In two seconds he was back on his legs and fishing around in his pocket for his jack knife.
“Now, look here,” Leveret said, “there ain’t no call for this. We ain’t done you no harm.”
Willie turned on him.
“What kind of god-damned man are you,” he said, “wouldn’t give a man a drink on a Saturday afternoon? What kind of god-damned man is that?”
He was working himself into a black rage, and Maclean could see that he wanted to fight now more than drink. While he wasn’t watching, Maclean opened the main blade of his jack knife, three inches long and well sharpened, and put it back in his pocket out of sight. He had no intention of cutting Willie if he didn’t have to, but he could use it to keep him off.
Leveret backed away from Willie, and the neck of the port bottle tilted over and stuck out from the front of his coat.
“You lyin’ old fucker,” Willie growled. “So you drunk it all up, did ya?”
He glared straight into Leveret’s eyes. Then drew back and hit him across the side of the face with the back of his hand.
He didn’t swing very hard, but he drove Leveret’s upper lip back against his teeth and a heavy drop of blood oozed out and down onto his chin. His hat went flying, and Jimmy caught up with it just before it went over the edge of the rock into the river.
Ginger watched all this with puzzlement, not sure that it wasn’t all just some kind of game, that Willie wasn’t just making believe he was angry, that all the name-calling wasn’t just rough affection, like saying, “you old son of a bitch, how are ya?” For a second or two, it even looked as if he thought that Leveret’s lip getting split was just a rough and tumble accident, the kind of thing that happened sometimes among pals with no harm meant. It was only when he saw Leveret stagger off to one side with his hand up to his face and saw Jimmy chasing after Leveret’s precious hat and heard Bill Kayton shout, “You dirty bastard, hitting an old man,” that he realized that Willie had really attacked his idol.
He bellowed and heaved himself to his feet and went after Willie, his big fists, the size of bowling balls, waving around in the air in front of him. In open ground, Willie could have stayed away from him, but there wasn’t much room to move around on top of the rock and not go over the side, and Ginger was on top of him before he could even get his fists up.
They wrestled around, Willie trying to keep his feet under him and not go over the side, cursing all the time, spit foaming at the corners of his mouth, Ginger bellowing and grabbing at anything he could get his hands on, intent only on killing Willie even if they did both go over the side.
Willie got a little space between them and drove his knee up into Ginger’s balls. Ginger howled and doubled over and let go of Willie, and Willie got a punch in somewhere on Ginger’s face. Ginger grabbed his arm with both hands and tried to break it the way you might snap a stick, and they both went down, half into the bushes and half out, Willie cursing, Ginger growling like an enraged bear.
While all this was going on, Junior was prancing around like a ten-year-old. Now he turned on Jimmy and put his fists up. Jimmy skipped out of his way and picked up a rock the size of a baseball.
“You come near me,” Jimmy said, “ and by the whistlin’, blue-eyed Jesus, I’ll knock your fuckin’ brains out.”
Willie had got astride Ginger and was trying to pry Ginger’s arms clear of his face to get in another punch. Leveret, hatless, still oozing blood, passed the bottle to Bill and got a big stick of wood from a fallen tree, four feet long and as thick as a man’s arm but starting to rot into a brown pulpiness. He lurched over and broke the stick across Willie’s shoulders. It was too rotten to hurt him much, but it put him off his guard long enough for Ginger to heave him off and come down on top of him. Ginger put both fists together and brought them down on Willie’s forehead and smashed his head back against the rock.
“You better git Ginger off,” Leveret said, “or he’s gonna kill him.”
“That’s enough, Ginger,” Bill said, taking Ginger by the shoulder.
Ginger didn’t want to stop. He hit Willie in the face again with a closed fist, like a man pounding on a table, before Bill got his arm and eased him off.
“Get the hell out of here,” Bill said to Willie, “or he’s going to kill you and end up in jail.”
Willie got himself up. He was bleeding out of his mouth now too, bleeding and spitting, with snot running down from his nose into the blood.
“I’ll git you fuckers,” he snarled. “Just you wait. You gang up on me, but I’ll git you fuckers one by one.”
He lunged forward with one foot towards Maclean, and Maclean drew the open jack knife out of his pocket and waved it in front of him.
“You draw a knife on me, you bastard,” Willie shouted.
“He don’t mean nothin’,” Leveret said. “He’s just tryin’ to protect himself. Now why don’t you go on back to town before there’s any more trouble.”
“I still ain’t had no drink,” Willie said.
“You’re not going to get a drink either,” Bill said. “That’s all we got left, and there’s five of us.”
“Suppose I just take it,” Willie said.
“You try to take it,” Bill said, “and we’ll beat the shit out of you.”
Maclean knew that if Willie got hold of the bottle, they might not get it back, but if that was the price of getting rid of the son of a whore, it might be worth it. Drawing the knife, he was telling himself, had been stupid.
“Well,” Leveret said, “if it’s O.K. with the other boys, it’s O.K. with me. But just one swig and then you git out of here and leave us alone.”
He looked at Bill.
Bill shrugged.
He passed the bottle to Leveret, and Leveret unscrewed the cap and passed it to Willie. He wiped the blood and snot from his mouth and tipped the bottle back and drank, swallow after swallow without breathing.
“Now, that’s enough,” Leveret said, and Bill went over and took the bottle away from him, cautiously, as if he were taking a bone away from a cross dog. It would be like Willie to throw the bottle and what was left in it into the river, but he let Bill take it.
“Junior’s gotta have one too,” Willie said.
“One,” Bill said and passed the bottle to Junior.
He tipped the bottle up, and after one swallow, Bill took the bottle away from him. Between the two of them, they had half emptied it.
“O.K.,” Bill said. “Now get out of here.”
“Now don’t go orderin’ me around,” Willie said, “or I may take it into my head to spend the rest of the afternoon here.”
“Just you go on, now,” Leveret said, “before someone gets hurt again.”
Willie stood long enough to satisfy his honour, then turned.
“Come on, Junior,” he said. “I’ve had enough of these cheap cocksuckers.”
They started up the path. Ginger would have gone after them, but Leveret stopped him.
Bill looked at the bottle. There was blood and snot on the neck, and Christ knows what else. He passed the bottle to Leveret, and Leveret pulled some leaves off one of the chokecherry bushes and wiped it as clean as he could, then gave it a final polish with his handkerchief.
“There,” he said. “Clean as it came from the store.”
He offered it to Bill, but Bill shook his head.
“Someone should kill that son of a whore,” Bill said.
“I expect some day someone will,” Maclean said.
They sat down, and the bottle went back and forth between the other three until they finished it. Ginger took it out to the tip of the rock and threw it into the river. No one was paying much attention. Ginger watched it bobbing around only a dozen yards from shore. He came back and sat down.
“I expect that bottle
with the note in it will just fetch up somewheres,” he said.
They had settled themselves down in a different pattern, Leveret, Ginger, and Jimmy together, Leveret with his hat back on, his cut lip still oozing a little blood, Maclean and Bill a little way off.
“You all right?” Bill asked Maclean. “You look like you got a bump on your head.”
“It ain’t nothing,” Maclean said. “Take more than that to kill me.”
“I expect,” Bill said.
But the truth was that he wasn’t feeling good at all. His head hurt, his back hurt, his stomach had turned queasy, and there loomed above him the thought that although Willie was gone, there would be more to it some other day. The knife had been stupid.
“The son of a whore,” Bill said.
Maclean looked at him out of the corner of his eye. He was a good-looking man. Thick, brown hair, always combed. Good features. Dress him up in a suit, and he could have been a businessman or a lawyer, a movie actor even. But if you looked close, you could see the skin going slack under the eyes, and the lids a little puffed-up and a little too pink. The booze starting to take its toll. Maclean wondered how old he was. Thirty maybe, maybe a little less. About the age he had been when he lost his last real job and gave up or gave in or whatever.
He felt he ought to say something to Bill. Though he probably didn’t know it, Bill was on the edge. Once over, it was tough to climb back. When the war was over, and there were lots of men and not much work the way it was after the Great War, they would be able to get good carpenters who didn’t drink, so why should they hire ones like Bill who did? So you would drink because you didn’t have a job, and people wouldn’t give you a job because you drank, and so it would go around.
So what should he say to Bill? Get yourself together. Stop drinking. Work steady. Get a good wife. Have children. Stay at home nights and listen to the radio. Or take your wife to a movie. Or work in your garden or your carpentry shop in the back shed. Go to church. Join a lodge. Be an upstanding member of the community. Live so that when you die, everybody will say nice things about you and give you a big funeral.
“You do have to wonder sometimes,” Henry said, “what life is supposed to be all about, now don’t you.?”
“It ain’t about anything,” Maclean said. “It ain’t about a god-damned thing.”
“No,” Henry said. “There has to be a purpose to it. It just stands to reason.”
“Like God,” Maclean said.
“That’s right,” Henry said. “Like God.”
Maclean dug at the moss-covered earth in front of him with the heel of his boot and uncovered a colony of tiny black insects, which went chasing around in the ruins of their world looking for somewhere to get back underground out of danger.
He looked out across the river at the climbing flame of red maple leaves behind the old school and remembered the first day he had gone there, setting out on a bright, summery September morning with Alice, who was already in Grade Four, a smart girl in school, pretty as pretty could be, with great, brown eyes and long, brown hair. (Once when he was little he said that he was going to marry her when he grew up, and his mother had laughed.) He had a bookbag and a slate that his mother had bought him early that summer so she could teach him his letters before he started school. Life was beginning for him, and he felt important and afraid, marching along the road beside Alice.
Other children strung out along the road ahead of them and behind, and a big old wagon passing them with a load of hay, and a man leading a little herd of cows across the road to a pasture on the riverbank, and the river flowing away beside them, and the town on the far side climbing its hill with the steeples and the town clock at the top, and this rock there too jutting out black from the bank of green, waiting for them to come and be sitting here today and waiting too for the time when they would all be swept away and forgotten.
7
MACLEAN TRUDGED, HEAD down, eyes front, uphill past big old houses with oak front doors and bay windows, wide lawns and carefully weeded flower beds. It was the kind of street he didn’t like walking on and only did when there was no other, even half-easy way to get where he was going, the kind of street that gave him the feeling of being watched by indignant ladies peeking out at him from behind curtains or through the wickering of trellises or gazebos, a shabby trespasser in their manicured world, a breath of undeodorized humanity from the alleys, a reminder even, in his skeletal lineaments and the evident fragility and brevity of his expectations, of the dust and mud and rot that all this tidiness was designed to allow them to forget.
At the crest of the hill, the big houses and the sidewalk abruptly ended, and the pavement gave way to a rough gravel road with ditches on either side, half-filled with brown, peaty water where beetles skimmed and tiny frogs kerflopped and vanished into the roots of the bordering weeds as he passed. Beyond a little buffer zone of uncut black firs, houses began again, but smaller and poorer now, some of them hardly more than shacks, on little lots cut out of the woods with unpulled stumps sometimes at the back and a general rawness of ground which gave the whole place the feel of being somewhere much further from the centre of town than it was.
Alice’s house was on the right, half a dozen houses on and set back a little from the road so that it was hidden by the house before it. Maclean approached cautiously, close over to the right beside the ditch, watching for the first glimpse, if there was to be one, of Mitch’s half-ton truck. The wonderful lightness of the early part of the afternoon had been driven away, leaving behind it something half way between drunkenness and hung-over sobriety. As he came up to the house beside Alice’s, he saw that Mitch’s parking spot was empty, and he swung out into the middle of the road and began to walk as best he could like a man drawn along by nothing more than a casual, summer-afternoon fancy for a little stroll.
Alice’s house sat sideways to the road and consisted mostly of afterthoughts. When Mitch bought it, fifteen years before, it was just a bungalow, but as their brood of kids grew Mitch pushed out rooms this way and that and finally added to the original structure a second-storey with an almost flat roof which had to be shoveled all winter to keep it from collapsing.
Maclean crossed into the yard on a culvert of old railroad ties and made his way around to the back of the house. He mounted the steps to the kitchen door and peeked in through the screen. Alice had become a little deaf and hadn’t heard him arrive. She was standing with her back to the door cooking doughnuts in a great pot of boiling fat on a black woodstove. There were pans and bowls everywhere, a cookie sheet with ginger snaps, a pan of johnnie cake, an uncooked pie.
Alice had undergone a succession of transfigurations since Maclean had gone off to the war. When he first came back, she was still a good-looking woman, not much different from the good-looking woman he had last seen when he left. Then after she had had six children, she became gaunt and worn and looked more like fifty years old than thirty-five. Then some years later, some female thing happened inside her, and she had ballooned in a couple of years to her present size and come to look the fifty she now was, only a different kind of fifty.
She was wearing an old, flowered, short-sleeve print dress, hoisted up higher in the back than in the front by her hips and streaked with sweat under the armpits and down the middle of the back. Her arms and legs were fat and white, her legs were pebbled with varicose veins, her hair was graying and thinning, hanging as straight and slack as a bunch of strings.
Maclean tapped on the screen door, first gently, then a little harder.
Alice looked back over her shoulder, and he caught the look of surprise, then, unmistakably, of aggravation as she recognized him. He thought of saying ‘hello’ and then leaving, but he found himself already opening the door, taking off his cap, and stepping inside into the heat and the rich smell of frying doughnuts.
“I was just going by out here
on the road,” he said, “and I thought I’d look in for a minute. I didn’t get you at a very good time.”
“I can’t stop these now,” she shouted, all flustered. “Once I got them started, I can’t stop.”
“No, no,” he said. “I can see that. Don’t you trouble.”
He fidgeted uncertainly at the door, wondering if he should go away after all, while Alice went on dropping in doughnuts, turning them, fishing them out, not looking at him, her movements abrupt and awkward.
“You gonna sit down?” she asked finally.
“Well,” he said, “just for a few minutes maybe, then I’ve got to be going.”
He edged past her, his cap in his hand, and sat in a chair by the window, where she could see him to talk to while she worked.
She leaned forward and stared at him.
“What have you done to your face?” she asked. “You ain’t been in a fight?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Something wrong?”
He got up and looked at himself in the mirror over the sink. There was a bruise, black and blue, on the side of his forehead where he had hit it when he fell at the Black Rock, and a scratch down one cheek and some dirt on his chin.
“I was working down at Jim Gartley’s stable,” he said, “and I bumped my head against one of the beams along the side of a stall.”
He ran a little water into a pan in the sink, washed and dried his face, and went back to his place by the window.
There was a teapot on the back of the stove, but Alice didn’t offer to pour any, and she didn’t offer him a doughnut either. He reflected that she probably didn’t want to encourage him to stay in case Mitch came back from the store for some reason. Or one of the girls dropped in.
“Tomorrow’s mother’s birthday,” he said.
“Yes,” Alice said. “August 22.”
She lifted out another batch of doughnuts and shuffled her feet around on the floor.
Maclean Page 6
