Dance of the Happy Shades (6 page)

My father baited the trap again using some pieces of yellow, winter-wrinkled apple. He put the rat’s body in a dark sack which he carried slung over his shoulder, like a pedlar in a picture. When he cut the apple I had seen the skinning knife, its slim bright blade.

Then we went along the river, the Wawanash River, which was high, running full, silver in the middle where the sun hit it and where it arrowed in to its swiftest motion. That is the
current, I thought, and I pictured the current as something separate from the water, just as the wind was separate from the air and had its own invading shape. The banks were steep and slippery and lined with willow bushes, still bare and bent over and looking weak as grass. The noise the river made was not loud but deep, and seemed to come from away down in the middle of it, some hidden place where the water issued with a roar from underground.

The river curved, I lost my sense of direction. In the traps we found more rats, released them, shook them and hid them in the sack, replaced the bait. My face, my hands, my feet grew cold, but I did not mention it. I could not, to my father. And he never told me to be careful, to stay away from the edge of the water, he took it for granted that I would have sense enough not to fall in. I never asked how far we were going, or if the trapline would ever end. After a while there was a bush behind us, the afternoon darkened. It did not occur to me, not till long afterwards, that this was the same bush you could see from our yard, a fan-shaped hill rising up in the middle of it with bare trees in wintertime that looked like bony little twigs against the sky.

Now the bank, instead of willows, grew thick bushes higher than my head. I stayed on the path, about halfway up the bank, while my father went down to the water. When he bent over the trap, I could no longer see him. I looked around slowly and saw something else. Further along, and higher up the bank, a man was making his way down. He made no noise coming through the bushes and moved easily, as if he followed a path I could not see. At first I could just see his head and the upper part of his body. He was dark, with a high bald forehead, hair long behind the ears, deep vertical creases in his cheeks. When the bushes thinned I could see the rest of him, his long clever legs, thinness, drab camouflaging clothes, and what he carried in his hand, gleaming where the sun caught it—a little axe, or hatchet.

I never moved to warn or call my father. The man crossed my path somewhere ahead, continuing down to the river. People say they have been paralyzed by fear, but I was transfixed, as if struck by lightning, and what hit me did not feel like fear so much as recognition. I was not surprised. This is the sight that does not surprise you, the thing you have always known was there that comes so naturally, moving delicately and contentedly and in no hurry, as if it was made, in the first place, from a wish of yours, a hope of something final, terrifying. All my life I had known there was a man like this and he was behind doors, around the corner at the dark end of a hall. So now I saw him and just waited, like a child in an old negative, electrified against the dark noon sky, with blazing hair and burned-out Orphan Annie eyes. The man slipped down through the bushes to my father. And I never thought, or even hoped for, anything but the worst.

My father did not know. When he straightened up, the man was not three feet away from him and hid him from me. I heard my father’s voice come out, after a moment’s delay, quiet and neighbourly.

“Hello, Joe. Well. Joe. I haven’t seen you in a long time.”

The man did not say a word, but edged around my father giving him a close look. “Joe, you know me,” my father told him. “Ben Jordan. I been out looking at my traps. There’s a lot of good rats in the river this year, Joe.”

The man gave a quick not-trusting look at the trap my father had baited.

“You ought to set a line out yourself.”

No answer. The man took his hatchet and chopped lightly at the air.

“Too late this year, though. The river is already started to go down.”

“Ben Jordan,” the man said with a great splurt, a costly effort, like somebody leaping over a stutter.

“I thought you’d recognize me, Joe.”

“I never knew it was you, Ben. I thought it was one them Silases.”

“Well I been telling you it was me.”

“They’s down here all the time choppin my trees and pullin down my fences. You know they burned me out, Ben. It was them done it.”

“I heard about that,” my father said.

“I didn’t know it was you, Ben. I never knew it was you. I got this axe, I just take it along with me to give them a little scare. I wouldn’t of if I’d known it was you. You come on up and see where I’m living now.”

My father called me. “I got my young one out following me today.”

“Well you and her both come up and get warm.”

We followed this man, who still carried and carelessly swung his hatchet, up the slope and into the bush. The trees chilled the air, and underneath them was real snow, left over from winter, a foot, two feet deep. The tree trunks had rings around them, a curious dark space like the warmth you make with your breath.

We came out in a field of dead grass, and took a track across it to another, wider, field where there was something sticking out of the ground. It was a roof, slanting one way, not peaked, and out of the roof came a pipe with a cap on it, smoke blowing out. We went down the sort of steps that lead to a cellar, and that was what it was—a cellar with a roof on. My father said, “Looks like you fixed it up all right for yourself, Joe.”

“It’s warm. Being down in the ground the way it is, naturally it’s warm. I thought what is the sense of building a house up again, they burned it down once, they’ll burn it down again. What do I need a house for anyways? I got all the room I need here, I fixed it up comfortable.” He opened the door at the bottom of the steps. “Mind your head here. I don’t say everybody should live in a hole in the ground, Ben. Though animals do it, and what an animal does, by and large
it makes sense. But if you’re married, that’s another story.” He laughed. “Me, I don’t plan on getting married.”

It was not completely dark. There were the old cellar windows, letting in a little grimy light. The man lit a coal-oil lamp, though, and set it on the table.

“There, you can see where you’re at.”

It was all one room, an earth floor with boards not nailed together, just laid down to make broad paths for walking, a stove on a sort of platform, table, couch, chairs, even a kitchen cupboard, several thick, very dirty blankets of the type used in sleighs and to cover horses. Perhaps if it had not had such a terrible smell—of coal oil, urine, earth and stale heavy air—I would have recognized it as the sort of place I would like to live in myself, like the houses I made under snow drifts, in winter, with sticks of firewood for furniture, like another house I had made long ago under the verandah, my floor the strange powdery earth that never got sun or rain.

But I was wary, sitting on the dirty couch, pretending not to look at anything. My father said, “You’re snug here, Joe, that’s right.” He sat by the table, and there the hatchet lay.

“You should of seen me before the snow started to melt. Wasn’t nothing showing but a smokestack.”

“Nor you don’t get lonesome?”

“Not me. I was never one for lonesome. And I got a cat, Ben. Where is that cat? There he is, in behind the stove. He don’t relish company, maybe.” He pulled it out, a huge, grey torn with sullen eyes. “Show you what he can do.” He took a saucer from the table and a Mason jar from the cupboard and poured something into the saucer. He set it in front of the cat.

“Joe that cat don’t drink whisky, does he?”

“You wait and see.”

The cat rose and stretched himself stiffly, took one baleful look around and lowered his head to drink.

“Straight whisky,” my father said.

“I bet that’s a sight you ain’t seen before. And you ain’t likely to see it again. That cat’d take whisky ahead of milk any day. A matter of fact he don’t get no milk, he’s forgot what it’s like. You want a drink, Ben?”

“Not knowing where you got that. I don’t have a stomach like your cat.”

The cat, having finished, walked sideways from the saucer, waited a moment, gave a clawing leap and landed unsteadily, but did not fall. It swayed, pawed the air a few times, meowing despairingly, then shot forward and slid under the end of the couch.

“Joe, you keep that up, you’re not going to have a cat.”

“It don’t hurt him, he enjoys it. Let’s see, what’ve we got for the little girl to eat?” Nothing, I hoped, but be brought a tin of Christmas candies, which seemed to have melted then hardened then melted again, so the coloured stripes had run. They had a taste of nails.

“It’s them Silases botherin me, Ben. They come by day and by night. People won’t ever quit botherin me. I can hear them on the roof at night. Ben, you see them Silases you tell them what I got waitin for them.” He picked up the hatchet and chopped down at the table, splitting the rotten oilcloth. “Got a shotgun too.”

“Maybe they won’t come and bother you no more, Joe.”

The man groaned and shook his head. “They never will stop. No. They never will stop.”

“Just try not paying any attention to them, they’ll tire out and go away.”

“They’ll burn me in my bed. They tried to before.”

My father said nothing, but tested the axe blade with his finger. Under the couch, the cat pawed and meowed in more and more feeble spasms of delusion. Overcome with tiredness, with warmth after cold, with bewilderment quite past bearing, I was falling asleep with my eyes open.
My father set me down. “You’re woken up now. Stand up. See. I can’t carry you and this sack full of rats both.”

We had come to the top of a long hill and that is where I woke. It was getting dark. The whole basin of country drained by the Wawanash River lay in front of us—greenish brown smudge of bush with the leaves not out yet and evergreens, dark, shabby after winter, showing through, straw-brown fields and the others, darker from last year’s plowing, with scales of snow faintly striping them (like the field we had walked across hours, hours earlier in the day) and the tiny fences and colonies of grey barns, and houses set apart, looking squat and small.

“Whose house is that?” my father said, pointing.

It was ours, I knew it after a minute. We had come around in a half-circle and there was the side of the house that nobody saw in winter, the front door that went unopened from November to April and was still stuffed with rags around its edges, to keep out the east wind.

“That’s no more’n half a mile away and downhill. You can easy walk home. Soon we’ll see the light in the dining room where your Momma is.”

On the way I said, “Why did he have an axe?”

“Now listen,” my father said. “Are you listening to me? He don’t mean any harm with that axe. It’s just his habit, carrying it around. But don’t say anything about it at home. Don’t mention it to your Momma or Mary, either one. Because they might be scared about it. You and me aren’t, but they might be. And there is no use of that.”

After a while he said, “What are you not going to mention about?” and I said, “The axe.”

“You weren’t scared, were you?”

“No,” I said hopefully. “Who is going to burn him and his bed?”

“Nobody. Less he manages it himself like he did last time.”

“Who is the Silases?”

“Nobody,” my father said. “Just nobody.”

“We found the one for you today, Mary. Oh, I wisht we could’ve brought him home.”

“We thought you’d fell in the Wawanash River,” said Mary McQuade furiously, ungently pulling off my boots and my wet socks.

“Old Joe Phippen that lives up in no man’s land beyond the bush.”

“Him!” said Mary like an explosion. “He’s the one burned his house down, I know him!”

“That’s right, and now he gets along fine without it. Lives in a hole in the ground. You’d be as cosy as a groundhog, Mary.”

“I bet he lives in his own dirt, all right.” She served my father his supper and he told her the story of Joe Phippen, the roofed cellar, the boards across the dirt floor. He left out the axe but not the whisky and the cat. For Mary, that was enough.

“A man that’d do a thing like that ought to be locked up.”

“Maybe so,” my father said. “Just the same I hope they don’t get him for a while yet. Old Joe.”

“Eat your supper,” Mary said, bending over me. I did not for some time realize that I was no longer afraid of her. “Look at her,” she said. “Her eyes dropping out of her head, all she’s been and seen. Was he feeding the whisky to her too?”

“Not a drop,” said my father, and looked steadily down the table at me. Like the children in fairy stories who have seen their parents make pacts with terrifying strangers, who have discovered that our fears are based on nothing but the truth, but who come back fresh from marvellous escapes and take up their knives and forks, with humility and good manners, prepared to live happily ever after—like them, dazed and powerful with secrets, I never said a word.

My cousin George and I were sitting in a restaurant called Pop’s Cafe, in a little town close to the Lake. It was getting dark in there, and they had not turned the lights on, but you could still read the signs plastered against the mirror between the fly-speckled and slightly yellowed cutouts of strawberry sundaes and tomato sandwiches.

“Don’t ask for information,” George read. “If we knew anything we wouldn’t be here” and “If you’ve got nothing to do, you picked a hell of a good place to do it in.” George always read everything out loud—posters, billboards, Burma-Shave signs, “Mission Creek. Population 1700. Gateway to the Bruce. We love our children.”

I was wondering whose sense of humour provided us with the signs. I thought it would be the man behind the cash register. Pop? Chewing on a match, looking out at the street, not watching for anything except for somebody to trip over a crack in the sidewalk or have a blowout or make a fool of himself in some way that Pop, rooted behind the cash register, huge and cynical and incurious, was never likely to do. Maybe not even that; maybe just by walking up and down, driving up and down, going places, the rest of the world proved its absurdity. You see that judgment on the faces of people looking out of windows, sitting on front steps in some little towns; so deeply,
deeply uncaring they are, as if they had sources of disillusionment which they would keep, with some satisfaction, in the dark.