by Alden Nowlan
He already knew that even in Lockhartville there were two classes: the rich and the poor. Here, the rich were the half-dozen farmers and their families. These people possessed automobiles, electric lights, and telephones. When their children finished eighth grade, they were sent to high school in Larchmont. Some few even went on to college. One or two, over the years, had become doctors or lawyers. The farmers took trips to Ontario and to the United States. The wives of the more successful bought their clothes in Halifax. When they dined, their tables were covered with white linen and they used special knives to butter their bread.
The poor were men like Judd O’Brien and their families. Those men were mill hands, farm hands, pulp peelers, and loggers. Six evenings a week, they lay smoking or dozing until it was time to go to bed. On Saturday night, almost all of them got drunk. Often they stayed drunk until they went back to work on Monday morning. Each year there were months in which they could find no work at all.
At fifteen or sixteen, their children left school. The girls got married and the boys went to work. Most of the boys became rural labourers, like their fathers. A few of the more imaginative and ambitious ones, like Kevin’s uncle Leonard, found steady jobs as railway section hands, grease monkeys, and attendants at filling stations. Men like Judd O’Brien regarded men like Leonard Dunbar with a mixture of envy and distrust. Len and the others who worked twelve months of the year at Larchmont and Bennington liked to boast of their high wages and of the praises showered on them by bosses who wore white collars and ties to work. “Big-feelin’ bastards,” Judd spat contemptuously.
Mary had been born in Lockhartville. But she spoke of the village in the manner of one who had come here from Halifax, or even from New York. “I don’t understand these Lockhartville people,” she would say. “I’ve never seen such people in all my life!”
Her father had been a farmer, one of those who were driven off their farms during the depression. Judd told Kevin that his Grandfather Dunbar had been a rogue and a braggart. The old man had devoted years to searching for Captain Kidd’s treasure, which, according to legend, had been buried on the Nova Scotia coast. And in his last years, he had left his wife and family and gone to New Brunswick, where, so rumour claimed, he had become a preacher for some obscure sect. When Mary spoke of the herd of Ayrshires which her father had once possessed, Judd guffawed and said that the herd had consisted of two toothless old scrubs. “Fenton Dunbar and his herd of Ayrshires” became for Judd a byword signifying any form of pretense or braggadocio. When he suspected Kevin of boastfulness, he would say, “That reminds me of Fenton Dunbar and his herd of Ayrshires,” and laugh dryly while Kevin hid his head in shame.
Kevin knew that his mother often lied. In a cowboy film shown at the Orange Hall there had appeared an actor named Clay Dunbar. He had kept a saloon full of ruffians at bay, and when one of the outlaws reached for a pistol, Clay had shot it out of his hand. “Anybody else wanta try that?” he had drawled. And Mary had told Kevin that this Clay Dunbar was her cousin. “The last time I was visiting Aunt Elvira in Boston, Clay was home from Hollywood on vacation, and . . .” The story had gone on and on. Clay had shown her his $200 shirts and his $500 pistols and she had ridden on his palomino stallion, Playboy, and . . . Kevin had lain in bed, his knees drawn up into the old shirt that he wore as a nightdress, and she had stroked his ear lobes as she talked, the lamp on the floor throwing a halo around her face. He had enjoyed listening to her. But he had known that was all lies. All lies! And despite the pleasure he took from her story, he had despised her for lying to him.
Grandmother O’Brien sometimes told him stories about his mother. These were simple little stories, narrated without comment, but Kevin did not fail to observe the derision in her face and voice. She told him, for example, of how Mary and her brother, Leonard, had once, long ago, boarded the train at Ginsonville and bought tickets, at ten cents each, for Lockhartville. During the three-mile ride, they had enacted an elaborate pantomime in which they had posed as travellers who had ridden a great distance: they had leaned back in their seats, feigned weariness, and chattered loudly of tickets and time tables. Kevin could not understand why his grandmother obviously thought this act idiotic. It was the kind of thing that he himself would have liked to have done.
Mary played games with her son, something no other Lockhartville mother would have dreamt of doing. Wearing an old red shirt of Judd’s and a pair of rinsewater-coloured jeans, she wrestled with him in the dooryard. Grappling one another, they rolled over thistles and couch grass and miniature rose bushes, the sky reeling above them. Kevin struggled until he was blinded by sweat; he gripped her wrists so hard that he left bruises. They butted and kneed and strangled one another. And, in the end, she always overpowered him. He never deliberately surrendered to her; he fought until strength and breath failed. But when she defeated him, he was glad. It was ecstasy to lie helpless, the weight of her body pouring through her arms and hands and onto his flattened shoulders. Silently, he rejoiced that he was in her power, that she could do what she liked with him.
But, paradoxically, he wanted her to defeat him only in play, only when his will was in abeyance. When she challenged his active will, he hated her. His defeat in the wrestling was good only because he knew it was merely a game. During their real quarrels he wanted to destroy her.
It seemed to him that she understood this; at times she appeared to take a brutal pleasure in breaking him. In return, he poured all of his energy into defiance.
A trivial question would arise. Perhaps it was raining and he started to go outdoors and she told him that he could not go, that he would catch a cold if he went. He argued. She issued commands. He whined. She threatened to tell his father. The initial argument was forgotten. What remained was a naked conflict of wills. It was at such times that they screamed and belaboured one another while Grandmother O’Brien looked on, a grim smile fixed on her yellowing lips.
Grandmother O’Brien also managed to rebuke Mary for wrestling in the dooryard. She said nothing, but when Mary returned to the kitchen, she always found that Martha had done some little job during her absence . . . she had washed the dinner dishes or polished the stove or mixed biscuits.
“You didn’t have to do that!” Mary would say, her perspiring cheeks yellow with anger.
Martha would clutch her hot brick and stare at Mary in shammed astonishment.
“Why, child, I was jist tryin’ tuh help out,” she would say.
That night, when Judd got home from work, Martha would mention, with seeming casualness, the work that she had done that afternoon.
“I hope yuh like them biscuits, Judd. I ain’t as good a cook as I usta be, mebbe. Seems as how whatever I cook tastes jist like I feel, and I been feelin’ mighty poorly, lately.”
Judd would look up from his food.
“Eh? You made the biscuits, Mother?”
“Oh, I try tuh make myself useful, Judd. The pain’s been somethin’ terrible tuhday, but I do try tuh make myself useful.”
“Mary coulda done it jist as well as not.”
“Oh, I know that, Judd! She told me I shouldn’ta done it. But I do try tuh make myself useful around the place.”
And Martha would smile and look across at Mary while Kevin scowled, hating the cruelty and triumph he saw in her wrinkled, walnut-coloured face.
Mary’s best friend and most frequent visitor was June Larlee.
Kevin knew that his father detested her. Judd hinted that she had been guilty of monstrous sins. “My God, Mary! She’s got herself in trouble twice and she ain’t eighteen yet!” Mary’s answer was always the same: “Hush, Judd! Think what you’re saying in front of Scampi!” So Kevin, although he devoted a great deal of thought to the matter, did not discover what her mysterious trouble had been.
It was Sunday morning. Wearing tight red shorts and a loose blouse, June sprawled on the cot in the O’Brien kitchen and smoked cigarettes. She reminded Kevin of the simpering, near-naked women in the pi
ctures nailed to the walls of Kaye Dunbar’s camp. Watching her cross her legs, which he considered disgustingly fat and hairy, he was both intrigued and repelled by her abundant, adult flesh.
As they often did, Mary and June were talking in riddles. This was a favourite trick of theirs, one that infuriated Kevin.
“I saw you-know-who in Larchmont the other night,” June said, puffing at her cigarette.
Mary shot a teasing little glance at Kevin.
“Little pitchers have big ears,” she warned.
Kevin sat at the table, pretending to study his Sunday School lessons. Something wicked shaped his face.
“All I said was that I saw you-know-who the other night in Larchmont,” June giggled. “You remember that certain person in Larchmont, don’t you?”
Mary exhaled and screwed her face into an expression of melodramatic disbelief.
“Oh, no! Not him again!”
“You bet!” June’s voice lowered. “And he was asking about you.”
“He wasn’t!”
“He was!”
“I don’t believe it!”
“All right, don’t you believe it, then. But it’s true. ‘How’s Mary-Mary-Quite-Contrary-How-Does-Your-Garden-Grow?’ he said.”
Mary giggled. “That must have been him, all right. It couldn’t have been anybody else.”
“Didn’t I tell you? Why don’t you believe me when I tell you things?”
Kevin thought these conversations, with their groans, sighs, giggles, and head-shakings, unutterably pretentious and silly.
“Well, I’m an old married woman now,” Mary said.
“Woe is me!” June snickered.
Mary smiled and shrugged. “Little pitchers have big ears,” she said again.
“I’ve got somethin’ else I want to tell you later.”
“Oh, yes.” Mary turned to Kevin. “Isn’t it time you started to Sunday School, sweetikins?”
He stood up sulkily. He knew she wanted him to go so that she could be alone with June.
“Yeah,” he muttered.
“That’s a good boy, Scampi,” June said, winking at him.
He hated the smug, teasing insolence in her grin. He hoped she would die in agony and burn forever in the deepest pit of hell.
Seven
The Minard farm covered a hillside on the northern side of the creek. The Minard brothers, reputed to be among the richest men in Connaught County, were old, and their wizened wind-burned faces were rendered forbidding by the blue-black and sallow blotches of great age. Zuriel, the elder, ruled his younger brother like a father. Watching them Kevin thought of the patriarch Abraham and his nephew, Lot, whose stories he had read in the Bible. The brothers were known as “old bachelors” and their sister, Sarah, who kept house for them, was called an “old maid.” Sarah’s hands were wrinkled and red, like the claws of a chicken, and her hair had thinned until she possessed only a scattering of stark-white wisps.
The previous summer, Judd had helped the Minard brothers with their haying. The mill usually closed down during the haying season, to allow the mill hands to help out on neighbouring farms. In afternoons when heat waves vibrated in the air like live electric wires, Kevin had galloped across the spike-sharp hay stubble, carrying a rum bottle full of cold buttermilk to quench his father’s thirst. He loved the sensation of standing by the clattering hay rake to pass the bottle to his father. It thrilled him to see how his father teamed the great, pungent-smelling Clydesdales with one hand and levered the rake up and down with the other. His nostrils tingled to the hot, sweet smell of the curing hay. And he had made friends with Zuriel, Reuben, and Sarah. He liked the gentle formality of the men, the little, excited-hen movements of Sarah. He had kept going back to the Minard farm long after his father had ceased to work there. Through the winter and spring he had paid many visits to the whitewashed old three-storey farm house with is maze of sheds and porches.
Zuriel and Reuben seldom uttered a complete sentence. They spoke in grunts and gestures and monosyllables. But they seemed strangely flattered by his interest in their hens, cows, pigs, horses, and sheep. When he reached out to pat old Bess, the leader of the Clydesdale team, and murmured into her huge, comically expectant ears, the brothers nodded and smiled, as though the words of endearment he whispered to her had been addressed to them.
But the farm possessed a lure greater than that offered by the animals and the outbuildings. Kevin had never seen a room like the Minard parlour.
Miss Sarah made him wash his muddy feet before entering the house. He sat on a bench in the porch that she called her laundry room and scrubbed his feet in a gleaming white basin. Then he could come into the kitchen and, if Miss Sarah was in a good mood, into the parlour as well.
Miss Sarah had learned that he liked books, and the parlour contained dozens of them, stacked on the shelves of a shining, varnished book case. Often, he spent an hour or more alone in the room, lying on his belly on the soft, maroon carpet and paging through stiff-backed, leather-bound volumes. In the past year he had read The Sermons of DeWitt Talmadge, The Life of Frances E. Willard, The Prisoner of Zenda, The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, and — both of these last three times each — The Life of Lord Nelson and A History of the United States written in 1901. But he would have been captivated by the room had it not contained a single book. For to him it seemed the height of grandeur and luxury. It was such a room as he would build in his palace when he became King of Nicaragua, such an office as he would use when he was elected to parliament, such a study as he would possess when he became the wealthiest and most famous doctor in Canada.
The parlour was dark, with the darkness of old, varnished things, and with the darkness of shadows. The floor-length, tasselled window curtains were kept closed because, so Miss Sarah said, the sunlight would warp the furniture and fade the carpet. The darkness of the walls, the darkness of chairs and tables glowed with incredible black luminosity. Everything in the room was odorous with age, redolent of soaps and polishes. And there was another fragrance, ambiguous and haunting, that reminded him vaguely of the scent of dead flowers pressed between the pages of a Bible.
The room drew him as a magnet draws a jack-knife blade. But he did not wholly like it. Sometimes when the six-foot-high clock standing between the curtained windows struck the hour, he started up as though he had heard the snarl of a werewolf or the wail of a banshee. And sometimes when he lay reading he stopped abruptly and looked over his shoulder, as though he had felt a hot breath on the back of his neck.
Something in the dark, shining, airless room troubled him and made him uneasy. He could not give his uneasiness a name, but it was a little, just a little, like the uneasiness he had felt on the one or two occasions that he had passed a graveyard, alone and at night.
One day after school, he clambered over the pole gate at the foot of the Minard lane. The poles in this section of the fence were not nailed to posts but lay between frames built like miniature ladders. When cattle or horses were to be driven up the lane, the poles were lifted from their rungs and slid to one side. Kevin preferred to climb over them.
He ran up the hill. Beyond the fences, on either side of the lane, flocks of sheep were grazing, their fleeces the colour of dirty white shirts. They blatted at him as he ran by kicking up red dust, the old ram blatting first, then all the ewes echoing him. Kevin was not fond of sheep. He disliked their sour, vomity odour and their stupid, trusting eyes. Whenever he looked at them, he wondered why God had compared men to sheep. Horses would have been so much better . . .
With a hop and a jump and a windmill of arms he was in the Minard’s back dooryard.
In the front dooryard, the grass was trimmed regularly with a lawn mower, the only lawn mower that Kevin had ever seen. The gravelled walk leading to the front door was lined with little flower beds in which Miss Sarah had planted butterfly-coloured, velvety pansies. Purple dahlias, which Kevin imagined to be flowers from some exotic land like Nepal or Peru, grew on either
side of the front door.
The front dooryard belonged to the house. The back dooryard belong to the farm. Here there were weeds and thistles and discarded tools and odds and ends of harness, and if Kevin did not watch his step he was likely to step in hen dung or cow manure. Breathing hard from his run up the hill, he went to the back door.
Miss Sarah was in the kitchen, white-aproned, her cheeks flushed from the heat of the stove. The air was sweet with the scent of sugar, nuts, raisins, and flour.
“Good day, laddie.”
“Hiyuh, Miss Sarah.”
“Planning to do a little reading today?”
She smiled at him, absently wiping her flour-covered palms on her apron.
“Yeah, if it’s all right.”
“Yes, if I may,” she corrected him.
“Yes, if I may,” he parroted obediently.
“That’s ever so much nicer. Well, run along. I’m much too busy to talk to you.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“Just a minute, haven’t you forgotten something?”
“Huh? Oh, gosh, yes!”
He ran back to the porch and washed his feet.
When he re-entered the kitchen, she gave him a strange look. In trying to adapt himself to his parents’ unpredictable moods, he had acquired the habit of studying faces and of giving names to the expressions he saw in them. He could not think of a name for the way in which Miss Sarah looked at him. Her eyes held something of the slavish gentleness he had seen in the eyes of sheep, yet there was something else . . . something almost like hunger.
“It isn’t nice to stare, Kevin.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know I was starin’.”
“Ing,” she smiled.
“— staring.”
“It doesn’t matter. Run along with you, now.”