The O'Briens

by Peter Behrens

  “Don’t be silly. It doesn’t mean a thing, Iseult. It’s just the way these IWWs talk. I think they’re all reading Russian novels.”

  “They’ve killed people before, haven’t they. When they blew up the Los Angeles Times, they killed plenty of people.”

  “I don’t want you worrying. It’s not good for your condition.”

  “I’d worry more if I weren’t here. I’m not going.”

  So she stayed, and Joe pretended to be annoyed but was also gruffly grateful, which he demonstrated in small ways: working in the garden under her direction in the evenings; bringing her buttered toast and hot, sweet coffee before he went off to work; rubbing her aching feet at night while composing nonsense names for their baby. Lady Lancelot Goldilocks O’Brien. Strenuous Happenstance O’Brien. Loitering-Magnificently-in-the-Mountains O’Brien.

  Then three cases of dynamite disappeared from a shed. One of the clerks happened to write to his brother, a Vancouver newspaperman, saying that foreign anarchists were plotting to blow up the railway. The story ran in newspapers across the Dominion, questions were asked in Parliament, and twenty Royal Northwest Mounted Police under an inspector were dispatched aboard a special train, with horses, a machine gun, and orders to arrest the IWWs. By the time the police arrived the Wobblies had disappeared, probably across the border into Idaho, but work was shut down all along the grade and a meeting was called. The police pitched their camp at one end of the valley and groomed and exercised their black horses while men poured in from the remote stations and held their union meeting in a meadow on the other side of the river.

  Iseult had spent the morning working in the garden and repairing fences. Elk had broken in again during the night, eaten all the radish tops, and unearthed a row of carrots. They were a constant problem. She had tried everything to keep them out but nothing seemed to work. A few nights earlier Joe had offered to sit up with a rifle and take care of the elk when they appeared.

  “You mean, kill them?”

  “That would be the general idea. One or two, anyway.”

  “Not while I’m with a baby!”

  “What does that have to do with it?”

  “Everything!”

  “But they’re stealing our food, aren’t they? The baby needs those vegetables too — you’re feeding the both of you. You kill chickens, don’t you? What’s the difference? You fix that fence and they’ll knock it down again. Nothing will stop an elk from feeding up, not this late in the summer, except a bullet.”

  “They do make me mad — they’re so clumsy. But I won’t have you shooting them. We’re the intruders here. It would not be good for the baby.”

  Instead she nailed up extra slats on her fence. He hadn’t noticed, but she had not actually, personally slaughtered a chicken in weeks. Mr. Bee, the Chinese tailor, who was helping her in the kitchen, did the killing and plucking now. Earlier in the summer she had steeled herself to the task because it was necessary, someone had to do it, and squeamishness was no excuse. She was happy enough to eat chicken, so death had to be faced, and faced directly. She’d killed, plucked, and dressed half a dozen. An awful, bloody business, but it also made her aware of a new kind of strength, grounded in awareness of her own courage and determination.

  But in the past four weeks she hadn’t killed a single bird. Probably the unborn baby was making decisions for her. It was the same in the darkroom: over the summer she had shot rolls of film, but the smell of developing fluid had become repugnant to her and, she presumed, the baby. She couldn’t go in there anymore. Pregnancy sometimes made her feel like a tenant in her own body.

  Using a steel bar, she pounded more rocks around the postholes to firm them up, then strung more wire, knowing none of it would do much good. Elk roamed the whole valley floor in late summer, females, with one or two bulls bossing each herd. They were feeding up for the winter and looking for salt licks. The bulls made a strange call — Joe called it “bugling” — a whistle more than a cry. She liked hearing it. It was a resonant and intriguing, like the whoop of the barred owl circling the main camp every night, marking his route with hunting cries.

  But she did resent their ravaging her crops, and if she weren’t pregnant she might have let Joe shoot one or two. Or done it herself — she had more direct and legitimate cause than he did. The garden was hers.

  She worked on the fence until she was tired, then went and lay down in the tent. Neither Lee Peng nor his sister-in-law had returned to the mountains. The elderly Mr. Bee helped with domestic chores. He wasn’t much good at taking care of stock and was too frail to be of use in the garden, but he did allow her into the cook shed, where she had learned a lot from him.

  She and Joe had visited the bone-house early in the season, pumping a handcar twenty miles back along the grade over flimsy temporary rails. There were no mountain flowers that early in the year; instead she’d brought along a chenille scarf that had belonged to her mother — from France, a brilliant orange. She’d left it there, wedged between some rocks. They had both cried. Her palms were covered with milky blisters; Joe had had to pump the whole way back to Head-of-Steel without any help from her.

  After a short nap in her camp bed, she arose hungry. She fixed herself some bread and butter and jam and a mug of tea. Then she slung her little Kodak around her neck and headed out for the meadow where Joe had said the police would be exercising their magnificent horses. No workers were to be seen as she walked through main camp and out along the grade. The desolation and silence were unnerving. All the telegraph wires had been cut a few hours after the train arrived at Head-of-Steel with the policemen.

  The grade smelled of dusty, ancient river gravel. And oozing tar in the sleepers. Everything was perfectly quiet except for the wind hissing through the tops of the Douglas firs.

  She found Joe in the meadow by the river, with the policemen and their black horses. The workers were holding their union meeting in a meadow on the other side of the green, galloping North Thompson River. Not much sound came across the garble of the fast water. The speakers were standing up on a platform the men had built using lumber and sleepers removed — “stolen,” Joe had growled — from the dumps of stores scattered along the grade.

  The men across the river could talk all they wanted, call him a capitalist and a bloodsucker; words didn’t count for a lot with him somehow. Not the same as for other people. Her husband handled language reluctantly, as if it were an unfamiliar table setting. He probably used fewer words in a year than many people did in a week. Actions were what he cared about, what he understood — actions, and things he could touch, feel, and grasp.

  She opened up her camera and began photographing the policemen, all expert riders, dashing their mounts around the little gymkhana course. They had set up the jumps using aspens they’d chopped down and limbed. She knew that her Kodak’s shutter was too slow to capture the atmos-phere of strain and competitive tension, and that her lens wasn’t fine enough for detail that would make the scene worthwhile. Usually the camera helped her see the world, but sometimes it felt extraneous, pushing her out of the moment instead of bringing her closer.

  She put the camera away. She was wearing a skirt with a short jacket she hoped disguised her pregnancy, and a hat that she’d bought at I. Magnin in San Francisco on their way north that spring. The hat was very much the latest Paris mode and she’d paid far too much for it, but she had just saved six dollars by buying her summer’s supply of photographic paper at a discount supply shop Elise had heard about on Third Street in downtown Los Angeles. She had been sensing the first twinges of pregnancy in San Francisco, and, feeling a need to indulge herself, she’d bought the ridiculous, beautiful hat and wore it whenever she plaus-ibly could. Of course she hadn’t used much of the photo paper, hadn’t printed in weeks.

  A constant, faint hubbub floated from across the river as speaker after speaker addressed the men — in at least half a dozen languages so far, according to Joe. “I don’t care what language they’
re talking. It’s all anarchy.”

  “They want a show of force,” the inspector said. “We can’t have a crowd of foreigners thinking they rule the mountains.”

  Joe shook his head. “You’ve got twenty men and they’re a couple of thousand. I don’t like it any more than you do, but if you interfere with their meeting you’ll get more trouble than you bargained for. Best let things cool off. Anyway, I’ll need these fellows back at work. I’m going to go back to the office and study the numbers and see what I can offer that’ll get things moving. First snow’ll be soon enough, then freeze-up, and we’d all be stuck here. If they’re willing to talk sensibly, I can talk sensibly. Anything to get the work on its legs again. Walk with me, Iseult?”

  “I think I’ll stay out here a little while,” she said. The deserted camp had felt lonely and bleak; the daylight was better, more cheerful, away from the penumbra of firs. The policemen’s scarlet jackets and yellow stripes were enjoyable daubs of colour. There wasn’t a lot of colour at Head-of-Steel, especially after a while. It all started looking like mud.

  She sat on a blanket spread on the grass, watching policemen jumping the big black horses over the aspen fences. Faint noises from the union meeting mixed with the dash of the river and the clattering of insects. The meadow grasses were dabbed with devil’s paintbrush and coneflowers.

  The police had a little campfire going, with tea brewing and biscuits baking in a Dutch oven. After a while the inspector, holding two enamel cups and a plate of biscuits, approached and asked if he might join her.

  “Of course.”

  He offered her one of the cups and held out the plate of buttered biscuits. They were delicious and the tea was hot, strong, and sweet. She hadn’t realized how hungry she was.

  The inspector took off his Stetson. His hair was thin and sandy. He was a handsome man, though not interesting to look at.

  “I see you’re in a happy state, Mrs. O’Brien.”

  She didn’t immediately grasp his meaning. Then she did. She felt her face flush. “Yes . . . well. Thank you.”

  “Do you have other children?”

  “We don’t.”

  “My wife and I expect our first around about Christmas time.”

  “We the same. Congratulations.”

  “Of course, I’m awfully old to be a father for the first time — I am forty.”

  “That’s not very old,” she said, thinking that it was.

  “How old is your husband, if I may ask?”

  “Joe will be twenty-seven next month.”

  “Very young for such an undertaking.”

  “He’s always had a lot on his shoulders. He’s used to it. He likes it.”

  “Forty years old.” The inspector shook his head. “That’s awfully late to start a family, but the Force don’t make it easy for a man to marry, even an officer. It’s a gripe we all have. They make no allowances, really. Of course the men aren’t even allowed to marry, not below a sergeant’s rank. And an officer’s pay isn’t much good. My wife finds it hardly sufficient to keep a decent household. I give her everything I can but she says it isn’t enough.”

  It surprised her that anyone would mention such private domestic matters to a stranger.

  “She has often implied that I . . . that I . . . ” He paused and blinked. “That I falsely represented that particular aspect of my situation. Before we were married, I mean. She has accused me of falsely giving her an impression that my salary was greater than it is. It’s ridiculous — I never did anything of the kind. I did talk about my prospects, probably more than I should have. I’ve always been looking for a promotion. Inspector’s rank in the Force is something like between a subaltern and a captain in the army. In the Force they say a man needs to be a superintendent before he can keep a family happy on his pay. I only wish I had listened to them.”

  She was listening to the noise of the river. Summer weather in the Rockies rarely lasted more than a day or two at a time.

  She no longer felt sick in the mornings, but this pregnancy was not so light-hearted as the first; there were undertones. Whenever Joe looked at her changing form, she knew he was thinking of the lost baby. She had found herself also thinking of death as much as birth. This pregnancy was making her moody. Not malcontent, but slow. Content to sit on the grass, listening to insects scraping their legs and twittering.

  While the inspector talked about meeting his wife at a garden party given by an English lord on his ranch south of Calgary, Iseult watched his face, which was bony and sallow. His clipped moustache was the colour of old, silvery hay. He kept crossing and uncrossing his long legs.

  He said he was going to quit the Force and return to England as soon as he had some reliable prospects there; he missed England terribly.

  After almost eighteen months of marriage, how close were she and Joe? What did love mean, really? They’d lost a child. They would neither of them get over that, she was certain. Right now they were both trying to forget what had happened, and in the excitement of a new pregnancy that almost seemed possible. But it was a deep scar and it really wouldn’t ever fade, would it?

  The inspector was still talking about England. Every year he missed it more. Really, England was the only country to live in, the only place that felt like home. The colonies were well enough, but he was an Englishman through and through.

  She half-listened. Joe never bored her. She’d hated him, yes. She’d blamed him — because someone had to take the blame.

  She loved him coming inside her — violence and tenderness, force — the way he could release himself. His way, determined and gentle, of touching her. She was thrilled by their lovemaking, and he’d confessed he hadn’t believed women were built that way, to get any pleasure at all.

  Six times that summer he’d come into her on a mossy forest floor, the Douglas firs whispering above their heads and her white firm belly loaded with mystery. The doctor in Los Angeles who’d examined her last winter warned that her pregnancies would be difficult from now on and they oughtn’t to count on more than two children, maybe three. Joe had a plan that they must build a big house somewhere in the East — New York or Montreal — and build or buy another house in California, by the sea. When this contract was finished, he’d said, they were going to Europe, for six months at least. He’d once gone to Havana to negotiate a contract, but otherwise had not travelled outside the States and Canada and the remote mountains of Mexico.

  The drone of the inspector’s voice was making her drowsy, and she was grateful for the bit of privacy her enormous hat provided. She was startled when he reached out suddenly and took her hand.

  “You’re the sort of female I ought to have waited for,” he said. “I have been watching you and trying to think where it was I went wrong, what I could have done differently, and I don’t know what it was, except I was too eager. My God, I’ve dashed everything, made such terrible mistakes; my life is an absolute hell. My wife is unhappy. She hates Edmonton. She’s from Ontario; her father managed a branch bank in a mining town, and she hated it there. But she won’t hear of England; she says it’s not home for her. She has never been happy anywhere as far as I can tell. She doesn’t know what it is — happiness. A child won’t make her happy; she’ll just spread her unhappiness to the child. I can’t bear her voice sometimes. The only passion I feel these days is the need to get away. The rest of the time I feel dead. Being with her is much worse than being alone. Why? She’s the woman I chose to marry. Now it frightens me to think of her with our child. She’s near the end of her tether as it is. I’ve told her I’ll get her a maid somehow but she says I don’t bring in enough money for it; she says our trouble is all because of that. She accuses me of lying —”

  Iseult pulled her hand away and he released it.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said helplessly.

  “I’m sorry to hear of your troubles, Inspector, but do you think it wise to talk of such things? I would be upset if I knew my husband was talking to st
rangers. Marriage is a mystery between two people, isn’t it? You can’t let others in. Think of your wife and how she would feel.”

  He stood up, his leather belt and boots creaking. His face had gone stiff. “You’re quite right. My apologies. Good day, madam.”

  For a moment she was afraid he was going to come to attention and salute, but he turned back to the horses and men, fitting on his broad-brimmed Stetson as he walked away.

  She felt depressed and frightened. And ashamed of herself. She ought to have let him talk. Maybe it would have done him some good. Maybe it would have done his wife some good. Mother Power would have recognized the need, the despair. The nun would have listened. But it was too late. Not wishing it to appear that she was running away — even if she was — she finished her tea before standing up. Her belly seemed to be swelling by the hour. She adjusted her hat, folded the blanket and draped it over her arm, and walked self-consciously past the policemen standing around their little fire.

  Heading back through the deserted camp, she thought of stopping at the main office, where Joe and his clerks were at work. But if she told him about the inspector seizing her hand and pouring out his troubles, Joe would make some wry joke, and she didn’t feel like laughing. The man’s despair had really shaken her.

  Mr. Bee had swept out the white tent and smoothed her bed. She put her camera on a shelf. She decided she ought to go out in the garden and dig up new potatoes; hard work always made her feel better. But instead of changing her clothes and going out again, she slowly unpinned her hat, took off her boots, and lay down on her camp bed. She stared at the canvas roof gleaming with sunlight and thought again about whether she loved her husband. She did, but love changed in marriage, became an element in a compound with a complex chemistry. It was never quite stable, it seemed.

  ~

  That night the strikers stacked up railway ties like tepees, doused them with coal oil, and set them alight. Every few hundred yards along the grade, bonfires were burning. From their tent Iseult could see the orange flames, but it would be no use trying to shoot the scene on the film stock she had.