The Wanton Troopers (7 page)

Seven

The Minard farm covered a hillside on the northern side of the creek. The Minard brothers, reputed to be among the richest men in Connaught County, were old, and their wizened wind-burned faces were rendered forbidding by the blue-black and sallow blotches of great age. Zuriel, the elder, ruled his younger brother like a father. Watching them Kevin thought of the patriarch Abraham and his nephew, Lot, whose stories he had read in the Bible. The brothers were known as “old bachelors” and their sister, Sarah, who kept house for them, was called an “old maid.” Sarah's hands were wrinkled and red, like the claws of a chicken, and her hair had thinned until she possessed only a scattering of stark-white wisps.

The previous summer, Judd had helped the Minard brothers with their haying. The mill usually closed down during the haying season, to allow the mill hands to help out on neighbouring farms. In afternoons when heat waves vibrated in the air like live electric wires, Kevin had galloped across the spike-sharp hay stubble, carrying a rum bottle full of cold buttermilk to quench his father's thirst. He loved the sensation of standing by the clattering hay rake to pass the bottle to his father. It thrilled him to see how his father teamed the great, pungent-smelling Clydesdales with one hand and levered the rake up and down with the other. His nostrils tingled to the hot, sweet smell of the curing hay. And he had made friends with Zuriel, Reuben, and Sarah. He liked the gentle formality of the men, the little, excited-hen movements of Sarah. He had kept going back to the Minard farm long after his father had ceased to work there. Through the winter and spring he had paid many visits to the whitewashed old three-storey farm house with is maze of sheds and porches.

Zuriel and Reuben seldom uttered a complete sentence. They spoke in grunts and gestures and monosyllables. But they seemed strangely flattered by his interest in their hens, cows, pigs, horses, and sheep. When he reached out to pat old Bess, the leader of the Clydesdale team, and murmured into her huge, comically expectant ears, the brothers nodded and smiled, as though the words of endearment he whispered to her had been addressed to them.

But the farm possessed a lure greater than that offered by the animals and the outbuildings. Kevin had never seen a room like the Minard parlour.

Miss Sarah made him wash his muddy feet before entering the house. He sat on a bench in the porch that she called her laundry room and scrubbed his feet in a gleaming white basin. Then he could come into the kitchen and, if Miss Sarah was in a good mood, into the parlour as well.

Miss Sarah had learned that he liked books, and the parlour contained dozens of them, stacked on the shelves of a shining, varnished book case. Often, he spent an hour or more alone in the room, lying on his belly on the soft, maroon carpet and paging through stiff-backed, leather-bound volumes. In the past year he had read
The Sermons of DeWitt Talmadge
,
The Life of
Frances E. Willard
,
The Prisoner of Zenda
,
The Little Shepherd of
Kingdom Come
, and — both of these last three times each —
The
Life of Lord Nelson
and
A History of the United States
written in 1901. But he would have been captivated by the room had it not contained a single book. For to him it seemed the height of grandeur and luxury. It was such a room as he would build in his palace when he became King of Nicaragua, such an office as he would use when he was elected to parliament, such a study as he would possess when he became the wealthiest and most famous doctor in Canada.

The parlour was dark, with the darkness of old, varnished things, and with the darkness of shadows. The floor-length, tasselled window curtains were kept closed because, so Miss Sarah said, the sunlight would warp the furniture and fade the carpet. The darkness of the walls, the darkness of chairs and tables glowed with incredible black luminosity. Everything in the room was odorous with age, redolent of soaps and polishes. And there was another fragrance, ambiguous and haunting, that reminded him vaguely of the scent of dead flowers pressed between the pages of a Bible.

The room drew him as a magnet draws a jack-knife blade. But he did not wholly like it. Sometimes when the six-foot-high clock standing between the curtained windows struck the hour, he started up as though he had heard the snarl of a werewolf or the wail of a banshee. And sometimes when he lay reading he stopped abruptly and looked over his shoulder, as though he had felt a hot breath on the back of his neck.

Something in the dark, shining, airless room troubled him and made him uneasy. He could not give his uneasiness a name, but it was a little, just a little, like the uneasiness he had felt on the one or two occasions that he had passed a graveyard, alone and at night.

One day after school, he clambered over the pole gate at the foot of the Minard lane. The poles in this section of the fence were not nailed to posts but lay between frames built like miniature ladders. When cattle or horses were to be driven up the lane, the poles were lifted from their rungs and slid to one side. Kevin preferred to climb over them.

He ran up the hill. Beyond the fences, on either side of the lane, flocks of sheep were grazing, their fleeces the colour of dirty white shirts. They blatted at him as he ran by kicking up red dust, the old ram blatting first, then all the ewes echoing him. Kevin was not fond of sheep. He disliked their sour, vomity odour and their stupid, trusting eyes. Whenever he looked at them, he wondered why God had compared men to sheep. Horses would have been so much better . . .

With a hop and a jump and a windmill of arms he was in the Minard's back dooryard.

In the front dooryard, the grass was trimmed regularly with a lawn mower, the only lawn mower that Kevin had ever seen. The gravelled walk leading to the front door was lined with little flower beds in which Miss Sarah had planted butterfly-coloured, velvety pansies. Purple dahlias, which Kevin imagined to be flowers from some exotic land like Nepal or Peru, grew on either side of the front door.

The front dooryard belonged to the house. The back dooryard belong to the farm. Here there were weeds and thistles and discarded tools and odds and ends of harness, and if Kevin did not watch his step he was likely to step in hen dung or cow manure. Breathing hard from his run up the hill, he went to the back door.

Miss Sarah was in the kitchen, white-aproned, her cheeks flushed from the heat of the stove. The air was sweet with the scent of sugar, nuts, raisins, and flour.

“Good day, laddie.”

“Hiyuh, Miss Sarah.”

“Planning to do a little reading today?”

She smiled at him, absently wiping her flour-covered palms on her apron.

“Yeah, if it's all right.”

“Yes, if I may,” she corrected him.

“Yes, if I may,” he parroted obediently.

“That's ever so much nicer. Well, run along. I'm much too busy to talk to you.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“Just a minute, haven't you forgotten something?”

“Huh? Oh, gosh, yes!”

He ran back to the porch and washed his feet.

When he re-entered the kitchen, she gave him a strange look. In trying to adapt himself to his parents' unpredictable moods, he had acquired the habit of studying faces and of giving names to the expressions he saw in them. He could not think of a name for the way in which Miss Sarah looked at him. Her eyes held something of the slavish gentleness he had seen in the eyes of sheep, yet there was something else . . . something almost like hunger.

“It isn't nice to stare, Kevin.”

“Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't know I was starin'.”

“Ing,” she smiled.

“— staring.”

“It doesn't matter. Run along with you, now.”

He tiptoed down a dark, carpeted hallway, turned a dark-shining brass knob, and entered the parlour.

He was rereading
A History of the United States.
The final chapter said that the Spanish-American War had been one of the most crucial conflicts in the history of the world. William McKinley, the nation's war leader, would be remembered as one of the greatest of presidents, fit to be numbered with Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Grant, the book said. Kevin was not sure that he agreed with this. He had a soft spot for William Jennings Bryan. There was something fine about that speech of his. “You shall not press down upon the head of labour, this crown of thorns! You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!” He studied the pictures . . . pictures of the battles of San Juan Hill and Manila Bay. He wished that generals still rode horseback. He would like to be General Kevin O'Brien, on a grey charger like Traveller, the war horse of General Lee. Flipping pages, he turned back to the picture of the battles of Gettysburg and Antietam and Bull Run. He looked at General Pickett, on foot, hat in hand, reporting to a mounted General Lee. “General, my noble divisions are swept away,” the caption read. A cold shiver of joy rippled up Kevin's spine and into his scalp. He closed his eyes and saw General Kevin O'Brien in a grey tunic and an orange sash. “Now, gentlemen, give them the bayonet!” “Don't cheer, boys, the poor devils are dying!” “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” “We have met the enemy and they are ours!” “Have lost a cheek and ear but can lick all hell yet!”

From his shirt pocket he extracted a pencil stub and a scrap of paper. Shaping the letters with care and tenderness, he wrote:

Kevin Kaye O'Brien, born Atlanta, Georgia, January 25, 1833,
the son of Colonel and Mrs. Judd O'Brien. Graduated from
West Point Military Academy, 1851. Lieutenant, United States
Army, 1851. Served with great distinction against Plains
Indians. Captain, United States Cavalry at outbreak of Civil
War. Major, Confederate States Cavalry, 1861. Colonel, 1862. Brigadier-General, 1863. Major General, 1864. Fled to Mexico
at close of war. Became Field Marshal in Mexican Army. Returned
to United States, 1880. Elected Senator from Georgia, 1882. Democratic candidate for president of the United States in

He stopped to reread what he had written. He decided that it sounded almost as good as the brief biographies of presidents printed in the book.

Suddenly, a hand touched his shoulder. For an instant, he froze in fear. Then he turned. Miss Sarah was bending over him.

“Hi,” he said, rolling over and sitting up. She stared at him and he was bewildered by the morbid, fixed interest he saw in her face.

She ran her hands through his rum-coloured hair. Her fingers were as dry and rough as dead twigs. And she was trembling.

“Been having a good time with the books, laddie?”

The words came with an effort. He wondered if she were sick, if perhaps she might topple over, sprawl on the floor beside him and die.

“Yeah. I been readin',” he stammered.

She sat down in one of the cushioned, throne-like, black-shining chairs, her chickeny hands clasped in her lap.

“Come here for a moment, I want to see you, Kevin.”

He got to his feet and went over to her chair. In the semidarkness, she looked a little like Queen Victoria, as shown in a picture hanging behind the teacher's desk at school. But, no, she was too sad and thin. The Witch of Endor would have looked like this, had she been pictured in the Bible. He wished the parlour were not so musty and dark.

“You're a very pretty boy,” she said.

Only his mother ever said such things to him. He did not know how to answer. “Mebbe, I better be goin' now,” he mumbled.

She reached out quickly and held him. “No, please! Just stay a moment. I want to look at you.”

He thrust his hands into the pockets of his shorts. Miss Sarah held him at arm's length, staring at him. He had never seen such starvation and loss as he saw now in her eyes.

“A long time ago I dreamt of having a boy like you, Kevin.” She paused, then repeated his name, “Kevin,” her lips shaping it like an endearment. “A boy with a fine, slim body and proud, dreaming eyes. When I was young — oh, almost as young as you! — I dreamt that the boy would come and take me away and we would go hand-in-hand over the fields until we came to the sea, and then we would board a ship with white sails and we would sail across the ocean until we came to a country where the sun shone twelve months of the year and where the air always smelled of flowers . . .” She stopped. Then in a different voice, she said, “Oh, I'm talking foolishness, laddie!”

“Mebbe, I better go now.”

He felt as if he had blundered into a room and surprised her there, naked.

“No, don't go! Don't go!”

She touched his hair again, and his face and throat. Her flesh felt dead. It was as though a corpse had reached out and touched him. “You're so pretty,” she crooned. “So pretty, Kevin.” Her hands slid down his body. “You're so pretty! You're trembling, Kevin. Are you afraid?”

“No,” he lied. “No, I'm not afraid.”

“Do you know who I am, Kevin?”

Her voice had been soft, caressing. Now it became shrill and cruel.

“Huh? Sure, you're Miss Sarah. You're . . .”

“No, Kevin. I am death.”

Her leer was so horrible that for one insane moment he imagined that she was telling the literal truth. Sarah Minard's body had been stolen by the Angel of Death! Then he shook himself and giggled.

“You're teasin' me,” he said.

Her voice was hateful, brutal, grating. “No, it is true. I am death. I was born dead. I was dead when I grew up. I am dead now. Zuriel and Reuben are dead also. We are entombed here together, three living corpses. Do you understand that?”

“No, Miss Sarah.”

Her fingers were in his hair again, this time her nails raked his scalp.

“Do you know how men make an ox?”

She leapt from one weird subject to another. He could not follow her.

“Do you know how men make an ox?” she repeated harshly.