Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You (22 page)

The snowbanks were high, the road went like a tunnel between. Under the fresh snow were boulders of old snow, hard and gray. Ribbons of dog urine ran down by the shoveled paths. Stump Troy's drive was kept plowed, and for whose convenience, asked Robina. She asked most things in a voice that already knew the answer. I walked with a knife in my pocket, a paring knife stolen from Robina's kitchen. I took my mitten off to touch it. Hidden by the snowbank, in his father's driveway, once a week, twice a week, I never knew when, Howard Troy was waiting for me. He would step out as if to go in front of me, to block me in the narrow road.

Fuck

You want to fuck

I walked past him with my head down and my breath drawn, just like somebody walking through a wall of flame. It was important not to look at him, not to hurry, and to feel the blade. I never thought that he could come after me. If he did not move at once, he would not move at all. Danger was in the aura of the word.

All that's beyond explaining now. I hear young children saying lazily, “What the fuck?” as they ride past on their bicycles. I hear a father yelling, “Get the fucking lawn mower off the drive!” It used to be a word that could be thrown against you, that could bring you to an absolute stop. Humiliation was promised, but was perhaps already there, was contained in the hearing, the being stopped, having to
acknowledge. Shame could choke you. I mean that. Not at the moment when the whole point was to keep safe and get past but later, what quantities of greasy shame, what indigestible bad secrets. The vulnerability which is in itself a shame. We are shamefully made.

I would never have told anybody, never asked anybody's help. I would have borne any danger, risked any violence, or final indignity, rather than repeat, or admit what was said to me. I saw this as being out of reach of all help, all authority. I believed of course that this could only be said to me, that Howard Troy would understand how he could threaten me, that it was a sign. And so it had to be concealed and blotted out, stamped out, quick, quick, but I could never get it all, the knowledge, the memory, it was running underground and spurting out at another place in my mind.

Robina used to take me home with her. We walked through the bush, behind where the airport is now, a mile, or maybe a mile and a half, to that little farm with stone-piles in the middle of the fields. We went in the wintertime, too, and Robina showed me what she said were wolf tracks. She knew of a case where a baby had been put in a sleigh, with a dog to pull it, and the dog had heard wolves howling, in the bush, and taken off to join them, with the baby still attached. Then when the dog got to where the wolves were it turned wolf too, and they all together pulled the baby out and ate it.

Walking through the bush Robina increased in authority, or took on authority of another kind than she had in my mother's kitchen, where she went under the inadequate altogether misleading title of maid. Her tall flat body seemed to loosen, to swing like a door on its hinges, controlled, but dangerous if you got in the way. She was maybe twenty years old at this time but she seemed to me as old as my
mother, as old as the powerful older teachers, the ladies looking after stores. Her hair was shingled, dark, pulled tight across her forehead and held with a bobby pin. Her smell was of the kitchen, and of dried sweaty cloth. There was something sooty, smoky, about her—about her skin and her hair and her clothes and her smell. None of this seemed objectionable. Who would object to Robina, who would be so foolhardy?

We had to cross a bridge that was nothing but three logs, irregularly spaced. Robina swung her arms out, for balance. The one sleeve that was half-empty flopped like an injured wing over the water.

Her most important story was about how she used to go tagging after her mother, who did housework, years ago, for ladies in town. At one of the houses there was an electric wringer-washer, a new contrivance then. Robina, five years old, stood on a chair to put clothes through the wringer. (Even then, I understood, she would have been unable to let anything alone, would have had to show herself boss of any process.) The wringer caught her hand, her arm. That arm ended now between the elbow and the wrist. She never showed it. She always wore a dress or a blouse with long sleeves. But it seemed to me this was not for shame; it was to increase the mystery, and importance. Sometimes on the road young children would trail after her, calling, “Robina, Robina, show us your arm!” Their calls were wistful, and full of respect. She would let them go on for a bit before she shooed them away, like chickens. She was chief of those people I have mentioned, who can turn disabilities into something enviable, mockery into tributes. I never thought of that arm except as something she had chosen, a sign of perversity and power.

I longed to see it. I thought that it would be sawed off straight, like a log, revealing bone and muscle and blood vessels in their gristly, fibrous, intimate nakedness. I knew
I had as much chance of laying eyes on that as I had of looking at the far side of the moon.

Other stories concerned her family.

“Duval when he was little he was up on the roof all day, he was helping them shingle. He shouldn't've been up there, because he has a light skin, he has the lightest skin of all our family. Our whole family is fair, except for me and Findley, the beginning and the end. Nobody thought about how hot it would be for Duval or put a hat on him. I was the one would've thought, and I wasn't home. But even if you had put a hat on him he'd've took it off, probably, because he thinks he's too smart to wear a hat if the men aren't wearing one. So after supper he laid down on the couch like to have a sleep. Then after a while he opens his eyes and says as loud as anything,
Get them feathers outa my face
. Well, we couldn't see feathers. So we all wondered. Then he sits up, looks right through us, didn't even know us.
Grandma
, he says,
get me a drink of water. Please Grandma
, he says,
get me a drink of water
. Grandma wasn't there at all. She was dead. But to hear him talk you'd think she was sitting there right beside him and none of the rest of us was in the room at all or anywhere he could see.”

“Was he having sunstroke?”

“He was having a sight of Heaven.”

Her voice was flat and scornful.

About all members of her family, from Duval and Jimmy who came right after her down to Findley the five-year-old, Robina spoke with peculiar respect and severity, to let you know that nothing that happened to them, no preference or ailment or feud or habitual saying or daily adventure of theirs, was to be taken lightly. Her own importance shone through them, or theirs through her. I understood that I did not weigh much in comparison. Nevertheless I was the child of the house where Robina worked; that meant something. I was not jealous.

As we walked through the bush we might hear nuts or pine cones dropping, at a distance, and Robina would say, “Maybe that's Duval or Jimmy or them out shaking a tree.” Then I was somehow excited to think that we were within range of them, in the territory of their excursions and adventures. I would look forward as much as Robina did to the sight of the unpainted slightly listing house, with no shade tree near it, adrift on the weedy fields—in winter, adrift on the snow—just out of reach of the bush, like an unlucky boat on a pond. Children would come spilling out of it when they saw us, white-haired except for Findley, barefoot until the ground was frozen hard. They would shout and show off and dangle from the pump handle; they would deliberately raise storms of dust and chicken feathers in the yard.

They did not go to the school in town. Their school was a mile or two through the bush, in another direction. According to Robina they were at all times the major part of the school population. I could imagine them making school more or less an extension of home, cupping their hands under the pump to get a drink and sitting on the roof to enjoy the view.

This meant I came to them free, as somebody strange and new. With them I was not who I was. I wore my coat; they asked to touch the fur. I swaggered then. This was magic, it was intoxication.
Listen
, I said to them. I told them riddles. I taught them the rules of games, which I knew from watching.
Red Rover. Take a Giant Step. Statues
. They who were daring and quarrelsome but still scared of town, ragged but not envious, took me as their leader. I accepted. It seemed natural.
Hide and Seek. Aunty Aunty over the Shanty
. They had a rope-and-tire swing. They would climb anywhere, and so would I when I was with them. We put a board across an open well, and walked on it. I was unfailingly happy, or so I think now. The only problem I had was with the food. Robina who in my mother's kitchen produced such complicated
puddings, such moist black devil's food, incomparable pastry, velvety mashed potatoes, thought nothing here of giving you a piece of bread with a greasy bit of bacon on it, and that nearly cold, barely cooked. The others would chew it and swallow it down in a hurry and want more; they were always hungry. I would have given somebody mine, but protocol made them turn it down.

Jimmy and Duval were big boys, big as men but still playful, unpredictable. They might chase us and pick us up and swing us by the arms until we flew straight out. They would not say a word, and would look very stern the whole time. Or they would come and stand on either side of me and say, “Can you remember, is this the one who ain't ticklish?”

“I don't know. I can't remember if that's the one.”

“I think it is. I think it's her.”

They would nod heavily, considering. Then they would just have to move, as if they were about to close in, to make me break into screams of jittery pleasure. I did not scream just at being tickled, or at the threat of being tickled. My joy was at being recognized. This teasing did seem to me a recognition, and a reprieve; I was never afraid of Duval and Jimmy, despite their size. I never minded, when I understood by their solemnity that they were making fun of me. I thought them powerful, benevolent, mystifying, rather like clowns. They actually could do tricks, as clowns do. They sometimes performed silently, amazingly, in the dust of the yard, turning cartwheels, leap-frogging. Robina said they were good enough to go in the circus but they wouldn't leave home, they loved their home. They did not go to school, either. They had not gone back since the day the teacher beat up on Jimmy for throwing the chalk-brush out the window, and Jimmy and Duval together—so Robina said—beat up on the teacher. That had been years ago.

“Whose girl friend is she?” they said.
Mine. Mine
. And they play-fought over me, each of them grabbing me from the other and trapping me in a hard hug. I loved their smell,
which was of barns and engines and Buckingham's Fine Cut.

They had enemies who could not be so readily disposed of as that teacher. There were the people in stores who had made accusations. There was Stump Troy. He was known to me as an enemy of Jimmy's and Duval's—and therefore, of course, of Robina's—long before his son Howard become an enemy of mine. But I had not paid much attention till then.

Robina said that Stump Troy had got the police on Jimmy and Duval for siphoning gas out of one of the cars that was parked in front of his place on a Saturday night. It was true all right that they were taking gas—this would be for the old car that was usually laid open on the gangway, not running—but it was from the car of a man who had never paid them for a job they did for him and it was their only way of getting back at him. Even before this time Stump Troy had been spreading lies about them, Robina said, and he was the one who paid a whole gang from Dungannon to wait for Jimmy and Duval and beat them up—even Jimmy and Duval could not beat more than maybe three men apiece—outside the Paramount Dance Hall.

I think now they may have been rivals, or fallen-out accomplices, in the bootlegging business. My mother was opposed to drinking, as was natural in her circumstances, and Robina in my mother's house appeared to share this view. She said their whole family was on the Pledge, their Grandma had demanded it. This may have been an exaggeration. Whatever the truth was, Stump Troy had got Jimmy and Duval into trouble, and had the means of getting them into more trouble, and they hated him.

“Oh, they hate him! If they was out on a dark night and old Stump was out on the road, he'd soon be sorry he ever heard of them!”

“How would he get out on the road?”

“That's it. Lucky for him he can't.”

“Jimmy and Duval are good-natured,” Robina said.
“They are not mean boys. But they don't forget when somebody has played a dirty trick on them. They don't let up on a person then.”