The Wanton Troopers (17 page)

“Gee whiz,” Kevin breathed. “Gosh!”

“O'course I expeck she's growed another finger by now, laddie. I expeck when somebody breaks a piece off of her, the Lord makes another piece grow right back on.”

“Holy mackerel!” Kevin whistled.

And he promised himself that when he became a man he would take a ship to Zoar and look upon the woman whom God's wrath had turned to salt.

At night, in the firelight-coloured seclusion of near-sleep, he saw the moon stand still on Gibeon and the sun in the valley of Ajalon. He saw the gleaming war chariots of the Amorites and heard the wall-shattering trumpets of Joshua. Swords flashed, spears rattled, lances hissed through the air. Fire and brimstone rained upon Sodom and hailstones smote the land from Azekah to Makkedah . . .

The creek became the River Jordan and beyond Jordan lay the lands of the Amorites. There dwelt Sihon, the King of Heshbon, and Og, the King of Bashan, who dwelt in Ashteroth, great ogres in leopard skins whose beards were frothed with their hatred of the Most High God.

In the sawdust desert behind the mill were the lands of the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. And beyond the cedared hills was the valley in which the swordsmen of Joshua ambushed and slaughtered the sons of Ai.

The grain field across the road was the field of Boaz in which Ruth had gleaned. And the swamp at the foot of the garden was the land of the Moabites. There Ehud, the son of Gera, the Benjaminite, slew Eglon, the King of Moab, a man so fat that when he was slain the fat of his belly closed over the hilt of the sword and hid it.

The north fence was the border of Abel-meholah. The great stone on the heath was Hebron. The barn was Jerusalem. The easternmost section of the heath was the valley of Rephaim and the alders were the mulberry trees in which the wind had sounded on the day that David, King of Israel, slew the hosts of the Philistines.

In this secret world, Kevin found somewhat the same sense of power and security as he obtained from his mother. And, unlike his mother, the God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob never abandoned him.

“I think you brood too much. It isn't good for you,” Mary said.

She sounded resentful — almost jealous.

“I ain't broodin',” he growled.

His voice was sullen. Since she had started going away in the evenings, her slightest criticism infuriated him. He felt that she no longer had any right to criticize him.

“Don't sauce, Scampi. I've got enough troubles without having you sauce me.”

“I ain't sassin',” he retorted.

They were in the kitchen, and Grandmother O'Brien was watching and listening. Her mouth might have been full of vinegar or sour milk, but Kevin knew that this was one of the ways she had of smiling.

Mary stamped her foot like a petulant child.

“You
were
saucing me! Don't you tell me that you weren't!”

“All right! Have it yer own way! I was sassin' yuh!”

This was how their quarrels were ignited and spread. It was like a grass fire: a single match was dropped in the dry spears and, within seconds, the flames were roaring across the field with the speed of the wind.

“Oh, Scampi! You treat me so awful sometimes! I do everything in the world for you and I don't get a bit of thanks for it! You aren't the least bit grateful for all the things I do for you —”

“I ain't never asked yuh tuh do anythin' fer me.”

“Oh, yes you have! You've come bawling to me a thousand million times, Scampi! Whenever the least little thing bothers you, you come running to me and you —”

“I won't come runnin' no more!”

He clenched his fists. Her taunts were a breach of trust. He hated her for betraying him.

“Oh, yes, you will! You'll come bawling to me. Oh, Mummy, you'll be whining. Oh, Mummy —” She imitated his terror-stricken whimpering. Her eyes were spiteful and pitiless. “Oh, Mummy, you'll be whining, and you'll want me to treat you just as though you were a tiny little baby and you'll —”

“It's allus
you
that wants me tuh act like a baby! It ain't me! It's you!”

“Me! Why, I wish you were a man! I wish you were big enough to go out and work for your living. Then I could put on my coat and walk out of here. I —” Her voice died. She bit her lip and glanced at Grandmother O'Brien. The old woman emitted a rattling, chuckling cough.

Kevin spun and ran to his room.

Throwing himself on the bed, he buried his face in the pillows and wept, his body jerking with the convulsive force of his sobbing.

After a long time, someone entered the room. He did not look up. This was his mother. She had come to comfort him. For as long as he could remember, their quarrels had ended with her voice in his ear, her soft, warm hands on his body. For a little while, he would pretend that he was still angry. She would stroke his ear lobes and the small of his back . . . Her breath would tickle his ear. And he would pout and refuse to respond to her pleading, lie stiff under her caresses. Then, when he felt that he had punished her sufficiently or when he could no longer restrain himself, he would turn and throw his arms around her neck and they would kiss, and —

“It don't do no good tuh bawl,” a harsh voice chided.

He lifted his head. Through a bubbling fog of tears, he saw his grandmother standing over him.

“It don't do no good tuh bawl,” she grated again. In her voice, sadness mingled with satisfaction.

Burying his face again, he sobbed until his throat burned as though boiling water had been poured into his mouth and nostrils.

Twenty

David was Kevin's favourite among the prophets, kings, and judges of Israel. He re-enacted the story of David until it seemed to him that he was not assuming the role of another, but repeating scenes from his own dimly remembered past.

As Kevin-David, he played the harp until the evil spirit departed from Saul. And as Kevin-David he went down into the valley of Elah to face the champion of the Philistines, Goliath of Gath, whose height was six cubits and a span and whose coat weighed five thousand shekels of bronze, and there he slew him with a stone from his shepherd's sling and smote off the head with his own sword, and when he returned from slaying the Philistine, the women came out of the cities with instruments of music and sang,
Saul has slain his thousands and Kevin-David his
ten thousands.

As Kevin-David, he fled from Saul to Achish, King of Gath, and there he pretended to be mad until he could escape to the Cave of Adullam, where four hundred men came and asked him to be captain over them . . .

Then came all the tribes of Israel to David unto Hebron and
spake, saying, O Behold, we are thy bone and thy flesh. Also in
time past when Saul was king over us, thou wast he that leddest
out and broughtest in Israel, and thou shalt be a captain over Israel. So all the elders of Israel came to the king of Hebron and
King David made a league with them in Hebron before the Lord
and they anointed David King over Israel.

The hen house was Gath, and the wagonshed was Perez-uzzah, where Uzzah was smitten when he touched the Ark of the Covenant. The east fence was Helam, where the king gathered together the men of Israel and slew the men of seven hundred chariots of the Syrians, and forty thousand horsemen, and smote Shobach, the captain of the host, who died there. And around him, Kevin summoned an invisible army led by the captains of David, among whom there were Abishai, the brother of Joab and the son of Zerulah, who lifted up his spear against three hundred, and Benaiah, the son of Jehoida, who went down into a pit and slew a lion in a time of snow.

And while Kevin-David led the armies of Israel into battle with the hosts of Bethrehob, Zobah, and Maacah, winter descended upon Lockhartville.

Judd hated winter. When the first snow fell, the lambent, star-shaped flakes melting the moment they touched the unfrozen earth, he stood at the window, shaking his fist and muttering with bitter sarcasm, “Snow, you bastard, snow! Snow, damn yuh, snow!” A few days later, the mill shut down and he, with most of the other mill hands, went to Larchmont and got drunk. This was November and Judd would be without a steady job until the mill re-opened in May . . .

One stony grey afternoon, Kevin helped his father bank the house. Now he wore wool breeches, tied with leather laces below his knees, flannel underwear that might have been made from rosethorns and thistles, two pairs of wool stockings, and a toque drawn over his ears. These clothes chafed like a straightjacket. And the wind, raking his cheeks and the strip of bare flesh between the cuffs of his mackinaw and his mittens, burnt like a dull knife.

Judd had wheel-barrowed slabs from the mill and, with these, built a box four feet high around the base of the house. Then, with a grub-hoe, he broke up a patch of frozen turf near the heath fence, and he and Kevin carried the sods and loose gravel to the box in shovels. The earth was almost odourless, but Kevin could smell the faint, yet unmistakable, scent of impending snow.

Judd worked like a machine, concentrating only on the shovelful of dirt in his hands. But this was not Kevin's way. He was depressed by the thought of all the hundreds of shovelsful of dirt that would have to be poured into the box before the task was finished. Two hours from now he would still be shovelling! When he emptied his shovel into the box it did not seem to make any difference at all in the level of the dirt. He tried to increase his load and, to his chagrin, more than half of it spilled away before he got back to the house. He moved faster, broke into a run, and again much of his load was lost. He dumped every load in the same spot, seeking to fill at least one small section of the box. Then he spread dirt from one corner of the house to the other, trying to do all of it at once. And all of these experiments his father watched with amusement and scorn.

“Take yer time, boy. We got all day,” he said. Or, “Be careful there, boy. Yer spillin' more on the ground than yer puttin' around the house.”

And Kevin almost wept in vexation and self-pity.

At last, he pretended that he was helping to build a wall for a fort. Yes, with the beginning of winter, the Amalekites began raiding villages. He was building a redoubt, against the lances and fire-arrows of the heathen.

He cast aside his coat of mail and his helmet of bronze and stood the sword of Goliath the Philistine against a mulberry tree —

“Look! The king himself is working at the wall!”

“Yes! He is setting an example to the people! He is giving them courage!”

“The great king himself is not ashamed to soil his hands with this lowly labour!”

“Surely, there is none like unto him in all Israel!”

“— What in Gawd's name are yuh doin', boy? Talking tuh yerself?”

Kevin was overcome with confusion.

“Gosh, no, I never said nothin',” he croaked.

“Sounded tuh me as if yuh was mumblin' tuh yerself.”

“No. I never said nothin'. Honest I didn't.”

“Well, it don't matter none, I guess. But remember this, boy, nobody never got no work done by standin' around an' dreamin'.”

“Yessir. I'll remember.”

An hour later, Judd cut spruce and fir boughs, spread them atop the dirt and tied them down with haywire. The first flakes of snow were melting on Kevin's cheeks.

“I guess there ain't nothin' more fer yuh to do here,” Judd said. “Yuh might as well go tuh the barn and start the milkin'.”

“Yessir.”

Only recently had Judd begun to trust Kevin with the milking. And even now he did not trust him wholly: he was constantly scolding him for leaving milk in the cows. “If yuh don't git all the milk, the cow will go dry. Remember that, boy,” Judd warned him.

“Yessir.”

He fetched the pails and the lantern from the house. It was dark now, the pertinacious, immuring dusk of winter. As he went in the cow stable, a gust of wind caught the door and sent it crashing shut behind him. He pulled off his mittens with his teeth, fastened the latch made of a length of haywire and a rivet, and went over to the cows.

The odour of the barn and the tawny-saffron glimmer of the lantern seemed to belong together. If smells had had colours, the smell of the cow stable would have been the colour of the lantern. He set the lantern on an overturned pail and kicked a milking stool, made from an old kitchen chair, under the red cow. She lifted her head and looked at him with mild curiosity, then turned back to her hay. The crunching jaws of the two animals made placid sounds. On a little mound of straw near the door to the feed room, an orange cat — half-brother to the cat that Judd had killed for stealing — lay purring. The wind bayed poignantly under the eaves and, somewhere on the roof, clacked a loose shingle.

His fingers began their rhythm: in and out, up and down, in and out, up and down, massaging X's of sweet milk into the pail, the sound changing as the pail filled. The walls were insulated with straw, stuffed behind unbarked slabs and secured with cardboard, but a draught from beneath the door chilled Kevin's ankles. He rested his cheek against the cow's warm, leather-and-manure-scented side. Scenting the milk, the orange cat rose, stretching, and came to arch its back against his feet . . .

Earlier, Judd had rented a team and a wagon from a neighbouring farmer and hauled twenty loads of millwood to the back yard. Every afternoon when he got home from school, Kevin took the bucksaw from its nails in the wagonshed and worked till supper, sawing the fourteen-foot-long staves into stovewood lengths. And, every day, as soon as he finished his mid-day meal, Judd hurried to the yard and sawed and split rock maple logs until the wail of the whistle summoned him back to the mill.

The millwood was burnt by day and the rock maple by night. The house was old and decayed, and the glacial winds burst through its walls like torrents of icy water churning through a broken dam. There were two stoves, one in the living room and one in the kitchen, and, from late November till March, Judd kept both fires burning day and night. In these months, Judd slept, fully clothed, on the cot in the kitchen so that he could rise hourly and stoke the fires without waking Mary. Once or twice in each winter, he overslept and allowed the fires to go out. On such nights, water froze in a crystalline mass in the bucket by the sink, twelve feet from the couch on which Judd slept.