Guy Vanderhaeghe - The Englishman’s Boy

As they advanced on twilight the wind died down, but heavy, grape-coloured clouds were louring in the north, gloomily dragging toward them. They and the wolfers met on the spine of a ridge in the last vestiges of tinted light, the world displayed behind smoked glass. A slow, steady rain began and with it night descended, a swift black sword. The men dismounted and the few with waterproofs wrestled into them, the rest crouched miserably under tented coats and blankets, passing a glum hour watching water puddle around their boots.

As abruptly as the rain had begun, it ended. Men, soaked and chilled to the bone, threw off soggy blankets, groaning as they shook and stamped free joints which had locked while they hunkered under cover. They hobbled about in the darkness, doing what needed to be done, unsaddling and picketing the horses, spreading bedrolls, breaking out biscuits and dried meat, dim wraiths, shadows of routine. Soft, impersonal curses, the clink of metal buckles and the creak of leather, someone’s dry, hacking cough were the only sounds. A few damp buffalo-chip fires began to fume and stink. Tonight Hardwick had relented and said they might smoke and build fires – if they could find anything dry enough to burn. A long, cold night threatened. Grace and the Englishman’s boy were muffled up in saddle blankets still warm with the body heat of horses. They sat before a small fire started from a bundle of kindling the Eagle packed for just such emergencies. The boy was toasting a stack of damp buffalo chips on a stick, drying them so they would burn. That was Grace’s idea. He had a handle on things, a practical turn of mind. Some of the pissers and moaners would rather stay wet and complain than do something to make themselves as comfortable as they could. The two of them were getting on though, doing just fine.

Or perhaps he should say the three of them because the Scotchman had crept up to the cheer of their fire like a woebegone dog. There he sat hugging his knees, three or four feet off where the flames licked at the night, his face wavering in and out of the black in tune with the beating heart of the fire. He wasn’t talking any more, to himself or anybody else for that matter, but he was still smiling, although the corners of the smile appeared to have wilted and run a mite in the rain.

“I don’t know what the point was – hurrying us all along,” said the Englishman’s boy. “It didn’t get us nowhere in particular, except under a cloudburst.”

Grace sat wrapped in his horse blanket, the firelight applying a yellow varnish to his face. His bald head was tied up in a big blue-and-white spotted bandanna. Earlier that day the wind had snatched off his hat, blown it to Kingdom Come like a tumbleweed, no point in even giving chase. Simply gone. The Englishman’s boy had taken steps to prevent a similar misfortune; his derby was lashed down to his head with a rawhide thong passed through the hat brim and knotted under his chin. He looked a bit like an organ grinder’s monkey.

“I figure this is Hardwick’s reasoning,” said Grace as he rolled a cigarette. “He wanted to pull within ten mile of Cypress before making camp. That gives us a short morning’s ride to the hills. In full light, nobody can take us by surprise, ambush us. We can put out scouts in the timber so we don’t stir up a hive of Blackfoot on our way to Farwell’s post. We went fast today so we can feel our way tomorrow. Not a bad plan.” He lit his cigarette on a brand from the fire and passed the makings to the boy. “Hardwick’s a funny case. He can think things through good enough – to a point. He’s a cool customer – to a point. But he’s like the man who woke up in a house-fire and started to climb into his pants. When they were halfway up he began to feel the heat and decided to hell with the pants, it’s time to run. In the heat of the moment, Hardwick sometimes trips, pants around his ankles.”

“You think that’ll happen?” the Englishman’s boy asked.

“Anybody’s guess. But I’ll tell you one thing, son. If it gets hot, nobody in this bunch is going to pull my fat out of the fire.”

For the first time, the Englishman’s boy thought the wary tilt of the Scotchman’s head might mean he was listening. The kid shook a buffalo flop off the stick into the fire. “So what you going to do about it?”

“Do?” said Grace. “Nothing to do.”

The boy was staring into the fire, the fitful convulsing of flames. “You stand by me – I’ll stand by you.”

Grace stretched his wet boots out to the fire, a faint steam rose from the leather. “I don’t know you but a little,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Fine,” said the kid. “I ain’t begging.”

“You’re right,” said Grace. “I was raised better than that. Who am I to cold-shoulder a courtesy?”

Nothing more was said. Their two faces danced in the glare of the fire. The Scotchman’s mouth grinned maniacally out of the blackness, receded, grinned again. The boy felt a sense of occasion, his father had been a ceremonious man, gravely polite in a backwoods fashion. The kid laid aside his stick, and with his blanket hanging off his shoulders like a cape, shyly held out his hand. Grace shook it three times, emphatically. The boy returned to his place and began to vigorously thrust more buffalo chips into the blaze.

On a quiet Sunday afternoon Rachel and I cross the sun-flooded lawns where patients recline in striped canvas deck chairs or, shepherded by attendants in white, shuffle the brick pathways which wind among flower-beds and hedges. Rachel has been accompanying me on visits to the Mount of Olives Rest Home ever since she learned my mother was a patient there. There is nobody else I would have admitted this to but Rachel. Her own utter lack of reticence is what gave me the courage. She has no qualms about telling anybody anything. I’ve heard it all, blow-by-blow accounts of her two marriages, intimate details of her frequent, calamitous affairs.

The barricades I had built up over the years had to be taken down piece by piece the night of my confession. The telling was a hard struggle, with myself, with memory, even with Rachel. The final struggle was to hold back my tears, but that struggle was no more successful than the others had been. I sat in a chair weeping and then she wrapped me in her wiry arms, pressed my head tight to her flapper’s bosom where with every sob I gulped her fragrance: tobacco smoke, cologne, the comfort of warm, tired flesh. It was, I suppose, the moment I knew I loved her.

For years my mother has been withdrawing further and further into a dense mist of apathy, eating whatever is put in front of her, going to bed when told, getting up when told, seldom speaking, never smiling. It is as if the rest of us are ghosts, shadowy presences whose existence she cannot quite credit. Except for Rachel Gold. She is the most solid, the most real to my mother. That much was clear from the beginning.

The first time Rachel came with me to Mount of Olives we found Ma in her room, standing in front of the window, occupied with the only thing she ever seems interested in – cleaning the glass with her handkerchief.

“Ma,” I said, “I’ve brought you a visitor.” She did not turn to see who this visitor was. The handkerchief continued to squeak in tight little circles.

“Mother, it’s Harry.”

For a second, the circles stopped, then began again, more rapidly than before.

“Mother, stop that. Come and say hello.”

The circles whirled on the glass, faster and faster.

“I know you can hear me, Ma.”

She began to whimper softly, the handkerchief spinning more and more frantically. Her head, bobbing with the effort, shook loose a few stray strands of hair from her bun.