Talking at the Woodpile

by David Thompson

  Winston had retrieved the piece of Nat’s ear and had given it to Dot. She had washed it in the kitchen sink, wrapped it in a damp cloth and put it in a teacup. But it wasn’t going back on. The doctor froze the wound and cut the bite mark straight, so Nat wouldn’t have to wake up to the outline of Howard’s teeth every morning.

  Nat’s wound healed, but he would always be resentful of how Howard Bungle had disfigured him. Frequently, particularly when his glasses slipped off, he would curse under his breath, sometimes loud enough for Dot to hear. Then she would gently admonish him. Howard was always resentful that he lived the rest of his life with a missing front tooth. O’Neill understood the consequences if he bothered Piedoe again and stayed away, but Nat was always cautious that no harm should come to his dog. The Duffys and the Bungles never spoke again.

  Piedoe and Sunny met on several occasions. They growled and postured, but didn’t fight; they seemed to sense that enough was enough. Piedoe and Sunny lived out their lives as good and faithful dogs to their owners.

  When Piedoe died at the age of twelve, Nat was heartbroken. He swore he would never have another dog. He buried Piedoe under the poplars at the top of his backyard. For days afterward, neighbourhood kids put fresh flowers on the grave, and when Nat went out at night, he placed flowers of his own.

  About two months after Piedoe died, Nat was in the darkened kitchen tidying up before going off to bed. By the silver light of the autumn moon, he could clearly see the backyard, and there was Sunny, stretched out asleep on top of Piedoe’s grave.

  By morning Sunny was gone.

  Victor the Gypsy

  Being blown up by his own actions changed Neil O’Neill’s life. After his stove full of stolen firewood exploded, he started to attend church regularly and got married.

  Neil and his wife Faith could be seen Sunday mornings, rain or shine, headed to St. Paul’s Church with Bible in hand. Faith was the youngest of seven sisters born and raised in Carmacks, a hundred miles north of Whitehorse. Her father, an accountant, managed the British Yukon Navigation Company office there and in 1933 was transferred to Dawson City. As the girls came of age, their strict mother scrutinized a steady stream of suitors at the front door. Just two months after Faith finished high school, she married Neil, who was ten years her senior.

  The newlyweds moved in a few doors down from Wilfred Durant, the creator of the exploding firewood. Victor the Gypsy moved into the neighbourhood about the same time.

  Wilfred was a forgiving, Christian type of guy, so it was not surprising that Neil became his friend. It also helped that Faith was keenly diplomatic and regularly took baking over to Wilfred. Some were not so forgiving and never trusted Neil for being a one-time thief. In fact Neil still pretty much stole everything he could get his hands on.

  Faith knew his habits, and because the houses were close together, neighbours could hear her shouting, “You’re going to get caught, you dumb ass. Then what? Will our house get blown up again and kill us both? Wait and see, Mr. Go-to-church-man, we’ll all be blown to Hades.” She never said Hell, just Hades, as if she didn’t want to offend anyone.

  Faith wasn’t much of a puncher but she was a crusher. She would force Neil up against the wall with her ample body, then lean in and squeeze the breath out of him like an anaconda wrapped around a bug-eyed Amazonian creature. When Neil was released, he would collapse out of breath with indentations in his back from whatever he was pressed against. The light switches and wall tacks hurt the most. After the squeezing, Faith would stomp out of the room, slamming doors and refusing to cook or sleep with him.

  Victor Caldararu, who had bought the house between the O’Neills and Taffy Bowen, got busy moving in. He didn’t hear what his new neighbours were talking about. If he had heard, he wouldn’t have given it much attention. Gypsies have learned to ignore the whisperings of others.

  “What the hell is a gypsy doing in the Klondike anyway? That’s what I’d like to know,” Taffy said to Neil and Faith. “Maybe he’s here to get more gold for his teeth.”

  “He’s probably stolen everything he could at the mine in Elsa, and now he’s here to do the same,” said Neil, who had slung his arm around Faith’s rounded shoulder and leaned on her.

  Faith stepped away from Neil, and he almost lost his balance. She shot him a glance, and his face went red. Neil had made his own midnight raids on the mining town, prowling streets and back alleys in his battered pickup truck, looking for whatever he could steal.

  “Well, he shouldn’t be here in the first place. This is no place for a gypsy. They don’t belong here,” Taffy said. “They belong with their caravans in Bulgaria or someplace like that.” He pounded his walking stick into the ground to make his point and walked back into his cabin muttering to himself.

  Taffy thought there were too many thieves moving into the neighbourhood. First you had O’Neill, who purported to be a reformed thief, but Taffy doubted that. Now a gypsy moved in. He was going to have to lock things up, and the inconvenience made him angry.

  Victor had just completed five years at the Elsa underground silver mine, where he made more bonus money than any other worker before him. He saved his money, paid cash for the house and was making plans for his future.

  “Maybe I send for wife,” he said to Wilfred one day.

  Victor was handsome, thin and muscular, with a heavy black moustache and a gold front tooth that flashed when he smiled. “Gold from Upper Bonanza Creek,” he was proud to say. “All gypsies have gold tooth. My grandmother looked like jewellery store when she laughed.”

  “He looks a little like Rudolph Valentino,” Faith said to her neighbour Dot Duffy.

  Victor was born in the Southern Balkans. His people had come to Europe from India by way of Egypt a long time ago. He was Romani and proud of it. His family was related to the Baro Shero, or the “big head” of his wandering people.

  O’Neill had no problem with a gypsy living next door; in fact he liked it. “It will take the heat off, having a neighbour like that. If anything goes missing, they won’t come looking for me so fast.”

  Faith, being a friendly neighbour, baked a pie for Victor. She and Neil went over and introduced themselves.

  “This is very kind of you to do this. Please come in, sit and have tea with me,” Victor said. He was happy to have company and showed Faith and Neil every courtesy. He spoke clearly and slowly so that his heavy accent wouldn’t interfere with what he had to say.

  “Thank you,” Faith said and led the way into Victor’s kitchen.

  She surveyed the empty and sparsely furnished rooms. A jar used for a drinking glass sat on the kitchen table along with an empty kipper tin full of knick-knacks, a deck of worn playing cards and a cribbage board with matchsticks for markers. A bookshelf hung on one wall, and a collection of well-worn hardcover books leaned to one side. A quick glance told Faith, to her surprise, that Victor read Shakespeare and Kipling.

  “Wee Willie Winkie,” she said pointing to the books.

  “Yes, Vee Villie,” Victor said.

  Packing boxes and suitcases lay on the floor throughout the house. Some lay open, and Victor had apparently tried to find places for their contents. Although he said he planned to stay, Faith guessed his gypsy spirit would not let him move in completely.

  Victor removed clothing from a kitchen chair and pulled another one from the living room, wiping it clean with his hand. “Please sit down. I make tea.” He filled the kettle with water from the tap and placed it on the electric hotplate.

  “So where do you keep the chickens you steal?” Neil asked with a grin.

  Victor was standing at the counter with his back turned and didn’t answer right away. When he turned to face Neil his eyes were narrowed to slits and his body was tense. “Steal chickens? What do you mean, steal chickens?”

  Faith went red in the face, and Neil realized his joke wasn’t very funny. Victor looked angry.

  Trying to get off the hook, Neil shrugged his shoulders and
stammered, “I mean, you are gypsy, aren’t you? I was joking.”

  Faith rolled her eyes. Even she knew the importance of first impressions. Neil didn’t seem to care, because he didn’t have a reputation that he wanted to impress anyone with.

  Victor tried unsuccessfully not to glare at Neil. He didn’t like this man. He looked at his cigarette, which he held between his thumb and forefinger, and decided to give Neil a little benefit of the doubt. He said with a smile, “Chickens? Store has them. I buy them there.” He waved his hand in the air and laughed a soft laugh.

  “But come now, let’s not talk chickens. Let’s drink tea and visit,” he said. “Tell me, how long you been living here?”

  Neil breathed a sigh of relief and took a sip of the tea.

  Victor knew that the slight had sealed their relationship. From now on Neil would be someone to disrespect and insult. Gypsy insults had been honed for centuries and were always delivered with a smile.

  They visited for a while longer. Faith got up first, and when she was out of earshot, Victor politely bowed to Neil and said, “You have nice house, nice wife, you are very lucky man. Too bad people have no trust in you.”

  Neil’s eyes went wide as saucers, and he started to respond. Thinking better of it, he said nothing but scurried across the yard to catch up to Faith.

  “What an ass, that man,” Victor said to himself as he watched them walk out the gate and around the fence toward their own home. “Why do I have neighbour like that all the time?”

  Fuming, Neil went down to Cooper’s Grocery and Hardware Store and bought two keyed-alike locks. He placed them on the counter and told Richard Cooper, “Got new neighbours, got new locks.”

  Richard didn’t like Neil because he had probably stolen from the store. He’d never caught him red-handed, but after fifty years in the business, he had a sense about the people who walked in the door. Richard was nobody’s fool. He put two and two together with the locks and the new neighbour.

  “Need some new security, do you?” Richard asked.

  Neil couldn’t have answered any faster than he did. “You could say that—if your new neighbour happens to be a gypsy!”

  Richard had delivered supplies over to the Elsa Mine for many years. He had met Victor and liked him. Richard was also too old to hold his tongue, so as he opened the ancient cash register and handed Neil his change, he said, “Seems like the kettle is calling the pot black these days, ever since some firewood exploded.”

  Neil absolutely hated being reminded of that event. Even more he hated anyone challenging his opinion. He slammed the door behind him when he left the store.

  Soon afterward, Richard Cooper hired Victor to make his deliveries and gave him a five percent discount at the store, where Victor immediately bought material for his new home.

  Taffy saw Victor carrying cans of paint into his house, and with a wave of his hand, Victor invited him over to see what he’d done so far. He proudly walked Taffy through the three small rooms painted in purples, greens and blues.

  “Damn gypsy has the place looking like a rainbow,” Taffy re-ported later to Wilfred. “I thought I was inside a Ukrainian Easter egg.”

  When he’d completed the interior, Victor painted the exterior to match. He also removed the warped and weather-worn fascia boards and with his coping saw scrolled new boards with elaborate detailed scenes of people, animals and symbols.

  “Legend and stories of my people. The moon, the stars and the sun,” he said.

  “Finest scrollwork I’ve ever seen,” Pat Henderson, the owner of the Flora Dora Café, told William Pringle. “Very detailed.”

  Victor loved his home and lavished care on it. The neighbours took some time to get used to it.

  “It will grow on you,” said William, Wilfred’s friend and sometime business partner.

  Taffy scoffed. “Who does he think he is, bringing that junk onto my street? Looks like a circus, it does. The only things missing are a giant Ferris wheel and fireworks.”

  As much as Taffy was concerned about Victor being a thief, he was more concerned about Neil being a proven thief, and a wood thief at that. He told Wilfred, “That Neil, I’m sure he’s up to his old tricks. I can’t leave anything out without it going missing. I’m going to catch that rat red-handed one of these days. Then you’re going to see action, I tell you.”

  On sunny days Victor liked to work in the garden, but on rainy Saturdays he sat inside the doorway sipping tea and smoking aromatic pipe tobacco rolled in Zig-Zag cigarette papers. He had an old gramophone and played scratchy records of Django Reinhardt, the famed jazz guitarist. In the dim room, where light struggled through the drawn curtains, he would drift off to another place in another time. After a while he would sit up and say, “This is true gypsy music by a true gypsy,” and pretend to strum a guitar.

  Victor liked Faith. She was smart and kind, but more than that, he liked her because she beat up Neil.

  “You’re good woman, Faith. Neil is very lucky man to have you for his wife.”

  Sitting on his porch, they talked for hours.

  “I started work in Elsa Mine as slop man,” Victor explained. “I carried buckets of toilet slop out of the mine all day every day. Then they let me be driller’s helper, then I become a driller. If I had not been gypsy, I would be top boss manager. I would sit in office, drink coffee, sleep with feet on table and have nice secretary.” He traced the outline of a shapely woman with his hands.

  Faith wasn’t convinced he would have made “top boss manager,” but he had the ability to pull more tonnage out of the mine than any other single person in its history. Banking a small fortune even after paying for his house, he was able to live simply but comfortably.

  Victor met Faith’s sister and took an interest in her. “Lily is not gypsy woman but she is good person. I think she likes me.”

  “I’m sure she does, Victor,” Faith said.

  “I think I take her to baseball game this Saturday. She told me, ‘I like good sports.’”

  Faith tried to explain what Lily meant, but Victor didn’t seem to understand. Finally she said, “That would be nice.”

  Victor did date Lily for the better part of the summer, but come fall, she took up with the new dredge master at Bear Creek. He was widowed and needed a mother for his four children. Lily wasn’t really keen on becoming a mother overnight, but the status of being a dredge master’s wife was too attractive. They had a whirlwind romance, and quicker than you could say “Bonanza Creek,” Lily and the dredge master were married.

  “That okay,” Victor said, “I never like her anyway. She lied. I took her to baseball game and tennis game, but she didn’t like, she told me so.”

  Late one night, about two o’clock in the morning, Victor was awakened by scraping and clinking sounds in the back of his house. He sat up and waited to hear more. Sure enough, something was out back in the shed attached to his house.

  “Could be bear,” he said as he pulled on his pants and slipped his feet into his slippers.

  Through the kitchen window he could see a person bent over his tool bench. Victor went out the front door, picked up a piece of scrap copper plumbing pipe that he’d left on the porch and silently walked around back.

  Neil O’Neill was too busy pocketing tools to notice Victor coming up behind him. Victor stuck the copper pipe in the nape of Neil’s neck and said, “Don’t move, gangster, or your brains make spaghetti.” Neil froze, raised his hands and dropped the tools clattering back onto the bench. He was dressed in his bathrobe, pyjamas and slippers. His thievery was so casual that he didn’t even dress for the occasion.

  “Bend over bench,” Victor commanded.

  Neil hesitated, so Victor said, “Or your head get one big hole for chicken to fly through.”

  Neil bent over the bench.

  “Drop pants,” Victor snarled, jabbing the pipe more forcefully into Neil’s neck.

  Neil let out a shrill, girlish scream, but hooked a thumb on each sid
e of his pyjamas and pushed them down below his buttocks.

  “Don’t move,” Victor said, then tipped the lid off a paint can that held brushes soaking in turpentine. He selected the biggest one, and with one swift movement, painted Neil’s backside.

  “Now run like hell before your ass burn off,” he said.

  Neil covered the distance to his house in record-breaking time. Victor heard him yelling for Faith and watched as the lights in the rooms came on one by one.

  The best the nurse at the hospital could do was to wash the area thoroughly with warm soapy water; it did help to ease the sting. Faith then applied liberal layers of white ointment.

  “It’s costing us one tube of ointment every time we cover your skinny behind,” she said, lathering it on.

  Neil hung his head. Even in pain, there was no peace for him from this woman.

  The next day the town was abuzz with the news that Neil had met Yukon justice once again. A parade of well-wishers turned up at Victor’s house, and when he went uptown, everyone wanted to shake his hand—but no one offered to take him to lunch.

  Taffy was the first to congratulate him and the happiest. “What a good neighbour I have, the best there ever was.” He then invited Victor over to his house for the first time.

  Amongst the crowd of visitors was RCMP Constable Smithers, who’d been sent to arrest Victor for assault.

  “Assault with turps?” Wilfred scoffed, and he and Taffy tried to talk the officer out of it.

  The officer said, “Charges have been laid, so now it’s up to the magistrate to decide.”

  Faith went around the neighbourhood apologizing profusely for her husband’s thievery. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with him. He just won’t stop.”

  “Don’t you worry, dear, this has nothing to do with you,” Dot told her.

  “But yes it does, Dot,” Faith said tearfully. “This is the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever had to face in my life.”