Читать книгу Bewilderment - Don Gutteridge - Страница 5

Gabe Goodfellow did not take the same route to his job at the Lambton Coal and Ice Company in the morning that he took when he left it at six in the evening to wend his way back to his mother’s house. It had not always been so, but none of the village folk who noticed the change (and welcomed it – brightening for them, as it did just a little, that ambivalent hour between waking up and becoming fully sensible of the world) could have told you exactly when it had occurred. Nor could Gabe, except that it most likely had happened some time after his mother fell down in her own kitchen – not tripping, mind you, for there was no obstacle for her to stumble over. Blossom made certain of that, even with two careless and forgetful children forever littering their own nest. His mother’s hip, so sturdy all the years it had to be, simply gave out, and down she went, already a cripple before the rest of her desiccating bones struck the linoleum.

Taking the short block north to Michigan Ave., Gabe was able to turn due west along the principal artery of the village itself, a-hum with stores opening, sidewalks being shovelled or swept, a gossipy knot or two of early shoppers, the clip clop of Lanky Anderson’s milk wagon in one of the alleys. And in the distance, tucked under the various veils of morning mist, lay the fields before the River: dotted with barns and shacks whose industrious smoke-pipes had once sweetly polluted the village air. This was now Gabe’s meandering route, and, late or early, he never failed to take it.

“Mornin’, Gabber,” Hec Burroughs called out between wheezes and a pause in his sweeping. “Some day, eh?”

Gabe tipped his hat, smiled, and noticed for the first time that it had snowed overnight, a mere dusting that the first streak of sun through the cloud cover would instantly dissolve. He turned up the collar of his jacket.

“You know what they say: in like a lamb, out like a –”

Lion , Gabe thought: but were they invariably right?

“Delivery next Monday, eh?” the grocer was saying. “Looks like we’ll need it.”

“You bet,” Gabe said.

Across the street, from the window of his bakery, Grumpy Brine, stooping to slide a tray of éclairs into the display rack, dipped his white head in silent greeting. Gabe gave his bucket a congenial wag.

Carman Browning, just ahead, was struggling with the awning-pole in front of his butcher shop. The canvas, whose stripes had pretty much lost their vigour in the seasonal flensing of sun and frost, had come out of its sanctuary crooked and protesting. The butcher uttered a stupendous if not totally coherent oath and wrenched away at the pole. At the sound of approaching footsteps, he glanced around, spotted Gabe, and grinned. “Thank God it’s only you,” he said. “I’m in enough trouble with the Ladies Aid as it is.”

“It’s only me,” Gabe said. He put his bucket down, took the pole gently from Carman Browning’s shaky fingers, wound the awning back into its original position, and then eased it out again into public view.

“Thanks, Gabber,” Browning said. “You’re a lifesaver.” His sour hangover breath was festooned with the fizz of fresh eye-opener. “The wife thought we oughta have a little colour out here, this bein’ the first day of Spring, an’ all.”

So, that was the source of the strangeness he had wakened to and carried with him through breakfast and Blossom’s glum, scattergun retribution that spooked the kids into rare silence and unnatural collaboration. It had still been there when he’d sucked in his first breath of disinterested morning air. Curiously, he thought now of Miss Stillwell’s grade-five classroom and the model of what she claimed was the universe with its rotating spheres of sun, planets and companion moons (no bigger than a shooter or an alley-crock), and Mother Earth tilting cleverly on her axis (encouraged by Miss Stillwell’s lacquered digits) so you could see how the sun might seem, to the merely earthbound, to roll down to the equator, pause for a momentous millisecond only, and on or about the twenty-first of March continue its patient somersaulting northward, and then just as Miss Stillwell was about to explain with her own brand of patience that such perceptions, understandable though they be, were simply illusions, Ellie Struthers cawed from her dunce’s stool: “But where’s Heaven, then?” Gabe smiled inwardly at the memory, and Bertha Henshaw, heading for Burrough’s grocery, smiled back at him from a wan face. He was puzzled, though, because, except for his dreams which were beyond his will, he rarely thought of the past, and the future was something that just happened to you so long as you insisted on breathing.

“How do, Gabber!” It was Gubs Galloway, unlocking the door of the pool-room (and village bus terminal) with his left hand (his only one – the right ‘arm’ being a shirtsleeve neatly pinned and oscillating as gaily as a noose in a dawn wind). “Ain’t seen ya ridin’ the Lambton Express lately.”

“Next week,” Gabe said.

“An’ none too soon, lad. My nuts near damn froze to the bedstead last night!” He laughed, a stout, rebellious laugh, thickened with catarrh and the dregs of mustard gas in the lungs.

Gabe passed the two boarded-up shops quickly, as he always did even though he felt guilty in doing so. Did he really think the ghosts of the ruined proprietors still lurked? (Both families had vanished into the nowhere beyond, where there was always work to be found but never was.) Across the street Maud Billingsley, who didn’t open her dairy bar till nine o’clock, was behind the soda counter fussing with the spigots and paraphernalia of her trade. Gabe could see the back of her uniform, starched and spotless as a nurse’s, and the modest yet unspinsterly gestures of her arms and hands. Some instinct, some intuition that was wholly hers and made her mysterious (and hence much discussed in the better salons of the town), caused her to turn, spot Gabe, and wave.

Gabe, who usually acknowledged the wave with the most discreet of nods (Miss Maud was, after all, unmarried, on her own, a successful businesswoman, and unnecessarily attractive for a maiden lady in her mid-fifties), found himself wagging his bucket like a semaphore, then casting about to see who might have seen. No-one. Except perhaps Bonnie Lumsden, who was rapping gleefully against the window-pane of her second-storey room in the Belvedere . She gave him the naughty-naughty sign, and grinned, her lipstick smeared and caking, like jam on a tot’s chin long after breakfast.

Gabe walked slowly past the last house of the village proper onto the cinder road that wound its way through the fields and river flats towards the rail yards, docks and freight-sheds. The big barn, where Teddy had practiced his smithing skills all his adult life, looked even more forlorn today. Its blackened timbers were cruelly draped with lace-curlicues of snow, like a doily on the head of a crone. A gang of boys, a few of their faces vaguely familiar, were attempting to poke out the last of its glass eyes. Gabe barked at them and they scattered, watching him warily from their cover in the field. He strode on, knowing full well they would slink back, and then feeling annoyed with himself that he had bullied them out of such a minute and harmless pleasure. Teddy’s factory was gone, as all the things of the past were gone. It was foolish to remember them; even the pain of doing so was an indulgence, a species of selfishness few could justify when so many were in need. To try and bring them back was more foolish still. Thoughts such as these rarely occurred as words in Gabe’s head and never as sentences who knew where they ought to go. Instead, they were tantalizing blurs, potent as dream-images that taunted and then disassembled the second you fingered them – leaving only their sting. Gabe often told himself that this was the reason he had failed grade seven three times, that he really did know the answers but when he hurried to capture them in words on blue-lined foolscap, they dissolved or fled back into the shyness of their own privacy.

“Outta the way, Major!”

Gabe didn’t have time to jump aside, which was just as well because the bicycle swerved to the same unrutted side of the path – its bell jangling, its chain rasping – and Dottie Baird, with her runaway army-surplus greatcoat and her harlequin scarves rippling astern, went cruising on by. But not before Gabe got a glimpse of the mad grin that carried her through the long, friendless days of rousting in her neighbour’s garbage and the frugal detritus of the village and through the cold nights in her tarpaper shanty over by the dunes. People who remembered her as a girl said that when the craziness struck her, it picked the moment she was happiest, and kept her that way.

Off to his right the CN day crew was clambering aboard Number 2026, now stoked and hissing blissfully in its ignorance. The docks were deserted but for two stevedores slumped on a bench and staring balefully at the ice-floes still spinning by. There had been rumours of a lake-steamer, loaded with pigiron from Superior, heading for the Point in spite of the ice and the delinquent Spring. But, then, there were always rumours of work to be had and money to be made. Well, the bridge was no rumour, or so it was said, and jobs were being promised with all the certitude of planks in a politician’s platform. And here in front of Gabe was the double row of surveyor’s stakes to prove it, as straight as a razor-cut all the way to the River’s edge where field and swamp blundered into one another, from which nexus, it was bruited with due modesty, the span of the bridge would leap out into the untrammelled air above the prehistoric waterway and, buoyed only by its own audacity, alight on the far American shore. However, in glancing off to his left (Gabe avoided looking at the coal-sheds ahead until he had got inside the gates), he noticed that the ribbon of stakes stopped abruptly somewhere about the middle of the swamp. Somebody – fearful of heights? wary of their Yankee cousins? – had pulled them up again. Constable McCutcheon, Blossom had told him with shameless satisfaction, had grilled every juvenile miscreant in the village about the outrage – with no success. The stakes kept disappearing as fast as the Bridge Company could re-plant them.

“I blame the Company,” Blossom had said, “they should’ve known better than to make them things the size of tomato stakes.”“And who’s gonna feel sorry for a bunch of capitalists?” Rennie had added in Mr. McTaggart’s voice.

Gabe took a deep breath and entered the Lambton Coal and Ice Company much as he had done since the day the news came from Belgium and laid out a future he could not repudiate.

Gabe was just about to open his lunch bucket (an act of pleasure he had come to anticipate throughout the winter mornings because it permitted him to call into his mind brief images of his wife’s nimbleness and solicitude – and, strangely, some particle of night-desire she could not bestow in any other way – as she crafted and packaged his noon meal on the kitchen table), in fact had actually sprung the latches, when he heard the scream that froze his fingers in place. So loud and so condensed with anguish it was that he could not tell whether it had shrieked out of man, woman or child. In the terrible silence that ensued, Gabe raced along the aisle between the holding bins towards the loading dock at the north end of the building. He was the first man through the doorway, but Long Tom and Stubby had already dropped their shovels and were feverishly trying to push the trundle-car back away from the end wall of the dock, away from the leg it had crushed and pinned there. Gabe threw his weight against the still-loaded tender and seconds later he felt it move along its rails and slide peacefully away. Gabe turned to look at Tug Matheson, who was gazing at his mangled leg the way a veteran soldier struck by a sudden shell might do: in disbelief, in awe at the anonymity of the act, in rage at its randomness – before the pain and its particular imperatives erased all else.

“Christ Almighty!” Stubby said.

“He went an’ knocked the shim off,” Long Tom said, then as if some further explanation were called for: “He didn’t mean to.”

Gabe was kneeling beside Tug. He could detect no blood seeping yet through the pantleg, but when he tried to draw it aside, the blast of Tug’s scream kicked him sideways. “We gotta get him to City Hospital,” Gabe said.

Between moans they were certain they heard Tug say ‘no.’ Gabe yelled, “Get a couple of pikes, Tom, and a pile of sacks. We gotta make a stretcher.” Visibly relieved to have some order to carry out, Long Tom loped off.

Stubby stared at Tug Matheson’s leg and said, “Jesus, Jesus,” and only stopped when he saw Mr. Maguire poke his skinny neck and bobbing head around the door-frame to investigate the racket that had disrupted his luncheon. Tug’s shriek drew him fully into the scene. “What the hell’s goin’ on!” he demanded.

“Tug’s got his leg crushed by the trundle-car,” Gabe said.

“What was the damn fool doin’?”

Doing the work of the two men he’d replaced when they were summarily laid off, Gabe thought of saying to his father’s cousin, standing there with hands on hips like an irked squire and looking ridiculous in the overalls and lumberjack’s shirt he wore to legitimize his role as ‘one of the boys,’ in spite of fingers that had never boasted a callus and plump-pink cheeks unsullied by coal dust or the inconvenience of sweat.

“We’re gonna haveta use one of the trucks,” Gabe said as softly as he could.

The manager of the Lambton Coal and Ice Company looked aghast. His rubicund cheek paled. Of all the territory and attendant possessions over which he held petty dominion, it was the five ageing, venerable delivery trucks he felt most personally responsible for, and whenever Gabe was relieved of his regular duties to adjust a balky sparkplug or diagnose a subversive cough in the seventh piston (as he regularly was), Manager Maguire hovered nearby, anxious and more-than-usually short of temper. One of the coal-men, a hard worker with long service who had tried to better his lot by pretending to the position of delivery-man and thereby and subsequently had dented a fender, had been fired on the spot without remorse or salary owing (somebody had to pay for the repairs).

Long Tom lurched onto the platform with his makeshift stretcher, trailed now by a half-dozen co-workers and several chaps from the CN. In their haste, they jostled Manager Maguire, who lost his footing but not his composure. “We’ll call an ambulance,” he said.

“I’ll drive,” Gabe said, and then the teeth-jammed groans of Tug Matheson as he was lifted onto the sacking by more hands than were needed, stopped all conversation.

“Maybe we could just take him home,” Maguire shouted into the din. “Cora used to be a nurse.”

Gabe stared at his cousin: a mute plea. Then, in a whisper he said, “Please, Goose. Tug’s got no money for an ambulance.”

Cousin Goose, whose milk-fed flesh and beanstalk neck had earned him his lifelong nickname, winced at the breech of protocol but quickly warmed to Gabe’s penitent posture, the rare hint of an abjection he deemed his due. “Take Martha, then,” he said aloud, “but for Christ sakes, be careful. There’s still ice on the roads.”

Mercifully, Tug had passed out. They had to wrestle the stretcher up onto the bed of the coal truck and then cover Tug with a pile of filthy sacks and two blankets from the CN bunkhouse. They wrapped him tightly to keep him from shivering and from flipping about in the frenzy of his pain. Goose refused to let Long Tom come along to tend Tug on the back of the open truck (Gabe saw Tom’s eyes narrow in rebellion for one dangerous second, then slacken as he jumped obediently down), so Gabe had to keep glancing in the mirror to make sure that Tug didn’t roll against the steel stanchions or swing himself loose from the swaddling blankets. Heedless of ice patch or Constable McCutcheon, Gabe gunned Martha’s engine and raced towards the City. Greased and oiled in readiness for next week’s deliveries, Martha made no complaint.

At the hospital Gabe helped the shocked attendants ease Tug onto a white-sheeted gurney. Tug’s eyes popped open. He grabbed Gabe’s hand so fiercely they had to stop wheeling the gurney and attempt to pry him loose. Seeing what it was that Tug wanted, Gabe leaned over and peered down into his face. In a grimaced whisper Tug said, “Tell Maguire I’ll be back in the mornin’.”

It was only when Gabe said “I will” that Tug let go.

When Gabe got back to the Company yard, he parked Martha with care in her accustomed spot and walked slowly through the loading area, where Long Tom and Stubby had long since emptied the trundle-car and were now busy channelling the contents of a new, and unbloodied, one down the chute into the storage shed. He continued on into the windowless alcove they used to don overalls and to eat lunch. Cousin Goose, whose ear never failed to pick up Martha’s chortling purr, stuck his face around the corner and said, “You better eat on the run, Gabber. We got three-dozen bags to fill an’ weigh before six o’clock.”

Gabe shrugged. “Somebody’s gotta tell Cora.”

“I don’t need to be told my duty,” Goose said. “I’ve already phoned the hospital, an’ she’s been informed. On her way in a taxi, they said, though it beats me where she’d find the money for that sorta foolishness.”

Bucket in hand, Gabe went in to join his mates, who were furiously shovelling coal from the holding bins into one-hundred-pound burlap sacks. Gabe yanked a hand-trolley into place and began slinging the sacks aboard.

An hour or so later, Gabe went up to the off-loading dock to check on the progress there and perhaps lend a hand. He had no doubt that exhaustion had caused Tug to act recklessly in disregard of his own safety. Goose was pressing them more and more each day – blaming the ‘big shots’ in Toronto naturally – while the Company continued to lay off men and cut the pay of those remaining. But then, as Goose reminded them hourly, half of the able-bodied breadwinners in town had no job at all. And no prospects. Neither Long Tom nor Stubby looked up to greet him. He soon knew why. In a far corner, wielding a rake, stood Ace Donaldson, who only last week had been given his walking papers for not pulling his weight on the shift. He hadn’t yet worked up a decent sweat.

Gabe found the Manager huddled over a stack of important-looking ledgers in his office. He made Gabe wait as long as he dared, then swivelled around and grinned. “Quit frettin’, Cousin Gabe. If the silly bugger can walk when he gets out, I’ll do my best to rehire him.”

Gabe nodded and turned to go.

Goose’s voice was suddenly a whine: “But who knows if any body’ll be here three weeks from now? All I know is we gotta get them orders out an’ delivered next week or we’re all in the shit.” He straightened up, and then said, “And I’m gonna get it done, come hell or high water. Even if I gotta use bums like Donaldson. Now get your arse back to work or I might forget I useta be your dad’s cousin.”

Gabe didn’t mind the work. Even at age fifteen he had been lithe and full of reverberative strength. At thirty-six he could still raise a coal-sack above his head and toss it onto the bed of a truck as if it were a loaf of bread, the only difference now being that his muscles ached far longer into the night and rippled a kind of dissent through his dreams. Gone too were the challenge and the bravado – that first youthful surge of growing towards what then seemed essential to masculinity itself. Well, he had grown into what he was meant to become: that is the simple explanation Gabe would have given. And Blossom, bless her, had seen the hidden gist of him long before he had seen it himself and, requiring neither story nor explication, had bound her future to its possibilities.

Coming out of the sheds at six o’clock, Gabe immediately noticed something was amiss. Martha was listing to one side. Two of her tires were flat. And someone, fearing neither hell nor high water, had taken a sledge to her windshield and poked out both of her eyes.

The Widow Fulcher, who just happened to be watering her African violets in the window-well, let the lace curtain (most of last summer’s starching gone out of it) fall limply back into place, wishing she had someone nearby to whom she could express her alarm. For Gabe Goodfellow, coming across the fields with his head down and both hands thrust into the pockets of his jacket, had just passed Granny Crack’s shack and veered south along the precipice of the Marsh. He was not whistling.

Gabe offered no resistance to the shift in direction. After all, it was to be expected. Through the cold, mocking mist he let his striding lead him where it must. Only when he was beyond the last house did he look up – scanning the verges of the park and listening, as a child might, for the echo of an echo. Nothing. Not even the oaks scratching at the wind could raise a sound. Then, off to his right, Blackleg’s hogs, answering to other hungers, started up their dinner-cry.

The caravan was not there. Nor was there any sign it ever had been: no wagon ruts in the pasture-grass, no scorching where a home-fire had blazed in hope, no jot of flotsam left behind to tell where wandering had interrupted itself and begun again. Still, Gabe lingered. The evening snow, reticent at first, brushed his cheeks, his lips, his eyelids: metamorphosed at last into the semblance of tears.

Sometime later, he became aware of streets, the smudge of houses, the pull of what once had been familiar.