The Bully of Order (16 page)

I decided then that my mother would live if I left. I was afraid of what would happen if I stayed. She couldn't die if I wasn't there. I had to leave before the doctor returned.

In the street I looked back at the doctor's house, with its six different styles of shingles. The windows mirrored the gray sky. Painted on the side of the shingle mill at the waterfront, it said: “We Do It All.” She was still in there, deep sleeping, as if she'd never lived. They do it all.

The McCandliss brothers, Ben and Joseph, spotted me down the hill and took off their hats and waved and yelled at me across the busy street. They didn't have a mother either and would surely like to compare loss to loss. Ben was trying to grow a mustache and looked like an ugly bearded woman, with his long hair grown past his shoulders. Joseph looked the same as he ever did in his too-tight clothes. His thick hands hung from his cuffs, curled and meaty. I waved and made like I was crossing the street, then cut between Weatherby's horse barn and the empty corral and hit Front Street running. Ben and Joseph's father, August McCandliss, was in the penitentiary for murdering a cattle rancher in Tacoma. And mine should be. We're none of us so different now. Somewhere out of my mixed-up thoughts rose the idea that life wasn't so much of a thing, you couldn't hold it except in your own body, but more of a season and too short, because when it ended everything changed and looked different and smelled different and that's where you were, you couldn't go back to where you'd like to be. You wake up one day and it's winter. You wake up one day and somebody is dead, and it might be you.

I went at a fair pace, with my back bent and my arms swinging. People on the street mostly stepped out of my way. A man dressed in a stiff and burned-smelling suit pushed me, and I smashed into the wall of Fitzgerald's Lodging House and spun and glared at the back of the man's head and his cauliflower ears sticking out from under his derby. I went on, both inwardly more scared and outwardly bolder than before. A black-haired girl blocked my path, plump in a blue dress with blood rising in her cheeks. I charged right at her and she slipped trying to avoid me and fell down in the mud, and I stepped over her legs like she was deadfall. When I looked back, I saw the ghost of my mother there on the ground. A skinny man dressed in black with a long beard came out of the crowd and leaned over her and offered his hand. A parental visage: death reaching.

So I ran. My lungs felt wooden and cracked. I hoped I'd be trampled by a horse, or fall somehow into the harbor and drown. I thought I could go with her, like I'd gone with her to town and to church. All the people had stopped talking and going wherever they'd been going and were watching me now. Birds watched me, horses and dogs. My strides lengthened, and I ran faster until I was at my ultimate, elemental pace, full, brimming; and I kept at it although I could feel it slipping; I ran as if I could run from this life to another. I could run to death, into its open arms, but I didn't want that. Fearfully, no.

At the intersection I stopped and huffed and hawked up stringy phlegm and wiped my eyes. It seemed the options weren't left and right but future and past. I walked up the street breathing and blinking and stretching my jaw, spit a yellow lunger from the very bottom of my lungs and wiped my chin on my jacket sleeve.

Bernice Travois, the old midwife, adopter of the McCandlisses, half-mother to all, was sitting on her porch. Someone had painted her house up to the height of a man but stopped there, no ladder. As I approached, she offered me a piece of bread from the basket on the porch. In the yard were six, maybe seven toddlers, wobbling and crawling in the trampled grass and mud, runny noses and scabby foreheads, pinkeye, jug-eared mud babies. I went into the yard and took the hard bread and bit into it and mumbled a thank-you through my chewing. I looked at the children in disgust. I was little once.

“I'm so sorry for you, Duncan,” the old woman said. “I'll say a prayer so that you'll be safe.” Bernice used to help teach school, but she didn't any more. Ms. Kletchko was the teacher now. Bernice raised the whores' unwanted children. Raising bastards up like corn, I'd heard said. The McCandlisses slept here.

I couldn't swallow, so I spit the bread at her feet and then scraped the wet crumbs from my mouth with my fingers, tasted my dirty hand. “I don't need nothin from you. Not yer pity or yer bread.”

“Heh,” the old woman said, sneered, showed missing and black teeth. Ben and Joseph said she was mean as a snake once the door shut you inside.

“Heh, yourself,” I said, and went on my way.

Since I missed the ferry, I took the road. I didn't have any money anyhow. I could sneak on, could free-hire a skiff, but I'd be against the tide. There was no stopping me from doing any of the wrong things anymore. The McCandlisses said that Hank Bellhouse told them that in wartime boys my age would be soldiering by now, saluting and marching and killing. “And what is peacetime soldierin if not criminal?” Joseph McCandliss said.

“If there's money that's not blood money,” his brother said, parroting Bellhouse, “I ain't seen it.”

Crossing the bridge, I spotted someone up ahead and was ashamed of myself, so I left the road and went overland, hiding, and not hurrying either. There was a path but I avoided that too. The rain made no difference to me. I hadn't even taken it into account until I was soaked through. The trees offered shelter and I zigzagged between them, more for the stillness than the dry. I rested for a while and the tears came back. The squirrels chattering in the trees and the lulling rain settled the question of my significance. I wished my father wouldn't have left me too.

Hours later, I came up from the river bottom and stood at the edge of the clearing and looked at the house. There was no smoke coming from the chimney. Our three remaining sheep stood rooted in the corral among the stumps and rotting logs, the standing water, looking in my direction. The milk cow must've heard me because it began to low. I wondered if the cow would miss her; if the birds might, the sheep, the mud, and the garden, the parsnips: the little old men.

The kitchen table and chairs had been pushed aside, and Uncle Matius's and Jonas's things filled the room. Their cases stunk of grease and woodsmoke and there were drag marks in the soft wood floor. Hay from the barn was scattered about and stamped into muddy footprints, but nothing in the bedroom had so much as moved. Father's rucksack, muddy and threadbare, was at the foot of the bed. He hadn't left at all. He'd be in town, lurching from bar to bar, moaning at the streetlights like they were burning him.

Father, get up. Mr. Bennet put you on his crew, remember? Mother promised him you'd be there.

Get away from me. I know when I leave. I know what. I know. I'm the best faller they got. I'm the bull of the woods.

Then get up and show them.

Show you.

Mother's brush and a paring knife, a file for her nails, were on her dresser. Next to the bed was a small wooden box with hairpins and some tin jewelry, her diary. She had two dresses besides the one she had on, and they were both hanging in the closet.

If Father left, he didn't take anything, and if he didn't take his bindle, he wasn't gone. They'd lied to me. He couldn't have gone without that. Now he was going to show up and ask for what? He wouldn't ask for anything. He never did. Relief was what I felt, and it made me sick. Don't be glad if he comes back.

I sat at the table in the corner with the shotgun and watched the door. The sound of the fire in the stove went on and on like there were tiny men working in there. I told myself that I was ready to kill him, and I'd do it too. I'd sit there and wait and when he came in I'd shoot him like he was an animal and I didn't know him and it was nothing. But sitting there I was as scared as I'd ever been.

The sound of the wagon and horses outside woke me. I waited, ready, while the wagon was unhitched and the horses put away. Jonas, the big cousin, came in first, and then Uncle Matius. They were both carrying crates of supplies. Neither of them saw me in the corner, both barrels aimed at the door, my finger on the trigger. The small heat from the fire was quickly sucked out into the night. Jonas saw me first. “Your father isn't with us,” he said. “It's just the two of us.”

“What in the hell are you doing, boy?” Matius said. “Put the gun up.”

“Where is he?”

“Who knows,” Matius said. “I said put that away.”

I lowered the shotgun and leaned it in the corner behind me. I had to push the table away to get out. “Is he coming back?”

“Sure he is,” Matius said, smiling.

“When?”

“I wouldn't care to speculate.” My uncle eyed me like I was food.

“He'll be away for a while,” Jonas said. Both he and Matius had on Belgian serge coats, like they'd been here all along, real Harbor regulars, but Jonas wore peg-top pants like a shingleweaver. Somebody should've told him.

“He said he was leaving,” I said.

“So he did. Help us bring all this stuff inside,” Matius said.

Not knowing what else to do, I did as I was told. Into the rain, to the wagon, arms heaped, flour and coffee, the bag leaked and spewed into my eye and burned. Inside, set down on the counter then out again. When we were finished Jonas shut the door, and we stood together in the kitchen.

“I'm sorry about your mother,” Jonas said.

“God knows she deserved better than your father,” Uncle Matius said, scratching his beard.

“Not now,” Jonas said to Uncle Matius. “Are you hungry, cousin?”

“This food has to last,” Matius said.

“I'm not hungry.”

“Your father left some money for you,” Jonas said.

“He left the money for me to watch over,” Uncle Matius said.

“You can't hold the boy in your debt for his own money.”

“He should know that if I let him in the door, I'm doing what's right by him, and I wasn't married to her.” Matius took a bite from his plug of tobacco, worked it into its place with his tongue. “He needs to understand that.”

“He understands fine,” Jonas said.

“He didn't take any of his stuff,” I said. “None of it.”

“We saw him at the docks.” Matius lifted the lid on the soup pot on the stove and looked into it, then spit and put the lid back. “I'd say he's in open water by now.”

“You'll be washing that, you filthy coot,” Jonas said.

“What should I do with his things?” I asked.

The two men watched me and then glanced at one another.

“And my mother's things?”

“Watch what you say, goddamn it,” Jonas said to his father.

“Watch your own self.”

“There's no hurry to decide,” Jonas said to me.

My uncle didn't move; he stood and looked down at me, his mouth working at the plug. “There isn't anything to talk about. It's done.” He spit through his teeth blasphemously this time onto the floor.

I pressed my tongue to the roof of my mouth, trying to staunch the coming tears.

“You hear me?”

“Yes.”

“You sure?”

“He said he heard you,” Jonas said.

“Good. That's good advice I just gave.”

“No lesson there to be had,” Jonas said.

“You could thank me,” Matius said to me. “That would be a start.”

She'd said, “Duncan, go to your room. I'm fine. Go on to bed.” Her eyeball was quickly turning the color of old blood, and there was a dark purple bruise rising at her temple. I went toward her, but she fended me off and pushed me toward my room. Jonas's hand on my back urged me on. I sat on the bed, and I could hear Matius and my father yelling outside, and then the sound of them fighting. Jonas went out and pulled them apart and Father went away yelling in the night, in the rain. Later Jonas came into my room and told me to get some sleep. “She'll be fine in the morning, just a bump on the noggin.” I did as I was told. I slept till morning and didn't remember dreaming.

Jonas passed me his kerchief and then squatted down in front of me and asked me again, like I was dim, if I was ready to eat dinner.

“Oh Christ, look at this,” Matius said.

“Leave him.”

“Crying doesn't help anybody.”

“I said, leave him. It's all right, Duncan. You can cry as much as want.”

“That's a hell of a lesson. Just a fine way—And I'm stuck with both of you. My worthless brother leaves me with this. I could've gotten my own clean start here, but now—What a mess.”

“It isn't your house,” I said. “You were supposed to leave. I heard him tell you to leave when you were outside, but you came back. It's my house, not yours.”

“You don't know a thing about it,” Matius said. “It's all of it, every acre and nail, my house. I hold the paper.”

I wiped my nose on the back of my hand. “You can't stay here.”

Matius gave me a steady, hate-filled look. “Stop your fucking blubbering, boy, or I'll crack you one.”

Jonas stood up hugely between me and his father. “There's all that grain that needs to be put up. Why don't you get to it?”

“Let the crybaby do it,” Matius said.

“No, you get out there and put it away, or by Christ I'll whip you in front of the boy.”

Matius's face twisted childishly. “You're not going to help me?” The roles of father and son had reversed. I wondered how old I'd have to get to have that happen. If my father would ever shrink, and if I'd ever be as brave as Jonas.

“I've had about as much as I'll take out of you,” Jonas said to his father. “You hear me? Go on outside. I'll start dinner.”

“And he's crying.”

“Yes, he is. And you'll leave him to it. Now get.”

“I'm your father.”

“Well, act like it.”