by Alden Nowlan
“Run out and help yer father, laddie.”
Quivering with nausea, he got to his feet.
“Don’t you tell him what to do! Don’t you give my son orders!”
Mary dug at her eyes, beginning to weep.
“Eh! An’ a fine son he’ll be with the likes a you fer a mother. Yes an’ with the blood a God knows what a-burnin’ in his veins. Conceived in sin! Conceived in godless, filthy lust! The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge! Oh, aye, a fine son he’s like tuh be!”
“Shut up! Shut up before I kill you!”
“Is it a murderess yuh’d be, eh! Come ahead, me girl, I dare yuh. One more sin won’t make no difference now. Yuh’ll burn in hell! Yuh’ll burn in hell with Jezebel and Delilah! Yuh hear me, girl! Yer gonna burn in hell!”
With a cry, Mary seized a stick of millwood from the box by the stove and advanced on the old woman. Martha made no move to raise her hands.
“Don’t, Mummy!” Kevin screamed.
Babbling, his breath coming in great spasms, he ran to his mother and grasped her wrist.
“What the hell’s goin’ on in here?”
Judd stood in the doorway. The club fell from Mary’s hand. Kevin clung to her, hiding his face. Martha swayed, then staggered to the rocker and sank down.
“Ma, what’s wrong?” Judd bent over her. “Will somebody tell me what the hell’s goin’ on here?” He laid his palm on his mother’s shoulder. “You all right, Ma?”
“Yes, son, I’n stand anythin’ the Good Lord wants tuh hand out tuh me. Ain’t no cross too heavy fer me tuh bear. Though he slay me yet shall I trust in him. Praise His name. Don’t pay no mind tuh me, Juddie. It ain’t yer old mother yuh got tuh worry about, boy.”
Judd stared around wildly as though in search of a culprit. “Hey, you!” His big hands closed on Kevin’s shoulders. “What are yuh! Nothin’ but a little wizzenin’ petticoat sucker? Eh? You hush that whinin’ or I’ll give yuh somethin’ tuh whine about. Yuh hear me?”
Jerking him away from Mary, Judd shook him. Then — it was as though the wind lifted him and hurled him from a great precipice. Falling, whirling, twisting, he plunged into an eyeless and bottomless pit. Down . . . and down . . . and down . . . and down. From a ledge, hundreds of feet above him, came his mother’s voice, growing fainter: “Scampi! Scampi! What’s wrong?” His last conscious thought was that he was dying —
He regained consciousness in the living room. His mother knelt by his cot, holding cold cloths to his temples and chafing his wrists.
As he opened his eyes, she tried to smile.
“You fainted, Scampi. That’s all. You just fainted,” she said.
He tried to raise himself, tried to reach out to her, then fell back. He was like one come back from the borderlands of death.
“I’m going away from here, Scampi.”
“Yeah.”
Somehow he had known this for a long time.
“In a few weeks I’m going to live in town — in Larchmont. You’ll have to stay here with your father for a while. But I’ll come back for you. I promise I will, Scampi.”
“Yeah.” His voice was dubious. He did not have sufficient energy to pretend to believe.
“Oh, Scampi!”
Weeping, she lay her face on his chest. She shook his body with the convulsions of her sobbing.
He sought to lift his hand . . . sought to touch her . . . but he could not. And in this moment he knew as though God Himself had told him that never again would he be able to reach her.
Thirty
He walked in the windswept road and he did not know if he walked there in reality or in dream.
The world was too huge and strange. He could never hope to understand it. He wished he could crawl into the earth like a worm and hide there in the darkness where nothing could reach him. He wished he were a tree or a stone. He wished he were a single snowflake in one of the great drifts beside the road. He wished he were a fencepost, a blade of grass, a twig — anything that did not have to think and feel and struggle with the unanswerable questions with which God badgered human beings.
“I wish I’d never been born!” he cried. And he hated his parents for having brought him into this world. He could not put words to the thought, but it seemed he remembered a long-ago time in which he had lain in a dark, secret place where there were no terrifying questions to be faced, no agonizing choices — where there was only will-lessness and warmth and a great peace.
Thoughts whirled through his mind. His mother’s hands soaping him before the kitchen fire. The ecstacy of surrender. He was no longer himself. He existed only as part of her body. Then the mill with its pulsating engine and shrieking saws. The oxen plodding forever before their log-boat. The old swaybacked nag floundering in deep sawdust.
There is a fountain filled with blood,
Drawn from Emmanuel’s veins,
And sinners plunged beneath that flood
Lose all their guilty stains.
Blood ran from the nail-pierced hands of Jesus.
Blood dripped from the knife-tormented flesh of Hitler.
Blood from the throat of a deer. Blood from the pitchforked side of a cow. The blood of the orange-haired cat on the blade of a hatchet . . .
Oh, Daddy, don’t kill me. Please don’t kill me!
The clock-like gong of the strap. WHACK!
I love you, Daddy! I do love you. Please don’t hurt me, Daddy!
Key-von O’Brien is a snotty-nosed little pimp.
Key-von O’Brien’s mother still has tuh change his didies.
Key-von O’Brien’s mother is the biggest old whore in Lockhartville.
Make ’im say it, Av! Make ’im say it, Av!
The skin torn from his palms, blood gushing from his nostrils and dribbling from his mouth.
Blood. Blood. Blood. Blood.
Have yuh had enough, Av? Have yuh had enough?
Well, if they ain’t a-gonna fight, don’t yuh think they oughta kiss and make up?
And as I passed by thee and saw thee polluted in thine own blood, I said unto thee that wast in thy blood, live: yes . . .
The nights of waiting for his mother. Counting the cars passing.
But what of the thing in the cellar that drinks so much blood?
A dead raccoon by the roadside. An empty rum bottle lying on a grave.
Wait! One more thing! They’ll come for you! Some night when you’re asleep in bed, they’ll come for you, and they’ll make you a living corpse like all the rest of us! They will! They’ll come with knives and ropes and they’ll drag you out of bed and they’ ll —
The gloss of darkness in Sarah Minard’s parlour. Her fingers pinching his flesh. You’re a very pretty boy. Kevin. Do you know who I am? I am Death.
Nancy Harker’s hands on his body. All the mill men get drunk. Madge says it’s the only time they’re alive.
His mother’s hands on his body. Oh, Scampi, there isn’t anything worse than being dead!
Yes, laddie, when God was on earth, women like her was stoned tuh death!
Yuh’ ll burn in hell, me girl! Yuh’ ll burn in hell!
June Larlee’s legs in red shorts. June Larlee naked on Kaye Dunbar’s bunk.
June Larlee: I guess yuh wouldn’t have tuh look at him twice tuh know he wasn’t a girl, would yuh, Mar?
The pictures of nearly naked girls on the walls of Kaye’s shack. Nancy Harker unbuttoning . . .
Cheatin’ little bitch! Dirty cheatin’ little whore! That snivellin’ little bugger don’t act much like no O’Brien!
Conceived in sin! Conceived in godless, filthy lust!
Put your hand there, Kevin. Put your hand there.
I’m a love-child, did you know that?
Put your hand there, Kevin.
Put your hand there.
Baby. Bay-bee. Sweet bay-bee. Sweet Scampi. Sweet Scampi bay-bee. Sweetest, sweetest, baby. Bay-beee . . . baybee . . . bay-bee . . .
P
ut your hand there.
I love you, Mummy.
Say it again.
I love you, Mummy.
— Again.
I love you, Mummy.
What are yuh, eh? Nothin’ but a wizzenin’ little petticoat sucker, eh?
Don’t kill me, Daddy. Please don’t kill me, Daddy.
Here’s a cuckoo! There’s a cuckoo!
There’s a cuckaroo!
Here’s a cuckoo! There’s a cuckoo!
Here’s a cuckaroo!
Saul has slain his thousands and Kevin-David his ten thousands.
Oh, please God.
Please.
Please, God.
Don’t let Mummy leave me, God.
Don’t let him say it again, God.
Don’t make it so I have to fight him, God.
Make them stop, God.
I promise I won’t ask you for anything else. I’ll never ask you for anything again. Please God.
I’m gonna be a prophet a God.
Put your hand there.
Make me like David, O God. Like David and Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel and . . . like Jesus.
Do you ever dream about girls, Kevin? Do you ever dream about doin’ things with girls?
Sugar-baby. Sweetikins. Scamper.
I’m going away, Scampi. You’ ll have to stay with your father for a little while, but I’ ll come back for you —
You should hear the music, Scampi! It makes you want to dance and dance and dance!
I am Kevin, the prophet of God.
I am Kevin, the prophet of God.
I am Kevin, the prophet of God.
Suddenly, Kevin knew what he had to do. The whirling galaxies of words and pictures that had been pouring through his mind vanished and were replaced by a great certainty and peace.
He knelt in the road, as he had done before, oblivious to the pellets that pelted his face.
“Oh God,” he prayed. “Show me a sign! Open up the heavens, O God, and show me a sign! Show me that I’m one of Thy mighty ones, a king and a prophet, O God! Show me that I don’t have to be afraid. Show me that I’ll never have to be afraid again. Show me your face in the sky, O God!”
He had closed his eyes during this prayer. Now tremulous but smiling, he opend them, lifted his head slowly and looked up at the sky . . .
Afterword
This novel was sent to one publisher, rejected, and put in a drawer. It found its way to the public sometime after Alden Nowlan’s death in l983. It is a great novel — one written by a poet in his youth — and has a deep poetic sense. Poetry redeems its darker moments and enlivens its lighter. It is probably as good a first novel as most I’ve read, and better than most of the novels published anywhere the year it was rejected. So why was it rejected? And why didn’t Nowlan, who fought whenever he had to, fight for it — and send it elsewhere? That is, did he believe the opinion of the editor who summarily dismissed it?
I doubt it. Nowlan knew more about literature than any editor did. He knew more about the novel, and that too is the secret. For this is a novel that stems from his youth, his growing up, his parents, and his village. It is a wonderful novel, filled with moments of unquestionable delight. Yet it also is a novel desperate with uncomfortable truths about his mother and father, his birth, and his solitude in the face of family and cultural violence. And I think this is why at least part of him might have been relieved by the rejection slip.
That long-ago rejection slip did Canadian literature and Alden Nowlan a great disservice, but no one in Toronto — or anywhere else — would know or care for almost thirty years. When I think of novels that have been dismissed in the century just past, I put this in the category of James Joyce’s Stephen Hero, or Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It, for the sheer blindness on which such decision making rests. In fact, I think The Wanton Troopers is a better novel then Stephen Hero — or what was managed to be saved of Joyce’s manuscript — and, in many respects, as accomplished as A River Runs Through It.
The Wanton Troopers was rejected because of what it was — frightening and brave, at times utterly brave. It is the hopeful journey of a small, tremendously gifted boy born into a poverty-stricken Maritime family back in the 1940s. And that might have been too real for the editor who looked at it to contemplate. Of course, that tells us more about the incompetence of the editor at reading than Nowlan’s ability to write. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said in Success, “’Tis the good reader that makes the good book . . . the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.” Far too many editors know nothing of great books — or at least how to read them. For this book, beyond everything else, has a deep, deep, enduring love for all things living, and a deep moral reverence for humanity no matter what. And nothing tells us this more than the poetry that crowns it. In this one way, then, The Wanton Troopers is a holy book.
If the book relied upon its poetry alone, then poetry alone would sanctify it. But its strength is greater than its poetry — for it is a book whose author understands humanity, character, and drama as well as most writers I have read. The human foible and false rebellion, the contrived bravery and final sadness of the father, Judd, make him as human as any of William Faulkner’s men. The wondrous, self-interested delusion of Kevin’s mother, Mary, gives her life the gift (yes gift) of tragedy. This is what the editor in some small office fifty years ago failed to see: the overflowing grace and human care of an artist determined to reveal at any cost those few elusive moments of tenderness among many terrifying hatreds — where Kevin is, like so many millions of solitary children, a scapegoat in a world he cannot control. No one was ever more careful to get it right, and to make it universal while doing so.
Nowlan was forever a major artist who needed to tell us not about his life so much as ours. And in the end, we celebrate this life he gives us as part of our own.
The Wanton Troopers recounts the 1940s Maritimes with a richness of expression rarely — if ever — found, and almost never surpassed. It is a book that exposes to forgive, forgives in order to celebrate — and in the end, begs us all to love.
David Adams Richards
Bartibog Bridge, Miramichi
July 2009
About the Author
In his preface to Gregory Cook’s biography of Alden Nowlan, American poet Robert Bly praises Nowlan as “the greatest Canadian poet of the twentieth century.”1 Whether the adversity that Nowlan faced during his childhood (fictionalized here in The Wanton Troopers) nourished or impeded his literary development is a matter for debate, but the story of his life is indeed an inspiring one of triumph over difficult circumstances.
Nowlan was born during the Great Depression in January of 1933 in the village of Stanley, Nova Scotia. He was the first child of fourteen-year-old Grace Reese and Freeman Nowlan, a marginally employed mill hand who was twice her age. Nowlan’s sister, Harriet, was born almost three years later, in November of 1935. Beset by poverty and Freeman’s alcoholism, the couple struggled to feed and clothe themselves and their children.
As a work of fiction, The Wanton Troopers conflates, transforms, and omits material from Nowlan’s life to create the world of Kevin O’Brien; still, the novel can be read autobiographically. Lockhartville and the shack in which the O’Brien family lives was, for Nowlan, actually two modest homes in the adjoining communities of Stanley and Mosherville. Each of these homes lay under the powerful matriarchal rule of a grandmother: Grace’s mother, Nora, and Freeman’s mother, Emma, respectively. Both were strong, capable women who took care of Alden and Harriet when Grace went off to dances or Freeman went to work in the woods or disappeared on a drinking binge with his buddies.
Had their grandmothers lived, the children’s lives might not have been so tragic. Of the two, Emma Nowlan most resembled Martha O’Brien of The Wanton Troopers. Although she was a pious, Bible-reading woman who eventually died of stomach cancer, Emma also earned notoriety as a village eccentric who amuse
d children with her antics (which included impersonating a witch). She entertained adults with a talent for step-dancing — something the fictional Martha condemned. But it was Nora Reese who looked after the children the most up until the fall of 1939, when Alden started school.
By the time Nora died of Hodgkin’s disease in the spring of 1940, Grace and Freeman’s marriage had already broken up. Grace attempted to move the children in with her and her boyfriend but was blocked by Children’s Aid, who assumed brief custody of Alden and Harriet until Freeman could move Emma into his house in Stanley. Once in the Stanley house, Emma took over as the children’s principal caregiver. As her health deteriorated, she indulged young Alden by allowing him to stay home from school. He eventually quit after completing grade four.
By 1947, Grace’s visits to Stanley-Mosherville had stopped, and Freeman’s drinking had worsened. When Alden — by now housebound, depressed, and entirely devoted to reading books — fell ill, the Reese family forced Freeman to have Alden and Emma taken to the hospital in Windsor, Nova Scotia, where Emma died that summer. On the advice of doctors and with Freeman’s consent, Alden was admitted to the Nova Scotia Hospital, a psychiatric institution in Dartmouth.
Although Nowlan could not resist using his experience at the Nova Scotia Hospital as sensationalist fodder for some of his later stories and poems, his treatment there — according to family accounts — was beneficial for the intelligent but socially awkward teen. When he was discharged early in 1948, Alden returned to Freeman’s house to work with his father in the woods and at the mill. He also bought a typewriter with his meagre pay and began to write short stories, poems, and articles for the local newspaper. A reporter, recognizing the young man’s talent, helped Nowlan make contact with a weekly newspaper, the Observer, in Hartland, New Brunswick. He was hired, and at the age of nineteen, he left Stanley for good.
During his Hartland years, from 1952 to 1963, Nowlan became known nationally as a poet and short fiction writer, producing five collections of poetry and earning praise from such figures as Irving Layton and Robert Weaver. On the day before he moved from Hartland to Saint John, New Brunswick, Nowlan married Claudine Orser Meehan, a divorcee with a nine-year-old son, Johnnie.