This is what bothered Nevin. Secretly he had, in a way – as most men in town – admired Jerry Bines. And yet when he saw his powerful body striding up to the house he realized what he should have realized years ago – that nothing Jerry did or said, or how he acted, could make any difference, in ways which were real.
For twenty years Nevin had remembered the little boy hugging his sister. For twenty years he remembered his first wife holding her thumb and smiling, first timidly and then peevishly, at the corner of the room. And both these recollections could assault him in a second more powerfully than any Jerry Bines or Vera Pillar. Because he had not been kind, when some law greater than his required him to be.
It happened at the schoolhouse Hadley went to. All the children had been warned about Nevin numerous times. It was like a great treat for them to see him, and to tell the teacher.
“There he is,” they would say, “over by the pole.”
And the teacher would go to the window and look out. Nevin would be looking across the street towards them. Then he would turn and walk back down the hill.
This had gone on most of the fall. All the children were now conscious of who he was and why he was there and, though they were told not to speak to him, sometimes they would yell at him at recess.
“Na na, na na na – na na, na na na,” they would chant. And then they would all run over near the empty swing and look back at him.
“Don’t say na na, na na na,” Nevin would say.
“Come and get us,” the children would yell. “Na na, na na, na na. Come and get us.”
“I don’t want to come and get you,” Nevin would answer. “Who told you that?
“Ah, go ’way,” the children would yell. “Na na, na na na.”
One day when he walked up the street to stand near the pole he suddenly saw a man come out of the bushes on one side and a woman walk across the lawn towards him. Both exits had been cut off, and he was not allowed to go on to the school property. He walked out into the middle of the street.
“What are you doing here?” the man asked. He was younger than Nevin – much younger – and the principal of the school.
Nevin reached in his pocket to haul out his ID and show it to him. He smiled at the man as if he could clear all of this up.
“I don’t want to see your ID,” the man said.
“We have one hundred twenty children to look after,” the woman said to him. “If you come back here again we’ll call the police – make no mistake.”
Nevin was wearing huge mittens and an old hat with kamikaze-style earflaps. His hair waved in the wind under it, and his checked woods jacket was opened, with a vest underneath.
“I can come here if I want – I want to see my daughter.”
“Ms. Pillar has made it quite clear that you are not allowed to see your daughter.”
“But she’s a goofball,” Nevin said, because he did not know what else to say. “She’s made everything up.”
The woman looked up at him with such clear hatred, such a testimony of dislike, that he felt she had been informed about him in some vast and terrible way.
“I’ve given up everything,” Nevin said, in a voice that seemed to come from some faraway part of himself – and he remembered as a little boy at school being punched in the stomach by an older boy. He had not thought of this in forty years. But now it seemed to come so vividly clear to him – the boy’s fist and the smile on his face when Nevin fell down, and the dark stone of the old brown school, and the wet pebbles he fell on.
“I’m coming to get her tomorrow and we are going to Woodstock.” He did not know why he said this, and he did not know whether he meant Woodstock, New Brunswick, or Woodstock, New York.
“Fine,” the principal said. “You’ve been warned.”
Nevin did not go back the next day. Nor the day after. But three days later he returned and stood at the pole. He had a suitcase in his hand. He had nothing inside of it, but he thought he should bring along a suitcase. He stood there for about ten minutes and looked towards the white building and then up towards the train station.
Suddenly, in back of him, a police car pulled over. Nevin went to step out of the way, and he was thinking: “They are coming too close to that pole.” He made a gesture as if to wave the car on when he saw another police car turn off the town hill and come towards him. He began to back away but suddenly one car drove right up to him, and the other car pulled over.
In two seconds Nevin was wrestled to the ground, turned over on his back, and handcuffs placed on him. All the while he made a great effort to explain things and kept trying to clutch the suitcase in his hand.
The next day Nevin carried a knife when he went to the tavern. Everyone knew he was carrying this knife. Because Nevin said he was going to kill himself as soon as he had a beer. “Maybe two beer – and then I’ll do it.”
He wore his old boots and his coat. The sky was bright blue that afternoon but a few stars could be seen by 2:00. The air smelled of wood smoke.
Jerry had heard all about the knife. And Nevin having it on him.
Jerry came into the tavern at 4:00. He looked at Nevin, saw his old coat and hat and turned-up salted boots, and looked away.
He went to the back so that, because of the wall, Nevin could not see him, and ordered a beer.
But five minutes later, rising from his seat twice, then hesitating, Nevin came over to his table.
Jerry looked at the knife sticking out of Nevin’s pocket and picked up his beer slowly and drank, just a sip, and put the glass down.
But suddenly Nevin trembled, and had the strange desire to confess things. He wanted to tell Jerry about his past, about what he had done at university – that Hallowe’en night when the little boy came to the door and he had tormented him. So Bines would understand him better. And he began talking to him. “Vera has given a sworn statement.”
“Oh – about what?” Jerry said.
“About Hadley being terrified of me,” Nevin said, “and about my attempted suicide.”
Bines didn’t speak. He shrugged and looked out the window. There were too many other things on his mind at the moment.
“I’ve never touched Hadley, but Vera is so certain of it – I don’t know, she almost has me convinced. It all comes from her past. I go there and Hadley hides behind a chair – she is only a little girl. I say to her: ‘Hadley, do you want your name to be a nice name like White, or a silly name like Pillar?’ And she shouts out ‘Pillar’ and runs down the hall. All the children call her Pillar, and everything –”
“Well – that’s too bad – too bad,” Jerry said. He didn’t know what else to say.
“I come from Massachusetts,” Nevin said. “I was at Woodstock – a lot of people only talk about Woodstock but I was actually there.”
But Jerry knew nothing about this. Or why it would be important. He shrugged. Some snow lay on the barrel outside and birds pecked at crusts of bread while water dripped in the middle of the afternoon.
Nevin told the story about all the trials he had had with his father, who had bullied him and had made him stay in on Friday night and made him get his hair cut and wouldn’t give him the car for the prom, and Jerry listened. Finally his dad and he had a fight over Vietnam and he came to Canada – where he first enrolled in Business Administration at the University of New Brunswick. But then he met this tall young woman. He told Jerry how he had tormented his first wife – and belittled her.
“I got mixed up in the Strax affair,” Nevin said, “Vera and I.”
“I don’t know what that is,” Bines said.
“It was a movement in the sixties at the university,” Nevin said, and, screwing up his eyes and trying to think, he continued: “It was positive – it was a positive thing.”
He told Jerry he went on protest marches, and burned the American flag – well, he did all the things the American children did.
But Bines had not heard of this. And it did not matter to him at all what p
eople did. He simply shrugged. His face had a tanned look, his eyes were bolt-black and each pupil seemed to shine in more than one place.
Suddenly Nevin said: “Dr. Leach has me on a bunch of pills.”
And he took out these pills – his blue ones and his yellow ones and laid the bottles on the table.
Nevin paused and lit a cigarette and looked around the room. A fierce wind blew across the street over the blue ice, which at twilight had turned deep violet. The shades of night were in the store windows.
Then he smiled uncertainly and looked down at his blue pills and his yellow ones, the butt end of a knife sticking out of his coat pocket.
Bines got up and left the table and he did it so abruptly that Nevin thought he was going to hit him. And he closed his eyes as if waiting to be punched.
But Bines went out of the tavern to his truck and came back before Nevin had his pills put away. “Read this here,” he said, and he left a book on the table. “It might help ya. It’s what Joe Walsh gave me when I was in jail – I don’t know, I never read it – never read it – but a lad in jail like you read it – as far as I know about it – and he is working over at Canadian Tire and doing okay – okay as far as I can tell –”
It was called Sobriety Without End.
Nevin looked at it. Bines had placed it down near the bottle of yellow pills.
When he looked up Bines had gone.
10
It was about 6:00 at night on November 19 when Lucy came to the door. She hardly glanced at Ralphie Pillar, just now and then looked up under an old cap as she spoke. “Jerry wants to see you,” she said.
“Jerry Bines – where is he?” Ralphie said.
“He’s in the hospital – so you have to come.”
The house was five or six blocks from the hospital. The trees were naked and a hard wind blew against their faces.
“What happened?” Ralphie asked.
“I don’t know,” Lucy said. Her jacket was short and thin and her arms were folded. Her boots scraped the pavement in time to the hurried motion of her hips.
Ralphie had not seen him in a while. Bines had never phoned him, had only once been to the house. Bines was not a friend of his in the ordinary sense.
When he and Lucy got to the hospital, he did not know what to expect or how to enter the room. That is, in the most basic way he did not know whether to look sad or smile, and he suddenly realized he had the same feeling when he had gone to visit his father years ago.
Bines was not in bed. That was the first thing that Ralphie had not expected. He was sitting in a wheelchair, side on, with the window slightly open – the window opened from the top – trying to get some air. The sky and earth were frozen solid now.
The nurse was trying to get Bines to go back to bed. Bines was listening to her, without speaking himself. Then Ralphie noticed, when Bines tilted his head, that his eyes were wrapped.
“You have to get back into bed, Jerry,” the nurse was saying.
“No, no – going home.”
“Oh dear – you can’t go home tonight.”
But Bines paid no attention to her.
“God, Ralphie,” she said, “what are we going to do with him?”
And she said this as if everyone knew Bines and was at a loss as to how to handle him because he was so wild, and that somehow this was wonderful.
But Bines paid no attention to her.
“What happened to you?” Ralphie said. He looked at the wrapping and he went to touch Bines on the shoulder but didn’t.
“Camp blew up,” Bines said.
“What?”
“Camp – blew me right through the door – the door,” Bines said.
“How are you?” Ralphie said.
“None too pleased about it,” Bines said.
Everyone was amazed that he had lived. Not only lived but that he’d only suffered a broken rib and a flash to his eyes.
“It’s a miracle he’s alive at all,” the nurse said.
Bines said nothing. He didn’t even seem to notice what people said about him, or that people were gushing over him or that people were amazed by him.
He told Ralphie that there was nothing left of the camp, except the door.
Bines kept touching the wrapping about his eyes, almost in slow motion, with the tip of his fingers, and turning his head slightly when Lucy spoke, or Ralphie. Lucy sat at the edge of the bed, looking at everyone with a cautious inquiring gaze.
Then the nurse told him that Dr. Freeman was coming in to see him.
“We can’t be responsible for you,” the doctor said when Bines insisted he was going, “if you don’t stay for more observation.”
“You should stay,” Ralphie said.
“No, no – don’t want you to be responsible for me – responsible for me – responsible for meself.”
And he would answer no more questions, say nothing else.
Bines didn’t stay in the wheelchair but got up and asked Ralphie to help him. It was strange to see that he was vulnerable.
“I want you to see if anyone is out by my truck,” he said.
Bines waited near the door. Ralphie came in and told him that there was no one around his truck.
“You sure?” Bines said, and Lucy ran herself to check.
“No one’s there,” she said, coming back a moment later.
Bines nodded.
They started out across the parking lot, with Lucy rushing ahead to open the door and then coming back to help him to it.
“It’s a miracle you’re alive,” Lucy kept saying, her face dazzling. “It’s a miracle is all I can say.”
Bines lay on the couch, and kept listening to the wind, with a cup of tea poured into an old mug resting on his lap.
“What time is it?” he said.
“Quarter to two,” Ralphie said.
“Quarter to two,” he repeated. His mouth looked pensive now that his eyes were wrapped, and the wrapping was so spotless it looked out of place resting against Bines’ hair.
“Quarter to two,” he repeated again.
Ralphie went and looked out the window. The sky was clear. The stars dotted the sky and made a great canopy over the soundless trees and uprooted stumps of the clearcut. Some snow lay against these stumps, a fine clean powdered snow. A way around the bend the river was silent and the dark shape of the island Ralphie owned was just visible. He had been left the island by his father, and he had always thought that he would build a camp on it, but there was a dispute with the Indian reserve over fishing rights, and though Ralphie had hardly stepped on it he’d never considered selling it.
Bines touched the wrapping and turned his head as if to look Ralphie’s way.
“How do you like William?” Bines said.
“Oh – I like him very much,” Ralphie said, smiling innocently, the way he always did when he was genuine and wanted to show affection.
“Like him, do ya – don’t think he’s spoiled – spoiled, is he?”
“No,” Ralphie said.
“I already got him to half-tie his own fly,” Bines said. “That’s not so bad, is it?”
“That’s great,” Ralphie said.
“I never touch him,” Bines said, pointing a finger out of the darkness. “You know, hit him or nothin – spose you thought I hit him?”
“No, of course not,” Ralphie said.
“You didn’t think that there?”
“No.”
“Oh – well anyways – I was thinking about it, and thought you might have,” Bines said.
It seemed that this was something which had worried Bines a good deal and now he was relieved. He reflected about something a moment.
“Don’t treat him like my old man treated me,” he said.
Ralphie couldn’t answer. He only nodded silently.
“Tea’s cold,” Jerry said.
When Jerry was young, wearing mittens and Humphry pants, his father used to take him down to the old rink to get him to fight with boys from
the rapids and elsewhere, boys sometimes four or five years older than he, for a quart of wine.
“Move under him – you’re smaller than he is – when he throws a right go inside and counter with your left – that little cocksucker won’t get ya – won’t get ya – you hit like a mule,” his father would say, maniacal in his own detachment from his son’s plight, his half-bared head catching the stiff breezes and being pelted by sharp falling rain, mixed with snow.
“Won’t get ya,” Bines would nod, his lips trembling in the freezing rain, sliding on his rubber boots, “Won’t get ya,” his small hands flailing away, and yet like something natural to his nature his punches short and hard under the dim light from the crooked shed, where men who had wanted to intervene but were frightened in some way stayed inside, the quart of wine Digger had bet on being held in someone else’s hand, and the sound of a truck throttling.
But no matter – no matter. It never mattered. He could not take the fear away. It was always there. Somewhere, like he had been hurt and lost a long time ago. As if a long time ago he wanted his father to hug him, and to say: “It’s all right, Jerry – all right. You know what I’m going to do for you? You know where we’re going to go? I betcha ya don’t know – I betcha you don’t.”
And his mother would laugh and they would all laugh, and his mother would go too.
11
At 3:00 in the morning, Bines unwrapped his eyes in the back porch of his house. By that afternoon, the pain along his left side, and particularly in his left arm, had grown worse. Still he went into town. He parked his truck and moved slowly down the street to a small store, where he bought a copy of the local paper.
“Man Escapes Blast,” he read.
He read the story about himself with difficulty, and felt good that people would say those things about him; that there was going to be a book on him as well. But then people had always said he was exceptional and Bines had always taken himself to be, and as with most men and women who have the belief that they are exceptional there is a certain inability to feel as much for others as they do for themselves.
For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down Page 9