The Wanton Troopers (2 page)

Finishing, she draped the towel around his hips, like a loin cloth.

“Me Jane. You Tarzan,” she laughed.

Their communion of warmth had ended. Now, as he always did at such times, he felt a feverish desire for sound and action. He threw his arms around her and squeezed, exerting all his strength.

“Ohhhhh! You're hurting me!” she cried in mock pain.

“I'm the king of the great bull apes!” he boasted. “You wanta hear me give the cry of the great bull apes, Mummy?”

The previous fall, they had gone to the motion picture house in Larchmont, and, ever since, Tarzan and Jane had been a game between them.

“Oh! You forgot! I'm not Mummy, I'm Jane!”

“Sure! You Jane! Me Tarzan!”

He threw back his head and howled until he was out of breath. She laughed again and slapped his posterior playfully.

His father snorted, shook himself, and sat up on the side of the cot. Rubbing his eyes, he glared at them angrily.

“For Chrissakes, Kevin, do yuh have tuh make so damn much noise!” he roared.

Kevin blushed and stared at the floor. Water that had dripped from his body as he stepped out of the tub lay in the little valleys in the warped linoleum.

“Yer gittin' too big tuh act like a baby,” his father growled. He fumbled in the pockets of his jeans, found tobacco and papers, and began rolling a cigarette.

“Yessir,” Kevin mumbled.

Shrinking with shame and self-contempt, he thought of how pitiful was his own skinny, almost hairless body in comparison with that of his father. Judd O'Brien's arms were bludgeons, and his horny, yellow fingernails reminded Kevin of hooves.

“Come to bed, Scampi,” his mother said.

She laid her hand on his shoulder. With a scowl of irritation, he drew away. He hated her when she caressed him before his father, for he knew that Judd despised all caresses as symptoms of weakness. Even now, so it seemed to Kevin, Judd eyed him with undisguised contempt.

She took his shoulder again. This time her fingers dug into his flesh. He knew that she had sensed the reason for his withdrawal and that she resented it.

“Come to bed, Scampi,” she commanded him.

She took the lamp from the shelf and, carrying it in front of her and above her head, led Kevin to his room at the other end of the house.

Setting the lamp on a chair by his bed, she helped him into the worn-out shirt of his father's that he wore as a nightdress. The air in this room smelled vaguely stale. It was strange how the odour of a room indicated the amount it was used. The air here contained just a hint of the staleness to be found in the unfurnished rooms upstairs.

He wiggled under the patchwork quilts, under the grey wool blankets that his uncle Kaye had stolen from the bunk house of the last saw mill in which he had worked. His mother put the lamp on the floor and sat in the chair by his pillow. At this end of the house, the storm was muted; water running from the eaves splashed almost gently against the window.

She leaned over him, and again he inhaled the aura of her presence: the scent of her perfume that always reminded him of wintergreen and lilacs; the pungent, comfortable odour of her body, the smell of grease and cooking oils and sweat.

“Do you love me, Mummy?”

This was the beginning of a nightly ritual.

“Yes, sweetheart, I love you.”

“How much do you love me, Mummy?”

“Oh, I love you a thousand million bushels, sweetikins, a thousand million bushels.”

“I love you too, Mummy.”

The words, spoken in a drowsy monotone, were, in reality, not words at all, but sound-units in a charm. They were
abracadabra,
a charm against the dark powers of the night.

“Let's say our prayers now, Scampi.”

“Yeah.”

He chanted, running syllables together so that the prayer was broken, not by words, but by the rhythm of his breath.

Now I lay me down to sleep,

I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

If I should die before I wake,

I pray the Lord my soul to take.

God bless Mummy and Daddy,

and Uncle Kaye, and Grammie O'Brien,

and God bless everybody.

Two

The morning was bright and boundless, the air electric with that sense of freedom, of infinite distances and open spaces, that comes on a sunlit morning following a rain. Kevin had breakfasted on milk, toast, and porridge flavoured with molasses. Now he was walking down the gravelled road, toward the school house.

He kept to the soft shoulder of the road, where there was no gravel to sting his bare feet. The odour of the mud made him think of the strangely pleasant stink of horse manure and fresh-ploughed earth. A purple mist hung low over the fields and drifted lazily through the jungle of alders, willows, and mullein lining the overflowing ditches. Little beads of moisture adhered to the almost invisible hair on his legs, chilling him.

From the thickets came the shrill, toy-like song of the wood pewee and the raucous cry of the red-winged blackbird. Over the hill, on the intervals beyond the railroad track, great flocks of crows were cawing. Kevin noted that each crow cawed three times. Caw! Caw! Caw! He could not remember ever having noticed this before. Caw! Caw! Caw! Three caws each time. Never more, never less.

Reflected sunlight glistened on daisies, dandelions, and buttercups. The rain had raked petals from the wild rose bushes and many of them had been blown on the coarse gravel, where they lay, soggy but still delicate and velvety.

He came to a place where the road was bounded on both sides by barriers of spruce, stunted pine, and fir. It was colder here, because the trees shut out the heat of the sun, and the trees were dark; even at noon, all evergreens seemed to be dreaming of the haunted darkness of midnight.

Coming out of the woods, he passed the saw mill. This place both attracted and frightened him. The steam engine pulsed with ferocious, relentless power, pounding until the long, low, shed-like building shook on its log foundations. At intervals, the big saw emitted its scream of agony and triumph: the agony of the cleanly sliced log, the triumph of the luminous disc and its invisible, irresistible teeth.

There were five saws in the mill, Kevin knew. He had gone there many times, carrying tobacco or a lunch to his father. The biggest saw was called the splitter and Judd was known as the splitterman. When a slab dropped from the log carriage, Judd seized it and hurled it down the rollers to the slab sawyer. When a board fell free, he grasped it and, half-turning, threw it on a rack, from which it was taken by the edgerman. Judd had worked in the mill every summer since his fourteenth birthday.

The slab saw hung between two hinged beams. Cutting a slab into stovewood lengths, the slab sawyer gripped a metal bar attached to the beam and jerked the saw toward him, steadying the slab with his other hand. Twice in the years that Kevin could remember, slab sawyers had lost fingers, and once the swinging blade had ripped off a man's hand . . .

The edgerman trimmed the strips of bark from the edges of the boards. He stood about twelve feet from his small, twin saws and worked them with a long wooden lever. The saws could be moved in accordance with the width of the board. As each board was thrown, screeching, from the jaws of the edger, it was grasped by the trimmerman, whose saw tore off its ragged ends.

When these saws were working at full speed, they ceased to be substantial, metal things and became rings of nebulous, convulsive light. Kevin could remember moments in which he could hardly resist an urge to thrust his hand into one of these luminous rings. There had been times when his desire had become so strong that he had felt his stomach contract in fear as he turned away. He wondered if the men who worked in the mill ever felt tempted to throw themselves into these hypnotic whirlpools. In the twenty-five years that his father had worked at the mill, three men had been killed.

Steam billowed from the great, guy-wired stack and spurted from the exhaust pipe over the well. The saliva-light odour of steam mingled with the acrid tang of green sawdust. The mill-yard was full of men, all of them working furiously with logs and lumber. Even Stingle, who sometimes got drunk with Kevin's father, walked ahead of his team of yellow oxen, twirling his black whip over his head. The oxen had gentle eyes in their huge, stupid heads. Zombie-like, they plodded behind their driver, their heads bent low under the red yoke with its leather straps studded with brass and copper rivets, red knobs attached to the tips of their inward-curving, yellow horns.

The oxen hauled a drag, called a log-boat. All of the oxen in the world were named Broad, Bright, Star, Lion, Buck, or Brown. Horses, Kevin liked and sometimes feared; for these beasts, he felt only pity. No matter how often it was beaten, a horse retained a little glimmering spark of wildness. When let out to pasture on Sunday, even the old, sway-backed nag that pulled the sawdust cart would sometimes toss her head and neigh like a high-spirited colt. Kevin feared the teeth and hooves of horses, but something in him responded to the secret light he saw in their eyes, the freedom and grace that could never be wholly destroyed by work or punishment but ended only with death, because its life was inseparable from the life of their bodies.

The oxen were strong, but their strength was as lifeless as that of the steam engine. They did not husband their strength, as horses often did. When yoked to a load, they pulled as hard as they could from the first, and they continued to exert all their strength until they were halted by their teamster. Under the lash, a horse would cringe or strike out with its hooves; an ox accepted pain as stolidly as it accepted changes in the weather.

“Hello, Mister Man,” Eben Stingle said.

“Hi.”

“If yuh don't hurry, yer gonna be late for school. Then, most likely, yuh'll git stood in the corner.”

Eben laughed, revealing tobacco-stained false teeth. Kevin grinned. He thought the joke inane, like most of the things men said to boys. But he always grinned when anyone smiled at him. The response came instinctively, and he was hardly aware of it.

Beyond the mill, the road re-entered the woods. Poplar, maple, birch, and cedar grew here, crowded so close together that they sucked the life from one another's roots. The trunks of these trees were so small that Kevin could have spanned them with his hands, but they grew to great heights, stretching upwards toward the sun.

The school house was about a mile from Kevin's house. He turned into the yard now. The tin-roofed, whitewashed building sat in the centre of a half-acre field, surrounded by flat and almost lifeless grass. A ragged and faded Union Jack hung limp from a pole opposite the door. Little crayon sketches of animals were pasted to the foggy glass of the windows. Approaching the open door to the porch, Kevin felt his stomach tie itself into a familiar giddy knot, his throat throb with the raw dryness of fear.

He entered the semi-darkness of the porch. Half a dozen boys lounged against walls studded with coat-hooks. Among them were two husky fifteen-year-olds in Grade VI: Riff Wingate, whose grin revealed a mouthful of broken, yellow teeth and whose breath stank of decay, and Harold Winthrop, whose face was pocked with feverish, red pimples and who liked to boast of the things that he had done to girls. To Riff and Harold, school was a ribald joke. Next summer, they would be peeling pulp or sawing slabs at the mill.

“Well, if it ain't Key-von!” Riff laughed.

Kevin reached for the knob of the inner door. Lifting his leg lazily, Harold barred his way.

“What's yer hurry, Key-von? Don't yuh like the company?” Harold smirked.

Ashen-faced, his hands by his sides, Kevin said nothing. Av Farmer stepped forward, a pudgy, fox-eyed boy of about Kevin's age. Kevin's terror of this boy was so abject that he could not muster sufficient pride to hate him.

Harold, Riff, and the others pressed close, grinning, their eyes bright with anticipation.

“The man spoke tuh yuh, Key-von,” Av leered. “The cat got yer tongue or somethin'?”

“Mebbe he ain't learnt tuh talk yet,” Alton Stacey guffawed.

Women said of Alton that he was pretty enough to be a girl. But his cunning had saved him from Riff and Harold. He had come to Lockhartville from Ontario, and he had cultivated the reputation of a sophisticate, a reputation he had enhanced by teaching Riff and Harold to shoot craps in the woodshed behind the school house. In these games, Alton invariably lost, and neither Riff nor Harold ever taunted him because of his resemblance to a girl.

“Show Daddy if the cat's got yer tongue!” Av demanded. He grabbed Kevin's collar and shoved him against the door. “Come on now, show Daddy!” The others giggled.

Kevin went limp. His paralysis was too negative a thing to be described as fear. His blood was water, his heart and brain ash. All feeling was dead. The room was a vibrating blur.

“Show Daddy, Key-von!”

Idiotically, he stuck out his tongue. The boys howled and danced with excitement. Kevin wished that he could sink through the floor, sink to the dark centre of the earth and cower there forever.

“Key-von's got a tongue! Cat didn't git it, after all!” Av shrieked.

“Did yuh see that! Did yuh see what Av done!” Riff was almost hysterical with joy.

Av reached out, grabbed Kevin's nose with one hand and his chin with the other, yanked his mouth open.

“Yessir, he's got a tongue!”

“Key-von's got a tongue!”

Mercifully, the bell rang. Av threw Kevin aside like a worn-out toy. The boys brushed past, elbowing him. Blindly, he stumbled after them into the class room.

Kevin believed that every one of these boys was stronger, tougher, and braver than he. Secretly, he envied their courage and strength and wanted to be like them. But he consoled himself by the conviction that when they grew up they would be only pulp peelers and mill hands. They would live all their lives in Lockhartville, fenced in forests and rivers, and at last they would die here and be buried in the cemetery behind the Anglican church. But he — ah, he would be a lawyer, a doctor, a member of parliament, and one day he would come back here, wearing a black suit and a shining white shirt, and then he would spit in their eyes! And, in thinking this, his eyes and mouth took on that insolent, faintly contemptuous look that made them hate him.