Guy Vanderhaeghe - Homesick

Daniel could feel his face flush and his ears burn. When had he seen? For a moment he considered denying the accusation but the calm, steady inspection that the old man was making of him helped Daniel recognize the futility of lying. It might, he thought, have been better to have been caught by his mother after all.

“Anybody ever teach you how to fight?” asked the old man.

The question was so unexpected, so unrelated to what had immediately gone before that Daniel was at a loss for an answer. “Pardon?”

“Can you fight?”

“Fight?”

“Yeah, fight. Anybody ever teach you to take care of yourself?”

As a matter of fact, nobody ever had. But he wasn’t about to admit it. “Yeah.”

“That’s good. Because you better be ready to handle yourself when school starts in September. A place like this, they’re not used to new boys. Anybody new is liable to catch it for a while until he teaches people to leave him alone.”

“My mother says she doesn’t believe in fighting. She says my father was a pacifist. So she is too.”

“If your mother’s a pacifist so’s Field Marshal Montgomery.”

“She says there’s better ways of settling an argument than with your fists.”

“No doubt there is – as long as you can find somebody to argue with who agrees on the procedures. I don’t think you’ll find many of those in Connaught.” The old man gave a sharp, foxy bark of laughter. “Imagine Vera talking that way. I can’t figure it. Maybe Earl but not your mother. I never came across anybody with more fight bred into them than she has. Not that she isn’t right in some ways. All my life I tried to avoid settling a disagreement with my boots and fists. That’s the truth. As God is my judge, I’ve walked away from more than one invitation to scuffle. When I was a young man I was a demon to dance and at every dance in those days there were always the cocks-of-the-walk who showed up to pick fights. They all acted as if fighting was some kind of sport, an amusement like baseball, or pool, or a game of horseshoes. Fighting was their way of attracting notice. You know how I handled them if they stepped on my toes? I took the notice away from them. I said, ‘If you want to fight, you sonofabitch, I’ll fight you. But a week from now, cold sober and alone. Just the two of us with nobody to watch and cheer and carry on. Just you and me, friend. Set the time and place and I’ll be there.’ I meant it, too. And they could see I meant it and their friends could see I meant it. You know how many takers I got?” Monkman formed a circle with his thumb and forefinger. “Zero. None. You know why? Because even the ones who pretend to like to scrap really don’t. It’s the cheering they like, the clap on the back, the chance to strut. Take away the crowd and you take away the guts.

“And you know how I discovered that fact?” said the old man earnestly, bending towards Daniel. “Entirely by accident is how I discovered that fact. I had this female cousin – Rose her name was, she’s been dead for years now – who was the hired girl to the postmaster’s wife. Now Rose was a good-natured, plain, hard-working girl but she was also a little on the simple side, not so as she couldn’t do a job if it was all explained to her, she could do that, but she was still simple, what I’d call trusting-simple, and there was this young fellow who lived next door to the postmaster’s who used to tease her. Now he must’ve been ten years older than Rose – she was about fifteen then – and he ought to have known better but he didn’t. His name was Billy Atkins and he thought pretty highly of himself. I suppose people encouraged him in it. He was handsome, the kind that lounges about decorating street corners. All the girls thought he was the cat’s ass and most of the boys were afraid of him because he had a reputation for being wild and one way or another he had whipped every one of them either in school or after he got kicked out of it.

“Anyway, whenever he and his friends happened to be holding up a telephone pole and Rose chanced to go by, Billy Atkins couldn’t help but treat the boys to a laugh at her expense. It was an easy thing for him to do because Rose couldn’t hide the fact she thought Billy Atkins was pretty wonderful. So as she went by, watching her feet, he’d call out, ‘Am I on for Saturday night, Rosie?’

“And she’d stop dead in her tracks and say in her quiet voice, ‘Do you really mean it this time, Mr. Atkins?’

“And he’d say of course he meant it and she’d say, ‘Well then you’re on,’ and he’d wink at his friends and say, ‘On for how long, Rose?’ And one of his admirers would shout, ‘For as long as it takes!’ And they’d all laugh themselves sick and Rose, being slow-witted, would look from one face to another, trying to catch the joke and sometimes laughing herself, at what she didn’t know, just to please Billy Atkins.

“It was getting so bad that the only decent thing to do was to try and stop it because I was a relative and Rose didn’t have any brothers and her father lived out on the farm and didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t want to do it because I knew I was no match for Billy Atkins. He was older for one thing. Then I was about seventeen. I’d been working for almost three years on labouring jobs so I had some muscle on me, but Billy Atkins had more and knew how to use it better. Pride decided me to do it the way I did. If I was going to get my clock cleaned I preferred to have it done private rather than public.

“At the time I’m speaking of, Billy Atkins was working hauling gravel for the concrete foundations of the new Old Fellows’ Hall they were putting up then. The pits were a couple of miles out of town. Haulage was all by horses then. Atkins would have to drive his team out to the pits, throw on a load, and then drive it back to town to dump. I figured the pits was one sure place to catch him alone. So one Saturday morning I walked out to find him. When I got to the gravel digs he was just topping off his wagon. He didn’t see me coming because his back was to me as he worked. I was almost on him when I saw him toss his shovel up on the load, step up on the wheel, and boost himself onto the seat. He got quite a surprise when he reached for the reins and there I was, looking up at him.

“ ‘What the fuck brings you out here, young Monkman?’ he says. ‘You on a Boy Scout nature hike?’

“All the time I’d been coming on, watching him shovel, I’d held my mind blank. That’s because I didn’t want to have no excuses prepared and ready if my nerve failed me at the last second. There was nothing to say to him but the truth. I said it quick. I said, ‘I came to tell you to leave my cousin Rose MacPherson alone. I don’t want you making fun of her in the streets anymore.’

“You could have knocked him down with a feather after I said that. Billy Atkins never bargained on that sort of talk from the likes of me. He couldn’t quite believe his ears, so he says, ‘What did you say to me?’ As if he were the King of England and somebody had asked him, ‘How’s your royal arse today, Your Highness?’

“Myself, I didn’t see how I could draw back now. I was in the thick of it. I started pulling off my coat. ‘Climb down off that wagon,’ I said, ‘Come off that wagon, Billy Atkins.’

“That’s when he gave himself away. Billy shot a quick look all around him. He was looking for the rest of us. It was just there, for the blink of an eyelid, but I saw how he couldn’t fathom I’d come alone. Where were my friends? The glance he couldn’t help taking told him there was nobody else, but he could scarcely believe it. His mouth went tight on him, like he’d bit into a lemon. ‘Are you in your right mind?’ he says. ‘Or are you as bad off in the head as that cousin of yours? If I step down off this wagon, by Christ you’ll rue the day.’