If there was anyone in town over the age of five who didn’t know that Ellie bootlegged, it could only have been someone who had just got off a train, but nobody had ever done anything about it, and it didn’t seem likely that anyone ever would. Ellie probably knew that, but it gave her a sense of importance to think that she was defying the law and that some night carloads of Mounties in red coats might come screaming up to her door. Ellie was a religious woman, but religion was one thing and the law was another, and there was nowhere in the Ten Commandments nor anywhere else in the Bible that she had ever heard of where it was forbidden that a man have a drink in moderation and in good humour among his friends, just the way the Lord himself had done.
“Evening, Johnny,” Maclean said. “Evening, Ralph.”
Johnny Doone was a little Irishman from a village out in the woods that had been settled by Catholic Irish so much to the exclusion of anybody else that the people there still had their accents after a hundred years. He worked at the railway yard and made good money but for some reason had never married.
Ralph Gowrie was an old veteran, a carpenter, who also made good money and had married but whose wife had dropped dead several years before while watching a horse race. He lived only a quarter of a mile from Ellie’s on the street with the electricity. He had been walking by one day and saw a loose clapboard on Ellie’s house and went home and got a hammer and nailed it back on and had got in the habit on a Saturday night of dropping in for a little tot of rum before going home to his solitary bed.
Maclean sat down at the table and got a pony of Black Diamond Demerara and a glass. He poured a little into his glass, put the bottle away in his coat pocket, and settled back into his chair, letting the warmth of the room begin to fold him into itself.
“We was taaalkin’,” Johnny said, broadening the “a” out in the back of his throat, “about bears.”
“We was talkin’, ”Ralph said, “about the time that bear come out of the woods here and Dreadnought was gonna fight it.”
It was a story that had been told a hundred times over the years, gathering around itself an atmosphere of tranquil predictability like that of a bedtime story.
One fall, Ellie heard a commotion outside, first the clatter, by the sound of it, of every can she had hung up in the trees, then the sound of Dreadnought, a young dog then, howling and growling the way he could have wakened the dead. When Ellie went out, there at the edge of the woods was the biggest bear she had ever seen, and in front of the bear all ready to fight it was Dreadnought. The bear swung at Dreadnought, and Dreadnought jumped out of the way, but he wasn’t going to run. He was going to stay there and fight and get himself killed. So Ellie went into the kitchen and got a little washtub and a stick of hardwood and came storming out, beating the bottom of the tub for all she was worth. The bear took one look and ran. On its way, it got tangled up in more of the strings with the tin cans full of stones, and you could still hear it a quarter of a mile away tearing off through the woods with the tin cans jangling along behind it.
“Dreadnaaaught,” Johnny repeated, “is a great dog.”
Their contemplation of the heroics of Dreadnought was broken into by a complicated ratty-tat-tat-tiddly-tat-tat-tiddly-tat-tat-tat on the top part of the outside door. Ellie went over and leaned her ear against it.
“Is that you, Legs?” she asked.
“No,” a put-on raspy voice said through the door, “it’s the sheriff and the chief of police and two mounties and the head of the boy scouts and three fierce ladies from the WCTU with billy clubs and axes, and we all come to put you wicked people in there in jail.”
Ellie unbolted both halves of the door, and a tall, lean, laughing old man with a long lantern-jawed face and a bald head stepped into the room, one long leg with elaborate slowness after the other.
“Some day, you come here and do that, and I’m gonna set Dreadnought on you,” Ellie said.
“Dreadnought wouldn’t bite me,” Legs said. “Truth is, I don’t think he’d bite nobody. You might as well have a pet pussy cat out there.”
“Ain’t so,” Ellie said.
“Remember the bear,” Johnny said.
“What bear?” Legs said. “I ain’t heard nothin’ about no bear. You ain’t gonna tell me some big lie about old Dreadnought standin’ up to some bear.”
Legs was a cousin of Ellie’s at a different generational level. His real name was Joshua Deboys, and some of the family called him Josh, but everyone else called him Legs because at one time, long ago around the turn of the century, he had been a step-dancer. Mostly he just danced around town for the fun of it, but he had once danced at some kind of vaudeville show in Fredericton for money and got mentioned in the paper.
“Legs,” Ellie said, “don’t you ever talk any kind of sense? You tease me hard enough and you’re gonna get a swipe of this across the side of the head.”
She picked the rolling pin up off the cupboard and waved it at him.
Legs put his hands up over his head.
“You want some buttermilk or what?” Ellie asked.
“Yes, thank you,” Legs said. “That’d be good.”
Ellie went out to the shed where she kept her ice box and came back with a gallon wine jug half full of buttermilk. Legs fetched a glass down out of the cupboard, and Ellie carefully poured it.
“Two cents,” Ellie said.
“Suppose I split you some wood come Monday, how’d that be?”
“O.K.,” Ellie said. “But don’t you forget, or you won’t see no more buttermilk or nothin’ else around here.”
Legs sipped the buttermilk and licked his upper lip.
“You hear about the McIntyre boy?” Ellie asked when she had put away the buttermilk.
“Yes,” Legs said. “I been over.”
“I ain’t been,” Ellie said. “I’ll maybe go over tomorrow.”
“You all heard about the McIntyre boy got killed in the army?” Legs asked the others. “Him that used to box?”
“Yes,” they said.
“Sam is takin’ it bad,” Legs said. “Even worse than Amanda.”
“It’s a terrible thing,” Ralph said, “to lose a son.”
“I think old Sam would a hundred times more sooner of died himself,” Legs said.
“What did he want to go over there for anyways,” Ellie said. “He didn’t have to go. They hadn’t called him up or nothin’. And even if they had, he didn’t need to go over there. He could of just set around like them soldiers downtown.”
“I guess he wasn’t that kind of boy,” Ralph said. “We was the same, John, wasn’t we?”
“I guess so,” Maclean said.
“So tell me why,” Ellie said. “Just tell me what kind of sense there is to it.”
“There ain’t no sense to it,” Ralph said. “But when you’re young, you’re stupid. You want to be a hero and all that kind of stuff.”
“And you want to get away and be your own man for a change,” Maclean said.
Ellie snorted.
“The only people wars do any good to,” she said, “are the rich people. You don’t see them over there gettin’ themselves killed. They’re all back here rakin’ in the money.”
“True,” Maclean said.
“But there was good times too,” Ralph said. “Some of the best times of our lives, wasn’t they? We were young, and we had wonderful pals would do anything for you. Like brothers. Better maybe than brothers. I sometimes think there ain’t never been anything like that since.”
“That’s true too,” Maclean said.
“Good times,” Ellie said, “unless you get killed like the McIntyre boy.”
There was a silence, and they all sat around looking down at their glasses and thinking about the McIntyre boy.
“Now, what would yo
u do,” Johnny asked, changing the subject after a respectful minute or two, “if you had a million dollars?”
“Well,” Ralph said, settling back in his chair and thinking about it, “a man don’t need no million dollars, but ten thousand would go down pretty good.”
“Twenty,” Johnny said. “Let’s make it twenty. Somewhere in the world, you could have a long-lost relative could die and leave you twenty.”
The talk drifted away into sunlit pastures of fantasy. Buying of houses and farms. Buying of horses and cars. Journeys to south sea islands of perpetual summer.
Outside the door, Dreadnought stirred and made vague mouthing sounds as if he were chewing a bone. Ralph and Johnny leaped to hide their glasses in the cupboard, and Maclean put his on his lap under the leaf of the table.
There was a pause, then the coded knock on the door.
Ellie unbolted the top part of the door and opened it a few inches, and the light fell on a long simpleton’s face topped with a swatch of brick-red hair that stuck out in all directions like the hair of a cartoon character who has just stuck his finger into a light socket.
It was Waldo Dumbar, a gangling young man who lived a couple of miles up the road and sometimes stopped in at Ellie’s on a Saturday night on his way home from his job in a store downtown.
“You still up?” he asked Ellie.
“No,” Ellie said, “I’m upstairs asleep.”
She opened the rest of the door, and he stepped inside.
He settled himself at the table, and Ellie poured him a cup of tea. Ellie never allowed Waldo alcohol because after a drink or two he became a crazy man running up and down the road shouting and falling into the ditch and wanting to fight with everybody he met.
While Ralph and Johnny had been dreaming about money, Ellie had taken the bread out of the oven, half a dozen loaves, butter-gold on top. She sliced a loaf now and put half a dozen slices in the middle of the table.
“That’ll be two cents,” she said to Waldo, “and I don’t need no wood split.”
Maclean would have liked the heel of the loaf, but Waldo got to it first and slathered it with butter and stuffed it into his face and licked around his lips like a dog.
“Bad accident downtown tonight,” he said.
Nobody ever paid any attention to Waldo because he never said anything worth paying attention to. Legs and Ellie started talking again about the McIntyre boy. Johnny and Ralph got into talk about jobs on the railroad. Maclean let his mind drift away into a warm nothingness.
“Kilt him right there,” Waldo was saying, talking away to himself. “Kilt him right there on the bridge.”
“Kilt who?” Ellie asked him finally.
“That there man on the bridge,” Waldo said. “I been tryin’ to tell ya. That there man on the bridge got run over and kilt.”
“What there man, Waldo?” Ralph asked.
“Willie Campbell,” Waldo said. “You all know Willie Campbell.”
“Who?” Maclean asked.
“Willie Campbell,” Waldo said. “He was walkin’ across the bridge goin’ home, and he was walkin’ with his back to the traffic, and somehow he seems to just have stepped out away from the rail in front of a truck, and it knocked him down and run right over him before the man drivin’ it had a chance to do a thing. Kilt him dead right there.”
“Did you see it?” Johnny asked.
“No,” Waldo said, “I never seen it. But some men come into the store that seen it and told us all about it, so it’s the truth, and there ain’t no doubt.”
“Was he drinkin’?” Johnny asked.
“That’s what they say,” Waldo said. “They say he got into a fight with somebody in front of the Farmer’s Store and got knocked down and his face all bloodied up, and they say later on he was so drunk he couldn’t hardly stand up and all covered with dirt and blood down the front of his shirt.”
“Are you sure it was Willie Campbell?” Maclean asked.
“Yes,” Waldo said. “Everybody said. And some of them was out there and seen.”
“And it killed him?”
“Yes,” Waldo said. “It kilt him dead right there. A great, big wood truck, and it run right over him. They say it squooshed his chest right out flat. And his eyes and his tongue.…”
“All right, Waldo,” Ellie said, “we don’t need no pictures.”
“Well, well,” Ralph said. “Now ain’t that somethin’?”
“No great loss to the world,” Johnny said.
“All the same,” Legs said.
Maclean looked down at his glass of rum and his cigarette burning in the ashtray. He couldn’t even pretend to himself that he was sorry for Willie Campbell. Some day, a week from now or a month or three months, Willie would have caught him alone in an alley with no policeman around, and he was going to end up beaten half to death. Now he was rescued. It was bad luck to feel glad about anybody’s death, no matter whose, but he was glad all the same.
“Run right over him,” Waldo said, wanting to go on being the centre of attention. “Squooshed him right out flat.”
“Shut up, Waldo,” Ellie said.
Maclean finished the rum in his glass and excused himself and made his way out through the shed to the outhouse and stood in the darkness.
On his way back to the kitchen, he stopped in the open door of the shed and leaned against the frame and looked out. Dreadnought got himself to his feet and shuffled over. Maclean scratched his ears, and he shook his great sheepskin hide and shuffled back to his spot outside the kitchen door and dropped himself down.
In the woods, the moonlight cast a network of shadows, and there were small sounds. A bird restless in its nest. (Did they dream?) Crickets. Rustling sounds too faint to identify, the movement of small animals going about their business, or maybe just a breath of wind, like a sigh, among the fir boughs. Fall was almost here, then winter. Snow drifted under the trees and piled high against the house beside the shoveled path. The big kitchen stove roaring with hardwood.
He thought again about Willie Campbell. Bad luck or no bad luck, he still couldn’t feel sorry. He wouldn’t have brought it about if it had been in his power to bring it about. And if it had been in his power to save him, he would have had to save him. But it didn’t have anything to do with him. It just happened, and whether he was glad or sorry didn’t make any difference.
He remembered the day Akers got killed. Sergeant Death himself. A bolt from the blue. Nobody heard it fired. Nobody heard it coming. It hit just in the angle of the trench. Most of the blast went the other way down the next traverse, but Akers was standing just by the angle. When they got themselves up, there was Akers all covered with dirt and one of his legs blown off above the knee and pouring blood. He clawed around on the ground, his eyes wild, squealing and gurgling like a pig with its throat half cut. Someone tried to get a tourniquet on the leg, but it wasn’t any use. Those big arteries went on pumping out blood, and in a couple of minutes more he was dead, his eyes rolling back into his head, and black blood pouring out of his mouth from the burst lungs that would have killed him anyway.
He hadn’t wanted to feel glad about that death either, but he had, and so had everybody else. (“Bye, bye, Sergeant Death,” someone had said.) There was even a crazy feeling that now that Sergeant Death had been killed, nobody else would get killed any more forever. And for the rest of that turn in the line nobody had.
But, of course, Death hadn’t died, and their next turn in, they lost ten men killed without any real fighting at all, just to snipers and random shrapnel.
It wasn’t long after that that they took him out for good. One day, carrying a load of lumber up through the communication trench, he collapsed, and when they got him back to the field hospital, he started spitting blood, so they sent him to hospital in England, and after a few weeks,
a doctor decided his lungs were damaged, and he should never have been sent back after Ypres at all.
He was going home. He was going to live. He could hardly believe it, and all the way over he was sure they were going to be torpedoed before they got him home. Then early one morning, they saw big, black gulls over the ship and a few hours later the coast of Nova Scotia, a long, low outline on the horizon like a bank of cloud. That evening they docked in Saint John. It was spring, leaves coming out, everything soft and warm. He still couldn’t believe it. For days, weeks, he couldn’t believe it.
He took the bottle out of his pocket and took a short swig, and went on standing for a while longer before he made his way back through the woodshed to the kitchen.
He sat down again in his place by the table, tipped a little rum into his glass, and added water.
The deaths of the McIntyre boy and Willie Campbell had been talked out, and the conversation had drifted off into the past, as it often did near the end of an evening.
“I seen you dance once,” Ralph was saying to Legs. “Way back before the Great War. Down at the Salvation Army at a concert they gave there to raise money for something.”
“That’s right,” Legs said. “Long time ago. Long time. And Ellie here sang in a chorus with a bunch of other girls. What did you sing, Ellie?”
“I don’t know,” Ellie said. “I don’t remember. It was a long time ago, just like you said.”
“You sang ‘Old Rugged Cross,’” Legs said.
“May be,” Ellie said. “I don’t remember.”
Maclean looked at Ellie and tried to imagine her young. He had never seen her then, not that he remembered anyway, but maybe he had and hadn’t known it. Maybe one day he had seen a girl who was Ellie walking down the street or standing outside the Salvation Army. And Ellie had maybe seen him too as a boy that long-ago day.
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