The Englishman's Boy (25 page)

Hughes and Harper swivelled in their saddles and squinted hard at the Englishman’s boy as if they were seeing him for the first time, as if they were striving to plumb his heart, his mind, his soul for some dark motive. Grace had to smile, seeing the way the Englishman’s boy stared back at them, like a stray alley cat outfacing a pair of mangy, slat-ribbed dogs.

Harper said, “The kid’s riding with us because he had to pull foot from Benton after he stabbed that hotel man. He don’t want to face the music. He scared off out of there.”

“That’s right,” said Grace. “Fear landed him here. Same as us. Only we’re along because it’s Hardwick’s got us shitting yellow.”

“Hell,” said Hughes peevishly, “I don’t appreciate that remark. Why you go putting such a complexion on things?”

“I’m not putting on a complexion. Complexion’s there. I know it for a fact and you know it for a fact,” said Grace. “We’re all of us afraid to cross the Green River Renegade.”

“He don’t like that name,” warned Hughes.

“Why?” said Grace. “He worked hard to earn it.”

Harper had been working on his righteous indignation until he’d puffed up like a tom turkey. “I ain’t afraid of Tom Hardwick. Any man says I am is a liar.”

“That’s right, he ain’t,” confirmed Hughes. “And I’m a gent cut from the same rough cloth. Jimmy Hughes ain’t afraid of any two-legged creature walks God’s green earth. I got myself out of tight corners Tom Hardwick couldn’t have spit out of.”

“That being the case, you brave boys sure as hell don’t belong in the company of two cowards like us,” said Grace. He paused. “So why don’t you heroes piss off out of here and go pin a medal on each other.” Grace leant back in the saddle and spat over his shoulder in summation. The gesture, the tone of voice, were two slaps in the face, bald contempt on bald contempt. Hughes swore, savagely jerked the reins of his horse, the bite of the bit hooking open its mouth, flinging back its head, popping its eyes.

Grace and the Englishman’s boy kept on, didn’t bother to look back. Hughes and Harper were cursing them, the wind wiping away
whole words and phrases, like a cloth smearing chalk on a slate. The Englishman’s boy strained to catch their threats. “Bastard … don’t ride away from me … you’ll answer … Jimmy Hughes … don’t forget … we’ll settle for you …”

The Eagle gave no sign he was listening, only passed a clumsy hand back and forth over his face like he was brushing off flies. “Maybe I ought to have held my peace just a little longer,” he said. “But I might have bust. Passed the worst winter of my life, shacked up with that bunch of whoreson rascals. I thought once we reached Fort Benton I’d get shut of them, and then five mile out of town those plaguy Indians scampered off with our horses. I always was a fellow scanty on luck. I got a ten-per-cent share in twenty-five-thousand-dollars’ worth of wolf pelts and you can bet how much of that I’d see if I’d told Hardwick I didn’t intend to help get the horses back.” He fell silent, absent-mindedly rummaging about in his jacket pocket as he contemplated hard luck and mischances. A piece of soiled candy came up in his fingers. “I got no use for this,” he said, turning it over and over. “Bad teeth. But a youngster likes his candy.”

He passed the sweet. The Englishman’s boy popped the smudgy peppermint in his mouth. “I ain’t no kid,” he said, sucking hard.

By early afternoon, Evans suggested they call a halt, but some time between breakfast and then Hardwick had undergone a change of plan. He had ditched the notion of leisurely travel and demanded they press forward. Evans did not argue and no one else asked for an explanation; they knew Hardwick better than to question the man’s decision. For the next five hours they pushed on, then paused to water the horses while the men ate a little biscuit and jerked meat. After twenty minutes, Hardwick signalled them to mount again, there were miles to be made before dusk fell.

As they advanced on twilight the wind died down, but heavy, grape-coloured clouds were louring in the north, gloomily dragging toward them. They and the wolfers met on the spine of a ridge in the last vestiges of tinted light, the world displayed behind smoked glass. A slow, steady rain began and with it night descended, a swift black
sword. The men dismounted and the few with waterproofs wrestled into them, the rest crouched miserably under tented coats and blankets, passing a glum hour watching water puddle around their boots.

As abruptly as the rain had begun, it ended. Men, soaked and chilled to the bone, threw off soggy blankets, groaning as they shook and stamped free joints which had locked while they hunkered under cover. They hobbled about in the darkness, doing what needed to be done, unsaddling and picketing the horses, spreading bedrolls, breaking out biscuits and dried meat, dim wraiths, shadows of routine. Soft, impersonal curses, the clink of metal buckles and the creak of leather, someone’s dry, hacking cough were the only sounds. A few damp buffalo-chip fires began to fume and stink. Tonight Hardwick had relented and said they might smoke and build fires – if they could find anything dry enough to burn. A long, cold night threatened. Grace and the Englishman’s boy were muffled up in saddle blankets still warm with the body heat of horses. They sat before a small fire started from a bundle of kindling the Eagle packed for just such emergencies. The boy was toasting a stack of damp buffalo chips on a stick, drying them so they would burn. That was Grace’s idea. He had a handle on things, a practical turn of mind. Some of the pissers and moaners would rather stay wet and complain than do something to make themselves as comfortable as they could. The two of them were getting on though, doing just fine.

Or perhaps he should say the three of them because the Scotchman had crept up to the cheer of their fire like a woebegone dog. There he sat hugging his knees, three or four feet off where the flames licked at the night, his face wavering in and out of the black in tune with the beating heart of the fire. He wasn’t talking any more, to himself or anybody else for that matter, but he was still smiling, although the corners of the smile appeared to have wilted and run a mite in the rain.

“I don’t know what the point was – hurrying us all along,” said the Englishman’s boy. “It didn’t get us nowhere in particular, except under a cloudburst.”

Grace sat wrapped in his horse blanket, the firelight applying a
yellow varnish to his face. His bald head was tied up in a big blue-and-white spotted bandanna. Earlier that day the wind had snatched off his hat, blown it to Kingdom Come like a tumbleweed, no point in even giving chase. Simply gone. The Englishman’s boy had taken steps to prevent a similar misfortune; his derby was lashed down to his head with a rawhide thong passed through the hat brim and knotted under his chin. He looked a bit like an organ grinder’s monkey.

“I figure this is Hardwick’s reasoning,” said Grace as he rolled a cigarette. “He wanted to pull within ten mile of Cypress before making camp. That gives us a short morning’s ride to the hills. In full light, nobody can take us by surprise, ambush us. We can put out scouts in the timber so we don’t stir up a hive of Blackfoot on our way to Farwell’s post. We went fast today so we can feel our way tomorrow. Not a bad plan.” He lit his cigarette on a brand from the fire and passed the makings to the boy. “Hardwick’s a funny case. He can think things through good enough – to a point. He’s a cool customer – to a point. But he’s like the man who woke up in a house-fire and started to climb into his pants. When they were halfway up he began to feel the heat and decided to hell with the pants, it’s time to run. In the heat of the moment, Hardwick sometimes trips, pants around his ankles.”

“You think that’ll happen?” the Englishman’s boy asked.

“Anybody’s guess. But I’ll tell you one thing, son. If it gets hot, nobody in this bunch is going to pull my fat out of the fire.”

For the first time, the Englishman’s boy thought the wary tilt of the Scotchman’s head might mean he was listening. The kid shook a buffalo flop off the stick into the fire. “So what you going to do about it?”

“Do?” said Grace. “Nothing to do.”

The boy was staring into the fire, the fitful convulsing of flames. “You stand by me – I’ll stand by you.”

Grace stretched his wet boots out to the fire, a faint steam rose from the leather. “I don’t know you but a little,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Fine,” said the kid. “I ain’t begging.”

“You’re right,” said Grace. “I was raised better than that. Who am I to cold-shoulder a courtesy?”

Nothing more was said. Their two faces danced in the glare of the fire. The Scotchman’s mouth grinned maniacally out of the blackness, receded, grinned again. The boy felt a sense of occasion, his father had been a ceremonious man, gravely polite in a backwoods fashion. The kid laid aside his stick, and with his blanket hanging off his shoulders like a cape, shyly held out his hand. Grace shook it three times, emphatically. The boy returned to his place and began to vigorously thrust more buffalo chips into the blaze.

18
 

O
n a quiet Sunday afternoon Rachel and I cross the sun-flooded lawns where patients recline in striped canvas deck chairs or, shepherded by attendants in white, shuffle the brick pathways which wind among flower-beds and hedges. Rachel has been accompanying me on visits to the Mount of Olives Rest Home ever since she learned my mother was a patient there. There is nobody else I would have admitted this to but Rachel. Her own utter lack of reticence is what gave me the courage. She has no qualms about telling anybody anything. I’ve heard it all, blow-by-blow accounts of her two marriages, intimate details of her frequent, calamitous affairs.

The barricades I had built up over the years had to be taken down piece by piece the night of my confession. The telling was a hard struggle, with myself, with memory, even with Rachel. The final struggle was to hold back my tears, but that struggle was no more successful than the others had been. I sat in a chair weeping and then she wrapped me in her wiry arms, pressed my head tight to her flapper’s bosom where with every sob I gulped her fragrance: tobacco smoke, cologne, the comfort of warm, tired flesh. It was, I suppose, the moment I knew I loved her.

For years my mother has been withdrawing further and further into a dense mist of apathy, eating whatever is put in front of her, going
to bed when told, getting up when told, seldom speaking, never smiling. It is as if the rest of us are ghosts, shadowy presences whose existence she cannot quite credit. Except for Rachel Gold. She is the most solid, the most real to my mother. That much was clear from the beginning.

The first time Rachel came with me to Mount of Olives we found Ma in her room, standing in front of the window, occupied with the only thing she ever seems interested in – cleaning the glass with her handkerchief.

“Ma,” I said, “I’ve brought you a visitor.” She did not turn to see who this visitor was. The handkerchief continued to squeak in tight little circles.

“Mother, it’s Harry.”

For a second, the circles stopped, then began again, more rapidly than before.

“Mother, stop that. Come and say hello.”

The circles whirled on the glass, faster and faster.

“I know you can hear me, Ma.”

She began to whimper softly, the handkerchief spinning more and more frantically. Her head, bobbing with the effort, shook loose a few stray strands of hair from her bun.

I was about to speak again when Rachel touched my sleeve, stopping me. She lit a cigarette and then crossed the room, her customary boiling, decisive energy leashed a little, but still capable of making her skirt snap, and took up a position by my mother at the window. Ma did not acknowledge her presence; she continued doggedly polishing the glass, her eyes pinned on a vast tree spreading its branches directly outside her window.

Rachel said, “I’m a friend of Harry’s. The name is Rachel Gold and I give a very decent manicure. If you do a lot of windows one thing you’ve got to look after is your hands. And you’ve got nice hands, very shapely. Unlike Harry, who owns a set of bricklayer’s mitts. Besides, he’s the nervous type and chews his nails. Anyway, if you’d like, the next time I come to visit I could do your nails for you.
However you’d like. If you’re the conservative type we could go with a little clear polish. If you feel like kicking over the traces, fire-engine red. And we’ll chat while I do it. It’s a very relaxing thing, to get a manicure and make small talk. Would you like that?”

My mother stopped rubbing at the window, she turned and intently searched Rachel’s face.

“Well, Harry,” said Rachel, “I think your mother and I have a date.”

When we said our goodbyes that afternoon, I saw that Mother’s eyes never left Rachel; they followed her out the door. I hadn’t seen that happen before.

So the manicuring sessions became a ritual. I noticed a change in Ma, nothing miraculous or earthshaking, just a tiny heightening of attention. In the past, I had only hurled bits of stilted conversation at her: How was she feeling? Wasn’t that a nice rain last night? Weren’t the flowers in the grounds beautiful at this time of year? Hard little pellets of desperate talk which rattled off her solitude like cold sleet off a tin roof. Nothing but racket.