‘He’s very sick,’ wrote Mary, in a scribbled note which reached me at the hotel. ‘But wants to see you as soon as he can. Will let you know.’
So, for two days, I waited, and was secretly glad of it, and spent the time trying to come to terms with what I thought and felt and believed about the old man’s story. I found that, somewhere between the personal and the professional planes, a split had already developed, and that the split was right down the middle of what I was entitled to call my soul. It was as fundamental as that.
Of course, as a newsman, I didn’t believe a word of what he had said; to hear and then to reject such stories was one of the ways I earned my living. It was no reflection on him … All sorts of people thought they had come across an earth-shaking story; at times it seemed that half the world wanted to catch you by the sleeve and tell you about the flying saucer in the back garden. It was often impossible to distinguish where the core of fact ended and the lunatic fringe began. Even in a short career, I had already encountered some beauties.
Moreover, these were only the self-deluders. There was also an army of liars who saw their names in print as part of the illuminated missal of history.
One developed, over the years, a certain hard-boiled cynicism; it was often a newsman’s best armour. It did not make him a better person, but it allowed fewer mistakes in an area where mistakes showed up in plain black and white, adorned with a red face rampant. I had come not to believe in the lost jewellery of film stars, or the marriage of true minds between a rich woman of fifty-five and a youthful European nobleman. I had serious doubts about the little old lady who stole to buy milk for her retarded grandchildren; and a resolute disbelief that a thug who robbed and kicked to death his victim was acting out some childish trauma and should be asked not to do it again.
Great strokes of philanthropy never accidentally leaked to the newspapers. Evangelists did not sell out Madison Square Garden to the exclusive glory of the Lord. Love affairs never became notorious by chance; they were the domain of exhibitionists who often showed what they could do in public because they were no good anywhere else. There were scarcely any blind beggars, and no reluctant dictators at all.
One could enlarge the area indefinitely; one often had to; from love and politics it slopped over easily into commerce. There was no such character as an insurance man who bled his company white in order to safeguard your future. I could not believe that new cars were fabulous one year, rubbish the next. There were no sales of furs at sacrifice prices.
Above all, there were positively no old men who discovered million-year-old refrigerators beyond the Arctic Circle.
On the Journal, we had an officially inspired motto: ‘If in doubt, check.’ They were always hammering it in, particularly where the juniors were concerned; they even had it printed on cards, like the silly signs that said ‘THINK!’ or (for funny people) ‘THIMK!’ or (for funny US presidents) ‘THE BUCK STOPS HERE’. So I checked, with the man who was always hammering it in the hardest; Bill Bradman of the Journal. It was high time for me to do so, because, in spite of all the warning signals, I was in doubt, the greatest doubt of my life so far.
When I put through my call to Bradman, I found that he, at least, had not changed.
‘How’s the boy reporter?’ was his greeting. He always said this; it always infuriated me. But that was not the reason he used these words; it was because he actually thought that I saw myself as some apprentice wonder-child of the newspaper world. That made it more infuriating still. Many such half-truths have this amount of penetration.
I returned his greeting, not too enthusiastically, and we talked for some time about the work in hand. Bradman did not sound in too much of a hurry, and he wasn’t pressing me for delivery – which was one of the reasons why I liked working for the Journal and for him; if they trusted you with a story, they trusted you to produce it when it was ready. It was a no-nagging paper. But he did ask if I had any more trips to make, and when I would be back.
‘I don’t know,’ I answered – and it sounded so inadequate, even to myself, that I had to improve on it. ‘I’ve got what I came for, I guess. But there’s always a chance of another story.’
‘Another story, another time.’ He had grown a little more businesslike. ‘You know what I want the series to cover. Don’t go steaming off into the blue looking for the abominable snowman. We’ve got him right here already–’ and he mentioned a cabinet minister for whom he had less than total respect. ‘If you’ve got enough material, bring it back and let’s take a look at it.’
‘There might be something else worthwhile.’ On the verge of talking about it, I suddenly wanted to skirt round the subject. ‘I met someone up here … Have you ever heard of a man called Shepherd?’
‘Yes,’ he said curtly.
‘Well, I met–’
‘What do you mean, a man called Shepherd?’ he interrupted me, with a prompt show of bad temper. ‘Strewth, there must be a million of them! There must be twenty thousand Shepherds in Canada! What sort of a question is that? Which Shepherd? Who? Where?’
‘I just wondered if you’d heard of an old man called Shepherd. I met him up here.’
‘Give me strength!’ he said, and sounded as if he meant it. ‘An old man? That narrows the field by about ten per cent …’ Then, when I did not answer, he seemed to check himself, and asked: ‘What’s all this about? Are you on to something, boy?’
‘I might be. He’s an old man. He’s lived up here a long time. He knows the north. I think he’s Canadian, but he might be English. I wondered if you’d heard of him.’
‘Could be.’ I could almost hear Bradman scratching his ear with his pencil, which was his trick when thinking hard. ‘Shepherd? Shepherd?’ He was dredging up Shepherds from a cloudy pool labelled ‘S’. ‘There was a hockey player called Shepherd. Henry Shepherd. No, he runs that girlie bar in Montreal. There was Paul Shepherd and the woman in the car-trunk. They hanged him … There was Bishop Shepherd, out in Manitoba somewhere. Is this one a bishop?’
‘No.’
‘Shepherd … What does he do?’
‘Nothing much, now. He used to explore, make trips up north.’
‘You’re a big help … There was a Shepherd involved in that timber concession swindle in Vancouver. But he’s sitting it out in Mexico … Couldn’t be Grant Shepherd. He’s dead. Must be.’
‘Who’s Grant Shepherd?’
‘Don’t you kids know anything?’ demanded Bradman, with a return of ill temper, and the habitual unfairness of the old. Give us time, I thought; one fine day, we will grow into human shape … Then his private filing system came into play, the capacity which I envied above all things. ‘Grant Shepherd went to jail for threatening the Russian delegate at the United Nations. Just after the war, when the iron curtain thing started. About nineteen-forty-eight. He tried to get their ambassador to read something, or look at something, and then he started raising Cain. He wouldn’t promise to keep away from UN headquarters, so they locked him up till he cooled off. Don’t you remember?’
‘In nineteen-forty-eight I was eleven.’
‘Hell, it was on the radio …’ But under his irritation was a professional alertness. ‘You think you’ve met Grant Shepherd?’
‘It sounds like it.’
‘He’s probably a nut case by now. What’s this all about, anyway?’
‘Oh, he was telling some stories.’ For no reason at all, I had now panicked; I could not bring myself to tell Bill Bradman what the old man had said. I would not expose him to another range of unbelievers. ‘I’ll have a second session with him, and see if it works out.’
‘I wouldn’t waste much time on him.’
‘OK.’ But it was not quite possible to leave it thus. ‘Did you ever see him?’
‘No.’
‘But did people believe him?’
‘The police didn’t … What do you mean, believe? What is there to believe, anyway?’
‘He wants to stop another war.’
‘Him and me both …’ There was a crackling sound, on the long wire between Bone Lake and Toronto, and the volume began to fade. It seemed to mark the return of isolation for me, and I was wholeheartedly glad of it. Bradman said something which I could not make out, and then I heard his last words: ‘Whatever it is, it had better be good.’
I was beginning to believe that it was. Indeed, from that very instant, the process of interior separation began. The phone call had taken care of one aspect, the hard-boiled professional side – what Mary had labelled ‘smart alec’. When I put the receiver back on its hook, faith flooded in, and took over.
It is time to say a little more about myself; not too much – just enough to make sense. It is the only way I can explain what now began to take hold, as the enormous and shattering effect of the old man’s story broke through, and became impossible to subdue.
My short voyage started with the home, where all things must start; a home from which my father, deeply loved, desolately mourned by my mother, vanished at a single stroke. But she was not made bitter by this loss; although his hideous death, when she learned about it later, struck her to the heart, the heart was never vanquished. After the first paralysing shock, she set herself (as I know now) to repair the damage; the damage to herself, to an only child whose face was a permanent question mark (‘Who is God?’ – ‘What’s for supper?’) and to our small ship which had met this wicked storm. To have a brave widow for a mother can never be a handicap. In my case, it furnished abright faith to grow on.
Her rule was mostly negative, mostly ‘not’ – and it was none the worse for that. If you can form the habit of not being a liar, not being a thief, not being cruel, and not kicking people in the face as you go up the ladder, you must be somewhere on the path to Heaven. It was Heaven my mother intended me to aim at; there was no mistake about that, either.
In our house, religion was not ‘strict’, any more than breathing was strict. It was necessary and natural; it was part of every day; it made irrefutable the fact that unless God cherished every heartbeat, a human being – and above all a boy – could only wander the world as an outcast, an envious starveling watching other people’s birthday parties. God ruled the world, and loved us all. I believed that, and I believed it still, in spite of awful evidence to the contrary. To try to reverse that evidence, in small ways and in large, was what we owed in return.
From all this, and especially from my father’s death, it was natural that war was the most hated image in our lives. War denied Christ; it denied humanity; what in the world was left to justify it?
But although, throughout my adult life, war had been an urgent possibility, I had draped all my thinking in an obstinate flag of truce. War was wicked; no quarrel could be just; ‘the bomb’ was the most wicked item of all; if good men forswore it, it would go away. Wrapped in this cosy moral blanket, I had settled for neutrality.
My mistake – as from today, astonishingly, it had become a mistake – was in thinking that one pious resolve was enough to clear the conscience. Of course it was not, and of course it solved nothing. Such resolution needed friends, converts, allies – by the score, the hundred, the thousand, the million. This, I now began to realize, in a slow-burning flash of recognition, was the lesson of the old man’s story; unless we took to heart his sort of warning, we were all doomed. The story dovetailed so neatly with what I felt and believed that its impact, if accepted, could only be fantastic.
Once I had absorbed it, I could not escape it. For a hundred reasons, I knew that it would hang round my neck for ever – or until I did something about it. What one man could do, to reverse history, to cure such infection, was not yet imaginable. But I would have to think of something, or be branded a runaway for ever.
One could run away from war, but never – not even with the rags of honour – from the prospect of peace.
On the second night, thus cornered by conscience, I took my troubles, like many a better man before me, down to the bar.
The jukebox was playing Lonesome Road; I wished I had laid a bet on it, particularly since it seemed that they were now playing it for me. I had had four drinks up in my room already, and was in a take-your-choice mood; ready to be sad and sorry for myself, ready to argue about anything, ready for a laugh. It was the day before the mid-month pay day, and the bar was nearly empty. The Ox – Callaghan – and the Weasel propped up one end of it. Two men were playing checkers at a side table, and two others watching them. Joe was at his position of trust behind the counter. Then there was me, and that was all. A festive evening at Bone Lake was under way.
I got my drink, and asked Joe about Ed the pilot, whom I wanted to see.
‘He’s gone after the doctor, up at Frobisher,’ Joe told me. ‘They’ve had plenty trouble up there.’
‘When will he be back?’
Joe shrugged. ‘Anybody’s guess. The way I heard it, they were snowed in again. But good.’ He looked at me, guardedly. ‘How’s the old man?’
‘Not too well.’
‘You want to get the doc for him?’
Down at the far end of the bar, the other two were listening to us. The raw antennae which were now part of my equipment, where the old man was concerned, began to come alive. I said: ‘He could use a doctor. But it may be too late.’ Joe gave the counter a swab and a polish, carefully watching his own hand as it moved to and fro. Then he asked: ‘How’s that?’
‘He’s very sick. The way he was when he left here.’
‘That’s too bad,’ said Joe.
Down the length of the bar, Callaghan raised his voice. ‘Labelle said he was walking OK when he left the station. Said he looked fine.’
I didn’t answer that one, but sipped my drink and stared at nothing. They were all guilty and they knew it. I wasn’t going to help them out. The silence settled round us, full of second thoughts.
Callaghan spoke again. ‘They say you’re taking care of the old man.’
The fifth strong drink was having its effect. For me, there could be no more denials. I saw now where I was going. If it could happen to St Paul on the road to Damascus, it could happen to me at Bone Lake.
‘Yes, I’m taking care of him. It’s time somebody did.’
The Weasel said, with a snigger: ‘You taking care of the girl, too?’
I didn’t answer that, either; the joke fell, like the traditional lead balloon, flat on the floor of the bar. Callaghan half-turned, towards his friend, and growled: ‘Knock it off, you!’ and then came back to me. ‘What’s the trouble with the old man?’ he asked.
‘You should know. You hit him.’
But Callaghan had already been tampering with the evidence. ‘I didn’t hit him. Not the way I could. I gave him the back of my hand, that’s all. And he asked for it! I’ve got witnesses for that.’
I said: ‘He’s seventy years old.’
‘That’s what’s wrong with him, then. We’ve all got to go, some time.’
Joe came up with a fresh glass and a prompt salute: ‘Have this one on the house.’
I took it, and justified it, in the same moment of time. Let it be my farewell to the corrupt world. I leant back against the bar and said: ‘He’s not dying of old age. He’s dying of a crack on the side of the face, and lying about in the police station without a doctor, and walking a mile home when it was fifteen below zero. He’s dying of brutality and neglect. He’s dying for you.’ I had meant to say ‘because of you’, not ‘for you’, but that was the way it came out. I raised my glass and finished, idiotically: ‘So cheers!’
In the foolish silence after that, Callaghan said: ‘Sounds like old age to me.’
At his side, the Weasel nudged him, and then called out to me: ‘Your girlfriend wants you.’
Mary was standing in the doorway, looking towards me. I had not seen her for two days; I had forgotten how shabby and second-rate she looked, how poor an ally. But this was something else that I would not worry about, nor relate to the merit scale of the past. Mary need not pass any family inspection; my friends didn’t have to be jealous. She was a fellow believer. I walked over to the door, and to her.
‘How is he?’
‘Not so good.’ She glanced towards the others, and then back to me. ‘He wants to see you, though.’
‘It’s mutual.’
The eyes in the thin face narrowed sharply. ‘If you’re going to be cute–’
I said: ‘I’m going to listen to him. That’s all I want to do, now.’
Then I took her arm, and we walked out together. It did not even feel strange. No couple, on their way to visit Shepherd, could ever be ill-matched.