Guy Vanderhaeghe - The Englishman’s Boy

The Englishman’s boy remained stubbornly silent. His reaction altered Grace’s mood; when he spoke again the pleading tone was gone, replaced with a sad resignation.

“I was born in old Ontario,” he said. “My mother had a piano in the parlour. We had books. One of them had a picture in it of a centaur -” His head bobbed up. “You know what a centaur is, son?”

The boy shook his head.

“A being, half man, half horse.” He stopped, began again, explaining. “I’ve been knocking around this country ten years – it changes a man. But I’m not all the way there yet. I’m not Tom Hardwick. I’m betwixt and between – half civilized, half uncivilized. A centaur.”

The Englishman’s boy waited for Grace to go on, but he was finished. “If I was a centaur, I could ride myself out of here,” the boy said. “But I ain’t. I’m mounted on Tom Hardwick’s horse. If I ride out of here on his horse, that makes me a horse thief. Horse thieves hang. I’d sooner take a bullet than have folks gawking at me while I kick and dangle.”

“So you won’t go?” The question was a formality.

“I won’t go. But if you want, the deal we made still holds.”

“It holds,” said Grace. “We’ll watch each other’s back.”

At dusk, they filed into the trees. Grace said it was a quarter to nine by his pocket watch, but the sky still held a little light. They climbed through a stand of lodgepole pine, winding amid the slender limbless trunks, straight as spear-shafts, which culminated in crowns of branches which lent the. pines the appearance of bottle-scrubbing brushes. There was little undergrowth and the forest floor crackled dry and sere under the horses’ hooves. The air held no taint of rot, of fungus, of mould, was odourless, except for the occasional furtive, astringent whiff of sap or pine needles.

Earlier, Vogle had discovered a deadfall that formed a natural breastwork and it was behind this they camped, unsaddling and hobbling their horses, unpacking gear, spreading blankets in a hushed, deepening gloom. Evans nominated two men as advance pickets for the first watch, and two more as reliefs. The first sentries glided off down the slope, flitting through the trees and ashen light like spectres.

Needing a piss, the Englishman’s boy strolled away from the camp to politely make his water. Despite the lateness of the hour, everywhere birds were calling to one another in the treetops, a cascade of urgent, piercing cries, succeeded by sombre, dolorous chirps which seemed to float, prolonged, thirty feet above where the lodgepole pines waved their heads in the breeze.

He stopped to listen. The shoulder of the hill acted as a windbreak; down here all was dead calm, the air still warm with the heat of the day, but overhead the pines whispered and sighed like a sickroom. It recalled to him the hotel room in which the Englishman, John Trevelyan Dawe, had surrendered up his spirit.

The boy shook himself free of that thought, drifted on, moving farther and farther from camp. The widely spaced pine grew blacker by the minute as the light died in the sky, turning into columns of ebony. Darkness was gradual and sudden both, a stealthy movement turned peremptory – simply there.

He arrested himself in his tracks, fidgeted his pecker out of his pants. Above the hissing of his water on the ground, off in the distance, he heard a burst of duck squabble. Was something else besides himself moving in the night? Indians? A grizzly?

Now that he was still, he heard the thin whining of mosquitoes, like an itch in the brain, and their stings prickling his back, his face, his hands like the touch of nettles, a savage cloud inseparable from darkness itself, a cloud against which he could only blindly flap his hand and curse. He buttoned up in haste, and began to blunder back to camp, stumbling over the tree roots veining the ground. Once he cast his eyes up to the forest roof and there was the moon, bouncing along in step with him, jarring and bobbing its lunatic face at him through the treetops.

He tripped and fell, scrambled to his feet with his Colt drawn. He could hear himself panting, hear his feet slithering in the slippery pine needles as he turned a circle, the barrel of his pistol holding the trees at bay. That’s when he saw it. An old gullied washout running straight and true like a well-worn wagon track down the slope. The moon’s onslaught of pallid light was turning the tide of darkness – or maybe his eyes were only accustoming themselves to it. He stared hard, until it seemed to shimmer in the dimness.

A road offering itself. But he knew better’n to take an offered road. There weren’t no straight tracks out of the trees, only the path you won yourself, squeezing and dodging, twisting and turning, doubling and backtracking, slipping through where you could. That was all, slipping through where you could.

The Englishman dead. Only God Almighty himself might know how that sorry-ass Hank had ended. Today he’d seen Scotty scribbling in that writing book, like Dawe had done, going so blamed quick you wouldn’t believe it. Writing ever so much faster than ever any man could even think. So what was he writing?

And Grace. Grace with his head tied up in a hanky like a bandage, asking him to take flight with him. Grace pretending there was some straight road the two of them could sashay down. Grace would have him hanging straight, straight down on the end of a rope, like the geese his Pap used to string up to age, hang until they dropped off at the neck.

There it was still, a road pointing off somewheres. Right enough, it give him a clutch in the throat. It hurt him with its straightness and its promise. It hurt him with its moonlight prettiness. But he knew it one better. He knew there weren’t no straight roads.

And so he slipped away, fugitive amid the pines, the passage of an animal, sure and deft now, his feet no longer awkward, but moving soft and certain in the soft and uncertain forest mulch.

He woke to the drumming of a woodpecker. Dawn was breaking. He stood up in his clothes and went to the breastwork. In the trees farther down the slope, he could see fine ground-mist unwinding skeins of white yarn. All around him men lay completely swaddled in blankets, even their heads were covered. It had been a bad night. Even in the midst of a swarm of mosquitoes Evans had allowed no smudges to be lit for fear of giving away their position. All night men and horses had suffered torment, the horses having the worst of it. The Englishman’s boy had listened to them stamping their hooves in frustration, the wild, hissing rustle of their whisking tails. After four or five hours, they had begun to groan hollowly, a deep, sonorous, dumb complaint against their misery. When the Englishman’s boy crawled out of his bedroll and went to his mount, he could see its eyes rolling wildly and flashing in the darkness. A comforting hand run down its neck came away wet with blood.

He did what he could. After he saddled the gelding he took the two blankets of his bedroll, wrapped one around the horse’s neck, draped the other over its hindquarters. Then he lay back down on the ground in his clothes.

He might have slept as much as an hour. Leaning now against the wind-toppled timbers of the natural barricade, he could feel how puffy his face was, his left eye almost swollen closed by the insect bites.

Someone was hacking and spitting behind him, someone else muttering. The wolfers were rousing themselves. He smelled match sulphur and pipe tobacco.

Soon they were back on the flat, where Hardwick had instructed them to await him. One hour, two hours passed; they acquired a discouraged and sullen air, like a school party abandoned in strange surroundings by their teacher.

Then someone shouted. Hardwick was coming.