sound I ever hear is the noon-time shouting of the camp motto,“Yip yap honika wonika! Tip tap eenika si!”—supposedly Huron for “Brave and true are we! First of all the tribes!”

  (My father, after I’d told him about the lack of drinking water and how we were forced to weed the vegetable garden, changed the translation to “Slaves and blue are we! Thirsty, dull, deprived!”)

  My tee-pee is as far away as you can get from the camp, hidden among all the logs and branches that have landed on the ledge over the years. Boys walk above the ledge and beneath it, oblivious. Only Abel knows I’m here, and the reason I am pretty sure of this is that the ledge is the only place in the ravine he avoids. I’ll see him on the other slope and wish I had something worth calling him over for. One of those gold-eyed toads would do, and it’s not as if there’s a rock within a hundred yards of my tee-pee I haven’t upturned. An Indian artifact, or even a particularly good stone would do.

  A body would do.

  On a Thursday afternoon toward the end of July, I arrive to find a man lying face down in front of my tee-pee.

  He’s big and old, or at least not young. Grimy green overalls, no shirt underneath, the soles of his shoes worn through, but his white hair is thick and silky.

  “Hello?” I say.

  There’s a tattoo on the flab of his upper right arm. It’s a wreath of snakes encircling a word I can’t see properly from where I am, so I tiptoe around to his other side. “Greta,” I read. I step back, shocked. No, it can’t be. Can it? But even if it’s another Greta, the name is German. “A spy,” I think,“a spy disguised as a hobo.” Thoroughly frightened now, I look across the valley for Abel.

  I look back at the man.

  I can’t tell whether or not he’s breathing. His right hand is clenched. Keeping my eyes on that hand (he might have a grenade), I pick up a stick and touch it to his calf. “Wake up,” I say. I touch it to the sole of his bare, blackened foot. “Wake up.” My voice seems to profane an immense emptiness. I move to his head and bend down but am driven up again by his foul smell. “Mister,” I call testingly. Then, louder,“Mister! Wake up!”

  A large black insect wriggles out of the hair by his ear.

  I scream.

  From him, not a twitch.

  I run screaming to the end of the ledge, leap off and run down the hill.

  Before I reach the bottom, Abel bursts through the trees. His terrorized face tells me how blood-curdling my screams must have been.

  “There’s a man.” I point. “Up there. A dead man.”

  “Dead?”

  “He isn’t breathing. He’s just lying there. He won’t move.”

  Abel looks up at the ledge.

  “I poked him with a stick.”

  “Is he bleeding?”

  “No. Maybe. I don’t know.”

  Abel continues to look up at the ledge. A strained composure overtakes his features. He seems to have a thought, an idea. Watching him, I calm down. “Should we go call the police?”

  “Not yet.” He scratches his arm. He’s wearing a red-and-yellow-striped T-shirt and new blue jeans he’s meant to grow into, the legs rolled up into wide cuffs. His belt is a piece of rope. Clipped to the belt loop by his right hand are a magnifying glass and a jackknife. “Okay,” he says, hiking up his jeans. He starts climbing.

  I scramble after him. “He’s an old man. He’s really filthy. He has a tattoo—” I stop myself. Abel will see the tattoo.

  He gains the ledge. By the time I get there, he’s standing over the body. I go and stand next to him. He’s looking at the tattoo.

  I say,“Greta’s your mother’s name, isn’t it?”

  He glances at me. Nods.

  “But it wouldn’t be her,” I say quickly.

  No response.

  “I wonder who he is?” I say, as if I suspect nothing.

  “A vagrant.”

  My heart starts jumping. “From another country?”

  “Search me.”

  “What’s a vagrant?” I ask then.

  “Somebody with no place to live.”

  I sigh. “A hobo.” Obviously, he’s a hobo.

  “I’ve seen him before.”

  “You have?”

  “Down by the factory. One of the men who works there gives him cigarettes.”

  I am reluctant to abandon the spy angle. “I think he’s holding something. A grenade, maybe.”

  Abel doesn’t even consider it. He crouches and places his hand on the man’s upper arm. “He’s not cold.” Politely, to the man, he says,“Sir? Sir?” He shakes the shoulder. When nothing happens, he presses two fingers under and at the side of the jaw.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Feeling for a pulse.”

  I look from the man to Abel, and automatically start assessing him. At such close range he becomes merchandise, the orphan among all the other orphans whom Mrs. Richter chose. The dimple in his chin … she’d have liked that, people like dimples. His hair would have been the clincher, though, the same dark brown as hers.

  “He’s alive,” Abel says, straightening.

  “Injured though, I’ll bet.” It’s a pitiless conjecture. Now that the man is neither a spy nor dead I find him repulsive.

  “He didn’t fall, not from the top.”

  “How do you know?”

  “There aren’t any broken branches.” He indicates the hill above us. “You’d see the slide he made.”

  “So he climbed up?”

  “Probably looking for a place to sleep. Where nobody’d pester him.”

  “So he climbed all the way up and then threw himself flat on his face?”

  “Not on purpose. He was drunk. That’s what that smell is.”

  “He’s a lush,” I declare. It’s a term my mother used to apply to Mrs. Bendy.

  “Well …” Abel hikes up his jeans. “I guess we should just leave him.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  He looks at me.

  “What am I supposed to do?” I cry. “Stand here and wait? What if he goes to the bathroom in his pants? What if he rolls over? He’ll wreck my tee-pee!”

  Abel blinks and folds his arms across his chest. I realize I’ve scared him. I have. There’s a huge drunken man on the ground, but I’m the
one he’s scared of. It’s insulting. It’s flattering, too, though. “Why don’t we set his pants on fire,” I say recklessly. “We could use your magnifying glass.”

  He moves his hand to the glass, as if I might make a grab for it. This only provokes me. “We could kick him in the pants!” I say. I swagger closer. And then, surprising myself, I do kick him, not very hard, in the rear end.

  “Hey!” Abel says.

  I go to kick again.

  “Don’t,” Abel says painfully.

  I hesitate, affected by his tone. “Don’t what?” But I kick my knapsack instead. “I hardly touched him.”

  Abel picks the knapsack up. “Do you have any water in here?”

  “Why?”

  “If we can get him to drink something, that might wake him up. He’s probably dehydrated, and that’s a dangerous state.”

  “I only have grape Freshie.”

  “That’ll do.”

  “No.”

  He waits.

  “His germs,” I say. “They’ll get all over my cup.”

  “We don’t have to touch it to his lips. But that’s okay, I have water. I’ll run and get it.”

  “No!” Horrified at being left alone. I sigh. “He can have my Freshie.”

  Abel opens the knapsack, removes the Thermos and sets it on the ground. “We’re going to have to get him on his back. We’ll roll him over, then I’ll get his mouth open, and you can pour in the Freshie.” He moves to the man’s side. “I’ll push his shoulder. You push there,” nodding toward the man’s legs.

  I go down on my knees. The smell is overpowering. “I’m going to throw up,” I mutter, resting my hands on the overalls.

  “No, Louise, like this.”

  He knows my name. Why wouldn’t he? I’m a neighbour, or he might have heard it at school. Maybe they talk about me at his house. An intoxicating thought. “Who is that girl who’s always out front?” “That’s Louise.” “There goes Louise!” “Louise doesn’t have a mother.”

  “You need to get leverage,” Abel says. His hands are bent back, palms shoved under the man’s shoulder.