A Bird in the House (18 page)

“Yes. Okay,” I would say. “We won’t, then.”

And we would both go our perpetually worrying ways.

Some months later I happened once more to come home just at the moment when Harvey was delivering the paper. This time I saw him from half a block away, and walked along the sidewalk quietly, sticking close to the caragana hedges for concealment. He had half a doughnut in one hand, and in the
other a white envelope. He held the doughnut through the iron grille, and when Nanuk came up to the gate, he opened the envelope.

Nanuk screamed. The sound was so sudden and acute that my breath was forced back in upon my lungs. I wondered how many times some kind of tormenting had taken place. I felt the burden of my own neglect. I should have taken it seriously before. I should have watched out for it.

Harvey rode off. When I went to Nanuk and finally calmed him enough to touch him, I found traces of the pepper around his still-closed eyes.

Whenever I tried to work out a plan of counterattack, my rage would spin me into fantasy – Harvey, fallen into the deepest part of the Wachakwa River, unable to swim, and Nanuk, capable of rescue but waiting for a signal from me. Would I speak or not? Sometimes I let Harvey drown. Sometimes at the last minute I spared him – this was more satisfactory than his death, as it enabled me to feel great-hearted while at the same time enjoying a continuing revenge in the form of Harvey’s gibbering remorse. But none of this was much use except momentarily, and when the flamboyant theatre of my mind grew empty again, I still did not know what to do in reality.

I did not tell my mother. I could not face her look of distracted exhaustion at being presented with something else that she was expected to solve and did not know how any more than I. Also, I could not forget what Harvey had said – “Why don’t you run and tell your mother?” I began hurrying home from school, so I would get there first. I thought he would not do anything if I were there.

Harvey flipped the newspaper neatly onto the front porch. It landed just at my elbow. I was sitting on the top step.
Nanuk was at the gate. I called to him, but he did not seem to hear.

Nanuk was eight months old now, and fully grown. He had changed utterly. His black fur had grown and coarsened, losing the downy quality it used to have, but gaining a marvellous sheen. It rippled silkily across the powerful shoulders that showed the Husky strain in him. The white ruff on his throat and chest was like a lion’s plumage. He had a Husky’s up-pointed ears and slanted eyes, and his jaws were wolfish.

He was growling now, a deep low sound. Not merely a warning – an open declaration of enmity. He did not try to get over the gate. He remained at a slight distance, his lips drawn back in the devil’s grin which I had only seen in pictures of other dogs of his blood, never on Nanuk. Harvey glanced at me, and his face puckered into a smile. He knew he was safe on the other side of the fence. Then, with a speed which caught me off guard, he pulled out a slingshot. The stone was fired before I could get down the steps and as far as the gate. It hit Nanuk on the throat, where his fur was thick. It did not damage him much, but it drove him wild. He flung himself against the bars of the gate. Harvey was already on his bicycle and pedalling away.

I grabbed the gate handle. Beside me, Nanuk was in a frenzy to get out. He could probably have caught up with the bicycle.

I looked at Nanuk’s unrecognisable face, at the fur rising in hackles along the top of his back, at the demented eyes. My hand clenched the gate shut once more. I walked back into the house without looking again at the dog. I went to my room and locked the door. I did not want to see anyone, or talk. I had realised something for the first time. Nanuk had
all the muscular force and all the equipment he needed to kill a man. In that second, I had not been sure that he would not do it.

Now I had to tell my mother. She did try, after that, to keep Nanuk inside the house at the time when Harvey delivered the papers. But something was always going wrong. Grandfather Connor let the dog out, claiming that Nanuk was giving the house a foul smell. Or else my mother forgot, and would be apologetic, and this would make me feel worse than if she had said nothing at all.

I tried to get home from school early, but I often forgot and went with my friends to the Regal Café to play the jukebox and drink coffee. On the days when I remembered and put Nanuk safely in the basement, I would watch from the bay window of the living room and see Harvey deposit the paper on the porch. He looked in through the gate, and sometimes he even parked his bike for a moment and waited, to make sure the dog was not there. Then, with an exaggerated shrug, as though he knew he were being observed, he would ride off, his face expressionless.

When I was late, sometimes my brother would report to me.

“Nanuk was out today, Vanessa,” he told me one afternoon. “Mum wasn’t home. And he wouldn’t come when I called him.”

“What happened?”

“Harvey – well, he lit a whole bunch of matches all together,” my brother said, “and dropped them. I got some water, after, and put it on Nanuk’s head. He wasn’t burned much, Vanessa, honestly.”

I no longer wove intricate dreams in which I either condemned Harvey or magnanimously spared him. What I felt
now was not complicated at all. I wanted to injure him, in any way available.

I asked my mother if we could go to the police and get them to warn Harvey off. But she replied that she did not think it would be considered a crime to tease dogs, and in any event she was nervous about going to the police for any reason whatsoever.

Then, unexpectedly, Harvey played into our hands.

I owned a telescope which had once belonged to a MacLeod ancestor who had been in the Royal Navy. It was brass, and it pulled out to three lengths, the largest segment being encased in dark leather interestingly scratched and scuffed with the marks of who-knows-what sea battles or forays into dangerous waters. The lenses were still in perfect condition, and if you sat up in one of our spruce trees you could see every detail of houses two blocks away. I was too old now to climb trees and spy, but my brother often did. One day I found him waiting for me on the front porch.

“Vanessa –” he blurted, “the telescope’s gone.”

“If you’ve lost it, Roddie MacLeod, I’ll –”

“I never!” he cried. “I left it on the grass near the gate, just for a minute, while I went in to get my rope so I could climb up. Harvey took it. Honest, Vanessa. I was just coming out the front door when I saw him ride off. And when I looked, the telescope was gone.”

“Listen, Roddie, you didn’t actually see him pick it up?”

“No, but who else could it have been?”

“Did you look carefully for it?”

“Sure, I did,” he said indignantly. “Go ahead – look yourself.”

I looked, but the telescope wasn’t anywhere on the lawn. This time I did not hesitate about telling my mother. This was
too good an opportunity to miss. I felt jubilant and excited. I felt like shouting some Highland war-cry, or perhaps whistling
The MacLeod’s Praise
. Or quoting some embattled line from Holy Writ. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.

“In a way, it’s kind of peculiar,” I said to my mother, talking so rapidly she could hardly make out what I was saying. “You know, like getting Al Capone on income-tax evasion instead of murder.”

“Stop dramatising everything, Vanessa,” my mother said, “and let me think for a minute what would be the best thing to do.”

“What’s all this?” Grandfather Connor demanded crossly, having been roused from his chair by the tumult of my voice.

My mother told him, and he was in no doubt what to do.

“Get your coat on, Vanessa. We’re going over there right now.”

I looked at him, stunned. Then I shook my head firmly.

“It’s a matter for the police.”

“Rubbish,” my grandfather snapped, unable to acknowledge any authority except his own. “What could Rufus Nolan do that I can’t do? He’s a fool of a man anyway.”

I had not bargained on this. I was out for blood, but I would have preferred someone else to draw it.

“You go, then,” I said sullenly. “I don’t want to.”

“You’d better go with him, Vanessa,” my mother said. “Father wouldn’t recognise the telescope. He’s never had anything to do with it.”

“I don’t know where Harvey lives,” I stalled.

“I know where he lives,” my grandfather said. “It’s Ada Shinwell’s house, at the North End, right beside the C.P.R. tracks. Vanessa, for the last time, you get your coat on and come along.”

I got my coat on and came along. The North End of Manawaka was full of shacks and shanties, unpainted boards, roofs with half the shingles missing, windows with limp hole-spattered lace curtains or else no curtains at all, chickens milling moronically in yards where the fences had never been lifted when they leaned and the weeds never hacked at or fought down. The cement sidewalks were broken, great chunks heaved up by frost and never repaired, for the Town Council did not pay much attention to this part of town. A few scraggy structures had once been stores but had been deserted when some of the town prospered and moved south away from the tracks. Now the old signs could still be seen, weathered to peeling pastels, grimy pink that had once shouted crimsonly “Barnes’ Grain and Feed,” and a mute rotting green that had once boldly been “Thurson’s General Store.” The windows of these ex-shops were boarded over now, and they were used only as warehouses or roofs over the heads of rodents and tramps.

At the furthest point of the town the C.P.R. station stood, respectably painted in the gloomy maroon colour known as Railway Red, paradoxically neat in the midst of the decrepit buildings around it. Above and beyond the station rose the peaked roofs of the grain elevators, solid and ugly but the closest thing there was to towers here.

I knew Harvey had been brought up by his aunt, his dead mother’s sister, but that was all I knew about him. My grandfather went directly to the place. It was a small square frame house with wooden lace along the front porch. At one time it must have been white, but it had not been painted for years. The rust-corroded gate stood open and askew, having apparently once been wrenched off its hinges. In the yard the goldenrod grew, and the tall uncut grass had formed seed-nodules like oats. My grandfather knocked at the door.

“Yes?”

The woman was big and haggard, and her face, wrinkled like elm bark, was spread thickly with a mauvish powder. Her grey hair was snipped short like a man’s. She wore a brown tweed skirt which looked as though it had never been cleaned throughout a long life, and a tight-fitting and filthy peach-coloured sweater that betrayed her gaunt and plank-flat body.

“Well, if it ain’t Mr. Connor,” she said sarcastically.

“Where’s your boy, Ada?” my grandfather demanded.

“What’s he done?” she asked immediately.

“Stole a telescope. I want it back.”

The door opened wider.

“Come in,” Harvey’s aunt said.

The house was not divided into living room and kitchen. There was one large room on the ground floor and it was used for everything. At one end the black wood stove stood, surrounded by pots and pans hanging on nails from the wall. The table was covered with oilcloth, the worn-off pattern showing only feebly. The dishes from breakfast were still there, the grease stiffened on them, the puddles of egg yolk turned to yellow glue. On the cabinet stood a brown crockery basin with a wooden spoon and batter in it – the pancakes for tonight’s meal. The house had that acrid sour-milk and ammonia smell that comes from food left lying around and chamber pots full of urine unemptied until they are overflowing.

In the front part of the room stood two armchairs with the plum velour ripped and stained, and a spineless sofa, sagging in the middle, once blue plush and now grimed to a grey calico. On the sofa sat Harvey. His long legs were thrust forward and his head lolled to one side. He looked as
though he were pretending, without much acting ability, to be asleep.

His aunt darted in like a giant darning needle.

“All right, you. Where is it?”

It seemed strange that she would ask him this question straightaway. She never asked him whether or not he had actually taken it.

Harvey did not reply. He lay there on the sofa, his eyes flickering open, then half closing again. His aunt with an explosive quickness that made me jerk in every nerve, snatched the wooden spoon out of the bowl of batter and hit him across the face.

Harvey’s eyes opened a little more, but only a little. The amber slits stared at her, but he did not move. He bore it, that she had hit him like that, and in front of other people. He was not a kid any longer. His shoulders and body looked immensely strong. He could have thrust her hand away, or held her wrists. He could have walked out. But he had not done so. Slowly, with a clown’s grin, he wiped the batter off his face.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll give you one chance more, and that’s all. After that, you know what.”

I never discovered what final card she held. Would she have turned him over to the Mounties, or thrown him out of the house? It did not really matter. Maybe the threat was one left over from childhood, still believed in by both of them, out of habit. Or maybe there was no specific threat at all, only a matter of one will being able to inflict what it chose upon another.

He lumbered to his feet, and in a few minutes he came back to the room. He threw the telescope on the floor, and he gave me a devastatingly scornful look. Then he sat down on the sofa once more.

His aunt picked up the telescope and handed it to my grandfather. Her voice was a whine, but underneath it there was a desolate anger.

“You’re not gonna go to the police, are you? Listen, you got no idea how it’s been. What was I supposed to do, left with a kid to look after? Who’d have married me? What man would’ve taken on that? He’s never been anything but trouble to me. Who do you think he takes after? Some shit nobody but her ever seen.”

“I’m not going to the police,” my grandfather said aloofly. Then he went away.

“Did you know her, before?” I asked him, when we were walking home.