Watch that Ends the Night

by Hugh Maclennan

  Some of the men in the camp Jerome remembered very well, better even than he remembered his mother. There was an old sailor, proud of being an Englishman, who used to tell him stories of Africa and India and China and who tried to make him promise that when he grew up he would take to the sea. Another man he particularly liked was a gigantic French-Canadian with a freckled face, a red complexion and the hairiest arms he had ever seen on anyone.

  “He spoke French most of the time, but with his looks he must have been descended from one of the Highland soldiers who settled in Quebec after Wolfe. He was the strongest man in the camp and he was a seasonal worker, for he had a wife and children on a farm somewhere in Quebec. He loved children, and I was the only kid in the place and he used to look after me. On nights when the accordian man played in the cookhouse I used to sit on his knee.”

  This red-headed giant was also a master craftsman. He built tiny ship models inside bottles, and it was he who built Jerome’s first canoe. It must have been one of the strangest canoes ever made, for it was boy-size, its strakes of varnished birch bark, its frame of thin pine, and there were air cans under the thwarts to keep it afloat if it capsized. When the river was open, Jerome used to paddle in the branch and go considerable distances into the forest, but he was never allowed to take the canoe into the main stream that poured down in front of the camp, for the current was so strong he could never have paddled back against it.

  “My mother,” he said to Catherine once, “I still dream about her sometimes and usually it’s a nightmare. Whoever she was, she must have had character, for she was the queen of that camp and make no mistake about it. She had power over those men, and the power went far past her control of their food. It came out of something inside of her that used to frighten me. Did she love me? I’m sure she thought she did. She was as possessive as a female bear with a cub, and I never had to worry about being molested by the men with her there. With her there I didn’t even know there are men who molested little boys. She’d have taken the carving knife to any man who so much as looked at me sideways. She hated men as a group and she despised them, too. ‘They’re no good’ she used to say I don’t know how many times. ‘All they want is one thing. That and drink is all they want. And they’re all the same.’”

  Catherine told me years later that Jerome’s abnormal fear of displeasing a woman came from his mother.

  Cyclically, this man-hating female required a man, and when she wanted one she took him. There would be weeks when she cooked for them and hardly noticed them, or bothered to answer them when they spoke, and then Jerome would see a certain look on her face and await the night with dread.

  “The nights she had a man in were bad nights for me. I was always afraid. I’d be asleep – I used to sleep in the same bed with her – and I’d wake up with her carrying me out of the bedroom in her arms. She used to put me down on a palliasse she kept beside the stove in the kitchen and she left me there under a blanket with the dog. Sometimes when it was over and the man went away she’d take me back to bed with her, and when that happened I’d lie awake all night. But generally she left me till morning under the blanket with the dog.

  “Was she a whore? I mean, did she take money for it? Somehow I don’t think she did, though she may have. Maybe I just don’t want to think she did. I don’t know. I can’t really remember what she was like. But I’ll never forget the nights when she had a man in. I think I remember every one of them in my last year in the camp.”

  He would lie on the palliasse listening to the lift of the lock of the kitchen door, he would hear the muttered announcement of some man that he was there. Sometimes the man’s boots would creak on the boards and sometimes his thumbs would snap at his leather belt and sometimes he’d give a throaty little laugh and sometimes he’d stand in the dark like a moose in the woods. In the deep of winter when moonlight reflected from the snow brightened the kitchen, Jerome would recognize the man as he stood among the shadows cast by the table and chairs and the pots and pans hanging on the wall. After the bedroom door closed, Jerome would lie tense on the palliasse with the dog nuzzling at him, watching the thin slip of light that struck out from under the bedroom door, waiting for the sounds.

  “Oh God,” he said, “men are such slaves to themselves! None of them, not one of them, wanted my mother for herself any more than she wanted any of them for themselves. And all of them were better than her. Oh yes they were, because I remember some things well. They wanted a woman – yes. But more than the sex they wanted sympathy and some woman to talk to. If she’d ever given them any of that, most of them would have taken it instead of the sex if there was any choice. I used to hear some of them talking about their mothers to her. Trying to talk about them, that is, for she’d never let them do it for long. I used to hear some of them trying to tell her about their wives and children. And I remember her saying – mean and sharp – ‘What do I care if you love your wife or not? What’s it to me?’

  “All she wanted from any of them was the sex, and by God she could be noisy about that. I’d lie there listening and driving my fingernails into my palms hoping to God the man she had that night would be able to satisfy her. Not many did, and she was cruel to them afterwards. I used to hear her sneering and mocking them. Usually she never talked unless she had to. But if she had a man, and he didn’t give her what she wanted, then she talked and I knew what her face would look like. I used to see some of those men creeping out like whipped dogs and I used to hate her for what she did to them. There was only one man that last winter who satisfied her, and he was a mean-looking, wiry little foreigner who could hardly speak a word of English. No, she didn’t like him, and in the daytime she never even looked at him, but he used to come in pretty often. Then without warning he went down the river and never came back.”

  It was Jerome’s last year in the camp, the year he was a husky boy of ten with the strength and robustness of a boy of thirteen, that he remembered best. What happened before that last year he could hardly remember at all, but the last year was vivid.

  “There was a man that winter,” he said, “that used to frighten me the way a snake frightens me now. There was nothing snakelike about his appearance, but there was a look in his eye, the way he had of looking at everybody. He never talked at all, and when he drank he drank sullenly. We all called him the Engineer because he was in charge of the stationary engine and he was the only man in the camp who could keep the motorboat in repair. He was dark and lean and he had this queer, drawn look in his face, and he used to carry a spanner wherever he went as though it proved he wasn’t an ordinary lumberjack like the rest of them. He carried it in a loop attached to his pants and he even wore it to meals. Maybe he even slept with it.

  “One March morning, about three weeks after the little foreigner went down the river, the Engineer said something to me while I was watching him work on the engine. I used to be fascinated by the engine and I would have watched more if I hadn’t been afraid of him. I knew all about the work the men did. I used to go out on the sleighs with them and come back on top of the cut logs. It was easy for me with most of the men. But this was the first time the Engineer had ever spoken to me. All he said was, ‘I want to eat pancakes tonight. Tell your old lady I want to eat pancakes and syrup.’

  “So I went back into the kitchen and told her the Engineer wanted to eat pancakes and syrup, and when she made them I knew I’d soon be seeing him in the kitchen.”

  But “soon” turned out to be quite a long time, for the Engineer stayed solitary all through the long spring breakup and through all of April into early May. In those days the cutting season ran from late September till April, and before the river opened the logs were piled on the banks. When the ice went out they floated the logs down in two big drives, the long, timber logs going first and the short pit-props following. As soon as the logs were in the river, most of the men left camp and went back to their farms for the spring work. Now only a handful of men remained, the permanent maintena
nce crew and the men who went down the river after the drives to float off the logs which had stuck on the banks or piled up on some of the little islands on the way to the sea. One of the men who remained was the Engineer, for there was still a large pile of logs to be cut into lengths for pit-props.

  It began peacefully, Jerome’s last night in the camp. It was one of those magic Canadian spring evenings that seem like a miracle when they arrive, one of those times in early May when a tide of southern air pours up from the United States and seems tropical over the half-frozen earth and around the sticky, unopened buds of the trees. All day long the forest had been hot. The few men remaining worked in a holiday mood stripped to the waist in spite of the blackflies and by evening some of their bodies looked like broiled lobsters wealed all over by flybites. Some of them went swimming in the water of the branch, water as cold as melted snow, and one of them took a cramp and had to be hauled out on a rope. Supper time came and there were pancakes and syrup to follow the pork and beans. After the men had eaten, in the long spring evening just six weeks from the June solstice, they sat about in the clearing and watched the sun roll down out of sight into the forest. The accordion man took his place on the cookhouse steps and played song after song, some of the men sang, and the others lounged about, fly-bitten, hot and tired. their backs propped against stumps on the forest fringe while they listened and drowsed and drank. There was liquor that night, but in the magic of the evening, the purest kind of evening we ever have in this northern country, the men sipped at their liquor without swilling it and nobody got drunk. Jerome’s mother came out in her apron and leaned in the doorway of the cookhouse listening to the singing, finally it fell dark and one by one the tired men got up and drifted off to the bunkhouse to sleep. When Jerome went to bed it was much later than his usual hour and the camp was so still the only sounds were the ringing of frogs and the slow sigh of the river in flood.

  He guessed it was an hour before midnight when he woke in his mother’s arms, his hands about her neck and his chest against her warm, heavy breasts. His face was still hot from the sun and his ears were swollen and hot from the blackly bites and he woke so slowly it was only when the spaniel nuzzled and licked his face that he opened his eyes. He saw moonlight pouring into the kitchen in three separate shafts through the three high windows that faced the moon, and between those shafts of light he saw the Engineer standing still. The bedroom door opened, his mother stood there, and he heard her say, ‘What are you waiting for?’ Then the man followed her in and the door closed.

  This time the encounter was different. The Engineer he had feared so much began talking in a low, earnest stream of conversation, talking about himself and how lonely he was and how wretched was his life, and how different everything would be if she would go away with him. Jerome could only partly hear his words, and hardly any of them could he remember, but he knew that of all the lonely men in the camp this was the loneliest of all, and he yearned for some gentleness to come into his mother’s voice in place of the withholding silence or the sneer he was afraid would come if the Engineer continued to talk like this. He wanted the Engineer to break through his mother’s refusal to some kindness inside, to some safe kindness inside.

  After a while the Engineer stopped talking and the usual noises began. They ceased almost at once and Jerome heard his mother’s voice flare in a jeer of unspeakable contempt.

  “So that’s the best you can do! A kid could of done better!”

  He heard the man groan and cry something out, and then he heard his mother mock and scorn him, and Jerome remembered thinking: Don’t let her treat you like that, Engineer! Please, please, please do something to make her stop treating you like that!

  The Engineer did. Suddenly his voice changed as the woman drove back his longing for tenderness into the pride and hatred Jerome had feared in him all winter. The man began to curse the woman in a stream of obscenity using every word Jerome had ever heard the men apply to the women they called whores. There was a short struggle, the pant of his mother’s breath, then a loud smack as she hit him across the face and Jerome thought: Please, please don’t let her do that again!

  What happened next was as sudden as a bottle exploding. Jerome and the dog sprang up together at the scream of enraged fear that came from his mother. Something bumped and fell in the bedroom, there was a heave of bodies, then the crack-crack-crack of hard fists driven expertly home. This was followed by a yelp from the man, a gasp of pain, then a crunching shock more terrible than a fist blow. Then silence.

  This silence, as abrupt and profound as the end of the world, was soon filled with a multitude of sweet noises. Mating frogs were singing high and happy in the night, so loud and high that the whole kitchen was filled with their joy. Then came another sound, the sobbing breath of a frightened man in agony.

  Jerome put his hand on the knob of the bedroom door and pulled it open. He saw the Engineer bent double clutching his groin and he knew where his mother had hit him that last time. Beyond the Engineer’s hunched body he saw his mother’s legs and thighs naked in the moonlight, but the hunched man was between the boy and her face.

  It was the dog who betrayed Jerome’s presence. Whining into the room, the spaniel rubbed against the man’s legs and made him turn. The Engineer gasped, his face came around distorted with his sick pain and was horrible with the knowledge of what he himself had just done. But he saw Jerome and recognized him, and the moment he saw him he plunged. The boy dodged back and the Engineer stumbled and hit the floor with a crash, his spanner rattling away from his right hand. Jerome saw that his pants were down about his lower legs and that it was these which had tripped him. On the floor the Engineer looked up, his mouth shut, his violence as silent as that of a fish in the sea. Jerome turned to run, escaped from the room, reached the kitchen door, felt the dog against his legs and had the presence of mind to push him back before he himself went out. He closed the door behind him and with his nightshirt fluttering and his feet bare he ran across the moonlit, chip-strewn clearing into the darkness of the forest. When he was in the trees the undergrowth began cutting his bare feet, he stopped, turned and lay flat.

  Nothing moved in the clearing. The long cookhouse with the two metal pipes that served as chimneys stood silent, its sloping roof whitened by the moon, its walls dark, its windows glittering like gun metal. He heard the sigh and gurgle of the river as it poured among the tree trunks along the flooded banks, but there was no sound of men and no light in any of the bunkhouses. He could not see the bunkhouse which was still occupied, but if there had been lights in it he would have seen their glimmer through the trees.

  With the instinct of an animal Jerome got up and changed his position, slinking through the shadows among the stumps at the edge of the forest-fringe to a place he knew about thirty feet away. He found it, a depression in the ground about ten feet from the edge of the moonlight, and lay down and scooped pine needles over himself to conceal the whiteness of his shirt and skin. Lying flat with his chin in his hands and his elbows in the needles, he stared at the kitchen door and listened to the pounding of his heart.

  The Engineer was only ten feet away when Jerome first saw him. He was skirting the forest-fringe with the spanner in his hand, staring into the darkness of the trees and stopping to take quick looks behind him. He wore no cap, his mackinaw shirt was open and in the moonlight Jerome saw the splash of dark hair rising out of his shirt to his throat. The man stopped directly in front of him and Jerome kept his head down, pressing his face into the needles, the needles itching in his hair. Once he lifted his eyes and saw the man’s feet and noticed they were small feet even in those high leather boots. There was a crunch of bracken as the man entered the woods, one of his boots came down within a yard of Jerome’s head, but the engineer was staring into the total darkness of the forest and did not look down at his feet. In the cool air of the night Jerome could hear the man pant and thought he could feel the heat of his body. The boots turned and went back out
of the forest into the clearing and as they crunched farther away Jerome looked up and saw the man’s shoulders go around the corner of the cookhouse and down the path to the bunkhouses.

  “I knew for certain that he was after me. He was putting himself between me and the men asleep in the bunkhouse. He knew I couldn’t get around through the woods without making a noise. He knew the path was the only way I could hope to go.”

  Jerome wondered if he ought to call out, but he knew how hard the men slept and he knew who would be the first to hear him. In any case he was too frightened to call. Except for that single jeering laugh of his mother and the man’s single outburst of obscenity, what had been done that night had been done with the silence of animals killing each other in the dark.

  Jerome lay still until he began to shiver and when the shivering came it was so violent it seemed to shake the ground. It was like being tied up in the cords of his own muscles shaking the earth so that everyone living on it must know where to find him.

  Getting to his feet, he beat the pine needles off his nightshirt and scraped some more of them out of his hair. Others chafed the tender skin between his thighs, but these he disregarded as he stepped slowly out of the forest into the moonlight. He stopped, waiting for the man to appear and give chase, but the only sound he heard was the pounding of his own heart and the only man he saw was the man in the moon. He believed there was a man in the moon who saw everything and didn’t care, who sat up there seeing and not caring and laughing to himself, and he thought he was laughing now. With his nightshirt fluttering, the boy ran across the clearing, opened the kitchen door and went in. This time he forgot about the dog, who jumped outside and ran away before Jerome could close the door.