Peace Shall Destroy Many (14 page)

“Nice posters they’re sending out, eh?” Old Lamont had come round the partition and blinked at him over the cluttered counter. “Pretty desperate for overseas recruits, I’d say. What do you think of it?” The rheumy voice needled slightly. He had fought his war thirty years before.

“Guess they can send out cheap posters if they want.”

“In the Great War they had no need to send posters like that to every smallest post office. Now—” The old Scot turned, his hand in a candy jar. “Mr. Block has me put them up about a day to fill regulations.” He shuffled out suddenly and jerked the red-blue poster from the wall. “Stupidity! Them as are gutless it won’t bother. And for the others it’s no’ a matter of stomach.”

Thom looked up, surprised, into the blinky eyes. He read the old friendliness and understanding there, mellowed with something like pity. For a moment Thom could not fathom that last, then he turned quickly towards the door.

“Thanks, Mr. Lamont.” As he closed the door, he heard the cardboard crumpling.

Thom stirred, looking up at Annamarie as she picked swiftly. Her slender figure seemed hardly to touch the ground.

The girl was thinking about her brother’s struggles and what answer she could return. She gloried in friendship. Marriage, which in the Wapiti situation of male initiative dominated most girls’ thoughts after leaving school, was to
Annamarie a natural consequence of life and so she did not bother herself thinking about it. She did not for a moment doubt she would some day marry; she was so unconscious of her own charming femininity, so occupied with what to her were more pressing matters, that she had no idea of Thom’s upheaval. She had enjoyed the drive of two months ago beyond expression, but she had reacted to the beauty of the whole evening, not merely to Thom’s presence. Her whole character conspired to conceal from her the effect she had had on the youth.

She arose now with her brimming pail. “I’m going to empty—are you?”

“Oh, you’re always so fast—but I’m about full too.” Margret laughed, “Thom’s only half!”

“Well,” he said, pretending discouragement, “I only come along to drive you anyway.”

“If you’d let us try, you might lose that job too,” Annamarie laughed as the two girls walked toward the milk pails in the shade of a pine-clump. The team and horses were out of sight in the trees.

So were the two older women, who picked with the greatest rapidity. Since coming to Canada they had acquired their families’ winter fruit in this way. They tried to k
eep the smaller children in sight, if not within admonishing distance, but with Hal to stir the Lepp twosome into action, either task was impossible. Bent on their work, they contented themselves with occasional halloos.

The three children were beyond a low ridge and a thick stand of pine, happy in their isolation. Since they had grown up in a wild country, the bush held no fears for them. Though the youngest, Hal was clearly the leader. He had conceived a
Great Plan that morning and had been trying ever since to get nine-year-old Johnny away by himself to reveal it, but Trudie, two years older and equipped with adequate intuition, stuck with them tenaciously. Finally Hal blurted his idea in her presence and she, habitual superiority forgotten, cried,

“Oh-h yah! Look at these pines here! The cabin could be right here and we’ve lots of trees to build it and for fire-wood in the winter—”

“Shucks,” Hal sneered, “I guess any
girl
would build on the north side of trees so she could have all the wind and snow blowin’ right on toppa her. It’s right in the open—anyone could see it an’ they’d find us right away an’ get us home. Na, we’ve gotta build it in the thick bush, in that hollow we come through that’s so thick all round—”

“Yah,” Johnny echoed, eyes agleam, “an’ me an’ Hal would be trappin’ all winter like the Indians an’ come back at night with our furs in the snow an’ you could be here in the cabin all day cookin’ an’ doin’ stuff an’ we’d skin ’em in the evenin’ an’—”

The three sat silent on the moss, faces rapt in the dream, pines whispering above them. They were alone o
n earth and theirs was one great happiness of anticipated life. They thought of the small open hollow they had traversed among the silent pines and the completed cabin already stood there thick-frosted with snow, smoke curling around the ice-rim of its chimney and up between laden trees. Johnny reached into the pail beside his sister and thoughtfully ate the last berries.

“How much do you get for a mink, huh?”

Hal considered profoundly. “’Bout five bucks.”

They had, occasionally, seen that much money when their fathers took them along to the store. Hal said, in wonder that
they had never thought of running away before (it was not that they disliked their homes: they were not thinking of their parents), “’Magine! We could get 250 taffy suckers for
one
mink. ’Nough for a whole winter!” They sat in silent awe.

“Aw, how could you two shrimps build a cabin?” the momentary charming of Trudie’s habitual superiority faded. “An’ what would we live on all the time—suckers?”

Hal had known it would not do to tell her. For a moment he had succumbed to the obvious asset of a cook and dishwasher, but they’d never wash anyway and she’d just want to boss them. He said, caustic, “I never asked
you
to come. You can just keep quiet—tha’s all—we don’t want any stinky girls—”

“I’ll tel
l your Mom on you an’—”

“No you won’t,” Hal yelled, “I’ll smash you to pieces before—” and he flew at her with daring intent, not caring that she could always throw him down,
when Johnny, who in wise meekness always sided with the winner, hissed sharply. The children froze, listening.

A horse trotting in their direction. In a moment the legs of a bay were visible through the tree-trunks, and then the rider emerged. It was Herb Unger. He jumped his horse over a log and reined up, grinning at Hal’s war-like posture.

“Hi, kids. What’re you fighting and hollering about?” He lounged on his jaded horse, face friendly.

“Hi, Mr. Unger,” said Trudie, shifting swiftly into her as-one-adult-to-another attitude. “It’s just Hal—always makin’ a fuss.” She talked as a mother would speak about her week-old infant. “He just got the idea of running away from ho—”

“Shut up, shut up, you ol’ sow!” Hal fairly screamed, only the presence of an adult restrained his attack. “You ol’—”

“Now hold on there, kid,” Herb’s voice soothed. He was alone enough to enjoy talking to children. “No use to get mad. Running away’s all right—every kid wants to, but it’s a big job if—”

“You can keep quiet too!” Hal shouted, past all caring. He glared up at the rough figure above him in the saddle, at the gun slung in the scabbard under the stirrup. “You think you’re such a Bigshot ridin’ around all the time with a gun.” Herb’s grin broadened and Hal, completely infuriated, could only scream, “You wait till Thom gets you!” The little boy’s frantic thoughts caught on an incident. “Can’t even keep your fence fixed! Thom was mad enough to clean you up that time. Just wait till he gets you! He’ll
do it right now if he sees you hanging round here.”

Herb’s face darkened as he looked at the two Lepp children. “Yah.” He muttered half in his beard. “He’d be here—picking berries with the women.” He spoke more loudly, Hal jubilant at the anger in his voice: “Where are they?”

Trudie directed importantly, “They’re over the ridge. Mom’s over there, the others there.”

Without a word, Herb wheeled his horse stiffly and trotted into the trees, ducking the supple branches. The children listened to the faint thump of hoofs on moss, then Hal whispered, rage forgotten, “Maybe there’ll be a fight! C’mon!” All three raced after the rider, their empty pails left blinking in the empty clearing.

Thom and the two girls had picked their way into the open where only the stumps and half-burned logs lay under the long sky. Margret looked at the sun, high and directly in the west. “About one more pail—then time for chores.”

Thom thought, And the day will be over. He looked at
Annamarie, picking steadily, and she glanced up and smiled. He could not have enough of looking at her; he was thinking that a whole lifetime would not suffice to see her, when the snort of an approaching horse marred the quiet. As they looked up, wondering, Herb emerged from among the trees.

Without particularly trying to avoid Herb, Thom had not encountered him since the picnic two months before. Herb now drew rein near them, looking in silence at the girls, and Thom suddenly comprehended a shade of this man’s need. Here was a man as lost and forlorn as the half-breed children that squirmed tousle-haired and ragged on the school seats every Sunday afternoon. Concerning the beg
inning of their antipathy Thom could not remember anything, except that childish matter about the two fish and then his own even more childish behaviour at the ball-game. How a mole-hill had mushroomed! He said, smiling, longing for friendship, “Hello, Herb. Out for a ride?”

The other returned, without a look, “No, I’m diggin’ ditches.” Margret blushed slightly under his gaze. “Hi. How’s the berries?”

“They’re good here,” with a wave of her hand. “See for yourself.” She busied herself with picking as Herb slid in one motion from the saddle and hunched down near her. Margret had never told anyone except her mother that Herb Unger had once asked her to marry him. She could still remember the question as it had confronted her one evening the preceding summer while the sun flamed out in the west. Alone, she was idling along the grain-field where faintly pink roses bloomed thick among the rocks, when he appeared beside her as if he had followed all the evenings that she had walked there, a ghostly attendant. As she understood, the question pushed
stunningly into her shock. He accepted her silence as hesitation and repeated the question gently, adding he now had a farm that could be fixed up, that she would be close to her parents. She could only think of the smell of his greased hair stifling the fragrance of wild-roses pinned at her breast, then she abruptly burst into running across the growing grain towards the house, not caring for anything save flight, her broken, “Oh-h, never—never!” seeming to stretch thin and snap in the twilight air between them as she fled.

She had no inkling of how he had stood, feet in the green grain, listening to her stumbled steps, and then shuffled back to his hovel like a whipped animal. She only knew now the dreadful distaste she had felt then, as out of the corner of her eye she saw his black-rimmed fingers rooting for berries. Now she hunched away.

Annamarie asked, in her warm voice, “What do you hunt this time of year?”

His voice broke in an unaccustomed laugh, “Well, I got tired o’ the same old thing, so I thought I might find me a small deer strollin’ around eatin’ berries maybe. Must ha’ heard me comin’ though.”

“Hunt out of season?” Her voice was reproving.

“Have to eat every day, dontcha? An’ Indians can shoot year round.”

“You’re no Indian, and it’s not right to do it, Herb.”

“We-ell, some people don’t think I’m much better.” He spoke in that peculiarly expressionless voice that he could employ on occasion; to each of them his words meant something quite different.

“Go on with you! Nobody thinks that. And if you’d behave yourself as you—”

“But that’s just the trouble. I don’t. The Wienses here are my neighbours—they know. That’s why they’re both pickin’ berries like mad! Look at ’em.”

Annamarie said coolly, “We’re your neighbours on the other side and we haven’t complained. What makes you think—”

“Yah, but the Wienses,” Herb paused, looking only at Thom, “have to put up with my poor fencing—so that they blame near chuck their love-for-all-fellow-men overboard and get all riled up in their house, which is just far enough from my place so I can’t hear them. Don’t they, Thom?” The sarcasm jelled thickly. Herb stood up, gnawing savagely on a few berries. “Why didn’t you come right over when you found my stock in your oats, Thom, and tell me to get that fence wired? Why send your Pa and the Deacon and my old man? Need the whole confounded church to tell one sinner he has to fix his fence?”

Annamarie, looking at the square grimy figure and then noting the fumble of Thom’s huge fingers among the berry-bushes, thought, Wouldn’t you be the surprised one if he ever took you up on your big words? It was clear to her that Herb talked because he rather depended on Thom controlling himself, yet that very restraint was partly what needled the bachelor to his baiting.

Thom said evenly, getting up to move with his pail, “When I run my own place, I’ll do that. You know the way we have of settling among ourselves.”

“Your kid brother there tells me that’s not quite the way you felt that morning.”

All had been so intent that only Herb had noticed the children approach. Thom, standing now, with Annamarie seated
directly between him and Herb, turned with the girls to see the three grouped beyond the grazing horse. To Thom, Hal’s face said, as if he had shouted it, “Plaster that Herb!” Thom knew the expression only too well; half his mind was urging with Hal, but he said, taking a step ne
arer the older man, “We all make mistakes in more ways than we know. I know what I wanted to do that morning, and I’m very sorry for it now.”

Herb nodded. “Yah. Nice speech.” He turned towards his horse, not looking towards the girls. “Probably be a preacher some day. I hear you’re already tryin’ it on the breeds—oh, hello, Mrs. Lepp, Mrs. Wiens.”

The two women had come up unnoticed, carrying their brimming pails. As they greeted Herb in their quiet way, Mrs. Wiens added, “It’s time we were going too. Look at the sun.”

Herb had mounted and, with a jerk, pulled his horse around. “Nice talkin’ to you folks. Hope my visitin’ doesn’t sour your fruit.”

Mrs. Wiens laughed, “Now why should it do that?” She pitied him with all her mother’s heart, this embittered man who was like an evil genius to her children, a man unloved and battering his better nature against the wall of what he knew he should do. Somewhere, along the line of his life, some Christian had possibly made a mistake. Or perhaps many. She looked down at her pail, misty-eyed.

“Never can tell,” Herb answered in the same easy tone, but his glance at Thom was quite different. For a brief choking instant, Thom almost heard him say, “Not only your Pa’s pants, but now behind women’s skirts!” Aloud, Herb only added, as an afterthought, “Well, well, well.” Then he kicked his sweat-roughened horse into a gallop and was lost among the trees.