Still the tiny canoe throbbed down the stream, the boy in the stern, and around the next bend he saw a shack but no smoke from its chimney pipe. Now he was sleepy and tired and stopped paddling; he sat with the paddles across his knees and his head sunk forward.
“I must have slept like that for half a hour, when I woke the canoe was drifting slantwise and light was hurting my eyes.”
It was the rising sun, a turmoil of gold like a tremendous excitement in heaven pouring its arrows into the forest and flashing them off the stream. His limbs dead and cold, Jerome straightened the bow of the canoe and let it drift in a current much slower now because here the river was deep and he felt the huge unseen pressure of the tide lower down. Close to the shore he passed a deer drinking on a sandspit and after a while he was afraid that if he fell asleep again he would lose his paddle. A small cape stood out with a sentinel pine, the canoe struck it with a soft crunch and Jerome crawled ashore and dragged half of it clear of the stream. Then he got back in and slept.
When he woke the sun was almost directly overhead, his nostrils were dry with heat and his body felt tired, hot, heavy and stiff. It was a May morning without a cloud in the sky and already the heat had made the balsam forest pungent.
“The time must have been somewhere between eight o’clock and nine. At that season of the year the sun rises about five, so I must have been asleep nearly three hours. If it hadn’t been for the glare I suppose I’d have gone on sleeping all day. I was in the aftermath of shock. Even now I can’t tell you how far I had come down the river, but I had been paddling with a fast current for at least four hours before I fell asleep.
“But I didn’t think about distances when I woke up. I didn’t even know what distances were. What I remember is how I felt. I felt black. I felt the way I felt that morning after I first killed a man in the war. I saw my mother’s dead face hard and angry in front of mine. God, she was an angry woman, that mother of mine. I saw the Engineer with his spanner and when I tried to eat some of my sausage I nearly vomited it up. I had to get out of that forest and get off that river. Far away was where I wanted to go, and then I thought about the trains.”
Though he did not know it, Jerome was now close to the sea and was paddling in a new kind of river. As it nears salt water that river becomes wide and is tidal for several miles. The town lies a distance inland and Jerome could not see the open water of the Gulf, but he could smell it and his cheeks felt a new salty, moisture in the air. He became conscious of settlement along the shores – not a town, but a scattering of frame houses and large breaks in the forest where there were fields and cattle. He also became aware that paddling had turned into heavy, leaden work, for the river was much wider here than it had been at the camp, and its current was stopped by the pressure of an incoming tide from the sea. Jerome ached all over his body as he forced the canoe forward, he sobbed with exhaustion and shock and was drowned in his own sweat, he was on the point of giving up when he rounded a final bend and there, right in front of him, was the black iron bridge that carried the main railway line between Halifax and Montreal. Beyond it was a small wooden bridge for road traffic and beyond that the river seemed enormously wide. There was a town on Jerome’s left, a small, drab town built almost entirely of wood, and through his sweat he remembered having been in it before, last fall when he came down in the steamboat with his mother and some men, the time she bought him his first ice cream. As his canoe drifted in toward the bridge he backed water and tried to ease toward the shore. He was so tired he cried. Then he almost dropped his paddle in terror, for a train appeared out of nowhere almost on top of him as it crossed the bridge.
“It was only a small work-train – an old-fashioned engine with two olive-gray cars and a caboose on the end. It made an awful racket though, for it crossed that iron bridge with me almost underneath it. Its exhausts were crashing as it got up speed and it belched smoke from the soft Cape Breton coal all the engines burned in those days. The whole river seemed to shake as it crossed the bridge, but by the time I passed under it the roaring had stopped and I heard the singing drone that rails make when a train goes away down a track. I looked up and saw a man on the platform of the caboose looking down at me and his face was shiny black. He was the first negro I ever saw and I wondered if all the people in the world outside the camp were black like him.”
Jerome forced himself into a last spurt of action and paddled the canoe across the current, making heavy leeway, toward a jetty on the left bank between the two bridges. He remembered it from the time when the steamboat had landed him there. The sight of the jetty also reminded him of the motor boat and he became terrified, for what if the Engineer were waiting for him on the wharf? But there was no sign of the motorboat either at the wharf or along the shore.
“He had either beached it above town or sank it in the river. He’d have wanted to walk quietly into town at dawn before the people were up and hide somewhere near the tracks till a train stopped.”
Two men in dungarees and peaked caps were sitting on the curb of the jetty watching Jerome as he paddled in, but neither of them moved as he swung against the landing stage. He climbed out and hung onto the canoe with no plan whatever. He was just doing one thing after another and the next thing he did was to take the painter and secure it to a mooring post.
“Wheer’d yew git thet canoe from, son?”
A lean, unshaven face with a chicken throat was staring down at him from the curb of the wharf.
“It’s mine.”
“Littlest goddam canoe I ever seen,” the man said and spat into the water.
Jerome climbed the ladder stiffly and as he reached the wharf the man made a lazy half-turn in his direction.
“Wheer’d yew come from, son?”
“I bin paddlin’.”
The man spat again but did not answer and continued sitting with his legs dangling and his unshaven lantern jaws working steadily on his cud of tobacco. Jerome, afraid of everything and everyone and tired in every bone, walked shakily off the dock onto a dirt track that ran along the riverside of the little town. He reached the railway, bent down and touched one of the shiny rails and found it so hot it burned. When he reached the station he saw men unloading freight out of a solitary box car and was surprised that none of them were negroes. Jerome sat on a bench under the overhang of the station roof and ate one whole length of his blood sausage, and there he continued to sit an unknown length of time half-asleep and half-awake like the town itself, but feeling a little stronger now there was food in his stomach.
It still seems ironic to me that a man like Jerome Martell should have made his entrance into the organized world in a town like that. It seems almost as ironic as that two prime ministers, one of Canada and one of Great Britain, should have grown up or worked in their youth in that general area. Once in a fit of curiosity I drove all through that town, a feat I performed in less than twenty minutes, and it left me depressed. These semi-ghost towns of a colonial past – we have several of them in that part of the country, and when you see them now it is hard to believe that once upon a time British officers in swallow-tail coats stepped ashore into their wooden jetties from corvettes, frigates and sloops-of-war. I remember the town’s main street was a hundred yards of battered macadam containing two wooden churches, half a dozen shops, a sad red brick bank, a sadder red brick post-office with a four-faced clock on the roof. I can’t remember the street’s name, but I would lay even money it was either Wellington Street or King Street. I remember the sawmills screamed so monotonously that the only time when you were conscious of them was when they stopped, and I remembered shirt-sleeved men leaning against store fronts whittling or chewing tobacco. In the back area of the town along the river there were a few expensive houses and one was a real period showplace, a wooden Victorian castle with a stucco front, four turrets, a lot of iron fretwork, a wooden belvedere and a sundial on what once had been a lawn. There were no curtains at the windows and a grove of dwarf spruce was creepi
ng in through the back fence. The only thing that seemed to matter in that town, except for the sawmills, was the railway station.
It was to the station that Jerome went that morning, and the first citizen of organized society who spoke to him was the ticket agent. He bulged at Jerome, armbands on the sleeves of a striped shirt, a blue serge waistcoat protruding over a solid belly burdened by watch chains, lodge charms and indelible pencils, an eyeshade separating the gray baldness of a bullet-head from the gray baldness of a pudgy face.
“Who’re yew waitin’ fer, son?”
Jerome stared at him.
“What’s your name, son?”
Jerome continued to stare at him, and the agent broke into a laugh like a mule’s bray.
“Don’t know nuthin, eh? Haw, haw, haw! Your Maw comin’ in on a train?”
Still Jerome stared. The man pulled out a silver hunter, snapped it open and dangled it in front of the boy’s eyes.
“Yew know what this-here is?”
The boy nodded, the ticket agent shot a squirt of tobacco juice out of the corner of his mouth and Jerome heard it smack the nearest rail.
“The Maritime, she don’t get in here for a long time, son. What hev you been doin’ gettin’ dirtied up like thet? Yew stink like my old man’s privy.” A big paw shot out and grabbed the boy’s shoulder. “Yew come along with me.”
Jerome was too tired to struggle and the ticket agent frogmarched him down the platform and into the station where he saw a potbellied stove with a dust of gray wood ashes around it, several slopped-over cuspidors and a door with a sign on it.
“Kin yew read?” said the ticket agent.
Jerome shook his head.
“Don’t know nuthin, eh? Well, that sign says Gents. Git inside and clean.”
He opened the door, pushed Jerome in and left him there. The boy stood trembling in the stinking place, knowing from the smell what it was used for. He heard water dripping from a leaking tap, and in a cracked mirror he saw his own face filthy and red about the eyes, some spruce needles in his hair and his ears like fans on either side of his head. There was a cake of grimy yellow soap on the edge of the basin and he washed his hands and face and the back of his neck. As there was no towel he rubbed his sweatered arm over his face and dried his hands on his pants. Although he had never seen a flush toilet in his life, he recognized the purposes of this one from the condition in which it had been left, so he used it, washed again, bent his mouth to the tap and took a long drink of water. Then he left the washroom and slunk out, crossing the waiting room on tiptoe for fear the strange man would see him. The man did see him, but he did not move or seem to care. He was sitting with his legs apart on a swivel chair beside the telegraph, his jaws working steadily on his cud, his eyes half closed.
Outside in the sunlight it was better. A shunting engine had moved in and was pushing the solitary box-car along the line onto a siding. It disconnected, puffed backwards along the track and disappeared around a bend in the line leaving the platform to bake in the open heat. A wave of sleep engulfed Jerome and his eyes closed. He slept unconscious of everything and nobody touched him or troubled to wake him up. It was noon before he woke in fright to feel the whole station shaking as a huge locomotive crashed past hauling a long line of freight cars that blocked the sun and darkened his eyes. The train ground to a stop and Jerome heard the engine panting under the water tower.
“I had to get out of there. I remembered the way the men talked about hopping trains and here was a train right in front of me. I saw the back of the ticket agent far up front talking to the engineer and I crawled under the train and came out on the other side. There was a double track and I walked back along in the path beside the train looking at it. Most of the cars were red boxcars, but there were some flats and some black gondola cars for coal. It was a train of empties and there must have been more than forty cars, for they ran out of sight around the bend in the line.”
As he was walking along wanting to climb on board but afraid to, the train itself made up his mind for him. It gave a shudder and a volley of crashes went banging down its entire length as the engine gave its first heave and the couplings cracked tight. The noise terrified him, for up front the engine was giving out the shuddering roars of an old-fashioned locomotive getting under way with a heavy weight behind it. An empty flat car moved by and Jerome caught the iron ladder at the end, climbed in and lay down on the boards until it had passed the station. Looking up he saw the town and the river recede around a bend and for the rest of the afternoon the train took him down the eastern side of New Brunswick.
“It’s amazing how fast a human being can learn. Once there was a terrific crash and a different kind of train slammed by and I knew it was an express for passengers. I’d heard the men use the word and I knew what it was.”
Late in the afternoon he ate the last of his sausage and slept, and when he woke the train was still and a huge eye of light was bearing down on him. He leaped up in terror to hear the crunch of feet on cinders and that enormous light made his hair prickle. He crouched back against the floor of the car as the light came on top of him and then it was suddenly dark and he looked up and saw, so close he could almost reach out and touch, the shoulders of a man in overalls sitting in the cabin of a locomotive with one elbow on the ledge of the cabin window and his right hand working the throttle. A red glare burst into Jerome’s eyes and he saw the toss of the fireman’s shoulders swinging a shovelful of coal into the firebox, then the engine passed, moving with no cars behind it, and looking over the edge of the flat car Jerome saw a forest of trains.
“Hey there, you kid! What the hell are you doing on that train?”
A man was standing below with one hand pointing at him and the other holding a lantern. Jerome jumped back, crossed the car, swung down the ladder on the far side and felt his feet touch ashes. He broke into a run between two stationary freight trains and fell flat on his face as his foot stumbled over a switchblock. Cinders cut his forehead and the heels of his hands, but he felt no pain because he was so frightened and got up and tried to escape from where he was. He was in a maze of box cars with his ears hearing hammer clangs in all directions as the workmen tested wheels and looked for hotboxes. The two lines of cars were sheer walls on either side and the lane between them dark and interminable. Suddenly the train on his left jerked and crashed and began to inch forward, frightening him so much he bent double and crawled underneath the train he had just left. When he came out on the far side there was a clear length of track ahead of him to a point about fiffty yards away where it ended with the shunting engine whose light had awakened him. Beyond this empty track was still another train. He crawled under it, felt a small scratching pain as his knee caught a splinter from a sleeper, and came out on the other side. Another train faced him and again he crawled under.
There were no more trains. Instead he found himself facing a sight he had never seen in his life: a large town at night. Everywhere he looked there were lights. He was on the edge of a cinder embankment and when he scrambled down he felt a cinder lodge harsh and gritty against the tender skin of his ankle, but he went sliding down in a spray of cinders and coal dust until he hit the bottom and tripped and fell. He got up and dusted himself and felt inside his larrigan with his finger and worked the cinder out. He was sobbing for breath and wet through with his own sweat, but he was too frightened to stand still even though he had no idea where to go. He was absolutely lost because he did not understand what a town is or what people in a town do. He was on a wooden sidewalk beside a dirt street and a team of horses was hauling a heavy cart up the slope of it to the station with a teamster sitting on the wagon box cracking his whip. Jerome called out to the teamster but the man merely turned his head, looked at him and spat (this was a spitting country in those days), so Jerome walked up the slope beside the wagon and stopped abruptly on the top. He recognized a station platform, one far larger than the one he had left that noon, with a new kind of train standing
beside it. This train was full of lights and there seemed to be hundreds of people.
“Out of the way, son!”
He jumped as two men pushed a cart piled high with boxes and suitcases along the platform beside the train. He looked around for a place to hide, but the platform was as bright as day and everywhere he looked there were people – people strangely dressed, women among them who did not look at all like his mother, men who did not look at all like the men in the camp.
“I had reached Moncton without knowing it. It’s all very well to say now that Moncton is only a fair-sized railway town where trains come in from Montreal, Boston, St. John and Halifax and are shunted around and re-grouped. I tell you that no city I ever saw afterwards – not even London where after the first day I fell asleep with streams of red from the buses roaring down my mind – not even London seemed as colossal and terrifying as Moncton did that night with all those trains and lights and noises and strange-looking people coming and going.”
Jerome slunk through the crowd without anyone noticing him, and in the waiting room when he looked at his hands they were like raw hamburger with coal dust ground into it.
“You know, in those days this country was used to ragamuffins. Kids who looked like me were a part of the landscape.”
The ticket agent in that little sawmill town had already made Jerome ashamed of being filthy and he was afraid somebody here in Moncton would see him and talk as the ticket agent had done and throw him out into the dark. He stole through the waiting room sure that everyone was staring at him until he found an empty corner in the farthest and darkest corner, and there he sat with his body crowded against the wall. He smelled coffee and frying eggs and salivated, but he was afraid to go over to the bright stall with the metal coffee boilers where all the people were eating sandwiches and drinking. A harsh voice bellowed its ritual about all aboard for some place or other and the people began crowding toward the doors. The waiting room emptied and after a while Jerome heard a train pull out. When it left the whole big waiting room was as quiet as an empty barn.
Watch that Ends the Night Page 24
