The Island Walkers (56 page)

“All right,” Ellen said. “Give me the damned thing.” She shot another poisonous look at her husband, who was staring at her, apparently in shock.

Doyle gave her the card, and she signed it on the small table beside her chair. She sent Jared out of the room to find a dollar, which he brought to her with evident distaste, holding out the bill and averting his head as she took it. She extended one arm, and as Doyle took the dollar and the card from her, she looked over at Alf and, without changing her dour expression, slipped him a wink.

After, in the car, Alf said, “I was ready to walk out of there.”

“Sometimes it’s the right move,” Doyle said. “You develop a feeling. That one was a believer, I knew it when I came in.”

“A believer,” Alf said, gently mocking. He was beginning to think that Doyle was a bit of a hot-air artist. They were driving down Shade, between the closed stores.

“She’s mad,” Doyle said. “You could see it in her face. She knows there’s injustice in the way things work — knows it in her gut. The whole time she’s saying, No, no, and doing the sensible thing. But inside there’s a tough old gal standing with clenched fists saying, Just give me a shot at the buggers.”

“You seem so sure,” Alf said critically. Doyle looked over at him.

“You must have sensed something yourself there.”

“Not me,” Alf said.

“Then why’d you give me her name?” Doyle said. Alf was startled. Why
had
he given Doyle Ellen’s name? He looked out at a passing tree, its new leaves orange in the tide of light rolling in from the west.

They got five signatures that night, with four refusals. The last refusal came at a house in Erie, a village a few miles outside of town, where the door was slammed in their faces with a report that filled the silent, shadowy street. They drove slowly back towards Attawan. Through the open windows came the thick, drowning sweetness of lilacs, wafting from roadside groves as big as transport trucks.

“A good night’s work,” Doyle said. He was slouching back with one arm falling over the seat behind him, the other straight to the wheel, his big head on angle: the posture of a fulfilled man. Alf envied him his lazy pleasure in his achievement. Doyle seemed someone who believed, who had brought home the harvest of that belief. There was nothing sweeter in life, perhaps, but Alf could not share his sense of a job well done.

“I feel like you did it all.”

“We wouldn’t have got half those cards without you.”

“So what am I — a pretty face?”

“That’s right,” Doyle said. Alf chortled and looked out the window where the fields revolved among the great, dark citadels of the bush-lots. He
had
felt moments of satisfaction in getting the cards — there was something about being with Doyle that normalized the whole enterprise and made it seem more possible than he’d imagined. He’d even experienced a sweet surge of vengefulness — against Bannerman’s, against Prince, against Kit Ford. But revenge wasn’t enough. To do this work properly, he sensed, you had to be a believer.
He
wanted
to believe, with the same kind of certainty Doyle had, or even with the inchoate angry belief of Ellen Kelly, but he kept coming up against a barrier in himself.

“How do you justify it to yourself,” he said, “risking these people’s jobs, in the chance you’ll get a union in?” It was the question that troubled him most, just now. He hadn’t worried about it when he’d worked for the union in 1949: he’d been so excited by the tactical, almost warlike side of the campaign, so caught up in the hope of making a better world, and yes, so mesmerized by the head organizer, Cary Winner, that he hadn’t really taken in the risk to anyone else. He had now, though. He was older and, besides, what had happened to Pete and the others had left him wary of fooling around with people’s lives.

“Hey, what we’re doing is
legal
,” Doyle said with gentle sarcasm. “And what
they
do, I mean firing people for organizing, that’s
illegal
, brother.” After a while, sounding a good deal more weary, the organizer added, “I worry about it, of course I do. I guess I believe in the big picture. To be frank, I don’t believe in it the way I used to, when I was a tyro. But I believe — I guess I believe we can push this bloody society to a place where the values are a little different. Where an ordinary person’s job, just a decent bloody wage for God’s sake, is more important than the ability of some obscenely rich bastard to add a new wing to his house in Palm Springs.”

“But if he’s earned it?” Alf said. It was the old independent businessman in him speaking, the guy who had once wanted to build houses, to someday build a fine house for himself.

“Has he earned it?” Doyle said, a new ferocity in his voice. “Or has the unfairness Ellen Kelly knows about just allowed him a god’s leverage on things, a leverage no human being should have? I mean, I don’t deny the punter his reward, but too much is too much. I know men who’d rather let a hundred or a thousand other men go to the dogs than give up a straw of their privileges. They haven’t earned it any more than I’ve earned the
air I breathe. They’ve just taken it away from the rest of us.”

Alf knew Doyle had a point. A world where a few men had a hundred pairs of shoes and millions had none was not a just world. But hell, wasn’t there room somewhere between those two extremes? What, after all, was the matter with wanting to have a nicer house, a better car? Yes, for all he’d been through, there was something in him that was still hopeful he might rise one day. And a union wasn’t about rising — it wasn’t about life lived on the vertical. It was about the horizontal life, it seemed to him, a life where you couldn’t rise, unless everyone else rose with you, equally. The thought of a purely horizontal life depressed him.

He looked out the window. They were crossing a bridge; the murky water of the Attawan drifted in mist. He was caught, he realized. He was not a committed union man, he felt he was doing it to help those who had lost their jobs, and to make up something to Pete. And, yes, because he needed the money. At the same time, he was afraid that history might be repeating itself. If their campaign was discovered, there might be even more job losses than last time. There seemed to be no way out of this. He struck a match and lit two cigarettes. For the rest of the way home, he and Doyle smoked silently, turning their faces occasionally to the windows, to exhale into the rush of night air.

They paid their visits mostly in the evenings, and on weekends. That left the days free: long, rather tedious stretches of time in which Alf worked around the house. Sometimes Doyle came over and they sat outside, drinking juice or beer on the picnic table under the apple tree. They were becoming friends. Whatever the difference in their political beliefs, a deeper current was at work in them — a kind of sympathetic vibration. They liked each other, they shared a similar sense of humour, they had both fought in the war, Doyle as a member of a British regiment, an experience that had grated rather hard on
his then Northern Irish, Catholic, nationalist sentiments. “I was just like Hitler,” he liked to joke. “Fighting a war on two fronts.”

For Alf, Doyle’s presence was a kind of gift. After Pete, he hadn’t expected to have a close friend again. In a way, he was already closer to Doyle than he had ever been to Pete. With Pete, he had always felt a bit superior, a big brother looking out for a younger. But he and Doyle seemed more like equals, mutually respecting. He had a sense he’d never had with Pete, a sense that Doyle understood him.

One afternoon he and Doyle climbed with their beer over the dyke and sat on a log near the deep bend of the Atta, where it swung below Lookout Hill. They were talking about the war, and Doyle told a story about falling asleep one night on sentry duty. That night, the Germans had attacked the camp he was helping guard, killing three men, one a friend of his. No one had known he’d dozed off, and in any case there had been several other sentries, so no one had blamed him — but he obviously blamed himself. “If I have one regret,” he said, and broke off his sentence. In the silence that followed, Alf watched a gull that had settled on the river, like a small white boat adrift under the shadowy bank. His mind was full of Pete. Hadn’t it been the same with Pete and him — his one slip-up leading to a result he’d never intended — to a regret that would never go away? He had thought it impossible he would ever tell anybody about what he’d done to Pete. But now, his heart surging, he felt he was about to.

Yet he shied away at the last moment, not at all certain his friendship with the organizer could bear it. Not sure
he
could bear it. Instead, he told Doyle about the German boy he’d shot in the wine cellar. Except for the death of his brother, it had been the worst moment of the war for him — when the cellar door was flung back and he saw the boy at his feet, the broken wine bottle in his hand. “I suppose he meant to kill me with it, but he couldn’t have. I’d got him in the heart.”

“Jesus,” Doyle said.

Alf dug at the sand with the heel of his shoe. He hadn’t told the story well, hadn’t conveyed at all his shock at what he’d seen: the freshness and youth of that lifeless face.

And Pete was still alive in him, a pressure.

49

ONE SUNDAY EVENING
when Doyle was out of town, Alf got a call from Mary Carr. She’d been fired. “Somebody must have squealed on me to the Roadrunner,” she told him. “Can’t figure who it is.”

Joe had the car — he was off with some girl, a new one, Margaret said — so Alf walked over to Mary’s house on the Flats. It was a tiny, stuccoed place — one end of a long, oddly curved building that had once been a rail station, in the days when a line fed into the valley. His father had left from this spot to go to France in 1915. Red roses bloomed against the brown stucco.

Mary lived here with her twin daughters. Her husband, Carter, had decamped years ago, for the West, a runty little guy with an aggressive manner who, as Alf remembered, had been in trouble as a boy for stealing a shotgun. When Alf knocked on the door, one of Mary’s twins (was it Susie or Sharon?) looked out with wide-set, eleven-year-old eyes.

“Who’s that!” he heard Mary bellow. From deeper in the house came a sound of childish sobbing. The girl with her prominent, curved chin, like Mary’s, withdrew her head. The door swung open a little.

“Alf, come in! I’m on the phone. Deirdre.”

He waited in the cramped living room. There was a couch, which looked as if it folded out into a bed, two armchairs, a couple of small tables, and an old-fashioned radio topped with a statue of our Our Lady, her robe painted a bright blue, her arms out in succour. One of
the hands had broken off. Mary stood with the receiver in the kitchen doorway, saying, “Yeah, yeah, yeah” while looking blindly in Alf’s direction. The twin who answered the door had disappeared. The sobbing had stopped, replaced by sounds of a TV pumping out the opening theme of
The Ed Sullivan Show
.

Mary hung up the phone and threw herself into a chair opposite Alf. Her shorts revealed slim, very pale legs.

“The fucker,” she said angrily. “He had the nerve to take a cup of tea off me. He comes to fire me, and he sits right there where you’re sittin’ and takes tea!”

“Who?”

She looked at him as if not understanding, blinded by her anger.

“The Roadrunner! The son of a bitch smiled as he told me. ‘We know you’re with the union,’ he says. Well I didn’t deny it. I should’ve denied it, I guess. I mean, what proof did he have? But I couldn’t — there was somethin’ in his face, I just wanted to hit him with the truth. He’s lucky I didn’t hit him with a brick. I did it to myself, no less!”

And she held Alf’s eyes in disbelief, as if
he
might tell her why she’d acted against herself — why she’d admitted to the Roadrunner that she was with the union when all she had to do was deny, deny. Of course, as she said, he
might
have laid her off anyway, but then at least she could have said she’d done everything she could to defend herself and her girls.

“The bastard wanted me to spy for them,” she said, throwing one long leg over the other.

“Spy —,” he said. He felt he had woken from a dream-state, in the deep chair.

“You know, I find out who’s signed cards, I can keep my job. The swine.”

“And you refused,” he said.

“I guess I did,” she said. She shook once, with a brief, silent laugh. Then tears glistened. “What am I gonna do with my girls! I can’t keep this place on unemployment!.”

“I’ll talk to Doyle,” he said, struggling to find his voice. “He’ll put you on salary,” he said, promising wildly. “At the least, when the union goes in, we’ll get you your job back.”

“That’s what Deirdre says.”

“Well there you go. We’ll fix you up.”

It was almost dark when he left her house. He walked down Willard to the corner of Bridge, and for a moment looked down the raceway, to the mills in their Sunday stillness. He had spent nearly twenty years in those buildings; his mother and father had spent most of their lives there. But now the mills seemed opaque, a mystery, with their countless windows reflected dully in the water below. In his chest, a little anger flickered and was gone.