Guy Vanderhaeghe - The Englishman’s Boy

Later, the villain kneeling beside wagon ruts, shaking his fist, presumably swearing revenge to the same sky the heroine serenaded. Followed by night. The wagon train encamped in a circle, a blazing fire, a geyser of sparks, eerily luminous smoke shuddering up into the black sky. Three men saw soundless fiddles, a boy twangs a silent jew’s-harp, a mute concertina snakes back and forth between hands. Men in big boots swing women in calico dresses and poke bonnets.

I can feel Chance stirring on the sofa beside me, his body tense with anticipation. I glance over at him. He is staring at the screen with such intensity that his soft, full face is as rigid as a granite Buddha’s. Suddenly he springs to his feet, gives a sharp, nervous tug to his trouser legs and skips to the screen. The hot white light of the projector glazes his features, giving him the queer, fixed look of a ceramic doll.

The camera cuts to a little dog, jigging on its hind legs. Round and round it hops, tongue lolling. An old man joins in the dog’s dance, capering in a spry, lock-jointed way, waving crooked arms above his head. The dog leaps against his legs, barking and barking, noiselessly.

“Him,” says Chance, holding a finger up to the face on the screen. Seemingly on his command, the camera cuts to a close-up. The old face swells, filling the screen the way a dream fills the mind. A huge, eroded face. He’s laughing now, the old man, the white stubble of his beard standing up like bristles on the back of an enraged hog, the deep eye sockets black and charred-looking, as if they had been burned into the face with a red-hot poker. “Him. His name is Shorty McAdoo. Find him for me, Harry.”

It is after three o’clock in the morning when Fitz and I leave Chance’s house. There are many things to discuss and plan. I am to have a car placed at my disposal. I am to have an expense account. I am to have an increase in salary from seventy-five dollars a week to one hundred and fifty dollars a week. I am to find Shorty McAdoo and get his story. I am to do this without revealing who I am working for.

When he bids me goodbye, Chance says, “My regrets at keeping you so late, Harry. But I do not sleep well. I sometimes forget that others are not accustomed to the same hours.”

“You’d get more sleep if it wasn’t for the speech-making in the middle of the night,” says Fitzsimmons disapprovingly.

“It is not speech-making,” Chance answers sharply. “It is thinking aloud. Thinking aloud, Denis.”

Fitz, reproved, shrugs.

Going down the long white corridor that morning, descending the long curved staircase, I feel the same anxiety I experienced earlier. In the midst of the silence, the starkness, I become too aware of myself. I watch my hand slide along the banister, my foot plant itself on the next step. Out of the corner of my eye I catch the ladder-backed chair isolated on the cold marble floor of the ballroom, the strangeness of its position.

Seeing as it was unseasonably fine that morning of April 16, 1873, the swells took the opportunity to cut a figure by promenading to and fro on the hurricane deck of the Yankton. The stern-wheeler had been due to depart Sioux City, Iowa, at ten a.m. sharp, but loading one hundred and eighty ton of freight and ten cord of wood to fire the boilers was taking longer than expected. A number of the topside gents flashed pocket watches in the pale spring sunshine and rattled souvenir gold-nugget watch fobs from the Montana gold fields to illustrate their impatience. The remainder strolled about with a grave and stoical air, frock coats unbuttoned to display paisley waistcoats and brightly checkered peg-top pants stuffed into knee-high boots. Like clockwork, they lifted their hats to the same two ladies they kept meeting on their circuit around the pilot house, or paused to lean out and launch impressive arcs of dirty brown tobacco juice into the dirty brown waters of the Missouri.

Down below, on the levee, a crowd of several hundred jostled feverishly, clutched by the excitement which always accompanied the season’s first run to Fort Benton, head of navigation on the Great Muddy. Well-wishers called goodbyes to relatives and friends jammed solid against the rails of the lower deck; children and dogs blundered about in the blind alleys of legs and skirts; roustabouts traded rustic sallies with departing deck hands. On the fringes of the crowd an old blind black man, hat in outstretched hand, sang with much fervour and little profit until a teamster driving a freight wagon swore to peel the skin off his back if he didn’t haul his black arse out of the way. The tatterdemalion’s tiny granddaughter led him away by the sleeve.

The sun climbed higher and the twin stacks of the Yankton belched black smoke and sparks into the mild spring sky as she built a head of steam. Several shrill warning blasts were loosed on the boat whistle, summoning all aboard, and the ladies flagged the air with cambric handkerchiefs and piped falsetto farewells, farewells suddenly overwhelmed by the ear-splitting squeals of a stray pig entangled with two dogs, one with its teeth sunk in the sow’s hindquarter, the other in her ear.

Then the Englishman sailed into sight, parting bedlam like Moses the Red Sea, sauntering coolly up the gangplank in the latest word in bicycling suits: tweed coat, braided trousers, Hessian boots, bowler hat, glories which momentarily stilled the multitude and cast the boys on the upper deck utterly into the shade, one of whom grimly remarked, “The things you see when you ain’t got a gun.” Behind the Englishman, stooped under a load of gun cases, Gladstones, and pigskin valises, plodded a young tough in broken-down boots, his face half-hidden by a wide-awake hat gone green with age.

Once these two were safely aboard, the crew smartly shipped the gangplank and to tumultuous cheering and a continuous shrieking of the boat whistle the Yankton began to forge its way upstream, the entire boat vibrating with the effort of its engines, pulsing and shuddering like a living thing as it beat against the current. Slowly, Sioux City shrank from sight and the brown boredom of the Missouri spread itself before crew and passengers, a monotony relieved only by the menace of snags and sandbars, by rapid shifts of weather and sky. The boys on the hurricane deck buttoned their coats as the breeze freshened and hurried down to the lounge to uncork a jug of bourbon and inaugurate a month-long game of poker.

Despite making an unfortunate first impression, the Englishman, whose name was John Trevelyan Dawe, proved to be popular with passengers and crew. He lost money at poker with equanimity, stood drinks with aplomb, made gallant and edifying conversation with the handful of ladies who qualified as respectable. When inquiries were made as to what he was doing in this part of the world, Mr. Dawe declared he was a sportsman, come to trophy-hunt. He talked a good deal, but interestingly, so his volubility was forgiven.

Some of the gents, particularly the Southerners, didn’t approve of his referring to the white boy as his manservant. In their opinion, if he wanted a servant he ought to have hired himself a nigger. Their displeasure, however, was somewhat alleviated when the Englishman complained that the boy refused to shave him, brush his clothes, or black his boots. The gentlemen told him this wasn’t England. In America, niggers came in only one colour – black. The Englishman said that if this was democracy, it was outrageous.

The boy, however, did condescend to keep his employer’s hunting gear in good order. Most afternoons he could be found sitting outside their cabin surrounded by the Englishman’s armoury, sharpening knives and hatchets, cleaning and oiling the Colt pistol, the Winchester, the Henry, the Sharps breechloading buffalo gun, the Westly Richards tiger gun. The frock coats were mightily intrigued by this latter example of British gunsmithing. As the boy worked, the gun-fanciers clustered around him and loudly debated the merits and demerits of the two-foot-long.65-calibre barrel, of the one-ounce ball it fired, of the ingenious spring which regulated the trigger pull.