One-Eyed Jacks

by Brad Smith

  “We have to talk,” she said to him.

  “You can talk to yourself. I’m going to bed.”

  “Half the farm is Tommy’s.”

  “I said no. You don’t listen too good, woman.”

  He was moving away from her.

  “Goddamn it,” she said. “Right is right.”

  He turned at the profanity. “Did your brother bring out the mick in you? Don’t you know that’s always been your worse side, Margaret?” He pointed. “Now get upstairs, I’ve had enough of it.”

  When she made no move to obey, he dismissed her obstinance — her existence even — with a flip of his hand and started up the stairs himself. Her voice stopped him.

  “Now you listen to me,” she said evenly. “You spoiled, self-centred, tit-sucking son of a bitch. Half the farm is Tommy’s or I’m leaving, and I mean tonight. Come morning you’ll be without a wife. Now what do you think those self-righteous, whiskey-drinking jackasses down at the Lions Hall will say about that?”

  On the stairs Pete Vedder knew his life was changing.

  And he wondered why he was relieved that it was so.

  FOUR

  In the morning they had a full breakfast — eggs and side bacon and potatoes and a home-baked loaf, all provided by Peg the night before. Afterward T-Bone washed the dishes in the sink and then dried them and put them away in all the wrong cupboards. He’d found a faded checkered apron somewhere in the kitchen and he wore this while he cooked and cleaned. Wiping his hands on the apron front, he put Tommy in mind of his grandmother, whose apron it had been. He told T-Bone this.

  “You never tole me your grandmother was an ugly coloured man, Thomas Cochrane,” T-Bone smiled.

  “It’s not something you brag about.”

  After breakfast Tommy took a walk back the lane, which split the farm in half. Using a broken shovel handle for a staff, he walked the entire ninety acres, land that he’d known so well for so many years that he couldn’t believe he’d ever been away. But then land didn’t change the way people and buildings did, the land remained the same because it couldn’t be changed — if it could, then some dumb son of a bitch would change it, and for the worse, you could bet a week’s meal money on that one.

  Still, there were things that needed attending on the farm. The wooden bridge over the creek had begun to fall in — after eighty years it could be excused. The timbers were white oak, strong as steel in their day, but after eighty springs of high water, dry rot had taken its toll. But there was plenty of oak yet in the bush lot at the back of the farm, the same lot that had built the original bridge. Tommy would build it again, and it would last another eighty years.

  At least, that’s what he’d like to do.

  The creek was high now from the rain, flooding the bank into the pasture field between the stream and the bush. The field where James Cochrane had summered his cattle; the creek was spring fed and had water all year round. The same field where Tommy had broken his arm trying to ride a yearling steer. The steer had had other ideas and ran Tommy into a hickory along the fence row, fracturing the big bone below the elbow and rubbing Tommy raw on the rough bark. James Cochrane had laughed and said that that was why God invented horses — so chowderheads like Tommy wouldn’t be tempted to ride cattle.

  The field behind the barn — the twelve-acre field — had been plowed; last fall, Tommy guessed, and walking the headlands he found an Indian arrowhead in a furrow near the lane. He slipped the flint into his pocket and walked back to the barn, where he took a shovel and pitchfork and spent the rest of the morning cleaning out the calf pen and the horse stalls.

  The barn was in good shape yet. The roof had been been kept up, and the eavestroughs, too. Those were the essentials for keeping a barn in trim, James Cochrane had always said. And Tommy remembered most of what his grandfather told him. It was strange, but if someone you loved told you something at age eight, you regarded it as gospel the rest of your life.

  The barn had once been purgatory to Tommy, though, representing nothing but work and more of the same. Nothing personal against the building, it was just that shovelling shit out of a calf pen ranked pretty far down a teenager’s list of preferred activities.

  The top boards on the horse stalls needed replacing, worn down by wind-sucking and gnawing. How many horses had occupied these stalls in James Cochrane’s day? In Tommy’s day even? In his mind he listed the names he could remember. Dancer, Big Elmer, Sure-Shot, Candy, Angel, BillyBob, Apache (Tommy’s paint), Thunder, Little Elmer (the mule), Fast Eddie.

  Tommy was staring into the stalls when T-Bone came in behind him. T-Bone followed the look but missed the horses.

  “What you starin’ at, Thomas?”

  Tommy turned with a start. “Nothing,” he said. “Ghosts.”

  “Don be sayin’ that.” T-Bone glanced about the barn. “I looking for a corn broom to sweep that house out. See one out here, Thomas?”

  Tommy shook his head and leaned his arms against the closest stall.

  “Your granddaddy a horse man, Thomas?”

  “He loved horses,” Tommy agreed. “Had ’em all his life, wouldn’t be without one, no matter how hard the times.” He laughed softly. “You know what galled him though?”

  “No, sir.”

  “He never once saw a foal born. A mare won’t foal if anyone’s around, as a rule.”

  “That private business for a horse,” T-Bone said. “That much I know.”

  Tommy smiled again. “Granddad had a dapple grey mare — I forget her name now. When she was in foal he was bound and bent he was going to see that colt born. It was winter, I remember, and he had her in that big stall there. When she went into labour, Granddad went to the house and brought back a bottle of Bushmills, sat on that railing and waited. All night he waited, and so did that mare. Colder than a witch’s tit, too, it was. Damn near dawn, Grandma came out and found Granddad almost frozen, the Bushmills all gone. She finally talked him into the house for a cup of coffee and a sit by the stove. After fifteen minutes, he headed right back for the barn. And that grey mare and her foal were standing there side by side, waiting for him.”

  T-Bone smiled. “That was a stubborn mare, Thomas.”

  “A stubborn old man, too. He wouldn’t talk to my grandmother for a week afterwards.”

  “That’s a fine horse story, Thomas.” T-Bone turned for the door. “But 1 got to find a broom, get that house swept out. Getting on suppertime.”

  “Molly,” Tommy said suddenly.

  “How’s that?”

  “The mare’s name was Molly.”

  Tommy went back to his pitchfork. He heard a car as he was finishing up and he walked to the house and found Pete Vedder inside, standing nervous and impatient under the smiling scrutiny of T-Bone Pike.

  “Mr. Pete like to talk to you,” T-Bone said.

  “Well, let him talk.”

  “I’ve been thinking this thing over, Tom,” Pete said. “And it seems to me that half this place is rightfully yours.”

  “That’s how it seems to you?” Tommy asked. “Seems to me it didn’t seem to you like that yesterday. You coming apart at the seams, Pete?”

  “You might try to understand why I did what I did,” Pete said. “The old man wasn’t himself. Who knows what he might have done? I was real worried about him, Tommy.”

  “Well, that’s the kind of man you are, Pete.”

  “You can save your wisecracks,” Pete said evenly. “I’m not one of your pals from the gym. If you want to listen, I’ll tell you how it is. I own half this farm. And farming is my business, it’s how I support myself and how I support your sister, you understand?”

  “Sure, I understand.”

  Pete nodded and then stole a quick, uncomfortable look at T-Bone.

  “We understand,” T-Bone assured him.

  “What I’m saying is — if you want this place, you’ll have to come up with five thousand dollars,” Pete said.

  “Five thousand,” Tommy r
epeated.

  “Five,” T-Bone said.

  “You got the money?” Pete wanted to know.

  “Sure,” Tommy said. “I’ll have to go into Toronto to get it. I’ve got money there. I’ll take my grandfather’s truck, I see it sitting down at your place.”

  Pete Vedder had been using the pickup to haul grain. His own truck was just a few months old and he didn’t like to get it dirty.

  “The licence is run out on that truck,” he said.

  “You let us worry about that,” Tommy said. “We’ll be driving the truck to Toronto.”

  “I wouldn’t dally if I was you,” Pete said. “I got a solid offer on this place not an hour ago. Ten thousand dollars. I put him off for thirty days, but when the time’s up, I’ll let him have it. You’ll get your half of the money and then you can be on your way.”

  “Wouldn’t that bring a tear to your eye,” Tommy said.

  Pete turned to the door. “No, it wouldn’t,” he said. “I’ve had enough of you to last six more years, Tom. You got thirty days.”

  Tommy was following him across the room. He stopped his brother-in-law by the front door.

  “Where’s the desk, Pete?” he asked, gesturing into the den.

  “What?”

  “My grandfather’s rolltop desk. Where is it?”

  For a moment Pete had a notion to lie. He decided against.

  “Its in my office, “ he said. “I’m using it.”

  “Bring it back.”

  Pete wouldn’t learn. “Seems to me that half that desk belongs to me,” he said. “Maybe I’ll have my hired man cut it in half.”

  “Whatever you do to that desk, I’ll do to you,” Tommy told him. “Bring it back, Pete. And while you’re at it, get that famous hired hand to bring a mower down and cut the grass around here.”

  “He’s got other work to do,” Pete said.

  “The desk and the grass, Pete,” Tommy repeated. “Or should I talk to Peg about it?”

  And he saw Pete’s eyes go funny and his face change and Tommy saw how it was now and he damned near laughed out loud. Pete managed to nod unhappily.

  “See you later, Pete,” Tommy said in dismissal.

  Pete shook his head. “You’re a long ways from God, Tom. A long ways.”

  “I don’t know if either one of us has lived so good that we should be measuring our distance from God, Pete,” Tommy told him.

  He followed Pete outside and watched as he drove away. T-Bone was standing inside, head cocked.

  “You awful hard on that man today, Thomas.”

  “I think,” Tommy said, “he’d better get used to it.”

  “He don’t like a coloured man, I can tell that,” T-Bone said. “T-Bone make him nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.”

  “He say something to you, Bones?”

  “He didn’t say nothing. He don’t have to, he show his thinking like a bad right hand. T-Bone Pike been around enough men like that to pick him out right off.” He crossed to the couch and sat down to rub his hand across his stomach. “Why you telling him you got five thousand dollars, Thomas? You only draw two thousand for the Rinaldi fight and I ’spect most of that gone. Where you getting any five thousand dollars?”

  Tommy stood in the doorway and pulled a wad of American bills from his pocket. T-Bone, on the couch, was beginning to think about lunch. Been a while since they’d eaten regular meals.

  “A hundred eighty,” Tommy said when he’d finished counting.

  “You ‘bout forty-eight hundred short, Thomas.”

  “We got thirty days, Bones. This one-eighty will bankroll that. We’re going to Toronto.”

  “I been there one time,” T-Bone said. “Fought down at the hockey gardens there. Fought a man who work on the railroad, a coloured man big as a house, and I knocked him colder than a well-digger’s belt buckle in the third round. Bust my knuckle on his hard head.”

  “Well, there’ll be none of that this time,” Tommy Cochrane said and he closed the door.

  FIVE

  Herm Bell was stepping smartly through the failing daylight along Parliament Street. He was wearing his dark green suit with the pegged pants — Sinatra all the way — with a pink shirt and his lucky Atlantic City tie. He’d stopped in the drug store in front of Toot’s pool room and bought a new rat-tail comb and a tube of Brylcreem and he’d gone into the bathroom and worked his hair until it was just right, ducktailed in the back and in front curled across his forehead with enough grease to hold its own in a typhoon. On the way out he’d bought two packs of Player’s filters and a new Zippo lighter and a deck of Bicycle cards, just in case.

  Herm had had a hell of a day and he wasn’t about to let it end. He’d got up that morning in a bad way, with the devil’s own hangover and a cut beneath his eye from a fight last night over on Shuter. His mother had ragged him from the time he rolled out of bed until she left for work at the five and dime. When did he plan to get a job? Why did he drink? His father drank, where did it get him? Why was he fighting, couldn’t he get along?

  Herm wasn’t exactly flush with answers to those kind of questions on a good day. This morning, he’d kept his mouth shut tight, searched the house for cigarettes and waited for his mother to leave.

  But then luck — rumoured to be a lady — came to call. And she stayed all day, bless her fickle heart. Her calling card was the change purse Herm found on the sidewalk as he trudged foggily to Lem’s Diner for breakfast. The purse held three dimes, a penny, and a crisp ten-dollar bill. There was no identification in the wallet, sparing Herm any potential moral dilemma. True, he could run an ad — but the thoroughbreds were running at Greenwood and this perfumed lady was blowing in his ear. The change provided streetcar fare to the track and half the sawbuck went on the nose of a steel-grey three-year-old — like his father, Herm was a sucker for a grey horse — named Early Hour, a winless gelding who beat the field going away and returned fifty-eight dollars on the five.

  Herm then risked twenty to show on another grey, this one Kenny Boy, who went off at thirty to one and finished second to pay Herm eighty bucks on the show ticket.

  It was house money then, and Herm laid fifty to win on a third grey, this one the favourite, Village Square, a two-to-one shot who lost by a nose, but then won the race on an inquiry. Herm collected a C-note the hard way. He took the inquiry as a sign though and he folded his winnings ($213, he counted) and walked out into the gorgeous summer sun. Life was good again, at last. Outside the track he lent a fin to Daytona Dave Burns who had a hot horse and nothing to bet.

  Herm then had passed the afternoon shooting Russian billiards in the rear of the Stafford Hotel. He drank a half-dozen bottles of lager and added another twelve bucks to his roll. Yeah, life was good, and the lady on his arm was acting like she had no place to go.

  And now he was on Parliament, checking the bars and the pool halls, the alleys and the flats, the restaurants and hotels. He was looking for a game and he didn’t particularly care what kind. Cards, dice, midget wrestling — he’d bet anything today. Herm Bell was hot after a cold, cold season and he would enjoy the heat while it lasted.

  Darkness on the street fell like soft velvet over happy Herm, and he went into the beverage room of the Boston Hotel where he gathered a pair of draught at the bar and went to sit with Stan Jones (the elder) and Chalk Johnson, who’d come out of Millhaven a week earlier and had been drunk as a failed preacher every day since. Herm sat down and kept his good fortune to himself. You didn’t brag on holding money in these parts.

  “Good day, gents,” he said. “Or good evening, I guess. Night has fallen.”

  “Who fell?” Chalk asked.

  “You don’t buy a beer for your friends, Herm?” Stan the elder asked. Stan was flat busted and had been nursing the same lager for half an hour. “I hope Frank Bell raised his boy better than that,” he said, figuring to shame Herm into standing for a round.

  Herm’s wad was in his left pants pocket.
He’d slid three singles in his right coming in and he showed these now.

  “Three bucks to my name, Stash,” he said. “But a man looks after his friends.” He called to the waiter, told him to bring a pair over.

  “You’re in a hell of a fine mood,” Stan said, waiting happily for his free beer.

  “Why shouldn’t I be, Stash?” Herm laughed. “I’m young, good-looking and out of work. I got it made in the shade.”

  Chalk Johnson blinked in surprise at the full beer in front of him. “Wha sis?” he asked.

  “Nice to be out — eh, Chalk?” Herm asked. Then he looked at Stan the elder. “They playing any cards over at Gino’s tonight, Stash? I feel like a little game.”

  Stan narrowed his pig eyes. “You gonna play poker with three bucks in your pocket?”

  “I got a pal up the street owes me half a hundred,” Herm told him. “Maybe I can get him to spring, if I can find a game.”

  “Well, Gino’s in Italy,” Stan the elder said. “He took his mother over. Some cousin or something died, Gino told the old lady he’d take her over if they went sixty-forty on anything she got out of the will.”

  “She went for that?”

  “I heard they cut cards on the percentage.”

  Herm drank off the first of his beers and set the empty glass aside. He took a Player’s from his pack and offered one to Stan the elder, who declined.

  “Not good for my physical conditioning,” said Stan, who had the body of an ailing aardvark. “But I might know where there’s a game. Close by, but I’d like to play myself, you know.”

  “I ain’t the Bank of Montreal, Stash,” Herm told him. “I bought you a beer.”

  “Montreal?” Chalk Johnson asked and he fell asleep in his chair.

  “Okay,” Stan agreed. “There’s a running game every Wednesday night over at Fat Ollie’s on Queen Street. Half a yard to sit down and it’s straight poker, no wild cards. The game starts at midnight.”