Fearless Warriors

by Drew Hayden Taylor

  “We’d been seeing each other for a couple of months when our fathers put a stop to it. Told us both we should know better. It wasn’t right, they said. In fact, his father even called it evil.”

  I knew something was missing. “Called what ‘evil’?”

  She looked at the road again even though no cars were passing. “We were cousins. First cousins at that. They were right, we should have known better. It was wrong.” After that she was silent. I sat there, trying to imagine Old Tommy Hazel as my potential grandfather, and me with two heads playing a banjo. It was all too odd for me.

  My grandmother cleared her throat and continued. “I had always felt a little uncomfortable with the whole thing, but he said it didn’t matter. Thomas said he knew it was right. Felt it, he said. It was even in the Bible in places, you know. As long as it had God’s blessing. Adam and Eve’s kids populated the whole world. And he was sure we had God’s blessing. I thought that was a stretch but I was too fond of him to care.”

  I tried imagining that man I met in the swamp saying those things to my grandmother, but the two distinct images were having a problem connecting in my head.

  “After we stopped seeing each other, our fathers went out of their way to make sure we never met up again, or spent time alone anymore, which was hard to do in a small village like this. I grew to accept the situation. Women are a lot more realistic about these things. But Thomas never did. Never. Some months later, I started to see your grandfather, and a year later we were married.”

  The clouds passed from in front of the sun, and the dazzling brightness of the summer day momentarily blinded me. Grandma closed her eyes and leaned back in her chair.

  “I remember coming out of the church with your grandfather on our wedding day. All the people were there on the steps, throwing things and cheering. All those smiling happy faces. Except for Thomas. He was standing across the road, a little ways to the left. All alone, hands in his pockets. He was watching us. I tried not to look at him, but I could feel him staring at us. I almost tripped coming down those stairs, but your grandfather caught me. Once I righted myself, I forced myself to look up. Thomas had turned his back and was walking down the street, away from us. I think it was then and there that Thomas became Old Tommy Hazel. I don’t think we’ve talked since. And I think that was the last time he was sober. At least that’s the way it seems.

  “It was two days later when I was going outside to fetch some water for my new husband’s coffee. When I opened the door, I hit something.” She pointed with her thumb through the open window in the direction of the tick, tick, tick I still heard. “It was a large clock, made of wood, that someone had left on our porch. There was no name, no wrapping, no clue of any kind. Just a big old clock.”

  “Old Tommy Hazel?” I asked.

  She smiled a faint smile. “I think so. I don’t have any proof, and he’d probably deny it, but I’m sure Tommy left it. He always liked to buy me gifts. I guess this was one last one. Sort of a reminder of different times, maybe. Or that he’d be waiting. And much like Old Tommy, it never worked properly since.” She shook her head like she was shaking off cobwebs.

  “All this talking to answer your silly question. I have no idea where he lives in the swamp. He moved out on his family soon after I got married. His family tried to help him, but he kept pretty much to himself. Can’t help an alcoholic if he don’t wanna be helped.”

  So that was it. I went looking for Old Tommy Hazel’s home and instead found a story, a family link in fact, to how this man ended up living in that swamp. And my grandmother was at the centre of it all.

  “And you haven’t talked to him since?”

  “What’s done is done. He’s an old foolish drunk now. He didn’t have to become that way. He could have gone on with his life, found another woman. Done something good in this world. Instead, he’s Old Tommy Hazel. Ain’t got no reason to talk to him.”

  Both her reasons no longer lived. Her father had long been dead, way before I was born. And my grandfather, her husband, had passed away a good seven years ago that winter.

  “I know what you’re thinking, boy, and no need for that. The past is the past, and there’s no way to relive it unless you have one of them time machines I see in them movies you like. Lives aren’t meant to be lived again. I’m too old to start walking backwards. Let it be. Besides, I’ve got better things to do than waste my time with an old foolish drunk.”

  “That’s kind of harsh,” I said. That didn’t sound like my grandmother—however the subtext did suggest to me a certain memory from high school: “perhaps the lady doth protest too much.”

  “It’s true that I do feel sorry for the man, I don’t deny that. The way Thomas spends his days is a disgrace and to be pitied. But he made his choice. I wish there was something I could do, but that was forty years ago. Our days together are long apart. If God wants me to talk to that man again, then let him tell me in his own way. He knows better than you or me. Now leave me be.”

  Before taking my exit, I excused myself to use my Grandmother’s bathroom, her pride and joy since the renovations eleven years ago. As I entered her house, I heard the clock again. Its tick hadn’t changed over the years, except maybe that it sounded more tired and worn. And the shelf seemed a bit lower now, or perhaps I was just a bit higher.

  I couldn’t help thinking of that clock as the time machine my grandmother had imagined earlier. And Old Tommy Hazel leaving it behind for her. Or, as my grandmother believed, it was God looking down on us all, remembering a forty-year-old relationship.

  Several days later, my supply of Kraft Dinner was running dangerously low and I was on a weekly pilgrimage to the local village store to stock up. As chance would have it, I decided on that beautiful summer day to take the path through the woods. Most of my relatives believe that if a trip involves walking farther than the length of your driveway, you take the car. Luckily, I hadn’t reached that stage in my adulthood yet.

  The path cuts through a small abandoned quarry and then, for a few hundred feet, it runs along the edge of the swamp. Under my feet the ground was still spongy, making me conscious of the dampness that still lingered in my sneakers.

  It wasn’t long till I came to the part of the path where Old Tommy Hazel leaves the civilized part of our village for his nightly excursions into his unknown world.

  As I expected, his bootprints had made their mark in the soft soil. Not that long ago it seemed, because the water was still leaking into the deep impressions. This in itself was unusual, for it was midday, long before and long after Old Tommy usually used the trail. The normal sequence of events had been broken.

  That was only half of it. Running parallel to the bootprints were a pair of smaller shoe prints, barely two-thirds of Old Tommy Hazel’s boot size. A couple of times the work boots had stopped and shifted position, as if to help somebody over a log, or a large puddle. They trailed along the swamp’s edge, and finally turned east, disappearing into its centre.

  God must have graciously decided to bless Otter Lake with a sign. Or perhaps it was that I had stopped on my way to the washroom at my grandmother’s, and stuck my jackknife into the keyhole where my grandmother winds the clock. I jiggled the knife until I felt something snap deep in the mechanism. My grandmother must have tried to wind the clock later that same day, but I guess the time had just run out.

  Or maybe it had something to do with the next morning when Old Tommy Hazel had been on his way into town. Before he had had a chance to hit the liquor store, I waylaid him as he passed in front of my house. My mother was at work, so no one noticed the strange man I put in the shower, gave a clean pair of pants, underwear, t-shirt and shoes (which I’m hoping to get back some day). Nor would she have heard me tell the startlingly different, almost presentable man about a broken clock, an old lonely woman, a sign from God, and the concept of second chances. God knows it’s hard to wipe away forty years of self abuse in one morning but I was willing to give it a chance.

>   I tried to do some mental calculations about those missing eight minutes every twelve hours. If those minutes were all added up over the last forty-odd years, all that time hidden under the floorboards and in the cracks in the walls, they would come to roughly six months or so. That’s a lot of extra time she had coming to her. My grandmother may not have known better, but for the first time in a long while, I felt I did.

  And maybe someday, if she finds the time or the interest, Grandma might just tell me where Thomas Hazel lives, way back in that old swamp.

  Fearless Warriors

  To put it mildly, the girls were not in a good mood. In fact, they were acting as cold as the wind buffeting our car as we drove home through the fall night. The two of them, Barb, my girlfriend, and Marie, William’s, sat in the darkness of the back seat, fuming, barely saying a word as I drove and William tended to his rapidly swelling eye. And as usual, he had a big grin on his face. The girls might have been angry but William was cheerful enough for the two of them. Me, I long ago learned not to get involved when these two opposing forces met, which unfortunately was quite often. I just pointed our standard Res car in the direction of home and took care of the driving.

  William repositioned the rear-view mirror to examine his new facial feature. “Ooh, that’s a beaut. Mom’s gonna kill me. Or at least blacken the other eye.” That was William; an angry girlfriend in the back seat, a hell of a shiner and he still worried about his mother’s reaction.

  “Luckily, I was too fast for the guy. He gave me his best shot, and of course my shot was better.” Even in pain he could brag.

  “William, we’re getting a little too old for this bar-room brawling stuff. My fist hurts.” And it did. William was far more the he-man type than I. It seems my duty in our friendship was to back him up and make sure he didn’t get into too much trouble. And that’s what I’d done tonight, or tried to, and that’s why Barb was mad at me.

  William winced as he touched his rapidly darkening eye, as if hoping he could rub the discolouration away. “Oh yeah, you were a lot of help. That second guy was practically on top of me before you decided to give a friend a hand.”

  “That’s because that other guy was the bouncer and I don’t like mixing it up with bouncers. I don’t like fighting period. Now we’re barred from the place for life. Thanks a lot, William, I liked that bar.”

  “Oh, don’t whine. We’re Ojibway men, fearless warriors from a long line of fearless warriors.”

  “William, your father pours cement.”

  “Details. It’s the spirit of the idea. We got a long history behind us. We weren’t gonna let a couple of farmer boys tell us anything, now were we?”

  I personally wouldn’t have cared one bit if they had recited the American Constitution, but William had a way of getting everything he wanted. And a few things he wasn’t expecting— like his black eye.

  “I just wanted a beer and a dance. That’s all, William.”

  William flipped back the rear-view mirror as he chuckled, “Well, you got a show too, and some exercise.”

  I just stared out into the dark strip of road that lay ahead of us. It was still fairly early as weekend evenings go, but as happens in the fall, the nights come quickly and can be very dark. It had been raining the last few days so there was no moon over us as our car cut through the slight fog that hugged the road.

  I kept replaying the evening in my mind, trying to find some way of making an excuse and getting back into Barb’s good graces. We had bumped into Steven Arnold, a guy we went to school with way back when, until William decided to drop out and pursue a career in anything he could get away with.

  I could see the storm clouds brewing when Steven, quite good naturedly, made some comments about William’s lack of education and whether he could spell “beer.” In typical William fashion, he responded by telling Steven what he could do with that beer, as well as another comment I only caught a bit of—something about Steven’s unusual fondness for cattle.

  Not long afterwards Steven and William, in their tumble, had knocked off a record seventeen beers, twelve liquor drinks and God only knows how many bowls of popcorn. And I found myself with this bouncer in a headlock, trying to figure a way out of all this. It was then I noticed Marie and Barb in the corner, seething with embarrassment and anger. To tell you the truth, I would still rather face the bouncer.

  As usual, William was oblivious to the condition of the ladies. “Do you think this eye makes me look more rugged, Marie?” There was no answer from the back, only the sound of wind whistling past the partially opened window. I silently prayed to myself that William would see the futility and possible danger of trying to strike up a conversation with them in their present condition.

  But William twisted around in his seat, his one good eye showing irritation.

  “Are you still mad at me? Get over it, Marie. It wasn’t that bad.”

  My palms were sweating, making me grab the steering wheel harder. “I wouldn’t if I were you.” Again I found myself looking after William’s well-being. At the age of twenty-five, it can get quite tiresome finding yourself babysitting someone your own age.

  “Relax, Andrew, Marie still loves me, don’t you sweetie?”

  I risked a look in the rear-view mirror, knowing that, like William, I was playing with fire. But that’s one good thing about being friends with someone like him. He may get you into trouble, but you can always count on him to take the brunt of the punishment and redirect unwanted attention away from more innocent people such as, mainly, me.

  The back seat was too dark for me to make out anything, let alone the girls. There were no other cars on the road to provide auxiliary light. It reminded me of a horror story I’d read somewhere of a naïve and unsuspecting man driving with a huge, vicious monster hiding in the back seat. Now I know where he got the idea.

  “Don’t talk to us.”

  Those four short words from behind said it all for me, and I was perfectly content to heed them, but evidently they didn’t say enough for William.

  “Don’t be like that. Come on, it’s over. Forget about it. Don’t make a big deal out of it. Right, Andrew?”

  There was only one thing I could say. “Keep me out of this.”

  “Thanks a lot, buddy.”

  “Hey, you started this evening, you finish it. I got problems of my own.”

  And unfortunately, there was William to my rescue, in his own particular style. “Oh leave him alone, Barb, he didn’t do anything wrong. Except date you.” A small chuckle. That was William for you.

  Suddenly, out of the darkness, Marie’s face appeared between us as she confronted William.

  “I know Andrew didn’t do anything. As usual this is all your fault. What is it with you all the time? Always got something to prove, no matter what the costs.”

  “Yeah, okay, so things got a little out of hand.” He pointed to his eye. “This will heal and it will all be forgotten. These things happen sometime. That’s all.”

  At this point, Marie was practically shouting in William’s face, making him slide sideways in his seat till his head was resting against the window.

  “But it happens all the time. Something pisses you off and you decide to get all macho about it and ruin the evening for us. You’ve been kicked out of so many places it’s a wonder you bother going into town. I don’t know how much more of this me and Barb can take.”

  William managed a small chuckle. “Now you’re exaggerating. It won’t happen again, I promise.”

  Marie leaned back into her seat, disappearing into the darkness once again. “What number is this promise now? Have we hit the hundreds yet?”

  As Barb leaned forward, I realized it was my turn. Barb was usually the quieter of the two. Usually. My foot went down a little harder on the gas pedal, hoping to get us home a little faster. “And you’re not much better, either. If he wants to fight, you let him. That doesn’t mean you have to do every damn thing he does. Use that brain of yours that you
’re so damn proud of.”

  I have a bad habit of trying to rationalize things a little too much. “But he’s my friend! I didn’t want to fight but he might have been … ”

  She disappeared into the darkness. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  William looked over at me and gave me his “we tried our best but what are we supposed to do?” smile. Then it was my turn to give him my “shut up and let them cool off or I’ll let you walk home” look, and my attention returned to the road.

  We had just turned off at Country Road 22 and were within fifteen minutes of getting to the reserve. Other than our little incident, it had been a very quiet night, and we had passed only three cars in the twenty-five minute trip home. Most people didn’t like to drive in the rainy weather we’d been having because it tended to freeze when it got dark, so we had the highway to ourselves. I turned the radio on.

  Some soft and loving Beatles tune came flooding through the car, which badly needed it. After a while, it seemed to cut through the tension like our car was cutting through the fog.

  A few minutes later, William peered out of his own little world to try some small talk. “Hey Andrew, going hunting next week?”

  “Don’t think so.” I had been invited by my uncles but, because of some college stuff, I had to hang around the village. Everybody in the community always looked forward to hunting season—tasting the venison or moose before the car even left the driveway.

  “I think I’m going with Mitch. He said he has room in his car. Can’t turn down a free space now, can I?” As I said, William is more into this he-man, outdoorsy-type stuff. Me, I’d rather go to a movie. “Gee, you haven’t been out hunting with us in a long time, buddy.”