by Jack Hodgins
“Sit down,” Momma said again. “You look like you could do with a cup of coffee.”
Emma Melville stood looking for a minute longer. She opened her mouth to say something, but closed it, then opened it again and said, “You set down, Lenore Miles. You ain’t here to sip coffee with no one. You set down and start listening, I have a lot to tell.”
The two women sat down at the table and stared at each other across the loaves of bread. Momma said, “Then start telling.”
Emma squirmed. “What I got to say may not be right for young ears over there.”
“Oh never mind that. He’s got his nose in a book and won’t hear a thing,” Momma said, who should have known better than that, seeing not one page turned yet.
“That bastard,” Emma said.
Momma stiffened.
“Yes. You mean Sandy.”
“Yes, yes Sandy. Yes, that shifty-eyed bugger. Yes, him. Lookit here.”
He looked too and saw the large purple swelling on the side of her face. There was no missing that, even without an invitation.
“And this!” Her hand opened the housedress and pointed to something he could not see.
“That’s something,” Momma said.
“Well, that’s all the thanks I get for going into town last night and dragging him out of the beer parlour before he got too drunk and started smashing up expensive furniture like the last time. This is my thanks, not that I expected any. He let me haul him out past all those laughing people and drive him all the way home and then, then, when we’re all alone, he says Couldn’t you at least take your hair out of pincurls, Emma, before you came huntin for me? And then he laughed, and right in the middle of a laugh he stopped and knocked me down like a stone to the floor and kicked me, kicked me, Lenore, the way you kick a dog.”
“Did you yell?”
“Did I yell. I cursed and screamed, and then you know what he did?”
Momma said, “I don’t know as I want to.”
Just try not telling, he thought, his eyes on the plum swelling. Just you try stopping now with these four ears pricked up to listen. He wondered what she had pointed to inside her housecoat.
“My God, Lenore, he dragged me into the bedroom.”
He did not intend to laugh. His body just jerked upright in the chair and before he knew enough to stop it he had laughed right out loud like an idiot, one sharp crooked sound he couldn’t swallow. They both swung their heads around fast, glowering, Momma saying “You hush” with her voice and “Blast your hide” with her eyes, and then swung back again as if not a sound had come from him and all that mattered in the world could be found right there on the table with those loaves of bread.
Momma sighed and heaved her shoulders. “What now?” she said.
“Now he’s gone. He walked out of this house and said he’ll never come back.”
Momma said, “He’s done it before. He’ll be back.”
And what Emma Melville didn’t like she ignored. “He said never. He said nothing could drag him back. He said he’d rather sleep in people’s barns than come back here.”
He had heard crying before, but nothing in ten years of listening to just about every kind of sound a farm or family had to offer had quite prepared him for what he had to listen to now: first, deep and heavy breathing uncontrolled, then hoarse rasping sounds building steadily until he might have been listening to a cow coughing from a thistle stuck in her throat. Suddenly the room smelled no longer of the bread they had brought in but of some staler odour, onions, maybe, that stayed around soaked up in the woodwork or wallpaper to fight and beat out anything new that might enter. In the wicker chair he was aware of that and the sound too, and, no longer pretending to be reading the magazine, he watched the heaving body of the woman with horror and fascination and then looked over to his mother, green and solid across the table, thinking, even before she noticed his staring, Now, let’s see you do your stuff, in a manner he would never have dared to speak aloud. But Momma’s eyes caught his, and maybe reading there just what thoughts went on behind, she got out of her chair and said, “You go out to the car, Duke, and wait for me there.”
Still wanting to see how she worked her miracles, he said “No” and barely got that one syllable out before she answered, “I said go out in the car and wait. This is not for you to see.”
Or anyone else, he admitted. Still, she had brought him all the way over here to see her in action and he did not want to miss it now. He said, “No,” again.
“You get, Barclay Miles, or I’ll tan your backside. Get out to that car.”
He got. He went out that door no one had thought to close (would the whole neighbourhood have to hear her panting and wheezing like a sick cow, and would they all but him hear what she said or did to stop it?) and slammed it hard behind him. In the silent wake of the noise, he considered sitting on the step to hear, but gave that up and went to the car and slammed that door too.
It took twenty minutes on the dashboard clock. He sat there cooled by the shade of a hawthorn tree and, thinking he would never speak to her again as long as he lived, crossed his arms and practised a scowl. But he soon forgot about the scowl and looked up the gravel road before him, at the powder-brown surface itself, at the dust-laden poplars and alders as still as silence on either side, dying. As still as silence, he thought, and how could they stand and be smothered and choked out by dust and never move or struggle? Down the road a boy came, walking, fourteen years old perhaps and staring at the empty sky, stirring up a trail of dust with two bare feet flat and wide as snow shoes. One of the Waddell kids from up the river, with nothing better to do all summer than tramp up and down the roads looking for beer bottles in the ditch. Duke would be darned if he would plod over every crossroad in the valley looking for empty beer bottles for pennies, even if he did live up the river with no father and needed the money for food. He’d starve first, which was about what would happen to him anyway if she didn’t get out to the car soon, lunch time being a ridiculous hour to go calling on people.
But the Waddell boy was hardly past the car by the time she and Emma Melville were out on the porch, both laughing and talking as if a nice social call were just coming to an end.
He swung and said, “She okay now?” before she had even hit the starter button.
“She’s okay,” she said.
“She’s not crying any more?”
“She’s okay.”
He had to shout over the whine of the engine starting. “Why did you bring me?”
They were a half-mile down the road before she worked up an answer to that one. Staring straight ahead as if all she needed to see would be right there in front of her she drove that car grim-faced and a little faster than she should have (having no driver’s licence and wanting none) right past the swans on Hanley’s pond, past the stand of timber Peter Wilson would not sell to the sawmill for lumber, and right on past the big sawmill itself standing silent and deserted for fear of spraying sparks, before she found the words.
Then she said, “I didn’t know she would be in such an ugly mood. It’s happened before and I didn’t think she would be so ugly this time.”
Not everyone can answer straight the first time so he tried again. “Why did you want me to come?”
“You needed to see that,” she said, double-clutching to slow down as they were coming to the highway. “There are lots of unpleasant things in this world and I hope you don’t ever see half, but that was one you needed to see.”
“See what?”
“You needed to see the kind of mean things some men will do to a woman. You wouldn’t ever see it at home, but you needed to know and no amount of telling would have been good enough. Maybe some day you will be tempted to do a woman a dirty turn, and you’ll remember Emma Melville’s black eye and crying.”
They were on the highway now, and she drove faster than ever, swinging the car around a farmer and his tractor without even seeing the truck that had to chew up the dust of th
e shoulder to miss hitting her, and propelling them across a narrow bridge with less than four inches to spare on his side. Sitting in that front seat low enough for the hood itself to seem like a giant shiny field dragging him down the narrow lane formed by the two converging rows of fence posts, he was afraid to turn his head away far enough to look at her, saying instead to the chrome figure at the head of the hood, “That wasn’t crying. That was a sick cow choking on a thistle.”
“That was crying,” she said, and released the accelerator a little. “That was real heart-break crying you heard. Don’t forget that.”
He knew even then that he would not forget it, whatever it was supposed to mean. She hadn’t been wrong about that. He moved closer to her on the seat, and, after making sure no one was coming down the road to see him, put his head on her shoulder. Close up, the green of her dress was a little coarse, not so gentle. He felt the strength of her sifting into him and making him cool. The only thing that worried him was what was he going to tell Dora and Mary when they asked.
What he was going to tell Dora and Mary was one thing he didn’t need to worry about. “Daisy calfed down behind the back alders, a pretty little bull,” Mary and Dora said. “Not that you’d care, but we had to haul a bucket of water down to poor old Daisy, for the spring’s dried up and she looked as parched as a raisin from the heat.”
He had two weeks of sun to mull over all that happened that day before they flung something else at him, they being fate and twenty pounds of falling cedar limb that dropped its weight down on more than any doctor would ever see. For every day of those two weeks the sun dropped its weight too, sucking the whole world pale by day and retreating at night just long enough to gain new force and momentum for its attack on a new morning. The burnt grass drooped, and the mint, which needed dampness, began to wilt and sag; only the poplars, indifferent or insensitive to heat, flourished as before. Duke spent most of those fourteen days barefoot on the bottom step soaking up the smells the heat lifted (mint and blackberry and the sweet high odour of pine), not enough alive to find himself a spot of shade for comfort.
So that day came, sluggish like them all in a valley that did not know how to live with this much heat, and before he knew it there she was at his shoulder again, saying, “Stirring up mud wasps again, Duke?” as if she couldn’t see, and then, “Whose car is that?”
“What car?” he said.
“Coming.” She stared at the point where the road slipped behind some trees and out of sight. “I hear it coming.”
And it came into sight the colour of fire and just as fast, stopping at the gate and then leaping forward again down the lane chased by its own dust. When it stopped, two men got out and then turned to help something else set its feet on the ground.
He watched it approach, something not quite human, something between those two men, setting its feet down as if it did not have his father’s caulk boots on and as if the wooden walk were broken glass. It wore his father’s blue plaid mackinaw too, the one that Duke liked to get close to and smell the grease and sweat. He looked hard, measuring each step with ten heavy heartbeats, and saw that it had a mouth all right, but everything above that was just a big white globe with black holes for eyes. A mummy. Pure white bandages wrapped around and around. A faceless mummy. There was blood on the mackinaw, he saw, a dark stain along the collar. And the hand, too, the hand, smeared red, moving up slowly to touch that white mask.
He yelled, and one of the men said, “Shut up,” and the other laughed, opening a large toothless mouth. They kept coming, and he yelled “Momma” three times, and she was there beside him smelling fresh, saying, “Be quiet, Duke,” softly.
“Yeah,” the toothless man said, “shut that big mouth. Yer old man ain’t in any condition to listen to that.”
So he stopped, closed his mouth so the yelling was all inside now, and he could hear her whispering, “Oh my God oh my God,” and he thought, If that is my father then she will run to him. But she didn’t move. She stood there on the step beside him and whispered those words over and over again all the time the toothless man was telling them about the falling limb and the nose laid open and the ear off and the stitches at the doctor’s. She did not take one step forward.
It said, “It’ll be all right, Lenore. Invite the gentlemen in.” From somewhere inside that thing.
With her hand at her mouth, she backed up a step, sobbing, “Oh Albert, oh Albert,” twice, and ran back into the house.
Alone now with the two men and his father, he could hear her footsteps thumping up the staircase. She was running for their bedroom. He looked at his father because he knew he had to believe it. He looked and looked, and still it was just a thing between those two men, and no father to anyone in this world. He looked and looked and it did not look back, just stared over his head at the open empty door. Then the man with teeth came up closer and said, “You take your daddy inside and don’t make no noise to bother him.”
He did not answer that, but walked right past the three of them standing there on the walk as if he could think of a thousand better things to do. Because that was no father to anyone in his world, or she would have run to him. If he just kept walking past those poplars and that mint patch and on into the woods, he would not even have to believe it. Because look how she ran. He thought, let them give me warning, and lay down in the mint beside the verandah to wait.
But waiting was another thing he wasn’t ready for. Levelled out like that, with his face close enough to the ground to hear the woodbugs moving, he thought of his sisters, both off to a neighbour’s and safe for the time being from whatever it was he was having to face. He thought of Momma running up those stairs and couldn’t quite put that together with the image of her walking up to Emma Melville’s front door. When he realized (the smell had all been sucked out of the mint) that he did not even know what he was waiting for, he went back to the step and helped his father inside.
“Be patient,” his father said, gently.
“Yes sir,” he said.
“Thank you,” his father said, for his help.
“Maybe she’ll be down later,” he said. “Sometimes there is nothing anyone can do.” But looking up into the black holes in his father’s face, he ceased to believe those last words as soon as they were said, as if saying them cancelled any truth there may have been in them once, at some earlier time when life was much simpler that it was now.
III
At the Foot of the Hill,
Birdie’s School
There were plenty of reasons to pause.
He had come down out of the hills without rest or incident, though once he had stopped just long enough to eat raw eggs by a stream and cut his finger on a blade of innocent-looking cattail. A nasty wound, but it healed instantly once he’d dismissed it and kept his mind trained like a blue-steel rifle on the coast. Now at the foot of the last and lowest mountain, he sat mounted to look over the town, and picked (one at a time, gently) the pine needles and dead twigs and broken spider threads out of his hair. Hope and the seventeen years, all he’d brought down with him, were light as breath on his mind.
That and the desire, the need, to be quickly corrupted.
Only he wasn’t ready to join the McLean gang, which was his one and certain goal. To steal livestock, to pistol-whip Chinese, to shoot Indians right and left, stab policemen, murder strangers, and to be hanged on the gallows at last before his eighteenth birthday. But he needed practice first or how could he expect to be welcome? And anyway, the McLeans were likely to be far away from here, and doing their deeds for all he knew in someone else’s lifetime.
Allan McLean Twenty-five years old—the oldest brother—he was tall and bearded and (so it was written) very very mean.
The thing was this: his name was Webster Treherne and the Old Man had kept him alone up there since his second birthday and taught him that time was meaningless and God was All. His mother and (perhaps) his father had retreated before that down the mountain in some
other direction with all the twenty others and left the commune shacks to sag and bleach and catch no other voices but theirs. They were a small world but complete: a cluster of leaning sheds in a cedar valley, an old man and a boy; a cow, a dog, a garden, and a few chickens.
Charlie McLean Twenty years old in the pictures, he was the one with the moustache, and with brows as straight as a ruled line, just as mean, it was said, as his brother.
And books. There were plenty of books. There were accounts of history and biographies of great men, collections of poems and tales of love. And every one that he read seemed a warning—that a person so far from crowds was doomed to get lonely sooner or later and go mad. Yet time, a poet told him from the dusty back pages of a fat collection, would take him by his shadow-hand and lead him up out of childhood to the dark swallow-thronged loft of mysteries and manhood. He knew the road of his birth: it was there in the stories of the infamous McLeans, written invisibly between the sentences he read over and over until he was convinced that being bad for a while would be more fun than hanging around for ever on this broken-down farm.
“You don’t even know how far out you’ll have to walk,” the Old Man said.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said.
“Look, I know you,” the Old Man said. “I brought you up. You don’t even know if there is anything else.”
“I do know,” he said, “because I can’t believe that in all this world there are only two images to reflect the nature of God.”
He was just playing with words, though, because he knew for sure that down out of the mountains there were all the people in the books and the people who wrote the books and the twenty-two others who had lived in the commune and left. And at least the McLeans were out there somewhere and the people they were destined to kill (or had killed) and all the other people who were going to get mad enough to hang them (or to have hanged them) and the people who were taking their photographs to put in the books.