Famished Lover

by Alan Cumyn

  What was I doing?

  I turned and walked back to the station. Nobody had seen me. I might as well have been completely alone in the universe, a puppet turning this way and that. The train whistle sounded — already a mile or more away.

  I walked to the telegraph booth and composed and sent a message to Frame:

  FAMILY MATTERS STOP WILL MAKE UP TIME STOP THANKS CROME

  “All right. Everyone calm down!” Collins says when we are safely back in barracks. “We have to give him a stumbling chance. Does anybody know anything about this? Did Witherspoon plan it all by himself?”

  Nobody knows. Napier thinks Witherspoon had a knife and a compass stuck in his mattress, and they aren’t there now. McGuire thinks Witherspoon was hoarding food and might have been sewing a pouch for it that he said was for tobacco. Findlay says Witherspoon got quiet all of a sudden after the last mail. “He only got one letter from Beatrice.”

  “One letter!” Eastman says. “That man gets more mail from his bloody Beatrice than the rest of us combined. So what if he only got one letter?”

  “Maybe he’d had enough of the fine cuisine,” Findlay says.

  “Listen,” Collins says, his voice still low but stiff enough to bring us to silence. “We’re all going to fry for this, and that’s all right. But it does no good to keep bloody secrets. If anybody else wants to leg it home, then let us in on it so we can help and prepare. I’ve seen these solo skylarks before. They usually come to no good, and we all get strafed whether we knew anything or not. So we might as well know. Understood?”

  Napier fishes something out of the little heating box, a half-burned envelope with Witherspoon’s name on it. “Hold on!” he says, waving it in front of us even as it crumbles to ashes. “This is it! The note from Beatrice! She’s either broke his heart or promised him something so wild he’s chasing after her.”

  “Bring it here,” Collins says, with enough steel chain in his voice to drag Napier to him. He takes the letter and examines it briefly. Then he returns the envelope to the heater and blows on the coals until it all goes up.

  “Let’s not become fucking animals,” he says.

  I could hear her cries some distance from the farmhouse, and began running then, although something else must have been tugging even before then. Why else had I gotten off the train?

  Lillian was screaming as if her body were being torn open by machines. Yet her father sat on the front porch sorting through a box of rusted tools. “It’s all right,” he said calmly. “Maisie Campbell’s on her way. And I’ve sent for the doctor.”

  “Is no one in there with her?” I yelled.

  It seemed he pitied me, getting this upset over something like a birth. “It’s not our place,” he said.

  I stormed into the bedroom. Lillian was kneeling on the bed screaming into the pillow, her hindquarters hoisted into the air.

  “Lillian! What can I do?”

  She’d shut her eyes and her muscles seemed coiled like twisted rope. She huffed and groaned, and the sheets beneath her were soaked.

  “Is . . . is it coming?” she moaned.

  I looked, but didn’t know what I was seeing. A flash of pink amidst blood and hair.

  “I think so.”

  A spasm drove the breath from her lungs. She grasped my arm and moaned again rapidly into the pillow. When the tumult had passed she said in a tiny voice, “It’s killing me.”

  “You’ll be all right.”

  She had not released her grip. She screamed again into the bed.

  “You’ll get through it. You’ll forget how much it hurts.” She reacted then as if struck in the belly and sat up suddenly, then leaned against me, thrusting her chin hard into the flesh of my shoulder. I straightened up to bear the load.

  When the spasm had passed once more she said, “What makes you . . . such an expert?”

  She snapped her weight against my shoulder again so hard I nearly folded. I leaned into her and held on.

  “Maybe . . . you should lie down.”

  Again and again, spasm after spasm, and where was the bloody doctor?

  Her limbs were shaking. I eased her back onto the bed. Her eyes were shut tight now and her face looked greenish. For a moment she seemed to loll back into a ghostly stillness. Then suddenly she screamed as if being torn within by shrapnel.

  When the terror passed I looked again to see what I could of the baby. The pink slit was more pronounced now.

  “That’s better! The baby is coming. Slowly, darling, but the baby’s coming!”

  I don’t think she heard me. I moved around to grasp her hand, and she lashed out suddenly and walloped the side of my jaw. I staggered back.

  “Gaaaaawwwdd!” she screamed. “

  That’s better! Lillian, hang on, it’s coming, it’s . . .”

  I could see more clearly now. The pink slit was a heel, not a head.

  Maisie Campbell entered the room then. “What are you doing here?” she said, and I swear I could feel the cold wind on the back of my neck. “This is not your place!”

  She was a tiny woman, brown hair twisted on her head and the tendons in her neck taut as wires.

  “I’m the husband!” I declared. “

  Then go boil water!”

  She looked at Lillian splayed upon the bed. “I’ll call you when the Lord has finished His work,” she said.

  Blasphemy bangs through the door just as I am shivering myself to a semblance of sleep. He comes with dogs and other guards, all of them barking. We shuffle as slowly as we can out into the rainy night. Then we stand, as ordered, in muddy pools and stare at the barbed wire growing grey in the dying light and listen to the howling of the dogs sent out to bring back Witherspoon.

  The searchlight scans our features as the screaming of the dogs recedes further and further in the distance. I try to think of becoming a fence post — of planting myself far down in the ground and letting the stiffness of my limbs hold me up, whatever the elements.

  Finally men begin falling, and we are allowed inside the barracks to moulder and shiver in our beds. The dogs come back to camp. The rest of the night I hear them sounding in and out of my dreams. When the bell rings in the morning and we are herded out — Raus! Raus! — I feel as if I was the one who’d been scuttling about in the wet and cold, waiting for snarling beasts to snap at my throat and haul me down.

  Once again we stand as they count us over and over. Blasphemy in particular looks as if he’s going to be assigned to shovel shit in a field himself — or much worse, to feed cannons at the front — if a single further one of us disappears into the dreary countryside. When he screams at us now his face is blood red.

  It seems certain they will send us back out to the fields to work another day without any food whatsoever. Suddenly the barking resumes in the distance, but it is clearly different — yelps of triumph and self-congratulation. We stand and listen to the sickening approach. Gradually they come into view: this army of grey-clad guards with their pack of beasts on leashes and the stumbling, muddy, wretched soul, bound and hobbled yet made to march and kicked back to his feet whenever he falters.

  There is nowhere else to look but at the spectacle of With-erspoon’s torment.

  Blasphemy goes on a tirade. Prisoners of war are bound to follow orders, to obey the German officers as if they are our own, to report for duty, not to violate the generosity of our hosts.

  “Tolerate, lads,” Collins says in a calm undertone, as he is translating. “Humour the misguided fool.”

  We are being fed and housed and protected while our fellow soldiers are dying in the slaughter of the Western Front. It is our great privilege to be afforded such treatment.

  “To starve and shiver like rats,” McGuire mumbles.

  “Look grateful about it, boys,” Collins says, his bad eye running, the rain giving his face a terrible sheen. “Think about what you’re going to do with your lives when this nightmare is done.”

  The doctor finally arrived, later
in the morning, and locked himself in the bedroom with my shrieking wife and that apostle of God, Maisie Campbell. Mr. McGillis puttered about the ruins of his farm, moving boxes of bits from here to there, then back again, and winding up odd coils of loose wire and stacking rotting lumber in corners of the barn unvisited since the invention of the automobile.

  I stood by.

  The water I boiled did not seem to be needed, the soup I heated went uneaten, McGillis seemed content alone with his boxes.

  And Lillian’s shrieks pushed like glass shards beneath my skin.

  “This is the way the Lord has arranged it,” McGillis said to me on the porch, when I could not sit and I could not stand and the hours scraped by. “A breech birth could last all night. You might want to walk into town and have yourself a drink.”

  “I won’t abandon her!”

  “She might abandon you,” he said ruefully. “All depends what Jesus wants.”

  A day and a night passed, and Michael George Crome was born, a scraggy kid with crow-black hair and a healthy set of lungs and wide, blue, irresistible eyes. Lillian lay back in the shadows, chalk white and exhausted, still as death. I sat with her hour upon silent hour, holding her hand, gazing at the boy, sick with love.

  “I thought I was dying,” she said to me, and felt my face with her chilled hand. “I thought I was going to be all alone.”

  “No. You were never alone.”

  She touched my cheek where she’d struck me. “You said you would never hurt me. Do you remember, on our honeymoon?” She searched my eyes. Of course I remembered. “Now look what I’ve done to you. We can harm each other terribly, can’t we?”

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “I hardly feel it.” “

  I can’t bear to go back to Montreal. Do we have to bring Michael to those awful rooms?”

  I stayed silent.

  “Surely we can rent something better now. Frame will pay you more now that you have a baby. I’ll help you look. As soon as I’m stronger —”

  I silenced her with a kiss.

  “I just need a little bit of a garden. And Michael will need a yard to run around in. It doesn’t have to be big —”

  The boy was snuggled in my arms, wrapped in a blanket and sleeping like an old man.

  “Ramsay, look at me! What’s wrong?”

  I didn’t want to tell her. It felt as if we were all wrapped in our blanket.

  “Why can’t we get a better place? We have the money, I know we do!”

  I kissed the baby and stared at his scrunched-up, brown little face.

  “I just got the wire today,” I said, as gently as I could. “Frame’s gone under with all the rest.”

  Eight

  I’d been out of work about eight months and was trying to make a thin pair of trousers last through another season rather than spend on a new pair now. But the cold March wind cut through them. Out of optimism I’d neglected to wear galoshes as well, and so my shoes were soaked by the sudden slush of a bad storm, and I had to fight my way up the street with my hand on my hat and my face lashed with wind and snow.

  I was in no way prepared for what was waiting at the hotel. Father’s message had said simply to meet him there. He had given his room number. When I knocked on the door he was a long time answering, and when it finally opened I barely recognized him: a shrunken, pale gnome, his body wracked with coughing even as he stood before me in his shirtsleeves.

  “Father! Sit down!” He was so diminished he followed orders and meekly sat on the edge of the bed. In the dismal grey light by the window I could see better the craggy outline of his skull beneath a sagging face: the great beaklike nose, the prodigious steel grey eyebrows, the drooping ears and long teeth of age. His eyes were the most changed: their usual fierce light had given in. His hands were shaking and cold, his shoulders as thin as those I’d seen years before on starved men of many nationalities.

  “How long have you been here? Have you seen a doctor?”

  His chest heaved just to draw the slightest breath. I tried leaning him back on the bed, but he fought himself upright again and through motions with his hands, while hacking and spitting into his handkerchief, he made me realize that he needed to sit up to keep from drowning in his own fluids.

  “Just . . . just in . . . from Managua,” he said. “I was much better . . . in the warm air.”

  “Does Mother know where you are?”

  “I sent her a letter . . . from New York.” He hacked and coughed again, and the terrible shuddering recaptured his chest and shoulders. I drew the blanket round him and again felt the iciness of his limbs.

  “I was almost done with the railway there . . . in Rivas. But they ran out of money and then . . . this hit.”

  “Have you eaten?”

  He nodded then fell into another weak-breathed round of coughing. After it subsided I brought up a bowl of broth from the hotel kitchen. Gradually, as he sipped, he gained control of his voice and breathing.

  “Have you found work yet?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve heard of some openings. We’re fine. Lillian and the baby are well.” I did not tell him how little of the savings remained, how fearful we had become of each month’s remorseless expenses.

  “Everybody healthy?”

  I assured him we were. “Except for a certain lack of sleep. Michael is a cherub by day and a howling terror at night.”

  “Montreal has always had rotten air. I’m sorry I brought you here when you were young. I suppose you’ve gained an attachment of some sort.”

  “There’s work here. Or there will be again.”

  He looked at me dubiously. “It’s a bloody awful system. And I’m not just saying that because I never won for long.” He winced then as some stabbing pain ripped through him. Finally he let out a deep, exhausted sigh. “I’ve spent half my life waiting to get paid by one group or another. Bridges, harbours, tunnels . . . those I can build. But trying to get paid . . . now that’s terrible work.” He looked around as if just discovering his surroundings. It was not the finest hotel but not the worst either. The mattress was sunken and the curtains looked rat-chewed, but it had heat and the sheets were clean and pressed.

  “Live in the country if you can,” he said, and started wheezing again, his great fists doubled in a gesture of fight. Perspiration now bathed his face as if the soup had gone straight to his pores.

  I found a towel by the sink and wiped his brow, and for some time he closed his eyes. He marshalled his considerable will to smother the cough into submission.

  “Have you room for an old man?” he asked weakly. “And Mother too, when she arrives. I don’t expect I’ll last more than a couple of months.” He stared coldly into his chilling bowl of soup.

  “Yes, of course,” I said. “Plenty of room.”

  He turned his gaze out the window. “I hate it when the workers are starved,” he said finally. “I could have finished that line and the backers would have made their money.” He took another deliberate sip of the broth. “Those rich bastards, they’re not entirely ignorant men. They don’t expect horses to work if they don’t get fed.”

  Some days later Rufus arrived from Boston in a black coat and tie, as if he expected to be attending a funeral. As always his face shone like a polished apple and his eyes were full of the easiness of things. He had brought his new wife with him. She wore a cloche hat and pearls and fashionable brand-new shoes, and her eyes scanned our sorry flat quickly and with undisguised pity.

  “You must be Vanessa,” I said. “Hello, Rufus.”

  We’d missed the wedding. And now Lillian stood with the baby beside those two shiny, rich young lovers, looking as if she should be sent out to wash the potatoes. I was aware, acutely, of how tired her dress was, of the unwashed plainness of her hair, the hardness that had crept into her face over the accumulating months of bad news and rotten luck. She fit in now with the poverty of our surroundings, with the darkness of the room, the lack of running water and toilet facilities, the
sheet pinned across the main quarters to make a stab at privacy. We both did.

  Rufus too was examining things closely. “Are you all living here?”

  Mother came out then from the other room where Father was sleeping. She’d grown stout in recent years and was not as easy in the limbs as she used to be. And with Vanessa she too looked nervous, afraid of offending. She shook hands formally with the tall, slender, pale young woman, then embraced her youngest son, Rufus stooping to envelop the round brown body that was so far from the Colombian plantation where Father had first spied her as a striking young girl.

  “I’m so glad you coming,” she said. She had been crying and crying for days, ever since she’d arrived from Victoria, and had hardly left Father’s side. For hours, while he lay sleeping or semi-dazed, she would sit stroking his hand and weeping. And when he was awake he would insist that she pull herself together and read to her from Shakespeare and Homer, quietly nudging her when she dozed off.

  Now I sat outside and smoked on the stoop while Rufus and Vanessa visited with the two of them. The sky was as blue and clear as it gets in Montreal. A group of children played stickball down on the street. The best hitter was a skinny girl with long legs who knew how to put every ounce of her little body into smashing that ball. They cheered and yelled and laughed while I felt numb inside, as if all my blood had turned to grease.

  Rufus came out and sat beside me. He refused the offer of a cigarette. “Vanessa doesn’t like me smoking,” he said lamely. But his face was full of another thought. My cigarette was hand-rolled, not the fancy kind he was used to. I had a sudden memory of him showing up at my door shortly after he’d landed his first job: night accountant at the Ritz-Carlton. He was green as lettuce and I’d been to the wars and somehow he thought he would impress me with his new position. I asked him the pay — it was pitiful. “But think of the wealthy men I’ll meet!” he said, his face already full of the accomplishment. Just the way he was looking now. Like a young scamp desperate to prove himself the better man.