The Wanton Troopers

by Alden Nowlan

  “When you look that way at school the boys say that you’re stuck-up. They say you think you’re too nice to talk to anybody.”

  His astonishment was thorough and genuine.

  “They say that about me?”

  “Sure, didn’t you know? They say it about me sometimes too. But if you aren’t thinkin’ anythin’, what are you feelin’ then?”

  “I ain’t feelin’ nothin’ neither.”

  He wondered how the boys could possibly believe that he was stuck-up, that he did not wish to speak to them.

  “Oh, yes! You must be feelin’ somethin’. If you don’t feel anythin’ then you’re dead. You aren’t dead, are you, Kevin?”

  “Don’t talk so silly.”

  “That isn’t silly. It’s true. When you don’t feel anythin’ you’re dead.” She repeated the words with the air of one proclaiming a truth from Genesis.

  “Well I guess I’m dead then,” he snapped disgustedly.

  “Then I guess you’re just like the others. I guess you’re just like Av Farmer and Riff Wingate and —”

  No insult could have stung him more than this.

  “No,” he shouted, almost dropping his parcels. “I ain’t like them a-tall!”

  Her eyes glittered. “You’re not? What makes you think you’re not?”

  “Because I’m not — that’s why!”

  He knew he sounded shrill and stupid.

  “Oh yes you are! Oh yes you are! Oh yes you are too!”

  Whooping, she danced around him like an Indian war party. He wished he dared drop his burden and slap her face.

  “No, I’m not!”

  “Tell me why you aren’t, then!”

  He was yellow with rage. The words burst out of him: “Because I’m gonna be a prophet, that’s why!”

  She stopped. “A prophet! You mean like the prophets in the Bible?”

  Hot with embarrassment, he wished he could cut out his tongue. He had spilled his secret. Now she would tattle and everybody at school would jeer —

  But he heard himself repeating it. “Yes, a prophet like Isaiah — and — and a king like David!”

  “A king like David!”

  Had he been able to murder her by will alone, she would have fallen dead in her tracks.

  But she did not laugh. “No, I guess maybe you aren’t like the others,” she admitted slowly. “You do feel things. You’re alive! Like me. But I don’t guess I’m very crazy about prophets. Don’t they just tear their hair and howl about sin? But a king . . . that’s different. A king like David . . .”

  They began walking again. “Did you ever think that maybe you aren’t really Kevin O’Brien, that maybe you’re somebody else who’s just dreaming that he’s Kevin O’Brien, and that maybe any minute you’ll wake up and find out that everythin’ that ever happened to you has been a dream?”

  He gaped incredulously. “Yeah,” he said. “Have you ever felt like that?”

  “Oh, yes, yes, yes! And did you ever stop all of a sudden when you were doin’ somethin’ — oh, maybe somethin’ like sharpenin’ a pencil or pickin’ a flower or tyin’ your shoes — did you ever stop and think how funny it feels to be yourself and nobody else, how, how funny it feels just to be you and alive?”

  “Yeah,” he breathed. “Yeah, I’ve done that.”

  She pirouetted on the snow, her skirts billowing and rising. Her chant was almost a song. “You are different, Kevin O’Brien! You are! You are! You are!”

  They were within sight of home now. He thought of what she had said about the dream, and about how it felt to be one’s self and of how it felt to be alive. These thoughts were almost, but not quite, destroyed when one tried to put them into words. Trying to fit these thoughts into words was like trying to dip up the ocean in a basin. Yet if she had not spoken, he would never have guessed that —

  “Tomorrow night after supper I’m goin’ skatin’ on the pond in the woods.”

  “Huh?”

  “There you go again! You heard what I said. Tomorrow night I’m goin’ skatin’ on the pond in the woods.”

  “Oh.” He wondered if she meant —

  She laughed and bounded. “Oh, Kevin O’Brien, you’re silly! Silly! Silly!”

  He flushed. “But I like you anyway!” she crowed.

  And he was startled by the realization that in talking with Nancy Harker he had quite forgotten the silvery new seven-dollar-and fifty-cent watch in his pocket.

  Twenty-Five

  Kevin did not go to the pond the following night, for by then he had convinced himself that Nancy had made a fool of him. Sick with dread, he thought of how it would be when school resumed a week after Christmas. Riff and Harold would meet him in the porch. Why if it ain’t Key-von, the prophet a God! they would snigger. Come on in here and tell us what they been doin’ in heaven lately, yuh prophet a God! He could almost see their wolfish, leering faces, almost hear their lewd, jeering laughter. And Nancy Harker would stand in the background, simpering. He wished he dared creep into her cabin at midnight and slay her; he wished he could drive a nail through her temple as Jael drove a nail through the temple of Sisera.

  But the day before Christmas, Kevin and Mary waded through the snow of the heath to chop a fir tree. Mary wore a pair of Judd’s overalls and one of his oldest lumber jackets. With the cuffs rolled into great bunches at her ankles and wrists, she looked like a little girl in a masquerade. They searched long and hard for a suitable tree and, wrestling it home, they tripped over buried windfalls, rolled in the snow, and pelted one another with snowballs until they were feverish and breathless. Kevin felt closer to her than he had felt in months. As they lurched through the snow, dragging the tree behind them like a log-boat, he almost forgot Ernie Masters and the jealousy and dark suspicion that preyed on his soul . . .

  From one of the glacial, abandoned rooms upstairs, they bore dusty cartons containing the paper ropes and shreds of tinfoil and little glass balls that had decorated the O’Brien Christmas tree every year for as long as Kevin could remember. Mary washed the balls in warm water and baking soda and polished them with a clean flour bag. With Kevin handing them to her one by one, she stood on a chair and tied them to branches.

  Many of the balls were tied and untied a dozen times at as many different places on the tree.

  “Oh, Scampi, I don’t think it looks right!” Mary would wail. And a solemn-faced Kevin would back to the other end of the living room and squint at the dangling bauble. “Mebbe not. Mebbe yuh better move it,” he would announce at last.

  And Mary would nod and purse her lips as she removed the trinket and attached it to a lower or a higher bough.

  “How does it look there, Scamper?”

  And once again he would back away and stare thoughtfully at the tree.

  Judd growled that such folderol and fuss were damn foolishness. Confronted by the gee-gaws and tinsel of Christmas, he snorted like a man embarrassed by something infantile and sentimental. And he had no patience with ribbon and gay wrappings. When offering a gift it was his way to shrug and affect a look of boredom and distaste.

  Kevin could not remember ever having believed in Santa Claus, although there had been a time, long ago, when he had pretended to believe because of his knowledge that the pretence would please his mother.

  He never gave his father gifts. Judd said it was silly for a son to buy presents for his father from his father’s own hard-earned money. But he had saved the nickels and dimes handed to him from time to time by his father, and at Biff Mason’s store he had bought a bracelet costing almost a dollar for his mother.

  On Christmas morning, she dug at her eyes and showered him with kisses. “Oh, thank you, sugar-baby!” she cried. Then she kissed the bracelet and slipped it on her wrist. She would never take it off, she said, she would wear it always, she would wear it even when she slept . . .

  His father had already given him the watch. His mother’s gift, wrapped in silverfoil and tied with golden ribbon, was a book, Th
e Star Rover by Jack London.

  “Do you like it, sweetikins?” she asked eagerly.

  “Oh, Mummy! It’s wonderful! I jist know by lookin’ at it!” And she glowed like a Christmas angel in the halo of his praise.

  At noon, his body sprawled on the floor in front of the living room stove, his teeth burst grapes and his tongue tasted them — but his soul was in the world of a man named Ed Morrel, whose body writhed in a straitjacket in a clammy dungeon while his mind roved like one of the sword-swinging seraphim through the incandescent dust beyond the farthest stars.

  And the O’Brien table was laden with food. Kevin masticated sweet, fat-rich pork and thick slices of spicy, smoke-fragrant ham. He cracked nuts with a claw hammer and gorged himself on their dry or oily meats. He laid-in candy until his teeth ached and devoured oranges until the acid of their juice stung his discoloured lips. All that remained of the money paid for the red cow, Judd had spent on rum and beer. Cross–eyed and thick-tongued with drink, he made his Christmas dinner from cold canned clams, onion slices half-buried in salt, hunks of unbuttered bread, which he tore from the loaf with his fists, and blue-green sour pickles, all of which he washed down with rum from the bottle that stood open by his hand.

  Grandmother O’Brien ate only bits of bread dipped in buttermilk. And throughout the meal, she rebuked Judd for his extravagance. “Mark my words, son, when yer poor yuh gotta plan ahead! If yuh don’t watch yerself yer gonna eat and drink yerself right intuh the poor house! Yuh’ll be huntin’ up the poormaster a-fore spring — that’s as sure as the skin on yer face!”

  Mary and Kevin, their mouths full of food, scowled at the old woman. And to each of her admonitions, Judd gave the same reply: “Well Ma, I guess it’s better tuh die a glutton than tuh starve tuh death.”

  In the afternoon, the clouds descended until it seemed they rested on the treetops, and the snow fell, soft and damp, spreading white cleanness over the world. Climbing the pole fence, Kevin tramped to the centre of the garden ground. Snowflakes disintegrating in his eyes, he saw the universe through a dancing kaleidoscope.

  For an instant, as he stepped outdoors, he had smelled the snow, but its scent was so subtle that he could not retain it for longer than a second. Here, where the seasonal loam lay buried under two feet of snow — the soft, fresh snow lying on the brittle crust from earlier storms — he had to draw his breath almost to his stomach to catch a whiff of the suspended, secret aroma of the frozen soil.

  There was an expectancy in the air, as there always was at the start of a snowstorm. He itched with excitement. His arms and legs tingled as though touched by electricity. He shaped a snowball in his hands, then rolled it on the ground, first kneeling, then creeping on all fours, then walking, then running. The snowball grew from a baseball to a squash, from a squash to a pumpkin, from a pumpkin to a nail keg, from a nail keg to a barrel. He decided that perhaps today he would make the biggest snowman since the beginning of the world.

  Twenty-Six

  As soon as he entered the school house, Kevin knew that Nancy Harker had not betrayed him. Riff tripped him, then asked what the hell was the matter with his feet, and Harold drew snickers from the boys lounging under the coat-hooks in the porch by wanting to know whether or not a new nipple for his nursing bottle had been among his Christmas gifts. But nothing was said about the secrets he had confided to Nancy.

  He decided that he had been foolish to worry. What, after all, was there for her to tell? Thinking back, he told himself that he had not really disclosed any secrets. He had walked up the road with a giddy girl, and they had chattered nonsense. That was all.

  Yet, as he took his seat and looked at her face, the small cheekbones, nose, and chin maturely finished and intact, devoid of even a suggestion of the fluidity normally seen in the features of children, he knew that she had somehow made him reveal himself. Meeting her bold, searching stare, he winced and turned quickly to his exercise books. He realized suddenly that what troubled him was not so much what he had told her as what she had known without having to be told. Even if he never spoke to her again, she would know every thought that rose in his mind, even those that came at night when he woke and took refuge in a softer and warmer darkness by hiding his face in the quilts. And just as she knew without words, so he would know without words that she knew.

  By some means she had made him naked and vulnerable. Because of this, he hated her. For he had been taught that all of the things that occupied his most intimate and fervent thoughts were cowardly and puerile nonsense, of which he ought to be ashamed.

  But, beneath this hatred, like creek water under burning gasoline, there flowed a different and deeper emotion. His vocabulary held no word for this emotion. He suspected that no word in the language was big enough to contain it. It was one of those dark intimations that could only be hinted at in words so vague and inadequate as to be almost lies.

  At recess, he sought to evade her. In the past, she had been only a misty fragment in the background: a head bending over a book, a swish of green-and-red-windbreaker cloth, a toss of ripe-wheat-coloured hair. Had anyone asked, he would have taken a closer look and said that this was Nancy Harker, just as in another case he might have answered that such and such a thing was a book, a table, or a chair. But, today, her wholeness confronted him everywhere . . .

  At last, he came face to face with her in the path between the school house and the woodshed. In spite of himself, he met her eyes. Accusation and amusement mingled in iris and pupil.

  “Why’ve you been tryin’ to run away from me, Kevin O’Brien?” she demanded.

  He fumbled for words; it was not his way to leap into communication like one diving into a pond. Like his father, like all the mill people, he preferred to wade slowly into the important matters, gauging the depth and testing the current.

  “I ain’t been tryin’ tuh run away from yuh,” he stammered untruthfully.

  “Oh, yes, you have! All through recess you been sneakin’ around like a mangy old dog with its tail between its legs!”

  “I ain’t been! I ain’t been sneakin’ around a-tall!”

  “Yes, you have too! But it doesn’t matter. I know why you’ve been runnin’ away from me even if you won’t tell me.”

  “Bet yuh don’t!”

  “Bet I do! Want me to tell you?”

  He kicked spitefully at the blue-grey shingles of the woodshed. “How duh yuh know I been sneakin’ around unless yuh been taggin’ after me?” he retorted. “Ain’t nothin’ I hate more’n anybody that keeps taggin’ along when they ain’t wanted.”

  She stuck out her tongue. He tore his eyes away from the disturbing little curve of her breasts.

  “If you’ll be good, I’ll let you kiss me.”

  He gaped. “Who said I wanted tuh kiss yuh?” he said, humiliated by his shaking voice.

  She laughed. “I don’t have to have anybody tell me things. I just know. Listen, let’s not fight anymore. Do you wanta come skatin’ with me tonight?”

  He kicked the heel of one boot with the toe of the other.

  “I dunno,” he muttered.

  “You scared a the dark?”

  “No!”

  “You scared a me?”

  “No!”

  “Well, then, I’ll see you after supper on the pond in the woods, okay?”

  Shoulders slumping, he thrust his hands in his pockets.

  “I guess so.” He did not know whether he wanted to laugh or to snarl.

  “Maybe I’ll even let you kiss me!” she cried.

  And, laughing, she skipped away.

  For the seven hours that followed, Kevin writhed in the anguish of indecision. In one moment, he vowed that wild horses would not drag him to the pond. In the next, he sought to convince himself that even before receiving Nancy’s invitation, he had planned to skate tonight. She did not own the pond, he told himself angrily. He had skated there long before her arrival in Lockhartville. If she happened to be there on a night that he chose t
o skate — well, then, she could stay at one end of the ice and he at the other! His mind swung back and forth like a pendulum.

  At home, while his mother prepared supper, he determined to leave the decision to chance. Pulling two straws from the broom, he dropped them in his cap, held the cap above his head with one hand, and picked out a straw with the other. It was the shorter of the two. That meant he would stay home. Well, pulling straws was silliness, anyhow. Perhaps he should seek advice from his mother. No — she did not consult him before going to dances or prior to entertaining Ernie Masters in the living room! He would make up his own mind. Just let her try to tell him what he had to do!

  “I guess the moon’s gonna be bright tuhnight,” he said. “I guess mebbe I’ll go skatin’ on the pond in the woods.”

  She did not look up from the stove. “Just remember to stay on the path, sweetikins, don’t go off and get lost in the woods!”

  So it was settled. He would go.

  An hour later, he stood with Nancy Harker at the edge of the pond. Above the black and white firs and cedars, the moon seemed to float like a ghost ship across the murky ocean and through phosphorescent islands of cloud. Little glassy bellflowers of ice tinkled on willows and alders. Skating out on the glittering ice was like running on the surface of the moon.

  “I’ll race you to the other end,” she shouted.

  And they were off. Lengthening his strokes, he felt the power of the moon ripple in his loins and belly. He had felt the pull of the moon before, but never so strongly. Everything was palpitant, lambent, changing, as in a dream. And the feeling it gave him was part joy, part pain: it reminded him of the times when his father, in drunken playfulness, had thrown him down and tickled him until he was almost delirious.

  She could skate fastest. Already she was six or eight strokes ahead of him. Looking back over her shoulders, her hair flying like spun moonlight, she gave a little yelp of triumph and laughed. In the moonlight from the sky, and in the moonlight reflected from the ice, her face was wild and strange. A mad thought struck him: suppose she were a vampire? In the daytime, such a suggestion would have made him giggle. But tonight — tonight he could think whatever he wished without having to be ashamed. And with this realization came a surge of power and courage. Even the vast darkness around the pond held no terrors for him. For almost the first time in his life he was not afraid.