by John Bemrose
He took a step backwards, to get out of her line of sight, then another. Billy grinned.
“What ya doin’?”
“Nothin’. Walkin’ backwards.”
Billy laughed his gurgling laugh and took a couple of steps backwards himself.
They went along Bridge Street to the bridge and looked down at the steaming black water, at the weeds bending under its surface, and up the river past the dam to the rail trestle, where a string of boxcars was rumbling against an empty sky. “We’re Sigh-Ox Indians,” Jamie said.
“Okay.”
“You can be Crazy Horse, because you’re the real Indian.”
“You wanta come to my house?” Billy said.
They walked to the Flats, along Willard and Pine to Billy’s. The place made Jamie sad with its lonely-echo feeling and no pictures on the walls, just a couch with a rip down the back. Billy’s bed was a mattress on the floor, his toys were scattered all over, and there was a smell of pee. After a while Jamie said he had to go: he and his Dad were going to buy a Christmas tree. “Are you getting a tree?” he asked, and Billy said he was going to cut one, right now. They could both go and cut one, okay? And because Jamie wasn’t going with his father until that night, and because cutting a tree would get them out of the house, he agreed.
Billy brought up a hatchet from the basement, and they walked up the road under the rail trestle: a web of dark girders through which slits of faraway sky showed. They went up a short street and along another to a forest of evergreens. In the forest, which was still and peaceful, the snow poured over the tops of Jamie’s boots and chilled his feet: he was beginning to wish he hadn’t come. But they waded on, talking about which tree would be good to cut, and finally they picked one and Billy started hacking at it with the hatchet. Pale gashes appeared, but though he was hitting it fiercely, gritting his teeth, he couldn’t get much deeper than the bark. Then Jamie took a try and it was while he was whacking away at the trunk that a voice sounded beside him. He was so scared he dropped the axe. He was ready to run, but Billy just stood there looking at a man — an old man Jamie did not know. He was smiling at them with a mouth that had no teeth. “Trying to take my treesh are you?” he said in a rough but not unfriendly voice. “I know yis one,” he said, nodding at Billy. “Who are you?”
“Jamie,” Jamie said. The old man was wearing an open coat and a plaid shirt underneath and a cap from which his ears stuck out like handles. He winced and looked at the tree and said they should come with him to the house, he’d get a proper saw. Jamie looked at Billy, but Billy just fell in behind the old man, following in the soft trail his boots made.
The house sat up on a small hill above the forest. Behind it stretched the open space of a gravel pit, where Jamie could see cement towers and a snowed-over line of conveyor belts. Then he was in a big kitchen, not bright and neat like his mother’s, but warm, with bare-wood cupboards, a kitchen table painted bright red, and an oil stove with slits in its side that reminded him of catfish gills. The old man told them to take their boots off and sit down at the table. While the old man was rummaging in a cupboard, Billy looked across the table at Jamie and said, “We’ll get candy.”
“Did I hear something about candy?” the old man said. His hair was as white as the snow.
He came back with a big glass jar full of different kinds of sweets: jawbreakers and licorice and others wrapped in twists of foil. The old man set the jar on the table and looked at Billy and said, “So, shall we tell him our little game?”
Billy looked at Jamie. “You take your pants down and he feels your dick and then you get the candy. Sometimes he sucks it. Then you get three candies.”
Jamie wondered, Sucks the candy?
“I don’t do anything you don’t want,” the old man said to Jamie. His smile had changed, he had teeth now, yellow teeth as straight as the boards in a fence. Jamie felt his face go hot and the old man giggled and said, “Now I think Billy here should go first, to show how it’s done. Okay, Billy?”
Billy jumped out of his chair and went over to a couch near the oil stove. He lay down and the old man went over and sat beside him on the couch and looked back at Jamie. “It’s just a little game,” he said. “It feels nice. Why don’t you come over here and look?”
Jamie didn’t want to go over, but when the old man winked at him and shook his head for him to come, he went. He stood beside the old man as he put out his big, lumpy hands and pulled down Billy’s trousers. And he thought of being in the doctor’s office when Doctor Carr looked at his dink, carefully pulling back the skin, and he thought of the time Carol Jenkins and her friend Chrissy Bell had pulled his pants down in Carol’s outhouse and they had hardly been able to stop laughing, and afterwards the girls had pulled their own pants down and showed him the place where they had no dinks, just a slot like a piggy bank. All these other times seemed to be with him now, as he watched the old man move his big, crooked fingers very gently over Billy’s thing, pulling and stroking it the same way he, Jamie, sometimes pulled and stroked Red’s ear, feeling its smoothness run through his fingers. “There there there,” the old man said (he had hair in his ears and even sticking out of his nose, Jamie saw), and he seemed almost to be singing, crooning away like a mother to a crying baby though Billy wasn’t crying, he was grinning up at Jamie as if he considered the whole business rather silly. Then he stopped grinning and his eyes went far away, blank.
“See, that’s all there is to it,” the old man said suddenly, looking around at Jamie. “You wanta try?”
“Aren’t you gonna suck it?” Billy said.
“Not today, you rascal.” And the old man snapped the band of Billy’s underwear. “You get yourself a candy or two. Just call me the Candy Man,” he winked to Jamie.
Billy pulled up his pants and got off the couch. The old man was looking at Jamie now, looking at him with a friendly smile in his eyes, showing his board-straight teeth. “Nothin’ to it,” he said.
“He’s chicken,” Billy said, walking back to the table.
The old man winked at Jamie and patted the couch.
“Just hop on,” he said.
Jamie lay down on the couch. He looked at the ceiling and looked at the old man’s long chin with its spiky stubble and felt his pants being drawn down. When the old man said, “Just raise your hips a little,” he did, and felt his nakedness in the air. Then the fingers touched him, and it felt nice down there, it felt nice and smooth, except the old man’s hand was a little cold, just like Doctor Carr’s hand, and the old man was crooning over him now, as he pulled his thing just like he, Jamie, pulled Red’s ear. “Oh you’ve got a nice one,” the old man said. “That one’s gonna be a real beauty,” and he bent over suddenly and kissed Jamie’s dink. But his stubble scraped Jamie’s thigh and made him twist away and the old man pulled him back, hard. In that moment, he knew something sharp and angry in the old man. The old man had jerked him back to where he wanted him, jerked him back like you’d jerk a bag of sand. Suddenly, he wanted to go home. He wanted to be at home, at the kitchen table, drinking tea-milk, and his mother there and all the lights on and the house snug against the cold. But he was not there, he was here, and the old man was bending to kiss him again, and everything that had been so strange and nice — the nice old man, the candies, the touch of his hands and even his lips — suddenly was replaced by a loneliness so strong he wanted to cry.
He heard his voice say, high and strange, that he had to go, but the old man kept his face down on him and he felt his dink in the old man’s mouth and the drag of something else that must have been his tongue. The thing was, down there it felt good, but down there was only a part of him now, small and far away, and in the rest of him he did not feel good: he felt cold and lonely, and he had the idea that the old man was eating him, eating him bit by bit starting with down there and there was nothing he could do about it. He looked at the ceiling, he looked at the old man’s head, balding and covered with scabs. He turned his head and l
ooked at the little table by the couch and saw the old man’s teeth sitting there in a jar, grinning underwater. “I have to go,” he said again, and the old man lifted his face, which was red now, and said in a coy, pleading voice, “Arn you going to help ush cut the tree?” Putting his hands over his dink (it felt wet, he half-expected it was bloody though he didn’t look), Jamie told the old man he was going with his father to buy a Christmas tree. So the old man got up and put in his teeth and Jamie got up and pulled up his pants, not looking at himself down there, not even wanting to know that down there existed. He did not want candies now, but he picked one out of the jar, fake-smiling when the old man made a joke, not wanting the old man to touch him again. Before he could go out the door, the old man bent down to him. He held Jamie’s shoulder with one hand and said, “Who’s your father?” And for a moment Jamie, looking over the old man’s shoulder at Billy, who was poking away in the candy jar, not upset at all it seemed by what had happened, could not think of his father’s name.
“Alf Walker,” he said finally, and the old man grunted. Then he said, “I wouldn’t tell anybody about this if I was you. This is secret, okay?”
Jamie said okay: he would promise anything if he could just get out. He looked over at Billy again, thinking they could leave together. But Billy was chewing a candy and did not look back. “We can go,” Jamie said, but Billy did not seem to hear him.
“Because if you tell,” the old man said, and his fingers tightened hard on his shoulder, “bad things might happen. Okay?”
“Okay,” Jamie said, and the old man said, “Look at me,” and he looked at the old man and saw the bad things in his eyes.
Outside, he trekked away through the forest of Christmas trees. The sun was just going down, a fire behind the hill across the river, and the snow was blue, and their old tracks were blue. And though he was headed home, he felt he had no home, he was just here, with a lump in his throat and a wet, loose feeling in his pants, trudging in the blue snow that spilled over his boots and went on forever.
“Course,” his father said, and his voice went inside Jamie and filled him so that he seemed, almost, to be listening to himself. “When I was a kid we’d cut our own tree.”
Their headlights reached up the steep, winding road of the Mile Hill, through a forest where trees leaned out into the light, from banks of ghostly snow. They were on their way to Gowans’ farm for a tree, and the heater was making a sound like a toboggan scraping over rough snow.
A car appeared up ahead, its headlights flicking down.
“How come we don’t now?”
His father said nothing, and Jamie knew he hadn’t heard. He’s sad about Pete, Jamie’s mother had said. They were friends when they were boys.
“Dad?”
“What?”
“How come we don’t now?”
“Don’t what?”
“Cut our own tree.” He thought of Billy’s hatchet, bouncing off the tree without hardly cutting it and felt again the sadness of the forest of Christmas trees outside the old man’s house, in the blue, lonely snow. It was still with him. He felt he shouldn’t have left Billy. He wondered if he was still in the house, on the brown couch, and he saw again the look in Billy’s eyes when the old man touched him, his eyes going faraway, not scared, but faraway as if he were in a day-dream where no one could ever find him.
“Well,” his father said, and again there was a pause. The tires crunched over a patch of ice and up the road, a long shape bounded through the edge of the light. “A deer!” Jamie looked but whatever it was had already vanished into the jail of shadowy trees that fell towards the river. His father slowed the car, and they looked off the road where a cable hung between posts. He couldn’t see the ground there, it dropped away so sharply. The deer seemed to have flown away among the trunks of the trees.
“A buck! Did you see that? Did you see the antlers on him!”
His father’s jacket smelled of smoke, a good smell. Jamie peered past him out the open window where the cold air flooded in. The trunks of the trees were lit dimly up one side.
“Did you see him?”
“Yup,” Jamie said. But he wasn’t sure what he’d seen.
“A big boy, eh?”
“Yup.”
He didn’t know if he was the big boy, or the deer was, but he was happy that his father was happy at the sight of the deer. The happiness of the deer had filled the car. He looked over at his father, hoping it would last. His father put the car in gear and they went on, through the high-piled snow.
My love is in the blue snow, the voice said. He sat alert, very still. He hadn’t heard the voice for a long time, though he hadn’t noticed until now. My love is in the blue snow: it was deeper in him than anything, than even his father’s voice, or his own voice, and at the same time it seemed to have come from the night around the car, lit by the car’s passing lights. He waited for it to speak again, but the only sound was the roar of the heater.
24
MARGARET WATCHED as the Reverend Ramsay, Jack to her, picked up his tea tray by the wooden handles and placed it carefully on his desk, the bone china rattling almost musically. There was also a plate of the biscuits his sister had sent from England: Fortnum & Mason’s. Just watching him put out tea, the way tea should be put out, calmed her. She felt it was something people in this country didn’t understand: the measure of peace that came with doing things right. Taking the right amount of time. Ceremonious. People here slurped their tea from any old sort of mug or cup, even paper ones, as if all they cared about was slaking their thirst. But tea was hardly about thirst at all, she felt. It was about conversation, and restraint, and good cheer: a bulwark against the failing day.
“What have you got this year — two angels?” Jack Ramsay said, taking a chair near her. He crossed his legs, in their priestly black serge: a tidily good-looking man, with a pleased, suggestive shine in his eyes, as though his occupation as the minister of St. Paul’s Anglican were not only a pleasure to him but a bit of a lark. He had the English talent, so welcome to her, of making an instant party, a little conspiracy of merriment.
“Both shepherds. Penny had her heart set on being an angel but —”
“Well, she is an angel,” he intoned.
“I’ll tell her that,” Margaret said, “if you don’t mind. She’s convinced she’s quite ugly in her bathrobe. Of course what she’d really like is the Virgin Mary, all the girls want the Virgin. I was the same, back home.”
“I never wanted to be anything but a shepherd. The angels seemed sissy to me, and as for Joseph — unimaginably embarrassing.”
“Why was that?” she cried eagerly. Any talk that led them back to England was a joy to her.
In the main hall outside his door, children were making a racket. In another ten minutes they would begin the next-to-last rehearsal for the Christmas pageant. Besides singing in the choir, Margaret was assistant director this year, which involved riding herd, mostly, making sure the requisite number of bodies was trooping down the aisles at the right times, searching for lost halos.
He said, “Well, if you were Joseph, it meant you were married to Mary. The other boys wouldn’t let you alone about it. Reduced more than one Joseph to tears. Married to the mother of God at thirteen, not easy!”
He shot her a twinkling look, lingering a split second longer than was necessary. She enjoyed his flirtatiousness. He was married to a Canadian woman much younger than she. But Helen was childless, and though she was pretty and good-hearted, Margaret found her a bit thick. She felt she offered the minister a taste of something a little more cultured, more in the spirit of his spirit. And it all felt safe.
“We’ve a lovely Mary this year,” she said, looking down, suddenly uncomfortable. In the hall Stella Bridgeman, the pageant director, was shouting for order.
Jack Ramsay’s voice came down a tone: “You wanted to speak to me.”
“I suppose it can wait …” She glanced at the open door.
He got up to attend to the tea.
They had never talked intimately, not really: intimacy had only been implied. Far from ever mentioning her problems, she considered it a point of pride to give the impression she had none. Others might come crawling to him, for help. But she and he were equals, in their English merriment. She no longer wanted to confide in him.
He handed her a cup and saucer, and went to close the door.
The cup steadied her: the creamed tea, its soothing fragrance. She sipped and went into herself, to find the reason, the feeling, that had brought her here on an impulse. She was no longer sure of the purity of her motive. Perhaps she had only wanted the distraction of his company.
But he was listening, waiting, only two feet away. The panelled room with its smell of old books and mildewed Sunday-school papers had filled with the pressure of expectation.
“It’s Alf,” she said, looking at the front of his desk — and immediately felt as if she had betrayed her husband to a process she was not sure she believed in. Already, in her mind, she was backpedalling, portraying matters as less serious than she felt they were. “I just feel, losing his friend and all — he’s in a bad way. It’s been nearly three weeks since — since the funeral — and he’s — he’s always been a very private person.”
