Spit Delaney's Island

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by Jack Hodgins


  Archie McLean At fifteen years he was round and sullen, a nosebiter (some thought that it was being put in jail for biting off an Indian’s nose that started their whole long chain of vengeful deeds).

  Raising hell. Riding through the countryside screaming “Kill the bastards!” Scaring up fear in people’s chests like nervous grouse. You can’t ask for much more than that. Except maybe to be there at the last, to wonder if the man you had bribed really had got the job of hangman and cut the ropes the way you promised to pay him for doing, so that when the floor dropped you would only fall through to the ground and then fight your way out.

  Alex Hare He was a neighbour, seventeen (“I wish to know what you have against me”).

  Webster Treherne dismounted, hopped down off the cedar-rail fence, pulled one foot quickly out of the fast-running ditch, and set out down the road towards town. He walked in the pale April sun as if thousands were awaiting his arrival, set his stride to steady and fast, swung his arms as if they could help. He walked well out in the centre of the pavement, which was slick as black oil, and soaked up light. His clothes—the deerhide pants, the ancient dark blue suit jacket someone had left behind, the homemade boots—all were older than he was and warm, warm. It seemed more than spring. On either side of the road cola cans gleamed in the roadside clumps of wet grass. A woman stepped out onto the front step of a strange triangular house and yelled for someone to come on inside and watch a television programme. Webster Treherne nearly went over to her fence to find out if she wanted him, too, but thought better of it and did not pause.

  Walking, he met a small barefoot boy, straight as a rod under a yoke hung with water buckets, who said, “Where you from, mister?” and “Me, I’ve been up the river a ways. Spend every blasted day hauling this water.” He looked Webster Treherne over from head to foot, then tilted his head towards town. “You’d think someone down in that place would dream up a decent water system. A dime a bucket I get,” and then put down his yoke and both wooden buckets to throw a large chunk of coal which hit Webster Treherne on the shoulder and tore his jacket.

  Later, a shiny new sports car went by and two yellow-haired girls leaned out the window to make faces at him. One of the girls put fingers into her eyes and nose and mouth and pulled them all out of shape as if she wanted to make him feel sick. He had seen pictures of cars and girls in the books, but the cars had always been clean, and none of the girls had been photographed while pulling ugly faces.

  He began to worry. About time and its meaning. About things. About water carriers who threw coal and girls who made faces.

  Because here was the town—

  (1) A few dozen buildings, some wooden, some brick, but all of them drab and coated with coal dust, facing one another across a dirt road that wound up from the beach. Black slag piles surrounded the town, mountains of coal dust like overturned cones. Out in the harbour a three-masted ship sat heavy and still, waiting for something. On the nearest building: D. L. PETERS GENERAL MERCHANDISE

  (2) Blacktop. Blacktop roads. Blacktop lots full of parked cars. And down the harbour a crane loading rolls of newsprint onto a Japanese freighter. Gas stations sat around every intersection as if waiting to pounce, and above them on steel poles their signs revolved like giant eyes watching out for coming business. On a narrow concrete building: G. D. POCK, ROAD SURFACING

  It was late afternoon when he walked up the steps of a grey building and knocked on the door.

  “I’m Webster Treherne,” he said. “Do you have rooms?”

  “Rooms?” said the woman who answered the door. “We got plenty of rooms, this is a school.” She was a large, sweat-smelling woman who introduced herself as Balk-eyed Birdie. Her left eye, though she tried hard to hold it steady on him, did a loop-the-loop and slid off to one side.

  The door was green but inside the front hall everything was a bright red. He felt as if he’d just stepped into someone’s mouth. A chandelier hung uvula-like at the far end and swung gently when she slammed the door. A sign on the wall said BIRDIE ATWELL’S FREE SCHOOL and above it a poster told him (black print of a sunset beach) to see Beautiful British Columbia this year instead of heading east or south.

  Besides her sweat he could smell boiled cauliflower.

  A school?

  “Yes, a school,” she said. She pressed her palms together under her chins and pumped her dimpled elbows. “But what would you know about that?” She marched ahead of him down the hall, flung a door open the length of her arm and pulled it shut again. “In there. Mr. Muir. Teaches Truth 122.”

  In the few seconds the door was open Webster Treherne could see three girls and a man, all seated and facing the blackboard as if waiting for some kind of news to write itself in chalk across the board in front of them. On the floor, a fat grey cat turned around and around in a circle nipping at its own tail.

  “And here,” she said, her face nearly purple with excitement, “is Mr. McIntosh, his room. He teaches a class in love.” There were no students in this room, just a man with a moustache who stood up when the door opened, lifted an index finger, said “Aha” as if Webster were just the person he’d been looking for, but Balk-eyed Birdie closed the door in his face.

  “And you?” he said. “What do you teach?”

  She sucked in her breath, tossed a blood-red apple straight up behind her and stepped back to catch it in the deep soft V of her dress front. “Life,” she said, and her bad eye did two loops and slid off to the side for a rest.

  He was only seventeen, without much experience in the world, so he said, “That sounds like plenty to me. I’ve heard lots of people spend a whole lifetime looking for those.”

  And Balk-eyed Birdie laughed. She had one front tooth capped in gold, one in silver. “Oh we don’t teach you how to find those things, we teach you how to lose them.”

  “Lady,” Webster Treherne said, and jammed out his hand as if straight into fire, “you just found a new pupil. This is the place for me!” He stripped off his clothes and lowered himself into the hot bath she drew for him. When he slumped down low the water came right up under his chin and dead ahead, scratched into the tiles above his feet, were the words let me play golden which he read over and over until he fell asleep.

  To raise hell. To ride through the countryside yelling “Kill the bastards!” To ride on the edge, an apprentice, and watch those four others gallop from murder to murder and on to their deaths as if all of it were not only fun but necessary. Oh Allan McLean, turn, turn your head and acknowledge the boy who rides on the edge! Squint those dark half-Indian eyes at me and say “Come on, kid, the next one’s yours.”

  The trouble was, Webster Treherne was good. The Old Man had seen to that, had told him from the first that the image of a perfect God can’t help but be good, was destined by definition to be humane, healthy, and immortal. You couldn’t just cancel out that kind of education overnight.

  When he had awakened and pulled on his clothes and eaten the thick soup she heated up for him on her old wood stove he went outside for a walk up the main street of town. Going up, he followed the boardwalk past the collieries office, the harness maker and the firehall stables, and went inside a little store whose front verandah sagged under the weight of a huge sign: Hugh Carmichael, Esq., DRUGGIST, LAND DEVELOPER, POST OFFICE. The inside of the building was divided equally amongst its three roles and the proprietor met Webster Treherne in the middle of the room, ready to run to whichever corner was needed.

  “Which will it be? Drugs? You got a prescription needs filling?”

  “Not that I know of. I never needed any before now.”

  “Land, then? You’re looking for a nice piece of land to build on? I got plenty to show.”

  “No money,” Webster said.

  “Then you’ve come to the Post Office. Mail a letter?”

  “Nobody to write to.”

  Hugh Carmichael, Esq., whirled around twice as if the answer to this nonsense were hiding somewhere behind him, then gave up and
rubbed a pudgy hand in his beard. “Would you mind telling me, then, just what it is you came in here for?”

  “I’m new in town,” Webster said. “Looking around to see where things are.”

  And he had seen already what he needed to see: that there were three separate cash registers in the room, just waiting to be robbed. A good place to start.

  He came out onto the verandah, leaving Hugh Carmichael still scratching around in his beard, and met the small boy again, carrying water, who put down his yoke and threw a big chunk of coal which hit Webster on one cheek and tore away half an inch of flesh. “My aim’s improving,” the boy said, and picked up his load. “It’s just a matter of practice.”

  Webster slapped the loose flesh back into place and undid the deed. In a universe where all space is taken up with an infinite God of Love there is no room for hatred or harm. An idea cannot be hurt. It had never happened. Going back down towards the school he walked on the concrete sidewalks which were painted in bright colours and inlaid with electric pipes to melt the snow in winter. He nodded to an old lady who came out of an import shop and showed him the fondu pot she’d just bought (on sale, though she admitted to having two better ones at home) and shook hands with a long-haired youth in undershorts who told him he was part of this world, they were all part of this world. The sports car went by again, accelerating noisily from a stop light, and the two yellow-haired girls made faces at him. One girl put her thumbs in her ears and flapped her hands. Her tongue flicked in and out like a frog’s.

  A robbery would be nice. A nice beginning. After all, this was coal, not cattle, country and even the McLeans if they had lived here would probably have got their start by robbing a store. They could hardly expect him to go out and steal cows or horses, after all. What would he be able to do with them if he did?

  “It may be interesting for you to go exploring around the town,” Balk-eyed Birdie told him, “but Mr. McIntosh has been waiting for you. He wants to get your class started.”

  “That’s all very well,” said Webster Treherne, “but when are you going to repaint this ugly hallway?”

  They started right away. He went out for the paint while she spread out newspapers on the floor and set up the step ladder.

  “White,” she said. “What kind of colour is that?”

  “The trim can be gold,” he said, “or if you want it could be green.”

  And Mr. McIntosh, who watched them work from the doorway to his classroom, held up one finger and said “Aha.” He waited there until they had finished painting the whole hallway, right down to the smallest trim, then scooped Webster into his room and slammed the door. “All right,” he said. “It’s time we got started.”

  After his class Balk-eyed Birdie led him upstairs to her own rooms and sat him down at a little table by the dormer window. “Young man,” she said, driving a knobby finger into his chest, “I know you from somewhere. I’ve met you before.”

  “Not unless you came up the mountain once. And even then I would have been too young for you to recognize.”

  She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. You’re all the same.”

  The little dormer window looked out across the roofs of other buildings to the harbour. Directly ahead, blocking his view of the strait, was a little island of twisted trees and a few shacks. She told him it was called Gallows Island. “They used to hang people there, right on that point, in the old days.”

  “Hanged who?”

  “Indians. Others.”

  “What for?”

  “Stealing. Shooting. Killing. They hanged the buggers right out there and sometimes just left them a while, in plain view of the whole town.”

  She made a face at the thought and slapped a basket of fruit onto the table in front of him. Then she sat down across the table and started peeling an orange. “The whole town used to go down to the waterfront to watch that. Everybody. Every single person who could walk and some that couldn’t, lined up along the beach watching. There were years when the First of July parade was a comedown by comparison. One time they strung up three all at once, all at one time, three scruffy-looking Yanks who killed one of our police. When they were marched up to the gallows across on the island there the whole crowd on the beach sang right through ‘God Save the Queen’ and there wasn’t a dry eye in sight.”

  But Webster Treherne was daydreaming again. That island and what she said about it reminded him of the McLean gang, so he told her how his plans were to practise up until he was good enough to be as bad as they were and then go join them.

  “Now?” she said.

  “Soon.”

  “Well, suit yourself. There’s no telling how long it’ll take for you to pass your courses here.” She popped the sections of orange into her mouth and then started breaking the peel into little pieces which she stacked up one on top of the other until the whole pile swayed and fell and scattered all over the top of the table. “Some people need more time than others. Those other schools now, all they do is try to fill heads up with things and they can’t figure out why it never works. The reason it don’t work is they forget you have to knock other stuff out first, to make room. That’s what we’re here for. To knock stuff out.”

  Mr. McIntosh knocked stuff out all through the next day. Webster Treherne sat in the classroom listening to a hundred reasons why love wasn’t a natural thing for man to feel and how there wasn’t anything in this world that deserved it anyway, but all the time one part of his mind was following the McLeans across dusty sagebrush country in hot sun. With them, he pointed guns at terrified ranchers, listened for the sound of an approaching posse. With them he rode into the night, surrounded the pig-scalding farmer by his fire, teased him with the tales of their deeds, then rode off without killing him after all. They had nothing against him; there were too many who really deserved to die. He felt the thudding of the horse’s hoofs beneath him, the quick touch of air against his face. He smelled the dust and the horse sweat and the high white smell of fear.

  Mr. McIntosh pulled a cluster of grapes out of a paper bag, ripped a handful free and tossed just one at Webster. “If I loved even so much as that one single grape,” he said, “I would also have to love God. And then where would I be?” Webster ate the grape and held out his hand for more.

  “I didn’t come all the way down out of the mountains for fresh fruit,” he said. “You’ll have to try a little harder than that.”

  So Mr. McIntosh waited until Webster was asleep on his narrow cot in the back-corner room and hung a hand-painted cardboard sign on the wall beside him. Sometime in the night Webster awoke and lit a match to get a decent look at the big white patch on the wall. It said:

  WARNING

  If you express even the tiniest bit of love

  you will be a part of him. . . . BEWARE

  Webster blew out the match and turned away. He decided that tomorrow he would begin, take the first step, move a little closer to his goal. Asleep, he dreamed of the Old Man, the commune, and a huge black shadow-hand which beckoned him up towards the dark and busy hayloft of the sagging barn.

  When he awoke the next morning he had lost all interest in Mr. McIntosh’s lessons and went out into the town as soon as Balk-eyed Birdie had given him breakfast. First, though, he helped himself to the gun he found beside the Bible in the drawer by his bed and tied a large red-and-white handkerchief loosely around his neck. Outside, he stopped to watch a miner lead two mules up the street and stop to talk a while with a dressmaker who came out to sweep the boardwalk in front of her shop.

  At the door to Hugh Carmichael’s triple-duty store he pulled the handkerchief up over the bottom part of his face and took out the gun he’d kept tucked down inside the waistband of his pants.

  “I want the money from all three tills,” he said.

  “At this time of day?” Carmichael said. “There’s nothing in them but the little I put in for change.”

  Webster wondered if he should shoot the proprietor but remembered
there were no bullets in the gun. And anyway it was hardly worth while for three near-empty tills.

  “What you want to do,” Carmichael said, coming closer, his hand buried in his beard, “is go away for now and come back later when there’s been a bit of business. This is no time of day for a stick-up.”

  “Just hand it over. Start with the Post Office.”

  “And besides, that’s the same jacket you had on when you come in here yesterday. Looks like some kind of thing I never seen before, with a rip in the shoulder. I’ll recognize your face the next time I see it, you won’t get away with this.”

  But he handed over the money when Webster jabbed the gun in his stomach. Three handfuls of heavy coin. They dropped to the bottom of his pockets and nearly pulled his pants off his hips.

  “My wife’s sick,” Carmichael whined. “Don’t do this to me. She’s dying.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, heading for the door.

  “It’s the consumption. It’s got her for sure.” His voice hung onto that last word, dying slowly.

  At the doorway Webster turned for a last look at the room. The McLeans would shoot the fat man, put a bullet right into his ugly face and watch that body collapse to the floor. But he couldn’t do that, not even for them. And besides, it had been a successful hold-up; even they wouldn’t be ashamed.

  “I hope you get it, too!” Mr. Carmichael yelled after him. “I hope you come down with the exact same thing and suffer just the way she’s suffering!”

  Webster took a taxi well out into the country, then hitch-hiked a ride back in with a farmer in a pickup truck. The farmer listened to rock music on his radio all the way in and let Webster off behind Birdie’s school.

  “What’s consumption?”

  “Consumption?” Birdie said. Her bad eye shivered like a struck bell.

  He hid the money beneath the bed, took off his clothes, and crawled under the blankets. Balk-eyed Birdie came in with Mr. Muir and pulled up a chair to sit where she could look right into his face. “That’s Mr. Muir’s job,” she said.

 

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