The Wanton Troopers (6 page)

“What duh yuh call it then, if it ain't stealin'?”

“What do I call it? I call it equalizin', that's what I call it. Now if I'd taken the last bite of food outta somebody's mouth, I'd figger that was stealin'. I ain't never took a thing that I didn't need more'n the man I took it from needed it. I needed that kerosene so I took it. Hod Rankine's got enough money to buy a thousand barrels of kerosene. Me takin' that one little, biddy old barrel was jist equalizin'. If I got anythin' he needs more'n I do, he's got all the right in the world tuh come and git it. I won't say a word if he takes somethin' . . .”

“But you ain't got nothin' that he needs!”

“That's right, Namesake! And that's what I mean by equalizin'!”

Kaye sat back with a smirk of triumph.

“Oh, gee whiz, nobody can explain anythin' tuh you, Kaye!”

Kaye grunted and yawned while Kevin pouted. Then Kaye began making faces: cat-faces, toad-faces, snake-faces. In spite of himself, Kevin snickered.

“Equalizin' is what I call it,” Kaye said again.

Six

Kevin often reflected on the difference between his mother and the other Lockhartville women. Where she skipped like a little girl, they trudged like spavined mares. The things that made her open her mouth in laughter made them close theirs in pale-lipped anger. Where she was pliant, they were unyielding. When she became soft and warm, they turned hard and cold. She was a solitary white birch sapling, surrounded on all sides by towering black spruces.

Angered, she did not, like other mothers, invoke the authority of parenthood and scold him from a pedestal of superiority while he stood hang-dog and chastened. She quarrelled with him; they bickered like children. And if, at last, she threatened to report him to his father, he felt that she had betrayed him; he despised her as he would have despised a child of his own age who had threatened to tattle to an adult.

If she told him to shut up, he would tell her that she could shut up herself. They would stand facing one another in the kitchen, yelling at the tops of their voices, while Grandmother O'Brien watched, her lips curled in contempt, from her rocking chair. If she slapped him, he would kick her shins. If she pinched him, he would pull her reddish-brown, shoulder-length hair until she yelped.

But they did not quarrel about anything that really mattered. Small disagreements provoked storms of rage and recrimination. The big disagreements, when they came, brought only silence and hurt.

Kevin had seen his mother spring from her chair in the midst of supper, snatch up food and dishes, and run with them to the pantry. This meant that she had spied an approaching visitor. Mary was bitterly ashamed of their bread and potatoes, humiliated by their cracked plates and tarnished cutlery. When the visitor entered — usually a mill hand or a mill hand's wife who fared no better at home — the table was clear and the chairs stood in their usual places around the kitchen. But Kevin always suspected that the intruder had peered through the window or, somehow, seen through the walls. Every grin, every glance at the pantry door meant that he was slyly ridiculing Mary's impassioned efforts to conceal their shame.

“Only a damn fool would come tuh a man's house at supper time,” Judd would say, after the visitor had gone. “Frenchmen and Dutchmen is the only people I've ever seen that didn't have better sense than tuh come tuh a man's house at mealtime.” And Kevin would promise himself that when he became a man he would obtain for his mother the most costly foods and the most beautiful china in the world.

He already knew that even in Lockhartville there were two classes: the rich and the poor. Here, the rich were the half-dozen farmers and their families. These people possessed automobiles, electric lights, and telephones. When their children finished eighth grade, they were sent to high school in Larchmont. Some few even went on to college. One or two, over the years, had become doctors or lawyers. The farmers took trips to Ontario and to the United States. The wives of the more successful bought their clothes in Halifax. When they dined, their tables were covered with white linen and they used special knives to butter their bread.

The poor were men like Judd O'Brien and their families. Those men were mill hands, farm hands, pulp peelers, and loggers. Six evenings a week, they lay smoking or dozing until it was time to go to bed. On Saturday night, almost all of them got drunk. Often they stayed drunk until they went back to work on Monday morning. Each year there were months in which they could find no work at all.

At fifteen or sixteen, their children left school. The girls got married and the boys went to work. Most of the boys became rural labourers, like their fathers. A few of the more imaginative and ambitious ones, like Kevin's uncle Leonard, found steady jobs as railway section hands, grease monkeys, and attendants at filling stations. Men like Judd O'Brien regarded men like Leonard Dunbar with a mixture of envy and distrust. Len and the others who worked twelve months of the year at Larchmont and Bennington liked to boast of their high wages and of the praises showered on them by bosses who wore white collars and ties to work. “Big-feelin' bastards,” Judd spat contemptuously.

Mary had been born in Lockhartville. But she spoke of the village in the manner of one who had come here from Halifax, or even from New York. “I don't understand these Lockhartville people,” she would say. “I've never seen such people in all my life!”

Her father had been a farmer, one of those who were driven off their farms during the depression. Judd told Kevin that his Grandfather Dunbar had been a rogue and a braggart. The old man had devoted years to searching for Captain Kidd's treasure, which, according to legend, had been buried on the Nova Scotia coast. And in his last years, he had left his wife and family and gone to New Brunswick, where, so rumour claimed, he had become a preacher for some obscure sect. When Mary spoke of the herd of Ayrshires which her father had once possessed, Judd guffawed and said that the herd had consisted of two toothless old scrubs. “Fenton Dunbar and his herd of Ayrshires” became for Judd a byword signifying any form of pretense or braggadocio. When he suspected Kevin of boastfulness, he would say, “That reminds me of Fenton Dunbar and his herd of Ayrshires,” and laugh dryly while Kevin hid his head in shame.

Kevin knew that his mother often lied. In a cowboy film shown at the Orange Hall there had appeared an actor named Clay Dunbar. He had kept a saloon full of ruffians at bay, and when one of the outlaws reached for a pistol, Clay had shot it out of his hand. “Anybody else wanta try that?” he had drawled. And Mary had told Kevin that this Clay Dunbar was her cousin. “The last time I was visiting Aunt Elvira in Boston, Clay was home from Hollywood on vacation, and . . .” The story had gone on and on. Clay had shown her his $200 shirts and his $500 pistols and she had ridden on his palomino stallion, Playboy, and . . . Kevin had lain in bed, his knees drawn up into the old shirt that he wore as a nightdress, and she had stroked his ear lobes as she talked, the lamp on the floor throwing a halo around her face. He had enjoyed listening to her. But he had known that was all lies. All lies! And despite the pleasure he took from her story, he had despised her for lying to him.

Grandmother O'Brien sometimes told him stories about his mother. These were simple little stories, narrated without comment, but Kevin did not fail to observe the derision in her face and voice. She told him, for example, of how Mary and her brother, Leonard, had once, long ago, boarded the train at Ginsonville and bought tickets, at ten cents each, for Lockhartville. During the three-mile ride, they had enacted an elaborate pantomime in which they had posed as travellers who had ridden a great distance: they had leaned back in their seats, feigned weariness, and chattered loudly of tickets and time tables. Kevin could not understand why his grandmother obviously thought this act idiotic. It was the kind of thing that he himself would have liked to have done.

Mary played games with her son, something no other Lockhartville mother would have dreamt of doing. Wearing an old red shirt of Judd's and a pair of rinsewater-coloured jeans, she wrestled with him in the dooryard. Grappling one another, they rolled over thistles and couch grass and miniature rose bushes, the sky reeling above them. Kevin struggled until he was blinded by sweat; he gripped her wrists so hard that he left bruises. They butted and kneed and strangled one another. And, in the end, she always overpowered him. He never deliberately surrendered to her; he fought until strength and breath failed. But when she defeated him, he was glad. It was ecstasy to lie helpless, the weight of her body pouring through her arms and hands and onto his flattened shoulders. Silently, he rejoiced that he was in her power, that she could do what she liked with him.

But, paradoxically, he wanted her to defeat him only in play, only when his will was in abeyance. When she challenged his active will, he hated her. His defeat in the wrestling was good only because he knew it was merely a game. During their real quarrels he wanted to destroy her.

It seemed to him that she understood this; at times she appeared to take a brutal pleasure in breaking him. In return, he poured all of his energy into defiance.

A trivial question would arise. Perhaps it was raining and he started to go outdoors and she told him that he could not go, that he would catch a cold if he went. He argued. She issued commands. He whined. She threatened to tell his father. The initial argument was forgotten. What remained was a naked conflict of wills. It was at such times that they screamed and belaboured one another while Grandmother O'Brien looked on, a grim smile fixed on her yellowing lips.

Grandmother O'Brien also managed to rebuke Mary for wrestling in the dooryard. She said nothing, but when Mary returned to the kitchen, she always found that Martha had done some little job during her absence . . . she had washed the dinner dishes or polished the stove or mixed biscuits.

“You didn't have to do that!” Mary would say, her perspiring cheeks yellow with anger.

Martha would clutch her hot brick and stare at Mary in shammed astonishment.

“Why, child, I was jist tryin' tuh help out,” she would say.

That night, when Judd got home from work, Martha would mention, with seeming casualness, the work that she had done that afternoon.

“I hope yuh like them biscuits, Judd. I ain't as good a cook as I usta be, mebbe. Seems as how whatever I cook tastes jist like I feel, and I been feelin' mighty poorly, lately.”

Judd would look up from his food.

“Eh? You made the biscuits, Mother?”

“Oh, I try tuh make myself useful, Judd. The pain's been somethin' terrible tuhday, but I do try tuh make myself useful.”

“Mary coulda done it jist as well as not.”

“Oh, I know that, Judd! She told me I shouldn'ta done it. But I do try tuh make myself useful around the place.”

And Martha would smile and look across at Mary while Kevin scowled, hating the cruelty and triumph he saw in her wrinkled, walnut-coloured face.

Mary's best friend and most frequent visitor was June Larlee.

Kevin knew that his father detested her. Judd hinted that she had been guilty of monstrous sins. “My God, Mary! She's got herself in trouble twice and she ain't eighteen yet!” Mary's answer was always the same: “Hush, Judd! Think what you're saying in front of Scampi!” So Kevin, although he devoted a great deal of thought to the matter, did not discover what her mysterious trouble had been.

It was Sunday morning. Wearing tight red shorts and a loose blouse, June sprawled on the cot in the O'Brien kitchen and smoked cigarettes. She reminded Kevin of the simpering, near-naked women in the pictures nailed to the walls of Kaye Dunbar's camp. Watching her cross her legs, which he considered disgustingly fat and hairy, he was both intrigued and repelled by her abundant, adult flesh.

As they often did, Mary and June were talking in riddles. This was a favourite trick of theirs, one that infuriated Kevin.

“I saw you-know-who in Larchmont the other night,” June said, puffing at her cigarette.

Mary shot a teasing little glance at Kevin.

“Little pitchers have big ears,” she warned.

Kevin sat at the table, pretending to study his Sunday School lessons. Something wicked shaped his face.

“All I said was that I saw you-know-who the other night in Larchmont,” June giggled. “You remember that certain person in Larchmont, don't you?”

Mary exhaled and screwed her face into an expression of melodramatic disbelief.

“Oh, no! Not him again!”

“You bet!” June's voice lowered. “And he was asking about you.”

“He wasn't!”

“He was!”

“I don't believe it!”

“All right, don't you believe it, then. But it's true. ‘How's Mary-Mary-Quite-Contrary-How-Does-Your-Garden-Grow?' he said.”

Mary giggled. “That must have been him, all right. It couldn't have been anybody else.”

“Didn't I tell you? Why don't you believe me when I tell you things?”

Kevin thought these conversations, with their groans, sighs, giggles, and head-shakings, unutterably pretentious and silly.

“Well, I'm an old married woman now,” Mary said.

“Woe is me!” June snickered.

Mary smiled and shrugged. “Little pitchers have big ears,” she said again.

“I've got somethin' else I want to tell you later.”

“Oh, yes.” Mary turned to Kevin. “Isn't it time you started to Sunday School, sweetikins?”

He stood up sulkily. He knew she wanted him to go so that she could be alone with June.

“Yeah,” he muttered.

“That's a good boy, Scampi,” June said, winking at him.

He hated the smug, teasing insolence in her grin. He hoped she would die in agony and burn forever in the deepest pit of hell.