“Give ya a start – a start, did I?” Bines said.
His voice was extremely soft, almost indescribably so, yet it had an unusual expansive quality to it. And it had with it, in its intonation, a completely uncomplicated River accent.
The first thing that was apparent to them was that Bines was reluctant to go anywhere now. He came late and said he only had a moment.
When he walked in, the house was almost dark, yet a soft light glowed from the lamp in the room and Vera had set up her tape-recorder. As he came from the darkness into the light Adele remembered that she had not really seen him in a long while.
He looked so much like her cousins from that other side of the family – the darker side, which Joe and Rita had always tried to protect the children from. He looked, for instance, like their cousin Packet Terri – except he was slighter. Adele felt strange that he was in her house, because she immediately felt that she must do something for him. And this was exactly the kind of devotion that he inspired.
Jerry shook Vera’s hand like a man who was so unused to this common civility that it embarrassed him, and then he smiled.
“Ralphie’s sister – right,” he said.
He said this not to make sure that he had gotten the relationship right but to show that he would treat her with the respect that Ralphie’s sister accorded.
And then he sat down on the small couch directly across from Adele. Adele tried everything not to look towards him but it was impossible.
“Hello, Delly,” he said quietly, after watching her for a moment.
When she looked up at him he winked. In a way this was done to bring her closer to him, in an instant.
“Sorry to hear about Joe,” he said softly. “Joe – always liked Joe – always liked Joe. He come to jail all the time – all the time when I was there. Try to straighten us around. I didn’t know his heart was bad – bad there – like your mom’s too.”
Adele only nodded at this, and then gave a sigh as if she was about to say something but thought better of it.
Vera then explained the nature of her request. It would be done only if he wanted to, and in the way he wanted it done.
“Write an article on me – why would no one want to do that?” he said.
He spoke with his head slightly slanted to the right.
“Oh, but you’re just the person I want to do it on,” Vera said. “Everyone’s heard so much about you.”
“About me – ya – about me,” he said. He glanced at Ralphie as if he were wondering about something, perhaps wondering who was telling things about him, and then he shrugged.
There was a long silence as he looked at them. All of them felt uncomfortable, and even frightened. But to him it was just a casual stare.
“Get Jerry a beer,” Adele said to Ralphie.
Jerry glanced sideways at Ralphie a second and then looked away, as if he were puzzled.
“Article – ya – don’t matter none to me.”
“It will only take a week or so – maybe two,” Vera said. “And then, after the transcript is done, you can read it.”
“Then it better not have any big words on it – cause I don’t read so good,” Jerry said softly, and he smiled.
But when she went to turn on the recorder, he said, “No – not now – some other place – other place – I’ll go to your place.”
“When,” Vera said, disappointed.
“Oh, I’ll go over in a week or two – week or two,” he said.
“I’ll give you my address then, and phone,” Vera said.
“No, no – I know where you live,” he said.
Then he told them he couldn’t stay. That his young lad was back in the hospital for his blood test and he wanted to go over.
“You have a child,” Vera said, “that’s right.”
“Little boy is sick – little boy who’s sick,” Jerry said. “What’s he got –?”
Adele looked at him a moment, startled. It was not that he did not know – it was that he was struggling with the word.
“Leukemia,” Adele said, kindly.
“Ya – got that,” Jerry said. “Lots of children got that – I guess – nowadays.” And then he said, as if he had calculated an advantage by saying it, “It’s what they put in our water now on the river – right, Ralphie?”
Ralphie, known as a conservationist, blushed, for some reason, and nodded, and Jerry nodded too.
Then he stood, said goodbye, and seemed to move away as silently as he had come.
“So that’s Mr. Jerry Bines,” Vera said, as a person does when someone is brought for their benefit to study.
“That’s him,” Adele said.
And she picked up another cigarette and lit it, and puffed out her cheeks.
In so many ways Bines was familiar to her. The problem was, as she told Ralphie that night, that once he thought you liked him he would like you – in fact he would die for you in a second, but then you could never not like him.
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” Ralphie said. “I’ll never see him again – I don’t even know if he’ll go to see Vera. I know one thing: he’s not worth worrying about.”
Adele said nothing more. She sat on the side of the bed, scratching at her feet. The moon was pale over the old trampled garden, and below them on the street some rocks shone yellow in the night. It was fall and the house smelled of dry paint. It was a house they had moved into two years before.
After Ralphie turned off the lights everything in the house was still, except the tick-tock of the clock downstairs in the hall.
It was as if nothing had ever happened to disrupt their lives.
“I feel sorry for his little boy,” Ralphie said, whispering in the dark.
“Do you ever see Nevin any more, Ralphie-face?”
“Not since I had to throw him out of my shop for whining about Vera,” Ralphie said, almost asleep. “Anyway, I’ll go over tomorrow and see him again.”
“Vera won’t try to use Bines, will she? I mean not for her own sake.”
“No, no –”
“Because he won’t like it if she does. He’ll give her all the benefit of the doubt, but if she tricks him –”
There was a pause, and Adele turned to face him. He could see in the light from the street her small nose covered in cream.
“I don’t like this,” she said.
“Why not?”
She paused and then sighed, and her voice was cold when she spoke.
“Something is going on – it’s time on this river for something to happen once again.”
Jerry actually went to Vera’s house four nights later. When he came in she was aware of how uncomfortable she was with him at first.
But he didn’t seem to notice this. He smiled at Hadley, her little girl.
“Nice dress ya got there – nice dress. What’s that, yer dolly – got a doll, do ya?”
He looked up at Vera and smiled as he just lightly touched the top of the girl’s head.
“She’s having some small trouble with her father,” Vera whispered (intimating that this was a natural thing for children to have). “He was just here.” And then smiling suddenly, she said: “Anyway, everything will go better sooner than we think. Won’t it, Hadley? There will be no more emotional violence.” And she touched Hadley’s head in a devotional way, brushing Bines’ hand as she did. Hadley looked as if this kind of thing had been going on a long time.
Bines nodded at them both.
“That’s good then – that’s good,” he said, though for some peculiar reason he did not like the little girl.
Vera now wanted to do the interview in three stages. Which would mean more than three meetings. One of the problems she faced was that she had heard so many stories about him.
After getting Bines to talk, at one point she interrupted him rudely, saying: “Well, that can’t be right because in 1968 your mother died and you went to live with Joe Walsh’s family – so perhaps you were too young to remember.”
Bine
s looked at her a moment.
“I remember what I say – remember what I say,” he said, and, flicking his hand up towards his eye, as if he was distracted, he continued speaking. “Anyway, my father took care of me as best he could,” he said.
“Well,” Vera said, quickly, “wasn’t there some problem –?”
“No problem,” Bines said.
“Oh,” Vera said, “I’m sorry, I thought there was more of a problem – with you and your father?”
Again Bines looked at her, puzzled, and trying to think of what she had heard, trying to find a common ground.
“All people have problems in a way – in a way,” Bines said, quietly.
“But wasn’t he a failed boxer – and didn’t he want you to box?”
“No,” Bines said.
He looked at the tape-recorder.
“Does the recorder make you uncomfortable?” she asked.
“Only when it’s on,” Bines said.
“Okay,” Vera said quickly, “but it’s best if it’s on. So, in 1971, you went back to live with your dad?”
“Is this going to be in the paper?” Bines said suddenly, smiling at her.
“Part of it might be – but actually I’m doing a book. So, in 1971, you went to live with your father again?”
“In September of 1970 I went to live with my father again.”
“Why did you feel you had to do this – was there pressure from him?”
“No – no pressure. He was drunk as an arse downtown sitting in front of Lounsbury’s with people stepping over him. I was on my way home from school – from school and I went and helped him. I sat down by him, to keep passersby from bothering him – you know, bothering him – I stayed there three hours – three hours keeping an eye on him.”
“I see,” Vera whispered. “Did you feel obligated to do this? I mean, why did you feel you had to?”
Bines did not understand these questions.
“Obligated – no – not so much. He was my father.”
“But people said he threw you against a stove and beat you – didn’t he?”
“He had a bad head on him. He sometimes couldn’t help what he did.”
“So even then you felt obligated to take care of him?”
“Obligated, no – no obligation.” And he again moved his hand, with an unfathomable sense of power up against his right eye, as if to ward something off.
“Well,” Vera said, “we can come back to that later. At any rate –”
“Come back, ya –”
“Were you treated badly at the Walshes’?”
“No – not at all – treated all right – just wasn’t my home.”
Again Vera wanted to bring the subject around.
“And you don’t think your father was to blame – in any way? I mean for your mother’s early death?”
“No – why would he be?”
Vera looked up at him quickly, but said nothing. Somehow she couldn’t really tell if he ever told the truth. His face was hard to read.
“Maybe some day I can get more of the whys and wherefores of your mother and how she coped, but I want to know how you were positioned in the family.”
“Only son.”
“Oh, I realize that – I mean other things specifically.”
“I don’t know–”
Then Bines stood up.
“What – did I say something?” Vera said.
“Never mind – never mind – we’ll talk again – again sometime. I don’t talk very much about my mom.”
And he left.
He remembered Vera looking at him. The trees were pale when he went outside. It was growing dark. He drove back to town slowly, trying to remember what he had said.
Years ago Bines used to drive into town with his two dogs in the truck and a knife in his boot, and one day when the dogs started to fight he took his shotgun and shot one.
“Which one,” someone had asked.
“The one on the left,” Bines said.
When Constable Petrie came to his house to check the dog’s feet with the plaster impression of a track he had received at the scene of a robbery, Bines said he had never had a dog with that big a track.
But he had shot one.
The one on the left.
“You didn’t want to get bitten,” someone had said.
“No, that’s right – I didn’t want to get bit,” Bines said.
Then he bought another dog, and they all got along better.
At this time however he was not thinking of the dogs – he was thinking of Joe Walsh, and Rita, and the children, and his mother – years ago.
He went to see Alvin Savoie.
He sat there in the dark with half his face visible, and half in shadow. The moonlight played on the thin window and against the dusty room.
Alvin was married to Jerry’s aunt, Frances, and Bines cared for her – and therefore for Alvin – as best he could. Alvin had lost his left arm because he had touched a wire, and was now on a pension of some sort. They had all kinds of kids about the house, and relatives of every description coming in and out.
“When Joe Walsh died I felt bad,” Jerry said.
Alvin nodded and said that he had also.
“Good. If a woman comes to talk about me, say if Vera Pillar comes down here to see about me – about something – you say nothing about that tractor-trailer, Alvin – you say fuck-all about my father – you say fuck-all about my boy.”
Alvin only looked at him, as if he hadn’t heard.
“Say nothing about it – nothing about it – no – nothing about it.”
Alvin said: “I never say anything anyway.”
Jerry smiled. The air was turning cool in the house and the old dog hobbled up to Bines, so Bines reached down and flicked its ear with his fingers and smiled at it gently.
“Old Pepper – ole Pepper, fella,” Bines said. The moon played in shadows on his back.
Lucy Savoie came from a family which had no power over anything. (The man from the camp made this observation to Andrew’s mother while they were driving from the Texaco in Chatham Head. It was a bright day in June. The sun shone over the water and made it sparkle. The mill left a trail of smoke against the sky. Across the river, those small buildings where Lucy lived out her life seemed not at all dramatic.)
Lucy had worn the same dress to the first three grades at school. She remembered her mother being frightened of people and her father being obsequious, and her uncle Buddy, the man who Jerry Bines shot in 1986, coming in and terrorizing the whole family, saying he was going to burn them out or shoot their thumbs off, and all of the children would cry and tuck their thumbs under their fingers.
And then he would walk around amid all of them, turning about every now and then to glance at them, growling under his breath at them, and wiggling his own thumbs to show how well they worked. And talk about buying a pistol to kill the priest. It never seemed to matter what priest. Whenever anyone was going to make their first communion Buddy would talk about shooting the priest.
Amid all of this, amid the winter and summer, the squalid months of fights and botched silly plans, Lucy was the only one to stand up to him.
“I understand it now,” the man said, coughing lightly because of the smoke from the mill as they went across the scrap-iron bridge in the heat. “I understand her courage now.”
“Courage?” the mother said.
“Courage to stand against the inevitability of your own demise. Like in the way Jerry’s father did at Kapyong – a battle so forgotten now in the annals of our miserable Canadian history books that well-heeled university boys will snigger at it in a second, and trivialize a grapple for life in the dark because they themselves have been ever protected from a slap in the head.”
The house would smell of tea as strong as boiled beer, and everything in the house seemed to be brown. The light from the street came in from the window and turned brown. There was an old horsehair chair in the corner and a big black
box sat in front of it.
They had indentured themselves so much to certain businessmen in town that her father Alvin could be telephoned in the middle of the night to nail campaign posters to poles, or to go to the bus station or train to meet someone and drive them home.
This happened on a regular basis.
Once, Lucy remembered, a man came into the house, a short man with the kind of ginger-coloured, finely tailored fur coat of a man who has always managed to make his life complete by acquiring things those around him did not have. And she remembered the worst terrible abuse coming from this man’s mouth because her father had forgotten to move a crate for him.
This was the man, her father had told them, who had as much as a million dollars. He had also told them that he was in this man’s will, and Lucy and her little sisters had always thought of this man, and how he was helping them, and how they would all be quite rich, just as soon as he died.
And then with all the children standing there he began to yell abuse at her father: “I don’t need to take this from you, you rotten, no-good son of a bitch,” he said to her father while their fish Timmy swam on its side in a bowl of milky water, wagging one fin. “You’re a useless, no-good son of a bitch.”
Alvin was sitting at the table, bent over, stirring his tea with a huge tablespoon. Every once in a while he would look up at the man and nod, and then put his head back down again.
Buddy always took control of the house when he came in, no matter how much they tried to get rid of him. In fact they often tried their best to bribe him to get him to go.
“You want that nice comforter, Buddy, darling – Buddy, dear?” Alvin would say.
“I have a few things to settle,” Buddy would say.
“Buddy has a few things to settle, Frances – Buddy has,” Alvin would say.
They would all be like mice waiting for him to come home from Dorchester Penitentiary. Each letter of his would be more ominous, more filled with foreboding:
“I’m on my way. Set up everything just right for me.”
“I’m on my way. It won’t be like last time. There will be no foolin with me this time. Love, Buddy.”
Then he would come home. He would drink quite a bit, and then sleep. He would take little pills to stay awake, because he didn’t want anyone fooling with him. He would stay awake because he didn’t want to be tricked by them again.
For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down Page 3
