The Wanton Troopers (10 page)

“Gosh!”

He turned and looked in the direction his father was facing. But he could not see above the grass without standing up, and he was very tired.

He rolled over on his back and broke off a daisy. He nibbled a white petal and found it flavourless, then chewed up the golden eye, enjoying its bittersweet pulp, licking at the grains stuck to the backs of his teeth, and wondering how many daisies he would have to eat every day if he were a cow . . .

He was halfway to his feet before he awoke.

Judd had fired once and was swearing as he reloaded.

“Where? Where? Where?” Kevin cried.

His father threw up the gun barrel and fired again.

The gun cracked and Kevin jumped back in fear.

“Got him! Got him by God!” Judd yelled.

Kevin whirled around and around, frantic because he could not see the deer.

“Where, Daddy, where?” he insisted.

Judd bounded across the field and Kevin ran after him, yelling.

At the centre of the field, Judd stopped.

Kevin ran faster, his heart hammering.

Then he saw the deer.

“Oh!” he cried.

He stopped.

The buck lay sprawled on its belly, one foreleg bent under its body, the other stretched out in the grass and daisies.

“Oh!” he repeated, stunned.

Judd ran forward and straddled the deer's shoulders.

The buck tried to rise, then fell back.

Judd drew a knife.

Kevin giggled. His father looked funny on the deer's back.

Judd bent low, reached under the white throat.

“Oh!” Kevin said. “Oh.”

His father's free hand grasped the antlers, jerked the head back.

Kevin's own head went back. His mouth dropped open. His eyes widened, staring.

Red blood gushed out.

“Oh,” Kevin groaned. “Oh.”

He smelled the blood, hot, saline, sickening.

It seemed to pour from his mouth and nostrils.

“Please, Daddy,” he whimpered. “Please.”

The earth under his feet was a sea of blood.

Blood. Blood. Blood. Blood.

He put his hands to his throat, as though to staunch a wound.

“Oh, Daddy,” he whispered. “Oh, Daddy.”

His father carried him home. He floated through a ghost-ridden void and saw only black blobs moving with terrible purposefulness through the shadows. Twice he emerged into semi-consciousness, while his father held him up and he retched.

His mother had undressed him.

Naked, wrapped in a blanket, he lay in her arms.

She rocked him gently, whispered into his hair.

“Baby,” she whispered. “Bay-bee. Sweet bay-bee. Sweet Scampi . . . Sweet Scampi baby . . . Sweetest, sweetest baby . . . bay-bee . . . bay-beee . . . bay-beeee . . .”

He tried to draw closer to her warmth, wishing he could crawl into her body and sleep there forever.

Ten

Isabel DuBois was the daughter of a French-Canadian who had come to Lockhartville that summer to work as tally man at the mill. She was in Grade VI, and everything about her — the colour of her hair, her swift, unpredictable movements — reminded Kevin of a squirrel. Because she spoke with a quaint, liquid accent, he thought her as alluringly alien as the purple dahlias beside the front door of the Minard house. And because Riff Wingate, Harold Winthrop, and the others twitted and baited her, he came to feel a deep confraternity with her — even though they had hardly ever spoken to one another.

Riff sat in the seat behind Isabel. In class, when Miss Roache was writing on the blackboard and had her back turned to the room, Riff would bare his yellow-snag-toothed grin and lift his leg until the toe of his sneaker slid under Isabel's skirt and nudged her thigh. The squirrel-haired girl, her eyes flaming, would turn and hit at him with her ruler. Hearing the children giggle, Miss Roache would whirl and demand to know who was responsible for the disturbance. Not a boy or a girl would blink an eye.

At recess each morning, when the children were let out of the class room for fifteen minutes, Harold, Riff, Av, and Alton would corner Isabel between the school and the woodshed.

“Oh, God, yuh look sweet tuhday, Frenchie!” Riff would leer. “Don't Frenchie look sweet, this mornin', fellers? Don't she look sweet, eh? Don't she, eh?”

Isabel would stamp her feet and claw at Riff's face and curse him: Kevin had never heard such oaths and obscenities pour from the mouth of a girl. Her profanity shocked him. But he envied her ability to defy her tormenters. In similar circumstances, he became as dumb and will-less as a stone.

“What colour panties yuh got on tuhday, Frenchie?”

“Oh, didn't yuh know, Riff? Frenchie don't wear no panties. She don't wear no panties a-tall. Didn't yuh know that?”

“Shut your big mouths, you bastards!”

“Aw, come on, Frenchie. Let's see if yuh're wearin' panties, eh? Let's see, eh?”

“Make her show yuh, Riff!”

And Riff, dodging and weaving to evade Isabel's flailing fists, would grab the hem of her skirt and yank it up around her hips. Watching, Kevin blushed and trembled with anger — though he felt a quick little shock of excitement in his stomach as he got a momentary glimpse of her yellow underpants and uncovered flesh.

“I'll tell Miss Roache on you, you big fool, you! You wait and see if I don't!” Isabel would shriek.

“What duh yuh think, fellers, had we better take Frenchie's panties down, eh?”

“Go ahead, Riff! I dare yuh! I dare yuh, Riff!”

And Isabel would back away, cursing them at the top of her voice.

“Watch 'er, Riff! She's gittin' away, boy!”

And the bell would clang and they would scramble back into the school house, the bigger boys cackling and squirming with excitement.

A dozen times a day, Harold or Riff pinched Isabel's rump or pulled her squirrel-coloured hair. Sometimes, at recess or noon hour, they teased her until she wept.

Kevin wished he could tell Isabel that she had one friend in school. He would have liked to have gone to her and told her that he understood her rage and anguish, that he too was the butt of taunts and ridicule. But he was too shy.

When he grew up, Kevin told himself, he would be like the Scarlet Pimpernel or Prince Florizel of Bohemia. He would wear a black, red-silk-lined cape and carry a sword-cane, and he would go all over the world punishing bullies and rescuing the weak and despised. Someday — twenty or twenty-five years from now — his black limousine, driven by a Hindu chauffeur, would turn into the yard in front of a miserable shack on the Lockhartville road. By that time the fame of the Black Avenger would have spread to the four corners of the world. Riff Wingate, a dirt-grubbing, sawdust-covered mill hand, would come from the shack to greet him.

“It's the Black Avenger!” And while Riff — poor humble peasant — knelt in the mud at his feet, Kevin would sweep off his hat and throw back his cloak.

“Do you know me, peasant?”

“Yes, sir, begging your pardon, sir, you are the Black Avenger!”

And Kevin would laugh sardonically and light a fabulously expensive Armenian cigarette.

“Ach, peasant! I am not only the Black Avenger! I am Kevin O'Brien. Do you remember me?”

And Riff would grovel like a whipped cur.

“Please, sir, let me live, sir! Have mercy, sir! Don't kill me. Let me live. Oh, please, please, sir!”

And the Black Avenger — Kevin O'Brien — would raise his sword-cane and —

When the day came that he finally intervened, no one was more surprised than he.

It was a few minutes before the noon bell. Half a dozen boys, led by Riff and Harold, had dragged Isabel into the woodshed. Kevin followed them.

Riff held one of her wrists, Harold the other. The younger boys, Alton Stacey, Av Farmer, Dink Anthony, and Jess Allen, shoved and capered, their eyes spiteful and intent. Had they noticed Kevin, they might have pushed him outside. But they were too engrossed in the scene before them.

“Gawd-a-mighty, yer a hell-cat, Frenchie!” Riff snickered.

She kicked at his shins, lunged forward, and tried to sink her teeth in his arm.

“Nobody's gonna hurt yuh, Frenchie!” Harold grinned. “Jist be a good girl. Ain't nobody gonna hurt yuh!”

“Oh, go poke your pimply face down a toilet hole!” the girl retorted.

“All we're gonna do is take yer little panties down, Frenchie,” Av Farmer shrilled.

“Go to hell!”

“Okay, Av. Git tuh work, boy,” Riff ordered.

While Riff and Harold tightened their grips and the others moved closer, Av stepped forward and reached down for Isabel's skirt.

“Hey! Hold 'er feet, somebody!”

“You dirty bastard! You sonovabitch!”

To his own amazement, Kevin found himself pushing between Dink Anthony and Jess Allen.

“You leave her alone!” he heard himself saying.

Eight eyes stared in disbelief. Isabel ceased to struggle. Av straightened and turned. For a long moment, the boys were too astounded to move or speak.

Then: “What the hell yuh sayin' there, Key-von?” Av Farmer growled.

The power that had made Kevin intervene had deserted him. He did not know what to say or do next.

“Jist you leave her alone,” he repeated meekly.

The six relaxed back into normalcy. There were a few scattered snickers.

“Who says so, eh? Who says so?” Av leered, laying his open hands on Kevin's chest and pushing. “Who says so, eh?”

“Say, who does that little snot-nosed runt think he is, anyway?”

This was Isabel's voice. Yes, she meant him! The withering contempt he saw in her eyes was like the slap of a frozen alder branch across the face.

“Oh, this ain't nobody, Frenchie — jist Key-von!” Riff sneered. They had released her wrists. But she did not attempt to move away.

“Tell him to get lost,” Isabel snapped.

“Yuh heard what she said, Key-von! Git lost. Hit the grit, sonny boy. Yuh ain't wanted here.”

“Get lost, you nosey little squirt,” Isabel called. “Run home and tell your mother to change your didies!”

Kevin slowly back away.

Later, he consoled himself with the reflection that girls were crazy and that the French were a heathenish and perverse people. Frogs, Judd called them. After all, Isabel was only a frog. But each time she crossed the schoolyard, encircled by boys, he found his eyes following her . . .

Eleven

The manner in which objects grew as they approached fascinated Kevin. There was his father who, a moment ago, had appeared at the end of the gravelled road leading down from the mill. Kneeling in a chair facing the window, Kevin saw him first as a toy man, smaller than Kevin's littlest finger, hopping past the tiny lumber piles. But when he re-appeared, after vanishing behind a clump of matchstick alders, he was as long as Kevin's entire hand.

“Daddy's comin',” he announced, half-turning.

His mother worked over the stove, wisps of hair caught in the sweat on her forehead. Even in the hottest weather, mill men like Judd O'Brien wanted hot meals when they came home from work.

She was hot and tired. “Don't he always come home when the whistle blows?” she snapped.

“What?”

“Don't he always come home when the whistle blows?”

She banged pots together, hating the adhesive heat.

“Gosh, yes. I mean, sure he does.”

He turned back to the window. The top rung of the chair bit into his belly, his face flattened against the hot, sticky glass.

Now, turning into the lane, passing the lilac hedge, Judd grew as long as Kevin's arm. The denim smock swung back and forth across his hips, a pendulum keeping time to his stride. Kevin loved the way the mill men carried their smocks, an arm thrown across the chest, the hand resting on the opposite shoulder, pinning the smock there, the other arm swinging free. All the men carried their smocks thus. It made Kevin think of the capes of Hussars.

The aroma of warmed-over beans, compounded of sweetness and fat, merged with the bitter steam of tea. His mother rattled the stove lids, angry with herself for hurrying.

Now his father stood in the dooryard, by the wagonshed. And he was longer than the legs that bent back under Kevin's denim shorts.

Kevin leapt from the chair, bounded across the room, threw open the screen door and ran across the yard to meet him.

Judd sat in the swing that hung in the wagonshed door. He had taken off his gum rubbers and was shaking clouds of aromatic sawdust out of them. Even on Sundays, when he lay resting on the cot, bits of yellow sawdust trickled from his hair.

“Hi!” Kevin said.

He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, waiting to see what his father's mood would be. Their every meeting began with this pause, this moment of waiting.

One of the swallows that nested beneath a horseshoe nailed to a high beam in the wagonshed darted past Kevin's head.

Judd had rolled down the cuffs of the jeans that he wore under his overalls and was rubbing the sawdust away with his thumb. Kevin never looked at these thumbs without thinking of hooves.

“Hot day,” Judd commented.

“Yeah,” Kevin agreed eagerly.

It was all right. He felt sure of himself now. There were times, especially at the end of hot days at the mill, when his father stared at him sullenly and refused to speak.

Judd bent down and ran his hands briskly through his hair, scratching out showers of spruce and pine dust.

He grunted. “That feels a damn sight better,” he said.

Kevin did not speak. Even during his father's relaxed moods, he was terrified of saying the wrong thing. When he was not sure of what he was expected to say, he kept silent. Their conversations were punctuated by gaps of tense, expectant silence.

Judd stood up, shaking himself.

“Guess we'd better git somethin' tuh eat,” he said.

They followed the footpath along the wagonshed to the house. Kevin tried to imitate the solemnity and assurance of his father's tread. His consciousness adapted itself to his father's presence, changing. Once he had caught a field mouse and imprisoned it briefly in his closed hand. He remembered the small animal's strange movements, its furious thrusts against his clutching fingers alternating with moments of tremulous peace in the soft centre of his palm. A frantic surge — then quiet. The sequence was repeated over and over. When with his father, he felt this astonishing rhythm of frenzy and peace repeated in his own breast.