After he’d turned nine, more often than not, he’d eat the handful of candy she’d given him peering up at the top row of the bookshelf in their living room, which is where his father kept all twelve of George’s novels. The lower shelves were occupied by duplicate sets of the complete works of Jack London, one in English and the other in Danish, a dozen books by Farley Mowat, an alphabetized row of miscellany covering topics ranging from astronomy to zoology, and twenty-six Farmer’s Almanacs spanning the years between 1971 to 1997, though Deacon had only ever seen his father read George’s Fictions.
Neither Deacon nor Abel had ever seen the inside of a classroom, their mother telling them that after what the government schools had done to her people it wasn’t likely that she herself could possibly do any worse. Sitting at the kitchen table, she’d taught them their numbers and letters, and by the time he was six Deacon could read well enough that he’d lie on the bearskin rug in front of the fireplace with one of Jack London’s adventures or Farley Mowat’s histories propped open against the grizzly’s head. By the time he was nine, he’d read all of those, and a few of the others besides. One evening when he went to choose another book, he’d peered up at the top row, thinking maybe he’d like to try one of George’s for a change. They were too high for him to reach and it hadn’t taken him longer than the walk to the kitchen to fetch a chair before he’d found out that it wasn’t an accident they’d been placed beyond his and Abel’s prying eyes.
His mother was washing the dishes and hearing the scrape of the chair against the linoleum she’d turned and asked him what he was doing. He told her and she responded by marching across the kitchen, snatching up the chair, and telling him, “You’ll do no such thing!”
Baffled by her reaction, Deacon returned to the living room. His father was staring up at a point in the far corner of the room, which he was often inclined to do when he’d finished a page and needed a moment to ruminate on it before turning to the next.
“Pa?” Deacon asked.
His father turned towards him, squinting over the rims of his reading glasses as if he was trying to divine where the voice might have come from though his son was standing not five feet away, plain as day. Taking off his glasses and setting them in the crease of the book to keep his place, he asked, “What’s on your mind, son?”
Deacon told him that he’d wanted to read one of Mr. Cleary’s books but when he’d gone to get a chair from the kitchen so that he could reach the top shelf, Ma’d told him he’d do no such thing.
“And she was plenty riled up about it too.”
“That’s because George’s Fictions aren’t for kids,” his father told him.
“How’s that?”
“They just aren’t.”
“But why?”
“They’re chock-full of violence for one.”
“There’s plenty of violence in Jack London’s books too.”
“It’s a different kind of violence.”
“What do you mean?”
“It just is. And there’s other things besides.”
“Like what?”
Deacon’s father cocked his ear to the kitchen to make sure he could still hear the clatter of dishes in the sink. When he could, he leaned forward and whispered, “Sex.”
“Ah hell,” Deacon said, shaking his head. “I already know all about sex.”
“You do, do you?”
“I’ve seen the animals mating plenty of times, now haven’t I?”
“Well, that’s hardly the same thing.”
“And I heard you and Ma doing it plenty of times too, when I was upstairs in bed. At least once a week ever since I can remember. Sometimes twice.”
His father blanched and Deacon grinned back at him, thinking that he had him there.
It took his father only a moment to recover, during which time he distracted himself by rooting around in the crevice beside the chair’s cushion until he’d found the ace of spades playing card he used as a bookmark. He replaced his glasses with that and closed the book, settling his hand on its cover as if trying to draw a measure of resolve from within.
“That’s different,” he finally said.
“How?”
“Me and your ma love each other.”
“And the people in George’s books don’t?”
“Some of them do. There’s no shortage of love in George’s books, that’s for sure. It’s just—”
Shaking his head and looking at his son, trying to find a way out of this conversation and seeing in his son’s steely glare that he’d have to answer him sometime, figuring it might as well be now.
“It’s just,” he continued, “there’s other kinds of sex aside from the loving kind.”
“And what kind’s that?”
“The kind that kids shouldn’t be reading about.”
“So when can I read them then?”
“I don’t know. Maybe when you’re fifteen.”
“But that’s six years away!”
“Then it will give you something to look forward to.”
“What about The Stray?”
“What about it?”
“It’s about you and Ma, right?”
“Parts of it are.”
“So why can’t I read that one.”
“Because of the parts that aren’t.”
Deacon thought about that and then after a moment asked, “Well, what’s to keep me from reading it when you’re not around?”
“I guess nothing, except if your ma catches you reading The Stray, she’s like to take all of George’s Fictions into the backyard and burn ’em.”
“She wouldn’t.”
“You don’t believe me? Go ahead and try.”
His father had then reopened his book, signalling that was the final word on the matter. Deacon returned to the shelf and scanned the titles within reach, finally choosing White Fang, which he’d read twice before but was a personal favourite.
Still, the very next time he found himself alone in the house—his mother in the garden and his father fixing the fence where one of their cows had snapped off a pole—he fetched the chair from the kitchen table again. Standing on it, he’d pulled The Stray from its place and then, climbing back down, he walked to the window overlooking their backyard. His mother and Abel were crouched amongst the cucumbers pulling weeds and he couldn’t see his father, the broken fence post as it was down towards the road. He’d likely come back by way of the driveway, and Deacon could see that fine so, keeping a lookout on his periphery, he scanned the book’s cover.
The drape of the waterfall was painted a dozen shades of blues and greens all smudged together. At its base there was a pool of water, and rising from within it there was a man whose face was also a blur, so Deacon couldn’t tell if it was his father or not. He was carrying a woman towards the shore. Her face was likewise obscured, but the leather dress she wore and the flowers in her jet-black hair made it plain that she was an Indian, so it wasn’t hard for him to imagine that she was indeed his mother. She lay limp in the man’s outstretched arms and appeared to be dead. Seeing her like that, and knowing it was his ma, choked the air right out of his throat.
He stared at it long enough for his breath to return and then he flipped the book over. In the bottom right-hand corner there was a photograph of a young man with black short-cropped hair, sitting at a desk in front of a typewriter. He was looking over his shoulder with the droop of a half-smoked cigarette in his mouth and wearing a surprised look on his face as if whoever had taken the picture had snuck up behind him. He was clean-shaven, couldn’t have been older than twenty-five, and hardly looked like the old man Deacon had come to know, though the caption beneath left little doubt that he was. George Cleary lives in Tildon, ON, was all it said and after reading that Deacon read through the paragraph above.
It told him that t
he book was set in the 1850s and was about a homesteader whose son had been killed by a pack of stray dogs. He’d followed them into the northern wilds to seek his revenge, only to run afoul of two Chippewa brothers hunting a Hudson’s Bay trapper who’d kidnapped their sister. He read over the paragraph twice, thinking that the sister in question must have been his ma, since she was Chippewa too, and the homesteader his pa, who indeed had killed a pack of dogs after they’d attacked none other than Deacon himself.
He had been only two years old, too young to remember what had happened, but his father had told him the story so many times that it had become as clear in Deacon’s mind as any dream. Bergin was chopping the winter’s wood in the shed when he’d heard Buddy barking and growling, Buddy being the German shepherd–cross he’d owned before Trigger.
“He was as friendly a dog as you were ever likely to meet,” Deacon’s father would relate, “and from the way he was carryin’ on, I knew it was more than just someone coming up the drive. My first thought was maybe it was a bear, because the last time I’d heard Buddy actin’ like that was on account of a black bear that had wandered into the yard. Buddy had soon taught it the error of its ways. He’d treed it in that big old oak out behind the barn and we had to keep Buddy inside for the rest of the day before it got the nerve to come back down. So I wasn’t too concerned when I came out of the shed, and that’s when I saw it wasn’t a bear at all, it was that son-of-a-bitch Pike’s dogs.”
Warren Pike was the old man who lived alone in a brick two-storey about a half a click down the road. He was their closest neighbour and a son of a bitch because it was he who’d sold Deacon’s father the tractor. When Bergin had driven down to his house to find out why he hadn’t been able to get it started, thinking maybe there was a trick, Mr. Pike had smiled and said, “Ain’t no trick. It’s just a piece of shit is all.”
Deacon’s father had protested, reminding him that he’d promised the tractor’d outlive him and probably his kids too, whereby Mr. Pike had replied that if he had a problem he’d best take it up with his Complaints Department. The old man then motioned with his chin at a spot just over Bergin’s shoulder. When he’d turned around to see what he meant, he found all three of Pike’s Rottweilers standing in a loose formation behind. The lead one bared its teeth and growled, and if the hackles Bergin saw running down its spine left any doubt that it meant business, that son-of-a-bitch Pike did not.
“You best be departing my property,” he’d said. “And you’ll want to be quick about it too.”
After that, whenever he’d driven by Pike’s house, Bergin would curse, “Son-of-a-bitch-may-he-rot-in-hell!” under his breath, often adding, for good measure, “He’ll get his due one day, and I hope I’m there to see it.” So when he’d come out of the woodshed, all those years later, and seen the three dogs grouped in a semicircle around Buddy, who was guarding the tractor upon the seat of which sat Bergin’s son, it had seemed to him that the day of reckoning had finally arrived.
“I wasn’t more than two steps into the yard when the three of them attacked. Buddy was a big dog and fierce when he had to be. He’d got one of them Rotties by the throat and had it on its back and then the others were on him and the last sound I ever heard poor old Buddy make was a startled yelp as they tore into him. You were on your feet screaming, ‘Buddy!’ You were always a fearless child and for a moment I thought you meant to jump to his rescue. I hollered, ‘Stay there, Deke!’ and you looked up at me with such terror that it unearthed something I’d have sworn wasn’t in me. Rage and something else I don’t have the words to explain, maybe nobody does. Maybe it’s a feeling that predates the advent of words themselves; a part of us buried so deep that we were more animal than man when we last had any use for it and which had suddenly become the sum total of who I was, seeing them dogs ripping apart Buddy, knowing that it’d only be a heartbeat before they’d be doing the same to you.”
At that point in the telling he’d pause a moment. There’d be a glint in his eyes that could have been tears thinking of what might have been or just as likely the vestiges of that feeling creeping up on him once again. Whatever it was, he’d savour it for a moment. When he went to speak, his voice would crack and he’d have to clear his throat before starting again.
“It’s thirteen strides at a hard run from the shed’s door to the tractor. I’d have made the distance in under two seconds but when I think about it now, time seemed to have slowed to a trickle so that it feels like it might just as well’ve been a lifetime. One of the dogs was waiting on me when I finally got there, standing between me and the others, growling and baring its teeth. I still had the splitting axe in my hand, the same one that’s hanging in the shed. You know I call it my splitting axe but really it’s more of a maul. I’d just sharpened its edge not fifteen minutes previous, and when I swung it two-handed onto that dog it split its skull right down the middle, burying the blade up to its nub in the ground. I wrenched it loose and swung at another dog, catching it lengthwise across the back and crushing its spine. It let out a most wretched shriek and then the last jerked towards me.
“The speed at which it moved caught me off guard and I just managed to get the axe handle between me and its teeth. I stumbled and then I was on my back, the axe wrenched loose from my grip, my hands grasping at the dog’s ears, the only thing I could get a hold of to keep it from getting at my throat. My hands were slipping and I felt then just like I imagine a man facing a firing squad would have as the countdown came to one.
“I could see you,” looking then to Deacon, and if he was within reach, setting his hand on his head as if he was thinking that at that moment in the telling he’d have liked to have done the same, one last time. “You had a look on your face of such utter despair that I could see in it my own demise, you watching as I was torn apart, knowing that such a thing would like to have followed you to the end of your days, and what kind of a father was I if I let that happen? So I did the only thing I could to give the inevitable a moment’s reprieve. I let go of one of those ears and jammed my arm into that dog’s mouth. I felt its teeth clamp down and had it been in there for more than a split second that dog would have chomped my arm clean off. But the moment I felt the sharp piercing my skin, I heard a shot ring out.
“The dog stiffened and there was the hot splatter of blood on my cheeks. I rolled it offa me and looked up at you again. The despair was gone from your face and in its place a look I’d seen only once before. It was that first time you’d stood on your own, pulling yourself up by the seat of a kitchen chair and letting go. Standing there wobbling like you had ball bearings for knees, your face alight with pride and wonder like you couldn’t have imagined such a thing was even possible. You were looking over at the house like that and when I followed your gaze to the porch, your ma was standing on the top step holding my Enfield, a wisp of smoke curling from the muzzle, the stock of it pressed to her shoulder, her eyes still sighting along the barrel, such hate in them that I hope I never live long enough to witness it again.”
The first time he’d told Deacon the story he’d added, “You may not know this, but your ma’s as crack a shot as any man I’ve ever met.” Thereafter, it’d be Deacon who’d ask, his face bearing a facsimile of the look he’d worn that day, “Ma’s as crack a shot as any man you’ve ever met, ain’t that right, Pa?” And his father would answer, “And it’s a damn good thing too, or I’d be one-armed to this day, if’n I was lucky that is. She shot that dog square between the eyes, and it died so quick, I tell you, it’d have taken a tube and a half of super glue to soften the snarl curled over its teeth.
“I’d just got to my feet and was pondering on that, and what might have been, when your ma strode past and grabbed you in her arms, casting me a most reproachful glare as she turned back towards the house.
“I knew what was on her mind, and I guess I couldn’t blame her for being angry. She was thinking about all those times I’d called Pike
‘a son-of-a-bitch-may-he-rot-in-hell’ whenever we drove by his house, how she’d shush me and say, ‘You curse a man, it’s liable to come back on you twofold.’
“I now saw the truth of what she’d spoke, though I was a fair turn from sending Pike my blessings just yet.
“While I loaded the bodies of his dogs into the back of the Jeep, I was still cursing his name, and while I drove the half click to his house I’d got to cursing his mother and his father, cursing his kids and his grandkids too. And I had every intention of doing the same to his face once I got there.
“When I pulled to a stop at the end of his driveway, I could see him sitting in the rocking chair he had on his porch. He hadn’t made a move and so I figured he was asleep. I slammed the door hard on my way out but that still wasn’t enough to rouse him. I hadn’t gone more than a few steps when I could see flies buzzing around his head. If they weren’t enough to tell me he was dead, the smell comin’ offa him when I come up onto the porch most certainly was.
“I stood there staring down at him, thinking of your ma’s warning. I tell you I’d never felt like such a low creature as I did then, thinking of what my spite had nearly cost me, as if Pike’s malignant spirit had impregnated his dogs so as to enact his revenge for having cursed his name all those times. I hadn’t smoked a cigarette in two years—the last one being on the morning you were born—but I had a powerful urge to have one then. I could see Pike’s pouch of tobacco poking out of his pocket. I took it out and rolled myself one. After I smoked it, I thought about rolling another, but I guess I knew where that might’ve led so instead I went inside and called the police.”
And that would have been the end of the story had it not been for George.
That same afternoon, he’d paid his first visit, introducing himself only as a reporter for The Tildon Chronicle. Bergin told him what had happened, filling in some of the details he’d left out while giving his statement to the police—about that son-of-a-bitch Pike and how he’d sold him the tractor, how he’d cursed his name even though Rose had warned him not to, and how his first thought upon finding the old man dead had been that his spirit had possessed the dogs to seek his revenge. The first cop who’d showed up told him Pike had likely been dead for almost a week, meaning the dogs were probably just half-starved, and so, he’d told George, he’d come to see that what had really happened was just the universe giving him a tap on the shoulder to remind him as to the error of his ways.
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