Guy Vanderhaeghe - The Englishman’s Boy

“And,” I say, “what was the result?”

“He give me a cool glass of buttermilk and some warm corn bread – with butter. He put a bit of salt pork in my satchel. He made his nigger take the boots right off his feet and give them to me. A man travels faster with boots on his feet.” He sends me a confiding look, his tongue mischievously tucked in his cheek. “You think your rich man going to like that story? That one going to sell?”

“It might, if that isn’t all. Tell me you met an angel of mercy on that road from the farmer’s house who turned your life around and put forgiveness in your heart. Tell me you went on to found a great business and endow numerous homes for orphans. Is it possible you did any of those things, Mr. McAdoo?”

He smiles to show we understand one another. “Hell no, Harry, I didn’t get around to doing none of them things.”

I close my pad and put my pencil in my pocket. “Then this was just practice,” I say. “I’m a little rusty with the shorthand and you’re a little rusty finding the right stories. Both of us will improve as time goes by.” I open my wallet and pass him the money. “Let’s see how we manage tomorrow.”

“Don’t forget that rich yellow cream,” he reminds me. “A peach ain’t a peach without it has some cream.”

“I’ll remember.”

“Yes you will!” he shouts after me as I go out the door. “Yes you will!”

The Englishman’s boy sat with his rifle cradled across his knees, looking up at the night sky. It was a sight to ponder, those stars. They recalled to him planting time, trudging his daddy’s fields, tossing oats from the sack at his belt, the pale seed fanning and speckling the dark loam like the stars fanning and speckling the black nap of the sky. He gaped up at the seed of heaven, the wash of the Milky Way, the single stars winking the hard bitter fire of flint and steel; a crick stitched in his neck. The whole sky turning lazily in his skull, a slow reeling wheel of constellations, of shaking bands and belts of pulsing fire, of sparkly, pricking light.

Fire day and night, the searing flare of midday sun, the brilliant salty light of midnight stars, fire smouldering its way into him through his eyes, scorching him clean, empty. A clean country this, he admired the smell of it, nothing like the odour of the pigsty, the chicken run, the reek of corn souring in the bin, the stench of a hated brother’s shit greeting him when he jerked open the privy door of a morning back home. He was shut of all that now.

Here the scent of sage rose hot and aromatic under the pestle of a pounding sun, the fierce wind bearing hints of cured grass, of desiccated, medicinal-smelling earth. If a man opened his tobacco pouch ten yards off, the Englishman’s boy’s nose wrinkled, everything carried sharp on the cleanly air. Even buffalo chips burned with a tang he favoured over the gassy smell of coal.

But he had no fire now. Hardwick did not allow it. When the shadows surrounding the herd of horses began to play on his nerves and on his eyes, to shake and shudder, he lifted his gaze to the sky. When the sky began to move, to stir and swirl, he dropped it to the screen of darkness.

A fire would have been a comfort to look at.

Maybe it was just the Scotchman’s talk that had him spooked. He had begun to talk strange after he shot Hardwick’s bull buffalo. The Scotchman said this place was like the land of the old Bible Jews. Heat and sun, wind and emptiness, no nooks and crannies to hide a poor, creeping man. A clear view for the Almighty.

Most likely Scotty was afraid, knew he’d made a mistake trifling with Hardwick’s pleasure. When folks went scared, or off their heads, they’d been known to pile on the Bible talk. The Scotchman seemed to be a bit of both. All afternoon he rambled on about the wilderness, his words quick and breathy, forty days and forty nights, whispering preachments of a sledgehammer sun and anvil earth, sinner stretched suffering between the two, beaten and beaten until he broke and shattered like cold iron, or glowed red-hot with vision.

That was the way of the Bible Jews, the Scotchman said, and the red savages. Walk out into loneliness, let the wind tear at you, your tongue parch in your mouth, your belly squeeze around emptiness, until God came calling. The wild God of dreams and visions. “Your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams,” he preachified. Prophecies hatched by the sun, promised in the Bible.

Voice dropping even lower, he said he had something to tell the Englishman’s boy, tell him because the boy hadn’t joined the Devil’s Sabbath either, hadn’t drank the foul cup of blood, eaten of the uncooked flesh. The Scotchman knew them for what they were, oh yes he did, the unholy ten. Staring at the smudgy red on their lips and chins he had seen them slowly change before his very eyes, their clothes rot and fall away, revealing raddled, poxy old women, Death’s bright lip rouge smeared on their sucking mouths. Rubbing the dripping meat back and forth between their legs, groaning, then lifting it to their grinning mouths, the communion bread of Satan, covered in a crawling blue green mould of flies. Feeding the evil heart through the evil mouth.

It made the Englishman’s boy cold to think of the look on the Scotchman’s face when he said that. It seemed he was changing, too, right before his very eyes. The Englishman’s boy hankered mightily after a fire. It was three hours to morning and the night’s chill was hammering cold steel nails into the marrow of his bones.

He wouldn’t have pulled this watch if Hardwick hadn’t seen him palavering with the Scotchman. Hardwick, savage as a meat-axe all day, nothing going to his satisfaction, needed to rake somebody. Vogle had failed to raise horse tracks, which meant the thieves hadn’t swung back to rendezvous as Tom had banked they would.

Tomorrow was the Milk River, the Medicine Line; beyond it, the English Queen’s country, no law, and a mighty congregation of Indians. If they didn’t find trace of the horses before the Milk, Hardwick meant to cross the river into Canada and ride north to the Cypress Hills. There was a plentiful crop of whisky posts in the hills, and for that reason the boys welcomed this plan like news of Christmas.

News of whisky didn’t set well with the Englishman’s boy. Bad luck and whisky made an evil potion. Killing that white horse was a bad-luck deed. He’d have cut and run, except he didn’t know where the hell to run to. Behind him in Benton was a stabbed publican, to the west of him a hornet’s nest of Blackfoot. He didn’t want to bump up against neither.

His eyes were telling lies again, the darkness shaping and changing. Out there in the belly of the night, the old blind white horse and whatever sat its back were stirring, the shadows parting and closing convulsively in the effort to give birth to this presence, to push this dead-white and terrifying thing, inch by inch, into his mind.

This ain’t no vision, he told himself, jerking his eyes up at the stars. Get yonder, second sight. Shake loose of me. I don’t hanker to be no Jew prophet. Hear me?

Shorty McAdoo has been dragging his feet, stonewalling for three days. Every night Fitz phones and shouts curses at me when I tell him I’ve got nothing usable yet. I try to get through to Chance on my own, to explain the situation, but can’t. Now I come home and find this note shoved under my apartment door.

Dearest Little Truth Seeker,