Guy Vanderhaeghe - Homesick

“As a matter of fact, at night I don’t sleep at all.” He smiled wryly at her surprise. “I’m a man of peculiar habits. I go to bed for five or six hours right after I close the store. At midnight or so I get up to read. Perfect peace and quiet. No interruptions. Except for tonight,” he added. “A bachelor’s freedom to do as he pleases. This is the wild use I make of my freedom.”

“You read all night?”

“I also drink too much coffee. Sometimes with a little whisky in it. More bachelor wildness.” He hesitated. “After such a cold and trying adventure as you’ve had tonight, could I interest you in a cup of coffee?”

“I believe you could.”

He held out his hand. “I believe formal introductions are usually the preamble to whisky. Stanley Miller.”

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Miller,” said Vera, taking his hand. “I’m Vera Monkman.”

“Please, Miss Monkman,” he said, indicating she should enter, courteously stooping his stooped shoulders even more.

That was how it began. Her trailing him as he puffed up the steep stairs packing an antique nickel-plated cash register in his arms. Or perhaps it didn’t really begin until she stepped into his apartment and looked with amazement upon his living room, books stacked to the height of a man’s head along three walls and a phonograph player spitting static because she and Thomas had interrupted his pleasure. And then he reset the needle on the record spinning there on the turntable and the music began once more at the beginning and it was classical. Pure and refined and as different from what she listened to on her radio in her rented rooms as crystal is different from everyday glass. (Kristallnacht was the word he had said.)

And the conviction took hold of her that all these books and this music were where she was headed when she was sixteen years old, reading Shakespeare and learning French, and then it got stolen from her, this dream she never quite got straight in her head because she was too young, but was nevertheless surely bound for, a true tendency of the heart’s deepest ambition.

It made her feel unworthy, that room, and filled her with regret that she had never become so fine a person as to deserve sitting in such a room. And that, too, was the beginning of it.

Once Daniel and Alec were clear of Connaught and onto the country backroads the police seldom bothered to patrol, grandson and grandfather exchanged seats so that Daniel could drive the truck the rest of the way to the farm. Alec couldn’t see any harm in this. He had given the boy plenty of practice wheeling the water-truck over the rutted trails that criss-crossed his land and tied one field and one pasture to another. He was confident Daniel could handle it. Traffic on the grid roads was always light and it was likely they would travel miles and miles without encountering another vehicle. Besides, Monkman had to admit that the kid might be less of a menace behind the wheel than he was himself. On several recent occasions Alec had caught himself just in time, at the point his truck was on the verge of careening off the road and plunging down into a ditch. There had been barely time to jerk the wheel around and recover his line in a spray of gravel.

Monkman knew it was not his eyes that were to blame; it was his mind. When it wandered the vehicle wandered with it. The young weren’t prey to this particular misfortune. Look at Daniel. All attention, he was trying his damnedest to do it right, to please. Not once had his eyes left the road, his speed remained cautious and steady, both hands were quick and diligent on the wheel. He glowed with importance. Well, it never hurt to give a boy a job that puffed his chest out a little. Everybody needed to matter. That was the reason he discussed his business with the boy, just as if Daniel had a clue as to what he was talking about or owned an opinion worth listening to. Respect was not ever wasted, not even on a twelve-year-old kid. If he had finally learned anything from living, it was that.

So he had explained to Daniel at great length what they were doing today and why they were doing it the way they were. He hoped it would be a lesson in how complicated life could be, a demonstration that nothing was ever as simple and straightforward as it might look. Not even catching a thief.

For five years running the old man had been after his tenant, Marker, to break a pasture on the farm and seed it to flax. Every year Marker promised he would, but never got around to it. When he neglected again that spring to turn sod, Monkman, disgusted that land should stand idle and unproductive, bought twenty head of cattle to graze it. Now one of them was missing. Marker claimed it had been killed by lightning.

On Tuesday, when Alec and Daniel had come to pump a tank of water for the garden from the creek, Marker had been too insistent on showing them where he had supposedly disposed of the animal’s carcass. He led them to the cellar hole of the original homesteader’s shack. It was filled with rocks carried from a stone pile at the edge of a nearby field. Marker had asserted that the missing steer lay buried under the boulders. Alec didn’t believe it for a second. First of all, there were no drag marks on the ground near the cellar hole and such marks would have been clearly visible if the steer had been pulled there with a tractor as his tenant claimed. Second, it was entirely out of character for Marker to go to all the trouble and effort of burying a dead animal, particularly one he didn’t own. Over the years, to his grief, Alec had learned that Marker was as lazy as a spotted dog. He would be much more inclined to let a carcass rot and breed flies than haul boulders to cover it.

However, Alec didn’t question or confront Marker with his suspicions. He held his peace. Later, when he told Daniel of his suspicions the boy had been incensed. He had said that if it were up to him, he’d make Marker prove that the steer was under those stones, even if that meant making him hoist every last one of those rocks out of the cellar hole, stone by stone.

“Not practical,” his grandfather had said, shaking his head. “It’d be impossible to lift some of those stones out of that hole and Marker knows it. He knows I’ll never know what’s really under there. Remember, it’s a hell of a lot easier to roll a stone into a hole than out of it. Besides, before you call a man a liar and a thief you better know you’re right. I only suspect I am.”

“What difference does it make if you’re right this time or not?” Daniel had wanted to know. “You say he’s been stealing from you for years. Serve him right.”

Monkman had said that. Yet deep in his heart he recognized that he had some responsibility to bear for the thefts. Somehow he had allowed the line between sharp dealing and outright dishonesty to grow fuzzy in Marker’s mind. He hadn’t checked the man at the very beginning when it would have counted. When he had detected Marker in certain blatant fiddles – underestimating the wheat yield to reduce his landlord’s share of the grain – Marker had never been shamefaced when discovered cheating. His most common reaction was to become aggrieved. By his standards his landlord was a rich man and rich men ought to expect to be taken advantage of. What was he complaining about? Caught in a lie he was apt to say disdainfully, “Well, if you say it’s yours – take it. I ain’t in a position to stop you. Your word’s pretty close to law around here, I suppose.”

Daniel thought the no-good sonofabitch should be pitched out on his ear. The young were always bloodthirsty. It was difficult for Monkman to explain why he couldn’t do that. He had to think of more than one Marker, after all. There were seven other little Markers ranging in age from thirteen years to six months and a Mrs. Marker, a hard-working, long-suffering woman whom he secretly pitied. If he kicked Marker off the place a family would lose a livelihood and a house. He wasn’t sure his conscience was up to that.