Guy Vanderhaeghe - The Englishman’s Boy

The Covered Wagon has something. Hundreds of prairie schooners creeping across a limitless expanse of earth under an infinite sky make the gigantism of Grauman’s theatre seem shabby and hollow. The scenery has a reality, a conviction, that Ra and the pharaohs – long-dead god and long-dead men – can’t compete with. It’s true J. Warren Kerrigan with make-up crinkled in his crows’-feet and his face as white as a geisha girl’s is every bit as dead as a California Tutankhamen, but the leathery faces of the extras aren’t; men and women like them are living in plain wooden bungalows all over L.A., you see them every day of your life. More important, you can believe they did ford the River Platte, did lay the bullwhip to the oxen, did tramp mile after mile in billowing clouds of dust. The honesty of certain faces, the honesty of the land itself.

Every once in a while I cast Damon Ira Chance a surreptitious glance. Throughout the picture he sits absolutely still, flat cap laid primly on the coat folded over his knees. He sits that way through the buffalo hunt, the Indian attack, the settlers falling to their knees in the snows of Oregon to give thanks, never moving a muscle until the last frames of the picture when he rises and taps me imperiously on the arm, a sign to follow him out.

Here and there, under streetlamps, young men with brilliantined hair are smoking and eyeing girls who strut by holding themselves sexlessly erect like models on a runway, only to collapse sexily against one another, whispering and giggling, once they have steamed by these islands of maleness and light.

Chance walks quickly, face set. Whoever he meets on the sidewalk, man or woman, has to step aside or risk collision. He simply doesn’t see them. Every few steps he takes, a hand flies up to his spectacles like a gadget on an assembly line, and jams them into his face, hard. With my bad leg, it is an effort to keep up. We go along like this for five or six blocks when he stops suddenly, grasps my shoulder, drags me closer. “Facts are of the utmost importance, Harry. If I can convince the audience the details are impeccably correct, who will dispute the interpretation? The truth of small things leads to confidence in the truth of large things. That is indisputable.” He looks at me anxiously, chewing his bottom lip. “ ‘The blood of America is the blood of pioneers – the blood of lion-hearted men and women who carved a splendid civilization out of an uncharted wilderness,’ ” he intones contemptuously. “Recognize it? It’s one of the titles from the picture we just saw. As soon as people start piously throwing around the word civilization , you can be sure they’re whistling in the dark. Civilization has always drawn enemies like rotten meat draws flies. I hate the word.”

Two girls are walking toward us, flapper dresses moving provocatively in the dusk like Victorian shifts glimpsed by gaslight. They lean together, deep in private conversation, and when they go by, one of them laughs, a low bubbling laugh like the cooing of a pigeon.

Chance follows them with his eyes, his hand tightens on my shoulder. He leans into me as the girls lean into one another. “They were laughing at me,” he says, “because of how I am dressed. Details again, Harry. Details are how most people read the world, the simple letters of their idiotic alphabet. They spell crude and literal meanings such as ‘clothes make the man.’ Most people don’t have what you and I do, Harry.”

“What’s that?”

“The gift to see beyond a flat cap, or beyond small facts.”

I can see how tired he is, his face looks jaundiced in the lamplight. He presses his shoulder to the lamppost and lifts his face to the light. It looks exhausted, drained. I follow his staring eyes to a delirium of moths whirling thickly around the electric light. Like the details chasing around in his head.

“Start work on the scenario, Harry,” he says.

Grace finally persuaded an old woman, Granny Laverdure, to cook them their Sunday dinner. She led them off to her son-in-law’s cabin, one of the most substantial in the Métis settlement. The logs were peeled and soundly chinked with clay, the walls standing twelve timbers high and set with three small windows of scraped fawn skin which shed a soft, tawny light into the quarters. Most impressive was a waterproof roof, canvas stretched over poles and topped with squares of sod.

“Snug as a bug in a rug,” Grace pronounced when he dipped his gangly frame through the low doorway.

The Englishman’s boy had to give the breeds their due. The cabin was stout as his own Pap’s. Except the breeds had a cast-iron stove where he and his kin had done their cooking and roasting in a fireplace chimbley. The breeds ate at a table, on benches, too; no Indian squat when they took meat. The floor was packed dirt swept with a spruce bough, you could smell spruce in the air and see the scrape-marks of the branch left in the dirt.

Along the walls more benches served as beds, piled high with Hudson’s Bay blankets, buffalo robes, grizzly skins; two youngsters sat on one of these, cheeks bulging as they chewed with frantic intensity.

Close to the iron stove, a few shelves holding flour, tea, a little dried fruit, roots, and meat were pegged into the wall. In a corner where a bitch lamp burned there was even a picture; he could see it from where he sat. One of them Cat-licker Jesus pictures. Him prying his chest open and showing his heart on fire.

He and Ed made easy at the table drinking boiled tea, black as coffee, while Granny clattered at the stove. A little twig of a girl of two, with gold rings in her ears, Rose Marie, stood clinging to the table leg, watching Grace wide-eyed. Every time he winked at her, she hugged the table leg all the harder.

“Those six bottles’ll be gone in an hour,” said Grace. “I spent a winter with those lads and experience has taught me liquor doesn’t lighten their dispositions. Put a pint of liquor in any one of them and they’re apt to turn quarrelsome. They’ll be fighting each other before the day goes out – or anybody else who’s handy. I’d just as soon not be handy. No, we’re better off where we are, drinking strong tea out of harm’s way.”

The Englishman’s boy couldn’t take his eyes off the two kids on the bench, jaws working like steam locomotives.

“Goddamn, Eagle,” he said, “what them boys over there chewing? They’re making my head hurt watching them.”

“Over there,” said Grace, squinting across the room, “is the ammunition manufactory. You know that lead foil the tea packets come wrapped in? They chew it to make bullets for their Northwest guns. A Métis kid’ll spit round shot for a five-eighths-inch bore like it came from a bullet mould.”

The smell of elk steaks frying and bannock baking put a glow of contentment and goodwill on the Eagle. He stretched his legs out comfortably under the table. “I tell you, son, once I lay hands on my share of that wolfing money I’m heading for the Red River country. This Whoop-Up country’s too wild for me. A betwixt-and-betweener prefers things by halves. Half-wild country. Half-wild women. I reckon those Red River women fit the bill. Half-French, half-Cree. Half-housebroke and half-wild, half-pagan and half-Catholic. I like a roof over me and a good bed under me, but on the other hand I’d sooner shoot my meat than raise it. I like to turn footloose in the summer when the sun shines and nest in a cabin in the winter when the wind blows cold and the snow flies. And those gals are handsome women, some light-skinned as any white women, and a few even have curl to their hair, or blue to the eye. I believe they’d suit me just fine.”