Guy Vanderhaeghe - The Englishman’s Boy

Somebody is fiddling with the volume of a gramophone, jazz spurting and sinking like the jet of an erratic fountain. My mind is jerking and starting, like the music. Rachel, I think. Walk away, I think. But a chilled fascination roots me to the spot. And fear. I’m frightened now. Of this strange, eerie house. Of Fitz and his brutal friends, crashing about upstairs. Of Chance. Say something, I think. But I don’t. And this is the thing that frightens me most.

Chance’s gaze sweeps the room. “Do you know something, Harry?” he says, suddenly subdued. “This is my favourite room, the room where I think, imagine. Here I imagine myself on a train, a train which carries me to every corner of America. I imagine myself speaking from the back of it, at every whistle-stop, to the heart of America. Because when you speak from the heart to other hearts – even imagined hearts – the truth slowly dawns on you. Then the lightning crackles in your mind, pictures flash… something profound, something original is born. You see what is really there.” His voice has sunk to a whisper, but it is a hot whisper, coals settling in a grate. “Turn out the light,” he whispers, rapt.

For the moment, his puppet, I do. A little starlight and cloud-swaddled moon steals into immediate darkness through the French doors. Chance clambers up on the waiting chair, sways, corrects his equilibrium, rises erect under the baubles of the chandelier, pale grapes glistening in the pale moonlight. The gramophone falls silent, someone is changing a record. In that moment everything freezes. So do I. “What I have to say gives me no pleasure,” he states. His voice, low and confidential, spreads like a soft carpet over the cold marble to every corner of the room. “My friends, I wish I did not see so clearly. I tell you, the age of the hard men is upon us. That is the Zeitgeist. The Italian mimics the Roman centurion. The German worships blood and iron. The Bolshevik murders the Czar and his children. They leave us no choice but to be hard too. Remember the frontier – how savagery answered savagery? Picture the lonely cabin in the forest, the eyes watching from the trees, waiting for their opportunity. The lonely hunter on the plain, naked in his solitude. The children hatcheted in the corn patch, the mutilated man in the grass. The wife raped. The barn burning, the cattle slaughtered, the carrion crows descending. We did not fail that test.”

The gramophone starts again. People are dancing upstairs, the chandelier shivers in sympathy.

“But the strangers among us have no memory of this – the fired roof, the women taken captive, the lurking, painted nightmare. The unseen enemy everywhere, at the turn in the river, behind the bluff, hidden in the long prairie grass. They know nothing of that.”

Someone in the back of the house screams. It is followed by shrieks of laughter.

Chance pleads with the surrounding darkness. “If Mussolini exalts the spirit of the Roman legions, the German the Teutonic knight, the Russian the pitiless terrorist, surely we are entitled to do the same. The picture of the rawhide frontiersman is entitled to hang in the mind of every American. To hang illuminated by lightning – the cold eyes, the steady hand, the long rifle revealed in brightness. Europe returns to wilderness and returns us with it.” Seconds pass as I stare up at him. “A Frenchman noted that the profound contempt of the Greek for the barbarian is only matched by that of the Yankee for the foreign worker who makes no attempt to become truly American. So be it. Was the Jew there when our forefathers knelt by the window in fear for their lives, watching the woods? Was he with us when we rode out on the broad plains under the eyes of savages? Can he understand us? Argue our case to the world? I know what you are thinking, my friends. Do not insult the Jew, you think, he repays every insult with interest. He…” Chance trails off, holds himself perfectly still on his pedestal. “No matter. The lonely house must be protected. The wilderness encroaches on the fields we have cleared, the wilderness stirs abroad. It is coming. They are coming. I walked among them. One day soon a face will peer in your window, the face of a Blackshirt, or the face of a Bolshevik. They who resurrect the savage ghosts of their past must be challenged with the savage ghosts of our past. I will help, I will raise up our ghosts. Steel yourself. Meet strength with strength.” His neck turns stiffly like the turret of a tank, testing every corner of the room for opposition. He is done. “Help me down,” he says.

I take the groping hand. The palm is the hood of a mushroom, stickily moist. He steps down abruptly, clutching at me to keep from falling. He hangs on my shoulder. “You see, Harry?” he says, face close to mine. “Rewrite it. Change the girl. The enemy is never human.”

With the addition of George Hammond, the party that approached Little Soldier’s camp tallied thirteen. This made the Englishman’s boy distinctly uneasy; they were back to the bad-luck number they’d suffered before Hardwick cut loose Farmer Hank. Now he felt as if Farmer Hank had changed shape, remounted, and was spurring himself across Battle Creek with them.

The Englishman’s boy stuck close to Ed Grace. They rode side by side, knees almost touching; the strong-boned profile of the Eagle with its powerful hooked nose was stoical, as pale as the marble bust of a Roman senator. He looked neither right nor left, but kept his eyes fixed dead ahead as if they were fastened on stern duty.

Hardwick had given the command to go forward at a walk, in good order, so as not to give the impression they were attacking; nevertheless every man carried a rifle at the ready, butt planted on hip. The camp stirred excitedly at their coming; the wolfers could hear the strident, hysterical barking of dogs, could see figures dodging in and out of lodge entrances, young boys hurrying to catch ponies in the pasture, women snatching up children on the run. In a matter of minutes, a phalanx of fifty or sixty warriors had assembled on the outskirts to meet them.

Hardwick halted his men three hundred yards from the camp, waved a white handkerchief in the air to announce a parley and rode forward, accompanied only by George Hammond. The fierce afternoon heat warped the air between the two parties like a flawed and wavy windowpane; sweat slid out from under the derby on the Englishman’s boy’s head and trickled down his face.

Some of the welcoming party were drunk, had the same slack-jawed whisky belligerence written on their faces as the majority of wolfers Hardwick had left waiting behind him. Yet a goodly number of the Assiniboine were stone-faced and sober, waiting so profoundly, so mutely still, the only discernible movement in their ranks was the flicker of a feather when a gust of hot breeze licked it. Their faces were painted red like the Bear Cult man’s, except their eyes were circled in white instead of black. The warriors’ hair was hacked short over the forehead, daubed and smeared with white clay, drawn back in long, thick queues trailing down their spines. Many wore ear beads, and those who went shirtless displayed two black stripes of tattoo running from their throats to their bellies. The red of the faces was repeated in red flannel breechclouts and leggings, black and crimson trader blankets which many of the old men wore draped around their shoulders.

The only firearms Hardwick could spot were Northwest muskets. The Indians without guns were armed with lances and horn bows.

Hammond leaned across his saddle-pommel to draw Hardwick’s attention to a tall, lean Assiniboine in a round wolf-skin cap, the owner of a ferociously lupine face extravagantly pocked with smallpox scars and looking like an adobe wall riddled by a blast of buckshot. “I know that bird,” he said. “He’s a bad one. Killed two Blackfoot outside of Fort Kipp last year. His name’s First Shoot, and he does.”