Guy Vanderhaeghe - The Englishman’s Boy

The Englishman’s boy would get the invite next. He was considering on what his answer would be. When she was offered to Scotty and he shook his head no, Hardwick took offense. “Why the hell not?” he’d wanted to know.

The Scotchman had hugged his knees like they were his sainted mother, saying softly, “I am a gentleman. The definition of a gentleman is one who never causes pain.”

“Don’t you go high and mighty on me,” said Hardwick.

“I am a gentleman,” Scotty whispered back.

Hardwick slapped his face. “Get in there.”

“I am a gentleman.”

Each time he refused, Hardwick slapped his face again, repeating, “Get in there. Get in there.” In the end he even latched onto his collar and dragged the Scotchman scuffling on his hands and knees halfway across the floor. Only when the Scotchman began to weep was Hardwick satisfied and, laughing, let him creep back to his corner, where he huddled himself up sobbing, meek as an orphan.

The Englishman’s boy was of a mind to answer the same as the Scotchman, but then he weren’t crazy. His twin, the old cold black anger, was sitting up in him touchy as a ripe boil. Hot and sore as the lance gash stiffening on his ribs. Maybe he daren’t risk Hardwick prodding that boil with his dirty finger. Maybe he ought to take his walk to that back room, because if Hardwick laid a hand on him he wouldn’t go Gentle Jesus like the Scotchman had. There’d been enough blood spilled today. He’d had his sup of it.

The train in the back room was building speed. He’d heard a winter of huffing, puffing racket like that in the whorehouse in Sioux City, Iowa. Late November, cold and starved, he’d knocked at its door because it was such a fine and promising big house. Might be the rich people biding there would let him chore for a hot meal. The woman who answered the door said, “What you want, Raggedy Andy?” He explained and she set him a job of work splitting stove-wood. That wintry morn the axe-handle bit his fingers like cold iron but he hung to it until he’d chopped her a goodly pile of butts and even shaved her a cache of kindling wood. Then she fed him buttered bread, creamed and sugared porridge. He’d swallowed three bowls of it.

That’s how he came to work in a knocking shop. For a place to sleep by the kitchen stove and three squares, he chopped wood, hauled washing water for the whores, curried and harnessed Beaky Sal’s driving team. Beaky Sal liked to tour around town in a cutter of an afternoon, to blow the smell of spunk out of her nostrils, she said. The only cash money the Englishman’s boy had ever touched was tips. Some fancy man might send him to fetch cigars, or a crew of river rats a bucket of beer from the saloon. If he moved sprightly they’d toss him a penny. Once he even run for a bag of peppermints for an old broadcloth pillar of respectability afraid to go home to his wife’s roast-pork supper with the smell of sin on his breath.

One thing he could testify, if whores had hearts of gold they was only gilt and flaked easy. Beaky Sal’s girls was mostly German whores, and they fought day and night, screeching Dutchy talk until he believed there was a rusty file running to and fro in his ears. Their line of work made them too free and easy in their manners to his taste; some would lift their shifts and squat on the chamber pot when he was sweeping their room.

No, he hadn’t found no gold there excepting Selena. Her daddy had sold her to Beaky Sal for twenty dollars when she was but a child of twelve and he was passing through Sioux City, bound for the Montana gold fields. He was a widow man and Selena only baggage slowing him in the race to fortune. He might have kept her, he said, but she was hard of hearing and that was a trial – at his age shouting wore him down.

Selena was skinny as a barked rail, but Beaky Sal figured if she fattened her she could charge the boys a premium for something young and fresh. But Selena didn’t fill out and the boys preferred the fat, red, German whores because they would play-act jolly and the best Selena could manage was to look like-an undertaker’s wife. The boys said she made their peckers droop like wet wash hanging on a rainy day. So Beaky Sal turned her into a whorehouse drudge, boiling sheets and slopping chamber pots. All the whores seemed to think she was their own personal slavey; they’d squawk for this and that, pinch her and cuff her for any mistake she made, sometimes just out of pure cussedness. One afternoon, a Kentucky whore who called herself Beulah Belle started pulling Selena’s hair in the kitchen because the washing water wasn’t hot enough for her liking. When she was at it, he’d come in with an armful of stove-wood, dropped it in the box and kicked Beulah Belle square in the arse.

Word got around he could kick like a Missouri mule and so the whores let up on Selena some. He supposed that’s why she went sweet on him. That and the candies and buttons. She was such a poor and winsome gal he couldn’t but help feel sorry for her. Sometimes when he’d got a tip, he’d buy her a pennyworth of hard candy. He knew she had a sugar mouth. Beaky Sal was always slapping her silly for putting her fingers in the sugar bowl.

Selena weren’t like him. Every bit of hardness he’d ever been handed, he’d put on the back shelf and stored. But hardness seemed to pass through her like light through a windowpane. She didn’t hold a particle of the anger he held. Not a particle. She stored sugar like he stored hate, let the sweetness out bit by bit. Her mouth tasted sweet. She didn’t favour you with a smile but seldom, but it was all the sweeter for it. Not one of them broad, false, whorey smiles, just a small and gentle and knowing one. She knew. By Christ, she knew.

He might yet be in that whorehouse if the Englishman Dawe hadn’t hired him out of it. He’d been setting on the stoop sharpening Beaky Sal’s butcher-knives when the Englishman pulled up in full daylight, arrayed in all his finery, bent on some fun with a sporting woman. He’d stopped at the step on his way in, picked up one of the knives, tested it on the ball of his thumb.

His daddy had said nobody could edge a knife like him. Once he’d whetted a blade you could split a curly hair with it, follow every kink and twist top to bottom. Dawe asked him if he could skin. Skin a grasshopper, he told the Englishman. The Englishman said he was going west to hunt the buffalo, bear and deer and goat, mountain lion and mountain sheep. He was going to carry them skins back with him to old England and for that he wanted a prime skinner and somebody to tote his guns. Gun-bearer he called it. They would have adventures, he said. The pay was ample.

So the Englishman’s boy signed on with him. He promised Selena he’d be back for her, back with his pockets full of English gold. She’d have a new dress to sew her buttons on. She’d eat white bread and honey, drink lemonade. He’d carry her out of this place.

He took her for a walk so’s he could shout it to her.

“When?” she said. “When?”

“Ever so soon as my pockets are full of English gold.”

The way things had fallen out, he knew he weren’t going to make it back.

John Duval came out of the back room, settling his suspenders. Hardwick hollered, “All goods satisfactory or money back!”

“I ain’t complaining,” said Duval, strutting to the whisky like a turkey cock.

“Well,” said Hardwick, “age before beauty. Now it’s the youngster’s turn. Nothing a youngster likes better than a pony ride.” They all laughed. “Look at him over there, stiff as a hoe-handle.” They all looked. The Englishman’s boy got to his feet. They followed him with their eyes to the back room, watched him push aside the blanket, go in.

A guttering tallow candle threw the only light. The naked girl lay sprawled on her belly on a pallet on the floor, her face buried in the blankets. She didn’t move, not even to lift her head to see who or what had walked into the room. The place was empty except for a stool kicked over on its side. The Englishman’s boy picked it up and sat down on it.