Homesick (20 page)

“Anyway, whenever he and his friends happened to be holding up a telephone pole and Rose chanced to go by, Billy Atkins couldn’t help but treat the boys to a laugh at her expense. It was an easy thing for him to do because Rose couldn’t hide the fact she thought Billy Atkins was pretty wonderful. So as she went by, watching her feet, he’d call out, ‘Am I on for Saturday night, Rosie?’

“And she’d stop dead in her tracks and say in her quiet voice, ‘Do you really mean it this time, Mr. Atkins?’

“And he’d say of course he meant it and she’d say, ‘Well then you’re on,’ and he’d wink at his friends and say, ‘On for how long, Rose?’ And one of his admirers would shout, ‘For as long as it takes!’ And they’d all laugh themselves sick and Rose, being slow-witted, would look from one face to another, trying to catch the joke and sometimes laughing herself, at what she didn’t know, just to please Billy Atkins.

“It was getting so bad that the only decent thing to do was to try and stop it because I was a relative and Rose didn’t have any brothers and her father lived out on the farm and didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t want to do it because I knew I was no match for Billy Atkins. He was older for one thing. Then I was about seventeen. I’d been working for almost three years on labouring jobs so I had some muscle on me, but Billy Atkins had more and knew how to use it better. Pride decided me to do it the way I did. If I was going to get my clock cleaned I preferred to have it done private rather than public.

“At the time I’m speaking of, Billy Atkins was working hauling gravel for the concrete foundations of the new Old Fellows’ Hall they were putting up then. The pits were a couple of miles out of town. Haulage was all by horses then. Atkins would have to drive his team out to the pits, throw on a load, and then drive it back to town to dump. I figured the pits was one sure place to catch him alone. So one Saturday morning I walked out to find him. When I got to the gravel digs he was just topping off his wagon. He didn’t see me coming because his back was to me as he worked. I was
almost on him when I saw him toss his shovel up on the load, step up on the wheel, and boost himself onto the seat. He got quite a surprise when he reached for the reins and there I was, looking up at him.

“ ‘What the fuck brings you out here, young Monkman?’ he says. ‘You on a Boy Scout nature hike?’

“All the time I’d been coming on, watching him shovel, I’d held my mind blank. That’s because I didn’t want to have no excuses prepared and ready if my nerve failed me at the last second. There was nothing to say to him but the truth. I said it quick. I said, ‘I came to tell you to leave my cousin Rose MacPherson alone. I don’t want you making fun of her in the streets anymore.’

“You could have knocked him down with a feather after I said that. Billy Atkins never bargained on that sort of talk from the likes of me. He couldn’t quite believe his ears, so he says, ‘What did you say to me?’ As if he were the King of England and somebody had asked him, ‘How’s your royal arse today, Your Highness?’

“Myself, I didn’t see how I could draw back now. I was in the thick of it. I started pulling off my coat. ‘Climb down off that wagon,’ I said, ‘Come off that wagon, Billy Atkins.’

“That’s when he gave himself away. Billy shot a quick look all around him. He was looking for the rest of us. It was just there, for the blink of an eyelid, but I saw how he couldn’t fathom I’d come alone. Where were my friends? The glance he couldn’t help taking told him there was nobody else, but he could scarcely believe it. His mouth went tight on him, like he’d bit into a lemon. ‘Are you in your right mind?’ he says. ‘Or are you as bad off in the head as that cousin of yours? If I step down off this wagon, by Christ you’ll rue the day.’

“ ‘I’m prepared to rue it,’ I said. ‘Step down.’ No sooner had those words left my mouth than I knew he wouldn’t. It came to me that this was all too strange for his taste. He didn’t want anything to do with this strange kid in an out of the way, lonely place. Maybe he took me for crazy.

“ ‘I’ll step down when I decide to step down,’ he said. ‘I don’t take orders from you. You can count yourself lucky I’m working. I’m not about to lose my job because I took time out to teach you your manners. I can arrange to do that some other time.’

“ ‘You don’t have to bother to arrange nothing if you arrange to leave my cousin alone,’ I told him. Didn’t that frost him? Not being able to back off a young pup like me sent him white in the face. He reared up on his hind legs on that wagon and cursed me with every name he could lay his tongue to. And when he ran out of names he up with the reins and laid them down hard on his team so that they came at me with their tails flying and it was get out of the way or be run down. As he went by, wagon bouncing, he hung his face over the side and shouted, ‘I’ll see you in town! See if I don’t!’

“And I hollered back, ‘If you do, I’ll be back to pay you a visit out here!’ Which was obviously the right answer because he never looked me up in town and as far as I know he never bothered Rose neither. So that’s how I learned about setting the price higher than anybody wants to pay. You don’t have to win outright. All you have to do is make the bully boys worry more, or hurt more than they counted on. I recommend it to you. If somebody hangs a licking on you in the schoolyard with all their friends watching, make him do it again, when there’s just the two of you. Catch him alone. See that you hurt him enough to spoil his fun. Teach him that picking on you isn’t going to be anything but hard work. Let him understand that for every whipping he hands out before a crowd, sooner or later, he’ll have to do it again, without the cheers and without the glory. There’s not one in a thousand that has the stomach for that.”

What made his grandfather think he had the stomach for the other? The chasing down and cornering of an enemy who had already beaten you? It seemed sick to Daniel. Why, even Montgomery Gift in
The Young Lions
hadn’t been so completely on his own. He had had his friend Dean Martin there to pick him up when he was knocked down, to beg him not to go on, to tell him not to be so foolish.

“It sounds sort of stupid to me,” said Daniel. “Looking to get beat up a second time.”

“Not so stupid if it keeps you from getting it a third time.”

Daniel thought for a moment. “Did you mean it – about them picking on me at school? Will they really?”

“Of course I can’t say. But I’d be ready for it. Think the worst – then there aren’t any surprises.”

“I don’t think I could do like you say,” said Daniel.

“You could. You’re your mother’s son.”

“She always says I take after my Dad. She says I’m nothing like her.”

“Wishful thinking. You’ve got to be as tough as she is to have survived her twelve years. She’d have killed anybody weaker. Even as a girl she was something to watch out for. One Dominion Day she tackled a full-grown man. She couldn’t have been more than ten.”

“What? Mom? A man?”

“Sure. It was over her brother Earl.”

“Tell me,” said Daniel. “What was it about?”

“It was about Earl,” Alec said. The look on his face testified to the pleasure he took in his own stories. “Earl was always shy and timid from a baby up. Vera used to tease him about it but Lord help anybody else that she caught tormenting her little brother. I remember coming home from work one night and what do I see but your mother, the one who’s the pacifist, boiling down the street after Hansie Beck with a croquet mallet waving above her head like a tomahawk. She was out for blood because he’d done something or other to make Earl bawl. Your grandmother spent half her day negotiating peace with the neighbours because of the scraps Vera got herself in, sticking up for her brother.

“She got herself in a big one Dominion Day. They could have cancelled the evening fireworks because they got them early the way she went off like a Roman Candle. There was lots to see her do it, too. July First was the biggest day of the summer back then.
All the farmers came in from the country and there was crowds and crowds of people. It don’t seem much for entertainment now that we got the television but then it was something, the Dominion Day Sports Day. There was a big ball tournament with prize money, a horseshoe-pitching contest, harness-racing at the track, a tug of war between the volunteer fire brigade and the Connaught hockey team – although they didn’t know how to split themselves up because half of them belonged to both – and more food than you could eat in a month of Fridays. All the ladies’ church groups and auxiliaries squared off to out-cook and out-sell one another. United Church ladies wanted to sell more pie than the Catholics and the Royal Purple wanted to plough the Red Cross under. Every organization had a booth with tables and benches and they sold cold pop out of tin washtubs full of crushed ice, and plates of cake and pie and potato salad and ham and cold roast beef and cabbage rolls, and mugs of coffee. It was a treat to have a seat in the booths because the husbands had roofed them for the ladies with poplar branches so it would be all green and shady and so a breeze could pass through them and stir the leaves up. On a hot day it was a cooling place to be. And all over the fairgrounds there were families, mostly country people who brought their own lunch because it seemed to them a crime to pay good money for something no better than they could get at home. They would be picnicking on blankets spread on the grass or sitting on the runningboards of their vehicles, eating. It was something. We wouldn’t have missed it for the world, Earl and me and your mother. Only thing that beat a Dominion Day was Christmas.

“Now on any such day Earl stuck to me like shit to a blanket because he was so shy. He’d hook his hand in my back pocket and hang on tight, like this,” said Monkman, illustrating by raising his hip from the ground and thrusting his hand into his pocket. “You couldn’t have crowbarred him off me. But Vera wasn’t like that at all. She preferred to go off on her own and see what trouble she could get into. Earl was more comfortable back there where he
could hide himself behind my legs and take a peek out around my hip every now and then just to see how the world was running, then duck his head back out of sight if anybody happened to catch his eye. He was about five and should’ve been past that but he wasn’t, so that’s how we saw the Sports Day, him hanging on to my pocket for dear life as we went about our business. It was funny, he was like your own shadow, you could forget he was there he kept himself so quiet. Your mother was cut from different cloth. She couldn’t be forgotten. You noticed Vera. Full of questions about this or that and if it wasn’t questions she was trying to jimmy another nickel out of you for more candy. She wasn’t a girl to overlook. But Earl wasn’t like that. He was awful quiet, a thumb-sucker and starer.

“That day, somehow I lost him. I ran into a fellow I knew and we had ourselves a talk and then I walked off without Earl on my pocket. He must’ve let go for just a second, maybe to swap sucking thumbs and I was gone. He couldn’t catch a hold of me because of the crowd and once he lost track of me in all that press of people, him being ass-high to the rest of the world, he couldn’t spot me again.

“Soon as I realized I’d lost him I went back on the run, pushing aside anybody got in my way. Not a sign of him. So there I was running here, there, and everywhere like a chicken with its head cut off trying to find Earl before he had himself a real shit conniption. Then I came on Vera. She was crouching underneath this big cottonwood somebody had hung a set of gym rings on. A bunch of harness drivers who’d been drinking behind the stables were showing off for one another, skinning the cat and chinning themselves. Vera was squatted there watching them like a vulture. She was probably getting ready to make a grab for any loose change they flipped out of their pockets turning themselves over and then run for it.

“I said, ‘Vera, your brother’s lost.’ It was all I needed to say. She knew what sort of state he’d be in, what that meant. She was up and gone like smoke in a wind.

“Back in those days I was a cigar smoker – White Owls – and I carried them in my back pocket because it was cut deep for a wallet. Earl must’ve spent a good deal of his time face to face with that white owl on the package with its big yellow eyes. Now when we got separated, naturally Earl, being Earl, panics. He gallops off this way and that way, looking. Then all of a sudden, right in the middle of all those asses what does he run up against? A White Owl package and two big old yellow eyes peeping over a back pocket. Sure enough, Earl makes a dive for it and rams his hand down in the pocket. Saved, he thinks.

“Wasn’t me, though. Just another White Owls smoker with his cigars stuck in his ass pocket. Vera arrives on the scene and finds this man shaking Earl by the shoulders, yelling. Of course, he took him for a thief with his hand stuffed down to the bottom of his pocket. I arrive on the scene of the crime just as Vera flies onto this character from behind. She tackles him and clamps down hard. She’s got her arms locked around his belly and her legs scissored around his shins and she’s trying to sink her teeth into his back right through his jacket. She only leaves off biting long enough to holler, ‘Run, Earl! Run for your life!’ and then she squeezes down on the fellow and goes back to work gnawing a chunk off him.

“But Earl’s too scared to run. His eyes are the size of saucers, he’s sucking on his thumb so hard it’s a wonder he doesn’t pull the nail clean off it, and he’s backing off one step at a time, slow, as this man staggers after him, Vera riding him piggyback, sticking like flypaper and bellering, ‘Run for your life, Earl! Run!’ ”

The old man began quaking with laughter. Tears stood in his eyes. “Jesus, wasn’t that something?” he asked. Suddenly, he threw back his head and roared at the sky.
“Run for your life, Earl! Run!
Jesus, what a commotion.
Run for your life, Earl! Run!”
he shouted so that his face darkened with blood and effort.
“Run! Run!”
Then, as abruptly as he had begun, he stopped. Monkman searched Daniel’s face. “She had the right idea, your mother, didn’t she?” he asked softly.