The Wanton Troopers (14 page)

The thought of uncleanliness made him imagine that perhaps June and the men ate of — but he squelched the thought. It sickened him. He almost retched when he tried to conceive of what the lepers might have meant when they cried, “Unclean! Unclean!”

His grandmother opened the Bible and read:

And I saw in the right hand of him that sat on the throne, a
book written within and on the back side, sealed with seven
seals. And I saw a strong angel proclaiming with a loud voice,
Who is worthy to open the book and to loose the seals thereof? And no man in heaven, nor in earth, neither under the earth,
was able to open the book, neither to look therein . . .

And the fifth angel sounded and I saw a star fall from
heaven unto earth, and to him was given the key of the
bottomless pit. And he opened the bottomless pit; and there
arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace;
and the sun and air were darkened by reason of the smoke of
the pit . . .

Kevin's detestation of June and his uneasy awareness of the flesh were heightened and intensified by June's teasing. As summer drifted into fall, her visits became more frequent. Twice she burst into the kitchen on Saturday nights while his mother was bathing him. And each time she made many little snide, giggling remarks about his nakedness.

“You don't have to be scared of me, Scamp. I've seen naked men before, haven't I, Mar?”

And, “Golly, Scamp, you look just like a bantam rooster with all his feathers pulled out!”

And, “Gee, Mar, I'd like to have myself a little play-toy like Scamper to keep me company when I get tired of the big boys!”

And, “Nobody'd have to look at him twice to see he wasn't a girl, would they, Mar?”

Each such remark was followed by a wink and a giggle. Kevin sensed that June found his nakedness not only comical but exciting. And, to his further discomfiture, Mary laughed with her.

“Oh, don't be silly, June!” she said.

But she flushed a little and laughed, and Kevin knew that she considered June's teasing amusing. For the first time in his life, he felt ashamed of his body.

And, a few days later, his shame became an almost superstitious dread.

Late one afternoon he went to Kaye Dunbar's cabin on the creek road.

As he always did, he flung open the door without knocking.

Kaye and a naked woman lay on his straw-filled bunk.

Blushing to the roots of his hair, Kevin whirled and ran back to the road.

“Hey, wait a minute, Namesake!” Kaye yelled after him.

But he did not stop. And behind him he heard the lewd, mocking laughter of June Larlee.

Seventeen

But, one Sunday in October, his path, for a while at least, turned in a new direction.

Mary liked to dress him for Sunday School. She had somehow persuaded Judd to give her the money with which to buy him what she called a “darling little suit.” And every Sunday morning she dressed him in black leather shoes, wool knee stockings, flannel shorts, a starched white shirt and bow tie, and a blue blazer. Getting him into these clothes involved innumerable small adjustments: she flicked tons of imaginary lint from his blazer, knotted and reknotted his tie until it almost choked him, straightened his collar and stockings again and again. And when she finished, she stood back and looked him up and down admiringly.

“Oh, Scamper, you're beautiful!” she gloated.

He knew that she was treating him as though he were a doll. These chafing clothes were his doll's suit. Bitterly, he thought of the dolls he had seen whose clothes were stapled to their bodies; he felt as though tacks had been driven through cloth and leather and into his scalded neck, itching legs, and contorted feet. Nothing irked him more than to be made a plaything; he detested the grinning adults who poked and jabbed him and asked him inane riddles. When his mother told him that he was beautiful, he knew she meant that he was as beautiful as a doll — and he hated it.

Coming to the first turn in the road, he sat down by the ditch and took off his shoes and stockings. The rest of the way, he walked barefoot. The soft mud was like a cooling ointment.

He came to the field in which the mill oxen and horses were pastured on Sundays. The horses grazed at one end of the field, the oxen at the other. Kevin could not recall ever having seen them come near one another. The horses ignored the oxen and the oxen did not seem to know that the horses existed; the indifference of the horses sprang from pride, that of the oxen from stupidity. He stood for a moment by the fence, watching them. In the polished October sunlight, the yellow bodies of the oxen called up visions of smoke-coloured fall sunsets. Despite their bulk and power, they looked old and despondent. He remembered the strange, frightening words of Miss Sarah Minard. An ox was a living corpse. Almost everybody in Lockhartville was a living corpse, she had said. And it was true that there was an uncanny, indefinable resemblance between these resting oxen and men let off from their work at the mill. The oxen did not appear to know that they were no longer yoked to the log-boat. Plodding across the rusting grass, they seemed to drag an unseen burden behind them. And it was the same with the men: even on Sunday they did not really interrupt their work. Kevin had seen Judd, lying on the cot, raise his arms and fling them about as if he were throwing boards down the rollers in his sleep.

The horses were better. Men spoke of breaking horses, but, in reality, a horse was never wholly broken until it was killed. He called to the old marble-eyed sawdust horse, and she trotted across the field and reached her head, with its blunt, tobacco-coloured teeth and great, moist nostrils, over the fence.

“Hiyuh, old girl,” he said.

She snorted and tossed her head. Suddenly, he felt sad; he wished he dared open the pasture gate and let the horses run away. The oxen, he decided disgustedly, would stay where they were even if the fence were torn down. But the horses — even this old, swaybacked nag, given the chance, would run into the woods like a deer.

“You're nice,” he told her. “You're real nice.”

She looked at him as though she understood perfectly, as though she could answer him with words of her own, if she wished to. He wondered what horses thought, if their eyes saw the same world as his. Judd had told him once that in a horse's eyes a man looked twenty feet tall. He wondered if this were so.

“Nice old girl,” he crooned, “nice old girl.”

Abruptly, she turned and trotted away. He was a little annoyed with her. He had imagined that she liked him, enjoyed having him talk to her. Her sudden withdrawal rather hurt him.

“Oh, go on then, you big fool!” he laughed.

And he tossed a pebble between her hooves, so that she threw her head in the air, stared at him for a moment, and then walked lazily away.

The bank was so steep that he had to run down it and clamber out of the ditch on his hands and knees. He brushed off dust and dead leaves and continued on his way.

The mill was silent and motionless. It made him think of a dark, brooding prison. Judd had been fourteen, only three years older than he, when he had first gone to work in the mill. For as long as Kevin could remember he had known, dimly, that the mill was waiting for him. The mere thought of this place of pulsating, shrieking power was sufficient to dispel all but his deepest and most desperate dreams.

Walking through the mire where the road had been churned into muddy soup by wagons, log-boats, and lumber trucks, he visualized himself three years hence: an ox labouring at a slab saw or on a sawdust cart. Perhaps Miss Minard had been right — maybe men would come for him with ropes and knives. He thrust the thought away and walked faster.

A dead raccoon lay by the roadside. As he came near, the ravens that had covered the corpse as flies will cover a lump of sugar, flew up and hovered above him. They made no sound at all.

The raccoon's body was like a piece of fur torn from a coat to stanch a wound. It was almost impossible to imagine that this little heap of bloody rags had ever been a living creature.

Turning his eyes away, he hastened past it.

Ten minutes later, he reached the church. The building was almost a replica of the school house: square, tin-roofed, and whitewashed. Kevin much preferred the appearance of the Anglican church, which had bells and a steeple. But his grandmother O'Brien said that the Anglicans were almost as wicked as the Catholics.

Before entering the church, he hid himself in an alder thicket, washed his feet in a puddle, dried them with his handkerchief, and donned his shoes and stockings. Then, automatically adjusting his consciousness so that he changed from the person he was when he was alone to the person he was when with other people, he went into the building. He was greeted by organ music and the voices of children singing:

What a friend we have in Jesus,

All our sins and griefs to bear.

What a privilege to carry

Everything to God in prayer!

The children, grouped according to their ages, sat in little clusters in various parts of the room. The smell of the church, the aroma of furniture polish and old, musty books, reminded Kevin of the Minard parlour. Embarrassed by his lateness, imagining that every eye was focused on him, he stumbled awkwardly to his own class, a dozen boys and girls sitting in the pew normally reserved for the choir. The teacher, Mrs. Cranston, nodded to him as he sat down. Her smile was as jarringly sweet as homemade fudge candy.

Oh, what peace we often forfeit,

Oh, what needless pain we bear.

All because we will not carry

Everything to God in prayer.

“Hiyuh, Key-von,” Av Farmer whispered.

“Hi.”

“Didjer mother change yer didies a-fore she let yuh out this mornin', Key-von?”

“Now, now, Avard and Kevin,” said Mrs. Cranston sweetly. “We don't talk with our friends in Sunday School, you know. We wait until Sunday School is over and then we can talk all we want to. I'm sure that all of us understand that, don't we?”

“Yes, ma'am,” Av grinned.

“And what about you, Kevin?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

Mrs. Cranston was the wife of the foreman of a railway section gang. Like all the Sunday School teachers, she belonged to the higher of Lockhartville's two economic and social classes. “The High Muck-a-mucks,” Judd called them. “The rich,” Grandmother O'Brien said. Kevin had heard his mother say, enviously, that Mrs. Cranston entertained at bridge parties and that she wore an evening gown when she went to lodge meetings in Larchmont.

Kevin knew that Mrs. Cranston pitied him, and he hated her for it.

“This morning,” she smiled, “our lesson has to do with worldly things. Now I'm sure that all of us know what
worldly
means —”

The girls sat in the front pew, the boys in the back. The girls wore little pink or blue or orange bonnets and their beribboned pigtails hung down over the back of the seat. Av Farmer and some of the other boys made a game of jerking the pigtails during class. Kevin thought this unspeakably silly and refused to admit that he would have done it himself had he dared to. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Av Farmer slip off one of the rubber garters that held up the long cinnamon-coloured stockings that he, like most of the other boys in the class, wore with his knee pants. Av leered slyly and Kevin kept watching him. But, after a few minutes, his attention wandered . . .

“— ‘Come ye out from among them,' the Bible tells us. Now I'm sure that all of us know what that means. It means —”

THWACK! The elastic garter hit Kevin's bare knee like the sting of a hornet. He flung himself back in surprise and pain. Av choked back a laugh.

“Now, Kevin, I'm sure there's no need for any of us to jump about like that,” Mrs. Cranston chided him patiently.

“No, ma'am,” he blushed.

“That's fine, Kevin. Now all of us will sit quietly in our seats until we finish our lesson and then we can run and skip and hop about as much as we please!”

The hot fudge syrup of her laughter was so sweet that Kevin wondered if it ever made her teeth ache.

“— Now I'm sure that all of us know that drinking is a worldly thing, drinking liquor, that is. God tells us in His Word that wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging, and he —”

THWACK! The garter stung Kevin's knee again. This time he did not jump. He sat very still, hoping that Av would think he had felt no pain.

“— Smoking, as all of us know, is another worldly thing. I hope that none of us think it's smart to smoke cigarettes without our mummies and daddies knowing about it. Because God knows what we do, even when our mummies and daddies don't, and —”

Av's fingers closed on the soft flesh under Kevin's knee like the jaws of a dog. Kevin gritted his teeth and pressed his spine hard against the back of the pew. As it always was at such times, his will was impotent, cataleptic. It was as though he had been injected with a paralyzing drug. He would not summon even the will to lift his hand in an attempt to push Av's wrist away.

“— Now, just as our mummies and daddies have to punish us when we're naughty, so God has to punish us if we're bad, and I'm sure that all of us —”

Mrs. Cranston's sweet, idiotic voice droned on. Pain burnt Kevin's leg like pincers of fire.

“— to accept our Lord Jesus as our own personal saviour. Now, those of you who haven't done that yet — well, you're really missing out on something, I can tell you! To know that the Lord Jesus Christ is your own personal saviour is better than eating the biggest ice cream cone in the world. Why, it's better than —”

Av dug his fingernails into Kevin's flesh, piercing the skin. Kevin's initial anger was replaced by self-pitying bewilderment. He wished he could find the voice to ask Av why he was doing this thing to him. He wished he could say, Look, here, Avard Farmer, I've never done anything to you, have I? Then, why —