The Englishman’s Boy

by Guy Vanderhaeghe

  “They cut his hair at the undertaker’s,” Wylie volunteers. “I didn’t know they cut hair at an undertaker’s.”

  “What was it?” I ask. Meaning the cause of death.

  Wylie looks at me. Looks at his brother. Looks at me again. “On account of the fall he took with the Running W, he busted up inside. Doctor said his liver, something else…” He stops. “He looks every bit himself though, don’t he?” Wylie still clasps my hand, gaze resting on his brother’s face. We stand in a pocket of stillness, onlookers to a greater stillness boxed by the casket. “It would have meant a lot to Brother, you coming,” Wylie confides.

  I throw a glance at McAdoo, but he is stubbing out a cigarette on the stovetop, eyes downcast. No help there.

  “Yessir, yessir, yessir!” Wylie yells suddenly, in a jagged, piercing voice. “You know who your friends are come a time like this! You bet I know my friends!”

  “Sure you know your friends,” Shorty says calmly. “Now leave go hanging onto Mr. Vincent and screw the lid back down on Miles. Time’s come.”

  He does as he is told. McAdoo motions me outside, leaving Wylie wrestling with the coffin lid.

  Back out on the steps all I can do is shake my head. A loud bang is followed by the sound of wood scraping wood as Wylie jockeys the coffin lid back and forth, aligning it to take the screws.

  “I told him he could bunk here with me until he found his feet,” says McAdoo.

  “Ever consider that might be one hell of a long time?”

  “Well, I’m riding easy now with my interviewing money,” McAdoo says. “Seven and a half a day should be able to carry us both for a time.”

  “I thought you were saving money to get to Canada.”

  “Could be both of us’ll go north. What’s the saying? Two can live as cheap as one.”

  “That refers to marriage. If there’s anybody I wouldn’t want to hitch myself to it would be Wylie.”

  “Oh,” says Shorty, “I can keep old Wylie out of my hair. Turn him to trapping quail and shooting rabbits maybe. Have him dig us a potato garden. Have him comfortable up the bunkhouse some. He takes orders like a damn, Wylie does.” Shorty turns, calls back into the bunkhouse. “You got her clamped down in there, Wylie?”

  Wylie appears in the doorway. “I lost one of the screws.”

  “Well, give her another look. If you find her, that’s good. If you don’t, in the long run that don’t matter neither.”

  Wylie goes back in.

  “We’ll have Wylie tote the light end of the casket – the legs. You and me can take the head,” suggests Shorty.

  “I happen to have a bum leg.”

  “We ain’t going far. I’d go to the bank on you being able to carry your share.”

  After some confusion – I have to switch to the left so that I can swing my stiff leg without knocking it against the casket – we get the funeral cortege moving.

  Despite his age, McAdoo manages better than I do. I admire the fiercely set jaw, the tendons stretched tautly along the thin, muscular stalk of neck. My arm burns with the strain and I can only make thirty or forty yards before begging for a halt. We lower the coffin to the ground, take a quick blow, and then McAdoo curtly bobs his head, the signal to stoop, lift, and scurry on. We make our way from bunkhouse to burned ranch-house, and then several hundred yards more, stumbling up a low hogbacked rise selected by Wylie as his brother’s final resting place.

  We set the coffin down. While I survey the scene, Wylie goes back to collect the tools. Underfoot, nothing but floury dust and dusty plants wilting back to dust. The inky etching of the fired house. The horizon a smudgy glare, the sun sucking blue out of the sky with a voracious mouth.

  I sit down in the dust. “He could have put him under a tree at least. There’s that orange tree just west of the bunkhouse.”

  “Well,” says Shorty, “them Easton boys come from open country. Wylie wanted to give Miles a look in every direction.”

  Wylie’s back with the tools. McAdoo takes the pick from him. “The ground here’s harder than a whore’s heart. I’ll have to loosen it some before you can shovel.” He starts to work, rocking back on his heels with each swing, slinging forward onto his toes, shuddering as the pick bites the resisting ground. The steel rings fervently when it strikes a stone. As the blood flushes his face, Shorty falls into a rhythmical grunting, a sweet basso punctuation marking the rise and fall of the pick. Beside me, his knees drawn up to his chin, Wylie monotonously extols the virtues of the coffin he has purchased, its water-repelling varnish, its stainless-steel screws, its zinc handles.

  After fifteen minutes McAdoo takes a breather, dripping sweat. “The ground seems to be a mite easier,” he says to Wylie. “See if she shovels.” McAdoo drops down beside me; Wylie seizes a spade and enthusiastically digs.

  I tell Shorty I ought to be going.

  “Can’t leave now. Not before the service. Wylie’d take it bad.”

  “Your service has nothing to do with me; I didn’t know Miles Easton from Adam. I came this morning for one reason – because I’m paid to collect your stories. Seeing you’re occupied, I have no reason to stay.”

  “You just rest easy,” says McAdoo, patting my knee. “Presently we’ll have us a few drinks. Send Miles off in grand style.”

  I get to my feet and start dusting off my clothes. “I’ll see you tomorrow – if tomorrow’s convenient.”

  Shorty grabs a fistful of my pant leg, a hard, mineral glint in his eyes. “It ain’t convenient,” he says.

  Shorty McAdoo means it. “Okay, I’ll stay. But you owe me some Indians for this one.”

  Now he has his way, his face relaxes a little. “What kind of Indian would you like me to serve you up? Tame or wild?”

  “Wild, naturally.”

  “Hell, I wouldn’t waste no wild Indian on you,” says Shorty. “Those wild Indians the army used to jail for scampering off the reservation, directly they was locked up, they shrivelled and died. Wild Indian got to run free. I’d guess you lock a wild Indian up between the covers of a book, same thing is going to befall him. He’s going to die.”

  “Don’t get too deep on me, Shorty.”

  “Hell, if I was a puddle and you stood in it, you wouldn’t get your soles wet. That’s how deep I am.”

  The grave is getting deeper. Wylie has taken it down six inches.

  “Then I’ll have to settle for a tame one. For the time being.”

  “I knew a middle-aged bachelor name of Harp Lewis married himself a tame Indian. Got her out of a reservation school run by a Methodist preacher,” says McAdoo cheerfully.

  “Just a minute,” I tell him. “Let me get my note pad and pencil out.”

  “Went to this Methodist and told him he was on the lookout for a likely wife, could the preacher recommend one of his girls? Methodist told Harp to come back in a week for an answer, so’s the preacher could take it to the Lord. Preacher took it to his wife and the Lord, seemed the two were in agreement. When Harp come back in a week’s time, Methodist told him he had but one girl he’d recommend as suitable for a white man, Ruth Big Head. Not much to look at – but housebroke. Preacher’s wife took Harp to the schoolhouse and gave him a peek at her through the window. She was a good, straight, strong girl but pocked and pitted some from the smallpox. Of course that wasn’t going to put Harp off – he must have been crowding fifty and he knew he wasn’t the answer to any woman’s prayers. Things were falling into order. Old Harp Lewis coming along just then wanting a woman was fortunate for the Methodists because they’d educated this girl up to where they didn’t want her marrying one of her own kind. Christian Indian girls generally backslid and went weedy if they took a buck for a husband. And Ruth Big Head was the biggest success these Methodists had ever had with a squaw and they didn’t want their good work dashed. They’d taught her how to bake and sew and wash floors and keep a garden and milk a cow and read her Bible and sing hymns. They told Harp she was as fine a Christian girl as you could s
hake out of a tree in Boston. ‘Sounds good to me,’ said Harp. ‘I’ll take her.’ And he did. He gave her father five horses for her, and the Methodist forty dollars for mission work and another ten to marry them.

  “Harp oughtn’t have had no complaints. What them Methodists said about Ruth was gospel truth. They’d trained the Indian out of her so that most any of the white women in those parts could have took a lesson from her on proper deportment and staying sober. She kept a fine house. Kept herself neat as a pin – always wore a starched sunbonnet and a clean apron. Couldn’t keep her out of a church or stop her praying. She was a purely upstanding Indian but for one particular. You couldn’t get a pair of Christian shoes on her feet. She couldn’t abide them. Said they bit her feet like a dog. Wore nothing but moccasins.

  “Now Harp was one of those fellers who are mindful how they stand in the community and he took it hard his wife wouldn’t wear shoes. It shamed him his wife should pull up just that much short of civilized. When neighbours called on the Lewises to pay a visit, all the time Harp would be watching them to see if their eyes didn’t go straying to his woman’s feet. They were married twenty years and every present he bought her – birthday, anniversary, Christmas – was a new pair of shoes. And every new pair of shoes she carted off to the church and put in the relief box for China. Old Harp Lewis must have put new mail-order shoes on many a China Lily.

  “It was just in the matter of shoes she didn’t satisfy. Harp had six kids off of her and people said they was the most mannerly, politest kids you could wish for. And people give her the credit for the raising of them, too. Of course, she had such a reputation as a righteous Christian by then it slipped folks’ minds she was an Indian. They overlooked the facts, you might say. Harp, who wasn’t much given to darkening the door of a church, used to say he was the heathen in the family. But he weren’t. There weren’t but one Indian in the Lewis clan.

  “Winter of 1910 or thereabouts, Harp come down with the pneumonia. He was an old man by then, in his seventies, coughed the life out of himself. Ruth Lewis tended him and prayed over him day and night for a week. Hardly slept, hardly ate, end of it looked like a brown ghost. When Harp died she closed his eyes and walked out of the room. No weeping, no wailing. Her oldest boy give her a few minutes to be alone with her grief and then followed after. Found her in the kitchen. She’d already sawed the little finger on her left hand off with a butcher knife. Blood all over. She was working on the little finger on the right when her son came in. Halfway through the bone.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I say.

  “I think she was a Crow,” says Shorty. “Crows’ll do that when family dies, take a piece of flesh off themselves as a sign of mourning. Finger, piece of muscle, flesh for flesh. The preacher threw a roaring fit about it, reminded Mrs. Lewis the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, that what she done to the temple was wrong, unholy wrong. She didn’t buy it. He might as well have tried to talk her out of her moccasins, for all the effect it had. Wouldn’t admit a speck of wrong or harm in what she done. She didn’t wear no shoes to Harp’s funeral either.” He pauses. “She gave old Harp two fingers for love. And she was a tame Indian. Makes you wonder.”

  Working in shifts, we get the grave dug by early afternoon and return to the bunkhouse. Shorty builds a fire in the stove and heats some water. We all have a good wash and, after, Shorty and Wylie shave with McAdoo’s straight razor. Wylie’s shirt has a torn sleeve so McAdoo gives him a clean one of his to wear and then slaps the dust out of Easton’s trousers with a broom until he judges him presentable for a funeral. Then he tells Wylie to sit on the bed and keep out of his way while he fries us some bacon, onions, and potatoes. We are halfway through dinner when a gritty rattle shakes the bunkhouse in a spasm of wind. Shorty looks up from his plate, listens. Another sharp gust follows, flying grit pings on the single windowpane, and a trembling hum fills the bunkhouse as the wind ebbs in a slow, sobbing withdrawal.

  “It sounds like it’s turning dirty out there.” Shorty pushes away his plate. “Soon as I dress, we best go.” He retrieves a box from under his bed, and takes out of it a black frock coat, the kind of coat nobody has worn since the turn of the century. The coat turns him angular, turns his shoulders and elbows sharper, his face more harshly lined, his eyes more unflinching. He becomes a daguerreotype from the last century, one of those stern, severe faces that their descendants can feel weighing them across the chasm of years, judging them small, insignificant, unworthy people.

  “Comb your hair,” says McAdoo to Wylie.

  We go out bareheaded. Wylie, his hair glistening with water, his rooster-tail dabbed down with a bit of soap, McAdoo with a coil of rope in each hand. A hot wind claps a burning hand over my mouth and nose robbing me of breath. In the slack, sallow sky the sun burns wanly behind a veil of blowing dirt. Tumbleweed bowls by and the low brush heaves and surges all about us. We lean into the wind and push it like a stalled vehicle, slowly, one step at a time, past the ruined house and up the slope to the waiting coffin, our hands shielding our eyes.

  McAdoo demonstrates how to buck the coffin into the grave, a rope through each of the corner casket handles on the diagonal. When the wind suddenly drops, we can hear the casket knocking the sides of the grave, creaking and groaning, the handles threatening to tear loose. Trying to brake the last couple feet of drop, the hemp sears my palms and I almost get jerked into the hole. The coffin lands with a hollow bang. McAdoo swears, peers into the grave.

  “It’s all right,” he shouts, making himself heard above the wind. “She held together.”

  We thrust our shovels into the heaped ground, filling the grave. When we lift them, the dirt blows off the blades in tawdry streamers, whipping into our faces. The very air is flavoured with earth. It coats my lips and teeth, I taste it souring in the back of my throat, feel it rawly scratching in my eyes. Everywhere dust is lapping and pluming the land, moving toward the horizon like the creeping, ragged smoke of wholesale destruction. McAdoo stiff-backed in his black coat, Wylie with the burial ropes knotted in his hands, and me. Three figures ghostly and obscure in the shifting, earthly smoke.

  So begins the interment of Miles Easton, with a grey smudge rolling across the landscape, edging into the sky like a nasty stain. With this and a memory of the grief of that other stranger, of the funerary rites of a Crow woman, who cut a part of herself away to join whatever she had lost.

  The wake lasts past midnight, past a bottle and a half of whisky. Wylie Easton lies collapsed on one of the bunk beds. He has cried himself into a drunken sleep, racking sobs and rage. Now his mouth hangs innocently open like a slumbering child’s, his chest rising serenely and falling softly. Outside the wind is drumming against the bunkhouse like a stormy sea against a breakwater. McAdoo has lit a coal fire and left the stove door open for the light it throws, a pulsing illumination which, like the wind, billows and recedes. We are both far gone in drink and strange melancholy reveries. I keep remembering last night and Rachel. McAdoo and I haven’t spoken in half an hour and scarcely moved except to reach down to the bottle between us on the floor, to swig from it and carefully replace it on its spot. For the first time, I see on McAdoo’s face the brutal, haunted look which marked it on the film clip at Chance’s house.

  He drains the dregs of the bottle, sets it down on the floor, topples it with a push of a finger. The bottle rolls across the temporary silence in the room; the wind is in a lull.

  “Dead soldier,” says McAdoo and jabs at it with his toe. It rolls some more.

  I feel like shit. My leg is throbbing with that old, familiar, sick, steady ache. I happen to be carrying a bag of marijuana Rachel gave me for my birthday. She said when the pain in my leg got too bad to use it. When I put it in my pocket this morning I thought I would be using it for other reasons, but now I think the time has come to roll myself some relief. McAdoo watches me.

  “You ever use this?” I ask, lighting up.

  “There ain’t much I ain’t used in my time �
�� or used me. Pass it on.”

  I hand him the bag and ease smoke out of my lungs. “Vipah,” I intone to the glowing end of the joint.

  “I spent a winter in Mexico once,” Shorty says. “I smoked more of this than ever I smoked tobacco that winter. I preferred it to that Mexicali liquor shit, worm in the bottle.”

  “You’ve been around. Seen some things,” I say, encouraging him to talk.

  “I seen some things,” he agrees in an expressionless voice. I wonder if he isn’t seeing them again, wonder if his eyes aren’t directed inward, directed back in time. They are hooded, secretive. He puts the twist of reefer in his mouth, sucks deeply. We sit holding the smoke captive in our lungs, McAdoo so still he hardly seems human in the light of the banked fire.

  “You’ve done some things,” I say again, prompting.

  “I done some things.” His eyes meet mine. Suddenly, the pool of ruddy light in which we huddle acquires the privacy, the intimacy of a confessional box, drawing us closer together, making us one against the shadows in the room, one against whatever they might obscure and shelter.

  I nudge him on. “Christ, Shorty, it’s been a long day. Don’t send me home empty-handed.”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “Give me a few wild Indians.”

  “You’re a driving man, Vincent.”

  “That old world’s gone. You can bring it back for us. Raise it up like Lazarus from the dead.”

  “Preacher Vincent,” he says.

  The wind moves outside, dark and elemental, like the life I imagine the man before me has lived. For an instant, I hungrily grasp at the wilderness McAdoo holds clutched inside him, not for Chance’s sake, but because of my need.

  “Tell me,” I whisper.

  Just then Easton stirs on his cot. He rises up on his elbow and stares at us with a sleep-blinded face. “Shorty, Shorty,” he calls, like a child waking lost in a strange bed.