Maclean (12 page)

While Ralph and Johnny had been dreaming about money, Ellie had taken the bread out of the oven, half a dozen loaves, butter-gold on top. She sliced a loaf now and put half a dozen slices in the middle of the table.

“That'll be two cents,” she said to Waldo, “and I don't need no wood split.”

Maclean would have liked the heel of the loaf, but Waldo got to it first and slathered it with butter and stuffed it into his face and licked around his lips like a dog.

“Bad accident downtown tonight,” he said.

Nobody ever paid any attention to Waldo because he never said anything worth paying attention to. Legs and Ellie started talking again about the McIntyre boy. Johnny and Ralph got into talk about jobs on the railroad. Maclean let his mind drift away into a warm nothingness.

“Kilt him right there,” Waldo was saying, talking away to himself. “Kilt him right there on the bridge.”

“Kilt who?” Ellie asked him finally.

“That there man on the bridge,” Waldo said. “I been tryin' to tell ya. That there man on the bridge got run over and kilt.”

“What there man, Waldo?” Ralph asked.

“Willie Campbell,” Waldo said. “You all know Willie Campbell.”

“Who?” Maclean asked.

“Willie Campbell,” Waldo said. “He was walkin' across the bridge goin' home, and he was walkin' with his back to the traffic, and somehow he seems to just have stepped out away from the rail in front of a truck, and it knocked him down and run right over him before the man drivin' it had a chance to do a thing. Kilt him dead right there.”

“Did you see it?” Johnny asked.

“No,” Waldo said, “I never seen it. But some men come into the store that seen it and told us all about it, so it's the truth, and there ain't no doubt.”

“Was he drinkin'?” Johnny asked.

“That's what they say,” Waldo said. “They say he got into a fight with somebody in front of the Farmer's Store and got knocked down and his face all bloodied up, and they say later on he was so drunk he couldn't hardly stand up and all covered with dirt and blood down the front of his shirt.”

“Are you sure it was Willie Campbell?” Maclean asked.

“Yes,” Waldo said. “Everybody said. And some of them was out there and seen.”

“And it killed him?”

“Yes,” Waldo said. “It kilt him dead right there. A great, big wood truck, and it run right over him. They say it squooshed his chest right out flat. And his eyes and his tongue.…”

“All right, Waldo,” Ellie said, “we don't need no pictures.”

“Well, well,” Ralph said. “Now ain't that somethin'?”

“No great loss to the world,” Johnny said.

“All the same,” Legs said.

Maclean looked down at his glass of rum and his cigarette burning in the ashtray. He couldn't even pretend to himself that he was sorry for Willie Campbell. Some day, a week from now or a month or three months, Willie would have caught him alone in an alley with no policeman around, and he was going to end up beaten half to death. Now he was rescued. It was bad luck to feel glad about anybody's death, no matter whose, but he was glad all the same.

“Run right over him,” Waldo said, wanting to go on being the centre of attention. “Squooshed him right out flat.”

“Shut up, Waldo,” Ellie said.

Maclean finished the rum in his glass and excused himself and made his way out through the shed to the outhouse and stood in the darkness.

On his way back to the kitchen, he stopped in the open door of the shed and leaned against the frame and looked out. Dreadnought got himself to his feet and shuffled over. Maclean scratched his ears, and he shook his great sheepskin hide and shuffled back to his spot outside the kitchen door and dropped himself down.

In the woods, the moonlight cast a network of shadows, and there were small sounds. A bird restless in its nest. (Did they dream?) Crickets. Rustling sounds too faint to identify, the movement of small animals going about their business, or maybe just a breath of wind, like a sigh, among the fir boughs. Fall was almost here, then winter. Snow drifted under the trees and piled high against the house beside the shoveled path. The big kitchen stove roaring with hardwood.

He thought again about Willie Campbell. Bad luck or no bad luck, he still couldn't feel sorry. He wouldn't have brought it about if it had been in his power to bring it about. And if it had been in his power to save him, he would have had to save him. But it didn't have anything to do with him. It just happened, and whether he was glad or sorry didn't make any difference.

He remembered the day Akers got killed. Sergeant Death himself. A bolt from the blue. Nobody heard it fired. Nobody heard it coming. It hit just in the angle of the trench. Most of the blast went the other way down the next traverse, but Akers was standing just by the angle. When they got themselves up, there was Akers all covered with dirt and one of his legs blown off above the knee and pouring blood. He clawed around on the ground, his eyes wild, squealing and gurgling like a pig with its throat half cut. Someone tried to get a tourniquet on the leg, but it wasn't any use. Those big arteries went on pumping out blood, and in a couple of minutes more he was dead, his eyes rolling back into his head, and black blood pouring out of his mouth from the burst lungs that would have killed him anyway.

He hadn't wanted to feel glad about that death either, but he had, and so had everybody else. (“Bye, bye, Sergeant Death,” someone had said.) There was even a crazy feeling that now that Sergeant Death had been killed, nobody else would get killed any more forever. And for the rest of that turn in the line nobody had.

But, of course, Death hadn't died, and their next turn in, they lost ten men killed without any real fighting at all, just to snipers and random shrapnel.

It wasn't long after that that they took him out for good. One day, carrying a load of lumber up through the communication trench, he collapsed, and when they got him back to the field hospital, he started spitting blood, so they sent him to hospital in England, and after a few weeks, a doctor decided his lungs were damaged, and he should never have been sent back after Ypres at all.

He was going home. He was going to live. He could hardly believe it, and all the way over he was sure they were going to be torpedoed before they got him home. Then early one morning, they saw big, black gulls over the ship and a few hours later the coast of Nova Scotia, a long, low outline on the horizon like a bank of cloud. That evening they docked in Saint John. It was spring, leaves coming out, everything soft and warm. He still couldn't believe it. For days, weeks, he couldn't believe it.

He took the bottle out of his pocket and took a short swig, and went on standing for a while longer before he made his way back through the woodshed to the kitchen.

He sat down again in his place by the table, tipped a little rum into his glass, and added water.

The deaths of the McIntyre boy and Willie Campbell had been talked out, and the conversation had drifted off into the past, as it often did near the end of an evening.

“I seen you dance once,” Ralph was saying to Legs. “Way back before the Great War. Down at the Salvation Army at a concert they gave there to raise money for something.”

“That's right,” Legs said. “Long time ago. Long time. And Ellie here sang in a chorus with a bunch of other girls. What did you sing, Ellie?”

“I don't know,” Ellie said. “I don't remember. It was a long time ago, just like you said.”

“You sang ‘Old Rugged Cross,'” Legs said.

“May be,” Ellie said. “I don't remember.”

Maclean looked at Ellie and tried to imagine her young. He had never seen her then, not that he remembered anyway, but maybe he had and hadn't known it. Maybe one day he had seen a girl who was Ellie walking down the street or standing outside the Salvation Army. And Ellie had maybe seen him too as a boy that long-ago day.

“There's a man somewhere,” Maclean said, “who says that all the time that ever was, and all the things that ever happened, are still here now, only in a different place.”

“I don't understand that, John,” Ralph said. “You say some funny things sometimes.”

“You gonna sing that song for us again, Ellie?” Legs asked.

“No, I ain't.”

“You used to play the banjo,” Ralph said to Legs. “You don't no more?”

“No, I don't, not no more,” Legs said. “I sold that banjo a long time ago. My fingers got too stiff to play it right, and I didn't like playin' it wrong, and it just hung on the wall there lookin' at me, so one day I up and sold it to a man had been wantin' to buy it for a long time. I was sorry afterwards. But I wasn't gonna play it again. Not in this lifetime. Nor dance no more neither.”

Outside the window, Dreadnought gwuffed once, then again a little louder, and they all stopped to listen. But they couldn't hear anything and Dreadnought settled down again. Somewhere beyond the reach of their human senses, somewhere out in the woods in the darkness, something had been making its way, looking for something to eat, or trying to keep from being eaten.

The talk drifted on aimlessly, circling for a while around the coming of winter, then drifting away again into hunting and the potato crop and the low water in the river, all these things touched on only, turned this way and that as if all of them sitting there around the table were somehow beyond the consequences attaching to any of these matters, looking down on them from some Olympian height, remote and invulnerable.

Maclean sat, half-listening, letting his eyes roam about the familiar room. The cookstove. The pine cupboards with their neat rows of glasses and dishes. The scrubbed floor. The white and blue check curtains. The kerosene lamps. The smell of bread, the rambling talk, the warmth. It was good. It was the way the rest of the world should be but, of course, never would.

He thought again of building himself a little house. Somewhere along this road maybe, so that he could drop up here of an evening and sip a little of Ellie's rum and sit in the warmth and have quiet talks with Ralph and Johnnie and Legs. A quarter of an acre of land would do him—space for the house and a garden where he could grow some of his own food. He could lease the land and not have to get together the money to buy it outright. People would lease land without too much fuss because they could always get it back if need be. He wasn't going to eat it up or burn it down or drive it over the bank into the river. And he could do most of the building himself with a little help maybe from Bill Kayton, who always knew where there was lumber lying around that nobody wanted.

A settled man with his own house, small maybe but his own.

The face of Claudine Swann once again began to take shape in his mind.

(Why not? Why in Christ's name not? Go away. Go away, god damn it, and leave me alone. I know why not, and I already know that it shouldn't have happened the way it happened. So go away.)

He looked at his glass and saw that it was empty. He took the bottle out of his pocket and considered the couple of fingers that were left and decided that for the moment he would leave them. It might be nice to have a little tot somewhere on the long walk home.

He settled back in his chair, adding a comment now and then to the conversation, but mostly just listening. Once he reached for his watch and found it gone and took a second to remember, then turned and looked at Ellie's clock on a shelf behind him.

After a while Waldo got up to go. He went out and closed the door behind him and Dreadnought went “gwuff.” Then Ralph and Johnny left, and there was only himself and Legs and Ellie. He didn't feel like going, but it was late, and he could see that Ellie was wanting to go to bed. He got up at last, and Legs got up with him.

“I ain't forgot you owe to split me some wood come Monday,” Ellie said to Legs.

She let them out and watched over the top half of the door as they walked down the yard.

Except for the lights behind them at Ellie's place, there were no lights now anywhere along the road. Legs lived nearly at the end of the road with his mother. She was almost a hundred years old, though nobody knew for sure, including herself probably, and there were stories that she had been a runaway slave who made it to Canada after all sorts of adventures. Nobody knew anything about that for sure either, and nobody Maclean knew had ever thought it proper to ask Legs.

“Ellie surely keeps a nice place,” Legs said when they were stopped in front of his house. “I surely would miss that place if anything ever happened to her. Ain't many pleasures left in the world come our age, now is there?”

“No, there ain't,” Maclean said.

“You all right, then?” Legs asked.

“Sure,” Maclean said. “I'm just fine. Never better.”

“You get home all right? Long way down there.”

“I'm fine,” Maclean said. “Don't you worry.”

“Good night, then,” Legs said. “And you look after yourself.”

“Good night, Legs,” Maclean said. “And you look after yourself too.”

Maclean watched him walk off into the shadows, his gait as angular and delicate as the final steps of a soft shoe dancer disappearing into the wings.

Then he turned and set off back down the hill.

Most of the houses he passed were dark, though here and there an upstairs light was still on where someone maybe was lying in bed reading or listening to the far-away stations that came in sometimes late in the evening, even on the dull-eared, asthmatic, old radio at Drusilla's. Once he heard, from far off on another street, the sound of someone playing something complicated and sad on a piano. Once from a darkened house close by, the sound of a woman laughing.

After a quarter of an hour's walk, slow and steady, he came to the Court House with its twin memorials of the Great War on the lawn out front—the gray German field gun on its square concrete platform and on the other side of the lawn, the cenotaph with its gray-granite soldier standing at attention on his pedestal, gun and soldier both spectral in the moonlight.