The Wanton Troopers (13 page)

And Judd did not fail to notice when Kevin slowed or stopped.

“Better sharpen up there, Kev. We ain't got all night, boy.” Or, “If yuh can't do no better'n that, mebbe yuh better go back tuh the house an' stay with yer mother.”

Kevin scowled and flushed. For a little while, he worked with furious haste. Then, “Look what yer doin' there, Kev. Yer only gittin' about half of them beans, boy.”

No, his father would not admit that he could do anything right. He was either too fast or too slow, too clumsy or too weak. This work that he would have enjoyed had he been free to do it in his own way became grinding drudgery when he did it under his father's supervision.

Leaving the garden at nightfall, they were both of them exhausted and sulky, hating the work and one another.

Moreover, Judd's outbursts of rage were becoming more frequent and more capricious. Kevin knew when to expect a strapping. And there were the incidents involving the orange-haired cat and the runaway cow . . .

Judd kept two cows. One of them — a red, swaybacked, sad-eyed creature that he had bought while he was drunk — hated the barn and vaulted over fences whenever Judd tried to drive her from the pasture.

The animal's perversity drove Judd into fits of rage that both terrified and amused Kevin. When she bounded over the fence, scrambled out of the ditch, and trotted down the road, her doleful face turned sideways, her aspect one of melancholy triumph, Kevin swayed between tears and laughter, and when Judd bellowed, broke off an alder switch, and took after her, Kevin first shrank back in fear, then slapped his hands over his mouth and giggled.

The cow had run away almost every night during the summer. The climax came one evening after Judd had come home and found Mary getting ready to go to another dance.

As usual, the cow jumped the fence and started down the road.

“Come back, yuh sad-faced bitch!” Judd howled, running after her.

Kevin always laughed when he saw a grown man running.

“Come back, yuh swaybacked fool!”

Brandishing his alder switch, Judd stumbled and fell to his knees. He rose, brushing himself and swearing incoherently.

“Come back, yuh dirty bitch!”

The cow ran faster.

Judd roared at Kevin.

“Hey! What the hell's wrong with yuh, boy? Head her off! Head her off, damn it!”

Quickly, Kevin crawled under a barbed wire fence and galloped across the garden to the road.

“Head her off! Head her off there!”

He clambered over the pole fence lining the road and leapt the ditch. He stopped, about twenty feet in front of the cow.

“Head her off! Head her off!”

The cow halted and stared stupidly at Kevin.

“Go on, now! Get back there!”

He was pleading with her.

“Go back to the barn! Go back to the barn, you old fool.”

Running back and forth across the road, he kept her from getting away. Judd caught up to her, struck her with the switch, and turned her back toward the gate.

She tossed her head once, as though in defiance, then slumped in defeat.

“Open the gate, boy! Wake up there and open the gate!”

Kevin scampered to the gate and struggled with the stiff, heavy bolt. When it slid back, letting the gate swing open, he sighed with relief.

The cow swung through the gate, entered the dooryard, and made for the barn, Judd trotting beside her, still wielding the switch.

“Took yuh long enough tuh git that damn gate open!” he barked as he ran by, puffing.

Spiritlessly, Kevin followed his father to the barn.

The cows were stanchioned. Having already forgotten her adventure, the red cow chewed her cud complacently.

The thing that happened next, Kevin never forgot. For Judd grabbed a pitchfork and, exerting every ounce of his strength, drove its three tines into the cow's side.

Kevin moaned as though the fork had gored him. The cow bellowed and tried to free herself from her stanchion.

“Yuh dirty bitch!”

Judd tore out the tines. Thick, dark blood spurted from the wounds. Smelling the blood, the other cow bellowed in terror. Her head almost touching the floor, the swaybacked cow was choking herself in her efforts to escape from her stanchion.

“I'll kill yuh, yuh bitch!”

Judd drove the tines home again. Kevin clapped his hands to his chest as if he had been speared. “Oh, please, Daddy . . . Oh, please, God,” he whimpered.

The cow, gushing blood in black jets, sank to her knees. Blood soaked into the straw on the floor. Her stable mate kicked and jerked wildly, trying to escape from the hot, salt stink of blood.

“That'll learn yuh, yuh whore. Yuh whore!”

The bloody fork still in his hands, Judd turned toward Kevin. For one insane moment, Kevin believed that the man was about to impale him.

“No, Daddy! Don't kill me!” he screamed.

Babbling, his lips frothing, he backed toward the door.

His father threw the fork aside, seized his shoulders, and shook him until his teeth rattled.

“Don't be a damn fool, Kev! Don't be a damn fool!”

With a terrible, sobbing shriek, Kevin wrenched himself free and ran from the cow stable.

“Come back here, boy! Don't be a damn fool!” he heard Judd roaring behind him.

The other incident, that involving the orange-haired cat, took place one Sunday afternoon, about two weeks later.

Judd, Mary, and Kevin went picking blueberries on the heath. Judd picked berries, as he did everything, with glum determination. By the time that Kevin and Mary had each gathered a quart, he would have filled a five-gallon lard pail to overflowing.

The day was cloudless, porous, serene. Kevin and Mary picked side by side, a little apart from Judd. She wore jeans and one of Judd's shirts and her hair was bound with a yellow kerchief, but even now, in the open field, he could smell the lilacs and wintergreen of her perfume.

They laughed together about the way in which the tiny mouths of the berries tickled their fingers.

“They're tryin' tuh kiss you,” he told her, shyly.

She laughed, and the sound was like the music of little silver bells.

“Oh, you say sweet things sometimes, Scamper. You really do.”

She threw him a little sly, teasing, almost wistful smile.

His knees were stained where he had knelt on them, crushing the rich, juicy berries. He and his mother had eaten berries until their lips, teeth, and tongues were purple-black. He could taste the berries in every fibre of his body. From time to time, he stopped and rubbed a berry between his fingers until all its blue dust was wiped away and it turned shining black.

A sudden thought struck him.

“Do yuh know who yuh remind me of today, Mummy?”

“Who, sweetikins?”

“Ruth — Ruth in the Bible — gleanin' in Boaz's corn field. That's who yuh remind me of.”

“Oh, you
are
sweet, Scampi! You really are!”

He searched for words.

“I guess Ruth wasn't a princess, not really. But seein' you pickin' berries here is like seein' a princess — one that's been driven outta her own country so she's had tuh go and pick blueberries, and . . . I guess I don't know how tuh say it.”

“Oh, you have a fine way of saying things, Scamp. And you know something?” Her voice sank to a whisper, and she leaned closer.

“No. What?”

“That's how I think of myself, sometimes. I think that mebbe I'm really a — oh, a Romanian or a Hungarian princess — and when I was a little small girl, too little to remember anything about it, I —”

He stopped listening. He was sorry that he had spoken. Something in her responses — some nuance of tone or phrasing or gesture — had made the idea seem false and silly. His mother never knew when to stop, he reflected resentfully.

“Hey — yuh fellers can talk when yuh git home. We're up here tuh pick berries!”

Judd laughed, but Kevin detected a note of annoyance in his voice. Perhaps he had overheard their talk of princesses . . .

“Golly, we'll be eatin' blueberries for months, Scamp!”

“Yeah.”

“Blueberry pies, blueberry muffins, blueberry shortcake, stewed blueberries — ugh! Well, I guess it's better than it will be in March when we'll be eating potatoes — and potatoes — and potatoes — and potatoes — and potatoes!”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, Scampi, it's terrible to be poor, isn't it?”

“I guess so, yeah.”

“Come on you fellers! Yuh expect me tuh pick all the berries myself?”

Kevin and Mary bent to their work, winking at one another.

An hour later, they returned, hot and tired, to the house. Judd threw open the door and Kevin and Mary followed him into the kitchen.

The orange-haired cat — a pet of Mary's, which she coddled as though it were an ailing baby — crouched in the centre of the room, playing with a string of sausage, as though the meat were a mouse. As the door opened, the cat looked up in almost human surprise.

“Eh! Ha!”

Judd kicked. The animal skidded across the floor, squealing, its claws screeching as it fought for footing on the slippery linoleum.

“Damn cheat! I ain't never had no use fer a damn cheat!”

Judd thumped his blueberry pail down on the table. He advanced on the cat cringing against the wall. There was fear in its eyes, but it continued to stare hungrily at the meat.

“Shut that damn door!”

Dead-faced, Mary shut the door.

Stunned by Judd's kick or petrified with terror, the cat did not try to run. It pressed against the wall, as though trying to crawl into the wood. Its back curved like a hoop as Judd seized its neck.

“Scratch me, will yuh, yuh cheat! Scratch me, will yuh, yuh cheatin' bitch!”

He carried the quivering, fear-crazed beast to the door.

“Kev! Fetch my hand-axe!”

Kevin stared wildly.

“Yuh hear me? Fetch my hand-axe!”

“Judd!”

Mary's cheeks were like chalk. She swayed, as though, she might faint.

Judd gave her a look that was almost a leer.

“Fetch me that hand-axe! Yuh hear me!”

Mary stiffened, collecting herself.

“You'd better do it, Scampi,” she said wearily.

Kevin went to the woodbox and got the hatchet. Holding it in limp, trembling fingers, he followed his father.

Judd ran to the wagonshed.

“Hurry up, boy! This damn cheat's tryin' tuh scratch me!”

Inside, he tore the hatchet from Kevin's hand and thrust the cat down on the chopping block — Kevin closed his eyes.

“Yuh goddamn cheatin' whore!”

There was a dull thud. The cat screamed. Kevin had never heard such a sound as came from the throat of this cat. It bore no resemblance to the yelp of a cat in pain! This scream was almost a strangled laugh.

Not until he turned did he open his eyes. Then he ran, weeping, to the house. His mother stood on the doorstep, her arms outstretched . . .

Sixteen

Kevin had learned that there were two kinds of fear. There was daytime fear — his fear of his father and of all strong, unpitying daytime things — and there was nighttime fear, the queasy horror he felt when he imagined a creature in a black cloak creeping toward his bed under cover of the wailing darkness.

The presence of his grandmother O'Brien sometimes filled him with a vague, unsettling dread, akin to that nighttime fear. For years, Martha O'Brien had fought against death. Her struggle was as frantic and squalid as that of a hen in the clutches of a fox. And, like the hen, she was doomed to defeat. Death had infiltrated her body. Death peered from her ice-blue eyes. And when she emitted a lusty cackle it seemed to be death that laughed.

Yet Kevin was drawing closer to her. For she hated the bright, dancing world of the flesh. And it was this world that was taking his mother away from him.

One night when his grandmother and he were alone together, she spoke of the sins that had been committed by June Larlee. She spoke in dark hints and sly conundrums, but he grasped the central fact: June's sins had their origin in her opulent flesh.

“Yes, the flesh, laddie!” Grandmother O'Brien said, her dentures, with their clay-coloured gums, rattling in her mouth. “The sins of the flesh!”

And he thought of June in her tight red shorts. His grandmother said that June was like unto Jezebel, the harlot of Ahab, whose bones had been licked by the dogs. In his mind's eye, June's thighs were like the bristled wick-white fat of pork. Shuddering — yet not without a thrill of cruel joy — he imagined June being pushed closer and closer to the edge of a precipice while the white-fanged hounds howled in the courtyard below her . . .

“Eh, yes, laddie — when God was on the earth, women like her was stoned — stoned to death, laddie. Can't yuh see that sinful white flesh of hers turnin' black under the stones!”

And Martha O'Brien laughed.

The picture inside Kevin's mind changed. He saw June Larlee on her knees, shielding her face with her arms and whimpering piteously . . . Surrounding her were robed men with fiery eyes and waist-length beards, and the names of these men were the names of books in the Bible: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Haggai, Ezekiel, Malachi, Joshua. They hurled stones at her, and as the stones sank in her flesh, she screamed — she screamed as the orange-haired cat had screamed under Judd's hatchet. And Kevin bit his lips and groaned, hating himself for having such a dream.

“— And she does terrible, bad wicked things with men, laddie — things so bad I can't tell yuh about 'em. My tongue would burn up in my mouth if I tried tuh tell yuh about such wickedness, laddie . . .”

He wondered what June and the men did to one another. Something his grandmother had said made him think that, perhaps, they drank of one another's blood. In any case, it was a diabolical, obscene thing that they did. In the days when God had lived upon the earth, men and women who did this thing were smitten with leprosy and they walked over the world in white shrouds, like ghosts, crying, “Unclean! Unclean!”