Guy Vanderhaeghe - The Englishman’s Boy

“Now Harp was one of those fellers who are mindful how they stand in the community and he took it hard his wife wouldn’t wear shoes. It shamed him his wife should pull up just that much short of civilized. When neighbours called on the Lewises to pay a visit, all the time Harp would be watching them to see if their eyes didn’t go straying to his woman’s feet. They were married twenty years and every present he bought her – birthday, anniversary, Christmas – was a new pair of shoes. And every new pair of shoes she carted off to the church and put in the relief box for China. Old Harp Lewis must have put new mail-order shoes on many a China Lily.

“It was just in the matter of shoes she didn’t satisfy. Harp had six kids off of her and people said they was the most mannerly, politest kids you could wish for. And people give her the credit for the raising of them, too. Of course, she had such a reputation as a righteous Christian by then it slipped folks’ minds she was an Indian. They overlooked the facts, you might say. Harp, who wasn’t much given to darkening the door of a church, used to say he was the heathen in the family. But he weren’t. There weren’t but one Indian in the Lewis clan.

“Winter of 1910 or thereabouts, Harp come down with the pneumonia. He was an old man by then, in his seventies, coughed the life out of himself. Ruth Lewis tended him and prayed over him day and night for a week. Hardly slept, hardly ate, end of it looked like a brown ghost. When Harp died she closed his eyes and walked out of the room. No weeping, no wailing. Her oldest boy give her a few minutes to be alone with her grief and then followed after. Found her in the kitchen. She’d already sawed the little finger on her left hand off with a butcher knife. Blood all over. She was working on the little finger on the right when her son came in. Halfway through the bone.”

“Jesus Christ,” I say.

“I think she was a Crow,” says Shorty. “Crows’ll do that when family dies, take a piece of flesh off themselves as a sign of mourning. Finger, piece of muscle, flesh for flesh. The preacher threw a roaring fit about it, reminded Mrs. Lewis the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, that what she done to the temple was wrong, unholy wrong. She didn’t buy it. He might as well have tried to talk her out of her moccasins, for all the effect it had. Wouldn’t admit a speck of wrong or harm in what she done. She didn’t wear no shoes to Harp’s funeral either.” He pauses. “She gave old Harp two fingers for love. And she was a tame Indian. Makes you wonder.”

Working in shifts, we get the grave dug by early afternoon and return to the bunkhouse. Shorty builds a fire in the stove and heats some water. We all have a good wash and, after, Shorty and Wylie shave with McAdoo’s straight razor. Wylie’s shirt has a torn sleeve so McAdoo gives him a clean one of his to wear and then slaps the dust out of Easton’s trousers with a broom until he judges him presentable for a funeral. Then he tells Wylie to sit on the bed and keep out of his way while he fries us some bacon, onions, and potatoes. We are halfway through dinner when a gritty rattle shakes the bunkhouse in a spasm of wind. Shorty looks up from his plate, listens. Another sharp gust follows, flying grit pings on the single windowpane, and a trembling hum fills the bunkhouse as the wind ebbs in a slow, sobbing withdrawal.

“It sounds like it’s turning dirty out there.” Shorty pushes away his plate. “Soon as I dress, we best go.” He retrieves a box from under his bed, and takes out of it a black frock coat, the kind of coat nobody has worn since the turn of the century. The coat turns him angular, turns his shoulders and elbows sharper, his face more harshly lined, his eyes more unflinching. He becomes a daguerreotype from the last century, one of those stern, severe faces that their descendants can feel weighing them across the chasm of years, judging them small, insignificant, unworthy people.

“Comb your hair,” says McAdoo to Wylie.

We go out bareheaded. Wylie, his hair glistening with water, his rooster-tail dabbed down with a bit of soap, McAdoo with a coil of rope in each hand. A hot wind claps a burning hand over my mouth and nose robbing me of breath. In the slack, sallow sky the sun burns wanly behind a veil of blowing dirt. Tumbleweed bowls by and the low brush heaves and surges all about us. We lean into the wind and push it like a stalled vehicle, slowly, one step at a time, past the ruined house and up the slope to the waiting coffin, our hands shielding our eyes.

McAdoo demonstrates how to buck the coffin into the grave, a rope through each of the corner casket handles on the diagonal. When the wind suddenly drops, we can hear the casket knocking the sides of the grave, creaking and groaning, the handles threatening to tear loose. Trying to brake the last couple feet of drop, the hemp sears my palms and I almost get jerked into the hole. The coffin lands with a hollow bang. McAdoo swears, peers into the grave.

“It’s all right,” he shouts, making himself heard above the wind. “She held together.”

We thrust our shovels into the heaped ground, filling the grave. When we lift them, the dirt blows off the blades in tawdry streamers, whipping into our faces. The very air is flavoured with earth. It coats my lips and teeth, I taste it souring in the back of my throat, feel it rawly scratching in my eyes. Everywhere dust is lapping and pluming the land, moving toward the horizon like the creeping, ragged smoke of wholesale destruction. McAdoo stiff-backed in his black coat, Wylie with the burial ropes knotted in his hands, and me. Three figures ghostly and obscure in the shifting, earthly smoke.

So begins the interment of Miles Easton, with a grey smudge rolling across the landscape, edging into the sky like a nasty stain. With this and a memory of the grief of that other stranger, of the funerary rites of a Crow woman, who cut a part of herself away to join whatever she had lost.

The wake lasts past midnight, past a bottle and a half of whisky. Wylie Easton lies collapsed on one of the bunk beds. He has cried himself into a drunken sleep, racking sobs and rage. Now his mouth hangs innocently open like a slumbering child’s, his chest rising serenely and falling softly. Outside the wind is drumming against the bunkhouse like a stormy sea against a breakwater. McAdoo has lit a coal fire and left the stove door open for the light it throws, a pulsing illumination which, like the wind, billows and recedes. We are both far gone in drink and strange melancholy reveries. I keep remembering last night and Rachel. McAdoo and I haven’t spoken in half an hour and scarcely moved except to reach down to the bottle between us on the floor, to swig from it and carefully replace it on its spot. For the first time, I see on McAdoo’s face the brutal, haunted look which marked it on the film clip at Chance’s house.

He drains the dregs of the bottle, sets it down on the floor, topples it with a push of a finger. The bottle rolls across the temporary silence in the room; the wind is in a lull.

“Dead soldier,” says McAdoo and jabs at it with his toe. It rolls some more.

I feel like shit. My leg is throbbing with that old, familiar, sick, steady ache. I happen to be carrying a bag of marijuana Rachel gave me for my birthday. She said when the pain in my leg got too bad to use it. When I put it in my pocket this morning I thought I would be using it for other reasons, but now I think the time has come to roll myself some relief. McAdoo watches me.

“You ever use this?” I ask, lighting up.

“There ain’t much I ain’t used in my time – or used me. Pass it on.”

I hand him the bag and ease smoke out of my lungs. “Vipah,” I intone to the glowing end of the joint.