No Quarter

by John Jantunen

  If you had Pa’s binoculars . . .

  And thinking that recalled to him the image of his father’s face, full of wonder and glee, the time he’d led him and Abel out to a spruce in the back of their property where an eagle had made its aerie, pointing up at the nest then peering through his binoculars, passing them over when the eagle’s head appeared over its lip so that Deacon could have a look too. Knowing then that he’d never see his pa’s face again—nor his ma’s nor Abel’s—the dread that had been creeping into his belly ever since he’d seen the falcon or the hawk wrapped its tentacles around his chest.

  He knew then that all those weeks he’d spent hiding under his covers, he hadn’t been hiding from the memory of the crash and the secret of what had come next, he’d been hiding from a thousand memories from the time before. He also saw that he’d been a fool to think he could hide from them when they were inside of him, each conspiring into a grim certainty that he was all alone in the world and that he couldn’t possibly get along without his family and that maybe it would have been better if he’d died too.

  He was sobbing now, his whole body shaking as if it couldn’t contain all that grief. Then hands were wrapping around him, holding him tight, and he buried his head in the soft weave of the old woman’s sweater. Her hand stroked the back of his head and she cooed, “There, there. It’s alright. Get it out. It’s okay.”

  Deacon knowing it was a lie and wanting to strike out at her, never so angry at another person than he was at this old woman, for telling him it would be alright when nothing could ever be alright again. His hands balled to fists and he pounded at her back though the blows felt feeble, no harder than a baby would have made.

  After a while, his anguish relented and his body stilled. Mrs. Cleary kneeled in front of him, smiling up at Deacon as if him sobbing like that had meant something beyond mere grief. She wiped away the tears from his cheeks with the back of her hand. The skin on her knuckles was as soft as silk.

  “Now, what was it you were saying about a parrot?” she asked and Deacon looked down at her, suddenly ashamed of crying like that and more so for pounding on her back and wishing her harm.

  “It was sit-sit-sitting in the window,” he started and the rest came pouring out, the words stuttering and tripping over one another, barely making sense even to himself. The old woman, though, seemed to have caught the general drift and her face brightened.

  “Binoculars?” she asked. “You want a pair of binoculars, is that it?”

  Deacon nodded.

  “George’s got a pair in the barn. Or at least he did. Why don’t we go see if we can find them?”

  “Okay.”

  Standing, she took him by the hand. As the old woman led him towards the barn’s front door, Deacon cast fleeting glimpses at the sky, searching about for the hawk or the falcon. It was gone, which meant the binoculars wouldn’t be of much use, but he trailed after her anyway.

  The old woman was telling him about how George would sit up by the window on the second floor of the barn for hours sometimes, peering through those binoculars.

  “He was looking for blue jays,” she continued. “Boy, does he ever have a hate-on for blue jays. Whenever he spied one, he’d shoot at it with this pellet gun he bought himself. Imagine that, an old man buying himself a pellet gun to shoot at blue jays. Me, I always liked them. Such cheerful birds. I don’t know how many times I told him to cut it out, but he’s like a kid with that pellet gun. How about you, do you like blue jays?”

  “I-I do.”

  “Good,” she said, turning towards him with a conspiratorial grin. “Then you and I will get along just fine.”

  They’d come to the barn and the old woman lifted up a stone that was sitting on the window ledge beside its door. The rock was about the size and shape of a softball, except it had a flat bottom. It was painted green and speckled with colourful dots—red and yellow and orange—and there was a plastic tree glued on top of it: a child’s idea of a grassy hill covered with wild flowers. A school project maybe, done in art class for Father’s Day, and now just another artefact amongst the thousand that spoke to Deacon of the life George and Adele had shared before he’d come to stay with them.

  Underneath the rock there was a bronze key, and while Adele was inserting it into the door’s lock, Deacon got his first inkling that the building wasn’t really a barn after all, or at least wasn’t anything like the barn his father had built. The bottom half of the door was made of steel and above it there was a window of frosted glass—a regular door like for a house—whilst the door to their barn had been made of wood slats nailed against three ten-by-ones. Surrounding the metal door was a patchwork of bricks, a shade lighter than the rest and spanning almost half of the front wall.

  He’d later learn that George had done the work himself, first removing the old double-wide wooden doors and bricking up the hole they’d left behind. He’d then installed a regular door, afterwards insulating the interior walls and covering them with barn board to maintain their rustic quality, lining those with shelves. It had taken him less than five years to fill them with books, and now thirty-five years later, the floor, the windowsills, the desk, and the steps leading up to the loft had all taken their share of the overflow. It was like a library had exploded, such was the impression it made anyway when Deacon first stepped through the door.

  His amazement must have been written large on his face. Seeing his widening eyes, Mrs. Cleary said, “It’s something isn’t it?” though the way she pursed her lips suggested she hardly shared the wonder Deacon felt.

  “I’ve been after him for years to clean this place up,” she said, flipping the switch beside the door. The dull glow cast from the overhead fixture sparkled off the dust glittering the air and she swat after it as she made her way towards the staircase, muttering more to herself than to Deacon, “Getting so a body can hardly move in here.”

  By the time she was halfway up to the loft, Deacon had overcome his initial trepidation and taken a step inside.

  “Be careful not to touch anything,” Mrs. Cleary warned, leaning over the loft’s rail. “You’ll be buried alive if one of those piles comes down on top of you.”

  Deacon was pretty sure she was joking but still he nodded and made sure to keep his hands firmly at his sides as he followed the narrow path through the stacks. It split into two at the desk and he followed it to the right, stopping only when he came to the typewriter sitting in front of the chair at its fore. It was old, he could tell because it didn’t even have an electrical cord. Remington Rand was etched in gold print along its hood and from the dust layering its keys it was obvious that it hadn’t been used in years. As if by its own volition, his hand reached out and his index finger pressed down on the letter J. An arm lashed out, striking with such a loud clack against the spool that he gasped and looked up towards the loft, waiting to be reprimanded.

  But Mrs. Cleary seemed to have other things to worry about. He could hear her muttering a litany of grievances against the mess she’d found upstairs, and he turned to the shelf behind the desk, finding at eye level a row of books wedged between two brass elephants.

  It struck him as odd, the rest of the shelves crammed as they were, and here on this shelf only a dozen books held together by the two elephants, their heads bent low, their legs straining as if it took every ounce of their strength just to keep them in place. It was only when he took a step closer that he could see the name printed on their spines and realized they were the ones George had written.

  Running his finger over the titles, he came to the last in the row and eased The Stray out of its place. He held it suspended between his hands, gazing at the cover, the picture of the man carrying the woman who looked to be dead enough to bring tears back to his eyes.

  He was still staring at it when Mrs. Cleary came down the stairs, griping, “Well, I don’t know where in hell’s half acre he put them. Ma
ybe the family of rats that have moved in upstairs could tell you, but I sure in Hades can’t.”

  When she’d come to the open door she glanced about and then craned to look past the stacks of books.

  “Deacon, you back there?”

  Deacon stepped out from behind the pile on the desk and she squinted as if she couldn’t quite make him out through the veil of dusty light.

  “I couldn’t find them,” she said. “We’ll ask George when he gets home. Now why don’t you come inside, I’ll make you some breakfast.”

  Deacon started towards her and then stopped. He looked down at the book in his hand and turned back to the shelf, thinking he should put it back but not wanting to part with it just yet.

  “What’s that you got there?” Mrs. Cleary asked.

  When he looked back at her she was walking towards him, setting the reading glasses that had been propped on her head down over her eyes and reaching out for the book. Deacon passed it over with grave reluctance. She gave it a quick glance, frowning when she saw what it was and then clamping it against her chest, showing no sign that she was willing to give it back.

  “You like to read?” she asked.

  Deacon nodded.

  “Well, this is hardly a book for children,” she said, turning for the door. “There’s a box in the attic of the ones I saved from when Edward and Louise were young. Why don’t we go and take a look in there?”

  “I want to read that one,” Deacon said, his voice forceful enough that it stopped her in her tracks.

  “It’ll give you nightmares. Now come on—”

  “But it’s about my ma and pa!”

  His voice cracked as he said it and when the old woman turned back to him he looked like he was set to start crying again. She frowned as if he was just being unreasonable and then looked down at the book in her hand. Her expression softened, all of a sudden realizing that what he’d said was true. She shook her head and peered sideways at Deacon. Then, frowning again as if she still couldn’t reconcile herself to being party to the corruption of a boy as young as he, she set the book down on top of the nearest stack and turned, calling over her shoulder as she strode through the door, “Just be sure to put it back when you’re done.”

  10

  Deacon read it sitting under the maple tree beside the barn, not looking up until Mrs. Cleary was setting a plate in front of him. There was a ham and cheese sandwich on it and some potato chips and she was holding the plate in her hand with the two pieces of toast and jam she’d left him for breakfast. He hadn’t taken a bite of those and didn’t feel hungry now but when she said, “You should eat something,” he picked up a sandwich half and took a bite. That satisfied her enough that she left him alone for the rest of the afternoon though he didn’t eat so much as a crumb afterwards. The only time he remembered the sandwich at all was when a squirrel startled him from the page by stealing the top piece of bread from one of the halves. It had dragged it a few feet away and was standing on its hinds, mocking him with its cheerful natter, but Deacon paid it no mind, eager as he was to return to the book.

  He was on page 107. So far, other than the scene where the dogs had attacked the homesteader’s son, which was indeed quite frightful, he hadn’t found any indication of why his father and Mrs. Cleary had said it wasn’t a book for children. Up until then the story had been rather tame, more so even than White Fang, as it alternated between the homesteader’s hunt for the pack of stray dogs that had killed his son and the two Chippewa brothers searching for their sister who’d been kidnapped by a trapper working for the Hudson’s Bay Company. Like his father, the homesteader was a Dane, whom George described as being five foot four, he’d joke, on a windy day who in spite of the shortness of his stature, or perhaps because of it, had become renowned in logging settlements stretching from Lake Simcoe to Georgian Bay, for there wasn’t a man among them more able with an axe or with a fiddle, nor more generous with a helping hand or a kind word, a description that Deacon thought fit his father to a T.

  There were plenty of other things about the man, named Asger, that reminded him of his dad and George had such a deft facility with words that he seemed to spring to life right off the page. For most of the book so far, he’d been walking from one logging settlement to the next, hearing stories of the dogs’ rampage from all he encountered, one old priest going so far as to call them unholy daemons unleashed by an Indian witchdoctor as a pox upon those who’d stolen his People’s land. Every time one of Asger’s chapters ended and one about the two brothers searching for their sister began, Deacon had a powerful urge to skip ahead, to get back to his pa, his restless anticipation tempered only by the knowledge that the girl in question, whom George had named Niimi, was his mother and the hope that his patience would be well-rewarded once she finally made an appearance.

  When she did, on page 121, the trapper was leading her through the woods by means of a manacled chain around her neck such as the slavers used. The trapper was known only as The White Devil though he had a face as red and swollen from drink as the ass end of a baboon. When they reached his shack he looped the chain around the trunk of a tree a dozen paces from its porch and secured it with a padlock, the key to which he wore on a leather cord strung around his neck.

  Niimi slumped to her knees within the tree’s shade, her head lowered, penitent just like The Crows had commanded her to do when offering prayers to their God. After almost a week of being dragged through the bush, she was in a most sorrowful state. The White Devil hadn’t fed her more than a few scraps since he’d taken her and the sharp lines of bones appeared on the point of cutting through the skin of her once ruddy cheeks, now calloused with mud and lined with channels like the tributaries of long-dead rivers. Her hair was clumped with knots and burrs so that it struck out at odd angles from her head remaking her into a half-mad witch. The soles of her bare feet had long been reduced to a bloody pulp, and the scrape from innumerable brambles made her legs look like a dozen games of tic-tac-toe had been played on them by a spastic at a school for the blind. Her back bore the sting of his whip, freely given whenever she’d slowed or stumbled, and her neck was rubbed so raw by the manacle that its edges felt like razor blades whenever she shifted against the weight of it pressing into the flesh of her shoulders.

  Encountering his mother thusly, Deacon clamped the book shut, afraid of what might happen to her next. He had the sudden urge to throw the damn thing away, so he’d never have to find out. He’d gone so far as to cock it back in his hand before the thought reared, But you can’t just leave her like that.

  Gritting his teeth, he set the book back on his lap, flipped to his page, and, taking a deep breath, began to read again.

  Her every breath was an agony.

  With no hope of better days ahead she waited until The White Devil had disappeared through the shack’s front door and then fished about with fevered eyes for a sharp stone within reach that she might use to end her suffering. The ground around her had been scoured clean into a circle of hard-packed dirt showing no trace of anything save the odd pebble and the gnarled finger of a root that had broken through its surface, the perimeter of which ran at a distance about the length of the chain tethering her to the tree. She was just on the cusp of gleaning the significance of that when she heard the shack’s door thudding open.

  When she looked up, The White Devil was walking towards her. He was carrying a body slung over one shoulder. It was naked and its legs were as stiff as logs and teetered against the sanction of his crooked arm. In his free hand he hoisted a spade shovel. When he’d come to the edge of the circle of hard-packed earth he planted that in the ground, pushing down on its blade with his foot to secure it. The body he dropped in front of Niimi with all the care of a sack of potatoes.

  It was a girl, she could see that, with long black hair like her own. She couldn’t have been much older than her first cycle as a woman, though her exact age was hard to measu
re due to the ravages inflicted upon her. Her ears had been removed and so had both of her breasts, leaving holes encrusted with black blood in her chest. Her body bore the mark of The White Devil’s whip, crisscrossing her skin in a beaver dam’s worth of thatched welts. Some of them hadn’t yet been old enough to clot when she’d died and within their ragged clefts, maggots swarmed in the ecstasy of their feast. But it was the ones that time had seen fit to heal that spoke most truly to Niimi of her own fate, as did the toothless cavity that had become the girl’s mouth. From its yawning chasm, tendrils of dusty white ran down her chin and there was more of the same crusted over the thin mat of her pubis, which Niimi took to mean that even death had provided the girl no relief from The White Devil’s lust.

  Staring down at the girl, she knew he meant her as a warning and she swore a solemn oath to herself that no matter what he asked of her she would suffer through it without complaint, comforting herself with the knowledge that it would only be a matter of time before her brothers arrived to rescue her, making a further promise that once they did she would make The White Devil pay double: for the horrors he had inflicted upon this young girl as well as the ones she knew were in store for her.

  So when, a moment later, he pointed to the shovel, commanding her to dig, she scrambled to her feet, took up the spade, and pitched its blade into the ground with eager obedience. Prying loose a morsel of the hard-packed earth with its tip, she looked up, smiling, seeking The White Devil’s favour.