by Alden Nowlan
Five
The first time that Kevin saw a picture of Abraham Lincoln, he was startled by the man’s resemblance to his uncle Kaye. The most striking similarity lay in the eyes; the eyes of Lincoln, like those of Kaye Dunbar, were withdrawn and yet not aloof; they seemed to look at the world with a mixture of compassion and ironic amusement. When Kaye walked into the yard, Kevin ran out to meet him. Of all the grown men whom Kevin knew, Kaye was the only one of whom he was never, even for a moment, afraid.
The gangling man with the sad-happy eyes grinned at him.
“Hiyuh, Namesake,” he said.
Kevin’s middle name was Kaye, and in his earliest years he had believed that this identity of names established some sort of occult bond between them.
Kevin blinked. “Hiyuh, Namesake,” he responded.
It was a beautiful, shining day. In Kaye’s presence, all of Kevin’s senses opened like the ripe buds of flowers. The former owners of the O’Brien house had planted rose bushes and a lilac hedge. These had been allowed to run wild, and now tiny rose bushes dotted the unmown grass of the front yard like the banners of Lilliputian lances. In the field on the other side of the road, daisies, buttercups, and devil’s paintbrush swayed gently in the breeze. Brown, purple-blue, and orange butterflies fluttered in the translucent air. Robins flitted low over the flowers. Occasionally, a goldfinch flew up from its secret place in the grass.
“I was wonderin’ if mebbe you’d like to go swimmin’,” Kaye drawled. He broke off a rose from the bush nearest his feet and stuck its stem between his teeth.
“Gosh, sure!” Kevin shouted.
“Better go ask your mother if it’s okay.”
“Yeah, jist a second. I’ll be right back.”
Kevin whirled and ran like a spooked deer to the house.
A few minutes later, they climbed the sagging pole fence separating Judd’s garden ground from the heath. Kaye and Kevin walked up the hill, past raspberry and blackberry bushes, through alder thickets and around the rotting stumps that spoke of the time, many years before, when this had been lumber woods. Kevin inhaled the swampy odour of alder bark, the medicine-sharp scent of wintergreen, the sweet vapour of wild strawberries. Rabbits hopped out of the bushes, stood long enough to take one astonished glance at the man and the boy, then bounded back into hiding. As they came to the top of the hill, close to the woods, a fox shot across Kevin’s line of vision and was gone so quickly he was not certain whether it had been a real fox or only a dream.
After walking about a mile down an abandoned logging road, they came to a tangle of raspberry bushes, birch saplings, and alders. Kaye had come here so often that he had beaten a path, like a tunnel, through the bushes. The opening was hidden by leaves and branches. Kaye pushed these aside and he and Kevin entered, as though going through a door.
At the other end of the tunnel, they emerged into brilliant sunlight and stood on a table of green-gold grass, overlooking a stream of glittering water. The birches growing on either side of the stream met high in the air, forming an inverted funnel. Sunlight stood in the funnel like a shaft of incandescent gold.
“Mighty nice here, eh?” Kaye said.
“Yeah.”
Kaye squatted on the ground. Kevin threw himself down beside him. The sun was so bright that the blond fuzz on his arms and legs shone like moonlight against his chestnut-coloured skin. He lay down and felt the faint, not-unpleasant roughness of pebbles and twigs under his hips and back.
“You hear the grass growin’, Namesake?” Kaye asked.
Their conversations almost always began with something like that.
“No. I guess not,” Kevin answered dubiously.
He laid his ear to the ground and listened.
“No, I guess I don’t hear nothin’,” he said.
Kaye said nothing. Kevin continued to listen.
He held his breath. It was true! He heard it! The sound was so soft it seemed like a whispered message from the dark centre of the earth.
He sat up.
“I hear it!” he yelled. “I hear it!”
“Thought you would.” Kaye grinned complacently.
“Don’t make much noise, does it?” Kevin asked wonderingly.
Kaye pulled a handful of the sparse, lacklustre spears and ground them to dust between his palms.
“Pretty poor grass,” he explained. “Can’t expect grass as poor as this to make much noise growin’. Good timothy and alfalfa now, you’n hear them all right. Especially at night. Everythin’ grows faster at night.”
“Gee, why?”
“Oh, I dunno. I guess in the daytime everythin’s kinda leanin’ back and soakin’ in the sun. Not sleepin’, mind you. Just kinda leanin’ back and thinkin’, like. Then at night all that sunshine begins to burn and sizzle inside of everythin’ under the darkness, and after a while everythin’ just starts to grow, kinda.”
Kaye thought deeply for a moment.
“You know, don’t you, that the sun don’t really go out at night?”
“Gosh, yes. We learnt that at school.”
“Well, I dunno if you learnt this at school. But I guess mebbe in the daytime the flowers and grass and everythin’ get their sunshine from above, then mebbe at night when everythin’s all dark on top of the earth, mebbe the sun’s down underneath shinin’ up at their roots. Mebbe that’s how it is. I ain’t sure. Mebbe I was wrong the first time. I dunno.”
“You dunno?”
“Nope. Nobody knows hardly anythin’ when it comes right down to it. I just kinda keep thinkin’, that’s all.”
“Gosh,” Kevin said. “Gosh.”
They stripped themselves naked and jumped down to the narrow gravelled shelf at the water’s edge. Kevin went barefoot through almost the entire summer, so the soles of his feet were like cowhide. Even so, the sharp stones cut into the soft skin of his toes. He followed Kaye into the water, its stroking warmth caressing first his ankles, then his calves, then his thighs, and finally his hips. He began to swim, entering a dimension as unearthly as the science fiction worlds of Mars and Venus.
Swimming was almost the only physical act in which Kevin functioned without self-consciousness and with ease and grace. His uncle, who had taught him, told him that he swam like a fish, like a trout or a silver salmon. He and Kaye swam far down the stream, shouting to one another. And when they became weary, they swam back, climbed up the bank, and lay in the grass, with their wet arms shielding their eyes from the sun. In the pink-tinged darkness behind his eyes, Kevin thought mysterious, incommunicable boy-thoughts. He thought of Kaye, whose life-spirit overflowed like a creek in freshet. He thought of the foxes barking in the distance, dog-like but with jungle wildness, and of the squirrels scampering and chattering, the humming midges and quick-whirring grasshoppers. As he fell asleep he heard, from every direction, the singing of unseen birds and the almost inaudible whisper of the leaves and grass.
Kaye lived in a cabin on the creek road, about two miles from the O’Brien house, and Kevin had often visited him there. Kaye had built the cabin from warped boards, which he had carried on his back from the mill. Its roof and walls were covered with tarpaper, secured by spruce slabs still clothed in their aromatic bark. The door hung on leather hinges and was locked with a wooden button. The windows could not be raised or lowered. In summer, Kaye simply drew the nails and lifted out the glass. Flattened cardboard beer cases had been nailed to the inner walls to keep the wind from getting through the cracks between the boards. On these sheets, in red ink, were the names of breweries and advertisements for stout, lager beer, and pale ale. Kaye had further decorated the walls with pictures torn from magazines: pictures of lions, tigers, elephants, and near-naked women. Kevin liked the animals, but he thought the women looked fat and foolish, and he could not understand why his uncle liked them.
The sink pipe went out through a hole in the wall, so that water poured into the sink drained out on the ground just outside the door. On coming to the door, Kevin’s nos
trils were always rasped by the lye-harsh stink of soap suds and dirty water. The cabin’s single room was furnished with a table and two benches, all made from wooden packing cases, a stove made from an oil barrel, and a bunk on which a mound of loose straw, covered with wool blankets, took the place of a mattress.
To Kevin, this did not seem an unusual type of dwelling. Many of his cousins lived in similar cabins in Bennington, Frenchman’s Cross, and Ginsonville. The difference was that this cabin was filled with the life-spirit of Kaye Dunbar. Even when he was absent, the echo of his laughter and the reflection of his grin seemed to touch everything — the rifle that rested on a rack of antlers above the door, the old violin hanging over his bunk, the beer bottles and Wild West magazines cluttering the grime-grey floor.
Kevin had spent many evenings here with Kaye. He would lie on the bunk, breathing the clean smell of straw and the stale smell of the blankets, and read stories about Billy the Kid or Wild Bill Hickok, while his uncle fried bacon and eggs, opening the door of the stove and resting the frying pan on the bluish-red coals.
After they had eaten, Kaye would play the violin and sing in imitation of Wilf Carter and Jimmie Rogers, his favourite cowboy singers. He would sing of hoboes and of freight trains and of herding cattle at night under vast, prairie skies, and Kevin would hug his knees against his chest and rest his chin on his knees and sway in time to the music, feeling a dark sweet sadness such as he felt when he woke and heard a locomotive whistle wail in the night.
Next to his violin, Kaye’s most prized possession was a pearl-handled revolver. On Sundays when Kaye, Kevin, and Mary visited Kevin’s grandmother Dunbar at Ginsonville, Kaye would sit on the backstep and shoot clothes pins from the line that hung between the corner of the cabin and a fir tree beyond the privy. The pins would snap and fly into the air and Grandmother Dunbar would rush out shouting and brandishing a broom. “Kaye Dunbar! Have yuh gone clean crazy?” Grandmother Dunbar would yell as she laid the broomstick across his shoulders. Kaye would laugh and empty his pistol in the air and Grandmother Dunbar would go back in the house, shaking her head and saying she did not know what she had done to deserve such a son. But Kevin would detect a little ghost of a smile in her eyes and at the corner of her toothless mouth.
Judd disliked Kaye. He said that he was “no good,” pronouncing the two words as one, with the inflection he used in speaking of one who was too lazy or too weak to work. Both Judd and Martha O’Brien could forgive anything of a man or a woman who was willing and able to work. Martha would sometimes halt in the midst of a denunciation of a drunkard or an adulteress to say that well, after all, he or she was not afraid of work. “They’n say what they like about him — he weren’t never scart of work,” Martha would assert, holding her hot brick against her belly. And Judd would agree. “Hard work never kilt nobody yet” was one of his favourite sayings.
Often, Judd, and many of the other men of Lockhartville, spoke of Kaye, and others like him, with hatred and rage. “I been makin’ my own livin’ ever since I was a young gummer of fourteen,” Judd would complain. “I’ve peeled pulp until my back was ready tuh break. I’ve chopped logs when it was fifty below in the woods. I’ve man-handled boards in the mill when it was ninety above in the shade. I’ve hoed potatoes and I’ve milked cows and I’ve slaughtered pigs and I’ve pitched hay. And what have I got tuh show fer it? Not a damn thing. Not a goddamn thing. Now, there’s Kaye Dunbar — he ain’t never done an honest day’s work in his life and he’s livin’ a damn-sight better’n you and me! It don’t seem right. A man like that should be made tuh work, god–dammit! Somebody should take a Dutch whip tuh him and whip him every mornin’ and every night fer a month! Then he’d be ready tuh work, by God! Hard work never kilt nobody yet. A man was put on this earth tuh work. It jist makes me sick tuh see a big, husky shyster like Kaye Dunbar sittin’ on his arse while the rest of us work our guts out! It jist makes me sick to my stomach, by God!”
At potato planting time or during the haying season, Kaye sometimes hired out to a farmer for a few weeks. But, for the most part, he lived by his wits. He was familiar with every acre of forest land in Connaught County, and during the trout fishing and deer hunting season, he guided sportsmen who came down from Halifax. Kevin walked in fear and awe of these men. They were doctors and lawyers and bank managers and Kevin considered them the rulers of the world, with their soft, womanish hands and clipped, insolent speech. They wore beautiful new garments of scarlet and khaki and such boots as he might have chosen for his Royal Nicaraguan Grenadiers. And they carried fascinating things: canvas gun cases, sleeping bags, Thermos bottles, and silvery rum flasks.
Kaye himself hunted for ten months of the year, ignoring the laws restricting seasons and bag limits. He killed — and ate — deer, moose, rabbit, porcupine, beaver, and bear. And he stole — a hen from a nearby farm, a gallon of molasses from the barrel in the shed behind Biff Mason’s store.
Kevin was shocked by Kaye’s thefts.
“It ain’t right,” he said. “You know it ain’t right, Kaye.”
Kaye looked at him in such innocent astonishment that Kevin laughed.
“How come yuh figger it ain’t right, Namesake?”
“Because it ain’t, that’s why!”
“That ain’t no kind of an answer. Why ain’t it right, that’s what I wanta know?”
“Because God says it ain’t right. That’s who!”
“What duh you mean — did God come up to you one day and put his hand on yer shoulder and say, ‘Look, here, Mister Kevin Kaye O’Brien, I don’t like stealin’.’ Is that what happened?”
“Oh, gosh, you know better’n that! It’s in the Bible, ‘Thou shalt not steal.’ God wrote it down and put it in the Bible. Grammie O’Brien says God wrote every word in the Bible. He took His finger and wrote it all on stone, and . . .”
“Huh! What you think it means, though — ‘Thou shalt not steal’?”
“It means what it says! Anybody could see that! It means you shouldn’t ought to have taken that barrel of kerosene from the saw mill. It means . . .”
“How do you know that’s what it means?”
“Because it says so!”
“Listen, here, Namesake, it don’t say anythin’ of the kind. It jist says ‘Thou shalt not steal.’ It don’t say what stealin’ means. You gotta figger that out for yourself. Now you think it was stealin’ fer me to take that barrel of kerosene, huh?”
“Sure, it was. You stole it. You told me yerself that you . . .”
“Hold on a minute! I never told you I stole it! I never stole a thing in my life. I never said no such a-thing.”
“What duh yuh call it then, if it ain’t stealin’?”
“What do I call it? I call it equalizin’, that’s what I call it. Now if I’d taken the last bite of food outta somebody’s mouth, I’d figger that was stealin’. I ain’t never took a thing that I didn’t need more’n the man I took it from needed it. I needed that kerosene so I took it. Hod Rankine’s got enough money to buy a thousand barrels of kerosene. Me takin’ that one little, biddy old barrel was jist equalizin’. If I got anythin’ he needs more’n I do, he’s got all the right in the world tuh come and git it. I won’t say a word if he takes somethin’ . . .”
“But you ain’t got nothin’ that he needs!”
“That’s right, Namesake! And that’s what I mean by equalizin’!”
Kaye sat back with a smirk of triumph.
“Oh, gee whiz, nobody can explain anythin’ tuh you, Kaye!”
Kaye grunted and yawned while Kevin pouted. Then Kaye began making faces: cat-faces, toad-faces, snake-faces. In spite of himself, Kevin snickered.
“Equalizin’ is what I call it,” Kaye said again.
Six
Kevin often reflected on the difference between his mother and the other Lockhartville women. Where she skipped like a little girl, they trudged like spavined mares. The things that made her open her mouth in laughter made them close theirs in pa
le-lipped anger. Where she was pliant, they were unyielding. When she became soft and warm, they turned hard and cold. She was a solitary white birch sapling, surrounded on all sides by towering black spruces.
Angered, she did not, like other mothers, invoke the authority of parenthood and scold him from a pedestal of superiority while he stood hang-dog and chastened. She quarrelled with him; they bickered like children. And if, at last, she threatened to report him to his father, he felt that she had betrayed him; he despised her as he would have despised a child of his own age who had threatened to tattle to an adult.
If she told him to shut up, he would tell her that she could shut up herself. They would stand facing one another in the kitchen, yelling at the tops of their voices, while Grandmother O’Brien watched, her lips curled in contempt, from her rocking chair. If she slapped him, he would kick her shins. If she pinched him, he would pull her reddish-brown, shoulder-length hair until she yelped.
But they did not quarrel about anything that really mattered. Small disagreements provoked storms of rage and recrimination. The big disagreements, when they came, brought only silence and hurt.
Kevin had seen his mother spring from her chair in the midst of supper, snatch up food and dishes, and run with them to the pantry. This meant that she had spied an approaching visitor. Mary was bitterly ashamed of their bread and potatoes, humiliated by their cracked plates and tarnished cutlery. When the visitor entered — usually a mill hand or a mill hand’s wife who fared no better at home — the table was clear and the chairs stood in their usual places around the kitchen. But Kevin always suspected that the intruder had peered through the window or, somehow, seen through the walls. Every grin, every glance at the pantry door meant that he was slyly ridiculing Mary’s impassioned efforts to conceal their shame.
“Only a damn fool would come tuh a man’s house at supper time,” Judd would say, after the visitor had gone. “Frenchmen and Dutchmen is the only people I’ve ever seen that didn’t have better sense than tuh come tuh a man’s house at mealtime.” And Kevin would promise himself that when he became a man he would obtain for his mother the most costly foods and the most beautiful china in the world.