Guy Vanderhaeghe - The Englishman’s Boy

In snatches the Englishman’s boy would doze on the floor, waking when Dawe commenced raving and thrashing on his straw tick, hollering for some woman called Nanny Hooper. The Englishman’s boy had seen his share die, and it was frequent they called on their mamma in the testing time, the hour of travail, travelling back to the years of the milk-titty. But the Englishman just bellered for his Nanny Hooper, whosoever she might be when to home.

The second night came the convulsions. Straddling Dawe’s chest he rode the bucking pony, grabbing fistfuls of hair to pin the flailing head to the pillow while the Englishman’s face slowly turned black, his eyes rolling back in their sockets, his heels beating a frantic tattoo on the hard mattress.

The third night there was nothing left to do but sit on a hard chair and listen to the sound of the ragged, hoarse breathing wind down. Towards two in the morning Dawe suddenly cried, “Nanny! Nanny! Nanny!” in the high voice of a little child, then he curled himself up on his pallet and died. The boy straightened the limbs, washed the body, tied the jaw shut with a hanky, closed his eyes. He didn’t know what a dead Englishman required in the way of a leave-taking so he sat back down on the hard chair with his hands on his knees and sang “Amazing Grace” to the naked white body, the aubergine face and yellow eyelids.

Going through the deceased’s effects he was surprised to find so little real money, only forty-five dollars in gold coin. He had heard Dawe say a line of credit was arranged for him at LG. Baker Company, but a dead man couldn’t draw cash nor goods and the Englishman’s boy was owed two months’ wages.

He appropriated Dawe’s tweed jacket and bowler. Both were sizes too big for him, but he could wear the hat by stuffing the sweatband with the old newspapers which the Englishman had refused to throw away because he said they spoke to him in the soft accents of home. The boy pulled on the jacket and examined himself in a yellowed mirror. With the cuffs turned back it would serve. Warm and a hard-wearer. He slipped a box of revolver cartridges in his left-hand pocket and a box of cartridges for the carbine in his right. Last of all, he crossed two bandoliers on his chest, buckled on the holstered Colt, and slung the Winchester over his shoulder in its saddle-scabbard. As close as he could calculate, with some generosity allowed for the risks he had taken nursing the Englishman, this was what he was entitled to. The rest of the Englishman’s worldly goods and possessions he left behind.

The owner was not on duty, a night clerk nodded in a chair. The boy tapped the counter with his knuckles and asked to settle up. The bill came to fifteen dollars for three nights’ lodging, six dollars for meals delivered cold to the room, five dollars for a bottle of whisky he’d dosed Dawe with when he was taken with the chills. Twenty-six dollars. Computing the inconvenience of a corpse, he handed the desk clerk forty, and kept back the last five of the Englishman’s ready money for himself.

The clerk asked if the fourteen dollars extra was on account for his friend, was he staying on?

“Until you bury him,” said the boy. “I took what’s owed me. The rest of his guns, his personals – they’re yours now.”

“You ain’t leaving a dead man on premises!” the clerk shouted after him as he went through the door. “Here, you! Stop!”

The boy walked on. He figured they’d do all right burying Dawe, it had to be purely profit. There were silver-backed hairbrushes and a gold watch up in that room. There were shirt-studs and rings in a jewellery case, fancy guns, drummer’s clothes. He could’ve taken his pick of it all and gone out a window, but creeping and crawling wasn’t his line. He remembered what the Englishman had said about him down the Missouri, that he’d stand and fight. If it wasn’t for the sake of those few words he wouldn’t have stopped a minute with the dying man – the truth be known, he hadn’t liked him much. His Pap had taught him his lessons about rich men. The soft words of a whore and a whore’s hard heart, hand in your pocket. Still, the Englishman had spoken him his due, allowed he had spunk, and was owed his due in return.

The Englishman’s boy went out into false dawn, presentiment of morning, the big coat and big hat and the expensive guns rendering him ridiculous and a shade sinister at the same time. The night clerk came to the door of the Overland Hotel, ready to press his point, but seeing him there lit by the light spilling from the doorway, dwarfed by another man’s clothes, dwarfed by the long shadow rooted to his heels and stretched in tortured protraction across the pale dust of the street, he felt a sudden unease and hurriedly turned back inside.

The door slammed and the boy sniffed the cold air, looked deliberately up and down the street. A few horses were still standing saddled and tethered to hitching posts outside the saloons, looming in the pearl-grey light like the strange horses that galloped through the last days of the world, the horses his mother had read to him out of the Bible. The boy walked on as the horses snuffled and nickered and tossed their heads in apprehension, walked on past the silent, shuttered hurdy-gurdy houses and saloons, past I.G. Baker’s and T.C. Power’s big trading concerns, past a livery stable, a blacksmith shop, a bunkhouse for bullwhackers, walked on with the numbness induced by three days of sleeplessness, propelling one boot mechanically in front of the other. It was a short street in a short town and soon he had walked himself out of it and into a wilderness of space, the forlorn sweep of sky and land offering the final proof he was trapped in this town. There was nowhere to go. He had no horse. The Yankton had left town as soon as she unloaded and headed back downriver. In any case, five dollars wouldn’t have bought him a ticket in steerage, wouldn’t buy him much of anything in a boom-town of sky-high prices.

He sat down on a rock, back to the rising sun, and wrapped himself tighter in the tweed jacket. One thing for certain, he couldn’t stomach sweeping out no more saloons, nor sloshing out no more cuspidors, nor being at the beck and call of bar-keeps, piano players with two left hands, frail sisters, and soiled doves. He was done with all that. Sooner starve like a dog in a ditch than be whistled up by the likes of them. And he knew ditches, had more than a winking acquaintance with them in the two years since his brother put the run on him.

It might be one thing to swallow a whipping at the hands of your Pap, but he didn’t figure that whipping rights had passed along to Dan with the farm when the old man died. Seeing as his brother was four years older and forty pounds heavier, he’d took it for a while, but then one day when he’d had enough, he’d done Dan with a shovel, whacked his head good and sound, same as a nail. One swing to pound him onto his knees, two more to peg him flat and level with the dust. That shovel blade had rung sweet as any church bell to his ears, whanging away on Dan’s poll.

So there his brother had laid swooning in the yard for nigh on an hour, the chickens clucking and cocking their heads at him, eyeing the blood leaking from his scalp and puddling on the ground. But at last Dan gave himself a shake, climbed to his feet like the risen Lazarus, and reeled for the cabin, muddy gore caked to his face. When he sallied back out with the flintlock, raising the stakes like that, gun against a shovel, what was he to do but fold his hand, cut and run? Now that he owned guns of his own, one at his belt, one at his back, God help any poxy bastard who snicked a bullet past his ear the way Dan had. He was done with showing his heels to any man.

The Englishman’s boy turned his eyes over his shoulder and to the river bluffs across the Missouri. There the strong glow of the rising sun lit a mass of shelving cloud so that it appeared a bank of molten lava squeezed from the guts of the earth, each striation distinct and gleaming with a different fire. The topmost layer the rich ruddy purple of cooling slag; then the dim cherry of a horseshoe heated for shaping; then layers of orange and yellow which smelted down to where swollen, bulging hills met the sky in pure white fire. He faced west again where the sun over his shoulder was painting the valley hills with a tenderer light. On the crest of these hills the Englishman’s boy could make out three tiny black dots, moving.