Twenty-Nine

EXCEPT in the vicinity of the slowly moving train, the September night was so still that in the forested hills of Cape Breton a snapped twig could startle a deer at a distance of half a mile. The deer were out that night with polished horns, but they moved so stealthily no one saw them come or go. The autumn salmon were furtive in the deep pools of the Margaree and the Baddeck, and halibut lay flat, black and icy-cold on the bottom of St. Ann’s Bay. All around Cape Breton, in the coves and at the foot of dark promontories, the sea ringed the island with a thin line of astringent foam as the ground swells broke in the darkness, retreated with long throaty sighs and broke again.

In the bedroom where Alan slept the lamp was out, but moonlight entered the window and made a bright crossbarred rhomboid on the floor. He woke up and opened his eyes to the light and then he saw a mouse crouching delicately on its hind legs in the bright center of the rhomboid as it nibbled on a crumb of bread. Its whiskers moved nervously up and down as it held the bread in its forepaws, and Alan was glad because the mouse had found something to eat. The house seemed very warm because his mother had built a big fire in the kitchen stove. Alan thought about the way the embers had glowed red through the draft under the stove box as he closed it the way he was told to do before he came upstairs to bed.

His eyes took in everything he could see in the room, the wooden chair on which his clothes always hung, the table where the globe of the world now stood, the lighter square on the wall which was the calendar the butcher had given him, and the book of ships lying beside the globe. He lay still, watching the mouse.

The metal alarm clock ticking in the kitchen could be heard through the floor. Its sound made Alan wonder why the mouse wasn’t frightened by it. He guessed it must be very late, maybe almost twelve. But there was still a murmur of voices in the parlor. Mr. Camire and his mother thought he was asleep and he knew they hoped he was. Mr. Camire had been in the house every night now for more than a month. It made a difference which Alan felt but could not put into words, not even to himself. His mother was as kind to him as ever. She did for him the same things she had always done. It was the way she did them that was different, as though she were no longer thinking about him at all. Alan knew that was on account of Mr. Camire. Tonight Mr. Camire had brought a bottle of red wine when he came and he made Alan understand that he wanted the wine and his mother to himself.

So Alan lay in bed and wondered, trying to understand what had happened in the past weeks since he had gone back to school. The biggest difference was not seeing Mrs. Ainslie and the doctor any more, even bigger than the change in his mother. It seemed to Alan as if he had begun to grow backward instead of forward, as though it were last year instead of this year. At first, when he was told he must not go to the Ainslies’ any more, he had thought the doctor was angry with him or disappointed because he was not clever enough, but his mother had said it was only because the doctor was too busy to see anybody except his patients.

And then there was Louis Camire. Alan’s ponderings stopped because he couldn’t find a satisfactory pattern for thinking about Mr. Camire. He remembered the little Frenchman talking to him in the hospital, saying that one day he would take them away to France. Maybe that was the trouble. Alan sat up in bed. Was it on account of Mr. Camire that the doctor no longer wanted to see him?

Wide awake, Alan stared at the windowpane and listened intently for sounds from below. There was an occasional movement in the parlor but the sound was very faint and he could hardly hear it. Mr. Camire and his mother were not even talking together. He lay back on the pillow but his eyes remained open. It was certainly on account of Mr. Camire that the doctor did not like them any more, just as it was because of Mr. Camire that Mrs. MacCuish said hateful things whenever his mother walked past her house. How could his mother really like Mr. Camire? Sometimes she refused to talk about him, and when Alan asked more questions she averted her eyes. What did Mr. Camire want of them, to make him return every night? Alan had no words for his feelings, but he knew that Dr. Ainslie had come to give, as Mr. Camire had come to take.

So the boy lay with round eyes staring at the dark ceiling where the moonlight showed a crack in the plaster that twisted and turned like a river in a geography book.

Perhaps it was the thought of the geography book that made Alan suddenly remember his father. His mother never talked about him any more, but Alan was sure his father would come home one day because that was what he had learned and repeated for years. His father was away in the States and things had gone hard for him there, but someday he would come home, and when he did that would be the end of Mr. Camire. His father was a fighting man, a man so wonderful at fighting that people wrote about him in newspapers, a man so mighty that when Alan had asked if Red Willie MacIsaac could beat him, Angus the Barraman had roared with laughter. Why was his mother ashamed because Archie MacNeil was a prize fighter? What was the matter with that, when his father was so brave and strong that even strange Americans paid money to see him fight and every man in Broughton was proud to have known him? Archie MacNeil would come home someday and show Alan what he could do, and then his mother would be the way she used to be and he would have a father like other boys in the school, and Mr. Camire would go away and the doctor would be friends with them all again. He wondered if the doctor knew his father. He wished he had remembered to ask someone.

Downstairs a door opened and closed. Alan jumped out of bed, for it was the outside door and its closing could mean only one thing–Mr. Camire was leaving.

In his bare feet he went to the bedroom door, opened it and stood at the top of the stairs to wait for his mother. He wanted to ask her right now if the doctor knew his father. It was dark, for there was no light burning in the hall below, but the foot of the stairs caught the light that shone from the open parlor door.

Suddenly Alan’s heart began to beat faster, even before his mind took in the fact that strange sounds were coming from the parlor. He stood stiff and silent, listening intently. There were heavy steps, and sounds of metal hitting wood, and then all at once grunts and scuffles and above it all his mother’s piercing scream. Before the scream died away there were more strange sounds of furniture being knocked about, and Alan was running down the stairs as fast as his bare feet would take him. When he reached the lighted square of the parlor door he stopped like a fawn caught in the headlight of a train.

Everything that was happening in the room he saw quickly and completely, understanding none of it, yet feeling all of it, so that for the rest of his life all the violence of the world would be the violence of this night.

An ugly man with a great body in a soiled city suit, his face battered and lumpy and his nose mashed square, was standing sideways to the door. His arms were bent at the elbows and thrust forward, his huge hands half clenched, his shoulders poised and on guard, and in the split second while the boy watched, not taking a breath, the big man’s clenched fist shot out and smashed into Mr. Camire’s head.

As the Frenchman’s white body fell backward, Alan heard his mother scream again. This time the sound of her voice in terror not only made his heart beat faster still, but it froze him where he stood in the doorway, unseen by the three struggling people within the room. In the next few seconds a table was knocked over, Camire got to his feet, and Alan saw that he was holding a wine bottle by its neck. The big man was looking at something on the floor that Alan couldn’t see, in the direction of his mother’s scream, and it was in this fraction of time that Alan knew he was watching his father. He felt the fact, rather than knew it, perhaps because he had so often dreamed of the day when his father would come home and rid them of Mr. Camire.

Like a fox, Camire made a sudden darting movement, smashed the wine bottle on the leg of the fallen chair and shot forward with the fangs of the broken glass jabbing at Archie’s face as the remainder of the wine dribbled out. It was then that Alan saw what his father could do. So that was what it meant to be the strongest man in the world! Archie shifted backwards and aside, smoothly and easily, and the broken bottle jabbed viciously towards his left ear. His hand shot out and closed on the poker beside the grate, the pack of muscles under the cloth of his jacket shifted, the poker shot up and Camire seemed to stand quite still, staring at the upraised arm.

It was then that Alan saw his mother. As the poker came down she was suddenly there between the two men, thin and frail as she tried to stop them. When the poker hit her head her large soft eyes rolled into her head and she seemed to sink down into the melting white wax of her own thighs and calves. The two men stared down at her. Alan stared at her. Then the house shook with the thunder of Archie MacNeil’s voice. He roared as the poker swung up again and Camire darted back and forth across the room, trying to find a place to hide as he gave mouselike squeaks of terror.

Seven blows landed on him, but Alan was no longer there when the Frenchman was silenced at last. The boy had fled.