Читать книгу The Stubborn Season - Lauren B. Davis - Страница 12

No.

The word waits for David wherever he goes. No at the gate, no at the door, no at the path, the portal, the window. A thousand faces, a thousand inflections, but always the same word. No. And sorry. How sorry they all are, these people who will not give him work, will not give him shelter, will not give him food or warmth or hope or comfort.

The boy knows it isn’t that they will not, it is that these people can not help him, and he sees by the look in their eyes that it shames them to have to say no.

Sometimes he gets lucky though.

“Any work I can do for you today, ma’am?” he says as he stands on the porch of the house, his hat in his hand.

“No work today. Sorry.”

“Chop wood? Fix the roof? I noticed you got a fence post tilting. Chicken roost looks like it leaks. I could fix that.”

“Can’t give you more’n dripping and bread.”

“I’d be obliged, ma’am.”

And if he does a good enough job, his head dizzy from hunger and his arms weak with fatigue, then maybe the woman will let him sleep in the shed or on the porch. He wakes up in so many different places that every time he opens his eyes he is surprised. It is hard, sometimes, to tell which is the dream and which the waking.

He grows to need things less. He pulls his belt tighter. Sleeps in the hobo jungles. Sleeps in ditches. Sleeps in the rail cars and the roofs of trains, tied down so he will not fall and be crushed beneath the steel wheels. He sleeps in barns and creeps away like a fox, with a chicken feather hanging from his cap, before first light.

If good fortune smiles David sleeps on bedbug-infested mission cots, eats their watery soup and stale bread and is grateful for it.

“Are you saved, son? Are you a lamb of Jesus?” says the man in the uniform of Salvation’s army.

“Yes, sir. I am tonight,” he says.

He eats beans and bread and beans and ketchup and beans and beans from a hundred different relief houses. He learns to eat fast and as much as he can, as much as they will give him at one sitting, for he never knows when he will eat again. More than once he eats from trash cans behind restaurants, brushing away the flies from half-eaten baked potatoes and pork chop bones. His father will forgive him, he knows, but the disgrace in him is deep sometimes. Only the sight of other men forced by circumstance to live the same stray-cur life saves him from falling into the pit of wretchedness.

David has been on the road for five months. He has travelled east until the land touched the sea, and then turned and started back again. He thinks about going home, and then he passes through Manitoba. Sees the skeletal cattle, the skyscraper tall clouds of dust, and he keeps on going west. He finds a letter waiting for him in Vancouver, general delivery, where he’s written his family they might catch him. Standing in the park at the corner of Hastings and Hamilton, the West Coast sky hanging iron-heavy and the air thick with humidity, he keeps his back against a tree to protect the ink on the page from the relentless drizzle and lets the tears spill from his eyes. Isaac writes there is another baby on the way and the land is cracking, mottling the earth like the back of a dying sun-baked turtle. They do not ask him to come home but send their love, his father says be careful. Be a good boy. He feels the weight of love behind those words. They mean he carries his father’s dreams with him. And his blessing.

He folds the letter and tucks it inside his shirt.

The park is full of men doing nothing, the occupation they all share. They stand and smoke and try to stay cool in the steaming shade. He has learned a great deal about men in the past months. How frightened they can be, and how fear can turn to rage in the time it takes to swallow a mouthful of moonshine. How kind they can be to strangers, and how cruel. He has learned a man can fall into depths of depravity if he is hounded by despair. Drugs. Alcohol. The infliction of pain on the weakest. He learns how despair follows shame, which in turn follows despair, and it is a drowning whirlpool.

The older men, who have known better, prouder times, are most shamed by their circumstances, he can see that. They stand with their heads hung low, or sit on the wet grass. A few drink from bottles wrapped in paper bags; a group talks in loud voices, cursing the rich, the cops, the politicians. Most just stand their ground, silent and brooding, thinking of home, perhaps, or food.

They stay together for one reason more than any other: the hope of hearing something. They follow the ripples of rumour. Have become disciples of hearsay. Hear a farm wants hands down the road. Might be some track to lay up north. A truck of lumber to unload. A tobacco field ripening. A factory needs a guy to replace the one that lost his arm. There’s forest to clear up the coast. Hear they’re hiring out in Kamloops, in Grassy Narrows, in Sioux Lookout, in Mississauga, in Lethbridge, in Truro, in St. John’s. Once in a great many days it is whispered that a truck might pass by the park looking for a few strong men for a day’s work. Three were taken last time; nearly one hundred are left behind, pleading and resentful in equal measure.

David stays two weeks, but no truck ever comes. There is talk of the coal mines. No one wants to go there. Only the desperate. He listens to the stories of cave-ins and company bulls and bad air and shakes his head. He tightens his belt again and prays he’ll never be that desperate.