The Wanton Troopers (11 page)

His mother had filled their plates with beans and fried potatoes. Bread, butter, and tea completed the meal. And already she had fetched the kerosene lamps from the pantry and placed them on the table, next to the sink, their freshly scrubbed chimneys gleaming.

“Well, Mar,” Judd grunted.

“Hi, Judd. Pretty hot day at the mill.”

“Hot enough.”

Judd threw his smock and overalls on a chair by the door and rolled up his shirt sleeves. Tiny bits of sawdust were caught in the reddish hair on his arms. He washed in cold water, head low, eyes shut, panting and spluttering.

Kevin enjoyed watching his father wash. It was much more exciting to watch him shave, but that ritual he performed only on Sunday mornings. Kevin could almost tell the day of the week by the length of his father's whiskers. This being Friday night, the whiskers were at their longest: a thick, reddish-brown moustache and beard.

The man and the boy would have eaten in silence if the woman had not prodded them. Sometimes she spoke because their silence made her nervous and lonesome and sometimes simply because their quiet annoyed her.

“Scampi made a hundred in his test today,” she said.

Judd ate with his face only inches from his plate, his shoulders rounded almost protectively over his food. He did not look at her when she spoke.

“He did, eh?”

Kevin's ear lobes burned. He was beginning to be embarrassed by his mother's pet name. And, before his father, he was ashamed of his successes at school, sensing that the man despised such things. He had heard him say, scornfully, that if a calf were taken to school and kept there for twenty years it would still be a calf when it left. Judd himself had left school in Grade V, and when he said that a man acted like a college boy he meant that he was both a weakling and a fool.

“Yes,” Mary said. “He made a hundred in history.”

“Huh.”

“Aren't you proud of him?” she insisted.

Kevin wished she would let the matter drop. He hated her nagging moods, the times when she would not let well enough alone.

“It ain't nothin',” he interjected.

“Git me some more beans will yuh, Mar?” Judd asked, not as though he were trying to change the subject but as if he had already forgotten what the subject involved and had allowed it to slip out of his mind because, after all, it did not concern him.

Without speaking, she rose and refilled his plate. Kevin hoped she would not speak of the test again. At the same time he felt hurt that his father had dismissed the matter so indifferently. In his father's presence, he tacitly agreed that school work was a childish thing that deserved no share in the conversations of adults. But that afternoon he had run almost a mile, coming home from school, to wave his test paper under his mother's eyes. The memory of that triumph remained. In spite of himself, he wished that his father would condescend to share in it.

“June Larlee was in today,” Mary said.

“Eh?”

Judd had not been listening. When he ate, all his attention was concentrated on his food. He ate with his whole body, like a healthy animal.

“I said June Larlee was in today.”

“Oh.”

“She said mebbe you and me'd like to go with her and Larry Hutchinson over to the dance in Larchmont tonight.”

He scowled, picking his teeth with a fingernail.

“She did, eh.”

“I said to stop in when she was going by. Mebbe we'd go. Anyway I'd talk it over with you, I said.”

He rose abruptly and crossed to the cot where he sat down and unlaced his rubbers.

“A man works all day in the mill he don't feel much like kickin' up his heels at a dance, Mar.”

He removed his rubbers, kicked them under the cot, and lay down, grunting.

“But it's just this once, Judd. You can get cleaned up in no time and I'll press your suit and Grammie can stay with Scampi and —”

He shut his eyes, cutting her off, pushing her out of his consciousness.

Kevin stopped eating. His belly twisted into its familiar, quivering knot.

“Please, Judd.”

He did not answer. Perhaps he did not hear her. His ability to detach himself was always his best, most unanswerable argument. He had cut her off as surely as if he had gone into another room and slammed the door in her face.

In a few minutes, he fell asleep. Kevin and Mary walked on tiptoe and talked in whispers to keep from wakening him. Through the window, Kevin saw the outlines of the barn and the wagonshed softening in the purple twilight.

Twelve

There were times, Kevin's mother said, when a person had to dance or die. Once or twice, she had given him lessons in dancing.

“Come on now, Scampi,” she cried, taking his hands in hers. “I'm going to teach you to waltz!”

Embarrassed, he tried half-heartedly to pull away. But she would not let him go.

“Now, come on, Scampi! I'll teach you!”

Surrendering to her, beginning to enjoy himself, he brought his feet together, then swung them apart, as she directed. They danced through the house, in and out of his parents' bedroom, across the hall, into his room and back again to the kitchen. She did not let him stop until they were both of them giggling and breathless.

And through it all, she hummed a wordless little tune. This was the music, she said, and he must learn to feel it in his shoulders and hips and legs. At dances, the music was provided by guitars, fiddles, and mandolins. Once she had attended a dance where a blind man had played an accordion and a mouth organ at the same time.

“Oh, Scampi, you'll learn in no time at all. You really will! Someday you'll dance just like your uncle Kaye!” She smiled. “Kaye goes out into the middle of the floor and step dances. He kicks off his boots and dances in his socks! Oh, you should see him, Scampi. All of my people — every one of them — were dancers . . .” Her voice trailed away.

Grandmother O'Brien said that dancing was sinful. Salome, dancing before Herod the King, had demanded the head of John the Baptist. John the Baptist, Grandmother O'Brien said, had founded the Baptist Church. Ever since his death, the Baptist Church had condemned dancing.

“There ain't no greater wickedness, boy,” she said darkly. “Men and women pressin' belly tuh belly and hoppin' up and down tuh devilish music! Terrible, bad, wicked things come of dancin', boy. Why, the devil hisself sometimes shows up at dances!”

“Gee whiz!”

“Yes, the devil hisself! It's the God's truth, boy. Why, I remember my own mother tellin' me about a time right here in this very settlement. There was a girl lived here, a girl name of Hutchinson, I do believe — and that girl loved dancin'. Rain or shine, she never missed a dance. Well, boy, one night there was a dance in the school house and about half-way through the evenin' a stranger walked in. He was black as a gypsy, Mother said, and his suit was as black as coal. And that girl that loved dancin' so much shared every dance with him! Nobody had ever seen anybody dance the way them two danced that night! They waltzed and they jigged and they clogged. They danced long after everybody else stopped dancin' — and still that stranger wouldn't let her stop. He made that girl dance until her feet bled and the blood ran down ontuh the floor! Well, boy, some of the men had a mind tuh stop it — and, yuh know what? — they was froze in their chairs! Yessir, they was froze in their chairs! They couldn't wiggle a finger. And the stranger and the girl kept a-dancin'. The fiddler laid his fiddle down — and, glory! That fiddle kept a-fiddlin' all by itself on a chair! There weren't no human hand nowhere near that fiddle bow but it kept a-playin'. Why, Mother said she never in her life heard a fiddler play like that fiddle played. And that stranger kept that girl a-dancin' until daybreak! After he left the people got up and looked at that girl and yuh know what they found, boy? Yuh know what they found?” Her voice became a high, quivering whisper. “Well, boy, they found two terrible big burns on her back where the stranger's hands had touched her, and — listen tuh this, boy! — there was a smell of brimstone in the room!”

Kevin thought of his mother dancing belly to belly with a gypsy-faced man in a coal black suit. The thought made him look over his shoulder and shiver.

For Mary went to dances now. June Larlee would come for her, and as his mother led him to bed, Kevin would look back and see June slouching in the chair by the window, making a ribbon of her chewing gum and running it in and out of her mouth. Sometimes, she would pull up her dress and scratch at her legs where her tight rubber garters had made them itch.

“'Nighty-night, Scampi,” she would call. And his hatred for her would rise in his throat like gall.

In putting him to bed before she left for a dance, Mary gave him even more caresses and endearments than usual. But he knew it was a sham.

She was abandoning him. Every kiss was a swindle and a betrayal. A million kisses would not have assuaged his anger and hurt. Stroking his cheek as she sat in the chair by his pillow, she sang to him:

I see a fireplace, a cosy room . . .

A little nest that nestles where the roses bloom.

Just Mollie and me, and baby makes three,

Are hurried to my blue heaven . . .

He wished he could contract a mortal illness — some horrible, incurable disease like the leprosy mentioned in the Bible. She would be sorry then! He saw himself on his deathbed. A doctor in a white smock stood at the foot of the bed. His parents knelt on the floor, gazing tearfully at his face; on his cheeks there was an angelic pallor like that on the cheeks of Eva St. Clair. It was dusk, and the room smelled of flowers.

The doctor wiped a tear from his eye.

“Mrs. O'Brien, be brave; your son is dying.”

Mary buried her face in his quilts and wailed.

“Oh, no, doctor! No! No! No! It isn't true! Say it isn't true, doctor! Please, say it isn't true!”

“Alas,” said the doctor, blowing his nose and again wiping his eyes. “Alas, it is too true.”

“Oh, Scampi,” she moaned. “Oh, I'm so sorry, Scampi! I'm so sorry for the terrible way I left you alone and went to dances. If you get better I promise I won't ever do it again. I promise, Scampi!”

Sobbing piteously, she pleaded with him.

A gentle smile touched his death-white lips as he whispered — “What's wrong, Scamper?”

“Huh?”

“You were a million miles away.”

“Oh, I guess I'm just sleepy,” he said sulkily.

“Oh, my! You look fierce, Scamp. You aren't mad at me are you, sweetikins?”

“No. I ain't mad.”

She was a fool. He wished she would go away.

“That's my baby.” She bent down to kiss him.

“Ummmmmmmmmmm-eh!” He turned away his head.

Taking the lamp, she started toward the door.

“Goodnight, sweetikins!”

“'Night.”

Purposely, he closed his eyes before she left the room, spurning her.

And she didn't even notice that I didn't want her to go! he reflected. The big fool! A fat lot she cares for me! Sweetikins — horse chestnuts. The big fool!

He lay in the dark and listened, hearing first the small, comforting sounds of her moving about in the kitchen and, a little later, the harsh, conclusive sounds of her steps on the porch.

She was singing again. Her voice came faintly from the dooryard, fading into silence as she and June walked away from the house:

Put me in your pocket

And I' ll go along with you,

No more will I be lonesome

And no more will I be blue . . .

“Oh, Mummy. Oh, Mummy . . . please don't leave me,” he whispered.

Thirteen

In almost every night of waiting for his mother — and when she was away from home, there was not a moment in which he was not waiting for her to return — Kevin crawled out of bed and stumbled, stupid with sleep, through the darkness to his father. Until Mary got home, Judd lay on the cot in the kitchen, on the straw-filled tick, with an old coat under his head, an army blanket pulled over his shoulders. No words were exchanged when Kevin climbed up beside him. The kerosene lamp, with its wick turned low, glowed like a single red coal. The green mill-wood, smouldering in the stove, crackled and sizzled. Wind wailed on the telephone wires and moaned in the rose bushes under the northern window. The smell of Judd's body was compounded of sweat, tobacco, sawdust, and leather. It made Kevin think of the sharp, good odour of ploughed earth, the aroma of onions and horse droppings.

Kevin lay still, fearful of annoying his father. The man's body was adamant, impenetrable. It was like rocky earth in comparison with the yielding, creek-water body of his mother. The Bible said that man had been created from the dust of the earth and that woman had been made from man's bone. Kevin wondered if this could be a mistake. Surely, his father had been created from stone, chiselled from a boulder like those that stood in the west pasture, and his mother — his mother had sprung from water, risen from the white foam.

He stirred only when the ache in his calves became unbearable. Each time he moved, the man beside him grunted. So he postponed the moment of moving until immobility became torture. Yet even this was preferable to the loneliness of his own room.

His eyes were open, and the darkness in the corners, by the woodbox, under the sink, beneath the table, might have been the shadows of vampires and werewolves. At times like this, he believed in malevolent, occult things. The vampire pushed away the lid of its coffin and rose from the grave — a black Christ, an Antichrist, rising from its sepulchre. Werewolves could be identified by the hair growing on the palms of their hands. The thought made his own hand itch. Secretly, he rubbed his knuckles against his palm . . .

A vampire could not be seen in a mirror. And vampires and werewolves could be killed only with silver bullets. But if one made the sign of the cross and cried, “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost!” these monstrosities would cower and disappear. He shaped the words soundlessly, so that his father would not hear. “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.” But if he came face to face with a vampire his lips might be paralyzed with fear!