Deep River Night

by Patrick Lane

  To that, Emerson had said not a word. He could feel the scar growing, becoming a thin white ridge that he would wear all his life. He’d been happy as he returned to lie on the mattress beside his mother’s bed. Sleep did not elude him. Emerson had learned to sleep standing up. It was a kind of resting that nurtured him. The sleeps he needed were taken in the forest under certain trees, his favourite a cedar whose healing boughs protected him. His mother had taught him the languages of trees and shrubs, the cedar and fir, the chokecherry and the Oregon grape. He had rested the remainder of the night. He knew he had to leave before dawn.

  His feet were in dusty boots, his shirt torn at the neck. The thin blue jeans were held up with a twist of what looked like a tanned strip of deer or moose hide. His body was oddly shrunk as if he’d never quite got enough food in him in his early years or more likely, given the love his mother had for him, because he was simply born to be small of stature like his father. He was squatted low on the floor as if nailed there, his arms crossed over his torn pants, his head lolled forward across his wrists. The bones in the back of his neck above the collar were ridged out tight against skin that was both white and darkly red, the demarcation between them showing where the sun had both touched and untouched him. He didn’t look like he was breathing, more like something carved and left there.

  Emerson had been silent for an hour or more as he’d waited for Joel to wake up. Once a man had walked down the aisle of bunks and passed on through the doorway into the last of dark to piss, but the boy had been so avoidably still he hadn’t been seen to be there.

  He knew Joel was awake now though and watching.

  * * *

  —

  BY THE LIGHT IN THE WINDOW above his head Joel knew he’d only slept a few hours, no more. His eyes were bare slits through which he stared at the Turfoot boy’s head, the raked green-blond hair hanging down the sides of his face neither combed nor brushed, but rather turmoiled by the wind and weather and further, likely shaped by him clawing his fingers through it. A bandage was wound around Emerson’s head. It showed through his tangled hair. Joel wondered where the boy had got such an injury that it would need such careful binding, but figured he’d find out one way or another.

  Joel had been looking at him for a while, thinking upon the boy’s purpose. The boy hadn’t moved even though Joel had stirred once or twice. The boy’s head was bent a little sideways, his eyes part open in what seemed like a half sleep and wasn’t. He was carefully awake. Joel knew he was staring directly at him. Between the two of them was a wordless agreement that until Joel made some move to recognize the boy being there, neither of them would stir.

  He had to be three shy of the oldest of Turfoot’s five sons, unless there were medium-sized or bigger ones hidden away up at the farm. Joel doubted that, given his own regular trips up the mountain. He’d seen this boy at the station the times Arnold Turfoot brought his family down to the train. There was a littlest one, then came this one, and after them the next-in-line three brothers, the bigger kids who did most of the loading up on the wagon when the shipment came in from the Woodward’s store in Vancouver. And Myrna, of course, the sister of them all, and the oldest.

  Joel couldn’t think of a reason for the boy to be in the bunkhouse other than to deliver some message to him from Myrna, though why he needed to hear it given he was going to be seeing her anyway later on was a mystery to him. It had to be important for the boy to be there at all. Farm people had little truck with mill people. The only places the village and farm met were at the train, the store, or the church, the last only on the rare occasion there was a service and that didn’t happen often. There was the Hall when there were dances. Everyone showed up for those.

  Like the dance being held that night just ten or twelve hours away depending on what time it actually was right then, the sun up, light coming in through the window and door. Come eight o’clock tonight the first record would be spun by Wally Yaztremski, maybe one of those twist songs or the one about the teeny weeny yellow polka dot bikini. Joel had tried doing the twist and figured he was good at it as most people. What he was hoping Wally would play was one of the new ones by Elvis like “It’s Now or Never,” a song that made Joel crazy for the Indian girl. It made him crazy for Myrna too. Her brother squatting there beside him made him think of Myrna with her dress up and her panties wrapped like an undone shackle around one of her ankles.

  A bluebottle fly slipped in through a tear in the wire screen above the boy on the floor. The winged bead moved upon the air like a feral trout in a stream, some human stench drawing it from the bog, a man’s heavy sweat or some torn skin or muscle unhealed and smelling close enough to dead to make it worth the looking. Joel heard the fly before he saw it, the weighted drone, its purple belly, and its wings like a bumblebee’s seemingly too small and fragile to hold such a body up.

  The fly passed over Joel’s shoulder and he caught for a moment the sun-bitten glint of blue on the fly-belly’s carapace, the wings a faint blur above. It passed over him and lifted above the boy’s bent neck, almost touching the line of sharp bones that rose beneath the skin, the bandage with its wound, frays of shaggy blond hair adrift. The boy did not move, though Joel saw the muscles flicker in the boy’s hand, another muscle in the wrist tensing so slightly it was less than a whisper. His head hung sideways above the knees and crossed arms, the eyes still seemingly on Joel, though there was a tightening of the lids around them, and now there was a space between the wrist and knee. The fly continued to move as if without purpose, aimless, drifting in narrow circles, descending out of its careen beside the boy then turning a sharp quick angle and grazing the hair on the boy’s forearm. As it did, the boy’s hand turned and rose in what Joel could only imagine was a rattlesnake’s strike it was that fast, vertical and impossible, the boy’s hand like a brown and bitten mouth closing upon the desperate carom of the fly.

  Joel heard its frantic whir inside the encasement of the brown fist held out over the boy’s knee. The boy raised his head, the eyes quick with a blue dark as autumn clouds. Joel blinked once and the boy smiled at him, raised his arm, and dashed the fly onto the floor between his feet, the fly’s body cracking there, its dying the sound a bubble of spit makes exploding on hot iron.

  Up at the front of the bunkhouse Joel heard wood crackling in the stove, and the hiss of water in a pot, a faint draft of coffee slipping through the still air. Saturday was a morning to sleep in. But someone was up, likely Vern Lupich, the man who most days got the coffee cooking in the pot.

  There was the cough of someone waking, but the boy didn’t stir. He stared instead back at Joel, his blue eyes opaque. Emerson returned his arm to the other arm, the two resting across his knees again, hands hanging down. When he spoke, his mouth barely moved.

  “She told me to get you,” he said. “I wouldn’t have come for other.”

  It was Myrna wanted him, who else?

  “Get me for what?”

  Joel watched the boy ponder the question as if wondering whether there even was an answer and if he might opine it, his instructions from her simple enough, but not in any way he cared to know, just doing what his big sister asked of him. Joel figured his question created a complication the boy couldn’t answer to, not knowing what it was she might want Joel for other than in Joel’s mind, the boy’s mind too, he figured, to rut.

  “She never said for what or why.” The voice was quick and angry, defensive, as he added, scowling: “You know for what!” and then almost not speaking aloud, in a sharp whisper said: “To get you is what she told me…and that’s what I’m here to do.” And when Joel didn’t respond, the boy burst out, spittle a flicker across his wrists, his whisper thin and hard: “You think I’d come for anything else?”

  There seemed to be a complex, maddening confusion in him trying to explain any of it. If it was the same for Emerson as what Joel had known back home on the farm in Nakusp then Joel knew that in the Turfoot family the boy was expected to do certain th
ings, not asked to do them and not told to either. He was to split and pile winter stove wood, feed chickens, sheep, the horse and cow, clean stalls, the barn, the workshop, help put in a crop, harvest it, and, or, dig, climb, cut, wield, walk, run, fish, hunt, shoot, cut, pray, or sing, and above all watch the weather and know who to talk to and who not, the latter being all and everyone outside of family except for the exceptions. The boy was expected to do whatever he did, simply, and to ask why made a ponderless dilemma out of the question, one without any logical meaning.

  Joel had been impressed by him killing the fly. He’d not seen it done that way before.

  “You got fast hands,” he said.

  Emerson looked at him steady as if he was without thought following upon his outburst.

  “I saw you catch that fly right in the middle of the air,” Joel said. “That’s quite a trick.”

  “Hell, anyone can do that,” the boy said, coming sullen up out of his reverie. He twisted his shoulders and stretched his thin brown arms out in front of him, his small hands pulled into fists, the skinny pyramids of the sharp knuckles shining. He stared hard across them at the walls beyond, seeming already to regret he’d talked at all.

  “No, I don’t think so,” said Joel. “I bet no one else can catch and kill a fly as good as you just did.”

  The boy’s eyes looked quick at Joel, a sudden glint sparkling out of the deep he had inside him, the brightness there as if strangely erupted by chance and circumstance, his being there with Joel at all and, to boot, being told by someone outside of his family, especially someone older, that he was good at doing things. There was a brief moment, a fierce pride Joel could see in him, and then it was hidden away, the eyes opaque again.

  “There’s lots I can do you don’t know about,” the boy said, an eye tooth glittering a split second and gone behind his narrow lips. When Joel didn’t say anything to that, the boy sulled up again and part angry, part humiliated said: “You think you’re smart, I bet. You think you got secrets. Well, I seen you with Myrna. I watched what you two do up there in the rocks above the high field. Don’t think I don’t know what you’ve been at. I seen you rut in her lots of times.”

  Joel stared into the eyes across from him. Other than that moment of pride, they revealed nothing. The boy had translucent eyelids like the haws of a cat, a third lid seeming to roll out beneath the other two, keeping what the boy was seeing a mystery for anyone who tried to read his thoughts.

  So the boy had spied on him when he’d been with Myrna. Oddly him seeing them didn’t matter to Joel. Emerson was as much animal to him as likely Joel was to the boy, as his sister was to either of them. He wondered if he’d been the same way when he was that age and thought he might, given the way he was still peering through windows at night. Talking to the boy made him suddenly feel older than he’d been a moment before.

  He didn’t want to think of Myrna. He had kept her mostly out of his mind since he got wrapped up with Art Kenning and McAllister, and the sawyer’s wife too, cutting herself like she did. Them and Alice, the way her smell tasted in the back of his mouth.

  The boy squatted there stolid, his body, so slight and quick, now seeming thickened. He turned his head away and spoke into the door laid up beside him, saying: “You can call me Emerson,” telling Joel what he’d already remembered. And then, belligerent again, quick to tease out an insult, added, “And don’t you go calling me anything but that neither.”

  “I guess I won’t do that then,” said Joel quietly, adding, “Emerson.”

  They were speaking in whispers, the boy with his close-set lips hardly making a sound. Joel didn’t have to strain no matter he was listening to him with only the one ear up, the boy’s voice insinuating in the same way water does when it wicks into a clot or sponge. Other sounds came up through his pillow, reverberations accentuated by the army cot he lay on with its iron frame resonant on the wooden floorboards, the metal struts and wires he was laid on vibrating. Farther off he could hear Joseph from out the front door of the bunkhouse, his scored and scratched guitar, those sharp fingernails cutting notes from the strings, each pick and pluck separate one from another, cruel too in the chords’ sweet loneliness. It was no tune Joel had heard before, but a salvaging of what at this moment the gang sawyer’s heart had to tell his hands of what it knew, Joel hearing some of the songs, bits of “Blue Canadian Rockies” among the far-off wince of “Cry Me a River.” And beyond that too a simplicity so complex in its yearning that he could only feel it, no understanding of such loss and loneliness possible in his short life.

  The smell of coffee was rousing other sleepers. Sounds came from elsewhere in the bunkhouse, not far off a foot pushing itself into a stiff boot and then another foot into another boot, a coarse hand slapping at an unshaven cheek or itching an arm to kill some errant mosquito or deer fly, and undercutting these a noise between the guitar and the boots and the slap, the mumble of men up at the front of the bunkhouse by the stove where there was a rickety table with five chairs, the men appearing half dressed from their bunks and all of a sudden starting to play their Saturday morning game of hearts, a penny a point, the odd number rounded up to a nickel when it was time to pay, the game with friendly stakes, nobody drunk, not yet, and nobody foolish enough to change to five-card stud or draw poker, those being games played only late at night after the drinking and carouse, the laughter and loneliness. He heard the shuffle of cards, the flitter as the tired pasteboards melded together, a grunt or two, a soft the hell you say, spoken by someone, and another voice responding is what she said, any and all other words and comments left to slip adrift in the farther dark of the long room, but over the game he heard boots come banging down past the rank of cots and stop behind him.

  Joel breathed in deep through his nose and expelled the stink of Reiner who’d come up to the foot of Joel’s bunk. Ernie was staring at the boy by the door, but Emerson didn’t move. His arms hung over his knees. The fists he’d made a moment before had turned back into hands, both of them hanging loosely from his narrow wrists, the left one swinging slightly side to side as a single leaf does on a cottonwood when there’s no breeze felt.

  Joel could feel the boy, the small body compressed and tense in a strange and intimate immensity.

  A crow called, guttural, insistent, the men at their cards quiet, no answer anywhere other than the far-off picking of Joseph’s guitar as it sought some other relic tune for relief of time along the river.

  “Who the hell’s this here?” Reiner said from behind Joel, his boot kicking at the iron bed leg, the clunk shifting the bed an inch or two.

  Joel kept still and tried to ride it out, this Reiner, this piece of misery.

  “None of you hillbillies are supposed to be in here,” Reiner said, talking to Joel and staring down at the boy. “Cliff and Joseph and the rest wouldn’t put up with it and I won’t neither.”

  Joel sat suddenly, his shoulders and chest bare, his belt loose in his pants. He swung his legs out from under his blanket and stood up, Reiner looming.

  “Joseph wouldn’t care and Cliff and them aren’t here and even if they were, this boy’s none of your business,” said Joel. “He’s a friend of mine is all.”

  Reiner took a step around Joel and reached down to grab the boy by the arm, Joel moving too late to try and stop him, but there was no need, for Reiner stopped himself, the boy’s one hand behind him, reappearing with a knife in his grip, the five-inch blade bare, sharp as a kitten’s tooth and shivering. The knife cut within an inch of Reiner’s outstretched fingertips and began to weave slow figure eights, light catching at the steel making it a bright wing.

  Reiner stared at the blade and his hand moved a hair’s breadth closer in the air between them.

  “Don’t,” the boy said, and quietly too.

  “What the hell?”

  The knife continued its slow arabesques as Reiner pulled his hand back slow, garbling a few words, and finally spitting out: “You little fucker.”

&n
bsp; The boy rose slowly up and then slipped around the door and out to the porch where he turned and faced back into the bunkhouse. Looking part bobcat, part wolverine, Emerson squatted on the porch lip in the same position he’d had beside the bunk, the knife gone, vanished behind him where Joel figured the scabbard had to be, a leather sleeve hooked to the boy’s belt under the tail of his shirt. It had been something to see the boy catch a fly and kill it, but his bringing out the blade had been faster, a silver trout sporting a riffle.

  Reiner took a step out, the boy not moving. “You get the hell on out of here,” Reiner said, confused and flustered. “What kinda kid are you?” When the boy didn’t respond, he said: “I could break you in half if I’d a mind to.”

  Joel could see the boy’s eyes locked on Reiner’s sternum. He struggled into his shirt and ducked around Reiner, his boots with the socks tucked in them hanging from his one hand, the other hand trying to notch his belt where his scabbard hung.

  “Leave him alone,” said Joel as he turned by the cedar round, half afraid and not.

  “Fuck off the both of you,” said Reiner.

  Joel sat down on the planks above the step, his back to Reiner, Emerson beside him as Joel pulled on a sock and then a boot, tying it tight to his ankles with the leather laces. He started with the other sock as he heard, “Fucking little redneck pricks,” Reiner’s loose boots horse-heeled in iron, diminishing in blunt echoes along the bunkhouse aisle as he walked back into the shadows.

  Emerson stared down the corridor between the bunks at the back of the man who’d tried to grab him, a watchful stillness in him, half tame, a wilding you touched carefully if at all. “He ain’t so much,” said Joel.

  The boy said nothing, Joel waiting, and then Emerson said, “He’s got bear skulls in there that he don’t deserve to own. I seen him shoot two bears up at the dump a couple of months ago. He did it just for fun.” Emerson breathed hard through his nose as if trying to expel something deep inside him. “He’s a coward, is what.”