- Home
- Guy Vanderhaeghe
Homesick Page 13
Homesick Read online
Page 13
“You’d better believe he’s bothering me,” chimed in Vera.
Thomas raked her with a brooding glare. “You better shut up, Vera,” he warned.
Suddenly she remembered the hat-pin. She drew it out of her sleeve and held it glinting in the light. “How’d you like this rammed up your ass, buster?” she said.
“That’s enough,” the store owner said sharply, pushing her arm down. “Maybe everybody should calm down and stop talking such nonsense, threatening each other like children. Maybe you should go home now, son, and give her time to think about it.”
“Yeah, with any more time to think about it I ought to really make myself sick to my stomach,” said Vera.
The man ignored her. He continued speaking to Thomas in a soft, persuasive tone. “There’s really no point, is there?” he reasoned. “This has all got out of hand. Leave her be. Sleep on it. The morning always makes a difference. Don’t make yourself any more trouble.”
It was the mention of trouble that seemed to agitate and incense Thomas. “There’s no trouble in me standing where I choose!” he said, flying into a rage. “You can’t order me off the street! You and your tribe may have bought everything on it but you don’t own the road yet!” Suddenly seized by suspicion he broke off, threw Vera a cunning, measuring look. “So this is it, is it? Some dirty old Jew waiting for you in his underwear.”
Vera flung her arms into the air in exasperation. “Didn’t I say he was crazier than a shit-house rat?” she appealed to the storekeeper.
“Don’t think I don’t know who the Sunday man is now. Only light on in the street and she goes for it. Pussy bought by a kike!” he shouted. “Pussy bought by a kike!”
“Lower your voice,” said the red-haired man. “There are old people who live on this street who shouldn’t have their sleep disturbed by such foolish and disgusting talk. It frightens them, loud voices and such talk.”
“Make me lower it,” taunted Thomas, mouth twisted, bitter. “What’s the old saying? Takes nine tailors to make a man. How many Jew tailors to make one? Show me. Make me lower it! But your type can’t, can they?”
What astounded Vera was the composure of the red-haired man. She could detect no sign of anger in his face, only some variety of resigned melancholy. “No,” he said quietly, “I suppose my type can’t ever make your type do much.”
“You’re fucking right you can’t!” crowed Thomas. “I’ll make just as fucking much noise as I please. I’ll, I’ll…” and, lost without a threat, Thomas looked wildly about him, reared back, and drove his heel into what confronted him in the glass of the store window, his own desperate, unhappy reflection.
The pane exploded in fissures like the break-up of a frozen river and then the shards began to drop about them in an icy, silvery-sounding rain as the store expelled a long sigh of warm air into their astonished faces. Vera and the shop owner were still gaping when Thomas whirled about and began a panicked get-away, coat billowing out behind him as he clattered up the street. Vera, turning, wondered why the red-haired man didn’t give chase. He hadn’t yet lifted his eyes from the glittering wreckage strewn at his feet. So it fell to Vera to express the anger and contempt she believed Thomas had earned. “Run, you coward, you!” she shouted after him. “Run, you gutless wonder!”
The sound of her voice brought Thomas up short, looking like a man who has forgotten something. He stood facing her, indistinct, blurred by a hundred yards of night. “So, Vera,” he called plaintively, “what’ll it be? Whose side are you on anyway? Mine or his?” A pitiable question that only Thomas could have framed in such circumstances.
Vera squeezed her eyes tightly shut and obliterated Thomas. “His!” she shouted, shaking with fury. In the release of bottled-up tension a kind of exaltation took hold of her. “His! His! His!” she cried, eyes and fists clenched tight. A hand took her by the shoulder. “That’s enough,” said the man. “Quiet. He’s gone now.” Vera opened her eyes to lights springing on above the shops and silhouettes sliding over drawn blinds. Her gaze fell to the road. He was right. Thomas was gone. There was no trace of him. Except for the broken glass.
Vera felt a twinge of responsibility for having led misfortune to the door of a stranger. “Christ,” she said, shoving a piece of glass with the toe of her shoe, “look at the mess he’s made. Look at what that poor excuse for a man did to your window. If you call the police I can give them his address. I know where he lives. I’d be glad to be a witness for you.”
The man shrugged, turned down the corners of his mouth expressively. “I don’t think police are what that unfortunate young man needs,” he said. He regarded the fragments of broken glass and the light which fell glittering upon them. “Kristallnacht,” he said to himself.
Vera had not understood the foreign-sounding word. “Pardon me?”
“Nothing. Don’t pay any attention to me. I was just reflecting upon the beauty of broken glass and electric light. Others have done it before me.”
“There’s nothing beautiful about broken glass. It only means work, sweeping it up, replacing it.”
“A practical woman,” he said.
“Well, maybe we should set about fixing it. If nothing else, we can tape some pieces of cardboard into the window. You must have boxes in the store.”
He dismissed the suggestion with a wave of the hand. “It’s much too big a hole for cardboard. Repairs can wait until morning.”
“I’m not saying it would keep anybody out but what if it snows? And a window without anything in it has got to be an invitation to help yourself.”
“If it snows it snows. There’s nothing really worth stealing except the cash register and I can carry that upstairs with me. Besides, if there are any prowlers I’ll hear them.”
“You sleep that light?”
“As a matter of fact, at night I don’t sleep at all.” He smiled wryly at her surprise. “I’m a man of peculiar habits. I go to bed for five or six hours right after I close the store. At midnight or so I get up to read. Perfect peace and quiet. No interruptions. Except for tonight,” he added. “A bachelor’s freedom to do as he pleases. This is the wild use I make of my freedom.”
“You read all night?”
“I also drink too much coffee. Sometimes with a little whisky in it. More bachelor wildness.” He hesitated. “After such a cold and trying adventure as you’ve had tonight, could I interest you in a cup of coffee?”
“I believe you could.”
He held out his hand. “I believe formal introductions are usually the preamble to whisky. Stanley Miller.”
“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Miller,” said Vera, taking his hand. “I’m Vera Monkman.”
“Please, Miss Monkman,” he said, indicating she should enter, courteously stooping his stooped shoulders even more.
That was how it began. Her trailing him as he puffed up the steep stairs packing an antique nickel-plated cash register in his arms. Or perhaps it didn’t really begin until she stepped into his apartment and looked with amazement upon his living room, books stacked to the height of a man’s head along three walls and a phonograph player spitting static because she and Thomas had interrupted his pleasure. And then he reset the needle on the record spinning there on the turntable and the music began once more at the beginning and it was classical. Pure and refined and as different from what she listened to on her radio in her rented rooms as crystal is different from everyday glass. (Kristallnacht was the word he had said.)
And the conviction took hold of her that all these books and this music were where she was headed when she was sixteen years old, reading Shakespeare and learning French, and then it got stolen from her, this dream she never quite got straight in her head because she was too young, but was nevertheless surely bound for, a true tendency of the heart’s deepest ambition.
It made her feel unworthy, that room, and filled her with regret that she had never become so fine a person as to deserve sitting in such a room. And that, too, was the beginning
of it.
9
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 o
n 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.