The Wanton Troopers (25 page)

He groaned.

“Oh, I bet your belly feels all funny and stirred up like creek water! That's even better than skatin', isn't it? Do you remember that first night we went skatin' and you said it was like runnin' across the moon? Well this is just as if you'd swallowed a little piece of the sun and it was shinin' all bright and warm inside you —”

“Don't,” he whispered. She was unfastening buttons. “Don't do that!”

He wrenched her hands away.

“Kevin! You're hurtin' my wrists!”

“I better go home.”

He would not have been more horrified and disgusted if her face had turned to a fleshless, grinning skull before his eyes. He thought of June Larlee and of Delilah and of Jezebel. He thought of how Eve had tempted Adam. In his mind there rose the figure of the serpent — a wriggling, hot, obscene thing . . .

Her blouse was half-open. He wanted to — No!

“What's wrong, Kevin?”

Her eyes were hurt, scornful.

“It's a sin!” he shouted.

“You liked it! You liked it!”

“No! That's a lie. I couldn't never like no sin. It's terrible wicked sin. People go tuh hell fer doin' things like that.”

She drew her blouse together.

“Don't look at me that way, Kevin.”

She sprang to her feet.

“Kevin, I wouldn'ta let any other boy in school touch me like that! I thought you wanted to, Kevin.”

He pulled on his mackinaw.
And after they ate of the fruit of the
tree of the knowledge of good and evil they knew that they were naked and
they were ashamed . . .

A moment ago she had been on the verge of tears, pleading with him. Now her voice rose in contempt and rage.

“You're just a baby! You don't know your — from a hole in the ground. I shouldn't never a had anythin' to do with you. I shoulda told Alton Stacey I'd be his girl — or Riff Wingate. You just wait until Monday, you'll see me with Riff and when you go by I won't even spit on you. You little —”

Blind with humiliation, he opened the door.

“Kevin! Don't be mad at me, Kevin! I won't really go with Riff. I promise, I won't. I —”

He lurched outside and stumbled along the narrow footpath to the road. The windblown pellets of frozen snow were like coarse salt hurled into his face.

Twenty-Nine

Judd had worked two weeks for a farmer, cutting and peeling pulpwood. But when he asked for his wages, the man told him impatiently that he could pay him nothing until spring. So Judd quit and went back to his futile wood chopping on the crown lands south of the creek. And, a few days after Kevin's twelfth birthday, Biff Mason informed Judd that he had reached the limit of his credit at the store. In relaying Biff 's words to Mary, Judd howled with fury and muttered dark threats. Some morning, he predicted, Biff would wake up to find that his store had burned to the ground.

Martha urged him to seek help from the township overseer of the poor. The suggestion made Judd spring to his feet and shake his fists like a madman. “I'll fry in hell a-fore I'll ask for help from any man!” he roared. “We'll live on what we got or we'll starve tuh death. One thing's certain: Judd O'Brien ain't never gonna ask nobody fer nothin'!”

The pantry contained almost a barrel of flour and the cellar held a bin of half-frozen potatoes. So, three times each day, they ate butterless bread or biscuits and the wizened, green-tinged, bitter-tasting potatoes that were edible only when drowned in lard-and-flour gravy and drenched with salt. Judd affected to relish this fare. “Ain't nothin' puts meat on a man's bones like taters,” he grunted as he dug his fork into the mud-coloured porridge before him. And every night he padded to the pantry in his socks and came back with a cold, dry biscuit which he covered with salt and washed down with water. As he ate, he smacked his lips and sucked his teeth like one enjoying a rich and hearty repast. Kevin was almost convinced that Judd ate such food through choice.

Mary refused to eat at the table. At mealtime she sat, chin in palm, in the chair by the window and stared at the naked lilac hedge and at the rose bushes, which the weight of the snow had borne to the ground. Two or three times a day, she stole into the pantry and nibbled a biscuit in secret. And, Kevin knew, her letters to her imaginary correspondents were filled with descriptions of banquets.

In mid-February, Judd sold the second cow to meet a payment on the house. Otherwise, he said, he and his family would be thrust out in the snow. As the cow was led out of the yard, Grandmother O'Brien stood at the window and watched, her brick clutched to her waist.

“It jist seems tuh me that God's put a curse on this here house!” she said. “It jist seems like God's tryin' tuh punish this here house fer some awful sin that's a-goin' on in it.”

“Judd being out of work for three months has a helluva lot more to do with it than God has,” Mary snapped. Kevin looked up in amazement: his mother almost never swore.

“Curse an' swear as much as yuh please, me girl. There ain't a sparrow falls without the Good Lord a-knowin' about it. And the Good Lord allus punishes sin. When a house is fulla sin, the Lord jist naturally reaches out His hand an' smites it —”

“Oh, what do you know about it! You aren't God!”

Grandmother O'Brien's voice was a whiplash of scorn, “No, I ain't God! I never said I was! But I know sin when I see it! I ain't blind, me girl — these old eyes is tired but they ain't blind. I know about the wicked, ugly, unclean sins a the flesh! I'n see 'em right under my nose! I know that God will punish an adult —”

“Shut up! You shut up your dirty old mouth! You foul old woman! Ever since I've been married, you've been sitting around here blatting about sin. To hell with you and your sin! I'm sick and tired of hearing about it.”

Grandmother O'Brien turned to Kevin, who sat trembling in a chair by the table.

“Run out and help yer father, laddie.”

Quivering with nausea, he got to his feet.

“Don't you tell him what to do! Don't you give my son orders!”

Mary dug at her eyes, beginning to weep.

“Eh! An' a fine son he'll be with the likes a you fer a mother. Yes an' with the blood a God knows what a-burnin' in his veins. Conceived in sin! Conceived in godless, filthy lust! The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge! Oh, aye, a fine son he's like tuh be!”

“Shut up! Shut up before I kill you!”

“Is it a murderess yuh'd be, eh! Come ahead, me girl, I dare yuh. One more sin won't make no difference now. Yuh'll burn in hell! Yuh'll burn in hell with Jezebel and Delilah! Yuh hear me, girl! Yer gonna burn in hell!”

With a cry, Mary seized a stick of millwood from the box by the stove and advanced on the old woman. Martha made no move to raise her hands.

“Don't, Mummy!” Kevin screamed.

Babbling, his breath coming in great spasms, he ran to his mother and grasped her wrist.

“What the hell's goin' on in here?”

Judd stood in the doorway. The club fell from Mary's hand. Kevin clung to her, hiding his face. Martha swayed, then staggered to the rocker and sank down.

“Ma, what's wrong?” Judd bent over her. “Will somebody tell me what the hell's goin' on here?” He laid his palm on his mother's shoulder. “You all right, Ma?”

“Yes, son, I'n stand anythin' the Good Lord wants tuh hand out tuh me. Ain't no cross too heavy fer me tuh bear. Though he slay me yet shall I trust in him. Praise His name. Don't pay no mind tuh me, Juddie. It ain't yer old mother yuh got tuh worry about, boy.”

Judd stared around wildly as though in search of a culprit. “Hey, you!” His big hands closed on Kevin's shoulders. “What are yuh! Nothin' but a little wizzenin' petticoat sucker? Eh? You hush that whinin' or I'll give yuh somethin' tuh whine about. Yuh hear me?”

Jerking him away from Mary, Judd shook him. Then — it was as though the wind lifted him and hurled him from a great precipice. Falling, whirling, twisting, he plunged into an eyeless and bottomless pit. Down . . . and down . . . and down . . . and down. From a ledge, hundreds of feet above him, came his mother's voice, growing fainter: “Scampi! Scampi! What's wrong?” His last conscious thought was that he was dying —

He regained consciousness in the living room. His mother knelt by his cot, holding cold cloths to his temples and chafing his wrists.

As he opened his eyes, she tried to smile.

“You fainted, Scampi. That's all. You just fainted,” she said.

He tried to raise himself, tried to reach out to her, then fell back. He was like one come back from the borderlands of death.

“I'm going away from here, Scampi.”

“Yeah.”

Somehow he had known this for a long time.

“In a few weeks I'm going to live in town — in Larchmont. You'll have to stay here with your father for a while. But I'll come back for you. I promise I will, Scampi.”

“Yeah.” His voice was dubious. He did not have sufficient energy to pretend to believe.

“Oh, Scampi!”

Weeping, she lay her face on his chest. She shook his body with the convulsions of her sobbing.

He sought to lift his hand . . . sought to touch her . . . but he could not. And in this moment he knew as though God Himself had told him that never again would he be able to reach her.

Thirty

He walked in the windswept road and he did not know if he walked there in reality or in dream.

The world was too huge and strange. He could never hope to understand it. He wished he could crawl into the earth like a worm and hide there in the darkness where nothing could reach him. He wished he were a tree or a stone. He wished he were a single snowflake in one of the great drifts beside the road. He wished he were a fencepost, a blade of grass, a twig — anything that did not have to think and feel and struggle with the unanswerable questions with which God badgered human beings.

“I wish I'd never been born!” he cried. And he hated his parents for having brought him into this world. He could not put words to the thought, but it seemed he remembered a long-ago time in which he had lain in a dark, secret place where there were no terrifying questions to be faced, no agonizing choices — where there was only will-lessness and warmth and a great peace.

Thoughts whirled through his mind. His mother's hands soaping him before the kitchen fire. The ecstacy of surrender. He was no longer himself. He existed only as part of her body. Then the mill with its pulsating engine and shrieking saws. The oxen plodding forever before their log-boat. The old swaybacked nag floundering in deep sawdust.

There is a fountain filled with blood,

Drawn from Emmanuel's veins,

And sinners plunged beneath that flood

Lose all their guilty stains.

Blood ran from the nail-pierced hands of Jesus.

Blood dripped from the knife-tormented flesh of Hitler.

Blood from the throat of a deer. Blood from the pitchforked side of a cow. The blood of the orange-haired cat on the blade of a hatchet . . .

Oh, Daddy, don't kill me. Please don't kill me!

The clock-like gong of the strap. WHACK!

I love you, Daddy! I do love you. Please don't hurt me, Daddy!

Key-von O'Brien is a snotty-nosed little pimp.

Key-von O'Brien's mother still has tuh change his didies.

Key-von O'Brien's mother is the biggest old whore in Lockhartville.

Make 'im say it, Av! Make 'im say it, Av!

The skin torn from his palms, blood gushing from his nostrils and dribbling from his mouth.

Blood. Blood. Blood. Blood.

Have yuh had enough, Av? Have yuh had enough?

Well, if they ain't a-gonna fight, don't yuh think they oughta kiss and make up?

And as I passed by thee and saw thee polluted in thine own blood, I said unto thee that wast in thy blood, live: yes . . .

The nights of waiting for his mother. Counting the cars passing.

But what of the thing in the cellar that drinks so much blood?

A dead raccoon by the roadside. An empty rum bottle lying on a grave.

Wait! One more thing! They'll come for you! Some night when you're
asleep in bed, they'll come for you, and they'll make you a living corpse like all the rest of us! They will! They'll come with knives and ropes and
they'll drag you out of bed and they' ll
—

The gloss of darkness in Sarah Minard's parlour. Her fingers pinching his flesh.
You're a very pretty boy. Kevin. Do you know
who I am? I am Death.

Nancy Harker's hands on his body.
All the mill men get drunk.
Madge says it's the only time they're alive.

His mother's hands on his body.
Oh, Scampi, there isn't anything
worse than being dead!

Yes, laddie, when God was on earth, women like her was stoned
tuh death!

Yuh' ll burn in hell, me girl! Yuh' ll burn in hell!

June Larlee's legs in red shorts. June Larlee naked on Kaye Dunbar's bunk.

June Larlee:
I guess yuh wouldn't have tuh look at him twice tuh
know he wasn't a girl, would yuh, Mar?

The pictures of nearly naked girls on the walls of Kaye's shack. Nancy Harker unbuttoning . . .

Cheatin' little bitch! Dirty cheatin' little whore! That snivellin' little
bugger don't act much like no O'Brien!

Conceived in sin! Conceived in godless, filthy lust!

Put your hand there, Kevin. Put your hand there.

I'm a love-child, did you know that?

Put your hand there, Kevin.

Put your hand there.

Baby. Bay-bee. Sweet bay-bee. Sweet Scampi. Sweet Scampi bay-bee. Sweetest, sweetest, baby. Bay-beee . . . baybee . . . bay-bee . . .