The Wanton Troopers (20 page)

Then a millionaire in a great, glittering automobile would stop . . . and pick him up . . . and take him home . . . and treat him as his own son. He would be enrolled in one of those schools where the boys wore uniforms and played football, and . . . someday, years hence . . . he would come back to Lockhartville as Sir Kevin O'Brien, the head of some great railroad or bank, and he would find his mother, a ragged, snag-toothed crone, living on bread and water in a tarpapered shack . . .

He stopped at a turn in the road, thinking of the silver dollar in his pocket and wondering what it would buy —

No, he could not spend this money! It was a bribe, like the thirty pieces of silver which had been paid to Judas for his betrayal of Christ. He would stalk back to the house and throw the vile coin in Ernie Masters's moustached face! Or, rather, he concluded lamely, that is what he would have done had he not been a coward . . . As it was, he would throw it away! The idea of such a sacrifice intoxicated him.

Jerking the silver dollar from his breeches pocket, Kevin sent it flying over a fence and into a field. For an instant, it cut a bright arc through the air. Then it was gone. Sighing and shaken, he congratulated himself. He had performed an act comparable to those recorded in the Word of God. He compared himself to Abraham who had been willing to give his son, Isaac, as a burnt offering unto the Lord. Then, remembering how God had sent a lamb as a substitute for Isaac, Kevin half-expected a million silver dollars to fall from the sky and lie like mounds of clean snow around his feet . . .

On a sudden impulse, he reached down and dug a stone out of the frozen earth. As his target, he chose a grey, skeleton-naked alder on the other side of the fence.

“This is for you, Ernie Masters!”

Leaping into the air, he threw — The stone struck the trunk of the alder and dead-grey limbs danced crazily.

“And this is for you, Ernie Masters!”

Pulling off his mittens, he clawed at the pebbles embedded in frozen mud. He heaved rocks at the tree until his nails were broken and bloody and his arms were numb.

“And this is for you, Ernie Masters!”

Exhausted at last, with the dusk closing around him, he sank to his knees.

“O God,” he prayed aloud. “O God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob, make me one of Thy mighty ones! Make me one of Thy kings and prophets, O God of Israel. Give me the faith to move mountains and the power to call down fire from heaven on the enemies of the Most High! Give me the staff of Moses and the sword of David! Oh God, make me like unto David and Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Solomon! Thy servant, Kevin, asks this, O God. Amen.”

Then, still kneeling in the road, he covered his face with his hands and wept.

Twenty-Two

In mid-winter, the house was a match cupped in a man's hands in the perpetual night and storm. To Kevin, the weather seemed to possess will and sinister intelligence. Shivering under the weight of nightmare, he thought of the wind as a pack of howling wild dogs who threw their ice-encrusted bodies against doors, windows, and walls. From the kitchen window, he had seen such dogs drive a deer out of the woods and onto the heath. There, the fear-maddened, spindle-shanked beast had floundered in deep snow and the dogs had torn her flanks and belly and sunk their teeth into her throat . . .

Sometimes, in the evenings, a draught struck the lamp by the window and caused the flame to bend until it lay horizontal, then shrink back into the wick, so that it almost went out. And on several nights, Kevin awoke with the little moan of fear as a sheet of glass was knocked from its sash in an upstairs window and went crashing to the floor.

The wind slithered under doors, though Judd stuffed the cracks with rags and gunny sacks. In living room and kitchen, cold fastened on Kevin's ankles like invisible jaws. In the grip of the wind, the roof shingles rattled like his grandmother's laughter. And when he ventured outdoors, the wind seized and lifted him as though to tear him from the earth. He half-expected that someday he would be caught up like a kite, his coat-tails flying, and sent hurtling into the endless cold of the sky.

And there was snow: mountains and deserts of snow. The road became a canal between great banks of snow. And on stormy nights, snow sifted in through the cracks around the windows and lay in crystalline mounds on the sills.

When Kevin's ears were frost-bitten, Judd took the wash basin to the yard and scooped up snow. While Kevin bent over the sink, Judd held handfuls of snow against his ears, held it there till it melted in the warmth of his flesh as pain shot through his scalp, and he whimpered and squirmed in the man's hands. “Whinin' ain't a-gonna do no good, young feller,” Judd growled and almost gleefully (or so it seemed to Kevin) he reached for another handful of snow . . .

Every morning, Judd rose from his cot before daylight, breakfasted on fried potatoes and warmed-over beans, and trudged into the woods with his axe across his shoulder. He was chopping firewood — illegally — on the crown lands south of the creek. It was almost certain that he would never be able to haul the wood home. There was no logging road to that part of the forest. In the spring, the cords of beech and maple that he had felled, sawed, and tiered would be left to rot. But he went forth every morning and came home exhausted every night. “It's foolishness, Judd,” Mary told him impatiently. “You might just as well stay home where it's warm.” But Judd always gave the same answer: “If a man ain't doin' anythin' I guess he might jist as well be dead.”

In the evening, Judd lay on the cot in a stupor of weariness, and Mary and Kevin sat for hours without uttering a word for fear that some chance remark would strike the spark that would bring him to his feet in an explosion of rage. Usually, Kevin read the Bible while Mary perused romances containing heroes named Julian and Adrian and Anton and heroines named Cecily and Cynthia and Mifawny. All of the heroes were tall, dark, and handsome, and all of the heroines had honey-coloured hair.

And sometimes, Mary wrote letters to imaginary correspondents. Unknown to his mother, Kevin had read many of these letters. The bulk of them were addressed to an apparently rich, aristocratic, and understanding matron named Lady Astrid Villiers.

My Dear Lady Villiers:
In this desolate and frigid outpost, your letters are like a breath
of warm spring air. You are so wise and so familiar with the
ways of the world that there must be times when you weary
of the trials and tribulations of a silly little country girl like me. But I do not think I could continue to bear my burden if I did
not know that there was in the world one person at least with a
capacity for understanding and sympathy.

Geoffrey, the man whom I met in Boston last summer
(Mary had never been in Boston)
wants me to run away
with him to New York. But I have told him that my duty is
here with my little boy. I tremble to think of his fate in a cruel
world if left to the mercies of that being whom I once called
my husband and whom I am still forced to call by that title,
although he is no longer capable of inspiring the faintest spark
of affection in my suffering heart.

I have suffered so much, my dear Lady Astrid, yet I know
my duty. I must remain a prisoner in this dismal place to
which I have been consigned by a cruel fate. If it were not
for my little boy —

And so on, for eighteen pages, which Kevin read with mingled fascination and scorn.

Grandmother O'Brien continued to sit in the rocker under the clock shelf, the heated brick hugged against her pain. She ate her milk and cracker gruel and read her Bible and, as in the past, she sang:

There is a fountain filled with blood,

Drawn from Emmanuel's veins,

And sinners plunged beneath that flood

Lose all their guilty stains.

Though he was beginning to think of himself as a prophet of the Lord, one who would smite sinners with whips and swords and call down fire from heaven upon the habitations of iniquity, Kevin was still terrified of blood. At times it seemed to him that the world was not whirling through space but rather bobbing like a cork on a churning ocean of blood. There was the blood of deer and cats and fish and cattle. There was the blood of porcupines and raccoons and sparrows. There was the blood of Dink Anthony on Alton Stacey's hands. There was the blood of Av Farmer trickling from his nostrils and the corners of his mouth. There was the blood of Kevin O'Brien. And there was the blood of Christ.

He wondered what Christ had felt at the moment the nails were driven into His feet and hands. What had He thought as He felt the steel touching his skin, heard the swish of the hammer as the crucifier lifted it for the first stroke? In Kevin's imagination the hammer made a sound like that of the strap hissing through the air.

Perhaps, if he were a prophet, he too would be crucified! Men with faces like those of Riff Wingate and Harold Winthrop would scourge him and crown him with thorns. And, nailed to the tree, he would smile down pityingly at the mother kneeling beneath his feet.

A thought struck him like a thunderbolt! Perhaps he was Jesus born again! The Bible said that Jesus would return. And the Jesus pictured in the Bible had reddish-brown hair and blue-grey eyes like Kevin's. If he were a man and wore a beard — why, he would look exactly like the Christ in the Bible! But did not the Bible say that on His Second Coming Christ would fall from the sky with a shout? If that were so, then he could only be a prophet — a forerunner like John the Baptist. But, in any case, God would give him a sign in due time. And if he were to be crucified, God would give him the strength and courage to endure the nails.

“What are you thinking about, Scampi?”

Rather worriedly, his mother smiled at him across the lamp-lit table.

“Oh, I wasn't thinkin' about much of anythin'.”

“A penny for your thoughts.”

“I guess mebbe they wouldn't be worth it.”

He was annoyed at her for trying to insinuate herself into his mind.
Why won't she leave me be? Why does she want to know every
thing I think and feel?

Shrugging, Mary turned back to her letter.

Immediately, his attitude changed.
Why won't she talk to me?
Why does she want to waste her time writing silly old letters to people
who aren't even real?

Wearily, Judd rose from his cot and stoked the fire, banging stove lids and pokers.

“If it weren't fer me I guess yuh fellers would let yerself freeze tuh death,” he growled.

Mary looked up from her writing and Kevin's eyes left his Bible. There was a tenseness, a waiting, until Judd returned to the cot and closed his eyes. Grandmother O'Brien smiled and embraced her brick . . .

Then came the soldiers and brake the legs of the first, and of the
other which was crucified with him. But when they came to Jesus
and saw that he was dead already they brake not his legs: But one
of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side and forthwith came
there out blood and water . . .

A week before Christmas, Judd sold the hens. Old Biff Mason had informed him that he would not extend credit for such luxuries as fruits, nuts, and candies. In repeating the storekeeper's words, Judd imitated his thin, querulous whine. “The way I've allus figgered it a man that cain't afford tuh pay fer what he gits oughta call hisself lucky if he'n have bread and potatoes on his table,” Biff Mason had said. And Judd swore that when he found work again and paid the $200 he owed, he would drive his fist down Biff Mason's throat and tell him he could put his store on his back and carry it to hell.

So one night, the hens were thrust into gunny sacks and trucked away. Kevin watched and listened at a window, excited by the men running to and fro in the dark dooryard and moved to pity by the squawking terror of the hens. “I ain't never seed nor heard o' sich foolishness in all my born days,” Grandmother O'Brien proclaimed from her rocker. “Goin' without eggs all the rest o' the winter jist so's yuh'n have a heathenish feast on one day o' the year!” And she turned her eyes toward heaven, as though to remind God that she accepted no responsibility for such sinful improvidence.

But the hen money was not spent on a feast. That same night, Judd went to the cabin of Madge Harker, the bootlegger, and bought rum and beer. He staggered home drunk and the kitchen resounded with his song:

Here's a cuckoo! There's a cuckoo!

Here's a cuckaroo!

Here's a cuckoo! There's a cuckoo!

There's a cuckaroo!

His cheeks the colour of pickled beets and his hair tumbling over his forehead, he sang and shouted in drunken ecstasy — and Mary and Kevin knew that he was mocking them. Mute and stiff with anger and frustration, they watched their dreams of foods and gifts and decorations gurgle into his mouth. And each time he drank, he laughed and peered at them with red, taunting eyes.

He was still singing when Kevin and Mary went to bed.

Oh, the Jones boys

They built a mill

On the top of a hill

And they worked all night

And they worked all day

But they couldn't make

That gah'damn saw mill pay

So the Jones boys

They built a still

On the top of the hill

And they worked one night

And they worked one day

And my Gawd didn't

That little still pay!

Kevin's eyes were wet as he wriggled down under the quilts on the cot in the living room. He shivered as the cold blankets covered his legs.

The grates of the stove were open and the reflected firelight cut a flickering, smokey-scarlet path to the kitchen door. He inhaled wood smoke and his mother's perfume.