Once Daniel and Alec were clear of Connaught and onto the country backroads the police seldom bothered to patrol, grandson and grandfather exchanged seats so that Daniel could drive the truck the rest of the way to the farm. Alec couldn’t see any harm in this. He had given the boy plenty of practice wheeling the water-truck over the rutted trails that criss-crossed his land and tied one field and one pasture to another. He was confident Daniel could handle it. Traffic on the grid roads was always light and it was likely they would travel miles and miles without encountering another vehicle. Besides, Monkman had to admit that the kid might be less of a menace behind the wheel than he was himself. On several recent occasions Alec had caught himself just in time, at the point his truck was on the verge of careening off the road and plunging down into a ditch. There had been barely time to jerk the wheel around and recover his line in a spray of gravel.
Monkman knew it was not his eyes that were to blame; it was his mind. When it wandered the vehicle wandered with it. The young weren’t prey to this particular misfortune. Look at Daniel. All attention, he was trying his damnedest to do it right, to please. Not once had his eyes left the road, his speed remained cautious and steady, both hands were quick and diligent on the wheel. He glowed with importance. Well, it never hurt to give a boy a job that puffed his chest out a little. Everybody needed to matter. That was the reason he discussed his business with the boy, just as if Daniel had a clue as to what he was talking about or owned an opinion worth listening to. Respect was not ever wasted, not even on a twelve-year-old kid. If he had finally learned anything from living, it was that.
So he had explained to Daniel at great length what they were doing today and why they were doing it the way they were. He hoped it would be a lesson in how complicated life could be, a demonstration that nothing was ever as simple and straightforward as it might look. Not even catching a thief.
For five years running the old man had been after his tenant, Marker, to break a pasture on the farm and seed it to flax. Every year Marker promised he would, but never got around to it. When he neglected again that spring to turn sod, Monkman, disgusted that land should stand idle and unproductive, bought twenty head of cattle to graze it. Now one of them was missing. Marker claimed it had been killed by lightning.
On Tuesday, when Alec and Daniel had come to pump a tank of water for the garden from the creek, Marker had been too insistent on showing them where he had supposedly disposed of the animal’s carcass. He led them to the cellar hole of the original homesteader’s shack. It was filled with rocks carried from a stone pile at the edge of a nearby field. Marker had asserted that the missing steer lay buried under the boulders. Alec didn’t believe it for a second. First of all, there were no drag marks on the ground near the cellar hole and such marks would have been clearly visible if the steer had been pulled there with a tractor as his tenant claimed. Second, it was entirely out of character for Marker to go to all the trouble and effort of burying a dead animal, particularly one he didn’t own. Over the years, to his grief, Alec had learned that Marker was as lazy as a spotted dog. He would be much more inclined to let a carcass rot and breed flies than haul boulders to cover it.
However, Alec didn’t question or confront Marker with his suspicions. He held his peace. Later, when he told Daniel of his suspicions the boy had been incensed. He had said that if it were up to him, he’d make Marker prove that the steer was under those stones, even if that meant making him hoist every last one of those rocks out of the cellar hole, stone by stone.
“Not practical,” his grandfather had said, shaking his head. “It’d be impossible to lift some of those stones out of that hole and Marker knows it. He knows I’ll never know what’s really under there. Remember, it’s a hell of a lot easier to roll a stone into a hole than out of it. Besides, before you call a man a liar and a thief you better know you’re right. I only suspect I am.”
“What difference does it make if you’re right this time or not?” Daniel had wanted to know. “You say he’s been stealing from you for years. Serve him right.”
Monkman had said that. Yet deep in his heart he recognized that he had some responsibility to bear for the thefts. Somehow he had allowed the line between sharp dealing and outright dishonesty to grow fuzzy in Marker’s mind. He hadn’t checked the man at the very beginning when it would have counted. When he had detected Marker in certain blatant fiddles – underestimating the wheat yield to reduce his landlord’s share of the grain – Marker had never been shamefaced when discovered cheating. His most common reaction was to become aggrieved. By his standards his landlord was a rich man and rich men ought to expect to be taken advantage of. What was he complaining about? Caught in a lie he was apt to say disdainfully, “Well, if you say it’s yours – take it. I ain’t in a position to stop you. Your word’s pretty close to law around here, I suppose.”
Daniel thought the no-good sonofabitch should be pitched out on his ear. The young were always bloodthirsty. It was difficult for Monkman to explain why he couldn’t do that. He had to think of more than one Marker, after all. There were seven other little Markers ranging in age from thirteen years to six months and a Mrs. Marker, a hard-working, long-suffering woman whom he secretly pitied. If he kicked Marker off the place a family would lose a livelihood and a house. He wasn’t sure his conscience was up to that.
Whenever he thought of the Markers, Alec was reminded of rats. Alfred Marker was the very image of a rat with his slightly bucked big front teeth speckled with snuff so that he looked like he’d been chewing chop in a farmer’s bin and his long, fat rat’s nose keeping his dark, beady eyes from rolling up against one another. All his children took after the father in appearance and temperament.
What Alec had to accept under the circumstances was the impossibility of totally eradicating rats once they had become established as this nest had. The best he could aim at was control, at keeping their depredations within bounds. Helping themselves to a steer was definitely out of bounds. If the steer hadn’t yet been disposed of – sold or butchered – Alec wanted to find it. And if he succeeded in finding it, he would give Daddy Rat such a godawful scare that for years hence he would shit yellow at the mere mention of the name Alec Monkman.
Monkman guessed that the steer might be haltered to a tree deep in bush, hidden there on the assumption that even if an old man had his suspicions he couldn’t go acting on them, couldn’t go beating the thickets, scrambling over deadfalls, bulling his way through willows and rose thorns looking for a steer. But what Marker had forgotten was that he had a pair of young legs to do his bidding.
The truck had come to the crest of hills which overlooked a broad, deep valley nine miles south of Connaught. Alec’s farm was just the other side of this valley, situated on a plateau which drew a straight line between sky and round-shouldered, wooded slopes. From this height, Daniel and Alec could gaze out over long prospects. Above, a bleached-denim sky and flying cloud. Below, the valley bottom, the quilt of crop and summerfallow darkening and lightening with shadow and sun as the clouds streamed overhead, the turtle-backed sandbars sunning themselves in the slow pulse of a drought-starved river. Across the way, the tops of the poplars shivered in unison as the road switched back and forth like a cat’s tail up the sides of the opposing hills.
Then all this was lost sight of in the descent. Hard to their left, cutbanks rose above the road, sheer clay cliffs pocked with swallows’ holes and sprouting hairy tree roots which groped and fumbled in the air. To the right, at every turning, Alec could peer over the edge of the road into a gash of coulee, a dark seam down the face of the slope, choked with berry and willow bushes. The truck twisted deliberately down on to the flats, rumbled hollowly over a bridge of planks, and then began to climb, Daniel gearing down under his grandfather’s direction, the sun beating on their faces through the tilted windshield whenever the trees that grew on the banks high above the road thinned and admitted a blaze of sky. Up top they rolled on for another half-mile before Daniel swung the truck into an approach, braked, and Alec got out and unhooked a barbed wire gate. They were at the farm.
The sight of the farmhouse never failed to fill Monkman with resentment and regret. It had been bought for Earl and Earl’s house was still how he thought of it. It was a bitter thing for him to contemplate the state it had fallen into. The lilac hedge was dead because Marker couldn’t be troubled to haul water for it. Alec couldn’t remember the last time the house had been painted, although he had on several occasions bought paint for that purpose. He had no idea where it had gone to, perhaps Marker had sold it. All he knew was that it hadn’t found its way onto his siding. Over the years the house had been almost completely reduced to the weary grey of weathered board, although patches of flaking paint still clung to the wood in places like stubborn lichen to rock. There was a grinning gap in the ornamental wire fence which surrounded the yard because Marker had cut it to allow the passage of his Ford tractor and cultivator to the back garden where one day he had harvested twenty hills of potatoes by tearing up the earth with cultivator shovels. Marker didn’t care for potato forks and digging.
Directly outside the mangled fence, in front of the front door, Monkman’s tenant had parked his farm machinery, presumably for convenience sake. However, to speak of the machinery as Marker’s was not strictly correct. Many of the implements had been bought for Earl and later loaned to Marker so that he could farm more efficiently. Regardless of ownership, all the pieces of machinery were in the same state of poor repair. At the moment, a hay rake, a disker, a tractor, and a hay baler were drawn up outside the house. All the tires on the hay baler were flat and chickens were nesting in the drop chute. Several of these fluttered awkwardly up when Daniel eased the truck beside the baler and cut the motor.
Mrs. Marker bustled on to the porch, squinting. She was thin as a rake and her skinny white legs seemed to stab out of a billowing, faded housedress and into a pair of broken-down men’s oxfords, as if they were trying to nail the shoes to the porch floor. Looking the way she did, she always put Monkman in mind of some stray bitch sucked too hard by too many greedy pups. He saw that they’d interrupted the setting of her hair; one half was lank, wet, and stringy, the other half, tight curls and bobby pins.
“It’s you,” she called out as Monkman grappled his way out of the truck. “When I heard the truck I wondered who could be company. We don’t expect you except water days, Tuesday and Friday.”
That’s what I’m counting on, thought Monkman grimly. His salute, however, was cheerful and hearty. “Good day, missus. Is the boss around?”
The rest of the Markers, the pups who had sucked her skinny, began to show themselves. The second oldest boy crept on to the porch. When he had identified the visitors as familiar he pulled open the screen door and shouted back into the house, “It’s nobody. Just Monkman.”
With this reassurance the rest trooped out: the five-year-old twin boys, the two girls, the oldest with her baby brother in her arms. The twins sprang off the steps, hurled themselves onto the yard gate and began to swing ferociously back and forth on it. The remainder of the Markers aligned themselves on the porch in a fashion that suggested they were readying themselves to repulse attack.
“No, Alfred’s not here,” answered Mrs. Marker. “Him and Dwayne took a part to town for welding.”
“Don’t matter,” said Monkman. “I was just going to ask him how’s tricks. What about you, Etta? How you been keeping?”
“I’d keep better without the baby’s eczema. I’d keep better with the electricity or if I had one of them gas washing machines. Otherwise – I got no complaints. Yourself?”
“Not bad, Etta.”
“If we ain’t bad, we must be good.”
“If you say so, Etta,” said the old man agreeably. He swept his eyes around the yard. “I was wondering if you could do something for me?” he asked. “I want to leave the truck parked here and I was wondering if you could keep the twins from crawling all over it?”
“Did you hear that, twins?” said Mrs. Marker, raising her voice. “The man wants you to stay off of his truck. You do it!”
The boys reacted to this by ducking their heads, sticking out their rear ends and swinging the gate even more violently, as if they intended to tear it off its hinges.
“I mean it!” warned Mrs. Marker. “You keep yourselves and your boots off the hood of that truck or I’ll brain the both of you! No more Freshie, either,” she added ominously, “if I catch you.” She turned her attention back to Monkman. “What do you want to leave it here for?” she inquired. “You walking somewheres?”
“Oh, we thought we’d go scouting for saskatoons. They ought to be getting ripe by now.”
“Saskatoons don’t amount to much this year,” offered Mrs. Marker, seizing a handful of her skirt. “And the wood ticks are awful bad. I’d stay out of the bush if I was you. I pick the kids over every night. Every night they’re thick with them. For the amount of saskatoons you find the ticks don’t make it pay.”
“Ticks don’t have a taste for bloodless old buggers like me,” said Monkman, smiling. “They’re for the young ones like Daniel here. The sweet ones.”
“Berries don’t amount to much this year. Hardly worth your while to look.”
“When you’re my age you find you fill your time with any kind of foolishness. I get a couple of cupfuls, I’ll be happy. It passes the time.”
Mrs. Marker crooked her finger at the biggest boy on the porch. “Doyle here knows all the best places to look. Doyle, you take Mr. Monkman and show him where to look. He’s the wanderer,” she explained. “Knows every inch of the place, Doyle does. I’d appoint him guide, if I was you.”
“No, don’t bother,” said Monkman, holding up a hand to ward off Doyle. “Where’s the fun if you don’t find them yourself?”
“South,” urged Mrs. Marker desperately as the old man and boy began to move off. “South’s your best bet. They ripen south first,” she called, pointing.
“South, my ass,” muttered Monkman under his breath. “North it is.” The old man led the way. A few minutes’ walking brought them to four ramshackle granaries. A flock of blackbirds exploded out of the shadows cast by the buildings where they had been feeding on oats and barley leaked onto the ground. The sudden flight, the whir of wings, the indignant cries of chek! chek! gave Monkman a start and shook him out of an absorbing rehearsal of what exactly he would say to Alfred Marker when he confronted him with the steer that had supposedly been dispatched by a bolt from heaven. It was then it struck him what going north meant. There were only two clumps of bush big enough to hide a steer in to the north. One ran along the fence line separating quarters and the other was a five- or six-acre patch of uncleared poplar, birch, and scrub oak standing in the midst of the field.
The field. Thinking of it made him apprehensive, made him step more quickly, made his chest tighten. They were crossing summerfallow now, heading toward the distant fence line where the tops of the poplars flickered silver in the sun and wind. The old man found it heavy going. His boots sank to the laces in the loose powdery soil as if it were new snow and the black earth radiated a fierce, dusty heat up into his reddening face. He wished he could turn back. A visit to the field was a visit to bad luck. For twelve years he had superstitiously avoided it whenever possible.
“When I reach those trees I’m going to find a spot of shade and cool myself out,” he declared, trying to initiate conversation. Talking would prevent thinking.
Daniel plodded along beside him without a trace of enthusiasm. Halfway up his shins his trousers were grey with dust. “Yeah, it’s pretty hot, all right,” was all the response Monkman could get.
“It’s hotter than the hubs of hell. A man could take a heart attack on a day like this. Plenty have.”
“My Dad died from heart trouble,” said Daniel. “He was forty-eight. That isn’t very old.”
Monkman threw the boy an appraising glance. Daniel’s expression was guarded, set. “You don’t remember him, do you?” asked Monkman.
The question provoked no change in the boy’s face. “No,” he said.
Monkman let the matter drop. They went on in silence until they reached the wood where a narrow strip of grass separated the tilled ground from the grove. Groaning theatrically, the old man shuffled over to the shade spread by the trees and lowered himself stiffly, in stages, down into the brome grass tassels. There he lay, the crushed stems prickling the skin of his back through his shirt and the pollen and dust he had disturbed settling on him. He had placed his hat squarely in the centre of his chest. Twice he sneezed violently.
“If you’re too tired to walk back, I’ll fetch the truck for you,” the boy offered, hovering over him.
“No, I’m fine. But what you can do is take a prowl in the bush and see if that bastard’s tied my steer up in there.”
Daniel wasn’t eager to take up the suggestion. “She said there’s ticks in the bush.”
The old man laughed.
“What’s so funny? You think it’s so funny, why don’t you go look yourself?”
“Played-out, fat old men aren’t built for bush. They’re not built for climbing over deadfalls and squeezing through all that kind of shit.”
“So why should I? What’s in it for me – getting eaten alive?”
“Five dollars if you locate my steer.”
“Five dollars?” Daniel was taken by surprise. For him it was a lot of money.
“Five dollars.”
“And if I don’t?” he demanded, suspicious of a catch.
“You’ll get fifty cents for effort. The prospect of an extra four-fifty ought to encourage you to look careful. Deal?”
“Deal.”
He heard the grass rustle, a dry twig crack as Daniel left him. Then he knew he was alone. Alone, it was more difficult to prevent the field beyond the curtain of trees from stealing back into his mind. To hold it out, he began to review in his mind the things he must soon tell Daniel.
It was very important to do it right. He had never said any of these things to his own son Earl. But then talking to Earl in such a fashion would have been pointless. None of it would have been any use to Earl. Earl had never been constituted to make anything out of common sense. This one was. This one weighed you while you weighed him. Earl had never weighed anybody. He had thought everyone was cut from the same cloth as he was. If you came right down to it, Earl wouldn’t have been able to learn what he had to teach him. This one, he suspected, knew half of it already. A shrewd, calculating little bugger to whom five dollars made all the difference in the world. So different, the two of them, Daniel and Earl. How did it happen, the clouding and confusion of bloodlines in a family? For the life of him he had never been able to see himself in his own son and yet he believed he could in his grandson. What was the old saying? Character jumps a generation? Was there anything of Daniel’s father in him? Of course, he couldn’t say. He knew nothing about the boy’s sire, the tailor, or whatever he had been. There must be some of that in Daniel, some tailor, although he couldn’t spot it. Everything he saw in the boy struck him as pure Monkman. The last of the line. The only grandchild.
He thought of Martha, dead before she was a grandmother.
Monkman could feel his sweat drying in the folds and creases in the skin of his neck. He realized how tired he was. Not much sleep again last night on account of the dream. Now, every time his eyes closed an insect would light on his face and go for a stroll. They must take me for dead, he thought, an old man stretched flat on his back in the grass with his eyes shut.
He blinked, brushed his hand back and forth over his cheeks. The cool and damp of the earth was rising up, leaching into his flesh. How? The ground ought to be hot and dry as a fever, there hadn’t been rain in weeks. He was contemplating sitting up so he didn’t take a chill in his kidneys when a dragonfly came helicoptering inches above his face and pinned him to the ground with its beauty, with its ruby sheen and shimmer. Martha had owned a brooch shaped like a dragonfly. It had fragile lacquered wings. Martha died of a stroke. Vera’s husband of a heart ailment. No luck in this family. The tailor had looked old in the wedding picture she sent. Too old for a wisp of a girl like her. Bride and groom standing on courthouse steps. Is that where Jewish people got married? In court? There was nobody else in the snapshot. No family, no friends. So who took the picture?
Alec’s grip on his hat relaxed. It slid off his chest and dropped by his side. He was standing in a poorly lit room being fitted for a suit. The sure, deft touch of the hands running the tape over his body was lulling, soothing. The tailor was measuring him. His limbs grew heavier and heavier, his joints looser and looser.
“Hey. Hey. Hey!”
Monkman woke with a gasp, wincing and gaping. Daniel was kneeling in the grass beside him, his hand resting on his grandfather’s shoulder.
“What?”
“You must have dropped off.”
The old man reached out, seized his grandson by the elbow, and pulled himself into a sitting position. His eyes narrowed and his head wobbled, assaulted by the dazzle of sun.
“No steer,” reported Daniel. His voice sounded all mumbly to Monkman because the boy had pulled out the front of his shirt and was peering down the neck of it as he spoke, searching himself closely and anxiously for ticks. “Nothing. I walked clear through and came out on crop on the other side. There’s bush in the middle of that field but I didn’t go on, in case you wondered why I was so long.” He broke off examining himself and lifted his face. “Jeez, I feel all crawly but I can’t see anything. How big are these ticks supposed to be anyway?”
Monkman was staring back the way they had come, staring out over the gently swelling and subsiding black earth. The air above the summerfallow quivered and bent, distorting the view like a pane of cheap, flawed glass.
Before he fell asleep there had been something to do with the boy. What? Then it came to him. Without preamble or introduction he simply said, “Your mother asked Mr. Stutz to have a man to man talk with you.” Having delivered himself of this news he studied the boy for any sign that Daniel had been warned of his mother’s arrangement. There was none. “Well,” said the old man, pressing on, “were there questions you’d been asking your mother that maybe she didn’t want to answer?”
Daniel shook his head.
“I guess it was her idea then? I guess she thought it was time you learned certain things it was more proper for a man to teach you.”
“I guess so,” said the boy apprehensively.
“Anyway, after your mother talked to Mr. Stutz he came to me because he didn’t feel it was his place to talk to you. He took it for family business and thought maybe I was the one should do it.” Monkman hesitated. “Seeing I’m the closest thing you have to a father.” Monkman squinted up at Daniel. “So maybe you should take a seat so we can do as your mother wants.”
The suggestion sounded like an order. Daniel sat with a look of extreme uneasiness. It was embarrassing to be talked to this way. Long ago he had read everything the Reader’s Digest had to say on the impending topic and doubted there was much he could be taught. He had even been able to correct Lyle on a few points. He was satisfied that his knowledge was pretty wide-ranging. He knew you couldn’t get VD from a toilet seat and he knew that husbands ought to be affectionate to their wives after the sex act as well as before it. Otherwise women felt used. And he knew whatever else fitted between these two bookends. With the old guy smiling that way, falser than even his teeth, he was sure he was going to be put through something horrible.
“I don’t know what your mother imagines is a man to man talk,” Alec began by saying, “but I’d guess it’s supposed to cover what a man should know to keep himself out of trouble. To my idea, what’s most troublesome for men is sex, drinking, and fighting. No particular order of importance.” But the last was a lie. There was a particular order of importance and the brave thing to do would be to get the worst bit over first. He reminded himself to tell the kid only what would prove useful to him. It was likely Daniel would do exactly as everybody else before him had done. There was no percentage in ignoring that simple fact. So whatever he said should keep in mind human nature. Mr. Stutz wouldn’t have kept it in mind. Mr. Stutz didn’t accept human nature as an excuse for anything. He was always laying down the law as to how men ought to act, despite the impossibility of them performing any of the remarkable feats he called upon them to perform. Alec had always believed in working with what you were given, and human nature was a given. It was where he would begin.
“I don’t know any polite way of saying this, and the only way I’ve got of saying it is straight out. A boy gets to your age, or somewhere close to it, and something happens – that thing of his starts provoking and tormenting him continual. If it hasn’t happened to you yet, it will shortly. There’s no getting around it, that pecker of yours isn’t going to give you hardly a moment’s peace. Which leads me to what I’m going to say to you now. Which is about playing with yourself. Now don’t get me wrong – I’m not recommending it, I’m just saying that more than one has taken it for the solution of a predicament. There’s boys your age that suffer terrible worries from that. If it’s a sin, it’s got to be a small one. As to whatever rumours you may have heard about the results – about going blind or mental – I can’t believe it. It doesn’t make any sense. How’s a pecker to know the difference between a woman and a hand? A pecker doesn’t have a brain, or eyes. It’s just a story, like a horsehair in a water barrel turns into a worm. What I’m saying is let it alone if you can but, if you can’t, remember you aren’t the first and you won’t be the last.” Monkman paused and waited. Daniel said nothing. All his attention was fastened on a spear of grass he spun in his fingers.
“You know what we’re talking about, don’t you?” asked the old man sharply.
Daniel nodded his head without looking up from the stalk of grass.
At least that was over. He hoped the boy had understood. “I won’t say nothing now about women,” said the old man brusquely. “I’ll save that one for when you’re older.” He took a deep breath of relief, felt himself on firmer ground. “Now drinking,” he said happily. “Stutz doesn’t have a single good word for it. He just goes on about how it has been the downfall of thousands. I won’t argue with him. I know myself the trouble it caused me at one time. If I learned one thing from my trouble it was this: there’s no point in drinking if you aren’t happy. The thing about liquor is that it’s an encourager. It encourages happiness in a happy man and sadness in a sad one. It encourages whatever else you happen to be feeling. The young bucks fight when they’re drunk because booze adds oil to the fire young men carry around burning in their bellies. Now I’m not saying any of this to you now because I expect you to follow my advice straight off. I’m saying it so that when you come to make your own mistakes you can think back and test what’s happening to you against what I said was true. It might bring you to reason sooner. There’s nothing like a second pair of eyes for help. It’s what Mr. Stutz did for me when he pointed out certain things about my drinking when I was bad into it. You see, I couldn’t see the start of my misery because I was too deep into it. Now it’s true I still take a drink – mostly when Stutz is around – but that’s just to prove to him I’ve got my own will. I won’t be a slave to it or a slave to avoiding it. Besides, if you keep company with men you’re bound to keep company with liquor. Particularly around here. It won’t be long before you’ll be drinking beer out behind the dance hall to work up enough courage to speak to a girl inside. There’s no point if the courage isn’t inside you. When you’re puking in the bushes, ask yourself then if what your grandfather said wasn’t right.”
“My friend Lyle and me drank some of the gin his mother kept hid under the kitchen sink,” volunteered Daniel, encouraged by what he took to be his grandfather’s tolerant attitude to drinking.
“Thief’s pride is pitiable pride. I wouldn’t brag on that, if I was you,” said his grandfather sternly, “hooking some lady’s gin the way you hook your mother’s smokes.” Then, noticing Daniel’s obvious alarm, he added, “Don’t worry. I haven’t said nothing to your mother about the cigarettes. But if I was you, I’d think twice about laying hands on her property. The consequences aren’t likely to be worth it. You need a cigarette that bad, lift it from my pack. Who do I have to complain to but myself?”
Daniel could feel his face flush and his ears burn. When had he seen? For a moment he considered denying the accusation but the calm, steady inspection that the old man was making of him helped Daniel recognize the futility of lying. It might, he thought, have been better to have been caught by his mother after all.
“Anybody ever teach you how to fight?” asked the old man.
The question was so unexpected, so unrelated to what had immediately gone before that Daniel was at a loss for an answer. “Pardon?”
“Can you fight?”
“Fight?”
“Yeah, fight. Anybody ever teach you to take care of yourself?”
As a matter of fact, nobody ever had. But he wasn’t about to admit it. “Yeah.”
“That’s good. Because you better be ready to handle yourself when school starts in September. A place like this, they’re not used to new boys. Anybody new is liable to catch it for a while until he teaches people to leave him alone.”
“My mother says she doesn’t believe in fighting. She says my father was a pacifist. So she is too.”
“If your mother’s a pacifist so’s Field Marshal Montgomery.”
“She says there’s better ways of settling an argument than with your fists.”
“No doubt there is – as long as you can find somebody to argue with who agrees on the procedures. I don’t think you’ll find many of those in Connaught.” The old man gave a sharp, foxy bark of laughter. “Imagine Vera talking that way. I can’t figure it. Maybe Earl but not your mother. I never came across anybody with more fight bred into them than she has. Not that she isn’t right in some ways. All my life I tried to avoid settling a disagreement with my boots and fists. That’s the truth. As God is my judge, I’ve walked away from more than one invitation to scuffle. When I was a young man I was a demon to dance and at every dance in those days there were always the cocks-of-the-walk who showed up to pick fights. They all acted as if fighting was some kind of sport, an amusement like baseball, or pool, or a game of horseshoes. Fighting was their way of attracting notice. You know how I handled them if they stepped on my toes? I took the notice away from them. I said, ‘If you want to fight, you sonofabitch, I’ll fight you. But a week from now, cold sober and alone. Just the two of us with nobody to watch and cheer and carry on. Just you and me, friend. Set the time and place and I’ll be there.’ I meant it, too. And they could see I meant it and their friends could see I meant it. You know how many takers I got?” Monkman formed a circle with his thumb and forefinger. “Zero. None. You know why? Because even the ones who pretend to like to scrap really don’t. It’s the cheering they like, the clap on the back, the chance to strut. Take away the crowd and you take away the guts.
“And you know how I discovered that fact?” said the old man earnestly, bending towards Daniel. “Entirely by accident is how I discovered that fact. I had this female cousin – Rose her name was, she’s been dead for years now – who was the hired girl to the postmaster’s wife. Now Rose was a good-natured, plain, hard-working girl but she was also a little on the simple side, not so as she couldn’t do a job if it was all explained to her, she could do that, but she was still simple, what I’d call trusting-simple, and there was this young fellow who lived next door to the postmaster’s who used to tease her. Now he must’ve been ten years older than Rose – she was about fifteen then – and he ought to have known better but he didn’t. His name was Billy Atkins and he thought pretty highly of himself. I suppose people encouraged him in it. He was handsome, the kind that lounges about decorating street corners. All the girls thought he was the cat’s ass and most of the boys were afraid of him because he had a reputation for being wild and one way or another he had whipped every one of them either in school or after he got kicked out of it.
“Anyway, whenever he and his friends happened to be holding up a telephone pole and Rose chanced to go by, Billy Atkins couldn’t help but treat the boys to a laugh at her expense. It was an easy thing for him to do because Rose couldn’t hide the fact she thought Billy Atkins was pretty wonderful. So as she went by, watching her feet, he’d call out, ‘Am I on for Saturday night, Rosie?’
“And she’d stop dead in her tracks and say in her quiet voice, ‘Do you really mean it this time, Mr. Atkins?’
“And he’d say of course he meant it and she’d say, ‘Well then you’re on,’ and he’d wink at his friends and say, ‘On for how long, Rose?’ And one of his admirers would shout, ‘For as long as it takes!’ And they’d all laugh themselves sick and Rose, being slow-witted, would look from one face to another, trying to catch the joke and sometimes laughing herself, at what she didn’t know, just to please Billy Atkins.
“It was getting so bad that the only decent thing to do was to try and stop it because I was a relative and Rose didn’t have any brothers and her father lived out on the farm and didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t want to do it because I knew I was no match for Billy Atkins. He was older for one thing. Then I was about seventeen. I’d been working for almost three years on labouring jobs so I had some muscle on me, but Billy Atkins had more and knew how to use it better. Pride decided me to do it the way I did. If I was going to get my clock cleaned I preferred to have it done private rather than public.
“At the time I’m speaking of, Billy Atkins was working hauling gravel for the concrete foundations of the new Old Fellows’ Hall they were putting up then. The pits were a couple of miles out of town. Haulage was all by horses then. Atkins would have to drive his team out to the pits, throw on a load, and then drive it back to town to dump. I figured the pits was one sure place to catch him alone. So one Saturday morning I walked out to find him. When I got to the gravel digs he was just topping off his wagon. He didn’t see me coming because his back was to me as he worked. I was almost on him when I saw him toss his shovel up on the load, step up on the wheel, and boost himself onto the seat. He got quite a surprise when he reached for the reins and there I was, looking up at him.
“ ‘What the fuck brings you out here, young Monkman?’ he says. ‘You on a Boy Scout nature hike?’
“All the time I’d been coming on, watching him shovel, I’d held my mind blank. That’s because I didn’t want to have no excuses prepared and ready if my nerve failed me at the last second. There was nothing to say to him but the truth. I said it quick. I said, ‘I came to tell you to leave my cousin Rose MacPherson alone. I don’t want you making fun of her in the streets anymore.’
“You could have knocked him down with a feather after I said that. Billy Atkins never bargained on that sort of talk from the likes of me. He couldn’t quite believe his ears, so he says, ‘What did you say to me?’ As if he were the King of England and somebody had asked him, ‘How’s your royal arse today, Your Highness?’
“Myself, I didn’t see how I could draw back now. I was in the thick of it. I started pulling off my coat. ‘Climb down off that wagon,’ I said, ‘Come off that wagon, Billy Atkins.’
“That’s when he gave himself away. Billy shot a quick look all around him. He was looking for the rest of us. It was just there, for the blink of an eyelid, but I saw how he couldn’t fathom I’d come alone. Where were my friends? The glance he couldn’t help taking told him there was nobody else, but he could scarcely believe it. His mouth went tight on him, like he’d bit into a lemon. ‘Are you in your right mind?’ he says. ‘Or are you as bad off in the head as that cousin of yours? If I step down off this wagon, by Christ you’ll rue the day.’
“ ‘I’m prepared to rue it,’ I said. ‘Step down.’ No sooner had those words left my mouth than I knew he wouldn’t. It came to me that this was all too strange for his taste. He didn’t want anything to do with this strange kid in an out of the way, lonely place. Maybe he took me for crazy.
“ ‘I’ll step down when I decide to step down,’ he said. ‘I don’t take orders from you. You can count yourself lucky I’m working. I’m not about to lose my job because I took time out to teach you your manners. I can arrange to do that some other time.’
“ ‘You don’t have to bother to arrange nothing if you arrange to leave my cousin alone,’ I told him. Didn’t that frost him? Not being able to back off a young pup like me sent him white in the face. He reared up on his hind legs on that wagon and cursed me with every name he could lay his tongue to. And when he ran out of names he up with the reins and laid them down hard on his team so that they came at me with their tails flying and it was get out of the way or be run down. As he went by, wagon bouncing, he hung his face over the side and shouted, ‘I’ll see you in town! See if I don’t!’
“And I hollered back, ‘If you do, I’ll be back to pay you a visit out here!’ Which was obviously the right answer because he never looked me up in town and as far as I know he never bothered Rose neither. So that’s how I learned about setting the price higher than anybody wants to pay. You don’t have to win outright. All you have to do is make the bully boys worry more, or hurt more than they counted on. I recommend it to you. If somebody hangs a licking on you in the schoolyard with all their friends watching, make him do it again, when there’s just the two of you. Catch him alone. See that you hurt him enough to spoil his fun. Teach him that picking on you isn’t going to be anything but hard work. Let him understand that for every whipping he hands out before a crowd, sooner or later, he’ll have to do it again, without the cheers and without the glory. There’s not one in a thousand that has the stomach for that.”
What made his grandfather think he had the stomach for the other? The chasing down and cornering of an enemy who had already beaten you? It seemed sick to Daniel. Why, even Montgomery Gift in The Young Lions hadn’t been so completely on his own. He had had his friend Dean Martin there to pick him up when he was knocked down, to beg him not to go on, to tell him not to be so foolish.
“It sounds sort of stupid to me,” said Daniel. “Looking to get beat up a second time.”
“Not so stupid if it keeps you from getting it a third time.”
Daniel thought for a moment. “Did you mean it – about them picking on me at school? Will they really?”
“Of course I can’t say. But I’d be ready for it. Think the worst – then there aren’t any surprises.”
“I don’t think I could do like you say,” said Daniel.
“You could. You’re your mother’s son.”
“She always says I take after my Dad. She says I’m nothing like her.”
“Wishful thinking. You’ve got to be as tough as she is to have survived her twelve years. She’d have killed anybody weaker. Even as a girl she was something to watch out for. One Dominion Day she tackled a full-grown man. She couldn’t have been more than ten.”
“What? Mom? A man?”
“Sure. It was over her brother Earl.”
“Tell me,” said Daniel. “What was it about?”
“It was about Earl,” Alec said. The look on his face testified to the pleasure he took in his own stories. “Earl was always shy and timid from a baby up. Vera used to tease him about it but Lord help anybody else that she caught tormenting her little brother. I remember coming home from work one night and what do I see but your mother, the one who’s the pacifist, boiling down the street after Hansie Beck with a croquet mallet waving above her head like a tomahawk. She was out for blood because he’d done something or other to make Earl bawl. Your grandmother spent half her day negotiating peace with the neighbours because of the scraps Vera got herself in, sticking up for her brother.
“She got herself in a big one Dominion Day. They could have cancelled the evening fireworks because they got them early the way she went off like a Roman Candle. There was lots to see her do it, too. July First was the biggest day of the summer back then. All the farmers came in from the country and there was crowds and crowds of people. It don’t seem much for entertainment now that we got the television but then it was something, the Dominion Day Sports Day. There was a big ball tournament with prize money, a horseshoe-pitching contest, harness-racing at the track, a tug of war between the volunteer fire brigade and the Connaught hockey team – although they didn’t know how to split themselves up because half of them belonged to both – and more food than you could eat in a month of Fridays. All the ladies’ church groups and auxiliaries squared off to out-cook and out-sell one another. United Church ladies wanted to sell more pie than the Catholics and the Royal Purple wanted to plough the Red Cross under. Every organization had a booth with tables and benches and they sold cold pop out of tin washtubs full of crushed ice, and plates of cake and pie and potato salad and ham and cold roast beef and cabbage rolls, and mugs of coffee. It was a treat to have a seat in the booths because the husbands had roofed them for the ladies with poplar branches so it would be all green and shady and so a breeze could pass through them and stir the leaves up. On a hot day it was a cooling place to be. And all over the fairgrounds there were families, mostly country people who brought their own lunch because it seemed to them a crime to pay good money for something no better than they could get at home. They would be picnicking on blankets spread on the grass or sitting on the runningboards of their vehicles, eating. It was something. We wouldn’t have missed it for the world, Earl and me and your mother. Only thing that beat a Dominion Day was Christmas.
“Now on any such day Earl stuck to me like shit to a blanket because he was so shy. He’d hook his hand in my back pocket and hang on tight, like this,” said Monkman, illustrating by raising his hip from the ground and thrusting his hand into his pocket. “You couldn’t have crowbarred him off me. But Vera wasn’t like that at all. She preferred to go off on her own and see what trouble she could get into. Earl was more comfortable back there where he could hide himself behind my legs and take a peek out around my hip every now and then just to see how the world was running, then duck his head back out of sight if anybody happened to catch his eye. He was about five and should’ve been past that but he wasn’t, so that’s how we saw the Sports Day, him hanging on to my pocket for dear life as we went about our business. It was funny, he was like your own shadow, you could forget he was there he kept himself so quiet. Your mother was cut from different cloth. She couldn’t be forgotten. You noticed Vera. Full of questions about this or that and if it wasn’t questions she was trying to jimmy another nickel out of you for more candy. She wasn’t a girl to overlook. But Earl wasn’t like that. He was awful quiet, a thumb-sucker and starer.
“That day, somehow I lost him. I ran into a fellow I knew and we had ourselves a talk and then I walked off without Earl on my pocket. He must’ve let go for just a second, maybe to swap sucking thumbs and I was gone. He couldn’t catch a hold of me because of the crowd and once he lost track of me in all that press of people, him being ass-high to the rest of the world, he couldn’t spot me again.
“Soon as I realized I’d lost him I went back on the run, pushing aside anybody got in my way. Not a sign of him. So there I was running here, there, and everywhere like a chicken with its head cut off trying to find Earl before he had himself a real shit conniption. Then I came on Vera. She was crouching underneath this big cottonwood somebody had hung a set of gym rings on. A bunch of harness drivers who’d been drinking behind the stables were showing off for one another, skinning the cat and chinning themselves. Vera was squatted there watching them like a vulture. She was probably getting ready to make a grab for any loose change they flipped out of their pockets turning themselves over and then run for it.
“I said, ‘Vera, your brother’s lost.’ It was all I needed to say. She knew what sort of state he’d be in, what that meant. She was up and gone like smoke in a wind.
“Back in those days I was a cigar smoker – White Owls – and I carried them in my back pocket because it was cut deep for a wallet. Earl must’ve spent a good deal of his time face to face with that white owl on the package with its big yellow eyes. Now when we got separated, naturally Earl, being Earl, panics. He gallops off this way and that way, looking. Then all of a sudden, right in the middle of all those asses what does he run up against? A White Owl package and two big old yellow eyes peeping over a back pocket. Sure enough, Earl makes a dive for it and rams his hand down in the pocket. Saved, he thinks.
“Wasn’t me, though. Just another White Owls smoker with his cigars stuck in his ass pocket. Vera arrives on the scene and finds this man shaking Earl by the shoulders, yelling. Of course, he took him for a thief with his hand stuffed down to the bottom of his pocket. I arrive on the scene of the crime just as Vera flies onto this character from behind. She tackles him and clamps down hard. She’s got her arms locked around his belly and her legs scissored around his shins and she’s trying to sink her teeth into his back right through his jacket. She only leaves off biting long enough to holler, ‘Run, Earl! Run for your life!’ and then she squeezes down on the fellow and goes back to work gnawing a chunk off him.
“But Earl’s too scared to run. His eyes are the size of saucers, he’s sucking on his thumb so hard it’s a wonder he doesn’t pull the nail clean off it, and he’s backing off one step at a time, slow, as this man staggers after him, Vera riding him piggyback, sticking like flypaper and bellering, ‘Run for your life, Earl! Run!’ ”
The old man began quaking with laughter. Tears stood in his eyes. “Jesus, wasn’t that something?” he asked. Suddenly, he threw back his head and roared at the sky. “Run for your life, Earl! Run! Jesus, what a commotion. Run for your life, Earl! Run!” he shouted so that his face darkened with blood and effort. “Run! Run!” Then, as abruptly as he had begun, he stopped. Monkman searched Daniel’s face. “She had the right idea, your mother, didn’t she?” he asked softly.
Daniel shifted his buttocks on the ground. He wondered if his grandfather’s uncontrolled shouting had been heard up at the house. He hoped not. It had given him an odd feeling. So had his grandfather’s question.
“I don’t know,” he said lamely.
“No, I suppose there’s no reason you should. And I’ve gone on and on talking. I should have stopped long ago, before I got to such old stories.”
“I liked them,” said Daniel.
“Well, whether you did or not, they’re finished with now. We’d better be getting home.”
“What about the steer?”
“To hell with the steer. I don’t care about the steer anymore.”
“I could check the bush in the field back there.”
“No.”
“It wouldn’t take long. No more than twenty minutes,” argued Daniel. “And then you’d know.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Monkman irritably. “I don’t care.” He was picking himself off the ground the way a toddler would, braced on all fours, raising his hind end tentatively, by degrees, testing his balance. Then one final effort, an abrupt wrench up out of his stoop and he stood swaying, a little dizzy finding himself upright.
“We come all the way out here and as soon as we get here you’ve all of a sudden got to go. Where’s the sense in that?” demanded the boy peevishly.
“It’s late,” said Monkman, avoiding looking at his grandson. He was angry. By arguing with him the boy made him feel foolish. Yet he knew he wasn’t going to let him set one foot in that bad-luck field.
“It isn’t late.” Daniel glanced at his watch. “It’s not even three.”
“I’m the one who decides whether it’s late or not. So it’s late. Come along.”
“What about my chance for five dollars?” the boy wanted to know. “Have you forgot that?”
“Come.” The old man swung round on his heel and struck out into the summerfallow with awkward, stumbling fury. Anger jerked him like a puppet over the furrows; his boots flicked aside the hot, black, sifted earth; his shoulders see-sawed and twitched.
Daniel stood his ground. “I’m going to look,” he called after him, although without much conviction.
The old man didn’t bother to turn. His right hand snapped up. Pinched between forefinger and thumb something fluttered. When he saw what it was Daniel followed, resigned. The money was something.