Spit Delaney's Island (18 page)

“You get, Barclay Miles, or I'll tan your backside. Get out to that car.”

He got. He went out that door no one had thought to close (would the
whole neighbourhood have to hear her panting and wheezing like a sick
cow, and would they all but him hear what she said or did to stop it?) and
slammed it hard behind him. In the silent wake of the noise, he considered
sitting on the step to hear, but gave that up and went to the car and
slammed that door too.

It took twenty minutes on the dashboard clock. He sat there cooled by
the shade of a hawthorn tree and, thinking he would never speak to her
again as long as he lived, crossed his arms and practised a scowl. But he
soon forgot about the scowl and looked up the gravel road before him, at
the powder-brown surface itself, at the dust-laden poplars and alders as still
as silence on either side, dying. As still as silence, he thought, and how
could they stand and be smothered and choked out by dust and never move
or struggle? Down the road a boy came, walking, fourteen years old perhaps and staring at the empty sky, stirring up a trail of dust with two bare
feet flat and wide as snow shoes. One of the Waddell kids from up the
river, with nothing better to do all summer than tramp up and down the
roads looking for beer bottles in the ditch. Duke would be darned if he
would plod over every crossroad in the valley looking for empty beer bottles for pennies, even if he did live up the river with no father and needed
the money for food. He'd starve first, which was about what would happen to him anyway if she didn't get out to the car soon, lunch time being
a ridiculous hour to go calling on people.

But the Waddell boy was hardly past the car by the time she and Emma
Melville were out on the porch, both laughing and talking as if a nice
social call were just coming to an end.

He swung and said, “She okay now?” before she had even hit the starter
button.

“She's okay,” she said.

“She's not crying any more?”

“She's okay.”

He had to shout over the whine of the engine starting. “Why did you
bring me?”

They were a half-mile down the road before she worked up an answer
to that one. Staring straight ahead as if all she needed to see would be right
there in front of her she drove that car grim-faced and a little faster than
she should have (having no driver's licence and wanting none) right past
the swans on Hanley's pond, past the stand of timber Peter Wilson would
not sell to the sawmill for lumber, and right on past the big sawmill itself
standing silent and deserted for fear of spraying sparks, before she found
the words.

Then she said, “I didn't know she would be in such an ugly mood. It's
happened before and I didn't think she would be so ugly this time.”

Not everyone can answer straight the first time so he tried again. “Why
did you want me to come?”

“You needed to see that,” she said, double-clutching to slow down as
they were coming to the highway. “There are lots of unpleasant things in
this world and I hope you don't ever see half, but that was one you needed
to see.”

“See what?”

“You needed to see the kind of mean things some men will do to a
woman. You wouldn't ever see it at home, but you needed to know and no
amount of telling would have been good enough. Maybe some day you will
be tempted to do a woman a dirty turn, and you'll remember Emma Melville's black eye and crying.”

They were on the highway now, and she drove faster than ever, swinging the car around a farmer and his tractor without even seeing the truck
that had to chew up the dust of the shoulder to miss hitting her, and propelling them across a narrow bridge with less than four inches to spare on
his side. Sitting in that front seat low enough for the hood itself to seem
like a giant shiny field dragging him down the narrow lane formed by the
two converging rows of fence posts, he was afraid to turn his head away far
enough to look at her, saying instead to the chrome figure at the head of
the hood, “That wasn't crying. That was a sick cow choking on a thistle.”

“That was crying,” she said, and released the accelerator a little. “That
was real heart-break crying you heard. Don't forget that.”

He knew even then that he would not forget it, whatever it was supposed to mean. She hadn't been wrong about that. He moved closer to her
on the seat, and, after making sure no one was coming down the road to
see him, put his head on her shoulder. Close up, the green of her dress was
a little coarse, not so gentle. He felt the strength of her sifting into him and
making him cool. The only thing that worried him was what was he
going to tell Dora and Mary when they asked.

What he was going to tell Dora and Mary was one thing he didn't need
to worry about. “Daisy calfed down behind the back alders, a pretty little
bull,” Mary and Dora said. “Not that you'd care, but we had to haul a
bucket of water down to poor old Daisy, for the spring's dried up and she
looked as parched as a raisin from the heat.”

He had two weeks of sun to mull over all that happened that day before
they flung something else at him,
they
being fate and twenty pounds of
falling cedar limb that dropped its weight down on more than any doctor
would ever see. For every day of those two weeks the sun dropped its
weight too, sucking the whole world pale by day and retreating at night
just long enough to gain new force and momentum for its attack on a new
morning. The burnt grass drooped, and the mint, which needed dampness,
began to wilt and sag; only the poplars, indifferent or insensitive to heat,
flourished as before. Duke spent most of those fourteen days barefoot on
the bottom step soaking up the smells the heat lifted (mint and blackberry
and the sweet high odour of pine), not enough alive to find himself a spot
of shade for comfort.

So that day came, sluggish like them all in a valley that did not know
how to live with this much heat, and before he knew it there she was at his
shoulder again, saying, “Stirring up mud wasps again, Duke?” as if she
couldn't see, and then, “Whose car is that?”

“What car?” he said.

“Coming.” She stared at the point where the road slipped behind some
trees and out of sight. “I hear it coming.”

And it came into sight the colour of fire and just as fast, stopping at the
gate and then leaping forward again down the lane chased by its own dust.
When it stopped, two men got out and then turned to help something else
set its feet on the ground.

He watched it approach, something not quite human, something between those two men, setting its feet down as if it did not have his father's
caulk boots on and as if the wooden walk were broken glass. It wore his
father's blue plaid mackinaw too, the one that Duke liked to get close to
and smell the grease and sweat. He looked hard, measuring each step with
ten heavy heartbeats, and saw that it had a mouth all right, but everything
above that was just a big white globe with black holes for eyes. A mummy.
Pure white bandages wrapped around and around. A faceless mummy.
There was blood on the mackinaw, he saw, a dark stain along the collar.
And the hand, too, the hand, smeared red, moving up slowly to touch that
white mask.

He yelled, and one of the men said, “Shut up,” and the other laughed,
opening a large toothless mouth. They kept coming, and he yelled “Momma” three times, and she was there beside him smelling fresh, saying, “Be
quiet, Duke,” softly.

“Yeah,” the toothless man said, “shut that big mouth. Yer old man ain't
in any condition to listen to that.”

So he stopped, closed his mouth so the yelling was all inside now, and
he could hear her whispering, “Oh my God oh my God,” and he thought,
If that is my father then she will run to him. But she didn't move. She
stood there on the step beside him and whispered those words over and
over again all the time the toothless man was telling them about the falling
limb and the nose laid open and the ear off and the stitches at the doctor's.
She did not take one step forward.

It said, “It'll be all right, Lenore. Invite the gentlemen in.” From somewhere inside that thing.

With her hand at her mouth, she backed up a step, sobbing, “Oh Albert,
oh Albert,” twice, and ran back into the house.

Alone now with the two men and his father, he could hear her footsteps
thumping up the staircase. She was running for their bedroom. He looked
at his father because he knew he had to believe it. He looked and looked,
and still it was just a thing between those two men, and no father to anyone in this world. He looked and looked and it did not look back, just
stared over his head at the open empty door. Then the man with teeth
came up closer and said, “You take your daddy inside and don't make no
noise to bother him.”

He did not answer that, but walked right past the three of them standing there on the walk as if he could think of a thousand better things to
do. Because that was no father to anyone in his world, or she would have
run to him. If he just kept walking past those poplars and that mint patch
and on into the woods, he would not even have to believe it. Because look
how she ran. He thought, let them give me warning, and lay down in the
mint beside the verandah to wait.

But waiting was another thing he wasn't ready for. Levelled out like
that, with his face close enough to the ground to hear the woodbugs moving, he thought of his sisters, both off to a neighbour's and safe for the time
being from whatever it was he was having to face. He thought of Momma
running up those stairs and couldn't quite put that together with the
image of her walking up to Emma Melville's front door. When he realized
(the smell had all been sucked out of the mint) that he did not even know
what he was waiting for, he went back to the step and helped his father
inside.

“Be patient,” his father said, gently.

“Yes sir,” he said.

“Thank you,” his father said, for his help.

“Maybe she'll be down later,” he said. “Sometimes there is nothing anyone can do.” But looking up into the black holes in his father's face, he
ceased to believe those last words as soon as they were said, as if saying
them cancelled any truth there may have been in them once, at some earlier time when life was much simpler that it was now.

There were plenty of reasons to pause.

He had come down out of the hills without rest or incident, though
once he had stopped just long enough to eat raw eggs by a stream and cut
his finger on a blade of innocent-looking cattail. A nasty wound, but it
healed instantly once he'd dismissed it and kept his mind trained like a
blue-steel rifle on the coast. Now at the foot of the last and lowest mountain, he sat mounted to look over the town, and picked (one at a time, gently) the pine needles and dead twigs and broken spider threads out of his
hair. Hope and the seventeen years, all he'd brought down with him, were
light as breath on his mind.

That and the desire, the need, to be quickly corrupted.

Only he wasn't ready to join the McLean gang, which was his one and
certain goal. To steal livestock, to pistol-whip Chinese, to shoot Indians
right and left, stab policemen, murder strangers, and to be hanged on the
gallows at last before his eighteenth birthday. But he needed practice first
or how could he expect to be welcome? And anyway, the McLeans were
likely to be far away from here, and doing their deeds for all he knew in
someone else's lifetime.

Allan McLean
Twenty-five years old—the oldest brother—he was tall
and bearded and (so it was written) very very mean.

The thing was this: his name was Webster Treherne and the Old Man
had kept him alone up there since his second birthday and taught him that
time was meaningless and God was All. His mother and (perhaps) his
father had retreated before that down the mountain in some other direction with all the twenty others and left the commune shacks to sag and
bleach and catch no other voices but theirs. They were a small world but
complete: a cluster of leaning sheds in a cedar valley, an old man and a boy;
a cow, a dog, a garden, and a few chickens.

Charlie McLean
Twenty years old in the pictures, he was the one with
the moustache, and with brows as straight as a ruled line, just as mean, it
was said, as his brother.

And books. There were plenty of books. There were accounts of history
and biographies of great men, collections of poems and tales of love. And
every one that he read seemed a warning—that a person so far from
crowds was doomed to get lonely sooner or later and go mad. Yet time, a
poet told him from the dusty back pages of a fat collection, would take
him by his shadow-hand and lead him up out of childhood to the dark
swallow-thronged loft of mysteries and manhood. He knew the road of
his birth: it was there in the stories of the infamous McLeans, written invisibly between the sentences he read over and over until he was convinced
that being bad for a while would be more fun than hanging around for
ever on this broken-down farm.

“You don't even know how far out you'll have to walk,” the Old Man
said.

“It doesn't matter,” he said.

“Look, I know you,” the Old Man said. “I brought you up. You don't
even know if there
is
anything else.”

“I do know,” he said, “because I can't believe that in all this world there
are only two images to reflect the nature of God.”

He was just playing with words, though, because he knew for sure that
down out of the mountains there were all the people in the books and the
people who wrote the books and the twenty-two others who had lived in
the commune and left. And at least the McLeans were out there somewhere and the people they were destined to kill (or had killed) and all the
other people who were going to get mad enough to hang them (or to have
hanged them) and the people who were taking their photographs to put
in the books.

Archie McLean
At fifteen years he was round and sullen, a nosebiter
(some thought that it was being put in jail for biting off an Indian's nose
that started their whole long chain of vengeful deeds).

Raising hell. Riding through the countryside screaming “Kill the bastards!” Scaring up fear in people's chests like nervous grouse. You can't
ask for much more than that. Except maybe to be there at the last, to wonder if the man you had bribed really had got the job of hangman and cut
the ropes the way you promised to pay him for doing, so that when the
floor dropped you would only fall through to the ground and then fight
your way out.

Alex Hare
He was a neighbour, seventeen (“I wish to know what you
have against me”).

Webster Treherne dismounted, hopped down off the cedar-rail fence,
pulled one foot quickly out of the fast-running ditch, and set out down the
road towards town. He walked in the pale April sun as if thousands were
awaiting his arrival, set his stride to steady and fast, swung his arms as if
they
could help. He walked well out in the centre of the pavement, which
was slick as black oil, and soaked up light. His clothes—the deerhide pants,
the ancient dark blue suit jacket someone had left behind, the homemade
boots—all were older than he was and warm, warm. It seemed more than
spring. On either side of the road cola cans gleamed in the roadside clumps
of wet grass. A woman stepped out onto the front step of a strange triangular house and yelled for someone to come on inside and watch a television programme. Webster Treherne nearly went over to her fence to find
out if she wanted him, too, but thought better of it and did not pause.

Walking, he met a small barefoot boy, straight as a rod under a yoke
hung with water buckets, who said, “Where you from, mister?” and “Me,
I've been up the river a ways. Spend every blasted day hauling this water.”
He looked Webster Treherne over from head to foot, then tilted his head
towards town. “You'd think someone down in that place would dream up
a decent water system. A dime a bucket I get,” and then put down his yoke
and both wooden buckets to throw a large chunk of coal which hit Webster Treherne on the shoulder and tore his jacket.

Later, a shiny new sports car went by and two yellow-haired girls leaned
out the window to make faces at him. One of the girls put fingers into her
eyes and nose and mouth and pulled them all out of shape as if she wanted
to make him feel sick. He had seen pictures of cars and girls in the books,
but the cars had always been clean, and none of the girls had been photographed while pulling ugly faces.

He began to worry. About time and its meaning. About things. About
water carriers who threw coal and girls who made faces.

Because here was the town—

(1) A few dozen buildings, some wooden, some brick, but all of them
drab and coated with coal dust, facing one another across a dirt road that
wound up from the beach. Black slag piles surrounded the town, mountains of coal dust like overturned cones. Out in the harbour a three-masted
ship sat heavy and still, waiting for something. On the nearest building:
D. L. PETERS GENERAL MERCHANDISE

(2) Blacktop. Blacktop roads. Blacktop lots full of parked cars. And down
the harbour a crane loading rolls of newsprint onto a Japanese freighter.
Gas stations sat around every intersection as if waiting to pounce, and
above them on steel poles their signs revolved like giant eyes watching out
for coming business. On a narrow concrete building: G. D. POCK, ROAD
SURFACING

It was late afternoon when he walked up the steps of a grey building and
knocked on the door.

“I'm Webster Treherne,” he said. “Do you have rooms?”

“Rooms?” said the woman who answered the door. “We got plenty of
rooms, this is a school.” She was a large, sweat-smelling woman who introduced herself as Balk-eyed Birdie. Her left eye, though she tried hard to
hold it steady on him, did a loop-the-loop and slid off to one side.

The door was green but inside the front hall everything was a bright
red. He felt as if he'd just stepped into someone's mouth. A chandelier
hung uvula-like at the far end and swung gently when she slammed the
door. A sign on the wall said BIRDIE ATWELL'S FREE SCHOOL and
above it a poster told him (black print of a sunset beach) to see Beautiful
British Columbia this year instead of heading east or south.

Besides her sweat he could smell boiled cauliflower.

A school?

“Yes, a school,” she said. She pressed her palms together under her chins
and pumped her dimpled elbows. “But what would
you
know about that?”
She marched ahead of him down the hall, flung a door open the length of
her arm and pulled it shut again. “In there. Mr. Muir. Teaches Truth 122.”

In the few seconds the door was open Webster Treherne could see three
girls and a man, all seated and facing the blackboard as if waiting for some
kind of news to write itself in chalk across the board in front of them. On
the floor, a fat grey cat turned around and around in a circle nipping at its
own tail.

“And here,” she said, her face nearly purple with excitement, “is Mr. McIntosh, his room. He teaches a class in love.” There were no students in this
room, just a man with a moustache who stood up when the door opened,
lifted an index finger, said “Aha” as if Webster were just the person he'd
been looking for, but Balk-eyed Birdie closed the door in his face.

“And you?” he said. “What do you teach?”

She sucked in her breath, tossed a blood-red apple straight up behind
her and stepped back to catch it in the deep soft V of her dress front. “Life,”
she said, and her bad eye did two loops and slid off to the side for a rest.

He was only seventeen, without much experience in the world, so he
said, “That sounds like plenty to me. I've heard lots of people spend a
whole lifetime looking for those.”

And Balk-eyed Birdie laughed. She had one front tooth capped in gold,
one in silver. “Oh we don't teach you how to
find
those things, we teach
you how to
lose
them.”

“Lady,” Webster Treherne said, and jammed out his hand as if straight
into fire, “you just found a new pupil. This is the place for me!” He
stripped off his clothes and lowered himself into the hot bath she drew for
him. When he slumped down low the water came right up under his chin
and dead ahead, scratched into the tiles above his feet, were the words
let
me play golden
which he read over and over until he fell asleep.

To raise hell. To ride through the countryside yelling “Kill the bastards!” To ride on the edge, an apprentice, and watch those four others
gallop from murder to murder and on to their deaths as if all of it were
not only fun but necessary. Oh Allan McLean, turn, turn your head and
acknowledge the boy who rides on the edge! Squint those dark half-Indian eyes at me and say “Come on, kid, the next one's yours.”

The trouble was, Webster Treherne was good. The Old Man had seen
to that, had told him from the first that the image of a perfect God can't
help but be good, was destined by definition to be humane, healthy, and
immortal. You couldn't just cancel out that kind of education overnight.

When he had awakened and pulled on his clothes and eaten the thick
soup she heated up for him on her old wood stove he went outside for a
walk up the main street of town. Going up, he followed the boardwalk
past the collieries office, the harness maker and the firehall stables, and
went inside a little store whose front verandah sagged under the weight of
a huge sign: Hugh Carmichael, Esq., DRUGGIST, LAND DEVELOPER,
POST OFFICE. The inside of the building was divided equally amongst
its three roles and the proprietor met Webster Treherne in the middle of
the room, ready to run to whichever corner was needed.

“Which will it be? Drugs? You got a prescription needs filling?”

“Not that I know of. I never needed any before now.”

“Land, then? You're looking for a nice piece of land to build on? I got
plenty to show.”

“No money,” Webster said.

“Then you've come to the Post Office. Mail a letter?”

“Nobody to write to.”

Hugh Carmichael, Esq., whirled around twice as if the answer to this
nonsense were hiding somewhere behind him, then gave up and rubbed a
pudgy hand in his beard. “Would you mind telling me, then, just what it
is you came in here for?”

“I'm new in town,” Webster said. “Looking around to see where things
are.”

And he had seen already what he needed to see: that there were three
separate cash registers in the room, just waiting to be robbed. A good place
to start.

He came out onto the verandah, leaving Hugh Carmichael still scratching around in his beard, and met the small boy again, carrying water, who
put down his yoke and threw a big chunk of coal which hit Webster on
one cheek and tore away half an inch of flesh. “My aim's improving,” the
boy said, and picked up his load. “It's just a matter of practice.”