Hunger of the Wolf (6 page)

The only way for Dale to assuage the uneasiness the girl provoked was long sessions of midnight masturbation—tricky when the bed's shared with a brother, his mass of flesh snoring then wheezing, farting, calling mangled monologues in slurry tempos, then panting and curling away. Wet dreams, loaded with bunches of collapsing black hair with bright black eyes, and her bent animal body, relieved him, anxiety finding its own way out of the labyrinth.

*  *  *

On April 3, 1917, Max careened into the offices of MacCormack and Sons with the happiest news any young man could imagine: A public and acceptable killing was about to begin. The war was to be the great chance of their lives, the effort of a generation, the American boys setting
off to solve Europe's stupid problems once and for all. Dale and Max skipped work to sign up along with the other clerks at MacCormack and Sons. The authorities snatched Dale out of the queue even though he had removed his glasses. His astigmatism was so marked that no examination was necessary. They refused Max for “a murmur in the heart” after a series of short, gassy doctors prevaricated into their beards.

Max wept in his brother's arms like a jilted bride.

“We'll find something else, Maxie,” Dale said.

“All right for you, right? Everybody knows about your eyes, but I can see. I can see.”

“We'll find another way to do our bit.”

“That's what the fellows who can't serve say,” Max said.

The Wylie boys never left Flora Avenue without their
ATTEMPTED AND REJECTED
badges, which deflected shame but not the anguish of irrelevance. The war had welcomed the other young men out of the light of the ordinary world into the deathly cool halls of history, where the names are inscribed forever on walls nobody reads. Even with the AR badges blazing, every gesture of the Wylies' lives, lifting a forkful of boiled beef or steeping tea or planning businesses or chatting with a fellow clerk about the latest speakeasy, wasted to insignificance.

The other men, the men who mattered, paraded down Main Street on their way to Cantigny and Belleau Wood and the Marne—their shoulders scattered with flowers from children and kisses from women and tearful gazes of old men—while Max and Dale roared in their useless privacy. Max moved pianos. Dale kept books.

*  *  *

More than money, more than the beast, irrelevance provoked the Wylie brothers to the wildest decision of their lives. They moved to Alberta.
The Canadian province had only possessed a name for a dozen years when the Wylie brothers set out to stake a farm in the country around the Peace River. Alberta had no shadows of any kind—a landscape free from the codes with which human beings spin a false, self-sustaining dream to blur the hard lines of hunger and death. Marie Wylie begged her sons to stay. She had been grateful that all the masculine silliness of the war had miraculously washed out, and now her sons were going to throw away their good fortune on a lark.

“You have solid jobs and good prospects,” she said, sucking in her tears in the parlor as they made their announcement.

“They're giving away land, Ma,” Dale explained.

“And they're not making land anymore,” Max added.

“Bob, tell these boys. Tell them how likely it is they're going to get rich off farming.”

Bob peered up with his sad eyes, somewhat shocked that he had been asked to speak, then shrugged. “Land is land,” he said. It was as close to meaning nothing as he could manage while speaking.

“See, Ma. If we crap out, we'll still have the land.”

“What kind of language is that? Already you're talking like gamblers. You'll have nothing. You'll have nothing.” She tossed her handkerchief on the floor and fell back in her chair, defeated. She had worked so hard for boys who were going to throw over their futures for a patch of wilderness in a foreign country. The waste was only slightly less impious than suicide.

*  *  *

I found Dale's explanation of Alberta in the blue trunk at the cottage, right on top of all the other papers. It was a letter sent to George when he assumed control over the North American operations.

June 23, 1961

Dear George,

Now that you're the big man I should probably tell you about the disaster. I should tell you about Alberta. It was more Max than me, even if that does sound like an excuse. The pamphlet from the Canadian government drifted down to him from the hand of one German girl's daddy or another. A lot of them drifted down from the north. Pamphlets and Germans. He just couldn't stand to live in Champlain much longer and there wasn't any more work for him to do. MacCormack refused to let me into the business, so we needed something more, both of us. We just had no idea how much more there was.

We left in what we thought was the spring, with what we thought were the necessary tools and kit, which I had horsetraded down to a pittance with old Johnny Mac. The deal itself was pretty sweet. The Canadians were giving away, to anyone who asked, a quarter-section of land, with the agreement that ten acres a year for three years must be cleared or it reverted to the government. They had to fill up that nowhere and why not with us?

A quarter-section of land is property enough, but I Englished the ball a bit, so that I got a quarter-section, then Max got a quarter-section, then Ma, then Pa, and I traded it around till they were all neighbors, and the Wylies owned title on a full section of land for nothing. I pray you never have to know this but a full section of land is a kingdom. And I'm not just saying that. There are kingdoms in Europe smaller than a full section, so I had finagled us a kingdom for free, that's what I figured.

We should have known, from the train ride out, that we were headed nowhere. Every berth filled up with Ukes. Ukrainians. People
who had been farming for ten thousand years. If you opened their veins, grain poured out. The distances that boggled us didn't seem to bother them much. If you told those folks there was a free quarter-section on the far side of Uranus, they'd find a way to get there. We had heard it was a seven-day ride to Edmonton, and I don't know why we didn't believe it. It's like when the doctors tell you how childbirth works, and you figure, “They must be exaggerating. It can't be like that or we'd all be dead.” But there it is, although that's for another letter, I guess.

They're not so much cities up there as depots that have sprawled. That entire place could be folded into a briefcase and carried away. It's funny to write down but we really did think we were going to make a fortune from farming. We rode out to the end of the tracks and then by truck the rest of the way to Grande Prairie, where they gave us our title, and we had our goods and chattels—saws and files, and spikes and baskets, and two stoves and two tents, and knives and hammers and chisels—and off we went. And we bought a couple of dray horses and a man came, ragged as a pony man, and asked, “How many axes you got?” And I said, “We got all our supplies,” and he said, “You oughta have four axes, in case one breaks and another's lost. You're nothing without an axe.” And so I did buy a couple more axes, and the fellow was right. A man out there is his axe and no more.

As we drove up to our little number on the map we were smiling. We sat out on our desolate strip of land, a huge piece of hugeness between four iron posts, and we were pleased as a dog on a meat truck. Look how much we own, we thought. Look at it all. But what is it that you own? That's what you have to ask yourself. Always. What do you own? We owned dragging ourselves off the ground because we didn't
own a bed. We owned the soil. We owned the weather. We owned the risk.

It snows every month but August in that country. To raise a crop of wheat you have to be lucky, but we were in our twenties, we knew we were lucky. Max said, “You're the ideas man,” and I said, “You're the brawn man,” and we set about a sod cabin, our one-room subterranean home. You start with a basement and build up. The joke was “Nobody needs to dig a grave in Grande Prairie, everyone's living in one already.” And that was half a joke because a couple of our neighbors did hang themselves in the winter and weren't found till spring.

I did the cooking on the cast-iron stove that nearly broke my back from stooping. Max couldn't parboil shit for a tramp. He chopped the kindling. On the plus side, there was a magnificent whorehouse in town. Just a small family place. The thing I remember most about Madame Helene's was the chess. Helene had brought all these fancy girls out of Montreal, and the rooms were only half full, but whenever you came into the foyer, Madame Helene was always playing chess with the customers and she always won. Always. I realized after a while that most of the men were visiting Madam Helene for the chess games. I would wager on it. Chess was the cure for the loneliness. The other stuff was more like sneezing. She sold the boys a confab over a game of chess with maybe a screw thrown in for good measure. No one is more polite than a prairie madam. Wouldn't say shit if her mouth was full of it. She figured me out, too, and whenever she came in from Edmonton brought all the papers for me, which she marked up about four hundred percent. Those were our happiest days along the Peace River, the days we drove back from Madame Helene's. The horses knew where they
were headed and I could let 'em drift back, Max sleeping and me catching up on week-old news.

Even that pleasant journey nearly broke us. I remember once, drifting back home from our Sunday, we got caught in the worst hailstorm I've ever heard of. Biblical. We had to tuck the horses' heads with us under the wagon for a bit. Sure enough, when we stood up out of it, the first farm we crossed was fifty dead cows—beaten to death by the sky. And we passed another Englishman's farm where three little girls in floral-print dresses were frolicking through the fields and gathering up hail into glasses for iced cordial. They didn't own cows, I guess.

From sunup to sundown, we hacked away at our land. We scraped away the sod, slabbed the stuff. There was a part of the section treed but we took a whack and left it. The worst was the bouldering, and that was for Max. There is work that isn't fit for a white man, and that's it. I did the cooking, like I said.

Then the first full moon came. I woke up three days later on the side of the field, smeared in blood, with Max by my side. How? I don't know. I knew nothing. Blackout. You know, son, Max and I were always asking ourselves when we come back, what was the exact moment we knew we were never going to amount to farmers. I always maintained it was the very first day, the day cutting sod to build a house. Max believed it was the first moon.

At the time, you understand, we never discussed how we were only hacking at the earth because we needed something to do for a year so we wouldn't be too ashamed when we returned to Aunt Millie. We never discussed anything, as far as I remember. So maybe Max never recognized that we failed. He threw himself at the country. I knew soon enough, anyone could know, that the boy was throwing
himself against nothing. The more he threw himself at the nothing, the smaller his efforts seemed.

We heard the wolves howling one night in June. I'll remember Max's face the rest of my life, that moment. The look of recognition.

Three days later we saw them, a pack roiling through a far stand of aspens, with their eyes low. We did not interest them yet. We weren't easy meat or imminent threat. So they slunk back behind the aspens.

“What do you think they want?” I asked Max, who was standing mid-roll with a boulder the size of a dead body that he was clearing off the territory.

“What do
you
think they want?” he asked back.

“I think they want us off their land.”

We stayed because according to a fiction in a government office in Grande Prairie, those fields belonged to us.

The wolves didn't reappear until the winter. The winter came soon, though. That first blizzard surprised everybody, surprised the wolves, too. Covered the whole sod cabin. Took us two hours working the door to open it after. First a crack. Up and down, up and down, like a whore's shorts on payday. Eventually, we worked enough to stick a cup in the space and scrape it out and heat the water and throw it out. When we finally worked the door open we wondered why we'd bothered. Where were we going to go?

You know an odd fact about the prairies? In the Second World War, the Canadian navy discovered that the best submariners came from Saskatchewan. Know why? Because there's little difference between the prairies in winter and the bottom of the sea. We had splurged on a small pane of glass in our sod cabin, and we had built to all government plans, but the smoke from our fires was sooty and
blurred the window and ourselves. We had firewood but had to use buffalo chips when it ran out. Burning frozen shit is about as fun as it sounds and the fire didn't matter anyway. The cold was permanent. In the morning the floor was a mess of snow and the wool blankets were frozen stiff. We were only doing a mite better than if we'd been laying up on the naked ground, but it was exactly the difference between living and dying. You have no idea how much a man craves a newspaper when he's so alone.

We had no newspapers so we played cribbage. What else? No hunting. Max tried, but anything that could survive that cold could survive Max. It is the stillness up there that stuns you. The way the snow stays in clouds along the branches of the evergreens with not so much as a raven daring to kick its defiant lightness. The snow amounts to a sneer. Everything is much too simple. Then the wolves came again. We reckoned they had come up against a herd of bison. One day we heard the howl, in the middle of the day. We could tell it was the middle of the day because the window was greasy yellow rather than greasy gray. Max ran out into the sound, without a coat, returned a freezing hour later next to death.

He said there were seven of them. I said it didn't really matter if there were seven or seven hundred, he wasn't going out there again. I needed him for cards. He said we ought to invite them in.