The Island Walkers

by John Bemrose

  Alf had his old chair by the window. With each name Mary came up with he grew more uncomfortable, taking hard drags on his own cigarette and looking bleakly out into the sunlit street. On the sidewalk, two women had stopped to talk. The world outside seemed a haven of sunshine and normality. But here, in this room, they seemed to be up to something else: an activity of smoke and shadows, conspiratorial, illicit.

  Mary stopped and looked at him. For this special occasion she had rimmed her small eyes with liner and painted her lips bright red. But there could be no disguising the oddness of her scooped-out face with its pointed chin.

  “Can you think of anybody else, Alf?”

  He frowned a thoughtful frown.

  “What about Matilda Barnes?” she said, wondering.

  The name jolted him. Matilda had been a friend of his mother’s, a woman in her sixties now who worked in the cutting department of the sweater mill. As a boy, he had often visited her house. Her husband had kept pigeons. Alf had loved to feed them while the soft birds balanced on his shoulders and even his head, their little claws needling his scalp.

  His whole instinct was to protect Matilda. He suspected that if he asked, she would sign a union card. But he didn’t want to lead her into a situation where she might be fired.

  “I wouldn’t think she’d go for it,” he said. “Too close to retirement. Not really the union type.”

  Across the room, Deirdre and Shirley were watching him. Deirdre Hoar was a stocky woman of perhaps thirty, with short black hair and beautiful fine eyebrows, a hooked nose, and a look of pent outrage, like a baby owl or hawk. Shirley Dearing was about the same age, tall with hunched shoulders and a long, attractive face within a thin fall of hair. Alf was aware of a certain shrewdness in the way she looked at him. Her presence intimidated him more than Deirdre’s, because it made him want to perform well.

  “I dunno,” Mary said, demurring. “Matilda’s a pretty independent type. Ain’t her husband in a union, over in Johnsonville there?”

  “Well, I could be wrong,” Alf said.

  “Anyways, you know her, don’t you?”

  “Years ago,” Alf said evasively. He could feel his face heating, and was glad of the dimness of the room.

  A silence descended. Alf did not know where to look, caught on the slippery slope of his own lie. He could almost hear the others thinking, incredulously, If you know her, why don’t you approach her? His own subterfuge had shaken him. He had come to this room full of enthusiasm, wanting to help. But something about surrendering names had awakened an old reluctance. In a way, he had come full circle. He was back in Prince’s motel room. Again, there was a man with a notebook, waiting for names.

  “I’d give her a try,” Mary said to Doyle.

  Doyle looked at Alf, his thick eyebrows raised: it was Alf’s call.

  “I wouldn’t,” Alf said, as nonchalantly as he could.

  “All right,” Doyle said. He studied the tip of his ballpoint. Alf licked his lips. Across the room, Deirdre was motionless in her chair, her eyes fierce.

  “Well?” Doyle said.

  Alf realized that several seconds had passed. He had lapsed away.

  “I’m sorry, I —”

  “Mali just wondered if you knew any other names?” This from Shirley, with a note of gentleness, of provisional support.

  “Right.” Alf looked at the door. Its pale, scarred rectangle stood only a few feet away, just beyond the gauntlet of legs and feet and shoes. He could stand up and say, I’m sorry. I’ve made a mistake. Or he could simply walk away. But he sat on, not knowing what he was going to do, only knowing that he would do something. He was, almost, a fascinated spectator of himself, waiting in a clarity without foreknowledge or understanding. Was he simply afraid to leave? No, something else was keeping him here, the pull of something he did not understand.

  He said, “I don’t want to put these people at risk —”

  Across the room, Deirdre swore.

  Doyle frowned. “Alf, I think I told you we’re not having any more meetings like the one at Pete’s. At least not until there’s so many of us they can’t fire us.”

  “You said no meetings.”

  “What’s going on, Mali,” Deirdre said. There was something comical in her anger, it was so immediate and extreme. Doyle ignored her.

  “If we can collect enough cards, there won’t have to be any meetings — not before certification. After we’re legal, it’s a whole new ball game.”

  “Have you ever done this before?” Deirdre asked Alf, critically.

  “Not for many years,” Alf said.

  “Because this is pretty basic —”

  “All right,” Doyle said, placating.

  “So give us some names!” Deirdre cried, slapping her thigh.

  “Not if you ask like that,” Alf said, fixing her with hatred. There was a certain joy in looking at her like this: all his strong emotion finally finding a focus. For a few seconds they simply stared at each other through the smoke.

  “All right, brother,” Deirdre said finally. She sat back in her chair with her sinewy forearms crossed, scowling.

  There was silence in the room. All were waiting for him now: the two women in their chairs, Doyle on the squeaky bedsprings, his carved, ancient face hovering in smoke like some tribal god. And Mary Carr with her back to the door, her bleak white face with its circles of eyeliner looking across to him without expression, the hardness of her life having purged her of any airs, any bother with false, encouraging smiles. All the people in the room were hard, he saw. There was something desperate and pinched about them, they had the air of underdogs. But at the same time they were true, as a chunk of rock or a good hammer is true. They had given their hardness as an instrument, to a cause.

  He said, “Ellen Kelly.”

  “Good!” Mary said, stabbing her finger at him. Doyle printed the name while the others watched, like people who don’t write themselves and have an immense, almost superstitious respect for the scribe in their midst. Alf was momentarily lost in the associations conjured by Ellen Kelly: the narrow house on the Flats, a bed of prize dahlias, Ellen’s fleshy arms. Yes, a name was more than a name. It was a life. What business did people have even uttering other people’s names — flinging them about like stones. There was no telling what might happen. He remembered reading about some Indian tribe where everyone had two names. One was for public use, the other was secret, and could not be uttered by others. How well he understood this. How he wished Ellen Kelly had another name, to make her safe.

  “Any others?” Doyle said, glancing at him pointedly.

  Alf looked up wondering, his brow sweating. Their faces hovered in smoke, like masks.

  He saw faces but could remember no names. He saw eyes, and gardens, and front porches; he saw a rowboat, tethered under willows, and a green Plymouth with furry dice hanging from its rear-view; he saw faces in their crooked singularity. But he could think of no names.

  The only name he could remember was his own. It had stuck in his head like some fragment of a song he couldn’t shake. “Alfred William Walker Alfred William Walker.” As if he were five years old, chanting it like a bit of magic.

  Then another name occurred to him.

  “Sidney Clarke,” he said.

  Sidney lived on West Street, about a hundred yards north of the Island. Alf and Doyle found him in his backyard, bent over his hoe on a strip of black earth. Below the sharp cut of the bank behind him, the Atta churned up pompoms of foam. Smoke poured from a pile of branches and leaves. Walking ahead of the organizer, Alf saw the stoop of Sidney’s labouring shoulders and was filled with second thoughts. What business did he have walking in here, asking Sidney to risk his peace and quiet? He felt the warmth of pity, only a hair’s breadth from self-pity.

  As always, Sidney was glad to see Alf. He kept his eyes fixed brightly on Alf’s, as Alf explained what he and Doyle were up to. From time to time, Sidney glanced at the organizer, and though his smile of boy
ish eagerness remained intact, it revealed a hint of something hard and suspicious. But when he turned back to Alf, his rapt expression returned. It reminded Alf of Pete, and he had to look away. Had he pulled Sidney’s name out of the air because Sidney was so much like Pete? If so, this was the last place he should have brought Doyle. What in the hell was he trying to do?

  To make matters worse, Sidney agreed almost at once to join, said, Yep, Yep I’m in, even as Alf, shifting his feet in the dirt, silently urged him to refuse. He felt Sidney was joining on his account only: the man didn’t know what he was doing. As Pete, he felt, had not known.

  “The deal is,” Doyle told him, “you sign a card, pay us a dollar, and when we get fifty-five per cent, the union’s in.” He had taken a card from inside his jacket. The grin froze on Sidney’s face as he eyed it with blank apprehension: a good patient watching the doctor load his hypodermic.

  There was no flat surface to sign it on. So Alf bent over and Sidney signed the card on his back.

  Sidney had left his wallet in the house. As he trekked away to fetch a dollar, Alf and Doyle turned to look at the river. It was beautiful just now, a hurrying ribbon of bronze lit with the elusive earth-tints of the spring evening. But Alf felt unconnected to the scene in front of him: he had stepped over a frontier, onto the questionable side of good. He turned, at a cry from the house, a woman’s high-pitched voice leaping in anger. Doyle chortled and looked back at the river. Alf was appalled. A surging unhappiness had invaded his limbs: he must do something. He found a flat stone and whipped it sidearm over the river.

  “Her father went out in ’49,” he told Doyle, accusingly. “Lost his job, in the end.”

  “Well maybe this time,” Doyle said, “she’ll learn who to blame.”

  “We’re all part of it,” Alf said, striking back at him. Doyle looked at him sharply, and for a moment, before Alf turned away to find another stone, their eyes met and their easy companionship was exposed as an illusion.

  Sidney came back down the yard, pale and trembling but with a smile still struggling for prominence on his thin face. Protruding from his hand, the way a child might carry it, was a stiff new dollar bill. As he handed it over, no one spoke of what had just occurred, but Alf could see Jeanie Clarke’s small face peering out a window: a vision of concentrated fury.

  Fifteen minutes later, they were sitting in Ellen Kelly’s front room, surrounded by wallpaper in a suffocating floral print like a dying jungle. Ellen worked in sewing: a heavy, grey-haired woman with doughy arms that wobbled underneath as she handed around a dish of peppermints. The scooped top of her flowered dress showed a sun-roughened chest, like so much pink crepe. Sitting back in her armchair she rolled a peppermint around her mouth with a clicking sound and looked sharply at Alf and Doyle and occasionally glanced at her husband, Jared, who had dragged a chair into the doorway to the dining room and sat bent over with his elbows on his thighs, staring at the floor as though his back and his patience had given out together. The house stank of Brussels sprouts.

  “So you can’t get enough trouble,” Ellen said in a loud, demanding voice to Alf.

  “Guess not,” he said.

  “It’s all right for you boys,” she said. “If this blows up, you still got your jobs. Not like us. They catch us signing one of your cards and we’re gone.”

  “That’s right,” Jared said absently to the floor. The bald patch at the back of his thinning brush cut gave off a yellow shine in the lamplight. He had been a mechanic in the air force, and now worked in a garage in Johnsonville. There was a weariness about him, as though he had long ago given up his interest in life, and was only waiting, a little disgustedly, for it to end.

  “I’m three years from retirement, I got my pension to think of,” Ellen said, glancing angrily at her husband as if this were his fault. “Maybe if I was twenty —”

  She looked at them with bulging eyes. Her big jaw worked on her candy and her eyes demanded, Well? Her refusal was enough for Alf: he stirred in the couch to signal he was ready to go. But Doyle went on sitting with a faint smile as if he was settling in for the night, oblivious to the uncomfortable silences that fell. He said, “Think of it maybe as a legacy. Something for the younger ones who’ve got a lot more than three years to go.”

  “I got eleven grandchildren,” Ellen barked at him. “That’s legacy enough for me.”

  “Eleven!” Doyle said. “That beats me. I’ve only got nine.”

  Ellen went on rolling a peppermint around on her tongue, apparently unimpressed. She was dead set against them, Alf saw. Why was Doyle wasting everyone’s time? Feeling embarrassed on behalf of them both, Alf cleared his throat and said, “Well” and looked towards the window where pots of African violets and baby’s tears floated against the dimming street. He was beginning to believe that Doyle was more than insensitive: there was a kind of brutality in him, unsoftened by pity or remorse, like a salesman who means to exhaust his victim into submission.

  Doyle said, “My daughter’s husband, he’s in this plant in Toronto — makes shock absorbers for trains. Good union — he’s a steward — sits on the board alongside the bigwigs. They actually have a say in how the place is run.”

  Jared said, “Fat chance of that here.”

  “That’s what they said there, apparently,” Doyle said coolly. Jared snorted and went on staring at the floor. Ellen glared at her husband. Alf felt he had stumbled into their secret life: a life of humiliations and unsatisfied rage, contained in this orderly little house where everything was spotless and exactly in place.

  Doyle went on for a time about unions he was familiar with, talking about how normal life got once they were established. Even the bigwigs ended up being happy with the situation, he said: a long contract let them predict their costs accurately, without surprises. Hell, he even knew one boss who bragged about what a good union he had — and this guy was one tough cookie. He’d fought the union like a Mafioso when it first went in. But he’d come around. He seemed almost proud of his union — as if he knew he was finally on the side of the angels.

  As Doyle talked he took a union card out of his shirt pocket and toyed with it in his big hands. He bent it between thumb and forefinger, stropped it on his index finger like a blade, touched it to his red, pitted nose. Ellen scowled at the little white card.

  Suddenly Doyle stopped talking. He looked at the card and seemed almost surprised to find it in his hand. He looked at Ellen, as if to say, What am I going to do with this? He raised his thick black eyebrows.

  “All right,” Ellen said. “Give me the damned thing.” She shot another poisonous look at her husband, who was staring at her, apparently in shock.

  Doyle gave her the card, and she signed it on the small table beside her chair. She sent Jared out of the room to find a dollar, which he brought to her with evident distaste, holding out the bill and averting his head as she took it. She extended one arm, and as Doyle took the dollar and the card from her, she looked over at Alf and, without changing her dour expression, slipped him a wink.

  After, in the car, Alf said, “I was ready to walk out of there.”

  “Sometimes it’s the right move,” Doyle said. “You develop a feeling. That one was a believer, I knew it when I came in.”

  “A believer,” Alf said, gently mocking. He was beginning to think that Doyle was a bit of a hot-air artist. They were driving down Shade, between the closed stores.

  “She’s mad,” Doyle said. “You could see it in her face. She knows there’s injustice in the way things work — knows it in her gut. The whole time she’s saying, No, no, and doing the sensible thing. But inside there’s a tough old gal standing with clenched fists saying, Just give me a shot at the buggers.”

  “You seem so sure,” Alf said critically. Doyle looked over at him.

  “You must have sensed something yourself there.”

  “Not me,” Alf said.

  “Then why’d you give me her name?” Doyle said. Alf was startled. Why had
he given Doyle Ellen’s name? He looked out at a passing tree, its new leaves orange in the tide of light rolling in from the west.

  They got five signatures that night, with four refusals. The last refusal came at a house in Erie, a village a few miles outside of town, where the door was slammed in their faces with a report that filled the silent, shadowy street. They drove slowly back towards Attawan. Through the open windows came the thick, drowning sweetness of lilacs, wafting from roadside groves as big as transport trucks.

  “A good night’s work,” Doyle said. He was slouching back with one arm falling over the seat behind him, the other straight to the wheel, his big head on angle: the posture of a fulfilled man. Alf envied him his lazy pleasure in his achievement. Doyle seemed someone who believed, who had brought home the harvest of that belief. There was nothing sweeter in life, perhaps, but Alf could not share his sense of a job well done.

  “I feel like you did it all.”

  “We wouldn’t have got half those cards without you.”

  “So what am I — a pretty face?”

  “That’s right,” Doyle said. Alf chortled and looked out the window where the fields revolved among the great, dark citadels of the bush-lots. He had felt moments of satisfaction in getting the cards — there was something about being with Doyle that normalized the whole enterprise and made it seem more possible than he’d imagined. He’d even experienced a sweet surge of vengefulness — against Bannerman’s, against Prince, against Kit Ford. But revenge wasn’t enough. To do this work properly, he sensed, you had to be a believer. He wanted to believe, with the same kind of certainty Doyle had, or even with the inchoate angry belief of Ellen Kelly, but he kept coming up against a barrier in himself.