Muriel Gray - The Trickster

Wilber peeled one arm from round his head and pointed to the bus. ‘He’s there. He’s goin’ to get me. Crazy guy. Keeps asking me his name.’

He was still weeping. Taylor swept the snow angrily off his thighs and marched over to where Wilber was pointing. Nothing. Of course. He came back round the front of the bus, stood over the wreck of a human being and hauled him up roughly by the arm. Wilber resisted, but Taylor was a powerful man and the Indian was on unsteady feet before he could protest further. Taylor shook him by the collar of his frayed and dirty parka. ‘Now I don’t need to tell you there’s nothin’ over there. And I also don’t need to tell you you’ll be back with the RCs faster than you can say I fuck dogs unless you pick up that shovel and shift this snow.’

Wilber looked towards the bus, then up at Taylor. ‘He gone?’

‘Don’t give me that. Get shovelling.’

He let go of Wilber’s jacket with a push and stood with his hands on his hips until the sniffing man walked gingerly to the edge of the bus and peeked round. It was true. No one there at all. Just the shovel lying on the ground where it had slid off the fence.

He walked round the back of the bus, looking left and right as though expecting an ambush, picked up the shovel and scurried back into the foreman’s sight. Where did the guy go? There was no one in the road at all. Not even a car. Unless he’d run off into the scrub, he couldn’t have just disappeared. There were no tracks leading to the scrub, but then as Wilber looked back at the sidewalk on the other side of the fence, he noted that there were no tracks at all. Anywhere.

Taylor spat, and tramped back into the shed in search of dry clothes, leaving Wilber Stonerider with the horror that maybe it was true, the sauce was hitting him bad. He looked forlornly at the smashed bottle in the snow and scooped it up in the plastic snow shovel.

A large black bird was perched motionless on the wing mirror of the broken bus and it stared at Wilber.

‘What the fuck you lookin’ at?’

He resumed his shovelling.

The bird looked back at him for a long, long time, then flapped its waxy wings and flew off.

‘Well? Are they going to move?’

Angus McEwan looked up from his makeshift table in the centre of the cabin, glaring past the man who stood in front of him as though speaking to a ghost at his side.

‘I fear it is more complex than that, Mr McEwan.’

McEwan allowed his eyes, raising them slowly and insolently, to find the face of the speaker. What an absurd figure the Reverend Henderson made. His considerable height, twinned with a slight build, made a mockery of the sombre black clothes he wore. He had the appearance of a gangly adolescent forced into ill-fitting Sunday best for a relative’s funeral, the white dog-collar rendering him almost comic, aided in its farce by a nose and cheeks turned purple by the cold. But he spoke these savages’ language, and the man was indispensable.

‘Complex in what respect, Reverend?’

Henderson stamped his great feet in a vain attempt to keep warm, and cleared his throat.

‘I have already explained their campaign to you. That is unchanged. I think it unlikely they will move at all. Not without force that is, and that would clearly be inadvisable, not to mention illegal.’

Angus McEwan paused to consider why he disliked this man so much. They were both from Scotland, albeit different parts of the country. Henderson was an east coast Church of Scotland minister, and McEwan was a west coast engineer. But there was little patriotic bonding between them, even though some such comfort would have been welcome in this distant, alien continent in which they both found themselves. It was Henderson’s stubborn and naïve allegiance to these base heathens that irritated McEwan so deeply. Any Christian man could see the Indians were not civilized beings, not fit to be treated as equals, and yet this ridiculous man treated them as though they were Lords.

To see a white man, a Scot, so humbled before savages, was disgusting to McEwan.

‘If we are to discuss legality, perhaps you would care to mention to your new flock that their forebears signed a treaty concerning this railroad and its building many decades ago. Mention that approximately ten minutes from now, when we kick their bloody behinds off the mountain.’

Henderson flushed slightly, giving new life to the broken purple veins the frost had drawn on his cheeks. McEwan often cursed to rile him. Not this time though. This time there was too much at stake.

‘I’m afraid I cannot allow you to do that, Mr McEwan.’

McEwan looked interested, and mildly excited.

‘And how do you propose to stop me?’

‘I will have words with the men. If they are for me, who will do your kicking of behinds?’

McEwan rose from the table and walked to the small pot-bellied stove at the back of the cabin. Turning his back to the minister, he knelt down, opened the door and threw in a log. Facing the wall, he spoke in a low voice.

‘You underestimate these men. They want this job finished as much as you and me. The weather is against you, Henderson.’

It was true. The blizzard that had been raging for over three weeks now, had cut off Siding Twenty-three from the world. No trains had been through since the snow built an impenetrable barrier at the top of Wolf Pass, and McEwan had been there when a futile attempt was made to break through with a snowplough on the engine, bearing witness that passage was now quite impossible.

But with or without communication, they would have to begin the initial blasting of this tunnelling operation immediately, or the whole project would be in jeopardy. But it was not the snow holding them back; it was a band of thirty-two Kinchuinick Indians, taking it in shifts to squat night and day on top of the very rock that had been drilled, ready to receive the dynamite.

When McEwan turned round to receive the minister’s response, Henderson had gone. He smiled. Well let him try, he thought. There were nearly fifty cold, homesick railroadmen out there. Christians or not, they would not take kindly to being kept away from their families an extra month or more by a bunch of unwashed barbarians. Henderson would soon see how much authority his God had, over men who dreamed nightly of their homes, tossing in their bunks and calling out the names of their wives.

Through the tiny ice-coated window he could see Henderson stumbling through the snow to the gang of men hacking at rocks with picks, the wind tugging at his black coat as he went.

McEwan resumed his seat at the table and flattened out the crumpled plans in front of him, the creases throwing flickering shadows in the light of a guttering lamp. Henderson could do as he wished.

They would blast tomorrow.

The man was coming again. Chief Hunting Wolf pulled the blanket tighter around his shoulders and composed himself. His warriors said nothing as they watched the tall man in the flapping black clothes scramble up the rocks towards them, but Hunting Wolf sensed them shift uneasily beside him in anticipation.

When the Reverend James Henderson reached the small group of natives, he was battling for breath, sweating with the exertion of the climb.

‘Big walk I do,’ he gasped.

Hunting Wolf laughed internally. This man’s command of their tongue was quite preposterous.

‘Sit down then, Henderson. You will not regain your breath by remaining on your feet.’

The Reverend made a small and silly bow with his head and joined them in the shelter of a rock, where six of them were squatting in the snow. Despite being out of the wind, the temperature on the mountainside was unbearable. Henderson could never get used to this dry, biting cold, not after so many years in the wet and windy land where he grew to manhood.