Beck

by Mal Peet

  Brothers Michaelis and Duncan sat on stools (stools stored away in the linen cupboard normally, but handy when baptisms were taking place) on the other side of the bathroom door, listening intently. It was regrettable that the heavy thickness of the door reduced the sounds from inside to muffled murmurings and splashes, but both men were adept at translating these into delicious imaginings. So when the extraordinary sound — somehow both a bellow and a howl — came from within, they were extremely startled.

  Both leaped to their feet, Brother Duncan losing his balance in the process and half falling against the wall. Brother Michaelis fumbled urgently with the key to the bathroom door and, pushing it open, was confronted by Beck, who was naked, wet, and apparently possessed. The boy was shaking from head to foot, his teeth set in a snarl. His right hand was raised in a threatening gesture; it gripped something sharp edged and bloody.

  In this frozen, almost hallucinatory, moment Brother Michaelis now saw Brother Robert half-risen from the bath, supporting himself with one hand on its rim and his other hand raised in a gory benediction. The left side of his face was masked with blood issuing from a gash on his forehead.

  The moment convulsed: Beck let fall the thing he had been holding — which was, Brother Michaelis now realized, a jagged half of the soap dish — and hurled himself toward the door. Brother Michaelis blocked him, enfolding the boy in a slithery embrace. Now Brother Duncan pushed into the room, and between them the two priests managed to force Beck to his knees and get a grip on his arms. The boy roared obscenities.

  Brother Robert, his detumescent organ dangling, climbed unsteadily from the bath and pressed a towel to his face.

  “Dear God,” Brother Duncan cried. “What happened, Bob?”

  “The savage little bastard tried to kill me.” He took the towel away from his face and studied it. “Take him downstairs. I’ll be five minutes.”

  With difficulty, Brothers Michaelis and Duncan straitjacketed the boy in a bath towel and dragged the howling Beck down the corridor. Brother John appeared at the turn of the stairs.

  “What on earth is going on?”

  Instead of answering, Brother Michaelis balled his handkerchief and shoved it deep into Beck’s mouth. He made an upward gesture with his head to where pale faces peered through the balusters.

  “Go to bed,” Brother John shouted. “All of you! Now! And stay there!”

  The cellar was a large space divided in two by a rough wooden partition with an unglazed door set into it. Beck, choking, half-strangulated and gasping silent curses, tried to brace his foot against the jamb but Brother Michaelis expertly kicked the boy’s ankle and shoved him through. It was pitch-dark inside the room; then came the rasp of a match.

  “Hurry up, John,” Beck heard Brother Michaelis say. “We can’t hold the little feck much longer.”

  A soft yellow flare of lamplight. Furniture. Paintings of flesh on the walls. A cast-iron bed with a stained mattress onto which he was flung. The towel was pulled away. He twisted, flailing and kicking, unable to breathe or make a sound. His fist made contact with something yielding before it was seized and his arm yanked forward. Something metallic closed upon his wrist, hurting the bone. A great weight settled upon his legs, immobilizing them. Now his other arm was wrenched and fastened. He was facedown on the mattress snorting great gulps of air through his nose like an animal. All he could think of now was that he needed air. He turned his head, panicking for breath. The musty stink leaked slowly into his gasping lungs; terror and suffocation stifled him.

  Brother Michaelis lowered his bulk onto a couch and wiped his face with a handkerchief. “Mary and Joseph, but the little shit has the devil’s strength. Sit where you are, John, while Duncan fastens the feet. That’s it. Now, isn’t that a picture? I’d say we deserved a snifter for our trouble. Duncan?”

  Beck heard glasses clink and a cork pulled. He lost consciousness like falling into a hole then pulled himself up out of it. Brother Michaelis was standing over him with a glass in his hand and a regretful expression on his face.

  “Well, Chocolat, you had me fooled and no mistake. You led my soft heart astray, so you did. Had me thinking you were an angel with a dirty face. Bit of a wash and brushup, you’d be one of the saved. But I was wrong, wasn’t I?”

  He took a pull on his whiskey. “Let me tell you how it is, now. The path between the womb and the grave is a long and winding one, and uphill and hard underfoot most of the traipse.” He paused to let Beck’s desperate heaving gasps subside. “And on this arduous journey, what sustains the pure in heart is the gift of love. And what sustains wicked little fecks like you is punishment. We offer both options here, and you chose the latter. So be it.”

  The door opened and closed and a bolt slid into place.

  Brother John’s voice said, “How are you, Bob?”

  There was no reply.

  Brother Robert came into Beck’s sidelong view. He wore a bandage knotted on his forehead and a fancy dressing gown. He held a bamboo cane in his hand.

  The first slash of the cane brought pain so extreme that Beck would have been unable to make a sound even if he hadn’t a handkerchief jammed halfway down his throat. He felt he’d been cut in half below the shoulder blades. It was almost as if it was happening to someone else in a dream of burning. During the pause between that first explosion of agony and the next he tried to gurgle a defiant obscenity, but could not. Then he burrowed down into a deep and familiar dark cave where he could not be reached.

  Brother Robert lashed Beck four times on the back and twice on the buttocks. Then, his face striped tigerish by blood and sweat, he raped the boy.

  ASHVALE, ONTARIO, HAD exactly twice as many buildings as it had letters in its name. Of these buildings, only two were worthy of mention: the Ashvale Emporium, a store that on its ground floor sold everything a decent person could want. Its upper floor comprised the Ashvale Hotel, four meagerly furnished rooms that were seldom occupied simultaneously. No alcohol was available on the premises. The other building of note was the reason the hamlet needed a name in the first place: the railway station, which consisted of a single timber platform and a low clapboard building coated in many flaked thicknesses of white paint. The larger of the two rooms in this modest edifice was the waiting room. The other was three offices in one: the ticket office, the stationmaster’s office, and the telegraph office, where one of Ashvale’s two telephones was located. This was the domain of Mr. Hicks, who — unsurprisingly, considering his three official roles — was an officious little man with an officious little mustache.

  Twice a week, shortly after two o’clock in the afternoon and whatever the weather, an air of expectancy gathered in Ashvale. Horse-drawn wagons and even an automobile or two came in from the outlying farms and parked in the space between the station and the Emporium. The store would do a brisk — by its own standards — trade in soda pop (summer) and hot potatoes (winter). Women — neighbors separated by ten miles or so — exchanged news and recipes. Men exchanged glances. Pocket watches were studied, their reliability debated. A train was due.

  And here, at last, it came, sounding its steam whistle, from the unreclaimed woodland to the northeast. Chugging smoke into the virginal spring sky. Approaching the station platform onto which now thronged the populace of Ashvale and thereabouts. Some of these people were there for a purpose: to greet a returning relative, perhaps, or take delivery of some long-awaited piece of agricultural equipment. Others were there merely to speculate: about the business of the rare stranger, or what fool had ordered a bicycle. Others — the majority, perhaps — came for nothing more than reassurance. To be reminded by the gasping locomotive that they were connected to other places, that there was — in theory, at least — something beyond what they could see.

  On this particular early afternoon, the guard pulled open the doors of the goods van and produced, first, a bundle of mail and packages, which he handed to Mr. Hicks. Then a slatted crate containing a pair of ruffled and irate g
eese, several boxes and sacks for the Emporium, a gearbox for a John Deere tractor, two sets of automobile tires, a large mirror in an ornate black frame (this attracted considerable interest), two very big, round-bellied glass bottles wearing jackets of woven straw, a repaired saddle, a large package wrapped in sacking, and a butter churn.

  From the second of the two passenger carriages, a black-clad woman stepped onto the platform to be greeted silently by her husband and boisterously by her young daughter. A man unused to the suit he was wearing climbed aboard without farewell.

  When all this was done, Stationmaster Hicks consulted the fat watch chained to his waistcoat for a good many seconds then blew the whistle he held between his officious lips and raised his arm. The engineer withdrew his head into the cab with a laconic wave.

  Within half an hour of the train’s departure all trace of its visit had vanished. Hicks had distributed letters and packets from the glass window of his ticket office, all cargo had been claimed, all spectators dispersed, and Ashvale, exhausted by the thrill of it all, had resumed its normal torpor. There remained, however, a solitary figure on the platform: a dark-skinned boy dressed in a rough woolen coat standing next to a tin trunk. Several people had noted the words on the label pinned to his lapel: Ignatius Beck. Giggs, Ashvale, Ontario. But no one spoke to the boy and no one seemed keen to claim him.

  Eventually Beck walked to the end of the platform. From that vantage point he had a view of the backyards of three mean dwellings. In the one nearest him, a woman was spreading wet bedsheets on a clothesline beside a rickety picket fence. She was the one item of human presence in a vast and empty landscape. Beck’s experience of unpopulated spaces was limited to the awful and limitless ocean he’d seen from the deck of the Duke of Argyll. And now it seemed to him that he was at sea again, a sea solidified and dead under a hot white sky. From this landlocked deck, you could slide boys into nowhere they’d ever be found. It occurred to Beck that this was indeed what had been done to him.

  Sweat had awakened the wounds on his back. He took off his coat, dumped it on the trunk, and unbuttoned the itchy gray cardigan. He walked to the open window of the white wooden building. Inside, the man with the cap and mustache was sitting at a desk making notes in a thick ledger.

  Beck said (his voice uncertain because it hadn’t been much used in two days), “Mister? Am I in Ashvale?”

  The man, without looking up, aimed a finger skyward. Beck stepped back to see what it was aimed at. Which was a black and white stamped metal sign nailed to the gable of the shack.

  “Fook you, then.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Beck walked back to his trunk. No, not his. The one those bastid Brothers had given him ’cause it was heavy and awkward and a sod to lug. He sat down on it, wincing.

  Because there was no other moving thing to look at, he watched a heat-shivered shape get bigger as it came and went between the low swells of the land. Gradually it became a horse-drawn buggy with legs moving in unhurried rhythm. The driver’s eyes blazed light when he moved his head. With implacable slowness, the vehicle approached the station, where it halted. The horse shook its head and whiffled. A minute later the driver came up the ramp onto the platform and went to the office and spoke into its window. While so doing, he took off his spectacles to clean them with a gray handkerchief. In response to something Hicks said he put his glasses back on and looked in Beck’s direction. He turned back to the window and spoke again. Then he walked along to Beck. There was a hitch in his stride, as though a boot nail were troubling his foot. He stooped and peered at the label on Beck’s coat.

  Then he stepped away, pushed his sweat-stained hat farther back on his head, and said, “Hell’s bloody teeth.”

  For several moments he stood with his hands on his hips, gazing about like someone seeking the perpetrator of a practical joke. Then he returned to the telegraph office, yanked the door open, and went inside. He and Hicks exchanged words that Beck could not make out. After a long silence, the man’s voice started up again, growing loud and angry, like he was having an argument, an argument with himself, because Hicks wasn’t talking back.

  Minutes passed at a cloud’s pace. The man came back out of the office, reached into the bib pocket of his dungarees, took out tobacco and papers, rolled himself a cigarette, and lit it. He drew deeply on it a couple of times then called in Beck’s direction. “You, boy! Fetch that trunk down here.”

  Beck took hold of one of the leather handles and hauled it, scraping, along the platform. “Are yer Mr. Giggs, then?”

  “Who the hell else I’d be, boy?” Giggs sucked in smoke, nipped the cigarette out, and put the stub into his pocket. “Damn,” he said on the exhale. “Well, come on. Jesus.”

  He walked away and Beck dragged his burden after him, down the ramp, through the sprung wicket gate, across the rough ground to where Giggs waited by his rig.

  “Can you lift that thing?”

  “Not by meself.”

  Giggs nodded dolefully, leaned, picked the trunk up one-handed, and swung it onto the back of the buggy. He climbed up onto the ruptured leather seat and looked down at Beck.

  “Yer comin’, boy, or are yer plannin’ to stand there like a stump the rest o’ the day?”

  THEY DROVE FOR what seemed to Beck, who was achingly hungry and thirsty, an eternity. Through low rolling farmland, fields separated from virgin prairie by nailed timber fences or rough walls of stone, through narrow stands of trees, over creeks spanned by plank bridges that rattled the buggy and sent shots of pain across Beck’s arse and back. A field of grazing, muttering sheep. Beck, entirely ignorant of animal husbandry, assumed they were the same ones that had shared his ship; he wondered, without caring much, how they’d gotten here. Now and again they passed a dirt track that met the dirt road and at each of these there was a post with a board fixed to it. Or a gallows with a board hung from it. On the boards, names: MCEWEN, SMITH, KELLERMANN, GREY. He sounded out each one silently, having nothing else to do but concentrate on his own pain and thirst.

  Giggs spoke not a word during the entire journey. Beck looked at him sideways at intervals. His captor was a hat, a pair of spectacles, a stubbled jaw hinged upon a neck of reddened and ropy sinews. Once, he let the horse’s leather traces rest in his lap and foraged in his bib for the half-smoked cigarette, then lit it with a match. His hands, like his throat, were made of weathered string and knobs.

  When the sky at its edges was deepening into indigo and the underbellies of the clouds began to pinken, Giggs chuck-chucked at the horse and turned right onto a track that seemed to lead nowhere. Then they crested a slight rise and Beck beheld his new home.

  It was a house not unlike those he’d glimpsed earlier: a low-slung affair hunched inside a group of trees. A black chimney pipe jutted out of the roof, leaking white smoke. A tin-roofed barn, a cluster of sheds. Approaching the place, the buggy passed a pasture in which cows grazed; they were as big as monuments. They had what looked to Beck like bags of guts dangling between their back legs. One gazed at the passing buggy, lifted its tail, and hosed shit like a comment.

  Without a word from its owner, the horse halted in the yard at the rear of the house and hung its head. A welcoming committee of irritable chickens gargled and strutted, gingerly lowering their feet as if the ground might scorch. Giggs climbed down, wincing slightly when his left leg took his weight, and tethered the reins to the rail along the porch. He limped up the three steps then looked back.

  “Git down. This’s it.”

  The door opened into a kitchen: a table with three chairs, a sink below the window, a bucket below the sink, a tea chest full of firewood, a black stove like a coffin on legs. Around the stove, a three-sided clotheshorse draped with underclothes. On the stove, a metal pan with a lid that rose and fell like a dying man’s chest, gasping steam that smelled of meat. Beck’s stomach contracted.

  Giggs crossed the kitchen to a second door that was stopped open by a stone and called, “Anni
e? Anne!”

  A muffled reply came from the barn. Giggs went over to a Welsh dresser, took an enameled mug from a hook, and filled it with water from a tall earthenware cooler. He drained it in a single draft and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He looked over at Beck. “Want some?”

  “Yeah.” And then, “Please.”

  Giggs sighed as though a thirsty boy was yet another predictable obstacle on life’s stony road.

  Beck was swallowing, nearly choking in his anxiety to drink, when footfalls clattered and the light from the inner door faltered, interrupted by a woman hauling a heavy pail of milk followed by a child and a silence as heavy as death. He lowered his mug.

  The woman wore a washed-out blue dress. Her hair hung from her head like parched grass felled by sudden rain. The child, who was perhaps five years old, female and red-haired, hid behind her mother.

  “Is that him?”

  “Yeah. This’s what they sent us.”

  “It can’t be, Walt.”

  “That’s pretty much what I said when I saw him.”

  “They said Ignatius. There never was no nigger boy called Ignatius, surely.”

  “I know.”

  “So?”

  “So soon as I clapped eyes on him, I went to Bill Hicks’s office an’ called them Brethren in Quebec. Cost me the best part of two dollars. Talked to that Brother Wossisface. I told him straight, Annie. That we been takin’ English guttersnipes inter Canada all these years, all right, but, I said, English nigger guttersnipes is somethin’ else. You can’t start doin’ that to us. This is Canada, not the Yoo Ess Ay.”

  “An’ what he say to that?”

  “Oh, he huffed an’ puffed, said he thought we’d been told. I said the hell we’d been told. Like I’d’ve said yeah, that’s all just fine and dandy, when we got a female child in the house? Anyways, the long an’ the short of it is we get to keep him a month then if it don’t work out we send him back. An’ anyhow, the Brother said, physic’lly this here’s the best of the bunch they had available. Most of the rest is little runts.”