Phoebe had covered herself once again with the layers of tattered clothing Ham Bone had rinsed out the night before and left near the fire to dry. All evidence of the young redheaded woman Tilman had seen were gone, buried under cloth. He could hear Ham Bone snoring in the corner of the shack.
“Hurry up,” said Phoebe. “We got to get out of here before he wakes up.”
Tilman, not knowing what else to do, headed for the door, though he knew the man was kind, not a threat. The dog stood watching them sleepily, then, evidently familiar with scenes of departure, groaned, walked in a circle, and curled up at the large man’s side.
“We got to keep moving,” said Phoebe as they walked through the junkyard. “You stay still someone’ll put a cage on you sure as anything.” She looked at the boy. “Guess you know that, don’t you, Chain Child?”
“Yes,” said Tilman. “Yes, I guess I do.”
Tilman travelled with Phoebe for less than a week. Neither one being disposed to changing their itineraries for anyone, they soon reached that inevitable crossroad where Phoebe took it in her mind to head east at the same time as Tilman headed west.
The boy was no more than fifteen paces away from Phoebe when he heard her call to him. He turned on his heel and sauntered back to where she stood. The breeze had picked up and in the sky there was a suggestion of snow. Tilman was hoping to reach a town as quickly as possible.
“Just want to give you something before you head off for God knows where.” Phoebe rummaged around in her layers of clothing. “Just want to give you the goddamned Royal Thunderer.”
Eventually she unearthed a bright silver whistle. “Can you read?” she demanded.
Tilman nodded.
“Then read that.” Phoebe pointed to some lettering incised on the surface. “Read it out loud.”
“Royal Thunderer.”
“Ham Bone give it to me in case someone ever wanted to get at me on the road.” She laughed and shook her head. “No one ever liked me enough to try. It’s all yours,” she said, handing the object to Tilman, then turning to walk away. “And remember, just whistle.”
He nodded and began to walk away. Then Tilman heard Phoebe calling him one more time. “I won’t come running, though, not now, not ever.”
“I know you won’t.”
“Try it and see. Count to one hundred, then whistle.”
While watching the batch of rags that covered Phoebe’s back grow smaller and smaller, Tilman counted slowly to one hundred. Then he put the Royal Thunderer in his mouth and blew. A trilling sound pierced the air.
Phoebe stopped, stood entirely still for several moments, her scarves and shawls flapping in the wind. Without turning around she lifted one arm in the air, waved it around, then started walking once again.
And so began Tilman’s unchained adventures on the road.
W
hen he was more than likely thirteen or fourteen years old, Tilman lived under a bridge that crossed the Nith River in Waterloo County. He had been walking and running on the dusty concession roads for days, stopping to beg for food at the tidy Amish and Mennonite farms common in the region, a little frightened by the somewhat familiar German dialect spoken there. He was concerned that because he had travelled for so long he might have actually left his own country behind and entered a territory so foreign he would never again understand anything. Once, he had questioned a woman who had just given him a whole apple pie, which he had spotted cooling on her windowsill. “Canada?” he had asked. “Ontario?” The woman had not understood the context of his question but had asked his name. Hearing her speak English, his mind at ease, he ran away without answering, the pie held out in front of him.
It was around this time that he began to train himself as a runner, understanding that this was a skill useful to him in his chosen way of life. His legs were longer now, and they had filled out some in recent months. They were, of course, along with his hands, the part of his anatomy he knew best, mirrors coming infrequently into his visual experience and often startling him when they did cross his path in that he had so little acquaintance with the boy he saw in them. But his legs, though covered by his patched trousers, were familiar, a dependable place to rest one’s hands or elbows and something to hold on to when crouching in a doorway or sitting at the edge of the road. He liked the firmness of his thighs, the boniness of his knees, and the reliability of his feet—despite his often desperate footwear. And he would never forget that it was his legs that had removed him from the place where he had been chained and had helped him escape chains of one kind or another ever since.
He ran along the spines of hills, along fence lines, through the narrow green hallways of tall corn. He ran on old settlement corduroy roads where the ribs of the logs on which they were built passed under his feet like waves, or on farm lanes that had a bright green band of grass between the two tracks of beaten earth. He ran on railway tracks, pacing his stride so that his feet never once missed a tie, and across trestles with such swiftness and confidence that he was disturbed neither by their height nor by the moaning sound of a distant whistle. He ran around baseball diamonds at the edge of villages on early-summer mornings before anyone else was awake, back and forth on Great Lake piers at Owen Sound or Goderich by moonlight. While he was in Waterloo County he drifted, once, into the city of Berlin and was seen by a policeman at dawn running down King Street after a good breakfast at the garbage bin behind the Walper Hotel. Having mostly avoided heavily populated areas, it had simply never occurred to Tilman that a policeman would be awake at four-thirty in the morning, but when he discovered that one was pursuing him he ran faster than he had known he could, straight out of the city, heading north until a kind of oxygen euphoria infused every cell of his body, stopping only when he could see nothing but trees and fields, having no knowledge that the policeman had given up after two blocks.
A few days later Tilman came upon the bridge. Hot, dirty, and thirsty, having run just that morning past the villages of Bamberg and Wellesley and Nithburg, he had seen the river lying like a bent silver arm in a valley half a mile away and had taken a narrow road to reach it, descending a hill so steep that he didn’t see the bridge until he was halfway down the incline. Made of iron girders and shaped like the back of a large animal whose skeleton was being presented to the boy in profile, every part of the structure delighted Tilman. He ran back and forth over its planked floor, across the shadows of its steel beams several times, though he was breathless and covered with sweat. Then he tore off his tattered clothes, climbed up on one of the iron railings, and jumped into the green-brown water beneath, which he had figured would be deep enough for the plunge. Floating on his back and looking up at the sky, he was able to admire the bridge from below, the way the sunlight shone between the planks and how the whole framework sat so squarely on its cement abutments. It was then he realized that, with scrub bushes on either side and the incline of the bank, the positioning of the southern abutment created the perfect shelter, the perfect hiding place, and he decided to make it his home.
It was a good summer. The view from the bridge was extensive in all directions, hills and fields and orchards being cut into geometric shapes by the angles the steel girders made, and the sound of the water was soothing. Tilman was up before dawn during his first few days at the bridge, skulking around the sheds and the dumps of neighbouring farms to get orange crates for furniture and empty cans and bottles for tableware. Once, he took a fishing rod that had been left leaning against a railing of a back porch. He kept it for a week, then, well fed and filled with guilt, he returned it to the spot, placing two freshly caught trout on the doorstep as a kind of payment. It was then that he first saw the border collie that wagged his tail vaguely as a greeting before ambling casually in the direction of the smell of fish.
After that it didn’t take the dog long to find the boy, to scramble down the bank and shimmy into the cave Tilman had made for himself. The dog approached the boy with courteous discretion, his ears down, his tail moving in circles. Tilman thought of calling him Saw Tooth but named him Buster instead, changing it only when the dog responded to a faraway human voice calling for Shep. Shep arrived at least once a day, sometimes much more often. No one else knew the boy was there, even though, because he needed food, the Amish farmers spoke in Pennsylvania Deutsch about the beggar boy who was sometimes found with his hands out at their back doors, and the usual attempts were made by women to capture and tame him.
Tilman sat under the bridge all summer watching the refracted light from the river tremble on cement and wood, memorizing the shape of the opposite bank, and listening to the sound of wagons and tractors rattling on the planks above him. He walked the river in both directions, passing by cows and the occasional horse but never meeting anyone else. These outings were considered adventures by him, but he preferred the cool shade of the cave, his view of engineering and of water, and of fragments of woodlots and fence lines. He liked also the way the dog stayed beside him, panting and alert, his ears and nose twitching in response to the subtlest changes in the atmosphere.
Having looked at the river for so long, Tilman was able finally to understand the language of water: quiet water, and water that speaks. He knew the slow, almost imperceptible sigh of it during weeks of drought, and its more aggressive babble after four or five days of rain. When it was swollen, full of itself, the river was most likely to offer surprising gifts: a perfectly fine and much-needed pair of boots tied together by their laces on one occasion, a toy boat on another, and, as the season progressed, apples fallen from the trees of neighbouring orchards.
He loved the bridge with a child’s love, the way a boy will love a tree house in the yard or a clubhouse in a scrub lot. But he loved it too in a way peculiar to his own nature, because it gave him shelter without closing him in. There were no impenetrable walls, no doors that might contain locks. Air and light flowed through it, all the landscape’s openness was visible from it. And always below him there was the river, solemnly moving and changing, going somewhere else.
Tilman knew the river was heading west. At the end of August, a week and a half of torrential rain made it hurry in that direction. Then, in the middle of September, a small punt came bobbing swiftly around the bend a quarter-mile upriver, and Tilman and the dog ran down to the bank to meet it. It caught on a log about fifty feet from the bridge and the boy leapt toward it, delighted by the fact that it had a rope attached to its bow. This he tied to a steel ring embedded in one of the cement abutments, and then he spent the rest of the day gathering branches to hide it from potential thieves. Its appearance seemed like a miracle, for Tilman was aware that soon he would have to follow in the wake of the migrating birds, and now he would have a vehicle for the journey.
He floated away in the middle of September, leaving the dog barking wildly on the beloved bridge and leaving too all the various textures of the undulating terrain that had become so familiar to him. He had had, though he did not know it, his first encounter with intimacy, his first experience of knowing something, anything, so well and in such proximity that he would never forget it. He had seen the bridge in every kind of summer light and darkness, knew the sounds it made when it supported wagons or motor cars or the odd bicyclist. Years later he would be able to close his eyes and see the exact patterns of rust on steel, the distinct black-and-white markings of a dog’s coat, or the way tall grasses bend in a breeze near the margins of a river, and when he recalled these details he would experience also the ache of loss. He had taken all these things into his heart and had voluntarily left them behind, the way he imagined that Phoebe had left Ham Bone. Nothing had kept him there, and so he loved the place harder as he let it go. His first true home growing smaller and smaller, its bones black against the sun as he sat facing the stern of the boat the river had given him. He shouted goodbye to the bridge and yelled words of praise to Shep, who hurled himself down the bank to follow the punt to the edge of the farm. Tilman knew the dog had been trained not to leave the property, so he was forced to call out one last word of farewell to him before a bend in the river removed them each from the other’s sight. He realized that these words of leave-taking were the first sounds he had made in weeks, that his voice was harsh and rusty as a result, and choked as well by tears.
E
ach autumn Tilman had followed the birds to the flat marshlands of southwestern Ontario. Situated on the northwest shore of Lake Erie, these reed-filled areas swept around the long curve of bays or moved out into the body of the lake, forming their own uncertain peninsulas. Or they journeyed inland, taking the edge of the water with them so that early settlers were sometimes surprised to awaken to a new damp world of frantic cries, beating wings, and singing frogs, as if the lake itself had made a decision to push both them and their recently constructed log houses farther inland.
Farther east the land stabilized, and here prosperous farms developed in full view of the water. Tilman knew the back screen doors of every solid red-brick farmhouse along the narrow highway called the old Talbot Road, and their front doors as well with the beautiful sunburst transoms, though he knew better than to knock there. He was familiar with all the barns, their granaries and mounds of hay, and had visited some of these wooden cathedrals so often that certain animals seemed to acknowledge his arrival with pleasure.
Occasionally Tilman was permitted entrance into one of the brick fortresses. This would happen when a gentleman farmer’s wife or a kitchen servant along the route would attempt to adopt him, to entice him into the domestic fold with hot food, a comfortable bed, and clean clothes handed down from their own or their mistresses’ children. Much later he would tell a friend that he particularly remembered the painted hallways of these places, how itinerant painters had worked the prosperous line, leaving behind them walls filled with distant blue landscapes quite different from the scenery anyone was likely to see in southwestern Ontario. After a few days of leaning on newel posts and losing himself in the drowsy ease of far-off imaginary mountains and nights spent in starched white sheets, he would become anxious and, inevitably, one early morning unable to sleep he would run off into the darkness.