The Englishman's Boy (22 page)

Working in shifts, we get the grave dug by early afternoon and return to the bunkhouse. Shorty builds a fire in the stove and heats some water. We all have a good wash and, after, Shorty and Wylie shave with McAdoo’s straight razor. Wylie’s shirt has a torn sleeve so McAdoo gives him a clean one of his to wear and then slaps the dust out of Easton’s trousers with a broom until he judges him presentable for a funeral. Then he tells Wylie to sit on the bed and keep out of his way while he fries us some bacon, onions, and potatoes. We are halfway through dinner when a gritty rattle shakes the bunkhouse in a spasm of wind. Shorty looks up from his plate, listens. Another
sharp gust follows, flying grit pings on the single windowpane, and a trembling hum fills the bunkhouse as the wind ebbs in a slow, sobbing withdrawal.

“It sounds like it’s turning dirty out there.” Shorty pushes away his plate. “Soon as I dress, we best go.” He retrieves a box from under his bed, and takes out of it a black frock coat, the kind of coat nobody has worn since the turn of the century. The coat turns him angular, turns his shoulders and elbows sharper, his face more harshly lined, his eyes more unflinching. He becomes a daguerreotype from the last century, one of those stern, severe faces that their descendants can feel weighing them across the chasm of years, judging them small, insignificant, unworthy people.

“Comb your hair,” says McAdoo to Wylie.

We go out bareheaded. Wylie, his hair glistening with water, his rooster-tail dabbed down with a bit of soap, McAdoo with a coil of rope in each hand. A hot wind claps a burning hand over my mouth and nose robbing me of breath. In the slack, sallow sky the sun burns wanly behind a veil of blowing dirt. Tumbleweed bowls by and the low brush heaves and surges all about us. We lean into the wind and push it like a stalled vehicle, slowly, one step at a time, past the ruined house and up the slope to the waiting coffin, our hands shielding our eyes.

McAdoo demonstrates how to buck the coffin into the grave, a rope through each of the corner casket handles on the diagonal. When the wind suddenly drops, we can hear the casket knocking the sides of the grave, creaking and groaning, the handles threatening to tear loose. Trying to brake the last couple feet of drop, the hemp sears my palms and I almost get jerked into the hole. The coffin lands with a hollow bang. McAdoo swears, peers into the grave.

“It’s all right,” he shouts, making himself heard above the wind. “She held together.”

We thrust our shovels into the heaped ground, filling the grave. When we lift them, the dirt blows off the blades in tawdry streamers, whipping into our faces. The very air is flavoured with earth. It coats
my lips and teeth, I taste it souring in the back of my throat, feel it rawly scratching in my eyes. Everywhere dust is lapping and pluming the land, moving toward the horizon like the creeping, ragged smoke of wholesale destruction. McAdoo stiff-backed in his black coat, Wylie with the burial ropes knotted in his hands, and me. Three figures ghostly and obscure in the shifting, earthly smoke.

So begins the interment of Miles Easton, with a grey smudge rolling across the landscape, edging into the sky like a nasty stain. With this and a memory of the grief of that other stranger, of the funerary rites of a Crow woman, who cut a part of herself away to join whatever she had lost.

The wake lasts past midnight, past a bottle and a half of whisky. Wylie Easton lies collapsed on one of the bunk beds. He has cried himself into a drunken sleep, racking sobs and rage. Now his mouth hangs innocently open like a slumbering child’s, his chest rising serenely and falling softly. Outside the wind is drumming against the bunkhouse like a stormy sea against a breakwater. McAdoo has lit a coal fire and left the stove door open for the light it throws, a pulsing illumination which, like the wind, billows and recedes. We are both far gone in drink and strange melancholy reveries. I keep remembering last night and Rachel. McAdoo and I haven’t spoken in half an hour and scarcely moved except to reach down to the bottle between us on the floor, to swig from it and carefully replace it on its spot. For the first time, I see on McAdoo’s face the brutal, haunted look which marked it on the film clip at Chance’s house.

He drains the dregs of the bottle, sets it down on the floor, topples it with a push of a finger. The bottle rolls across the temporary silence in the room; the wind is in a lull.

“Dead soldier,” says McAdoo and jabs at it with his toe. It rolls some more.

I feel like shit. My leg is throbbing with that old, familiar, sick, steady ache. I happen to be carrying a bag of marijuana Rachel gave me for my birthday. She said when the pain in my leg got too bad to
use it. When I put it in my pocket this morning I thought I would be using it for other reasons, but now I think the time has come to roll myself some relief. McAdoo watches me.

“You ever use this?” I ask, lighting up.

“There ain’t much I ain’t used in my time – or used me. Pass it on.”

I hand him the bag and ease smoke out of my lungs. “Vipah,” I intone to the glowing end of the joint.

“I spent a winter in Mexico once,” Shorty says. “I smoked more of this than ever I smoked tobacco that winter. I preferred it to that Mexicali liquor shit, worm in the bottle.”

“You’ve been around. Seen some things,” I say, encouraging him to talk.

“I seen some things,” he agrees in an expressionless voice. I wonder if he isn’t seeing them again, wonder if his eyes aren’t directed inward, directed back in time. They are hooded, secretive. He puts the twist of reefer in his mouth, sucks deeply. We sit holding the smoke captive in our lungs, McAdoo so still he hardly seems human in the light of the banked fire.

“You’ve done some things,” I say again, prompting.

“I done some things.” His eyes meet mine. Suddenly, the pool of ruddy light in which we huddle acquires the privacy, the intimacy of a confessional box, drawing us closer together, making us one against the shadows in the room, one against whatever they might obscure and shelter.

I nudge him on. “Christ, Shorty, it’s been a long day. Don’t send me home empty-handed.”

He doesn’t answer.

“Give me a few wild Indians.”

“You’re a driving man, Vincent.”

“That old world’s gone. You can bring it back for us. Raise it up like Lazarus from the dead.”

“Preacher Vincent,” he says.

The wind moves outside, dark and elemental, like the life I imagine the man before me has lived. For an instant, I hungrily grasp at
the wilderness McAdoo holds clutched inside him, not for Chance’s sake, but because of my need.

“Tell me,” I whisper.

Just then Easton stirs on his cot. He rises up on his elbow and stares at us with a sleep-blinded face. “Shorty, Shorty,” he calls, like a child waking lost in a strange bed.

“I’m here, Wylie. Go back to sleep. It’s all taken care of,” says McAdoo soothingly.

Wylie sinks back down on the bed. We listen to the slow steady breath of sleep move like a sweeping broom in the pauses of the wind.

McAdoo turns his face back to me. “I’m taking him to Canada with me. It’s his best chance. I been to Canada,” he says. His voice changes, as if he is speaking out of a cavern. A cavern of regret, or sorrow. “I went Indian up in Canada.”

“You mean you lived with Indians there?”

For a minute, he doesn’t speak. I sense the dumb misery of an animal gnawing its leg in a trap.

“Here’s where you go Indian.” He puts a finger to his temple. “Up in your head. Indian is a way of thinking. Lots of them Eastern boys riding at the studios
play
at cowboys and Indians. They learned Indians reading those boys’ books – maybe same kind of book you asking me to help you write – books tell you how to do sign language, show you how to chip an arrowhead with a deer horn, make a war bonnet out of turkey feathers. Books don’t make an Indian. It’s country makes an Indian.”

“How does country make an Indian?” I ask quietly. “Tell me.”

He reaches out with his boot and closes the door of the stove. The light in the room shrinks to a few bright slivers threading through the dampers. The glowing end of the reefer travels up to his face and flares there. The cavernous eyes, the stark cheekbones. His voice hard, deliberate, distant. “Five months I went alone out there. Never spoke a word to a soul. Kill your meat and find your water. No coffee, no tea, nary a lump of sugar. Ever know a white man went five months without bread, or biscuits, or beans? I done it.

“I’d soured on folks, wanted shut of them, but lonesome country breeds lonesomeness. I sung every song I knew trying to drown out the Indian talking in my head. Every day I heard him plainer and plainer. The country done it to me. The sky was Indian sky, the wind was Indian wind, every last thing I laid my eyes on was cut to fit an Indian.

“I taken myself away from my own kind; I’d sickened on white folks. I seen a sign of them, seen bull teams, seen freight wagons, I hid. Only trail I followed was animal trail. I seen a hawk, I followed the hawk. Hawk passed me on to a deer, I followed the deer. Deer tipped his horns to the sun, I followed the sun. I rode forty miles some days, east, west, north, south, I wasn’t bound for any particular place. Watered my horse in the Frenchman, the Saskatchewan, the Oldman, the Bow, the Big Muddy. I covered some ground. Kept moving.”

My pencil is moving under cover of darkness, too, scratching out a story offered under cover of darkness. I turn the pages of the notebook quietly, marching my shorthand across the paper by feel. My eyes grow accustomed to the dark; I dimly make out the old man on his chair, head held upright, the reefer steady now, its bright point hung down the side of the chair.

“Lived that way for a month, went sick. Suffered the bone ache and fever, the bloody shits. One day I found myself squatting by a buffalo wallow, buck naked and white as peeled willow. Looked up and saw a four-o’clock sun, didn’t know how it got there. Didn’t know where my clothes was. Heard myself … singing. Next I knew, it was night. Standing out in the bare prairie in the middle of the most godawful storm you ever seen, but now my clothes had climbed back on me. Thunder booming and the sky cracking like a bad plaster wall, booming so hard your ears near bleed, yellow-green cracks of fire running ceiling to floorboards, whole world shaking and burning like a house falling down around your head, timbers snapping, floor giving way under your feet, roof buckling.

“Two balls of ground lightning come rolling towards me, skipping and flaring over the short grass, crackling, jumping like drops of water in a hot skillet. The hair on me jumps up straight all around my
head, I lift my hands to cover my eyes to shut out what’s a-going to blast me to Kingdom Come … there’s a hovering blue light all around them hands … like sundogs circling round the sun. I feel myself lifting, boots dangling above the ground.

“Sky opens up. Rain drives me back down, knocks me side to side, pounds me so hard it’s going to tear the rags I’m wearing right off me, shred and peel them off my bones like wet newspaper. Can’t catch my breath the rain’s driving down so hard, I’m breathing rain. She’s like standing in a fast-running river, white water boiling over my head, and on the banks of this here stream, big old green tree trunks of lightning are waving in a white wind, forking their roots down into the ground to reach the very hubs of hell.

“Of a sudden I’m stinging all over, cold bees are at me. Hail. She’s making a sound like a scythe cutting grass, blood roaring through your head. There ain’t no cover but my horse. I throw my coat over his head and duck under his belly. The stones are drumming on him and he begins to squeal like a stuck pig, you never heard the like of it.

“God knows how long I listen to that squealing. I squat under him with my arms wrapped around my head to shut out the sound of it, just rocking back and forth. Then, all of a sudden like, she’s hushed, dead quiet. The scythe’s done cutting, the blood’s done roaring. No more lightning, no more thunder. I can feel the cold rising off the ground, see the pale ice steaming. I come out from under that horse on all fours. I crawl. Don’t know where I’m going, don’t care. Hail’s crunching like broken glass, biting into my knees. Everywhere’s white and frozen, mist smoking off the ground and me creeping through it, sweating fever and fear, bawling like a baby. I creep and crawl, looking for a hidey-hole to worm myself into, some place to curl. Then my limbs won’t carry me no more and down I drops on my face in the hail, me mumbling into the ice and the thunder muttering off in the distance.

“I wake round dawn, the sky apple-green and me nigh right in the head, but wet and chilled and shaky. I suspicion laying in the hail drew the fever out of me. Only now I ain’t laying in hail I’m laying in
melt-water. Slathered in mud. I pick myself up out of the muck and look for my horse. No horse. He’s made tracks with my saddle and my rifle.

“There’s a blow of black despair for you. I sink back down into the mud, can’t pick myself out of that wallow. I’m whipped.

“The sun keeps climbing, the mud dries stiff on my face, my hands, my hair, my clothes. And I just sit, can’t rouse myself. Until I hear horses. Good Lord, maybe I been saved. I look up from studying the mud caked on my trouser legs and what do I see? Three Indian bucks making towards me on their ponies.

“I shake myself up then, by the Jesus, shake myself up and go for my pistol. But there ain’t no pistol to hand. All that capering the night before jogged it loose and it’d gone missing somewheres. I cast about every which way but all I see is puddles with sunshine slanting off them, hail-beat grass, and mud-holes. No Colt. The only weapon stands between me and those Indians is a knife.

“They’re on me now. Rein their ponies up in my face and investigate me Indian-fashion – poker-faced and solemn. I must’ve been a study. Raggedy-ass white man in clothes a beggar of a fort Indian wouldn’t wore. Hair all matted and twisted up in mud like a mop, rest of me crusted over with a acre’s worth of God’s good earth.

“They was right handsome boys, all done up for a party, paint and feathers. The one I figured for the leader of this expedition was straight as a gun barrel, a fall of that blue-black Indian hair hanging down to the small of his back, half his face painted yellow and the other half red, necklace of brass bells hung round his neck that went tinkle-tinkle every time his horse pawed the ground.