Beck

by Mal Peet

  She touched her glass against his. “Cheers.”

  He regarded the diluted amber liquid in his glass.

  “You have to look at me when we toast.”

  Reluctantly, he raised his eyes to hers. The hard resentment in his gaze pierced her. He switched away in a flash.

  “Beck, what’s the matter? Aren’t you well?”

  “I’m fine.”

  Grace sipped her drink. Beck took a gulp of his and shivered.

  “That good?”

  “Yeah,” he said, then corrected himself immediately: “Yes. Thank you.”

  He stood at the sink to peel the potatoes. Usually he was good at keeping the peelings thin and not wasting the flesh, but his hands were unsteady and Wilder’s plump assured voice from the other room tormented him. At the table Grace was chopping onions. The knots inside his body tightened.

  Grace moved behind him and he froze. She pressed the side of her face against his back between his shoulders, thinking of the scars there, and the ones she couldn’t see. He felt her hair on the nape of his neck, her cheekbone on his spine. His heart stopped.

  When it began to beat again he heard her put the pan down on the table. The potato he’d been peeling had blood on it. He watched the blood well up on the ball of his thumb.

  The next thing she said was, “We’re nearly ready.” Like nothing had happened and maybe he’d gone crazy and imagined the whole thing.

  Wawetseka, Jim Calf Robe, Ksiistsikomiipi’kssiiwa, Sonny, Tom, Jack, and Otter Moon trailed in to supper. The conversation was general, about horses and crops and Otter Moon’s baby, which was due any minute but which Straight Speaking said would be late. And a boy.

  Wilder drank more whiskey and enjoyed the farm talk, joining in expansively and asking questions. Afterward, Grace fixed another round of drinks, the workers dispersed, and she, Straight Speaking, and Wilder went out and sat in the section of the veranda screened off from flies and mosquitoes.

  Straight Speaking embarked on one of her tales, smoking her pipe. Wilder lit a cigar. Smoke formed lazy strata above their heads. Beck stood in the doorway and watched moths, attracted by the lamplight, dash themselves against the screens. These small acts of confused violence might have been taking place inside his head. The diluted whiskey had addled him slightly but had done nothing to ease the pain of his thoughts. He couldn’t bear to stay, nor to leave.

  Straight Speaking fell silent at last. Grace said something to her in Siksika. Beck assumed it was “Take Beck away, Nah-ah. We want to be alone.”

  But the old woman didn’t reach for her stick. She only nodded and refilled her pipe. The conversation returned to the lawsuit against the government. Another language Beck didn’t understand. Nor could he read the meaning in the occasional looks that Grace gave him. He thought about saying, “Well, I guess I’ll leave you to it.” He rehearsed saying it so it would make her feel bad while telling her he knew what was going on and didn’t care. But he couldn’t trust his voice to hold.

  Eventually, Wilder seemed to become aware of Beck’s exclusion from the talk, or more probably was discomfited by his sullen presence in the company. The lawyer sought to ease the situation by engaging the kid in small talk. He understood Beck had come from Ontario, that right? That was interesting because he himself came from there originally. Newcastle, on the lake. Know it at all? No, why would you? It never was much of a place. No, he’d never heard of Ashvale. Kitchener? Sure, he knew Kitchener. Until 1916 it used to be called Berlin. Did Beck know that? A chuckle. Guess they thought it politic to change the name to something more, ah, loyal, what with what was going on in Europe. And Windsor? You sure moved around, son. Yes, indeed, know Windsor well. What did Beck do in Windsor?

  “This and that. Odd jobs.”

  Wilder leaned back. The kid’s monosyllables were wearying.

  Without warning, Beck continued. “I was a bootlegger for a while. Whiskey. We ran cases of it over to Detroit. Hiram Walker, good stuff. Drove it across the ice in the winter, used a boat other times. We sold it to Al Capone’s mob till the Purple Gang took over and then — then, we had to stop.”

  Silence. Not even a moth hitting the screens.

  Straight Speaking said, “Damn, the boy speaks more’n five words in a row. Never thought I’d live to see the day.”

  Grace stared. “Bootlegging? Beck?”

  He’d shocked her and was glad of it.

  “That was a rough trade to get mixed up in.” Wilder laughed uneasily. “I hope you know you’re talking to a lawyer.”

  Beck turned and met his gaze. “You gonna tell the police?”

  Wilder laughed again. “You’ll get nothing but admiration from me, young man.”

  Beck stood up. “Yeah, well, I guess I’ll leave you to it. Got an early start in the morning.” The words almost failed in his mouth. He pushed the screen open and walked down the steps, wishing he could run instead.

  Grace moved to follow him and then, glancing at Wilder, stopped.

  At the door of the guest room, Grace said, “I hope you’ll be comfortable, Jerome. You know where everything is.”

  “Yes. Thank you. It’s good to be here again.”

  She said, “Forgive me, I forgot to ask after your family. How are Emily and the boys?”

  “They’re well. Charlie got the chicken pox back in March and looked a fright for a while, but he’s fine now. Daniel’s talking eighteen to the dozen already. I suspect he might turn out to be a lawyer like his pappy.”

  “He could do worse.”

  A smiling pause.

  Wilder said, “It’s none of my business, but that boy . . .”

  She waited.

  “I know you’re of a, ah, a charitable disposition, but a boy like that . . .”

  Grace looked at him sharply. “He’s a man, Jerome. Does the work of a man.”

  “With a criminal past. I know a thing or two about bootlegging. It’s a nasty business.”

  She smiled. “I’m not sure I believe a word of it, anyway.”

  Wilder was surprised. “You think he made it up?”

  Feigning a yawn, Grace stepped back from the threshold. “I have no idea. But right now . . .”

  “Yes,” Wilder said. “It’s late. Goodnight, Grace.”

  In her room, she lit the lamp, sat on her bed, and thought about the evening. Beck, a bootlegger? She knew so little of his past, except that he didn’t speak of it. There were other mysteries. She’d caught him unawares, studying a book she’d left out, and felt a flush of pleasure at the realization that he could read. He’d shut it carefully, replacing her bookmark, and when she told him to borrow another if he liked, had thanked her with a neutral expression and left the room. A bootlegger. A literate bootlegger with more than his share of scars, visible and otherwise.

  She had crossed a line with him tonight and it frightened her. The moment she understood that Beck was jealous had been like a silent thunderclap, a shift in the weather. His jealousy had been both ugly and absurd but it thrilled her. She could not tell him in words that he was wrong, that he had misread the situation with Jerome: that would have been tantamount to a declaration. He was an unbroken horse, half-wild, unpredictable because he himself didn’t know what he might do next.

  She thought of how he’d frozen at her touch, and knew that his outburst on the veranda was for her, not Jerome. I am no one’s boy, he was telling her. It was the delayed thunder after the lightning.

  She stood up, went to the dresser, washed her face and hands, and unpinned her hair, the little rituals that sharpened her solitude. As she undressed for bed, she caught sight of herself in the mirror. Not so old, she thought. Her breasts hadn’t slumped; her belly was flat and firm, her waist and hips distinct and well shaped. She moved closer to the mirror and studied her face. Still good, but time and the implacable prairie climate had announced their intentions: in five years, perhaps less, youth would be a distant memory. Her hands were already older than the rest of her. There
were things she could no longer wait for.

  She gazed at herself, dispassionate. Was she really waiting? Or was this solitary life merely an excuse, a failure? Had she come to believe that being different required her to be alone? That independence meant she could never depend on another? And what about pleasure? What about companionship? Was it possible that solitude was the compromise?

  She went to the window and looked out. There was no light from Beck’s cabin. After a while she reached up and drew the curtains.

  HE WADED DEEPER into the water, breaking up reflected clouds pink-bellied in the dawn light. Bird music and the merest whispery shifting in the trees. Just ahead of him, a large insect jerkily skating the surface. He’d awoken with his mouth rank, his limbs dirty and hot. Last night’s misery had barely been interrupted by sleep. He’d pulled on his jeans and come down to the lake thinking he might drown himself, and how it would punish her.

  The water rose to his chest.

  Last night he’d sat alone outside on the step and cried like an abandoned child. He shook his head, humiliated.

  When he’d looked up to the house, there she was against the light of the window. In a rage, he’d jerked himself off, picturing them doing it, not knowing how to picture them doing it, trying not to think of horses carelessly mating, of Brother Robert. He cupped his hands and dashed water against his hot face, groaned.

  Now it was clear to him why she’d pressed herself against him in the kitchen. It was a way of saying sorry for what she was going to do. She was in bed with him now. He took another step forward, slipping down the lake’s steep shelf. It might not be hard to drown yourself if that’s what you wanted to do, and he forced his feet backward. He couldn’t swim.

  The lake cooled his body but his head was still hot and troubled. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, turning toward shore and submerging himself completely, pushing forward with his feet. With his head underwater he opened his eyes. Gray shadows shifting on the lake’s bed. Diffuse beams of light. The water ahead of him murkier than he’d thought it would be, full of specks and motes of vegetable matter.

  He breached the surface and she was there, just a few paces from the shore, naked, her arms out to the sides, the palms of her hands resting on the surface of the water as if using it to support herself. Her face was solemn. Beck stood paralyzed with shock, wondering if he had conjured her out of thin air.

  But no. She waded slowly up to him, her fingers skimming the surface. “Beck,” she said.

  He choked. “I . . .”

  And then she embraced him, pressed her body against his in the cold water so that all the warmth in the universe gathered between them.

  She drew in a long slow breath and together they rocked gently, back and forth.

  Gradually he untensed his jaw and leaned into her, listening to the way she breathed and feeling the blood pump through her body, waiting for his muscles to stop trembling, for her head to drop and his pulse to slow. The left side of her face pressed into his neck. He stared over her shoulder at a familiar scene turned inside out. As much to keep his balance as anything he held her, his hands firm against her flesh. It was a dream. His heart beat. Time slowed.

  Last night he’d whacked off in a rage hating her, dear God.

  She spoke, in his ear, “Last night —”

  He interrupted. “Someone might see us.”

  “Come, then.” She took his hand and led him ashore.

  She retrieved the robe she’d worn down to the lake, wrapped them both in it, picked up his jeans and shirt, and ran with him, along a path in the woods to a clearing thick with tall grass. When they lay down together they were invisible.

  She’s planned this, he thought. She knows this place. But after that he stopped thinking.

  God in his merciful wisdom. This unruly prong of flesh.

  He closed his eyes and shuddered, his breathing fast and shallow. Then felt Grace’s hands on either side of his face.

  She kissed his eyelids. “You’re beautiful.”

  He shook his head.

  She leaned into him. Head on his shoulder. Kissing his neck. Breasts against his chest.

  “I’m nothing.”

  She pulled back and gazed at him, frowning. “You’re everything. Ever since that first moment. You burn in me like fire, Beck.”

  There was no need to confirm or deny how he felt for her. It was entirely obvious.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t help . . .”

  “Don’t be sorry.” She smiled and kissed him.

  Fits perfectly into the human hand.

  He looked into her eyes. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “I’ll show you,” she said. And she did.

  It was all over very quickly. Grace was neither surprised nor disappointed. She had presumed, correctly, that he was inexperienced. There would be time, later, for her own pleasure. For now, it was enough, fully and joyously enough, to have possessed him. She felt that same sense of relief, of being right, she had felt when she first saw the valley all those years ago, and, another time, the inevitability of the naked boy and the burning tree.

  Too soon after he’d bucked fiercely and cried out, he’d made as if to lift himself free of her but she wrapped herself around him to keep him close. After a while his harsh breathing steadied. The moment was approaching when they would have to speak. She rolled onto her side, taking him with her, then eased away so she could see his face. She smiled. “Was it good?”

  It was a question that barely made sense to him. In less than a minute, an ecstasy of terror had erupted out of him and he had died and been born again. He felt tender and delicate toward himself and toward Grace. He did not understand her and could not imagine what she might do next. Perhaps she had what she wanted from him and now it was over. Or maybe this was a contract and they would be together forever. He had no idea.

  He managed to nod.

  She ran the palm of her hand down his arm. “What I feel for you cannot be measured,” she said. “You are part of me. I won’t fight against it. Never again.” Her voice was so soft, he couldn’t be sure he’d heard her words.

  They clung together like people made new.

  He stared at her and their eyes grew deep, pouring out a lifetime of longing. And suddenly he felt frightened, as if he were standing too close to a fire that would consume him, leave nothing but charred remains.

  Sighing reluctantly, she released him, knelt, and reached past him for her robe. “I have to go,” she said. And kissed him, and laid a hand for a moment on his chest.

  Beck watched her disappear almost silently through the trees. He lay motionless for some time. Then the anxiety took hold of him and he scrabbled about for his clothes, thanking God in heaven that she hadn’t left him to make his way back to the lake in broad daylight without them. He pulled on his jeans and boots. On the way to his cabin, the hissing and chirruping of insects seemed to make the warm air vibrate. As time passed and the calm logic of her presence deserted him, a panic began to rise in his chest.

  Jerome Wilder, in shirtsleeves, was sitting at the table, writing. “Ah,” he said. “I was wondering where you were. Early morning dip, eh? Great way to start the day.”

  “Yes. I’m sorry to keep you waiting. Have you been up long? Give me a minute to get dressed. Wawetseka will make coffee.”

  Her grandmother, thank all spirits, goddesses, and deities, had not yet emerged.

  In her room, Grace stood for a long moment with her hands clenched in the pockets of her robe. The enormity of what she had done thrilled her. What had it cost her to approach him, to make her intentions clear? She would court disapproval; Lord knows what Nah-ah would say to her, she who could barely mention her own daughter’s name after all these years. Would it be enough to make an announcement, to say to everyone (including Beck), “I have never felt this way before”? Of course it wouldn’t be enough. Everyone knew who she was and what was expected from her in this valley. Everyone knew how she sh
ould behave: honorably, generously, sensibly. Sensibly above all. She was not expected to fall in love with a half-caste boy-man, uneducated and unversed in her people and her history.

  Grace set her jaw. What sort of woman was she? And what did she have for a future?

  GRACE APPLIED HER mind to the management of an affair. It could not be declared just yet, she felt certain of that. In Winnipeg she hadn’t given a fig about disapproval, had almost invited it. Here it was different. She was growing a community to which she was central; she had to command respect. The people she gathered at this place trusted her, brought their problems to her. They watched her to see what they, themselves, could be.

  It would be tolerated, she supposed, because she had the right to do what she liked. But it would call her judgment into question. When the men gathered at the store on Saturday afternoons they’d laugh about it. Ben would break open the beers and she could exactly imagine how the talk would go.

  Well, Grace, she ain’t been gettin’ any for a long, long time.

  Yeah, but come on. The hired kid? And her near old enough to be his mother?

  The laughter might be tolerant, but it would be at her expense. At his.

  All this she turned over, hour after hour, throughout the day, thinking about it one way and then another, wondering how they might be together, knowing that they must. She fretted the day away, retiring to her room so she could think of him in private, lying still, imagining his hands on her, the look in his strange green eyes, now clear, now clouded with desire, the intensity of his need, the passion, the doubt, the look, the feel, the him of him.

  She needed him. But was it possible? Was it wise? They couldn’t keep it hidden. People came early to the house. On evenings when there were meetings or gatherings, it wouldn’t do if Beck was still there when everyone else left. And Jim might come to the sleepout on early start days and not find him there. Nah-ah would take him away and with her coyote ears hear him stealing back. Or leaving in the morning; she woke early.

  It was intolerable to think of loving him illicitly. Who would respect her for that?