THE MA-AND-PA shack was now theirs. George assumed the coital bed, while Rue occupied solo the boyhood bed he’d shared with his brother, when they’d slept with each other’s feet at the other one’s head, like the inverted figures on playing cards. They kept in lots of home brew, now, distilled from hops and raisins. They kept a full keg, with a spigot on the side, sittin by the stove. Cynthy’s photograph smiled lonesome and winsome down at them from the back-room wall, but Asa’s pictures had long since been torn up and burnt.
That spring and summer after Cynthy’s death, when they needed coin for more than just cigarettes, they’d stroll at dawn down to Newport Station and hitch the train into Windsor, hire out to haul garbage, pound nails, anything at all (but not the gypsum mine, not the knackery), then get the train back to Three Mile Plains at night, stop at Pemberton’s store for groceries: chocolate bars, bubblegum, salami, cream soda, ginger ale. They’d pore over comic books too, not the newspaper. Radio blaring a crime show, crackling as if afire, they’d sit up nights, not doing much but singing, or playing harmonica, or shamefully, shamelessly sobbing, over a bootleg bottle, about being hard-done-by orphans. They hugged, sometimes, but the pain inside them tore them away from each other too.
Feeling nasty, they geared for fights always. Without explaining it to each other, and without knowing why, they’d go into Windsor, or they’d go to Wolfville or Kentville, those cigarette or liquor towns, shuttling between Three Mile Plains and Kentville, either hitchhiking or going by train, but set to fight: white boys, mixed-up boys, black boys. Didn’t matter. They wanted to incubate Fear for miles around. They wanted to be hulking hundred-plus-pound holy horrors. They wished to be so sharp-eyed, so quick in hand they could dice air with a razor, cleave the wings off a fly in mid-flight. They’d pick a town, go and get uncomfortably drunk, then comfortably snooze in an apple orchard, then walk back to town for more rum. They’d drink away whole weekends in the Annapolis Valley, keel over, then get up, set to tussle.
One July, Saturday night, the guys was staggerin back across a railroad bridge from Kentville when three chalk-faced toughs blocked their passage on that narrow bridge.
The palefaces laughed, “Let’s crunch these nigguhs up.” Rue already had em measured.
George told em boys, “I been drinkin and am feelin kinda tired. So I’m gonna let my brother handle yas, while I sit down and rest.” Woozily, George sat down beside the tracks, while Rue made three guys feel sorry for themselves. One by one, he ground each of those white boys—well-done, medium, and rare.
Then George, sobered now, got up, said, “My turn!”
He smacked the trio silly while the sweaty, panting Rue shouted, “Run em down, knock em down, and kick em. Hard! Pound piss out of em! Break their spirits!”