Читать книгу Peace River Country - Ralph Allen - Страница 7

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Had he lived in a time when men looked on Christian martyrdom as anything but comic and preposterous, CPR Chatsworth might well have fed the lions in the Colosseum or, quite as joyously, perished in an auto-da-fé in Madrid. As it was, he represented an anachronism: a man lacking neither in conviction nor, in at least some measure, the courage of conviction; but a man still cheated, vitiated, and disarmed by the lack of opportunities to try his convictions out.

He had never, except in his very early childhood and in one brief, cruel paroxysm when he was past the age of forty, sought to find a formal religion. He had simply hoped to live by the golden rule and, if not precisely to be honored for doing so, at least to be taken seriously. This, through personal limitations which he understood just well enough to increase his torment, proved impossible for him.

When he was still very young the mother who had first instructed him in the matter died, with a final reminder that the most important thing in life was Doing Good to Others. It was about the same time that his father, up to then a tentatively committed do-good man himself, suddenly became bankrupted and disgraced through the prolonged and skillful dishonesty of a trusted business partner. The senior Chatsworth was nearing forty-five before he had paid off his debts and felt free to move west and begin again as a farmer. With a nine-year-old son to raise and a section of new wheatland to break, he advertised in the paper for another wife, went to Winnipeg to inspect the three most promising and accessible candidates, and selected a strong and conveniently bewildered Ukrainian girl, whose recently immigrated parents had just been cremated in a rooming-house fire. The night they arrived at the farm he introduced her to young Bill and said crisply, but not unkindly: “Put hair on his chest.”

Throughout his boyhood, Billy Chatsworth’s training and his education fought fearful battles, stained with the blood of his secret heart, against his instinct and his inclinations. He yearned for nobility and nobility receded like a choked-off cry.

His father accumulated wealth, or what passed for wealth in those times and parts. He was still in vigorous health, a big, florid man who assailed his land with industry and rage. Toward people—his neighbors and his help—he behaved with implacable honesty and scrupulous inhumanity. In good years and bad he paid his stookers and threshers exactly twenty-five cents a day above the going wage, and set them exact daily quotas which—since he would only hire especially hard and willing men—gave him the cheapest wheat in the district and the quickest, cleanest, most profitable harvests. Before long he was threshing his neighbors’ crops on contract. He was not a man for pride, but since he could not feel pride, he had the need to feel contempt. This he fulfilled through his ability to do a better job on the soil than the natives of the soil could do.

In the bad years they turned to him for money. By then Billy’s second mother had died. The boy’s only vivid memories of her were the brisk, unending, cheerful clatter of stoves, brooms, dishes and milk pails and a few gingerly caresses stolen above his father’s constant admonitions to “quit treating the youngster as if he was a goddamn doll!”

Every time a neighbor came to seek a loan, or to pay a loan, or to ask for an extension of a loan, Chatsworth made a point of conducting the transaction in the boy’s presence. During the second decade of his life young Billy came to know the story of a dozen failures with the same impersonal and academic intimacy that a professional theatrical critic will acquire toward a familiar play in which he has heard many varied readings of the same lines. And always his father, like Chorus, kept the moral before him: “See that? They’re all alike, by God! Borrow your money, then hate you for wanting them to pay it back!” Billy, of course, grew up hated like his father.

His father died when Billy was twenty-one, leaving a good deal less money than had been expected. Billy sought eagerly to reclaim his kinship with the human race, but he did not know where or how to present his faded credentials. He went through what money there was in one bitter, angry year, trying to buy on the sordid little streets near the railroad yards of Winnipeg the things for which he could not even find a name. He drank and whored in a highly uninstructed, highly disappointing way, and then reformed, found a job on the railroad, and lived a life of exemplary prudence and emptiness until he reached the age of forty.

One night he found himself, almost by chance, sitting in a camp meeting outside the little Manitoba town at the end of his regular brakeman’s run. Before the evening was over he was groveling in a pile of straw before a wooden altar while majestic voices spoke inside his head and his own voice thundered piteously for the Lamb to come and claim him. He arose dazed and full of glory just in time to witness the arrest of the presiding pastor on charges of having attempted rape against one member of his congregation, as well as seducing two others below the age of consent and spending an inordinate percentage of the collections to acquire a tent full of illegal booze. In Chatsworth’s search for affinity, this debacle represented the last fling. Men who make fools of themselves pursuing sin can expect the understanding, if not the sympathy, of their fellows; but a man who makes a fool of himself pursuing virtue is beneath anything but ridicule. This time the moral stuck; at last he was ready to believe if not quite to abide by the precepts of his father. He asked the railroad to transfer him to another branch. The request was granted after his superior—who had heard about the camp meeting—had read him a lecture on the advantages of circumspection, particularly to railroad men on small branch lines.

His marriage, which took place shortly afterward, was a final surrender to common sense and non-impulsiveness. He turned, of course, to a woman who negated all his early yearnings. She was almost as old as he, a sensible near virgin of thirty-nine, who, his state of defeat and loneliness being as abject as it was, had the hospitable, reassuring appeal of a coffin. They got on well enough together, as often happens with couples who have so little in common that there is no ground for conflict or resentment. Three times a week Chatsworth made his two-hundred-mile return run on the railroad. This left him at home three nights and all day Sunday. After the first year the nights were as quiet and virginal as the Sabbath afternoons. The sense of sinking into a coffin had been with him for more than twenty years, and now, sixty-four and nearing the age of retirement, he did not struggle against it. He had not altogether lost the urge to struggle, but he could not find the means to struggle. Where was the enemy? The enemy had disappeared, faded without a trace, as a nightmare fades in the hollow, sweat-bathed instant of awaking, leaving the feeling that something terrible was there which cannot be remembered or opposed.

Sometimes, to be sure, a remnant of the old impulse stirred. Sometimes, to be sure, he still wished that he could find a way to create more warmth between himself and his daughter. In the beginning he had not been prepared for parenthood and he had never been able to catch up. Bearing her pregnancy joylessly, lean and guilt ridden, Amelia had not told him of it until the eighth month; Billy, a stranger in the new town and out of town almost all the time anyway, was not the sort of man a strange doctor went out of his way to congratulate in advance. When, a bare three weeks before her confinement, he asked her in bewilderment why she hadn’t told him sooner, Amelia replied crossly that it was a man’s business to know such things. Chatsworth found the accusation so utterly mysterious that he was sure it must be utterly just. He did not question it.

The first few times he heard it said in the child’s presence that of course her father hadn’t wanted her (the silly, lucky man, of course he’s changed his mind long since) he offered a feeble demurrer. And one black Sunday afternoon he struck Amelia for saying it; struck her for the darting, clever glance she had made in the child’s direction; struck her for their whole life together and the coffin-cry of its summing up: See, Billy Chatsworth? Even now, I’m all you’ve got and ever will have! You haven’t even got a daughter! Struck her three times, while the little girl’s look of puzzlement and faint hurt changed to hate and terror.

After that his dealings with Vanessa were much like the normal part of his dealings with Amelia: Everything that stood in need or in hope of settlement was now settled. Because it was final, there was no need of further struggle, no further place for expectation or disappointment. During the remainder of her childhood Billy took his daughter to the Chinaman’s every Sunday after Sunday school and bought her a strawberry ice-cream cone. On the way to the Chinaman’s and back they talked of dolls, of simple arithmetic problems, of domestic animals and familiar food staples, choosing their words cautiously and uttering them in the uncertain, hopeful tones of beginners in a Berlitz class. Vanny was, of course, wildly devoted to Amelia, as was Amelia to her.

The child spent the first month of her eleventh year in bed; a fairly mild case of measles, their family doctor said, complicated—he said later, and with a consummate absence of tact—by too much babying. Amelia refused his advice that the child be evicted from her bed by physical force if necessary. Another doctor gave her the same advice. But Amelia knew her own eyes and her own child and Vanny remained in bed, attended only by her mother. At the end of six months a young physician from Regina came to pay a visit with his parents near town. Amelia sent for him on her husband’s unexpectedly dogged insistence.

“How long has she been ill?” the young doctor asked. Billy thought it strange that he asked nothing about the nature of the illness, but then remembered that the doctor was young and from the city and that this was his first professional call in the community where he had grown up, and therefore that he had much to live up to and much more to atone.

“Well,” the doctor said, after a lengthy examination. “Well,” he repeated carefully. Then he said, in a tentative, guarded way, as though he might or might not be changing the subject: “Did you happen to read that article in Maclean’s on rheumatic fever?” He looked quickly at Amelia, as though for a sign of recognition. “My poor baby!” Amelia choked and began to cry.

“Now! Now!” the doctor said, much more confidently. “It’s almost a complete recovery already.”

Amelia and Vanny read everything they could find about rheumatic fever during the last months of the convalescence. It all pointed to the same thing: if Amelia had heeded the first two doctors, Vanny would either be dead or crippled for life. But now—thanks to merciful God—there was no need ever to trust a doctor again. All that was necessary was to be careful of Vanny’s heart.

Vanny was not allowed to run or skate or dance or swim, although, as her mother thankfully reminded the neighbors, she was able to lead a perfectly normal life in all other respects. Because of the time she had lost, she was almost nineteen before she graduated from high school; but even this had been a blessing in its way, for otherwise she might not have been considered mature enough to be given the one position in the village to which she was ideally suited. This was the position of town librarian. The library was open from noon to nine on Saturdays and from eight to ten on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays; Vanny was able to discharge her tasks without any severe tax on her strength and she still had a good deal of time at home for reading, of which she was genuinely fond. It was universally agreed after the first year that she was the best librarian the town had ever had. She was often referred to as one of the most popular girls in Elevator; it meant, her father was glumly aware, that she had neither a single enemy nor a single friend, that no one coveted her and no one was jealous of her.

Billy himself continued to converse with her in set and stilted phrases, like a form of Berlitz. The only difference now was that they had moved along from dogs and cats and dolls and cakes to the Standard Works of Literature. Now, in her twenty-second year, Billy was really no closer to her than he had been in her second year or her twelfth. The things he knew about her could be encompassed in three or four short sentences. He had never heard her laugh out loud. But she smiled quite frequently, in a kind and patient way. She was very close to being pretty, with a smooth white skin, black hair, and dark brown eyes. Her body, considering that it had been so little used, was surprisingly clean and supple and graceful.

But Billy Chatsworth, better known as CPR Chatsworth, was no longer ambitious for the affection even of his daughter. Respecting the new strangers in his home he had no ambitions either. It had not been a free act of will which had led him to gather in the remnants of the Sondern family. More a reflex, a nervous twitch, which he could neither help nor make sense of. He had pieced together their situation from gossip heard in the few minutes while his train stood beside the platform at Dobie. He knew their desperate need of befriending, but he did not really feel drawn to them. On the contrary he was a little repelled, in the helpless hypnotized way of a reformed drunkard who, seeing an untended bottle, knows the wish to touch it and, having touched, cannot bring his hand away. He did not expect that in the long run he would be able to do anything for them or they for him. Probably they would manage to cheat him in one way or another, just as he himself had cheated Amelia by offering the sanctuary of their coffin to these strangers who had no right to it and were not yet even ready for it. But there were some things a man could not control.

He avoided a scene with Amelia by refusing to discuss the matter with her at all. He avoided a scene with himself by refusing to talk to the Sonderns. During the first week of their tenancy, he entered and left the house with positive stealth; Mrs. Sondern intercepted him once in the front yard and told him gratefully that if it was all the same, her husband had been delayed a while in Dobie and perhaps they’d stay here and have the children finish out the school term. He said it was all the same. Once the child called Kally was playing in the yard with a tennis ball; she yelled, “Catch?” but he pretended not to hear. After a few days the back-stairway door connecting the upstairs apartment to the downstairs was locked and it was as though nobody else was living there at all.

At the end of the first month his wife told him grudgingly: “Well, she paid the rent.”

“Uh-huh,” he said. His voice showed no interest, but a tingling came over him, as when some unexpectedly good or heroic thing happens in a book.

“She’s taking in washing for half the town. I’ll say this for her, she’s not lazy.”

“Uh-huh.”

“They’ll probably be here forever,” she flared.

“Uh-huh.”